Advantages of Failing

A Date with Failure.jpg

By Michael Jimoh

A Date with Failure: The Art of Standing Up Again by Somi Uranta, Lagos: SPW Publishing Company, 332pp

Writing a book on failure is destined to end up in one place – the trash can. Apart from detesting everything failure represents, nobody wants to have anything to do with it or be associated with it.

Failure is what sensible people have abhorred from ancient times to now. Okonkwo’s rise to fame and fortune was his fear of becoming a failure like his father, Unoka. Success, more success, and not failure, is the benchmark for progress in much of today’s acquisitive world.

So, writing about failure takes courage. Somi Uranta, author of A Date with Failure: The Art of Standing Up Again, shows he is courageous.

A year short of 50, Uranta has spent more than 40 years of his life confronting calamities of one kind or the other. He has lived to tell the story as an act of defiance and not as one who gloats. Perhaps the only Nigerian author to have written a book on failure, Uranta is proud to have failed and failed again.

A Date with Failure is not so much about his own adversities as it is a paean to world figures whose rise to prominence rests solidly on their successive string of failures.

First among them, and one readers suspect is the author’s ultimate model, is Abraham Lincoln, 16th president of the United States of America. For 27 years, America’s now most revered president and statesman, suffered dozens of defeat in politics, business and legal practice. His relationship with the opposite sex fared no better.

In-between, Lincoln suffered a nervous breakdown. Respite came briefly when he was elected president of the U.S. in 1960. Lincoln was 51 then.
Four years later, after presiding over a grueling civil war, and just on the cusp of achieving greatness, John Wilkies Booth, a breathtakingly handsome actor and Confederate, put an end to the president’s miseries by killing him in a theatre. By then, Lincoln’s place in American history had been established.

“His passing from the human scene,” Edwin Markham wrote at the time of Lincoln’s assassination, “was like the falling of a great tree, which in its falling left a lonesome place against the sky.”

Most of the individuals highlighted in Uranta’s book left a similar void in their passing. Though of different backgrounds – educationally and socially – and circumstance, and from several different professions, nearly all of them were resounding failures at one time in their lives. Rather than be weighed down by those setbacks, they surmounted them to reach their goals and ambition in the end.

Winston Churchill occupies a prominent place in the history of England taught to students in the Commonwealth as Shakespeare and Elizabeth 11. Sir Winston suffered neglect by both parents and was left at the mercy of a nurse. And then, there was his bout of severe depression – what he called his Black Dog – which ran in his family. Caught and jailed during the Boer war, Churchill escaped from detention in South Africa to England. Summoning up uncommon courage at the time others quaked with fear of Hitler and Nazism, Churchill led the United Kingdom to victory during WW11.

Written as a motivational book, A Date has other examples of individuals who succeeded in the face of certain defeat. Uranta calls them “celebrity failure cases.” Thomas Alva Edison is in the forefront. His famous declaration that “genius is ninety nine percent perspiration and one percent inspiration” is often evoked to encourage lethargic students who may have amounted to nothing in life.

On the podium of “celebrity case failures” in the Americas sit such historical personages as Martin Luther King Jnr. Henry Ford also has a prominent position. Across the Atlantic, Uranta’s choice, apart from Churchill, is another military commander, Napoleon Bonaparte.

An entrepreneur, Soichiro Honda, the inventor of the Honda motor, makes Uranta’s list. Honda was not only unfairly matched against better-shaped students in school because of his diminutive physique, he also suffered from inferiority complex. Poor academically and in physique, Honda immersed himself in machines where he has made his name today. “I got poor grades in school,” Honda himself has written. “But it didn’t upset me very much. My universe revolved elsewhere, around machines, motors and bicycles.”

Beset by obstacles early in life and through much of his adult life, Honda has bequeathed to humanity, through trial and error, perseverance, one of the most popular exports from Japan. So then, only one who has encountered failures severally could write, as Honda did, that “Believing deeply in something allows all of us to find tremendous inner strength and to surpass our limitations.”
Anyone is bound to ask if A Date has no ready example of “celebrity failure cases” from Africa. Of course, there are – namely Obafemi Awolowo, Nelson Mandela and Philip Emeagwali. One of them is deceased but his history is still very recent. Mandela and Emeagwali are alive. The author’s account of their success against all odds is more like a potted biography of each, which shows he has read extensively not only about the Africans but the rest of his subjects from other parts of the world.

Obviously, Uranta is enamoured of their rise to success considering the odds against them. He faced a similar situation, also. Born to a famous family in Queenstown, Opobo in Rivers state, Uranta lost his father while in primary school. After secondary school, he went to work immediately as a contract staff of Wilbros International, a construction company in Port Harcourt. His status did not ensure permanence. He was soon laid off. He started a pastry business, dispensing lunch packs to opulent companies. Fire razed his business premises, thus depriving him of a home and means of survival. A friend invited him to Warri where he began his pastry making. As if fate marked him, fire destroyed his business once again, leaving him homeless and jobless.

Rather than navel-gaze about his circumstance or succumb to them, Uranta braved the odds, knowing full well that, quoting Plutarch, “as bees extract honey from thyme, the strongest and driest herb, sensible men often get advantage and profit from the most awkward circumstances.”

The prince of ancient biographers isn’t the only one Uranta exhorts to advance his compendium on failure. There is Emerson: “When it is dark enough, men see stars,” and Sir Edmund Hilary, the conqueror of Everest: “It is not the mountain that we conquer but ourselves.”

From Warri, Uranta relocated to Lagos to, in his words, begin all over again. He hawked designer ties to bank staff, washed cars and did some odd jobs here and there. Now, he has a permanent carwash outfit in Lagos. He has also acquired a degree in Philosophy from the University of Lagos, Akoka. A celeb in his own way, Uranta has appeared twice on NTA (AM Express) and interviewed by reporters in Lagos. How he started his one-man carwash business, now with staff strength of more than 50, is part of local lore in Oregun.

Books like this come with errors, mostly editorial. For instance, Oscar Wilde was not an American as the author writes. He was Irish. Still, he has to be commended for his effort at writing – after all no carwash man has yet written a book in Nigeria.  Again, you think that Uranta is taking himself too seriously by claiming A Date is the “missing link…the last revelation…the last principle upon which the emancipation of mankind rests.” How is this so?

While A Date will fascinate a certain generation of Nigerians, it may not interest youngsters in Nigeria today angling to become rich as well as famous in the shortest possible time - the better for them if there are no hurdles along the way, better still if the obstacles are avoided.  Is it for nothing the refrain of a popular song by a youngish Nigerian musician is: “I no go hustle till infinity, but I go bubble till infinity?”