The Nation Newspaper

Category: Biodun Jeyifo

  • The young shall grow, even in Nigeria, even in the perilous times and world we live in (2)

    The young shall grow, even in Nigeria, even in the perilous times and world we live in (2)

    This we all know: in virtually all fields of competitive sports, to be a 35-year old person is to be an “old” woman or man very close to retirement. Indeed, if by the mid-20’s a sportsman has not yet broken a record, risen to the top of the ladder in his sport or made it to the national soccer squad, the chances are quite slim that he will ever make it in his late 20’s, not to talk of the early 30’s. What we don’t know, I think, or know deep down but refuse to let it rise to the forefront of consciousness, is the fact that this great significance of youth in sports extends to all areas of life, almost without exception. I know of only one exception and this is the attainment of wisdom and self-knowledge – which hardly ever happens in youth. In all other areas, youth is where it’s at – as the Americans would put the matter. For this reason, every society and nation must do all it can to make sure that this period of life is not wasted, both for individual youths and all young people in general. Indeed, this is the fundamental idea or hope behind the slogan that gave rise to this talk – the young shall grow! In discussing this idea, permit me to give a few telling examples of famous or iconic people whose world-historical achievements took place in their youth.

    In this regard, it is pertinent to observe that Jesus Christ, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., Napoleon Bonaparte, Fidel Castro and Mother Teresa had all embarked upon their life’s mission and achieved fame by their mid-30s.  Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo and J.P. Clark, all alumni of this university, wrote most of their greatest works in their late 20’s and early 30’s. I am tempted to say that their beloved alma mater also saw its glory years in its “youth” and since then all has been downhill to the “old age” of the present time. But the Vice Chancellor (or his representative) is here and this would be an ungracious thing for me to say in his presence, quite apart from the fact the we can’t and shouldn’t compare the life span of individual human beings to the phylogeny of social institutions whose “life span” is measured in hundred-year cycles, not seven, eight or nine decades at most. But the general point I am making holds true: the best that we manage to achieve comes relatively early in one’s career. This is why such masterpieces of world and African literature by Achebe and Soyinka as Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, A Dance of the Forests and The Road were all written before their respective authors reached the age of 30. The case of my friend who, like Achebe and Soyinka, is also a giant of African literature and an alumnus of UI, Femi Osofisan, may appear to be different from what I am saying here about Achebe, Soyinka, Clark and Okigbo, but this is not true. By his early 30’s, he had also written some of his best and most memorable works like The Chattering and the Song, Morountodun and Esu and the Vagabond Minstrels. What is perhaps distinctive about Osofisan is the fact that he is a marathon or long-distance runner of the creative arts and humanities who continued to produce sparkling and memorable plays and critical essays well into his 40s, 50’s and 60’s, a feat that perhaps only Soyinka among the forerunners also managed to seemingly effortlessly achieve.

    From these examples from history, literature and the humanities, I would like to move to the more general field of higher education to make essentially the same point though in a somewhat different register in order to highlight the dimension of hope in this lecture. What do I have in mind here? Well, it is nothing other than the fact that in the United States, Nigerian American youngsters in high schools and universities rank among the highest achievers among all national groups of so-called “hyphenated” Americans. The last time that I checked the figures, among all the national groups of these “hyphenated” Americans, only Asian Americans ranked higher than Nigerian American kids in all fields and disciplines combined. And yet, this is the same Nigeria in which our universities at home are, with only one or two exceptions, not among the most highly ranked institutions on the African continent. What is the cause of this great difference between the performance of Nigerian-born students in the United States and their counterparts at home and what relevance does this question have for the subject of this lecture?

    In response to this question, permit me to introduce a dimension of comparative achievements of young Nigerians at home and abroad in diverse in order to considerably complicate a simple and unambiguous division between what the young can hope to achieve at home in Nigeria and the opportunities available to them in the world at large, especially in Europe and North America. Here, in addition to performance in higher education, I am thinking of the media or genres of film and fiction. Let me remind you of the fundamental question at issue here: can the young grow at home and abroad or is it the case that the young can only grow if they go away from home to seek their fortunes in the greener pastures of Euro-America? If this question seems ironic coming from a Nigerian who teaches abroad, I acknowledge the validity of the irony but affirm that the story is far more complex than a simple separation of inside and outside, of Nigeria on one side and the world on the other side. To illustrate the point I am making here, let us consider the achievements of Nollywood, mostly at home, but also abroad in the world at large.

    When I wrote the first of the three series of essays on Nollywood that have appeared in my newspaper columns, first in The Guardian and later in The Nation on Sunday, this was the title I gave that first series: “Will Nollywood Get Better? Did Hollywood and Bollywood Get Better?” My answer to the question – my prediction in essence – was that Nollywood, like the American and Indian national film industries before it, would ultimately get better than its extremely very poor, low-quality beginnings would seem to indicate. That prediction has proved accurate and the quality of Nollywood films is incontestably improving in all aspects of film production, especially in the crucial areas of screenplay writing, directing and camera work. This is all well and good, except that in this talk, my emphasis is not on the accuracy of my prediction. Rather, my emphasis is on the fact that Nollywood is almost completely a homegrown film tradition, so much so that it was and still is difficult to find in our national film industry any traces of influence from the great film practitioners of the world, including those from the African continent. And I am also placing emphasis on the fact that Nollywood is a cinema tradition that is young with regard to both the age of the industry as a whole and the ages of the creative and technical personnel. And finally, I am placing emphasis on the fact that from its beginning as a completely homegrown cinema tradition, Nollywood is now acquiring the temerity, the confidence if you wish, to take on influences from the best national traditions and practitioners of world cinema. I suggest that from this profile of Nollywood, we can infer that the young shall grow, the young indeed grows and takes on the world when it has learnt from its own errors and shortcomings.

    In contemporary African literature, young and aspiring writers are in a completely different place than Nollywood directors and screenplay writers. If the Nigerian film industry started with absolutely no contact at all with world cinema or even African cinema, young Nigerian “litterateurs” of the present generation inherited from the older generations traditions of writing with very strong, self-confident links with world literature in all the genres – drama, fiction, poetry, criticism. I would go so far as to say that young Nigerian writers at the present time have an awareness of, a contact with currents of writing in the world at large far beyond what members of the older generations of writers ever had. This has some very subtle implications that we ought not to miss on any account. For instance, African writers of all the previous generations believed passionately that the African writer and her audience ought to live in the same place, that is of course in Africa itself. The members of the current generation of younger writers are no longer as insistent on this point that used to be a fundamental criterion in the definition of what African literature is and isn’t. In other words, defining African literature no longer seriously interests many members of the younger, post-globalization or millennial generation. A good number of the writers in this generation live abroad, but it is significant that many of them shuttle back and forth between Africa and the Western countries many of which now have demographically substantial numbers of diasporic, second and third generation African communities. The new writers’ audiences at home and abroad were initially created by members of the older generations. But massive displacements and migrations caused by globalization immensely fast-forwarded these developments. Bearing all these points in mind, it is safe to say, confidently, that like Nollywood but for completely different reasons, the young shall grow and grow well in 21st century African literature at home and abroad.

    But can we say the same thing about the fate of the young in our country and our continent in science and technology or in the extremely competitive world of startups in the communications and information industries that are the driving engines of most forms and formations of capitalism at the present time? Can we give assurance to the young that they have a future in fundamental things like getting both sound basic education and quality higher learning? What of more mundane but life-enhancing things like getting employment after years of training in the professions? Can we secure for the young the means of realizing their expectation that if one lives in the world, the world ought to be a place for one to live in with jobs, security, peace and dignity? The answer to these questions, Mr. Chairman, is a ringing no – at least at the present time. In my observations and reflections on this rather very morose assertion, I move to the final segment of my talk.

    To be continued.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • The young shall grow, even in Nigeria, even in the perilous times and world we live in (1)

    The young shall grow, even in Nigeria, even in the perilous times and world we live in (1)

    The young shall grow! As we all know, one of the biggest passenger luxury bus services in Nigeria bears that hopeful and endearing prayerful declaration as its company name. Since I first saw the slogan boldly inscribed on the buses of the company, I immediately, even if rather unconsciously, uttered a silent prayer. This is the prayer: on my road journeys across our country, may I never come across any of these buses as a crashed wreck rusting somewhere in thecountry’s hinterland! So far, praise be, that prayer has been answered. I have seen the battered hulks of other crashed buses in different parts of the country, but never one with those crystalline, prayerful words: the young shall live!

    Although I know that to this particular audience I do not need to explain the social and cultural roots of that prayer of mine that so far has been answered, I will do so all the same. Road accidents, needless and gruesome road accidents, are rife on our roads and highways throughout the country. If I should ever, heavens forbid, come across a crashed bus with the legend, “the young shall grow”, on its upturned side, I would have a chilling feeling that here is one instance where young and old lives, but mostly young lives, were cut short and denied the blessing of growing to old age. There is a sort of gruesome irony here and it is this: since in our country sooner or later, sooner rather than later, one will one day come across the crashed, rusting remains of a luxury bus, oh lord, let it have on its side “Destiny Cannot be Changed”; or “No Telephone To Heaven”; or even “God’s Case – No Appeal”; but not “The Young Shall Grow”! In our country and our continent, indeed in the entirety of the world we live in, every people, every group prays for its young not to die young and that is why there is a version of the words of the title of this talk in every language, in every cultural tradition of the world. But as universal as this cultural and existential phenomenon may undoubtedly be, it takes a particularly harrowing dimension in our country and our continent. Let me explain what I mean by this as a way of leading directly to the main substance of my talk this morning.

    In 1954, Dr. S.O. Onabamiro who was a lecturer in parasitology at this university at the time and would later go on to become a major cabinet member of Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s Western Regional Government, published a scientific monograph with a rather prosaic title, “Why Our Children Die”. I first became aware of Onabamiro’s book and the great impact it had when it was published from the account that I read of it in an essay by the late Chinua Achebe titled “The Truth of Fiction” that Achebe had initially delivered as a Convocation Lecture at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife, when I taught there. In referring to Onabamiro and his book in his lecture, Achebe had used the work of the scientist to clinch his claim for the truth of his own works of fiction. At a time when the majority of the people in his country believed that children die from the evil work of human beings and malevolent spirits, Onabamiro’s book had argued that parasites, especially the guinea worm parasite, were the main culprits. Study parasites and the conditions that make them thrive, wipe them out and create clean, sanitary environments everywhere and our children will live, the great parasitologist had argued, Achebe stated in his Convocation Lecture at OAU. The scientific truth of Onabamiro, the great novelist insisted, was completely compatible with the imaginative and metaphoric truth of the novels that he and other African writers were producing. How so?

    As a sort of meeting point between Onabamiro and Achebe, consider the following incident from Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart. This pertains to one of the wives of the protagonist, Okonkwo, who was plagued by what she considered the curse of ogbanje (or abiku) children. At first, she gave variations of the nameOnwubiko, that implores death to please leave the dying and returning child alone. When this did not work, she resorted to variation of names asking death to do his worst – which of course he did! That is until, finally one child, Obiageli, did not die but lived to herself become a bride expecting to bear and raise children.

    Sigma Chief, Mr. Chairman, the honoree of this occasion, Professor Tola Atinmo, the Sigma Deputy Chief and Chief Scribe and members of the Sigma Club, invited guests, ladies and gentlemen, it is not because both Dr. Onabamiro and Professor Chinua Achebe had, like me, deep ties with this university that I cite them and their works as guiding posts for this lecture, though that is part of the reason. It is because in their different but profoundly related ways, they were deeply interested in the topic of this lecture, this being an inquiry into why, against all the odds stacked against the prayer, we must make sure in our part of the world that the young shall indeed grow. It seems so benign, almost anodyne in fact, this slogan, “the young shall grow”. However, in my talk, Mr. Chairman, I start from the premise that it is, to the contrary, a cry from a past and still unfolding history in which so many things conspire to make growth a futile prospect for most of the young in our region of the world. Mr. Chairman, I agreed to give the lecture because I was told that it would be delivered as one of the events in honor my old friend and Hall Chairman at Kuti Hall, Professor Tola Atinmo. To this agreeable inducement was added the additional pleasure of being informed that you, Professor Ayo Banjo, my former and deeply revered teacher here at UI, would be the Chairman of the occasion. So, I thank the Club for inviting me and congratulate Professor Atinmo with the assurance that it is a great pleasure for me to be part of the festivities in his honor.

    All protocols now duly observed, I return to where I left off in the lecture: the thesis that far from being just a benign expression or a simple act of prayer, the slogan, “the young shall grow”, is really a cry from the bottomless pit of the danger, insecurity, horror and privation that the young have faced and still face in our country, our continent and our world today. In the lecture, I shall not, of course, ignore the prayerful part; indeed, it is the basis for the distinctly hopeful note that I deliberately strike in the title of the talk. But if that hope is not to be merely wishful and naïve, it must first be subjected to what, for want of a better term, can be called a baptism of fire. Hope, let us remember, is nearly always the product of hopelessness and great hope is the child of a much greater hopelessness. And so, in the manner in which I brought Onabamiro and Achebe together at the start of the discussion, let us range widely over science and history, economics and fiction, politics and cinema, and statistics and “breaking news” as we take stock of what the young have faced and still continue to face in a history that seems like a nightmare from which we can never wake.

    Mr. Chairman, in the first week of September 2015, like the rest of the world, I was shocked and immeasurably saddened by the picture of the Kurdish-Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, whose lifeless but still very lifelike body was found washed ashore on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey near the town of Bodrum. That picture of that little boy has remained one of the most widely circulated and haunting expressions of one fact concerning the generalized violence that causes massive populations displacements in many parts of the world. This is the fact that children, women and, especially, young people constitute the bulk of the victims, the displaced, the uprooted. The thousands that have perished in futile and fatal crossings of the Mediterranean   from North Africa into Southern Europe are, overwhelmingly, young people, especially the 360 that drowned in Lampedusa, Malta on 3 October, 2013.These thoughts went through my mind as I saw with the rest of the world that picture of the dead Alan Kurdi. But then something else flashed in my mind, the memory of an episode I had encountered many decades ago in Amos Tutuola’s classic phantasmagoric novel, Palm Wine Drinkard. What is the scene about?

    It is the scene in which the hero-protagonist, the “drinkard” himself, is driven out of what the author calls “Dead’s Town” by an extremely violent phalanx of the souls of dead children who died violent deaths at young ages. These undead avenging furies had no particular quarrel with the “drinkard”; their quarrel, their raging quarrel, was against everything in nature and life that had conspired to violently rob them of life before their allotted time. From what imagined or real experience had Tutuola plucked this episode in the Palm Wine Drinkard? At my first reading of the book, the answer to this question completely eluded me. It was to take a few decades before I understood: in this episode in The Palm Wine Drinkard, Tutuola was imaginatively memorializing the horrendous experience of hundreds and thousands of children and the young violently killed before “their time” through the countless internecine inter- and intra-tribal wars of our continent, through both internal slavery and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and through innumerable plagues and natural disasters.

    Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy and Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation come to mind here also. Both are powerful anti-war novels that focus on young, innocent and even naïve people as special victims, as unique specimens of the “collateral damage” of the innumerable meaningless wars that have ravaged many parts of Africa in the postcolonial era. The narrator-protagonists of both novels are perhaps the first portraits that we have in African literature of the notorious boy-soldiers that came to achieve worldwide notoriety for their barbarity in the civil wars of countries like Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda. In these two novels, we come to a slightly different real and imaginative territory than what we have in Tutuola and Achebe where the young are victims through and through. By contrast, in Sozaboy and, especially,Beast of No Nation, the young are also perpetrators of war and destruction on entire populations and on young people like themselves. This also marks a pivotal moment in this talk in which we are forced to take a more critical look at the young as a social category that can be as responsible for good and evil in society like any other social group. In other words, if the prayerful slogan that the young shall grow has so often met with negation in our country and our world, the young are sometimes the source of the problem, without forgetting that the young are also often part of the solution. At this juncture in the talk let us turn first, Mr. Chairman, to the good part, to the bounteous seeds of growth, progress and renewal often planted by young people,using examples from around the world but with particular reference to our country.

    • To be continued.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Against the specter of impeachment, Trump reminds America, capitalism and all of us unpleasant truths about ourselves

    Against the specter of impeachment, Trump reminds America, capitalism and all of us unpleasant truths about ourselves

    For the moment, I say that it is a specter, not an inevitable probability, that before the end of his four-year term in office, the new American president, Donald Trump, will be impeached. Technically, the formal term for which an American president may be impeached is couched in this intriguing legalese: “high crimes and misdemeanors”. In the case of Trump, the “misdemeanors” are legion and they are so arrant that if the Democratic Party and not Trump’s party, the Republicans, were in control of Congress, the impeachment process would have started by now. More on this point later in this discussion. The “high crimes” dimension is the heart of the matter because if unequivocal evidence can be found for it, even the Republican Party cannot and will not even try to save Trump, otherwise it would be fatally damaged as an actual or potential ruling party in America. In this piece, I speculate on these issues at the heart of American politics at the present time. But as it will become apparent in the concluding section of the discussion, my larger aim is really to point out and speculate on aspects of this specter of a Trump impeachment that reveal some deeply unpleasant truths about us as human beings, together with some profoundly disquieting things about us as a planetary community living in and through one of the worst crises of global capitalism. To start us off on this discussion, it is perhaps useful to briefly review the case fo impeachment that is slowly but almost relentlessly mounting against Donald Trump.

    Let us take the “high crimes” aspect first, since it is, at bottom, more crucial, more decisive than “misdemeanors”. The main point here is the growing mountain of evidence that through human and electronic surveillance and spying, Russia intervened in the presidential elections of 2016 to enable Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton and it did so with the connivance of the topmost layers of the Trump campaign team. Already, the case for Russia’s massive intervention in the elections is already strongly established. The only notable person who still disputes the evidence when it pleases him to do so is – Donald Trump. That this makes him suspect as a probable participant in the alleged Russian effort to enable his victory over Clinton does not worry Trump in the slightest degree. This is because as morally and politically nauseating as it may be not to care that the Russians helped him defeat Clinton and the Democrats, it does not constitute a crime. But that is only as long as there is no evidence that Trump and his campaign team connived with the Russians. Ominously for Trump that’s precisely what is becoming more and more apparent every single passing day: he himself and leading members of his team in all likelihood knew about and connived with the massive Russian project of defeating Hillary Clinton in last year’s elections.

    The clock is ticking slowly but unstoppably on the process of gathering and providing evidence against Trump on this case. The day the evidence is finally assembled and presented to Congress and the American public, Trump’s presidency will be as dead as a dodo. Indeed, his impeachment will be more disgraceful than that of the other two American presidents that have ever been impeached, Andrew Jackson and Bill Clinton. Meanwhile, Trump himself and members of the inner caucus of his administration, with help from influential Republican members of the Congressional committees probing the matter, are doing everything they can to slow down the process and/or completely block it. Will they succeed?

    It is unlikely but not altogether improbable. The action or inaction of two particular forces will be crucial, these being the Democratic Party and the media. At this point in time, it can be reported that the media – print, electronic and digital-virtual – is doing its best, for the sake of the survival of the country’s democratic heritage, to make sure that the American people get to know whether or not their president colluded with a foreign power to steal the presidential election of 2016. But the Democratic Party is another proposition altogether; it is one of the most spineless, irresolute and clueless liberal-democratic political parties in the Western world, with just a few exceptions among its leaders. Left only to the demonstrable will and abilities of this party, Trump will almost certainly get away with the treasonous “high crime” of colluding with an adversarial foreign power to undermine and weaken the American electoral process. That’s why the media and its impact on the American public seems likely to be the deciding factor in the element of “high crimes” as a deciding factor in any impeachment proceedings against Trump. What of the far more nebulous but all the same more corrosive factor of “misdemeanors”?

    It is at this level that we can see clearly that, against the background of all the historical, economic and cultural forces making the likelihood of such a development arising in the USA nearly impossible, Trump, in the course of under three months in office, has committed “misdemeanors” that are normally associated with rulers of poor, failing states of the Third World countries. These include shocking acts of incompetence; the impunity with which political office is used for self-enrichment; deliberately mixing, confusing and replacing the hard, irrefutable facts of social reality with opinions partial to one’s interests and convenience; and great insensitivity and cruelty toward individual and collective victims of one’s policies and actions. Let us take only a few of these, especially the ones that we have not seen at the uppermost level of the American political process in the course of the last hundred years, the ones that these days we see mostly within the ranks of the endlessly corrupt, cynical and nation-wrecking rulers of the developing world.

    To see parallels to how openly and aggressively nepotistic Trump has placed his family and close associates at the helm of the running of governmental affairs at home and abroad, you will have to go the desperately poor and/or despotic countries of the world. The most astonishing, indeed the most confounding of this Trumpian administrative debacle is the appointment of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a real estate magnate with absolutely no experience in government at any level, as the overall supervisor of all domestic and foreign affairs of the Trump presidency. Now, there is absolutely no constitutional provision for this appointment, no precedent for it in American historical memory, yet Kushner has priority and authority over all constitutionally mandated cabinet posts like Secretary of State, Secretary of Defence, and Treasury Secretary. Indeed, at crucial meetings abroad where either the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Defence should have been the right-hand man of Trump as president, the person we have seen is the president’s son in law. If this reminds you of Ghadaffy’s son, Saif al-Islam, you can be forgiven because that’s the common face of arrant nepotism for you.

    To nepotism, add a level of aggressive, blatant use of the state for self-enrichment that no one has seen in the USA in a long, long time, a sort of economic impunity of corrupt governance that we see only see in the poor countries of the world. Indeed, there is a constitutional provision that all American presidents on assumption of office must legally separate themselves and members of their families from their businesses for the entire period of their time in office so as to prevent a conflict of interest between the pursuit of personal financial interests and the “business” of governing at the highest level. Trump has failed to comply with this constitutional provision. He has turned his hotel emporium in Florida, Mar-a-Lago, into a den where people and organizations hoping to “buy” his influence gather nearly every weekend since it is well-known that most of his weekends are spent there, away from the White House. Indeed, up till two days ago, (I am writing these words on Friday, April 28, 2017) some official websites of the US State Department abroad carried glossy profiles of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago hotel as a beautiful “Winter White House” where guests can hope to spend the best time possible in any hotel in America. These free ads for Trump’s business on State Department websites overseas were taken down only after media outcry against them became impossible for Trump to ignore and brush aside – as he has done with every other criticism of his failure to comply with longstanding practice of American presidents and their tax and business obligations and constrints.

    Considering all these “misdemeanors”, there is not the slightest doubt that the American government under the new president has become a division of the unregistered “Trump Inc.” Compare that with the fact that while Trump has done everything lawful and unlawful to use government to enrich himself and members of his family, he is now set to work to cut taxes for the rich, for his billionaire friends and supporters, while the millions of both the working and unemployed poor who voted for him wait in vain for action from Trump to improve their economic hardship. In plain language, what is happening now and seems about to become a constant aspect of the Trump presidency is that while socking it to the poor, he will suck up to and enormously further enrich the already super-rich. How does he hope to manage the turmoil, the eruptions that are almost certain to come from these tendencies? Well, I don’t think that he can. But he will try to; indeed, he is already trying to do this. This leads us to the most culpable and despicable of Trump’s impeachable “misdemeanors”.

    Many of Trump’s supporters and apologists talk of his anti-globalist economic nationalism, his avowed “Make America Great Again” project. But this is indivisible from his “White nationalism”, his not-so-covert “Make America White Again” agenda which, underneath, is really “Make White American Men Great Again”. So far, this has been enormously helpful to Trump, even if it has made racial hatreds and feuds, together with misogyny against women of all races, classes and ethnicities, rise to unprecedented levels in Trump’s America. This is quite deliberate on Trump’s part, even if its effectiveness is more potent at subliminal levels of social and individual psychology than in measurable hard data. In concrete terms, this means that Trump is hoping and banking on racial, ethnic and religious hatreds and feuds to stave off impeachment if and when it comes, if and when the poor and marginalized of all groups come to realize that they are being squeezed and screwed by Trump for the enrichment of himself, his family and his billionaire cronies. We who have lived and/or continue to live in the world’s poorest, most marginalized and corrupt nations recognize in Donald Trump a kindred spirit of leaders who have been squeezing and screwing our peoples for many decades.

    Why is it that a demagogue, a nepotist, a xenophobe, a misogynist and a peddler of hate and division between different groups like Trump can and against all the odds in a country like the US, rise to power and hope to hang on to power as many rulers in the Third World have been doing for along time now? I will not presume to know or have the answer to this question, if indeed there is one single answer to the question. I think of only one probable answer among other possible answers: as human beings, we are very susceptible to seeking refuge from our problems, crises, contradictions and dilemmas by turning against one another, race against race, religion against religion, ethnicities and nationalities against one another. Bankrupt Third World rulers have been doing this for decades now. America and the European liberal democracies are joining the tradition. The roots lie deep in our human nature, with some help, some nudge from the global, regional and national crises of capitalism. This notwithstanding, I see a silver lining in the dark clouds. Trump will eventually be impeached. If and when that happens, remember that you first read about it in this column!

     

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

     

     

  • In defence – and clarification – of comparing Nigeria with the United States (2)

    In defence – and clarification – of comparing Nigeria with the United States (2)

    Let the eagle perch and let the kite perch; whoever says the other should not perch, may its beak break!
    Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

    Two weeks ago in this column, I wrote the first of the two-part series of which this week’s piece is the concluding essay. Last week, the column was devoted to a tribute to my friend, Dr, Yemi Ogunbiyi, for his 70th birthday anniversary. Because a tribute is only really worthwhile when it is made at the appropriate time, last week I had to interrupt this series on comparisons between America and Nigeria. Now in returning to the series after the tribute to Dr. Ogunbiyi, I find it fortuitous that an untold part of my friendship with Yemi provides a very useful point of entry into this second and concluding installment on the series begun two weeks ago. Why is this so?

    Well, as I promised in my concluding paragraph in that first essay in this series two weeks ago, my comparison in this concluding piece will shift to the field of higher learning in the tertiary educational system of Nigeria and America respectively. Now it so happens that after our undergraduate education at the University of Ibadan, (UI) Dr. Ogunbiyi and I had our postgraduate education in the US, in New York University (NYU) to be precise. I wish to start my observations and reflections in this piece on insights derived from that experience of Dr. Ogunbiyi and myself in which for us, higher learning in America came after the foundation laid by our education at UI. What exactly do I have in mind in making this observation?

    In response to that question, I wish to say, unequivocally, that the foundation of and for higher learning that Yemi and I had received at UI was so solid that it consistently astonished our professors and mentors at NYU. This is not a boast, it is a statement of fact which, by the way, applied to all the graduates of the so-called first-generation universities in Nigeria that went abroad for advanced doctoral and postdoctoral studies, especially in America. Thus, if I speak specifically about the experience of myself and my friend at NYU, it is only because I wish to make use of the unassailable value of personal, biographical experience. This is why I wish to place the highest emphasis possible on the fact that at NYU, our professors were astonished by the fact that, (a) Yemi and I were much better prepared for the challenges and rigor of doctoral studies than most our American course mates that had had their undergraduate education in the US and, (b) by the fact that we finished our studies and got our Ph D’s in record time, long before the average time that it takes to do all the necessary course work and write and defend your doctoral dissertation. Again, let me repeat: this experience was not peculiar to Yemi and I; it was common to most of the members of our generational cohort that went to America for higher learning armed with the tremendous advantage provided by the solid foundations of the undergraduate education that we had received at UI. Today, slightly more than a half century later, it saddens me immensely that deep, tectonic crises are rocking the foundations of higher learning in both Nigeria and the US and things are far from what they were then in both Nigerian and American higher education. This is the central issue that I wish to address in this concluding piece to the series begun two weeks ago in this column. What are the manifestations of these crises and how do they differentially but also similarly affect higher education in Nigeria and the US respectively?

    At this point in the discussion, permit me to pause briefly to reflect on exactly what I mean – and do not mean – by the phrase, the term “higher learning”. In essence, it is not the certificatethat you are given with the successful completion of your studies. Neither is it the elaborate ceremonies arranged to formally mark that act of certification. I make these observations because, rather intriguingly, Nigerians and Americans love certification and graduation or “commencement” ceremonies endlessly, perhaps more than any other nations in the world. I swear that in the last three and half decades when I have been going back and forth between Nigeria and the US, nothing else has struck me as so similar, so identical in the folkways of both countries than this love of certification and graduation ceremonies! But anyone who has ever had anything to do with teaching and mentoring students in institutions of higher learning knows that the “real thing” lies elsewhere and not in mere certification, not in festive ceremoniesin which political, economic and social dignitaries converge with the graduating students and their families in rituals that are so surreal, so spectacular that they often seem to be taking place in film, in a Hollywood high melodrama!

    I do not wish to argue that higher learning does not take place, or cannot take place side by side with certification and the surreal ceremonies of “commencement” or graduation. My point is that higher learning, when it is actually taking place, when it is protected and assured by vast financial and infrastructural investments and the dedicated work of teachers and mentors, higher learning is one the greatest means of the reproduction of intellectual and cultural capital from generation to generation. Let me state this in as simple and uncomplicated a manner as possible: in and through higher learning, the high-level mental and professional skills and capacities that every single society in contemporary global civilization needs to survive are safeguarded from deterioration and attrition. And there is also this important thing about higher learning, distinct from though related to the needs of reproduction of intellectual and cultural capital: it develops and nurtures critical thinking as an inestimable end in itself. As a teacher in institutions of higher learning all my adult life, I testify that this is perhaps the greatest professional satisfaction that one gets as a mentor: young, fledgling students take up hints and suggestions that you give them; and they take these hints and suggestions much farther than you had yourself thought…

    Let us stay with the issue of the social reproduction of intellectual and cultural capital. Perhaps after my coming retirement, in a memoir about my experience as a teacher, I shall reflect on the finer points of the cultivation of critical thinking through higher learning. For now, and in the context of the present discussion, my focus is on how certification and the ceremonialization of being or becoming certified as graduates have brought unprecedented crises to higher learning in Nigeria and America. The crises have different expressions and consequences in each of the two countries, but so also do they have surprising similarities. In what follows, I will first deal with the similarities before concluding the discussion with reflections on the huge and instructive differences.

    In America, it is called the “corporatization” of the university. Simply stated, this means, as the term implies, that all universities in America, public and private, are more and more run exactly like business corporations are run. The fees are getting astronomical, causing students from poor backgrounds to get into huge debts in order to get university education; administrators are getting much higher salaries and emoluments and are becoming more influential, more decisive than academics in running the affairs of colleges and universities; and students and their parents are behaving like consumers who must get their money’s worth in their dealings with their teachers and professors. In Nigeria, in slightly different circumstances, the same basic processes are taking place in our tertiary educational institutions. As federal and state funding for public universities and polytechnics get into a freefall with no bottom in sight, private universities that charge astronomical fees are increasing exponentially, to the point where they now vastly outnumber the state-financed public universities. As a consequence of these developments in higher education in Nigeria and America, university education is more and more tied to certification as the visible, tangible index of the exchange value of what has been learnt in the marketplace of economic and commercial transactions. To emphasize my sense of how very similar these developments are in Nigeria and America, let me reveal here how much I have been struck with how greatly diplomas or certificates – the document, the paper –  are cherished in the two countries. It is as if both what you now “know” as a graduate, what you can provide potential employers and the world as the end product of your university education is somehow fetishized in your certificate.

    There are many books, monographs and documentary films on the current dire consequences and equally troubling future prospects of these developments in American higher education. Two of my personal favorites in the vast body of print, electronic and digital materials on the subject are the book, The University in Ruin, by the late Bill Readings and the stunning documentary, “Ivory Tower” by Andrew Rossi. There are tens of scholarly articles and dozens of journalistic writings on the Nigerian version of the same crisis in our educational system, but we have nothing approaching the seriousness and the concern with which the Americans are engaging the crises in their own tertiary educational system. This, for me, is symptomatic of the chasm that separates how the two countries, especially scions of their respective national intelligentsia, are approaching crises that have similar roots in the capitalist organization of higher learning on a global scale in the new millennium.

    I could write a whole monograph, or even a book-length study on these differences between how the Americans are dealing with their own crises of higher education and how we in Nigeria are barely doing anything significant about it. One main and quite telling difference is that the American educational, economic and social elites are confronting the crises head on, with a view to saving what they can from the seemingly unstoppable march of “corporatization”. Mighty struggles are being waged against the astronomical rises in fees, and against the takeover of the running of the universities by administrators whose first, second and third loyalty is to the profit margin and the satisfaction of students and their parents as “consumers”. In all of these instances, you get a distinct feeling that the liberal and progressive elite in America knows, remembers and wants to preserve and even expand what was and is good in their country’s system of higher learning. By contrast, this element seems to be completely missing in Nigeria. I have said that when Dr. Ogunbiyi and I went to NYU for graduate studies in the early 1979s, we had the solid foundation of the education we had received at UI as a bulwark for the challenges we faced in America. What are we, the educational elites in Nigeria, doing to salvage and reproduce what remains of that solid foundation for higher education?  With the exception of small pockets of concern and protest by an organization like ASUUand a stellar educationist like Pai Obanya, there is deafening silence where there should be loud and unrelenting outcry over the slow death, the withering away of higher learning in our country.

    Above all else is the bankruptcy and hypocrisy of our economic elites. They are forever complaining that mere and empty certification has replaced true, useful and employable education in our universities. They say for everyone to hear that the graduates being produced in our tertiary educational institutions are so mediocre, so bad that most of them are “unemployable”. But they do absolutely nothing to respond to the crisis. In fact, many of them, as chairmen and members of the governing councils of the public universities, participate in the brazen looting of the meager funding provided by the state for the same universities that our economic and political elites lavishly pour scorn upon.

    Why are the economic elites, the capitalist class in America deeply concerned about the crises of higher learning in their country while the same class in Nigeria couldn’t care less? That is the question, compatriots!

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

     

  • A Christian and People’s Memo to the Chairman: for Yemi Ogunbiyi @70

    A Christian and People’s Memo to the Chairman: for Yemi Ogunbiyi @70

    Earlier this week on Thursday, April 13, Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi, former Head of the Theatre Arts Department at the University of Ife and former MD and CEO of Daily Times of Nigeria, turned 70. He is quite possibly the biggest producer and distributor of textbooks in Nigeria. He not only has knowledge of that trade as much as any other person in the country does, he is the profession’s best example of conscientious, indefatigable and sophisticated practice. Since he left academia more than two decades ago, he has succeeded superlatively in everything he has done. For a man who is neither a politician nor a self-promoting socialite, he is widely known and admired by the public for his professional abilities, and for his uncanny ways of bringing people of all stations in life and of diverse social, ethnic and religious backgrounds together. When, some months ago, he was appointed the new Chairman of the governing council of the University of Ife, the acclaim that the announcement generated was near universal. More on this point later in this tribute. Thus, Dr. Ogunbiyi is a man of great accomplishments and in all likelihood, a man of still greater things to come.  He is also, of course, Yemi, one of my three closest friends. This is the vantage point from which I am writing this tribute because, quite literally, much of what life and the world have meant for me has come mostly from my very close friends among whom Yemi is quite distinctive.

    It was in secondary school thatYemi and I first met and became, instantly and forever, friends who are very much like brothers. In the long period of more than a half century since then, Yemi has remained the same in the things that make him so uniquethat all who know him seem agreed that he is truly one of a kind. These things include a generosity so unstinting, so limitless that it has become the stuff of legend to all who know him; a gregariousness that is so capacious, so elemental that he is always the centre of interest, the heart and soul of any gathering in which you find him; and a kindness that is so unlimited that it makes no distinction between family members, friends and complete strangers.On this last point, I often tell our mutual friend and acquaintances that unlike most people we know who became “generous” when they became rich, Yemi was the essence of generosity long before all of us became who we are today in our late adulthood. For instance, in our boarding house in high school, Yemi was the only student in the entire school who shared his provisions liberally with everybody, to the point where half-way through nearly every term, he would have become “provision-less”! As anyone who has ever been a resident of a boarding house knows, this is nothing short of disastrous. But to Yemi, it was nothing at all. I was personally greatly impressed by this otherworldly generosity of my friend, so much so that I tried to follow his example. Well, l had better keep silent about my failure in the effort lest some mischievous people retroactively use this confession to query the genuineness of my socialism!

    I do not wish to mythologize my friend in this tribute. He is not entirely who he was in our teenage years going to the period of our young adulthood. Who among us is? For instance, there is one quite remarkable change in Yemi that strikes me as nothing short ofa sea change. What is this change? Well, he now has a very sharp and deflationary sense of humor that we his schoolmates, did not associate with him in secondary school. Yemi did not exactly have a saintly, altar boy personality, but it was very rare indeed to find him corrosively, if also good-naturedly teasing anybody. But now, he is the Balogun of playful, teasing apara dida! I think this serves him as a sort of tonicor tactic for negotiating those unexpected turns to negativity and unpleasantness that suddenly spring up in human interactions and affairs. The world is a hard, hard place and as Sigmund Freud demonstrated in his classic monograph, Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious, humor, sharp-edged humor, often helps to negotiate moments of tension and or unpleasantness. In drawing attention to this factor, I am, I hope, rendering my friend a service because from now on, anyone who gets a sample of Yemi’scaustic, teasing “awada” or “apara” will be obliged to go and read Freud in order to appreciate the usefulness of the sting in his mischievous his jokes!

    Beyond this basically blameless and harmless teasing habit, there are two big things in which, over the years, Yemi has changed significantly. Because he will probably be surprised by my identifying and even making much of these two changes, I wish to make them the pivot around which I will weave my thoughts, my wishes for my friend on this occasion of his 70th birthday anniversary.

    The first of these two changes pertains to attitude and predisposition toward religion in general and Christianity in particular.I could express this simply by saying that Yemi has become more religious, more of a practicing Christian than he was in the long period that spans our teenage years in high school, through our undergraduate years at UI, to the time of our young adulthood as graduate students at New York University and young lecturers at the University of Ife (OAU). But this does not adequately express precisely what I have in mind. After all, these days, people in all stations of life in our country are turning to religion in mighty wavesof new converts every day. In such a context, to say, simply, that someone has become more religious is to say something quite banal. What I find in Yemi is different from this phenomenon. I can think of no better way of expressing it than to say that he has become a real true believer, a practicing man of faith fired by the moral and philosophical tenets of Christianity, without however clothing his Christian activism in the cheap and showy garb of thereligiosity that is the defining mark of Christianity in our country today.No, Yemi is a man who serves God with genuine but unostentatious rectitude.

    Here, I must make a “confession” of sorts. Many times, as I have watched Yemi unfailinglygo to church every Sunday and on special occasions, and as I have observed him spend huge chunks of his time, his energies and his material resources in furtherance of good deeds promoted by his church, it has crossed my mind to ask him exactly what religion, what his Christian faith means to him. But we have not had that discussion because I have not posed the question to him. Perhaps in this tribute lies the beginnings of that conversation? I do not know. What I do know is that his birthday immediately precedes Easter which, as we know, is the central cycle of symbolic ceremonies in Christianity. The cycle starts with the Lenten period of fasting and deep soul searching and ends with Easter Monday that is laden with the symbolism of renewal and regeneration attached to the resurrection of Christ. Since my friend has become a faithful and committed Christian, that is one of the two major things that I wish to reflect upon in this tribute.

    Concerning the second big change, I am not exactly sure what kind of a change it is, even as I am certain that it is a big, big change. To put it briefly, here is what it is. Believe it or not, at one time, Yemi was an avowed socialist like many of us who still remain socialists whilst he has “moved on”, so to speak. Yes, he was not one of the so-called “hard” Left. But he was a member of the editorial board of our journal, Positive Review, a journal that was unapologetically socialist and Marxist. He was one of the socialists whom our elder and mentor, Wole Soyinka, savagely attacked and derided as “Leftocrats”. The term “Leftocrat”, in Soyinka’s bitingly sarcastic coinage, conjoins “Left” and “autocrat”. Thus, by the term, Soyinka meant a hard and dogmatic Left. For this reason, the fact that Yemi was one of the principal targets of Soyinka’s ire in that attack against us meant that the Nobel laureate not only saw Yemi as one of us, he saw him as an essential member of our group. But gradually, from that location in the storm centre of the maelstrom of Leftist ideology and politics, Yemi “moved on”, so to speak. But then, it is at precisely this juncture that I locate Yemi’s movement to Christian social activism. Is there a link between the two? Is there a connection between moving on from socialism and moving to Christian activism? Does one “moving on” reflect the other, no matter how obscure or incommensurable this might seem?

    Since the abstract theological, ideological and philosophical dimensions of this question are much too big for the present discussion, I will not deal with them. Instead, I go back to the earlier mentioned symbolism of Lent and Easter: after fasting, after chastening hardship and soul searching comes renewal and regeneration. I see the widespread praise for Yemi’s appointment as the Chairman of the Governing Council of the University of Ife as symbolic of the long and interminable period of Lent in the experience of the University of Ife itself and most of the public, state-financed universities in Nigeria. It is impossible to overstate the depth of hardship, confusion and misdirection in OAU, the depth of a Lenten mortification of spirit, soul and mind that the university has undergone, with particular reference to the students and the faculty. I can testify as his friend that Yemi has been deeply, deeply moved by the outpouring of sentiments of goodwill and expectations of renewal and regeneration that have been expressed to him. No one has expressed this in the specific idiom of Christian symbolism, but the resonance is unmistakable. I cannot imagine that in his moments of reflection and insight meditation, Yemi can fail to see the intimations of this Christian symbolism.

    Christianity has deep, formative theological and cultural roots with socialism. The early Church was the religion of the poor and the oppressed; it was openly and doctrinally socialistic. Organized Christianity became the religion of the wealthy and the powerful when Emperor Constantine made it a state religion. Christ himself was deeply averse to usurious capitalism. And throughout history, some of the most humane and lasting effects of Christian social activism have been directed at the liberation of the poor, the downtrodden, the neglected. Thinking of these buried or forgotten aspects of the history of Christianity, I draw your attention, Yemi, to the fact that just as you were once a socialist, your religion also has an honorable and proud history of socialistic humanism. This is thus both a Christian and People’s Memo to you as the new Chairman of the Governing Council of our beloved OAU. It comes with fervent wishes for long life, health, and great success in the next ofthe many great challenges you have faced and mastered in the course of the last four decades. The rich, the powerful, the well-connected will flock to you in your new assignment. In their memos to you, they will lay emphasis on big, heavy capitalization, with much of the contracts of course going to them. And so of course will the marginalized, the excluded, together with their leaders and representatives, come to you with pleas for cooperation, fairness and accountability. May the Easter of unprecedented renewal and regeneration follow the Lenten tales of hardship and crises that you will no doubt hear daily as you move to start the great work ahead of you.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • In defence – and clarification – of comparing Nigeria with the United States (1)

    In defence – and clarification – of comparing Nigeria with the United States (1)

    Let the eagle eat and let the kite eat; whoever says the other should not eat, may its beak break!                  Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

    When I compared Muhammadu Buhari and Donald Trump as political leaders last week, it was not my first time of comparing Nigerian and American political affairs in this column. For instance, in a series last year, I had compared the electioneering campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Trump with that of our own Buhari and Jonathan in 2015. Before then and over the years, I had written columns devoted to this same habit of occasionally comparing politicians and political affairs of America with their counterparts in Nigeria. In all these cases, I did not in the least think that what I was doing could be likened to comparing Doncaster Rovers, the current leaders of the English Third Division or League with Chelsea Football Club, the current leaders of the Premiership League. Rather than this, I thought of my comparison of the Nigerian president with his American counterpart in the framework of what happens in the English F.A. Cup competition. What does this mean?

    Well, as the aficionados of English professional soccer know, all the teams in all the leagues of English soccer have a right to compete for the F.A. Cup.Indeed sometimes, teams from the lower divisions or leagues not only get to the semifinals and finals of the F.A. Cup competition, they actually win the coveted trophy! In other words,asit obtains in theall-comers’ F.A Cup jamboree, my comparison of politics in Nigeria and the U.S. in this column has always been based on the strong conviction that all the countries of the world have a right to aspire to the best that our common earth can give to its diverse nations and regions without regard to how rich and “developed” a country is or is not. This in effect means that just as we can and should compare Nigeria with the United States, so should we compare Nigeria with Botswana, a country which, by the way, has a higher life expectancy at birth statistic than Nigeria. As Chinua Achebe famously put is in the words of the epigraph to this piece, “let the eagle eat and let the kite eat; whoever says the other should not eat, may its beak break!

    Fundamentallythen, at the bottom of all the comparisons I have made in this column between Nigeria and America is a humanistic rationale whose assumption is that all human beings and the nations into which they are born and/or assert their collective belonging and identity are equal. In a two-part series that begins this week and comes to an end next week, I wish to reflect on the ethical, ideological and political dimensions of this rationale which, against all the circumstantial evidenceagainst its claim, vigorously declares that all the nations, more precisely, all the peoples of our planetary community are irreducibly equal. But having made this categorical assertion, there is a lot left to be said.

    If it is the case that Nigerians think a lot about America and all the time make comparisons between the affairs of that country and our own, Naija pundits in general do not know – or talk much about – the three ideological, political and discursive camps into which their attitudes and ideas about America and Americans are based. What are these three discursive and ideological camps?

    First, there is the leftist, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and anti-racist camp. To those who, like this columnist, belong to this camp, it is above everything elsedefined by is a more or less permanent watchfulness over the influenceof America in the world. Adherents of this camp are especially watchful over how America’s great influence in Nigeria’s influence and the West Africasub-region can be used to consolidate American economic, military and political interests throughout the African continent. We shall come back to this group or camp later in the discussion since, as a matter of fact, it is the group to which this writer belongs, the group whose central ideological and philosophical ideas have shaped most of my activities and moral and emotional investments throughout my intellectual and political adulthood.

    We can only very briefly or succinctly deal with the two other camps or groups since, though distinct, they are rather like two sides of the same coin. On one side of this “coin” is what I would describe as the mainstream of heavily pro-American, free-market politicians and pundits in our political affairs. To the thousands of members of this group, America is the ideal and idealized vision of where the future of the world lies, together with Nigeria’s prospects in that world. The most effective expression of the sheer political and ideological influence of this camp may be gauged from the fact that from 1999 to date, all the constitutions and proposed constitutional amendments in our country have been based on the American institutions, most especially the American presidential system. There are occasional calls for us to go back to the parliamentary or “Westminster model” of governance, but such calls are routinely ignored by the mainstream of our political elites.

    I wish I didn’t have to say this, but there is no way of avoiding it: this ideologically and politically dominant group of Nigerians are extremely and opportunistically slavish in their imitation and appropriation of the institutions and values of American presidentialism. Apart from the questionable political salience of the things they so much like to imitate and appropriate from the American system, there is also the fact that running our political order like the American order is far too costly for a developing nation like Nigeria. Waste and squandermania in Nigerian political affairs are in the main due to corruption, but part of it comes from the beliefof our rulers that our president and state governors should have all the material trappings of power, prestige and authority that their American counterparts have. A pox on all these “follow-follow”, “Americana”Nigerian political elites!

    We come now to the third group which, as I have earlier observed, is the other side of the coin of sedulous popular and elite love for and imitation of all things American. This is the ordinary woman’s and man’s “Americana”, one in which the dream, the lifelong aspiration is to go to America, to live there permanently if possible, to go on a long visit at the very least. In this aspiration, this sublime yearning, most Nigerians are like virtually all the ordinary citizens of all the nations of the world: everyone wants to go to America, everyone wants to see Disneyland and the Statue of Liberty inthe New York harbor. It so happens that though this “Americana” yearning is mostly a lower middle class phenomenon, it in fact pervades all the rungs of the social ladder. You can find it among lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers, accountants and bank managers as much as you can also find it among mechanics, tailors, barbers, and shoemakers. And even among fraudsters, crooks and “419ers”. For those who have not read it, I strongly recommend Chimamanda Adichie’s brilliant novel, Americanah, in which this craving for all things American, this drive to go to America by any and all means, is the driving engine ofplot structure and character development in the narrative.

    Let me repeat it: I place myself as a columnist and public intellectual among the first of the three groups I have been profiling in this discussion, this being the camp of left-wing anti-imperialists, anti-capitalists and anti-racists. Without going too much into details of personal biography, I should perhaps reveal here that it was in America itself that, as a graduate student in the early 1970s, I first entered the ranks of this camp – on a lifelong basis. This fact is worthy of emphasis because most Nigerian leftists and socialists don’t seem to recognize and acknowledge the historic fact that many of us were in fact “converted” to socialism and anti-imperialism in the United States itself. Even far more portentous is the fact that a great number of socialists and anti-imperialists in Nigeria do not know, or make very little of the fact that there are class struggles in the United States, that there are, indeed, strong, sophisticated and determined movements of anti-imperialists, anti-capitalists and anti-racists in America. It is one thing to doubt whether this camp will ever come to power in America or even come to a position where its ideas and perspectives will exercise significant or even decisive influence; but it is another thing entirely to ignore the fact that long before anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism arrived in our region of the world, there had been several generations of this ideological and intellectual formation in the political and economic history of the United States. Of course, the homegrown movement the country itself is by far more rooted, more promising than what any other traditions of socialism and anti-imperialism can offer us, but this does not mean that we should adopt a philistine slogan – as many Nigerian comrades do – that no good can come out of “the belly of the beast”.

    If the readers of this piece did not notice that in the sentence in the paragraph preceding this one where the word “converted” is bracketed wherein I stated that it was in the United States that I was first converted to socialism, let me now draw attention to this fact. Why bracket the word, “converted” in that sentence? Well, firstly because I think we should leave the work of “conversion” to the evangelical proselytizers – there is simply too much “conversion” going on in our country right now, without the slightest sign that we are becoming a more humane and godly nation. More significantly, I wish to take”conversion” out of the discourse here because that was not what happened when, at about the age of 24, I became, then and forever, a leftist, a socialist humanist. And neither is it what I am trying to do in this piece in focusing on the younger generation. In other words, I seek not to convert but to persuade, not to preach but to argue rationally and methodically. My adherence to socialism is not based on allegiance to an abstract principle or dogma. Yes, I am proudly and assertively a socialist, making this declaration at a time, a period when it has gone out of fashion to say that one is a socialist, especially in Nigeria. But fundamentally, my allegiance is to the interests, the betterment of human beings, especially hundreds of millions who are needlessly made to suffer because political and social elites run the affairs of this nation and this world in their own selfish and corrupt interests.

    Martin Luther King, one of the greatest anti-imperialists and anti-racists of recent American and global history did not seek to make any conversions in his extraordinarily eloquent speeches and writings, even though he was a man of the cloth. Berny Sanders, the vastly popular and openly leftist candidate in the last U.S. presidential elections did not “preach”; he sought to persuade, to convince the poor and disadvantaged tens of millions in America to rise up and act in their own interest. I am persuaded by the examples of these two figures – among dozens of other figures that I could invoke – that comparing America with Nigeria and any other country in Africa and the world is not only helpful but necessary. In next week’s concluding essay in the series begun with this piece, in order to draw attention to certain unknown or forgotten aspects of the crises of the reproduction of social and cultural capital in our world, I will focus specifically on a comparison between Nigeria and the United States in the field of the tertiary educational system that is in place in each respective country. As we shall see, quite justifiably, American higher education is celebrated as one of the most developed in the world. But that is not the whole picture; in the United States, there are contradictions of extremely unjust, mediocre and irrelevant education as we find in Nigerian tertiary education. Doncaster Rovers is, or should be right there with Chelsea Football Club.

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • What is it that, quite unbelievably, Trump and Buhari have in common as leaders?

    What is it that, quite unbelievably, Trump and Buhari have in common as leaders?

    In terms of personality, there cannot be two people who are as dissimilar as night is to day as our president, Muhammadu Buhari, and the American president, Donald Trump. But as rulers, the similarities between the two men are as uncanny as they are utterly surprising. Briefly stated, here is the bottom line in our profile of these similarities: a gift of masterful personal charisma that is almost completely neutralized by an unacknowledged proneness to weakness, confusion and obtuseness in running the affairs of the nation. There is nothing inherently antithetical between great personal charisma and the demands and responsibilities of governance. Indeed, some of the greatest statesmen and women in history have been endowed with large and equal doses of the two. But when charisma comes with either an innate or determinate propensity for weakness, confusion and coarsened sensibilities in exercising power over a nation and its populace, then the charisma becomes a liability, an alibi for mediocre, unjust and frightening political governance. This, I contend, is what we have in the unfolding scenario of the rule of our president and the incumbent American president.

    In making these opening observations in this piece, this much I must immediately admit: of all the thirteen executive heads of states that we have had in this country, Muhammadu Buhari is one of the two or three rulers who seem the least comparable to Donald Trump. Indeed, to speak quite candidly on this issue, the two Nigerian heads of states that I personally find the most comparable to Trump are Olusegun Obasanjo and Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida. Obasanjo: like Trump, he is a supreme egomaniac whose first, second and third locus of ethico-political priority or investment is himself. Babangida: like Trump, he freely mixes amorality with immorality, so much so that he is as incapable of remorse as a recidivist rapist who is forever hoping to be given the chance to revisit and re-enact all his previous crimes. Buhari is not a saint, but he is not an Obasanjo or a Babangida. And as a matter of fact, either as a military dictator or an elected ruler, Buhari is not among my favouriteNigerian ruling class politicians. But I want him to succeed. I want him to succeed simply because his success will help to bring our country closer to the minimum of consolidation of a democratic order of the developing world that can meet the challenges of a global economic and political system that is overwhelming rigged against the interests and aspirations of the poor nations and regions of the world. If this is true, what then is the basis of my comparing Buhari with Trump?

    I promise: I will give a straightforward and unequivocal answer to this question at the end of this piece. Before then,it it is necessary to further expatiate on my claim that a similarity does indeed exist between Buhari and Trump with regard to the gift of an enormous personal charisma that is neutralized by an unacknowledged weakness, confusion and crassness. We must of course admit it: American democracy is much older and far more stable than our own fledgling, abiku democracy in Nigeria. Moreover, America is the most affluent country in the world while Nigeria is one of the poorest and most economically unjust. These significant facts notwithstanding, women and men are the same all over the world and the moral and political coordinates of governance are comparable everywhere in our common earth. Moreover, please think of this fact, compatriots: the Nigerian presidential system is closely, even apishly modeled on American presidentialism. Above all else is the fact that kleptocracy reigns supreme in both countries, though it is of course more rampant, more “unashamed” in Nigeria than in the United States. No, dear readers, there is nothing fanciful in comparing a Nigerian mode of questionable political charisma with an American one.

    And so: what are the expressions of charisma suffused by weakness, naivety and confusion in the respective vocations of the current presidents of the two countries? We can only be selective in our response to this question. Like Trump, Buhari came into office thinking that the sheer charismatic force of his personality would blow away corruption and bring “change” to the status quo andthe country. But corruption has not only fought back in the president’s chosen or preferred theatre of war (the law courts), it has invaded the inner chambers of his presidency, right up to office of the SGF, thereby making the Nigerian president look utterly feckless.

    Trump had a more colorful metaphor for the same thing: he was going to “drain the swamp” of corruption and inertia in Washington, DC, he shouted to the four corners of the land during the electoral campaigns right up to his inauguration as the new incumbent of the White House. But before he could settle down in the nation’s morally diseased capital, the “swamp” had claimed Trump and drawn him and many members of his administration into its murky embrace. Indeed, as I write these words on Friday, March 31, 2017 inside the US itself, it has just been revealed that the disgraced former National Security Adviser to Trump, General Michael Flynn (Rtd), was a secret foreign agent of Turkey and had also received large cash handouts from Russian parastatals close to Putin. Thus, in both cases in Abuja and Washington, DC, the question is loud and clear: why has the charisma of each president been so ineffectual, so naïve, so laughable in its utter lack of critical self-awareness?

    Charisma in Buhari and Trump has perhaps found its most effective limits in its confrontation with divisions and vested interests within each president’s own ruling party, respectively the APC (Nigeria) and the Republican Party (the US). This scenario seems worse in Buhari’s encounter with the political robber barons in the APC, but that may be because Trump has been in office for less than three months while the Nigerian president has been in office for about two years. Thus, while Buhari has now more or less completely given up all pretense to being in control of the political bosses of his party in the National Assembly and the states, Trump is still twitting and barking orders at rebellious operators in his party to fall in line and give his programs legislative backing. This is regardless of the fact that dissolute factions within his own party have just handed the American president a crushing defeat in the form of failure to repeal and replace the so-called “Obamacare”, a cornerstone of Trump’s campaign for the presidency.In both the Nigerian and American cases, the following questions are now being asked: can a president whose “charisma” cannot match the machinations of politicians and vested interests inside his own party be expected to carry out promises and programs intended to be beneficial to the whole country? Why is “charisma”, alone on its own and without much else to fortify and make it hardy and resilient, why is it so ineffectual?

    These questions find their most pertinent application in the framework of the much larger question of the survival of the nation itself.  Here I must perhaps make a confession: I have just arrived in the US after a long stay in Nigeria and I find that this same politically existential question of the survival of the nation is on nearly every thinking person’s mind in each country. Please note the qualification of “existential” here with the adverb, “politically”. This is because it is not so much the literal survival of each respective country that is in question; rather, it is what will be left of the country, after the “charisma” of Buhari or of Trump might have been finally contained by forces that neither man can grasp, let alone master? Put differently, here is the same question: what will be left of the country, its unity, the moral, psychological and cultural resources in its patrimony, after the president’s “charisma” has finally caved in to the nation-wrecking interests tearing away the last remnants of vitality, justice, solidarity and honour across the length and breadth of the land?

    At this point in the discussion, it is time for me to now return to the question that I earlier promised I would answer unequivocally at the end of this essay. Here is the question, slightly rephrased from the form in which I first posed it: if Nigeria and the US are so different in the age and the nature of their democratic dispensationsand in the wealth and power of each nation, and if Buhari is one of the least comparable of Nigerian rulers to the current American president, Donald Trump, why then have I thought it necessary, perhaps even instructive to compare the two men? I shall be very direct and concrete in my response to the question.

    Unlike what obtains in Buhari’s Nigeria, Americans have not (yet) started killing one another in bloodbaths based on ethnicity, religion, regionalism and settler-indigene identities backed by destructive, rampaging violence. But this is no comfort to most decent, humane, thinking Americans since everyone recognizes that the present period is more filled with hatreds and phobias based on race, gender, sexuality and religion than any other period in at least the last half century if not longer. In plain terms, American society is more riven by these divisions now than anyone can remember in living memory. Both Buhari and Trump are products of this deeply troubling history, Trump far more culpably so than the Nigerian president. Indeed, one could go so far as to say that Trump is as much an instigator, a catalyst of this development as he is also its product. Buhari is not completely innocent of being a fomenter, an instigator of violently irredentist identity, but for the most part, this belongs to his past. His “present”, so to speak, is shrouded in mystery and irresoluteness. The nation and the world expect far more of him than he has either been willing or able to give and this is the main or real issue: his charisma is wearing thin and becoming jaded, torn.

    Speaking only for myself, I found it deeply disturbing that throughout all the killings in Southern Kaduna, Buhari hardly uttered a squeak. The cries of the dead and their grieving families hardly reached or touched him, it seemed. More portentously, his administration seems totally lacking in the will and the understanding needed to bring justice, restitution and peace to all the aggrieved communities in the country in all parts of the country, east and west, north and south. Justice is indivisible, restitution and peace are due to all communities without discrimination. But Buhari’s administration is dithering. And meanwhile, as a baleful background to the violent inter-communal bloodletting in the land, the looting is still going on, the heavens help us!

     

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Women in the Nigerian socialist and revolutionary movement: for Bene Madunagu @ 70

    Women in the Nigerian socialist and revolutionary movement: for Bene Madunagu @ 70

    I cannot believe that it is already ten years since I wrote a tribute in celebration of the attainment of the age of 60 by my friend, sister and comrade, Professor Bene Madunagu. But since I myself have almost “forgotten” now that I am already over the age of 70, it is not hard for me to accept the fact that on March 21 this week, comrade Bene did in fact join the club, the rare order of Septuagenarians of the Left (SOL).But how could I not remember and then celebrate this fact when there are so very few of us in the SOL! Yes, there are few of us in SOL primarily because most Nigerians don’t live past the age of 60. But there is also the fact that many members of SOL are keeping the criteria of membership very strict! For instance,next month, on April 13 to be precise, my bosom friend, Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi, will turn 70. But I can tell readers of this piece that when that happens,there will be a spirited debate whether or not he should be admitted to the SOL. Yemi will of course have my vote, but as I am anticipating strong resistance to his nomination to membership of the order, I am thinking that perhaps we should create a wing of the SOL into which I am sure there will be a strong vote in favour of Yemi’s membership. That wing of the SOL will have the the acronym, SODL, which stands for “Septuagenarians of the Democratic Left”!

    I have chosen to start this tribute on these half playful, half serious musings on exclusivityof membership within a special unregistered and indeed unconstituted group or community of elderly Nigerians in order to underscore an aspect of comrade Bene’s life, career and achievements that I left out when I wrote a long tribute in celebration of her 60thanniversary ten years ago. What is this aspect? It is something that could be calledrarity raised to the power of two: women are not visible, not prominent in the Nigerian socialist movement; exceptionally strong women who can and do match men on virtually all indices of capability and achievement are rare in the Nigerian Left. Why are the sources and portents of this problem – this is the issue that I seek to briefly address in this tribute. But before I delve into it as the focus of all that I wish to say in this tribute that uses the exploration of a general idea to celebrate the life and work of one person, let me first write in demonstration of my claim that comrade Bene is indeed exceptional – among men and women in general; and in particular, among Nigerian Leftists,the country’s human rights activists and humanistsandprofessional academics and scientists.

    I should perhaps state here that comrade Bene is only the fourth person about whom I have written more than one tribute in celebration of their birthday anniversaries in my newspaper columns, the other three being Professors Wole Soyinka, Abiola Irele and Femi Osofisan. I do not need to draw the attention of the reader to the fact that Bene is the only woman in this group. But what does one make of the fact that she has stood out among many other categories of very accomplished and highly respected people among the ranks of the national intelligentsia?

    In the six years between 1980 and 1986 when I was, first, National President of ASUU and, then, Immediate Past President (IPP), Bene was quite easily the most conscientious and highly respected chairperson among all the chairpersons of the local branches of the Union. As we did not organize any competition among thesechairpersons of ASUUlocal branches to honour the best, or the most dependable among them, the reader will have to take my word on this claim. Fortunately for us, there are tens of colleagues from that period of the early, formative stages of ASUU’s evolution that are still alive, still around to lend their testimonies to my claim here that Bene was the chairperson that all other chairpersons in ASUU without exception looked up to. But then, why did it never occur to us that she should have gone to be ASUU National President? Why, in fact, has there never been a female ASUU National President? [Parenthetically, I do not wish in any way to imply that not having been ASUU National President in any way diminishes comrade the totality of Bene’s achievements, an observation that would be utterly ridiculous. Needless to say, I raise the question only as a general commentary on women in the Nigerian Left]

    Here, I cannot avoid recourse to the hidden but not exactly unknown secret lives of Nigerian Leftists. Socialists, activists and radicals of the Left everywhere in the world all belong to a very rare breed of humanity in the sheer number of hours they expend in meetings going meticulously over obscure or even arcane matters of ideology, strategy, tactics or principle. Nigerian socialists often took this to extremes of time, energy and resources expended in these marathon sessions that sometimes lasted all day and all night and my friend, Femi Osofisan, used to tease and berate me about this phenomenon. I mean, where other Nigerians hold all-night vigils either for fortifications against Satan and his hosts or to endure emotional abuse from ritualists promising them great wealth, Nigerian socialists and activists have their “vigils” on how Lenin and his comrades would have, in the Nigerian context, responded to that classic query: What is to be done? I testify here that we in the Nigerian Left have spent a large part of our lives, our waking hours on this classic Leninist question: What is to be done?Sadly, only rarely have we ever come up with answers that rise to the challenge implied in the question.

    I raise this particular matter because there was/is a subtle gender inflection in it, at least in the Nigerian experience and culture of the Left. This is the fact that men were/are far more obsessed than women bythese obscure points of ideology, strategy or principle. In American movies of the genre of Westerns, the closing issue at the end of every film is – who is the last man standing? Who is the last man standing? Well, in many instances of our day-long or night-long sessions on tactics, strategy or principle, comrade Bene was not the last man standing; she was the last person standing, even though she was/is not particularly fond of the excessive, self-absorbed quarrels of the men over ideology and principle.

    In concrete terms, what I am intimating here is the fact that comrade Bene has always sought to move us from ideology to action, from theory to praxis, from the abstract programme to actual effects in the world, especially on the lives of the deprived and excluded majority of our peoples. One of the most memorable and moving of my experiences in the Nigerian Left is having conversations with young, teenage girls that had gone through the education and training provided in Girls’ Power Initiative (GPI), the NGO that Bene cofounded and ran for a long time in Calabar. In my travels around many parts of the world, I had never met – and still have not met – any young women from poor and disadvantaged backgrounds with more knowledge and insight about their place in the world than the products of GPI. To think that comrade Bene achieved this remarkable feat while at the same time rising to eminence among Nigerian botanists and scientists and in the meantime working indefatigably as a human rights activist, this is humbling for all of us in the Nigerian Left. This observation leads me directly to the central idea of this tribute: the dominant visibility of men in the Nigerian socialist movement in juxtaposition with the rarity of exceptional women in leadership positions and roles in the movement.

    About three years ago, something deeply portentous happened at a big ASSU national event that throws some light on the focus that I am placing in this discussion on the place of women in the Nigerian socialist movement.This was a so-called National Educational Summit (NES) organized and sponsored by all the unions in our tertiary educational institutions. I had the honour of being the Chairman at this summit. Well, dear reader and compatriot, consider the implications of the following fact: the session on the place of women and the special problems that they face in our universities, polytechnics and colleges of education was reserved to the very last session of the last day of the summit when people were visibly exhausted after more than three full, all-day meetings. Consider this also, compatriot: with very few exceptions, most of the men present at this special session on women laughed at and about every issue raised concerning the problems and challenges that women face as women in our tertiary educational institutions. I was so taken aback and deeply offended by this open display of extreme backwardness about women’s issues at an ASUU-sponsored event that I drew pointed attention to it in my commentary on that summit in this column.

    I do not wish to oversimplify the ramifications of this happening but still, I cannot but ask: would the majority of the male delegates at that NES have been laughing if a woman was ASUU’s National President? Would it have made any difference if ASUU had had several women National Presidents in the last three decades? There were many female delegates at the summit and quite a good number of them were senior professors and academic administrators: why did their presence not make the sexist yahoos among the male delegates self-aware about their sexism? Do we need exceptional women like comrade Bene to turn things around? Isn’t the very notion of exceptionalism problematicin being subtly and insidiously sexist?

    I leave these questions unanswered here, though I must confess that I certainly hope that the careful reader would have an intimation of what my answer to everyone of these questions would be. Sexism, especially in the form of the type of open, anti-feministreduction of issues pertaining to the place of women in our society to matters fit only for laughter and levity, is rampant in the Nigerian Left. It is necessary to celebrate the lives and achievements of exceptional women in the movement like comrade Bene, but not on the basis of the reification of exceptionalism. In the final analysis, exceptionalism is gender-neutral. But it is everywhere surrounded and pervaded by deep but casual sexism. As we honour and celebrate the life and achievements of Bene, let us not for one moment forget this pervasive but often ignored aspect of the Nigerian socialist movement.

     

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Modern African poetry and the stranglehold of versification: for Niyi Osundare @70

    Modern African poetry and the stranglehold of versification: for Niyi Osundare @70

    There are many things, many achievements to celebrate in the life and career of my friend, comrade and brother, Niyi Osundare, especially on the occasion of his attaining the age of 70 in a country whose official statistic for life expectancy at birth is only 52 years. I give only a few of these: Osundare is one of the African continent’s and the world’s foremost poets; he is a scholar and literary and art critic of great discernment and eloquence; he is a courageous, passionate and unrelenting fighter for social justice in our country, our continent and our world; and he is a man, a human being of great decency and sensitivity. Personally, I can report that he is numbered among the few friends with whom I have had and continue to have the most rewarding conversations on the state of things in our country and the world and from these I can also report that Osundare’s sense of humour is razor sharp, its keenness reflected in the unique ring of his laughter. Of course, he is not without flaws – who amongst us is? But lucky is the woman or man like Osundare whose flaws are dwarfed by the towering example of his strength of character!

    If these opening words indicate that a worthy tribute to Osundare on the occasion of his 70th birthday anniversary would have to be quite long if it is to do justice to the subject, I hasten to confirm the sound basis of that idea. The problem of course is that this is a newspaper column with fixed or set limits of length and scope. And so, bearing this in mind, I have chosen in this context to celebrate Osundare on only one of his many achievements, especially as this has never, as far as I am aware, been properly acknowledged and extensively discussed. I write here of the fact that it was Osundare’s great fortune and a turning point in our literary history in postcolonial Africa, to have been the person to finally and decisively lay to rest the longstanding antagonism between versification and poetry. It is perhaps necessary to briefly explain what this antagonism, this needless contradiction means before going on to relate it to Osundare’s career as a poet, theorist and critic of uncommon power, breadth and originality.

    In the best of circumstances, verse is to poetry what a beautiful, well-wrought bottle is to the excellent winethat it contains: you are grateful for the wine but your pleasure, your gratification is tremendously enhanced by the fact that the wine came in the best bottle ever manufactured so that long after you have drunk the wine, you keep the bottle to remind you of the experience of drinking that particular wine. Alternatively, one could think of poetry as the fruit that one eats or the sweet nectar that one imbibes when the skin of “versification” has been peeled away; there is no way in the world that the fruit or the nectar could have been preserved for your delectation without that outer skin. Best of all, think of poetry, compatriots, as life itself with verse as the lines or borders around it giving it a particular form, shape or identity. We shall come back to this particular metaphor later in this piece.

    Unfortunately, as we go through life and experience, only rarely are we blessed with the best of circumstances. For most of the time it may not exactly be the worst of circumstances, but quite often, things are close to this. While this is true for all of us, it is truer for the majority of people at the bottom of the social order. A square peg in a round hole; an old, rancid wine in a new bottle; or life boxed in by all kinds of avoidable constrictions that cause pain or unhappiness. That’s where things stand between verse and poetry, especially in periods of literary and cultural history when verse becomes more important, more valued than poetry, so much so that in some cases, only through verse is poetry recognized and celebrated. The colonial experience in every region of the world is the most notorious of this conflation of poetry with versification. Let me add that here, I speak from experience, an experience that was both personal and generational.

    I do not know about the experience of the present generation of primary and secondary school pupils but in the time of my generation in late colonial West Africa,what one read and heard of as poetry proper was always in the form of verse. And not just verse in general, but verse with very strong and clearly defined patterns of stanzas, meters and rhymes, together with the appropriate diction to go with the verse. Even when,as undergraduates in advanced classes in poetry and literary criticism my colleagues and Ieventually encountered modern, unrhymed free verse, we continued to hold on tenaciously to that complete identification of poetry with verse that we had been taught in the early, formative stages of our education. Moreover, it was not only the case that we could not imagine that poetry could exist outside of versification, there was also the fact that virtually all the verse forms that we were taught were from the Western heritage of poetry, especially of the written, canonical currents. In the last year of my undergraduate education at UI in the late Sixties, lectures on oral African poetry began to be given in an optionalcourse on African Literature. But at the time,it was not a popular course at all. Indeed, only about a fifth of my set of about sixty students took that course. I regret to say that I was not one of them. In effect, it was to take at least another decade before the idea of oral poetry, the idea of vital and sustaining connections between orality, poetry and indigenous and local African sources began to take rootand grow among teachers, criticsand, especially, poets themselves.

    I admit it: from the vast conceptual and expressive spaces of the confrontation of modern African poetry with Western forms and traditions, I am deliberately narrowing the field of discourse here to the special case or “front” of poetry versus versification. Typically, when the subject of Africa and poetry in the historic contexts of colonialism and modernity is raised by scholars and poets, the emphasis is on the African heritage of poetry as a match for the imposed Western heritage and its forms, especially with regards to the fact that colonialism could not and did not wipe out the traditions of poetry in our indigenous languages. We read of the stillsurviving and vibrant traditions of heroic, oracular, sacred, secular and satirical forms and traditions of poetry in our continent. We read of the Zulu izibongo; of Yoruba ewi and ijala; of Urhoboudje; of the Swahili utendi. But hardly ever do we read of poetry in relation to verse. If that is the case, why am I deliberately narrowing the field of discourse in this tribute to Niyi Osundareto the focused issue of the confrontation of poetry with versification?

    The answer to this question is both simple and complex, both uncomplicated and incredibly challenging in its implications and ramifications. The simple part is this: it seems to me that of nearly all our poets, the question is most productively raised in relation to Osundare’s poetry because, in fact, it is a question, a challenge to which he returns again and again, almost more than any other African poet. For the complicated part, we will have to grapple with the fact that Osundare did not set out to produce poetry that would eventually help to resolve the inherited, colonially imposed antagonism between poetry and versification in modern African literature; rather, he was/is only following where poetry would take him and that was/is nearly everywhere. What do I have in mind in making this observation or claim?

    Long, long before Osundare and other poets of his generational cohort like Kofi Ayindoho, Odia Ofeimun, Femi Osofisan, Tanure Ojaide and Syl Cheney-Coker, many African poets had engaged this issue of poetry’s confrontation with the imposed verse forms of the Western poetic heritage. As a matter of fact, beyond an early imitative or apprenticeship phase, extraordinarily powerful and eloquent poets like Leopold Sedar Senghor, Agostino Neto, Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, J. P. Clark Tchicaya U Tam’siand Kofi Awoonor had broken free of the imposed Western versification models, ranging freely and wonderfully between and around Western verse patterns and African matrices of poetic creation in all its richness and diversity. As a matter of fact, Senghor, Okigbo, Soyinka and Clark weremasterful in the syntheses that they brokered between the colonially inherited verse forms and indigenous, local African expressions of poetry. In the best of their poetry, they went beyond and broke completely free of the colonial overdetermination of their generation. In other words, it came to pass that in the best output of these poets, it was no longer possible to separate Western verse forms from African poetic sources.

    With Osundare and the poets of his (our) generation, the colonial overdetermination had vanished. In plain and simple terms, schoolchildren were no longer taught to recognize poetry only – or even primarily – in the form of verse – as we had been taught. Poetry, we now knew, is not restricted to verse forms and patterns but could be found everywhere – since it was/is coincident with Life itself. Let me put this in very blunt terms: in my undergraduate literary education at UI – which was as sound as one could get at that time in the best universities in the English-speaking world – there was not a single African poet in the syllabus for Poetry, one of the six compulsory courses in the English honours program examined in our final year examinations. Okigbo, Soyinka and Clark had already produced some of their best poetry, but no, they did not make it to our syllabus for Poetry! Meanwhile, they faced another nemesis of far greater ferocity since, despite their achievements, critics like Chinweizu and his partners in the so-called “bolekaja” criticism railed tirelessly against Soyinka and the poets of his generation for not being “African” enough in their poetry.

    Free of the colonial overdetermination, Osundare and the poets of his generation, together with younger poets like Harry Garuba, Ogaga Ifowodo and Esiaba Irobi, could look anywhere and everywhere for inspiration. And based on this experience, they have discovered that the poetry-verse tension or antagonism is not restricted to only the colonial condition or experience since, as a matter of fact, it is a perennial, never-ending dialectic of literary history in general and the fate of poetry at all times in particular. I may be wrong, but I think that more than any other poet in his generation, Osundare has taken this truism to heart. He looks for “poetry” everywhere – and he usually finds it, sometimes in the most unusual of places: the street; the marketplace; the farmland; the legislative houses of our “politrickians” (apologies to Harry Garuba); the town or village square; other poets; books, newspapers and the social media; and the innermost recesses of the heart. This is my favorite of all: in the relentless struggles for justice in our country, our continent and our world. Osundare is indeed, the ultimate walkabout or, in Nigerian Pidgin, “waka-waka” poet of his generation.

    This is not, indeed cannot be a long tribute. I have not spoken of the actual contents of his poetry, a subject that has been universally adjudged to make Osundare the “people’s poet” parexcellence of this period of our history. And neither have I spoken of the incredible range of verse forms and techniques in his output, a subject that would perhaps qualify Osundare as, after Okigbo, “the poets’ poet” extraordinaire.  There will be a time and a place for all these and more. So, let me bring this to a close. In case you do miss the point about my using good wine as a metaphor for poetry in this tribute, let me point it out to you, Niyi: boo fe, boo ko, you will treat us to excellent, priceless wine to celebrate your attainment of this milestone, my friend. Welcome to the club, okunrin ogun!

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • “A foremost” and”penultimate week” – which is the more disturbing catachresis?

    “A foremost” and”penultimate week” – which is the more disturbing catachresis?

    As it appropriate for me to state confidently or even categorically that most of those reading this piece today do not know that it is a misuse of words and language to say that a person is aforemost writer, surgeon, engineer, sportswoman or socialite? I think so. The reason for this is the fact that I have encountered this misuse of the word foremost not only among averagely literate Nigerians but also within the ranks of the highest levels of the nation’s intelligentsia. When you see a word or a phrase constantly in use by virtually everybody including some of the nation’s most highly educated men and women, you tend to think it is correct and standard usage, even if and when this is not the case. Now, the standard or correct form is the word “foremost” used in conjunction with the definite article as in “the foremost”. Using the word with the indefinite article “a” – as in “a foremost lawyer” – is non-standard and incorrect. In all my professional and non-professional travels throughout the English-speaking world, Nigeria is the only country in which I have encountered this misuse, this catachresis: a foremost historian; a foremost artist; a foremost musician; a foremost actress.

    It is of course as a social critic and a cultural theorist and not as a grammarian that I am approaching this issue in this piece. Nonetheless, it might be useful to briefly reflect on why the construction “a foremost journalist” is wrong, non-standard and catachrestic. Briefly here’s the reason: foremost is a word, an appellation that is comparative with regard to place, order or rank. Indeed, in its most standard and correct usages, foremost encodes not one but several layers or levels of comparison, what one might call a comparison within a comparison. This can be quite easily seen in one of the most frequent uses of the word, which is in the phrase, “first and foremost”. Every time that the phrase is used, the reader knows that a series of things or events, not a single entity, is involved.

    This is also why, quite often, what we see in uses of the word that are correct and standard is something along the lines of, for an example, “the foremost among the brightest of the younger generation of the nation’s lawyers”. As can be easily seen in this sentence, the particular lawyer referred to is “foremost”, not among all lawyers without any specifications but among two closely linked subsets, these being the younger generation of lawyers and the brightest among that collectivity. But with the usage that has now become so widespread, so universal in its occurrence in Nigeria as to be a new linguistic normal, this comparative dimension has more or less been completely, though unintendedly obliterated. A person is now “foremost” only and exclusively, it seems, with regards to him or herself. This is what interests me in this topic, this unintended erasure of comparison and distinction in the phrase “a foremost” in our public discourse, together with the related issue of the general decline in language use in Nigeria as a symptom of a deep social and cultural malaise that urgently requires our attention.

    In order to demonstrate that I am not approaching these issues as a strict or censorious grammarian, let me assure the reader that for me, “aforemost critic” instead of “the foremost among art or literary or music critics” is a very mild and rather innocuous misuse of language. Indeed, it belongs to the order of language misuse that goes by the name of catachresis. As all cultural theorists know, catachresis is very pervasive in the use of language. This is true of all languages, but is even truer of languages that have historically, geographically and culturally strayed far from their autochthonous homelands, as is the case with the English language in our part of the world. Indeed, so common is catachresis in languages that it is often used by poets, novelists, dramatists and comedians to creatively harness its unintendedly quaint or bizarre effects. This is why catachresis is at the root of the appeal and the fame of the colorful and absurd English language use of Chief Zebrudaya Okoroigwe Nwogbo, alias “4:30” of the famous New Masquerade comedy series on Nigerian television in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Catachresis is also the source of the brilliant inventiveness of the “rotten English” deployed in Ken Saro Wiwa’s Sozaboy and Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation.In both novels, the narrator-protagonists are barely literate and hence are very bad speakers of English. But their “mistakes” are so colorful, so original that they effectively and totally transform the language used in each novel into a new and original creation, especially in conjunction with the tragic, harrowing plot of each respective novel.

    But having gladly yielded so much room and leeway for catachresis in its self-ironizing and creative expressions, we must also recognize that not every instance of its occurrence is beneficent for a culture, a nation. For instance, when I encounter the use of “luxuriant” when “luxurious” is the clearly intended word, I know that linguistically speaking, something wrong and untoward has taken place. Same thing with the word “being” when the word the writer had in mind is quite clearly “been”. This is a misuse of language that, by the way, I have encountered innumerably in our country – and from the most unexpected of persons or places. In this respect, perhaps the single most egregious catachresis in Nigerian English of the genus of journalese at the present time is – penultimate, as in the phrase “penultimate week”. As nearly everyone reading this piece apparently knows, the supposed meaning is, unambiguously, last week.

    But this is absurd because “penultimate”does not stand alone in and by itself; it is what comes before the “ultimate” in a temporal or logical sequence. In a book, the penultimate page is the page before the very last page of the book. In an epoch,”penultimate” is the century, decade or year that comes before the very last century, decade or year in the epoch. In other words, you should not use”penultimate” when and if what comes after it will not be the very last in a sequence. Thus, as this week is not going to be the last week in the month of March or the year 2017, to write of last week as “penultimate week” is both a linguistic and logical howler. But this has been so completely normalized in Nigerian journalism that I had to accept the (rotten) state of things and stop railing against it, much to the amusement of my friends, Professors Niyi Osundare and G. G. Darah.Both were very surprised by my temerity in thinking I could make journalists stop using the phrase simply be railing tirelessly against it. Indeed, Osundare and Darah used to tease me about the outrage I felt about this conceptually barbarous thing called – “penultimate week”!But then, listen to what Osundare himself once wrote in a lamentation about the quality of language use in literary reviews in Nigerian newspapers:

    “Not infrequently, review columns confront the reader with howlers such as”thesecond paragraph” of the poem; “this is X’s second anthology of short stories” (for anthology read collection). And the work is praised as “simplistic” when what the writer means is “simple”. There is a constant mention of “renown” authors, and reviews are hardly balanced in their handling of “strengths and floors”. Too monotonously, our critics “opine that…”. Almost invariably, what passes for a review is bungled content summary without a single word on form and style. Quite often, the reviewer confuses biography with autobiography; “criticism” with “critique”; metaphor with simile; “summarily” with “summary”. Achebe sometimes gets credit as the author of The Concubine. And the pages drip with cheap, whorish clichés!

    These are, without question, very strong words, justified by both the scope of the problem and the seeming unawareness that the problem exists at all. I mean, don’t we all know that the editors of Nigerian newspapers more or less stopped editing content for errors of grammar, spelling, punctuation, language, and conceptual appropriateness a long, long time ago? In this connection, the constancy and pervasiveness in the use of “penultimate week” is the surest sign of this abdication. But then think of this point, dear compatriot: the editors of our newspapers are not the sole perpetrators or guilty parties in this abdication; the enumeration should include teachers and mentors at the highest levels of our tertiary educational system, the national professoriate itself. This observation is at the root of the title of this piece in its counterpoising of the catachresis of “a foremost” to that of “penultimate week”. What do I mean by this?

    Well, in both degree and kind of linguistic, logical and conceptual errors, “a foremost” is much milder and perhaps even somewhat benign in comparison with “penultimate week”. This is not merely due to the fact that for the most part, it is only journalists that use the term, “penultimate week” while senior and distinguished professors use the other catachrestic term, “a foremost”. More significantly, “a foremost” seems more excusable and therefore more acceptable than “penultimate week” because its perpetrators constitute the court of last appeal in matters of the cultural and linguistic health of the nation. In making this observation, I feel it necessary to make a confession here: no errors, no instances of the misuse of language and words have been more shocking and perplexing for me than “a foremost” –even as mild and “benign” as it is – precisely because I have encountered it in the circles of the most distinguished individuals and institutions of academia in our country. This leads directly to my concluding thoughts in this piece.

    If the underlying argument in this piece has led to the question, “so the most learned and distinguished academics and professors can commit errors of language use”, the unequivocal answer is – yes and yes again. For that is not the point since nobody or group is beyond making mistakes. Beyond this, the real point is whether or not it can and will be admitted that an error or errors galore is/are being made. So far, the brotherhood and sisterhood of journalists have refused to perceive or acknowledge that a crisis of language misuse of enormous proportions exists in their profession. Will the eggheads in academia also resort to the same ostrich response? That is the question, compatriots. For behind the catachresis of “a foremost” is the deeper malaise of the collapse of the vocation of true, relevant and humanistic intellectualism in our country and our era. But that is a crisis that I have not even begun to address in this piece. If everybody is and can be “a foremost”, then nobody is really and substantively “the foremost” in a segment, a branch of a discipline or a field of knowledge. This seems “democratic” and egalitarian, but only falsely so. Where, as in our country and our continent, real quality and distinctiveness are being remorselessly wiped out, we are at a great distance, a great remove from real democracy in the institutions and practices of valuable, fulfilling intellectualism.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu