By Biodun Jeyifo

 

2020 will surely rank as one of the worst moments in the collective life of the species. A pandemic worse than any other within the collective living memory of all the denizens of the planet descended on the world. Millions died and tens of millions got stricken by the pandemic. At its beginning before it spread over every nation and region of the earth like the sky above us, people fixed their hearts and minds on the place from which it seemed to have come. But the futility of this response quickly became clear to almost everyone with the exception of a charlatan and his followers that we shall meet later in this parable. The virus travels by air and doesn’t everyone know that air carries no passport and ignores all borders in its travels around the world? Everywhere in the world, men and women, young and old, the firm and the infirm trembled in elemental dread. But that was just the beginning because this pandemic-causing virus came with a challenge that humankind had never faced before in the collective experience of the species. What was this challenge?

As simple as it was also infinitely complicated, the challenge came in the form of the following dilemma: only by staying away from all others could every person keep the virus at bay and hope to survive. But humankind is the most social of all the species on the planet, a condition which is rooted in the biological and ecological coordinates of our existence. Of all the living things on the planet, the human child has the longest period of total dependence on others for both its physical survival and its conditioning as a survivable and sentient being. Even the most destructive and negative propensities of our species, like war, misanthropy and sociopathy, are enacted as social projects, not as self-restrictive acts. More positive and sustaining, it is when we act on our obligations and drives as social beings that we get the most life and self-affirming confirmations of our humanity. Against all this came the virus, together with the pandemic that followed in its wake, with that grim challenge for us to break apart and away from one another in order to survive. Because this goes against the most powerful impulses of our adaptation to living in and on our planet, it began to seem to many that this virus came to finish us off completely, all of us. But that is not the end of the parable, at least not in the forms and the contents of its present and yet to come manifestations.

We must of course do all we can not to invest the virus with a purposive will, a secret intent or an immanent telos, as if is an avatar or even the spirit of an ancient ancestor of our species who has come to test how adaptable we are as a species! This is because having first stricken us with the imperative of breaking apart and away from one another in order to survive, it turned out that this was not intended to be forever. In other words, it turned out that what we had to do was break the social bond, survive and then rebuild or restore the imperatives of sociality again. In this respect, the ultimate test of the challenge the virus posed to us was not to break the social bond everlastingly; it was whether or not we had the will, the life-force to break away for as long as it would take to either starve the virus to death or weaken it enough to render it harmless. To put the matter in a somewhat over-simplified form, here is what the virus seems to be asking us: how long can all of you and any of you survive alone, away from others and can you do so again and again if that is what it will take?

Our parable assumes the familiar didactic form of all parables and fables if we recognize that most, if not all the nations and regions of the world have woefully failed the challenge of breaking away and apart in order to survive. This is due to the enormously complicated fact that breaking apart and away from one another in order to preserve life has in most cases led to the loss or “death” of livelihoods – we know that life is ultimately impossible without livelihoods.  But we must also admit the fact that for most of us, we simply do not have it in us to keep to ourselves away from others. The age of small, isolated roving bands of hunter-gatherers ended a long, long time ago and the congealed and preserved memories of that experience seems to have been wiped out of the templates that keep such memory in our genes.

If you want to construct or tell a parable, you must pay attention to its twists and turns, its main plot and subplots, its mix of sorrow and catharsis and its climaxes and anti-climaxes. In particular, this is a parable that is without equal in its mixture of fact and fantasy, of the real and the phantasmagoric, of science and magical thinking. One day, believe me, all these diverse but vital aspects of a mega-parable of the virus and its pandemic will be told. But the time is not yet ripe for that. I have fond hopes of surviving the pandemic and being one of those who will be able to give a narration of the parable in full. So far, I personally have been spared of direct experience of the sorrowful, tragic aspects of the parable but I do not lose sight of this pervasive deathly layer in the plot of the parable. As I write these words in Cambridge, MA, in the US on New Year’s Day, 2021, more than three thousand people died in the country yesterday of the pandemic; this figure has been repeated again and again in the last one week. And there is also this about the pandemic in America: it has deepened and worsened racial, class and gender inequities in the country,

I confidently expect that in the years ahead, this pandemic will loom very large in the stories that people everywhere in the world will be telling themselves, their children and their children’s children. The stories will be told in all the forms, genres, media and idioms of expression and representation – poetry, painting, music, drama and theatre, dance, sculpture, public art, film, street art, etc., etc. Indeed, this is already happening. Nothing less than the very structure of narrative itself will be turned inside out in the process.

Our parable in this piece is chastened by this awareness of the scale of narrativity and representation that this pandemic will entail. For this reason, I am particularly concerned about stories and tales that will either not be told at all or will be forgotten easily in the deluge of narratives and tales struggling to be told, read and heard. This is why this parable centers on the outline of a narrative which we must never forget: how woefully most of the countries and regions of the world have been in their response to the ultimate challenge of the pandemic to us: that we must break apart and away from one another in order to defeat the virus, no matter how many times we are forced to do so again and again. I wonder: will anyone in the future tell this central story or parable of how we failed to meet the central challenge of the pandemic that I call the parable of the provisional fragmentation of the social bond?

Typically in a parable, the protagonist or protagonists must face a test, a challenge that he, she or they must successfully engage by the deployment or operation of cleverness, will, guile, luck or divine favor. Also, the test or challenge must entail something fundamental in the life of the person, the society or humankind itself. Now, in the challenge posed to us by Covid-19, it is easy to see that the challenge does indeed entail something of great importance to the society, this being the survival of the society itself. But on a closer look, it turns out that this is not the real test; the real test is whether or not the society would be able to carry everyone along, preferably by persuasion but if not, then by compulsion. All over the world, failure of the challenge haunts nearly every community, every nation.  Here are some examples, each with its own pattern of failure. America: complete failure to either persuade or enforce compliance. Nigeria: haphazard enforcement and equally haphazard compliance. U.K.: lackadaisical enforcement and compliance. Germany: persuasion and enforcement in nearly equal parts. New Zealand: persuasion as the overwhelming tool, only minimally backed by compulsion. For most of the world in both high income and low income countries, great failure both in persuasion and enforcement. Please remember, the stakes involved in this challenge were the lives and livelihoods of the populations of the world’s nation-states.

Our mega-parable achieves its greatest clarity and resonance if we compare the sharply contrastive cases of the two island nations of the United States and New Zealand, together with the roles of their respective leaders, President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Since a lot has been written about these two polar opposites of the worst and the best national configuration of deaths and cases of the pandemic in the world, we need not  go into the details here beyond the startling fact that as I write this piece, New Zealand has had no new cases and no deaths for several months now while the US is in its worst surge of new cases, hospitalizations and deaths since the beginning of the pandemic. It is significant to note that both countries are island nations, if only because for all its large population and great wealth, the US, like New Zealand, has the “protection” of a very large body of water. In its tragic encounter with the pandemic, what it does not have – which New Zealand has aplenty – is an ethos in which in all matter of life and death, production and consumption, and security of persons and communities, cooperation is far greater preferred than competition and regulation trumps freewheeling deregulation.

This profile makes sense, of course, because America is the heartland of global capitalism which historically rates competition over cooperation and regards regulation an anathema. But with regard to the pandemic, Trump has taken the normative protocols and practices of competition and deregulation in American capitalism to new dizzying heights. From the beginning of the pandemic to the present, he has been far more worried about falls in stock market shares than in figures of rising fatalities due to the pandemic. Indeed, he completely refused to have the federal administration regulate and coordinate the efforts of the states to combat the pandemic, asserting that by its natural, unregulated spread, the pandemic would reach its terminus when it might have infected about 70% of the population by which time the stock index would have achieved a new and historic high. Please note that New Zealand is also a capitalist nation and economy. Well then, what is the significance of its choice of cooperation over competition and regulation over laissez faire deregulation in its encounter with the pandemic?

The answer to this question lies at the heart of our parable. It is an unambiguous answer: challenges like the pandemic that entail dire threats to the foundations and ramparts of our sociality can and will never be defeated by those fundaments of capitalism, competition and deregulation; they will be effectively engaged by everyone pulling together and doing so in a regulated, effective manner. Indeed, in the last two and half centuries, capitalism has all but wiped out many of the things that promoted cooperation and fostered the wise regulation of how we use the resources of nature, the one inside of us and the one outside in the environment. It is beguiling to think of cooperation standing by itself alone, without the support of regulation. But this is the idealism of the liberal bourgeoisie. Regulation is, in practice, the handmaiden of cooperation. What is unregulated hardly ever conduces to cooperation.

 

• Biodun Jeyifo, bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

 

By Biodun Jeyifo

The latest news about the worldwide pandemic, Covid-19, is very auspicious: vaccines said to be very safe and about 95% effective have been developed and will soon, in relatively short order, be available to most of the population of the world. The irrefutable proof of this claim, this hope is yet to be affirmed by the consistency of the experience of all who receive the vaccines around the world. But there is no gainsaying the tremendous investment of all men, women, adults and children throughout the globe in the success of this development. Thus, nearly everywhere in the world, everyone is, so to say, hanging on and hoping that they do not succumb to the pandemic before they get protection from the “miracle” of the now available vaccines. Just think about it, how cruel, how tragic it would be for anyone to die from Covid-19 now that the vaccines have finally arrived!

I confess that these days, this thought occupies a lot of both my wakeful consciousness and my dreaming subconscious. In this piece, I wish to share snippets of my dreaming and waking reveries on the pandemic with readers of this column in the hope that what I write will help some readers to reflect productively on both what we have experienced and are yet to experience in the trying, perilous age of Covid-19. At the heart of where things are with the pandemic at this very moment of its ravages is the extraordinarily confounding dilemma in which at the very moment when vaccines arrive with the possibility of effective prevention, hospitals are filling up with new cases and unfortunate victims are dying daily, minute by minute, in their hundreds of thousands around the world. We have seen this “movie” before in Hollywood films like “Contagion”, “Pandemic” and “28 Days Later”.

But it is one thing to watch a horrific plot unfold in a film and another thing entirely to experience the horror as a real life phenomenon. As I write these words on Friday, December 19, 2020 in Cambridge, MA, U.S.A., “breaking news” are unrelenting in their report of how hospitalizations of new Covid-19 infections are eroding ICU (Intensive Care Units) hospital spaces in virtually every state in the country; of refrigerated trucks being brought close to hospitals to provide spaces for corpses because the mortuaries have long been overfilled; and of the medical, nursing and auxiliary staff of hospitals both reaching the limits of their endurance and dying of the pandemic in large numbers. Note, dear reader, that these are all happening at the very moment when vaccines touted for their extraordinary effectiveness and safety have at last arrived!

But primarily, we confront the fear and the dread of Covid-19 as residents and communities of specific localities, nations and regions of the world, not as undifferentiated consumers of the “braking news” of the broadcast and newsprint media of the world. This fact is uppermost in both my wakeful consciousness and my dreaming subconscious. I think: at my age and given the specific and irreducible facts of the compromised state of my health and wellness, where should I be at this moment as we all await the “miracle” of the vaccines, Ibadan or Cambridge? I think: national and regional contexts matter a lot, but so do local conditions and attitudes. And I think: consider the objective facts but do not ignore the emotional and psychic factors.

Between the US and Nigeria, the respective national data and statistics profiles are so different as to seem like the difference between day and night. At the present moment, here are the figures for cases and deaths for the two countries: US: 17.2 million cases, 311K deaths. Nigeria: 75K cases, 12K deaths. Incidentally, at more than 3K deaths per day now, more people in the US die every day than the total number of all those who have died in Nigeria since the coming of the pandemic. Moreover, the infection rate in Nigeria is considerably, indeed vastly smaller than that of the US. Perhaps most important of all, while it is known that Nigerians, like Americans, are very lax, indeed nearly as resistant to wearing masks, social distancing and lockdowns, Nigerians have never been told by their president and state governors that it is their individual and collective right and freedom to decide whether or not they wish to wear masks, social distance and stay at home. To put it bluntly, Nigeria does not have a Trump in Buhari and neither does it have state governors like Republican state governors that are at best equivocal about public heath mandates intended to get the populace protection from the spread of the virus.

But Cambridge is very “Unamerican” in these matters. Unlike most of the other boroughs of the greater Boston metropolitan region to which it belongs, the residents of Cambridge strictly follow the public heath guidelines for staying free of infection by the virus. Very rarely do you see anyone in the streets or in grocery stores not wearing a mask. And people are for the most part very mindful of keeping to the recommended measures of social and physical distancing without seeming to be creating islands of isolation or alienation. These things are perhaps due to the socio-economic and cultural coordinates of Cambridge as a community: both working class and social and economic elites live there in fairly equal numbers, but the cultural ethos is dominated by the great number of liberal intelligentsia that live in the community, these being the teaching and administrative staff of the many prominent higher institutions in the community, like Harvard and MIT.

Does this mean that it would be much safer for me to sit out the pandemic in Cambridge and not in Ibadan while waiting to get the vaccine for the virus? I wish things were that simple. For the convoluted fact is that the infection rate for the virus is considerably higher in Cambridge than the figures for Oke-Bola or any of the other “areas” or “quarters” of Ibadan for that matter. Why is this so? Well, simply put, Cambridge, MA, is not an isolated community; it is part of the greater Boston area, part of the State of Massachusetts, and part of the USA. People still come and go, in and out of it, every day. Many come to work and some stay there awhile as they journey to other parts of the state, the region and the country. Think of this fact: the figures for Covid-19 infection cases and deaths for the State of Massachusetts (with a population of only about 7 million,) are respectively 309K and 11.5K. Both are considerably higher than the figures for the whole of Nigeria (about 200 million in population).

I do not forget that it is a great privilege for me to be able to choose where it is safest, where it is best for me to sit out the pandemic while waiting for the vaccine. Overwhelmingly, most people in Nigeria, or the USA or indeed, the whole world do not have that privilege. But it is a structurally determined privilege, not a birthright, and not an endowment from nature. In other words, in Cambridge, MA, which is massively more privileged than Oke-Bola, Ibadan, Nigeria, people are dying from the pandemic in much greater numbers than in the whole of Ibadan. Yes, the pandemic has had a far greater negative impact on poorer and more deprived communities but ultimately, Covid-19 is not a respecter of social and economic privilege. I admit that there is another mark of privilege in Cambridge that counts a lot when we are talking of the pandemic. What is this particular privilege? Well, some of the best hospital complexes in the USA and perhaps in the world are located very close to the Cambridge community.

But this has a rather ambiguous inflection in the context of this discussion. On the one hand, between anywhere in Nigeria and Cambridge, this is where I am most likely to be infected; however, no matter where I get infected, this is one of the best places where I can be saved by medical practice from the infection. In other words, if the thing to do is to avoid infection this close to the “end” of the pandemic, that can best be achieved by being in Ibadan. But who can discern the hand of fate, who can give a guarantee that close to the “end” of the pandemic, one will not be infected, in Cambridge or Ibadan? Thus, the prompting at the core of one’s entire Being is this: if in spite of everything, one can be infected anywhere on the planet; it is best to stay close to where an infection can be best be successfully contained.

But the conundrum continues! With this pandemic, infection could be almost as dreary as fatality. One of the most dread effects of a Covid-19 is the impact it could have and indeed has had on both the cerebral and neurological systems of the human body. What is left when these systems have been badly damaged by a Covid-19 infection? If infection is more likely in Cambridge can one then boast of a complete and decisive advantage of Cambridge over Ibadan?

It is merely a matter of chance that the ravages of the pandemic found me “marooned” on this side of the Atlantic. Lucky are those reading this piece who do not worry at all about the pandemic, especially about the supreme irony that it is precisely at the moment of its most dreaded surge that promising vaccines have emerged. For those like me who think a lot on these matters, take heart, you are not alone. Remember, we are endowed with imaginings that are pretty impregnable, even to this terrifying virus!

A foremost doctor? Why not also a cleverest surgeon and a nicest priest?

This week, I found out that the uniquely and quintessentially Nigerian misuse of this adjective of comparative value of importance, standing or achievement – a foremost author, a foremost lawyer, a foremost doctor, a foremost this or that – has left the Nigerian homeland and crossed into the Nigerian diasporic community. Good, better, best. Nice, nicer, nicest. Clever, cleverer, cleverest. These we all learned in primary school English Grammar lessons. Either intuitively or laboriously, we learned that you used the indefinite article, “a”, only for the first and second adjectives along the spectrum of comparison: a good man, a better man. Or a clever man, a cleverer man. We learned this also: you use only the definite article, “the” for the third or final item on the spectrum of comparison: the best writer; the cleverest lawyer; the nicest man. Even with adjectives in which the terms or words of comparison are not directly given or stated, you never apply the indefinite article, “a”, to the final term as in “a foremost author”. The correct use is: the foremost critic; one of the foremost of our writers; she was foremost among the lawyers of her generation.

The misuse of this word – e.g. a foremost journalist – started with our journalists and then spread through other layers and cadres of our professional classes, reaching its apogee in our intelligentsia, in particular the literati. This was a specifically and uniquely Nigerian phenomenon as I have never spotted it in Ghanaian or Liberian, or South African or any other national variety of Anglophone African English. And until this week, I had thought that this misuse of “a foremost this or that”, known technically as a “catachresis”, was limited to academics domiciled at home in Nigeria. But this week, I discovered an instance of this by now completely normalized catachresis in the work of Nigerian academics based abroad in the Nigerian diaspora.

I know better than to presume that this intervention can lead to a reduction, not to talk of an eradication of this particular catachresis. Any word whose misuse that has gone this far is beyond reversion to the original correct usage. However, at least, I pray that individuals in our community will take the following advice to heart: each time that you write this harmless but barbaric term – “a foremost author; a foremost philosopher; a foremost this and that” – you are perpetrating a howler which may no longer be recognized as such at home but will definitely be found quaint and laughable in most of the other regional and national communities of scholarly English-language use in the world.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

Alas! Yai, a friend whom I had known when he was a student in Unibadan where I began my career there, is gone. Many memories of our contact and relationship come to mind. The first and most memorable was the visit with my children to his home in Cotonou, Benin Republic on our way to Togo, Ghana in the quest to know our neighboring Africa. Even though a bachelor, he gave us an unforgettable meal which my children kept remembering thereafter.       Professor Emerita Bolanle Awe

 

Our venerable elder colleague, Professor Emerita Bolanle Awe, is right: if you ever had the pleasure of dining with Olabiyi Yai at his home, especially after he stopped being a bachelor, it was sure to have been an unforgettable experience. If only one instance of this exquisite gourmandizing experience could create such a lasting impression, consider how much more matchless this would have been if it happened not once, not twice, not even three times but many times. This was my good fortune when Yai and I were colleagues at the University of Ife in the late 1970s to mid-1980s.

Of course I do not forget WS and Yemi Ogunbiyi at whose homes, in Ife and other cities, I had, over the years and decades, culinary delights of the highest order. But no offense to WS and Yemi, their meals did not quite have the extraordinary and extravagant combination of Nigerian, Beninois and Afrodiasporic cuisines that one encountered in Yai’s house. Yes, WS and Yemi had wines of the vintage quality as did Yai, but with regard to gastronomic fare, my palate has a sharper and more vivid memory of what I consumed at Olabiyi’s home at Ife. [Yemi is not only a friend, he is a brother and he will not make me pay for this “outrage” but I am already thinking of emissaries to send to WS to mollify him about this seeming ungrateful affront!] And as if this was not enough, at these fabulous sybaritic encounters at the Yai home in Ife, Abiola Irele was always present and the three of us, with any other colleagues that came in a chance move, as we discussed the leading lights of French poststructuralism and Post-Marxism, especially Louis Althusser. Althusser? Let me explain.

Before Abiola Irele brought us together into an intellectual comradeship, I had known Olabiyi as a much respected colleague in the faculty to which we both belonged, this being the Faculty of Arts. At faculty wide seminars, he was consistently brilliant in his contributions and interventions, although in his characteristically understated manner. Moreover, he often combined pithy, witty and sagely observations with very erudite references, with absolutely no affectation as if it was the most natural thing in the world for the sage and the scholar to coexist fruitfully in the same person. Add to this the fact that his spoken English, unlike his spoken Yoruba, had a distinct French lilt marking him as constitutively Francophone, even if his contributions at these seminars seemed rooted far beyond Francophonie to a cross-border intellectual identity that took in not only other regions of our continent but also the language and cultural zones of the African diaspora.

If this was the general background or context that brought us together, how exactly did it happen? My memories are rather blurry now, except that I do remember that Irele was the agent. As I remarked in the tribute that I wrote to him when he passed away in July 2017, I became very close to Irele when, on countless visits to UI from Ife in the period, Irele’s home at the campus was a constant port of call for me largely on account of the excellent meals and wines I was sure to consume and imbibe, together with the strictly intellectual conversations we would have. Thus, I think it must have been on one such occasion that Irele asked me whether I had met, “really met”, Yai. When I replied that I had not quite “really met” him, Irele replied that “you of all people should really meet him, if only for the common interest that you both have in Althusser”. And then Irele added, “in my next visit to Ife, I will ask Joe to invite you over to lunch so you can get to really meet him”.

Now, metonymy occupies a special place in the vast theoretical armory of Yai. For this reason, it is important for me to emphasize here that my reference to Althusser in this tribute is strictly metonymic: he is invoked, not only or merely in his single, selfsame identity but metonymically for the movement of French High Theory from the mid-1950s to about the early to late 1970s, especially concerning Poststructuralism and Marxism. Of course, Althusser stands in his own right in the context of this tribute because Yai had studied at the Sorbonne under his tutelage. But when, at Irele’s prompting, I “really met” Yai, where I had expected to meet an “Althusserian” like me at that stage of my intellectual odyssey, I met someone who had gone far beyond his phase of worshipful “Althusserianism”, that is if he ever had gone through such a phase in his intellectual development – as I did.

In the context of this tribute, I can only write summarily about this issue. Thus, when I “met” Yai in the manner in which I am indicating in this tribute, where I had centered my interest in French poststructuralism and Marxism around figures like Sartre, Althusser, Foucault and Derrida, Yai had moved beyond particular figures and the cults around them and in the process he had taken what he needed and rejected what he felt he did not need in the entire formation or tradition. The clearest expression of this move in the work of Yai is the inclusive and eclectic nature of his intellectual references. Beside the high profile of French High Theory in his work, his wide frame of reference included Russian Formalism, Mainstream Anglo-American Linguistics, Chomskyan Transformational Grammar, Russian Formalism, Cognitive Science, Speech Act Theory and Semiotics. And African and Afrodiasporic oral poetics, metaphysics, ethnohistory and ethnophilosophy. Actually, where I have used the term “eclectic” in the wide frame of references in Yai’s work, the term I should have used is correspondences. Let me explain.

At Irele’s prompting, I had gone to “meet” Yai with Althusser primarily on my mind. He did not disappoint me, but he had far more than Louis Althusser to share with me. Rather, just like the extraordinary richness of the meals and wines that we consumed and imbibed, the intellectual fare was stunning in its transatlantic and global inclusiveness; more specifically,  Yai’s  oeuvre was filled with correspondences. One particular set of correspondences was nothing short of astonishing, this being the fascinating correspondences and resonances between, on the onehaand, the radical disruption and decentering of linearity and teleology in African oral poetics and, on the other hand, poststructuralist theory and poetics. Permit me to use a set of fragments from the oral praise poetry of the Yoruba god Esu and the Fon equivalent deity, Legba, to briefly illustrate what I am saying here while noting that the fragments have made successful transatlantic crossings from West Africa to our diasporas in places like Brazil and Cuba in the New World:

Esu/Legba threw a rock yesterday/the rock kills a bird today/Esu/Legba throws a rock today/the rock killed a bird yesterday

Esu/Legba sleeps in the courtyard/ the courtyard is too small for him/Esu/Legba sleeps in a room/the room is still too small for him/Esu/Legba sleeps inside a palm kernel/Now he has space large enough for him to sleep in

It is important to note here that these fragments have been extrapolated from oral poetic texts from which they have been extracted are rife with breaks, gaps and disruptions in both the composition and the delivery of chants. In this manner, the text in both its totality and its fragments are rife with the sort of radical decentering and disruptions that we associate with mid to late 20th poststructuralism. Expecting to discuss Althusser and the French poststructuralists when I “met” him, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Yai’s understanding of the nature of knowledge production over time and in diverse spaces – an understanding that broke down conventional linear, over-literal and positivist methodologies and epistemologies – was as much derived from Yoruba and Fon poetics and metaphysics as it was a product of French postmodernism.

Much later after we had both left Ife and went our diverse ways and I read the essays collected by Bill Readings in a book appropriately titled Postmodernism Across the Ages: Essays on a Postmodernism That Wasn’t Born Yesterday, I came to a deeper understanding of the breadth and depth of Yai’s intellectual achievement. One could say that he was profoundly influenced by poststructuralist and postmodernist scholarly and theoretical traditions. But so was he also influenced by the diverse currents of theory, philosophy and scholarship that I mentioned earlier in this tribute. Indeed, I confess that I am tantalized by a question for which I have no ready or easy answer. This is the question: was Yai empowered to easily and robustly embrace the poststructuralist and postmodernist currents of Althusser and the other avatars and gods of French High Theory because of his prior tutelage to the sages and elders of Sabe; or was it his grounding in the fascinating epistemologies of Yoruba and Fon oral poetics and epistemologies that predisposed him to Western postmodernism?

At the Sorbonne, Yai took the first degree and left, apparently feeling that he needed neither a Ph D nor the state doctorate unique to the French system of higher education. He was right; he didn’t need to, as I have met few scholars with Ph D’s with the depth of learning and scholarship of our departed friend. And there is also this: Yai did not produce many books; indeed, he produced only one book and two monographs. The book is a Yoruba-English and English-Yoruba Concise Dictionary. The two monographs are scientific texts published by the UNESCO, one in Portuguese, one in French. This a rather slim output. But wait until you count and, more importantly, read the amazing number and quality of essays, published and unpublished, that Yai produced. I have read many of the published essays but only in English) and can testify that the elegance, the sophistication and the erudition of his essays are almost unmatched in African and Afrodiasporic literary and cultural scholarship, perhaps with the single exception of essays by Irele himself. But Irele collected and published many of his essays and indeed his venerable reputation lies mostly on the collections of his published essays. Consider then the fact that many of Yai’s essays, though written and delivered at conferences and colloquia, nevertheless remain unpublished. Add to this the fact that Yai was not only fluent in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish, the effective official languages of the Black World on the continent and the Diaspora, but he also participated in the intellectual cultures of all of these languages. His great theme in all the essays and monographs – if I may be so bold as to try to tease out a constant and unifying theme in a body of essays that both thematize resistance to totalization and reification and enact this resistance in its enunciative registers and accents – is the condition of  possibility for producing liberating knowledge in the historic aftermath of the epistemic violence that colonialism and imperialism perpetrated in Africa itself and  more generally in the Black World.

I have mostly left out of this tribute Yai’s resounding successes as a cultural diplomat who rose to the pinnacles of advocacy and leadership in global projects of solidarity and reciprocity among all the nations, races, and peoples of our world. Much has been made of this aspect of Yai’s life and career in other tributes. All I wish to add to that subject in this tribute is that if there is a “secret” to our departed friend’s success in this domain, it is the fact that he combined and gathered into himself, the two traditions that formed his intellectual and social  identity, that of the sage and that of the scholar. We are all aware of the adage that says that when an elder dies in our communities, it is a whole library that dies with her or him. But that is in appurtenance with the oral tradition. Yai was also a first-rate scholar and he left us a bountiful harvest of written scholarly texts of a very high order. May that harvest yield other harvests repeatedly – like the palm kernel in which Legba/Esu found the space in which to be endlessly germinative.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

 

By Biodun Jeyifo

 

 

The following Statement speaks for itself. The regular readers of this column are aware of my deep and sustained interest in the Black Lives Matter movement as currently the most successful and influential movement for the rights and dignity of Black people everywhere in the world. For this reason, the crisis in the BLM indicated in the statement below is, I imagine, of great concern to all Black people and progressives of all racial communities and all zonal constituencies of the world. For the most part, I shall let the Statement speak for itself, mostly because the crisis indicated in the Statement is in its inception. However, because the Statement casts a retrospective shadow on all the things I have written about the BLM in this column, I will append a short comment, a brief reflection, on the need for the structural and ideological reinvention of the BLM that is inherent in the Statement.

 

It is Time for Accountability

 

It was recently declared that Patrisse Cullors was appointed the Executive Director to the Black Lives Matter Global Network (BLMGN) Foundation. Since then, two new Black Lives Matter formations have been announced to the public: a Black Lives Matter Political Action Committee and BLM Grassroots. BLM Grassroots was allegedly created to support the organizational needs of chapters, separate from the financial functions of BLMGN. We, the undersigned chapters, believe that all of these events occurred without democracy, and assert that it was without the knowledge of the majority of Black Lives Matters chapters across the country and world.

We became chapters of Black Lives Matter as radical Black organizers embracing a collective vision for Black people engaging in the protracted struggle for our lives against police terrorism. With a willingness to do hard work that would put us at risk, we expected that the central organizational entity, most recently referred to as the Black Lives Matter Global Network (BLMGN) Foundation, would support us chapters in our efforts to build communally. Since the establishment of BLMGN, our chapters have consistently raised concerns about financial transparency, decision making, and accountability. Despite years of effort, no acceptable internal process of accountability has ever been produced by BLMGN and these recent events have undermined the efforts of chapters seeking to democratize its processes and resources.

In the spirit of transparency, accountability, and responsibility to our community, we believe public accountability has become necessary. As a contribution to our collective liberation, we must make clear:

 

1. Patrisse Cullors, as the sole board member of BLMGN, became Executive Director against the will of most chapters and without their knowledge.

 

2. The newly announced formation, BLM Grassroots, does not have the support of and was created without consultation with the vast majority of chapters.

 

3. The formation of BLM Grassroots effectively separated the majority of chapters from BLMGN without their consent and interrupted the active process of accountability that was being established by those chapters.

 

4. In our experience, chapter organizers have been consistently prevented from establishing financial transparency, collective decision making, or collaboration on political analysis and visionwithin BLMGN

 

5. For years there has been inquiry regarding the financial operations of BLMGN and no acceptable process of either public or internal transparency about the unknown millions of dollars donated to BLMGN, which has certainly increased during this time of pandemic and rebellion.

 

6. To the best of our knowledge, most chapters have received little to no financial support from BLMGN since the launch in 2013. It was only in the last few months that selected chapters appear to have been invited to apply for a $500,000 grant created with resources generated because of the organizing labor of chapters. This is not the equity and financial accountability we deserve.

 

We remain committed to collectively building an organization of BLM chapters that is democratic, accountable, and functions in a way that is aligned with our ideological values and commitment to liberation. We will move forward with transparency and expound on our collective efforts to seek transparency and organizational unity in a fuller statement in the near future. As we collectively determine next steps, we encourage our supporters to donate directly to chapters, who represent the frontline of Black Lives Matter. We understand that these issues are not new and that some chapters left, were not acknowledged, or were pushed out of network with the community of chapters because of them.

 

Signatories:

 

BLM Philly; By Any Means Necessary, Indianapolis; BLM, Washington, DC; BLM, Chicago; BLM, New Jersey; BLM, Vancouver, Washington; BLM, Oklahoma City; BLM, San Diego; BLM, Hudson Valley.

 

Comment/Reflection

 

          In all the articles that I have written on the BLM in this column, I have placed great emphasis on the “leaderlessness”, the deliberately decentralized organizational structure of the BLM. I was particularly emphatic on the fact that this “leaderlessness” was a departure from the traditions and practices of all previous civil rights organizations and movements in the United States. In lauding this crucial aspect of the BLM, I ascribed its remarkable successes, especially in the current period, to this loose and sparsely coordinated structure. To make this point, I argued that unlike most civil rights and direct action organizations of the past and the present, BLM was notable in how very thinly connected the chapters and branches of the organization were to the central, “coordinating’ body, a formation that actually seemed unwilling to tightly “coordinate” the activities of the chapters and branches. In this organizational and ideological context, the Statement republished here seems to be pitched as a robust challenge to, indeed a radical departure from what the BLM has been so far.

It is too early to say how BLM will react to this challenge from the seven self-identified chapters. Definitely, these are some of the most active and vibrant branches. And there is the possibility that seven will become fourteen and that might become twenty-eight and so on and so forth. Who knows, we might even soon have a National Convention of all or most of the chapters of the BLM, something that has neve taken place or, indeed, seemed thinkable at all!

The reader may have perceived that the challenge of the seven dissenters does not raise the fundamental issue of BLM’s ideological and practical commitment to decentralized revolutionary praxis. Indeed, the dissenters astutely pitch their rebellion on an assertion of the need for “internal democracy”, knowing fully well that it would be difficult for any activist organization or movement to admit to a lack of interest in, or dedication to “internal democracy”. But how does “internal democracy” arise or apply to a movement whose branches and chapters almost entirely operate as completely separate and independent units? Dear readers, please understand this: no emissaries, no revolutionary apparatchiks ever went out from a central body to form each of the city, state and regional zones of the BLM; all of them were self-constituted.  Well, is it then the case that the time has come when the movement’s remarkable successes have brought things to a new horizon of organization development or, in the words of the title of this piece, reinvention? Only time will tell.

Perhaps the most delicate or even startling issue raised by the dissenters is that of “accountability”, especially with regard to alleged “millions of dollars” donated to the central body. Notably, the Statement does not make any bald accusations of financial misdeeds. Rather, the claim is twofold in its expression. First, it is alleged, quite rightly I might add, that the central body, the BLMGN, receives “millions of dollars” from unnamed, unidentified sources. Secondly, it is alleged that the process whereby BLMGN sends subventions to some branches and not to others is not transparent and is even unknown to most of the branches of the movement.

But the BLM, together with its organs, is not your typical NGO or civil society organization. Permit me to be absolutely frank about this aspect of the BLM: if and when its fundraising activities become the subject of open and acrimonious disputes, then it has begun the path to a routinization that will bring it closer and closer to what we expect and know of bourgeois political parties and nonprofit humanitarian organizations. Who among its most generous donors as well as its cadres and militants scattered around the world, who ever asked the ANC in the long period of its frontline anti-apartheid struggle to give an account of how monies it received were disbursed?

I confess that in all the articles on the BLM that I published in this column, I was deliberately silent on the movement’s remarkable successes in recent years in raising funds. I was silent on this aspect of the BLM because, quite frankly, it is somewhat naïve both to be surprised that an organization like BLM raises substantial amounts of funds and to ask how it makes use of the funds that it raises. I have read the histories of many revolutionary organizations and movements in the modern world and never have I encountered an open, “accountable” auditing of how these organizations raise and spend funds! Is this case of the BLM and the BLMGN an aberration? No, not quite. Just don’t expect that this will be the cause of a routinization of the BLM.

As I stated earlier in this discussion, this is only an initial or provisional comment. If I have given the impression that this Statement of dissent on the BLM is unjustifiable and will probably go nowhere, I hasten to deny any such intention. Indeed, what is uppermost in my mind is the thought that this is likely to be the beginning of a process of renewal or reinvention which, in all likelihood, will lead at first to fragmentations of the BLM as a movement. The contours of these are still unclear, but I make bold to say that at least two factions will eventually crystalize: one faction will continue on the path of leaderlessness and decentralization that has so far been dominant; another faction will return to a past that will become a new future, this being the future past of revolutionary and activist organizations that are hierarchical and centralized. And need I say this, with admixtures of these two prototypes of the centralized and the decentralized. Black people and all dominated and oppressed peoples of the world will have their day of liberation, with or without centralized and hierarchical movements.

 

 

• Biodun Jeyifo,bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

 

 

Biodun Jeyifo

 

As I write these words on Friday, November 20, 2020, it is nearly two weeks since the end of the elections, but as the whole world knows, Donald Trump is yet to concede that he lost the elections. Indeed, as recently as yesterday, he gave indication that he will stick to the bitter end in his refusal, even if this leads to a fatal breakdown of the political and constitutional order of the United States. But there is no doubt that Trump is close to endgame. The clearest indication of this is the fact that he has given up his attempt to use the courts and legality itself to overturn Biden’s victory. The outlines of this post-legal strategy are still unclear but basically, it involves getting Biden’s electors to cross over to Trump’s side when the Electoral College meets on December 14, 2020. This will mean nothing less than a coup, a non-military coup whose chances of success are between zero and zero minus.  This brings to mind that sardonic adage: a drowning man will clutch at a straw.

But if Trump is more or less “finished”, at least for now, Trumpism is far from dead. As a matter of fact, ironically, it is precisely at the very moment that Trump himself is politically at the end of his tether that Trumpism recorded its greatest electoral gains. The most disturbing expression of this astonishing point is the fact that while Trump himself was defeated, Trumpism recorded stunning electoral victories. Against all the polls, all the confident predictions that Biden and the Democrats would score impressive electoral Congressional victories, the Democrats actually lost many seats in the House of Representatives and failed to flip control of the Senate to their Party. Moreover, many of the Republicans whose victories significantly reduced Democrats’ control of the House to single digits are far-right, Trumpian diehards. Control of the Senate is still within reach of the Democrats but that is only if they win the two seats in the State of Georgia in runoff elections that will be held on January 5, 2021. Thus we can say that Trump may be gone but Trumpism is still here with strong legs and muscular sinews, alas.

It is far too early to get a working sense of what this will mean for the incoming Biden administration in particular and, more generally, for the country and the whole world. We must be honest with ourselves: we expected a great, thumping electoral repudiation of not only Trump himself but of Trumpism also. Everything was riding on that expectation, that hope. The racist, misogynistic, xenophobic and fascist excesses of Trump and his hordes would be radically curtailed, if not completely wiped out. The normalization of falsehood, vulgarity and cruelty in big and small things would vanish from public life. Corruption, mediocrity and autocratic highhandedness would go away from governance. And in the wake of these expected changes would come fundamental redress of both ancient and new savage inequities of American society, both at home and in relation to the world at large. None of these happened.

Before the advent of Trump and Trumpism, most Americans had forgotten or never thought much about how ugly and repellent aspects of Americanism could be, side by side with the universally admired achievements of American society, culture and civilization in science, technology, music, literature and the arts, sports and entertainment. McCarthyism and its cult of paranoia and scapegoating in public life were more or less forgotten. The harrowing travails of most immigrant groups in the country, especially the darker-skinned races and peoples, were buried under feelgood myths and narratives of American openness to immigrants. Racism and White supremacist ugliness and violence were consigned to a past that America was said to be doing everything possible and necessary to put behind it. Magical thinking and a medievalism that seemed more than half a millennium behind all modern societies were thought to be completely incompatible to the spiritual and moral arc of American progressivism. That is until all of them were resuscitated by Trump and his hordes, almost intact and indeed in invigorated forms and incarnations.

I cannot move on and away from this list without singling out one of the most confounding and pernicious expression of this Trumpian regress to America’s spectral dark past, this being the so-called QAnon movement. That millions of Americans believe, literally believe, that Democrats and the Hollywood glitterati are pedophiliac and satanic cannibals who sexually molest and then consume children, what can one say in the encounter with this mass movement of Trumpian America, especially given the fact that Trump himself is regarded as a sort of demigod, a half man and half deity avatar of the movement? Please note that some of the newly elected Republican members of Congress are avowed, militant members of QAnon. Note also that Trump has spoken warmly and positively of the movement. Note, finally, that QAnon is so osmotic within Trumpian cultural politics that it has melded seamlessly and effortlessly into the right-wing Christian evangelism that is a huge constituent formation of Trump’s political base.

Perhaps the most consequential aspect of Trumpism that has robustly survived beyond Trump’s electoral defeat is the mythology that the Covid-19 virus is either a hoax or is miraculously disappearing. In the last one week, accounts have been coming from the storm centers of the pandemic in hospital ICU’s showing that even as some terminally stricken patients are dying from affliction by the pandemic, they continue to maintain that the virus is a hoax and  what the doctors and nurses are telling them is a misdiagnosis! I place great emphasis on this issue not only because it will tragically cause hundreds of thousands of deaths but also because, so far at least, Biden and the Democrats do not seem to know how to deal with this phenomenon. As they see it, what they need to do is to depoliticize the response to the pandemic. But any careful and nuanced analysis of the Trumpian masses’ response to the pandemic would show that it belongs far more to the phenomenon of mass hysteria than politicization by an opportunist demagogue. When thousands of men and women, adult men and women, go willingly to their deaths believing Trump and not Dr. Anthony Fauci, it should be obvious that the panacea should combine depoliticization with the application of mass shock therapy.

As I approach the conclusion of this discussion, permit me to say, once again, that Trumpism without Trump in power is a phenomenon that is unprecedented in America or perhaps in the world. If this seems like saying that Hitlerism survived Hitler, I would hasten to respond by saying that Hitler built full scale Hitlerism only after he had destroyed every institution and norm of German liberal democracy whereas Trump achieved full-blown Trumpism with most of the institutional and normative foundations or strongholds of liberal democracy in America still relatively intact. This is why already Trump has begun to fly the kite of a bid for the presidency in 2024. This promises to be the ultimate test of the strength of Trumpism without Trump in power because Trump can only be the Republicans’ presidential candidate in 2024 if his looming criminal and civil troubles once he leaves office do not imperil his rights as a legally unimpeded citizen. Only time, in the immediate future as well as in the long haul, only time will tell.

I will end this discussion on one of the most urgent issues that will arise in the immediate aftermath of this emergent space of Trumpism without Trump whose major characteristic is the fact that not only was Trumpism not decisively repudiated but it actually gained considerable electoral strength and leverage. This issue is none other than the alliance of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement with the Democratic Party. Here, permit me to say that I can only give tentative remarks and commentary since we are still in the midst of evolving, open-ended developments. My point of departure, I should emphasize, is my belief that the kind of victory that Biden and the Democrats won shows that America is still fundamentally a Center-Right country whereas the BLM-Democratic Party alliance was predicated on the belief, the hope, that America was about to become, at last, a Center-Left country.

I will be very concrete in my remarks in illustration of this thesis. In any of the liberal capitalist democracies of the West, being Center-Left means you will always need sizeable electoral victories to transform demands articulated in radical activist protests and demonstrations to egalitarian economic, social and civil policies. This is the political and ideological foundation of the welfare state and its celebrated economic and social features – socialized medicine; structural rearrangements of relations between wealth, income and the tax burden in favour of the working and middle classes; state or public support for quality of life, employment, education, pension, leisure and recreation for all and not just those who can afford them, etc., etc. If at any time the Center-Left formation suffers electoral reverses or outright defeats, the ramparts of egalitarianism unravel and social and economic policies undergirding the welfare state unravel. This is what has been happening to the Labour Party and its allies in the United Kingdom in about the last decade.

Of course, America has never had a true or full-blown welfare state, though of course it has had periods of significant progressivism in social and economic matters. I hope that I am not being hasty in my thoughts and deliberations here, but it seemed to me in the final stretch of the marathon electoral cycle of the 2020 American presidency that for the first time in the political history of the country, a historic Center-Left alignment was about to emerge via the alliance of the BLM and the Democratic Party.

We know enough already that this did not happen in the recent elections. In very concrete terms, this means that the numbers and the spread are not there for Biden and the Democrats on one side, and the BLM on the other side, to translate their electoral platform into policies through legislation. Of course, Biden can and will almost certainly use the power of presidential incumbency and, especially the so-called “Executive Orders” to effect meaningful or considerable improvement in the living and working conditions of Black people and other exposed minorities. But BLM and the radical wing of the Democratic expected far more than this. At the very least, they expected that their performance in the elections would lead to procuring the legislative muster to pass far-reaching laws against police brutality and lawlessness against Black people, legislation that would have had multiplier effects on other areas of American public and civic life. We should not expect that they will abandon these legislative agendas; too much “blood”, too much thought have been given to these projects. But, regrettably, to deploy Chinua Achebe’s luminous words, it is not yet morning on creation day in race relations, in undiluted racial justice in America.

I will end on a note of realistic hope. Perhaps it was too idealistic to hope that a country like the United States that is the heartland and the center of gravity of global capitalism can move from Center-Right to Center-Left in one single electoral cycle? Perhaps for that to happen, we would need two or three electoral cycles of the BLM-Democrats’ alliance. If so, the midterm elections in 2022 should serve to confirm or refute these prognostications.

 

• Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

 Biodun Jeyifo

 

Lumpen: of or relating to dispossessed and uprooted individuals cut off from the economic and social class with which they might normally be identified] Dictionary.com (Online)

As soon as I got the news that “hoodlums”, “thugs” and other sundry criminal, lowlife elements had hijacked the overwhelmingly peaceful EndSARS demonstrations and protests, I sensed that the protests were in danger of being derailed and delegitimized, especially by the federal government and its spokespersons. Being far from home but knowing the answer I was likely to get before posing the question, I nevertheless asked some friends in phone conversations who these people were who had hijacked the peaceful protests and was told, “awon area boys ma ni o” (it is the “area boys”, who else?).

This information troubled me a lot because “area boys” signifies something far more portentous than those elite putdowns of our dispossessed underclass as “hoodlums” and “thugs”. This is because the term “area boys” goes far beyond the dismissive moralism of “hoodlums” and “thugs” to give hints that in the term “area boys” we confront group or collective amoral or even criminal values and attitudes. In radical liberal and Marxist sociology, this social group or category is known as the lumpenproletariat which, in this piece, I am calling its shorter form of lumpen. You may call them what you like – “thugs”, “”criminals”, “area boys” – but please know that it was the work of the lumpen as a social group that sharply confronts us in the following excerpt from the stunned and mournful account of the Governor of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, on the destruction visited on Lagos when the #EndSARS demonstrations were hijacked:

“Our beautiful city has seen a level of destruction almost akin to a war zone. It was a shocking and very sad spectacle. Our land took a beating and this hurts. Historical buildings, cultural centres, private malls, government holdings and private businesses were pillaged & burnt…This is not the Lagos we know. I am the 15th governor of the state and Lagos has never witnessed this level of destruction. The oldest court in Nigeria was razed down. Many properties were completely destroyed. It is time to heal ourselves and time to heal Lagos”.

By the way, I have read accounts of this savage and destructive intervention of the lumpen in the #EndSARS demonstrations in many other towns and cities in the country, that of Calabar almost matching the number and scale of the destructions in Lagos. I confess that I was not aware of the sheer scale of this devastation when I wrote my piece on #EndSARS in this column last week. This is not to say that the added information or knowledge would have changed anything I wrote in that piece. That being said, I must admit that if knew what I now know, I certainly would not have ignored it and, indeed, that knowledge would have sharpened some of the most crucial observations and reflections that I made in the piece. On this point, permit me to remind the reader of the phrase in the title of the piece that spoke of the “anguish and the rage of our youths”. This is the point of departure for me in thus piece.

Compatriots, I am in complete agreement with some of those who have commented on the #EndSARS demonstrations with the suggestion that we must do everything to avoid hasty, careless or superficial analyses and conclusions concerning what transpired in the demonstrations. Indeed, I do hope that the piece that appeared in this column last week was neither careless nor overhasty. But having said that, I must admit that when I wrote about the “anguish and the rage of our youths”, I was thinking mostly of the youthful protesters themselves, not the lumpen who infiltrated their ranks and almost nearly derailed their peacefulness and idealism.

As a matter of fact, it was the thought that #EndSARS seemed to have effectively subsumed anguish and rage into a very hopeful and selfless intervention in the terrible impasse in the current state of affairs in our country, it was this that led me to think – erroneously, it now appears – that the “area boys”, the lumpen, constituted only a small part of the demonstrations, this being the fragment that had, for the most part, devolved to opportunistic violence, looting and wanton destructiveness in response to the government’s ferocious, murderous violence. I have not completely discarded this idea, but I must emphasize that I now believe that we must think of the lumpen as a related, but distinct and “independent” factor in the demonstrations – if only in recognition that it alone seems “victorious” in the stalemate that seems to have overtaken the #EndSARS demonstrations.

The lumpen as the “victors” in the demonstrations, leaving the peaceful and idealistic demonstrators, the government and the whole society itself as the losers? Yes, but only if we grant that opportunistic and cynical looting and pillage was a victory of sorts. After all, moveable properties, dry goods and consumable merchandise were carried away. And sweet and savage “revenge” was visited on the rich and the powerful of our society – their palatial mansions were looted and torched, their businesses, banks, factories and warehouses were razed to the ground. The government was not spared: iconic public buildings, police stations, historic mansions, edifices and complexes held in government or public trust were destroyed. More subliminally, the government and the society as a whole sustained an incalculable loss in the manner in which the constitutional right of peaceful protest and assembly quickly appeared to be too “expensive” and “unrealistic” a right to be sustained if the cost was the sort of mind-numbing destructiveness captured in countless images and accounts. Coming too close for comfort and incredible in its emotional impact, the buildings and grounds of this newspaper, The Nation, were destroyed beyond recognition.

Let me be very clear and unambiguous on this issue: in the aftermath of this development, at the very best, only governmentally “allowed” protests and demonstrations whose duration are moreover predetermined, only these will receive approval, not only from the government but also from powerful and influential segments of our elites. Already, strident and eloquent calls are being made to this end. At the worst, the initiators and participants in the #EndSARS project will suffer a crippling bout of self-doubt, a sense of inexcusable ineptitude for not having in the least anticipated the intervention of the lumpen, when all the signs were clearly evident for all to see. Indeed, it is not only the proponents of #EndSARS that will probably undergo these bouts of confusion and indecision; rather, it is virtually all groups and projects seeking to exercise their constitutional rights to freedom of assembly and protest that will internalize this unexamined and ungazetted moratorium. I hope I am wrong in this, but the statement from one of the sponsoring and coordinating groups in #EndSARS, the Feminist Coalition, that announced the suspension of the demonstrations, this statement gave hints that more than a temporary suspension was involved.

I suggest that one of the things that all well-meaning and progressive Nigerians, old and young, should do in the aftermath of these developments is to begin to pay a more critical and nuanced attention to our “area boys”, considered as the vast, teeming hordes of the lumpen of our modern Nigerian society, especially in the cities and towns. The first step in such a process is to examine precisely what kind of “victory” it/they have won in the impasse that has descended on #EndSARS. As soon as we begin this process we are confronted forcefully by this question: what kind of victory can this group, this social formation win when, as long as it remains lumpen, perhaps the most dispossessed and uprooted social and economic category in all modern societies, what kind of victory can it/they win in a society like ours that is one of the most exploitative in the world? Compatriots, you may continue to call them mere “area boys” if you like, but please know that they are completely like the lumpen of all societies in the modern era in their volatility, their profound sense of having absolutely nothing to lose, their readiness to serve one master, two masters, a hundred masters and, indeed, no masters. The moment you take this factor into consideration, compatriots, you begin to see and dread the kind of “victory” that the “area boys”, the lumpen, won in the #EndSARS demonstrations.

I regret that I cannot get into a substantial discussion of the lumpen in this piece, especially with regard to its volatility and its propensity for both petty and horrendous criminality. Those inclined to look further into the matter might find a lot to absorb in Wole Soyinka’s dramatic masterpiece, The Road, together with riveting accounts of his encounter with hired political thugs and hoodlums during the “Operation Wet E” in the then Western Region in the mid-1960s, this in the second volume of his memoirs, Ibadan: the ‘Penklemes’ Years. In The Road, which is heavily poetic and symbolic but at the same time unforgettable in the realism with which it portrays the “area boys” or lumpen characters of the play, the destructiveness of the group builds up slowly, ever so slowly, but when it breaks out precipitously at the climactic end of the play, readers or audiences are left with a haunting, spectral sense of the world of the lumpen of our society. In Ibadan: the ‘Penklemes’ Years, a long narrative stretch details the author-protagonist’s battle of wits and wills with a famous, indeed celebrated leader of political thugs in Ibadan at the time, a battle that shows that WS had/has a discomfiting or, if you like, revolutionary affinity with the lumpen.

I confess that it is with hesitation that I say this, but no costing of the trillions of naira involved in the destruction of public and private assets and properties in Lagos and other cities by the “area boys”, the lumpen, can match the cost involved in the unquantifiable, serial and seemingly endless acts and processes of dispossession that turned millions of drifters from our villages and rural communities into “area boys”, into lumpen. Fundamentally, the thing about area boys, about the lumpen, is that though they are a large and perhaps dominant part of the “wretched of the earth”, they rarely ever wear their wretchedness on their miens, their social personae for all the world to see. In your/our own interests, please keep this factor in mind, compatriots. Being “thugs”, “hoodlums” and “area boys” is not an act of God, and neither is it an index of an unalterable natural state of things. It is a form, a mode of immiseration and no modern society is condemned, as ours seems to be, to an ever-increasing social reproduction of the lumpen.

I wish to end on an upbeat, optimistic note. #End SARS will reemerge from the suspension of its recent demonstrations. Peaceful and idealistic expressions of disaffection for the cruelties and injustices of our society are like oxygen to diseased, asthmatic lungs, especially when they come from our youths. Without them, we are left with only elections and/or coups as the levers of change and progress. But we all know the dubious value that these have for changing the state of affairs for the better in our society. In time, the proponents and coordinators of #EndSARS will learn how to anticipate the intervention(s) of the “area boys, the lumpen. Perhaps the government too will learn that it is in its own enlightened self-interest to protect the right to freedom of assembly and demonstration in our country. This may happen, but I am not banking on that possibility with the administration of Muhammadu Buhari.

 

• Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu