Being Okey Anueyiagu’s review of Dr Ken Onyeali Ikpe’s recently released book, “RE-IMAGINE: My Life and Lessons in Black and White”

PROTOCOLS

This magnificent book by Dr. Ken Onyeali Ikpe cannot, and is not expected to capture possibly all the events that marked the author’s remarkable life, but it gives a clear testimony that offers a glimpse into the life and lessons of the man, in black and white.

When Dr. Ikpe asked me to write and present a review to this book, I balked at the proposition, mainly because my schedule was tight and may not have allowed me ample time to do a thorough job. I was also a bit hesitant, because I wasn’t certain that it was ripe enough for him to be writing a memoir of his life at this stage, considering his relatively young age. However, when I began to look closely at the man, Ken, I realized the huge intellectual and consequential gravitas and milestones of his life. I discovered that the ideals and the development of this individual for his own and for the common good, justifies an imperative for this book.

The spirit of this book demonstrates and conveys a sense of the urgency to tell the world about the fledging and an impressionable life that can be re-imagined in the most exhilarating and desideratum ways. To read and digest the content of this book, is like listening and hearing human conditions and experiences that are wrapped around some sort of seismic intelligence and sweet poetry. The subtle styles in its delivery, clearly occur from the beginning to the end, and, imagining resplendently in endless possibilities that are embedded in the thrills of the stories.

In reading this book, my first instinct is to note the importance of us not romanticizing our past. Nonetheless, it is also good for us to embrace the stories that define our beginning, and of those that fiercely make us virtuous citizens of the world. RE-IMAGINE meets these objectives in so many fronts, making a powerful case that for us to understand where we are today, we must look back to the beginning, and use it as a compass for our continuing existence.

This book in lots of ways, meticulously weighs all these variables and experiences with all the moral obligations of humanity in the consideration of how we as humans in our homes or within the larger society, relate to honor, shame, patriotism, truth, legacy, authenticity, and the real meaning of leadership. Dr. Onyeali Ikpe captures in such a beautifully crafted prose, the essence of these attributes in this book.

The book from the onset, becomes a dazzling set of conversations that inspire and illuminate a timely importance of Ikpe’s life by exploring the lessons of the past that help the reader to navigate through the author’s sojourn on earth.

The foundation of this book begins with family. It starts with the noble birth of the author into a family filled with love and other essential ingredients of uprightness and virtue. Tracing the lives of both parents that were steeped in responsibility and honor, with education serving as the benchmark that measures success, the author prepares the reader for a solid ride through the pages of this book. Using the dedication and fidelity of his parents to upholding the astute and proper values that made our society thrive in their times, Ikpe pivots rather effortlessly, and perhaps unknowingly, to our past decades that have been marked and marred by growing cynicism, disorder and distrust in all facets of our lives. The glorious past unwittingly points us to the present with a wide and pervasive sense that our system has decayed and collapsed, thus making this book not just about Dr. Ken Onyeali Ikpe, but about us and our world.

This book, even as it is a memoir, is in so many ways, much more than that. It provokes a deep conversation of the essential good that humanity has in common, and what may have happened to it. Hidden all over this book, is this question, even as the author may have failed to provide the reader with a simple answer about what might be done to restore order of the past? While waiting on the author to clarify this situation, I believe that he may have written an exceptional book that sends subtle messages about what we owe one another as members of the same society, as he journeys us through his eventful life. Ken Onyeali Ikpe, brilliantly, may be using one stone to kill many birds.

When the author takes us to his village of Nekede near Owerri, and introduces his grandmother to the reader, he captures the reader with a magnetic power. In reading about Ikpe’s grandmother, the writer takes us all down memory lane. Even for those who didn’t know, and didn’t experience close interactions with their grandmothers, the author brings the sweetness of this affectionate relationship closer to the heart than can ever be imagined. In the author’s grandmother, the reader will find comfort and a deliberate narration of endearing stories that are deeply reflective of the author’s ancestry and the sweetness of his present life emanating from his grandmother’s import of wisdom through aphorisms. His grandmother’s words are keenly abstruse, but are also laced with absolute simpatico and some elements of likeable and clear compatibility to her grandson’s eventual trajectories. Grandma taught little Ken the real meaning of his family name, and the weight of its essence: pure humanity, honesty, integrity, impeccable and unsoiled character, uprightness, hard work, perseverance, honour and respect for all. Today, the man Ken has imbedded in his life, his grandmother’s lessons and admonitions, and has carried them like a gentle and humble giant in this book, and into his world. This is evident everywhere.

An undercurrent of hazy stories run through this book, which charts a few pages to be of some uneasy readings in terms of some unnecessary distractions. This is an observation, and not a critique of the book. As you can guess from the title, Ikpe’s memoir is filled with a self-serious sentimentality, even as the intellectual prowess and the sensibilities in his book are sequentially and carefully arranged, planned, demonstrated and amplified in most parts of the book. The author is clever, and writes like a professional writer, raising the readers curiosity about some of his wondrous stories.

This book tells a sophisticated tale. It combines a meticulous inroad into the epoch of a child’s life, with more intimate stories of the author growing up in the farm, at school, and his other movements around the world in pursuit of knowledge and livelihood. To construct these grand narratives and the connection of his childhood to the family history, the author adopts what may be considered to be a non-linear approach by moving steadily back and forth across time and space in each chapter. Recall his educational excursion to Russia, and the unfamiliarity and hardship of living in a foreign land encountering strange and difficult language, unpalatable food, and harsh weather. His dive into working as a clerical clerk in a Russian train station was an enduring experience and an object lesson that shapes the character of the man, today.

RE-IMAGINE finds different paths to the contemporary procedural: devoting more energy to more of his personal quests, and raising the stakes in his stories to extra-melodramatic levels and proportions. Here, the author evaluates his major careers and his many life choices across three distinct paths: (1) The Road Well Travelled, (2) The Road Less Travelled, and (3) The Road Never Travelled. These three variables read like a propulsive driving force that illustrates almost in a dramatic form, the legendary Newton’s third law of motion – for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Ikpe utilizes these clearly defined movements to push or thrust his life forward and onward.

He uses these three roads framework to define the good attributes of leadership architecture that are grounded in the making of deliberate life choices that prepare one for success. Dr. Ikpe begins from this moment, to apply highly structured technical and evidential techniques to analyze the paths he chose that took him to his desired destinations. He calls them: Hindsight, Insight, and Foresight. As a man very well trained, tutored and nurtured in analytics, he uses his deep knowledge to address these subjects in this book that turns from a simple memoir to a classicist and a philosophy book. He tactically turns this book into a timeless and quintessential vintage material that touches almost all fields of study in so many alluring ways.

In this book, there are more hits than misses. His three-step analytical engine stands out, filling the void by advancing an argument or cohere around a unified purpose. The author uses these points to reflect the breadth and depth of his talent and knowledge. For Hindsight (Retrospection): Analysing historical antecedents and memory. For Insight (Interpretation): Reading the underlying pattern beneath the numbers and data. For Foresight (Projection): Rehearsing both best-case and worse-case outcomes in private before acting, allowing one to remain unshakeable when executing. This part of the book, meant to be a memoir; the story of a man, becomes at this moment, extreme and difficult with the introduction of some technical complexities. At this point, in my opinion, the book becomes and remains stubbornly unpredictable as it departs from its initial simplicity, to a tough product that is lacking in subtlety.

This book starts well and ends well, with a few bumpy patches in between. The reader may be intrigued by some of the stories in it. If the goal of the author is to link his childhood stories with his upbringing and to use his other life experiences to point to his longer-term question and analysis of how these variables are interrelated and their relevance, it works rather perfectly. Many of these stories are fascinating with the craftsmanship of the author rendering them with such potency and enchantment.

The chapter on the author’s career opportunities and choices registers as an elaborate labour of love for his successful life. This part for me, represents an important theme of this book, because it displays great nuance and brilliance. This, I believe, is an effective way to memorialize people and their achievements that the society wants to celebrate. In this regard, if this writer and his book’s purpose is to tell the reader stories that leave the reader with an idea of an indelible great feeling, then that idea will definitely be very useful, and will stay with the reader forever. Dr. Ken Onyeali Ikpe has achieved tremendous success in doing so.

It is powerful and validating to see one’s life and community reflected so elaborately in a book. However, it is just as important and even essential that the book — real or imagined, should be written through a sequence of interconnectivity and symbiotic resonance. When it comes to reimagined tales, Ikpe is the reigning king of the genre of storytelling, as he combines this spin with the magical power and prowess of a storyteller that is fresh and utterly engrossed in familiar territories.

There are several anecdotal evidence embedded in Ikpe’s stories. He effectively uses these personal stories with many isolated examples to claim many useful facts. His testimonials appear to adopt some anecdote to describe many story-based observational evidence. For example, when he writes about growth and patience, he says that; “if you despise the slow seasons, you will arrive at the fast one without the foundations on which to bear their weight, and the weight, when it comes, will break you in proportion to your unpreparedness”. This is equally as profound when he also writes that; “the man who refuses to pause may move faster from one season to the next … He will not necessarily move better, and speed without direction is merely an efficient way of arriving at the wrong place”. These anecdotes serve to support the many intelligent positions adopted by the author in making this book a master class.

Dr. Ken Onyeali Ikpe becomes a veritable philosopher in this book. Probably, and unintentionally, l think, the author uses the essence of Philosophy which notoriously resists definitions to expand and propel his epistemological theories of knowledge. In his writings, he explores unwittingly, the subject of metaphysics by dealing with the nature of reality and the fundamental issues that constitute and shape it. Because Philosophy questions everything about life, you will discover in this book, that the author asks a lot of rhetorical philosophical questions, and follows with his own answers — a dutiful job of someone who understands philosophy as being the search for truth in everything we do.

Waxing philosophically on page 75, the author writes that; “... the man who has rehearsed his response to failure is not destroyed by failure... He has already met it once, in his own mind, on his own terms". He writes further on page 77 that; “... the proud man calls every reversal a betrayal of principle. The weak man calls every retreat a display of humility. Neither has learned the difference. The difference is the whole of the matter”, Just like the French Philosopher Rene Descartes proclaims that we only exist because we think: "I think, therefore I am", even as we sometimes know that reason and reality may be untrustworthy, Onyeali Ikpe writes forcefully to assure us that we must never be fooled as to our very existence and by the exigencies of life. In this regard, he writes that; "A man can be right about the direction and still be early. Being early is not the same as being wrong. It is only more expensive."

Like the Greek philosopher Socrates, whose famous quote suggests that if we are not free to explore the fundamental questions of life, and wherever these lead us, then what is the point of living, Ken Onyeali Ikpe subjects us in his book with his many quotes suggesting that an unexamined life like Socrates explains, is not worth living. What this book does, is to lead us on the pathway of the world's greatest thinkers in history, by using short quotes and sentences to unlock a whole philosophical approach. This is quite a clever proposition by the author.

At the tail end of the book, Ken Onyeali Ikpe writes about family and destiny. Without explicitly stating it, the question arises, by asking for the meaning of love. Everyone in these disturbing times is asking and longing for answers to this question. Today, the world is lost in the search of the definition of love. Many people proudly parade their love metaphors for many objects of their desire. But Ken begins and ends his search for love in his family. He writes with an assurance that love of family transpired through him when he took an early retirement to support his dear wife, Dr. Nneka Onyeali-Ikpe who had become the Managing Director/CEO of Fidelity Bank. This gesture fully professed in this book, and in the words of the author, is “built on mutual growth and intentionality” in the support of his wife and family. The spirit of awe inherent in this part of the book, transforms the book to a higher translation of dazzlement.

From the start to the end, the book RE-IMAGINE moves deftly among narrative perspectives, in a sort of epiphany that becomes very crucial to understanding the life of a young boy who becomes of age, and living glorious years that are absolutely packed with life and impacted by a legacy, though still unfolding, that will live forever in this book, and also, will endure for generations to come in our sweet memories.

•Okey Anueyiagu, a Professor of Political Economy, is the author of Biafra, The Horrors of War, The Story of A Child Soldier and Nigeria and World Affairs, The Dynamics of Their Complexities.