Category: Biodun Jeyifo

There is, of course, the seemingly unending sadness which one year has not blunted at all. He lies buried not more than three miles driving from where I live in Cambridge, MA. Mount Auburn Cemetery, that’s the name of the place. Every time that I drive close to it, I am overcome by an urge to visit his grave. Indeed, on one occasion, I set out deliberately with the set purpose of “visiting” him. The cemetery is a huge one, with many entrances and exits to it. But I know that if I took the central entrance that we took on the way to his interment on the day of his burial, I would know the exact row of graves wherein I can find his. But at the last minute on the day when I was going to pay him that “visit”, I was overcome by the feeling that I wasn’t quite ready for it. What exactly does this mean?

Well, after an initial bafflement at this reluctance, I was helped to come to an understanding of it by remembering that the same phenomenon had occurred when my mother passed away in 1992: for several years, I could not visit her grave because the work of mourning her loss was yet uncompleted. For reasons whose logic eludes me, I felt that I would know when grief and mourning had gone from my heart and then I could, would visit her grave. So has it been with Egbon Abiola Irele this past one year since his death. As much as I have felt moved to visit his grave, I have felt unready, as if on one day whose coming would almost certainly have nothing special about it, I would know that the time had finally come to do so. This much is clear to me. But then, something else has been happening, something not exactly replacing or displacing mourning but considerably complicating it. That something is – remembrance.

The thing about remembrance, especially of the dead whose lives and work are/were inestimable, is that it is as deep and wide as the sea. Because of this, one doesn’t even know where to begin. Shall I begin with the sounds of mesmerizing Congolese dance music to which, even if you’re not physically dancing to it, you’re “dancing” in your psyche as you listen enraptured to its magic? I would never have thought that almost every time that you hear it, this music would remind me, with quiet laughter and tremulous sentiments, of Abiola Irele. But that’s what has been happening. The world knows that Irele loved Italian opera with a passion and on occasions when the time and the mood were right, he regaled friends with near divine renditions of arias from famous and not so famous operas. But Congolese popular dance music? Yes! And he was a superb dancer too! I can report here that close to the end, he was still dancing. For instance, every first Saturday in December at parties thrown by and for the birthday celebration of a dear, mutual friend of ours – Professor Selwyn Cudjoe of Wellesley College – Egbon danced as he must have danced more than four decades back when he had just returned home from his doctoral studies at the Sorbonne!

Remembrance is based on memory and as we know, memory is boundless. This is why the metaphors that we traditionally use for remembrance are of spaces and encounters that are limitless. The oceans and the seas. Rivers, lakes and streams flowing across many lands, high and low. Journeys through forests, savannahs and deserts. And dreams or reveries, recovered through the mind and the imagination. And thus, remembrance takes me to many places and I remember Egbon Irele among the communities of the living and the departed. I wonder: Femi Osofisan, Niyi Osundare, Yemi Ogunbiyi, Odia Ofeimun, Anthonia Kalu, John Ohiorhenuan, Folabo Ajayi-Soyinka, Teju Olaniyan, Kunle George, Akin Adesokan, Simon Gikandi, Eileen Julien, Selwyn Cudjoe, the Oyelarans (Egbon Sope and Eileen), Olabiyi Yai, Pamela Smith, Obi Nwakama and so many others I can think of, how are they dealing with their memories of Irele’s passage here among us? This is because you remember the departed both in isolation and in relation to others. Especially in relation to others when the remembered is one like Abiola Irele whose life and work profoundly touched and even shaped the lives of so many others.

In my remembrance, I am struck by how we all completely took it for granted, the fact that he had such a prodigious appetite for life, for work, for play, for new directions and pathways. He had his own writings to do and he wrote them continuously and unstoppably to the very end of his life at 81. But he also found time, energy and enthusiasm for projects that brought in so many others, especially those new to the profession. With absolutely no fear of exaggeration, I can declare that nobody did more for the profession of African literary and cultural studies at home in Africa and in the world at large than Irele did. I have said of my friend and comrade, Eddie Madunagu, that he is the ultimate historian, archivist and memoirist of the Nigerian Left. I make the same declaration about Abiola Irele with regard to modern African literary and cultural scholarship worldwide. The difference between the two men is that, for reasons I cannot get into here, Madunagu has largely worked almost alone, unaided by grants and/or other comrades. By contrast and because of the institutional context of Irele’s work, he has brought onboard innumerable scholars as he carefully and repeatedly compiled, edited and annotated many of the standard general works of our profession.

Remembrance is wide, long and deep. But it can also be narrow, focused and intensely personal. This is why it is still somewhat difficult for me to write of perhaps the single most memorable and consequential aspect of my relationship with Irele, this being our conversations over the years and decades. At first, we talked mostly about books, ideas, writers and thinkers, African, Western and Latin American. This started when I was teaching at Ife and he was still at Ibadan. On many of the countless occasions when I came to UI, I would of course stay with my bosom friend, Femi Osofisan. But inevitably, I would make my way to Irele’s house where I knew that over good food and wine, we were sure to have the most engaging conversations I could expect and get from anyone in the country. It was on the basis of such conversations that Irele prompted me to write the Introduction to the first collection of Niyi Osundare’s poetry, one of the best essays I wrote at that stage of my career. And it was also on the basis of those same conversa-tions with Irele that I went on to collect, edit and write a very long Introduction to the authoritative collection of Soyinka’s essays titled, Art, Dialogue and Outrage.

Yes, we started those conversations that would eventually last for more than thirty years on mostly intellectual issues. But we lived (and I still live, for how much longer, I don’t know) in a country, a continent and a world of great economic, social and cultural crises and injustices. Then and until he died, Irele was the closest Nigerian/African scholar to the ideal of the European bourgeois Left liberal, of French extraction: one foot among the enlightened segments of the ruling class and the other foot among the rebels, the revolutionaries. A love of life and the many good things it can provide if you have the means; but also, a passion for redistribution of the sustenance of the earth and the economy to all. Irele, from his Paris days as a student at the Sorbonne, was steeped deeply in this tradition. This is hardly surprising since he had in fact being trained by doyens of this formation of Left liberal scholars and thinkers. [The supervisor of his doctoral dissertation was Roger Bastide] This meant that he had more than a glancing familiarity with Marxism; indeed, outside the circle of Marxists, Irele was the first and perhaps only Nigerian intellectual with whom I could discuss Marxism and its thinkers and formations on the basis of sound and deep knowledge. On his own part, he found in the late Omafume Onoge and myself Marxists that he could converse with endlessly; and beyond conversations, I think he found that we were in earnest, that we really wanted, not only to interpret the world, but to change it. At any rate, a special bond of empathy developed between us and I believe that it was on the cusp of this feeling that when he remarried in 1986, he asked me to act as a sort of “Best man” by being the person to sign the Marriage Register as witness.

Perhaps one day, I shall write about my conversations with him. A book, a memoir about conversations? Yes, because the conversations have been priceless, even if I can say that now only because while Irele was here, I took them for granted, I could not see how much we were both invested in them psychologically and intellectually. The conversations became more regular, perhaps even more habitual when we both moved to Harvard – incidentally absolutely without any coordination between us. Like preachers, teachers love talking. At any rate, they must love talking if they wish to succeed in their profession. But for the talking, the conversation to become a genuine intellectual friendship, something else has to intervene. It is hard for me to define what this “something else” is. All I know, all I can point to is the fact that I miss my conversations with Irele so profoundly that I feel as if there is big hole where there was once substance, pith, sustenance. This feeling, this angst, is made all the more tantalizing by something that happened a week before Irele died.

I was at home in Nigeria, about to leave for the U.S. in a matter of days. Then, an email came to me from Egbon, intimating me of a matter of great political importance for the future of the country that we must discuss as soon as I arrived in the U.S. Well, I was so startled by the nature of the subject indicated in the email that I forwarded copies of the email to Femi Osofisan and Yemi Ogunbiyi, informing them that as soon as I might have had the discussion with Irele, I would let them know about it. But the discussion never took place because it was on the day that I arrived in Cambridge, MA, that Irele slipped into the coma from which he did not return. Of course, it was far more than our conversations that came to an end that day. But the interrupted conversations stand for the mark of the incompletion that can attach to a life even as full, as beneficial and as procreative as Abiola Irele’s.

Which is why, finally, my remembrance of Irele links him with others who have departed, by far the largest and the most constantly replenished community of all. To name a few relatively recent departures, Chinua Achebe, Akin Isola, Ben Obumselu, Emmanuel Obiechina, Isidore Okpewho, Adebayo Faleti. Yes, the list will keep growing, as the epigraph to this piece from Shakespeare makes clear. But remembrance will sustain us – until we, too, join the list.

• Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

These past two weeks as I have lain in bed recovering from a bout of serious illness, I have had time aplenty to watch FIFA World Cup 2018. I was deeply disappointed to see Nigeria and Senegal, the two most promising African national teams at the world finals, exit the competition at the group stage. Senegal’s exit was particularly harrowing because it had exactly the same tally of points and goal average with Japan which went on to the next stage of single-game contests from the now concluded group stage. The reason? Senegal had more “yellow cards” than Japan!

From these opening words, I wish to draw attention to the factor of nationalism, more precisely a benign and perhaps even festive experience of nationalism. Yes, there has been a lot of talk on individual superstars and up-and-coming new talents in the national teams gathered in Russia for FIFA World Cup 2018. But by a long shot, the focus has been on the nations represented at this world event. The most obvious illustration of this point is the sheer number of times that the national anthems of the teams are played or will be played – which is every single time that a country plays another country before it loses and exits the competition.

On this count, before we made our exit at the conclusion of the group stage, our national anthem was played three times and broadcast to the entire world community watching the competition. And please note that as the national anthems are played, television images of cheering and swooning nationals of the respective country are beamed across the globe. Which was why Lionel Messi of Argentina was unlucky to have been caught by the television cameras being totally indifferent and even distracted when the Argentinian national anthem was being played before the match against Croatia that Argentina lost 0-3.

And there has been more substance to the nationalism regaling the whole world at FIFA 2018 than symbolic, mere “national anthem” nationalism. As I have remarked earlier in this piece, the accent has been on collective cohesiveness, on national team spirit rather than the individual performances of the great stars. More substantively, many commentators have noticed that while the Messis and the Ronaldos still get much talked about as exceptional, there is now a greater parity between the national teams in the competition than at any other competition before the current one. In other words, between the countries, there is now a far greater unpredictability as to which will win, which will prevail than in the past. It is true that European national teams still continue to predominate over teams from the other regions of the world, but the margins of victory have been remarkably slimmer than in the past. The case of England 6, Panama 1 was an exception that proves the new normal: in most cases, the margin of victory was 1 or 2 in matches stoutly contested until the whistle is blown to end the match.

And then, there were the finer points of national belonging, the subtler intimations of the identity and presence of the nation off the soccer pitch. Crowds of supporters from virtually all the countries represented at the games brought aspects of their national culture with them to the competition for display, for pride, for civic and national camaraderie. The most distinctive, the most talked about has been the so-called “Viking Clap” of Iceland. With the European countries, the general pattern has been dozens of supporters dressed in forgotten or traditional styles of dress from each country’s sartorial past. This is truer of the Northern or Scandinavian countries than the more restrained nations of Western Europe like England, France and Germany. But the supporters of even these countries had their own masqueradery, their own attention-getting make-up on their faces and bodies. Supporters of the African teams had drums and unceasing drum music as the main item of display and celebration, but so did some of them have elaborate painting of white or red ochre on the entire body presumably for ritual invocation of the spirits of ancestors and deities. And the supporters of the national teams of the Latin American countries? They were perhaps the most “ecumenical” of all in the ways in which the creolization of the cultures of Africa, Europe and the indigenous native Indians that gives Latin American regional cultural identity its uniqueness marked the music, songs and dances of their display. More on Afro-diasporic demographics and expressions at FIFA 2018 later in this piece.

In all then, nationalism has been having the best of times at the World Cup matches in Russia these past two weeks. Of the roughly 195 nations in the world, only a fraction, 32, are represented at FIFA 2018. But what is lacking in numbers, the atmosphere, the élan makes up in substance. We human beings were placed on our lonely planet so that we can comingle and cooperate to defeat the loneliness. We thrive best when we highlight what unites us, what binds us together in our common destiny on planet earth. True, we live our political communities in nation-states that have borders and boundaries, but we all know that those borders and boundaries should not wall us into exclusionary homelands. As one watches television images of FIFA 2018, one notices, with gratitude and perhaps even exultation that the exclusionary walls are down, that friendships across nations and regions are being forged, that perhaps many procreations will take place and the earth shall increase in numbers as a consequence of this extraordinarily benign incarnation of nationalism.

Alas, we live in times when the dominant image and impact of nationalism has been increasingly xenophobic, exclusionary and violently revanchist. In at least the last decade, and in all the regions of the world, nationalism has been waging wars internally and externally on the “Others”. Indeed, if one was tempted to think that there was a temporary, provisional suspension of the nationalism of racist and ethnocentric politicians and their followers while FIFA 2018 lasted, we were rudely awakened to the withering loss of national and global community by events around the world, thanks to the nationalism that predominates now in our world. I will mention only two, since each one affects the country of either my birth/nationality and/or residence. The two cases are the brutal killings, yet again, of farmers by herdsmen in Plateau State in Nigeria during the first week of the games in Russia and the forced separations of children from their migrant or refugee parents on the orders of Donald Trump, the U.S. President, together with the endorsement of the U.S. Supreme Court of Trump’s Executive Order banning the entry of citizens of certain named Moslem countries into America.

Since much has been written and said about the fresh killings in Plateau State, my remarks on it in this context will be brief because my intention really is to juxtapose the killings with the image and the expression of Nigerian nationalism at FIFA 2018. Everyone knows that the nationalism that the Super Eagles evoke in the hearts and minds of Nigerians is as passionate as it transcends all ethnic, regional and religious boundaries. But it is a nationalism of sentiment, of symbolic aspirations in which winning over other competing nations is its own justification. In other words, in those final four excruciating minutes before Argentina scored the goal that sent Nigeria out of the competition, the nationalism evoked by the exploits of the Super Eagles demanded nothing more than hanging on to the draw that would have sent us to the next age 00f the competition. This is different from the nationalism involved in dealing effectively with the destructive menace of the herdsmen killings: you have to work really hard for it. But Muhammadu Buhari is not working hard, indeed not working at all for that kind of nationalism. The statements credited to him after the killings are so naïve and so puerile that one cannot but come to the conclusion that this is a president who cannot and will never work for building a nationalism that can protect human lives and livelihoods across our diverse communities.

Since the U.S. is not present at FIFA 2018, the case of Donald Trump and the White, Christian nationalism that is at the bottom of his Executive Order banning Moslems from specified countries from entering America is different from the contradiction between the nationalism evoked by the Super Eagles and what is (not) going on at home under Muhammadu Buhari. Buhari or no Buhari, we know from the nationalism displayed at the games that there is some basis for hope in Nigeria. In contrast to this, it is almost as if America is not present at FIFA 2018 because the White, Christian nationalism of Trump and his hordes of supporters is a profound misfit at the World Cup games. We know of course that the real reason why America is not at the games is because the U.S. is not exactly a competitive soccer nation, that professional, grassroots-supported soccer is still a dream in the U.S. All the same, because the U.S. is the richest and most powerful nation on the planet, it is of great consequence that the type of nationalism at the helm of affairs in the country at the present time is the type profoundly at odds with the kind of nationalism that we have been seeing at FIFA 2018. However, unfortunately for all of us, this is the type of nationalism that is increasingly dominant, increasingly pervasive in these times.

The extremely bad news or portent is that the racist, xenophobic, exclusionary and isolationist nationalism of Trump and his movement cannot only not be isolated and quarantined from the rest of the world, but indeed cannot be prevented from spreading around the planet. To the consternation of the leaders of Western European liberal democracy, Trump has loudly proclaimed his intention to back the rising fascist and irredentist parties and movements of the Western world. His disdain for liberal democracy and its institutions is as deep as it is unrestrained. Hence the unprecedented, utterly heartless plucking of the children of migrants and refugees from their parents right at the very moment when the nationalism of inclusion, cooperation and tolerance of difference seemed to be waxing at FFA 2018. The foreboding that this specter raises is not helped by the fact that in another two weeks, FIFA 2018 would have ended but Trump, his movement and his agenda will still be with us.

All is not lost, compatriots. One portent that struck me forcefully as I reflected on the implications of the nationalism we have been seeing at FIFA 2018 is the implication of the fact that the majority of the nations represented at the competition are what you might call “Rainbow nations”. Specifically, in these nations, the players and their supporters at the games and at home are distinctly multiracial, multicultural and multiethnic. I am talking here of countries like France, England, Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Portugal, Nigeria, Senegal, Saudi Arabia and Uruguay. And here, I must point to the countries in which the African diaspora are richly represented – which are precisely most of these “Rainbow nations”. By contrast, countries like Japan, South Korea, Iceland and Poland in which all the players and supporters are monoethnic, monoracial and come from the same patrilineal stock are a distinct minority. Thus, the demographics of the present and the future are not in favour of the nationalism of exclusion, intolerance and hate. All is not lost, compatriots.

• Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

Let us go directly to the subject of this piece, this being one of the legacies of June 12 that, in my opinion, has been almost completely forgotten: carnivalesque, joyous legitimation of progressive capitalism. Let me break this down. M.K.O. Abiola was not only never, ever going to give up his wealth; as a matter of fact, he thought that wealth is good, providential, life-sustaining and dignity-enhancing. But only in as much as you spread it around as widely as possible. We need not go into the roots of this idea in Abiola’s personality and business interests. The fact is that his legendary generosity presupposed and was erected on the belief that poverty is good for no woman or man and based on this idea, he believed that it is only the foolish and reckless wealthy man, woman or class that would corner the wealth, assets and resources of the society or the nation to himself, herself or themselves.

Incidentally, Abiola was neither the first nor the last of the avatars of this open and indeed moral and ideological legitimation of progressive capitalism in Nigeria. One precursor of the tradition who, as a matter of fact, gave more reflection and expression to the idea than Abiola was none other than Chief Obafemi Awolowo. But while Chief Awolowo was essentially puritanical and made a clear distinction between his great personal wealth and the wealth of the nation that was to be rigorously and justly redistributed, Abiola made no such distinctions and separations. All wealth, he believed, was to be shared, his wealth and the wealth of the nation.

Abiola was not of course all that there was in June 12 which, as a political and historic event, was much bigger than one man’s predilections, worldviews and interests. I mention this caveat because there may be those who would argue that it was because he was such a shrewd businessman that Abiola believed in spreading his wealth around. On this account, since he did business throughout Nigeria and Africa, was it not in his interest to spread largesse throughout the country and the continent? And did his wives not come from diverse areas of the land? How could a man with in-laws everywhere not try to make the fame of his generosity to be known everywhere? Yes, we must not conflate the personal and the political, the idiosyncratic and the historic in our profile of that progressive capitalism, that legitimation of wealth as providential that is one of the legacies of June 12.

Our task in this separation of the personal and the political is greatly helped by the fact that at the height of its mobilizational and electoral successes, that the series of events and developments that we now know as June 12 became a movement. And it was at this juncture, roughly around the late 1980s to the early 1990s, that Abiola’s personal beliefs about wealth coincided with ideological and political contestations about, precisely, wealth generation and redistribution in our country. Fortunately for us, we have permanent documentation of these debates and contestations around wealth in Chapter 2 of the 1990 Constitution titled “Fundamental Directives and Objectives of State Policies”. I earnestly and solemnly ask all young compatriots reading this piece to go and read that chapter of the 1990 Constitution. Indeed, it is repeated almost verbatim in the 1999 Constitution, same Chapter. What does it say?

Briefly, it says that the generation of wealth must be commensurate with the redistribution of wealth. It says that all over the world, there has been a raging argument as to whether or not you can simultaneously pursue the generation of wealth through development and the redistribution of wealth through guaranteed constitutional provisions. The chapter very carefully, if only briefly and cogently, reflects on the widespread feeling in many parts of the world that you cannot pursue development and redistribution at the same time. In other words, this is the rearguard, conservative feeling that since you cannot “redistribute poverty”, you must first produce and conserve wealth before distributing it. In a ringing critique of this view, Chapter 2 of the 1990 Constitution – the Constitution on which the elections that gave the June 12, 1993 mandate to Abiola was based – stated that both wealth generation and wealth redistribution must be pursued at the same time; one must not be deferred for the other. Indeed, the chapter lists many specific economic rights for all Nigerians that must be protected. True, these rights are not made justiciable, but all the same, they were given the most clamorous moral and ideological endorsement in that 1990 Constitution. And as a sort of epilogue to the adoption of that Constitution, when Babangida formed the two political parties, the National Republican Convention (NRC) and the Social Democratic Party (SDP) that contested the elections in 1993, he famously stated that “one was a little to the right and the other was a little to the left”. The SDP, Abiola’s party, was the one that was “a little to the left”. On this account, it was the party considered better suited to meet or pursue the goals of that Chapter 2 of the 1990 Constitution.

What the Constitution stated as abstractions, what the SPD adopted as electioneering programmes and slogans M.K.O. Abiola gave the élan of living, flesh-and-bones substantiality. He made it seem as if generating wealth and redistributing it at the same time was the simplest and most enjoyable thing in the world to do. Very rich women and men flocked to his ranks; so did the multitudes of the poorest of the poor, of the flocks of the most oppressed and insulted. Workers and their unions flocked to him; so did the self-employed and the unemployed, in their hundreds of thousands, in their millions. It is always repeated of the elections of June 12, 1993 that it was the freest and fairest elections ever held in our country; let it be added that it was also the election that came closest in Nigerian political history to the classic outlines of the carnival of the oppressed. Typically, in such carnivals, the oppressed of the land or the world, actually get to live and act out the hopes and dreams of their liberation from oppression. Yes, compatriots, progressive capitalism, staged as a festivity of liberation from poverty for Nigerian masses of all ethnicities, religions, social status and gender, this is one of the legacies of June 12.

We shall of course never know if the carnival, the festivity would have been transformed into reality, into an achieved set of policies and programmes if the June 12 Mandate had not been annulled. I emphasize the festive, carnivalesque element here because in our country as in many parts of the developing world, it is one of the means of “selling” progressive capitalism to the poor masses. There are, as we know, many who argue that Nigerians are by nature “capitalistic”, and that their “capitalism” is refreshingly unbridled, chaotic, noisy and colourful. Leaving aside the probability that these traits all have their countervailing opposites in the Nigerian psyche, I ask why it is that it is almost never mentioned that a defense, a legitimation of capitalism was a significant part of the legacy of June 12. In other words, if Nigerians are some of the world’s most “natural” capitalists, why is it hardly ever said that June 12 wanted to usher into our body politic stabilization of capitalism as a providential order in our country? What accounts for this amnesia?

We do not remember the past just as we wish; we remember it through the prism of events, developments and personalities that sear indelible marks on our psyche and our consciousness. June 12 was annulled not because progressive capitalism threatened Babangida and the praetorian hegemons, but because M.K.O. Abiola was not from the “right part” of the country. Put differently, there was, there is a geo-ethnic balance of forces by and through which aspirants to the Nigerian presidency are adjudged when it is their “turn” to be president or, indeed, to be president at all. It was through and by the operations of this balance of forces that, to compensate Yorubas in particular and the South in general, Olusegun Obasanjo was “awarded” the presidency in 1999. Except of course, that it did not fulfill the burden of reconciliation and restitution placed on it. How could it have? At any rate, these are the prisms through which we now remember June 12. Plus, of course, the violence and savagery with which the annulment was consummated.

There is another crucial reason why progressive capitalism is now almost completely forgotten and buried as a legacy of June 12 and it is this: capitalism in Nigeria is now so predatory, so unregenerate, so wasteful that it dares not proclaim its name and identity in the open. Let me be frank and concrete here. In the epigraph to this piece, we have the famous pronouncement or dictum of the protagonist of the Hollywood film, “Wall Street”, Gordon Gecko: “Greed is good”. Does it not seem that Gecko speaks for most Nigerian politicians of all ruling class parties, especially the two main political parties, the APC and the PDP? Who can see the repeated acts of looting by our legislators, of all parties, without thinking that Gordon Gecko speaks for them all? What of the looting, the corruption that has surfaced within Muhammadu Buhari’s presidency and his inability to treat it with the bravado and noise with which he and his representatives go after the looing and the corruption of opposition politicians? Greed is good: they do not proclaim it, but they act it, they live it. When you feed so gluttonously on greed, you dissipate national wealth and that makes it impossible for you to say of wealth, as M.K.O. Abiola did, that wealth is providential.

Above all else, I would give the factor of the massive transfer of the nation’s wealth, resources and assets through privatization to private ownership as perhaps the single most important reason for amnesia about progressive capitalism as a legacy of June 12. I mean, look at the oil sector. Look at the energy sector. Look at the educational sector, especially at the secondary and tertiary levels. Look at the health sector. Look even at the collection of taxes, levies and rates in some states of the federation. All massively privatized, public spending on and in them drastically reduced while the public-owned enterprises and services are sold at rock-bottom, give-away prices and allocations. This is not redistribution; it is disaggregation. Services do not in general improve with the privatizations; and neither has any significant quotient of the surplus extracted from the privatized businesses and enterprises percolated to the general population. The dire effects are already being felt; unhappily, they will be still be felt ages and ages from now.

As readers would no doubt have noticed, this piece is dedicated to the memory of the late Comrade Ola Oni, of deeply revered memory. Ola Oni was perhaps unequaled as a partisan of the actualization of the June 12 Mandate. His courage, his passion, his solicitude for the oppressed were endless. He had no illusions about progressive capitalism as a legacy of June 12. He saw it as a starting point, a point of departure, not a port of arrival. He saw that you can work with progressive elements within the capitalist class – but only if you remain ever watchful of the limits beyond which you cannot make them transcend their contradictions. Chapter 2, Nigerian Constitution of 1999, is a good indicator of those limits.

• Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

Note:
[Published under a slightly different title, the text below first appeared on May 9, 2018, in a publication of the BBC titled “BBC Culture”. With a few other scholars from around the world, I had been invited to write a short commentary on any play, novel or book of poetry that had made a major cultural impact in our time, emphasis on the word “cultural”. Obviously a very difficult decision to make, I ultimately settled on Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman. The difficulty in choosing any text out of the dozens of texts I could think of can be gauged by the fact that, even within the body of Soyinka’s own dramatic works, I actually like The Road and Madmen and Specialists more than Death and the King’s Horseman! However, since the criterion of choice was not my own personal sensibility but decisive cultural impact across diverse spaces and regions of the contemporary world, Death and the King’s Horseman easily prevailed over those two other plays of WS about which I am in everlasting awe of their power and resonance]

What makes Death and the King’s Horseman so powerful as drama is the myriad of narratives, fables, songs, chants and dances that simultaneously celebrate and elegize the terror of death. In this respect, the play reminds us of similar cultural forms and attitudes surrounding death in many of the world’s civilizations, from ancient traditions documented in the Egyptian and Tibetan Books of the Dead to the still extant Mexican Day of the Dead. To continue to be able to observe and celebrate these traditions or not – that is the central axis of the plot of Death and the King’s Horseman, which stretches the boundary between ancient ritual and modern performance (with long and stunning passages of trance and possession that few modern plays contain).

Published in 1975 while Soyinka was a professorial fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, Death and the King’s Horseman is a drama in five scenes, meant to be performed without interruption. It is based on a real-life incident that occurred in the 1940s, at a time when Britain retained colonial control of the Yoruba cultural heartland that had become part of Nigeria in 1914 when the Northern and Southern Protectorates of the country were amalgamated. With the death of the Alaafin of Oyo, a major Yoruba monarch, the Commander of the King’s Stables (known as Elesin or Horseman) is expected to commit ritual suicide and be buried with the dead king in appropriate ritual festivities. Indeed, most of the festivities do take place, but not the suicide that was to follow it.

Thinking this a ‘barbaric’ act, Simon Pilkings, the British colonial ruler, intervenes and prevents Elesin from taking his own life. However, as in the British Raj in India where the banning of the custom of “sati” or ritual suicide through widow burning sparked revolts from the colonized, the community ends up in turmoil over Elesin remaining alive, with hostility from the Oyo people directed more at Elesin than at Pilkings.

But it’s not just that it considers death in a way highly specific but also universal – Death and the King’s Horseman is a world-shaping work because it reanimated the English language with new purpose in a form called “Anglophone”. Originally a term that simply meant “being English-speaking”, its definition has been expanded and it now refers to what it means around the world when one is English-speaking in relation to other languages with which English mixes and collides to invent new and expanded communities of speakers of the language at home and abroad.

It is in this sense that some countries in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Oceania and the Pacific region are known as “Anglophone” countries. Thus, in an Anglophone work of drama or fiction, the characters may be fictively speaking in English when in actuality they would have been speaking in other languages, complicating traditional separations between “English” and “Non-English”. Death and the King’s Horseman is a master-text of this tradition of world Anglophone literature, fusing Yoruba proverbs and idioms with a cannibalized version of the Queen’s tongue to create a new, hybrid but highly original and distinctive linguistic entity.

Though published the year before, the play had its world debut performance in Nigeria in 1976, followed by subsequent productions in the UK, the United States and other places around the world. And indeed, the play very quickly became a classic of Anglophone drama – a work written in English but emerging from a culture on which English was imposed, much as how great Irish writers have almost always written in the English language and not Gaelic. In this, it followed in the path of previous works by Soyinka. “Every decade or so, it seems to fall to a non-English dramatist to belt new energy into the English tongue,” Penelope Gilliat, an influential critic of the London stage, wrote when an earlier Soyinka play, The Road, premiered in 1965. Gilliat continued: “The last time was when Brendan Beehan’s The Quare Fellow opened at Theatre Workshop. Nine years later, in the reign of Stage Sixty at the same beloved Victorian Building at Stratford East, a Nigerian called Wole Soyinka has done for our napping language what brigand dramatists from Ireland have done for centuries: booted it awake, rifled its pockets and scattered the loot into the middle of next week”.

The type of Anglophone writing we read in Death and the King’s Horseman is a harmonious cultural and linguistic fusion, not to be confused with the crude cultural appropriation we see Pilkings and his wife engage in. At one point in the play, they host a masquerade ball of their own and appropriate Yoruba Egungun masks into their own outfits – a thoughtless, colonialist act of desecration. In colonization there’s always a push-pull between the efforts of the colonizer to destroy the culture of the colonized while taking some pieces of that culture they find enticing for their own – just look at white fashion models wearing Native American head-dresses on catwalks in a country where Native American cultural identity has all but been destroyed. That self-serving colonialist separation of Christian from pagan, civilization from barbarism, modernity from anti-modernity and rationalism from irrational superstition is the central conflict Soyinka adroitly constructs in Death and the King’s Horseman.

But the play is fundamentally not about a clash of cultures, not about a confrontation between superstructures of worldviews and structures of belief, and definitely not a drama on the irreconcilable antagonism of two different races or peoples – as Soyinka vigorously insists in his own foreword to the play. For all its brilliant and fascinating use of African and European idioms of ritual and courtly performances, the play’s shattering artistic and intellectual force lies in deeply personal, existential crises and anxieties around the phenomenon, the reality of death – and, especially, the language we use to engage with death. In other words, it is not as a sort of shaman, not as an intercessor between this world and the next, that the force of Elesin Oba’s personality as protagonist is secured; rather, it is on the basis of his language, his words, his spoken and performed narratives and oratory that we are asked to either judge him or suspend judgment of him. And since Death and the King’s Horseman is in English, Elesin has to make his case in that language – even though in real life he would have used Yoruba, his mother tongue.

And what a case he makes! What flawless beauties of language, what sublimities of rhetoric, what heights of oratory he climbs! It is all putatively and recognizably English – except that through it all can be felt the distinctiveness of his Yoruba mother tongue since no English of England remotely speaks the language in this manner. This is why Elesin Oba’s Anglophone English is so infinitely richer than the English of the English themselves. And this is why this exemplary differentiation does not lead to an exoticization of Elesin Oba: Soyinka makes us privy to the fabulous and elaborate speech acts by and through which Elesin must justify his existence both before and after the aborted ritual suicide. This leads us to what I consider the greatest impact of the play: its status as an exemplary text of Anglophone world drama in which the English spoken and performed by the Africans, the natives, is infinitely richer, more lyrical, more sublime than the English of the whites, the Europeans, the mother-tongue autochthones.

Death and the King’s Horseman takes us far beyond the “English” and “non-English” binarism that English speakers often engage in; it takes us into the far more complex and fascinating conception and practice of Anglophone literature in which every writer who uses the English language is at least somewhat Anglophone. What we thought of as English before the 19th Century was a hybrid, anyway, a mixture of ancient Germanic, Latin and French, let alone the Celtic languages immediately surrounding England. Indeed, for most of their history the English themselves had been, not pristinely, but at least somewhat relationally, Anglophone. That is to say, relational to the Irish, the Scots and the Welsh on the British Isles. And later, English was relational to all the other languages spoken and written in the British Empire – and many words spoken by Indians, Africans and Native Americans ended up in English. This was as much a crucial aspect of power relations between colonizer and colonized in the Empire as it was also a dimension of the creation and contestation of imposed identities during and after the end of Empire.

But until around the 1960s when the word “Anglophone” began to appear in the dictionaries of the language, this fact was neither well-known by the general public nor made the object of attention by experts in the unfolding histories of the language. Death and the King’s Horseman marks the moment of transition when this relationality of all written, spoken and performed English in the world to other languages was fully revealed. Think about how many times Irish writers writing in English about characters who had not (yet) lost their Irish Gaelic necessarily had to make those characters speak in English because the playwrights were writing for a contemporary Irish audience that has almost completely lost the mother tongue and thus speaks only in English.

Death and the King’s Horseman marks a turning point in linguistic history at which what appears as English, as Anglophone English, is really an echo chamber in which languages subjugated by English assert important dimensions of their distinctiveness as living languages. Of course, a lot of plays, poems and novels continue to be written, published or performed as if the long Anglophone revolution has not taken place. But as Raymond Williams has shown in his acclaimed monograph of the same title, that is the nature of all long revolutions.