ADEBOWALE ORIKU

Kemi Badenoch: Failing at being a self-hating Bad-ass

2025-02-23T00:07:00.000-08:00

Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the British Conservative Party, is trying to insinuate herself into a club that does not want her as a member. No, I am not alluding to the Conservative Club, which has many chapters across Britain. To be sure, a number of these politically incestuous clubs would not accept her as a member. She became the leader of the Tories thanks to complex internecine rifts and disarray within her party. For all her extravagant attempts at foisting her sense of belonging on everyone, Kemi is as British as Rishi Sunak or Boris Johnson, who, by the way, was born in New York.

The club Kemi is intent on joining is neither that of Britishness nor even Englishness (after all, she was born in England), but that of 'whiteness' or Europeanness. And she's not just appealing to the mainstream; she has been brazenly playing to the jerks’ gallery of white supremacists and racists. She harps on racist talking points like the hierarchy of cultures and humans – 'lesser culture' over against 'higher culture', 'civilised people' vs ‘peasants and sub-communities’, etc.

Her negative references to Nigeria are not as off-the-cuff as some might think. It is an orchestrated, barely disguised game of racial and cultural self-undercutting one-upmanship. She tells her target audience: see how rotten and barbarous Nigeria is, compared to ‘our’ beloved, supercivilised Britain. She is getting away with the disingenuous ruse for a number of reasons. She carries a Nigerian passport and had spent some of her early years in Nigeria. Her critique of the Nigerian polity, although exaggerated and cynical, has a ring of half-truth about it. Thirdly, she may have calculated on the echo-chamber syndrome among some Nigerians, on whom her views would bounce off and resonate: 'oh, she's telling the truth about the state of Nigeria.' And that is all there is to it.

Of course, the cobbled-up space called Nigeria is indeed in a sorry state, owing to a long relay of dreadful leaders, including the current vice president, who scolded Kemi and suggested that she drop her Yoruba name. I have no time for the reprobate Nigerian ruling class, so I no longer waste any breath on them. Even then, if I were called upon to speak about Britain, as a private British citizen, I would not start babbling about Nigeria, still less about Nigerian politicians. Kemi is the British Leader of the Opposition and has absolutely no business denigrating another country, whether she carries the country's passport or not. It is undiplomatic and in bad taste.

Kemi is more of a glib panderer than an honest truth-teller. It is not so much about the truth or untruth of what she says about Nigeria but its pointlessness and vicious point-scoring. She is a heavy-handed political climber, and all she has done is use Nigeria as a foil for her rose-coloured, over-romanticised view of the 'greatness' of Britain. She is asked what she thinks about the British police, and she pivots straight to how the Nigerian police officers stole her brother's shoes. This is not just unnecessary, but it is also infantile and pettish.

Dragging Nigeria into British political topicalities is the very definition of dishonesty. It is a pushy, validation-seeking ruse; it's all about showing her audience that she is eternally grateful and beholden to them for allowing her to inhale their 'civilised' ozone. It is indeed an explicit appeal to the racist and white-supremacist wing of her party.

Recently, Kemi tried to live up to her punned marital name, Bad-Enoch – in other words, a misbegotten heir to racist and xenophobic Enoch Powell. She should be embarrassed by this comparison, but being utterly lacking in self-awareness, she has failed to see the irony of her situation.

Recently, she came out with some batshit anti-immigration proposals, which are not worth repeating here. With her characteristic smugness, she seems to rejoice in channelling the anti-immigrant hysteria in a country whose recent imperial history makes it a fair destination for a quarter of the world’s population. A few days ago, Kemi again tried to outdo herself by submitting that Palestinians are less human than Ukrainians, so they should not have the right of political asylum in the UK.

There is no doubt that Kemi is a proud member of the vile Trump Fan Club – she is a Trumpette who conveniently reckons without the fact that she would, if she were American, have been a target of Trump's and Musk's DEI witch-hunt.

Kemi’s Thatcheresque pose often falls flat, and we should not forget that Thatcher herself was a class-hopping posturer. Kemi wants to be seen as the latest incarnation of an unshifting, uncompromising iron lady. I can't imagine her having the forethought to know that she will suffer a fate worse than Thatcher's because she will not be prime minister before she is eased out of her over-big boots.

Kemi wishes to be seen as a moral exception to prejudiced presumptions of her right-wing fellow travellers, but at best, she has made herself out as the idiot referent of racists and supremacists – a signifier of unrequited racial foot-washing. At worst, she is a bad-faith actor who blurs the line between a lack of sense of proportion and a bankruptcy of common sense. She has only succeeded in showing herself up as white supremacists' performing monkey, which is why her arrogance jars and is laughable.

If Kemi is thinking of Englishing her name, she may try Stephanie – witness Stephen, the slimy, deplorable house negro in Tarantino’s ‘Django Unchained.’ That is the way she comes across. How does she see herself? A ‘human stain’, a la Philip Roth?

‘Psychoanalysing Kemi’ might be a good topic in a decolonial classroom, but decades ago, Frantz Fanon had done that in ‘Black Skin White Masks.’

The Curious Case of Nigerian Trumpians

2025-02-08T11:34:00.000-08:00

That many Nigerians love Trump is no longer news. It is a given, sadly so. A few days ago, I was compelled to respond to some Nigerians commenting on a post whose woman-hating riffs were attributed to Trump. The post was indeed fake: the overload of ‘Nigerian English’ and register leapt out at me from the first sentence. But of course, my gentle reproof meant absolutely nothing to the Trump rapture-heads who continued to chorus their ‘Heil Trump’ hymn. They were already far-gone on the high of Trump worship.

In 2016, when Nigerians gravitated towards Trump, I wasn’t surprised. A population who had been ruled and ridden roughshod over by robber-politicos, piratical dictators and patriarchal rogues like Abacha, Babangida and Obasanjo would undoubtedly find something worthy of worship in a morally challenged, fake-ass, unprincipled, convicted criminal like Trump.

In 2024, Nigerians who love Trump upped the ante. They moved the adoration of their putatively God-avenging magus from the secular to the ridiculous – that is, faux-religious. After all, Trump does not even pretend to be religious; he only stoops to indulge the cognitive blindness and tone-deafness of his flock. When I asked someone who lives in Nigeria why they loved Trump, they replied: ‘Because he is going to ban gay-ism, trans-ism and woke-ism in America.’

Well, Trump indeed attracts strange bedfellows, and not only within the curious mix of stateside Magadiots but also a global ragtag of ultras: racists and racial supremacists, culture warriors, stiff-necked evangelicals, counterintuitive Muslims, wilful anti-wokes, hypocritical homophobes, strongman-loving Africans and many others. Indeed, two Nigerian ‘pastors’ made an Inauguration pilgrimage to Washington to contribute to the consecration of their infallible popish idol.

I ignored the pitiful answer the Trump-loving person gave me and moved on to something else. My general attitude to Trump’s second coming has been shoulder-shrugging boredom. The day after Trump was elected, someone I know in the US called and tried to gloat about the victory of his hero. I told them I did not care whether or not Trump won, nor did I ever labour under the assumption that he would lose.

If America, or half of America, decided to choose a vain, vacuous and crass chancer, why should that be of any concern to me? I am only intrigued by the psychopathology of human folly, by the phenomenon of human unreason and herd instinct. Here is a man who wishes to turn America into a neo-imperial leviathan of yes-men and women, fear and loathing, and racistocracy. For all the curated hype about the wonders of his first term, there are ample signs now that Trump will plumb new depths in his second term. More so now that he has belly-flashing Jumping-Jack Elon Musk and other kowtowing oligarchs and millions of Maga running dogs to lick his spittle – well, to put it mildly.

It is also not a surprise that Musk is popular among Nigerians – Musk, who could very well have been a cross between a supremacist character from The Turner Diaries and a pompous jackass from any of Ayn Rand’s sub-literary rants. Of course, Musk, who was raised in apartheid South Africa, is the richest man in the world. Quite a good few Nigerians are worshippers of the golden calf, and while Musk is a global golden manchild, Trump is a real-life, if unregenerate, Mr Goldfinger.

The point a lot of Nigerians miss is that Trump as cartoon Superman might be the perfect religio-political messiah for them, but Trump as Nietzsche’s ubermensch (overman/superman) would consider them human trash, not worthy of notice. Well, even though Trump is only a caricature of Nietzsche’s Superman, he no doubt still considers Nigerians who love him unuseful idiots.

In 2016, when a fair number of the world’s population still thought we were living in a rational world where propriety mattered, many people believed that Donald Trump was an aberration that would soon be chucked into the dustbin of history. Well, simply put, the rest is history. Trump won in 2016, lost in 2020 and instigated a violent insurgency, was convicted in a civil court for sexual assault in 2023, and convicted in a criminal court for cooking the books in 2024, but yet he won the presidential election in 2024 and has, like a rough beast from the marshes of Mar-a-Lago, slouched his way back into the White House. Surely, we are not living in as sane a world as we would like to believe.

In 2016, the Nigerian Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, declared that if Trump became president, he would destroy his ‘green card’ - in other words, give up his American residency. Even at the time, Nigerian Trump lovers ‘threw shade’ at Wole Soyinka; they questioned the man’s motive in making a profoundly personal, if not moral, decision.

After Trump was re-elected, I found myself returning to Soyinka’s Green Cards, Green Gods, the seventh instalment of his Intervention chain, published in 2017. In the book, Soyinka gives Trump short shrift, but he savagely lights into Nigerian trump-bots who doubt his bona fides. Soyinka does not suffer fools at all, to say nothing of gladly. I would say that he is the most combative and combustible writer of significant stature in the last sixty years, and his thirteen Intervention chapbooks are one weighty corpus of socio-political diatribe. Of all the books, Green Cards is the most acidic. I will conclude with a quote from the book:

‘I was in New York during the run-up to (2016) elections. I watched this face, its body language, listened to his uncouth, racist language, his imbecilic harangues, the insults to other peoples, other races, especially the Hispanics, Africans and Afro-Americans, even citing once…Nigeria as an instance of the burdensome occupation of global space.’

Well, Baba Wole Soyinka, some of our fellow Nigerians would not care even if Donald Trump took a dump on them.

Why Pastor Adeboye May Not Be A Liar – A Kind of Defence.

2024-06-21T08:23:00.000-07:00

Pastor Adeboye may indeed not be a liar. First, a caveat for those on whom simple irony may be lost. This (me) irredeemable anticlerical defender of the faithless has not suddenly become a friend of the church – nor that of Pastor Adeboye. I would not even deign to damn the ageing ‘man of God’ with faint praise. Nonetheless, I would not be surprised if someone only glanced at the title and went away gloating to himself: Ah, the atheist old dog has lost his bark and bite – he has been brought to heel by God!

Recently, a few faithless folks have been ‘blaspheming’ Pastor Adeboye. Not only has he been called out as a fraud, but he has also been labelled a liar. As for being a fraud, clearly he is an Abrahamic shepherd whose large robes have a million pockets in which he stuffs the shekels and tithes he collects from his sheeple. To be sure, Adeboye cares nothing for ‘liberation theology’ or for what I'd call feeding-the-hungry gospel. He obsesses over tithes and how obligatory they are. Recently, I saw a video where he called on the Nigerian thieving political elite to remember the suffering poor – it was like watching a ham actor struggling to sustain the role of Fagin. Adeboye would rather be friends with Dives than with Lazarus, and there he was snivelling at Dives to forgo the measly droppings from his high table for Lazarus.

As for being a liar, this is far more complex. Anyone who said he drove a car for 200 miles with an empty tank would lay himself open to critique, and he would only have himself to blame if he was called a liar. Fifteen years ago, the empty-tank abracadabra piqued my curiosity. Even though I did not use the word ‘lie’ to describe the implausible assertion, I called it into question – maybe because this cloud-headed sky pilot’s miraculous ‘testimonies’ were not as well-advertised as they are now.

Thanks to the internet and social media, Adeboye’s incredible God-induced figments have become viral fodder for ridicule and mockery. And rightly so. Let’s start with the pièce de résistance. The old man purports to have had tea with God or that God had barged in on him and his good wife and had poured tea from their teapot. As he had done with Joshua, God, in his omnipotence, had flipped the weather and temperature a couple of times solely for Apostle Adeboye – a veritable moveable feast of miracles made only to suit Adeboye’s whims. God had widened a narrow bridge so that Adeboye’s car could wormhole its way round a juggernaut, which had completely hogged the bridge. These are happy-clappy old wives’ tales all right, but then the question may still be asked: Is Adeboye bullshitting? He may not. Before I continue, I would like to say that I will indulge myself in a bit of psychologism here. This is simply because, for all its pretensions to normality and tradition, religion – particularly the so-called ‘revealed religions’ – is received psychosis.

So, is everyone who is religious mad? I will use a paradox to answer the question. The story of Emperor’s New Clothes loses its gist in a town where everyone struts around in their (naked) glory. In such a town, to be clothed is to be mad. Nothing exemplifies this more than the psalmic foolery that is still being echoed down millennia by bible-bashers, which goes, ‘A fool says in his heart that there is no God.’

To a god-worshipper, godless people are not only foolish, but they are also stark-raving mad. Pray, what could be more foolish and schizoid than kneeling in the corner of your room and murmuring to the wall but deceiving yourself that you are appealing to something called God? Or believing such nonsense as a talking donkey (and my Christian friends would never accept that The Donkey in Shrek does indeed talk!). Or the virgin birth. Or the resurrection. Or a man seeing an angel who dictated an unoriginal piece of mythology to him. Or the story of the same man riding a winged horse into the clouds. Or the parting of the Red Sea. Or the utter bunk of Noah’s ark. What religion has done is to make foolishness legit. Religion is an illusion, says Freud; God is a delusion, says Dawkins.

One of the two books I alluded to above is the wellspring of Pastor Adeboye’s inspiration. The import of saying Adeboye is lying is that his reasonableness has been taken for granted. However, just because someone is a former maths teacher does not mean they are an Einstein of reasonableness. It takes a certain self-awareness to lie – to fabulate. Fabulation is another word for lying. To fabulate is to invent false and fantastic tales or fables, just like the first tellers of the Adam and Eve story when they came up with the Garden of Eden horse-manure.

There is another word: confabulation. It’s easy to see this as a pun, a play on con, or conman, and fabulation – a conman who uses tall tales from the Bible and the name of God to steal from the people, for instance. But I am not playing with words. Shrinks use confabulation to describe fabricated rememberings believed by the fabricator to be true. Does Pastor Adeboye believe that a bridge widened into a vast swathe to let his vehicle magic its way round a truck that should have steamrollered it? Maybe. Does he believe that he had tea with God? Maybe. Does he believe that God changed winter into summer for him? Probably. The pastor has been so steeped in the psychosis of religion that he may very well be confabulating rather than fabulating. It's all a function of delusion. Or maybe it's a conflation of fabulation and confabulation. God, as we all know, moves in mysterious ways.

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Of Fraternities and Cults: The Scapegoating of Wole Soyinka

2024-05-07T09:26:00.000-07:00

Last month, I finally picked up Wole Soyinka’s 2021 novel Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest Peoples on Earth. The novel gave neither joy nor sweetness and light. Besides its darkish subject, the style is heavy-going, baggy and constipated. Anyone unfamiliar with the Nobel Laureate's genius and prowess as a poet, dramatist, life writer and essayist would seek to get him out of their system and never return to him.

However, Soyinka is not only brilliant, but he is also prolific. His memoirs and autobiographies are some of the finest offerings in life writing. Therefore, after a brief post-Chronicles decompression, I pitched into Isara: A Journey Around 'Essay,' ‘Essay’ being Soyinka's epithet for his father. Isara is a marginally novelised narrative about the lives and times of ‘Essay’ and some of his townspeople. Again, like Chronicles, Isara is not Soyinka's lithest creation. Atmospheric and episodic, the book is overloaded with 'Ijegba' local colour.

Last week, in a work-in-progress, I referred to how Soyinka and six other undergraduates inaugurated the Pyrates Confraternity at the University of Ibadan in the early 1950s. And only a few days ago, I stumbled on a clip in which Soyinka returns to the University of Ibadan and reminisces as he accesses the 'alcove' where he and the other young turks launched the countercurrent Pyrates’ galley, propelled by the sea-change that was about to happen in colonial Nigeria.

I have never had the time to 'read' comments on social media posts, although sometimes I glance over a few to take the measure of human wisdom and idiocy – the latter is often more in evidence. I expected such adverse and ill-considered sentiments in responses to Soyinka's video, particularly from a section of the Nigerian society that harbours those whom he described as 'fascists.' I will not digress into the recent wrong-minded politicisation and coarsening of the Soyinka persona by the featherbrained, mickey-mouse fascists – they are not worth wasting precious time on.

However, for some years, I had wanted to write something about the misapprehension and misreading of 'fraternities' and the blaming of Soyinka for the irruption of vile, bloodthirsty and murderous secret cults on Nigerian university campuses and its overspill into the streets of cities and towns. There is a certain small-mindedness about this imputation. It’s an illustration of how incuriosity and philistinism have eaten into Nigeria’s body politic. A cursory reading of the history, definition and configuration of university fraternities and societies would easily have shown that Soyinka and his friends were only reenacting a centuries-old tradition of collegiate convergence, fellowship and camaraderie. American universities borrow classical terms like Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Chi, and Kappa Alpha to name their fraternities. In Germany, fraternities are called Studentenverbindung. Britain settles for societies.

Many years ago, I read a biography of Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970). One of my takeaways from the book was his membership of The Apostles, a Cambridge University society that was founded in 1820. Otherwise called The Conversazione Club, Cambridge Apostles is essentially a debating society. In the biography, I read about how members would brainstorm through the night on philosophical problems, mathematics, literature, etc. When Russell was a member, he fraternised with G.E. Moore (author of Principia Ethica) and others; a decade or so later, John Maynard Keynes invited Ludwig Wittgenstein to be a member. These were some of the most remarkable intellects of the early 20th Century.

As Soyinka clarifies, the Pyrates’ raison d’etre was (and still is) playful and ‘fun’ nonconformism and a ‘rebellious gesture’ against a ‘colonial, rather staid and stuffy atmosphere’ of pre-independent Nigeria. Even though it is almost always a civil and social affair in the UK and continental Europe, I am by no means implying that fraternities or societies are steeped in trouble-free child’s play all the time. College fraternities in America are considered the bosom of elitism, cronyism, racism, misogyny and binge drinking. Death via initiation hazing has been known, although this is rare. Even then, these are America-specific issues, and no one blames the founders of fraternities in American universities for these drawbacks.

Etiology – the study of causes of diseases and abnormal conditions – can only go so far. Who brought the idea of kidnap-for-ransom into Nigeria? When? Should we blame Festus Okotie Eboh and his train of drapery for the corruption and conspicuous consumption among the current cabal of Nigerian politicians? Who do we blame for the retrograde religiosity and God-parroting that are ruining Nigerians' collective psyche and intellect? European missionaries? Ajayi Crowther? The jihadists? Othman dan Fodio? The perverse scapegoating of Wole Soyinka for the explosion of cutthroat cultism on Nigerian campuses and streets and the atrocities they wreak would be puzzling if I did not know where it comes from – sheer lazy thinking.

Let’s attempt a counterfactual: if Soyinka and his friends had not set the Pyrates’ boat afloat, would all Nigerian undergraduates and youths be prim-and-proper, overwhelmingly acquiescent sheep today? Rabid cultism reflects the sociomoral state of play in the country - what Soyinka calls ‘anomy’ in the title of his 1974 novel, Season of Anomy. The season of anomie endures and is now acute and desperate. According to Soyinka, chivalry was one of the Pyrates’ terms of reference, and, as the great man gibes, today’s university cultists would spit on chivalry if it was offered to them on a plate. I daresay the word would sail over their doped heads.

Soyinka, Sartre and Style

2024-05-05T01:04:00.000-07:00

Stylewise, Wole Soyinka's Baiting Igbophobia: The Sunny Igboanugo Thesis, the latest (and twelfth) outing in the Nobel Laureate's Intervention series, is strong meat. The book is strong meat, not exactly in the British sense of being so indelicately shocking and off-the-wall as not to everyone's taste, but strong meat, tangentially, in the biblical sense. In the Yoruba sense, too – Eran tó yi – strong, gristly, chewy meat. Of course, any number of readers would pass on Wole Soyinka as any random peruser of books would pass on any other author. It is simply a matter of taste. Some people would consider Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary unreadable or not readworthy, even in the sublime French original. Beyond the chasm of time and space that separates them, Soyinka is not Flaubert, and I would not even begin to compare the masters - both are terrifically larger-than-life figures.

Jean-Paul Sartre testifies to Flaubert's existential vastness and genius in the unfinished biogra-fiction The Family Idiot. The 5-volume, 3000-page literary alchemy is a nonpareil. Again, I will not attempt the merest aperçu into The Family Idiot. Not only would it smack of readerly showoffishness (more so in these unreaderlike times), but it is almost impossible. Joseph S. Catalano's attempt to condense the tomes into a smaller readable volume is effective and handy - handy in more ways than one. (By the way, speaking of taste, Catalano wasn't as taken with Madame Bovary as he was by Moby Dick.) Setting aside the potted edition, few mortals have indeed read all the five volumes of The Family Idiot. There is no sprinting through three thousand pages of text, still more when it is allusive and erudite. And not only are they as rare as gold dust, but they are also as pricey as gold bars, save the first volume, which is inexplicably reasonably priced. Anyway, enough of bibliophilic diversions.

The above is not as digressive as it seems. Soyinka recalls Sartre in a lot of ways. Sartre bestrode French literature and philosophy in the 20th century. As a litterateur, he wrote plays, novels, autobiographies and essays and was a giant of philosophy. Although he is a 'thinker' and intellectual in the Aristotelian sense, Soyinka does not write philosophy. But there are parallels between the men. They are similarly prolific; they are hugely brilliant; they are monstres sacré (sacred monsters); they are non-politically engagé; and they would have been fellow Nobel Laureates if Sartre had not rejected the prize in 1964. Some of their writings are dense, difficult, and well and truly caviar to the general. Soyinka's The Credo of Being and Nothingness may be a minor opus but the intellectual ballast - and bombast, so to speak - at its core is no less weighty than Sartre's summa existentia Being and Nothingness.

Now, here is the rub. How do I write about Soyinka's literary style without turning it into a parody, a parody of purple prose? And not just a parody of Soyinka's prose but also of the pastel shades of my own writing! Anyway, speaking of purple prose, in the tenth Intervention, Soyinka recounts how an English professor, whom he showed his collegiate attempt at writing a play, described his prose as 'purple.' Well, the don lived long enough to witness how purple became the new and rewarding black for Soyinka when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986.

Beyond purple and black, how well does Soyinka's word-painting read and leap out from a canvas? For one thing, unlike, say, Vladimir Nabokov, Soyinka is not a prose stylist. Contrary to what some might think, he does not strain after effect. He is a writer whose genius errs on the side of tough-grained brutalism. If you possessed a fair amount of vocabulary, Soyinka would not send you to the dictionary as often as you might fear, but he might make you sweat, swear and hyperventilate because you could not make your way out of his labyrinthine constructions.

This is not the place and time to analyse Soyinka's redoubtable style. Where does one start? His plays? Poems? Novels? Life writing? Essays? The great man will be ninety this year, and something seems to be happening to his prose. No, it is not mellowing - it is indeed simmering, bubbling over. You could glean that from his Intervention series, which he began about fifteen years ago. The first five books are combative, vivid and reader-friendly; the middle three are brooding, adversarial and not reader-unfriendly, but the last four are... Well, they read as if they were written with ichor (golden blood) taken from the veins of Ogun, Zeus, Sango and Prometheus.

Pastor Adeboye, Grigori Perelman And Poincare: the Mathematical Degrees of Separation. (First published in 2010)

2019-12-16T14:11:00.000-08:00

When I read the report of how the Russian mathematician, Grigori Perelman, turned down the 1 million dollar Millennium Mathematical Prize for solving one of the most redoubtable mathematics problems, I was again reminded of the knotty linear continuum, otherwise called Africa. What has Perelman got to do with Africa? A lot more than you would guess. All right, he is not a descendant of the poet Pushkin, who had an African great-grandfather. But then, who says Perelman does not have his own African ancestor, lost in the reverse offing of time? Anyway, soon after he resolved the mathematical problem (Poincaré Conjecture), Perelman resigned from his teaching job at Steklov Institute and has since eschewed what he sees as the seamless materialism of modern life, he has escaped into a kind of temporal semi-monastic existence in a verminous flat in St Petersburg, a neo-Tolstoyan figure time-travelling into an unwritten Dostoevsky's epic.

After Nigeria's Pastor Adeboye was named one of the People of the Year in 2009, I wrote an article in which I mentioned the Millennium Mathematical Problems. I submitted that it would have been a more worthwhile achievement if Adeboye had solved one of the problems instead of winning plaudits for pronouncing the profound obscurantist drivel of hoping to plant churches in every corner of Africa. I took full cognisance that Mr Adeboye has the freedom to act according to his lights or what he considers the lights of his god – if his great God had told him to supplant mathematics with religion, then one should better leave well enough alone. After all, if there is such a saying that the road to hell is full of good intentions, I don't think it would be entirely facetious to suggest that the road to heaven may indeed be full of daft intentions.

I found it ever so slightly bemusing that it was not only Mr Adeboye who had given up a career in mathematics for a calling as a scriptural shepherd corralling flocks of Nigerian Pentecostal sheep. I understand that Mr Kumuyi, head of Deeper Life Church, was also a mathematics teacher (probably a colleague of Adeboye's) before he became yet another shepherd overseeing a huge flock. I remember someone parlaying his Christianised commonsense into my rueful observation of this coincidence: Isn't it a good thing, he argued, that mathematics loss is God's gain? Being a born-again bonehead, this person failed to reason it out that mathematics' loss is not just God's gain but yet another instance of Africa's reversion to the state of ante- or anti-enlightenment. Would it have mattered whether or not Pastors Adeboye and Kumuyi had remained run-of-the-mill mathematicians and were not even capable of solving the merest mathematical problem? Probably not. I just don't see any point in celebrating the sacrifice of mathematics to religion.

And this would not have meant anything if these two had not set a lamentable precedent that it is something to be rapturous about when someone brilliant enough to be a scholar gives academe up for preacherly calling. Today Nigeria is full of doctors, engineers, architects, lecturers and ‘professors,' who are either honorary or part-time pastors, or deacons, to use a happy-clappers' parlance, or who have given up their old professions to become full-time bible-cramming gospellers. Again, there would not have been anything wrong in a handful of well-educated lay Christians taking preferment, but for this to have become a fashion, a badge of respectability and wisdom, is pitiful. For one thing, it would seriously undercut the chances of anyone from such a society ever winning anything as rare and crucial as the Millennium Prize.

And what is this Millennium Prize, and why am I going on about it? This is a very important Prize, and considering that it is not won every year or even every four years like the Fields Medal, it may even be said that it is more important than the five intellectual Nobel prizes, more important than the latterly instituted Abel Prize. I am not the most mathematical in the village; my handhold on the finer points of maths has always been slippery and very weak indeed. While I would not presume to compare myself with such literary colossi as Updike and Soyinka, I have read both men express how the love of maths was lost on them. Possibly, the DNA sequence of the denizens of the literary republic carries an elision in numeracy, so there is no point in fussing over an expatiation on any of the Millennium Mathematical problems.

Nevertheless, I appreciate and even have an apprehension of the power of mathematics, its omnivalence, its overarching immanence in the exploration of the morphology and meaning not just of the earth, but of the whole universe, maths is the ethereal (as well as real) equivalent of carbon. From Pythagoras to Ptolemy to Newton to Einstein and even to Hawking - maths has been the instrument of choice in these men's effort to untie the few they can among the billions of knots and skeins and the mysteries of the union of space and mass. To render it further down, there could not have been such an invention as the computer I am writing now without mathematics – plus millions of other things. And although applied maths could bring forth such a beautiful – or at least useful thing - like the computer, in its pure form, it is notoriously difficult; it is dense, deep, and to a lot, metaphysically runic.

The Millennium Problems are the apogean problems of mathematics, the eminently bull-headed cruces, the bitch septet. One of them is the cognately complex Poincaré Conjecture. This conjecture is no more or less complex than the Riemann Hypothesis, P versus NP Problem, or Yang-Mills Existence and Mass Gap. In 2003, Grigori Perelman cracked, or shall we say, second-conjectured the Poincare conjecture. In his time, the Frenchman Henri Poincaré was a mathematical luminary; his contributions to mathematics were (still are) massive; among dozens of formulations, he conjured up what is now known as the Poincaré Conjecture. Like all Millennium problems, this is all but humanly unsolvable and extremely prickly. This is why the Clay Mathematics Institute offered a million-dollar prize for the solution of any of the seven.

Perelman was the first person to solve any of the long-unsolved problems - the Poincaré conjecture was proposed in 1904. In 1996, it had been proved and verified that Perelman had marrowed out the conjecture; he was awarded the Fields Medal. However, Perelman declined the award and refused to appear at the International Congress of Mathematics to accept the medal. Several years before he was awarded the Clay Millennium Prize, he had given up mathematics, describing the subject as too painful to discuss. And again, like the Fields Medal, he rejected the Millennium Prize with its million-dollar premium, saying, 'I'm not interested in money or fame. I don't want to be on display like an animal in a zoo.' He believes cracking the theorem is enough reward.

What piques my fascination is how Perelman has reacted rather than his gargantuan algorithmic achievements. Well, crackpot and idiosyncratic, you might say. But we should not forget what had come from that crackpot mind in the first place. And despite the odds, Nigeria, or maybe Africa as a whole, needs a mathematical crackpot like Perelman rather than ex-mathematicians who have chosen a no less crackpot religious persuasion in which they see nothing wrong in praying for miracles or to the ‘unmoved mover,' to move cars. As I wrote earlier, someone like Mr Adeboye has all the right in the world to give up maths for the pulpit, but the effect of such personal abdications is part of the problems of Africa today, and we are yet to thoroughly examine where this sort of teleological drift would land us. Ours is a continent slumbering in the belly of the whale of time. I fear that it might be too late by the time Africa is disgorged; the continent might find itself islanded, arid and sterile, a metaphorical Jonah.

And there is a paradox to the connections I am trying to make. Perelman, the mathematician, worked his backside off, solved a thumping mathematical problem, and won a prize, but chose to live a hermitic life, spurning the million dollar gift, an attitude which mirrors the scriptural Jesus Christ than that of a man who gave up mathematics for charismatic Christianity and thought nothing of buying a billion naira aircraft. At the same time, several thousand members of his congregation might be unable to send their children to school for want of money or feed themselves squarely. This sort of parable is one of Nigeria's subtle tragedies. And when the final tally of the most influential people of this century or even millennium is made, I don't think it will be too hard to separate the grains from the chaff. No Nigerian ‘pastor' – not even Adeboye – has done anything worth celebrating in a high-minded, even humane, way. The likelihood is that these men and women would feature in lengthy footnotes when the story of the failed state once called Nigeria is written.

M

2019-08-23T04:05:00.000-07:00

My fascination with the pun mummy
the mother and mummy the embalmed
Egyptian soul endures.
Time and sophistication have not erased it,
much more so when mummy
the mother abides in time, well-preserved,
cherished, honoured and full of soul.
We never grew out of calling her mummy.
Even now after she's gone...
Gone.

Sometimes you wonder:
Is that it? Is that all there is to it?
Yes, it is.
This is something grave philosophies
and pollyanna religions
do not prepare you for.
For we all measure our time
against the span of our parents' lives,
still more so against the parent
who lives longer, long.

She left in her 90th year,
yet everything looks foreshortened
and brief.

At last, sooner or later,
time's arrow pierces every heart:
in one fell swoop Thanatos
eases out Eros;
the wrecking ball of Earth
smashes us against the bosom
of nothingness and nonexistence.

My fascination with Allan Ginsberg's
Kaddish endures, the poet's song
for his late-lamented mother.
But where Naomi Ginsberg was the very
sea itself, stormy and calm by turns,
Sade Oriku was at once
an oasis and a dune, harbour
and haven for us all.
You would think the words,
'Oh you look like your mother'
feel less bemusing now.
They do not, not when mirror
and reflex tell you otherwise.
Well, aren't we all flickering shadows
of the dead?
Aren't we guttering candles
planted on shrines to the dead?
Aren't we merely one of
the multifarious mutations of evolution?
But here we shall stay with things
sub-specie humanitatis...

Her anima enriches me, stuff
from which my marrow was made.
Her humane gene endures
but the meme of Christianity
that was foisted on her foreparents
has gone awol in me.
I recall her heartfelt Abrahamic prayers...
My forced, knowing, bad-faith 'amen'
now ring hollow.
But that was duty, filial duty,
and she knew - the soul of kindness
and care, Mother.

We still call her mummy
even though she's gone,
even though in her last
testament and autobiography,
she mutes mummy, calls herself Mama.
Isn't Mama better, sturdier, realer,
solemner and mother-earthy?

Mama, you're forever
mummified in our hearts.

Antinatalism

2017-01-27T14:54:00.001-08:00

"How could an omnipotent deity have created in its own image - an exceedingly obscure, almost taunting notion - a being too feeble to escape affliction, misery, temptation? What sadistic experiment is being played? May the Almighty be cursed for his pains, in all senses of that word... We did not ask to be born." (George Steiner: Poetry of Thought).

George Steiner is on target here. Inherent in this passage is Steiner's not being a fan of God, even if the polymath somewhat nods in 'his' general direction in many of his books. However, Steiner's problem-of-evil gibe is not my concern here. I am as bored of that grammatical expletive called 'God' as I am of the debates about 'his' omni-ness or lack of it. The gist of this quote is not so much the anti-God rehash, not so much the old-testamental execration, as the antinatalist final sentence. Steiner's 'We Did Not Ask to Be Born' clincher piques my ideological fancy.
Antinatalism: It is better never to have been born—or anti-procreation. Antinatalism is another way of putting the better-never-to-have-been-born postulate—or position. Antinatalists believe that it is not only perverse for humans to subsist in an imperfectible world of suffering and loss, but it is also thoughtless, unnecessary and utterly self-indulgent to procreate when you find yourself in this 'vale of tears.' Antinatalists are convinced that this only world we know is nothing if not the repository of harm, hazards and hurt.
Bar a few desultory interludes of joy, existence is nothing but a cacotopia of pain, suffering and decay - a cacatopia, or to vulgarise that neology, a massive ball of turd, a cosmic shithole, an existential cesspool. Antinatalism stands in opposition to the contents of many conditioned assumptions and settled reflexes which include religion and its often shallow unphilosophical dictates, particularly those of the family of Semitic religions. Go ye and multiply, they all command. But one does not need religion or the say-so of any god to be natalist, to desire the flesh, to have sex, have children, although these same religions repeat doctrinal downers like 'original sin' and 'generational curse.' Biblical books of Jeremiah and Job resonate with antinatalist laments and regrets, with these two luckless eponyms 'cursing' the day they were born. Even the 'vale of tears' I wrote above is from the Bible.
Anyway, antinatalists have no time for religion. The crux of their argument is simple, if ramifying. In as far as we did not 'ask to be born' and were born just the same, we should not make the mistake our procreaters made and spawn other suffering-prone littluns...
Antinatalism is neither prescriptive nor life-affirming, nor is it anti-life - it is only a philosophy, a tough-minded, even fair-minded, philosophy. Ask any parent who has seen their child suffer, I mean unspeakably acute, bone-deep torture, you would begin to understand antinatalists... Then just ask parents: the sheer burden of parenthood, the conscious and semiconscious everlasting worry, the nagging, niggling apprehensions... What hand would the Fates deal this colic-wracked tot? a thoughtful parent might wonder. She might also ponder, if she was not unrealistically Pollyannaish, how much would her child's bed of roses be interspersed with spiny brambles and stinging nettles? conveniently forgetting that for many the only bed there is is a bed of nails and spikes?
And speaking of colic, I would ask, along the lines of Steiner's thinking: How would a so-called benevolent and perfect god create such a torturous affliction as colic, why would 'he' subject a few-days-old child to such sleepless torment?
Of course, I am an antinatalist might-have-been, which nullifies the question of whether I am an antinatalist or not, or even whether I ever possessed that cast of mind. Only the consciously—even joyously—childless is the authentic antinatalist. The thoughtful parent of a child can only mull these things over, impersonally, if sensibly, which is what I am trying to do here.
I'll conclude with Steiner (from Grammars of Creation).
"Crippled by congenital disease, made blind or limbless by hereditary infirmity, begot in drunken rage or uncaring tedium, children have been known to ask their parents: 'Why did you force existence on me?' In times of massacre, of wilful torture and deprivation, such as the Shoah (Holocaust), the questions pressed on children's lips. And there were indeed those who asked out loud... By what legitimacy do we procreate, do we sentence to a lifetime of pain and victimisation, beings who have not asked to be?" Needless to say, Steiner, like me, is an antinatalist manqué.

Donald Trump and the Right Nation

2016-12-26T12:49:00.001-08:00

To put Donald Trump's president-electhood into perspective, I have been rereading my overthumbed John Micklethwait's and Adrian Woodridge's 'The Right Nation: Why America is Different.' Published in 2005, The Right Nation is a remarkably perspicuous book about how America, despite lapses of liberal-seeming regimes (both Democrat and Republican), is essentially a conservative country, politics-wise. I have found some of the passages of the book eerily relevant to recent events. Below is one: 'As for elitism, rather than dreaming about creating an educated 'clerisy' (class, if you will), the Republicans ever since the 1960s have played the populist card. Richard Nixon saw himself as the champion of the "silent majority." In 1988, the aristocratic George HW Bush presented himself as a defender of all-American values against the Harvard Yard liberalism of Michael Dukakis. In 2000, George W Bush, a president's son who was educated at Andover, Yale and Harvard Business School, played up the role of a down-to-earth Texan taking on the might of Washington.' Reading the book before Trump's tricky victory, I realised that this passage had melted into the larger analysis of American politics, but now it leaps out at me. Donald J Trump is the last in the gallery of Republican presidents who rode to power through the agency of crass populism. I say crass, but in one form or another, populism seems to have worked for these men, as evidenced by how they were able to harvest a number of American 'Belts'. There is the ever-dependable Bible Belt. The marginally moveable Rust Belt. The Gun-nutters' Belt. Amorphous White America Belt. And, particularly in the case of Trump, a sizable girth of Racist Belt, held up by sturdy and close-woven Braces of 'Deplorables.' Trump has been able to harness the hackneyed jingles of Republicanism, bellowing them from rooftops, haranguing from the tribune of tart politicking, he has been able to cram Nixon's 'silent majority,' Bush the Elder's 'all-American values,' and Bush the Younger's hail-fellow-well-met dudeishness into his 'make America great again' warcry. A few people have compared Trump with the slave-owning, Indian-hounding, frontiersmanlike Andrew Jackson, America's 7th president, a flighty and muddled comparison, but that is not my concern here. Anyway, the mugwumpish demiurge of the Democratic party had long been dead before the incubation and hatching of the ' Right Nation' in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Although loopier and kookier than his 'conservative' forebear, Trump took more than a few leaves out of the tract of Barry Goldwater, a Republican presidential candidate, in 1964. Goldwater opposed equal rights for blacks; he haughtily countervoted the Civil Rights Act. He was seen as a 'bigoted nut', and to a large extent, he was. Micklethwait and Woodridge sum him up: 'It wasn't just a question of extremism. Goldwater cheerfully broke all the basic rules of politics. He sometimes started speeches by listing all the people he didn't want to vote for him. He told an audience in Texas that an aeroplane contract should have gone to Boeing in Seattle rather than to a local company. He denounced Johnson's antipoverty program in poverty-stricken West Virginia... One fan created a soft drink called "Gold Water - The Right Drink for the Conservative Taste." With characteristic political sensitivity, the candidate (Goldwater) promptly spat it out. "This tastes like piss!" he spluttered. "I wouldn't drink it with gin." Needless to say, Goldwater was beaten by Lyndon B Johnson in the 1964 election. But then, it was a different America - or, shall we say, Uncle Sam. It was the Uncle Sam who could still see the difference between 'right-minded' and 'Right-minded,' uncynical Uncle Sam who hadn't developed a thick skin to nuance; conscientious Uncle Sam who was still mulling over ways to atone for past sins, who was still somewhat avuncular, trying as best as he could to commune with the ghost of Uncle Remus. At least in looks, Donald Trump is as different from Remus as possible. Even in temperament. For one thing, Trump is neither cuddly nor biddable. And for an heir to Goldwater, he is indeed a mutant, a Midas-pawed alchemist who has turned Barry Goldwater's baser ambitions into a frightfully garish reality. If anything, Trump is as loose-tongued as Goldwater, if not recklessly so. Because where Goldwater had only been antipoverty in impoverished West Virginia, Trump had told Iowans that they were stupid. But he had defeated Mrs Clinton in Iowa because Iowans had lapped up everything he said, including the slur. As it turned out, Trump's boast that he could shoot someone on New York's Fifth Avenue and get away with it is no hot air. He didn't shoot - or hasn't shot - anyone, but the way he was apotheosised during the campaigns, he would indeed have got away with murder. He disrespected women and boasted about abusing them, yet he got 53% of white women's votes. He called Mexicans rapists and ne'er-do-wells, yet 29% of Latinos voted for him. He lied, he bragged, he bullied. He taunted a disabled man. He faked piety, yet the majority of American Christians voted for him. He refused to release his tax records, yet almost half of the American electorate voted for him, with the fusty Electoral College system tipping the balance in his favour. This unlikely and considerably unlikeable monstre sacre is America's president-elect; he is now cakewalking towards the White House. One wonders what happened to Uncle Sam and the United States of America. Probably nothing. Or nothing. It is not as if Trump is a Satan-spurned golem let loose from far-flung badlands unconnected with America; he was birthed from the mouldering womb of the American body politic. Thomas Frank, that fantastic and prolific chronicler of the rise and rise of the American Right, is still pitching around for unambiguous answers in his books. Something stands out, though, as it does in the Right Nation: a discrete American character, a logic-shy New World ethos. Americans always yodel their exceptionalism - perhaps Trump is the exception that merely proves a slightly undifferentiated rule. The authors of The Right Nation got a few things right in the book - the pharisee politics of the Right, the Republican party's macropolitics, America's intrinsic conservatism, the lingering sainted odour of Ayn Rand, the ever-lurking hegemony of the Right - but even for them, a post-Platonic and cartoon-conservative figure like Donald Trump was difficult to adumbrate.

Is Rastafarianism A Proper Religion?

2016-10-27T21:58:00.001-07:00

My daughter asked: Is Rastafarianism a proper religion? Although I could guess what she meant, I told her to clarify: What do you mean by 'proper religion'? Something like Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, she said. Oh, I see. Briefly, I set it into perspective for her. There's no such thing as a 'proper' religion. A religion is a religion, whether it is Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Sangoism, Mormonism or Rastafarianism. No hierarchy whatsoever. All religions are spawns of the imagination, figments of fear, delusion, ignorance, or straight-out battiness - or the throwup of phantasmagoria as in the case of Peyote Religion.
I don't think worshipping an Emperor of Ethiopia who was clearly bemused by it all is more ridiculous than the worship of a wraithlike ahistorical figure called Jesus who, in the stories written about him, was somewhat confused whether he was the 'son of man' or the 'son of God.' Nor will I use the attributive 'proper' to describe a religion whose followers take as holy writ a pieced-together chapbook of ancient tales, injunctions and diktats, all said to be spoken by an unbodied voice to a man under a rock or dune in Arabia. Although some Buddhists take themselves too seriously, the religion itself stresses maya - illusion -and it does not rejoice in blowing the sweet-sour raspberry of heaven and hell or bloviating about a draconian singular god.
If you grew up in Africa in the 1970s and 80s, you would - or might - go through a phase of Rasta consciousness. There was Bob Marley, of course, helming the 'Zion train' of dreadlocked Reggae-making Jamaicans who popularised and proselytised Rastafarianism. There was cannabis, the main constituent of Rasta eucharist, oodles of it. Impressionably enough, under the influence of this 'herb', I tried to listen and stomp to Peter Tosh's 'Legalise It' and 'Bush Doctor' while sporting scrubby unconvincing dreadlocks. Something I never quite understood was the deification of Haile Selassie, the late Emperor of Ethiopia. While recognising the Jamaicans' connection with Africa, I thought there was something off-beam about them making a god out of an Ethiopian monarch. Considered the scion of Solomon, he was also believed to be their King of kings, Lion of Judah. I remember asking myself: even if Selassie was all of these things, how are my Jamaican brothers and sisters connected to Judah or King Solomon? You see, there is an overlap between my deconstruction of Rastafarianism and rejection of Christianity. I could see some parallels between Selassie and Jesus - or between those who made both out as gods of some sort. There is the same mass delusion. Same hero-worship. Same idolatry. Same aggrandisement and over-identification with a father figure. Same embrace of absurdity and unreason.
In a recent post by a Facebook friend about the absurdity of God-belief, I commented that 'I can't get my head around the idea of God and religion.' Someone replied, 'Bro, smoke some weed.' I couldn't help but chuckle to myself. Sadly, I am now teetotal when it comes to pot-smoking. But then, having grown older and mellower, I think it might indeed work. If I dosed myself up with Fela Kuti-size rolls of skunk, I might, like Amerindians stoned out on peyote, begin to hear the call from God, see Moses and his burning bush, David, Solomon, Elijah. I might even glimpse Haile Selassie.

How I Became a Christian... Not.

2016-10-27T21:55:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, I made an absolute burnt offering of a slice of bread which stayed in the toaster a few moments too long. I was about to toss it into the bin when I glimpsed the Face - that familiar, popular, bearded, iconic face. It leapt out at me so keenly that I nearly convinced myself that the stippled tracings I saw on the piece of burnt bread cohered into that stock face of Jesus. It was Sunday morning, and I could very well have gone on to zap a secular, carefully and thoughtfully constructed edifice of Reason and Irreligion, christianise myself there and then, make a 'spiritual' sea change, embrace God and his dearly beloved son and doppelganger, Jesus.
Let's pursue the counterfactual. It was indeed Sunday morning, and, alas, I saw the face of Jesus of Nazareth charcoaled across one side of the slice of carbonised bread. A voice descended from heaven and told me to stop being a bullheaded Saul and become Paul, Jesus of Nazareth's chief bullshitter, to stop being a scapegrace and enter into God's grace-scape, to stop being an unbelieving asshole and become part of the flock of Christian sheep. Amazingly, the voice had an effect - affect, more like - and I began to speak in tongues, sing and dance, glorifying and jitterbugging for Jehovah. Drunk with rapture, I sauntered off to a church, the nearest evangelical ark, to confess my sins and profess faith and born-again belief. Everyone was happy for me, and I became an effigy of the lapsed atheist, a lost rogue ant who found his way back to the teeming anthill. After all, it was only last week that someone I had not seen for years, aghast at how irreligiously unregenerate I still was, again forecast how I would truly become not just a Christian but a pastor. Tandem with this prediction, I made a beeline for pastorate after becoming a Christian. And miracle of miracles, within 24 hours, I became a 'Man of God,' ordained and all that. Praise be!
But it didn't exactly happen that way. The burnt toast with the cloudy outline of something that I couldn't very well persuade myself was a face that did not have that effect. And it could not. But let's proceed with the assumption that I discerned a face, and apparently the face of Jesus. Which Jesus? That of the Nazarene, who may or may not have lived in a place called Judea 2000 years ago? As we all know now, the received Jesus physiognomy could very well have been that of Cesare Borgia or that of Max Von Sydow or Robert Powell, whose lean, handsome, if hippieish, face still graces the walls and altars of evangelical churches. I knew that even if any image was singed on the incinerated slice of bread, it would be anything but that of a man from 2000 years ago or anyone from any time. It might well be a small, charred, nondescript surface whose random ridges and lines vaguely described a hairy face.
Which brings to mind a particular Jesus' optical illusion. You stare at some Rorschach-esque images for a minute or so, and when you lift up your head and focus on any wall around you, you see Jesus. I knew a Christian person who took this optical mindfuck so seriously that she thought Jesus had indeed popped up on her wall, who weaved the sign of the cross and breathed a momentary Jesus-themed prayer, who thought the illusion shouldn't be repeated often as it might offend Jesus and God, that it might amount to blasphemy, like calling the name of the Lord in vain. And thereby hangs the whole sorry tale of religion.
However, just as there isn't any Jesus on the wall and it's all fancy, there can't have been any Jesus face etched on burnt toast. When you say you see Jesus on the sea-lapped sands of a beach, or in a frothy cup of cappuccino, or in the areolae of your girlfriend's tits, you have only seen what your mind trickily tells your eyes to see. It's pareidolia, a relatively recent subcategory of apophenia - the tendency in humans to see patterns and meanings in random objects, in smoke and clouds.

Culture and Its Christian Enemies

2016-06-22T00:57:00.001-07:00

The notion that the Second World and Black Festival of Black Arts and Culture (FESTAC), which took place in Nigeria in 1977, called down a curse on the country has been in the air for some time. This muddleheaded underthinking was broached in the late 1980s as Nigeria began to trundle towards the morass of economic depression, sociomoral decay and the corresponding weedlike flowering of a species of Christianity - pentecostalism - and its dopey consolations. When this hypothesis was first hazarded, it erred on the side of causation: the economic troubles Nigeria was experiencing could be blamed on the overspend on FESTAC. Crude calculus, of course, but it was relatively semilogical, marginally more sensible than the daft supernaturalism of blaming the shitty wicket in which Nigeria finds itself on the Festival of Arts and Culture. I heard the latter argument 20 years ago, and someone, an evangelical pastor, tried to impress me again last week. Here's the routine: Nigeria is in this state because we turned the country into a vast Baalist basilica dedicated to the worship of 'traditional' idols, images and false gods in 1977. To say I nearly lost it is to understate it - overstate, in fact. Because all I did was shrug and say to myself: why waste my time, breath and vocal chord on trying to educate anyone so superstition-bound as to sacrifice arts and culture on the altar of a foreign religion foisted on and fed to us with the opiate kernel of cultural supremacism?
In 1966, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Senegalese president, poet, homme de culture and honorary Gaul, hosted the first Festival of Arts and Culture in Dakar. In those post-independence years, Africa was awash with hope and cultural pride; the continent felt it was ready to show and tell the world that it was not the cultureless Conradian Black Chaos whose occupiers were only capable of unlanguaged gibbering while wallowing in the barest jungle existence. The budding African culturati repaired to Dakar to celebrate Africa. The black diaspora also made an appearance, and a few dashikistas and cultural pilgrims made their way to Dakar, reconnecting with Mother Continent. It was a high-tone spectacular and cosmopolitan, too. Even the hard-to-please Wole Soyinka, who attended the event, testified to it as a succès fou. In one of his books, he gives Senghor a grudging pass for curating a cultural do which went beyond the ambit of the poet-president's ideological preoccupation: negritude. Contrariwise, Soyinka often trashes the Festival of Arts and Culture that the Olusegun Obasanjo military government staged in 1977. Although the Nobel Laureate had participated in the month-long festival, his later postmortems and revisits of the event are damning. The degree to which this has to do with his animosity towards Obasanjo can only be surmised. Soyinka thinks the Black Arts Festival 1977 was not 'cultural' enough, too low-brow, too derivative. But I was around in 1977, although a preteen, a curious, intellectually ambitious youngster (what you'd call a nerd today). However, no quotient of curiosity or precocity could have pushed my interest in FESTAC 77 as far as it went if my dad had not been there. The old man had made sure I was distracted from mere play to watch and sit in on what was happening on TV. The opening ceremony. The songs. Miriam Makeba. Odyssey. Osibisa. Dramatic performances like Langbodo. With his early-type tape recorder, Dad recorded many of the musical performances, particularly Miriam Makeba, and in the next few years, the distinctive Makeba lilt suffused my world. For all its blemishes, FESTAC 77 was a leaven for my cultural sensibility. It helped to shape my appreciation of the arts. So one wonders: How could a festival celebrating African traditions and cultures be bad? Where did that come from? To blame the foreign religions of Christianity and Islam is to absolve most of their Nigerian adherents, slavish, forbiddingly hollow adherents. Why would any self-respecting human pay so much obeisance to the cultures and religions of others at the expense of his own, regretting the celebration of the ways and world in which he was born and raised?
The FESTAC mascot was the ivory pendant mask stolen from the palace of the Edo (Bini) King by the British. Only the representation of the mask was used: the British Museum, which has been its home for almost a hundred years, would not allow Nigeria to have it, not even on loan. Some cultural imperialists have argued that artefacts stolen by the British are better kept and safer in the British Museum. At first, you want to yell and swear at the superlative carefreeness with which this lofty paternalism is expressed, but when you hear Nigerians describe such an artefact as an 'idol,' you baulk. The mind boggles when it contemplates Isis barbarians smashing up and destroying museums and ancient sites, but it boggles no less when it ponders the cultural illiteracy and ignorance-driven iconoclasm of Nigerian Christians. The phrase 'when I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver' has been attributed to a few sources (mainly German), but not to muddy the waters even more, I will rest content with the transposition: 'when I hear the word culture, I reach for my Bible' - apropos of the Merry Christians of Nigeria. The problem with this kind of attitude is how the apparently educated, those who have been through university classrooms, still choose to get blissed out on a cocktail of ignorance and religion-concocted pigswill. In 1977, the barbarians were at the gates, raring to overrun the country; now, they have fully occupied the whole of Nigeria, all of 170 million, give or take a few. In this light, I think Soyinka's stingy appraisal of FESTAC 77 as less than perfect is superfluous - after all, a diamond is a diamond, even if it is rough. For all it might be worth, a jamboree-like arts and culture festival, even one as grandiloquent as 77, would today be wasted on Nigeria. In his Freedom and its Enemies, Isaiah Berlin analyses six thinkers who stood athwart freedom in Enlightenment Europe: one of the men is Hegel, a dismisser of Africa as a place devoid of history and, consequently, culture. Isn't it shameful that we have turned Hegel's 300-year-old postulate into a self-fulfilling prophecy? No, I am not about to argue that cultural and artistic refinement and Christianity are mutually exclusive. The high priest of high culture, TS Eliot, indeed made cultural and poetic capital of his almost ideological devotion to Christian Neoplatonism and the High Church. But while new-wave Pentecostalism in Nigeria does not (and cannot) even pretend to be Low Church, it is obscurantist and anti-knowledge; it is a movement in which the common denominator is marked so low as to be merely imaginary.

Yinka Shonibare's Art

2016-04-03T06:23:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, I went to Turner Contemporary in seaside Margate to see the exhibition of Yinka Shonibare's 'Empire' doublet. Although my little boy got underfoot a few times, it was still a treat. I like some of Shonibare's works. For instance, Nelson's Ship in a Bottle: a warship immured, like a genie, in a blown-up glass wine jug - a montage of art, craft, and history. But do I like everything Shonibare does with the so-called 'African wax fabrics?' Not quite. The multiplicity of colours is pleasing but not always to my taste. The polychrome overload dazzles, but not always in a wow way. Well, even if I were to paraphrase George Braque and remind myself, 'Hey, art is meant to disturb,' I am, sadly, neither disturbed nor perturbed by much of Shonibare's print art. Anyway, I think Braque overeggs the art pudding with the 'shock' saw. Art is meant to affect. Despite its colourfulness, Shonibare's vibrancy of expression falls between the stools of overwhelming and underwhelming. Whelming? Probably to a degree. (Recognising that besides the quirk of currency and incurrency, 'whelm' and 'overwhelm' are much and muchness). But to quickly double back, a few of Shonibare's works pack affect, particularly when they reach beyond hyperaesthetic chic.
By the way, is the 'African print' fabric he works with truly African? I'll look for an answer through the Yoruba lens because I, like Shonibare, am Yoruba. I don't know how the people of southwestern Nigeria came up with the name 'ankara' for the fabric - probably some Turkish traders, or 'drapers' as they might be called, used to sell them in Yoruba markets. Even so this sort of cotton print is not native to Turkey, or its city of Ankara. Maybe ankara is a corruption of Accra; the Yoruba moniker for the fabric may have descended from the capital of Ghana rather than the capital of Turkey.
The fabric has its provenance in Indonesia. It's a species of Indonesian batik. The Dutch liked the art of the design. As colonial intruders in what was then Java, or Dutch East Indies, later Indonesia, they took both the fabric and the idea back home and started to mass-produce batik in their factories. Often by way of Rotterdam, once the largest port in the world, the fabric found its way to Africa.
The issue of autochthon - that is, origin, authenticity, indigeneity - is crucial in postcolonial, post-imperial politics. Is Indonesian batik or Dutch print or ankara or African print African? One shouldn't be too bothered about this, really. Dutch interest in the cloth was and is only mercantile. And while its popularity has waxed in most of Africa, Indonesia has had a kind of fast-and-loose relationship with it for some hundred years. Would anyone escape the snort of pedantry or pettiness if they got into a huff about the roots of a certain kind of fabric? The word batik may be Javanese, but how could one know for certain that wax-resist dyeing began in Java? Might it not have begun in China? Japan? India? Finland? Or even somewhere in Africa. The tie-and-dye Yoruba adire shares cognate technology with the batik, with starch replacing wax.
Would it have looked and sounded more 'African' if Shonibare were using adire? Maybe. But what difference would that make? Probably none. Although Shonibare works on a more cerebral level, Nike Davies-Okundaye is doing wonderful things with the adire, some brilliant palettework reminiscent, somewhat, of Frida Kahlo's nature arabesques. Even so, Davies-Okundaye sometimes drifts into pastiching batik style and design. The cultural town of Osogbo overflows mainly with adire artists - artisans. Besides being intellectually do-as-you-please, I am also against pointless nativism; I don't subscribe to the bad faith of drawing the juices of inspiration from any localised parish pump. Although the batik may have its font in Indonesia or Java, Shonibare can own it - as he has - in the same way that Africa, especially West Africa, has appropriated it, splashing the batik with narratives and themes, ranging from the dramatic to the sublime.
Shonibare's The British Library exhibited alongside The End of Empire, is fantastic. Both works are great, but The British Library 'affects' me more. Call me a bibliophile if you like, but not in the way of liking books for the sake of it, but liking books because of what I can get out of them. I have gone past the juvenile stage when I'd allow myself the indulgence of being called a 'bookworm,' or a bibliophage, literally bookeater - although there is something almost decadently scrumptious about the confection of books on the lofty shelves. But 'The British Library' must be judged beyond the book covers. It is a work about how the British Empire almost made Britain, made London, where the British Library is situated, the centre of the world. And there is something yet still 'central' about the library, the hub of cosmopolitan bookery. I have dropped in and out of the library a few times - frequenter, lately. The library: the books, journals, authors, readers, researchers, a reliquary of literaria, ancient and contemporary - it's where the world and his wife meet. And that is what Shonibare's 'The British Library' is all about how the library represents the home where the chicks of the Empire have all come to roost. The manifold colours of the books, the different shapes and sizes, and the 'multiculturalism' inherent in the names on the spines of the books: Olufemi Majekodunmi. Anne Bronte. Otto Neurath. Majita Nastasic. Indigenes. Immigrants. Émigrés. Authors. Artists. Scientists.
And concerning cultural appropriation, sometimes what Shonibare works with is described as 'African print fabric,' sometimes as 'Indonesian batik', and in the Turner exhibition, it is described, wordily, as 'Dutch wax printed cotton textile.' Which seems to have given the word 'transculture' a fresh, interesting value. This, I think, should serve as an object lesson to that ditzy African-American girl who was apparently peeved that the cool-looking Jewish dude wore dreadlocks - and sadly, on a university campus. That's profound miseducation and racial tunnel vision. She should come round and see Shonibare's humane multicoloured canvases. By the way, my children and I were the only Africans pottering around the two exhibits on that balmy mid-spring Friday afternoon. Perhaps I should have scolded the European and Asian co-potterers in the gallery: why are you looking at the works of a man who bears a Yoruba name and who wears dreadlocks!

Now I am done with the God-debate: It's Pointless.

2016-01-28T13:07:00.001-08:00

I have just finished reading Gary Cox's The God Confusion: Why Nobody Knows the Answer to the Ultimate Question, and I think I am now done with reading books about God - for or against. Gary Cox is an agnostic, an atheistic agnostic who prefers to be called an agnostic, so his book is more against than for it. In fact, The God Confusion is a well-written and philosophical counterargument about the dusty entity called God. You could describe the book as popular philosophy, and this is not to undercut the integrity of the contents or the bona fides of the author, a reputable philosopher, but to stress his uncomplicated, slightly primerlike writing style.
Cox grounds his agnosticism in philosophy or being a philosopher because, according to him, doubt should be the default position of every thinking person. He thinks atheism is as absurd, if not impossible, a position to take as theism - you cannot strike the attitude of negating the existence of a god whose nonexistence defines your position; therefore, he gives short shrift to 'new atheism' and its popularisers like Richard Dawkins. But like the secular philosopher he is, he is not particularly interested in setting Richard Dawkins or his imaginary enemy, God, down from the pedestals on which some people have installed them. He only tries to offer empirical and invariably contrary datums to the question of God.
The God Confusion is worthy of review, but I will let that pass because that is not the point. As a matter of fact, to attempt to review or critique this book is to squelch the very purpose of putting this down. However, while solidly ensconced in his sceptical stance, Cox upends the many fanciful building blocks of the entity called 'God.' The idea of God. The concept of God. Ontological argument. Cosmological argument. The Unmoved Mover argument. Theodicean argument. Teleological Argument. Evolution. And many more. And the many dramatis personae in the God superdebate. Bishop Berkeley. Anselm. Pascal. Voltaire. Descartes. Darwin. Aquinas. Augustine. Nietzsche. Kant. Hume. Durkheim. William James. Freud. Even bit players like Aristotle, Gaunilo, Wittgenstein, Plato, JL Mackie. Cox's conclusions are balanced and unhysterical but surefootedly agnostic and sceptical.
However, in spite of the book's satisfactoriness, halfway through, I had a sort of reverse epiphany: now I am getting bored by all this, I thought. This eternal God Argument. By the time I finished the illuminating book, my mind was made up. I will not waste time and dissipate mental heat on books about God again - I am done with them. This is probably an unintellectual attitude, but seeing the number of books I have read, pro and con, about something patently a chimaera, I thought it was about time to pack it in. Note that The God Confusion is a play on Dawkins's The God Delusion, which itself is an allusion to Freud's religion-is-illusion observation. Being the urtext of 'New Atheist' thinking, Dawkins's The God Delusion has spawned mostly alliterative textual responses, what I'd call 'Delusion industry,' anything from the two theocentric 'Dawkins Delusion' to the utterly misbegotten 'Deluded By Dawkins.'
The God Confusion is in a different league, as it neither seeks to counter Dawkins nor recompound his heady atheistic absinthe, it's only a book which points out the irrationality of thinking, or believing, in any being called God. I am an agnostic of sorts, so that argument agrees with my thinking. But even a fine, well-written book like this would not help relieve the intellectual bloatedness I now suffer about the question of God, having ingested and engorged spoonloads of treacle, bile, pap, and even heaps of crap, owing to a hunger for understanding, clarification, for better insight into the nonthing described as 'God.' From the Bible to the Qur'an, to GB Shaw's Black Girl in Search of Her God, to Kierkegaard and many books by atheists, agnostics, philosophers, and theologians. A few weeks ago, I picked up Karen Armstrong's The Case For God (why she used 'The' and not 'A' I don't know). Armstrong's lawyering in God's behalf is very much in character: slipperiness, jargoneering, a shuffling of apriorism and aposteriorism, clever apologetics, heavy deployment of 'dead languages,' I mean Latin and Greek. God the Being itself is ipsum Esse subsitens, God as the Prime Mover...the Necessary Being is quod omnes dicunt Deum. I guess it would be seen as facetious if I translated the latter into 'God is a Fat Bearded Cunt,' but then that was as much sense as Armstrong's book made to me. Not too long ago, I read Terry Eagleton's 'Culture and the Death of God.' Now, this is one of the more cryptic and difficult parts of Eagleton's high-tone tomes. In the book he stylisedly skirts the death of God and he uses an elaborate trudge through the lush historical meadows of the French\English Enlightenment, German idealism, and Romanticism to confront, in a backhanded way, the death of God.
By the way, every book written by every atheist, agnostic, apatheist - antitheists in sum - in the last 150 years or so has been a kind of variation on, and a rehash of, searching intellectual firstfruits of freethought by early 'disbelievers' like Baron D'Holbach and Jean Meslier, or a comparatively latter one like Ludwig Feuerbach. Although I will continue to read books about the inanities of religion, which, of course, will always carry with it the negation of God and its existence, I don't think I will again spend time reading any book that seeks to prove or disprove the existence of God. Now, so saturated with the anodyne reagent of God-debate, I might very well go John Updike's Dale Kohler one better and try to extrude a cast-iron God from the entrails of my computer.
In spite of having always preferred the label agnostic to atheist, I have never truly been an either\or person - 'either-there-is-God-or-there-is-no-God' person. By the time I reached high-noon as a nonbeliever in God or gods a few years ago, the golden mean had become neither\nor, and it still is: I no longer err on the side of doubt nor certainty. For me, the question of whether there is or there is no God is superfluous, time-wasting waffle. This attitude somehow bears on what some have described as ignosticism or igtheism, meaning, broadly, that the lack of a clear definition of the term 'God' tends to make any debate about it unnecessary. Oh, I am not about to suggest that I should be described as an ignosticist or igtheist or a contratheist or antignostic etc. An alternation between agnostic and apatheist is just about enough. Is it? So, how would you describe yourself if you spurned all debate about God because you thought it was nonsense? An I-dont-give-a-fuckist.

Deconstructing Prayer Before Connecting to The Internet

2016-01-28T13:01:00.001-08:00

Almighty and eternal God,
who created us in Thy image and bade us to seek after all that is good,
true and beautiful,
especially in the divine person of Thy only-begotten Son,
our Lord Jesus Christ,
grant we beseech Thee that,
through the intercession of Saint Isidore,
bishop and doctor,
during our journeys through the internet was , we will direct our hands and eyes only to that which is pleasing to Thee
and treat with charity and patience all those souls whom we encounter.
Through Christ our Lord.
Amen.

I couldn't believe the above when I saw it. An English translation of Prayer Before Connecting to the Internet was originally written in Latin by a certain Father, John Zulsdorf. This was and may remain my greatest WTF moment this year. I thought it was a kind of popish joke, the work of a clowning lapsed Catholic, probably Dave Allen. If you know you'll be 'tempted' when you use the internet, why use it? Why not get yourself cloistered, throw on a hairshirt or a sackcloth blouse, and whip yourself all day? And the Guardian spirit of the Internet! Isidore - who lived hundreds of years before the Internet was dreamt up.
I know that religion, more so Catholicism, is an anachronism, but to try to father the guardianship of safe browsing on a medieval religioso is the height of religious pomposity. And what has happened to freewill, the theological cheat that Christian apologetics always try to palm off on us? Because if having a computer in your house, a phone in your pocket, or a tablet in your bag is a matter of choice, shouldn't the choice be left to you what you would do on the phone or computer?
A man could very well pray that 'Lord, as I go out to sit and drink some wine on the porch of my house, help me to avert my eyes from the sizable derriere of neighbour's wife when she walks past.' Now the problem is, the man had consciously gone out into the porch to stake out the ass of his neighbour's wife. Before you blame the man for exercising his free will to sit on the porch in the first place, reread the line in the 'Lord's Prayer' which says, 'Lead us not into temptation, deliver us from evil.' If God had had the power to lead the man into temptation, despite his silly little prayer, who is to say it wasn't the great 'He' who had made him commit the 'sin' of leching after the ass of his neighbour's wife from the first time he saw the woman, or saw the ass itself? By the way, if people still read the 'Lord's Prayer' and can't see the absurdity embedded within it, why would a Catholic priest not write Prayer Before Connecting to the Internet and not expect anyone to read it with a straight face? Would anyone?
Think of a callow pubescent Catholic boy brainstorming for pristine, clean internet sites to visit, praying to Saint Isidore to help him direct his eyes and mind to nothing but...But what! The Sound of Music? Sister Act? Who knows what he would find on the tenth page of 'Sister Act' search result? Perhaps a sorority of nuns cavorting with a brotherhood of friars - or even cavorting among themselves with sapphic abandon. Let's face it, when the Catholic Father Zulsdorf sat down to write his prayer before using the internet, the mortification of porn, or the flesh, couldn't have been far from his God-clouded imagination. Since I know there's no avoiding what the priest seeks to suppress, I'd advise the Catholic youth that instead of wasting his time on such a prayer, he should recite the last movement of WB Yeats's poem, Long-Legged Fly:

That girls at puberty may find
The first Adam in their thought,
Shut the door of the Pope's chapel,
Keep those children out...

By the way, if prayer before using the internet does work, Arab countries will not be recording high tallies of visits to pornographic sites - extreme, kinky ones, for that matter. These are countries where praying five times a day is mandatory. However, somehow, between those quintet of devotions, the antsy denizens of Greater Levant still find a way to commit the grave sin of onanism with the aid of their computers and whatnot. Or maybe they are not exactly praying that Allah should help them avert their eyes from earthly infidel whores online. By the way, why should anyone who has three scores and some virgins waiting for him in the afterlife waste his time on porn?

'So you think there is no supernatural force, the metaphysical?'

2016-01-14T11:37:00.001-08:00

I have been asked a few times: So you think there is no supernatural force, metaphysical force, unseen energy, etc.? I'll give a brief answer. One man's supernatural force is another woman's mumbo-jumbo, and what you consider 'the metaphysical' may not be more than what an illusionist will conjure from his bag of tricks. Derren Brown is a British illusionist who always tells his audiences that what they are about to watch is no more than tricks, the sleight of hand and plain illusioneering (which includes endlessly fascinating mathematical magic). To many people, Derren Brown can only be nothing but a jujuman, a wizard, someone who got his wondrous 'powers' from mammy wata (water nymph) or from behind a burning bush or some otherworldly thing. But this is not the case: everything Brown does can be unpacked. In my book, Schopenhauer's Child, I describe him as a mindfuck artist. He does that very well: mindfuckery. Which is another name for metaphysical claptrap. One of his easier routines is hypnosis and mind control. To many, you can only make someone 'go to sleep' or behave in specific ways with juju or by some kind of fetishised drivel. But even I, though magically untrained, am au fait with the trick of hypnosis; it has nothing to do with the supernatural; it's a suggestional trick of the mind.
So, can anything be described as preternatural, hyperphysical or paranormal? The simple answer is No. Anything possible, doable, conjurable, and achievable is natural, immanent within nature, not extranatural. I'll use astroscience - simply because it's science - before I begin to speculate on voodoo, animism, miracles and other forms of superstition. Many pragmatic achievements in space travel and orbital mechanics are decidedly and literally out of the world. Not only cargo-cult islanders who see England's Prince Phillip as God would marvel at the science of space travel, but the majority of other humans, including those who understand the physics, would find it intriguing - and even if humans were to conquer Mars, tame it, transplant themselves there, that would count as a phenomenon, a signal human phenomenon. Although the trajectory might be squiggly, tortuous and complex I will always double-back agential responsibility on the human.
Besides the fantastic accomplishments in space science, the antics and farcicalities of voodoo, juju, and muti are paltry and insignificant. But hundreds of millions of people, many from my dear continent, still take these things seriously despite their overappropriation of foreign religions like Islam and Christianity. As it is, these Middle Eastern religions have further metastasised belief in Africa's primal shibboleths. But for the sake of philosophical argument, I will not dismiss out of hand what millions and millions of people hold true; such absolutism does not have a place in philosophy, not even in science, although secular positivists like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking uncompromisingly and rightly pooh-pooh supernaturalism. Even then, using philosophy to prove or disprove supernaturalism is all but impossible - which is why the occasionally forced consilience between philosophy and theology is forbiddingly loose. The weakest link in the vast galaxy of Immanuel Kant's philosophy is where, in Critique of Practical Reason, he clumsily tries to manipulate transcendence and God into being.
In the same way that the burden rests with theists to prove the existence of God, so does it rest on the believer in juju to prove its virtues, efficacy, and, above all, preterhuman potency. But proving this is as impossible as proving the existence of God. If someone came to me and said a young girl who died yesterday was killed by a witch through invultuation - sticking pins and needles in her mini graven image - I would tell the person to prove the truth of his statement to me. In the best of all philosophical worlds, proving or disproving this assertion would necessitate a rollout of arguments, which might include anyone from Aristotle through Hume to Sartre, anything from causality to counterfactuality. But we do not live in the best of philosophical worlds; we do not even live in a philosophical world; as a matter of fact, maggots like paranormal investigation, shamanism, and other religions not only thrive on the corrupt meat of antiscience but also on the ordure of antiphilosophy (in its pure literal sense). If no concrete evidence has been provided for any kind of 'paranormal activity,' if no one has been able to win the 1 million dollars prize for solving the Miracle Question from James Randi Foundation, if no substantiation has ever been provided that the 'witch who cackled last night when she flew past caused the death of my neighbour's child' then I will never get any tangible and satisfactory explanation from the person who purports that a witch had killed a young girl. Hume's scepticism about what he called 'the idea of necessary connection' still holds true today, and nowhere is this more relevant than in the attempt to anchor the galleon of reality in the quicksand of irreality. All I would expect from the dewy-eyed supernaturalist is obfuscation, mystification and a regress into infinite idiocy.
If I felt pain, a growth, anywhere, for example, I'd prefer to go and see a doctor who would make the correct diagnosis and prognosis rather than a babalawo, a sorcerer or a witchdoctor who would maunder about a poison-tipped arrow shot from the invisible bow of an 'enemy,' who would then fob snake oil on me after extorting shedloads of money. Or a 'pastor' or 'prophet' who would offer another kind of greasy placebo. There has also been a rather clever argument that juju, or mojo, might work owing to a sort of telepathic synchronicity between wishful thinking and wish fulfilment, that in societies which believe in these sorts of things, a critical mass of magical thinking might on occasion trigger results. The submission is if Africans stop believing in fantasia like curses and spells, juju and whatever horseshit is out there, they will no longer have no effect - just as it has happened in Europe over hundreds of years. Is this really the case? Did the slippery hacceitas, thisness, of witchcraft, spell-casting, and vampirism ever come near the testability, for instance, of Newton's laws of motion? Did alchemists ever find the philosopher's stone, the elixir? Did 'witches' ever use broomsticks to fly in Pendle, and were there 'possessions' in Loudun? A mere browse through the protosadistic and sinister document called The Malleus Maleficarum would show the houndlike cussedness, the utter ignorance, at the heart of the medieval embrace of superstition and the supernatural in Europe.
For argument's sake, let's put the problematic of causality aside, cool the ardour of our scepticism and hazard belief in the supernatural, but then the measliness, the limitations and the poverty of the signifiers of 'fancies' like witchcraft are enough to short-change any argument for their importance. Even if juju, or witchcraft, did succeed in killing one person, or two, or three, could it have been useful in winning the First or Second World War, or even any war for that matter? A Yoruba politician who was once seen as the embodiment of juju, the incarnation of an ancient Yoruba shogun-like General with occult powers, was routed and blasted to eternity with the guns of young soldiers during a coup after his mojo failed him; he had picked up a gun and used it to defend himself - to no avail. And just as Christian miracles and faith healing cannot help bring back a missing limb, witchcraft can only do so much in killing anyone. This is the biggest argument against superstition, its insignificance, its blurred myopic scope - the worm's-eye view captives have of the world around them. Put a coven of shamans and sorcerers in a dark room with a group of physicists and electricians and challenge either side to bring forth light...

‘What god do I worship, what do I believe in?'

2016-01-08T05:17:00.001-08:00

This question, unexceptional though it seems, plumbs the depths - the depths of depthlessness. Fewer people ask me the question now than, say, 25 years ago - this may have to do with the fact that I now live in a country where you don’t need to worship any god or believe in any religious idol or any newfangled Neoplatonic idea, or seek the validation of a heavenly superwanker, aka the Almighty, to be reassured of your humanity.
But then, occasionally, a religionist (a Nigerian often) does fling the question at me. A few days weeks ago, I was again assailed with the rather needless poser. Below is the give-and-take:
'What god do you worship? What do you believe in?’
'Why must I worship any god? Why believe in any deity?'
'One must believe in something, anything.'
'Why?'
'Because one must.'
'Why?'
'One cannot just be like that?'
'Like what?'
'Be without anything – without God, it’s like being empty.'
'Empty of what?'
'Of God, spirit...'
'Do I look spiritless to you?'
'Not that kind of spirit, the spirit of God.'
'Aha, that.'
But I had stopped because I could not continue the metaphysics-light exchange with the person beyond that point. For one thing, I’ve made the decision not to engage with anyone who possesses neither the liberal imagination nor the moral breadth to know that the choice between belief in God or gods and belief in the existence of dogs is not exactly analogous to a choice between Gog and Magog - or argue with someone who could not cotton on that her declaration that I was ‘empty of God’ was doctrinally self-defeating. Kenosis is a theological term for ‘self-emptying' - particularly how Jesus, the Nazarene, is said to have emptied himself of divinity and godhead to become human. If Jesus made himself 'empty,' why could I not?
Okay, enough irony. Enough of digressive strawmanship. Not believing in God or not worshipping anything does not make me ‘empty.’ As a matter of fact, I have never felt more ‘full,’ whole, more self-contented and relaxed, within humanly possible bounds. And let me repeat: I do not need religion or God to achieve plenitude; all I need is to get to grips with my inner Buddhahood. Needless to say, I am not a Buddhist (even though I see the point of Arthur Schopenhauer’s dalliance with Buddhism, I have no interest) and no time for any new-age east-meets-west eyewash. 'Inner buddhahood,' if you will, is a playful metaphor for chilled-out godlessness. But then I am still often asked what I believe in because it is received wisdom in most of Africa to see belief, faith, worship and sacramental mush as an existential necessity.
And what about the gods and religions of the Yoruba world? After all, I am Yoruba, and someone had once made a curious assumption that my rejection of Semitic religions and their ethnocentric god equals an embrace of Ogun, the iron-clad Yoruba deity, or Sango, the belcher of fire and brimstone, or any of the scores of he- and she-gods in the Yoruba pantheon. This thinking is not as far-fetched as it seems. The eminent Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka makes a virtue of being an Ogun votary. I will not second-guess what Soyinka finds in Ogun (although it's easily parsable), but I have never felt there is a need for any back-to-the-roots posturing; I am as unconcerned about Jesus or Mohammed as I am about Ogun or Obatala. And if I do not see anything in the divinities of the Yoruba world, I can't see myself gathering with tunic-wearing 'neopagans' to worship the sun at Stonehenge or becoming a Freysgodhi, although I have been giving Jediism or the Way of the Jedi, a cool and considered thought lately. What with the hoopla around the latest instalment of Star Wars! Well, if I wrote it down for a Yoruba person that I am a Jedi, the likelihood is that I would remind her of the trots, okay, diarrhoea, before Star Wars because that is what the word 'jedi' means in the language. Oh, this is becoming too anal-expulsive now.
And being from a society in which there is the instinctual desire to mystify everything masquerade reality behind the shroud of the supernatural, the unsayable, the unreachable, the unknowable, it is not unlikely that some would surmise that I may very well belong to a 'secret society,' that I am an allegiant of some fraternity or some hugger-mugger cult. But then the very thought of this is as laughable as giving a thought to becoming a serious devotee of Dudeism or the Church of SubGenius and its great god, Jehovah 1. Even then, these latter two 'religions' make more sense to me than any fraternity or cult with its self-important, sobersided ceremonials. After all, I like the Coen brothers' The Big Lebowski, which is the matrix of Dudeism, and I find Momus, the true god of SubGenius, amusing.
So what god do I worship, to which religion do I belong, and in what faith do I have? To answer 'nothing' to all these questions is to snare myself in the ideological slough of nihilism - nothingness for its own sake - which is a philosophically tricky situation to place oneself in if nihilism is broken and ground down to its brutally dusty lowest common denominator. But then, I do not worship any god or belong to any religion. As regards faith, I have none except faith and belief in humanist ethos, sustained neither by ritual, worship nor by a cacophony of self-indulgent pieties. This is why I would not also think of becoming a member of August Comte's Positivist\Humanist Church, a needless parody of Abrahamism, or even its hipper, newishly laidback offspring, The Sunday Assembly.

Translating the Nigerian Constitution into Yoruba

2015-12-24T09:00:00.001-08:00

When I received Segun Akeredolu's message informing me that he had just finished translating the Nigerian Constitution from English into Yoruba, I knew he had accomplished something. I saw Segun the last time I visited Nigeria. He was one of the lawyers who came round to my friend's - Charles's - office at the Ministry of Justice in Akure to say hello to me. (Charles Olafimihan is a childhood friend and a barrister/advocate). Tony, another legal hotshot, was also a curious and shrewd questioner and listener. Another young man whose name now escapes me had also turned up, only to slink away a few moments later because he thought I was blaspheming his ancestors while atheologising his biblical ancestors like Abraham, David, Jesus, and Joshua!
Segun, whose office is next to my friend's, whom I had become acquainted with during previous visits to Nigeria, didn't tell me he had been working on rendering the Nigerian Constitution into Yoruba. When he sent the finished work to me, I was impressed by the integrity of the contents and the thoroughness implicit in the construction, and seeing that it took him five years to wrap it up, it was clearly a herculean toil. A somewhat heuristic exercise, too, because by the time he finished the job, he would have had a better, rounder and more nuanced grasp of Nigeria's laws. I have gone through Segun's Yoruba language Nigerian Constitution and it is indeed a remarkable feat of intellection. (Yoruba words are elaborately accented and Segun has gone to the trouble of marking every word).
This is also important given the pejoration of the Yoruba language over against English. A trend which began long ago - in days when Yoruba was by colonial impress described as a 'vernacular' - has now crescendoed in the complete inferiorisation of the language. Children born to Yoruba parents living in Yoruba cities cannot speak the language, and often, their efforts are twangily creolised and warped. I speak Yoruba to my children as frequently as I can in the UK, and no one can put anything past them in the language; they even try to converse in it. My teenage daughter was bemused when some children who came from Nigeria with their parents last summer could not speak Yoruba; these Yoruba post-millennials were also loath to be addressed in their supposed 'mother tongue.' The irrepressible Fela Kuti described this sort of behaviour as 'colo mentality' or, amply speaking, colonial mentality.
No, I am not a cultural essentialist and I know the English language has become global in its reach, the common patter of modern times. But then, I still consider the Yoruba language as important, just as a Frenchman or a German would take his language seriously and consider it worthy of preservation despite the superscription of another language, i.e., English. The Yoruba diaspora is larger and farther-flung than any from Africa, and echoes of the language can be picked up even in the heartlands of Brazil, Cuba and Haiti. This was why I thought I should congratulate another friend I saw on television in Nigeria. I knew Dr Olayinka Olatunde Ayinde through Facebook - an intelligent and reasoned thinker, and I could still recognise this sterling reasonableness when I saw him on TV offering medical counsel in the Yoruba language - his delivery was clean, urbane and eloquent. Beyond all, self-commisioned and labour-of-love acts like the translation of the Nigerian Constitution by Segun Akeredolu can reverse the slide of the Yoruba language into extinction.

Atheists can't be 'Worshippers' of Satan

2015-12-06T22:52:00.001-08:00

Against my self-drawn rule, a few days ago, I responded to a friend's quasi-religious post. In a slightly forked-tongue way, the friend wondered why atheists always deny the existence of God and never that of Satan. I responded solely because the person who posted the piece was an old friend and classmate. Even though we have not been in the presence of each other for decades, I still consider him a friend, such was our buddyhood in primary school. Notwithstanding that, while my friend may very well have steeped himself in the nether reaches of the ocean of Nigerian religionism, I now follow the not-so-beaten path of irreligion. I also responded because of the reference to atheists. I am not an atheist simply because it would be a misdescription of someone who doesn't care either way whether or not there are gods or a God. But I have been called an atheist a few times, and, electively speaking, I do have an affinity with atheists. So, I thought I should respond to my friend's post.
Here is what I wrote. 'In the Bible or the Qur'an or the Torah, Satan is the spawn of God, Jehovah, Allah or however you wish to describe him, or her, or it - Satan is one of your 'creator's' earlier angelic androids. So by a process of entailment, the denial of Satan must be subsumed by the denial of the middle-eastern monotheist god who I imagine you meant when you wrote 'God,' in the same way that the affirmation of that 'God' presupposes the cognitive factor of Satan. Satan cannot be separated from the 'God concept'; it subsists within the theology of the 'first cause' god who, or which, I think you believe in. The person who commented first appears to have helped you to clarify what you were trying to say by stealth: that atheists are believers in Satan. This is not true - in most cases. For instance, as an agnostic, when I cast doubt - strong doubt - on the theology of the Abrahamic god, the doubt extends roundly to Satan. To me, both of these entities - non-entities - signify nothing.'
Of course, I knew I was only preaching to the unconverted when I wrote the above. All right, it is slightly teacherly, but it had to be so because I thought it should be as clear as day why 'real' atheists would not bother with Satan. Should it? Maybe in some places, it is. Satan, or the Devil, or the arch-demon, is big in Africa, with South America coming far second. In so far as most African Christians are now evangelicals, Satan is indeed a huge, loomingly leviathan on the continent. Of course, Western theologians had been writing Satan out of the Bible even long before Kierkegaard arrived on the scene with his avant-garde, up-to-the-minute Christianity and for quite a while before the religion was introduced to Africans. And contemporary theologians would go to hell first before expending any intellectual time on Satan. Although the practice of Satanism is more of a neo-Gothic paganism rather than any Augustinian exercise which seeks to apprehend the sly biblical Satan, Carl Raschke's attempt at analysing Satanism in America in his book, Painted Black, is monumentally flawed. And here, within evangelical circuits, Satan is no longer a regular referent - except in the frenzied liturgy of mucky charismatics and hucksterish African pastors. Even in the sterner religion of Islam, there has been more emphasis on heaven, fruits, flowers and fuckable virgins than on hell and Iblis (Satan).
I will not go into why Satan has always been a feature of life in Africa (because it will take a book to do that), but I'll briefly touch on why it'll remain that way for a long time. Christianity is in a state of intellectual stasis in Africa. In other words, despite the mushrooming of churches and the multiplication of God memes, the religion has not approached in sophistication the sort of liberal theology which prodded David Strauss to write his 'Life of Christ' (1808), a sceptical and revisionist theobiography of Jesus, or the open-mindedness of JW Colenso, Bishop of Natal (1853), racial equalitarian and rational reader and interpreter of the Bible. Even in the biblicistic and Satan-obsessed minds of African Christians, Strauss and Bishop Colenso would be burning in hell now.
As I pointed out above, atheists shouldn't be in the business of denying the existence of Satan. The confirmation or denial of the existence of Satan should be the preserve of theologians. The refutation of the existence of God, a paradoxically unnecessary exercise, is just about enough for atheists because the very negation of God implicates the nonexistence of Satan. By the same token, anyone who describes himself as a Satanist in any Abrahamic sense is, by simple extrapolation, a theist, not an atheist. The incarnation or spiritualisation of Satan is contingent on the moral coefficient of an Anti-Satan, and that can only mean God. For Satan to be an adversary and an antagonist, he needs a protagonist and a principal: God. The ever-thoughtful Martin Luther agrees: 'The Devil is God's Devil.' In other words, Satan is no more than the sidekick that God uses to tempt and try his creatures. It was necessary from the first that the creators of the fiction of God must come up with a foil, a countergod, a baddie to offset God's improbable goodness. To use a loose analogy, you can only deconstruct a Bond baddie within the construct of James-Bondology, or shall we say the theology of James Bond?

The Meaning of Life (Or Its Meaninglessness)

2015-11-23T04:23:00.000-08:00

Many years ago, I wrote an essay entitled The Meaning of Life, a consequence, I suppose, of being not so much a paid-up ponderer on such things - like a professional philosopher or a theologian - as being merely a thinking animal whose mind had been encroached upon by a rather cerebral matter. Without realising it, I engaged in abstruse reasoning in the piece. Since I could not, as a human, truly define the meaning or purpose of life, I had merely skirted the boundaries of being and beingness (and, of course, those of nothing and nothingness) in the short piece. The essay was published in a newspaper I wrote for in West Africa. Much of the feedback I got harped on the essay’s indecipherability; in other words, the promise the title gave was not met by the contents; if I had proffered any meaning of life at all, it was lost in the complexity of the essay.

I was slightly surprised by this observation because I was under the impression that my ‘take’ on the meaning of life was clear and accessible. Inasmuch as I would like to be seen as an essayist who had expressed his views as lucidly as he could, the imputation of intellectual esotericism and verbal denseness was not quite something to whoop about – although these days, I don’t give two hoots about how what I write comes across to anyone. Even then, how does one begin to write about the metaphysics of the meaning of life without running the risk of stylistic heavy-handedness or even piffling meaninglessness? One must necessarily walk a tightrope and be careful lest one fall into a dark intellectual abyss.

But then, shouldn’t every essay or book entitled The Meaning of Life be approached with common sense, with the preknowledge that however eloquent and reader-friendly the author may be, she is never going to offer any substantive explanation of the meaning of life, even if the writing style is as clear as the retina of Gautama Buddha’s eye, the value will be opaque, at the very best. No Guru, no Teacher, no Polymath has been able to hazard a definitive and provable interpretation of the essence of life. No book, either - not the Bible, Quran, or Vedas; neither Aristotle’s nor Spinoza’s Ethics, nor Collected Shakespeare, Shaw or Soyinka can offer anyone a conclusive explanation of all things. Of course, Christians might find a sort of meaning in the Bible, and Muslims might see the Quran as the book that sheds gnostic light on the shadowiness of being, but a neutral-minded reader of both books would only encounter bemusement, some poetry, contradictions, myths, antediluvian tales, reductio ad absurdum, cautionary bugaboos in the shape of hell and eternal roasting and a temperamental inadequate ‘creator’ and ‘controller’ of the world – and possibly wafts of self-induced spiritualism.

The question of the meaning of life came up again a few weeks ago (years now; this article was written a few years ago) when I ran into Professor Terry Eagleton’s book of the same title. Eagleton is a literary critic, not a philosopher, and maybe that is why his short introduction to this nagging, if pointless, question is not one of the most original. He goes over the same old grounds. Without explicitly declaring himself religious, hews the line of believers over against ‘unbelievers’ - he is, by the way, the arch-Anti-Dawkins. Although the book is fairly readable, Eagleton offers no meaning for life, and he actually warns against frequent posing of the question. He rounds on philosophers he considers nihilists, such as the profoundly pessimistic Schopenhauer. He touches on how modernism and its mongrel offspring, postmodernism, have been detrimental to the grand narrative of meaning. Enough of Eagleton now – he committed blasphemy with his reproof of Schopenhauer! Viktor E Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning, the author’s quest for meaning against the background of his experiences as a Holocaust survivor, makes for better reading.

Have I just had a brainwave of what the meaning of life might consist in? You bet - not. Isn’t this a triangulation we had better leave to the three Fates to deal with, particularly Atropos, who would inevitably cut off the thread spun by Clotho and measured by Lachesis? Does religion offer any meaning as ‘believers’ would like to imagine? Well, even when I was a kind of believer, the galleon that carries the Minotaur of Meaning in its underdeck was very far from the offing. Even the finest explainer or interpreter of the Bible or Quran could not crystallise their readings into an epiphany of unassailable truth or summa. Like many things in life, religion offers some consolation and acts as a placebo, a potent narcosis, which may truly help some to cope with humans’ common Oedipian blindness. Rather than being the polar light, religion is no more than a bendable cane - a ‘walking stick’ - with which some try to feel their way through the vast dark jumble-room, or even charnel house, of life.

Philosophy gives its own consolations, too, although less pompously than religion. As a matter of fact, philosophy offers no consolations – despite the flavoursome proffering of such by writers/philosophers from Boethius to Alain de Botton – what it does is to turn anyone who embraces it (or her, Boethius’s Lady Philosophy) into the ballast in the very boat of his/her life - you sink or float by your own devices. Philosophy does not attempt the concentring of life’s rather spiky spokes onto any hub – in other words, philosophy is only a cog and not the hub. Philosophy does not offer saccharine julep that kills the bitter taste of life. Philosophy offers counterpoison; it offers hemlock, which destroys the candied sweetness and light in your mouth and guts, which will not kill you and will not make you stronger, but probably savvier. Philosophy removes your milk teeth and especial sweet tooth and replaces them with nicotine-coloured wisdom teeth. Backgrounding any philosophical study of life’s meaning is the Socratic axiom that he knew nothing. Socrates would not have been able to offer any definitive meaning of life if you asked him. At best, he would ask you to tell him what meaning you thought life, or your life, had - loading the question so lightly that you would certainly be shown up.

So how does one get a purchase on the meaning of life? One might as well shin up a slippery Babel-tall thread to Christian heaven to arrive at it. So far as I am concerned, there is no definable meaning at all to life; it only behoves every person to seek and define the meaning of his or her life (a very anti-Eagleton subjectivism). I see nihility in many things we give undue weight to, but I am not a nihilist in the sense of being completely enamoured of nothing and nothingness. I have a family and kin; I have friends. Even if I fancy myself a great understander of nihilism, I am a poor nihilist just like I failed to be a true antinatalist (a practiser of the Silenian ideal of better-never-to-have-been-born). I only try to give meaning to things within reason. For instance, I reject the possibility or existence of any god because even if there is any conclusive evidence of a ‘god’ being there, it will add zilch meaning to my own existence – as a matter of fact, the thought of any entity called ‘god,’ or worse, ‘God,’ detracts from any meaning I may want to give to life. In a way, the monotheist God reminds me of the story of Diogenes the Cynic and Alexander the Great, God being the latter: a distraction, a kibitzer who interferes in the treacherous card game of life – except, of course, that Alexander the Great was real and God is a figment of our imagination. Before the Distinguished Thing - the name Henry James gave to death - arrives to do the not-so-distinguished thing, humans do their best to shamble and blunder, Oedipus-like, for any kind of meaning for their lives. We quest for meaning in religion. In spiritualism. In food. In various forms of antifoodism. In friendship. In freemasonry and kindred organisations. In family. In love. In books. In art. In music. In bullshit and bullshitting. In drugs. In gambling and every kind of addiction, including the Internet. In procreation. In philoprogenitiveness. In childlessness. In many ruts and rituals of everyday life. In masturbation. In sex and its manifold kinks. Oh yes, in sex. Or why would the late English poet laureate, John Betjeman, say in his last days that the only regret he had was that he did not have enough sex? And the latest pop-psych weasel word, ‘sex addiction,’ is indeed nonsense. In my opinion, consenting adults can have as much sex as they can. Now, the once ragingly goatish Bill Clinton seems to have ‘mortified the flesh’ and zenned out, but in a rampant Freudian alter-world, the ageing man would not say 'no' if he were gifted an Abishag to warm the cockles of his heart – or some other cockled organ. However, whether these things offer any ‘real’ meaning is another matter. Again, take the primal sop we offer ourselves: sex. For good reasons, the French describe the act’s orgasmic finale as ‘la petite mort’ or ‘the little death,’ but then for many who recover from ‘the little death,’ post-coital tristesse, or after-sex sadness, melancholy, sometimes overtakes the momentary spasms of ecstasy.

I like reading books, and I have immensely enjoyed reading some of them, even experiencing Barthes’ version of ‘le petit mort’ while perusing certain books, for instance, Tolstoy’s War and Peace. But what is the sum of meaning that I have found in the sum of every book that I have read? It is incalculable, and this is not because I have found in them a googol (or Google?) of meaning that has led me to resolve and ratiocinate the surds of life, but incalculable because even now I cannot begin to unravel how the reading of George Eliot’s magnificent Middlemarch has contributed to the sum of my intellect. Or Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason – or Critique of Practical Reason, or even his Critique of Judgement. Or Achebe’s Arrow of God. Or American Psycho. When you throw the latter novel into the mix and yet another offbeat beast like Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, in which a character gets his kick from eating shit, then I think it becomes clear that one tittle of meaning you take from life is the bilge in its underbelly, the utter shittiness (notwithstanding that the books are fiction, I would imagine that murderous psychopathy and pathological coprophilia are humanly probable). This is what depth psychology tries to help us to crystallise, sometimes with goodish results. Even though I am a keen reader of Freud, Freudianism and its offshoots, Jungian psychology is my guilty pleasure, guilt because, even with the best will in the world, I can’t embrace Jung’s God/paranormal placebo...

Now, why stop abruptly? Or isn’t that how the lives of many of us are cut off, suddenly, unwarned, even painfully. To conclude, I will quote Flaubert. ‘Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread and want to know the whole design.’ We simply can’t.

The Starers of Prague: A Kafka-inspired Essay

2015-09-04T10:13:00.001-07:00

There should be a word for the act of staring at people who do not look - racially speaking - like you. Xenoscopia? This is a neology that just came to me, but I am always very careful about giving the import of racism, or even the slightly euphemised racialism, to everything. When you shout and wolf-cry 'race' at every glance, wink, or even bodycheck, it will inevitably stew your mind into a witch's brew of paranoia, self-pitying prickliness, victimism and even inverted racism. Racism must be confronted and properly chastened, but to put the exponential of race and racism on everything is to teeter on the borderline of maladaptive neurosis - which most racists suffer from, anyway.
Prague is the capital of the Czech Republic in Central Europe - not in Eastern Europe, as the late Iron Curtain might have delineated it. Perhaps this is why someone from the United Kingdom, say, would call someone from the Czech Republic an Eastern European (and for other reasons). The point I am trying to make is that Prague is not exactly in the farthest corner of Siberia or in some sort of bumpkinish Boratland where the apparition of a black person would call forth a million stares during a metro ride. I am fairly well-travelled in Western Europe: France, Belgium, Spain, Austria, and I can say that even in free-spirited Spinozaland (Holland), in Amsterdam to be specific, interracial gawpy stares have not exactly become passé, except that in a comparatively fair-sized city like Hamburg in Germany it is not as monomaniacal and zombie-like as in Prague. I daresay, though, that straying into the hinterlands of Bavaria or the steppes of Finland might, understandably, invite such spectatorial interest.
Patronage has not been wholly threshed out of the 'collective unconscious' of Europe and Europeans (not all), particularly concerning people from Africa. David Cameron, British Prime Minister, set off a squall of debate over the word 'swarm' when he used it for immigrants trying to get into Britain from France, the most visible of whom are Africans from the so-called 'horn' of the continent. Only a couple of weeks ago, editors of NRC Handelsblad in Holland thought it was cool to write: Nigger, Are You Crazy? This is clearly reminiscent of how the editors of Charlie Hebdo thought it was kosher to simianise a black woman as a kind of appropriative satire. Even so, I am instancing things that one might use the careless derivate 'casual racism' for (I'd call it 'cavalier racism'). But when you are stared at with such autistic automatism that the good citizens of Prague contrive to enact and sustain everlastingly, then I think it would be unfair on them to call it 'casual racism.' How do you begin to second-guess the thoughts of a young man, woman, or an elderly man or woman eyeballing you? Of course, you know it might have something to do with your race, your colour, your muchness of melanin - or, in my own case, my bald pate. After all, there has always been an under-discussed lookist dimension to baldness. It's even possible to give the stares racist overtones, but I am, alas, a thoughtful person. Now these are not dirty looks, not glowering, smouldering transfixions, not the sort of stares that followers of Santeria in South America would call 'evil eye.' These Prague stares are mostly chess player-like, dry, seemingly incurious, eyes-wide-shut deadpan. They are by no means friendly gawps, nor are they staringly unfriendly; they are neither cold nor warm, neither furtive nor shifty, not an astonished goggle nor the kind lovestruck gazey ogle you might direct at the object of your admiration.
My teenage daughter, who spent much of the time reading on the metro, exclaimed to me as we came out at a stop: oh, people stare here, don't they? I replied: yes, they do. Why? I don't know, I replied. Thank goodness she's always been a good reader of books; I would have thought she was trying to screen herself behind the book. This would not have worked anyway because if there was a word for anyone watching someone as they read, I would have used it to describe a young woman who eyeballed my daughter for so long that you might wonder whether she was furiously incubating a short story entitled 'Young African Girl Reading On Prague Metro.'
After all, Prague is the quintessential city of culture, writerly culture for that matter. The first thing I saw when the plane taxied to a stop was Vaclav Havel Airport. This had induced a favourable impression on me: here is a country naming its major airport after a writer. Can we have Chinua Achebe Airport in Lagos or Abuja? Then I remembered that Havel was not only a writer but also a 'statesman' who became the first president of the Czech Republic in 1990. Havel had brought up Milan Kundera and Ivan Klima. I recalled Klima's book of short stories set in Prague, in which I mainly read dark tales about ordinary lives in the city. It's not really hard to see how Klima came up with those stories. It's almost 30 years since the long death rattle of communism in Czechoslovakia lost all momentum, giving life to free-market openness with its accompanying palette of late-modernity. However, you could still see the signs of statist regularity and brooding amplitude in Prague's architecture. The hotel we stayed in, the International, is a huge secular cathedral, limestony, Soviet-built, its massive columns capstoned by sturdy simulacra of workers.
I did not go to Prague as a culture vulture, hungering for and grubbing through the rich entrails of the city's bohemian soul; I only went for a short break with my family. But I had to 'see' and 'do' Prague. There were the bookshops, so many of them. Posters advertising Mozart's Don Giovanni. Plays. Operas. Galleries. Museums. Alfresco cafes. The Jewish quarters. Medieval synagogues and churches. With its abiding images of Spring 1968, Wenceslas Square is a large screen showing films about the event. The square recalled Paris's Champs Elysée, a boulevard, foreshortened, like a monumental upended plinth at the head of which rests the huge National Museum. A quick visit to the Naprstek Museum of Asian, African and American Cultures - which has its own corner of 'African' artefacts. And the black-themed Franz Kafka museum, the piece de resistance of my touristy saunter. Kafka might not have been subjected to 'xenoscopia' in Prague, but - as a Jew in a country full of Czechs, with a sizable German population, and at a moment in history when the poison of antisemitism which would culminate in the 2nd World War was marinating, he was, potentially, a 'marked man.'
Now back to the stares - I'd rather give the apparently compulsive, even instinctual, act an anthropological explanation rather than racial. Humans generally tend to subject the unfamiliar, the other, to 'the gaze.' If a Czech person found himself in a local market in Niamey, Niger, he might also attract glances and double-takes, not because some of the people who stared may never have seen a European but because the 'white man' looked different. Now some of the more irate race warriors might argue that there is always subterranean politics to stares. Implicit in one stare is innocuous curiosity, even slightly quizzical adoration, if not approbation, and inherent in another is detestation, even dehumanisation - since the stares I received were not indicative of Afrophilia, the reasoning might go, it was undoubtedly Afrophobia, there can be nothing inbetween. As an African I understand this prejudice very well: while it might seem black-and-white and not the sort of position I would take without good reason, it cannot be dismissed out of hand. The stares might very well be an expression of a certain kind of unease, discomfiture; it might be the bemusing attempt to grasp what some scholars have called the 'idea of Africa,' the Hegelian, louche idea of Africa conceptualised and nurtured by the European mind.
Rather than fling the word 'phobia' around lightly, I would use the term 'betenoire complex' to describe the spectrum of unconscious responses to the 'idea' of racial 'blackness.' I had to plumb humanity's psychic depths to come up with this coinage. I'll illustrate. Close to midnight, I was walking down a well-lit, if solitary, street of the north Kent town I live in and a few meters before me, I made out the apparitions of two young women saying goodbyes as they descended from the porch of a house, making a beeline for a car which had just been smart-readied. As if by a cue, both women had turned to see the dark figure looming, and both had slewed on their stilettos and skittered towards the house like chicks who had glimpsed a bird of prey in good time. As I went past, I could see them disappearing into the porch. Would they have panicked and doubled back to the safety of the house if they had glimpsed a 'white' rather than a 'black' face? I don't know, but over against philosophical balance and dispassion, it would be difficult to argue that a dormant, if unreasonable, reflex had not been in play or undercut the fact that measuring the panic threshold of the women's response might borrow some percentage from pigmentation. Not so long ago, the 'black man' was used by some white parents to induce good behaviour in their children - here comes the nigger, the monster, the ogre. This is the sum of the 'betenoire complex', and those who suffer from it greatly, clinically, may still find the black-bogeyman cautionary stratagem useful.
The stares of Prague may be set down in the Kafka-absurd, vague, and minor end of the scale of the 'betenoire complex' - at least many of them. Because, again, the motive behind stare A may be different from that of stare B. For instance, in the concourse of Prague's central train station, there were posters depicting global 'cultures' and peoples. I noticed that the only representation of Africa was a montage of black-and-white pictures of Pygmies of the Kalahari, half-naked, 'primitive,' and peculiarly picturesque. In one of the frames, a white man stands amidst the Pygmies, tall, commanding, like Gulliver among Lilliputians, beaming with with paternal aplomb. Against the background of this poster, I'd caught a couple of people lost in a glaring brown study. I also found subliminal images of racialism in the lobby of Czech's Academy of the Sciences, where I was welcomed with images of Mursi women in various states of undress, dust-coloured, lips stretched out with large discs, disked dangling earlobes, cropped hair, and knocked-out teeth. Beautiful women all right, and one has to acknowledge the scientific good intentions and the anthropological truth-seeking which informed such displays. But you do not need to be a close reader of Chinua Achebe's disquisition on the politics of 'image' to know that if a child is fed with certain stereotypes, inoculated with single-coloured impressions of peoples of a continent, he might grow up to stare and stare again, puzzled, puzzling over this black being, mulling the dark vision he's just seen over, probably to validate the preconceptions he had. Even then, this cannot be defined as racism; some of the stares might very well be informed by other aesthetic, impressionistic or even anthropological rationales.
After a few hours in Prague, I came up with a strategy. Stare back, hold your stare, and make it a grainless, straight-faced stare. Turn the whole thing into a staring game; do not be outstared; stare down whoever you entered into the game with. I actually wished I had a talent for hypnosis, to put those who stared for too long into deep sleep and make them miss their stop. I wished I had the power, African voodoo if you please, to turn anyone who overstared at me into stone or a pillar of salt.

PS: I had to end this piece with lighthearted satire. A lot is going on in the world. Hunger. Famine. Wars. Genocides. Untold human suffering. Racism in its most malign form. The so-called 'migrant crisis.' And, of course, xenophobia. With all these, why should I get myself worked up about mere stares? About mere xenoscopia.

Coming Out

2015-08-11T11:23:00.002-07:00

A few years ago, a nineteen-year-old youngster, a second-year university student in Nigeria, contacted me. He'd read stuff I wrote and was (according to him) impressed with my freethinking, irreligion, etc. He wrote that he had a problem and he'd be happy if I could help. Oh no, it wasn't a begging letter but something more spiritually affecting and humanely exigent. The problem was that he didn't know how to approach his parents. Come out, not as gay or a cross-dresser or a genderfucker of some kind, but as an atheist, a nonbeliever in God, in Jesus, the H. Ghost and all the Judeo-Christian jazz. Nigerians, as I should very well know, are heavily opiated with religion but his folks binged on the God dope. His father, a university teacher, was a part-time pastor who, like Adeboye and Kumuyi, considered giving up his job as a don for God and Church. His mum was not only a devoted Christian wife and mother but also multitasked as deacon, chorister, usher and all-around busybody for Jesus, or shall we say, dogsbody?
He was one of three supposedly godfearing children, the oldest. Indeed, he used to fear God - fear mixed with worshipful love, I would think. He used to pray as hard as any member of his family. Then, around the time he got into university, something happened - or began to happen - in him. He began to think beyond the Bible, prayer, God, Jesus, John, Paul, apostles, prophets and the horde of 'heavenly hosts.' At the end of the Platonic period, he came out of the cave of woo-woo shadows into light, into the sweet-sour reasonableness of rationality - although he was still trying to adjust his eyes to the light. But he could only do these things inwardly; he dared not show his hand or come out as a 'freethinker,' that wasn't an option. So far as his engineer-lecturer father was concerned, there was no such thing as atheism - theism was a given. The young man might as well go batshit first, streak onto the street, shouting 'God is dead,' then at least everyone would know he'd gone stark raving mad, which would be more comforting than knowing that he was sane yet 'blasphemous' - after all, the Yoruba Bible mistranslates the word 'fool' for 'madman'. The centuries-old amping-up of 'fool' into 'madman' shows that the Pavlovian dog of Christianity and God and Fear was not only let loose among Africans but that it has now spawned a continent-wide intellectual stupor and hysteria.
Clearly, the young man was caught in a bind, which wouldn't have been any better even if he were a few years older and fending for himself. Even then, he would have agonised over it, although since a certain degree of independence, even agency, would come with being self-sustaining, he might not need to get in touch with anyone. But now he was a university student: he still lived at home, and he still had to attend church - which he had to do because he was still tied to the purse strings of his parents; they also paid his school fees, so it was important for him to play along, even if he often felt like leaping up from his seat in the church to tell the smug-faced pastor that the 'man of God' got a lot of things wrong. I knew how unthinkable it would be to his parents that anyone would not believe in God, particularly under the banner of Christianity or Islam - and then to know that it was their beloved son who had spurned God! The parents would have raised hell if the young man had told them he'd become an 'idol worshipper,' to use that silly update of the colonial 'pagan,' but they would not just raise hell if he said he no longer believed, they would picture him right there in the inferno.
It's really a shame that, for some fogeyish reason, in 21st-century Nigeria, a 19-year-old young man cannot let his parents know that he has a mind of his own. It was also a moral crisis. The young man was in a quandary. Aptly, it'd brought a 19th-century autobiography by Edmund Gosse to me - Father and Son, the coming-of-age story of an adolescent son who rejected his father's religious belief and heavy strictures. But to the extent that Africa has stagnated, even abysmally antiquated, itself with religions which were midwifed into existence millennia ago from the antediluvian imagination and the historical womb of Semitic people, the adolescent Gosse was able to exercise more freedom of choice, more intellectual expressiveness, in fin-de-siecle Europe than a young intelligent Nigerian in this day and time.
I could fairly imagine the desperation, the seething frustration, that had driven the young man to seek advice and an irreligious paraclete to help him see his way through the crypts of false piety in which Nigeria and Nigerians have buried themselves. But in reality, I could not do much to provide any equilibrium to the dividedness which assailed the young man's 'soul,' soul in that 18th/19th-century sense. It was Henry Miller, I believe, who wrote at the height of modernism that the 'soul problem' perhaps went away with Dostoevsky or had, at least, been chemicalised. In Nigeria, 'soul' is still in that stage Dostoevsky left it - no, it's even pre-Dostoevsky, because here was a young Nigerian Ivan Karamazov, a contrarian, a budding atheist, made forlorn of soul, of voice, even of personhood. If you are not part of the Abrahamic mass orgy or do not wish to be part of the happy-clappy menagerie as in the case of the poor guy who got in touch with me, living in the whitewashed and rotting ark of Africa's parodic religiousness can be suffocating, even noxious. Even here in the UK, where there is a degree of sociological sophistication, it is not all that easy for a young Nigerian or Ghanaian, say, to segue into being an unbelieving 'black sheep' of his family, particularly if it is a family which prides itself on its piety.
I have a philosophical allergy to self-aggrandisement in any guise. I hate to take on the role of a 'wise counsellor,' I hate being a pastorish mouther of feelgoodisms. Anyway, I wrote to the young man that he must continue to dissemble, to deceive his parents that he was a Christian - pretend Christian - he should carry on with a caricature of filial piety and try to sustain it for as long as is necessary. This was an existential crisis, and for all Sartre wrote about 'bad faith,' about 'authenticity,' it would not be in the young man's best interests to announce to his parents that he had backslid (I'd call it forward-slid), or had taken a leap onto counterfaith. He lived in a society which provided no safety nets - a society where things like student loans no longer existed, so he needed his parents to do their duties, and if appearing to be a Christian was the quid pro quo, so be it. But only for as long as he was under his parents' thumb. He only had to wait for the right time to let them know that he no longer had any time for their Christian/evangelical baloney. No, it wasn't going to be easy, but if they had any generosity in them - which even the Nazarene showed in some of the stories written about him - they should accept that their son was now truly reborn, although there is no doubt that they would expect him to come crawling back, prodigal-son like. That is even being generous to the parents because if they had belonged to a fundamentalist movement like the Jehovah's Witnesses, their son might be 'disfellowshipped,' excommunicated, godsped onto the highway to perdition.
In my reply to the young man, I had no personal experience to draw on. As I had written a few times, I had slipped effortlessly into irreligion - no hangups, no familial feelings to spare. At 19, there was no need to express my doubts; the Nigerian society I grew up in - though considerably religion-minded - was not so obsessed and bloated with Abrahamism. I spent much of my free time in university drinking beer in a smoke-filled Student Union's 'buttery;' I never crossed paths with religion and the religious. Well, not to stray too far into gonzo territory, I should wrap up with the advice I gave the young fella. Be strong, don't buckle to the pressure; deafen yourself to the overwhelming and spellbinding drumbeat of 'God' and its heady accompaniment of pentecostal 'praise and worship.' And when the time is right, come out and free yourself from the chains and tyranny of religious faith.

'Why Chuka Umunna will neither become Labour Party Leader nor British Prime Minister.'

2015-05-22T06:00:00.001-07:00

If time had permitted, I would have dashed off - typed, really - a short piece entitled 'Why Umunna will neither become Labour Party Leader nor British Prime Minister.' This would not only have been prescient, it would also have come across to some as cynical, if not 'un-Nigerian.' 'Un-Nigerian' because last year, a prominent Nigerian newspaper had misreported that Umunna might become British Prime Minister this year. I made a brief comment under the link: well-meaning or not, this was a lazy, if not idiotic, piece of misinformation. Chuka Umunna was a member of the opposition party and however high-ranked he was he could not become British Prime Minister this year for the simple reason that he was not the leader of his party. As it turned out, even the leader of the party, Ed Miliband, did not become Prime Minister; he had to resign after the last election, trounced and bruised.
But I know why the false prognosis that Chuka Umunna would become prime minister was made. Like three other MPs in the British Parliament, he had a Nigerian parent - his father. Perhaps owing to a misplaced sense of ownership, Nigeria (personified) has always had this vain and prideful quirk of claiming someone born and raised in Europe or North America and has made good as its own. This is all very well. But that this attitude may be carried too far, as with the mendacious newspaper report. And certainly, some of these Nigerian ‘sons’ and ‘daughters’ abroad do not shy away from their Nigerian connections. Tinie Tempah, aka Chukwuemeka Okogwu, declared during a cookery programme that he likes jollof rice; Jimmy Akingbola likes dodo; David Oyelowo can do the Yoruba accent to 'gbam;' Chiweitel Ejiofor sees his participation in ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’ as homecoming.
And politician Chuka Umunna, Tempah's friend, isn't embarrassed by his Nigerian side, either. But that is where it all ends. These guys - or blokes - are British. Though they likely carry both Nigerian and British passports, I'll leave which of the two takes precedence over the other open. But before I go back to Umunna, I'll again detour. Idris Elba has Sierra Leonean and Ghanaian parents, so he is as African as Akingbola or Ejiofor, but in so far as he fits the bill for the 21st century James Bond better, his name has come up many times as a potential 007. Reactions in Britain have been muted and British - that is ironically demure. But the American radio rant artist and right-wing jerk Rush Limbaugh went to town on Elba; he argued that the Brit could not be James Bond because he was black - Bond must be white, eternally, essentially, white. It is easy for 'liberals' like me to dismiss Limbaugh as a Tea Party loony, but you may not be surprised to learn that what Limbaugh voiced out chimed with what many others did not, both in America and here. But then, despite Limbaugh and his fellow travellers, Elba, or some other black 'dude,' can be James Bond. Just as Obama could be - and became - American president despite Rush and the likes of him.
Of course, Rush Limbaugh would foam at the mouth and rave about Chuka Umunna not looking like the textbook British Prime Minister - as if it should matter to him what a British PM should look like. A radio presenter here fancies himself as the British Limbaugh, tubbiness and all, but he is a watered-down, shock-lite version of the American. His views about Umunna weren't overly poisonous – scabrously sour, certainly. Even the Daily Mail, an old-guard British rag and its proudly politically incorrect readers, commentariat and army of often spiteful commenters only used the feint of their overt support for the other main political party to lay into Umunna after he declared that he was going to stand for Labour party leader. He was derided for being a ‘champagne socialist,’ slated for being a jumped-up urbanite, lampooned for describing himself as 'British Obama,' accused without solid proof that he edited his Wikipedia page to reflect this, which was a subtle way of dismissing Umunna as a dreamer, a faux-Obama, a black Walter Mitty. There was considerable ethnic-baiting, too: in other words, Umunna had come in for Obama-Osama-type slurs, particularly with his first name, Chuka. Barbarisations like Chukka, Chuggy, and Chucky flew around, and there was the odd Chaka-Chaka Umunna and Chuka Lumumba. And it did not help that the young man showboated his new girlfriend a couple of days before he put himself forward as a prospective Labour Party leader, a girlfriend who, contra-Obama, happened to be white. There is no accounting for love or with whom one falls in love, but is it a coincidence that most black British men who belong, or aspire to belong, in the top drawer often parade svelte white women as significant others. I wasn't surprised to see Umunna stepping out with his, well, semi-svelte girlfriend (and there is no overlooking the fact that he is half-white, anyway). When someone called in during a radio show that being mixed-race might negatively affect Umunna's chances of becoming Labour leader and prime minister, the presenter disagreed. Britain is now the avatar of a post-racial society, he affirmed. Is it, I asked myself? Even though Britain is not America and that ‘minorities’ constitute between 10 and 14 per cent of the British society (of which Africans and Afro-Caribbean are only 3.5 per cent), I still wanted to believe the presenter’s assertion, but all I could do was to leave it open-ended.
Then, suddenly, Chuka dropped out of the race last week or ‘chucked in the towel’ as a newspaper reported. I was as surprised as many, even the Daily Mail reader who had wryly suggested that Umunna should wait for scores of years before declaring that he wanted to be Britain’s prime minister would be surprised. The only reason Umunna gave was that he could no longer take the pressure of media ‘scrutiny’ - of his life and those of his loved ones. This is all very well, although the commonsensical question as to why Umunna should expect anything but scrutiny has come up a number of times. But this is the least uncharitable of the responses. The muck-raking is still ongoing in the right-wing press. What skeleton has he got in his closet? Speaking of 'closet,' there have been vague and rather specious speculations that ‘metrosexual’ Umunna may be gay, which, of course, would not really have mattered had he not been escorted by a woman, with the implication that he was dissimulating. There has also been speculation that Umunna was embarrassed by his own image, his oft-reported slickness, dapperness, and the fact that he belongs to a London exclusive club that flaunts its decadence and opulence. There have also been reports that both Umunna and his mother have profited from the proceeds of tax avoidance - which is not illegal but a rather morally wretched thing to do. In the more shit-stirring newspapers, there is a tenor of reportage which depicts Umunna as all facade and that if the surface is scratched, the real Umunna will be teased out, scrofulous and rotten. Ultimately, only Umunna and those close to him know why he left the race, but it might just as well be that he could not muster up enough Labour MPs to support his bid. Aspirants need 34 members of parliament to gain candidacy. Anyway, Umunna is out and I hope I won’t be reading it in a Nigerian newspaper in the next four years that he is set to become prime minister in 2020 after Cameron.

And why did I come to the conclusion that he could not have become Labour Party leader, let alone prime minister? I can’t say with any certainty. His relatively young age of 36 and experiential brevity as a parliamentarian, which, of course, had raised a few eyebrows? However, Conservative Prime Minister Cameron became the leader of his party at 39, and few suffered conniptions on account of his age. Umunna's colour - mixed-race? Just like Obama, he is taxonomically and sociologically ‘black.’ Is Britain ready for a black prime minister? Well, enough Britishness has seeped into me to make me baulk at giving a negative answer to that question. For now, the Great Black Hope has retreated behind the barricades.

The 'God Factor.'

2015-05-14T04:06:00.002-07:00

Olusegun Obasanjo, former Nigerian president, reveals in his overly God-slathered book, My Watch, that the grounds of Aso Rock where Nigeria's presidential residence is situated, have all of four mosques and two churchlets, otherwise called chapels. It was one churchlet to four mosques but when Obasanjo got there, like a kind of retro-Levite, he said to himself: 'In the name of the Lord we Christians will not be outmatched here.' So, he built yet another Christian praying house. After Obasanjo, the state house has been tenanted by two presidents. The Muslim Yar Adua may have added yet another mosque before he died, and the ever-kneeling, equally God-proud Goodluck Jonathan may have tried to raise the tally of churchlets in the state house. Even if the statistic remains the four mosques and churchlets that Obasanjo left, six places of religious worship in the abode of the Nigerian president are still alarming. What is the point of four mosques and two chuchlets on the grounds of the so-called villa?

Constitutionally speaking, Nigeria is a secular country, and there shouldn't be any monument to religion in the president's estate or, if any, there should be balance. Or, if for the convenience of the distinguished tenured guest of that rarefied space, a church and a mosque were built - six of one and half a dozen of the other, if you ask me - then there should also be shrines to Ogun, Amadioha, Olokun and the thousands of deities that populate Nigeria's ethnic enclaves. After all, Obasanjo, who now struts around as a born-again Christian, was a self-proclaimed 'traditionalist' in his first coming as head of state; he even advocated the use of juju and voodoo as the sole armament against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Doesn't this again show how Africa has lost its way - honeycombing the so-called presidential villa and its surround with 6 sancta of foreign religions in one of the most important countries on the continent?

I am irreligious in every sense of the word, so I do not have any time for 'African religions' either; their shrines or altars should also not have any place in the government house. Okay, maybe a fire-belching, hawk-eyed head of Sango installed in a shrine would be better than the hypocrisy and the cultural mimicry inherent in building churchlets and mosques. If the presidents are superstitious enough to believe in a foreign god and build many shrines to it (taking cognisance of the fact that Allah and Yahweh are indeed Tweedledee and Tweedledum), it might not be beyond them to impute the powers of a purveyor of 'retributive justice' and sulphurous punishment to Sango like Obasanjo once did.
One has to read Obasanjo's book to know how fixated he is with what he describes as the G-factor or God factor: parrotlike he repeats God, sings God, snorts God, burps God, spews God, bloviates God, spits God, farts God, he blusters and bullshits with God, the portly former president of Nigeria sweats God from every pore of his Sir Toby Belch-like frame. The word 'God' is repeated in the book several hundred times, so much so that what Obasanjo calls the God factor I'd call 'God complex,' a kind of Freudian-Oedipal over-attachment to his 'heavenly father'. The project of making Mr Adeboye the Billy Graham of the Nigerian polity began with Obasanjo and peaked with lame-duck Mr Goodluck Jonathan, who used every opportunity during his presidency to kneel before the all but pontificated pastor, seeking some kind of benediction or 'favour.'
Now, I don't have any problem with anyone following whatever religion they like or namechecking God as many times as they want. I could easily stop and get on with something else if I felt too irritated by Obasanjo's life story. But I had to keep on plodding through the man's 1,000-page ego-trip out of curiosity and because of what I had gleaned from a couple of his earlier books: an attempt to reconfigure Nigerian history not only from his sometimes insightful perspective but also in his own self-adulatory image - although by all appearances this last tome may have been ghosted by any number of hacks.
As I pointed out above, the presidents are only tenant-occupiers of the state house, and I think there is a certain satire, if not an absurdity, to the way the men are ingathering mosques and churchlets in (and around) their taxpayer-supported grace-and-favour residence. Beyond satire, it is simply lamentable. All right, there are worse ways to squander Nigeria's money than scattering religious follies around the presidential compound, but this is still evidence of the lack of accountability and the civic irresponsibility which drives decision-making in that country. In a saner secular state, building a single place of religious worship would call for debate, consensus and compromise. Niceties like the separation of religion and state have no place in a superstition-laden society like Nigeria. But this bombastic business of interplanting mosques and churchlets in every free soil of Aso Rock is very much symptomatic of the 'belief' and 'faith' meme which has eaten into the very core of our being. I shouldn't be surprised that Aso Rock boasts six Abrahamic temples, or even sixty; this is a reflection of how the whole society has tatted itself up in pious vestments; it is indicative of the collective religiose monomania that has taken root in the country. Would I be miffed if I heard that the president's living quarters had all of six libraries and/or reading-cum-quiet rooms? Yes, as I might argue, that six were too many - more so with the likelihood that they were underused. Even then, I would still feel better that the rooms and spaces were devoted to something more worthwhile than being shrines to the 'invisible man' whose more thoughtful worshippers now argue might not be resident in the sky after all but might be some kind of 'spirit' or 'presence' or whatever.

'I am not Charlie,' says a French friend.

2015-01-15T04:54:00.000-08:00

I called a friend a few days ago to ask whether she was one of those who had gathered at the Place de la Republique (and Nation) in Paris to reconsecrate France's triune of 'values' - celebrating free speech and racial diversity. Incisively, and with all the Gallic passion she could muster, she told me that she wasn't interested in the march and was not by any means 'Charlie' - a la Charlie Hebdo.
Why, I asked? She said the magazine had been racist towards black people: a black female politician – the country’s justice minister, no less - was depicted as a monkey in an edition of CH. To her, this was an extremely offending caricature of a black woman, of black people. This had given me pause. I am uberliberal, if not ultraliberal, a fierce advocate of free speech, artistic freedom, etc. I told my friend I would like to see the cartoon before making any judgment.
However, before I searched for the cartoon, I called on the foreknowledge that artistic expression in France can be so liberal, even to the point of crude offence. For instance, no British writer, however 'mad' the persona he projects, would write about other races like Michel Houellebecq does. I shifted in my seat a bit while reading what Houellebecq - or his alter ego - thinks of Africans in his subnovella, Lanzarote. But then, I reasoned: this is satire, a savage one, written by a dour, glum and sour misanthrope. In the book, Europeans are not exactly dressed in clothes of glory - clothes of garish gold, maybe because, as you would imagine, the rich Europeans call the touristy shots on the decadent island of Lanzarote.
Anyway, when I put the phone down, I googled the 'offending' cartoon and immediately saw the point of the young woman's pique. An androgynous effigy - the black minister, Christine Taubura - glared at me with slightly-spaced simian eyes, ear-to-ear jumbo lips, not to mention the distinctly tableau-ed signature tail, ruggy coat, cornrows, and dangling from her earlobes are 'jungle loops' which recall the sort of 'tribal' bling the baleful black mistress of Kurtz wears in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Well, I told myself, I can easily understand my friend's reluctance to embrace 'Charlie.'
You have to be black to know that the 'monkey' jab is not often a laughing matter for the person at the receiving end of it - the connotation comes with a lot of stereotypical baggage, a relic of late 19th century systematic inferiorisation of the black race. Darwin was made out as a monkey in the years following the publication of Origin - but then that was Mr Charles Darwin, and an argument can even be made for the religious blockheads who cartoonised Darwin as a monkey that they were only trying to lampoon the theory of evolution, of which they had a profound misunderstanding.
Almost two decades ago, I tried to trivialise the monkey slur in an essay, arguing that, with my understanding of evolutionary biology, I was no more a monkey than any of my Nordic human cousins, that we might as well be living on a 'planet of the apes.' The problem with my attempt at meliorating, or ‘owning,’ the monkey tag is that my Nordic human cousin does not have to be constantly reminded about his kinship with monkeys.
Far more often in mainland Europe (than in the UK, where they live), Africans, or darker-skinned people in general, are still mocked, insulted and vilified with the monkey slur. Italian footballer Mario Balotelli has had to deal with it both on and off football pitches. In a popular Belgian magazine, Barack and Michelle Obama faces were photoshopped into a most overcontoured primate-mugs. So, it was no surprise that Christine Taubura was morphed into a monkey in the Charlie Hebdo skit.

So am I Charlie? It is easy to pipe up the pat parrot-cry of ‘Je suis Charlie,’ but now, days after the heinous murder of the journalists and cartoonists, I think I might very well allow myself a lag of deliberation before giving an answer. Of course, the monkey cartoon is not in the best of tastes (often cartoons are not); one might even hazard that its author, Charb, the late editor of Charlie Hebdo, was rather insensitive to the vicious overtones of the monkey gibe; after all, there are a dozen ways to reimagine a black woman than making a monkey of her. Cartoons, however serious the moral intention might be, should be stippled with a lightness of touch, and it is rather curious that Charb did not pay any attention to the dead hand of racial ridicule and historical dysphemism at the heart of setting out a black person in the guise of a monkey. But would I storm the offices of Charlie Hebdo to ‘avenge’ my race? Certainly not. I would even be careful about labelling Charb a racist – shall we say he had a crass sense of humour? If he had not been killed by the Brothers Koauchi, I might very well (if I knew him) have a reasoned chat with him about why exercising a sage sense of proportion when it comes to the matter of race should not be equated with being a wimp. But then he would still be within his rights to disagree with me (more likely). Something which has become clear about Charlie Hebdo is that it is more limits-bucking, laisser-aller than left-wing or liberal, and though its cartoons might carry a certain streetiness, CH is no street-living hugger, its journalism is posh ‘yellow’, and it is not in the business of sparing the feelings of the ‘minorities.’

Even though there are now conscionable highlights of the disparate coverages of the Paris murders (saturation reporting) and the massacre of hundreds of people by Boko Haram in Baga, Nigeria (footnote reporting), I am yet no less Charlie than any of the girls kidnapped by the Nigerian terrorists, because what Charlie now represents in a broader, universal and human sense, is Freedom, or the struggle for Freedom, free speech, free association, freedom to belong and not belong to a religion, and a protest against religious extremism, pious censorship etc. I wouldn't have had any problem marching through Boulevard Voltaire in Paris if only for Voltaire’s humanist declaration: ‘I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it.’