The price seemed reasonable, location
Indifferent. The landlady swore she lived
Off premises. Nothing remained
But self-confession. “Madam”, I warned,
I hate a wasted journey – I am African.”
Silence ….
“HOW DARK?” … “ARE YOU LIGHT OR VERY DARK?”
Wole Soyinka – Telephone Conversation
The poet in racy tone told the grisly tale of a world hooked on colour. The complex repartee of the evasive madam to a mundane transaction awoke to the reality of race back in my teenage years. In that bigoted world you are made or ruined by the colour of your skin; the hand dealt you by fate in the raffle-draw of life. Are you lily-white, chocolate-brown, or of the ‘raven-black’ bottom stock, like the poet? Skin colour spells life and destiny in the world of racial prejudice.
Once upon a time, bigotry was as transparent as George Wallace, the lily-white governor of Alabama who defiantly embraced racism in his post-inauguration speech back in 1963. George Wallace unashamedly craved the continuation of the encumbrances that had made life unworthy of life for many generations of Black people in America. The address still rings hollow like a knell bell. Consider some excerpts: “Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people… we sound the drum for freedom, as have our generations of forebears … and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny… I say . . . segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.’
Mr. Wallace evidently perjured when he said he had tossed “a gauntlet before the feet of tyranny.” The governor did not know the meaning of tyranny. He sided with the segregation all his life and to the end of his long-life time in politics. He was a guiding light to the ‘Separate-But-Equal’ movement which sought to keep Black apart from White in America. He sided with all segregation rules including those forbidding Blacks and Whites from peeing in the same urinal.
George Wallace’s rap-sheet on racism is an endless stretch. He provided the cover of state tothe Ku Klux Klan (KKK) an extremist anti-Black group throughout his tenure in the 1960s. The governor looked away in 1963 when four innocent Black girls were killed at a choir practice in a racially motivated bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Montgomery. But George Wallace personally journeyed to the University of Alabama to stop the admission of its two pioneer black students in 1965. He opposed Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and branded the 1965 Civil Rights Act that ended official segregated America as”fraudulent in intent, in design, and in execution.”
In all these, George Wallace always insisted “I am not a racist in my heart,” and rarely employed explicit lingos in service of bigotry. He was master at dressing slursin innuendos. He called for return to “law and order” when he rallied his base mostly made of ‘respectable’ Southern, WhiteChristian ladies and gentlemen. He talked of “our Christian values,” and branded desegregation laws “communistic amalgamation” while railing against “welfare mothers,” “forced busing” and “big city thugs.”
Remarkably, George Wallace’s mantra for the 1962 governorship campaign was ‘’Stand Up for Alabama.’’ Think of it, more than 50 years later, he will be entirely comprehensible to the disciples of Make America Great Again. Some White evangelicals especially will appreciate the fraternal echoes and his “deep” Christian values.
History is resilient. Someone wrote that history always says, ‘see you later,’ and never ‘goodbye’. But echoes of America’s racial past are now somehow muffled in the world of Hollywood and its assumptions on American innocence. It is worst here in Nigeria, the home to largest number of Black people on earth. Mr. Wallace and his innuendoes might have been in another planet because of our unease with history. We once banished the subject from our classrooms to further expand our altar for theoretical science. We dream to land a man on the moon someday without understanding our past and why we are yet to join others in dominating the earth.
Nothing proves our disdain for history more than how we have left the story of our 30-month civil war untended. We rarely tell our kids the story of the war that forever changed the country and when we do, it is told from many slanted angles. The two principal actors in the conflict refused to lend their perspectives to posterity, preferring to leave the space to journeymen who serve myth as history on critical episodes of the war. How can you learn the history of yourrace ifyou are apathetic to your personal story? Why care about Jim Crow, George Wallace, or the veiled insults of the Lady in the Telephone Conversationwhen we do not know the contexts?
But apathy to history doesn’t make some pro-Trump arguments here less pathetic. The thoughtsare too simple and presumptuous; especially on Donald Trump as a divine instrument to steer sinful America into righteousness. The logic discounts the racial content ofTrumpspeak;the meaning of “taking our country back,” “the dumb policies of Obama,” and Africa as a “shithole.” It alsooverlooks the anchor mantra; “Making America Great Again,” and its innuendoes on Black ineptitude. Does Obama report card really suggest that he made America less than great? Why then our readiness here to define the meaning of the moment in evangelical terms. Why the fuss over the purported re-entry of ‘Happy Christmas’ into the American lexicon?
History cautions that the hood does not make a monk. George Wallace was a Bible-wielding Christian gentleman who worked tirelessly for segregation and Black debasement. Adolf Hitler too was a man of faith like George Wallace. Both believed that all men (and women) are created by God. The problem is not the belief but their interpretation that the Creator did not create all men equal. That is why it is dangerous to invoke the Catechism in explaining the essence of Donald Trump.
But I somehow admire Mr. Trump. Not for the reasons advanced by the local evangelicals but because he holds up a mirror for us. We owe Donald Trump a load of gratitude for reminding us that our continent is a huge septic tank; the same point our youths seem to be making by their suicidal missionsto Libya and Europe. Where else in the world, save Iraq, Syria and Yemen, are youths fleeing desperately to escape their motherland? Which other country spills out its youths on the Mediterranean Sea like our own?
Think of unemployment and our pathetic response to the epidemic.Think of our penchant for chest-beating oninanities; our craving for hollow praises, empty titles and the fanfare we put up to commission boreholes and pit latrines. Think of the hope raised and dashed since we started out in 1960. Just think ofall the chances we lost to talk back to Mr. Wallace and the Lady of Complex Repartee. Then you will find the problem is less with George Wallace and his colour-coded world.