The Mancunian Candidate

At the first World Negro Arts Festival in Dakar, Senegal in 1967, I had met Obi Egbuna, a young Nigerian novelist, whose first novel, Wind vs.Polygamy, had been dramatized there. In my initiative to flesh out my rubric of International English Literature, I got money enough to bring him to Glenside to lecture on West African Fiction and Nigerian Drama. I had also chatted with Wole Soyinka in Dakar, but he was already too august for mere Beaver College, and, in any case, as shall develop, was in jail for trying to settle the Biafran Civil War on his own. Egbuna was eager to get to the Promised Land, or to put it another way to get the hell out of the inferno that was contemporary Nigeria.

I flew over to fetch him on a cheap flight to Manchester. My seat mate, serendipitously, was the music critic from High Fidelity magazine. When I asked him what he was up to, he replied that he was booked to review a new Catholic Requiem composed by a Jewish dentist for a socialist television station, viz. Granada. That triple ploy sounded interesting enough to me to track in down. So the next morning, a Saturday, I showed up bright and early at their Manchester studios. Almost nobody was at work on a weekend, but I did get the PR man's name, to try to snap a free ticket.

In the parking lot, I flagged down a car that was leaving and asked if he knew where to contact the PR man. No idea. Another car was entering the lot. That driver wanted to know what I wanted. I repeated the formula of a Jewish dentist commissioned by Socialist TV station to compose a Catholic Requiem. I perceived a slight smile on the face of my interrogee. He said he could arrange it. Just go to Free Trade Hall (visions of John Bright dancing in my head!) a half hour before the performance and there will be a ticket in your name at the Box Office.

Then I decided to push my luck, since I had a quarterly piece to write for the British Film Institutes TV magazine, Contrast. Do you know, I asked, how I could speak with the head of Granada, Sidney Bernstein. Yer talking to him, the friendly executive replied. So there we gabbled for fifteen minutes, my head bending towards his hanging out his car window on the state of British Television. I had just become the education adviser for Time Life Films, where my job was to screen BBC-TV videos each week and decide which had good potential for distribution in schools and museums and public TV. He candidly didn't see much potential for his popular programming in America, but gave me the name of the man in charge of documentaries.

The Requiem was not Bach, or even Verdi. But I enjoyed it in an ex-Catholic sort of way, being more interesting in ecumenism than in theology at that stage in my life.

Obi was something else. As we settled in for our flight to New York, I asked him to outline his talks so that I could write press releases for our college and for the Philadelphia public schools where a very creative administrator, Marjorie Farmer, had agreed to book him into some local high schools. (She was married to the director of Philadelphia's Human Relations Commission, and at that period of curriculum development, Afro-American and African Lit seems like a good move.)

Obi slept for most of the flight as I got antsier and antsier over his cavalier attitude. Boy, should I have. When the time came for his lecture in front of the entire womanhood of Beaver, all he would talk about was polygamy! How much more civilized it was than Western monogamy. I sat on the dais, remembering my last great idea bringing Amiri Baraka (still then only a lowly Leroi Jones) to talk about Black Lit. Oh boy!