The Nnolim I Remember: Jokes, Beer, Literary Wars & A Voice That Filled The Room

By UDUMA KALU

The Professor Behind the Critic

ONE thing I remember about Professor Charles Ekwusiaga Nnolim is his jokes.

Not the solemn Nnolim of literary criticism. Not the intimidating Nnolim whose essays could send younger writers scrambling for dictionaries, references and defensive arguments. Not even the Nnolim who entered the history of Nigerian letters through one of the most persistent controversies surrounding Chinua Achebe.

I remember the funny man.

I remember him telling a rather salacious joke about the Igbo name Uju, a feminine name associated with fullness or abundance. His joke played on other Igbo names and on the physical attributes of a woman. It was the kind of joke I had expected from undergraduates in a hostel corridor, not from a professor of Nnolim’s generation.

I was aghast.

Yet Nnolim was completely at ease.

That was the first lesson he gave me, although he probably never intended it as one: professors, especially professors of literature, are not always the solemn figures we construct in our heads.

They laugh.

They drink.

They gossip.

They quarrel.

They tell dirty jokes.

They remember old wounds.

They tell stories that never enter their books.

And sometimes, when the books are closed, they become simply human.

A Different Kind of Academic Life

I encountered Nnolim in the literary world around the Association of Nigerian Authors, where the boundaries between writer, critic, teacher and drinking companion could become wonderfully blurred.

I remember an ANA gathering, perhaps in Owerri. Nnolim was relaxed, drinking with us as though we were classmates rather than a professor and younger writers.

That camaraderie has always fascinated me.

I had seen versions of it at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. My former lecturer, Professor Jonathan Haynes, an American exchange scholar who later moved to the University of Ibadan, once told me he preferred Ibadan partly because of the camaraderie between students and lecturers.

At UNN, we had professors who could move effortlessly between the classroom and the ordinary pleasures of conversation.

Professor Ola Oloidi of Fine and Applied Arts was one of them. He was a distinguished art historian and critic, but I remember his humour and his ease with students as much as I remember his scholarship.

Professor Emeka Nwabueze was another.

Nwabueze taught English and Dramatic Arts, but his classes were never merely classes. Literature came alive through humour, contemporary events and the cultural history of Ekwulobia.

And then there was Jadum.

Jadum, Madness & the Professor as Storyteller

Nwabueze told us about Jadum, the eccentric philosopher of the Ekwulobia market who considered himself the undisputed king of madness.

One day, according to the story, Jadum encountered another man who claimed to be mad.

So Jadum proposed a test.

They would trek around the market 20 times.

The other man gave up before completing five rounds.

Jadum, naturally, was only getting started.

The verdict was immediate. The newcomer was banished. The market, Jadum declared, was for real mad people.

Years later, Professor Bede Okigbo gave me another version of the Jadum story at his home in Ojoto.

Bede was not merely another professor. He was a major agronomist and a cousin of Christopher Okigbo. His house itself could have been a book. The exotic plants gathered from different parts of the world seemed to tell their own stories.

There, literary history was not something locked in a library.

It was alive in conversation.

When Achebe Sent Us Looking for History

Those conversations became particularly memorable during the period when Chinua Achebe, through his foundation, organised a national intellectual project at a time when the idea of a broader Nigerian national dialogue was being debated.

I was involved in the project.

With Professor Enekwe and Alvan Ewuzie of The Sun, who had also been my boss at The Champion, I travelled to interview some of the country’s intellectual figures.

We visited Professor Bede Okigbo and Professor Chukwuemeka Ike in their homes.

The interviews were later serialised by The Guardian under the management of Emeka Izeze, then Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief.

Looking back, I realise that I was not merely interviewing professors.

I was collecting fragments of a disappearing intellectual Nigeria.

That Nigeria had time for stories.

It had time for arguments.

It had time for beer.

It had time for palm wine.

It had time for long conversations that could begin with literature and end somewhere around family history, politics, sex, death or village gossip.

The Literary Evenings We Have Lost

At UNN, I enjoyed the company of people such as William Nwaegbe, Nnadozie Inyama, Enekwe, Damian Oparta and Mariam Ikejiani-Clark.

We would move towards the GRA area of Nsukka and share local food and drinks.

There was laughter.

There was intellectual disagreement.

There were stories.

There was also the feeling that university life extended beyond lecture halls and examination scripts.

I sometimes wonder whether that world still exists.

Perhaps it does.

Perhaps it has merely changed its shape.

But something has certainly disappeared.

The professor who once sat with younger writers over palm wine now often seems to have been replaced by the professor who rushes between committees, emails, conferences, administrative obligations and social media.

I may be romanticising the past.

I probably am.

But memories are allowed their sentiment.

Enekwe, Biakolo & the Literature of the Bottle

Professor Enekwe was not necessarily a regular at the staff club, whose motto, I was told, was “Best Brains are Best Preserved in Alcohol.”

I once heard the joke explained to me by a science student friend.

The brains, he said, were supposedly preserved in alcohol.

Einstein’s was there.

Hitler’s too.

Whether the story was true did not matter.

It was funny.

And that was the atmosphere in which many of our literary conversations occurred.

At Ikenga in Awka, during an ANA conference, Enekwe drank and talked with younger writers about the history of the Association of Nigerian Authors, his own period as acting president and his work with Okike, the literary journal founded by Achebe.

Those evenings were part lecture, part memoir and part theatre.

I remember similar moments in Abuja and at Delta State University, Abraka, during the international conference on Tanure Ojaide.

I remember Emeritus Professor Emevwo Anselm Biakolo.

That night, with professors drinking and smoking, the conversation moved across post-structuralism, literature, politics and life.

Biakolo had taught poetry, oral literature and folklore at the University of Ibadan. He later moved to Botswana and eventually returned to Nigeria, where he became the founding Dean of the School of Media and Communication at Pan-Atlantic University.

He died in Lagos in 2024.

But I remember the laughter.

The Professor as Human Being

There were other nights.

At an ANA gathering in Abuja during the Abacha years, Professor Ada Ugah and Professor Onokome Okome argued over theories, achievements, old disputes and personal histories.

Meanwhile, Odia Ofeimun was under surveillance and there were concerns about possible arrest.

He was eventually moved out of Abuja.

Inside the room, however, the literary argument continued.

Dr. Remi Raji, now Professor, was campaigning for proper participation in the ANA elections.

That was literary Nigeria.

It was never simply books.

It was politics, personalities, friendships, rivalries, ideology and ambition.

And underneath everything was the desire to be heard.

Achebe Was Different

My memories of Achebe are different.

I never experienced him as the boisterous professor who would drink beer with younger writers.

He was fatherly.

I remember orange juice rather than beer.

He listened.

He remembered.

He solved problems.

Professor Chukwuemeka Ike was similarly different in my memory.

I visited him several times at Ndikelionwu, the village he shared in literary memory with Nwankwo.

Nwankwo was different again.

He could drink.

He could tell stories.

He could open his life to you in ways that made the distinction between literary biography and ordinary conversation disappear.

On one occasion, I stayed in his house after a literary and cultural event organised by Renaissance Nigeria.

The night became an archive of family history.

There were stories about literary growth, family, friendship and the things people rarely put into books.

The Women Had Their Own Stories

I cannot tell this story honestly without remembering the women.

Professor Akachi Ezeigbo comes to mind, particularly for her maternal and mentoring presence.

Professor May Nwoye remains another memory.

One night in her University of Benin home, she told us about her experience in the United States.

The conversation turned to the Igbo name Ikechukwu.

She recalled how an American woman’s pronunciation transformed the name into something unintentionally comic.

May, a Pan-Africanist, had apparently been uncomfortable with the shortened form Iyke.

The experience changed her mind.

And then I saw another side of her.

She danced.

She entertained her guests.

She had a humour that could fill a room.

I do not remember seeing her drink.

But then, drinking was never the real point.

The point was that professors were people.

Then There Was Nnolim

And that brings me back to Charles Nnolim.

I remember his sideburns.

They were enormous.

I sometimes wondered why he kept them.

Perhaps they made his head appear larger.

Perhaps they gave him the appearance of height he did not physically possess.

He was not a tall man.

Yet he had the voice of one.

That reminds me of Odysseus. The man may have been physically smaller than many of the warriors around him, but his voice and intelligence gave him a presence that exceeded his body.

Nnolim had that quality.

When he finally sat behind a table and began to speak, the room changed.

The Guardian Encounter

I encountered that voice professionally at The Guardian.

I was in charge of Friday Review, the newspaper’s magazine-style literary and cultural section.

One day, Jahman Anikulapo, then editor, passed an essay to me.

It was from Nnolim.

It was explosive.

He was writing about the new Nigerian writing.

Writers of my generation and those around us—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Helon Habila, Lola Shoneyin, Maik Nwosu and others—had become increasingly visible.

The argument was no longer simply about whether young Nigerian writers could write.

It was about what they were writing about.

Nnolim entered the fight with a critic’s confidence.

His essay became known as “New Nigerian Writing: Between Debauchery and the Kitchen.” The title I gave it at The Guardian became the title remembered by many readers. The underlying argument was unmistakable: Nnolim believed much contemporary Nigerian fiction had abandoned the large national and moral questions associated with the earlier generation for sex, domestic life, consumerism and what he saw as the fashionable appetites of the literary marketplace.

The criticism was severe.

Young writers and scholars pushed back.

And I think that controversy tells us something important about Nnolim.

He was not frightened by generations that disagreed with him.

He provoked them.

The Critic Who Refused to Whisper

Nnolim’s criticism of contemporary fiction was part of a larger philosophy of literature.

He believed literature should carry intellectual and social weight.

He worried about what happened when the national imagination became reduced to private appetite.

His critics, however, had another argument.

The newer generation was writing from a different Nigeria.

They were writing after military rule, structural adjustment, globalisation, migration, the Internet and the collapse of some of the publishing structures that had supported earlier generations.

They were also writing for a global audience.

So the argument was never really just about sex or kitchens.

It was about who had the authority to define Nigerian literature.

That is why Nnolim mattered.

He was not merely reviewing books.

He was fighting over the meaning of the Nigerian literary tradition.

The Achebe Question

But there was an even older battle.

Nnolim’s most famous controversy involved Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God.

In 1977, Research in African Literatures published Nnolim’s “A Source for ‘Arrow of God’”. The article examined the relationship between Achebe’s novel and The History of Umuchu, a 1953 pamphlet by Simon Alagbogu Nnolim, Charles Nnolim’s uncle. The article appeared in volume 8, number 1, pages 1–26.

Nnolim argued that the pamphlet provided a significant, indeed central, source for Arrow of God.

His comparison focused on striking similarities involving a high priest, colonial authority, chieftaincy, imprisonment and the sacred yam.

That was not a small claim.

It went to the question of literary originality and source acknowledgement.

C. L. Innes subsequently published a response in Research in African Literatures, showing that the debate was not going to end with Nnolim’s article.

Later scholarship has complicated the story further. Achebe was reported to have acknowledged that the Umuchu story was part of the oral and historical material that informed his thinking about Arrow of God. One later scholarly account quotes Achebe explaining that he had heard the story through a radio programme and subsequently sought out Nnolim’s uncle and visited the village.

So the dispute was more complicated than the shorthand version we sometimes repeat.

It was not simply “Nnolim accused Achebe of plagiarism.”

It was a dispute about sources, oral history, written documentation, literary transformation and scholarly responsibility.

And that distinction matters.

The Strange Irony of Nnolim & Achebe

The irony is that Nnolim was not simply an opponent of Achebe.

His later scholarship shows profound admiration for him.

In his 2011 essay, “Chinua Achebe: A Re-assessment”, Nnolim described Achebe as the writer who established and defined the Nigerian tradition in the novel and praised his use of proverbs, legends, folktales and local myths.

That is hardly the language of a man trying to destroy Achebe.

It is the language of a critic who believed that admiration did not cancel scrutiny.

That, perhaps, was Nnolim’s central contradiction.

He could honour Achebe and challenge him.

He could celebrate the Nigerian literary tradition and quarrel with the people who defined it.

He could be a conservative critic of new writing while remaining an innovator in critical debate.

What I Finally Remember

And so, when I remember Nnolim, I cannot reduce him to the controversy.

I remember the joke.

I remember the beer.

I remember the sideburns.

I remember the small man whose voice seemed much larger than his body.

I remember the critic who could make young writers angry because he refused to flatter them.

I remember the professor who could sit among younger writers and laugh as if academic rank had temporarily disappeared.

And I remember the strange beauty of that generation of Nigerian intellectuals.

They argued fiercely.

They drank.

They laughed.

They fought.

They wrote.

They mentored.

They sometimes wounded one another.

But they also left records.

Nnolim’s death closed one chapter of that world, but it did not settle its arguments.

Perhaps it should not.

A critic’s real afterlife is not silence.

It is argument.

And Nnolim, right to the end of my memory of him, never allowed the room to become silent.