Some of the things the British overlords of the artificial space called Nigeria - as well as their other colonies - bequeathed on it are such highfalutin phrases as ‘My Lord’ and ‘A Right Honourable Gentleman.’ The latter was how the British members of Parliament (as well as some highly-placed officials) addressed one another in the House – and they still do. Also ‘His Excellency’ – used for British diplomats, among others, who were some sort of occidental mandarins in the heyday of ‘Rule Britannia.’ Our premier politicians had used these phrases and more to good effect – and while some would argue that some of them deserved to be addressed so grandiloquently, others of the rather skewed Kaduna Nzeogwu school would disagree.

Signs that we might overdo the ‘honour’ and formal ‘respect’ routine had come early. I recall reading a biography of one of the first sets of military men that went to Sandhurst from Nigeria – I can’t remember the biographical subject now, but I remember how a Nigerian cadet almost sent a British officer into a tailspin with his overusage of the word Sir. The officer had to tell him that he should cut down on the number of ‘Sirs’ he deployed in a sentence and that his name was not ‘Sir.’

Of course before the colonial interlopers came to Africa, we had forms of giving respect to one another. The Yoruba language, for instance, has honorifics that could be used according to age, rank and status. Even the Igbo, believed by some Yoruba not to be culturally inclined to address each other with honorifics, have a way of giving respect to whom it is due. In one form or the other every society follows a certain kind of honorific rules, although there are variations and gradations to its application and usage. Even in a place like England where ‘she’ means ‘she,’ where you do not need to prefix your elder sibling’s name, or someone who might or might not be older than you, with genuflectal ‘Sister,’ terms like Your Worship, Your Highness or Your Majesty are obviously honorific, and mere pleasantries like Mr or Sir might be obligatory in certain instances.

I remember how I used to wonder why the Queen of England was addressed as ‘Your Majesty’ and the kings in Yorubaland were tagged ‘Your Highness.’ Weren’t they all rulers of some sort? My interest, if you please, was more linguistic than royalist, as a matter of fact I am an anti-royalist of sorts. In most societies the royal establishment has become a tumorous growth, no less so in Nigeria where the Oba, Eze, Obi and Emir have become expensively and rottenly irrelevant. It’s even amusing the way the British colonialists decided to relegate them with the appellation ‘Your Highness,’ which is used for princes in their country, after all Queen Victoria was the sole Queen and Empress of the British Empire. Then again, for instance in Yorubaland where there may be as many ‘kings’ as there are towns and villages, how many ‘Your Majesties’ would anyone be able to bear? I understand that a certain Yoruba Oba has been trying to commandeer the title Your Majesty for himself for some time now. And why not? If the Queen of England could be addressed as Her Majesty, why not a king of an ancient Yoruba town who nurses a Yoruba-wide imperial ambition? Even to make it highly flavoursome in the Nigerian way, he could use ‘His Most Serene Imperial Majesty.’

Needless to say, ours is a society that wallows in titular extravagance. The days were long gone when the description Double-Chief was the acme of social aggrandisement. There are now men who are chiefs a hundred times and more, and who would like to be recognised accordingly. It began long ago with the early politicians, most of whom were either addressed as Chief or Dr or Alhaji. Then the soldier-rulers had come with their own stolen qualifications. Young upstarts like Murtala Mohammed and Shehu Yar Adua had taken self-propelled leaps from Colonels and Lt. Colonels to Generals. I wonder why none of the jackbooters and juntaists did not copy their Ugandan friend, Idi Amin, and become a Field Marshal, among other arrogations.

The musicians seemed to have outdone the soldiers, though. Among juju musicians there was an Admiral, a General, a Commander, and some had taken gingery civilian titles like Emperor, Doctor, one had almost used a de-facto deed poll to change his very name to ‘King.’ There are still very fierce battles over who is king in the virtual kingdom of nearly every genre of music in Nigeria. The climax had come when the military dictator who arrogated to himself the handle President, Ibrahim Babangida, conferred the four star of a General on a Fuji musician who had seated himself on the chair of a Professor before then. The Fuji man had, overnight, become Alhaji Professor General Master, having also considered himself a magisterial Past Master in the art of Fuji music. Babangida’s gesture, though considered as yet another civic coup by those who thought the man was clever (I never did), was actually no more than a pea-brained exercise in self-mockery.

The Nigerian Guardian had tried to buck the trend when it began publishing more than two decades ago. The newspaper had attempted an equalitarian mode of address for every name printed. Everyone would be Mr or Mrs. Mr Awolowo. Mr Shagari. Mr Azikiwe. The paper had seen itself as a sort of leveller, an ultraliberal broadsheet the type of which puffed-up Nigerians had never seen. Few people had cottoned on the sticky corner The Guardian had painted itself into. Such idealism as calling everyone Mister in a society like Nigeria would be hard to achieve, indeed. A society where it is all but the norm for many who consider themselves not just as persons but uber-personalities, to be big-headed, and diametrically small-minded. A society that thrives on crude, class-based apportionment of relevance. A society that equates moneyless ordinariness with voiceless namelessness. Not to accord some of the jumbo egos in Nigeria with their appropriate mouthfuls of titles is as good as defrocking the Pope. The Guardian experiment fell through within months. 

The owner of paper would not even have thought up such finespun quixotry in Nigeria of today. We are now overrun with Pooh-Bahs in agbada and babariga that such an effort would have rendered a newspaper which hoped to be serious as no more than a spoof rag like Britain’s Private Eye. Since the publisher of the paper is an Ibru, how would the paper address the Ibru brothers who are chiefs, what would it do with the self-referential cognomen of Olorogun? Yorubaland now has more Otunba per square mile than there are Ogbeni (Misters). And when the ostensibly modest ‘Daddy’ and Overseer of the Redeemed Church, Pastor Adeboye, ordained some ten thousand people in one fell swoop, he had superadded yet another army of titled deacons and pastors to their ever-widening bandwagon in Nigeria.  

And finally, the Honourables. Or shall we say Honorabilistas? Homo Honorabilis. Nigerian legislators. Nigerian elected and even unelected office-holders. In the days when Babangida attempted to splice military dictatorship with democratic governance, my brother had been made a Supervisory Councillor for Education in a local council (a political appointment), a young man of twenty-six for whom the title and office of Supervisory Councillor was sufficient. But during the two years he spent in office, the young and the not-so-young would rather call him ‘The Commissioner,’ and sometimes ‘The Minister!’ Whenever he went out either by foot or driving his car, he was often carolled with the cries of ‘The Honourable Commissioner’, ‘Honourable Minister’ and simply ‘Honourable,’ the latter being more heard and repeated than Commissioner and Minister, although all three were truly well-meaning, if overstated, applause. I was even called The Honourable’s Younger Brother, a curious fraternal complement which of course was considered a compliment by its clueless mouthers. The honourable craze, like many Nigerian peculiarities, has been coming for long, even before independence.

While I am fairly certain that my brother was not exactly cock-a-hoop about being hailed as Commissioner or Minister or even Honourable, you may not be able to say that for many an ‘Honourable’ today. The term, no less fluid than it has ever been, has become more robust and proprietorial, more intoxicating and self-congratulatory, a cachet of godlike pre-eminence.  Honorableness is now a state to aspire to, to wish for, and to binge upon when won – the first estate of the Nigerian seamy realm. So far as I am concerned every person who holds an elective or nonelective office in Nigeria might as well be addressed as - and revel under the title of - Honourable, but do we know the exact number of Honourables who might be suffering from honorificabilitudinitatibitis - oh yes, honorificabilitudinitatibitis?  

What is honorificabilitudinitatibitis? It is a backformation of yet another polysyllabic word. Honorificabilitudinitatibus. Shakespeare and James Joyce are perhaps the most important writers to have used the word. Honorificabilitudinitatibus: The highest quality of honour, or the state of being able to attain honour. This sesquipedalian used to be the longest word in Latinate English language before it was humbled by a few. When one looks at how the ‘honourable’ gentlemen and ladies who populate Nigerian political underworld are carrying on, one can easily conclude that the juxtaposition of the word Honourable with names like Chinyere Igwe amounts an oxymoron, a elemental contradiction. There is no point repeating how dishonourable it is to slap a fellow human who is only doing his job and then proceed on boastful barking and shitheaded ego-trip for almost half an hour after that. It was when I was pitching for the right word to describe the social disease that Mr, no, Honorificabilitudinarian Chinyere Igwe and others of his ilk suffer from that I imagined it would not be far-fetched to create honorificabilitudinitatibitis out of Honorificabilitudinitatibus. 

Honour is a word that used to carry a lot of weight – and it still does in certain ways and in certain instances. To take girl’s honour in a Victorian novel is to deflower her without the intention of making a honourable woman of her, that is marry her. Some Muslim extremists have carried the honour-equals-hymen to bloody conclusion in the 21^st century, easily murdering their own sisters or daughters for daring to be less than Islamically incestuous in their choice of lovers: This they call Honour Killing. Few years after the British Peer, Lord Jeffery Archer, wrote the novel idiomatically entitled Honour Among Thieves, he had to switch the House of Lords for the House of Correction, still bearing the honourable title of Lord. Honourable man among thieves? Not likely. Anyway, what took Lord Archer to prison in England would have been so legit, so paltry and natural among our own 'honourables' that it would have been buried among a welter of grand thieveries and dishonesties. How about Honourable Thieves for a title of a Nigerian novel? Or to use a Fela-sounding phrase: Honourable Stealing. 

Robot  # 1 | 04.10.2009 20:30

...Read the full article.