BLACK #FABS :::: Osonye Tess Onwueme: We need to join efforts towards` empowering that Pan-African ideology and vision as the tablet of hope for Africa.

PROFILE

Osonye Tess Onwueme (born September 8, 1955) is a Nigerian playwright, scholar and poet, who rose to prominence writing plays with themes of social justice, culture, and the environment. 

In 2010, she became the University Professor of Global Letters, following her exceptional service as Distinguished Professor of Cultural Diversity and English at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire.

She has won several international awards, including: the prestigious Fonlon-Nichols award (2009), the Phyllis Wheatley/Nwapa award for outstanding black writers (2008), the Martin Luther King, Jr./Caeser Chavez Distinguished Writers Award (1989/90), the Distinguished Authors Award (1988), and the Association of Nigerian Authors Drama Prize which she has won several times with plays like The Desert Encroaches (1985), Tell It To Women (1995), Shakara: Dance-Hall Queen (2001), Then She Said it (2003), among numerous honors and international productions of her drama.

Through her plays, she is able to use the theater as a medium to showcase historically silenced views such as African Women, and shedding more light on African life. She sustains her advocacy for the global poor and youth, along with the experiences and concerns of the (African) Diaspora in her creative work. In 2007, the US State Department appointed her to the Public Diplomacy Speaker Program for North, East, and West India. The 2009 Tess International Conference: Staging Women, Youth, Globalization, and Eco-Literature, which was exclusively devoted to the author's work was successfully held by international scholars in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, following the Fonlon-Nichols award to the dramatist. She is regarded as one of the band of more important African authors.

BIO

She was born Osonye Tess Akeake in Ogwashi-Uku, present-day Delta state, to the family of barrister Chief Akaeke and Maria Eziashr. Osonye was educated at the Mary Mount Secondary School: it was while at the school that she first dabbled in writing. After secondary education, she married an agronomist, I. C. Onwueme, and bore five children, during the time she attended the University of Ife, for her bachelor's degree in education (1979) and master's in literature (1982). She obtained her PhD at the University of Benin, studying African Drama. In 1998 she married Obika Gray, a Jamaican political scientist.

Her Most Recent Conversation

US-based Nigerian multi-award winning writer, Tess Onwueme, was recently  appointed University Professor of Global Letters at the University of Wisconsin, USA. Here she shares her story with ANOTE AJELUOROU. Excerpts:

“When will Africa/Africans (and Nigerians most of all!), ever learn that “united we stand, separated we fall? That our diversity should be our beauty and strength?

That the founding fathers and mothers of black independence and civil rights––e.g. Nkrumah, Zik of Africa (not just of Nigeria!), Garvey, Du Bois, etc, invested their lifeblood and talent and voice in crusading for that empowering Pan-African ideology and vision as the tablet of hope for Africa in the onslaught of the rabid western capitalism, materialism, and individualism that kills the many to enrich the few?

The absence of a vital collective awakening and knowledge has since left the African world in fragments, with pockets of rival ethnicities battling to facilitate the imperial agenda and exploitation of Africa with her dismembered family, flung far and wide to the vicious whirlwind and with the hurricane of globalization and its viral  “poly”tricks?  If only, we’d revision ourselves, consciously rewrite our present and past for a future of collective strength and prosperity, what will Africa not do? What can Africa not do? “And who can, dare, to mess with us?”

You certainly have been on a long journey to the arena of global letters starting from your native Nigeria. When you look back, what do you see?

I see me –– a child of Faith––trying to make me a miracle from a pinch of salt. In a way, I’ve been the proverbial Tortoise without wings, striving slowly, steadily, but surely up from my peasant roots in the Nigerian Delta to the hilltop, and believing that “I can ‘fly’. I know it now: the Tortoise, too, can fly––if she truly invests the time and effort!  Now truth is naked, and I cannot but behold it in its startling dimensions.  I look back and I see me unfolding like the rose bud, blooming out of season in the midst of thorns.

A young a mother of five little children in 1985, I found myself deliciously stunned and thrust in the glare of the critical national limelight, when my play The Desert Encroaches won the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) drama prize that left me aglow and vulnerable in the spotlight. Then in 1988 two of my plays––The Broken Calabash and The Desert Encroaches––were selected major features on the respective American stages at the First International Women Playwrights’ Conference in Buffalo New York, and the Bonstelle Theatre, Detroit in a collaborative performance of the Detroit Council of the Arts and Wayne State University theatre, directed by the acclaimed Dr. Von Washington. That spectacular landmark lit open, yet, an unexpected fortuitous spotlight for me to win the Martin Luther King, Jr./Caesar Chavez/ Rosa Parks Distinguished Writer/Scholar award that propelled me into becoming a resident in America.

Then 1993 would offer its own luminous confetti––when at the age of 38, I was concurrently appointed as Distinguished Professor of Cultural Diversity and Full Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin. An enticing rich menu of speaking engagements in the US and Canadian universities would equally accompany these developments as the knowledge and publicity for my work began to unravel.

International stage productions of my work have become an increasing reality as well. Among them was the production of my drama The Missing Face, which was selected in 2001 as a featured production of the New Federal Theatre with the renowned Woodie King, Jr. as the Producing Director.

Then in 2007, the US State Department took a remarkable step to appoint me to the State Public Diplomacy Speaker Program for North, East and West India. 2007 would also flatter me with the stage production of my socio-political allegory Parables for a Season on the international arena of Khartoum, Sudan. Other plays like Tell it to Women, Shakara: Dance-Hall Queen, and Then She Said, would not only assert themselves on stage, but also march on in their respective aesthetic capacities to win the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) drama prize in 1995, 2001, and 2003.

In the 2004 and 2005 fall season, the BBC produced and broadcast my play Shakara: Dance-Hall Queen as a main feature for the BBC World Service in drama.

Then came 2009 with its garland of the prestigious Fonlon-Nichols Literary Award. The glamour would persist with the accompanying 2009 Tess International Conference––“Staging Women, Youth, Globalization and Eco-Literature, which was solely focused on my work and in my honor.

2010 would top it all. First, it arrived strutting with the tantalizing Shakara: Dance-Hall Queen, now not only translated into the Hindi language, but was also being featured on stage in the famous international Indian Khatakali centre with the concurrent English version of the play performed in New Delhi, India.
Finally 2010 pulled it all into a peak with the announcement of a Named Position in my honor as the University Professor of Global Letters at the University of Wisconsin. What else could I ask for in my profession?

The above roll call has marked some of the significant highlights in my career, with so many other unnamed significant imprinted landmarks I have earned, and all culminating in my present crown as the University Professor of Global Letters––a position that was exclusively created and named for me.

And, looking forward, what more mountains are there for you to climb?

There’d always be new mountains to climb high up in the world outside here. But growth is not, and should, not always be upwards or outwards, but could be inwards and spiral. At this stage in my life, having raised five successful grown up children in a foreign wilderness with the help of the Almighty God, I should be growing in a different direction; that is inwards, and back to the very heartland of my home. So the one mountain that I know I must climb now is Nigeria.

For no matter what, Nigeria is the only land we’ve got and own. Nigeria is the one Motherland I have. And I must act, like the “grown up girl” that I am now, and as a true Nigerian daughter––born, bred, buttered (and battered, maybe!) by her, too, to rise up to invest my own hand and heart with my diverse Nigerian kindred committed to cradle her back to life and beauty. No doubt, our motherland is in great disrepair and needs caring hands to nurture her back to life and beauty.

As a frequent visitor around the world, I squirm as I hear of my own country Nigeria often named in the same breath with the shame of undesirables: corruption and greed and rot and decadence and violence, etc. In the face of such ugliness, it takes so much courage to stand tall and be counted as you beat your chest out there in the accusing eyes of the critical world, to proudly claim Nigeria as yours. And yet, I do! For I strongly believe that NIGERIA CAN BE BEAUTIFUL, if we (Nigerians), truly desire her to be.

I doubt that the “re-branding” mantra can do the magic. But how can we re-brand garbage and then hope for a better Nigeria?

Sure we can whitewash garbage. Mask it. And dress it up to look pretty.  And even deodorize it. But when the soul and body stink so foul as it does these days when our most cherished values rot and sink, now how many barrels or metric tons of the almighty scented and perfumed crude oil must we siphon and spray to erase the noxious anti-social stench? And to survive and renew the self, Nigeria needs not just the urgent sanitizing and deep cleaning from within her soul to manifest in her outward body polity, but also the immediate blood transfusions of new ideas, new visions with the crucial insights from her committed sons and daughters who enrich other nations with their (un)common talent and knowledge, in order to help revive, renew, and nurture her back to the life of beauty and excellence. For me now, Charity Must Begin at Home: Nigeria! And so that new mountain I must climb is my home: Nigeria! Perhaps, we all should!

How much of African culture is permeating the outsider world in view of the onslaught of global culture on the African culture, which is threatening to assimilate it in spite of efforts from scholars like you?

A lot! The question should not be what Africa has given to the world, but rather, what has Africa not given to the world; with the voracious appetite of those taking and consuming her world. For Africa has given too much already and still continues to give with neither acknowledgement nor thanks from her “takers.”

Think of the millions of Africans forcefully uprooted from the motherland Africa to the white plantations in North and South America and the Caribbean. Though nameless, their sweat and blood built the monuments, the skyscrapers, the industries, etc in the new world of captivity. Those missing forgotten and unsung Africans with successive generations are the children of Africa, who gave the world pearls with chiming legacies that still remain muted. Intellectual giants and the undying voices of the likes of Bob Marley, Langston Hughes, WEB du Bois, Michael Jackson, Barry White, Luther Vandross, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Isaac Hayes, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, etc, are branches of those children of Africa giving their word and tune and mood and heart to heal and keep moving the heady life and wheel the world forward. The children of Africa gave the world Jazz and Blues and Soul and Reggae, and Rap and more. Need I name more, for the list is inexhaustible?

Then there are those other waves of Africans–– volitional and willful laborers and nation builders, I tag them––migrating to the Americas, Europe, and the western world in general, to toil for better opportunities that grow and make the western world swing.
And then these days when the world is “drunk” and married to the sweet crude oil which the trans-nationals siphon from the belly of Africa –-e.g. Angola, Egypt and Libya (now burning and in tatters) with the Nigerian Niger Delta––and leaving the indigenous rural communities empty, polluted, and naked with the bleeding land, while their sweet crude products nourishes and shines the faces of the benefiting Euro-American worlds, Africa still continues to drain and give her soul and body to the outside world.

But do we in Africa, truly know and remember all these? Do we have a common collective vision of us, our historical pasts with our interconnecting identities and struggles and challenges that could be mobilized to affirm us as a people and give us a voice with strength? No! We are busy, instead, mired in aping the west. We are recklessly ruining and forgetting what should mean everything to us––our values––as we fight and kill one another in the name of religion and power and money. Like crabs in a bucket, we claw each other down in Ruanda and Nigeria and Libya, and Liberia and Sierra Leone and all over.

When will Africa/Africans (and Nigerians most of all!), ever learn that “united we stand, separated we fall? That our diversity should be our beauty and strength?

That the founding fathers and mothers of black independence and civil rights––e.g. Nkrumah, Zik of Africa (not just of Nigeria!), Garvey, Du Bois, etc, invested their lifeblood and talent and voice in crusading for that empowering Pan-African ideology and vision as the tablet of hope for Africa in the onslaught of the rabid western capitalism, materialism, and individualism that kills the many to enrich the few? The absence of a vital collective awakening and knowledge has since left the African world in fragments, with pockets of rival ethnicities battling to facilitate the imperial agenda and exploitation of Africa with her dismembered family, flung far and wide to the vicious whirlwind and with the hurricane of globalization and its viral  “poly”tricks?  If only, we’d revision ourselves, consciously rewrite our present and past for a future of collective strength and prosperity, what will Africa not do? What can Africa not do? “And who can, dare, to mess with us?”

I’m so passionate about these nagging issues and questions that I’ve devoted such plays as The Missing Face, Riot in Heaven and Parables for a Season to the smoldering but muted matters.