People · c. 1914-1956
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A church organist from Arondizuogu went to America, came home preaching palm wine over gin and African cloth over suits, and left Nigerians a word they still use in place of "Mr".
When a Nigerian man is called Mazi today, few people stop to ask where the habit came from. Much of it goes back to one man, Mbonu Ojike, who spent his short life arguing that Africans did not need to borrow everything from Europe, not even the little word in front of their names.
He was born around 1914 in Arondizuogu, in what is now Imo State, to Mbonu Emeanlulu and his wife Mgbeke. His father did not want him in the Anglican schools, but the boy went anyway. He started at the CMS School in his hometown, and by 1925 he was already a pupil teacher at Anglican Central School, first in Arondizuogu and then in Abagana. In 1929 he went to the CMS Teachers Training College in Awka and finished two years later.
His first real job was at Dennis Memorial Grammar School in Onitsha. There he did a bit of everything a keen young church teacher could do. He led the choir, played the organ and looked after the Sunday school. From the outside it looked like a settled life.
Inside, he was growing unhappy. The longer he worked in mission schools, the more he felt the education they gave was not built for Africa's needs. Worse, he believed it pushed African culture down and taught children to be ashamed of it. In the end he left the school and became an agent for the West African Pilot, the newspaper of Nnamdi Azikiwe.
Azikiwe's writing stirred him, and so did the writing of James Aggrey. Ojike decided he had to study further, and that meant going abroad. In November 1938 he sailed out of Nigeria with eleven other students, bound for America.
He began at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, moved to the University of Illinois, and finished at Ohio State University with a degree in economics. He went on to earn a master's degree in education and administration. All together he spent about eight years in the United States, and he did not spend them quietly.
Ojike found that many Americans knew almost nothing true about Africa, and much of what they did know was insulting. So he set about correcting them. He travelled around giving lectures about growing up inside an African culture, and he spoke plainly about colonialism and racism. When newspapers printed articles that painted Africa as backward, he wrote back.
He also wrote books. The best known are My Africa and I Have Two Countries. In My Africa he walked American readers through the customs of his own people, partly to knock down the idea that Africans were inferior, and partly because he hoped the two cultures could come to know and respect each other.
He was not against everything Western. This is the part of his thinking that is easy to miss. He did not want Africans to throw out every foreign thing. He spoke instead of what has been called cultural plasticity: take what is useful from outside, but keep hold of the values at home that give a people stability, progress and dignity. America itself taught him something here, because it was there that he came to admire a working democracy.
In 1941 he joined K. O. Mbadiwe and John Karefa-Smart to start the African Students Association of the United States and Canada. It looked after the welfare of African students and tried to explain African culture to Western audiences. He was also part of the African Academy of Arts and Research, which he founded with Mbadiwe, Nwafor Orizu and Lawrence Reddick. Between 1943 and 1945 the academy put on a run of African dance events that were well received. Through these groups, Ojike was able to attend the United Nations Conference on International Organization in 1945.
When he came home, he brought an idea with him: a Nigerian university on the American model, so that young people could earn degrees at home and stop spending fortunes overseas. It never came to pass. Instead he became general manager of the West African Pilot in 1947, writing two columns, "Weekend Catechism" and "Something to Think About".
Ojike's message was simple enough to fit in a slogan: boycott the boycottables. He did not mean refuse everything foreign. He meant stop wasting money on imported things Africans could do without, and put that money into education and work that would make the country strong. He drank palm wine rather than imported gin. He pushed educated civil servants to wear African clothes, and he backed the idea of an African national costume. His love of music and dance led to the founding of the All African Dance Association. People started calling him the boycott king. And he made the Igbo title Mazi a common stand-in for "Mr", which is why so many men answer to it today.
He was a businessman too. In 1948 he set up the African Development Corporation and bought a well-known bakery that had belonged to Amos Schackleford.
He did not stay out of trouble. In 1949, after police shot dead 21 striking coal miners at Enugu, Ojike wrote a column calling for joint action against the colonial government. It was judged seditious, and he was fined. The killings also pushed him to help start the National Emergency Committee, chaired by Akinola Maja, which spoke out against racial discrimination for about a year before rivalries broke it apart.
He rose fast in Azikiwe's party, the NCNC. His "Freedom song" was sung at its rallies, he became its second national vice president, and he won a seat for Lagos. In 1951 he was made Deputy Mayor of Lagos. Two years later he moved into Eastern Region politics and in 1954 became Minister of Works, then Minister of Finance the same year.
The end came quickly. There were allegations about the region's Finance Corporation buying shares in the African Continental Bank, Azikiwe's bank, while Ojike held the finance post. He resigned in 1956 and, at the tribunal that looked into the matter, stayed loyal to Azikiwe. On 29 November 1956 he died at Parklane Hospital in Enugu, and he was buried the next day. He was in his early forties.
