HOMAGE: When a Friend Returns to Familiar Places

Baba Yunus Muhammad

There are books one reads as a reader, and there are books one encounters with a peculiar sense of recognition. HOMAGE: Return to Familiar Places, the memoir of Dr. Chidi Amuta, belongs to the second category for me. I approached it not simply as a book written by a distinguished Nigerian intellectual, journalist, columnist and public commentator, but as the work of a friend and brother whose journey has intersected with mine at different points over the last three decades. And then, somewhere in the middle of the book, I encountered my own name. It was not in a chapter celebrating friendship or in an account of some professional achievement. It appeared on page 313, in one of the most vulnerable passages of the entire memoir.

Amuta was in a London hospital, seriously ill and uncertain whether he would survive. His physical condition had deteriorated; his confidence was ebbing; and, in the frightening solitude that accompanies the possibility of death far from home, he began making arrangements for what might happen if he did not return alive. He asked his wife, Jane, to reach out to a few friends. Among the names he mentioned were Yemi Ogunbiyi, Segun Adeniyi, Rotimi Amaechi and mine: B Y Muhammad. To most readers, they are simply names in a memoir. To me, they were something else. It was an unexpected encounter with a memory that I had not known I occupied in quite that place in his life.  That is perhaps the peculiar privilege—and burden—of reading the memoir of someone one has known personally. One does not merely read the author’s recollection of his life. One finds oneself occasionally standing inside it.

And that, in many ways, is the secret of HOMAGE. It is a book about returning to places, but its deeper journey is a return to people, experiences, memories and meanings. The familiar places of the title are geographical, but they are also psychological and historical. They are the places where a life was formed and where, long after the physical journey has moved on, memory continues to reside.

Amuta’s return is therefore not merely a homecoming. It is an interrogation of memory. The remarkable thing about the book is that the author does not treat memory as a passive storehouse of things that happened. Memory becomes an active instrument through which he revisits the making of a person and, beyond that person, the making and unmaking of a country.

This explains the unusual architecture of HOMAGE. It is neither autobiography in the conventional sense nor political history, although it contains elements of both. It moves between personal recollection, poetry, cultural memory, historical narrative, journalism and philosophical reflection. At 397 pages, supported by a remarkably copious 96-page bibliography, the book is also substantial in both physical and intellectual scope. It is clearly a work that has been assembled not merely from memory but from a lifetime of reading, observation, documentation and reflection.

One published assessment has aptly described the book as an unusual hybrid and suggested that Amuta may be opening the possibility of a distinctly Nigerian form of the “literary memoir.” But even that description, useful as it is, does not quite capture what the book is attempting.

At its deepest level, HOMAGE is an argument about the relationship between a life and a nation. Amuta’s childhood is not presented simply as the childhood of one Nigerian boy. The village becomes a window into a disappearing cultural universe. The memories of family, elders, ancestral practices, farming, village pathways and early schooling are also memories of a Nigeria that has been transformed almost beyond recognition. His movement from the village to Aba introduces another Nigeria—the urban Nigeria of colonial spatial divisions, poverty, aspiration and the rough social intimacy of those who had little but shared what they had.

Then comes the Civil War. Here the memoir acquires a different emotional temperature. The war is not encountered primarily through the language of military history or political theory. It is experienced through the eyes of a young person whose world has suddenly become unsafe. Death ceases to be an abstraction. The familiar world is broken. The assumptions of childhood are shattered.

This may be one of the most important dimensions of HOMAGE: Amuta does not write about history from a safe distance. He writes about the history that entered his own life and changed its direction. The Nigerian Civil War therefore becomes more than an episode in the author’s biography. It becomes one of the formative experiences through which he came to understand Nigeria itself.

The young Amuta emerges from that history into university, intellectual life and eventually journalism. And here another transformation takes place. The boy who once observed his immediate surroundings becomes the journalist who begins to observe power.

Journalism becomes, in Amuta’s account, more than a profession. It becomes an education in the anatomy of influence. Through journalism he encounters men and women who exercise power, and he discovers the complicated relationship between ideas, language and authority. His encounters with figures such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, Moshood Abiola and General Ibrahim Babangida, as well as political figures abroad, provide some of the most revealing sections of the memoir.

My own relationship with Amuta also belongs, in a modest but meaningful way, to this world of journalism, ideas and public engagement. Over the years, our friendship has been accompanied by professional collaboration, including our work together on the political projects of General Ibrahim Babangida and the co-editing of books dealing with his administration. Those engagements created a professional and intellectual bond that has, in its own way, also linked the two of us to the retired General and to an important chapter of Nigeria’s political history. They were occasions in which friendship and intellectual work met, and in which we shared the task of documenting and interpreting the political experience of an era in which both of us had, in different capacities, become involved.

Yet, what is interesting is that the older Amuta does not appear to be writing simply to remind us that he met important people. The deeper point is that proximity to power does not necessarily make power less mysterious. If anything, it humanizes it. The statesman, the president, the businessman, the journalist, the intellectual and the ordinary citizen eventually inhabit the same human condition. Beneath titles and public reputations is the same vulnerable human being seeking recognition, relevance, meaning safety and, ultimately, some form of validation.

This is perhaps why the section of the memoir dealing with Amuta’s own illness is so important. After a lifetime spent observing the powerful, the commentator becomes the observed. The journalist becomes the patient. The man accustomed to explaining the country to others suddenly has to confront the possibility that his own journey might be ending.

And this is where my own appearance in the book becomes significant to me. The names of friends summoned into that moment of uncertainty are not there because they are famous. They are there because friendship, at such a moment, becomes stripped of all public decoration. What matters is not office, reputation or achievement. What matters is who might answer the telephone.

I was deeply moved to find my name among those called upon in that hour. But perhaps more importantly, it reminded me of something that public life often causes us to forget: behind the public intellectual there is always a private human story sustained by relationships that rarely make the newspapers. This is one of the virtues of HOMAGE. It allows us to see the man behind the public persona. And yet the book does not remain there. Its final movement is toward Nigeria.

This is where HOMAGE becomes considerably more ambitious than a memoir. Amuta gradually turns from the question “What happened to me?” toward the much larger question: “What happened to us?” The personal journey becomes a national journey.

His reflections on the Nigerian ideal are particularly important in this regard. He is clearly disappointed by the Nigeria that emerged from the hopes of independence. He writes of a country consumed by violence, corruption, exclusion, poor governance, insecurity and the repeated betrayal of public expectations. Yet, he refuses to surrender entirely to cynicism. The closing reflections retain an unmistakable belief that another Nigeria remains possible.

This is an important distinction. Amuta’s criticism of Nigeria is not the criticism of a man who has ceased to care. It is the anger of someone who remembers that the country was supposed to become something better. That may be the true meaning of “homage.”

An homage is not necessarily an act of uncritical praise. One can pay homage to something precisely by mourning what it has become and remembering what it was capable of becoming. In that sense, Amuta’s return to familiar places is also a return to the abandoned promises of Nigeria.

The child who once encountered independence as a promise of a new world eventually became an adult who watched that promise become entangled in corruption, political conflict, violence and institutional failure. Yet the older man refuses to allow the failures of history to erase the possibility of renewal. The conclusion is therefore more hopeful than the preceding journey might lead one to expect. Amuta eventually assumes a share of the responsibility for the failures of his generation rather than placing all the blame upon others.

That admission matters. It is easy for an older generation to write the history of Nigeria as though it were merely a history of the mistakes of politicians. It is harder to ask what intellectuals, journalists, professionals and citizens themselves did—or failed to do—with the opportunities history placed before them.

Amuta does not completely escape that question. And perhaps that is why HOMAGE should not be read merely as a book of reminiscences. It is a book about responsibility. Memory can be sentimental. But memory can also be accusatory.

To remember the Nigeria of childhood is to ask what happened to the values that once held communities together. To remember independence is to ask what happened to the promise of nationhood. To remember the Civil War is to ask what lessons were learned and which were forgotten. To remember a career in journalism is to ask what happened to the relationship between truth, power and public responsibility. And to remember one’s friends is to recognize that no life is entirely one’s own.

This is perhaps the deepest lesson I take from reading HOMAGE as someone who is not merely acquainted with its author but has shared a portion of his journey. Friendship gives the reader a different responsibility. One must resist the temptation to turn affection into uncritical praise. A friend owes the writer something more valuable than applause: honesty.

And so I read HOMAGE with admiration, but also with the curiosity of someone who knows that memory is never entirely objective. We remember selectively. We emphasize some encounters and suppress others. We see our younger selves through the eyes of the person we have become. The memoirist is therefore not simply recovering the past; he is interpreting it from the vantage point of the present.

Amuta knows this instinctively. His return to “familiar places” is not really a return to the places as they were. They exist now primarily in memory. The village of childhood is gone. The Nigeria of independence is gone. The young journalist is gone. Many of the people who inhabited those worlds are gone. What remains is memory and writing. Perhaps this is why the book’s title is so appropriate. The journey is not simply back to places. It is back to meaning.

There is also something profoundly Nigerian about such a journey. We are a people who have lived through enormous historical ruptures within a single lifetime: colonialism, independence, coups, civil war, military rule, democratic restoration, economic upheavals, religious and ethnic tensions, technological transformation and the disintegration of many of the social structures that once gave people a sense of continuity.

A Nigerian memoir of sufficient depth can therefore never remain entirely private. The story of one Nigerian life inevitably becomes, in part, a story of Nigeria. That is the achievement of HOMAGE. Its greatest value is not that Chidi Amuta has lived an interesting life, though he has. Nor is it simply that he has met presidents, statesmen, journalists and other prominent personalities, though those encounters enrich the narrative. Its value is that he has used his own life as a lens through which a generation can look at itself.

The book asks us to remember what we have forgotten. It asks us to consider whether the Nigeria we inherited was already carrying the seeds of the Nigeria we eventually became. And, perhaps most importantly, it asks whether remembering the promise of the past can help us recover a future that has not yet been lost.

This is why I find the final optimism of HOMAGE more significant than it may initially appear. It is not the optimism of innocence. The young boy in the village could believe because he had not yet encountered the full weight of history. The older man who concludes this memoir has encountered war, political power, disappointment, illness, mortality and the failures of a nation. If he still believes in Nigeria, that belief carries a different moral weight. It is hope after knowledge. And perhaps that is the most generous homage of all.

Chidi Amuta has returned to familiar places. He has found the child, the student, the journalist, the husband, the father, the friend and the citizen who inhabited those places. He has also found the ghosts of a country that once promised much more than it eventually delivered. But he has not returned merely to mourn. He has returned to remember. And in remembering, he has left us with a question that is larger than his own life: What kind of country will we leave behind when our own generation becomes somebody else’s familiar place?

That, ultimately, is why HOMAGE deserves to be read not simply as the memoir of Chidi Amuta, but as a meditation on memory, friendship, history and the unfinished Nigerian journey. And for those of us fortunate enough to have shared some of that journey with him, reading it is also a strangely intimate experience. For somewhere among the memories of a life, we discover fragments of our own. I discovered mine on page 313.

It was there, unexpectedly, in the company of Yemi Ogunbiyi, Segun Adeniyi and Rotimi Amaechi, that I encountered the name by which I have been known professionally and among friends for decades: B Y Muhammad.