Chidi Amuta’s Historical Recall
Text of my presentation at the public presentation of Dr. Chidi Amuta’s memoir, ‘HOMAGE: Return to Familiar’, in Lagos yesterday
Olusegun Adeniyi
Exactly 12 years ago in September 2014, I had the privilege of being the reviewer at the public presentation of Dr Chidi Amuta’s collection of essays, “Writing the Wrongs”, spanning 1065 pages. This memoir, ‘HOMAGE: Return to Familiar Places’ is not as voluminous as that book but it is more profound in that it tells a compelling story of the man that we have come here to celebrate today. Yes, I contributed a blurb to the book but having now read the complete work, all twenty-four chapters arranged in six carefully conceived movements, I find the memoir quite sobering. On a personal note, let me pay a special tribute to who has over the years been one of my professional mentors. Let me also thank his wonderful wife, Mrs Jane Amuta who has always treated me almost like a member of their family.
Incidentally, before Amuta tells us anything about himself, he reveals how he wishes a life to be read as a ritual of remembrance. Therefore, what the reader will first encounter in this memoir is the deliberateness one expects of a man who has spent half a century thinking seriously about literature, its structures, rhythms, and habits of memory. It is also no surprise that the commanding public intellectual started his life journey from circumstances strikingly ordinary. But the distance between that modest beginning and the figure who now occupies a secure place in Nigeria’s literary and journalistic landscape is immense. Yet this memoir never presents the journey as miraculous. Rather, it unfolds as the cumulative consequence of discipline, education, curiosity and endurance, qualities that prove more persuasive than mythology. That perhaps explains why one leaves the opening pages reminded that influence need not be inherited, and stature can still be earned.
The first section, ‘Ordinary Beginnings,’ traces the making of such a life. Its emotional centre is ‘Umuguru Boy,’ where the textures of an Igbo village are rendered with enough specificity to resist nostalgia without surrendering tenderness. Before Aba, Asa Grammar School, and the institutions that would enlarge Amuta’s intellectual world, there was the family and intimate geography of childhood. And like most Nigerian memoirists of his generation, Amuta writes from within the familiar trajectory of the gifted village child whose education becomes a family’s collective wager on the future. Yet he revisits that narrative with uncommon self-consciousness. That is also no surprise. Having devoted much of his professional life to interrogating how stories are told, Amuta understands that memory itself is never innocent. His recollections are therefore marked by an awareness of the narratives through which lives acquire meaning.
The second section, ‘Fogs of War,’ inevitably darkens the book’s emotional register. Amuta spent almost the entirety of the Nigerian Civil War in adolescence: old enough to remember its terror, young enough for those experiences to become permanent fixtures of consciousness. Such a position grants the memoir a distinctive perspective. He presents the narrative from the eye of a child whose education into nationhood came through violence. ‘Prelude to War’, ‘Nights and Days of War’, ‘Farewell Biafra, Return to Nigeria,’ and ‘Return and Awakenings in Nigeria,’ suggest less a sequence of historical episodes than stages in a psychological passage. What emerges is the story of learning one’s country twice: first as a child whose imagination is fractured by conflict, and later as an adult compelled to reconstruct citizenship from the fragments left behind.
That is no small achievement. The best memoirs resist reducing history to backdrop, allowing public events and private consciousness to illuminate one another instead. This section promises that. It deserves to be encountered without excessive mediation, and so I leave its most affecting revelations to the reader.
By the time the memoir arrives at Section Three, ‘Enduring the Peace,’ its concerns have shifted from survival to formation. War recedes, though never entirely; what occupies the foreground now is the painstaking business of becoming. Peace, Amuta reminds us, is another apprenticeship. ‘Ife Days’ is among the book’s most consequential chapters because it records the making of an intellectual. The University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University, was more than the institution that awarded him a first-class degree and, years later, a doctorate. It was the place where literature became the grammar through which he would understand the world. Universities at their best reorder the imagination. Amuta’s account suggests such a transformation.
There is something remarkable about Amuta’s academic journey. It is uncommon enough to distinguish oneself as an undergraduate; rarer still to remain intellectually tethered to the same institution long enough to return as a scholar, refining rather than abandoning the questions that first animated one’s curiosity. In an age increasingly impatient with intellectual continuity, Amuta’s career offers an older, almost unfashionable model: scholarship as lifelong vocation rather than professional credential.
The chapters that follow, ‘Starting a Family’ and ‘Port Harcourt Days,’ extend this portrait of adulthood taking shape. Domestic life unfolds alongside professional ambition, each tempering the other. As a lecturer in literature and communications, Amuta emerges as a man inhabiting responsibility. The memoir is careful here, refusing melodrama. Careers, marriages and reputations are built through the accumulation of ordinary days honestly lived. Amuta understands this instinctively, and the narrative is stronger for its patience.
Then comes the delightfully understated ‘Brief Encounter with Government.’ The adjective brief carries an unmistakable note of amusement. One suspects, even before reading the chapter, that government represented an interruption rather than a calling. It is a characteristic touch: self-aware, lightly ironic and entirely devoid of self-importance. That interruption gives way to the memoir’s most kinetic movement. Section Four, ‘Encounters and Exploits,’ marks the point at which Amuta yields center stage to the editor, columnist and public intellectual. Here the pace quickens noticeably. If the earlier sections are occupied with inward formation, these chapters look outward, recording a career lived in proximity to history.
‘Rebirth of the Daily Times’ recalls Amuta’s stewardship of a newspaper that once stood at the very heart of Nigerian public life. Rescuing an institution already burdened by decline is a task that is almost more archaeological than administrative. The memoir captures that challenge without succumbing to institutional nostalgia. It understands that newspapers, like nations, cannot survive indefinitely on memories of former greatness. Perhaps this chapter is better read together with ‘The Post Express Experiment.’ Nigerian journalism is littered with newspapers that possessed vision, talent and editorial courage but could not withstand the unforgiving economics of the industry. Post Express, conceived through the late Dr Stanley Macebuh’s formidable imagination and led by Amuta as chief executive, belongs to that distinguished yet melancholy tradition. The memoir treats its story without bitterness. Failure, it suggests, need not invalidate aspiration. Some institutions deserve to be remembered because they demonstrated what excellence once looked like.
‘Encounters with World Leaders’ could easily have become a catalogue of famous names. Instead, its significance lies elsewhere. Over the course of his career, Amuta found himself in conversation with figures such as Margaret Thatcher, François Mitterrand, Robert Mugabe and Yoweri Museveni as a journalist asking questions of power. Such meetings matter less for their glamour than for what they reveal about the peculiar privilege of serious journalism: the opportunity to witness history from across the table.
For many readers, however, the emotional centre of this section will almost certainly be ‘The Babangida Moments’ and ‘Handshakes with Abiola.’ Few periods in Nigeria’s political history continue to generate as much unresolved argument as the years surrounding the June 12 crisis. Every participant remembers them differently. Regarded as one of the palace intellectuals in the court of General Ibrahim Babangida, Amuta’s interpretation of events will most likely provoke reactions from other part actors and observers of that era.
The section closes with ‘Turning Words into Merchandise,’ an ending that is both fitting and unexpectedly moving. After decades spent writing, editing, and interpreting the lives of others, Amuta finally transforms accumulated experience into enterprise through the founding of Wilson and Weizmann Associates. The title is characteristically playful, but its implications are profound. It records the moment when writing became an institution.
If the memoir possesses a hidden center of gravity, it may well be section five, ‘Private Parts.’ The title itself is provocative, and hints at the relinquishing of the protective distance that has characterized much of the narrative until this point. After chapters spent navigating the public worlds of journalism, politics and national history, ‘Home, Love and Near Death’ and ‘Guardians of the Sacred Quest’ promise a different register altogether. Here the questions become deeply human. What sustains a man whose professional life has required him to chronicle the ambitions and failures of a nation? What remains when the public voice falls silent? These are the questions every worthwhile memoir must confront, because no public life can be fully understood without some account of the private convictions that made it possible.
Wisely, Amuta appears unwilling to dramatize intimacy. ‘A Day in My Life at 70’ is an especially inspired choice of title. At first glance it appears almost modest. Yet the older one grows, the more one recognizes that a single ordinary day often reveals more about a life than an inventory of achievements. The memoir concludes by returning its gaze to the country that has shadowed every stage of its author’s life. Section six, ‘Reflections on the Nigerian Idea,’ restores Amuta to the voice his readers know best: the essayist, the columnist, the public intellectual who has spent decades interrogating Nigeria’s unfinished project with equal measures of affection and impatience.
The memoir’s closing Recessional is remarkable. Having guided readers through childhood, civil war, scholarship, journalism, family life and public engagement, Amuta refuses the temptation of either triumphalism or despair. Instead, he settles upon something more difficult: hope stripped of illusion. It is an ending earned.
Meanwhile, Amuta and I share a university, though not an era, and our journalistic paths have intersected over many years. His columns have long appeared alongside mine, both of us belonging to that increasingly endangered fraternity of writers who eventually discover that weekly commentary is not enough. Perhaps that proximity explains why this memoir resonated so deeply. Those of us who write about Nigeria eventually confront the same dilemma. Is it sufficient to chronicle events as they unfold, or must one also attempt to preserve the texture of having lived through them? Amuta has answered that question decisively.
All said, no memoir of this scale is without its imperfections. Nor should one expect it to be. A life spanning more than seventy years, traversing civil war, academia, journalism, business and national politics, cannot possibly grant equal attention to every season. Some readers will wish for a fuller account of his time in government. Others, especially contemporaries, may remember particular episodes differently. For instance, in recent weeks, officials of the current administration have had to join issues with Amuta. So, I expect that some people out there may disagree with his interpretations of certain national events in this memoir. Such disagreements are neither surprising nor especially troubling. Memoir is not a judicial proceeding; it is a literary act of memory.
If there is a more substantive criticism of this book beyond the typo errors that I find quite irritating in the latter chapters, it lies in the occasional compression demanded by the book’s ambition. Entire decades sometimes pass with a swiftness that leaves the reader wanting more because the life being narrated exceeds the space available to narrate it. What distinguishes HOMAGE, however, is the quality of its intelligence. Throughout these pages, one senses the enduring presence of the literary critic, a mind trained to remember events, ask what they mean, how they shape identity, and why certain memories continue to resist closure. The result is a memoir that functions simultaneously as autobiography, intellectual history and a meditation on Nigeria’s postcolonial journey.
That, finally, is the book’s greatest achievement. By the final page, one understands that the homage is directed as much toward memory as toward place. Amuta honours the people and experiences that formed him without embalming them in sentimentality. He writes with gratitude, and in doing so, he accomplishes what the finest memoirs always aspire to achieve: he persuades us that one carefully examined life can illuminate far more than itself.
In this insightful book, Amuta is not interested in constructing the illusion of an extraordinary life. Rather, he demonstrates how an ordinary life, lived well over decades of unusual national history, acquires extraordinary resonance. The distinction is subtle, but it is the difference between memoir as self-celebration and memoir as witness. In HOMAGE, Amuta consistently chooses the latter, and in the process, he has given us a book that will not only provoke conversations about our country but also enrich the imagination of the younger generation about a glorious future that is still within their reach.
