Category: Biodun Jeyifo

Biodun Jeyifo

I must necessarily begin this piece by expressing my appreciation to the devoted readers of this column, in particular those who wrote to express concern over my absence in the last two weeks. My illness is not over; indeed, it is chronic. But I am sufficiently recuperated to be able to resume writing again. The body is still weak and fatigued but the spirit is strong. Indeed, this is how I would put the matter: in spite of the chronic nature of the illness, life does not seem about to give up on me; why should I give up on life?

Appropriately, I start here from where I ended the column three weeks ago, that is in the spectacular failure of the president of the US, Donald Trump, to impose martial law on the country in response to the nationwide protests and demonstrations around Black Lives Matter – actually the most important revolutionary movement in the world at the present time about which I shall have much to write in this column in the weeks ahead. So, Trump tries but fails to impose martial law on the country? Very well, think of the following details of a complete contempt for the rule of law and its constitutional and institutional foundations by Trump and the Attorney General of the United, States, William Barr.

I think we can all agree that if Olusegun Obasanjo, as elected civilian president, is the most contemptuous hater of the rule of law we’ve ever had in Nigeria, the pair of Muhammadu Buhari and Abubakar Malami, as President and Attorney General respectively, have been our most cynical and anti-democratic “guardians” of law and justice. At least during the first term of Buhari’s presidency, they routinely ignored court rulings they did not like; they twisted the operations of the law to allow criminal looters in the administration to escape with their loot; and they endlessly misused the instruments of state violence and terror to make life miserable for many members of the official opposition as well as, significantly, many activists for popular democratic causes. Please let us not forget, Buhari and Malami became so paranoid that they listed insult to the president as one of the treasonous charges against Omoyele Sowore – personal insult to the person of the president as treason! On this score, Buhari and Malami certainly provided my co-columnist in this newspaper, Palladium, our uncompromising sentinel for the rule of, some of his finest and most troubled writings. (I confess that I say this in both genuine admiration and due reservation)

But just imagine, in the use and abuses of the combined power of the presidency and the attorney generalship for the sort of dictatorships that we find in the Third World, Buhari and Malami are amateurs compared to Trump and Barr! True enough, Trump and Barr have not disobeyed court rulings but that may be because they are sure of the hold that they have on the Supreme Court. More crucially, they have achieved something that Malami and most Attorneys Generals of the world’s dubious democracies can only dream about. What is this? It is the complete abrogation of the constitutional provision of separation of powers that enshrines congressional oversight of the executive. Trump has not only effectively refused ever to be summoned by Congress on any questions arising from any of his actions, he has extended this refusal to all members of his cabinet and administration. They can obey Congressional subpoenas or summons only if Trump says they may. And so far, for the most part, none have appeared before Congress without a Trump-Barr permission. Those who have done so have been fired, even before making their appearance before Congress. Separate and vastly unequal, the presidency and the legislative branch of the American government – that is the grotesque two-headed monster that the Trump-Barre combination has lodged right at the heart of America’s liberal-democratic order of governance, one of the oldest and hitherto most solidly entrenched in the modern era.

The matter appears in all its shameful, dictatorial and heartless details when we consider the sort of actions and policies for which Trump has used his abrogation of the constitutional and institutional principle of the separation of powers. Since power is now almost exclusively lodged in one branch – the Executive – we now routinely see in America things that we normally see only in antihuman and anti-people governments of the world. These include but are not limited to immigration policies and actions that break up families and separate children from their mothers; words, actions and propaganda that have subjected America’s racial and ethnic minority communities to great physical violence and insecurity; the stripping away of many of the social protections of America’s poor people of all demographic backgrounds, especially with regard to health care, welfare benefits and childcare services.

Trump and Barr are at their most “Third World”, lumpen or “agbero mode of dictatorship when you take a look at just how brazen they have been in the use of the reins of power and the administration of criminal justice for the President’s own personal benefit, including members of his family. If you are his family, friend or business crony and you have a problem with the law, Trump asks Barr to take care of the matter. And if you are his enemy, real or imagined, he sets Barr after you, digging up stuff that the Justice Department can use against you. And of course, Trump himself is the greatest personal beneficiary of this use of Barr and the Justice Department. From the drama of the total stonewalling of Congress in his impeachment proceedings to his numerous problems on tax fraud, he has used the Justice Department to checkmate all  his adversaries. The truly surprising thing here is not that this is all happening in America and not in a banana republic, it is the fact that it is done extremely brazenly, bringing indifference to governmental accountability to an unprecedented high  level in modern American society.

Implausibly and also almost laughably, before he became Attorney General under Trump (he had also been AG under Bush, senior, briefly), Barr had argued for a constitutional change that would place American presidents above the law by making them untouchable and unaccountable for any misdeed, any crime committed while in office. The irony is that he has achieved that goal now – but without a constitutional change. If you link this with Trump’s own infamous boast when, as Candidate Trump, he boasted that if, while walking down 5^th Avenue in New York City he brazenly shot somebody dead his followers would still flock to him, what do you get? That is the issue to which we now turn in the second and final segment of this piece.

Where does Trump’s fascist and dictatorial use of an elective, democratic presidency come from? And what does it portend? On the surface, apart from his own personal maniacal tendencies, it seems to come from Trump’s fascination with the dictators and strongmen of the world. He is thrilled by the ease, the freedom with which they can go after their enemies and use the instruments of state power to enrich themselves, their families and their cronies. But on deeper reflection, fundamentally, it comes from the Western liberal democracies themselves. The First and Second World Wars against fascism had their epicenters in Europe. Hitler, Mussolini and Francisco Franco were all fascist dictators. They were all products of the greatest crises of modern capitalism. As capitalism, with all its undoubted achievements in the generation of wealth, foundered now and then and produced terrible unevenness in the distribution of wealth, the anger of the masses was diverted away from capitalism itself to other targets – foreigners, minority racial and ethnic communities, women, the ruling elites themselves and the free press that the hordes were persuaded to see as their enemies. And we must take particular notice of this point: America always, always had a tradition of admirers and supporters of fascism at home, even though European capitalism was the primary incubator of modern fascism. As a matter of fact, Trump’s father, Fred Trump, was an admirer of European fascists and we can see that in this matter, the apple did not fall far from the tree!

Remember, compatriots, that in the two World Wars of the 21^st century, America first stood alone in the belief that the wars were European family quarrels gone terribly wrong. But in the end, the United States joined the international antifascist alliance and fought against fascism with the rest of the world. Now, in an unprecedented reversal of historical trends within capitalism, Donald Trump has launched the paradigmatic fascist “solution” to the crises of capitalism. Like all fascist apocalyptic leaders of the past, he must start with “enemies” within. But unlike all those other eminences, he cannot find any plausible foreign enemies since no nation has attacked or will dare to attack the United States. This is beside the fact that the reach of the Trump-Barr machine does not extend beyond the borders of the United States. America.

I wish to end this piece with a very brief note on what I am calling the paradigmatic fascist solution to the crises of capitalism. What is this solution? Let us put it simply and clearly. Instead of a broad coalition of communities coming together to solve explosive social and economic conditions, a strongman rises and founds a vast populist movement that manages to seize power which is then used to destroy all its opponents, especially in democratic institutions, norms and practices; and then, through allies in the international community, the undertaking is extended abroad, across the whole world. This is Trump’s ultimate goal: to find or create alliances all over the world that will be like his own regime and perhaps be usable as his puppets. And then, compatriots, it may well be the world, or rather residual popular-democratic in the world, that will save America from fascism and in doing so, save all of us from neofascist dictatorship, all of this in the great, spectral shadow of Covid-19.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

Biodun Jeyifo

First section: 1:00 a.m., Friday, May 29, 2020, Boston, U.S.A.

This piece is almost unlike anything that I have ever written in this column. It has two sections. In the first section that I will write up before I go to sleep in slightly over an hour from now, I will deal with video images and audio track of the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota in flames that I have been watching on television in the last three hours. In the second section that I will write when I wake up around 8:00 a.m., I will write about my considered thoughts, my reflections on the things that I will be writing now before I go to sleep. But then, think about this fact: by the time that you, the reader, gets to read the whole piece on Sunday, May 31, 2020, it would be two whole days after piece was finished and sent off to my Editor for publication. Thus, indisputably, by the time that this piece is being read after its publication, much would have transpired by way of developments and commentaries on the things that I write about in this piece. Will the things that I will say in the piece hold up to further developments on Friday, Saturday and Sunday? That is the challenge that I face.

So, here goes with the first section of this submission consisting of a bare reporting of the things I have been watching on tv in the last three hours – images and sounds of Minneapolis burning. As I watched mesmerized, amazed, I knew, I felt, instinctively, that millions of others in America and around the world are watching the same real-live drama that I was watching. This was not the first time that I and the whole world was watching an American city in flames because of anti-black racist violence. But for some strange reason, this one seemed different, very different. It took me some time both to grasp and understand this difference of Minneapolis burning, burning.

The whole thing seemed like watching a mild, seasonal rainfall grow into a raging and destructive typhoon, almost imperceptibly.  Beginning with boisterous and militant but relatively peaceful slogans, chants and songs, the protestors were in the third day of demonstrations over the execution of George Floyd, a black man, by four white officers of the Minneapolis Police Department. At first, television broadcast of the event was sparse and intermittent, necessarily sharing broadcast space and time with other urgent issues of the day and the moment, like updates on the scourge of Covid-19 and the unfolding implosion of the global economy. But again almost imperceptibly, what was happening in Minneapolis began not only to dominate other news items, it ultimately began to be the ONLY thing being broadcast on tv, hour after hour after hour. Portentously, this development coincided with the protests becoming more and more inflammatory, literally and figuratively.

The critical turning point came when a police precincts (American for police station) was overrun by protestors and was then set ablaze, mainly for two reasons, The first reason: the police defending the precincts were over-powered by the sheer number and determination of the protesters. The second reason: for tactical or strategic reasons that we do not know now but will probably know in a couple of days, the police melted into thin air, left their station undefended and simply let it burn. No backups of other police units or the Army National Guard, already mobilized, appeared. The protestors were in complete control of the police post and the streets, both now engulfed in flames. Thereafter, the name of the slain George Floyd became the dominant audio item in the unfolding saga of Minneapolis burning. How did this happen? A sing-song chant of a two-line victory chant began to be repeated again and again: “What’s my name?”; “George Floyd!” “What’s my name?”; “George Floyd!” At that point, commentators took over control of what we were all watching and hearing, unbelievingly: an American city burning, undefended as protestors and “rioters” took control of the city or at least a section of it. Burn baby, burn! This was too much for most pundits and commentators.

I have retained one final image, with its own eerie sounds, from my three-hour marathon encounter with this extraordinary event. What is this image? The skyline lit up by the reflected after-glow of the flames, protestors now mostly seen as silhouettes, buildings and streets like a smoldering war-front right after the cessation of hostilities. Except that right until I decided that the main fare was done and only the aftermath or afterglow remained, I did not hear of a single fatality and, indeed, almost no mention of injured people or policemen and women. Burn, baby burn! But nobody “burned”: that was the final residue of Minneapolis burning, circa May 28, 2020. Of course, we will have either confirmatory evidence of this or, conversely, countervailing evidence that some bodies have been discovered, some souls lost. Right now, I testify that no deaths were recorded tonight, the night of Minneapolis burning, Thursday, May 28, 2020.

Second section, 8:00 a.m., Friday, May 29, 2020

I am picking up from where I left off and went to sleep four hours ago. Deliberately, I have neither listened to the radio nor watched the tv since then. Why so? I wish to keep the phenomenological “integrity” of what I watched last night intact. That was why I first set out in this piece to write a bare account of the things that I saw and heard on tv last night. Of course hereafter, in the days and weeks ahead, I, we shall know more of what happened last night and perhaps that will shed new light on what we saw and heard. But for now, I wish to keep intact the memory, the “integrity” of what I saw and heard last night. Thus, let what I now write in this second section of this essay stand as a distillate of thoughts about what I wrote in the first section last night.

I have given this piece, with its two sections, the title “The fire this time”. At first, I wanted to give it the simple and uncomplicated evidentiary title of “Minneapolis burning!” But I decided on the title that I settled on because I intended a reference to James Baldwin’s nonfiction work published in 1963, the celebrated The Fire Next Time. Easily one of the greatest works of nonfiction in 20th century American and world literature, Baldwin’s book was the first book to propose this startling thesis: American racist hatred and  fear of black people, together with the terror and violence that often goes with them, will only come to an end and a humane restitution when whites come to a full realization that they are also victims of their hatred and fear of black people.

Even more startling was Baldwin’s second argument in the book that though American whites believe, as good Christians, that they should finally accept the humanity of black people, it is actually they, the whites, who need to discover and take for granted their own humanity. There are other extraordinary moral and psychological insights in The Fire Next Time, but these are the two main insights of the book that have entered into the mainstream of 20th century American and world anti-racist and anti-colonial thought. Here are these two ideas at the heart of Baldwin’s book: It is the oppressor, it is the white racist and his culture that, being out of touch with their humanity, must rediscover it in order to be able to take it for granted. For if you cannot take your own humanity for granted, you will always need what you deem to be the inhumanity of other races, other peoples, to give you the assurance, the certainty of your humanity. Please think carefully of what the world has seen in the video images and audio clips of the execution of George Floyd by those white police officers in Minneapolis last Monday: Floyd can’t breathe, he is choking, he is being killed and as this is happening the white police officers keep the strangulation going; they cannot see a common humanity between their kind and Floyd’s kind. But whose humanity is called into question in the encounter? Whose (re)presentation of their racial claim to humanity is profoundly questioned in the encounter which has been watched a thousand times on tv and the social media throughout the world, Floyd’s or the four white police officers?

Baldwin in The Fire Next Time, believed that ultimately, white Americans in particular and whites all over the world in general, will ultimately be able take their humanity for granted and therefore stop needing the inhumanity of blacks and other non-white peoples to give them certainty of their humanity. What if this never genuinely happens? The answer to this question is what is implied in the title of the book. For according to the biblical myth of Jonah, the first time that God wanted to destroy the world for its sins and iniquities, he used water, he used a global holocaust of flooding to carry out the apocalypse. But Baldwin in his book famously said, no, not water, not flood next time, it will be fire! That’s why, last night as I watched Minneapolis burning, burning, but no lives destroyed, I thought I was watching a fulfillment of Baldwin’s prophecy: the city, America, the world is in flames and all the infrastructures, all the personnel of control and security in whiteness, of monstrously inhumane order are gone, or they are nowhere in sight. Surely, of course, this is only a parable, because by this afternoon, by tomorrow, we can be sure that the forces of law and order, of unjust and inhuman social, economic and racial predatoriness will be back in view and on display. But no one can deny what we saw and heard last night.

One final thing to keep in mind as I bring these reflections to an end. Did I say that as Minneapolis lay smoldering in the after burn of last night’s saga, the protestors became rather like silhouettes or shadowy doppelgangers of an army of righteous avengers? Yes, I did, but not in so many worlds. Now, I wish to expatiate on that description. You could tell, compatriots, that this band of protestors, even in their ghostly shadowiness, were a rainbow crowd of black, brown, Native American, Asian and white people. I think, I expect that some commentators and pundits will soon be calling it a black crowd, or its more coy version, “ a mostly black crowd”. But this will be false and the evidence will be there to prove its falsehood. Does this rainbow, multiracial conflagration bear any relationship to the overall Covid-19 context of Minneapolis burning? Yes, I think so. But also, I have this thought in mind: Baldwin’s insights and predictions in The Fire Next Time have come full circle. The blackness and whiteness and brownness of skins hide a common humanity that will, must be rediscovered and reaffirmed if we are to survive as one indivisible human community.

• Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

Biodun Jeyifo

Dear reader, if unlike me in Boston, you are presently confronting the terror of the coronavirus pandemic in a city, town or village that is not in a hotspot of the rampage, then you can be forgiven if your mind has not dwelt much on death stalking, stalking your community. This is the bottom line, the unique angle of vision from which you receive and consume all the news coming from around the world about the catastrophic work of the pandemic: you see everything against the backdrop of the fear that has descended on everyone in your community.

In literal terms, the death count of those who have succumbed to the pandemic is not that great: slightly more than 3 million cases and two hundred thousand deaths in a global population of over 6 billion souls. But in a place like Boston, that offers little comfort to you because of the very fact that death through the pandemic is so close to you. And because the lockdown, stay-at-home social distancing order gives you unlimited time to spend with yourself, your mind wanders a lot. In this piece, through three vignettes, I am making bold to share some of my thoughts on death in the age of Covid-19 with readers.

I am calling the first vignette death and the sacrificial ritual. In this matrix, the ritual impulse can be either humane and self-directed or savage and cynically opportunistic. Here are some instances of the first kind: hundreds of thousands of nurses, doctors and other hospital staff, many of them retirees, rushing to areas of their countries where the virus is wreaking the worst havoc; and they work in shifts that are so long and repeated day after day, that they’re surpassing normal feats of human endurance. The self-sacrifice among such people is best seen in those among them who are long past retirement age, many of them in their sixties and seventies. On the other hand, there are young men and women too in this extraordinary formation of volunteers who rob death of its terror by placing themselves and their young lives in jeopardy. The impulse here is idealism; these are not the often unwilling or forcibly compelled scapegoats of the human ritual sacrifice of the past in traditional religions around the world.

Against this pattern of sacrificial response to death in the age of coronavirus, consider the case of thousands of working people who are being forced to work as first responders to the ravages of the pandemic without adequate protection from the virus. Like combatants going into  battle without weapons, this group of first responders are being sacrificed and there is no other way to see this. This is more alarming, more cynical when politicians are motivated by personal and collective political ambition: the longer the lockdown and the social distancing order are prolonged, the more the national economy is imperiled, making grip on power and incumbency in office endangered. Trump and the Republicans in the USA are the best exemplars of this sociopathic practice. In their worst acts of this phenomenon, they are forcing workers at meatpacking factories to go back to work without making the work environment safe from the invasion of the Covid-19 virus.

In some social media spins on these acts of Trump and the Republicans, they have been compared to big men and politicians in the developing world who perform money rituals to gain wealth and stay in power. On the surface, this comparison seems bizarre. But if you look closely at the basis of the comparison, the analogy between them is not that far-fetched: slaughter of innocents, the taking of human life to gain an advantage whether by cultists and their clients or by politicians in the world’s richest and most powerful nation, is ritual murder. We can imagine some of Trump’s closest advisers secretly and not so secretly telling the president: if you want to remain in office, if you want to be reelected in November, you must face up to the fact that thousands will die if you force people back to work under present conditions – as you must. A ritual is a ritual, whether or not you call it by its name. More tellingly, in a ritual, you seek to obtain a result that demands acts that are so out of the normal scheme of things that you have to weigh the consequences carefully. If one of the consequences is the loss of human lives, especially under very violent or gruesome conditions, so be it. That is what obtains in both cultists’ money rituals and Trump’s power ritual.

We are not yet done with the theme of death and ritual in the age of coronavirus. This is because in one manifestation of the theme that I will call death as a collective rite of passage for both the dead and the living, we have the second of our three vignettes. Denmark is perhaps the best exemplar of this paradigm in the age of Covid-19, although in more nuanced and indirect forms, the paradigm is taking place in many other parts of the world. What do we find in this matrix? Basically the whole society, the whole nation comes to an agreement that they will confront Covid-19 on its own terms. They will try to mitigate the worst of its effects, but other than that, they will let it do as much havoc as it can in the absolute certainty that, in the end, there will be many, many more survivors than deceased victims. This seems clear cut, if even it also seems coldly heartless. But since every individual, every family will one way or another feel the pangs of the loss in human lives that this matrix entails, we may be able to see this as a collective rite of passage for the entirety of the Danish nation.

Thus, in Denmark we see astonishing images of people of all ages carrying on with life as if Cocid-19 is a distraction. The shops are open, public parks are open, schools are open, churches are open. Yes, people may wear protective masks, but there is no lockdown, no notable social distancing. I wish I could say that we see happy, smiling faces in Denmark, while the rest of the world is living in and with tragedy. But that is not the case. People are just carrying on as if the coronavirus pandemic is a bad cold that you have to live with. The basic rationale is that Denmark has historically struggled to achieve its standard of living – which is one of the highest in the world now and of all time. Rather than fatally damaging the national economy through a stay-at-home lockdown, the question the Danes are asking themselves is why not preserve their achieved way of life that is the envy of the whole world even if the price is the probable death of as much as a fifth of the population?

Those who are the most vulnerable to Covid-19, are they comfortable with this collective decision to “cooperate” with the pandemic? I do not know. Definitely, no referendum was conducted to place the choice before the electorate, though of course a wide-ranging national debate did take place in the country. This is what makes the whole thing seem like a rite of passage. In a passage rite, everyone is involved, there is no division between an observing group and a performing or acting group as everyone is a participant. Moreover, at the end of the rites, everyone is transformed so that it is not the same persons who emerge from the rite as those who went into it. And if you ask what of the dead, what of the fact that they will not be around to give their testimony when the rites come to an end. The answer is simple and unassailable: the dead were perfectly aware that they could die in the course of passage through the rite; they had therefore given their assent to the performance of the rite. Thus, one cannot really separate the dead from the living in this passage rite: both groups agree, implicitly, that finally, life and death are not opposed; one is inextricably mixed with the other.

At this point in the discussion, I need to ask for the reader’s indulgence for what may appear to some as the fancifulness of my musings in this piece. Although Covid-19 has only taken the lives of a small fraction of the population of the world, it is extremely savage in how it kills people. And its devasting impact on national and regional economies around the world has been colossal. As one commentator has put it, the pandemic has pitted life against livelihood as no other pandemic in the modern era has done. Given this backdrop, my musings in this piece might seem not only fanciful but self-indulgent. People are dying horrible deaths and the livelihoods of billions of people are at stake and I am talking of a metaphysics of the inextricable link between life and death, the living and the dead?

Yes, compatriots, I am! If not at this fateful moment in the collective experience of the entire global community, what other time seems perfect for us to be “metaphysical” in our struggle to come to terms with the emotional and psychic weight of the pandemic on all of us? And what else do you expect when there is all the time and space in the world for our imaginations to wonder, to look in on their own innermost thoughts? At any rate, permit me to use this “interlude” as a means of bringing this discussion to the final of our three vignettes that I am calling Eros and Thanatos: the Life Force and the Death Drive. Permit me to briefly explain what I have in mind here.

Eros, the god or goddess of love in ancient Greek mythology was also responsible for all that express the life force in human beings: sex, games, eating and drinking, feasting and carousing, especially when these activities are taken to their extremes, bringing them close to death itself, the ultimate negation of life. This is precisely the point of this matrix in which Thanatos, the god of death in classical Greek mythology, is always shown not too far from Eros. Among many other things, this means that life is never as valued as when it is close to death. It also means that death meets its greatest challenge when life achieves its most intense and overpowering expression of its force, its vitality.

Permit me to give a simple example of what I am talking about here by referring to a daredevil air show that the US Airforce performed over the skies of New York City two days ago (Wednesday, April 29, 2020). Here is what transpired in the show: going at speeds of over 400 miles per hour, two fleets of jet bombers etched out flawless, beautiful geometrical patterns for all to see in the skies, all the planes being extremely close to one another. As you watched, you simultaneous held your breath in fear of collisions of the planes with one another; but at same time, as you watched the breathtaking aerial panorama formed by the planes, you delighted in how beautiful life and its expressions could be. That is Eros and Thanatos coming together, precisely because the air show was meant to celebrate life in the face of the deaths and catastrophes of Covid-19.

Yes, huge spectator sports and games have vanished, at least for now and the foreseeable future. People die and it is impossible to have funerals for them. Indeed, in countless instances, the dead spend their last moments alone, deprived of the solace of the closeness of their loved ones in their last moments. And as if things could not be worse than this, many of the dead are buried in unmarked graves, their bodies having only been recovered from makeshift refrigerated trucks serving for mortuaries. Death triumphant? Yes, so it seems. But look at the extent to which, everywhere in the world, people are inventing new ways and recreations to affirm life. Thanatos, yes; but also Eros.

• Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu 

Biodun Jeyifo

BY now Americans in particular but also the whole world has become aware that Donald Trump is so used to telling lies repeatedly that no one is any longer shocked by his congenital mendacity. But as bad and unprecedented as this is, it is by no means the worst aspect of the American president’s trademark lien on lying and falsehood. For this, we have to look to the elaborate and deadly machinery of falsehood and misrepresentation that both created Trump and that Trump himself has enormously expanded. I am of course referring to Fox News and the alternative news industry of the American right.  Seen as a totality, as an extremely well-funded and profitable project, this means that beyond personal human moral bankruptcy, Trump is really an avatar. Ignorance can be innocuous; but it can also be deadly. Worse still is it when it achieves the mythic status of an avatar as it has in the case of Donald Trump.

We must have the forthrightness to see Trump for what he truly is. Even as people are dying because he is providing the most incompetent, dysfunctional, corrupt and cynical presidency in American history, he is loudly proclaiming that things are working out well under his leadership. He has so “domesticated” all who work for and with him that even the physicians and scientists who serve on his Coronavirus Task Force have to watch what they say in the daily White House briefings on the pandemic. As a matte of fact, he has dismissed two eminent physicians who served in the Center for Disease Control (CDC) who courageously counterposed objective facts and data to his lies and misinformation. He has aided and abetted protesters and demonstrators against lockdown and social distancing guidelines that his own Task Force enjoined on the whole country. He has withheld supplies from federal government stockpiles to state governors who have either spoken out on the mediocrity of his leadership in the war against the virus or his lack of empathy with the sick and dying victims of the pandemic.

History will be merciless with Donald Trump. Indeed, already, contemporary records have come to their summation of who and what this American president is. The Boston Globe has said that he has blood on his hands and only yesterday (Thursday, April 23, 2020) dozens of protestors made up of doctors and nurses who are treating the sick and the dying descended on Trump’s hotel in Washington, DC, to place body bags in front of the hotel. Denunciations of Trump in the social media are uncountable. There is not a single other nation on the planet in which horror and regret about a political ruler’s handling of the apocalypse of Covid-19 has reached such a level. Most people say that Trump is being driven by the fear of losing the forthcoming presidential elections of this year. This is true. But beyond it is the probability that Trump is an incarnation of something primeval, something rooted in the hatred of truth and knowledge by ignorance and malignity.

Biodun Jeyifo @fas.harvard.edu

Biodun Jeyifo

THIS week the world got to know, with astonishment and not a little despair, that the symptoms of the Covid-19 virus are legion, stretching beyond the triad of a dry cough, fever and difficult breathing. Here is the run of the expanded list of the virus’s symptoms: loss of sense of taste and of smell; blood clots in the leg(s)or the arms, heart, brain or kidneys and cardiac arrest or stroke. Because there are many other ailments and diseases that have these same symptoms, it is nothing short of wonder that researchers have been able to identify the symptoms in the work of the Covid-19 virus inside the bodies of its most unfortunate victims. This is all the more remarkable given the fact that like all viruses, the Covid-19 virus is itself completely invisible to the naked eye and immaterial to all the other organs – touch, hearing, taste and smell.

Genuine knowledge of all kinds is immensely impressive and useful in itself. Even much more so is knowledge of invisible and immaterial things and phenomena. I testify that the thrill that I felt decades ago when I finally “discovered” for myself that our earth is really round and not flat and is rotating on an axis, this thrill has never left me. As we all know, these facts about our planet that directly contradict the evidence of our eyes and our feelings have been scientifically proved for centuries and ages. Yet, until each person has “discovered” the facts for himself or herself, he or she has not really “discovered” the facts but accepts them in order not to be deemed an ignorant, flat-earth person!

Consider for example the particular case of the fact that the earth rotates at a tilt or axis of 23.5 degrees along the plane of its orbit around the sun. This axis is not a physical object, it is not a long rod holding the earth in place in its eternal orbital rotations; it is completely invisible. And yet, it is because it is there and effectively regulates our endless orbital journeys around the sun that we have different seasons in the world. The overwhelming majority of earth’s population are unaware of and indifferent to this fundamental fact. Only those who “discover” it for themselves can value the sense of wonder, the uplift of the mind and the spirit that comes with that knowledge. Thus, we cannot give enough praise to knowledge of things and phenomena that are invisible and immaterial, especially when they portent great danger to human beings in their entirety.

Fortunately for us, we have a long and meritorious heritage of accumulated knowledge about the world, the universe and the myriad of invisible and immaterial things and phenomena that surround and pervade our individual and collective existence. Anyone with an interest in the history of science can find out for herself or himself the impressive knowledge out there about these things and phenomena: gravity and the magnetic fields that pull things together in our planet; the secret tropism that draws humans, animals and plants to water (hydrotropism), the sun (phototropism), and the earth itself (geotropism); the conversion of sounds and images to electric signals that can then be reconverted to the original sounds and images and transmitted across vast spaces around the world; measurement of time and space at the scale of one millionth of a second or a meter as in nanosecond and nanometer; virtuality of digital messages that are sometimes more real than reality itself. The really wonderful thing about this stock of accumulated knowledge of things unseen and unfelt is that both the methods and the institutions for making use of these knowledges are out there ready for “rediscovery” and use by anyone who will make the effort to discover, understand and use the knowledge. This observation leads to the coronavirus which, because like all viruses it is completely invisible to the naked eye can only be ultimately defeated by and with knowledge.

There are many things happening in the wake of the outbreak of Covid-19 in our world. In this week’s column, I focus on the frontier of evolving and slowly growing knowledge of the virus. This is because of the probability that knowledge may well turn out to be the most important and decisive front of the war against the virus. In this “war”, two things are fundamental or unique. First, we face an invisible enemy. Secondly, the battle line in the war pits all human beings and populations on one side and the invisible enemy on the other side. Putatively, we are not waging the war as enemies of one another – as we do in most of our wars. On this basis, one could say that if knowledge is one of our most important weapons in the war, the worst thing that we could do is become divided and confused around this weapon of knowledge about and against the virus of Covid-19.

Did I say that we humans are all on the same side in the war against coronavirus? Yes, I did make that observation but unfortunately, the observation has to be revised or qualified. This is because Covid-19 has found powerful allies within our ranks. The principal ally of the virus is the same age-old nemesis of knowledge, namely ignorance, willful or unwitting. Since ignorance takes such diverse forms and expressions as deliberate falsehood, misinformation, an obdurate clinging to custom and plain dull-wittedness, whatever knowledge we may cumulatively find about this virus stands the risk of being made useless by the force of ignorance and its many forms and hideouts.

Thus, in many parts of the world, knowledge, facts and data on how to curtail or even control the spread of coronavirus before a vaccine is discovered for it are being either flouted or outrightly denied, sometimes by segments of political rulers and even the educated elite. For instance, look, compatriots, at the huge crowd of those who attended the burial of Abba Kyari. Behold also the many protests and demonstrations of Christians and Moslems who wish to keep mosques and churches open to all worshippers in many parts of the world. Far more ominously, there is the situation in which even as facts and data about the virus are growing exponentially thanks to the work of gifted and dedicated researchers and scientists, fake news and conspiracy theories about the virus assume a dominance over the facts and data. Speaking only for myself, I know of no other outbreak of an epidemic or pandemic in my entire life to date in which data, facts and information about a virus have been so abundantly available as with Covid-19. And yet, no other pandemic has been as massively saturated by lies, misinformation and rumours as has Covid-19.

Part of the accumulating knowledge of Covid-19 pertains to the social and economic dimensions of its impact, especially with regard to class and status, race and ethnicity, and level of development and installed infrastructures and capacities. To put this in a nutshell, though coronavirus itself is not a respecter of race, ethnicity or class, depending on where you live and preexisting patterns of your family or community vulnerability to various kinds of diseases, coronavirus will treat you and yours differently than how it treats other communities. This point leads to perhaps the most astonishing development in the differential encounters of the nations and regions of the world with this virus. Simply put, the United States which is the richest nation in the world and which has the most advanced scientific and medical infrastructures on the planet is the most beset by a destructive encounter with Covid-19 precisely because it is the nation in which, more than any other country, ignorance and misinformation are giving coronavirus its greatest allied support. As I write these words, researchers in the US are coming up with new facts and data, new knowledge about Covid-19. Only yesterday, they broke new ground by announcing the precise “half-life” of coronavirus under different physical contexts and conditions. Portentously, at the forum in which the announcement was made, Trump got into another one of his many ignorant arguments with the medical and scientific members of his own task force. And this bizarre and confusing exchange completely drowned out the importance of the announced “half-life” of the virus.

It would be nice to assert that ignorance always loses out to knowledge. But that is not the case. Better for us to hope that in the present historic case, knowledge will win out over ignorance and to do everything we can to create strategic and tactical advantage of knowledge over ignorance. Please, compatriots, wherever you are be on the side of knowledge in this war with the virus. Your survival may depend on it.

Biodun Jeyifo

And what exactly is herd or group immunity? Simply put, it is immunity or protection from the ravages of an epidemic or pandemic that a community gets when a plague has infected almost everybody in the community and there is no one left to infect. The term rests on the assumption that even the most contagious and deadly plague cannot destroy everybody. Typically, in the worst plagues, up to 70% to 80% of the population survives. And if that is the case, after a plague has done its worst, those who survive will have acquired immunity which then means that there are no people in the community without immunity to the plague. Historical epidemiologists and virologists say that in the long history of plagues on our planet, there have been many instances of herd immunity as the ultimate saving grace from the nastiest epidemics or pandemics. Of course, this only applies to contagious diseases since non-contagious diseases like tetanus or congestive heart failure do not jump from one person to another.

Like many other avid watchers of the astonishing rampage of Covid-19, I first became aware of and intrigued by this term when it began to be invoked or insinuated as the most likely or perfect answer to coronavirus by very prominent people in the global community. The most   assertive of such people is the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, who also turned out to be the most ironic proponent of herd immunity. Absolutely without any inclination that he could or would fall  prey to the pandemic, he almost callously said that Britain should simply let the plague run its course and all would b well in the end. Even more surprising was the fact that the chief science adviser to the government of the UK, Patrick Vallance, lent his voice to Boris Johnson by suggesting that the country’s strategy against Covid-19 should be to slow down the progress of the plague enough so that ultimately, herd immunity would finish off the virus. And the prime minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, used the term “group immunity” and suggested that it could be used strategically to ultimately defeat Covid-19 in a “controlled manner”. Even Donald Trump has had his say on the matter. On many occasions, he has testified that many of his official and non-official advisers asked him when the pandemic first appeared in the US to just “ride out” Covid-19.

As I write these words, although they are not explicitly invoking herd immunity as a national strategy against Covid-19, many of Trump’s supporters in the US are protesting against total lockdown and social distancing because they are willing to accept and live with the very high number of people that will fall sick and die if the lockdown is lifted in a few weeks’ time. This is nothing but herd immunity without directly invoking the term. One of Trump’s prominent ideological supporters, Bill Bennet, has actually said that after all, most of those dying from Covid-19 are already “on their last legs”!

And there is the astonishing fact of Trump himself in his total indifference to the demand of the majority of the scientific and medical establishment of the country that massive and credible testing for the virus should be carried out among the population before the lockdown is lifted. What is particularly galling in this matter is the fact that it is not because their ultimate goal is to defeat Covid-19 that Trump and his supporters are making use of herd immunity; rather, it is because of the forthcoming national and presidential elections of this year. The thinking is, yes, thousands, perhaps millions of Americans might die if the lockdown is lifted in a few weeks’ time, but that’s okay because the economy, Trump’s ultimate weapon in the coming electoral battle, will be restored to the brilliance and opulence that the Covid-19 virus putatively came to wipe out. On this basis, it becomes apparent that when Trump calls Covid-19 a powerful and clever enemy, he is thinking of this virus not as the “enemy” of all Americans and human beings, but as his own enemy and potential nemesis. This thought allows us to see the difference between Boris Johnson and Donald Trump as proponents of herd immunity: Johnson sees herd immunity as a regrettably high cost to pay in the interest of the British people; Trump sees herd immunity as a necessary weapon for his victory in the first presidential battle of the age of Covid-19.

Does this mean that there is a difference between benign and cynical manifestations of herd immunity? Yes, I think so. Of course, this does not mean that we have to choose one or the other. In the modern age in general, we shouldn’t have to choose either of them. In the distant antiquity of our species when plagues were confronted with magical thinking, the notion and practice of herd immunity seemed to have provided solace and hope for a humanity that had little rational and scientific weapons with which to fight epidemics and pandemics. [By the way, an epidemic is a plague at the level of communal groups or nation states while a pandemic is a plague at the global level]

Science and rationality cannot, unfortunately, be invoked and deployed automatically; rather, they entail incredibly hard and taxing exertions of human intelligence, patience and will. For instance, everyone agrees that it will take at least a year to eighteen months to find a vaccine and a cure for Covid-19. And cooperation across many fields of knowledge and national and global communities. Seen in this light, the intellectual tragedy of Covid-19 is that it comes at an age when cooperation and community at the global level are at their most dangerously low level in the last few decades. To put this in plain language, Covid-19 could not have come at a more auspicious time for its war against humanity than the precise historical moment when anti-globalism has not only engulfed the rich, liberal democracies of the West, but also large areas of the developing world. Bearing this in mind, it becomes possible to see herd immunity as not only a social or historical fact but also as a metaphor or a parable for the some of the worst social, economic and political plagues of our age.

Take, for instance, the scourge of poverty, together with the suffering that it causes at both national and global levels in our world. If you applied the strategy of herd immunity to give battle to this social plague, what do you get? Well, what you get is the astonishing scenario in which poverty having “infected” about 80% of the population, everyone becomes immune to it! But how could anyone or everyone become immune to poverty? And yet, as absurd as this metaphor or parable might seem, this is indeed the profile of poverty in many parts of the world at the present time: a vast majority of the world’s total population, including many national populations, are poor and survive mainly on the immunity, the protection offered by the existence of so many other poor people. A plague that becomes “universal” becomes a protection against itself! On this principle, poverty becomes bearable, becomes even “normal” when it is so overwhelming in its pervasiveness. In other words, like the protection that herd immunity provides in natural plagues when a vast majority has been infected, poverty that has “infected” so many people in our world itself becomes a sort of immunity. You look around you everywhere and all you see is a surfeit of the poor who are surviving in their poverty, some of them even doggedly snatching a measure of dignity from their poverty. Yes, there is much about which to ponder in this metaphoric application of herd immunity to the scourge of poverty in our world.

To stick to a rigorous social application of this metaphor, we must necessarily also apply it to the small minorities of the rich and the “fortunate” of most parts of our world. If we do so what do we get? Well, the profile is very interesting. Why so? This is because contemporary manifestations of poverty in our world are so scandalous, so destructive of genuine human solidarity that every thinking and caring person should be opposed to them. But that is not the case. The rich and the powerful seem so perfectly adjusted to degrading poverty on such a large scale that one can be forgiven for accusing them of believing that they have herd immunity from poverty! The “no-income” poor have become more numerous than the “low-income” poor in many parts of the world, especially in most countries of the global South. And in recent years and decades, this has become multigenerational as poverty passes from one generation to another. In other words, in the manner in which herd immunity operates in natural plagues only through communicable diseases, poverty in our world seems to operate now as a communicable disease when in reality it exists only because of vastly unjust and indefensible socio-economic arrangements.

I ask myself: are there expressions or manifestations of herd immunity in relation to Covid-19 in Nigeria? My answer is, I hope not! At least, no representative of the federal or state governments has, like Boris Johnson or Donald Trump, expressed the hope that if we ride out the invasion of the pandemic, we would in the end have protection through herd immunity. Perhaps some official has expressed such an opinion but I am not aware of it? Again, I hope not. All I can venture on the matter is the suggestion that because there is such an alarming inadequacy in our medical infrastructures that we seem utterly unprepared for a full-scale explosion of the pandemic in our country, many Nigerians, especially at the official level, are instinctively praying for herd immunity in our encounter with Covid-19. But bear in mind, compatriots: we live in a global community whose best interests are served by cooperation and solidarity. Yes, we have inadequate, crumbling medical infrastructures and Covid-19 will not wait for us to fix these problems and challenges. But that is no reason not to make intelligent and creative use of the resources that exist in other parts of our world.

I ask myself also: what explains the fact that herd immunity as parable or metaphor is so pertinent to societal and individual responses to poverty in our country? We are now known as the poverty capital of the world: isn’t that proof enough that poverty has so massively “infected” our society that we are resigned to poverty itself as immunity? This question is not as abstract and purely conjectural as it seems. The resignation with which Nigerians as a national community endures mass scale poverty is as legendary as the uses to which divisions based on ethnicity, religion and regionalism are used to frustrate common and collective action against the ravages of poverty. Isn’t that a form or mode of herd immunity? In nature as in human society, herd immunity operates as the last stand of any society that is unable to look to its stock or heritage of knowledge, expertise and initiative to confront a plague, natural or social. Trump and the Republicans are at least open about their cynical and opportunistic use of herd immunity. Boris Johnson was more devious, but in the end, he learnt his lesson. What of Buhari and our ruling class elite? Let us hope that among the inevitable changes to a new normal that will come in the wake of Covid-19 in our country will be abandonment of herd immunity as strategy for engaging both natural and social plagues in our country.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu