Biodun Jeyifo

 

I WENT on my first and only vacation from writing this column for only seven weeks. But it felt as if I was away for a lifetime. So much happened at home and abroad, unfortunately most of it dire and terrifying. When a new year also happens to be the start of a new decade, the portents for the future take on an additional weightiness. This becomes even more onerous if the new year and the new decade also have about them intimations that the crises that we face as national communities and a global civilization will probably get even worse. In this first piece after my vacation, I comment briefly on four randomly chosen issues in Nigeria and the world in an effort to give readers a sense of what I would have written about them if I wasn’t on vacation when they peaked as issues of the moment.

Project ‘Amotekun’ in the Predators’ Paradise

As everyone seems to have agreed, the nationwide furore on this issue arose over whether or not legitimate calls for communities across the entire country to participate in securing travel and movement, properties and possessions and life itself also had about them unveiled indications of secessionist or irredentist aspirations. In other words, if the Southwest was/is saying out loudly what many other zones or regions of the country are feeling and saying, is this particular zone of the Southwest also saying what other zones are not saying? If I wanted to make a frivolous joke about this question, I would have said that since this Southwest regional security project was codenamed “Amotekun” (Leopard) but not “Ekun” (Tiger), there are no irredentist intentions hidden in the project. This is because “Ekun” is infinitely more ferocious, more fearsome than its cousin, “Amotekun”! But this is not a time for frivolous jokes, no matter how innocuous they may be.

More importantly, it must be admitted that there are irredentists and ideological ethno-nationalists among important and very vocal proponents of “Project Amotekun”. In the main, they do not want or call for secession; what they want and passionately call for is something that amounts, more or less, to a very loose confederation to replace or displace the current over-centralized federation. Ideologically, they run the whole gamut from conservative irredentists to bourgeois-liberals and/or radical-progressive humanists. And let this be said: if there are indeed irredentists and ethno-nationalists in many of the geopolitical zones of the country, the Southwest zone has in contemporary Nigeria produced the most insistent and eloquent expressions of the trend.

These ideological and communitarian currents apart, it must be simply and clearly stated that in our country at the present time, travel across the country and travel to distant places have become greatly unsafe. Perhaps even more onerously, travel within one’s region and locality of residence has also become dogged by feelings of unsafety and dread. These developments did not start with the reign of Buhari and the APC but they have become immeasurably escalated under the presidency of PMB. I give a personal experience of this. About six weeks ago, I had urgent cause to travel from Ibadan to Osogbo to meet Comrade Hassan Sunmonu, the former illustrious President of the NLC. But I couldn’t go on that journey because at the time, that stretch of highway between Oyo and Osun states was generally thought to be particularly fraught with the activities of marauding bandits, kidnappers and extortionist criminals. Out-of-state bandits and opportunist in-state bandits pretending to be out-of-state operators. And there is also this: I often go to Ife; but these days not as regularly as I used to do and when I do, not with the peace of mind that I have felt for more than four decades when travelling on that stretch of road.

We must identify, keep apart but not ignore the interfusion between currents of ideology and existential dread lodged at the heart of “Project Amotekun”. At the bottom of everything is the fact that the project has its foundations in the violently predatory republic of the APC-PDP hegemony and the other ruling class political parties. A republic that is a paradise for predators but a hell on earth for the masses of the citizenry. Listen to what Buhari recently said of the reign of bandits and marauding criminals across the whole country: “there is an evil plot against Nigeria!” I agree, I concur. But I repeat that this “evil plot” has its roots in the violence of our predatory republic.

Donald Trump’s post-impeachment trial

Everyone, I assume, is familiar with the phrase, “God’s own country”, as an appellation for the United States. Well, I have never used that appellation, whether as an ironic putdown or an expression of admiration of the country. But thinking now of the phrase, I say that if God wanted to “save” this country that is alleged to be his own, he would make Republicans join Democrats in removing the endlessly corrupt and dysfunctional 45th president from office. But that will not happen. Trump will be acquitted. Indeed, I am writing these words close to the end of the trial and it is now as clear as daylight that by the time that this piece is being read, Trump’s acquittal would probably have been confirmed or, at least the “trial” aspect would have been concluded and only the formal declaration of the acquittal would remain to be made.

To go by the phrase, “God’s own country”, Trump’s acquittal would mean that God has rewarded the president’s rank and violently misanthropic, xenophobic, racist, misogynistic and megalomaniacal iniquities. And if God rewards such iniquities, can it not be that, for some strange reason, He wants to destroy the person or entity so “rewarded”?

Trump is endlessly boastful, endlessly insulting and discourteous to friends and foes alike. In every act of political, diplomatic, economic, bilateral and multilateral engagements with foreign and international principals, he puts his and his family’s interests first. Hatred, fear and animosity between communities have increased in America since he came to power, very much like our own Muhammadu Buhari in Nigeria – except, of course, that Trump is a thousand times more vile than PMB. Above all else is the fact that Trump is besotted with power, so much so that he will use almost anything and everything to stay in power – war, jingoistic patriotism, racial bigotry, completely shameless lying, environmental degradation and the “innocent” ignorance of most Americans about the terrible things that are done in their name around the world by their presidents, most of all Donald Trump. If Trump is thus Iniquity personified, Iniquity with a capital “I”, why would God save him from post-impeachment removal from office if it is not to teach America and the world some terrible lessons about the wages of sin and iniquity?

In the final analysis, we must move far beyond theology and eschatology in coming to terms with Trump and Trumpism in America and in our world. The trial and acquittal of Trump is understandable and explicable in very rational, non-mystical and indeed, logical terms. His rise to power, together with his trial and looming acquittal, mark a historic moment of perhaps terminal crises of the global hegemony of Western capitalist imperialism. Liberal and welfarist capitalism succeeded for a very long time in securing a humanitarian and benign face for the underlying inequities and savageries of capitalism. But not anymore. More precisely, Trump arrives on the scene and is completely open and bullish on greed, exploitation, dog-eat-dog predatoriness, all couched in the discourse of making America great again – even at the very moment when most Americans and most of the denizens of planet earth are, in popular lingo, catching hell.

Well then, say Trump is acquitted. The hope is that he will not, must not, be reelected. If he is? America and the world will catch hell for four more years by which time Trumpism would have sunk its roots far deeper into the soil of America and the soil of our common earth.

The Fire Next Time

Many readers will recognize that this section title in this piece refers to James Baldwin’s classic work of non-fiction of the same title. In that brilliant, searing work, Baldwin had made allusions to the biblical tale of Jonah and the flood. In that parable, God had declared that the next time around when time came to deal with the self-destructive iniquities of humankind and our depredations against nature and God, fire, not the watery deluge of floods, will be the instrument of apocalyptic reckoning. Indeed this is made very explicit at the end of Baldwin’s book when he argues that America’s racist and anti-human savagery should learn from the parable of Noah and the flood: the fire next time!

We are now confronted with vistas of the recent and still continuing raging Australian bush fires and the forest fires of California, both destroying vast swathes of natural ecosystems, flora and fauna, and millions of hectares of human habitation and agricultural cultivation. Is the terrible prophecy narrated in Noah’s tale here at last or are we seeing only its foreshadowing? Since there is now virtual agreement that the underlying causes are global warming and climate change due mostly to human deeds and misdeeds, does this mark the fulfillment of the prediction at the end of the biblical tale of Noah as echoed by Baldwin? The fire this time?

You could say so, except that the likes of antediluvian floods narrated in Noah’s tale are still very much around, wreaking terrible havoc around the world. Indeed, we now know that global warming will cause both torrential floods and forest and bush fires of epic, “biblical” proportions. We know that all it will take for all this to become somewhat like a universal holocaust of destruction by water and fire is for the earth’s temperature to rise uniformly by a few degrees above the current already frightening levels.

We are not in an eschatological end-of-time apocalypse. Global warming and climate change are man-made and they can and will be man-rectified – if we are wise, humble and above all just and egalitarian in how we use and distribute the resources of our common earth.

God made the world in six days, only six days!

I end with a summary of an elaborate existential joke dramatized in Samuel Becket’s play, Endgame. An Englishman gives his tailor a piece of cloth from which he wanted a magnificent bespoke overcoat to be made. The tailor asks him to come for the coat in two weeks. At the end of that period, the Englishman shows up and he is handed the finished coat. He puts it on and discovers that the shoulder pads are uneven and ungainly. The tailor says that this is a simple problem and will be fixed within three days. The customer returns in three days only to find that another error of fashioning has been perpetrated by the tailor – the left arm piece is longer than the right arm piece. Not a problem at all, says the tailor, I’ll fix it by tomorrow afternoon. But when the Englishman shows up the next day for a new coat without a blemish, yet another blunder has happened – the midsection of the suit is too tight. At this point, the customer had had enough. He shouts, “This is an outrage, it is unacceptable! In six days, only six days, God made the whole world and you, my man, are taking more than three weeks to make a simple bespoke coat?” To this the tailor replied, “with all due respect Sir, I refuse to be compared with God and his work. I mean, have you taken a recent look at this world that was made by God in only six days?”

 

Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

 

[For Eddie, in commemoration of our roots in APMON]

 

In December 1974, two weeks after my return to the country after graduate studies abroad, Eddie Madunagu and I met and with others revitalized the Anti-Poverty Movement of Nigeria (APMON). This cycle of counter-beatitude poems marks the 45th anniversary of that meeting.

 

The beatitudes of Christ and the damnations of Fanon

 

Christ’s beatitudes announced tidings of blessedness and exaltation

Fanon wrote tirelessly about conditions of wretchedness and damnation

Each had the agency of the talakawa in his prophecy deliverance

Holy pacifism meeting irreverent rebelliousness in a stunning alliance

Beware, compatriots, lest you choose one and exclude the other

If death be the wages of sin, pray what are the wages of poverty?

Misery, hunger, joblessness, despair and violence, said Fanon

Jesus averred a bequest as vast as the kingdom of God, no less

And neither wasted his time or his solidarity on the wealthy

Beware, compatriots, lest you miss the compassion common to both

You must take the vows of poverty, the one who came from Judea insisted

The prophet from Martinique took up abode with the mad and the disconsolate

From the bottom up, from the valleys, they brought the heights into compass

The kingdom of this world merging with the kingdom of God

Beware, brothers and sisters, lest you keep the two worlds apart

Forget the thieving, cheating and self-righteous rich, both prophets said

Neither history, nor nature nor providence will be kind to their memory

Their kind will lay the earth and its resources to waste and despoliation for a long while

War, famine, droughts, pestilence and the death of the spirit will follow in their wake

Beware, comrades, lest you cast your lot with them

 

Fool me once, fool me twice

Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me

So says the adage, forgetful that the fooling goes on endlessly

No beatitudes here, said Christ, maledictions in his words, the whip in his hands

Far easier for the camel to pass through the eye of a needle, he said

Than for your kind to gain acceptance into the kingdom of heaven

And from the temples of this world, your kind will be driven away

Why so much anger and rejection for wealth and the wealthy?

Why the total absence of reprieve for particular men and women of wealth?

Surely, Jesus knew many and indeed, some flocked to join him

So, what explains this conundrum that merges wealth and the wealthy

In an unbreakable union steeped in damnation and spiritual desolation?

Look for an answer, compatriots, at the new gospelers of prosperity of our time

Forgotten now are the counter-beatitudes of Christ, with their crystalline clarity

Together with their astonishing focus on wealth, usury and money laundering

Not forgetting Christ’s total and transformative embrace of the vows of poverty

In a world dominated by emperors, conquerors, kings and colonial potentates

The world he envisaged would be free of these exalted beings and their scions

Where less would be more and the last would be the first, brothers and sisters

The wealth of nations always and forever overwhelmed by near universal poverty

As one circulates among the few, its penurious “other” entraps and enslaves multitudes

Redistribution, rarely ever of wealth, nearly always of poverty and dehumanization

Till Christ and Fanon, Marx and Rousseau, Solarin and Fawehinmi and many others

Became prophets and heralds of a new social contract, a new dispensation or covenant

Forging a commonwealth between the kingdom of this world and the kingdom of God

 

Did Christ and Fanon romanticize the poor?

Did Christ and Fanon romanticize poverty and the poor?

Which man or woman prays for poverty and wears its garments like robes?

Don’t the poor pray for their children and children’s children to escape from poverty?

Don’t the poor often hate and despise other poor people with a passion?

Does envy and resentment of the wealthy not rankle in the hearts and minds of the poor?

Who could hope to convince Adeboye and T.B. Joshua, Oyakhilome and Oyedepo

To abjure the gospel of prosperity and like Christ, take the vows of poverty?

Will the abolition of poverty not mean the abolition of all wealth?

Isn’t reduction or alleviation of poverty a more realistic and feasible goal?

Did Christ or Fanon know of the destructive negativity of the youthful poor?

Does not poverty of the body often go with poverty of the psyche?

When revolts of the poor and oppressed take place, do they not cause bloodbaths?

And indeed, did Christ and Fanon romanticize poverty and the poor, compatriots?

 

 

On less being more and the last becoming the first

When accumulation ceases to be life’s main or only driving force

Less becomes more as all logics and priorities of life are reversed

Less a matter of precepts than a reordering of sensibilities and attachments,

You discover, compatriots, new selves, together with new practices of community

Within the experience of only one generation, this great change can take root

Those who had been the icons, the who’s who and the upper crust

Vanish from view, vanish from the social register and the moral order

And you discover, compatriots, that the last have become the first

Think, compatriots, of when it becomes shameful to eat imported foods and wines

While the multitudes, men and women, old and young subsist on empty bellies

The suffering and the wretchedness of the many becoming an albatross on collective conscience

You discover, brothers and sisters, that it was a curse, a malefic order of life that we had

Across the span of several generations, having more can become an absurdity, an anachronism

Having less becoming a great instigation to open blocked reserves of creativity and initiative

“More” and “less” themselves becoming interchangeable and interfused categories

And you discover, comrades, that Christ and Fanon did not romanticize poverty and the poor

 

The new gospelers of prosperity

All hail to the new gospelers of prosperity and their rites of lavish self-celebration

Well known and much decried is their hold on the psyche of the poor

But who better to preach prosperity for all than the openly and gloriously wealthy?

The old gospelers’ sermon that poverty is an affliction that will be only in this world is gone

All shall be affluent and be blessed in this world and the next, that is the new gospel

All hail to them indeed, for have they not humbled the rulers of the land

Even as their flocks and franchises expand to the four corners of the earth?

Astute and cunning in extravagant proportions, they found the key to our rulers’ terrors

From lands near and far, rulers come for longer lives and surer grips on power

All rulers are welcome and all will be protected, that’s the new covenant

Who can fail to hail prelates who control the rulers and the ruled, the poor and the rich

Their flocks outnumbering crowds at political rallies and workers’ demonstrations?

They are worldly without any apologies, but an occult otherworldliness is their stock in trade

All who come to them and even those who don’t watch them awestruck, spirit-possessed.

All hail to them, even if the suspicion that they are charlatans is widespread?

It is no secret that many of them are adulterers or fornicators or receivers of looted wealth

Their annual “predictions for the new year” have become the stuff of unfunny jokes

Many of them have been dragged to the law courts and disgraced in the court of public opinion

All Hail? No, compatriots, All Heil!

 

 

If dem tell you say poor man no get sense

Tell dem say na lie, na yafuyafu lie!

Tell dem say me and all de poor people, we be victims

 

Dem fit tell you sef say na poor people cause dem own poverty

Again tell dem say na lie, na big lie, God punish dem!

Ask dem whether dem give me work and I refuse to work

 

Sometime sef, dem dey say poor people no differen’ from rich people

Na dem dey craze, people wey dey say such nonsense!

My frien’, you never see people wey dey fear dem own shadow?

 

De one wey vex me pass na de lie say gov’ment no like poverty

E no go better for dem wey dey tell such useless tori!

Who dey for gov’ment, no be all de useless politicians?

 

Broda, as khaki no be leather, so is poverty not Aro

But if dey like, make dem continue to lie, we know say God dey!

De God wey tell Jesus to forget the rich and walk with poor people

If na craze catch am wen he say so, make dat same craze catch me now!

 

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

 

 

A RATHER startling awareness of Ukraine and Ukrainians emerged on the very last day of the impeachment inquiry of Donald Trump this last Thursday. Please, note that I have bracketed the word “startling” here. I will presently explain why I have done so. First, what was this awareness? Simply this: that it was possible that the country and its citizens were all the time aware that Trump in particular and all Americans in general regarded Ukraine and Ukrainians as so much in the grip of stupefying corruption that they did not know, indeed could not know, that that they were being manipulated, being treated with great condescension.

Permit me to put this in concrete terms: if a man, woman or a country has so completely reduced himself, herself or itself to abject beggary through monumental wastefulness and corruption, it loses its capability to know when other people or countries treat him, her or it with manipulation in the guise of assistance or solidarity. This was the supposition. But on Thursday, it finally occurred to the Americans that perhaps the Ukrainians, despite the terrible state of their weakness, their corruption and their dependency, knew all the time that they were being manipulated, being openly and willfully condescended to. This is how Adam Schiff, the Chair of the Impeachment Inquiry put the matter: “if we, Americans, can put two and two together to get four, don’t you think that the Ukrainians can do so too?”

Why do I think that this awareness, this delayed recognition was “startling”? It is startling because one would have thought that the capacity to know when one is being manipulated, being treated as a dependent, inessential being or people, this capability can never be lost, even by corruption, wastefulness and decadence of the worst kind. Again, let us put this in very concrete terms. In all societies and cultures of the past and the present, poor, dependent relatives whose livelihoods rest on their richer relatives know that even if they must perforce both actually and symbolically kowtow and genuflect to their “olore” or benefactors, they must nevertheless not completely lose their self-respect, their dignity. And indeed, wasn’t the popular revolution in Ukraine in the year 2014 called the Revolution of Dignity? And haven’t we seen the outbreak of “dignity revolutions” in other countries of the world especially in the global South in these times? Egypt, Tunisia, Iraq, Palestine, and even Saudi Arabia? On this note of emphasis on dignity in the face of corruption of the worst or highest kind, let us now focus on the title of this piece: America is Ukraine; the whole world is Ukraine.

In the ongoing American impeachment inquiry, Ukraine has become the ultimate cipher for corruption and corruptibility, not only of persons but also of institutions. Again and again, we are told that before the election of President Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine was either the most corrupt nation in the world or one of the three most corrupt. We are told that a few oligarchs and their foreign collaborators were completely in control of affairs, especially economic, bilateral and multilateral. We are told that Ukrainian politicians and business elites were completely beholden to one foreign power or another, always to the detriment of the interests and well-being of  most Ukrainians. We are told that in particular, Ukrainian institutions of governance, administration of justice and socialization of youth were in shambles. Finally, we are told that virtually all Ukrainian presidents were corruption incarnate. It seems to me that if you remove the words Ukraine and Ukrainians in this profile and substituted the words, America, Americans and Donald Trump, you would be perfectly accurate in your description because, as strange and counterintuitive as your proposition might seem, Trump’s America is Ukraine, an ersatz Ukraine yes, but a Ukraine in all the essentials of advanced and frightening levels of degradation of institutions of governance and corruption and corruptibility of a sizeable segment of political elites.

Please, look at the near total abrogation of separation of powers between all the three branches of government, especially between the executive and the legislature in Trump’s America. Look at the number of Trump’s associates who are either already in jail or will go to jail sooner or later. Look at the extreme dysfunctional state of the executive branch of government under Trump himself as the president gives full rein to his suspicions of a “deep state” that he can neither trust nor control. Look at the complete annihilation of statutory separation of expenditure on Trump as president and Trump as a businessman providing services to the American state. Look at the innumerable lies, deceits and absurdities of Trump and members of his cabinet, especially William Barr, the Attorney General. Look at the blatant and opportunistic nepotism of Trump in his deployment of his children and son-in-law in internal and external portfolios and assignments for which they do not have a modicum of professional training or experience. This is all happening in America, Trump’s America. America is Ukraine.

You could of course say that not all Americans are either worried or alarmed by this turn of events and reality in America and you would be right. Indeed, all experts in the matter agree that close to 35 to 40% of Americans love this turn of things under Trump. To this vast number of Trump-worshipping Americans, there is nothing that he could do, no outrage that he could perpetrate, no corruption that he could commit that would turn them away from him. As a matter of fact, nothing pleases them more than to actually and symbolically fight with Americans who either hate Trump or are frightened by the prospects of Trump remaining in office beyond one term of four years. Nigerians who are currently worrying about rumours of Buhari and his cabal extending the president’s rule into an unconstitutional third term might see an equivalence here. But I think the more appropriate equivalence is between Trump’s reelection in 2020 and Sani Abacha’s intention to stay in office indefinitely before sudden and propitious death intervened to resolve the crisis, at least for a while.

We know that not all or perhaps even most Nigerians were overjoyed or perhaps even relieved when Abacha fortuitously died. We have one case on the record, that of Buba Galadima, former APC chieftain who had been a prime supporter of Buhari in the CPC. Galadima famously fell out of favour with Buhari after the CPC joined forces with other groups to capture federal power in 2015. One of Galadima’s complaints was that he had not been rewarded with any office, any appreciable largess by the president. More pertinent to the present discussion was Galadima’s contention that he had helped to form the CPC because in his view, the country was being consumed by an anti-Abacha “fanaticism” and this was detrimental to the interests of the “North”. I was personally very astonished by this idea since I had assumed, I had thought that the “North” had been as much damaged as the South by Abacha. But this is the very essence of political tribalism: not only does it defy logic and rationalism, it creates wide, terrible schisms between the diverse communities that make up the nation. As in Trump’s America. As in Boris Johnson’s United Kingdom. As in many of the European liberal democracies at the present time. As in much of the global South for many decades now. America is Ukraine; much of the world is Ukraine, with only a few exceptions here and there. China. Japan. Scandinavia perhaps. And some of the monolingual and monoethnic nations of the world, especially those like South Korea and Lesotho that have not been savagely ravaged by millennial capitalism and its discontents, especially the already wide and still widening gaps between the few hundreds of the super-rich and billions of the wretched of the planet.  “Ukraine” is everywhere, compatriots.

Back to America, back to the future. Who would ever have thought that things could become so “Ukrainian” in America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, the gravitational center of global or millennial capitalism no less, who would have thought that tens of millions of Americans would fear and hate their president as we did in Abacha’s Nigeria? Think here of the millions of Egyptians in terror of Al Sisi and his ironclad grip on power. Think of  the more benign “Ukraine” replicas in the world – Buhari’s Nigeria. Ramaphosa’s South Africa. Museveni’s Uganda. Indeed virtually all the nation-states of our own continent, as well those of South and Central America. A new barbarism reigns in all the continental regions of the world. Obviously, the new mode of global capitalism that has been severally called millennial or casino capitalism has something big to do with this development. But this is a topic for a future piece in this column.

My profound apologies to Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. Where I have placed Ukraine and Ukrainian in this piece, I could and perhaps even should have placed Nigeria and Nigerian. At least, the Ukrainians have had their own revolution of dignity. We in Nigeria have not been entirely bereft of such a revolution; it is only that ours has been more fragmentary, desultory and inconstant, almost to the point that we do not think of them as dignity revolutions. And there is this: Buhari is not like Trump, but there are remarkable convergences between them in the arrogance of power. This too is a topic for a future article in this column.

New normals, savage counterfactuals

GREAT, fabled islands of wealth in vast oceans of poverty

Between nations, yes, but mostly within nations

These oceans are rising, rising as spectral affronts to the islands

Unfazed, the islanders are slumberous in their indifference

In time, a few will wake up to the threat of their oceanic surrounds

That is the hope, but there is the nightmare of apocalypse also

 

Age preying mercilessly on youth, the future mortgaged to the present

An abomination in which  even before death, parents are burying their children

A conspiracy of silence, of amnesia and of myopia in funereal cavalcades

Rites with neither officiating priests nor contrite communicants

In time, some will break away from the throngs and retrace their steps

That is restitution of sorts, but remember, the fire next time, said the prophet

 

Facts and truths drowned by and in fake news

A Pentecost of cloven tongues proffered as insight and revelation

A glossolalia of hate speech indissociable from patriotic pieties

Thou sayest and thou sayest not, thou shall and thou shall not

In time the stutterer will intone, Baba, and who knows, the dam will then flow

When that comes to pass, wake me from the sleep of the ages, compatriots

 

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

 

 

Throughout its history, America has struggled over three competing but interlocking general ideas about its identity and its place in the world. These ideas are, first, America as a white only country; second, America as a majoritarian white country; third, America as a multiracial and multicultural country. In literal or indeed actual terms, America has never been a whites-only country. An indigenous population was there thousands of years before whites arrived in the country and, indeed, it took a nearly successful genocide of that indigenous population for whites to become the dominant racial demographic in the country. And in the course of time, simultaneously as whites from Europe arrived and settled in the country, so did groups from the other continents of the world – Africa, South America, Asia, Australasia. However, European whites always came in greater numbers and, more importantly brought with them ideas, projects and policies of racial superiority and innate will to dominance.

As these are indisputable and constitutive aspects of American history and identity, they are not the real focus of this piece which, at its core, is a reflection on the ongoing impeachment inquiry into the presidency of Donald Trump, the 45th American president. Trump is being tried in the US House Representatives for abuse and misuse of power: instead of the interests of the country, he is using the enormous powers and authority vested in his office for his own political gain in the forthcoming presidential elections of 2020. In concrete terms, Trump is being tried because through coercion and extortion, he tried to extort the president of Ukraine to provide him with scandal and dirt about Joe Biden who is likely to be his opponent in next year’s presidential election. This is bad enough, especially since America has itself intervened in the elections of many other countries of the world and therefore knows what outrage and humiliation a country feels when another country intervenes in its elections. But what is worse is the fact that in his attempted extortion of Ukraine, Trump and his minions destroyed the careers of many American diplomatic and civil service officials as well as the lives of hundreds of Ukrainians.

In the American constitutional and political order, you do not need a myriad or a surfeit of crimes and misdemeanors to be charged and tried for impeachment. You do not even need for small or great suffering to have been caused by your crime or misdeed. All that is required is for your misdeed to have crossed the line between legality and impunity and the borderline between the dignity and authority of the presidency and the caprices and arbitrariness of autocracy. In other words, impeachment rests not on the suffering, pain or insecurity a president may have caused but on his proven violations of cardinal principles and norms of the American political and constitutional order.

Think about this: Bill Clinton, the 42nd president, was impeached because he was deemed to have lied under oath, thereby perjuring himself over alleged  adulterous sexual liaisons with an intern at the White House. Think also about this: with maximum impunity and completely in the open, Donald Trump has used the presidency to promote the business interests of himself and members of his family, most of the time at the expense of American taxpayers. But no serious calls for his impeachment have resulted from these crimes. Indeed, as I wrote in this column three weeks ago, throughout their history, Americans have been extremely reluctant, not only to impeach their presidents, but also to initiate and successfully conclude impeachment proceedings against a sitting president.

In variety of the observations that I have been making about impeachment in the American political order in this piece, one thing is constant: though of great consequence, impeachment of American presidents do not necessarily have to be based on crimes and misdemeanors that cause great suffering or immense challenges to the peace and stability of the country and its peoples. Let me add the following, although it will never be invoked as a basis for initiating impeachment proceedings against any American president: at different times in the country’s history, American presidents have caused great havoc in the lives of many countries and their populations through intervention in their politics; but no American president has ever faced impeachment inquiries for such acts and it is safe to say that none will ever face that challenge. This observation leads directly to the heart of the present discussion, this being the monstrous crimes and misdeeds of Donald Trump of which we can be sure that he will never face impeachment inquiries. On this point, I return to the opening paragraphs of this piece in which I made general remarks on the identity of America as, not a whites only country, but a white majoritarian country on its way to becoming a truly multiracial and multicultural country.

There have been many racists and even white supremacists in the White House and, indeed, a lot has been written about them. But in modern times, none has been more militantly white nationalist and racist than Donald Trump. His racism and xenophobia toward non-white peoples are so deep and wide that they cover not only all of the American homeland but the entire planet. In illustration of this observation, permit me to draw attention to one small detail in the case being carefully built up case against Trump in the ongoing impeachment inquiry. This concerns Gordon Sondland, Trump’s Ambassador to the European Union, who is at the heart of the attempted extortion of Ukraine by the American president. Well, it has come out that Sondland, a businessman who donated a million dollars for ceremonies for the inauguration of Trump in 2016, was posted to the European Union mainly because of his well-known belief that American immigration policy should revert back to the previous privilege of European whites over all other races, ethnicities and groups in the world. In other words, Sondland had absolutely no background in diplomacy and little to none in public or civil service. But since one of Trump’s main objectives is to completely remake America, Europe and the world in terms of racial hierarchies, Sondland was his man for the EU ambassadorship.

This is worth repeating. Trump, through surrogates like Sondland and Stephen Miller, his Senior Adviser on Immigration policy who is a confessed white nationalist of the far-far right, has openly and militantly embraced white nationalism as a project and a policy, he has rekindled racial bigotry as a leading and open mobilizer of political passions in America itself and in the world at large. Apart from demonstrations and marches by neo-Nazis who openly declare Trump to be a mentor and a kindred spirit, mass killings based on race, religion and ethnicity have reappeared all over America. Jewish synagogues have been attacked and cemeteries desecrated. Churches of Black Americans have been firebombed and worshippers in them slaughtered. In plain language, hundreds of non-white Americans have already died and it is likely that more will die – as long as Trump remains president and the movement that his rise to power has sparked grows in outrage and impunity. But these bonfires of racial hatred and destruction are not and will never be the bases of impeachment of Trump. Why not? Because these atrocities and catastrophes are the direct consequences of Trump’s policies and policies can never be invoked as grounds for impeachment, no matter how evil and destructive they may be.

Think of this, dear reader: Trump has withdrawn America from virtually all the bilateral treaties and obligations to keep the world peaceful, to protect the environment for the future of our human community and to sustain friendship and solidarity among the nations and peoples of the planet. More narrowly, he has made it abundantly clear that he wishes to destroy NATO as an alliance between America and European nations, replacing NATO with a loose alliance of militantly anti-globalist autocracies around the world. Do you know, dear reader, that he is not impeachable for any of these mad and disastrous policies and projects precisely because American presidents can only be impeached for misdeeds and misdemeanors, not for their policies however dire they may be for America and the world? Permit me to express this in concrete terms. Most Americans are frightened, very frightened by Trump’s political friendships and overtures to the likes of Vladimir Putin, The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Kim of North Korea, Erdogan of Turkey, Al Sisi of Egypt, Duterte of the Philippines and Nigel Farage of the U.K. But what can Americans do about their fears and worries concerning these radical far-right and neo-fascist alliances and friendships of Trump in our world? Nothing at all, least of all making them articles of impeachment of Trump.

I go back to Trump’s virulent racial bigotry and white nationalism. This is the core, the heart and the soul of his presidency, together with the movement of millions fascist zealots that he has brought to life as a sort of fulcrum or lever of American politics at the present time. But there is another side to this story of the unfolding saga of possible or looming race war or conflagration in America. What is this other side? It is this: America of the 21st century is not like America of the 19th and 20th centuries and a sizeable proportion of American whites are as frightened of Trump’s white nationalist policies and agendas as are African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Arab Americans and other ethnic American demographics. As this is absolutely crucial, permit me to make a short elaboration on it.

White nationalism is a threat to whites who do not only disagree with its ideas, goals and symbols but deeply hate the movement. The reasons for this are both simple and complex. Here is the simple part: for white nationalist zealots, only members of their groups are true whites; any whites who are not white nationalists and zealots are suspect. The more complex reason pertains to the core class component of white nationalists, this being the poorest, least educated and most resentful among whites. In all the historic and most lethal rule of white nationalists – Pre- and post-abolition America; Hitlerite Germany; and apartheid South Africa – white supremacy rested on this alliance between poor whites and upper-class whites. When that alliance breaks down for one reason another, white nationalism and supremacy meets its limits and ends in defeat. In most places, that comes to pass when non-whites show every indication that they will no longer put with any individual, institutional and cultural bastions of racism. This is why, in the long view of unfolding history of America and the contemporary world, white nationalism is a doomed project – regardless of the fact that Trump will never face impeachment for his racism, xenophobia and nationalist anti-globalism.

 

Diversity – Outline of a Poeticized Credo

 

Beyond the primary colours, look to an extravaganza of colours

Bio meeting diversity in a startling munificence of nature

Look to surprises of attraction and revulsion, all in your beholder’s eyes

Knowing that you, the beholder, is also be the beheld

The sovereignty never coming to rest with anyone, anything

 

Beyond the main watersheds look to the hundred thousand tributaries

The numbers startling the finitude of fixed points effortlessly

Look, look always to the mosaics if only because they defy your grasp

And as you look, as you lose your certitude in their perplexing affront

Be comforted in and by the scintilla of intuitions that creep on you

 

Beyond the Babel of tongues native and foreign, first, second, third and nth

Some in expansive metamorphoses, others transfixed in suspended animation

Look to chains broken by mother tongues and chains broken through imposed tongues

Know, compatriot, know that silence can say as much as Amebo volubility

So, friend, choose your terms, your words with both care and abandon

 

Beyond profligate iterations, expressions and manifestations of Being-in-itself

Saints and sinners, the blessed and the damned, the elect and the excluded

All accosting you in endless combinations of possibilities and negations

Look inward and outward, look close and far but not with Medusa’s eye

Diversity will not fail you, but swear compatriot, that your heart is not made of Stone

 

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

 

 

Biodun Jeyifo

LAST week, the 38th Annual International Convention of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) meeting in Enugu ended in such chaos that elections to replace the outgoing executive council of the association could not be held. Although it appears as if this unprecedented occurrence in the Association’s history has not been reported in any newspapers or any outlet of the social media, we can be certain that this is a matter of time. Why so? Well, because the Convention came to grief over elections, the Achilles heel of our political order and our politicians. When a national union of writers descends to the level of cynical and predatory political gladiators, something terribly confounding has either taken place or is gradually coming into being to make the Nigerian republic of letters a mirror image of our republic of, shall we say, desperate, precarious stomach infrastructure.

It may well be that this commentary on the implosion of the ANA at Enugu last week is premature and that sooner rather than later, the writer-gladiators involved will make peace rather than war. That is my hope. But I am making this comment for two main reasons. One: as is so common in our country in these times, the warring writers will descend into even messier quarrels, perhaps even take one another or the ANA itself to court. Who knows? At that point, the matter will become, as they put it in legalese, the jargon of the lawyerly profession, sub judice. This Latin phrase literally means under a judge; more substantively, it means the matter is in court being tried by a judge and can therefore not be discussed anywhere else until it is settled in the justice system. Before that happens, it is important, in my view, to bring the matter up for public discussion.

The second reason for making this comment now has little or nothing to do with the quarrel and indeed completely bypasses it. In other words, whether or not the fallout from the failed ANA convention at Enugu last week is resolved expeditiously, this statement concerning writing in itself and writers organized in auxiliary associations and institutions ought to be made now. I hasten to add that this does not mean that I do not have faith that the crisis can and will be resolved. And neither does it mean that I have come to a conclusion on the culpability of all or any of the contending parties in the crisis. What this statement means, simply, is that regardless of who is to blame and who is blameless in the dispute, the whole matter requires that we stand back and examine the historic and cultural relations between writing in itself and writers organized in national, international and global associations to promote the cause of writers and writing.

At the beginning of ANA, it was an arduous task to convince the writers who emerged as the national leaders of the new association to stand for office in election and take up duties as flagbearers. As a matter of fact, the “elections” were mere formalities, as the main challenge was to get the then emergent world class Nigerian writers to lead the association. This was consistent with experience of creating writers’ national and regional associations all over the world: the great writers, the “real” writers were everywhere reluctant to be the officers, the apparatchik or national nomenklatura of writers’ association. It was as if by becoming officers in an association, especially when the association was created or subsidized by the state, they had betrayed a vital part of who they were as writers. What is the explanation, the rationale for this?

Writing is a profoundly individualistic vocation, one of the most unabashedly individualistic professions in modern cultural and literary history. Writers, like other artists, have had wealthy patrons or the national state giving sustenance to their work and have often been all too gratified to get such support. But this has never stopped them from being extremely protective of, or even paranoid about the inviolability of their individual integrity as writers. Think of Christopher Okigbo’s famous declaration, when asked for whom he wrote his poetry: “I do not write my poems for non-poets; I write for other poets!”. Can you think of such a writer fighting for office as a leader of ANA?

It may be objected that Okigbo was an extreme example of the point that I am making here about the constitutive nature of individuality in true writers. That way lies snotty elitism, some would say. I agree. But the Okigbo example enables us to drive home the pertinence of individual vision and integrity that seems almost completely lost  in the current generation of would-be ANA leaders. Please, take note: I invoke individuality here, not individualism. What is the difference? Well, individuality denotes an irreducible uniqueness that everyone alive now and at any time has, all six and half billion of us on planet earth at this moment in time and history. What of individualism? It almost always smacks of possessiveness: what you can have; what you can eat; what you can accumulate. Any would be leader of ANA who brings thugs and other dubious characters to the Association’s national convention is prone to individualism, not individuality!

On this last point, I come to the heart of the matter. And here, I find it particularly helpful to return to the example of Okigbo. In all accounts of his life and work, he was unique in his individuality. This is everywhere in evidence in his poetry. He refused stubbornly and immovably to write according to what and how the critics and the audience-readers wanted him to write. Looking back now at the totality of his oeuvre, of his output, the slimness of it is astonishing. Of course, he died young. But that is only part of the explanation. Of far greater relevance is the fact that he wrote, rewrote and rewrote yet again, always confident that in the end, his individual talent and vision would see him through. You could say that his muses kept faith with him and he almost always came through with new and incandescent poems. You would be more correct if you ascribed it, fundamentally, to how strong was his sense of vocation as, first and foremost, a writer devoted to his art, his writing.

Perhaps ANA should now have it enshrined in its Constitution that only insofar as you have established your uniqueness as a writer could you present yourself for election as a leader in the Association’s national executive? That would be extreme, if only because, as we have seen, most writers who spend their time actually writing – and producing good and relevant writing for that matter – either do not in general seek office in the association or have to be persuaded to do so. Still, I believe that it is important to point out that writers who have never established a presence, a uniqueness through their writings, such writers do not really impress anyone of the genuineness of their work as writers. And if the truth be told, it seems to me that these days, many writers present themselves for office as ANA local, state and national leaders first, hoping that this will augment their chances of becoming or being eventually known as authentic writers. I have never seen this happen and I doubt that it will ever happen: because you are ANA President, or General Secretary, or Chairman of a State Chapter, you automatically become a writer who is known and respected for his or her writing, it will never happen. This seems so apparent that it is a reflection of the sorry and messy state of the vocation of writing in our country at the present time that it has to be stated and repeated here.

To express this sorry state of affairs in its real proportions, I observe here that at the Enugu ANA convention last week, the dispute did not arise over opposing visions and practices of writing in the country and the world today. Rather, it was about who would hold what office and therefrom extract the spoils of office. And yet ANA at one time was powered by vigorous debates over what writers and writing should do to be relevant and vibrant to our country’s present circumstances and future prospects. Indeed, Okigbo’s famous putdown of “non-poets” was made in the context of one of such debates. And having raised the stakes so high for the autonomy of the individual artist or poet, the ensuing debate revealed that far from being an elitist and self-absorbed poet, Okigbo was indeed a poet of great prophetic vision about the dangers to the survival of the country.

Lastly, let me clarify what I have in mind by mentioning “spoils of office” in ANA in the preceding paragraph. Well, everyone knows that ANA is not rich in disposable funds, in endowments for nurturing new and upcoming talents, and in sponsoring writers’ retreats and workshops. As a matter of fact, ANA has a piece of land in Abuja granted to it by the government several decades ago which it has, so far, been unable to develop. So what are the “spoils of office” over which the chaos erupted last week in Enugu? This is worthy of careful thought, compatriots.

Capital comes in many forms: monetary, moral, social, symbolic. An ANA presidency carries absolutely no monetary capital with it. It should, but it also does not, at this point in time anyway, have much of moral capital. What it has is symbolic capital and it has this aplenty. Why is this so? Because ours is still fundamentally a recently post-oral culture and society. To be able to present yourself as the President of ANA, or General Secretary, or Chairman of a State Chapter, has tremendous exchange value – even if you are yet to write a novel, a play, a work of poetry or non-fiction that anyone has read and treasured. This works best with government, corporations, philanthropists and donor organizations with all of whom the title of President of ANA, especially when presented as the largest national association of writers in Africa, works wonders.

Elders of ANA, please take note! There is work of a taxing, even perplexing nature ahead of you!

 

 

Oshiomhole versus Obaseki

Akintola’s break with Awo was just as bitter
But neither the party nor the people were mere onlookers
As they are now, gentlemen, in your fight-to-the-death
Where the “death” stalks not you, the combatants,
But millions of malcontents of stomach infrastructure

When Balarabe Musa broke with Aminu Kano
No one had to look in vain for principle and just cause
As we must now in the moral emptiness of your quarrel
Right and wrong, truth and falsehood, honesty and deceit
Hopelessly lumped together in the cauldron of your tirades

Oh, remember, gentlemen, when the colonized broke with the colonizer
The world was left neither in puzzlement nor in stupor
The world of the colonial overlords and the world of the colonized
Agreeing to disagree in mutual recognition of history’s reckoning
The casus belli – human equality bartered for slaves, land, gold deposits

It’s almost a cruel joke to speak of casus belli in your quarrel
Not every war has a just cause and you, gentlemen, have made no pretenses
You have neither invoked the public good nor the munificence of your rule
Your surrogates, gentlemen, are even more savage in their self-seeking
No wonder, for it is an age of open, cynical predation in which you govern

I declare you to be frenemies, gentlemen, in a violent roforofo fight
This is the kind of fight in which both or all combatants are muddied
At the end of which the people cannot tell one combatant from the other
Both are bloodied and both retire from the battlefield to fight another day
While the people, inscrutable in their inhuman patience, have the last laugh

Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

In some days, indeed on many days, I wake up and feel like not getting up, not even to bathe, clean up and have breakfast but spend the whole day lying in bed doing absolutely nothing. This is, of course, the lure of laziness, one of the most widely distributed afflictions of retirees. I had been warned about its occurrence by colleagues and agemates who retired before me and I had brushed their warnings aside, confident that my workaholic nature would protect me from this legendary post-retirement affliction. Now, I know better!

At first, I panic. What is happening to me, I ask myself? How can I of all people succumb to this affliction that I consider more ethical than physical, more an ailment of the mind and the psyche than of the body and the motor limbs?  But then my mind goes to the classic Marxist-anarchist monograph, “The Right to be Lazy”, written by Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law, in Saint Pelagie Prison in France in 1833. In that monograph, Lafargue had argued, only partly tongue-in-cheek, that laziness is the norm and work is the abnormality, and that it is only because we must have roofs over our heads, clothes on our backs and food in our stomachs that we work, otherwise we would rather not work. Capitalism, Lafargue further argued in the monograph, had made work for workers even more oppressive, more exploitative and degrading. Which means that the end of capitalism would sound the death knell of work as we now historically know it, ushering the return to – laziness!

I testify that in my life, I have known many people who greatly preferred laziness to work. I confess also that in my pride and hubris, I had found such people very objectionable. But lo and behold, in my retirement, laziness is creeping up on me! One part of me says, surely, I have earned the right to be lazy, if true Lafarguian laziness is what I am feeling. But the other part of me counters with a refusal and goes to the bathroom to carry out cleansing rituals of the morning, thereafter having a makeshift breakfast before settling down to write this column. And I conclude that only when the body refuses to respond to these demands and rites, only then would I have finally earned the right to be lazy!

 

• Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

 

By Biodun Jeyifo

Since it is only four months since my voluntary retirement from the teaching profession took effect, this piece has to be regarded as a provisional report. Perhaps in six months, a year, five years, I will feel differently. This is unlikely, but you never know. At any rate, at this point in time, and on the things that I write about in this piece, I am fairly sure that I am unlikely to feel or think differently in the months and years ahead. I say this with a particular group of readers of this column in mind, this being young women and men new to the teaching profession, especially at the tertiary level. I have the general public in mind also, but my primary addressees are new and potential entrants to the noble profession of teaching.

Starting first with the things that I will not miss at all, let me draw the attention of the reader to one very important aspect of teaching that is barely or hardly ever talked about, an aspect that for want of a better term I will call the “admin” aspects of teaching. “Admin” here of course stands for administration. So how do teachers “administer” what and how they teach? There are many ways, even though the term “admin’ is never formally applied to them. Perhaps the most important of them and incidentally the least talked about or even recognized as such pertains to what you have to do to successfully “administer” the courses that you teach. Permit me to go over this carefully, glad to do so now that retirement has finally relieved me of its burdensomeness.

When you teach an entirely new course – which happens about every three to four years – you don’t have to order the books you will be teaching in the course yourself. A teaching assistant, one of the departmental secretaries, perhaps even a student volunteer does it for you. But you have to choose the books and draw up a list of such books by yourself. Nobody can do it for you. Now, you would think that this should be an exciting and perhaps even pleasurable exercise in which you are made to read widely and discover all the new books in your field. But that is not how it works, at least these days. Yes, you do get to read books that you enjoy reading and encounter some new and talented authors. But for every such author, there are many others whom it is a waste of your time to have to read. Most of these are authors whose writings their publishers are aggressively pushing, with their sales representatives relentlessly pushing their products on you because to adopt a book in your new course might become a windfall for the publisher.

That axiom which states that you cannot tell a book by its cover is also, alas, applicable to publishers. You might think that the biggest and most prestigious publishers produce the best new books in the field. But that is often not the case; small, struggling publishing outfits sometimes do much better than the big legacy publishers in discovering new talent in the field. How can you discover such books and their talented authors if you don’t venture far from the beaten paths of the publishing world? But think, dear reader, how many struggling new authors and their publishers you have to encounter before discovering the gems from the surfeit of counterfeit products. My estimate, while I was still teaching, was that for every single book of merit that you discovered while drawing up the list of books for a new course, you had to plough through ten books you didn’t have to read. No, I will not miss this particular aspect of the teaching “admin” at all!

To the newcomer to the profession, you have my sincere sympathy: you cannot avoid this experience which, for more than forty years, I could do nothing but endure. Let me correct that observation. In the beginning of my career in the profession, I actually enjoyed this aspect of teaching. Why? Well, because it provided the possibility of changing the curriculum of your field or, if you are courageous and lucky, of actually changing what books are taught and how the discipline, the profession in general deals with changes in the direction of knowledge. An example here is when, during the long reign of military autocracy in our country, the despots in uniform and their civilian agents in the universities tried to exclude “subversive” books from the curriculum. It was through insisting on our responsibility for drawing up the list of books taught in our courses that some of us successfully persisted in teaching relevant and progressive texts from our continent and other parts of the world. Thus saying that I shall not miss is should not have the same meaning for those who are just about to begin a career in the profession.

Another aspect of teaching, of the pedagogical vocation that I shall not miss in my retirement pertains to a whole group of mandatory duties and obligations central to the profession – the grading of students’ papers, with extended commentaries; the writing of reports on their progress or lack thereof; the constant reviews, written or verbal, of statements toward the completion of Master’s or doctoral projects; and the recommendations that must accompany applications for fellowships and bursaries. As we have to execute these tasks and cannot do otherwise, we put up with them, even sometimes convincing ourselves that we love doing the tasks involved. But that is not the case!

Sometimes, you may have a class made up almost entirely of very bright and eager students. Then you do enjoy grading papers and writing long commentaries on what students submit as papers for courses they take. But typically, every class has its share of students who plod through the course and this group of students are no less desirous of getting excellent grades than the bright and hardworking students. Infamously, we once had a serious problem at Harvard with grade inflation in which, merely for being at Harvard, every student not only expected to get an “A” in every course but successfully brought pressure on many professors to give everyone in their classes an “A”. Just imagine what it must have been like to have to write lengthy comments on the papers of students in such courses or classes!

Ha, the confessions of a retired teacher! I never particularly liked the fact that year-round, whether in session or on short and long breaks, like all other professors, I had to make myself available to graduate students I was supervising. The rule is you MUST make yourself available to your graduate students, your mentees, all the time. In my time as a grad student in the early 1970s, we were more independent of our supervisors, we were more self-reliant. But in these times, the students in general are more needy, less inclined to find their own paths to the completion of their projects. In case the reader here might think this is impossible, please know that I tell all my students of this change in the culture of learning in our research universities and they agree with me. I tell them that in my four years at New York University, only twice did I meet with my supervisor. I tell them that this was not unusual in the period. They shake their heads and agree with me that things have indeed changed a lot since they cannot imagine meeting with members of their committee only twice in a semester, not to talk of the entirety of their program!

Dear reader, at this point in the discussion I can feel you wondering if there are things in teaching that I will miss in my retirement. Of course, there are! There are two separate and yet closely connected moments in the pedagogical encounter between students and teachers that are so fulfilling, so priceless as to serve as a redemption for all the hardships in the profession. I miss, deeply miss these two moments of what I can only call epiphany. One is when you, the teacher, succeeds in making your students finally achieve a grasp, an understanding of a text or an author that they had thought themselves incapable of understanding. The other is when they, the students, enable the teacher to achieve a deeper understanding of a text or an author through their brilliant and inspired use of the clues provided by the teacher. These two moments collectively constitute the moment of glory, of triumph in the teaching profession – if it does not seem too inflated to give it such a designation.

Ignorance and philistinism are powerful forces; when they show up in the classroom, they are almost invincible. In my experience as a teacher, it was one of the great challenges I faced to convince students that some texts and authors that some leading lights in the teaching profession had declared “difficult”, “obscure” or “impenetrable” were wrongly or even ignorantly convicted on the basis of ignorance and philistinism. As unbelievable as it may seem now, I and others encountered at the highest levels of academia the expectation, the belief that any knowledge that is not easily transparent and not immediately understandable is suspect! I shall miss the many instances in the classroom when this belief was soundly defeated, especially where the agents of illumination were the students themselves inspired by the teacher.

Teaching, at its best, can cause life-changing encounters between student and teacher. And what is truly amazing is when this becomes repeatable without becoming routinized. How is this possible? Well, the human mind is forever open to new discoveries, new acts of self-replenishment through learning. In practical terms, all great works of the imagination in the arts, the humanities and the sciences are open to reinterpretation beyond the first estimates made of their significance. This is an experience that the luckiest teachers repeatedly have and there is no location that makes this more possible than the classroom. When you have this experience often, it means that you have a calling for the profession. And if, truly, you felt that you had a calling for the profession, how could you retire from it without missing it greatly? Which is why, in my retirement, I sometimes find myself back in the classroom teaching. In my dreams…

By Biodun Jeyifo

On August 9, 1974 when Richard Nixon resigned from office, I was in the last stage of my doctoral studies in the United States. I remember quite distinctly that by date, all political support for Nixon had evaporated, even among members of his own party. However, the polls at the time had only 58% of the populace wanting Nixon impeached – 58%, not 95%, not even 70% as one would have expected, going by how unpopular as a president Nixon had become. The same strange political calculus could be applied to Donald Trump. He has committed virtually every crime and misdemeanor worthy of impeachment; he has broken every norm of decorum and legitimacy of the American presidency; yet only 52% of the American electorate want him impeached. Say what you like, but you have to admit that by a very wide margin, most Americans want their president chased out of office through an election, not by impeachment.

I have written a lot about Trump and the possibility of his impeachment in this column. I now confess that just as it was with Nixon when I was a graduate student in America, so is it now with Donald Trump four decades later: I did not realize that guilt and culpability is one thing, impeachment is another thing altogether. After all, no American president has ever been removed from office through impeachment. In 1974, as the noose was tightening around his political neck, Nixon was given the chance to resign rather than face impeachment. We know what he chose. Even more telling is the case of Bill Clinton. His impeachment trial was successfully prosecuted in the House of Representatives. But in the upper chamber, the Senate, his impeachment was nullified and he went on to win a second term in office by a resounding electoral victory.

So, why is it that Americans prefer to remove any president who proves by gross misdeeds and misdemeanors that he is unfit for office by the vote rather than by impeachment? There is a clue for the answer to this question in how Americans elect their presidents. It is a huge, costly and long affair lasting over two years. It is nothing short of the kind of ritual process in the making of a monarch or indeed an emperor. In the course of the ritual, the contestants are made to endure a lot of challenges to their personal wealth, confidence, self-respect and honour, all of which they must bear with unflinching resolve.

They must present every aspect of their lives for scrutiny, including the most intimate details of their health, their marital lives, their religious faith and their circle of past and present associates. They must crisscross  the length and breadth of the country, pandering to the likes and dislikes of every community. As they do this, the faint-hearted or the inept or the simply unfortunate among the contestants are weeded out, first in the primaries and then in the general election. At the end of the process, one man (so far, there has never been a woman) emerges as the victor and from that moment the positions are reversed: the contestant, the supplicant becomes the most powerful man in the country and the world; the populace, the collective king-makers, become the putative subjects of the imperial president.

Through the long, long electoral process, the people make the president-monarch; only they, and not other politicians using the instrumentality of an impeachment, can unmake him, if the need ever arises. That is the thinking, the logic behind the general reluctance to impeach any president, including Donald Trump who has broken every legal and ethical norm of the legitimacy of the presidency. This logic is not only profoundly anti-democratic, it is full of dire prospects for the nation. In any other truly or even relatively democratic nation in the world, Trump would have been removed from office within the first few months of his presidency, given the degree of his misuse of his office to augment the business interests of himself and his family and the degree to which he went out of his way to play out in public the extent of his liaisons with the likes of Vladimir Putin and other dictators around the world. But it has proved remarkably difficult to launch even the tentative, formal process of impeachment inquiry against him. In the world at large, only dictators and dictatorships are able to carry out and get away with this level of crimes against the interests of the nation and its peoples.

I confess that in all my previous writings on Trump and the probability of his impeachment in this column, I had not been sufficiently aware of this atavistic American tradition of treating presidents as monarchs who must not be removed by any other means other than an election. I confess also that now that I am all too aware of the tradition, I am baffled by it. America is not only the richest and most powerful nation in the world, for about slightly more than a century now, it has also been in the forefront of worldwide scientific research and technological innovation. And in literature and the arts, in music and cinema, it has produced some of the giants of modernism and avantgarde breakthroughs in techniques and forms of expression. And yet, we have this profoundly feudalistic treatment of presidents as monarchs whose installation and removal must go through an electoral process which is, in every aspect, a ritual process.

Thus, to the question that serves as the title of this piece, it does seem that the answer is a ringing yes: the removal of an American president through impeachment is regarded as the deposition, the regicide of a king. In the hallowed traditions of monarchical rule through time and space, regicide is the ultimate crime. For it is regarded not only as a crime against the monarch himself or herself, it is also regarded as a crime against the tribe or the state or the empire. This created a powerful mystique around the person and office of the monarch. I think Trump knows this instinctively and has used it to perpetrate and get away with hitherto unknown levels of outrage and embarrassment of any world leader. He tells lies and childish, absurd stories of his genius endlessly; he appoints and fires cabinet members and White House staffers at a rate exceeding that of any presidency in American political history; he insults opponents and even members of his own party that unsettle him with language that is so foul and crude that it has stopped being shocking in its predictability; and he has carried his crudity, his mendacity and vulgarity to the wider international and global arena of affairs and relations between the nations, peoples and religious faiths of our planet.

But Trump knows that there is one thing beside the reluctance of Americans to remove their presidents through impeachment on which, ultimately, his political survival depends. What is this thing? It is the extent to which the electoral base of his political party, the Republican Party, remains solidly loyal to him. Let us look at this factor carefully. To this electoral base of the Republican Party, there is no wrongdoing, no outrage, no crime that Trump could commit and not get away with it. At the very start of his campaign for the presidency, he had made the infamous boast: “I can go down 5th Avenue in New York City and shoot somebody and get away with it”. At the time, the statement was thought buffoonish and outlandish, even as a boastful joke. But the statement has proved prescient. Trump has not actually shot and murdered a person on 5th Avenue. But he has said things to his supporters and shared deeds and actions with them that no president, no politician in American history has ever said and done with supporters that form the solid base of his or her party. The primary instrument is something he has ominously called “fake news”. Basically, this applies to anything and everything against Trump; and it is concretely and institutionally embodied by CNN and the New York Times, the two most resolute media nemesis of Trump and his brand of politics. Thus, through the category of “fake news”, Trump can call something that is ontologically and factually black white and his political base will believe it, against the evidence of their eyes and ears.

Perhaps the most astute and beneficial effect of the invention of “fake news” for Trump and his supporters is the fact that he has been able, in broad daylight and in plain sight, to collaborate with and even kowtow to Putin – and against the interests of America itself and its NATO allies to boot! His children, his son-in-law and his businesses have been misusing presidential incumbency to enrich themselves, all completely in plain sight. But all factual reporting of these misdemeanors and all media criticisms of their corrosive effect on presidential legitimacy are denounced as “fake news” by the solid electoral base of the Republican Party controlled by Trump.

Trump and his supporters did not start the willful confusion of facts and truth with fakery. Long before the rise of Trump and his movement, George Orwell had detected the emergence of something that he categorized as cynical “newspeak” passing for truth that was ultimately named after Orwell himself as “Orwellian”. But Orwell deliberately tied the rise and development of Orwellian “newspeak” to the emergence of totalitarianism in post-Second War Europe. But Trumpian “fake news” supposedly comes out of 21st century liberal democracy. The question that this poses is this: is America under Trump still truly liberal-democratic? As everyone knows, Trump and his movement have very strong fascist, racist and xenophobic tendencies. Moreover, they have sought and continue to seek allies around the world, principally in Europe but far beyond Europe into virtually the whole world. So I repeat the question: is Trump’s America still a liberal democratic bastion?

We will be able to engage this question more clearly after the resolution, one way or another, of the current move toward the impeachment of Trump. I  think it is safe to say that the impeachment will be successful in the House of Representatives but will be overturned in the Senate where Republicans hold a comfortable majority of votes over Democrats. This in effect means that it is a foregone conclusion that Trump will not be impeached. But it is very likely that the impeachment trial will be so damaging to Trump that his stay in office will do him no good in the coming presidential elections of 2020. In that case, impeachment would have been virtual, if not actual. Who knows? We may arrive at a Nixonian moment in the impeachment of Donald Trump. What would this moment be like? Well, it would look something like this: Trump is so damaged by the weight of the evidence against him in the impeachment trial in the House of Representatives and so blustering, so pathetic in his performance, that he will be asked to resign rather than go through the proceedings in the Senate. You see, although Nixon was not impeached in 1974, he was nonetheless forced out of office by the threat of impeachment.

This is the “no” part of the answer to the question that serves as the title of this piece. Impeachment might seem to most Americans like the deposition of a king; but it once served as the means by which a politically corrupt president was forced out of office. Trump is immeasurably more corrupt than Nixon. At the very least, he would be damaged, rotten goods after his impeachment. Trump trying to be coherent and truthful so as not to perjure himself at his impeachment trial? That is a sight worthy of top billing in all the media outlets of America and the world!

• Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

Gbe mi lole/Did you have to gbe mi lole?/What happen?/In your boys’ quarter? Niniola, “Boda Sodiq”

I was driving my car – yes, I do drive myself, thank you very much! – when I first heard the song on the car’s radio. It was such a rambunctious, sassy and funny song that I stopped driving and parked the car so as to listen to it without the need to concentrate on the driving. What was the song? Niniola’s newly released hit number, “Boda Sodiq”. In the song, a female character embodied by Niniola herself, is accosting another character, apparently a “big man” and the owner of the “boys’ quarter” that serves as the setting for the confrontation enacted in the song. Briefly, here is what the song narrates, through innuendo and insinuation: “You took me home when I asked for a lift from you –  did you have to take me to your home? Now, please have the decency and the honesty to tell the world what happened in your boys’ quarter!”

Now, everybody knows that more than any other group among our elites, university lecturers and professors are the people most closely associated with the culture of “boy’s quarters”. However, the term originated with the perquisites enjoyed by very senior civil servants during the colonial era in our part of the world. Let us recall that the first “buys’ quarters” were intended only for whites at the top of the ladder of colonial officialdom and the big, European-owned trading companies. For this reason, it was a historic moment when blacks who managed to scale the ladder of racial barriers, achieved seniority in the colonial civil service – and got their own boys’ quarters. Eventually of course, the practice became an architectural  sub-culture of elitism in our country: every house, every dwelling built by or for the arriviste bourgeoisie of our society mandatorily had to have its own boys’ quarters. Which brings us to the present period: whether you live in university or company housing or in a dwelling you had built for you and your family, you must have your own boys’ quarters – alhamidulai!

If you are so inclined, dear reader, listen to Niniola’s song about boys’ quarters titled “Boda Sodiq”. It is a gentle, celebratory satire on boys’ quarters and their owners. And indeed, “Boda Sodiq” is very tame in comparison with countless Nollywood films that depict boys’ quarters as cesspools of the moral depravity and sexual exploitativeness of the owners towards the female occupiers of their boys’ quarters. But this is not to say that those who live, temporarily or permanently in boys’ quarters are saints, either in Nollywood films or in real life. As a matter of fact, in the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, the boys’ quarters of many of our university campuses were the dens and hideouts of the criminal extortion and intimidation gangs known as “cults”. The children, relatives and dependents of the owners of the boys’ quarters were the kingpins of these criminal gangs, implying that the decadence operating from the boys’ quarters had their roots in the main quarters – the apple never falls too far from the tree…

This essay is not about the complete historical and contemporary ramifications, positive and negative, of boys’ quarters on or off our university campuses. For that, you need to write a whole monograph, perhaps even a multi-volume book. Nollywood has been exploiting the theme for decades now and there is not the slightest sign that the well is dry. If that is the case, how could anyone hope to cover it all in one single article in a weekly newspaper column? Hence, my intentions are very modest in this piece.

What are these intentions? To go back to the origins of boys’ quarters in the colonial era wherein they were intended solely for the servants of the big ogas and madams in the main quarters. Going back to that origin will enable us to focus on the privileged elitism through which one became the owner of boys’ quarters. In other words, because servants and their families are no longer the sole or even the main occupiers of boys’ quarters, elitism has receded into the background of what we now know and say about boys’ quarters, even though some servants and their families continue to be lodged in boys’ quarters. This, I suggest, is the persistence of a colonial practice of privileges and perks accorded to a meritocracy that, for the most part, is a vanishing group in our age.

Permit me to put this idea in rather very dramatic terms. In our country, once you rise above the mid-level tiers of the civil service, of corporate administrations, of the teaching and research cadres of tertiary educational institutions and of the gentlemen and officers of the uniformed services, you must get your own houseboy or housemaid, you must never again wash your own car, wash and iron your own clothes, sweep, clean and mop the floors in your home, clean the toilets and cook and serve the food that you eat. It is an unwritten law, but it is so strictly enforced that very few ever dare to break it. I mean, my friend, have you ever seen a professor, a general, a doctor, an accountant, a bank manager, a lawyer or a bishop washing his or her own car?!

Yes, I agree, if you are an oga or a madam, at a pinch you would do any of these things for yourself in an emergency. But ordinarily, all things considered, once you cross the line between the ogas and madams (nowadays known as “mommy” and “daddy”) and the rest of us, you must never again be seen doing work that others can do for you, be it household chores or running errands that require day-long searches in the town. As I do not wish to personalize these observations and musings, I will permit myself to use only one personal detail to illustrate the general point that I am making here: in the U.S., like almost all professors that I know of, I neither have nor can I afford a “houseboy”; in Nigeria, I not only have one houseboy, I can indeed afford to have two more if I so desire.

To have others do your work for you is a great privilege that in the historical past of the human race, only the richest and the wealthiest enjoyed. There were and there are historical and cultural exceptions to this, of course. The most important exception was based on age: in nearly all societies of the past, once you achieved the age of late adulthood, you were spared a lot of both household work and work in the fields, the markets or the hunt. There was also the exception based on certain vocations, like the priesthood or the calling of healers who cared for the sick, especially the mind-sick. Thus, the idea, the practice that once you move from being a grade two schoolteacher to a lecturer at the state polytechnic you must not be seen washing and ironing your own clothes if you have no children or younger siblings to do the work for you, this idea confers a great privilege to you. Don’t take this for granted! Hence, I repeat: it is a great privilege to have others do your work for you.

Why do lecturers and professors in Nigeria, to take only one category of our elites, have servants (“houseboys”) while in the “developed” capitalist societies of the world their counterparts don’t and cannot even afford to have servants? That is the question we must face. If we can truthfully respond to this question, we may be able to finally engage the unacknowledged or unrecognized dimensions of this issue. Of all the possible answers that I can think of to this question, two seem to me especially salient. One: in Nigeria, in our region of the world, every big oga and madam can have his or her own servant because there is a vast reserve pool of idle, unemployed labour that makes it very easy and affordable to find cheap, underpaid labour to employ as servants; in sharp contrast, in the “developed” capitalist economies and societies, labour is so expensive and unaffordable that all but the richest and the wealthiest can afford to have servants. Two: in the “developed” economies, the use of labour-saving devices and gadgets have so completely saturated everyday life that much of the work that servants could do are gone. But in our own society and economy, as incredible as it may seem, it is actually much cheaper to employ a “houseboy” than to buy labour-saving gadgets for which maintenance and/or replacement have no guarantees and, more generally, electricity supply is very quixotic.

Are we moving to the model provided by the “developed” economies and societies? Should we? Permit me to phrase the question more concretely and provocatively: will the vast reserve pool of labour from which “houseboys” and “housemaids” are employed always be there? Contrastively, should we look forward to a future in which, as in Europe and North America of the present age, we in the developing world will have labour-saving gadgets, even automation, to do all the work that houseboys and housemaids now do? These questions reveal how complex the issues involved are. For this reason, the questions have no clear and unambiguous answers. All the same, one thing we must keep in mind is this: it is a great privilege to have others do for you work that you should, all things considered, do for yourself.

Of course, I know some of the excuses and rationalizations. Like, if professors and doctors, lawyers and accountants, engineers and dentists have to do housework and run their own errands, what time would they have left to do the work that they do in their professions? Like, there is dignity in labour and no work is so unworthy that it can or should be stripped of this innate dignity of labour. Like, manual, physical labour may be less valued and remunerated than intellectual labour, but the time has not come and will probably never come when we will no longer need physical, manual labour. All are true but all are rationalizations that make it possible for the middle-level elites of our society to take their dependence on the labour of servants for granted.

In the end, that is the bottom line in this discussion. The privilege of having others do your work for you very cheaply is massively taken for granted in our society. It is so taken for granted, so super-exploited that the issue of fair and equitable wages for servants, for houseboys and housemaids, has never been seriously raised in our society. From region to region, from city to city, from household to household, wages for servants are so varied and so uncoordinated that it is almost impossible to get reliable figures and stats. And yet, there are middlemen and women in control of the more organized formations of the trafficking in household servants, especially between Nigeria and our Francophone neighbours to the west.

We started with boys’ quarters in this piece; let us end with them. At the beginning, they were either solely or even mainly occupied by servants and their family members. Then, others – owners’ sons or daughters, nephews and nieces, the children of poorer cousins and acquaintances – moved into boys’ quarters. A distinct subculture grew around them. But, their origin as initially the abode of servants is not lost to us. So is it with the privilege of having others do for our mid-level elites the work that they cannot or will not do for themselves. It is no longer seen as a privilege; rather, most people now see it as a necessity. But unless extreme old age or crippling, debilitating illness makes work of any kind impossible, no lecturer, no professor, no general, no bishop should take it that it is unnatural or unbefitting for him or her to wash and iron his or her own clothes or clean the toilet he cannot do without.