A fool and his intellectual capital are soonest parted. As it was in the beginning, so it it is proving to be at this late and probably closing phase of western domination of the universe. As the Black month unfolds, it is appropriate to dwell on the issue of intellectual slavery and the mental constitution of the colonial subject. The greatest wars take place in the territory of the human mind, and it is the unchallenged domination of this vital front by the western imagination that is responsible for its six-century domination over the rest of the world..
There is a consensus among anthropologists that slavery has always existed in human society. It is an offshoot of warfare. Old Britain, for example, was a colony of the Roman Empire. People have always colonised and enslaved each other. But intellectual slavery, that is the mental colonisation or the deliberate and systematic inferiorisation of the other, has achieved its most potent form and formula with western imperialism and its variant of modernity.
Physical enslavement and actual colonisation can be savage and abusive of human dignity, but intellectual slavery, because it works insidiously at the level of the mind, is even more cruel and exacting. Once a people’s mind is conquered and enslaved, the dominion and domination naturally extend to other domains such as the political, the economic and even the spiritual. The mentally enslaved is thus comprehensively de-humanized, that is stripped of their humanity— which makes the work of the conqueror easier.
So it is, then, that today, the Black person, unlike the Chinese and Indians, has no viable religion of his own, no economic system, no political institution, no traditional epic genre as Isidore Okpewho spent a life time refuting, no literature as they impishly and impudently told Wole Soyinka as a Knight’s fellow in Cambridge, no culture as they taught Chinua Achebe, and of course no history but a barbaric void as Lord Hugh Trevor-Roper grandly claimed.
Having been a combatant in the global theatre of mental decolonisation for over four decades, yours sincerely is often amused by the antics of the mentally colonised. But one must not fail to notice when some delicious ironies appear in the horizon to lift the universal gloom about the unhappy fate of the Black person.
Just as the Black month of February(2013) was unfolding, there on television was a group of retired Nigerian rulers together with the incumbent stoutly defending the government decision to spend billions of naira to commemorate the centenary of the amalgamation of the protectorates of Nigeria. There is a lot to celebrate about the amalgamation, they all chorused as if on cue and without any sense of irony.
It was a most beguiling and historic snapshot, particularly with the most combatively unenlightened among the lot railing and thundering with the usual combustible gusto. There may be a lot to celebrate about Nigeria despite everything. But the amalgamation was not a Nigerian event.
The “Dual Mandate” of Lord Lugard is a famous piece of fiction and a pious fraud since there is no evidence to show that the overrun nationalities ever gave their consent. It is a consecration of empire and imperial might, a testimony to its awesome power of colonial coercion and ability to territorialise and re-territorialise Africa at will.
If this singular feat of human supremacy should be celebrated at all, it should be by relics of empire glorifying the might and power of their ancestors and not the descendants of those who were herded in like human cattle. The celebration and commemoration of one’s own enslavement is a classic instance of mental colonisation and the most depressing example of Afro-Saxony in recent political history. By the same token, the Japanese ought to commemorate the arrival of Commodore Perry on their shores, and the Chinese the seizure of Hong Kong.
Yet as we have hinted, a lack of self-awareness and its ironic possibilities is a logical corollary of mental slavery. The Secretary to the Federal Government was widely quoted to have repeated Lord Lugard’s words with warm approval that Nigeria was “the product of a long and mature consideration”. Snooper will like to ask the burly and amiable Anyim Pius Anyim if any of his ancestors was present at the deliberation.
If the Nigerian officials had wanted to be fair to themselves and to history they ought to have gone a bit farther in time to the Berlin Conference which began in 1884 and effectively saw to the colonial partitioning of old Africa. It was in 1884 that Henry Morton Stanley, the footloose Welsh explorer who managed to fight on both sides of the American Civil War, arrived in Berlin clutching a raft of treaties with traditional African chiefs who had willingly signed away their possession in exchange for meretricious trash.
Next year, it will be 130 years since 1884, even though the Berlin Conference actually concluded in 1885. Since this tradition of frittering away immense natural resources has continued in Africa, particularly in Nigeria, we must not be afraid of celebrating and lionizing our worthy ancestors. Where it comes to a celebration of self-dispossession, the Nigerian government must accord this date a priority over mere amalgamation.
But there may be more mundane matters hiding under this grandiose nonsense. The goat eats where it is tethered, says a famous Cameroonian proverb. Even if one cannot discount an element of deliberate mischief in all this, it is noteworthy that virtually all the newspapers reporting on the centenary extravaganza published a curious picture of Anyim with his mouth apparently salivating with intent. It could not have been at the prospects of the giant Ohaozara yam or rice from his native Ishiagwu.
What will Equaino, Du Bois, Blyden, Martin Luther King, Cheikh Anta Diop, Azikiwe, Nkrumah, Macaulay, Senghor, Sapara Williams and all the avatars of the great project of mental decolonisation say about this desecration of history by the ruling elite in Nigeria? How will Frantz Fanon, the great psychiatrist of cultural deracination and political schizophrenia, describe the ruling class that presides over the current post-colonial anomie of Nigeria?
It should be noted that while this capitulation to neo-colonial slavery is going on in Nigeria, two great sons of the Third World, one a Nigerian, the other an India and both Nobel laureates in different fields, are engaged in stellar decolonising projects. Soyinka and Sen are two of a different kind, but both are united in their passion and affection for their respective countries and continent.
While in a new book, Wole Soyinka is deepening and refining his time-honoured quest and engagement with the recovery and recuperation of a noble and heroic African past as a weapon for confronting the neo-colonial devastation of the continent, Amartya Sen is chairing a committee in India to revive Nalanda, the world’s oldest university, after an 800 year recess.
Soyinka surely has his Marxist and neo-Marxist critics who accuse him of romanticizing Africa’s feudal and unedifying past. The debate and the fundamental flaw in this argument are beyond the purview of this column. But suffice it to note that the decolonizing project is more than a matter of life and death for its heroic protagonists. Exile, humiliation, torture and death have been their lot. Francois Mitterrand, the late French president, famously described Thomas Sankara as “a cutting edge that cuts too sharply”. His childhood friend and comrade in arms, the same fellow who was taken in as an orphan by Sankara’s noble parents, was persuaded to do him in. The rest is history and Ibrahim Taore. The question is: why has it proved so costly proving to the rest of the world that all people are equal and that even if Africa is no longer at the cutting edge of civilisation, it was at least the cradle of current civilization as evolved?
The reason is the size, scope and scale of ambition of western modernity. For the first time in the history of the world, we have a vision of modernisation which can only expand and grow by denying or suppressing everything that came before it and by obliterating all that is parallel and contemporaneous to it.
Hence the costly struggle to re-establish the Egyptian foundation of western modernity and the momentous inspiration it derived from classical Islam. Once the link and the trail of human achievement are re-established, the myth of the primitive Africa savage is very hard to sustain indeed. And so by the same taken is the project of mental colonisation..
In 1809, more than half a century before the outbreak of the American civil war, the Abbe Henri-Baptiste Gregoire, sent a manuscript of a new work to Thomas Jefferson, a founding father and the third president of the United States. The book was a celebration and commemoration of essayists, writers and scientists of African extraction who had found their way to the west. It was titled, De La Litterature des Negress.
As we have had cause to note in this column, despite his principled opposition to slavery, Jefferson’s view of the intellectual capacities of black people was notoriously truculent and characterised by savage dismissals. In an infamous passage from his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson noted thus of the African American: “It appears to me that in memory they are equal to whites: in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous”.
This remarkable diatribe was coming on the heels of the literary exploits of the trio Equaino, Cuguano and Sancho, former slaves of African descent, who seized late eighteenth century literary London by the scruff of the neck and were feted in all the leading saloons of England’s capital for their astounding feats of imagination. Being very well-connected to the metropolitan circuits of the old world, Jefferson could not have been unaware of the literary triumphs of these exemplars. Perhaps it was a case of prejudice compounded by deliberate ignorance. Gregoire’s treatise could have been a well-aimed and profoundly clandestine attempt to help Jefferson modify or moderate his unhelpful worldview.
But it was an uphill task. The same views resonate in the works of European intellectuals and philosophers such as David Hume, Emmanuel Kant, Friedrich Hegel and even Karl Marx. As far as Marx was concerned, India and the African continent lost nothing in the wanton destruction of their old culture by the European conquerors as it was a culture shot through with idiotic superstitions and morbid myths.
Nowhere else in human history had there been such a systematic and concerted attempt to cast a whole race as inferior. It was a pan-Western project of mental colonisation in which conservative, liberal, reactionary and radical intellectuals shared a unified vision of the world based on collective mental conditioning and the assumption of the “natural” superiority of western modernity.
The consequences of mental colonisation are still very much with us, despite the cessation of physical colonisation,. They can be seen in nation-states that are inferior and poor copies of the original, political institutions that are not up to scratch, political elites that are a miscegenated breed of thieving nuisance, economic systems that are uncritically and uncreatively borrowed without any thought for the local conditions and in borrowed religions that lack race-specific nutrients.
It will take a new intellectual elite with a new dream of Africa and a new visionary conception of human redemption to free the Black race from the clutches of mental colonisation. Before this mental revolution, all political revolutions are null and void.
•First published in March, 2013. An earlier version of the essay was published as part of the proceedings of an international conference held in London in August, 1997 to commemorate forty years of Ghana’s independence.(ed, Ad’obe Obe)
Natasha was here
Reading you yet again one wondered whether it’s the manner or the matter or the inimitably felicitous interweave of content and form that enthrals to the last syllable of the incandescent quill. Such is your invaluable contribution to human enlightenment, and, impliedly, global gnosis that even transition to ancestor realm would be a colossal loss of epochal, if not, apocalyptic proportions. Long may you live, old master. In your earlier intervention on the Natasha saga, you did hint on the less-than- prepossessing and propitious metaphysical conceits of her Eastern onomastic etymology. Very easily, Natasha’s striking elegance and nubile litheness compels a ready comparison with heroines of myth on the one hand and countervailing Amazons of history on the other: we recall female avatars such as Joan of Arc, Cleopatra, Juliet, Queen Amina of Zauzau, Moremi of Ile-Ife and others. However, there is a sense in which all female homo sapiens carry congenitally the germ of erotical Manichaeism such that, on the one hand, they can be considered benignant, gracious, good; a beauty, and on the other hand, malignant, fiendish, evil; a Gorgon. As Wole Soyinka tells us in his Myth, Literature and the African World, the kitchen cleaver is at once both a domestic implement and a blood-letter. This Janus-facedness, this Ogunian duality, this Pharmakos element is what Natasha seems to emblematize in Nigeria’s body politic. As she cuts caper, swaggering about the place, her spiritual precursors headed by the incomparable Helen of Troy egg her on….Like them, Natasha is a latter-day femme fatale singeing to cinders the unwary Alpha males like feckless moths in her inflaming flares. What is the use of her physical comeliness? A potential banana peel for men; a healing, therapeutic sight for sore eyes? Is it ultimately a bane or boon both to self and society? This poisoned chalice requires further interrogation and societal problematization going forward. Whilst it is in order to reprimand the privileged rogues of the NASS for their shameful philandering and the accompanying loutish dereliction of duty, it is important also to note that in realpolitik, class loyalty, like the word, is an egg, once broken, it cannot be patched up. Today, Natasha is making hay or social capital from male-bashing at the highest levels of national power and authority. But, sadly, she is equally singing her own swansong as far as political relevance and leadership recruitment are concerned. Natasha was here.
Name withheld. The rejoinder is from a former student and current Professor of English at the University of Lagos.
And from a retired female professor, former dean and former DVC at OAU
Baba Agba, I am not impressed by the lady’s antics at all.
