Book Review
Oseloka Obaze*
Monday, August 31, 2009
The Eagle in its Flight
Being A Memoir of
Hon. Sir Udo Udoma, CFR
(ISBN: 978-0-9819192-0-1: Grace and Son/IEI, USA, Nigeria, UK, 2008; p.326; Price, $59.95)
Available at: ikemesit@comcast.com
“History,” it is said “offers us every reason and cause to worry.” However, the unknown, undocumented and unrevealed, might indeed, prove a more compelling reason and cause to worry. As so it is, in reading The Eagle In Its Flight, the posthumous memoir of Hon. Justice Sir Egbert Udo Udoma, CFR. I dare say that those who, perchance, get to read this book will concur with this observation.
Justice Udo Udoma started writing his memoirs well before his death on 2 February 1998. At that time, some ninety-eight percent of the book had been completed. Still unfinished, as it were, it fell on his son, Ayanti Udoma, to finalize the book a decade later, adding the preface and the last two chapters, the latter, a fitting postscript that brings the memoir to life and a full circle. Such an added perspective is one, which many memoirs lack. The rationale for this approach is most understandable, as the co-author Ayanti observed, “I have written the last two chapters as I saw him during that period before his death and I believe that those two chapters in addition to the preface will give you the added perspective of ten absent from an autobiography such as this.” Readers would come to appreciate this novel, unusual but salutary approach.
A memoir is at once a legacy and a personal and historical recount of what the author was keenly part of, namely, encounters with people, places and events. Udo Udoma’s personal history, his rise and accomplishments as a legal luminary, political leader and community leader, are well documented in this book. However, this is also a book institutional and partisan politics in Nigeria. It offers an unvarnished account of the various personalities that have shaped Nigeria pre-independence and post-independent politics. Furthermore, it renders an unusual insight into the politics within the legal profession and especially, in the highest echelon of the Nigerian Court system.
Cumulatively --and this would be most essential to students of history, politics, law, and broad social sciences -- Udo Udoma reveals, with uncanny wit and forthrightness, a lost mosaic of a nation, once hopeful, and once full of potentialities. In summation of this severe reverse, Udo Udoma, once said of his dear and beloved country, “Nigeria has collapsed”. Aside from his discourse of the pitfalls that dogged the pre-independent and First Republic politics, he offers a glimpse to military anti-politics and how Nigerian soldiers who strayed into politics, were often manipulated by the better educated, but conniving civilians. The Nigerian and the Uganda Supreme Court, two noble institutions, in which, Udo Udoma served creditably as the Justice and Chief Justice respectively, were x-rayed with stark and unapologetic details. Some of his remarks about the machinations of his political and judicial colleagues were unflattering.
This twenty-nine chapter book with its appendices is a rich emporium of personal and national record. In it, Udo Udoma narrates his humble but forthright beginnings, and his early encounter with the clash of cultures, his native Ibibio culture, which his father held dear and the imported Christianity, which his mother embraced without any reservation. This dichotomy between the traditional ways and the church is played out in Udo Udoma’s life and his recount. In one instance, he is torn between accepting an academic scholarship offered by the Methodist Mission that would lead to his becoming a teacher, against his father’s wish to go on to study law. Young Udoma was most desirous of accepting the scholarship and had indeed signed a commitment letter. His father, having greater vision and dreams for him rejected the scholarship outright. The issue was only resolved when his father, told him emphatically, “then you must obey my command” (p.19). Udo Udoma bowing to parental supremacy, was a mark of discipline, respect his pedigree and tradition, being that his great grand father was the founder of Ikot Abasi and his own father, “a leader of the Attat and the Ekpo Nyoho titled societies as well as the distinguished president of the customary court.”
A commonality shared by his parents rested on their abiding faith in the power of education, which was thankfully a value also held dear by his Ibibio community. As fate would have it, Udo Udoma, having lost both parents at a youthful age, lived up to their expectation, thanks to a communal effort in sponsoring his education abroad. Understandably, he devoted the entire Chapter 8, to how he became an “Ibibio Scholar” and went on to chronicle the origins of Ibibio people and Ibibio Union, and indeed, was the first Ibibio man to obtain a doctorate degree in law and a to rise to the apex court in Nigeria.
Though Udo Udoma did not devote a specific chapter to colonial rule in Nigeria, the memoir is laced with strands of encounters and historical records of the purpose and role of expatriate missionaries and publics officers as well as some of the most unsavory effect of the unregulated insinuation of the representatives of Her Majesty’s Government into every facet of the Nigerian life. Udo Udoma had very strongly held views about the ills of colonial administration in Nigeria and had as a student in Dublin, Ireland, laid out his impenitent views in a 1943 speech, titled, “The Lion and The Oil Palm,” which was to have originally formed a chapter in the book, but was instead, appended as an annex. Yet, the speech and another annexure, an essay titled, “The Clash of Culture” also written as a law student in Ireland, which won the Silver Medal of the Philosophical Society in 1943, offers the reader a profound and unremitting glimpse into the mindset of this iconic scholar, politician and legal luminary.
Udo Udoma formed an early view of the deficiencies of colonial policies, observing as it were, “the solution to West African problem was a planning for and with the people instead of against them.” In acknowledgment of his bona fides, as western commentator would remark, “Mr. Udoma is qualified to write on the colonial problem, for he is in the position of uniting the subjective sympathy of an African born and bred with the more objective out-look of the European familiar with the problems that confront both sides”(p.62). As a student in London, where his peers and interlocutors included African nationalists such as Hastings Banda of Malawi, Kwame Nkrumah of Gold Coast (Ghana) and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Udoma proved himself a political activist in the West African Students Union (WASU) and continued his role as a trenchant critic of British colonial policies and practices in Africa.
Memoirs are renowned for their revelation of the unknown or for making whole, historical accounts by providing the missing links. In this regard, the The Eagle In Its Flight does not fail. Three areas or endeavors are worthy of recall in this context. Udo Udoma’s recounts his foray into post-independence national politics, his service as Chief Justice of Uganda, and his ascendancy to the Nigerian Supreme Court, and how he, being a minority, who had shown unalloyed loyalty to Nigerian during the civil war, was twice passed up from becoming the nation’s Chief Justice, though he was the most qualified. Udo Udoma was a self-made man who by a dogged commitment to excellence and dint of handwork accomplished whatever goals his had set for himself. Well before arriving to the juncture of being an eminent jurist, he dirtied his hands doing such yeoman’s job as being a golf caddy and house keeper for two expatriates, a collector, a book-keeper and a time keeper in the of in Customs Service. Similarly, he was continuously engaged in the affairs of Ibibio Union, which he eventually came to lead as President of the Ibibio Union in 1947.
Udo Udoma’s rendition of the goings on within Nigerian politics was most revelatory. He recounts his various roles as an Aba-based legal practitioner, member of the Eastern Nigerian House of Assembly, and the Federal House of Representatives, as founder of the Calabar Ogoja Rivers (COR) state creation movement and a newspaper owner. The latter put his at odds with the venerable Nnamdi Azikiwe, who was the owner of most newspapers in the Western and Eastern parts of Nigeria, known as the Zik Group of Newspapers. Evidently, his perceived impudence in starting newspapers without consulting Zik had rubbed Zik the wrong way. As he recalled, “Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe’s reaction to my failure to consult him before embarking upon the project was to indicate to me that I was mistaken in my enterprise because it was likely that all my wealth realized from my lucrative practice in court as an utter barrister would be wasted on the newspaper publication, and that in any event, the Eastern States Express newspaper was likely to expire within six months of its founding” (p.109). Zik was dead wrong! The Eastern States Express, initially under the foundation editor, Mr. Abiodun Aloba, a former Zik employee, was published successfully for another seventeen years.
Diplomatically, Udo Udoma described his relationship with Zik as “somewhat cordial” but, by his account, it was clear that partisan politics had further estranged both men. Udoma, having be elected into the Eastern Region House of Assembly as an Independent candidate in 1951, had joined Zik’s NCNC, only to depart/decamp with other colleagues to establish the opposition United National Independent Party (UNIP). His politics certainly did not please Zik, so much so that when he was in 1961 appointed a judge of the Federal High Court, Zik asked him how it felt to be a judge, a question, which he felt was Zik’s way of saying, “thank God they have caught this man at last” (p.119). Udoma linked that exchange to Zik’s prior desire, as Premier of Eastern Region, that he should abandon politics, concluding, “He would have preferred to see me a judge than a politician in Parliament in the opposition.”
Udo Udoma served with distinction as Chief Justice of Uganda for six years and as Acting Governor-General in 1963. President Milton Obote of Uganda confirmed as much in his letter of 25th April 1969, wherein he reaffirm his personal appreciation and that of the people of Uganda “for the services you rendered o this country” (p.178), Yet, through an act of fate and what Udoma saw as machinations of Biafran agents, he was brusquely and embarrassingly removed as Chief Justice of Uganda in 1969. Indeed, untidy housekeeping at the Ministry of External Affairs, Lagos, which led to Udoma not receiving a letter from President Obote and hence not replying to it in a timely fashion, might have been responsible for the misunderstanding that led to his removal. Then, again, Udoma did not contemplate or address the wish on the Nigerian Government to see his return to Nigeria, rather than to Biafra, of which his southeastern hometown of Ikot Abasi belonged during the civil war. Udoma recalls fondly his sojourn in Uganda, his role as President of the Constitutional Court, and his participation in handling of three landmarks cases, Uganda vs. Commissioner of Prisons ex parte Matovu, and Tumuhiere vs. Uganda, and Attorney General of Uganda vs. The Kabaka Government, as well as the overall reform of the Ugandan court systems, shifting it away form the Indian model to the more generally accepted English model.
If Udo Udoma faced disappointment in Uganda, he faced betrayal in Nigeria. For a man, who like a few others opted to stay on the Nigerian side when his kith and kin were initially in the secessionist Biafran enclave, Udoma was badly rewarded for his loyalties and his bitterness in this regard was palpable. He had gone to Uganda on the understanding that he would be appointed to the Supreme Court of Nigeria on his return. That part of the deal was kept when he returned in 1969. However, he was subsequently bypassed twice for the position of Chief Justice of Nigeria. In the first instance, Udoma inferred that the eventual appointee, Hon. Justice Taslim Elias, had used his Muslim connection to secure the job of Chief Justice of Nigeria by “offering gratification to the Sultan of Sokoto as an inducement to enable the latter to exert pressure on the Head of State of Nigeria to favorably support the candidature of Dr. T. O. S. Elias…” (p198). To assuage him, he was appointed Chancellor of Ahmadu Bello University.
In the second instance, while he was in the UK, receiving treatment to rectify an obvious malpractice, in which one Dr. Duncan of the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH) had “ignorantly and negligently” administered excessive radiation thus causing more harm than good, there was a coup on 29 July 1975, after which Dr. Elias was removed from office. In his place, Udoma’s professional junior colleague, Hon. Sir Darnley Alexander, was appointed acting Chief Justice. Udoma would note later that Dr. Ducan’s malpractice, which eventually resulted in his double amputation and for which General Olusegun Obasanjo would not grant him leave to seek legal recourse, was in some ways used maliciously to block his chances of becoming Chief Justice of Nigeria.
Udoma recalled how his colleague and presumed friend, Hon. Justice Fatayi Williams, schemed his way into the office of the CJN by ethnic blackmail and perfidy and, specifically, by registering “a solemn protest on the grounds that he saw no reason why I should be given such a high post as the Chief Justice of Nigeria despite the fact that I was an amputee” (p.202). Yet, Udoma acknowledges that other political consideration might have been at play. Citing Justice Williams’ book, “Cases Places and Faces”, he noted that Williams had convinced General Obasanjo to appoint him to the position, in view of the possible electoral outcome, in which the Shagari/Ekwueme, Hausa/Igbo presidential ticket were likely to emerge victorious over the Awolowo/Umeadi, Yoruba/Igbo presidential ticket. In such an eventuality, he had argued that the office of the Chief Justice of Nigeria ought to be filled by himself, a Yoruba man...” It bears noting that Fatayi William’s reasoning might have had a valid logical slant, even if it did constitute as Udoma alleged, an act of betrayal. In this vein, Udoma’s angst is understandable, for when Nigeria needed his services and he pleaded infirmity, General Obasanjo dismissed his objection by asking him, “Do you think with your feet?” (p.201). Ironically, the same General Obasanjo denied him the prized appointment of Chief Justiceships because of being an amputee.
Justice Udo Udoma retired from Supreme Court of Nigeria in 1982, having also served as Chairman of the Constituent Assembly responsible for the draft 1979 Constitution, as well as Chairman of various national panels of inquiry. He eventually founded and served as Chairman of the Cross River State/Akwa Ibom State Law Reform Commission. In that capacity, he gave as usual of himself, not always receiving comparable appreciation in return. Nonetheless, Udo Udoma’s love for and service to Nigeria, without doubt, was that of a true patriot. Yet, true to the vagaries of Nigerian politics, such a distinguished service resulted in his inauspicious departure from both the Uganda and the Nigerian Supreme Courts, prompting him to ask on reflection, "All these and more, what was my reward?" (p.205). He lived a noble and enviable life and his legacy will live on, if not for Nigerians, then for his Ibibio people and his children, to whom he no doubt passed on his diligence, cosmopolitanisms, and worldview of life and issues. As his co-author Ayanti asserts, Justice Udo Udoma was “so visionary, and as such a pioneering spirit; but he was also, oh, so traditional.” That point requires no further amplification, in either law or logic.
The Eagle In Its Flight is a very captivating and urbane, yet unvarnished account of Udoma’s deep personal experiences, all rendered in a seamless flow and with erudite, legal-minded and incomparable storytelling skills. Though posthumously published, this is an illuminating, rare and intimate memoir and a portrait into the soul of an eminently distinguished human being and a true Christian soul. The Eagle In Its Flight is a good, engrossing, and moving read.
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Mr. Oseloka Obaze is a founding member of the Kwenu.com Book Review Forum, which is dedicated to the promotion of books with Igbo and Afrocentric themes. He is also a supporting Member of the African Writers Endowment (AWE). From 1999 to 2005, he served on the editorial board of INYEAKA, the journal of Songhai Charities, Inc., a New Jersey community-based charity founded and run by Nigerians based in New York Tri-state area in the United States, first as its founding Publisher and later as the Editor-At-Large. He is also on the editorial board of The Amaka Gazette, the journal of the Christ the King College, Onitsha Alumni Association in America. His collection of poems, “Regarscent Past: A Collection of Poems” was second among the top three finalists in the poetry category in the African Writers Endowment Publishing Grant Program for 2004. He is working on a novel titled “Happy Eulogy”. He reviews books and arts strictly as a hobby.
© Copyright 28 August 2009.