|
Preparations for a seminar on
African prison writing made me return to Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died
during the Easter break. It was a second reading, coming some twenty-two years
after the first. You do not approach the genre of African prison writing
without an obligatory engagement of The Man Died, the text that cleared
the path for later offerings by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Jack Mapanje, Ken Saro-Wiwa,
Kunle Ajibade, Chris Anyawu, and even some later Robben Island narratives. What
caught my attention this time was not the interpellative power of Soyinka’s
prison experience; not the sobering acknowledgement of the continued actuality
of the tragic atrophy of project nationhood so many decades after the book’s
publication; not the discouraging realization that the same amoebic,
feudalistic, and illegitimate leadership still sits arrogantly atop our
beleaguered destiny; no. What caught my attention this time was a name:
Emmanuel Ogbona.
Hear Soyinka: “Let me remind you of
the affair of the Ibo photographer Emmanuel Ogbona who was abducted from his
studio at Odo Ona, Ibadan, sometime last year, murdered and thrown into the
bushes some miles away.
Two soldiers of the 3rd
Battalion, Ambrose Okpe and Gani Biban were later charged with his murder and brought before the court in Ibadan.
Try to recollect the mysterious delays in the trial of these men, the barely
disguised obstructions and maneuverings which would have done credit to any
Klan-impregnated court south of Alabama. We marveled briefly when finally the
public prosecutor announced that ‘acting on instructions’ he had no choice but
to withdraw the case. The Army authorities, he reported, had decided to deal
with this matter themselves. This was the moment when we should have spoken and
acted; as usual we decided on that common salve of timid consciences – ‘to wait
and see’. With that event not only the Courts of Justice of the Western Region,
but the very pretence of law and justice in the entire federation were
subverted to the doctrine of justifiable genocide!”
Soyinka was writing in the late
1960s. Three decades later in the northern Nigerian city of Kano, irate Islamic
militants seized another Igbo man, Gideon Akaluka from a police station. His
crime? He allegedly tore some pages out of the holy Koran. The judgment?
Instant beheading. But even that judgment, plagiarized from the instruction
manual of the christianizing Spanish conquistadors in the Americas, was not
deemed sufficient to atone for Akaluka’s sins in the estimation of the Kano
Ochlocrats who considered themselves instruments of Allah’s swift revenge. They
mounted Akaluka’s head on a spike and paraded it triumphantly through the
streets of Kano. In broad daylight. This was Nigeria in 1996. Add another
decade to the calculus and we arrive in Abuja, Nigeria’s federal capital in
2005. Six Igbo youths, aged between 22 and 24 years, were returning from a
night out of relaxation when they were seized and executed by policemen. Just
like that. Although the Nigerian media has adopted the irritating strategy of
lumping them into a depersonalized collective called the Apo Six, it is
important to insist that they were people and had names: Ifeanyi Ozor, Ekene
Isaac, Tony Nwokike, Paul Ogbonna, Chinedu Meniru, and Augustina Arebum. These
individual Igbo trajectories must, of course, not be separated from the broader
history of unaddressed and unatoned pogroms that have been the lot of the Igbos
in Nigeria.
As I lingered on the story of Ogbona
in The Man Died and my mind wandered to so many other instances of the
ritualistic violation of humanity in the Nigerian nation-space, my sadness – I
was not shocked. I’ve long lost the capacity to be shocked by the state in
Nigeria – devolved from the total absence of this tragic human dimension in the
robust but increasingly frustrating internet debates that have sought to
determine whether Nigeria has assembled enough negative traits to be classified
as a failed state. In recent months, I’ve encountered versions of this debate –
in listservs, in the blogosphere – ranging from the illuminating to the
risible.
On one side are the self-styled
“patriots”, megaphones of Abuja’s constipated official narratives of
nationhood. The position they espouse is often no more than a monotonous
parroting of the attributes of patriotism as outlined in Abuja. The “patriots”
fall into two groups. There is a cantankerous group who, unable to offer
serious intellectual perspectives on why they believe Nigeria is not a failed
state, resort to evangelization of the Christ Embassy or Mountain of Fire
variety. It is unpatriotic to label Nigeria a failed state, they preach
vociferously. We have only one country and no matter where we live, home will
always be home. Things may be bad, we need not wash our dirty linens in the
open. We ought to be proud of our country. Bla bla bla. When proselytism fails,
they resort to beer parlor aggression, abusing the critics they label
“unpatriotic”.
The second group of “patriots” are
those worthy of one’s attention because they have read the books that must be
read before one can dabble into sophisticated public disquisitions on the
subject of failed states. They are capable of demonstrating how, despite its
benumbing difficulties, the Nigerian state still has many of the ingredients of
sovereignty and integrity as elaborated by the likes of Plato (in the Socratic
dialogues), John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau and so many other thinkers; they
are capable of marshalling the Westphalian tenet of territorial integrity in
support of their position; they have read or heard about Max Weber’s Politics
as a Vocation and can therefore argue that the Nigerian state still largely
maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within its borders.
Closer to our times, our patriotic friends are familiar with all the dizzying
and regularly updated ‘failed states indicators’ manufactured by American
think-tanks and are quick to argue that Nigeria has not assembled a sufficient
number of those indicators to cross the failed states rubicon. And because
American think-tanks, notoriously unaware that Iraq, Palestine, Guantanamo, and
Abu Ghraib effectively make America a criminal state, are always manufacturing
nomenclatures for the Global South – rogue states, narco states, crisis states,
fragile states, weak states, vulnerable states, collapsed states, warlord
states – our friends will go fishing and argue that Nigeria is at worst a
fragile or vulnerable state. Noam Chomsky’s book, Failed States, is
sometimes summoned into the argument. After all, he does not mention Nigeria,
abi?
Whatever the variations in
intellectual sophistication, the “patriots” are united by their collective
contempt for the folks they routinely demonize as “unpatriotic” because some of
them sometimes use the failed state model in their strident criticisms of the
Nigerian project. Where these “unpatriotic” critics of Nigeria are based
abroad, the insults thrown at them become orgiastic, proportional to the degree
of their imagined comforts and perks in Euro-America. As a proud member of the
“unpatriotic” clan, I use the failed state model very unapologetically in my
writings. As I read the articles of the intellectually sophisticated “patriots”
on the other side of the argument, I am always amazed that people who went to
proper Universities and were trained by proper Professors in the business of
dissent and rigorous questioning of intellectual orthodoxies would throw so
much strategic thinking into an inflexible deployment of dogmatic and calcified
definitions of failed states from Plato to Chomsky.
Beyond social science dogma, the
most important measurement for me – I’m almost tempted to say the only one – in
this business of identifying a failed state lies in the relationship of that
state to the life and humanity of that faceless individual we call the ordinary
person in the street. What is the life of this ordinary person worth to the
state? Have the institutions and the apparatuses of this state evolved to be respectful
of, responsive to, and responsible for the humanity of this citizen? To be more
precise, what is the worth of the life of an ordinary Nigerian to the Nigerian
State? Not even our patriots will be in a hurry to answer this last question,
the answer being too painful to contemplate.
Now, let’s transfer the same set of
questions to the United States. Here the situation changes dramatically. Even
my grandmother in the village knows the worth of one American life to the
American state. The entire Federal might of the American state, every
institution at its disposal, is ready to be deployed to save one distressed
American. This admirable national culture is even extended to America’s dogs,
cats, and squirrels. I have seen firemen and ambulances rush out to save
American distressed squirrels while the Nigerian state allows citizens to drop
dead in the streets of Lagos and has zero clue how to remove their decomposing
bodies. Indeed, the American state places more value on the life of a squirrel
than the Nigerian state places on the life of a Nigerian. Imagine a distressed
Nigerian abroad phoning his embassy for help! He’ll be lucky if rude embassy
staff do not sue him for abuse of telephone. Yet, these are not even the best
examples of the relationship of the American state to the humanity of its
citizens. The best example of America at work is on television.
Cold Case Files is perhaps the only
television programme I have never missed in the last ten years. I watch it with
religious devotion at least three times a week. I watch the programme because
it offers me the best measurement of the tragedy of Nigeria. As each case is
narrated, I mentally transfer it to Nigeria, wondering what would happen if the
concerned victims were Nigerians. The scenario is always simple. You are
walking your dog in a park. Your dog stumbles on something – a tooth. You phone
the authorities. The specimen is taken to the lab. Results show it’s a human
tooth. Further analysis shows the specimen has been in the open for forty
years. The American state springs into action. The local police open a file and
invite the federal authorities to help. The tooth is carefully stored and
labeled Jane Doe or John Doe. Investigations could last another ten years until
the identity of the ‘tooth’ is reconstructed. Turns out John Doe or Jane Doe
was a man/woman murdered in 1960. The body was never found at the time and the
case was never solved. The murder investigation is reopened. The state traces
John Doe or Jane Doe’s family. Where the case cannot be cracked because the
identity of the ‘tooth’ can no longer be reconstituted or the family can no
longer be traced, the tooth is accorded a proper human burial and City Hall
buys flowers and funds the funeral. The Police Department and City Hall staff
attend the funeral. This is not all. As the documentary progresses, policemen
and other officials involved in the investigation constantly stress the need to
treat the tooth with dignity and respect because it once belonged to an
American citizen. When all is over, officials express satisfaction that the
dead and the living have finally had closure. America has done right by an
anonymous citizen murdered forty years ago. Keep these keywords in mind:
justice, dignity, respect, and closure.
Now, make the appropriate
substitutions and lets bring Emmanuel Ogbona, Gideon Akaluka, and the Apo Six
into this picture. Mr. Ogbona was murdered in the 1960s. Somewhere in Igboland,
he still has people, perhaps an aged mother. It is a failed state that has no
memory of citizen Ogbona, let alone evolving structures that could one day
guarantee justice, dignity, respect, and closure for his people. He now only
exists in The Man Died. Mr. Akaluka was murdered in the 1990s. Somewhere
in Igboland, he still has people. It is a failed state that has allowed citizen
Akaluka to slip from its criminally short memory into oblivion, to be mourned
and remembered now by an extended family that will never find justice or
closure. The Apo Six were murdered by agents of the Nigerian state in 2005. It
is a failed state that has allowed the so-called murder investigations to go
the way of Nigerian murder investigations.
With military equipment too obsolete
to withstand occasional incursions into its territory and assaults on its
people by Cameroonian, Chadian, and Nigerien gendarmes, the Nigerian state
always miraculously gathers enough fire power to mow down its own people in
cold blood, like a snake coiled to eat itself up from the tail: Umuechem, Odi,
Zaki Biam. Entire villages wiped out in military operations by the Nigerian
state. Men, women, and children: wiped out in broad daylight. No justice. No
closure. No memory. This is what the “patriots” don’t tell us when they bring
legitimate use of violence into the argument. That instrument is effective only
when the Nigerian state is using it for mass murder among its own people. I
have a proposition for our internet “patriots”. Let them go to what is left of
Umuechem, Odi, and Zaki Biam and scream from the rooftops that Nigeria is not a
failed state; let them find the families of citizens Ogbona and Akaluka and
preach their version of patriotism to them. I am willing to bet that those
families will not follow them to the last refuge of the scoundrel. On their way
back from Igboland, let them stop in the Niger Delta and preach patriotism in
MEND territory.
Justice, Wole Soyinka insists, is
the first condition of humanity. What do you call a state that has repeatedly
shown, with the haughtiest arrogance on the part of its mostly uncultured
officials, that it is neither interested in nor understands the first condition
of the very humanity of its own people? A failed state! What do you call a
state that allows its citizens to casually drop dead in the streets of its
cities – especially Lagos - and watches, arms akimbo, as their corpses
decompose right there in the street? A failed state!
Recognition and acceptance of this
sobering verity is not only the most patriotic of acts on the part of any
intellectual who merits that designation, it is a necessary precondition for
the envisioning of new and workable departures. “Thinking”, says Octavio Paz,
acclaimed Mexican poet and Nobel laureate, “is the first obligation of the
intelligentsia and, in most cases, the only one”. How do we think when a
fundamental premise of thought – contemplation of observable verities – is
criminalized as unpatriotic?
As for those who complain that
writing about the inanities of the Nigerian state amounts to unpatriotic
exposure, I propose a tortoise tale to help them determine who is truly
exposing Nigeria. Tortoise has a slave boy who is fond of eating leftovers from
the dustbin. Every effort to make him stop eating from the dustbin fails One
day, Tortoise announces that he is expecting some very important visitors from
a foreign land and will prepare a sumptuous feast for them. The slave boy
approaches tortoise and pleads: master, please do not tell your visitors that I
am a slave. I want you to tell them that I am your son. Tortoise agrees. But
there is one condition: make sure you behave like my son. Do not call yourself
a slave. The visitors arrive and the great feast begins. One of the visitors
throws a leftover chicken bone into the dustbin. The slave boy, who had been
introduced as the master’s son as agreed, completely forgets himself and rushes
to the dustbin, grabs the discarded leftover, and begins to eat it ravenously.
The visitors ask in consternation: why is your son eating from the dustbin?
Tortoise smiles and remarks calmly: don’t tell me you believed it when I
introduced him as my son! I was just joking. He is only a slave. After the
visitors left, the boy approached Tortoise for an explanation. Oh, I did not
call you a slave, replied Tortoise. I kept my side of the bargain. You
called yourself a slave. When visiting foreigners are routinely treated to the
sight of decomposing corpses of Nigerian citizens in the streets of Lagos, the
Nigerian state calls Nigeria a slave. Not the critics.
|
Authors 
Posted by Robot| 26.03.2008 13:14