Category: Biodun Jeyifo

By Biodun Jeyifo

My the time that readers get to read this piece, it will be two days since it was written and sent off to my Editor. Of course, I am writing it now, in the early hours of Friday, October 23, 2020 in the time zone of the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. I have just read Buhari’s speech on #EndSARS. The speech is terribly disappointing, to say the least. On the surface, it seems conciliatory. In it, Buhari profusely thanks eminent persons at home and abroad who have sharply criticized the president and his administration for using deadly, murderous force to try to crush a protest movement demonstrating against state-sanctioned murderous force.

Buhari in the speech also seems to validate the constitutional rights of the protesters to demonstrate and protest peacefully. But at a fundamental level, the speech shows that Buhari has absolutely no sense of how deep the anguish and rage of our youths are. What is one to say of a ruler who has only a shallow and superficial sense of the consuming despair and anger of our youths, the  largest demographic bloc in our society?  This is the subject that I wish to address in this piece. However, before getting to it, permit me to briefly give an account of how I became aware and profoundly impressed by the #EndSARS movement

Like most Nigerians at home and broad, I am still reeling from the catastrophic development that overtook the #EndSARS demonstrations last Tuesday. Indeed, it is with a hesitation, a great desultoriness that I am attempting to write about the development in this piece. Again like most Nigerians, I have watched innumerable images and texts on this event on the social media of the Internet, in Nigerian and international radio and television broadcasts, and in newspaper reports, editorials and opinion pieces. Beyond the certainty that a fateful line has been crossed by the killings at the Lekki tollgate in Lagos, I confess that I am still trying to achieve even a minimum of the understanding that the development calls for. What exactly do I mean by this?

First, there was the welcome surprise of the nationwide scope of the protests and demonstrations, together with the boisterousness, the selflessness, the idealism. In this column, I have long argued that the poor and the excluded in their millions, especially among our youths, come from virtually all the ethnic communities, religious faiths and regional zones. For this reason, it warmed my heart and stoked my hopes that #EndSARS was/is a thoroughly Pan-Nigerian phenomenon, the likes of which have been hard to come by since the June 12 Movement of 1993. This was all the more remarkable given the fact that #EndSARS seemed the brainchild of the youths themselves, without the patronage or manipulation of either professional politicians or vested moneyed interests.

Secondly, finding to my great surprise many parallels between #EndSARS protests and the demonstrations of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, I actually began to hope, to pray – in my secular expression of faith – that things would go successfully with and for #EndSARS demonstrations as they did and are still doing for the BLM. After all, didn’t the BLM demonstrations begin, as did #EndSARS, with denunciation of police brutalities against Black people before morphing into a general call for an end to all the social and economic injustices that Black people are forced to endure in America? Indeed, one parallel with the BLM movement struck me forcefully in #EndSARS, this being the apparent leaderlessness, the deliberately decentralized nature of mobilization and organization. From accounts that I either read or was given by people in the know, this was such a marked feature of #EndSARS that most people were both impressed and baffled by it.

And then thirdly and finally, #EndSARS had a festiveness, an air of ecstatic joie di vivre that did not however in the least detract from the utter seriousness of the protesters and demonstrators. Food was cooked and consumed in the streets and highways, music and dancing combined with songs and chants of principled militancy, and instantaneous artwork was created and “consumed” through posters, T-shirts, signage and handbills. And as all this was happening, much of the art and performance created was almost simultaneously shared across the length and breadth of the country and the outside word, especially via the social media and its capacity to make things that are launched into circulation go wildly viral. I confess that the demonstrations and protests had been going on for about three to four days before I got wind of it. But when I did, much of the material, “evidence” of something new, unprecedented and wondrous, was there for me to watch and listen to as if in real time. In revolutionary history, there is something known as the “carnival of the oppressed” – that is what we were seeing in the #EndSARS movement. This phenomenon is at the heart of what I have to say in this piece because it poses the question of why oppressed populations – or fractions thereof – often stage their protests, their uprisings as a sort of festival.

You must remember, compatriots, that the median age of Nigeria for this year, 2020, is 18.1 years. Going by the technical definition of the concept of median age, this means that half of our country’s population is under 18 years and half over that age. Equally telling is the fact that the estimate of Nigerians under the age of 24 is 64%. The implication of these stats and data are inescapable: the vast majority of Nigerians are young; those of us who, like Muhammadu Buhari, are in the eighth decade of life are an infinitesimally small fraction of the population. More to the central point of this article, since about 7 out of every 10 Nigerians live in poverty, it means that the poor in our country are, by an overwhelming majority, young. I admit that I am perhaps merely giving a statistical and data inflection to facts about poverty in our country that most people know. But I do have my reason for doing so, especially in juxtaposition with Buhari’s septuagenarian gerontocracy.

In Buhari’s #EndSARS speech, there is a genuine surprise that his administration’s offer to scrap SARS and replace it with another reformed formation in the Nigerian Police was rejected and furthermore, it was complicated by more demands that went well beyond police brutality and extra-judicial violence. Why could Buhari and his advisers not see that #EndSARS’s demand for an end to SARS would not stop with that demand and would logically and inevitably extend to the myriad of indices of hardship and hopelessness that our youths ae compelled to endure? Joblessness; parents and older family members in grinding penury and therefore incapable of adequately feeding, clothing and housing themselves and their young; the education they are getting nearly worthless in getting them employment or preparing them to be competitive in the national and global marketplace of skills and professions; the profound ennui of what to do with themselves as all kinds of temptations assail them, making them to drift into either cynicism or criminality.

Yes, one of Buhari’s daughters is alleged to have participated in #EndSARS demonstrations, but was this what lured Buhari into thinking that once he had offered to scrap SARS the youths should have danced their way into talks with his government? I do not wish to diminish the genuineness or the value of whatever she felt in joining #EndSARS demonstrations, but Buhari’s daughter is vastly separated from the despair and anguish of most, if not all of her fellow protesters. Unless of course she commits “class suicide”, leaves Aso Rock before the end of her father’s current term in 2023 and becomes a full-time or lifelong activist.

Nothing, compatriots, nothing reveals Buhari’s ignorance of the depth of the despair and anguish of our youths than the programs and policies of his administration that he outlined in his speech as evidence or proof that he is not indifferent to the suffering of the poor and the downtrodden of our society – Farmermoni; Tradermoni; Marketmoni; N30,000 each to 100,000 artisans; 250 businesses to be registered at the Corporate Affairs Commission; etc., etc. In relation to the size of our population and the structural features of our economy, these are mere palliatives that will not make a dent in the scale of poverty and immiseration in our society, especially among the youths. This is beside the fact that these policies and programs do not in the least touch the real bases of the vast wealth and income disparities of our national economy.

Mr. President, how in the world can you address the dire circumstances and prospects of our youths without touching one jot on the existing structure of wealth and income inequality in our country that is one of the worst in the world? And in this regard and to be completely blunt here, predatoriness – the division of society into predators and preys – is the motive force of our political economy: how can Buhari and his administration come to the rescue, in his own words, of “youths, women and the most vulnerable in our society” when predatoriness has not decreased but has been magnified and finessed in the rein of Buhari and the APC?

Permit me to put this argument in a revisionary syllogism that can be easily understood. Here goes: To lift most, if not all, of our youths out of despair and anguish without touching the existing structure of wealth and income disparities, you would need to generate new wealth on a colossal scale; this is not happening now and does not seem about to happen in the foreseeable future; ergo, you cannot lift the youths and other excluded groups out of poverty without ending predatoriness, thereby vastly reducing wealth and income disparities. If Buhari and his advisers try to make light of these arguments, let it be known, first, that wealth and income disparities in Nigeria are universally known to be one of the worst in the world and secondly, with the possible exception of the U.S., all countries marked by the sort of vast disparities of wealth and income that we have in Nigeria tend to be marked by violence and criminality as the preferred instruments of governance among the ruling elites.

I would like to conclude with a final word on the idea of the “carnival of the oppressed”. #EndSARS was remarkable not only in extending and reproducing itself throughout the country, but also in empowering our youths to believe in themselves and to think their way out of the terrible impasse that we, the older generations, created. It is a wonderful experience for an entire generation of youths, against all the odds, to find strength and possibility in themselves and in the future. That was what was celebrated in #EndSARS; that was the source of the “carnival of the oppressed” that was such a distinctive feature of the movement. The apparent present impasse will not last. This is because once a whole generation has come into intimate contact with its powers of self-destination, no force on earth can take that away from it/them.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

 Biodun Jeyifo

I confess: even if the title of this piece does not exactly reveal the irony, the absurdity even, in the suggestion that any country in the modern world could be younger than any generational cohorts of its citizens, I wish to make that intention very clear, very explicit. For if we follow too closely and rigidly the “postcolonial canard” that Nigeria is (only) 60 years old, it does mean, doesn’t it, that the two generations of Nigerians born respectively between the 1920s to the 1930s and between the 1940s to the 1950s, are older than their country? But I doubt that there are any Nigerians of any generation that feel, deep down, that they are older than Nigeria. I most certainly do not think or feel so, even though I belong to the generation of those born between the 1940s to the 1950s, well before independence in 1960, the presumed or putative year of our “birth”. On this note of confession, this note of a disclaimer that I am older than my country, permit me to make a second confession.

What is this “confession”? Well, here it is. With perhaps the single exception of  the year 1960 itself, I have never joined in celebrating October 1 as a day of any special significance. Indeed, I joined in the celebrations in 1960 because I was young, I was in my first year of high school and independence felt very good, very exciting and very “cool”, as adolescent Americans might put it. And also because on that day of October 1st of that year, all schoolchildren in the three regions of North, East and West were feasted generously at government expense. I should perhaps inform compatriots of younger generational cohorts reading this piece that prior to 1960, we schoolchildren had also been feasted annually on “Empire Day”.

But the feasting on October 1, 1960 felt very different from all or any of the previous feasts on Empire Day because it had “independence” attached to it. We sang a brand-new song or anthem different from the one we had always sung in praise of The Queen and her far-flung Empire. And we had a new flag and a new iconography of rulers, potentates and dignitaries. In other words, October 1, 1960 came with an excitement, a euphoria that had been missing in the feasting and celebrations of Empire Day.

When and how did the excitement and the euphoria about “independence” in relation to October 1 end so quickly for me? Frankly, I do not have any precise dates or thoughts with regard to causes and effects. It is almost like asking me when and how I stopped being mindful and celebrative of my own birthday anniversaries. The fact is that for this question, I have no answer beyond the rather lame explanation that I simply do not mark or celebrate my birthdays because it is not my habit to do so. [Disclaimer: I had no hand, none at all, in the huge celebrations that marked my 60th and 70th birthday anniversaries, though of course I remain forever grateful and indebted to the friends, comrades, colleagues and students who made them possible]

I will of course not “dodge” this question, for I do have an answer for it. However, I must inform the reader that this “answer” became clarified for me only gradually, indeed almost imperceptibly over the course of several decades. What is this answer? Well, simply put, I gradually began to see in our celebration(s) of October 1 a great gap, a great dissociation between, on the one hand, freedom from our past colonial bondage and, on the other hand, responsibility for our eventual failure to fill the empty bag of our “freedom” with mastery in our dealings and entanglements with the outside world, more precisely the rich and powerful post-imperial nations of the global North. Expressed differently, this means that for me, every celebration of October 1 came to smack too much of our failures in establishing real freedom, mastery and dignity as a nation and a people, at home and also in the wider world. In other words, although I cannot ascribe a specific date to it, I do know that in the course of time, October 1 became for me so emptied of meaning and significance that I often barely noticed when it came – and went!

Which is why I began to be affronted by the imputation that, thanks to the reification of October 1, 1960, Nigeria is younger than all of us who were born between the 1920s to the 1930s and the 1940s to the 1950s. But we do know that our country is much older than that! We do know that long before 1960, the various peoples and nationalities in what is now Nigeria had achieved both failure and breakthroughs in establishing peaceful and productive relationships amongst themselves and the outside world. And we also know that under differing conditions, this is an unending historical process in the light of which the literal and additive calculus through which Nigeria is adjudged to be (only) 60 years old is an absurdity, especially given the fact that most of those 60 years have been devoted to what Chinua Achebe described as trying to find out when the rain started to beat us.

I do admit it. Much of what I have in mind here has been widely and amply discussed under the framework of what is known as postcolonial disillusionment. Now, I should explain that in my professional life of nearly half of a century as a scholar, much of my teaching and research focused on this world-historical phenomenon of postcolonial disillusionment. Indeed in one of my books on this grand theme, I coined the phrase “truthful lie” that became an instant hit and in which I discussed many developments like the manifold cultural effects of the “flag independence” that the British gave us in 1960. Indeed, I have an inclination to now apply this concept to the imputation that Nigeria is (only) 60 years old: compatriots, it is nothing but a truthful lie!

As I do not wish to offer a rehash of all I have written and taught on this vast subject in this piece, what I wish to engage here is what I would call the necessity for a second independence or more graphically, a Second October. The independence that came with October I, 1960, has turned out to be empty, contentless. We must now struggle for a second independence, a Second October. When this Second October comes, call on me, compatriots, and I shall be at the feasting and banqueting hall! Or more to the point, let us all work in unity for that second independence and then we can have a celebration that is not an empty ritual, like Nigeria at 60!

How should I express the coordinates of this Second October? I look for a short, pithy way to express this and I must confess that words fail me and intuition doesn’t seem adequate to the problem posed to it. I think, think very hard and all I can come up with is this: We, Nigerians and Africans, live in the world and the world ought to be a place fit for us to live in. Do you get my point here, compatriots? In nearly all the jeremiads that are routinely written and spoken like a secular catechism every October 1st in our country in the last sixty years, we encounter the grim fact or datum that neither in Nigeria itself nor in most places in the world are Nigerians, with notable exceptions, accorded a dignified and livable existence. This is very bad, compatriots, isn’t it. Well, yes, except that this is not a uniquely “Nigerian” phenomenon as it is true of more than a half of the population of the earth: for most people on the planet, their countries of origin, birth or nationality are like refugee camps and they flee from their homelands, they are not welcome as migrants or immigrants in most of the other countries and regions of the world. Thus, on account of this sobering fact, we must say that Nigerians are the most representative, the most paradigmatic of the terrible spiritual desolation of most of the denizens of planet earth.

Let us explore this proposition soberly and equably, compatriots. These days, the phrase, “Nigeria is the poverty capital of the world” is very widely used, both in Nigeria itself and in diverse areas of the wider world. But aren’t “poverty capitals” found in most parts of the world including even the United States, the wealthiest country on the planet? And suffering, great and almost unassuageable suffering? Don’t we find it as prevalent all over the world as we find it abundantly in Nigeria? And, to take the flip side of this phenomenon that Fela Kuti famously called “shuffering and shmiling” that seems to be a uniquely and sublimely Nigerian phenomenon, don’t we find it all over the world? The thing that gets me the most is the predatoriness of rulers toward the ruled, which in my view, is the single most consequential development of governance in the period inaugurated in October 1, 1960, the “First October”. I have travelled a lot and with few exceptions, every country I have visited in the world has its own forms and expressions of this constitutive predatoriness of rulers over the ruled. Doesn’t this make the predatoriness of our rulers, admittedly the most notorious in the world, also a paradigmatic condition of governance in many of the nations of the planet?

Beyond these illustrations and clarifications, let us keep the essential proposition that I am exploring in this piece in mind. For this reason, permit me to restate it. Since 1960, October 1 has served as a sort of ritual moment in which to reflect on what is wrong and what is right – mostly what is wrong – with the country, especially its rulers. As a matter of fact, it would not be overstating the case to assert that after 60 years, this ritual has come to serve as perhaps the most authoritative act or expression of sovereignty that we have as nation. Typically, the President and Commander in Chief gives a speech to mark the occasion and no matter how dissatisfied Nigerians are with the contents of the speech, the very act or ritual of delivering it on October 1 is regarded as a supreme expression of our national sovereignty. However, if at one time – perhaps within the first six years of independence – October 1 and the President’s Speech did fulfill that expectation, who can contest the fact it has been clear for at least the last four decades that it has become clearly apparent that both the Speech and the Day constitute empty rituals.

Take the case of Muhammadu Buhari’s October 1st Speech given only a few days ago in which there was much heat but no light. A dire hint that fuel subsidy will soon be removed once and for all and a heavy burden of sacrifice will, once again, be placed on the masses, at a time when most Nigerians are reeling from the economic depredations of Covid-19. But did you find any indication in the Speech that the burden of sacrifice will also fall on the predators in the executive, legislative and judicial arms or institutions of governance? Did you read that salaries and emoluments, the most bloated and unjust in the world, will be reduced? Did you, compatriots?

• Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

Biodun Jeyifo 

What is the preexisting condition of being black in America? For the avoidance of confusion, let me begin this discussion with the clarification that I am referring here, not to a state of Being that precedes existence itself, but to a very specific term of the discourse and practice of medical care in America. In other words, in this article, I will for the most part be using this term as a metaphor and not in its literal connotation. And what is this literal aspect of the term? Well, it pertains to the fact that since healthcare in America is the most costly in the world, most people in the country, including the very rich, depend on health insurance of a robust and dependable kind in order not to lose all they own through paying for their care when they get very sick and need lifesaving medical attention. However, no matter how good on the surface the terms of your health insurance are, God help you if you are deemed to have a “preexisting condition”!

And what exactly is a preexisting condition? It is any disease or chronic illness that you had before joining the plan of your insurers. This is especially true with regard to the most serious diseases like cancer, diabetes, stroke and other myriad serious diseases of the heart, the lungs, the kidneys, and the brain. It is nothing short of catastrophic for any person to be found by his or her insurers to have a “preexisting condition”, whether from your own honest declaration to your insurers or from details they discover, legally or illegally, from your personal medical records. Once this takes place, your healthcare costs balloon astronomically, to the point where you lose all your life’s savings or in the worst circumstances, lose life itself because you cannot afford the cost of staying alive. To put this matter in plain language, it is a great economic and psychological liability in America to have a preexisting condition. This is because no insurers will enroll you in their plan and if they do, it will be at a cost far beyond the earnings or the total financial resources of most Americans families or individuals, except the very wealthy.

The grimness of the matter can be gleaned from the fact that only if you have never been seriously ill in your life can you be free of a preexisting condition. This is why saying “preexisting condition” to any American conjures images and thoughts of some of the most truly disadvantaged in the land. The prayer is silent, very silent, but if you have an inner ear, you can hear Americans to whom you utter this term invoking God’s benevolence in sparing them of the disaster of having a preexisting condition. Indeed, Obamacare is so popular in America precisely because of the effective protection that it gives to millions of Americans from the exclusions and disadvantages of the “preexisting condition”. In other words, before Obamacare, uncountable number of people had striven to find one way or another, indeed any and all ways to escape from the “curse” of the preexisting condition. Here I give a personal testimony from my own experience. In 1995 when I was first diagnosed with the chronic illness that has dogged me for several decades now, only very narrowly did I escape being trapped by and in the calamity of a preexisting condition. I will not go so far as to say that I am alive now because the insurers did not adjudge my illness to be a preexisting condition but all the same, I do realize that if they had done so, life between then and now would have been significantly different for me, mostly in an onerous direction. Permit me to use this personal testimony to now take up the metaphoric aspect of this term as indicated in the title of this piece, this being the preexisting condition of being black in America.

At this point in the discussion, it is perhaps necessary for me to make very clear why and how I am using the phenomenon of the “preexisting condition” as a metaphor for blackness in America. Ostensibly, it seems to be a metaphor of great disadvantage, a trope of an almost natural and unalterable proneness to misfortune. This is clearly deeply problematic. It is as if, because the chronic illness for which I was diagnosed in 1995 disproportionately afflicts more black people than white people, blackness itself is an inevitable precondition for the chronic illness, a sort of ersatz preexisting condition. But we know that this is a half-truth because most black people do not get the diseases of which they are deemed to be more afflicted than other racial groups; only a small percentage of them do and it is that fraction of black people that are compared with the fractions of other racial groups that get the same diseases. In other words, to talk of blackness as a preexisting condition for medical and/or social malaises smacks too dangerously of a racial determinism. If this is the case, the question then arises: why talk at all about blackness in this discursive idiom of an unalterable preexisting condition? This question leads us to the heart of the matter in this article.

In the last few weeks in this column I have discussed again and again the extraordinarily promising developments in the protests and demonstrations under the leadership of the BLM in particular and, more generally, the entirety of the African American community. Without mincing my words or restraining the exuberance of my language, I have given testimony to how black people in America and around the world, together with forces of solidarity from other racial communities, are powerfully contesting virtually all the forms and expressions of their historic oppression as a racial group. I now wish to make this more explicit as I hereby declare that in all of my adult life, I have never seen a more consequential movement of black people heroically and effectively challenging every aspect of all the institutions, all the laws, all the practices that have historically been created to oppress them. Indeed, it is a complex but also exhilarating thing not only to be a witness to this history of a deeply redemptive kind but also to try to capture it in words and language, in image and metaphor. Permit me to add that I say all this about these current eruptions without having suffered an amnesia about the uprisings of the 1960s and 1970s in Black America, part of which I was also a witness and a participant.

But we are still haunted by the question: Why go into the misericordia of blackness as a preexisting condition for medical and social malaise as I seem to be doing in this piece? Let my response to this question serve as my justification for the issues that I am taking up in this piece. I will state it briefly first before expatiating on it in the rest of the discussion. It is this: Yes, being black in America at this moment in history is far more audaciously self-assertive and life-affirming than I have ever seen in all my adult life of more than a half century; but there is also a quality of mourning, a harrowing sense of disaster and loss, a cry of joy that is deeply inflected by what Soyinka once called the possibility of a tragi-existential catharsis at the core of Being itself. Have you noticed, dear reader, that in many festive national occasions these days in America, African American hymns and spirituals, with their unique mix of joy and sadness, pain and psychic release, are rendered as an accompaniment to the American national anthem? Yes, this has an old and familiar ring for haven’t “Kumbaya” and “Amazing Grace”, among a great repertoire of traditional Afro-American gospels and spirituals, been appropriated into the national heritage of traditional American music? So, yes this is not entirely new but it is a different thing altogether when the biggest sports league in the United States, the National Football League (NFL), plays a recording of the acknowledged African American anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” side by side with the American national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner” before every game.

We must move toward the conclusion of this piece. In the present context, space will allow me to briefly explore only two instantiations of this phenomenon of a sorrowing, mourning side of the revolutionary optimism of the Black community in America at the present time. As I do this, please bear in mind, compatriots, that blackness as preexisting condition has its origins, not in the discourses  of Black people themselves, but in the supremacist myths and practices of White racism. For we must never forget that even as the eruptions of revolutionary ferment in Black America rock the country and the whole world, White supremacist rhetoric and myths are at their most blatant and widespread in more than a hundred years in America.

First, then, think of Black people in America and the Covid-19 pandemic. With the possible exception of Latinos/a, the pandemic has killed a far greater proportion of Blacks in terms of their percentage of the national population beyond that of any other racial or ethnic community. Let me put this matter in as graphic a form as I can. The Black Lives Matter movement started before and continues to be a mass phenomenon separate and distinct from the ravages of the pandemic. But they are linked, even if the loss of lives contested and mourned in the BLM movement do not exactly dovetail with lives lost to the pandemic. This is because the disproportionate deaths of Black people from the pandemic could not have come at a worst moment than the upsurge of deaths of Black men and women at the hand of the violence of racist White cops.

Let us be very clear about this situation. It is the deaths of the George Floyds and the Breonna Taylors killed by the police that provide the rallying cry for BLM protests and demonstrations. But powerfully, if only subliminally, the deaths of tens of thousands of Black people killed in the pandemic seem as needless and as wanton as the deaths from police killings. Revolution in the time of the Coronavirus pandemic: even if Black people were only marginally affected by the pandemic because they are less than 20% of the population, the very fact of the grisly background provided by the pandemic suffices to provide an explanation for the anarchist rage at the edges of the BLM protests and demonstrations.

Secondly and finally, there is the dimension of uncertainty or contingency in the deep mourning that pervades the joy and exhilaration of BLM protests, together with the demands for a radical and transformative reordering of American society. As much as things seem to be very auspicious for fundamental changes in America, there are dangers ahead and there are no certainties that we can cling to. The only thing we can be sure of is that after the coming presidential elections at whose core is an uneasy alliance of the most radical elements in the Black and White communities, things will never, never again be the same in America. For there is an almost as powerful a current of counter-revolutionary energy and imagination in Trump and his revanchist, authoritarian hordes as there is with the BLM movement and its allies. I personally tend more to the element of optimism and tragic joy in these convulsions. But let us not ignore the forebodings.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

By Biodun Jeyifo

This week, Richard Joseph, the John Evans Professor Emeritus at Northwestern University, turned 75. The greetings, salutations and tributes from all over Africa and the world but especially from Nigerian scholars, have been as plentiful as they have been very moving. Joseph taught at the University of Ibadan in the mid-to-late 70’s as Lecturer in Political Science which was when I first met him as I was myself also a beginning lecturer at the University. It so happens that as an Africanist scholar with a very broad range of professional interests and engagements, Nigeria is not the only African country to and in which Joseph – or Richard as I will henceforth refer to him in this tribute – has worked. He was at one time a Lecturer at the University of Khartoum and has carried out research throughout Africa. Cameroun, Ghana, Ethiopia, Liberia, Senegal and Zambia, these are some other African countries which nearly as much as Nigeria, have legitimate claims to having been Richard’s “area and country studies” interest. Nonetheless, Nigeria has indisputably been the intellectual and spiritual center of his work as a scholar, policy activist and public intellectual and this is the focus of this tribute. Before coming to this subject, a few words about Richard’s career and achievements should serve to provide a context for the tribute.

When he arrived in UI to begin his scholarly career, Richard created quite a stir with both his credentials and his personality. He had been educated in some of the best institutions in the English-speaking world. For his undergraduate education, he went to Dartmouth College, one of the Ivy League American institutions. From there he won a Rhodes Scholarship that took him to Oxford University in the U.K. from which he received a PhD in 1973. I doubt if  this is still the case now, but at the time, you could not boast of a more prestigious pedigree as a scholar than this profile, especially in a place like UI at the time. But there was nothing staidly “Oxonian” in Richards’ personality or attitudes. For one thing, he looked too young for his age and credentials. More importantly, he was easygoing and affable and everyone liked him.

A gifted teacher, his students admired him immensely as did his colleagues. And he aligned himself to other young and radical lecturers at the university, he and his friend, the late South African scholar, Sam Nolutshungu, also a Lecturer in Political Science and one of the brightest men I ever met. By the mid to late 1980s, when one thought of radicalism in Nigerian universities, UI was not one of the places one thought about. But in the mid to late 70’s, UI was in the forefront of intellectual radicalism and Richard and Sam were, in their own unique ways, in the thick of things. Unlike some of us who felt that it was pointless to have anything to do with the government, civil servants and for that matter the UI academic and administrative establishment, Richard and Sam had a deep social science and Enlightenment faith that you could and should use knowledge to affect policy and policy makers for the social good.

Without any romanticization but admittedly with some nostalgia, I recall Richard and Sam in this period. The world of academia knows Richard as a solid social scientist, a policy and governance specialist of high caliber and intellectual gravitas. But he was also a passionate lover of the arts, had a deep interest in literature and theatre and was very well read in African, Caribbean and Western literatures. As a matter of fact, he was something of an expert on the Cameroonian novelist, Mongo Beti in particular and more generally, Francophone African literature. The friendship that he had with me, Femi Osofisan, Kole Omotoso and, later Odia Ofeimun (who, if my memory does not fail me, was Richard’s student) was based on this shared interest in the arts. Like the late Omafume Onoge who was in the Sociology department, Richard, it seemed, had more in common with us in the Arts Faculty than with his colleagues in the Social Sciences Faculty. An incredibly polymathic academic, he could have had a great career in the Humanities.

With this sort of background, Richard was surprisingly a devoted family man seemingly so inseparable from his wife and three sons that you wondered how he found the time to do all the scholarly and professional work that would eventually earn him great distinction and success in academia. Though I cannot be absolutely sure of this, I think he was very happy in Ibadan and Nigeria, he and his family. He found Nigeria and Nigerians a place with almost limitless capacity for growth and development. He did not romanticize us and indeed as some of his best work demonstrates, he had a very “Nigerian” keenness to our faults, our shortcomings. But he was happy here, he and his family. He would have stayed if SAP and neoliberalism had not dealt a fatal blow to higher education in our country such that expatriate lecturers and professors, together with foreign students, became a rarity on Nigerian university campuses. If there is anyone reading this, being aware that I also left and might as well be writing about myself here, please remember that I was not an expatriate in Nigeria. And neither was Richard – as I hope to demonstrate later in this tribute.

So, Richard left and we were very sad to see him and his family go. However, he has always come back and we were not surprised about this. This is because though he left Nigeria, Nigeria never left him. This is perhaps why in the universities and donor organizations in which he has worked in the United States, he has convened and devoted innumerable seminars, workshops, and collaborative research projects to Nigeria and its challenges and prospects. As we all know, things can get so bleak, so exhausting in our country that one craves an opportunity to get away from it once in a while to find a place where one can pause for breath and intellectually recharge so as not lose one’s sanity or hope. Richard, especially at Emory and Northwestern, has convened many encounters of Nigerian academics, writers and artists for this purpose where it was like being home away from home. And he has been of great assistance to many young Nigerian scholars.

In this short tribute, space does not permit me to deal with Richard’s scholarly work in great detail. As I remarked earlier in this piece, he is not a “one country” Africanist. Indeed, his earliest work focused on Cameroun, to which he devoted two books. Moreover, as the title of one of his books, State Conflict and Democracy in Africa indicates, the African continent in its entirety is his field of scholarly vision. Nonetheless, I would argue that Nigeria is the focus of some of his most acclaimed books and essays, of which the 1987 title, Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria, is perhaps the epitome. To date, that book is probably the best book ever written on corruption in Nigeria.

There is a slightly unintendedly funny dimension to the reception of the book when it came out. As no one had apparently ever heard of the word “prebendal” in the title of the book, readers, including scholars, rushed to find out the meaning of the word and when they did, “Nigeria” and “prebendal” became twin concepts with regard to corruption. The word has not lost its explanatory purchase on corruption in Nigeria, but it has been displaced by other terms like “stomach infrastructure” and the “politics of the belly”, neither of which, in my opinion, comes close to prebendal politics in explaining the structural, as distinct from the aberrational aspects of corruption in our country. This is as much as to say that when Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria came out, it was so discursively authoritative that some said that only a Nigerian scholar could have written it. I leave the reader to go and read the book to find out what prebendal politics means! [Clue: it links predator and prey, looters and the looted, the government and government workers in the manner in which the bishop and the congregational church rat are linked!]

Time to begin to bring this tribute to a close. I said earlier that Richard left Nigeria but comes back so often that it is as if he never left, as if his work and life there can never be finished. Can this not also be said of many of us living and working in the diasporas in Europe and North America? Can it not be said of me, of Niyi Osundare, Obiora Udechukwu, Toyin Falola? We left and are always coming back as if we never left. We always come back not merely out of nostalgia but because Nigeria is broken and our work there is unfinished. If this is the case, it does mean, doesn’t it, that the status of “expatriate” in Nigeria and Africa does not really apply to someone like Richard Joseph. The expatriate is an expatriate precisely because no matter how much he or she tries, he or she can never feel the deep intellectual and psychic investment in healing the brokenness of  the chosen country, in this case Nigeria. I want to salute and honor Ricard as one who belongs in a long tradition of Africans of the diaspora, especially of the Caribbean, who come to Africa as “expatriates” but end up with an incredible sense of attachment and belonging such that they never leave and even when they do they are always coming back. Richard’s achievements stand on their own merit but they also belong to and in turn extend and enrich a long Caribbean tradition.

The well-known figures here are Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James, Marcus Garvey, George Padmore (Malcolm Nurse), John La Rose, Kwame Touré (Stokely Carmichael). Each of these men left their Caribbean island homeland and became hugely important figures in other parts of the Black world either in Africa itself or in the diasporas in Europe and North America. Fanon is paradigmatic in this tradition. He went to Algeria to work as a government psychiatrist in the colonial service of the French colonial imperium. But he was so opposed to the oppression of the colonized Algerians that he not only went over to the side of the Algerians, but he became an Algerian, he became the acknowledged authoritative theorist of the Algerian revolution in particular and more generally, the African anti-colonial revolution. In different ways, the same is true of most of the other figures in the list here. But there is something about Fanon that I find remarkably applicable to what I am trying to say about Richard Joseph in this closing section of my  tribute.

I have said that Fanon initially went to Algeria as a civil servant in the colonial medical service. Like countless other such Caribbean middle-class professionals who went to serve in colonial and postcolonial Africa, his life and work in Algeria, no matter how meritorious, would have remained unknown and unheralded if he had not joined the Algerian revolution. The list is very long of middle class, meritocratic professionals who went away from their Caribbean island homelands to serve in Africa itself and in the diasporas in North America and Europe whose lives and work have never been heralded, like Fanon before he became the voice of the Algerian and African anticolonial revolution. Doctors, teachers, engineers, scientists, accountants, civil servants, university dons – they went from the Caribbean to all parts of the Black world as a vanguard formation in the transition from slavery, colonial servitude and neocolonial maldevelopment to the beginnings of an egalitarian modernity.

In Richard Joseph, we get the two bifurcated parts of Fanon combined: the superb and dedicated meritocratic professional and the visionary advocate of progress and development. It so happens that Trinidad, Richard’s natal home in the Caribbean, looms large in this tradition. With his characteristic humility, Richard will perhaps balk at this comparison with Fanon. But I will stick with the comparison. Congratulations, my friend, my brother. Long, long life. You deserve all the glowing tributes you have received on attaining – for Nigerians – the ripe, ripe age of 75!

• Biodun Jeyifo

bejeyifo@fas.harvard.edu    

Biodun Jeyifo

I concluded last week’s opening piece in this series with the following observation: for a revolution to have the widest possible impact possible in our age, you do not need a centralized body directing the “show”; what you need is a loose, decentralized formation with the capacity to coordinate all the diverse sites and expressions of the protests, demonstrations and convulsions that constitute the most progressive and transformative tendencies of the moment

Let me remind the reader here that I made this observation about the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in relation to the older civil rights organizations in America like the NAACP, the National Urban League, the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), and Congress for Racial Equality (CORE). What marks the BLM from all these other civil rights organizations, you might ask. Well, here’s the answer to the question: with the possible exception of the SCLC under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jnr., the BLM movement is the only organization or movement that makes it a fundamental aspect of its program apart from direct action activism  to coordinate all the diverse progressive and revolutionary movements in the country. Permit me to clarify what I have in mind here.

To the general public, BLM is primarily, if not exclusively, an organization by and for Black people. Whites may and do participate in the movement’s protests and demonstrations, but everyone knows that the movement is for the liberation of Black people from White supremacist violence and diverse other related injustices and oppressions. Well, this is what people in general think of the BLM and its program. But what is BLM’s own view of this matter?

Simply put, BLM is acutely aware that the oppression of Black people does not exist in isolation or a vacuum and that it is crucial for Black people not only to be aware of all the other communities of oppressed and disaffected people but to connect their struggles with the struggles of these other communities and groups. More specifically, BLM has made it a crucial aspect of its program to be aware of and linked with the most progressive and revolutionary movements and expressions in America and around the world.

At this point in the discussion, I think it would be helpful for me to give the reader my own sense – not BLM’s – of the most revolutionary movements and manifestations in America at the present time. Thus, in no particular order or hierarchy of importance, I think of and name the following: radical women’s and feminist movements like the Me Too movement and the struggle for gender equality in the workplace and in salaries, wages and remuneration; labor unions, churches and faith communities that have made poverty reduction or alleviation a realizable goal now, not at some distant point in the future; the extraordinarily prescient ideas and proposals for a “green economy” and for urgent action to save the environment; the radical reordering of the racial order in America from majority white to minority white in a formation in which all racial hierarchies have disappeared; the Left-wing formation within the Democratic Party that has finally tabled prospects for democratic socialism at the center of ruling class party politics and the economy; and new and unprecedented expressions of gender and sexuality, identity and selfhood.

Here, I cannot resist the urge to reflect briefly on the visibility and urgency that poverty and inequality have achieved in American politics at the present time. Anti-poverty progressivism is not new in America. As a matter of fact, it has had a tendency to resurface again and again over the decades and centuries, even if it has repeatedly been beaten back as basically “unamerican”. But now, there is a growing perception or angst that terrible economic inequality is becoming a permanent feature of American society, especially as organized between income as the ordinate and wealth as the superordinate, the great majority of Americans being located around income while less than 5% revolve around wealth.

I confess: this area of contemporary American progressive politics has a special resonance for me because it was in the Anti-Poverty Movement of Nigeria (APMON) in 1976 that I first entered adult, mature radical politics after the ideological and political adolescence of my years as a militant undergraduate and graduate student. I look at the widespread and growing levels and forms of economic deprivation in America and shake my head: not much has changed between 1976 and 2020 and between the richest country in the world and the poverty capital of the planet.

But I digress. We were musing about BLM and its remarkable program that focuses on the violence and injustices that Black people face and at the same time is deeply informed by the fact that there are many other sites of struggles against oppression in America. Let us return to that subject. Well, you might ask: what is remarkable about this; isn’t every well-informed person aware that there are diverse groups and communities of the oppressed in every society? But this misses point, for we are not talking of awareness here in its bare, existential state; rather, we are talking about a critical awareness that strives to know which groups and communities of the oppressed and those who stand by them are truly progressive and which are not. Permit me to refer to a very concrete instance of this sort of critical awareness here, this being the BLM’s awareness that in making an alliance with the Democratic Party, it must critically differentiate between the radical and progressive forces within the party (Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) and the centrist establishment of the party. Wouldn’t BLM need to ask itself how and where its own program connects with the program of the “democratic socialism” of the leftwing of the Democratic Party?

This point leads me to the heart of this discussion. I have claimed several times in this series that the BLM movement is at the forefront of the revolutionary struggles of the present time, both in America and around the world. In simple, uncomplicated terms, this is largely because the slogan “Black Lives Matter”, in its many and diverse  expressions, has captured the imagination and perhaps the conscience of the world. Everyone is talking about it; it is ubiquitous in all the media of information, communication, culture and leisure; and it is the object of countless commentators and pundits around the world. It is difficult to think of any other slogan, rallying cry or catchphrase in the history of African American and Black struggles with greater mobilizational and affirmative force. I think particularly of this possibility: “Black Lives Matter” has probably offered many White people a subtle escape hatch from the confounding “prison’ of either being wittingly or unwittingly complicit with White supremacy without any possibility of doing anything about the matter. This is not exactly a revolutionary development, but it could be the basis of the beginning of commitment to thinking through the exertions of mind and body needed to end racism.

At a far more complex level, “Black Lives Matter” confronts all progressives and revolutionaries in America and the world with the remarkable impression that the slogan, the rallying cry comes from nowhere, from no lionized, celebrated or even identified leaders and no organizational power base. As a matter of fact, there is a distinct and very widespread feeling that “Black Lives Matter” is leaderless. As a matter of fact, as I disclosed in last week’s column, the organization does have leaders. At any rate, in comparison with all the historic civil rights organizations and movements in America and the world, BLM is notable in its departure from male-dominated, “macho” leadership structure. The movement’s three cofounders are not unknown; it is simply the case that they do not live and act their leadership roles in the accustomed manner or tradition of the revolutionary male heroism of a Fidel Castro, an Abdel Gamal Nasser, a Nelson Mandela, or a Kwame Nkrumah.

Why does the leadership of the Black Lives Matter movement act as if it is not necessary – or possible – to exercise a centralizing control over the revolutionary process, as most revolutionary movements of the past have done? Permit me to rephrase this question more concretely. The BLM movement has been accused of not being able to control protesters and demonstrators prone to looting, arson and vandalism. Although much of the violence has come from right-wing, White supremacist groups who have confronted BLM demonstrations with counter-demonstrations, there is no denying the fact that BLM has not particularly paid attention and energy to curbing the violence coming from its ranks.

This point is very crucial. The violence in and of civil rights and Black nationalist organizations in America has historically been marked by both violence and non-violence, both armed and unarmed struggle, with Martin Luther King, Jnr., and Malcolm X respectively representing each of these two polar tendencies. It seems to me that the BLM movement has chosen to locate itself in neither of these two traditions. I am speculating here, but to my mind, I think that BLM takes the view that the revolutionary process cannot and should not be controlled. In lieu of control, what a revolutionary organization of the present should do is, as much as possible, connect all the revolutionary trends and movements in the country and the world. This observation leads to my concluding thoughts in this series.

Black people and their concerns and interests are to be found in every progressive and revolutionary movement in America: poverty and economic inequality; living conditions of incredible housing and amenities deprivation; immiseration in wealth acquisition on a monumental scale; health and life prospects at the bottom of historic American and even global standards; the furthest location from the centers of power, authority and influence. Name the site, the concentration of deprivation and injustice and our people are well-represented there! This partly explains why the BLM movement has a connection with virtually all the movements and expressions of progressive, radical politics in the country. But this is only part of the story. Far more significant, in my view, is the fact that as much as the BLM movement seeks to empower Black people in their confrontation with the historic ravages of White supremacy, the organization does not seek power for itself as an organization, something very rare in the history of revolutions.

Time to bring the discussion, the series to an end on this note of the BLM’s movement’s disinterest in struggling for power for itself. In practical terms, this means, compatriots, that in the months and years ahead, we will find many victories and achievements of the BLM movement all around us but without the movement itself being anywhere in sight, just as at the present time we see many of the signs and inscriptions of BLM everywhere but have to look far and wide to find where the leaders are. But I am getting ahead of myself. It will be a long walk to freedom, compatriots.

• Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu 

Biodun Jeyifo

INEVITABLY, a lot has happened in the six weeks that this column last appeared before I proceeded on a medical leave. Six weeks is a long time of absence and it has been quite unsettling for me to be away for such a long time, even though the absence was needed. That the period happened to coincide with momentous events and developments in Nigeria and around the world made my absence from the column even more regrettable. I am a creature of intense responsiveness to the conflicts and possibilities of the age and a cultural journalist who derives his greatest vocational self-validation from bearing witness to both positive and negative portents in our collective encounter with history, lived and mutable history. Since it so happens that I consider the present period as possibly the most portentous pre-revolutionary moment in all of my adult life, it has been very difficult, very onerous for me to have been compelled into the “silence” of my inevitable medical leave from the column.

In resuming a regular weekly appearance of the column with this piece, let me concretely express what I have in mind in these opening musings. Readers may remember that the last two or three weekly columns that I published before I went on the six-week medical leave were all based on protests and demonstrations pertaining to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) upheavals in America itself and around the world. It was bad enough that my illness and hospitalizations prevented me from sustaining the exploration of BLM that I began in those columns before I went on leave but what was worse is the fact that because of my illness, I could not physically be a participant in BLM protests and demonstrations. If I could have continued to be able to write about the movement in this column, that would have been a form of activism, a mode of giving form and content to my sense of the great historical potentiality of this movement. What does the potentiality consist of? It consists of the fact that in the BLM we have nothing less than something bigger than the historical significance of the struggles of the last days and years of apartheid in South Africa as the most revolutionary movement of African and world anti-racist, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggles.

I am perhaps moving too quickly in my observations and thoughts in this piece and I perhaps need to proceed more cautiously and critically. If, as I seem to be arguing in this piece, the BLM movement is potentially far more historically consequential than the anti-apartheid movement led by Mandela and the ANC and supported by virtually all the progressive movements and governments in Africa and around the world, what is the basis of my making this claim? This is of course a huge question which requires nothing less than a monograph in which an expansive and useful account could be given. That being impossible in the present context, I offer a few salient details in lieu of a fulsome account. I might add here that what I am proposing here is the outline of what I have extrapolated from my own efforts at self-clarification to decide for myself the significance, the revolutionary impact of BLM in America and around the world.

Thus, I identify and emphasize the following crucial aspects of the Black Lives Matter movement. First, please note that like the ANC long before it became the post-apartheid ruling political party in South Africa, BLM was a movement, a project that did not have but had to fight for recognition and legitimacy among the generality of Black people. And like the pre-legitimation ANC, BLM spent a long time before it gradually began to find and consolidate a foothold in the African American community. Perhaps most important of all, BLM was founded and sustained by women, black women, who critically and astutely used gender as the intersectional linchpin connecting gender with class, gender with race, gender with ethnicity, gender with sexuality. Not to be ignored is the extraordinarily uncompromising theoretical and activist stance of the women who founded BLM and sustained its revolutionary integrity in the period before it achieved its current mainstream activist celebrity and élan.

I confess: I write here as if BLM as a movement has fulfilled or is about to fulfill the full scope of its revolutionary potential. That is not quite the case. For it must be clarified that to most black people in America and around the world, BLM is separate and distinct from the global action and advocacy network that officially bears the name Black Lives Matter. To most black people in the United States and around the globe, BLM is a powerful slogan and a resounding cry against police brutality and all forms of state violence against black people. Its program of radical civil disobedience is well known and that’s about all that the average black person knows about its program and its activities. This point leads to a crucial aspect of the organizational structure of the movement which, basically, is very decentralized. In other words, though it has an official website which gives a thumbnail profile of its activities and networks, its decentralized nature in effect means that unlike most avantgarde revolutionary movements or organizations, there is no controlling body that directs or supervises all that is claimed or done in the name of the movement.

This last point brings me to what for me is the most consequential aspect of the Black Lives Matter movement at the present time. This has to be carefully and critically expressed. Thus, though it could be said that BLM is in a sort of alliance with Joe Biden and the Democratic Party in the forthcoming US presidential elections, it is not an alliance between two organizations that will share power if and when victory comes. Of course, it is true that BLM was very influential in the Democratic Party’s choice of a black woman, Senator Kamala Harris, as the Vice-Presidential candidate. But BLM is far more revolutionary than the Democratic Party and for that reason, rather than lay all its eggs in the programmatic basket of the Democratic Party, it must keep its options open as to which elements in that political party can be trusted to keep its promises to working people and black people.

I began this piece with the claim that thanks to the intervention of the BLM, we are now in the most important pre-revolutionary moment since that anti-apartheid struggles of the 70s and 80s of the last century. Let me explain what I have in mind here as clearly as possible. Please bear in mind here that Black Lives Matter, in its most revolutionary expressions, deals with all the social, economic, political and cultural aspects of the oppression of black people worldwide. To speak first of BLM within the US alone, the revolutionary challenge that it poses to the country can be found in the postulate that only on the basis of the transformation of American politics to meet all the oppressions and injustices of the American economic order can the specific demands of black people be met. Of course, many of the theoreticians and activists of BLM will gladly take any specific and particular redress of the condition of Black Americans as a community. But far beyond this, BLM, following established traditions of radical African American thought, is insistent that the liberation of whites in general and poor whites in particular is indissociable from the liberation of black people. What is the basis of this claim, this fundament? It is this: the black woman is the most oppressed, the most mistreated group in America and indeed, around the world; ergo, in order to address oppressions and injustices that disfigure all individual lives and social relations, you must use the most oppressed, the most despised as your benchmark.

The black woman as the mule of the world, as the most oppressed and despised, as a millennial incarnation of the Fanonian “wretched of the earth”? Yes, you could easily find the facts, the data, the statistics to back this claim. But tread carefully, because this claim hides a profoundly ironic fact or datum: in the post-apartheid era, black women, as writers, artists, public intellectuals and activists, have been relatively more prominent than black men. This is why the leading founders and theorists of BLM are women. It is why black women occupy avantgarde positions in black radical traditions of thought and action in the present age. The age of the dominance of the “big man” of politics, of art, of theory and of revolutionary action is gone. I do not mean by this that men, or black men, are no longer to be found in the leading ranks of thought, art and culture; rather, what I mean is that the “big man” who is a man among men, who commands other men and women like a colossus, is gone as the benchmark of African or black liberation.

Mark my words, compatriots. If Biden and the Democratic Party win in the American presidential elections in November, BLM will be a huge factor in the politics of post-Trumpian restitution. Race will be a huge factor in who wins or loses the elections. But it will be race in its intersections with gender and class. Anti-racism, anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism will achieve a new relevance, a new currency in the American political order. And of course, anti-sexism and anti-misogyny. Needless to say, America is not quite ready for such a transformation, if only for the fact that Trumpism will not automatically fade away. But ready or not, America will and must confront its racial and gendered specters of oppression and inhumanity. BLM, as decentralized as it is, will be at the center of the conjuncture.

• Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu