His name, let us recall, is Francesco Schettino, Captain, Francesco Schettino. He was the master of the doomed cruise ship, the Costa Concordia, that nearly capsized in January 2012 when it accidentally hit an underwater rock near Tuscany off the Mediterranean coast of Italy. 32 people comprising mostly passengers and a few members of the crew perished in the disaster. The world now knows of this ship captain as the man who left the damaged and badly listing ship while there were still about a hundred passengers onboard, yet to be evacuated. Indeed, of the three charges that Captain Schettino subsequently faced for which he was given a jail sentence of 16 years, the third is the most serious: failing to be the last man onboard. [The other two charges are manslaughter and abandoning ship while the evacuation of passengers was still going on]As we all know, this charge of “failing to be the last man onboard” has a deeply cherished and indeed almost mystical code of honour behind it that is centuries old. Indeed, of the many acts and behaviors of great opprobrium and dishonor known to the human society in all places and all times, this charge is one of the worst.
This unsavory matter of Captain Schettino and the Costa Concordia came upin a recent conversation between myself and my friend, Femi Osofisan. Currently, we are both senior fellows at an international research center at the Free University of Berlin where we are sharing an office. The conversation in question was prompted by our reactions to the published text of a lecture given by our friend, Niyi Osundare, “the people’s poet”. Osundare’s lecture was given to mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Colonel Adekunle Fajuyi in July 1966 in the second of the two bloody military coups of that year. For readers of this piece who were either not yet born in 1966 or were too young then to have been able to incorporate the cause of Fajuyi’s assassination into their moral imagination as members of my generation have done, here’s the relevant fact to bear in mind: the coup-makers who killed Fajuyi were not after him, they were after General Aguiyi-Ironsi, Head of State and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces.Aguiyi-Ironsi was on a visit to the Western Region where Fajuyi was the military governor; the head of state was therefore the guest of the military governor. In effect, when the coup-makers came for Aguiyi-Ironsi and requested of Fajuyi to hand over his guest and commander-in-chief to them, they were presenting him with an ultimatum that was clear to everyone involved: either you hand over your guest to us and save your own life or you refuse and die with him. Fajuyi’s choice sent him to his grave in an act of self-sacrifice whose legendary heroism was the subject of Osundare’s lecture that sparked that conversation between Osofisan and myself that is the cause, the instigation for this piece.
I ask anyone reading this piece who has not yet done so to read Osundare’s lecture on Fajuyi. It is deep and wide in its reflections on both heroism itself and the need for it in our society in particular and all human societies in general. Moving between and around two antithetical propositions – unhappy is the land that has no heroes; and unhappy is the land that has a need for heroes –Osundare in his lecture moved heroism from the lofty, fairy-tale universe of saints and superheroes to the real world of crucial human weaknesses or strengths that predispose us toward how we either memorialize and treasure heroism and self-sacrifice for the public good or, conversely, ignore or rubbish them in acts of cynical opportunism, selfishness and downright impunity. Thus, the logic of Osundare’s Fajuyi lecture is truly sobering in its implications for the nature and scope of public (a)morality in our country at the present time: in a society that is doubly unhappy because it both has a need for heroes and lacks heroes, things can get so bad that anti-heroism becomes so widespread and rampant that it becomes itself a sort of “heroism”. In other words, this is a perverse “heroism” in which heroic self-sacrifice is turned into sacrifice of others, especially of the poor and the looted, for the wealth, the security and the happiness of the leaders. Is this not what the unspeakable impunity and notoriety of the case regarding the “padding” of the 2016 budget by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon Yakubu Dogara, amounts to?
Please note that even without the “padding”, Speaker Dogara is quite easily one of the two or three highest paid public officeholders in the whole wide world. His salary, emoluments and allowances in one year alone amount to more than what dozens of professors and lecturers in our public universities will get in retirement over several decades. But this apparently is not enough for the Honourable Speaker and so, of course, the national budget is illegally and immorally “padded” to add more billions to the Speaker’s remunerative “take-away”. Meanwhile, Dogara makes sure that all the members of the House are implicated and will get their own individual shares of the “take-away” bonanza. Meanwhile also, from the presidency and from the leaders of the Party, mixed, complicit signals and/or silence. Since there’s a lot of talk in the land about sacrifice in a time of severe economic hardship, this can only mean sacrifice of the many for the few, of the ruled for the rulers, a sort of reverse sacrifice which, though very common in history, is far less talked about than the heroic self-sacrifice of kings, nobles, warriors and saints about whom we learn so much from history books and collections of patriotic nationalist or “tribal” songs, poems, tales, and dances.Before concluding this article on this tradition of the reverse sacrifice that unjust rulers and leaders have always both demanded and extracted from the people, a few words about sacrifice itself is perhaps in order. More specifically, this is about the great physical and moral challenge that self-sacrifice always poses, as revealed in that part of the title of this essay that asserts that sacrifice is tough, very tough.
“Father, father, why have thou forsaken me?” [Matthew 27:46]. In this famous and widely discussed sentence from the holy book of the Christians, the pain, the terror of the impending death overcame the resolve of Jesus Christ. Even though it was a temporary, passing experience, it is immensely portentous and bears testimony to the fact that sacrifice in general and self-sacrifice in particular is very rarely undertaken willingly and with complete resignation. It is important to emphasize this because there are countless sacred and secular accounts avowing precisely the opposite of this fact, in effect alleging that if the sacrificial agent or volunteer is psychologically and/or ritually well-prepared, he, she or they will go to their death willingly, even ecstatically. With the probable exception of the Japanese tradition of the hara-kiri and the suicide bombers of the jihadist terrorist groups of contemporary society, the sacrificial agent or “volunteer” is axiomatically not too enthusiastic about self-immolation. As a matter of fact, this is precisely why for most of us alive at this very moment in history, we are in total bewilderment at the audacity, the “madness” of the suicide bombers because their acts do not accord well with our view of human nature. And it is on account of this view of human nature with its powerful reservation about, or evenabhorrence of self-sacrifice that all the religious traditions of the world without exception gradually and inexorably moved away either completely from sacrifice in general and/or human sacrifice most especially. Which is why, in an admittedly humorous vein, I include the chicken in the list in the title to this piece: if you could pose the question to chickens and other animals typically or normatively used as sacrificial creatures, they will no doubt tell you that they do not wish to be sacrificed, thank you very much! The case of the chicken is “useful” because it underscores and at the same time exposes one of the most important and insistent ethical, physical and psychological problems of sacrifice, this being the fact that if and where the willingness of the sacrificial object or subject is not self-evident, we err in assuming the freely given participation of the agent, the “volunteer”. If all the chickens and goats, the rams and the dogs, and the “strangers” and the “misfits” that have ever been sacrificed could wake from the dead, talk and tell their stories, the heavens will open up to indict and punish us with orgies of severe mortifications of the body and the spirit!
I certainly do not wish to end this piece with a suggestion, no matter how muted and implicit, that willing, noble and selfless sacrifice for the public good and the survival of the community, especially in times of great adversity and crisis, is rare among human beings, whether as individuals or as entire communities. This is far, far from the case. Indeed, as I write these words, in many places in the world, individuals and groups of very courageous and high-minded people are making sacrifices of great heroism to keep hope alive and salvage what they can of dignity and security of life in conditions of war, terror and dislocation of unspeakable proportions, the latest reports from Aleppo, Syria, being a case in point. But from Aleppo it is a long way to Abuja. Speaker Dogara is absolutely unambiguous in declaring to the nation that he and the legislative assembly that he heads expect nothing but great sacrifices from us to keep him and the other “Honourables” happy and contented. Reverse sacrifice has a long history in human affairs and its latest incarnation in the leadership of our new ruling party should be seen in the refracted light of this long tradition. So dear reader, when next you hear talk of “sacrifices” to be made in these difficult times from our rulers, know that the sacrifice is from YOU to them, not from them to and for all of us. You see the world better and clearer when you know what your rulers are really saying in their duplicitous talk of sacrifices, sacrifices and more sacrifices.
Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu