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Category: Biodun Jeyifo

  • In the shade of pragmatic, Fabian socialism: for Olu Obafemi @70

    In the shade of pragmatic, Fabian socialism: for Olu Obafemi @70

    Biodun Jeyifo

     

    UNSURPRISINGLY, the tributes to Professor Olu Obafemi of the University of Ilorin on turning 70 this month have been many, eloquent and moving. He is a man of many accomplishments. There are the accomplishments of meritocratic and institutional provenience: former President of the Nigerian National Academy of Letters, the most prestigious self-organization of the most senior and distinguished of professors in the country; former President of the Nigerian Association of Authors (ANA), the premier organization of Nigerian writers; and sole winner of the National Order of Merit for the year 2019. I may be mistaken, but I do not think that there is any Nigerian professor or writer other than Olu Obafemi who has bagged all these three most coveted accolades of the Nigerian literati.

    But as if these were not enough, Olu Obafemi is a former Director of Studies at the National Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS) which, as we know, is the training and breeding ground for the topmost and most ambitious military, police, civil service and business heavyweights of the country. But that’s not all, since he was also at one time the Chairman of the National Commission of Museums and Antiquities. Meanwhile through his serial tenure in all these posts in the nation’s highest voluntary and official institutions, Olu occupied the highest academic and administrative posts at the University of Ilorin, minus the Vice Chancellorship. Not to either bore or overwhelm the reader with even more accomplishments, it is with a whisper that I must now say that Olu spent much of these same times or periods writing dozens of plays, poetry, novels, academic papers and journalism, while finding the time to also form and run a vibrant amateur theatre company of actors, “Ajon Players”. Given this overall stupendous achievement, it will be appreciated why all his friends and admirers love to tease Olu with the observation that while he is naturally vertically challenged, he casts a very long shadow and occupies an overlarge frame of social visibility.

    I met Olu and we became friends when neither professional success nor social visibility was something we thought about or even desired as our life’s goals. Indeed our friendship had two separate though linked roots. First, I met him in activities and activism that we all then called the Nigerian Left. Endless visits by me to the University of Ilorin and visits by him to the University of Ife (as it was then called), both of us in the company of many other comrades, some departed but many others still alive. Secondly but almost simultaneously, we became friends because Olu became friends with my bosom friend, Femi Osofisan, also a stalwart of the “Left”. Something like the friend of my friend is my friend. The three of us and many of our mutual friends belonged to that formation of intellectuals, writers, dramatists, critics and journalists that I am calling here “the Left”. We were angry young men – very, very angry! – but we were also filled with idealism, laughter, irreverence, and rambunctious joie de vivre.

    Please, remember, compatriots, that I am referring here to a period when our country and our continent began to be overtaken by brutal military dictatorships, debt peonage to Western imperialist and capitalist forces, a terrible fall in standards of living for most of our peoples, and the steady decline of all of our educational institutions, primary, secondary and tertiary. Olu Obafemi’s poems and plays, Osofisan’s plays, novellas and poems, and my own criticism, scholarship and journalism were all filled with engagements of these crises and challenges to our peoples and our own class or subgroup of the radical or progressive national intelligentsia. To speak here only about men and women of letters leaving out social and natural scientists, and medical doctors and lawyers, we and our works and activities spanned an incredible range and diversity of talent, individuality and form and level of commitment. I think here of Festus Iyayi, Odia Ofeimun, Kole Omotoso, Tunde Fatunde, G.G. Darah, Tanure Ojaide and many, many others. If you distinguish individuality from individualism, you would agree with me that in such a movement or formation, even as we all violently rejected the possessive individualism at the core of capitalist ideology and culture, we could neither ignore nor adequately deal with the imperative of individuality at the heart of what it is to be human, specifically a social being.

    In the ineluctable expressions of his individuality, Olu Obafemi is a very gregarious and affable man. In this he reminds me very much of the late Professor Oyin Ogunba for whom there was no subject under the sun that was so serious, so onerous that it could not be engaged with mirth or tonic levity. Like the late Professor Dapo Adelugba, Obafemi’s laughter is a sight and a sound to behold in and for itself – resonant, eruptive and etched through almost every inch of the upper part of the body. His appetite for life and its many sybaritic expressions is legendary. I understand that he longer imbibes as much as he used to do; I will believe it when I see it! He is considerate and solicitous toward friends, colleagues and acquaintances to a fault. He could be a little tight-fisted on occasion, but isn’t that because regardless of his great professional success, he’s still only a salaried man, not a man of wealth, timber and caliber? To this I can counter the argument that when he and his wife play host to visiting friends and acquaintances, their hospitality is impeccably warm and welcoming. Indeed, his wife, Mama Todun, is the very essence of courteousness and graciousness.

    I do not know now and will probably never know how these expressions or manifestations of Obafemi’s individuality led to a moment of profound change in his career and life circumstances about which all the tributes to him on this occasion of attainment of the age of 70 have been silent. I am speaking here of the so-called ASUU-Unilorin crisis that erupted in 2001 and lasted for nineteen years. Based on both ideological and practical differences on how to engage incursions of both university authorities and the federal government on academic freedom and university autonomy, a violent split erupted between so-called “moderates” and “radicals” in the ASUU-Unilorin leadership. Obafemi, easily one of the most influential men in both ASUU itself and the university at large, found himself among the “moderates”. Almost overnight, people who had been close colleagues, trusted comrades and even family friends became sworn, bitter enemies. It did not help matters that the faction to which Obafemi belonged, the “moderates”, was openly adopted by the university authorities and government as their proxies. Matters came to a point of no return when many of the “radicals” were purged and expelled from the university, some of them never to be reinstated or rehabilitated before they passed away.

    This is a tribute to Olu Obafemi, not a re-litigation of the rights and wrongs of that bitter crisis. And for truth in historical recollection and witness bearing, I must state here that as a so-called elder in the national leadership of ASUU, I was more partial, more sympathetic to the “radicals” than the “moderates”. But with others like Dipo Fasina and Festus Iyayi, I patiently listened to both sides. Most important of all, I parleyed many, many times with Olu, even though I realized quite clearly that he was going through a crise de conscience, a disturbing moral uncertainty. In one visit to Ilorin to engage the fallout from the crisis, Olu took me to the then Vice Chancellor of Unilorin, Shamsuddin Amali (aka Samson Amali) who had been my course-mate and classmate at the University of Ibadan. As expected, both Olu and Amali were very courteous and attentive in hearing me out, but neither had it in himself to resolve the crisis – powerful forces within and outside the university had taken total control. The rift lasted nineteen years, even though about halfway through the period, the law courts adjudged the “radicals” the injured party and awarded restitution to them. Ironically, when the rift came to an end last year, all charges and allegations, all accusations and counter-accusations were mutually dropped and ASUU-Unilorin became one united body again. Gradually, old comrades and friends are beginning to talk to one another again.

    But that is not the end of the story. Indeed, my point in going back to this crisis in the middle of a tribute to my friend is to underscore my belief that there is no end to the story. More precisely, it is to explore one particular aspect of the crisis that, in my opinion, went on to have a great impact on Obafemi’s profile in the years and decades just before and after the eruption of the crisis. Since I have written extensively on the subject, I will only write about it briefly in this tribute.  Thus, permit me to put it rather succinctly here as the move from a revolutionary, idealistic and total struggle for socialism to an evolutionary, reformist and gradualist program of change.

    This is the defining expression of that move: before it, like most comrades and members of the Left, Obafemi thought very little of the possibility that meaningful change could come from working with or within the institutions and organs of the state in all their formations, governmental and non-governmental; after the move, Obafemi becomes, within and outside the university system, a public intellectual who apparently believes that in the seeming impossibility of revolutionary change, it is best to work for gradual, incremental change by making use of the organs and institutions of the existing state and society. This is what is known in development sociology as meliorism; it is what I am calling, in the title of this piece, pragmatic Fabian socialism. Perhaps the most easily identifiable expression of this move is to be found in Obafemi’s stint as Director of Studies at the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies: you not only get to teach and mentor military and civilian bigwigs with ambitions to rise to the topmost rungs of power and wealth, you also secure a present and future influence with them with regard to desirable change in our country.

    As far as I am aware, this aspect of Obafemi’s career and achievements has neither been articulated by himself nor made the subject of commentary by his legion of admirers. To his credit, Obafemi has brought badly-needed patronage and resources from the state and its incumbents to organizations like the National Academy of Letters and the Association of Nigerian Authors, as well as to a countless number of academics, artists and students. In his many positions within Unilorin and the university system, he has mentored an uncountable number of younger colleagues and, especially, women. The postman always delivers: this is from an American urban lore that speaks to the vital role of organizations and individuals who are positioned, one way or another, to deliver much-needed resources of modern life, especially under conditions of great adversity. If you read many of the tributes to Olu on the occasion of his attainment of this milestone, the underlying sentiment is, “Olu Obafemi always delivers”! Although this will never end the adversity and its causes, it can often offer sustaining relief from its worst effects.

    Olu Obafemi, I salute you! You are one of greatest intellectual and activist incarnations of meliorism in our country. You have done much and therefore greatly deserve your retirement. I have only one thing to ask of you, Baba Todun: please, leave open the possibility that the prospects for revolutionary change are not permanently foreclosed in our society, even in our own present unhappy age. Welcome to the club of retired but not tired elders!

     

    Biodun Jeyifo  bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu         

     

  • Overwhelmingly, it’s a rich people’s world; will it remain so when the ravages of Covid-19 end?

    Overwhelmingly, it’s a rich people’s world; will it remain so when the ravages of Covid-19 end?

    Biodun Jeyifo

    As quiet as it was kept, three weeks ago when I was in Lagos, there was a rumour about Covid-19 circulating in the city. Actually, it was more than a rumour given the fact that there was a modicum of truth to it. What was “it”? It was an assertion that Covid-19 is an affliction of rich or well-to-do people, the jetsetters who travel by air for business and/or pleasure around our world nearly all the time. It was a “rumour” because in spite of the grain of fact and truth in it, Covid-19 quickly showed that it could travel as effectively by road, rail, canoe and human legs and feet. As a matter of etiological fact, its preferred medium of “travel” is the human hand. Thus, if at first this pandemic appeared to be a rich or well-to-do people’s disease, it very quickly took up residence and began its rampaging devastation in the greatest concentrations of the poor and the forgotten. This is what I wish to communicate in the title and the substance of this piece: Covid-19 seems to have come to a world that is overwhelmingly a rich people’s world only to place the burden of more suffering and destruction on the poor.

    Of course, there are caveats to this view of the “secret intentions” of the pandemic. All human beings, rich and poor, old and young are vulnerable to the virus in equal measure, irrespective of their wealth or poverty. Moreover, if and when any person contracts the disease, there is no correlation between their wealth or poverty and their chances of survival or death. Presidents, prime ministers, billionaires and the glitterati among the elites of the world succumb to the pandemic in the same measure as do cooks, mechanics, farmers, petty traders and hawkers. Indeed, think of this startling fact, compatriots: right now and for the immediate future, Covid-19 has wrought far greater devastation in the rich countries and regions of the world than in the poorer lands of the global South.

    We are far from the end of the road in the unfolding apocalypse of this global pandemic. In the next few months, it will probably be clearer to us whether or not the current lopsided disequilibrium between the global North and South will shift to the misfortune of the countries of the global South. Heaven help us if the most populous countries of this region like India, Brazil, Nigeria and Mexico, with their surfeit of vast concentrations of the poor, overtake countries of the global North like Italy, Spain, the UK and the US in numbers of those stricken by the disease and dying from it. The hundreds of thousands of migrant workers of India going by feet to their ancestral home villages from the cities – is this a grim portent for other over-populated countries of the global South? Wuhan, China, did not follow this pattern, but how many countries in the world can replicate the draconian lockdown that China imposed on Wuhan and its entire population in order to cope with the outbreak of Covid-19 in that over-populated conurbation?

    As I write these words, I am particularly and forcefully stricken by the thought, the recognition that I am in the country, the United States, with the sharpest and most bitter debates in the world on wealth and poverty and on stultifying poverty in the midst of untold accumulation of wealth. Yes, America is by far the wealthiest country in the world and probably in history. But it is a country in which less than 5% of the population own and control more than 90% of the wealth. I am also very conscious of the fact that I am writing this piece for a country, Nigeria, that is now generally known as the poverty capital of the world. Moreover, with Covid-19 has come an economic downturn of epic proportions for the United States, a recession maybe, even possibly a depression. These two separate but related set of facts is what gives the title and contents of this piece their salience: after Covid-19 might have done its worst in the world and in these two countries, will we still have, overwhelmingly, a rich people’s world? Or is it the case that when it is all over and the dust and the fog have cleared, the world would have ben transformed for the better?

    The US and Nigeria present us with two very different articulations or manifestations of these questions. In the US, the questions are being openly and vigorously asked and debated. In Nigeria, at least so far, there doesn’t seem to be an awareness that Covid-19 has now and will in the future have anything to do with either an intensification or a substantial reduction in poverty. Just take a look at the bitterness and the resolve with which the Democrats had to fight Trump and the Senate controlled by the Republicans to include substantial payments to workers and the poor in the $2.3 trillion rescue or stimulus package signed into law last week. Left to Trump and the Republicans, all they wanted to do was dish out hefty disbursements to the big corporations and their CEO’s, to do absolutely whatever they liked with the handouts. As I write these words, Trump and the Republicans are still pursuing their case in the law courts against the implementation of Obamacare. Just think about the scale of a war against the poor that this indicates: in the age of Covid-19 when people are falling sick and dying in multiples of thousands, Trump and his allies still want to leave tens of millions of Americans unprotected by healthcare insurance coverage!

    Apart from the fact that one is the wealthiest country in the world and the other is known as the poverty capital of the world, the big difference between the two countries in this matter is the fact that in the US, the reign of oligarchs and plutocrats is being challenged now as it had hitherto never been challenged while in Nigeria, the two ruling political parties, APC and PDP, are still singularly dedicated to poverty intensification through a looting frenzy of the most savage kind. In concrete terms, there is abundant evidence that many sectors of the political order and the press in the US seem bent on making the war against Covid-19 a war against oligarchy and plutocracy.

     

    Permit me to put this in a slightly different formulation: In the US, there is a widespread feeling that, even with its rampaging destructiveness, Covid-19 provides a historic opportunity to redistribute wealth more fairly and end severe poverty forever. If you wish to put this in ideological terms, you could say that liberal social democracy is at war with neoliberal oligarchy and its rightwing populism. The war against Covid-19 in the country is thus profoundly shaped by this ideological and political struggle.

    In Nigeria, only the most unthinking, diehard supporters of APC and Buhari still harbor illusions that the party and the president will bring real relief and succor to the teeming masses of Nigerians, North and South, East and West. Of course, the opposition party, PDP, is ideologically and politically washed up and is a spent force which survives only because it can still get some mileage from ethnic and regional irredentism. Let us put this matter in stark, unmistakable terms: does anyone expect that a president and a ruling party that cannot bring reconciliation between “herders” and “farmers”, a president and a party that have seen extreme ethnic jingoism and communal insecurity rise to unprecedented levels under their reign, does anyone believe that such a president and a ruling party will conduct the war against Covid-19 with a view to ending or reducing poverty and its blights in our country?

    Yes, of course, philanthropy has appeared as a strong component of the vision of Buhari and the APC as a big part of the strategy and tactics of the war against Covid-19. This is both the philanthropy of some billionaires and of the government itself. We are told that legislators will donate two months’ salaries to aid poor Nigerians in the fight against the pandemic. The federal and state governments have outlined some programs to offer relief to the masses of Nigerians and their families, although nothing solid and concrete has been implemented. But please note, compatriots: nothing is being planned to stop the astronomical accumulation of wealth through control of the state and its organs and institutions. The highest salaries and emoluments of parliamentarians in the world; pension schemes that are the most juicy for public officeholders on the planet; wholesale and brazen privatization of public assets and resources at giveaway prices; and a judiciary that is an institutional accomplice to these primitive accumulation practices: all these depredations are continuing and intensifying as the nation is told that Covid-19 will find a worthy foe in the government, the presidency.

    In the fight against Covid-19, thou shall break up, go apart from thy neighbours, even from thy family and thy kith and kin in order to stay safe and survive the pandemic. That is the fundamental rationale of strategy and tactics in the war against the virus. This fundamentally undercuts the strength and fortitude that the poor and exploited have always found in being physically, socially and psychically together. Does this therefore mean that something in the inner dialectic of Covid-19 is against the saving togetherness of the poor and the downtrodden? Not necessarily so. As we have seen in the case of the US, even as families and communities are forced into the isolation of mandatory social distancing, the fight to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor has intensified. In other words, even as we are compelled to pull away from one another, our destinies have never been more mutually constituted.

     

    The imponderables of “luck” and “ill luck”, of deliverance and death

    As  I wrote in this column last week, my self-imposed total quarantine of two weeks will be over this weekend, tomorrow, Saturday, April 4, 2020 as a matter of fact. Thankfully, I have shown no signs or symptoms of Covid-19. This means that if I took a test for the virus now, I would probably test negative. But then, there are those who test positive and yet are completely asymptomatic. Is this the category to which I belong? A test can easily resolve the matter, but in the part of the US in which I live for part of the year, unless you are sick and show some symptoms of invasion by the virus, you cannot get tested. This means that for as long as I am fine, I shall not know whether or not I have contracted the virus. This leads me to the following enigmas about this virus and the pandemic it is causing worldwide.

    There are those who test positive and are asymptomatic. There are those that test positive and are symptomatic but have a very mild, almost benign encounter with the pandemic. Then there are those who test positive and have extremely harrowing symptoms of the disease. So far, no scientist or researcher has found what it is that makes some people have no symptoms at all, while some have very mild symptoms and still others experience excruciating suffering and pain. I have a deep, deep faith in rigorous scientific research.  I believe that sooner or later, we shall find out what it is that make some survive the illness relatively unscathed while other go through hellish suffering before they succumb to the disease. But I do not completely discountenance the imponderables of unique selfhood and fate. Perhaps this places me at some distance from the rigorous historical and dialectical materialism of my youth and middle age adulthood? Well, so be it!

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu 

  • Waiting for Covid-19 to come and go – an actual and symbolic travelogue

    Waiting for Covid-19 to come and go – an actual and symbolic travelogue

    Biodun Jeyifo

     

    AS I write these words, I am in the fifth day of a two-week quarantine for Covid-19. No, I have not tested positive for the virus that causes the pandemic and I am not ill, at least not yet. The quarantine is both self-imposed and strongly enjoined by the local authorities. I am quarantined because two weeks ago, I travelled from Boston home to Nigeria and back to Boston, making my way through London, Lagos, Ibadan, London again, then New York City and finally back to Boston. The situation for me personally is made more complicated because five weeks before my journey home and back to Boston, I had had a surgical operation from which I was and still am recuperating. As part of the recuperation, I’d had to see doctors and consultants three days a week for post-operative sessions. Now, these sessions have been cancelled and will be resumed only if, at the end, it turns out that I do not test positive for the virus.

    So, I have nine more days of complete self-isolation in quarantine. As I wait for it to end, I am both hopeful and fearful – hopeful that so far I have not felt any of the symptoms of the disease but fearful because I am not yet out of the woods and I know that if it turns out that I test positive for the disease, I am of the age and the medical condition of those who are the most vulnerable members of the society to fatality from the pandemic. Thus, every time that I cough or sneeze, I pause to wonder whether the cough or the sneeze seems “normal” or strange and unnerving. Indeed, if I must be completely truthful about this, I try to suppress every cough or sneeze that I feel coming. Why am I doing this? Well, because I think that only a cough or a sneeze that will spell trouble can break down my will to suppress it! Of course, I am the first to admit that there is absolutely nothing scientific or logical about this thought.

    In a quarantine, whether self-imposed or mandated by the civic authorities, the mind has all the time in the world to wander, to roam far and wide. For instance, I think a lot about what happened in each of the stops on my recent journey home, wondering at which of these places I might have made myself more susceptible to contacting the virus – London, Lagos, Ibadan or New York. But the journey was and is also a series of different states of the mind and the psyche. In other words, there is both a literal, physical journey and travels that take place in the mind or the imagination. In the literal journey, you take note of what you are doing, of how you are relating to those around you and of what things ring alarm bells in your mind. In the symbolic or imagined travel, your mind wanders to things or thoughts that are far from your physical surroundings and the threats or reassurances they communicate to you.

    But it is also the case that sometimes, the actual and the symbolic merge. At any rate, this is what seems so clear and so insistent to me as I reconstruct the following travelogue of my recent journey home, the journey that landed me in the quarantine that is the subject of this piece. In what follows, I trace the contours of the travelogue from the present back to the beginning on the day when I set out from Boston to Lagos.

     

    Friday, March 27, 2020:

    I am of course writing this piece now. As I set about the task, my mind is on books and films on plagues that I have read or watched. Three books in particular occupy center space in my mind – Albert Camus’ The Plague, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, Femi Osofisan’s Kolera Kollege. Garcia Marquez’s novel has been made into an excellent film and Osofisan’s novel, initially published as a farcical novella, has been staged with great success as a satirical play. Incidentally, though none of these works is available to me in the isolation of my quarantine, I have a solid recall of what happens in each text, almost as if I had each one in my study or indeed on my writing table.

    The Osofisan text is narrowly focused on the corruption and the cowardice of the authorities in the face of an epidemic that breaks out in a “kollege” that stands for the nation-state. The implication is that the outbreak of the plague itself is not the object or focus of the play; rather, it merely provides yet another means for revealing the depth of the moral plague in the society. Gabriel Garcia’s Love in the Time of Cholera is even more symbolic than Kolera Kollege because no actual plague takes place in the novel; the closest that we come to a plague is when the protagonist of the novel, Florentino Ariza, gets the captain of a cruise ship on which he and his intended lover, Fermina Daza, are sailing to falsely declare the ship as being overrun by a plague. In reality, the “plague” is in Florentino’s mind, psyche and, ultimately, his body too. This is because he is suffering from a profound lovesickness caused by his rejection by Fermina such that as he grows older and more infirm and decrepit, he becomes a living embodiment of the plague itself. In other words, although there is no actual plague in the novel, some fatal infirmities of mind and body mirror what happens in a real plague as the human estate itself succumbs to plague-like manifestations of disease and putrefaction.

    Camus’ The Plague is, indisputably, the text to read in the age Covid-19. Set in a town, Oran, in colonial Algeria, the plot of the novel lasts for a whole year during which, from spring through summer and fall to winter, we observe life in its combination of the best and the worst in human beings as the plague forces complete cutoff of the town from the rest of the world. Some citizens plan relentlessly to escape from the seemingly doomed town in order to join their loved ones in France and other places. Others take to profiteering by smuggling in badly needed goods which they sell at cutthroat prices. Yet others become religious fanatics swayed and manipulated by prophets of doom. A few characters struggle valiantly against the tempting of their worst nature and find grace in compassion and human fellowship.

    At the end of the novel, there is as much to despise in human beings as there is to admire. Thus, although Camus’ novel has only white colonial characters without a single Arab, the novel is extraordinarily insightful about the range of conflicting experiences and emotions in a plague of such a proportion as we are experiencing in Covid-19. If you want to get a feel of where humanity has been before with the plagues of the past and might be again in the plagues of the present and the future, read Camus’ The Plague and be wiser. I last read the novel as an undergraduate at Ibadan in 1969; when and if Covid-19 is over and I am still here, it is the first text that I am going to check out of the library in order to reread it!

     

    Saturday, March 13, 2020, London:

    The flight from Boston was uneventful, except that right at the end when we arrived at Heathrow, it was announced that one person on the flight had shown signs of serious illness and debilitation and had to be evacuated first before the rest of us could be allowed to disembark. I confess that as we all waited anxiously, I got some relief from the fact that the person concerned was in another part of the plane from mine.

    At the Virgin Atlantic Airways lounge where I had to pass the time before the flight to Lagos, I had about ten hours to kill. It was while watching television for updates that the news came that the US government would be banning all flights from the UK in two days’ time. Two days! I am booked to return to Boston in five day via London! Briefly, I thought about turning right back and heading to Boston from which I had just arrived. But I resisted the thought and turned my mind to making sure that I scrupulously observed all the tips about keeping safe from the Covid-19 virus. Fortunately, the lounge had far less than its usual number of occupants. Briefly, I debated in my mind whether or not it was safe or wise for me to eat and drink in this watering hole between starting point and endpoint in my journey. I opted for eating and imbibing, but it was in vain that I tried not to think of what I might be ingesting with the food and the drink. London was already a declared hotspot of the Covid-19 invasion. Ori iya mi o!

     

    Sunday, March 15 – Wednesday, March 18, 2020, Lagos:

    Is Lagos a part of the world? Nobody, absolutely nobody is observing any precautions against contacting the virus. People shook hands with gusto, laughing while doing so. At the conference that had brought me home, people embraced one another, hands, torsos and limbs entwined in defiance of all self-distancing injunctions of the age of Covid-19. At breakfast, lunch and dinner, people ate and drank within one foot of one another without a thought for the conditions under which the fare was cooked and served. I kept asking myself: is my country apart from the rest of the world? Is it true, as people apparently believed, that Covid-19 had not really taken root in Nigeria and would not do so?

    For a while, I resisited these “laissez faire” attitudes and beliefs and tried to observe all the tips about how to be protected from the virus. But man is a profoundly social animal and a creature driven to conformity. And thus it was that against my own better judgment, I, too, began to fall in with others in shaking hands and embracing friends and acquaintances I hadn’t seen in a long time. The worst is this and I am now deeply embarrassed by the thought: I began to join in the speculation that perhaps some things in our genes and our climate were naturally fortifying us against the virus! Of course this is nonsense! Thus, if I end up testing positive at the end of my period of quarantine, this period will loom large in my mind as the fateful moment of dire slippage!

     

    Thursday, March 19, 2020 – Friday, March 20, 2020, Ibadan

    Nothing much to report here, except this significant detail: I began to observe all the injunctions again. It is like coming back to reality, stolid, banal reality after a night of drunken revelry. Beside visiting a couple of friends, I stayed away from places in which I might meet and mingle with crowds of people. These included the funeral of a younger sibling. Fortunately in this case, culture and tradition were on my side since I was not expected to participate in the final obsequies for a sibling who was nearly twelve years my junior. Plus, the somberness of the occasion helped: the untimely death of this sibling beckoned me to think of my own mortality as also possibly “untimely” if I failed to observe precautions against contacting the Covid-19 pandemic.

     

    Sunday, March 22, 2020, New York City:

    By the time of my arrival here, New York had become the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States. Fortunately, I was very much aware of this fact. More fortunate was the fact that I had only about an hour to spend at the airport. And moreover, when I embarked on the plane that would take us to Boston, the flight was simply the most sparsely passengered of my more than five decades of air travel. Indeed, the flight prepared me well for the empty streets, roads and thoroughfares of Boston when I arrived there. A ghost town in a ghostly age. May I and you not be ghosts by the time this is all over, compatriots…

     

    Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • When poverty is wealth: for Odia Ofeimun @70 (2)

    When poverty is wealth: for Odia Ofeimun @70 (2)

    Biodun Jeyifo

    There is no necessary or inevitable connection between poverty and the word. Odia was born to write; poverty in the sense in which I am using it in this talk was and is a choice. Once Odia discovered that he had a gift for language, for writing and the word, he could not help himself. Or rather, he helped himself and relentlessly pursued the vocation of writing. In all accounts of his biography, you will find this devotion to the word from very early in his life. For instance, in the complete obscurity of someone who had never had a poem published, Odia sent his poems to Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.

    Now, this is not as unusual as it sounds. Unpublished neophytes who send their poems or short stories to famous authors are uncountable. When you are that young, inexperienced and brazen, rejection slips or being completely ignored is not as emotionally damaging as they are when you are older, already published and self-important. But in Odia’s case he was successful in his first contacts with the older writers, Achebe and Soyinka, beyond his wildest imagination. Each of them published the poems Odia had sent them. After that, Odia began writing in earnest and he has never stopped writing since then. But we must pose the question once again: what is the connection with poverty? If he was born to write but not to be poor, where and how did the two, poverty and the word, meet?

    These questions are not as baffling or confounding as they seem to be. I have suggested Christ and Gandhi as historical examples of visionary leaders who took the vows of poverty and absolutely never turned back from that choice. Christ is completely in the religious or theological tradition; on his part, Gandhi resided in the quasi-religious streams of the heritage of Indian thought. I now add the secular examples of revolutionaries of the past two centuries who turned their backs completely on the wealth and privilege of their families and their own achievement, embraced poverty and never looked back: Friedrich Engels; Fidel Castro; Ernesto Che Guevara; Fela Anikulapo and thousands of idealistic youths who, as the formulation goes, “committed class suicide” and never looked back. At a more mundane but nonetheless immensely consequential level, haven’t we all heard about teachers or headmasters who completely turned their backs on the rat race and endured hard, impecunious lives, completely devoting their lives to the education of generations of other peoples’ children? In all these examples, theological or secular, choosing poverty and/or abjuring the pursuit of wealth provides a springboard for following the most selfless and idealistic intimations of one’s intuitions, indeed of one’s being. So it is with the nexus, the compact between Odia, poverty and the word. In other words, Odia found in the abjuration of the pursuit of wealth the means with which to fulfill his destiny of being born to write, of being both a servant and a master of the Word.

    At this point, permit me to make a necessary clarification. Why am I using the term “the word” in this lecture rather than the term “writing”? After all, writing is Odia’s own preferred term. As he tells us in his autobiographical statement for this celebration, from as early as the age of seven, he knew he wanted to write, he knew that one day, he would become a writer. Well, that is all well and good. But to me, what Odia regards as “writing” was and is more properly conceived as the more inclusive and pristine phenomenon that is the Word. Thus, writing is only one of the many modalities of the Word. So is voice. So is utterance. So are speech and language, chanting and singing and music and dance. Indeed, in many of Odia’s poems, these cognate terms or modalities of the Word are used in place of or as modifiers of writing.

    What is the import of this clarification?  It is a transfiguration or sublation of Odia’s lifelong drive to write; beyond writing, beyond the audacity of announcing at age seven that he was going to be a writer, Odia was possessed by the Dionysian spirit of the Word. And what happens in the phenomenon of possession? You are “mounted”, you are taken over by the spirit, god or the avatar of that by which you are possessed: revolution, music, dance, war, poetry, the Word.

    At the most direct and unmediated level, this factor shows up in the work of Odia in the sheer number and range of his writing in poetry, nonfiction prose, polemics, dance drama and cultural journalism. As a matter of fact, Odia has published more single poems and volumes of poetry than any other African poet. But this is not a numbers game; if you write a hundred books, indeed a thousand books and most of them are indifferent in quality and impact, it cannot be validly claimed that you are possessed by the spirit or divinity of writing, of the Word. As a matter of fact, in his relatively short life, Christopher Okigbo produced only a slim totality of poetic works. But what works of powerful and incandescent poetry! He worked endlessly on revisions of the poems and this no doubt contributed to the slimness of the total output.

    Odia is very different from this Okigbo paradigm: no sooner has he completed a poem or a cycle of poems that he starts on other poems or cycles of poems. What unites Okigbo and Odia is the fact in the presence of their poetry, you have a distinct feeling that you are in the presence or the company of a possessed poet. Sometimes, this takes the form of a modulated incantation, an outburst of lyricism that simultaneously draws attention to itself or gestures towards an epiphany, or very artful utterance that brings together radically different or diverse phonetic and semantic effects. How to do things with words, with language, and with articulation beyond the ordinary, these are what you get in the poetry of Okigbo and Odia. From the Bible: in the beginning was the Word and (the) the Word was made flesh. In this conception, language and utterance in poetry are taken to the roots of being. This is an effect, a feature that one finds again and again in much of Odia’s poetry. Please note that this is an effect that most poets never achieve in their poetry, no matter long and hard they try.

    Here I must say that I have a confession to make. What is this confession? Well, because Odia’s poetry, throughout most of the volumes of poems and in both the early and latter stages of his career tend to be move along inexorably, I had always thought that writing was a relatively easy task for him. But that was before I read an interview in which Odia made a bald confession that writing poems was always for him a hard job, a frustrating exercise in plodding laboriously at the demands of this vocation that seems to be in possession of his talent and skills. This information flabbergasted me. Well, that was until I thought carefully about the matter and then it made sense to me. Why so?

    Well, because I surmised that up till that moment, I had been so focused on Odia’s mastery of the word that I had failed to notice that he was also a servant of the word. A servant of the word because only in the service of poetry could Odia spend so much time and labour to produce what I had thought near perfect lines of poems. Here is another way of putting this observation across: I had thought that technique and craftsmanship as a poet came very easy to Odia; but here he was confessing that he typically expended considerable attention to craftmanship, to the knots and bolts of poetic composition. Again, let us recall the career of Okigbo here: endlessly he revised his poems, only to revise the already revised poems, in the end coming to a lean harvest of very beautiful and haunting poems that projected complete mastery of his medium. But look at the totality of service and mastery and you have a more accurate idea of what he achieved.

    It is time to begin moving towards the conclusion of the lecture. To do this, I must now shift the discussion of service and mastery of the Word away from technique and craftsmanship to the content, the concerns and the politics of Odia’s works in all the genres, forms and idioms. Of course a corpus of more than forty books in diverse genres cannot and should not be reduced to a set of generalizing themes and concerns. But all the same, there are certain synthesizing truth-claims that can be made about Odia as poet, polemicist, writer of nonfiction meditations and thinker. Basically, this is a matter of sensibility; but it is also a matter of deeply held convictions that have been remarkably consistent throughout all the stages of the development of his career. I will use the conjoined tropes of service and mastery of the word to discuss these constant, powerful motive forces of Odia as a poet.

    As I stated at the beginning of this lecture, Odia is one of the most revolutionary poets and writers of our continent across the many generational cohorts of modern Nigeria and Africa. But his is a very special, almost unique form of expression of revolutionary subjectivity and identity. There are poems, essays and polemics of straightforward radical protest in his corpus, but on the whole, he goes far beyond simple, direct protest to powerful and complex meditations on the nature of suffering and oppression, alienation and disalienation.

    As a poet and a polemicist, Odia is a witness and a tribune who pays attention to both the big issues and the not-so big ones.  He is nearly always present in his poems, essays and journalism, either recognizably in his own voice and persona or more complexly in self-referential characters or both, as in one of his most celebrated poems, “The Poet Lied”. Odia is particularly good in cycles of poems that often weave a fascinating tapestry of the portrait of the whole nation or continent around the prism of the real life or lives of both unknown and known, famous persons. The cycle of poems in honour of his father titled “Giagbone” is, in my professional opinion, one of the most powerful cycle of poems ever written. In this long, haunting poem, Odia is both revolutionary witness and tribune. The witness offers testimony or proof of social evil; the tribune indicts or prosecutes. Permit me to reflect very briefly on this claim.

    It goes without saying that Odia is not only one of our most prominent public intellectuals, but what is often understated is the fact that he deliberately prepared himself well for this role. With most public intellectuals of the present age, routine, formal certification or credentialization is crucial in their formation, making for an incongruence between “public” and “intellectual”. But not with Odia who comes almost in the footsteps of the public intellectuals of bygone eras of post-enlightenment intellectualism. This is why Odia believes fervently in the truth-content of any and all claims while at the same time he pays great attention to the reality of subjective experience and intuitions, especially those based on a tough-minded but critical self-awareness.

    In concrete terms, Odia as revolutionary poet and writer is obsessed by the oppression, suffering, defeats and alienation of the weak and the excluded. But he is also mindful of the decadence, violence and inhumanity of the powerful and the privileged. In poetic terms, he often moves in and out of the polarities of oppressor and oppressed, the servant and the master. He does not refuse to take sides in this confrontation, but he is extraordinarily perceptive and eloquent on the mutuality that exists between both sides. Indeed, in my opinion, it is when Odia is attentive to both the negative and the positive – the servitude and the mastery – that he is at his most moving, lyrical, funny and tragic in his poetry. To bring this lecture to a close, permit me to read some passages from two of my favorite lighter poems of Odia, “London Letter” and “Eko, my city by the lagoon”.

    Odia’s place as one of the leading poets and public intellectuals of this age is already secure. But he is not done yet, not by a long shot. Let us hope that the flame will continue to burn brightly. Welcome to the club, Baba!

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • When poverty is wealth: for Odia Ofeimun @70

    When poverty is wealth: for Odia Ofeimun @70

    [Being an excerpt from the Keynote Lecture, “Odia Ofeimun: Servant and Master of the Word”, International Conference in Honour of Odia Ofeimun, University of Lagos, Monday, March 16, 2020]

     

    SOMETIME in September 2004, Odia collapsed at a lecture hall at the Obafemi Awolowo University just as he was about to deliver a public lecture. To the consternation of everyone present, Odia passed out completely and only came back to consciousness at the University Teaching Hospital to which he had been rushed. The next time that I saw him in person after that event, I asked him what exactly was the thing that caused his collapse. His response to my question was, so to speak, speculative and conjectural, not scientific and objective. This caused me to provide what I thought was a proper scientific and materialist explanation for that collapse. But in order to soften the rigour of this “scientific” explanation, I spoke in Pidgin English: “Odia”, I said, “na poverty make you collapse that day; no be lack of sleep, tiredness or small, small fever wey you been get the week before; na poverty, pure and simple!”

    I was greatly pleased that Odia understood and took well the intended joke behind my suggestion of poverty as the cause of his collapse that day in Ife in September 2004. But the truth is that I was also in earnest in my suggestion of poverty as the culprit, the nemesis. Permit me to start my lecture this morning from this observation. But before doing so, let me very briefly “appreciate” the man for and about whom we are gathered here in celebration today and tomorrow. Let me also note parenthetically here that in the idiom or parlance of Nigerian English as a derivative of the discourse of religiosity, to “appreciate” in Nigeria now means to glorify. I hope that it will be obvious in the course of my lecture that my “appreciation”, my glorification of Odia will be critical.

    Mr. Chairman, your excellencies Executive Governors, fellow scholars, writers and artists, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, all protocols duly observed, let me start by saying that it is a great honour and privilege to have been invited to give this Keynote Lecture. But where does one start with the task of “appreciating” Odia? It is one thing to be one of the most prolific writers of Nigeria and Africa of all time as Odia is, indisputably. He has produced more than forty books of poetry, polemics, nonfiction prose, choreopoems better known as “poems for dance drama” and cultural journalism. But it is something else entirely to also be one of the most revolutionary of the poets across several generations of poets in our continent. Moreover, consider the fact that for more than forty years from the 1970s when Odia started writing to the present time, his productivity has been  unceasingly sustained.

    And there is this also enormously crucial aspect of Odia’s intellect as a formidable polymath whose poetic and intellectual works are informed by and breadth of learning, both for its own sake and in dazzling application to many of the subjects, themes and concerns of his works. For instance, in works like A House of Many Mansions and In Search of Ogun: Soyinka In Spite of Nietzsche, we encounter a great parade of the thoughts of the world’s greatest scholars and writers of the past and the present, African, European, American and Asian, the likes of whom one hardly ever encounters in a single work by any author. And yet, they say Odia went to Oxford and did  not complete his studies towards the Ph D. Who needs a Ph D when he or she is already enormously self-educated to the highest possible standards of higher learning? These are all rare achievements but quoting Toyin Falola quoting Fela Kuti, let me say here that “I never finish”! Never finish what? “Appreciating” Odia!

    I invoke Fela here for one particular reason. Like Odia, he was immensely prolific; his productivity was sustained unstoppably through the three and half decades of the tumult of his life and music. But Fela’s productivity, his prolificness was deeply marked by his inventiveness in the genres, forms and idioms of music. He was trained in classical, “scored” traditions of music, but he went far and wide into musical and perfomative idioms of the heritage of African folk music to the sounds and smarts of the street. And this generic or formal inventiveness of Fela was expressed both across and within genres.

    So it is with Odia, as it is also, I might add, with Soyinka and Osofisan. In Odia’s specific case, it could be argued that beyond writing within and across several or diverse genres, he invented some new generic hybrids in Nigerian and African Anglophone poetry and prose. For instance, take the medium or idiom of prose or, more specifically, nonfiction prose. It has been accurately observed that Odia is, among other things, a veritable polemicist. What is often left out of this declaration is the fact that in many of Odia’s polemical, nonfiction essays, he freely mixes idioms of discourse that are ordinarily or normatively kept separate and apart: long, circuitous ruminations with impeccable scholarly references right next to tangential or side remarks that read like Fela’s famous “yapis” at the Shrine; searching analyses derived from close readings of complex and challenging texts combined with passages of loquacious asides that one might find in the “Amebo” idioms of the market and the oral social media.

    I never finish but for now, make I stop there, country people. The main point, I hope, has been vigorously argued: the work of Odia in the last four decades is a bountiful harvest that is worth celebrating, especially against the background of the fact that at age 70, he is still as active and productive as ever. This leads me to the point about poverty with which I began this talk.

    Now, it would seem that from the profile I have given here of Odia’s workaholic lifestyle and productivity, his collapse at Ife in September 2004 was probably or arguably due more to overwork and exhaustion than anything else. Or else it was due to nothing more than the vagaries of life itself as embodied and lived in the frailties and vulnerabilities of our bodies and their organs and tissues. So how does poverty come into the discussion? Well, the fact is that poverty is so much a constitutive aspect or expression of Odia’s life and identity that it is universally taken for granted and never really made an object of critical discussion about him and his works. Today, in my lecture, I wish to correct this evasion or silence regarding the place of poverty in Odia’s work and lifestyle. Put at the simplest level of a formal proposition, this is what I am claiming and asserting here: poverty did not choose Oda; Odia it was who chose poverty.

    Since the details of Odia’s early life are well known, some people might jump straight to the conclusion that I have in mind in making this observation or declaration the fact that Odia’s early life up to his young adulthood was indeed marked by poverty and hardship. For those who are unfamiliar with this aspect of our celebrant’s early life, please read the short bio of Odia written by the organizers of this conference in the circulated/distributed Program of proceedings. But this is not the poverty I have in mind here. Yes, abject, literal poverty may have chosen Odia in his younger years without waiting for an invitation, but once the celebrant, against all the odds, became a university graduate and a top-flight journalist and member of the national intelligentsia, he could have parted company with poverty forever. But he chose not to do so. Let me put this across in a slightly different formulation: Odia’s talent, his work as journalist, media administrator and doyen could quite easily have fetched him, if not enormous wealth, at least a comfortable existence in our country.

    After all, this is what nearly everybody does who ever gets the rare chance to join the cultural and literary elite in our country: make it rich and become fortified against poverty as quickly as possible; if you can’t become a billionaire, at least become a multi-millionaire in double or triple digits. Odia did effectively and brilliantly join the national literati more than forty years ago, and this at the very top rung of the ladder. But he did not part company with poverty; rather, he embraced it and lived it, as Jesus Christ of Nazareth and his disciples did and as Mahatma Gandhi of India did. Unlike these figures out of history and religion, Odia never formally took the vows of poverty, but he might as well have done so since poverty is such a remarkable aspect of his work, his life, his identity. Permit me to put some flesh on the bare bones, the skeleton of this profile.

    As far as one can tell from the profile of his biography sketched by the organizers of this conference, the last time that Odia had a regular, paid employment was 1999. That is some twenty-one years ago. One could say that since then, he has been self-employed, living on earnings made by the Hornbill House of Culture, the organization he set up to publish and distribute nearly all his works and produce dance dramas based on his poems. But everyone knows that Hornbill House has not made it rich; as a matter of fact, there is reasonable doubt that it was ever intended to make Odia rich. Meanwhile, rumuor has it that Odia neither has a car nor owns the house in which he lives. I know that once upon a time long ago, he did have a jalopy, but he now traverses Lagos and the country, either in public transportation or in rides with friends or acquaintances travelling to the same locations as himself. Most significant of all, it is well known that like some writers and artists of other places and eras of human cultural history, Odia has had what you might call “patrons”, these being lovers of writing, art and culture, who have provided some material support for his needs and his projects. But precisely because such support by “patrons” is normatively irregular and whimsical if not sometimes compromising, Odia has stolidly maintained his independence of all “patrons” and consequently, his art and his intellect have remained his own. This is the heart of the matter in this lecture: poverty as a form of wealth, a source of extraordinary emotional and ideological fortification in life, art and culture.

    Of course, I am talking here of poverty in a very special sense. I have already given a hint of this kind of poverty by invoking the examples of Christ and Gandhi. I now add as a supplement, the philosophical tradition which holds that the only way to be wealthy is to want and own as little as possible since the craving for wealth is often not only insatiable but also destructive of genuine human capacities for compassion, fellow-feeling, altruism and the pursuit of public good. Let me put this across as simply as possible. Odia could quite easily have gone into academia and become a celebrated scholar; he could have become a media executive of the highest caliber; and he could easily have used the breadth and reach of his contacts among the powerful and the wealthy of our country and other parts of the world to become rich. But he chose to live and work, literally and ideologically, among the poor and the disadvantaged. Among all members of the upper echelons of the contemporary Nigerian literati, he is almost alone in making that choice. This is significant in itself, but far more significant is the fact that it comes, in my opinion, from Odia’s lifelong, almost maniacal devotion to the word. This is the second, longer and more substantive part of this lecture. Time now for me to go to it directly.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

     

     

  • Celebration of life, of spirit: for Harry Oludare Garuba, 1958-2020, poet, scholar, theorist, romantic communard

    Celebration of life, of spirit: for Harry Oludare Garuba, 1958-2020, poet, scholar, theorist, romantic communard

    By Biodun Jeyifo

     

    When died in South Africa two weeks ago, Nigeria and Africa lost one of the most prominent literary scholars in our continent. Harry was Professor of English and Director of the Center for African Studies at the University of Cape Town (UCT),  South Africa’s premier tertiary institution and the most highly ranked among Africa’s universities. Perhaps second only to Kole Omotoso, Harry was the most distinguished among Nigerian academics and intellectuals in our South African émigré or diasporic community. I mention Kole here because he and a few of us who formed a collective of writers, critics and cultural activists had been Harry’s teachers at UI in the mid-to-late 1970’s. Harry was powerfully drawn to us, was indeed radicalized by our teaching and activism, but he was completely his own person. For instance, in my classes, he was often stoutly contrarian; indeed, he sometimes deliberately provoked long, disputatious conversations in the class just to show his independence of spirit and his refusal of automatic tutelage, earned or unearned. He drank a lot, chain-smoked, loved women, loved laughter and loved life.

    Harry Garuba was soft-spoken but he had a big, big heart. He joined others of his generation to form collectives of poets, artists, and cultural activists. He blended well with others within the collectives but had great belief in and accepted full responsibility for his own intuitions. Which is why, as strange as it may seem now, when Harry collected, edited and had published the groundbreaking anthology of the poets of his generation, Voices from the Fringe (1988), he did not include a single poem of his in the anthology, even though he was at the time the most prominent of the poets of that generational formation. This is why, to me, he was and always remained a romantic communard. Yes, the “commune” to which he belonged was a commune of the spirit, but at home and in the diaspora, in his youth and middle age, he remained the person around whom many points converged.

    There will be time to honour Harry’s life and work more memorably and lastingly. In this short tribute and celebration, I wish to share with others 8 poems from his first collection, Shadow and Dream and Other Poems (1982). In that collection, as can be seen in the following poems, Harry continued and extended the revolution in poetic diction and form that Niyi Osundare had launched against the more elaborate and “learned” versification gymnastics of poets of the older generation. But beyond this, Harry went back to more traditional and more “inviting” patterns of Anglophone poetic imagining and utterance. He was a poet of love, but love was for him also a passage to many other areas of life. This is why I cannot believe that I am succumbing to sentimentality when I argue that in some of the following poems, Harry is so evocative of many of our collective fears, tribulations, hopes and dreams that his voice as poet becomes prophetic, visionary, restitutive. For now, let that stand as an intimation of his legacy. And let the poem which bears the title of “Epitaph” serve as an epitaph for his transition to what Soyinka as called the “diaspora of no return”.

     

    Shadow and Dream

    a band of worshippers insolently intone

    incantations beneath the tattered shawl of leaves

    a little bird flaps its wings in the thin air

    drenched in the full colour of sunset

    a leaf stirs with the light wings of a meteor

    and drops silently into my childhood nest of laughter

    and I recall, through frayed amber edges of a blurred past

    the memory of the strange quiet of an evening

    an evening in the tale of elders

    I recall a dream of wings and the horizon

     

    To all compatriots

     

    Brother,

    I stretch out my hand

    to reach for you in the dark

    feeling for the warmth of  love and life

    and all I the is slippery touch of cobwebs

    We are all in the dark

    a dark cave from which despair threatens

    we will braid these cobwebs

    into tiny fingers of scars

    and long threads of scars

    a lacework of struggle and suffering

    and then our laughter

    will roar on to the rooftops!

     

    Communion

    The wine we shared that night

    Did not grow out of our heads

    But out of the earth we trod

    The wine we shared that night

    Did not ferment in our souls

    But out of the earth we trod

    Between the kernel and the wine

    In the ancient womb of earth

    Has grown our brimful dream

     

    Bubble

    Watching

    a little bubble

    inflate itself

    with the wind of a dream

    rising with the longing of hope

    to fly from the depth of despair

    to emerge from the quicksand of anguish

    to stand daintily on a little tendril of love to explode with the seminal fluid of sea-wine

     

    I hold in my wounded breast the perpetual pain

    and its memory

    and hug with blood-warmth

    the secret eternal pain and dream of a bubble

     

    Phoenix

    (1949: Iva Valley, Enugu. For the murdered miners) He is a speck against the skyline,

    a lone bird,

    dawning,

    draped in the blood of a rising sun,

    out of the spent ashes of yesterday,

    rending the transparent evil of veiled clouds

    with the beak of love.

     

    He is a lone bird,

    full-fledged with memories,

    dawning with the sun,

    against the counterpane of ashen sky.

     

    Prophecy

    We will be here when it ends

    Watching beyond clouds that

    Have lost the will to gather

     

    We will be here when it ends

    Staring vacantly at cornices

    Where evil eyes had been

     

    We will be here when it ends

    When the harvest comes

    On the fruit-fringes of rain

     

    We will be here when it ends

    Watching dancing silhouettes of skeletons

    Drifting on a huge wave that leads to the desert.

     

    Our Legacy

    In the midst of my pain

    I decked you in laughter-laurels

    I left a song at your doorstep

     

    Though the wounds of that battle

    We fought that children may share

    In the grains of laughter have healed

    The echoing scars of the past remain

     

    I will forever cherish

    These pearls of laughter

    And beads of song

    For those are our only legacy.

     

    Epitaph

    Here is one who let his soul expand

    With the wind of love

    One who let his soul explode

    With the fire of splitting pods

    That seeds may scatter and take flesh

    Within the fragile womb of dreams

     

    Here is one who lives

    At the beacon of time

    He yeasted his blood with earth sod

    That tears may cease

    And fruits flourish on every farm

    He lives in the bounty of harvest

    And the fulness of song

     

    His names are myriad:

     

    Kunle Adepeju

     

    Akintunde Ojo

     

    Soweto Stars, etc., etc.

    Cherished crystals for the light of memory

     

    • Biodun Jeyifo, bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
  • Waiting for the Coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) to come – and go

    Waiting for the Coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) to come – and go

    Biodun Jeyifo

     

    THERE is an intensely personal, perhaps even existential dimension to this piece on the outbreak and galloping spread of the Coronavirus pandemic, also known as COVID-19. This personal dimension is not the focus of this essay; however, it does provide a point of departure for my observations and meditations in this piece. Permit me to briefly narrate what it is.

    I am writing this article on Friday, February 28, 2020, although it will appear on Sunday, March 1. Yesterday, Thursday, February 27, 2020, I was in a hospital for a routine medical procedure in Boston. Three and a half weeks ago, I had had a surgical operation in the same hospital complex, a very successful operation, I should add. So my visit yesterday entailed a post-operative meeting with the team that had performed the operation. The post-op also went well, thankfully: I am recuperating well and getting stronger after the surgery. But then, there appeared to be a catch, not concerning me, but pertaining to the doctors and nurses that attended to me. What was this catch? Well, they were all afraid of what the spread of COVID-19 would do to their health and their ability to continue to render services to patients like me. Why so?

    Well, three months after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan, China, there is as yet no vaccine and no known curative regime of treatment anywhere in the world for this spreading disease. Indisputably, in time an effective vaccine will be developed. More importantly, a cure for the disease will also be found and will hopefully be available in all parts of the world, in the poor countries as well as in the rich countries. But all that will take time, costly, angst-ridden time. And everywhere in the world, the group of people that will be most vulnerable to the spread of the pandemic will be the “first responders”, these being medical personnel in hospitals that will have to treat those who contract and succumb to COVID-19.

    This was the talk, the fear expressed by some of the staff who attended to me and other patients at that Boston hospital yesterday. In the knowledge that no vaccine and no cure is as yet available anywhere in the world for this disease, they are waiting for the big-time arrival of the pandemic in the United States in a state of great anxiety. Hearing them talk yesterday and sensing their dread, I had an intuition that if and when COVID-19 arrives like a tidal wave in the US, people like me who require all kinds of pre- and post-operative medical services on a continuous basis will be greatly imperiled. This is because, until a vaccine and a curative treatment are developed for this disease, the only thing that anyone can do to prevent him or herself from contracting the disease is near total self-isolation: you must stay away from everybody, including those you will continue to need to see as you get better from a surgical procedure. This dilemma is the source of the title of this piece: waiting for the COVID-19 pandemic to come – and go.

    As I write these words, I meditate on the phenomenon of waiting in great anxiety or dread concerning something catastrophic that is lurking on the horizon of consciousness and the present, about to come with full, devastating force. I call this condition waiting in extremis: you do not know when it will come; you know only that it will surely come and that for quite a while after its arrival, there will be no effective protection available from its ravages. You stay away as much as possible from people who are not members of your household; you may even go into near total self-isolation. But even as you seek assurance and solace from these measures, you know that they too come with heavy, perhaps even devastating consequences. This is because these same measures that are calculated to insulate us from the depredations of COVID-19 are causing costly disruptions in services, travel, schooling, and trade and commerce within and between the countries and regions of the world. And indeed, haven’t we seen the collapse of financial markets around the world on the mere inkling that COVID-19 is coming? The futures markets in particular have been hit hard because not knowing when it will come and how big it will be, plans cannot be made to secure the future availability of raw materials, spare parts and tools for the world’s productive economic activities. Indeed, yesterday, Thursday, February 27, 2020, US financial markets suffered their worst fall in share prices in history, all on account of waiting, waiting for COVID-19 to come.

    As we wait all over the world, we cannot but notice that while only Antarctica among the continents of the world remains free of invasion by COVID-19, Africa is far less invaded by the pandemic than the other continents where the pandemic has surfaced. I confess, shamelessly, that I derive some solace from this present profile of the global distribution of the pandemic. May it continue to be so! For who can dispute the fact that when it comes to stigmatization for starting and spreading worldwide pandemics in the modern age, Africa and Asia have borne the worst of the stereotypes, the stigmas and scapegoating? I do not rejoice that, so far, COVID-19 is invading other continents more massively and aggressively than our own continent. All continents, nations and people live in the world and the world ought to be a place in which we can all live together in health and peace. But I do confess that because we have some of the most ineffective medical infrastructures and services on the planet, it is a matter of great relief that, for whatever reasons that we do not yet know, Africa is so far the continent of least interest to the COVID-19 pandemic journeys around the planet.

    It would not have escaped the notice of careful readers that in the title of this piece, I talk of COVID-19 coming and, ultimately, going. Well, since the pandemic has not (yet) fully arrived and since we do not know how big and devastating worldwide it will prove to be, how can we even talk about its going? The answer to this question is as simple as it is incontrovertible: global pandemics have a long, long history in our world. Indeed, if anything is certain about them, it is the fact that they come and then they go. I give you the word of a diligent researcher: prompted by my own personal and existential relationship to the spread of this current pandemic, I have gone to the historical records and confirmed this fact that global pandemics come and then they go, unfailingly. I have also discovered that they have tended to be more catastrophic in the past than in the modern age. For instance, perhaps the worst pandemic in the modern age in terms of mortality figures is the HIV-AIDS pandemic which has taken about 34 million people around the world. Compare that to the Black Death of 1347-1353 that killed between 75 to 200 million in Europe, Africa and Asia. Indeed, Ebola, whose virus proved to be one of the most deadly of viruses the world has ever known, took lives only in double, not triple-digit thousands, definitely not in millions.

    Needless to say, I am neither a virologist nor a historian of viruses and their links to global pandemics of the past and the present. Indeed, in the course of my own lifetime, only three or four pandemics have occurred, the worst in terms of the death toll being the Asian Flu of 1956-1958. Altogether, about 2 million people died in this particular pandemic, with an estimate of deaths in the US alone put at 69,800. I was in my last years of primary school when this pandemic happened and though we were made aware of its devastation around the world, I remember that it seemed to us to be happening far away in another world. Of course, this profile does not include epidemics of diseases like cholera, smallpox and influenza that happened at different times in my childhood and young adulthood and that often took hundreds or thousands of lives. In other words, between epidemics that were more nationally and regionally localized and pandemics whose impacts ranged across national borders to the whole world, everyone in my generation knew that these outbreaks came and went, came and went and you were lucky if you did not contract the prevailing epidemic or pandemic or, worse still die from it/them.

    Is it because I am in my eighth decade of life and also because I am recovering from a recent surgery that my attention and interest have been so raptly caught by the spread of COVID-19? Of course, this is indisputable. For it does strike me as I write these words that I had never been as attentive to any epidemic or pandemic as I am now to the Coronavirus pandemic. Yes, I had once thought of and written about the Malthusian account of how and why plagues happen: that when populations rise exponentially in economic, physical and sanitary conditions of great insufficiency and insecurity for most people, plagues emerge to decrease the population in order to bring back a levelling, a reckoning. Of course, I was and I am a resolute anti-Malthusian, but short of considering the Malthusian account as truth revealed, I do admit to a willingness to grant Malthusianism some pertinence in explaining why and how the world’s national, regional and global populations go through periodic decimation. At this particular moment in time, I think that China has a lot of anti-Malthusian wisdom to teach us, indeed to bequeath to us if it can keep low the mortality rate from COVID-19.

    In Samuel Beckett’s iconic play, Waiting for Godot, the characters wait and wait for Godot but he/it never comes. This is somewhat similar to what Donald Trump, the American president, hopes about COVID-19: that it will not come as the scientists, the experts are expecting. As a matter of fact, Trump seems to believe that the pandemic has come and is already on its way out! Trump is of course full of bullshit and cares not what the coming of the pandemic will do to people, but what it will do to the economy and his chances of reelection in November. He is willing to place his political fortune well before the health and lives of the American people and the world’s peoples. I despise Trump’s megalomania but this is one instance that I wish he is right! For if COVID-19 has already come and gone, I will not have to contend with a crisis of medical personnel falling to the pandemic as I recover fully from my recent surgery. In the months and years ahead, I shall keep in mind the remarkable resiliency of the human spirit that has confronted and outlasted the dozens of plagues that have come and then gone.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo, bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

     

     

  • Socialism, center-stage in the 2020 presidential campaign of America!

    By Biodun Jeyifo

    This you have to admit: socialism is (already) at the heart of the 2020 presidential campaign of the United States, not (yet) the presidential election of the year that will take place in November. For that to happen, Bernie Sanders, the leading contender among Democratic candidates, would have to defeat all the other candidates and win the party’s nomination. Sanders seems likely to get the nomination, but nothing can be taken for granted. If he ultimately does not get the nomination, socialism will vanish as a central issue in the November elections and what we are seeing and hearing now would seem to have been nothing but a mirage. All the same, it is nothing short of a seismic shift in the ideological and political struggles of the United States in the last half a century that socialism should now be center-stage in the contention for the highest office of America, the heartland, the epicenter of global, millennial capitalism. Wasn’t the death of socialism declared and celebrated more than four to five decades ago? And hasn’t that “death” been announced and re-celebrated again and again in America and around the world? What exactly is going on?

    To get a sense of how totally unexpected or unprecedented this development is in American presidential elections, think of the following other unprecedented facts or aspects of the ongoing campaigns for the US presidency that have received far less notice and discussion than the irruption of socialism into the campaigns. First, there is the candidacy of Pete Buttigieg, an openly gay man who is one of the leading contenders for the nomination of the Democrats. Not only is Buttigieg completely open about his sexuality, it is also the case that the man to whom he is married, his husband so to speak, Chasten Buttigieg (formerly Chasten Guzman), is always at his side in his campaigns, much in the manner in which the spouses of male and female heterosexual candidates are always by the side of their spouses campaigning for the presidency. There have been a few controversial remarks about Buttigieg’s candidacy, but nothing close to the interest and controversy generated by Bernie Sanders’ socialism.

    Secondly, there is the fact that Bernie Sanders himself and Mike Bloomberg, the former Mayor of New York City, both of whom are currently leading in national polls of Democratic presidential candidates, are Jewish. If either of them wins the Democratic nomination, this would be the first time that a person of Jewish descent has won nomination of any of the two  ruling class political parties of the US for president. And of course, if either of them wins the general election in November, the world will see the very first Jew in the White House, much in the manner in which the world saw the first Black man, Barrack Obama, in the White House after the presidential elections of 2008. Anti-Semitism in general and, in particular, the scapegoating of Jews around issues of power and money have historically worked against Jews seeking the highest office in America. But in this year’s campaign for the presidency, so far at least, the Jewishness of Sanders and Bloomberg has not surfaced as an issue of concern to the electorate of the Democratic primaries.

    We could add another factor that is unusual about the ongoing 2020 presidential campaigns or primaries of the Democrats: this year, there is more than one woman with a valid claim, a serious contention for the highest office in the land. When Hilary Clinton got the nomination in 2016, she was alone as the female with any realistic prospects. But that is not the case this year. True, there are only two women – Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar – left as serious contenders in the primaries, but please note that only three men are left as serious or realistic contenders. Indeed, before the winnowing down to the last five persons standing, the field was full of both men and women almost in equal numbers and measure. Gender parity in how and who Americans elect as their president is yet to be achieved, but it seems to be coming, coming. This leads us to the central focus of this piece: socialism, long pronounced dead, resurrects as a central issue in the 2020 American presidential election, throwing into the hidden background such factors as homosexual identity, Jewish heritage and female agency as historically contested pegs for campaigns for the presidency of the United States. What is going on?

    To get a useful purchase on how best to approach this question, we could ask not only why Bernie Sanders is absolutely insistent on identifying himself as a socialist, but why he is also placing capitalism in the dock, so to speak. He could quite easily and more cunningly have called himself a social democrat because, as a matter of fact, that is what you see if you look carefully at his program and his ideas as to what he will do if he is elected president. In sum, he will make the wealthy pay more taxes than they do now and he will drastically cut down subsidies to corporations by the government. But he is not going to abolish private property ownership.

    Yes, Sanders will introduce socialized medicine to America, but he will not expropriate the giant companies of the pharmaceutical industry and neither will the banks, the financial services businesses and the transnational corporations become state-owned. Indeed, there is nothing in Sanders’ program that talks of state ownership and control of the means of production – which is what socialism, in its most basic expression, implies. Yes, Sanders is talking of greater regulation of capitalism in America and he places the greatest possible emphasis on redistribution of wealth in favor of the poor. But again, that is social democracy, not socialism as such. So, why does Sanders absolutely insist on the label, socialism? Why doesn’t he call it social democracy – which, in reality, is what it is?

    One answer to this question is quite simple and it also happens to be quite persuasive: Sanders has been talking about democratic socialism for such a long, long time that it has become a sort of mantra for him. This is a strength and a weakness. It is a strength because it shows a consistency, a reliability that most politicians sorely lack. It also shows that he has remained unshakably true to the idealism of his youth: he entered politics as a young man who fervently believed in redistributive justice through socialism and he remains dedicated to that ideal in his old age.

    But it is also a weakness of sorts for Sanders to be inflexible in how he talks about and promotes his program. When Sanders talks these days of his socialism, he talks as if both the political party whose nomination he is seeking and the people whose president he wants to become are used to the historical and political conditions that produced the emergence and successes of socialism as an alternative to capitalism. But that is not the case at all. Political parties led by working class militants and anti-capitalist revolutionaries have periodically surfaced in the United States. But they have never had any great or even notable electoral successes – as they have in Europe and other parts of the world. Definitely, the Democratic Party whose nomination Sanders is seeking, is an amalgam of virtually all ideological tendencies without a center that is reliably left-leaning and pro-working class. As a matter of fact, Sanders is not a registered member of the party! Thus, when Sanders talks of “socialism”, we can be sure that what he has in mind about the term, the label, is very different from what his youthful followers have in mind. For indeed, many of them were not even born in the decades when socialism was in its heyday and capitalism everywhere trembled when socialists sounded its death knell.

    I think Sanders is insistent on his socialism because he wants to make capitalism the issue in the coming 2020 US presidential election. Indeed, last week, this intention clearly emerged in the debate between the Democratic candidates in Nevada. This happened when the question was put bluntly to Sanders and Warren by one of the comperes of the debate whether or not they are capitalists. While Warren quickly and nervously replied that she is a “capitalist” who only wishes to make capitalism better for working families, Sanders replied that he is a socialist, adding that his “democratic socialism” is opposed to the “corporate socialism” of big business that depends on hefty subsidies from government or the state. More specifically, Sanders stated that “corporate socialism” is not only economically unjust and ethically unjustifiable, it also stands in the way of the efforts of “democratic socialism” to ensure livable incomes and dignified lives for the great majority of Americans. Thus, if Sanders wins the Democratic nomination, we should expect an epic battle over what socialism and capitalism meant historically and what they might mean in the future. How and why so?

    Well, let us now look closely at the candidacy of Mike Bloomberg who, so far in this discussion, we have only briefly mentioned. He is reputed to be one of the 10 wealthiest persons in the world. He runs one of the most successful financial data firms on the planet. The news service which bears his name is a giant of world news digest and circulation. He is thus not only capitalism personified but capitalism lionized, especially in contrast with Donald Trump. Dollar for dollar, Bloomberg will outspend Trump who is thought not only to be a fake billionaire but a crooked and bankrupt one. Thus, if Bloomberg ultimately emerges as the Democratic nominee and wins against Trump, he would go down as a savior of American or indeed global capitalism at its greatest moment of electoral trial, this in the heartland of capitalism itself.

    Meanwhile, Sanders confronts Bloomberg on the stumps of the campaigns of the Democratic primaries. Bloomberg is outspending Sanders by a factor beyond single digits. Indeed, Sanders is the only candidate in the primaries who has turned down contributions from billionaires and corporations; almost entirely, his campaign is being funded by small donations from millions of working people and ordinary Americans who believe passionately in Sanders’ vision of an America in which “democratic socialism” will prevail over “corporate socialism”. We can be sure of this: every effort will be made by Trump and the Republicans to equate Sanders’ “democratic socialism” to communism, to un-American authoritarianism. Indeed, even before Sanders’ capture of the Democratic Party nomination, the knives have been unsheathed and are being readied for the kill. In the gutter press of Republican fake news and disinformation, Sanders is being compared to Latin American dictators of the Left and the Right, Sanders, a man who is not even a registered member of the Party that might bring him to power, a man whose path to the presidency lies not through a Central Committee but the hopes and dreams of tens of millions of working people and poor families.

    It is of great historical and theoretical interest that Sanders has now tactically fractured socialism into two opposing formations: “democratic socialism” and “corporate socialism”. Marxist purists and ideological border guards will balk at this formulation, even though Sanders has not formalized these notions into a formal thesis. But it may attract notice, especially if Sanders eventually becomes the 46th President of the United States. However, we must not run too far ahead of ourselves. If Sanders wins the Democratic nomination and prevails over Trump in the general elections in November, it will be enough that he would thereby have placed prospects for socialism at the center of the politics of economic justice and human equality in the heartland of capitalism in our world.

    Sam Omatseye, please take note!

     

    Biodun Jeyifo, bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • “Out of the mouth of babes”: homage to the Sunrise Movement and its world counterparts

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength – Psalms, 8:2

     

    The quote with which I begin this piece is a well-known passage from the Christians’ bible. Usually it means something along the following line:  because they are naturally honest and innocent, wisdom and truth come from children more readily than from their parents or from adults in general. But note that the particular quotation at the head of this piece talks, not of “wisdom” or “truth”, but of strength. Strength from children, especially when weakness, confusion and defeat are what you get from adults? Yes, a strength, a passion, a will that seems to come from the natural “estate” of childhood or youthfulness. When you think of contemporary youth revolts and movements that are making a huge difference where most other traditional or modern organizations and institutions like trade unions, ethnic societies, faith communities and political parties seem weak, fragmented and lost, that is what you have: “out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength”.

    I am thinking here of diverse individuals, revolts and movements across the world in which young people, sometimes in their millions, have made a huge difference. I am thinking of the “Arab Spring” of the last decade; of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, the environmental activists of the “Sunrise Movement” and the dedicated anti-fascists of “Antifa” in the United States. I am also thinking of the “Dignity Revolution” of Ukraine; of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani woman who, at 22 years, is the youngest ever among Nobel laureates and the foremost voice for the education of children, especially girl children, in the world. And I am thinking of Greta Thunberg, Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for 2019, who is unequalled as the world’s most influential spokesperson for timely and restorative policy and action against current and looming disasters of climate change and global warming. Strength, passion and unbending will in children and young people where most of the institutions run by and for adults have failed, in some cases almost utterly, as in climate change.

    I think about this astonishing development in the contemporary world and wonder where it comes from, both in life itself and in the world of the imagination and the psyche in literature, the arts and the humanities. In all instances, there is a thirst, a hunger for life lived fully and in dignity, as if nature itself is based on this principle and is renewed and enriched further by it. More pertinently, I think of this issue as a case of losing and finding and losing again, the regenerative springs of life. And it is nearly always led by the young. Somewhat confounded by this fact, I think of the phenomenon as I have encountered it in signal moments in my lifetime and in the works of some writers and dramatists that I admire immensely. Thus, I start with the harrowing experience of the death of my brother, Keye, to whom this piece is dedicated. Permit me to narrate the experience as it is forever indelibly stamped in my consciousness.

    It was 1964, a few weeks after I wrote my “School Cert” exams. Secondary schooling was over for me but I was yet to either go for higher school education or look for and find a job. Long idle hours every day, with little or nothing to do or occupy my mind – except reading. So, for the most part, I went with some friends to the Alalubosa Lake to swim. I was coming back from one of such escapades when, on the fateful day of Keye’s death and a few yards from home, I heard the terrible wailing of my mother saying repeatedly, “ina jo mi leni o, ina jo mi leni o” (“I am consumed by fire today!”). Hearing this, my legs nearly gave way under me and at any rate, I couldn’t move and one of my friends ran past me into the house to find out what had happened, all of us knowing that it had to do with the death of one of my six siblings, the questions being which one and how it had happened.

    My friend soon came back to confirm that it was indeed the death of Keye, a boy who had not been ill, who I last saw only about a couple of hours earlier. In addition to the death itself, it was the way and manner in which he died that hit me like an emotional cyclone: absolutely without any palpable cause, he had suddenly begun to experience violent stomach pains with unstoppable vomiting, all the time shouting, pleading, “e ma je kiin ku, ema je kiin ku” (“don’t let me die, please don’t let me die!”). But he died within an hour, long before he got to the hospital to which he was rushed. At a rational level, we all thought that it was a case of accidental food poisoning. Certainly, we hoped that it was not the case that someone, an “enemy”, had administered the poison, unbeknownst to the unfortunate boy. But the takeaway for nearly everyone was the voice with which he repeated those last words, “don’t let me die, please don’t let me die”. Some said that the voice was so strange, so spectral that it seemed not to coming from Keye himself but some obscure part of nature itself. For a long time afterward, people in the neighborhood still talked of that voice with which Keye had tried but failed to avert his fate. Everyone said they had never heard anything like it.

    I admit it: at that stage of my life, I was as impressionable and given to fanciful flights of imagination – like any other teenager of my age. For a long time, I was deeply haunted by the account of the tenor and inflection of Keye’s voice as he desperately shouted, pleaded his last words. This led me to wild imaginings, like the thought that if I had not gone to Alalubosa, I could have saved him, despite the fact that no one else did or could have. In my adult reflections on the experience, I of course realize that this was my own way of grieving for my brother’s loss, this feeling that if only I had not gone to the lake that day, I could have kept death away from him.

    From that period of my life, fast forward to the years and decades after my undergraduate and graduate education when, in works of literature and drama, I encountered subplots and motifs that brought back to my mind and imagination those fanciful thoughts about Keye’s last words. For instance, in Amos Tutuola’s Palm Wine Drinkard, there is the episode in the Dead’s Town in which the hero-protagonist is violently attacked by a pack of children who had died young and never made it past childhood. Some of the most unpleasant experiences of the hero-protagonist of the novel take place in that Dead’s Town. And of these, the attack on the hero by the dead children resentful of their being deprived of their lives early is the most savage. And as they enact their resentment against the hero, they shout that only a retroactive restoration to life lived in full would assuage their resentment. Do forgive my unconscionable fancifulness in declaring that imaginatively, I place my brother, Keye, in the group: at the point where he was about to lose his life, he found a voice which for decades has rung in the ears of his siblings and neighbors as a haunting affirmation of life.

    Readers familiar with Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests will perhaps hear echoes of the plight of the Half Child in this episode from The Palm Wine Drinkard. Except that in the case of the Half Child, he was never even born; in a time of war, he had been torn as a fetus out of his mother’s womb during a mass slaughter that spared nobody, even the unborn. Indeed, a large part of Soyinka’s plot and theme in the play revolves around the question, the possibility of whether or not the Half Child will at last finally be born and be allowed to live his life to the fullest possible. Very astutely, Soyinka links the fate of the Half Child to the fate of the new nation that became independent when the play was first staged in 1960. It was a bracing metaphor in 1960 for WS to have suggested that, like the Half Child, our new nation came into being like a stillbirth seeking the fullness of generative growth. Some would argue that a half century later, we are yet to give that bloodied fetus a proper and sustaining birthing.

    Have I satisfactorily explained the mystery of why so many of contemporary movements of and for change and renewal in our world have been led and are being led by the young? Certainly, I do not wish to suggest that “youth” has replaced or displaced class, nation, gender or race as a fundamental basis of progressive change and revolutionary possibility in our world. And neither do I wish to suggest that both as an analytical and practical guide to action, youth operates like class. Obviously, when you talk of youth, you are talking of a slippery term, an ambiguous category. The criminal, lumpen elements of most capitalist societies of the modern world are overwhelmingly drawn from the young. Indeed, as we saw in the example from Tutuola’s Palm Wine Drinkard, revenge and resentment fuel some of the collective engagements of the young. But we know that positive, sustaining change can come from resentment and revenge only if something else intervenes, this being insightful and humane leadership in the service of social justice and peace.

    For me, class remains primary, of course always on the condition that it, too, never stands alone. As Chinua Achebe always reminded us, where one thing stands, another thing will stand beside it. Indeed, one of the most remarkable things about the youth movements and individuals that I highlight in this piece is the fact that almost without exception, they all stand with and for the “right” classes in nearly every instance. The “right” class and not the “wrong” class? Yes, but this is an account for another day, another column.

     

    With the passing of Arthur Nwankwo  comes a great generational divide:

     

    THE country and the world was plunged into great sadness last week with the passing of Arthur Nwankwo. Although we shared many friends and colleagues and belonged to similar formations of Nigerian progressives and public intellectuals, I never met him in person.

    But it was as if I met him for everywhere I went, I seemed to accost him in body and mind, finding that either he had been there or was about to arrive there.

    In the period of military autocracy, he was a stout but canny resister. He cultivated the friendship of enlightened soldier-intellectuals like the late Mamman Vatsa and kept murderous buffoons like Sani Abacha at a distance. As one of the principal chieftains of NADECO, he was principled but tactically stayed in touch with persons and elements of center-right ruling parties.

    His numerous books attest to the power of his intellect. With the Fourth Dimension Books which he started in 1977, he created one of the most vibrant and progressive publishing houses in the country.

    Nearly everyone wanted to write for the outfit. I certainly wanted to and it is still a wonder to me today why I never did.

    Of  recent, Arthur Nwankwo seemed to have withdrawn from active participation in the political and intellectual affairs of the country.

    One hopes that this did not arise from disillusionment. The image that I wish to keep of his life and work is his dynamism, his largeness of spirit. His transition marks the passing of a unique generational form of consciousness in Nigeria and Africa. May his capacious soul rest in peace.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu      

     

  • A Trumpian anti-globalist age with deep globalist foundations – cautionary tales

    By Biodun Jeyifo

    President Trump, please get us out of here, get us home”. This distress plea came from an American trapped in an ocean cruise ship in the sea of Japan. Together with hundreds of other Americans, the woman and her husband had been confined for the coming two weeks to her cabin in the ocean liner because it had been discovered that a few of the other souls on the ship had contacted the Coronavirus disease. Wisely or otherwise, the captain of the ship, following orders from medical and local authorities on land, had issued the order confining all passengers aboard to their cabins. The last place anyone would pray to find themselves in an outbreak of a looming pandemic plague like the Coronavirus disease is a ship because, if cases of the disease increase on the ship, the ocean liner becomes like a death prison from which one cannot escape. That is the source of the absolute terror in the voice and the demeanor of the woman who radioed her desperate plea to Trump.

    There is a profound irony in the harrowing tale of this woman and her co-passengers looking for Trump to save them. Like all modern or, more precisely, recent global pandemic diseases, the Coronavirus disease is both a symptom and a manifestation of globalization, the very globalization against which Donald Trump is the contemporary world’s most implacable opponent. Trump has taken America out of almost all the major international treaties intended to secure cooperation and solidarity among the nations and regions of the planet. He has boasted again and again that while nearly all the other parts of the world are facing dire economic prospects, American prospects under his watch are excellent.

    The list of countries and regions that Trump wants to ban from sending immigrants to the United States keeps growing. And Trump is the greatest among all the climate change deniers among the rulers of the world. Against science and incontrovertible evidence, he has stoutly maintained that climate changer patterns that we are seeing all over the world are not happening and require no joint action by all of us denizens of the planet. Thus while the Coronavirus plague is a grim reminder that, for good and ill, we are all together on our planet, desperate souls in the ship in our tale are turning to Trump, the ultimate anti-globalist, to save them. There is an ironic, cautionary tale worth exploring in this encounter. Permit me to elaborate carefully what this tale is.

    One of the most telling signs of globalization and its relentlessness in our world is how quick and pervasive the movement of people, goods, services and contacts have become in our world. This is within and between countries. For instance, when I was growing up, letters and telegrams that we sent to other countries took ages to get to their destination. There were only two major airports in Nigeria, one in Lagos and the other in Kano; now, there is an airport in every one of our thirty-six state capitals. A travel out of the country in those days to Europe or America was like a journey to the moon, with all of one’s relatives and friends at the airport to see one off to what was thought to be another world, another planet. Flights out of the country were about three or four, at the most. Today, there are many flights a day and people make journeys to every part of the world as if every part of the planet is just a stone’s throw away from home. Perhaps the most astonishing is the state of nearness that social media has created between and within all the communities of the world. In my youth, you didn’t get to read newspapers from abroad until three or four days after their date of publication; now you see and read them online within minutes of their being published. Thus, globalization is arguably the driving engine of the modern world and the trends clearly indicate an intensification, not a diminishment, of this motive force.

    More pertinent to our cautionary tale in this piece is the fact that of all the nations of the earth, America, Trump’s America, has benefited the most from the forces of globalization. The roots of American hegemony in globalization go back to the moment when the American dollar replaced gold as the ultimate standard of exchange between and among all the currencies of the world. This was tremendously augmented by the fact that America achieved considerable power of control over the two foremost multilateral financial institutions in the world, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Before Japanese brands in cars and Chinese supremacy in the exchange of cheap consumer goods arrived on the global scene, American corporations and products had saturated world trade – Xerox, IBM, IT&T, American Steel, blue jeans, movies and movie stars, chewing or bubble gum. Indeed, when America became the biggest donor nation in the world, its donations, its charitableness, was strictly tied to the American dollar and American goods and services. In effect, this means that if you are given two billion dollars in aid, you must spend all or most of it buying American goods and services. This point is absolutely incontrovertible: globalization has been enormously good to America. Yes, the country has an internal market big and rich enough to be almost self-reliant, but historically, America has depended a lot on drawing continuously from the peoples and economies of the whole world to augment its might and influence.

    And the pleasures and gratifications of its people. This leads us back to our opening story of the woman in the ocean liner and her distress plea to Trump. Travelling as a leisure activity was not invented by Americans but it became a global, multibillion-dollar business under American involvement in the global trade in the hospitality industry. The turning point was the emergence of the credit card system of buy now and pay later. Transferred into the operations of the global hospitality industry, this means travel now, see the world and take your time in paying for your travel and your gratifications while travelling. Ecotourism, medical tourism, sex tourism – whichever tourism you want, go for it, don’t worry about the cost since you can take your time in paying for it. This could only have come into being under the American introduction into world economy of the credit card system. Since this system has been globalized, everyone around the world is travelling now and paying for it later. Like Americans.

    Actually, the last statement is not exactly accurate. Not all Americans travel around the world as ecotourists, sex tourists or plain pleasure-seeking, footloose adventurers. Most Americans travel only in their country; after all, it is a vast subcontinent of a country. More importantly, as generalized as the credit card system has become, tens of millions of Americans remain unintegrated into the system. For such Americans, they cannot buy now and pay later; they must necessarily pay now for what they buy, what the consume now. These are the Americans who globalization has left behind and who, because globalization has left them behind, are passionately anti-globalist. These are the Americans on behalf of who Trump has launched his ferocious anti-globalist, nationalist crusade. The irony is that just as Americans who feel left out of the benefits of globalization seem unaware of the immense contribution of globalization to American prosperity at home and abroad, so does Trump himself seem forgetful that as a businessman, he built his business empire on the opportunities made available by globalization. His hotels and his golf courses came from reliance on foreign partners; even his hotel staff, kitchen and cleaning hands came from his heavy reliance on grossly underpaid foreign or “guest” workers.

    History, including contemporary history, is not an abstraction. It is first and foremost the lived reality and experience of people, living and suffering human beings. The woman and her husband who sent that desperate plea to Trump in the face of the threat of the Coronavirus pandemic disease could hardly have had globalization on their minds. Every country must look out for and cover the back of its citizens, that’s all she was probably thinking about. At best, we can justifiably hope that it may have occurred to her that she was appealing for help from a president who has steadfastly turned down appeals for help from climate refugees seeking refuge in America. Trump cannot be absolved of guilt, terrible guilt and hypocrisy, for making the most out of globalization while basing his political career on the most pitiless and vengeful turn away from globalization in the era after the Second World War.

    American exceptionalism – the belief that America is so self-reliant, so replete in its achievements and endowments that it can and should stay away from the affairs of the world whether in war or in peace – did not start with Donald Trump. At several moments in world affairs in the last century and half, Americans have had bitter and divisive debates on whether they should or should not get involved in the affairs of the world. In the moments when they chose to get involved, they did so only or primarily because they realized that American national self-interest was at stake and that if they failed to get involved, they stood to lose much of things they cherished in their country – like democracy, freedom, peace.

    To which we must now add health. Like all the global pandemics before it, the looming Coronavirus plague shows how deeply and inextricably connected we are, thanks to the forces of globalization. Yes, like global warming and environmental change, this is globalization in its darker, more menacing aspects. Viruses and plagues do not need visas to cross borders and range freely over the entirety of the world. What they need is ease and regularity of travel between and within the nations of the world. Who thinks for a moment that we can stop travel and contacts between the peoples, nations and regions of the world? Don’t we all know that the panic measures now being put in place to enforce restrictions and constraints on travel and commerce in response to the existential threat of the Coronavirus plague can only be temporary, not permanent?

    Which and how many of us will die with this pandemic disease? A terribly grim question. The answer is, we do not know. Like the woman who sent her desperate plea to Trump, we are all hoping that it will not be our fate to go with this plague. I add that may it not be our collective fate to rely on an evil powerful ruler like Donald Trump who will be at the helm affairs in our world as the decisions are made, the decisions about globalization and its discontents, together with its growing ranks of malcontents.

    Why did you engender me? – An apocalyptic epilogue

    As a sort of prologue to globalization and its specters in this piece, the following dialogue has been culled – not quoted verbatim – from Samuel Becket’s play, Endgame. I suggest that it should be read as a symptomatic confrontation between a generation that has utterly failed the world and the generation to whom the task of saving the world now devolves:

    Son: Scoundrel, why did you engender me?

    Father: I did not know.

    Son: Did not know what?

    Father: That it would be you

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu