By Paul Onomuakpokpo
If the German-speaking
Jewish writer Franz Kafka were in Nigeria now, he would observe that
it is not only in the imaginative space that there are boundless possibilities
in the depiction of the human condition. A validation of his art would have
been that his brand of surrealism that is a staple of the imaginative
provenance has assumed actuality in the human realm. In that case, Kafka would
have been spared being sniggered at on account of Samsa Gregor, a human being,
mutating into a vermin in his The Metamorphosis.
*Buhari |
This kind of
validation was the lot of Chinua Achebe when his prediction in A Man
of the People of the epochal termination of the nation’s first
democratic experience was fulfilled by the military who sacked the wayward
politicians of the 1960s and triggered a series of cataclysmic events that
provoked the civil war. But Kafka and Achebe would have been at the same time
amused and shocked that the boundless and surrealistic possibilities in their
fictional worlds could be located in the realm of actuality in Nigeria – even
beyond their imagination.