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Category: Biodun Jeyifo

  • A Talakawa Guide to the Jonathan/ PDP-Buhari/APC Roforofo Fight

    A Talakawa Guide to the Jonathan/ PDP-Buhari/APC Roforofo Fight

    Two people dey yab/Crowd dey
    Two people dey yab/Crowd dey look/Roforofo dey! Fela Kuti, Chorus, “Roforofo Fight”
    1. The class in power is about to kick out the party/government in power!

    The late Claude Ake, following Karl Marx, used to insist that we must always distinguish between the ruling class, the class in power, from the particular government or party that may be in power at any particular moment in history. The one is a part of the whole that is the other. In other words, the party or government in power represents only a part of the totality of the ruling class, the class in power. This is easier seen in the institutions and practices of the developed bourgeois democracies of the world. In the United Kingdom, sometimes the Conservative Party is the party in power and at other times the Labor Party supplies the government in power. In the United States, sometimes it is the Democratic Party; other times, it is the Republican Party. Though completely absent in the federal seat of power, this distinction between the class in power and the party/government in power is not unknown in Nigeria. At state and local levels, opposition parties often wrest control from the PDP as the dominant, hegemonic party of our political elites, our ruling class and vice versa. What we are about to see in the 2015 general elections is unprecedented: the ruling class, the class in power, is about to kick out, perhaps forever, the party and government in power.

    The ostensible reason for this is the abysmal record of the PDP as the party and government in power at the center. The litany of PDP’s and Jonathan’s political misrule and mismanagement of the country’s economic and human resources is all too familiar. The corruption and squandermania are so vast, so incorrigibly resistant to control that Jonathan’s own Finance Minister, Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala, once said that she would be satisfied if she could reduce the waste by as much (or as little) as 4%. 70% of Nigerians live in dire poverty, even as a minority of the wealthy lives in fabled and lavish opulence. Our youths who constitute the largest demographic bloc in the population can expect nothing but a future of joblessness and uncertainty. Under the PDP and Jonathan, our educational system at all levels has become one of the most mediocre in Africa and the world; indeed, there is now no “Nigerian science and technology” to talk about. With the exception of a small segment of elites that live in fortressed, ultramodern mansions, for most Nigerians insecurity of life, property and personal possessions has become the very texture of daily existence, month after month, year after year. Of the Nigerian “brand” in the world at large, infamy as one of the worst places on the planet in which to do business has become an almost unshakeable fixture in the minds of not only the world’s transnational corporations but also of Nigerian businessmen and women.

    As important as these factors are, they do not constitute the real basis for why the Nigerian ruling class is about to kick out PDP/Jonathan as the party/government in power. Simply put, the power brokers in the Nigerian ruling class are dumping the PDP and Jonathan simply and unambiguously in order to save themselves by expelling the leviathan before it brings the house down on all their heads. Not content to misrule, mismanage and lay everything to waste on a colossal scale, PDP/Jonathan wanted to wipe out all the other ruling class parties by transforming the political order into a fascist one-party state in which it will be the only party with a national spread, a country-wide plurality. This would have been unattainable even if PDP/Jonathan were a model, high-achieving party and government in an ethnically and culturally homogenous country. But in a linguistically and culturally diverse country with a deep chasm between the haves and the have-nots, PDP/Jonathan overreached themselves.

    Obasanjo’s relentless verbal assaults on Jonathan; the mass defections from the PDP; the revolt of many of its governors; the merger of parties with only very thin connections between them only on the basis of ousting Jonathan and the PDP from power: these are some of the manifestations of the historic fact that, as some organisms shed their skins for new ones, the Nigerian ruling class is about to send the extant ruling party into political and historical oblivion and cobble together a new one. Where this will lead us, no one knows, but the consensus is that anything at all is better than the hole, the cesspit into which Jonathan/PDP are burying us. In what follows, I contend that that is not the end of the story.

    2. APC as the new party/government in power will not commit class suicide!

    It is of course not absolutely certain that Buhari/APC will oust Jonathan/PDP. Though Jonathan/PDP cannot win on their terribly dismal record, they may well attempt to rig themselves into a perpetuation of their misrule, their ‘failing-state’ paralysis. In the governorship elections in Ekiti and Osun States, the level of militarization of the electoral process was unprecedented; and for the first time in our electoral history, we saw hooded men of the state security apparatus arrest opposition party leaders and activists en masse. PDP/Jonathan may well attempt a repeat performance of these intimidating and coercive quasi-rigging tactics at the national level.

    But PDP is a stricken, wounded formation; it is as much buffeted by cyclones of inner implosion as by the external headwinds of a realignment of regional, ethnic and religious forces in which the Northwest, Northeast and Southwest zones are the dominant brokers. To these can be added parts of the North-central and South-south zones. The PDP is all too aware of these shifts in the zonal realignment of forces. And this awareness will temper its desperate will to rig itself into a firm grip on power. At any rate, this in effect means that the APC is the product of zonal or horizontal forces within the ruling class; it is nothing remotely close to a vertical class realignment of forces across the great dividing lines between the haves and the have-nots in our country.

    Let us be completely frank and unambiguous on this point. If Buhari/APC wins the 2015 elections and replaces Jonathan/PDP as the nascent party/government in power, its priorities will be governed by a drive to present the kinder, fairer and perhaps less corrupt side of our ruling class to Nigerians. An anti-corruption zealousness will probably be its most ardent legitimating program. In Nigeria and around the world, this will win it considerable credibility, goodwill and support. But it will not differ substantially from the ideological and broad policy orientation of the Jonathan-PDP party/government. The massive and unconscionable privatization of public enterprises and national assets will continue, with its unashamed excesses of the primitive accumulation through which rich and powerful Nigerians extract capital from the state to buy and privatize our national assets. The awesome powers of incumbency and patronage of the Presidency will be left intact under an APC/Buhari government/party; indeed, it may be expanded and made more imperious. And we will continue to have one Head of State and 36 mini heads of states, with the monumental wastage in the cost of governance that this entails. Finally, massive expenditure to substantially reduce or abolish poverty and to work for full employment has never been a major ideological or policy hallmark of any of our political parties. It is a stretch to think that in power at the center, APC/Buhari will embark on this path to redressing the great gap between the haves and the have-nots when its constituent parts have never done this in the state and local governments they have controlled.

    3. A kinder and fairer face of the Buhari/APC govt. in power must be deepened by a social movement of the talakawa and those who struggle with and for them

    Because at the present moment we are in another electoral cycle, the idea, the myth is once again very current that people hold their destiny in their own hands by voting for those who will represent their interests, who will make government work for the governed. But this is a half-truth. The ultimate achievement of elections is that they ensure that rulers cannot and must not take the ruled for granted, that it is in the power of the ruled to throw out rulers who have not performed well, who indeed have performed atrociously. Other than that, when elections are over, when an election cycle has run its course, the electorate must remain vigilant and mobilized if it wants to get the same attention it got during the election cycle. Nigerian political parties and politicians are notorious in their post-electoral cycle tendency to abandon their election promises and pursue instead their individual and class interests.

    In this particular historic context, this tendency will be magnified a hundred times, a thousand times by the fact that the defeat of the Jonathan/PDP will mean that the APC/Buhari party/government will have thousands of positions to fill and new patron-client relationships to forge as it positions itself to become the new ruling party. The thinking seems to be that the one and proper way to become the ruling party is to effectively distribute the spoils office among all the competing groups of elites in the country. One does not have to be a prophet to predict that ethnic, religious and geopolitical balancing in appointment to public offices and award of contracts will be the first order of the new ruling party and the government. The tragedy of Nigerian progressive mass politics is that the masses themselves too often get sucked into this maelstrom of ruling class manipulation of ethnic and religious differences in the sharing of the spoils of office and power. I contend that the euphoria of the defeat of Jonathan/PDP will make the independent self-mobilization of the Nigerian masses a particularly onerous task. But that said, we must prepare ourselves: as one ruling party goes into the oblivion of time and history and another one takes its place, this will mark something totally without precedent in our political history. In that case, how immensely fitting would it be for the Nigerian masses and those who fight with and for them to push relentlessly for real social justice and a dignified existence for the most disadvantaged in our country.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

     

  • Michael Brown contra Eric Garner: further reflections on the twilight of the racism of impunity

    Michael Brown contra Eric Garner: further reflections on the twilight of the racism of impunity

    Racism is not a constant of the human spirit.
    Frantz Fanon, “Racism and Culture”

    In last week’s essay in this column, I wrote with great but cautious optimism that the racism of impunity, the racism that is violent and completely unashamed to show its face to the world, this crude and destructive racism is in the twilight of its long, historic existence. One justification that I gave for this cautious optimism is the fact of the sheer number of people of all races, black, white, brown and yellow, in cities across every region of the United States who were protesting and demonstrating against the slaying of unarmed black men and teenagers by white police officers. A week after I wrote last week’s essay the protests and demonstrations have not only continued they have grown bigger. As a matter of fact, in one of the most dramatic expressions of these protests, athletes in major American sports like basketball and football – with tens of millions of fans – have been displaying powerful, symbolic expressions of protest against the racist violence of the police, expressions like the wearing T-shirts bearing the inscription “I can’t breathe”. Indeed, as I write these words on Friday, December 12, 2014, the word is out that next weekend, a big, “Million-Man March” against racism is planned to take place in the American capital, Washington, DC.

    Now, this is all well and good but it is not the main reason why I am asserting that the racism of impunity is in its twilight days. Indeed, as important as the protests and demonstrators are, they do not constitute the real reason why I am returning to the subject in this week’s column. For this, we have to turn to an unprecedented development that is closely connected to the social media that has turned the tables decisively against the forces of violent racist impunity among white American policemen and their millions of defenders and supporters in Congress, the media and ordinary citizens. Since this development is, in my opinion, an absolutely crucial factor in the ongoing protests, demonstrations and debates pertaining to the slaying of unarmed black people by white police policemen, I would like to put it across in as concrete and dramatic a way as possible. This is why, in the title of this piece, I have hinted at this development by the contrast I am implying in the phrase, “Michael Brown contra Eric Garner”. Both men, unarmed, died at the hands of white policemen, one in Fergusson, Missouri and the other in Staten Island, New York City. What contrast am I making between the deaths of these two men and, more particularly, the role of social media in public perceptions of, and debates on their deaths?

    On the surface, the difference is quite simple and indeed may seem unremarkable: no video clip exists of the last moments of the death of Michael Brown at the hand of officer Darren Wilson in Fergusson, Missouri; by contrast, the video clip of Eric Garner’s last moments in the chokehold of officer Daniel Pantaleo in Staten Island, New York immediately went viral on the Internet from the moment of its release and millions of people have seen it across the length and breadth of America and the world. But the matter is not that simple. If I may put the significance, the weightiness of the difference quite sharply, I would say that while to all people of goodwill of all races the video clip of Eric Garner’s last dying moments says a lot, to the defenders and supporters of the Darren Wilsons and Daniel Pantaleos of this world that video clip means absolutely nothing. In other words, to their millions of supporters, no evidence, no proof that their black victims were unjustly and senselessly killed will make them waver in their support of killer white policemen. What this means is that black lives do not matter in the least to these white cops and their supporters. And if this is the case, they cannot be persuaded by any evidence to withhold their support for the Darren Wilsons and Daniel Pantaleos among white police officers of America.

    But, this, it is beginning to become more and more apparent, is not exactly true. No nation, no social group in the world is immune to the effects and ramifications of the social media. The supporters and defenders of racist killer policemen are no exception to this rule, this norm of the 21st century world of the pervasively mediatized interplay between reality and the images circulated and consumed through the digital appliances that dominate our lives all over the world. The “evidence” provided by the social media can no longer be either ignored or left out of the logics that structure our daily lives, personal or collective. In other words, if the social media catch you in a compromised or damning moment and then circulates that moment to the whole world, you cannot continue to act as if you are untouched by the national and global circulation of your moment of inhumanity, embarrassment or shame. This is the unexpected dilemma that has hit the defenders and supporters of the racism of impunity in the United States like a tsunami of moral and social crisis. Let me explain what I am claiming here by briefly returning to the concrete cases of the racist killers, Darren Wilson and David Pantaleo, and the difference between them that was established by the social media.

    Fortuitously, the decision not to charge Darren Wilson by the grand jury in Fergusson, Missouri came two weeks before the decision not to indict Daniel Pantaleo in Staten Island, New York. Since there was no recording, no video clip of Wilson’s slaying of Michael Brown, the grand jury hearing that case was presented with widely varying and divergent testimonies of what actually took place in the fatal encounter. Moreover, the public prosecutor who presented the case to the grand jury was quite openly sympathetic to policemen and their unions in general and Darren Wilson in particular. In the absence of any recording of the fateful event, this white public prosecutor manipulated his presentation of the evidence to the grand jury in favor of Darren Wilson. At any rate, the case became one of the classic instances of “take-your-pick” between one man’s word against another man’s word, with the jurors left to choose which side of the evidentiary divide to lean toward. In a country in which, overwhelmingly, all-white or predominantly white jurors never rule against white police officers who kill unarmed black men, the die was cast and not too many people were surprised that Darren Wilson was declared free to walk away, no indictment if you please.

    Things were completely different in the case of Daniel Pantaleo and the grand jury that he faced in Staten Island, New York. The evidence against him presented in the video clip on the Internet was both unambiguous and overwhelming. The Chief Medical Examiner of New York City had proclaimed Pantaleo’s slaying of Garner a homicide. Moreover, the use of the chokehold with which he killed Garner had been banned by the New York City Police Department for more than a decade precisely because it had caused many deaths of suspects in the course of attempted arrests by police officers. Above all else, the evidence of the video clip not only showed that Garner was unarmed, it also showed that he was in fact jumped and pounded upon by five burly white policemen; since he could therefore not have escaped the grip of the arresting police officers even if he had wanted to, they did not have to apply lethal force in arresting him. For all these reasons, as people awaited the decision of the Staten Island grand jury in the wake of the disappointment of the decision of the Fergusson grand jury’s decision that had absolved Darren Wilson of any criminal indictment, the feeling was high among the general population in America that this was one case in which the police could not use the convenient argument of conflicting evidence to abort the cause of justice and let Daniel Pantaleo off the hook. But of course that is precisely what the grand jury in Staten Island did; they chose to completely ignore the damning evidence against Pantaleo and his fellow killer officers. In other words, to the impunity of the policemen who killed Garner, the grand jury members of Staten Island added their own impunity of complete disregard for the evidence provided in the video clip that showed to the whole world how Garner was killed.

    Impunity has its limits and sometimes those limits can make all the difference in the world. There have been countless cases in which all-white or predominantly white juries completely ignored clear-cut evidence of criminal wrongdoing of white policemen and consistently ruled to uphold and sustain terrible miscarriages of justice against black people, especially black men and teenagers in the inner city ghettoes of America. But those were days before the rise, rise and further rise of the age of social media in which the eyes of the whole world are turned on America and on every single nation on the planet. In the period before the advent of the social media to a place of commanding presence in the world, impunity in American race relations always relied on a cloistered, hidden and protected form of white tribalism. To most decent, progressive and fair-minded white people, this was always a cause of great shame, embarrassment and guilt, this protected and unashamed white tribalism that kept alive blatant forms of racism that belonged to the epochs of slavery and separate and unequal segregation. Now, the social media are relentlessly stripping the cover off this revanchist, murderous and racist white tribalism and things will never be the same again. In this past week alone, we have seen, read or heard about condemnations of the Staten Island grand jury by prominent groups and individuals among American whites that had always defended and supported grand juries that shielded white policemen who shot and killed unarmed black men or teenagers. Where this unprecedented departure from a long tradition and practice of defence of the racism of impunity will lead no one knows, but it is important to record this rupture, even if it is a small, inchoate one.

    At any rate, I repeat: impunity does have its limits. And I add: look for some of the most telling expressions of those limits in the effects and ramifications of the social media of the new and still unfolding digital age, with their anarchic, uncontrollable and contradictory tendencies.

    In conclusion, I ask the reader to please note that in this piece, I have limited myself to the racism of impunity. If it is the case that it is by far the worst form of racism, it is however not the only racism that the world still has to deal with. My main or underlying point in this essay – as well as in last week’s piece – has been to suggest that if this racism of impunity that is the worst of all forms of racism can find no refuge from the changing, transforming forces of 21st century experience, then we can agree with the utopian view of Frantz Fanon as stated in the epigraph to this piece: “Racism is not a constant of the human spirit”.         

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • “I can’t breathe; we can’t breathe”: enduring legacies and new, unprecedented responses to racism of impunity in the United States

    “I can’t breathe; we can’t breathe”: enduring legacies and new, unprecedented responses to racism of impunity in the United States

    Inthe video clip of the incident which, as the saying goes, has gone viral on the internet and has been seen all over the world, five white police officers of the New York Police Department (NYPD) are surrounding a black man who is on the ground and is saying repeatedly, “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe!” The black man is saying these words – which will be the very last words in his life – because one of the five white police officers has him in what is called a chokehold. This, in ordinary language, means a tightened grip around the neck that completely shuts down the airways to the lungs. In my own careful watching of this video clip several times, I was able to establish that the black man, whose name was Eric Garner, says “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe” about eight times.

    This video clip of course refers to the tragic and fateful incident that has given rise to the most potent and resonant slogan of the current country-wide protests and demonstrations in the United States against the recurrent slaying of unarmed black men and boys by white police officers. The slogan – which I have chosen to include in the title of this essay – is: “I can’t breathe; we can’t breathe!” In a country which prides itself as the most important bastion of democracy and the rule of law in the world, a country which wants to be perceived by all the other regions and nations of the planet as the world’s most tolerant and accommodating nation when it comes to respect for racial, religious and cultural diversity, it is logical that demonstrators and protestors from all racial groups in the country quickly realized that Eric Garner, in his fateful last words, was speaking for everybody who is not a racist, not a bigot, not a moral and spiritual cretin. Thus, out of what might well have been the anonymity and senselessness of his death, Eric Garner has emerged in his dying words as the ersatz prophet of an America and a world that are moving, if ever so slightly and imperceptibly, to a world in which racist killers in police uniforms and with institutional authority can no longer set the benchmark for what unites or divides us as members of one single human race or community.

    But this is perhaps moving too quickly. We need to dwell a little longer on Garner’s fateful encounter with the policemen who took his life. And we need to look also at other incidents of the slaying of unarmed black men by racist killers in police uniforms. I have stated that I counted eight times when Garner uttered the words, “I can’t breathe”. Others who have come forward to give a public account of their viewing of the video clip of the encounter have said that they counted Garner’s utterance of “I can’t breathe” up to eleven times. To me, the actual number does not really matter. What matters is that once or twice should have been enough for the white police officer – whose name is Daniel Pantaleo –  to relax his chokehold on Garner’s neck, especially since the use of the chokehold to arrest people by any of its officers has been banned by the NYPD for more than a decade now.

    Parenthetically, it should be noted that the “crime” for which the violent, murderous arrest of Garner’s life was perpetrated was the illegal selling of cigarettes in singles and not in packets. In most parts of the world, this “crime” is known as street vending and it involves hundreds of millions of poor people. More astonishing, more poignant is the fact that none of the four other white police officers asked Pantaleo to stop when Garner was saying “I can’t breathe”. Indeed, the worst, the most nightmarish thing that one sees in the ghoulish video clip of the event is the attitude of all the white officers after they realize that the black man, Garner, is no longer speaking and no longer responsive to anything around him: they do absolutely nothing to resuscitate Garner. Indeed in the video clip, the last thing that we see of Pantaleo, the man who choked the breath of life out of Garner, is this killer chatting casually with one of the other officers and waving merrily to the camera of the cell phone that was recording this terrible event.

    This past week, a so-called “grand jury” in New York found nothing wrong, nothing criminally homicidal in the slaying of Garner by Pantaleo and decided that he should not be prosecuted. Indeed, as I am writing this essay on Friday, December 5, 2014, there are huge protests and demonstrations taking place in many cities across the length and breadth of the United States involving black and white protestors and demonstrators against this particularly heinous decision of the New York grand jury. This statement has to be corrected: the protests and demonstrations are not only about the New York incident; they are about similar incidents in two other places in the country within the space of the last two weeks.

    To get a sharp sense of the present and ongoing crisis in the United States engendered by this phenomenon of the slaying of unarmed black men by white police officers, it is useful to give a few details of these other recent cases against the historic background of yet other similar cases that go back several decades before this most recent case of Eric Garner in New York City. By far the most hotly disputed but most widely reported of these cases is the slaying of Michael Brown, a black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri in July by one Darren Wilson, a white patrolman in the small town’s local police force. Brown was actually fleeing from Wilson when he was shot and killed. Then there was the far more incredible case of 12-year old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio a week and half ago. He was playing in a public park with a toy gun and upon a radioed report to the police from someone at the park that he was waving and pointing his gun at people in the park, young Tamir was shot dead within two seconds of the arrival of two white police officers at the park, no questions asked of him.

    And of course, there are the innumerable other cases stretching back to three to four decades ago: Michael Stewart, strangled by eleven white police officers in New York in 1983; a couple, Mr. and Mrs. Russell who, for a minor traffic infraction, was chased in their lone car by 62 police cars in Cleveland, Ohio; when they were eventually stopped by the more then five dozen police cars, the couple had more than 137 shots pumped into their bodies by 13 police officers, one of who stood on the roof of the Russell’s car and shot his barrage of shots through the windscreen of the car. Indeed, in a report on the Oakland, California Police Department released by the Federal Department of Justice, it was stated that of 45 shootings of unarmed people between 2004 and 2008, 37 of the shootings were of black men, none of white men and the remaining 8 were of non-white Latino or other people of color.

    What does this profile tell us? How can one justify my claim that there is, or ought to be, a plausible line between Garner’s last words – “I can’t breathe” – to the other half of the slogan of the coalition of protestors and demonstrators who are saying “We can’t breathe”? For unfortunately, concerning the phenomenon of the regularity and the outrage with which white police officers in America kill unarmed black man, about the only thing that one can presume that most people in America and the rest of the world know is the fact that white police officers do not kill unarmed white men with the same regularity, the same impunity and outrage with which they kill black men. In other words, most people in America and the rest of the world know only too well that the fact that racist cops kill or maim black men and get away with these crimes indicates that black lives do not matter to these cops and their supporters among white people. But not too many people know that while the main flank of the opposition to the persistence of this very old racist violence against black people is led by black people, there are hundreds of thousands of white people, most of them young, who are also resolutely opposed to this residual old-style racist violence in the law enforcement agencies and central judicial systems of the United States of America. Permit me to clarify what I am getting at in making this observation, this assertion.

    For the greater part of its half a millennium history as first a colony and then an independent, slave-owning republic, racist violence against black people was both the letter and the norm of the law of the land in the United States. This was obvious during the centuries of the legal enslavement of black people, for it is in the very nature of chattel slavery that the owner had rights not only to the person of the slave but to his or her life as well. In the long post-emancipation period of legal and unequal segregation that is the immediate background to modern race relations in the United States, the threat, the practice and the impunity of murderous violence against black people was the main means of enforcing segregation. Segregation was dehumanizing, it was impoverishing, it was all-pervasive and only the threat and the practice of murderous violence, legal and illegal, could secure and consolidate its legitimacy. This is why, apart from social, economic and educational desegregation itself, one of the most significant victories against racial segregation in America was making murderous, racist violence against black people no longer legal, no longer unashamed, no longer capable of being done with impunity.

    To most decent, thinking, non-racist people of all racial groups in the United States, the recent spate of incidents in which white police officers go scot-free after slaying unarmed black men or boys has thrown up a profound crisis of conscience and confidence. To be a member of this group of decent, non-racist people, you have to believe with all your heart and soul that while the old, blatant, unashamed and violent racism of the past has not yet gone out of existence, it remains only as a vestigial element among lunatic fringe groups of the most conservative race supremacists in the U.S. and Western Europe like the KKK, the Aryan Brotherhood and the National Front. The crisis comes when this old racism that was and is never afraid or embarrassed to show its face, this racism that is murderously violent is revealed to have a solid and almost impregnable habitation in central institutions of the state like the law enforcement agencies, the judiciary and some outspoken outlets in American mainstream media of information like The Daily Post of New York City and the Fox News Network. But we must recognize this racism as an old, old racism that is on its last legs. It draws its strength and resilience from newer and more subtle forms of racism. And from its opponents who play into its hands by not recognizing that the fight against this old, hoary racism will be won only on the condition that we know and accept that when one black man or boy “can’t breathe” men and women of all races and social groups “can’t breathe” either.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • A generous, joyous and romantic eccentricity at the molten core of theatre and life

    A generous, joyous and romantic eccentricity at the molten core of theatre and life

    (For Dapo Adelugba, 1939-2014: egbon, teacher and mentor)

    WHEN the text message came to me from Femi Osofisan informing me that we had lost him, I screamed back a response that carried the full weight of the devastating shock that I felt: : “WHEN and HOW did he die?” Femi replied simply: “check your email”. And I did and found not one, but two emails. One was from Siji, the late Emeritus Professor’s brother and a friend of more than half a century; his email stoically accepted the inevitable and gave thanks for a life that had been prodigious in service to the nation and humanity. The other email was from Jahman Anikulapo that had been forwarded to me by Femi himself; this email hinted at a death that could easily have been avoided by observance of the most elementary protocols of professionalism in medical practice in our country. I think I shall always and forever be caught between the inscriptions in these two emails. One: “gbese ni’ku; ko s’eni ti ko ni lo” (“death is a debt that we all owe and none shall leave this life alive”). Two: the terribly and monstrously backward state of medical practice in Nigeria has itself become the bedrock of the banal “inevitability” of death in our country. In many other parts of the contemporary world, while death’s “inevitability” has not been obliterated, it has been enormously constrained, almost to the point of redundancy.

    The bitterness of these opening observations in this tribute has a very concrete and particular basis. Sometime late last year, I had had a series of conversations with Siji and Femi and others on how we might all work together to smoothen the relocation of Professor Adelugba to Ibadan. He had finally “retired” from his post-retirement contract with Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria. For a while he had stayed on in Zaria but had then moved to Lagos. But anyone who knows the slightest thing about him knows that Ibadan is his spiritual home. And it is the one place that has the largest concentration of those with whom he had experienced the happiest, most memorable and productive years of his professional and personal life. At any rate, it was with a great, optimistic expectation that I “conspired” with others late last year to welcome “Uncle D” back to Ibadan. I looked forward to resuming old, unfinished discussions with him; and I was excited by anticipation of new topics of discourse that we would almost certainly engage in. As recently as last week as I began to prepare for my annual seven-week visit home every December, this long-awaited anticipation of linking up again with “Uncle D” was high on the list of pleasures that my visit home would yield. This is the emotional context for that response that I screamed back to Femi when I received his email informing me of Professor Adelugba’s death: “WHEN and HOW did he die?”

    In the death of Dapo Adelugba, the world of the arts, the humanities and, especially theatre in academia in our country and in Africa has lost one of its legendary pioneering figures. Absolutely, he was one of a kind. He was loved, he was revered by generations of his students with something approaching hero-worship. To those who were never directly his students, this always seemed mysterious. But nothing was as free of mystery as the foundation of the worshipful devotion of Uncle D’s hundreds, maybe thousands of students. For the simple but profoundly moving thing about this assertion is the fact that Adelugba made every single one of his students feel that she or he was important, was special. He gave equal attention, equal time and energy to every single student. Every paper that was ever written and submitted to him was read and graded with great care; and he made detailed commentary on every single paper submitted to him. As if that was not enough, he made himself available to every single student who wanted a personal one-on-one follow-up on top of the copious comments that he’d made on a paper. I testify that as a teacher myself, I have never met any teacher, any colleague that equaled Uncle D on this particular point.

    Indeed, when I was one of his undergraduate students in the late 1960s, I often marveled at this generosity that in my personal experience was unequalled. Typically, we were relatively few in our classes at that period of the history of higher education in Nigeria. For instance, in one of the most formative classes that I took with him which was on dramatic criticism, there were only about eight of us in the class. Imagine my surprise then when many decades later I read glowing testimonies affirming this same generosity from Adelugba’s students from another period when class size had more than quadrupled beyond what we were used to in my time at U.I. Only a tiny minority of the most conscientious teachers ever aspires to reach every single one of their students; far more remarkable is the fact that among this order of the elect among teachers, it is very rare to have what it takes to fulfill that noble aspiration. Uncle D was a scion of this order of the elect among teachers. He gave an unquantifiably large chunk of his life to his students. Since he was only human, this took a great toll on him, but this is not the occasion to dwell on this particular matter.

    Adelugba was of course not a saintly mentor who suffered fools and slackers among his students silently; he was not a guru presiding over an ashram of god-obsessed neophytes. He was a workaholic teacher and mentor who demanded from his students what he demanded of himself. He was quick to anger and he tended to express this anger tempestuously. Quite often, the cause of the anger was, to the offender, so slight, so inscrutable as to be quixotic. This was perhaps the basis of a reputation that over time he garnered as the chief exemplar of a defining eccentricity among U.I. Theatre Department professors and lecturers! But since he was the very embodiment of generosity, since he had a laughter that was unique in its affability and emotional resonance, no professor’s or lecturer’s “eccentricity” was more tolerable – and tolerated – than his.

    The vocation of teaching is of course not a contentless abstraction; as a teacher you school, you mentor students in a particular subject, a particular academic discipline: Physics or Chemistry; Mathematics or Sociology; History or Geography. In the case of drama, theatre and the arts as a composite academic discipline and practice in our country, it was part of his destiny that Adelugba shared the pioneering spotlight with other legendary figures like Geoff Axworthy, Wole Soyinka, Joel Adedeji, Demas Nwoko, Dexter Lyndersay and Ola Rotimi. These men – among whom only Soyinka and Nwoko are still with us – were/are all without exception endowed with great talent and equally great egos. I make this assertion absolutely without any sarcasm, any irony, any criticism. It is in the very nature of pioneers in all fields of endeavor to be driven, to be single-minded, to be eccentric. To this, add the significant fact that in the period when drama and theatre were being established as a composite academic discipline at U.I., there was very little sympathy, talk less of understanding among the powers that be in the academic pecking order of the university. Many of the most eminent and powerful professors at the time could not bring themselves to understand and lend their support to the move to transform the old School of Drama to a Department of Theatre Arts. Even when the transition eventually took place, the old antagonism, the old philistine condescension towards the arts and theatre persisted. With his own peculiar brand of “eccentricity” that I am calling generous, joyous and romantic in this piece, Adelugba played one of the most central roles in these pioneering efforts to provide a valid and respected place for theatre and drama in the curriculum of Nigerian universities. What exactly does this assertion entail?

    With the possible exception of Soyinka, Adelugba was the most self-assured in his knowledge of, and immersion in local and international currents of the world’s drama, theatre and the arts. He came to the profession of academic teaching with legendary feats as an actor and theatre director in his student days at the old U.C.I. and his teaching stint at the Ibadan Grammar School. As “Suberu” in That Scoundrel Suberu that he adapted from one of Moliere’s plays, as Murano in The Road, as Dawodu in Kongi’s Harvest, and as Old Man in Madmen and Specialists (my favorite among the many roles that he performed in Soyinka’s plays) he had regaled hundreds of secondary school and university students as the country’s uncontested leading actor in the then newly emergent Nigerian drama and theatre in English. As a theatre director whose charisma and enthusiasm were unparalleled, he gave much joy and enrichment to his actors and technical crew. As the School of Drama was transforming into the Department of Theatre Arts, he was the chief pedagogue of the central disciplines of acting and directing. More than perhaps any other person, he produced the largest crop of the most talented younger generation of theatre directors in the country. The times that I spent as an actor in his productions were unquestionably some of the happiest times in my undergraduate years at U.I. I know for a fact that most of my classmates who were in his productions felt the same way. And in his classes, we encountered texts of dramatic literature and criticism from virtually all the regions of the world that went far beyond the narrow British focus of the authors and texts that I encountered in my major in the English Department. In short and to summarize the essential point that I am making here, in Adelugba Nigeria’s and Africa’s pioneering theatre department found one of its most cosmopolitan, charismatic and self-assured voices in its hard fought struggle for legitimacy.

    For good or ill, it also came to pass that Adelugba outstayed all the other pioneers of the great project of making drama and theatre a valid and respected discipline in Nigerian universities. Long after either death or other interests had diverted his fellow pioneers away from academia, he stayed on. He was thus the longest serving senior academic teacher and administrator of drama and theatre in our country. Today, his protégés constitute the single most pervasive and influential bloc of senior academics in theatre departments in universities in Nigeria and across the African continent. This is a monumental achievement. But it is not without its ambiguities.

    I do not claim to fully comprehend exactly what happened but it seems that after legitimacy was won, after most of his fellow pioneers had departed, Adelugba turned his attention to mass production of Ph Ds, apparently as part of U.I.’s  self-reinvention as primarily a research rather than a teaching university. With this paradigm shift, the U.I. Graduate School became big and the mass production of the next generation of Nigeria’s professoriate began in earnest. I am told that no department in the University has been more eager in fulfilling this new mission than the Theatre Arts Department and no professor in the entire University has produced more Ph Ds than Adelugba.

    It is too soon to produce a final verdict on this particular aspect of Adelugba’s rich legacy. That will come long after all of us are gone. I sincerely hope that when that verdict comes, it will be kinder to his memory than the toll that the effort exacted on his life in the last two to three decades. Conscientious and generous to the last, as he mass produced these Ph Ds, he lived virtually in his office, poring over overlong tomes of doctoral dissertation. It was very injurious to his health. And he became reclusive, very reclusive. When he was still in Ibadan before relocating to Zaria, I sometimes visited him at his house on campus. For the most part the conversations went well on these visits. But it was his laughter that I always looked forward to and always cherished the most during the visits. In my experience, the only other person who had laughter to match his was the late Agbo Folarin. Adelugba’s laughter was fulsome, it came in gales or waves of a pure release of mirth that crested in an expressive summit at which, in my imagination, Adelugba could see all of life’s absurdities, challenges and promises with equanimity. But instead of ending on that summit, the laughter would start anew in gales and waves that would crest in still other summits, on and on and on. I can think of no better image for his life and career. He is gone now. But he was here, he was here.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • “Fail in English, fail in all” – and my conditioned envy of Physics and Mathematics

    “Fail in English, fail in all” – and my conditioned envy of Physics and Mathematics

    It took me a long time to discover that the great professional or intellectual envy that I have had of Mathematics and Physics (and of mathematicians and physicists) all my adult life had its roots in my secondary school education, especially with regard to what we used to call “fail in English, fail in all”. I say “envy” deliberately, for I could as well have said “admiration”. This is because while I have a great admiration for all the sciences and scientists, especially the really gifted and conscientious among them, what I feel about Mathematicians and Physicists is envy. Admiration is to envy what possibility is to improbability: we admire what is within our ability to achieve and envy what seems totally beyond our capability to master. This is what I feel about Physics and Mathematics.

    This disciplinary or professional envy is one of the unspoken, subconscious highlights of my life as a professional academic. It is not an envy that drives me crazy with distraction, thank heavens! But it is enough to make me know that it is an unwelcome and perhaps psychologically unhealthy thing. And only this realization has stopped me from quitting my job as a Professor of Comparative Literature and going to enroll in a bachelor’s programme for a combined honors degree in Mathematics and Physics! Ah, “fail in English, fail in all”, what roiling confusion thou hast wrought in my adult intellectual life!

    Of course, since I dare not presume that most of those reading this piece know what “fail in English, fail in all” exactly meant in the lives and careers of all secondary school pupils in my teenage years, I suppose I had better explain the term and its meanings first before attempting to show its linkage with my envy of Mathematicians and Physicists. The phrase literally meant what it proclaimed. Before the creation of the West African Examinations Council (WAEC), the examining body for all secondary schools in English-speaking West Africa was based in Cambridge, England. This was the period in which the “fail in English, fall in all” policy was put in place. It meant that if you failed in English, you were automatically denied the passes that you might have recorded in all other subjects for which you might have sat in your school leaving exams. But the real emotional force of the phrase went far beyond literalism. For not only did you automatically fail all other subjects if you failed in English, you had to retake all those other subjects with English in the next round of the Cambridge school leaving exams. Everyone in my generation (and several generations before ours) knew or had heard of hapless, unlucky students who sat year after year for the Cambridge School Certificate Exams and failed year after year only because they had failed in English while sometimes performing brilliantly in the other subjects. Indeed, it was not unknown for the educational prospects of many otherwise brilliant students who could never obtain a pass in English to founder and crash only on the basis of this policy of “fail in English, fail in all”.

    With English being my very best subject, I was of course one of the few very lucky students who were completely immune to the real and imagined traumas of this policy. And I knew it, perhaps knew it in a manner that would ultimately work against me, though I did not know this at the time. All I knew, all most of the other students never let me forget was the fact that I was relieved of the endless hours and herculean efforts that others put into passing in English. This was made all the more blessed for me – so I thought at the time – by the fact that my ease with and in English opened the doors for excellent grades in other subjects like Literature, History, Government and Religious Studies, these being subjects in which competence in English was considered essential and mastery a divine gift. This meant in effect that with English, I was assured of automatic excellent passes in FIVE subjects. All I had to do, all I thought I had to do was perform well in two other subjects and I was okay. In my case, those other subjects were Geography and Chemistry in which I did sufficiently well without ever having really had to apply myself rigorously to their specific demands as academic subjects.

    At this stage in this piece, perhaps it is necessary for me to pause and explain the colonial basis of this “fail in English, fail in all” policy as this was an absolutely crucial aspect of general educational policy in the colonies of Great Britain. On the surface, this colonial dimension was merely apparent; it did not loom large in our consciousness. English was the medium of instruction in all subjects and this was the reason why a pass in English was compulsory, not because English was the language of our colonizers, the language of our cultural and linguistic tutelage. This is what we were told. And it is necessary to point out that we were given this rationalization of the policy by black, Nigerian and not white, English teachers. But dig a little deeper into the historic context and the impregnable colonial basis of the policy was revealed. For instance, it never occurred to us until after the policy had been relaxed or completely retired why students who failed in English had to redo ALL subjects over again, including even subjects in which excellent passes had been recorded. I mean, why did they not simply have students who had failed in English retake only English? What was the point of making such students retake every single subject if the whole basis of the policy was not to make English the language of colonial triumphalism?

    Almost a half century later I see it now, but I must confess that I did not see anything wrong as such with the policy when I was one of its few lucky beneficiaries. I was sympathetic to its victims, especially the students who we thought were “wizards” in the sciences but who somehow never seemed capable of finding their graces in English, the key that opened the doors to success in many other subjects, the language of the imperial lords of the planet. The worst part of my memory of this period in my life is the realization that the policy was a vital part of the general colonial educational policy of keeping the number of high school products that would or could go on to higher degrees through university education very, very low. And indeed, it was not until WAEC replaced Cambridge as the examining body and students could combine passes in the West African School Certificate Examination (WASCE) with passes in the General Certificate of Education (GCE) that it became possible for university education to be available to thousands of high school leavers that could never have got past the iron gates of “fail in English, fail in all”.

    How does this all connect with the besotted envy of Mathematics and Physics of my intellectual adulthood? Well, I must emphasize the fact that what I see now with great clarity I simply did not see, did not comprehend then. For I realize now that  deep down, I must have felt a deep fascination with these two particular subjects. This may have been because they were the two subjects that I found the most challenging, the most resistant to my efforts, not to achieve mastery but to get a bare, working knowledge of their “mysteries”. There was a rather funny and poignant way in which this was manifested: the brightest students in Mathematics and Physics envied my consistently excellent performance in English and plainly showed it; but clothed in the marvelous cloak of English, I could not and did not show them my envy of Mathematics and Physics. However, I could not hide this truth from myself, even if I wanted to – which I didn’t. For I knew only too well how I often secretly leafed through the pages of Mathematics and Physics textbooks marveling at the strange and endlessly fascinating “language”  that I found in those textbooks. And I knew only too well the tremor that coursed through my whole body when the “wizards” of Mathematics and Physics among my classmates held their own against our teachers in these subjects.

    In my adult intellectual life, I of course came to a much better understanding of these aspects of the great miseducation that that “fail in English, fail in all” policy had wrought in my life as a professional academic. Permit me to become rather sentimental in my expression of this pathos. I think I was/we were all born into this world to have a working knowledge of Physics and Mathematics, to avail myself/ourselves of their incredibly rich methodologies and procedures for understanding the physical laws of the universe and the logical, abstract relations between numbers, phenomena and things that we cannot easily perceive with only our eyes and the other sensory organs. I was/we were born into this world to penetrate the veil that hides super-small things and relationships from our perception. But that accursed “fail in English, fail in all” policy made it impossible for me to realize these things for which I was born into this life to know and appreciate from the closeness of, if not of an expert, then of a competent amateur. How did this happen, you ask?

    You see, I had bad teachers in Mathematics and Physics. But this did not bother me in the least – until it was too late. If I had had bad teachers in English, I and my classmates would have raised hell and protested mightily. But we did not protest at all against the bad teachers that we had in Physics and Mathematics. Indeed, now that I think about it, I realize with the shock of recollected memory that the students who were good in these two subjects did not protest either. They were far too busy worrying about passing in English to expend their energies on subjects they knew they could easily pass even without good teachers. When eventually I wanted to protest against the bad teachers that I had in Physics and Mathematics, it was about four decades too late!

    I do not wish to end this piece on a sad, defeated note. If the conclusion that I wish to make is not exactly buoyantly optimistic, it is nonetheless hopeful. Now, I know more about and of Physics and Mathematics than I knew two or three decades ago. For the most part, I have been learning – again – the most basic and rudimentary aspects of these two subjects from scratch and mostly by self-instruction. I shall never get a combined honors bachelor’s degree in Physics and Mathematics, but I am slowly coming to a deep and gratified appreciation of the practical applications of these subjects in modern societies and modern life. That’s enough for me. Q.E.D.

     

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • American midterm elections, 2014: two-thirds standing beside one-third in the shadow of big capital

    American midterm elections, 2014: two-thirds standing beside one-third in the shadow of big capital

    Where one thing stands, another thing will stand beside it.
    Chinua Achebe, “The Truth of Fiction”

    Come and see, American wonder, come and see American wonder!/Come and see American wonder, come and see American wonder!
    The single, repeated line of a magicians’ song from my childhood

    A big tidal wave, a tsunami, a landslide, a complete and unmitigated rout: these are some of the metaphors or terms that have been applied to the defeat of the Democratic Party by the Republicans in the just concluded American midterm elections of 2014. The defeat is so thorough, so crushing that you have to go back to almost a half century to see something close to it in modern American political and electoral history. The Republicans not only expanded their control of the House of Representatives and regained control of the Senate, they did so by taking seven senatorial seats away from the Democrats, four of those in so-called “purple or swing states” that had voted for Barrack Obama in the presidential elections of 2012. Moreover, in local and state elections around the country, the Republicans wrested control of governorships from states like Maryland and Massachusetts that are some of the “bluest” states in America where “blue” means heavily Democrat, red means heavily Republican and “purple” means a swing state that could vote Democratic or Republican depending on how successful the party which wins such state is in winning voters away from the other party.

    As a matter of fact, the thorough defeat of the Democrats was compounded by the fact that many legislatures throughout the length and breadth of the American hinterland are now controlled by the Republicans. This means that with their expanded control of the machinery of local politics and administration across the country, the Republicans can, and will almost certainly, tinker with existing state and local laws so as to redraw the electoral map of the country to tilt things in their favor in future local, state, federal and presidential elections. There is not the slightest doubt about it: this week the Democrats, with their far more progressive positions on internal American and global affairs than the Republicans, suffered an electoral rout greater than any defeat they had experienced in recent memory.

    With regard to my own emotions as I sat watching television coverage of the elections on Tuesday night, two things stood out above all others in mind. One: I recalled the famous, tongue-in-cheek observation of the contemporary German philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, that because of America’s significance for the rest of the world, all other countries on the planet ought to be able to vote in one way or another in American elections. Two: because as I watched and listened to the tidal wave of the rout of the Democrats I did so as a person from the Third World, a person who divides his time between Cambridge, Massachusetts and Ibadan, Nigeria, I was able to see a silver lining of progressive, liberal trends in the dark and ominous clouds of the Republicans’ conservative electoral victory that I imagine most Americans are probably not predisposed to perceive. These two observations lie at the root of my reflections in this piece.

    First of all, let me highlight a few of indications of progressive undercurrents in what otherwise looks like a massive endorsement of the Republicans’ conservative politics and policies in the 2014 midterms. Some of these are in fact very pertinent to the state of affairs in the rest of the world, especially in our country and our continent. In this respect, perhaps the single most remarkable feature of these recent American midterm elections is the fact that everywhere in the country in which it was contested as a ballot initiative, an increase in mandatory minimum wage won by huge majorities. This victory for instituting a mandatory minimum wage was all the more remarkable in that it took place in even the “reddest” and most conservative states in the country. This rousing electoral victory for poor and average American working families should be seen against the background of the fact that – again in every part of the country – exit polls of voters indicated that most Americans believe that the American economy is massively rigged to favor the super-rich that constitute less than 2% of the population.

    To readers who might think that I am placing so much emphasis on these “hidden” aspects of the 2014 midterm American elections only because I tend to see “talakawas” in every part of the world, my response is that if Americans, since the economic crash of 2008, have been speaking of an ever-widening gap between the few super-rich and the rest of the populace, I can only concur with them, based in part on the evidence of what I see with my own eyes and what I read in mainstream American news media. In this respect, one particularly pertinent thing that I read in virtually all the major news outlets in America is the fact that while these recent elections are by far the costliest in American electoral history, it so happens that these elections also recorded the lowest voter turnout in recent memory. Here are the specifics: the total amount spent was around $3.7 billion and it was financed by 0.2% of America’s population of 316 million; the percentage of registered voters that participated in the elections was about 34%. This is a staggering feature of American democracy at the present moment: electoral victories are being “bought” by lesser and lesser percentages of the population; but this is happening because voter apathy is getting higher and higher. This is why, in his first post-election press conference, Barrack Obama stated that he clearly hears both the verdict of the one-third who did vote in the elections and the verdict of the two-thirds of the electorate who did not vote.

    It is instructive to compare the voter turnout figure of 34% in these recent American midterm elections with the figure of close to 85% of registered voters that participated in the referendum on Scotland’s continued membership of the United Kingdom in September. In our own part of the world, the Ekiti State governorship election recorded voter apathy of immense proportions last April. Thus, voter apathy is not a constant and invariant aspect of 21st century democracy in our world. In the first epigraph to this essay, I make an allusion to one of my favorite aphorisms from Chinua Achebe’s writings: where one thing stands, another thing will stand beside it. I must add here that I have never thought that Achebe intended in that adage for us to think that the thing that stands beside another thing does so complacently, lost in confusion or perplexity. Rather, in nature and society, one thing stands beside another as a corrective, an alternative, an indication other choices and directions. The tidal wave of Republican victory in the 2014 midterm elections will be repeated only if the two-thirds continue to stand lamely and ineffectually beside the one-third that is bought and tied up by big capital. American domestic affairs are remarkably similar to the domestic affairs of most of the nations of the planet precisely because in most of the regions and nations of the planet, nearly everyone is in the shadow of big capital. What sets America apart from most of the rest of the world is the fact that its foreign interests and affairs are unlike the foreign affairs and interests of most of the other nations of the world. The Republicans know this and know it well; and they exploit this knowledge to the fullest extent possible. One of the most notable aspects of Obama’s presidency has been the attempt to align and bring closer together American domestic and foreign affairs and interests. He and the Democrats will never succeed in this attempt unless and until they make the idle and complacent two-thirds struggle powerfully against the bought and delivered one-third of the American electorate.

    An atheist obsessed with preaching the gospel of the non-existence of God

    When, about four and half decades ago I stopped being a Christian and a religionist, one of the things I decided was that I would never seriously concern myself with questions concerning the existence and non-existence of God. This decision was at first rather subconscious; when people tried to draw me into discussion of the issue, I would simply avoid it without any comment. But by the time that I entered into my forties, the decision became something of a guiding ethical principle of my mental and psychic life. As a consequence, I made a solemn promise to myself that as far as religious beliefs and practices were concerned, I would never strive to change any person’s belief in the existence of God and neither would I make it my business to shore up any person’s unbelief in God’s existence. The issues involved in this resolution are very complex and perhaps in future essays in this column, I may take them up.

    I make this observation against the background of a response to the recent series in this column on “religion and science, faith and rationality” from one Gilbert Alabi Diche that was titled “Jeyifo, religion and science” and was published last Sunday in this paper on page 15. Before sending this response to the Editor of The Nation on Sunday for publication, Mr. Diche had sent me two long emails in which he argued passionately that I was being too soft, too accommodating to religion in my series. In particular, Mr. Diche argued in his emails to me that I should have kept belief in God completely out of and separate from science and the scientific ethos. In my one response to his two emails, I told Mr. Diche that I had no interest whatsoever in being drawn into the controversy over the existence or non-existence of God. I went further to inform him that the essential difference for me between human beings was not whether one believed or did not believe in God; the essential difference was between those who used either their belief or unbelief in the service of the human community or against the public good.

    Apparently, Mr. Diche was not satisfied with my response to his private emails to me and for this reason, he went public and had his rejoinder published last week. Fair enough; that is his right. But he has no right to completely and willfully distort the things I had stated in my series. As a matter of fact, it is extremely damaging to his arguments to resort to deliberate distortions and fabrications of the things I had stated in my series, things that can be very easily shown to be deliberate inventions or fabrications. In most of these fabrications, parts of sentences from diverse parts of the series are brought together through ellipsis to make new sentences or assertions that were not there in my series. The most egregious of these can be found where Mr. Diche writes in his rejoinder last Sunday: “Jeyifo also claims that ‘All Nobel laureates in the sciences … also believe in God’. This is a blatant lie”. This is simply beyond belief because there is no such sentence in any of the three articles in my series on religion and science. As I ponder the reason why Mr. Diche HAD to invent this and other fabrications in his rejoinder, I wonder whether or not he has not metamorphosed into the thing about religion that he so passionately opposes: the human transmitter of the gospel of an avatar that has taken complete control of his rationality, this being the deity of unbelief in the existence of God.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • At the National Education Summit (NES 2014): Is there a dividing line between the failing Nigerian state and its utterly failed educational system? [For Dipo Fasina, the Convener of NES 2014]

    At the National Education Summit (NES 2014): Is there a dividing line between the failing Nigerian state and its utterly failed educational system? [For Dipo Fasina, the Convener of NES 2014]

    The National Education Summit (NES) that took place in Abuja this week is unquestionably the most comprehensive and radical response that has ever been made to the colossal educational crisis in our country. Of course, since I was the Chairman at the Summit, it can be said, quite truthfully, that I make this observation not as a disinterested and neutral reporter who is looking back at an event at which he was not a participant, not an interested party. But as the reader will soon find out from my report and reflections in this piece, even persons and organizations opposed to both the organizers and objectives of the Summit will find it hard to fault my assertion at the very start of this piece that in NES 2014, we had something that is without precedent in the history of attempts to respond appropriately to the terribly dysfunctional state of education at all levels in our country at the present time. First, a word on the range and diversity of organizations and stakeholders that were both responsible for and present at the Summit.

    Officially, all the four Unions in our universities were listed as the organizers of the Summit. These are the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU); the National Association of Academic Technologists (NAAT); the Non-Academic Staff Union of Educational and Associated Institutions (NASU); and the Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities (SSANU). But consider the fact that these four unions not only worked together to make NES 2014 happen, they also collaborated with the Federal Ministry of Education, the Ministries of Education of all the states of the federation and virtually all the major non-governmental and civil society organizations in the country that have anything to do with education at all levels in Nigeria.

    Indeed, in planning for and inviting participants to the Summit, all the governing councils of all universities in the country were contacted and invited, as were student bodies of all the universities in the land. Moreover, bodies such as the National Universities Commission (NUC), the Committee of Vice Chancellors, the Committee of Pro-Chancellors that usually regard themselves as serving interests and constituencies that own or regulate our educational institutions and those who work in them were consulted, invited and did actually send representatives to the Summit. Finally, associations of professionals like lawyers, doctors were also invited to the Summit and many of them sent representatives.

    I have meticulously gone over this comprehensive list of organizations and institutions consulted and invited to the Summit not merely in order to impress the reader with sheer numerical scale but, far more importantly to underscore the fact that at NES 2014 itself, not a single group, organization or person among this long list enjoyed any special privilege over others. The protocols of formal courtesy and deference did not last beyond the ceremonial opening session on Monday. Pro-Chancellors, Vice Chancellors and Deputy Vice Chancellors got no special treatment of any kind that distinguished them from students and non-academic staff present at the Summit. I personally keenly felt and secretly enjoyed this radical overthrow of Nigerians’ great love of deference to status, authority and privilege. As the Chairman of the Summit, the expression of formal or symbolic deference to me did not last beyond the first day of the Summit; from the second day to the fifth and final day, I was just another delegate and any courtesies or expressions of respect to me came from junior colleagues and was based solely on their sense of my professional work. Very distinguished professors and highly respected public figures mixed very freely with everyone else as if we were not in Nigeria but in another nation in a different region of the planet. I was particularly bemused to watch some Pro-Chancellors, VCs and DVCs being denied the countless acts and expressions of exaggerated obeisance to which they feel entitled and which they normally receive; they put on a brave face and acted like genuine, born-again democrats! [Normally, the only time this ever happens in our universities is when protesting students corner a VC, DVC or Chairman of Council in a rough patch of a campus that is in the grip of militant or violent turmoil]

    In case the point I am making through this profile of a radical practice of popular democracy at NES 2014 is not clear and unambiguous, permit me to make it explicit. In seeing some of the most highly placed officials of our tertiary institutions in free and open dialogue with senior professors, mid-career lecturers and the most humble members of our academic communities together with concerned citizens and organizations outside the educational sector, it felt as if we were in the only truly liberated space in Nigeria, a space in which what mattered, what motivated everyone present was not hierarchies of power, status or perquisites but the rescue, the liberation of our country’s educational system from its present near comatose state. Indeed, I solemnly testify here that in at least the last decade, I have not been anywhere of, or read or heard about any assemblage of people and organizations as in NES 2014 where Nigerians were gathered, not to give praise to God, not to jockey for money, position or power but simply and only to reflect on what needs to be done to liberate our country from its present dire and worsening conditions.

    This observation leads me directly to the two distinct but interlocking ideas that served as a sort of intellectual and ideological motive force for NES 2014, these being the liberation of Nigeria itself and a liberating education for all Nigerians, especially the pupils and students of our primary, secondary and tertiary institutions and the teachers who work in them. Please note that in the last sentence of the previous paragraph, I speak of the liberation of our country. This is significant, given the fact that the actual theme of the Summit was the liberation of the system of education in Nigeria at all levels from the forces that currently keep it backward, dysfunctional and crisis-ridden. The liberation of Nigeria; the liberation of education in Nigeria: these were the animating ideas of the Summit. Some of the most brilliant and penetrating presentations at the Summit astutely merged these two ideas.

    Without in the least intending any departure from the practice of radical popular democracy at the Summit, I mention here particular presentations and interventions from the floor in which these two ideas were brilliantly and compellingly fused and articulated and these were presentations or interventions by Emeritus Professors PAI Obanya and Otonti Nduka, Professors Toye Olorode, Asisi Asobie, Abdulai Sule-Kano, Demola Popoola and Comrade Biodun Aremu. In this context, I should mention here the many powerful presentations on gender within the framework of the linked projects of liberating Nigeria and a liberating education for Nigeria; regrettably, I must record the fact that quite a large number of male delegates to the Summit were openly derisory or even plainly hostile to this particular category of presentations. From this, one can conclude that Nigerian male academics are in dire need of liberation from a Neanderthal-like conservatism in matters of gender equality!

    There are formidable theoretical and ideological challenges to providing the link between, on the one hand, liberating Nigeria and, on the other hand, a liberating education for Nigeria and Nigerians, even though for most of those at the Summit who argued passionately for linking the two together, those links are pretty obvious. I happen to be on the side of those who took this position at the Summit; the point, though, is that I don’t think that we should complacently feel that since we feel that those links are pretty obvious, those who don’t think so are dumb or of necessity reactionary. Indeed, it is precisely because of this factor that the title of this essay has the phrase, “a failing Nigerian state and its utterly failed educational system”. For if you think, as most parents and employers of labour do, that the crisis of the massive production and reproduction of mediocrity and illiteracy in our schools and universities is one which can be simply corrected by holding the feet of federal and state governments and of teachers and lecturers to the fire of responsibility, accountability and patriotism, then you are not likely to think that you need to worry yourself about the liberation of Nigeria. For the great majority of those who take this position, great reform in policy, policy implementation and governance in our educational system is all you need; all talk of decolonizing the failing, neocolonial Nigerian state is ideological extremism as a means of hiding the collusion of teachers, professors and university administrators in the total debacle that has overtaken education in our country.

    But this view is a dangerous half-truth and the questions raised by and in the phrase “the failing Nigerian state and its utterly failed educational system” will not simply disappear. The line that separates one from the other is so thin that it barely exists. This is because it is the same alliance of interests and forces that are looting the Nigerian state dry and crippling it that are at the base of the corrupt, unethical and unprofessional processes that are ruining our educational institutions. If the Nigerian state is still failing and not yet completely failed as the educational system has, that is only because it is the senior partner, the hegemonic force in the relationship between the educational system and the federal and state governments. Without oil revenues and a largely volunteer army whose payroll is still assured for the foreseeable future, the Nigerian state would be as nearly fatally crippled as the Nigerian educational system. In their barracks, our soldiers live in conditions that are nearly as sub-human, insanitary and primitive as the conditions under which most of the students at our university campuses live and study, but at least the soldiers regularly and unfailingly get paid. Remove this dividing line and then the stark underlying reality would be revealed: the failing Nigerian state and the utterly failed Nigerian educational system are mirror images of one another. You cannot deal radically and effectively with one without dealing with the other. At any rate, at NES 2014, reform and revolution were not separated from one another; but neither was one confused with the other.

     

    – Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu      

  • Can we conquer the specter of educational kwashiorkor as we did that of the Ebola pandemic?

    Can we conquer the specter of educational kwashiorkor as we did that of the Ebola pandemic?

    Specter:

    1. An object of terror or dread: the specter of famine or disease.
    2. A mental image of something extremely menacing: the specter of an epidemic disease
    Dictionary.com (online)

    This past week, the declaration of the World Health Organization (WHO) that Nigeria is free of the specter of an Ebola pandemic finally hit the airwaves of the Western media in a big way. On radio, on television, in newspapers and in the virtual but ubiquitous universe of the Internet, the news finally broke and pervaded reports in every broadcast medium that Nigeria was no longer one of the West African countries to be avoided. This development gave me a relief of such immensity that I knew that something was involved that was much greater than my simple but profound joy in the realization that people would not be dying in their thousands or hundreds of thousands from an Ebola pandemic in our country. That “something” was the thought that we actually might have in us the capacity, the will to fight and conquer all the social evils that plague us now and seem impregnable, things like endemic, miasmic corruption; Boko Haram; a whole generation of young people with future prospects worse than the frightening present; and the metaphoric kwashiorkor that has made the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors of education in our country one of the worst in the world.

    In thinking about what to write, what to include in this piece, I consciously made the decision that first of all, I must give in to and express my great joy and relief that we beat the specter of the Ebola pandemic. The removal of Nigeria and Senegal from the zone of “West Africa of Ebola” is the single best piece of news from our continent in a long time. This is all the more exceptional because for the most part, we did it on our own. We did get some assistance from foreign medical personnel and the active interest of the WHO, but no one can deny the fact that it was the work and dedication of heroic and selfless Nigerians that made this achievement possible. Thus, my mind goes back again to that woman of extraordinary bravery, courage and selflessness, Dr. Ameyo Adadevoh. From there, my mind wanders to the inspirational story of Dr. Adah Igonoh’s survival from the near-death clutches of an Ebola attack. And then to the Lagos State Government, with some help from the Federal Ministry of Health. As I write these words, I am filled with a pride, a faith in my country and its human capacities the like of which I have not felt in a long while. Indeed, in writing these words, I have a strong intimation that many of those reading this piece also feel, as I do, that beating the threat of the Ebola pandemic is the best and most positively portentous news that we have had in Nigeria in perhaps the last half of a decade.

    Only now that we seem to have beaten the threat of an Ebola pandemic does it come with a startling revelation that in actuality, it was the specter, not the reality of a pandemic that inspired us to dig deep into our collective selves and find the capacities we have in us to beat the threat. For unlike Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea that are countries facing the grim reality of the Ebola pandemic, we had only seven deaths. And after the initial spread of the disease beyond the index carrier, Patrick Sawyer, the figure of real and suspected secondary cases of infection never exceeded a couple of hundreds. That is why, at least in hindsight, one realizes now that it was the specter of being overwhelmed by the reality of the pandemic raging in those three countries that spurred us.

    Is this a general law, a general feature of human affairs, that people are often far more frightened and prompted to action by the threat and not the reality of great, surpassing calamity? On this account, calamity itself – and not its specter – leaves little or no room for redeeming, curative action. This, it seems, is because with the threat, the specter of calamity, you are not yet overwhelmed by its actuality; you still have breathing room to act decisively. I think this is a false and unhelpful assumption but because we have just experienced the specter and not the reality of an Ebola pandemic, I wish to probe a little further into the matter through the example of what I am calling in this essay the kwashiorkor of a colossal fall in educational standards in our country.

    I chose the metaphor, the image of kwashiorkor deliberately. This is a disease that comes from extreme malnutrition whose victims are, overwhelmingly, children. More spectral is the visual image of kwashiorkor stricken children: the belly is grotesquely bloated, making the head look shrunken or naturally undersize. This then makes it seem as if there is nothing in the head, the seat of knowledge, while the belly, the seat of nourishment for the whole body, is full, sated. But of course in kwashiorkor the belly is also empty as, indeed, is the whole human frame and mass. Thus, in kwashiorkor you have the perfect image for an undernourishment that is so severe that in both the bloated and shrunken parts of the body, there is nothing of value left to sustain the body and, indeed, life itself.

    I first thought of this image as an appropriate metaphor for the collapse in education at all levels in our country when, in the year 2009, I read that the failure rate of those who sat for the NECO exams for the year was 98.2% which meant that only 1.8% passed. Since then, other facts, figures and actualities of educational doldrums in our country have added to the appropriateness of the kwashiorkor metaphor. One statistic is the fact that the passing rate for English and Mathematics in NECO exams in the last five years has never risen above 35%. Yet another fact is perpetual complaint of employers of labour in Nigeria that the graduates being produced in our tertiary institutions are so mediocre that they are virtually “unemployable”. Add to that the fact that not only very rich Nigerians but also those who are only moderately well off are abandoning Nigerian universities and sending their children to foreign universities where “foreign” here includes African countries like Ghana and South Africa. Finally, there is this fact: even though everyone connected with education in Nigeria agrees that the standards of performance, of teaching by our primary and secondary teachers are very low, the teachers themselves are very resistant to re-training and re-professionalization.

    The reasons for this educational kwashiorkor are many, but most significant of all is the fact that public funds, or national wealth that could have been used to adequately fund education at all levels in our country are being massively looted and diverted to the private local and foreign bank accounts of a few thousands of members of the political class and their cronies in the private sector. I think this is why our educational kwashiorkor has gone far beyond a specter to an overwhelming and crippling actuality. The most telling indication of this is the fact that, as far as I am aware, no Federal Minster of Education and no Commissioner of Education in any of the states of the federation has ever raised an alarm at the terrible failure rate of our secondary school leavers. I mean, when the specter has become a pervasive reality, why raise an alarm, why worry, especially if you are amongst and within the ranks of those causing the severe malnourishment to education in our country? In most countries of the world, a failure rate of 98.2% would have caused the powers that be to bring all stakeholders together to devise a strategy to avert the possibility of the specter becoming an overwhelming and crippling reality.

    Specters constitute a very complex, very interesting phenomenon in human individual and mass psychology. Because I have not been in the country since July when I came twice, I have been informed by reliable friends that since the Ebola threat or specter, standards of public hygiene have improved considerably in many parts of the country, especially in public spaces and venues. If that is the case, we can assert that specters sometimes have beneficial uses and in the case of the Ebola scare, the specter was spectacular in the degree of civic mindedness that it inspired in thousands of Nigerians. All the same, we must realize that it is a desperate and failing state that needs a specter in order to do what is right, what will be of lasting value to Nigerians of living generations and generations yet to be born. And there is always the fact that specters are never completely laid to rest. We have beaten back the first specter of an Ebola pandemic that came with Patrick Sawyer, but who is to say that another “Sawyer” will never come into the country and start the scare, the specter all over again? Indeed, specters arise not only from what is yet to come but also from what has already come and is raging in the land. So that even as terrible as the undernourishment of education is in our country now, there is the specter of the fact that it could get far worse than what we are experiencing now. Thus, it is never too late to arrest a worsening situation; we are not trapped irrevocably between the specter and its reality. This coming week, there is going to be a National Education Summit (NES) to be hosted by ASUU and the NLC. This piece is written with fervent hopes that the Summit will end in a resounding success.

     

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • “IJN” scientists in a massively inhospitable environment for science – an epilogue

    “IJN” scientists in a massively inhospitable environment for science – an epilogue

    Religion is the opium of the people (but it is also) the soul of a soulless world.
    Karl Marx

    The University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana is one of the best research and teaching universities in the U.S. and the world. It is a Christian denominational institution. Its leading social and natural scientists are first rate scholars and researchers. To teach and do research in this fine institution, it is not required that you should be a Christian, though of course if you are a Christian and also a top-flight scientist, Notre Dame will be very pleased to have you among its distinguished faculty. At this institution, both Christians and non-Christians have absolutely no obligation to attend church worship, prayer vigils or revivalist crusades since these are not part of the essential work and identity of the institution as is the case with our own Redeemer’s or Covenant University. As far as I know, there is not a single “IJN scientist” on the faculty of Notre Dame. In our country, “IJN scientists” are, by a long shot, the majority among men and women of science in our tertiary institutions.

    I openly admit it: I am being very, very deliberately provocative in coining this term, “IJN scientists”. This of course then necessitates providing a working definition of the term. To this, I say that an “IJN scientist” is a highly formally qualified, highly formally credentialized scientist who believes that since God is in control, since In Jesus’ Name nothing is impossible, you can still do science, you can still produce scientists of the next generation in an environment that is extremely inhospitable to science. This of course is total nonsense: you cannot do quality science, you cannot produce quality scientists of the next generation in an environment in which the absolute minimal conditions for doing science don’t exist – as in our country at the present time. The world has never seen and will probably never see scientific work of quality and usefulness to human beings where you have no infrastructures, no water, no electricity and all you have as a scientist is your faith that God is in control and somehow you will become and remain a great woman or man of science.

    Let me expatiate further on this term, “IJN scientists”. If there are no “IJN scientists” at Notre Dame, this is largely due to the fact that in the U.S. as in the other leading scientific and Christian nations of the world, there are no “IJN scientists”. These countries spend colossal sums on science and science education. And they have excellent environments for doing and teaching science. In a formal sense, they are Christian nations and indeed many of their top scientists are Christians. As a matter of fact, one can imagine that when such scientists that are also Christians submit grant applications to the National Science Foundation (NSF), they may pray to God for the success of their grant applications. But they know that if they don’t get the much-needed grant, no amount of prayers and vigils will advance their research projects. What is the basis of this assertion? Simple: in the leading scientific and Christian nations of the planet, you cannot simply say God is in control when your colleagues who get the prestigious grants are producing landmark scientific research while you produce nothing of merit, nothing of value. This means that “IJN scientists” are produced only  in a country like ours where you can be considered a great man or woman of science when your last scientific work of value was done years and decades ago when conditions were far less dire and inhospitable for doing and teaching science.

    At this stage, the careful reader might have noticed that I am making, indeed I am insisting on a distinction between “IJN scientists” and non-IJN scientists both of whom are Christians (or Moslems or Judaists) and both of whom believe in the existence of God. In this, I am returning to my insistence in my series on religion and science, faith and rationality, that though they are fundamentally different operations of the human mind and express often quite opposed dimensions of human thought and sensibility, religion and science are not incompatible. I am returning to this point here because I got many emails from readers who gave passionate arguments trying to convince me to change my view and accept that religion and science have little or nothing to do with each other. In fact one of such interlocutors went as far as to suggest that if great scientists like Newton and Einstein were also believers in the existence of God, that does not mean that science and religion are compatible. All it means, according to this interlocutor, is that Newton and Einstein managed to effectively keep God out of their scientific work!

    But I remain unconvinced by this argument, this insistence that the religion and science are incompatible. In their most penetrating and beneficial forms, both religion and science entail extraordinary feats of intellectual and psychic energy; they both entail hard toil and considerable creativity of thought and imagination. I think fellow atheists who insist on the absolute separation of the two misrecognize this fact; probably, they take all forms and expressions of religion as mystification, especially when, as in contemporary Nigerian Christianity, there are legions upon legions of charlatans, swindlers and impostors at the highest level of the pastorate. But religion has a rich, ambiguous and complex place in human affairs. Which is why I have nothing but the greatest admiration for such schools and movements of religious thought and action as Martin Luther King’s Southern Leadership Christian Council (SLCC), Liberation Theology in Latin America and the centuries of work that the order of Franciscans, with their vows of poverty, did among the poor and the wretched of Europe. In these expressions and movements of radical and progressive religious expression and activism, we are far from the laziness, the mendacity, the bad faith of our “IJN scientists” in invoking God while nothing of scientific value is being produced, while indeed the masses of laboring and suffering Nigerians are being looted dry to the skin of bare life.

    Of course, I am only too aware of the fact that the distinction that I am making between one type of religion and another, between, on the one hand, the true saints and intellectuals in and of religion and, on the other hand, the holy charlatans and swindlers is difficult to sustain in our country at the present time, with perhaps one or two notable exceptions. For any thinking man or woman of religious disposition in our country today, it is difficult to look at the total darkness, the complete decay that envelops religion and be willing to accept my insistence that not all that we have in the heritage of religion in this country and the world is rotten. For I suspect very much that this is why many of the fellow atheists who wrote me pleaded so passionately for me to not provide an alibi, a reprieve for the kind of religion we have in this country today. But as I have said on other occasions in this column, I have lived long enough to have known a time and a form consciousness when religion was not, by and large, the rotten moral and spiritual sinkhole that it has become in our country at the present time. At any rate, against certain schools of hidebound and narrowly defined atheism, I insist absolutely that at certain levels and forms of exertions and operations of the human mind and imagination, religion demands and gets the same kind of hard, dedicated and venerable work that we associate with science and scientists.

    This leads me to my concluding thoughts in this piece, thoughts having to do with belief in the existence or non-existence of God. Frankly speaking, while this issue has deep and fascinating intellectual, moral and social implications for us in Nigeria and all of humankind, it has not been of any particular interest to me, either in the series on religion and science or in this prologue to that series. I believe that it is not because of belief or unbelief in the existence of God that one is a either a good or a mediocre scientist. They may invoke God, but show me the man or woman who becomes a truly brilliant and great scientist who has not worked hard and long to reach that position and I will take back my words. If a given person scientist gives the glory to God, that’s fine with me; all I will say or do is tell such a person to become lazy and complacent and see what happens. Thus, the bottom line for me is human effort and inventiveness riding on the cusp of solidarity with the most oppressed and marginalized of our country, our continent and the world.

    This, by the way, is why in the piece on Dr. Adah Igonoh I did not bother in the least to raise and settle the question one way or another whether she was saved by divine intervention or by her rigorous and herculean pursuit of the remedies available through medical science. If she privileges divine intervention, that is her right and that’s fine with me, as long as readers of the piece did not fail to note the great emphasis I placed on the extraordinary work of rationality that she also expended. That is why, even though I suspect that she may not like this, I will still say that I do not see her as an “IJN scientist” who, even as the environment for doing and training scientists in our country worsens and worsens, are content to declare victory in the fading shadow of what science once was in our country: a practice, a tradition, an intimation that indicated that we were on our way to becoming one of the medium level scientific and technological powers in the world.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • The religion and science, faith and reason controversy – again (2)

    The religion and science, faith and reason controversy – again (2)

    At the end of last week’s column I promised that I would start this conclusion to the series with an account of how and why even though historically religion had never been an “enemy” of science in our country, in the last few decades, a particular form of contemporary Christianity that has captured the minds of large segments of our national intelligentsia (including and especially our men and women of science) has become the “enemy” of science in our country, with very dire, very disturbing intellectual consequences for Nigeria’s present and future. In what follows, I give three “case histories” in support of that promise. Thus, let us go to the first case.

    The Nigerian Academy of Sciences (NAS) is the highest non-governmental self-organization of scientists in our country. To become a Fellow of the organization with the honorific title of Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Sciences (FNAS), you have to achieve great respect or even fame as a scientist among fellow scientists in the country and perhaps also in the world since NAS is an affiliate member of the International Council for Science (ICS), the highest international organization of science and scientists in the world. For these reasons, to be the President of NAS is to be a man or woman of science who has great renown as a scientist. Well then, imagine this following true and factual account that took place about ten years ago.

    The President of NAS who roughly at the same time also happened to be the Vice Chancellor of the University of Lagos brought the General Overseer of the Mountain of Fire and Miracles (MFM), Dr. Olukoya, to the campus of Unilag to perform an exorcism of the spirits and demons deemed to be behind the “cultism” and other acts and practices of evil mayhem and criminality among the students of the institution. This NAS President (who incidentally is a distant relative of mine) was quoted in newspapers as asserting that the exorcizing visit of the MFM to the Unilag campus was the best day of his life in the University including his days as an undergraduate; his years as a lecturer, senior lecturer and professor; and the long road to becoming Vice Chancellor from HOD to Dean of Faculty to Chief Executive of the University. We might note in passing here that Dr. Olukoya, the General Overseer of the MFM is himself a scientist with a PhD in Molecular Genetics from the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. During his ritual of exorcism, he gave the names of the seven or eight demons that he expelled from the Unilag campus. This all seemed to have come from Ben Johnson’s The Alchemist, written and performed in London in the early 17th century. As far as I know, no Fellow of the NAS, and no scientist at the University of Lagos ever expressed any opposition, any disbelief that in Nigeria of the 21st century, an eminent man of science could not openly and triumphantly practice exorcism in one of the leading universities in our country but actually go on to extol the event as the very pinnacle of his experience in the University of Lagos. This is case No 1.

    Case No 2 also involved exorcism, but of a very different kind. This took place at the University of Ife. After the tenure of Professor Wande Abimbola as the Vice Chancellor of the University, the VC who succeeded him was afraid to move into the official VC’s Lodge until the place was “spiritually cleansed” by a long round of vigils and prayers by a select group of campus “born again Christians” many of whom were very senior professors in the arts and sciences. As an agricultural and environmental economist, the VC in question was a scientist somewhere in the middle of the “soft” and “hard” sciences. It is important to explain why this VC was afraid of moving into the Lodge formerly occupied by Professor Abimbola and his family. As many people reading this who are familiar with Professor Abimbola’s scholarly work and career know, he is regarded as the world’s foremost specialist on the Ifa corpus and one of the most revered High Priests of the Orisa religion. This was why his successor was in great dread about moving into the VC’s Lodge; he and his co-religionists feared that Abimbola had left behind all the spirits and avatars of his own religion. And so thorough, so total was the “spiritual cleansing” that they performed that priceless traditional works of art that graced the VC Lodge were thrown away, including the magnificent carved doors of the Lodge. And once the “cleansing” had been done, the new VC and his family declared victory IJN and began to hold regular vigils and prayer sessions in the VC’s Lodge. That is case No 2.

    Case No 3 has a personal and rather sad resonance for me. It concerns a Professor Emeritus of Physics who, during the years of his active life as an academic, was one of the brightest scientists of his generation and was easily one of the most highly respected physicists in our country and in Africa. As a matter of fact, he was a one-time President of the Nigerian Association of Physicists. After retirement, he became a pastor and founded his own ministry. There is nothing wrong, nothing inherently against science in that; famously, Isaac Newton, the father of modern physics, was a pastor in the Unitarian Church. And as I observed in last week’s column, there are dozens of Nobel Prize Laureates in the sciences who are devout Christians or Judaists.

    What is saddening in this particular case is that upon becoming a “born again” pastor, our former renowned physicist abandoned physics and the scientific ethos. This came out in a series of very bitter public exchanges between him and Wole Soyinka over the former physicist’s allegation that the Pyrates Confraternity (PC) had been a cult, the work of Satan and his hosts when he and WS and a few other undergraduates founded the organization in the early 1950s. Much later, when I was an undergraduate at Ibadan, I was myself a “pyrate”, a member of the PC. This is why this case has a personal and very sad connotation for me. To believe that the PC in the time of its original founders was a “satanic cult” is bad enough; but to believe that the Pyrates Confraternity, even when it had joined other violently criminal and extortionate gangs on our university campuses was the work of Satan in a world caught in an eternal struggle between God and Satan is not modern Christianity but a throwback to the Christianity of the European Middle Ages. This is the form of Christianity that now has a commanding grip on the minds and the brains of hundreds and thousands of our national intelligentsia and is conducting an undeclared war on science in our country and our continent.

    In this series, I have repeatedly stated that religion and science are not incompatible, not mutually antithetical. I now wish to make the clarification here that by this I mean religious expressions that are not opposed to the rational processes of the human mind and brain, that in fact see the hand of God in these processes. All the Nobel Laureates in the sciences that also believe in God are, without exception, of this kind of religionists. The first and second generations of scientists in our country were also of this category of men and women of rationalistic and rigorous scientific endeavor who were also religionists. To back this up, I wish to state here very clearly that all the three “case histories” that I have profiled in this piece would have been unthinkable in my years as a high school student and a university undergraduate. A VC who dared to bring an exorcist to a university campus would have been considered a figure of derision. In my days as an undergraduate, we would have written and performed satirical plays about a VC who was terrified to move into the VC’s Lodge because he thought it was occupied by “spirits” left there by the last occupant. In those days, things like that happened in the dark, in secrecy; their perpetrators were too afraid of the scorn they would have attracted if they acted on their fears and anxieties in the open. These days, they not only operate in the open, they do so from the hallowed podiums of Vice Chancellorships and Presidencies of the Nigerian Academy of Science. When the most eminent men and women of science in a country are self-declared and militant religious medievalists of this kind, science in the given society undergoes a retrogression that may perhaps take generations to recover from. We are in deep, deep trouble in this matter, compatriots.

    In conclusion, let me say that I have some errors and confusions to correct from last week’s column. Thanks to some readers who sent me emails, I can report now that it was Dr. S.O. Onabamiro who wrote the monograph, Why Our Children Die, not Dr. S.O. Awokoya as I stated in last week’s essay. I probably got confused by the fact that Awokoya and Onabamiro were both, at different times, Minister of Education in the old Western Region and they both fell out of favour with their Party Leader, Chief Obafemi Awolowo. Also, the error was mine, not Chinua Achebe’s. Moreover, the book in which Achebe cited Onabamiro is not The Trouble with Nigeria but the book of essays titled Hopes and Impediments. To my very good friend Professor Olabode Lucas who wrote to say that I did not give any credit to many Nigerian scientists who, even though they did not win Nobel prizes, achieved considerable acclaim as scientists worldwide, I completely concur. My aim in this series has not been to disrespect science and scientists in our country and if one or two generalizations that I have made have given that impression, I wish to state that I take them back. Finally, one comrade wrote to tell me that the great problem that science and scientists face in our country today is underfunding and lack of the basic infrastructures that make the scientific enterprise possible in the first place. I accept this thesis but I think we must correlate it to the pervasiveness of religious medievalism among our scientists. In a completely separate piece, I shall take up this issue in next week’s column.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu