Category: Biodun Jeyifo

By Biodun Jeyifo

As I write  these words in the early hours of Friday, July 23, 2021, I am still trying to make sense of something that happened almost like a response to what I wrote in this column last week: in the last two days, very prominent leaders and media personalities of the Republican party have been calling on Americans who have not been vaccinated against Covid-19 to go and get the vaccine. They are “testifying” now that the vaccines are both safe and effective. The Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, the Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, the caucus of doctors among Republicans in Congress, Fox News anchors like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, all of them and others have, in the last forty-eight hours, made statements urging all American to be vaccinated. If it is apparent that these declarations were coordinated, what remains unclear are the reasons for the sudden about turn. Whatever these reasons may be, what is important for me is the context, the ethos in which both this change of heart and the original cultic anti-vax battle are being enacted.

Before every other consideration, my first response to this development is this: I fervently hope that the unvaccinated in their millions will listen to these new, born-again vaccination promoters. In other words, we need to know as soon as possible whether it was the dog that was wagging its tail or the tail that was wagging the dog. This is not a mere rhetorical flamboyance on my part. Many of us knew that most of the political leaders and opinion molders in media who were asking the base of the Republican party not to take the vaccine were themselves vaccinated. When they were asked whether they themselves had been vaccinated, they neither denied nor confirmed it, leading many observers to conclude that they were vaccinated. Why would anybody who had not been vaccinated be hesitant to loudly and stoutly declare that they had not been vaccinated? Why would such a person insist that it was his personal and private business whether or not he or she was vaccinated? And indeed, much more fundamental is the question of who really is the “dog” and who the “tail” – the leadership and/or the base of the Republican party?

In the next few weeks, we may be in a position to get the answers to these questions, framed by most Americans’ prayers and hopes that the millions who have been rejecting the vaccine will begin to relent and receive the vaccine. For people are again beginning to fall dangerously ill and die of the pandemic in numbers that we saw in the spring and summer of last year, 2020. And we are now in a different place than we were two months, a month ago when it seemed that the worst days of the pandemic were over, at least in the United States, if not in most of the other parts of the world. Businesses, schools, social life, cultural activities, rituals of community and sociality, all seemed to be getting back to “normal” even if this was a sort of “new normal”. But then the vaccine rejectionists erected a huge road block in the path of the country’s progress toward post-pandemic new beginnings. In perhaps the most frightening manifestations of this development, even people who were residents of states in which large segments of the adult population had been vaccinated, even they began to get intimations of the specter of the pandemic reasserting dominion over all parts of America. Yes, in a few weeks and months, everyone will be looking to see if the unvaccinated millions will respond positively to this new and completely unanticipated call of leaders of the Republican party for all Americans to be vaccinated.

But the well has been poisoned and it is not clear that a detoxification of its waters is possible. Indeed, within a day, not to talk of hours, of the “about turn” on rejection of anti-covid vaccination, most independent commentators had reacted not only hesitantly but also suspiciously to the Republican leaders call for full American vaccination. Some commentators remarked wryly that the about turn of the Republicans did not entail the slightest admission that they had been wrong to turn people against vaccination, talk less of apologizing and doing penance for all the deaths they had caused. We woke up one morning and those who had been shouting to the rooftops telling people to avoid the vaccines, began to say go and take the vaccine, absolutely without any explanation! Not only that, but they have continued to peddle their other lies and conspiracy theories, many of which are nearly as toxic and anti-human as the anti-vax canard.

Of the most plausible explanations for the “about turn”, the most persuasive is this: next year, 2022, a set of midterm elections will take place and the Republicans have begun to feel that if people are still falling sick and dying from the pandemic by this time next year, their hopes of taking back one or both Houses of Congress from the Democrats will be dashed. The extreme cynicism of the logic behind this calculation is chilling: it is not deaths from Covid-19, hospitalizations and disruption of lives and livelihoods that caused Republicans to begin asking Americans in their millions to take the vaccines; rather it is their fear of being kept out of control of the Houses of Congress, together with the White House, possibly for a long time. Does this mean that the Republicans did not know, or could not anticipate that asking people not to be vaccinated could and would be politically damaging to them? This is the fundamental question in this piece and to respond to it, we must get back to the issue of the context, the ethos in which, as I remarked at the start of this piece, we can make sense of why Republicans are now asking Americans in their millions to be vaccinated, having hitherto been building a death cult on the actual and symbolic pyre of vaccine rejectionism.

I repeat: the well has been poisoned in contemporary American politics. In forma, de facto terms, America is still a liberal democracy and to that extent, the two main political parties are still locked in the norms, practices and cycles of liberal democracy. But one of the two parties, the Republican Party, has clearly and decisively moved into the spaces and zones of insurrectionary politics of an extreme rightwing vintage. On the one hand, on discovering that sticking to its death-cult campaign against vaccines can make it suffer catastrophic electoral defeat in the midterm elections of 2022, it abruptly begins to campaign for vaccination acceptance to the masses. But on the other hand, it is still pursuing the insurrectionary agenda of the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. This makes for practices, behavior and symbolism that are clearly beyond and outside the norms of the liberal democracies of the West. Here are some examples. One: the party is passing extremely restrictive and anti-democratic legislative bills into law in all the states under its control, laws expected to henceforth guarantee its victory in all future elections. Two: the party’s leaders, representatives and foot soldiers all routinely make remarks and take actions that are calculated to offend civility, negate rationality and disrupt logic. Three: policies, programs and even ideology have all been massively displaced in importance by “cultural” issues like “cancel culture”, “wokeness”, “heritage and legacies”, “fake news”, “conspiracy theories” and “MAGA” (Make America Great Again). Four: the cult of the Leader whose control of the party is near absolute, both in its hold on power and its deployment as the model for leadership succession in the party.

If this profile of one of the two main parties in contemporary American politics inspires fear, that is indeed exactly what it is calculated to inspire. And indeed, whether they openly admit it, make light of it or completely deny it, most commentators and pundits of contemporary American politics are very susceptible to this element of open or subliminal fear. Insurrectionary politics, especially when they are of the extreme Right or Left, are anathemas to the good conscience and benign self-regard of liberal democracy. With the Republicans of the present period, there are additional elements of racial supremacy and xenophobic demagoguery, often violently aggressive. Indeed, the most prominent, visible and charismatic men and women in leading positions in the Republican party talk, act and behave as if their intention is to inspire fear and dread among the ranks of their actual and projective enemies. But then, there is another side to this profile in which the fear and dread are ingressive, self-directed. I suggest that this is the domain of the political psychology of the Republican party at the present time that should be of interest to us. I wish to end my reflections in this piece by briefly exploring how this particular aspect relates to the surprise of the Republicans’ call on all Americans to get vaccinated.

The fear that is haunting the Republicans is the existential fear that they are rapidly becoming a minority party that is doomed to remain so for the foreseeable future. This fear is based as much on race as it is also based on ideology and policies. Racially, over the last few decades, the party has moved closer and closer to White supremacy, to the point that at the present time, the party now has many open, self-declared White supremacists among its elected local, state and federal legislators. Ideologically, the era of the so-called “big government” that was supposed to have been killed and buried by Reagan and Reaganism, that era has been resurrected by the Democrats and is now alive and doing well, nurtured by the hopes and dreams of most of the present generation of American working and poor people of all races that only government, “big government”, can make them realize their hopes and dreams. Perhaps in another half century from now, the temporal and ideological pendulum will swing again to the era of “minimum government”, who knows? But while the present ideological zeitgeist persists, the Democrats have a considerable electoral advantage over the Republicans, in terms of both racial demographics and ideology and policies.

Why can’t or won’t the Republicans adapt to changing demographic and ideological circumstances, you might ask? Answer: Go and ask the leopard to change its spots! More productively, we should ask the following question: when a storied political party not only swings between extreme rightwing insurrectionary politics and restrictive laws that give it unfair and corrupt advantage in electoral politics but also sees these two strategies or tactics as the only two options open to it, what else can one expect? As I watched many of the Republican leaders and representatives who have come forward in the last two days to urge Americans to go and get vaccinated in their millions, I looked very carefully to see regret, compassion or solidarity on their faces. I solemnly swear that I did not see one single face, one single body in which any of these emotions or sentiments were etched. I was shocked. But then, what should we expect from a party that is so full of extremely cruel and vainglorious men and women?

• Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

By Biodun Jeyifo

The fool had said in his heart/There is no God – Psalm 14, The Bible, King James Version

When, in my early to mid-20s in the first half of the 1970s, I became an atheist and a secularist, I got tremendous encouragement to make that decision from the fact that two prominent Nigerian public intellectuals whom I admired a lot were self-declared atheists and secularists. These were the late radical educationist, Tai Solarin and the famed mathematician and political maverick, Chike Obi. I did not arrive at secularism and atheism through the views of the two men on the existence or non-existence of God. Neither Solarin nor Obi said much about these subjects; they simply declared themselves and got on with their non-conformist views on religion and deism. I, on the other hand, had come to atheism and secularism through a process of extended reasoning based on my own life and life around me, backed by a lot of reading. Thus, what I found “usable” in the examples of Solarin and Obi was the fact that nobody could credibly accuse them of being fools or lunatics for denying the existence of God – though many “defenders” of God and religion tried to label them, if not fools, then “madmen”.

At one time in the not-too distant history of the planet, to declare that God does not exist was a capital offense in many parts of the world. As a matter of fact, publicly declared atheism is still a capital offense carried out through extraordinarily brutal executions in more than a dozen countries. Examples of such countries are Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iran, Malaysia, Maldives, Qatar, Mauritania, Yemen, Libya, United Arab Emirates and Somalia. As a matter of fact, even mere religious skepticism, far below full-blown atheism, also carries the death penalty in these countries.

And also, there is the fact that even in many countries of the world which neither kill nor imprison citizens for atheism and secularism, there is a widespread practice of socially scapegoating those who dare to, in a manner of speaking, “declare” themselves. Which brings us to the main point of this concluding part of the series that I began in this column last week: why would any man or woman risk actual and symbolic forms of social scapegoating and/or notoriety by declaring themselves to be atheists and secularists? There is no simple, straightforward answer to this question. However, there is one answer that is fairly close to the question and it is this: secularism is one of the most important issues of peaceable community for all modern societies and you cannot talk of secularism without also talking about atheism in its many forms. This is the case in nearly every country in the world. Why so?

Well, if secularism is the name of the official, constitutional separation of state and religion in most modern societies, atheism, in its most robust and articulate forms, constitutes one of the most resolute and eloquent champions of secularism. Permit me to make a slight correction of this observation: among atheists, agnostics who hold that it is near impossible to find logical and coherent arguments for the existence and non-existence of God, agnostics constitute perhaps the most effective advocates of secularism. I am assuming here that most adult, literate and patriotic Nigerians would readily agree to the supposition behind these observations, this being the thesis that without secularism, our country would have been destroyed a long time ago by the bitter religious rivalry between the country’s two main organized religions, Christianity and Islam. Yes, we can admit that we do not (yet) practice a robust, enlightened secularism in Nigeria. Rather, what we have is a patchwork of the balancing acts of concessions to the official and unofficial demands of the Christian and Islamic establishments. But nonetheless, we can all agree that without the modicum of secularism in our national, public affairs, Nigeria would long ago have joined the considerable number of African countries that have tragically succumbed to the forces of religious zealotry battling amongst themselves for the soul and the body (politick) of the nation. Here, I remember one of Tai Solarin’s declarations about secularism and the basis on which we can realize its potential benefits to our country: to build better schools, roads, hospitals, factories and modern scientific and engineering projects, we must leave the affairs of God and religion to our homes, churches and mosques!

As honorable as Solarin’s secularism was, it was questionable on one crucial point: he was apparently unaware that Religion, all religions without any exception, harbor now and have always harbored their own “Doubting Thomases”, their own secret internal “atheists”. The most powerful cultural evidence that we have for this is the existence, again in all the religions of the world, of parodic mimicry of religious songs, hymns, sermons, parables and visions. Most of the creators of these parodies of pious religious expressive media and content are doubtless the ordinary laity in hidden or open rebellions against the priesthood. But we do know that some of the creators of these parodies were also priests and clergymen. And most notable of all is the fact this tradition of irreligious parody was directed not only at the priesthood but also  against God Himself or Herself. Indeed, I confess now nearly a half-century after the fact, that long before I “formally” became an atheist, I had been undergoing “training” through my delight in this idiom of “God-weary” blasphemous parodies produced by both priests and the laity!

Of course, religion is not the only institution or collective practice in society that is subjected to parodies. Law, patriotism, language, the professions and age, gender and class identities are all routinely subjected to parody and satire. The general rule seems to be that the more venerable and venerated an institution is, the more it is likely to be “cut down to size” parodically. This seems to follow the general or common idea that “too much of anything is bad”. However, God stands alone as a special category in this tradition. Why is this so? Well, the reason is that the stakes are much too high with God. In other words, when you pitch the scale of consequence and accountability at the level of the eternal damnation of the soul and/or separation from God and departed loved ones for all of eternity, blasphemous parodies against God becomes immeasurably more forbidden than parodies against the Law, the Government or even the Church. On this note, I now move to the concluding section of this discussion that I began last week in this column.

The existence and/or non-existence of God is a subject that has generated discussion for thousands of years, since at least the invention of writing systems, probably long before then when orality was the primary medium of communication. If that is the case, one would have thought that this subject should by now have been either settled or become so over-flogged that it should no longer be of interest. But that is not the case at all. One reason – my own reason – for this is because the things that are claimed for and in the name of God are so vastly consequential that they will always and forever generate discussion and disputation. In my own formulation of the subject, I assert that if God did/does not exist, She would have been invented. Here is another way of putting across the same idea: I look far ahead of the present moment in history as possible and I cannot think of a time when the need of human beings for the notion of God would have ceased to be vital for our species. What do I mean by this?

In the Abrahamic religions, God is said to be omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent, that is to say, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful. This raises many questions for us, many of which have been answered over the ages by theologians and philosophers. One question is what needs of humans that such a Being be can invoked, good or evil, benevolent or destructive. It is claimed that God can and will visit destruction on people who turn away from Him or seek to vitiate His plan for humanity in general or the portion of it that constitutes His Chosen People. Will the human need for this aspect of the omnipotent majesty of God ever cease, given the terrible evils have been perpetrated and justified by this aspect of God? Slavery, servitude of  diverse kinds, war, the slaughter of innocents, the pillage of cities and entire national and regional communities have they not at one time or another been justified in the name of God?

Beyond large-scale atrocities and calamities visited upon vast populations, what of monstrosities that we might describe as the granular suffering visited on the bodies and minds of individuals among enslaved and/or conquered populations? We had thought that the close links between Christianity and Master Race ideology that the Nazi and the Apartheid regimes tried to establish as a form of permanent domination of Non-Aryans in Germany and South Africa respectively, we had though that this was a thing of the past. But Republicans in the United States are reinventing this savage, pitiless form of rule in the 21st century, with hordes of evangelical Christians leading the charge and invoking the name of God. Yes, God can be invoked and “mobilized” for such things precisely because there is no other Being or Entity omnipotent enough to rationalize and justify such a need or project.

But let us not forget the other side of the coin of Divine Omniscience, this being the God that is infinite in His Mercifulness and Grace, the God who, through his omnipresent constitution, often comes to the aid of the weak, the defenseless, the insulted, the wretched of the earth. The saga of the liberation movements of African Americans for more than half a millennium would have been impossible without the belief in this God. We often come across the slogan, “with God, everything is possible”, without properly contextualizing it beyond the modest hopes of a poor man or woman that though present realities and prospects are dire, God can and will provide for him/her and the children. In the present context, I am thinking of a historic struggle like that of the African Americans in which the balance of forces was so overwhelmingly against the oppressed that only the belief that the omnipotent God was on one’s side. Countless so-called “Negro Spirituals” attest to this factor, as do hymns in praise of God’s glory and majesty that have now become the staple of authentic American and global sacred music.  We must not forget here the Quakers as a group among Whites whose ardent abolitionist and anti-slavery fervor was based on an absence of a priesthood in their sect and the corollary belief that everyman and woman can and should reach God directly on the supposition that only a direct access to the Mercy of God will help one to prevail over the forces of darkness and oppression.

In the modern era, the locations where the omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent God has been invoked to empower rebellion against iniquitous rulers are legion: the Americas, North, South and Central; the Caribbean; Africa, especially the Southern region; and parts of Southeast Asia. Simultaneously and almost side by side, the same God has been invoked and corralled to justify fascist and authoritarian master-race abominations. And, sometimes, you cannot separate the one from the other, the jealous, punitive God and the God of infinite Mercy and Compassion. The outstanding examples of this confusing mix was best exemplified by the participation of Christian missionaries in the colonizing projects in Africa, the Caribbean and South America. But this is a dimension of this discussion that deserves its own separate treatment.

I end the discussion with two seemingly unrelated issues. The first is this: unbeliever that I am, in my life, I have met some men and women of faith that are wonderful human beings, while, needless to say, I have met far many more who are the worst specimens of human nature, also claiming to be men and women of faith, indeed “prayer warriors”. This leads me to conclude that it is not your belief or unbelief that matters; it is what your belief or unbelief makes of you that matters. Here is the second issue: the small matter of the fact that more than fifty years after I became a dedicated secularist and atheist, I still occasionally surprise myself by interjecting such phrases as “Jesus Christ!” and “Good God in Heaven!” into my thoughts and spoken words, especially in moments when I am either struck by a great thought or event or by an encounter with one of the imponderables of life, mine and other peoples’. I leave the reader to make what she or he pleases of this “confession”. As for me, this is where I stand, where my secularism and atheism place me: if God did/does not exist, we would have invented or have to invent Her/Him.

• Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

By Biodun Jeyifo

Encountering the term, “farseeing geniality”, in the title of this piece, I can imagine the person to whom it is addressed, my friend, Mac Ovbiagele, saying spontaneously to himself, “Abijey, you don come again o! Which one be “farseeing geniality”? It is a fair query. Though it is not shrouded in mystery, the term is not exactly self-explanatory. But obviously, in conjoining “farseeing” with “geniality”, I am implying a special form or mode of being genial, being affable and good-natured. As a matter of fact, initially, in place of “farseeing”, I had thought of “oracular” to get “oracular geniality”. But expecting Mac to take me to a harder task on this, I chose the term that we have here, “farseeing geniality”: the habit or practice of being sociable with all men and women with the gift of knowing what words or expressions to use at the very moment when they are not only needed but will deepen the intent and meaning of thoughts and feelings expressed during a conversation. Be it in English, Nigerian Pidgin, Yoruba or slang, Mac is never short of the appropriate proverb, saying, bon mot or witticism to use, effortlessly but absolutely without any ostentation. Dear reader, have you ever met a man or woman who is a master in the art of conversation without being tiresome or grandiloquent about their skills? That is who Mac Ovbiagele is, apart from being an omoluabi and a man of deep faith of the first order. Please, take this brief but somewhat intriguing note as an introduction to this piece that I offer as a reflection on faith and Spirit, capital “S”.

Briefly, here is the background, the context. As regular readers of this column will probably remember, I recently wrote a tribute to a departed friend, Ebenezer Olu Ademulegun, aka Olu Adex. Although I did not single out Mac among all the friends of Olu Adex that I mentioned in the tribute, above all others, I had him in my mind as I wrote the tribute. This was based on what Adex had meant to Mac and, especially, what he, Mac, had meant to Adex. Predictably, the death of Adex produced a flood of emails between Mac and myself. Some of the issues in the emails were based on what I had written in my tribute to Olu Adex but the bulk went back to the years and decades when all three of us, our late friend, Mac and myself, had been undergraduates at UI. [Mac and I indeed go back before our UI days to Oke-Bola, Ibadan when we were in our mid to late teens].

In our email exchanges, there was grief, there was mourning. But there was also exultant celebration of the life of our friend. In this mixture of harrowing thoughts and feelings with consoling exultations, I, non-believer that I am, unexpectedly surprised Mac – not to say shocked him – by my positive use of religious or quasi-religious words like faith and yes, Spirit, capital “S”, as Mac himself put it. He was particularly surprised by my assertion in one email that I usually send dearly beloved departed friends, relatives and colleagues to the Hereafter in the protective, guiding embrace of Spirit. Given Mac’s perfectly correct knowledge of me as an atheist, this was too much for him. And to add mystery to enigma, in last week’s column, in a tribute to another friend, Femi Osofisan, I invoked the name of God, asking Him to be my witness on the veracity of claims I was making in that tribute to Osofisan. With that, Mac had had enough and forthwith from him came the questions that inspired this piece, chief of which was this question: “BJ, you of all people, are using the term “Spirit”, capital “S”? Please, confuse me some more!”

But the term “Spirit”, capital “S” is not new in my writings in this column. For instance, I had used it in a tribute to the late Professor Abiola Irele on his death in 2017. This was published in this column on June 9, 2017. Indeed, it is pertinent for me to confirm this claim through a long quotation from that tribute to the late Professor Abiola Irele:

Inclusive of all the members of his immediate family, there were ten of us at his bedside at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. It was Sunday, July 1, 2017, around 5:55 p.m. The doctors having earlier informed us that the end was near, a Roman Catholic “last rite” had been expeditiously arranged. It was conducted by a Nigerian priest. When Father Chris had gone through the first stage of the profoundly moving ceremony, he invited any of us who so desired to speak our farewell to him after which he, the priest, would bring the order or proceedings of the “last rites” to a close.

Members of the family went first, turn by turn. And then, we, friends of the family, each had her or his turn, each woman and man moving close to the still warm and living body and addressing him as if he could hear us though, scientifically speaking, all cognition had gone from him. As I waited for my turn to say my last words to him, an incredible riot of thoughts and emotions raced through my mind, undergirded by an overwhelming sadness. He was still here, on this side of the great divide; but I, we, all knew that he was slipping away into the night of Time and Being. The work of mourning him had already begun.

I swear that even as I approached him to say my farewell, I had not yet chosen the words to say to him. Unlike him who, with his matchless rationalism and towering intellect, was a believer, I am not a believer, at least not in the sense of organized, formal religion. But at the very moment when I got to his side and laid my hand on his arm, the words came of their own. I felt, I knew that I was addressing his spirit, addressing Spirit itself which binds all of us, the living, the dead and the unborn, together. Both the real and the factitious, trivial line separating “believers” and “unbelievers” had vanished as I said the following words to him, simply:

“Egbon, we shall not forget you. I testify that you have left us a prodigious legacy, a bountiful bequest that will never perish. I testify that you crossed many borders, that you are the greatest border crosser of your generation. The innumerable borders that you crossed enabled me and other members of my generation that you inspired to do the same. In the course of those border crossings, you lived life to the fullest. You are now at another border. On behalf of all who are not present here, I ask you to go across this last of all borders gracefully. Go gently and courageously into the Shade, Egbon”.

I do admit it now. I was not completely satisfied by my invocation of Spirit in that tribute, even in the very special circumstance of the occasion that produced it. It was against the background of this conditioned discomfiture that in that tribute published in these pages on July 9, 2017, I offered the following rational explanation for my invocation of spirit, both small “s” and capital “S”:

I have said that I addressed my farewell, my last words, to his spirit and to Spirit itself. I admit that this smacks of a metaphysics of Being, but it is perfectly explicable in terms with which nearly everyone, “believers” and “unbelievers”, can agree. Thus, Spirit here connotes the universal yearning for and will to enlightenment, to liberating knowledge, to humanizing generosity, to genuine solicitude and fellowship between all women and men. Irele’s spirit was completely at one with this Universal Spirit.

For fellow atheists, agnostics, secularists, Marxists and not to exclude diverse Doubting Thomases, I wish to say very pointedly that though the explanation of my use of “spirit” and capital “S” “Spirit” in this discussion is rationalistic, I do not exclude religion and religious mysticism from my deployment of Spirit in that tribute to Irele. As a matter of fact, Irele himself was/is a perfect embodiment of the compatibility of aspects of religion with the rationalistic conception of Spirit that I am revisiting here after my first invocation of it in my tribute to him. Permit me to address this issue in a rather roundabout manner.

When, in my early twenties, I stopped being a Christian and, more generally, a religionist, one of the reasons for this was the fact that religion did not and could not provide answers to many questions that began to greatly trouble my mind. For want of space, I cannot in this context go into all of them or indeed many of them. Given this limitation of space, I will deal with only one of such deeply troubling issues that, in my early adulthood, I began to find religion in general and Christianity in particular deficient in providing answers for. Thus, among such issues was the tendency of religion, all religions and Christianity and Islam in particular, to perpetually fragment into sects, mostly in benign co-existence with one another but quite often in theological and actual, physical warmongering and warfare amongst themselves. Some of the most horrible wars in human history, on all the continents, were caused and prolonged by the factional zealotry of organized religion. The standard Marxist explanation for this is that warmongering and warfare among religious faiths often stood in for and justified warfare for other objectives like dynastic struggles among kings and emperors; territorial conquest; trafficking in slaves, serfs and peons; land grabbing and expropriation of the products of human labor from those who labor. Here in the context of this discussion, without making it a sort of “first principle”, I am considering almost completely on its own terms the tendency of religion to break up and fragment into other faiths and sects.

Now, Wole Soyinka has argued persuasively that the heritage of religion and religiosity on the African continent did not follow this presumed “universal” pattern because autochthonous African religions were not religions of conversion. Well, that may have been the case, but Africa and its religions did not permanently stay away from “contamination” by the religious traditions of the other regions and continents of the world. Which means that the tendency of religions everywhere to fragment into sects and faiths which then further fragment into still other sects and factions, this tendency, with its propensity to be extremely warmongering, has for at least three centuries now penetrated deeply into African religious practice. The “tribes” of religious fanaticism have taken refuge in the “tribes” of ethnic irredentism, aggressive or defensive. And clashes of faiths masquerade as or become embedded in clashes of ethnic nations and communities. Of all the continents, ours is the most ravaged by this factor at the present time.

What consequence does this perpetual fragmenting sectarianism have for religion and the Spirit that is said to animate it, that indeed it doctrinally promotes? Permit me to recall the Spirit which, in my definition, characterized Irele’s life and work: “the universal yearning for and will to enlightenment, to liberating knowledge, to humanizing generosity, to genuine solicitude and fellowship between all women and men. Irele’s spirit was completely at one with this Universal Spirit”. As fine-sounding as this definition of Spirit may be, for all or most religionists, it poses one huge problem: it leaves out worship and service, especially to the greater glory of God or the gods, depending on the particular religion. I confess that this exclusion is deliberate on my part. Why so?

All or most religionists, when confronted by the question of Spirit, respond by posing the following question: recognition of Spirit in the service or worship of which or whose God? But to do so is to reduce Spirit to its manifestation in the faith or sect to which one belongs. Yes, of course, Christians believe that the same Spirit animates all the diverse faiths and sects of their religion. But do they extend this to other religions? Is the spirit of ecumenism dominant among all the sects of Christianity and among all the organized religions of the world? Unbeliever that I became in my early adulthood, I found that if such questions could be posed among religionists, where does this leave me and my “sect” and “faith” of unbelievers? In my life and work, in my hopes and fears, and in the best motivations of my spirit, I do not exclude anybody, any group,  any “sect”, believers and unbelievers, from the Universal Spirit, including even those who choose to exclude themselves from Spirit by their deeds of inhumanity to other men and women.

There remains of course my invocation of the name and the power of God to be a witness in my favor and to punish my detractors, this in my tribute to Femi Osofisan in last week’s column. Of course, I intended it to be ironic, mock-pious. But is that all that there is to my invocation of the name and power of God? No, not at all. Nearly half a century after I stopped being a Christian and a religionist, why does an apparently powerful, subliminal linguistic habituation continue to make me refer to God? This will be the starting point in next week’s conclusion of the series.

• Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

By Biodun Jeyifo

Let me have men that are fat/Sleek-headed men and such that sleep at night/ Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look/He thinks too much/Such men are dangerous Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

I swear that I am writing this tribute to my friend, Femi Osofisan, in nothing but a spirit of genuine joy and fulsome celebration on his attainment of the age of 75. I swear that though I never grew fat and remain lean and hungry-looking like Cassius in the quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that stands as the epigraph to this tribute, I have no envy, no disapproval of my friend’s fatness. It was decades of chronic illness that kept me lean and hungry-looking and anybody who thinks I am proud of or even resigned to this “fate” could come and exchange their fatness for my beanstalk leanness! This is beside the fact that Femi Osofisan isn’t fat; Niyi Osundare isn’t fat; Edwin Madunagu isn’t fat; Yemi Ogunbiyi isn’t fat; they are robust, they are not horizontally-challenged like me. God will punish anybody who thinks that I am invoking leanness in this tribute because God is my witness that I am not!

Indeed, we do not have to go so far as to bring God into this matter because we have the evidence of the facts of biographical and literary history to draw upon. In the first place, I did not remain lean and hungry looking while all my friends and colleagues became healthily corpulent. I, too, was on my way to decent lateral girth when chronic illness intervened in the matter – as anyone can see in the picture that accompanies this tribute. More pertinent is the fact that the title of my tribute to Femi in this piece is a deliberate attempt to recall the title and contents of “And After the Narcissist?”, one of the most influential pieces in Wole Soyinka’s earliest critical prose. The “narcissist” of that outstanding essay that occupies a very special place in Soyinka’s early critical prose is the typical Negritude poet, novelist or intellectual of the generation that preceded Soyinka’s own generation of African writers, artists and intellectuals. This was Soyinka’s essential point in the essay: having won respect, self-love and dignity for modern African writing through Negritude, will African writers remain stuck in Negritudist themes and styles and if so, at what cost to the development of modern African letters?

“And after the ‘angry young men’ moment”?, the title of this tribute to my friend, is intended to invoke the spirit of Soyinka’s “And After the Narcissist?”. But only in a manner that is historically and logically posed differently from Soyinka’s interrogation of the generation that came before his own generation. In my case in this tribute, the question in the title of the tribute is not only posed to my own generation, it is being posed at a moment that is nearly half a century after the event! In other words, while Soyinka posed his question in “And After the Narcissist?” to Senghor and the other giants of the Negritude movement when they were, relatively speaking, still in their prime, I am posing my question at a time when at least two generations that came after us have been posing the same question to us, of course in differentially phrased formulations. If that is the case, how could men who have grown, if not fat then corpulently endowed, dare to raise questions about the time when they were lean, hungry-looking and angry? And if I, personally, have remained lean and hungry-looking, does that give me the right to raise the question? After all, I have stated that I did not choose to become lean and hungry-looking; it chose me! Or is the case that I am implying that I, alone, have remained angry while “anger” has disappeared in other members of our generation, wiped out by their corporeal endowments garnered over the last four decades? Ah, men are wicked o! How can anybody have such wicked, wicked thoughts about my intentions without having taken the trouble to hear (or read) me out in this tribute?

Well, confronted by this quandary, I invoke the support of the adage which says that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. As this tribute is completely guileless, only by forthrightly stating it will I be able to make my point and convince my readers – among who the subject of the tribute himself occupies a place of great distinction – that I have something sincere and worthwhile to say. If we were all “angry young men” of Nigerian and African letters and radical politics, Femi Osofisan occupied a very special place in the cultural and literary formation in which history and circumstance located us. He was lean, very lean; and he was angry, very angry. But among all of us without any exception, his anger was modulated by compassion and gentleness, humor and wit, song and laughter, music and dance. Permit me to give a short elaboration of this point.

Kole Omotoso, Festus Iyayi, Odia Ofeimun, Biodun Jeyifo, Niyi Osundare, Esiaba Irobi and many others, we were all extremely angry young men and to this day, the anger still breathes in the writings that we produced in the period. But as “modulated” as I claim Osofisan’s anger to have been, if you read some of his writings from the period today, you will see that his anger was no less than that of anyone among all of us. For instance, I had the general reputation of being the fiercest of Soyinka’s critics. But go and reread Osofisan’s brilliant essay, “Ritual and the Revolutionary Ethos” and you will get an acute sense of how the fierceness of its critique matched anything that I wrote. Iyayi’s novels, especially Violence, garnered the reputation of being the most focused and searing in its anger toward class and status exploitation of workers and the poor. But there is a worthy equivalence in some of Osofisan’s plays like Oriki of a Grasshopper and Morountodun. And in public gatherings such as debates and book launches, Osofisan was often as fiery and forthright as any of us, perhaps the most exemplary of these being his performance at the famous Ibadan Radical Conference on African Literature of 1978.

Above any other citable phenomenon or reality of this generational experience of being “angry young men”, it is the lived and shared aspects that I would place at the center of this tribute. In plain language, Osofisan was, in about the first decade and half  of our biological and intellectual adulthood, mistakenly taken for me and I was equally mistaken for him. Ditto between Omotoso and myself. It was not a mere case of physical resemblance. No, the “mistake” was nearly always in the context of the person mistaken being perceived to be enacting an aspect of our collective “angry young man” identity. Indeed, the most astonishing aspect of this phenomenon was the fact that those who mistook Osofisan, Omotoso and myself were not strangers; they were colleagues and even relatives who knew us well and saw us often. Like when in 1976, an uncle of mine, the late Mr. Sunday Ajayi-Obe, Project Manager at the Cocoa Research Institute of Nigeria (CRIN), saw Osofisan at my father’s house at Oke-Bola and taking Femi to be me, launched into a long conversation with him on why he should curb his disagreements with his siblings concerning how elaborate and grandiose our father’s burial ceremonies should be. Being used to this sort of thing, Osofisan patiently listened to my uncle, never said a word, never disabused the man of his error, content with the thought that as long as he passed my uncle’s message to me, everything was fine!

Or take the time earlier in 1971 when Osofisan and I were hallmates in the Tafawa Balewa Postgraduate Hall, University of Ibadan. As a matter of fact, this was the period when the whole phenomenon started. One day, I went to the then newly opened ultramodern wing of the Main University Library designated as the Post Graduate Library with the intention of spending several hours there, only to be forcibly and unceremoniously ejected after about thirty minutes. The reason? I had quietly written a note which said, “Quiet in the Library Please!” and silently placed it in front of a woman who was having a phone conversation whose decibel was so high that it could be heard clearly at every corner, every spot in the entire library. It turned out that the woman in question was not only the University Deputy Librarian but was also the wife of the Vice Chancellor!

Which was why, as quietly as I had dropped my note in front of her, she moved out and about five minutes later, she reappeared with the University Librarian himself in tow who promptly had me ejected with a suspension of all my library privileges. Nearly everyone present in the library took my side because they had also been outraged by the loud and offending phone conversation of the Deputy Librarian in, of all places, a library. To cut a long story short, when Osofisan showed up in the library the next day, he caused a big stir because the Librarian, the Deputy Librarian and the guards all mistook him for me and – proceeded to throw him out! But this time, since the incident with my uncle was in the future and was yet to happen, Femi had to await clarification from me on why he had been thrown out of the library and how both of us – together with Omotoso – could begin the long lesson in what mistaken identity as “angry young men” would teach us in the future, extending to the time when long after we had changed so much that people stopped completely from mistaking each of us for another, both physically and substantively.

The Young Shall Grow! Angry young men become crisis-ridden-middle aged men; then they become aging, querulous men; then in the twilight of life, they become doddering and lost old men. Supposedly, that is the “natural” order, which is not necessarily the order of actual societies and particular individual lives. Some things persist and completely new possibilities arise. Recently, I had the pleasure of reading the most recent and still unpublished dramatic writing of my friend, a very original adaptation of Euripides’ Medea. Permit me to use this experience to bring this tribute to a conclusion by briefly recounting what I saw of the expression, the modulation of “anger” in this play written in the 74th year of my friend’s life.

I was struck by the force of the collision of antithetical propensities of the human spirit in this new play, especially with regard to sureness of creative impulse. I could see old, reliable habits in the new work, as in the earliest of his many adaptations in the years of the “angry decades”. These were things like aesthetics and relevance powered by frames of metatheatrical playfulness and storytelling, together with a deeply affecting solidarity with the plight of women under a patriarchy that seems to have never been taught a proper, chastening lesson. But the new play is “new” in surprising ways too, the most surprising one for me being my friend’s very obvious and telling sense of needing assurance that the creative powers are not waning, whereas I myself read in the play a strong sense of approaching creative challenges as if one is starting afresh in paradisiacal beginnings. Osofisan always welcomed and cherished commentaries from trusted and capable colleagues, but never to the degree of an unsureness that I sensed in this new work, an unsureness completely unjustifiable given the work’s commanding surefootedness in the historic context of the 19th century internecine wars in Yorubaland. In the context of this tribute, what is most important in this is the fact that the quotient of the anger of women against patriarchy in the play becomes diffuse, unfocused in a manner in which it had never been in any of Osofisan’s plays, original or adapted. I am sure that this will not become a significant feature of my friend’s work in the years to come. For of one thing we can be certain: he will continue to write, deo volente!

So, it is okay to express anger at 75, mon ami, especially by one like yourself who, as I remarked earlier in this tribute, has always been a master in modulating anger with compassion and gentleness, humor and wit, song and laughter, music and dance. Let tyrants and philistines beware, anger has not gone away in my friend’s capacious art, with its rousing humanism!

• Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

By Biodun Jeyifo

Our nation is the toad which forgot its tale
That mindless nanny goat whipped countless times
For repeated transgressions; season after season,
We drown in the same river of unknowing
Always, wrong wo/men in the right places
Hideous, hidebound, insufferably haughty
Medieval in their methods, dark in their deeds
Deaf to the throes of a nation dying in their hands
Niyi Osundare, “This House Must Not Fall”

Did the nation suffer with President Buhari the debacle of the suspension of his Twitter account? You would have to be a fanatical supporter of the president to think so. For one thing, if the countless number of Nigerians who regularly pour abuse and opprobrium of an extremely negative and violent kind on Buhari in Twitter platforms had their way, Buhari’s account on Twitter would be suspended permanently. Indeed, going by what Buhari is typically subjected to on Twitter, it is nothing short of a reversal of epic proportions that for a ruler who rode to power as an elective president in 2015 on a tidal wave of admiration and euphoria, he has turned out to be perhaps the most hated ruler in Nigeria’s post-independence era. And for another consideration, did Buhari and his advisers really think that Nigerians would willingly and sympathetically accept the president’s clumsy and autocratic extension of his ban on Twitter to the whole nation? If that is what they expected, does this not reflect an astonishing level of naivety on the part of the president and his advisers?

This piece is only referentially and tangentially about the suspension of Buhari’s Twitter account. More centrally, it is about the context in which this event and its fallout are taking place. It is this context, this national ethos of pervasive fear of present realities and an acute sense of foreboding concerning looming catastrophes that I wish to juxtapose to the president’s brash expectation that the nation would “patriotically” suffer his Twitter debacle with him. Indeed, it is this ethos that is powerfully and lambently evoked in the two pointed literary references indicated in both the title and the epigraph to this essay, Allan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country and the lines from Niyi Osundare’s haunting poem, “This House Must Not Fall”. Paton’s famous novel was published in 1948, just before the apartheid state was instituted as a sort of “solution” to the sense of an irremediable brokenness that gripped all South Africans in the years and decades before the emergence of apartheid as a “solution” to that nation’s dire problems. As for Osundare’s poem, dear reader, just take a minute to reflect on the depth of the sorrowing jeremiad in the following lines

We drown in the same river of unknowing Always, wrong wo/men in the right places Hideous, hidebound, insufferably haughty Medieval in their methods, dark in their deeds Deaf to the throes of a nation dying in their hands

For those who are unaware of the pointed referentiality of the title of Osundare poem, the direct reference is to a book on Nigeria published in the year 2000 by an American academic, Karl Maier with the title, This House Has Fallen. Writing his poem and signifying on the title of Maier’s book, Osundare’s does not say, “This House Has Not Fallen”; he does not say, “This House Will Not Fall”; he says, “This House Must Not Fall”. This is because twenty-one years after Maier’s book, things in our country have become immeasurably worse and the “house” that the American scholar had declared as “fallen” is now in the mud, in the doghouse of historical unravelling. Except that there is another consciousness, another logic in Osundare’s poem and it this thought which, among all the classical 19th century founders of intellectual Pan Africanism and their 20th century revivalists, Amilcar Cabral best illustrates: there is no level to which a community, a nation has fallen from which it cannot rise again. The historic context of this “thesis” of Cabral is the extreme exploitativeness of Portuguese colonialism in Africa. So backward, so unregenerate was it that, on the eve of independence in most of the Portuguese colonies, many of them were in conditions of underdevelopment worse than the state in which they had been conquered by the Portuguese. It was in this historic context that Cabral formulated his famous thesis: there is no level so low from which a society cannot rise again.

Please, let us take note of the fact that Buhari’s Twitter account was suspended for the extremely divisive, petty and negative comment that the president made on the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War. It is beyond dispute that everyone, regardless of which side they were/are, perfectly understood both the intent and the message of that comment. Leaving the pettiness and the divisiveness of this Twitter comment aside, in the context of Cabral’s thesis that I have just outlined by way of Osundare’s poem, isn’t it amazing that a president whose government is losing badly against present-day insurrectionary and irredentist movements can hark back to an empty triumphalism wrung from the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War? Where is the Nigerian who feels confident that the Nigerian armed forces will defeat and crush the Boko Haram insurgency, not to talk of the other myriad security challenges and crises before which the whole nation has been brought to its knees? Indeed, is it not through a version of Cabral’s faith that African societies, like all human societies, have a self-regenerating propensity that Nigerians are able to keep hope alive that out of the present dire prospects may come better days? Does Buhari any longer remotely inspire such Cabralist hope and faith in our peoples, if we concede the fact that he once did?

In the context of these musings, nothing could be more morally and politically disastrous for Buhari and his advisers than to begin arresting and prosecuting Nigerians who continue to patronize Twitter in angry and contemptuous response to the government’s extension of Twitter’s suspension of Buhari’s account to the whole nation. Clearly, as many individuals and civil society organizations have claimed, this is a case of arrant abuse of power. It is absurd for any ruler in the world to claim that regardless of the cause, any disgrace to himself or herself is a disgrace to the nation. This may have been “true” in the olden days of feudal kingdoms in our continent and around the world but it is a completely baseless and unsupportable proposition in the modern world. This is why when Facebook kicked Donald Trump from its accounts, no American felt that the expulsion of their president was also their own disgrace, including even the most ardent supporters of Trump. Indeed, I predict that if Buhari’s Attorney General and Minister of Justice goes ahead with his threat to have any Nigerian who continues to make posts on Twitter arrested and prosecuted, Buhari himself and his administration will become the laughing stock of the whole world. A word is enough for the prudent. But you never know, for as an Igbo adage culled from one of Achebe’s novels puts the matter, the fly that has no one to advise it follows the corpse to the grave!

To those among Buhari’s handlers and advisers who would argue that if Nigerians who ignore the threat of arrest and prosecution and continue to use Twitter are not dealt with the government will lose face and thereby inspire more “disloyalty” to the president and the administration, there is an answer. The answer comes in the form of a question: which is worse, the government quietly dropping the whole matter and losing a “little bit” of face at home in Nigeria, or arresting and prosecuting the “refuseniks”, inevitably to the derision of the whole world? Let there be no doubt about this: nothing in recent memory comes close to making Muhammadu Buhari the laughing stock of the whole world than the arrest of hundreds, perhaps thousands of Nigerians for nothing worse or more than making posts on Twitter regardless of the content of the post.

In making this point so bluntly, I have in mind the fact that among all of Nigeria’s postcolonial rulers, Muhammadu Buhari has been more sensitive, more reactive to actual or imagined slights and insults. As the whole world knows, in his infamous Decree No 4 of 1984, he made it a crime to cause embarrassment to his military dictatorship through any publication, even if the publication was based on truth or fact. And when he had Omoyele Sowore arrested and detained for treason for the RevolutionNow protests and demonstrations of 2019, one of the listed offenses was “insulting the president”, a crime that has no constitutional or legal basis in Nigerian jurisprudence. Indeed, it is very likely that the nastiness and pettiness of the post that earned Buhari the suspension from Twitter probably comes from the fact that the president has been the recipient of very insulting and excoriating posts by IPOB, especially its controversial leader, Nnamdi Kanu.

But would Buhari be so prone to being driven to extremes of pettiness and nastiness by real or imagined insults if he and his administration were truly and effectively responding to the terrible problems and crises that make our country one of the most dangerous places in the world in which to live and to die at the present time? That is the question, compatriots. In one of the most startling stories in Chinua Achebe’s collection of short stories titled Girls at War and Other Stories, we are told the riveting fable of a man who leaves his burning hut to pursue a fleeing rodent.  He manages to catch the terrified rodent, but afterwards, he finds that there is no hut for him to return to. I do agree that there is an awkwardness in my comparing Buhari’s “tormentors” on Twitter and other social media platforms to the “rodent” of Achebe’s fable, but let the analogy stand. Insulting the president, pouring abuse and vitriol on his person and his rulership is a false salve for the terrifying edifice imaginatively depicted in Osundare’s poem, “Let This House Not Fall”. There are far more substantial grounds on which to engage in dialogue with our rulers than the usually arid fulminations of Twitter and Facebook. This is why the image of the burning house in Achebe’s fable and that of the falling edifice in Osundare’s poem are so apt as replacement subjects for both the president and his Twitter and social media tormentors.

Women in the French Open 2021

The crucial term is here is “women”. This is because something extraordinary at the French Open (Tennis) this year has posed a very sharp question which, at the same time that it highlights the significance of gender in professional sports in general and tennis in particular, also indicates the necessity of not making gender too overdetermining. Here’s the situation: in women’s tennis these days, no super-athletes dominate the competition and slams and other major competitions are won by players who have not established nearly insuperable dominance over the field. In the French Open this year in particular, all the eight players who reached the quarter finals and thus had a chance to move to the semifinals and finals are relatively lowly seeded players. This is in sharp contrast to men’s professional tennis which is (still) dominated by superheroes who have held dominance over the field for the last two decades, together with new superheroes who have joined the old pantheon of Federer, Nadal and Djokovic. Does this reflect an essential male thing to which women at the French Open 2021 is also an “essential” female thing?

I am reminded here of something very pithy, very tantalizing that Bertolt Brecht, the great German playwright, wrote in his play, The Life of Galileo: Unhappy is the land that has no heroes; unhappy is the land that has a need for heroes. If we render this as “unhappy is the gender that has no heroes and unhappy is the gender that has a need for heroes”, would this be satisfactory in relation to the French Open 2021? I wonder, deeply troubled by both this proposition and its seeming real life expression in this year’s French Open where all the winners were players supremely satisfied and fulfilled in not being superheroes, for instance, like Serena Williams.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

By Biodun Jeyifo

What do I mean by magical thinking of the worst kind? Let me explain through a concrete example of the phenomenon. Take the so-called “Oko Oloko” mass hysteria of the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, principally in Lagos but also in many other cities of the country. “Oko” is the Yoruba word for the male sexual organ and “Oko Oloko” roughly translates as another man’s sexual organ. In the light of this translation, we can appreciate the terror of the mass hysteria that went by that name: the allegation not only that some evil men had the power to spirit away the male sexual organs of other men but that they were doing it for money-making rituals. In the streets and thoroughfares of Lagos, especially in the Mainland, many “suspects” who were accused of the hellish crime were lynched. Once anyone and everyone heard the scream of “Oko Oloko”! all hell broke loose. Accusers, the accused and the public, all were locked in repeated acts of mass hysteria in which nobody seemed capable of freeing themselves from the insanity and delusion of the accusation and the savage punishment. How did it end, “Oko Oloko” ? It just died out, that’s all.

Well, let us pause for breath. “Oko Oloko” did not simply go away; it morphed into another phenomenon of magical thinking of the worst kind, this time involving accusation of individuals or groups of children as witches, as agents or incarnations of satanic witchcraft. This time – in the late 1980s to the mid to late 1990s – the center of gravity was Akwa Ibom state, though other parts of the country also had their own witch-hunt frenzies Any child or group of children unfortunate to be named and denounced of witchery was/were horribly tortured until they “confessed” and gave the names of their human and non-human, demonic principals. Those who did not confess at all or took too much time confessing were brutally murdered. When human and civil rights activists moved to fight the horrendous inhumanity of the witch-hunts and offer refuge and protection to accused children, they came under fire from the mostly religious organizations leading the campaigns. Things got so bad, so alarming that the phenomenon caught the world’s attention, denunciation and attempted restitution.

In my own mind, in the period of this particular phenomenon, I named it the “slaughter of innocents”. Let me be explicit on why I made this declaration. I state categorically that all acts of mass hysteria based on magical thinking of the worst kind have no basis in fact or truth and are therefore acts of incalculable human punitiveness, usually against the most vulnerable members of society like children and both the employed and unemployed poor. I have a specific reason for not only making this declaration but doing so categorically. This is because in our society, this phenomenon of magical thinking of the worst kind turns on whether or not one believes that occult powers exist and their nefarious powers can be harnessed and used to harm individuals and entire communities. But for me, belief or unbelief in this idea is completely beside the point since it can never be finally or definitively settled to everybody’s satisfaction. What can and should be definitively settled to the satisfaction of every sane, humane adult is the contention that when magical thinking of the worst kind leads to destructive mass hysteria and delusion, as many members of the society as possible should rise up in protection of potential and actual victims. This observation leads me to discussion of one of the most frightening and pernicious acts of magical thinking of the worst kind in the contemporary world, this being in the United States of America.

According to the historical records, the last great act of destructive magical thinking in America took place about three hundred years ago, this in Salem, Colonial Massachusetts, in the late 1600s. Known now as the Salem Witch Trials, it took place between February 1692 and May 1693. More than 200 people were accused, 30 were found guilty of which 20 were executed by hanging. Though it did take a long time, eventually all the accused, prosecuted and executed victims were rehabilitated and today, it is the Church, the Law and the Society that persecuted them that stand condemned. Indeed, the rehabilitation is so complete that the town of Salem has turned the tragic event into a profitable commercial venture through a Museum, a Hotel and Gift Shop which sells merchandise based on major themes and characters in the historical event. As a matter of fact, a leading American playwright, Arthur Miller, wrote a play, The Crucible, which deploys the Salem Witch Trials as a parable for the hysterical anti-communism of the McCarthy Era when Arthur Miller himself and dozens of other leftwing writers, artists and intellectuals were hounded and tried for harboring and promoting “Anti-American” communist sympathies.

Well, if Arthur Miller’s play, together with the excellent 1996 film based on it, both refer to events in American history that took place centuries ago, does it mean that American society has been free of the kind of magical thinking of the worst kind that produced the Salem Witch Trials? That is the general claim: in the modern era, America, like most of the other countries and societies of the so-called “civilized world”, knows nothing of witches and witch-hunts. Of course, it is readily conceded that occasionally, charismatic figures pronouncing apocalyptic visions that captured the imagination of millions of Americans have come and gone. But magical thinking of witches and satanic cults, of devil worshippers who attract millions of followers to their fold? No, not in America of all places in the world. Well, if that is that case, from which hidden and buried cultural repositories has the QAnon movement arisen? For the truth is that QAnon is much bigger and more bizarre in its magical thinking than the Salem Witch Trials that happened more than three hundred years ago!

Dear reader, please prepare yourself for the shock of what the QAnon magical fantasists of the Trump wing of the Republican Party are claiming as the “truth” about Democrats and     their alleged international cabal of backers comprising mostly Jewish billionaires and philanthropists. They say they are devil-worshipping Satanists. They say they are pedophiles who engage in child-trafficking. They say they are cannibals who engage in practices of ritual consumption of the flesh of children. They say that the cabal leading and controlling Democrats was sent by Satan to stop the new reign of GREATNESS that Trump will bring to America. They say that Trump only feigned fealty to Putin’s Russia in order to reveal the collusion between Obama and the Clintons to consummate America’s indenture to foreign powers like China and other contenders for global hegemony. They say that Biden in the White House is a mere illusion and Trump remains the real president. And recently, they set August as the month when the illusion will be dispelled and Trump will be seen back in the White House by Americans and the rest of the world.

Needless to say, QAnon is a discredited movement, not only because its characterization of Democrats and their supporters is so bizarre that no sane person would take it seriously, but also because some of the accusations that they make about Democrats do not and cannot take place in the real world – like cannibalism with a preference for the flesh of children! But this is precisely the point because this is idiom of satanic witchcraft. In other words, what the QAnon wing of the Republican Party is doing is accusing Democrats and their supporters and backers of the same old witchcraft that the women and children of Salem were accused of in the late 17th century, only in a far more bizarre articulation this time around in the first quarter of the 21st century. In all periods of human cultural history when people are accused of witchcraft what is it that is done to them if not physical and mental violence beyond ordinary scales or norms? Permit me to put this in another formulation: to say that a president (Biden) and a political party (Democrats) are in power through witchcraft is not only to delegitimize them but also to call for and justify opposition to them that uses, not the law, not the Constitution but great, calibrated physical and mental violence. Indeed, let us not make the mistake here of not recognizing that America has now entered a new age of “Salem Witch Trials Redux”!

At this point in this discussion, it is useful to recall here the declaration that I made earlier in the discussion concerning the need not to make the truthful or factual basis of magical thinking of the worst kind our logical or ethical touchstone. In the light of this declaration, I assert, once again, that the point of engaging people accusing children of witchcraft and doing great violence to them is not to prove that there are no witches; rather, the point is to divert the engagement from trying to discover the truth and/or falsehood of witchcraft to stopping or ending the mass hysteria unleashed by the accusation and the attempt to act on it by visiting violence on those who are accused. Here is another way of expressing the same thought: in the “Oko Oloko” phenomenon, it was never the intention of accusers to convince anyone, the accused or onlookers, that accusations were based on provable facts or truth; the intention was to visit great harm on the accused. Similarly, in the violent witch-hunts against children in Akwa Ibom state in the 1990s, nobody was particularly interested in proving or disproving whether or not witches do spiritually possess some children in order to harm the community; rather, the intent was to unleash a “curative” violence on children accused of witchery.

Concerning the irruption of the idiom of witchery into American politics and culture three hundred years after the Salem Witch Trials, I find a remarkable homology in the fact that just as it is extremely surprising that this is happening in one of the most “developed” nations in the world, it has always surprised me that in Nigeria, it is in the Southwest, perhaps the most educationally developed and economically most advanced region of the country, that violent cultic rituals for money and power are at their most extensive. Here, I am deliberately using the figure of homology rather than that of analogy. In analogy, one is comparing two or more things that have no relationship to each other, whereas in homology, there is a relationship of sameness of structure over a chain of different locations. For an example, wherever you find proteins, whether in plants or in animals, you will find the same structure, the same properties. In this sense and only in this homological sense, I think that we can gain some insights into why the Southwest in Nigeria is so much more irradiated with discourses and activities of cultic rituals than in the other zones of the country, zones that are educationally and economically less advanced. At the risk of oversimplifying and/or literalizing this claim, permit me to posit the following provisional thesis: just as in the case of the United States in relation to most of the other parts of the world, the contradictions of the present social order are much sharper and riper and that’s why the old, buried contradictions of magical thinking of the worst kind are resurfacing in tragic and futile attempts to solve new contradictions that we have neither fully grasped nor created the conditions for their supersession. Let me put this observation in terms that will be absolutely clear to all the readers of this piece: in spite of magical thinking of the QAnon, Trump will not be seen again as the residential incumbent of the White House in August; and cultic rituals in the Southwest will not make the slightest dent in the explosive violence created by wealth standing side by side with a surfeit of poverty as great as in the other zones of the country.

But it is strange isn’t it, the persistence of magical thinking of the worst kind this late into the modern era of a global capitalist civilization that is (only) limping to its post-capitalist futures?

• Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu