The Nigerian political class is not asking itself the correct questions about the unimaginable level of mutual distrust, hatred and ethnic baiting that pervades the land at this moment. Like many of our compatriots who find all this particularly unsettling and disorienting, one can also seek refuge in the promiscuous optimism of all those who believe that it will soon pass, that all the venom will dissipate once a new political order is in place and happy days have returned to this unhappy land.

One does not have to be a political astrologer to know that this is unlikely to be. Only the savant can determine the nature of the pregnancy a snail is carrying by mere looking at the shell. Never in the history of federal elections in contemporary Nigeria has there been so much rancor, mutual hostility and hate-mongering in the land. The universal acrimony cannot be reduced to the current dispensation. All the past sins of omission and commission appear to be coming to a head in a perfect storm.

It is sad to note that the dystopia has reached the Nigeria diaspora. All the virtues of human warmth, generosity and compassion for which Nigerians abroad are known are dissolving in a bonfire of political acrimonies. You cannot blame many of these people. Some of them have invested in the Nigerian dream and in the exceptionality of the greatest concierge of the Black universe. But it has turned out a roiling nightmare.

Yours sincerely experienced a glimmer of the apocalypse to come last week in a beautiful suburb of Philadelphia. My host and friend, a great Nigerian patriot with whom one had marched side by side during the glorious days of NADECO and the struggle against military despotism in Nigeria, has lost total faith in Nigeria’s viability as a nation and was now part of a group adamantly committed to the exit of the Yoruba people from the ruinous conglomeration of traumatised nationalities.

A notable medical practitioner who had invested his time, energy, hopes and immense resources in Nigeria, our man was no longer ready for any special pleas or alibis for the nation. According to him, he has written off his vast investments in the nation as collateral damage. And should in case my numbskull was not absorbing the disturbing information fast enough, he had asked one the rhetorical question whether it had not occurred to one that he had kept away from these shores in the last six years.

In the afternoon of the second day, my host informed me that he was heading to his study for a zoom meeting of like-minded Yoruba nationalists which could last about five hours. And it did. At some point, news filtered to the august gathering that yours sincerely was lurking somewhere around. In personal recognizance one was ushered to the study to say a brief hello to the gathering of Yoruba luminaries from all over North America and Europe and then summarily banished like a naughty child.

Wearing a benign scowl, my friend later told me that it was important and necessary to preclude me from the deliberations since I was returning to Nigeria. At that rate, it was beginning to look likely that our next meeting may take place in his garage or the nearest Walmart. Our people are taking fixed positions in the trenches of ethnic hostilities. Such has been the degree of the mismanagement of the ethnic diversity in the nation which has reached its apogee in the last seven years.

In the light of the foregoing and before going forward, we can summarize the crisis bedeviling the country into three major aspects. First is the deepening economic immiseration of the Nigerian people in the last forty years and the advent of a generation that has known nothing but poverty and biblical squalor. A poor and deprived people are the ultimate nightmare of the social and political engineer.

Second, is the intensification and deepening of the National Question, particularly since the Orkar coup of April, 22nd, 1990 and the annulment of the freest and fairest presidential election in the annals of the nation and the martyrdom of its winner. This simmering cocktail of ethnic resentments has now been further compounded by the wanton ethnic gaming of the last seven years which has made genuine elite consensus a virtual impossibility.

Finally, the demographic shift in favour of the youth of the nation has rendered precarious the possibility of electoral engineering along the old lines of the electorate voting and the selectorate selecting. It has also rendered electorally impotent the grim premonitory hectoring and occultic grandstanding of a particular brand of sub-national politics. The result is a vast youthful population that is unable to make hay in terms of electoral ascendancy but which is capable of great disruptive possibilities.

This multi-dimensional crisis is bound to impact on the elections in a way that has not been thought possible in earlier generations. We are already beginning to see some of the manifestations in the hate-filled discourses in the social media, the irrational threats, the wanton vandalization of INEC property and the grotesque scare-mongering among the political elite.

It is now appropriate to broach the main thesis of this intervention. All political struggles take place under an ideological occlusion. An ideological occlusion is the political equivalent of a complete eclipse. Such usually is the intensity of the besetting fog that true goals are hidden from true intentions; the real trophy is hidden in a dandelion of thorns; enemies embrace bitter foes and long-term allies could no longer recognize each other.

By the time the smoke clears and after the walking wounded have been separated from the quick and dead, it will be obvious that what has been won is not what has been fought for and lost. It will then be left to others to resume the struggle in a fresh format which in reality is a mere reframing of the old order of battle. This is how history proceeds with much cunning and in a manner that seems to pass all human understanding.

Within the theoretical thrust of the thesis adumbrated above and the political sketch that follows, it is possible to make a few intelligent guesses and deductions in order to make a rational choice between heroic pragmatism and visionary idealism within the limited and constricted choices imposed on Nigerians by structural contingencies and the post-military polity.

In 1983 having been adjudged the loser in a presidential poll widely believed to have been heavily compromised and generally flawed, Chief Obafemi Awolowo held a press conference in which he bade both democracy and politics in Nigeria a mournful goodbye. He added the clincher that if Nigeria needed his services, they knew where to find him. For those who can read between the lines, it was a vote of no confidence in democracy as practiced in Nigeria.

It will be recalled that in 1978, a few hours after the military government announced the lifting of the ban on political activities in the country, Chief Awolowo also announced the formation of a new political party and commenced open, country-wide consultations. Now five years after, the Ikenne titan appeared to have had enough, having been subjected to the most unimaginable political torture and psychological ordeal all in a bid to salvage the country.

The military overlords of Nigeria were lurking in the background and watching political developments with more than a keen interest. If they were truly interested in democracy, they knew how the elections were rigged and how the system was badly compromised. Military intelligence was dutifully compiling the record of electoral shenanigans. And they knew what to do.

But unknown to Nigerians at that point in time and even more widely unknown to the political actors and gladiators dueling unto death on the field, the Nigerian military hierarchs had virtually concluded plans to impose a military dominion on the nation to last an epoch. General Mohammadu Buhari, the founding Fuhrer of this new military Reich, viewed the political class with such contempt and hostility that he did not deem it necessary to table a new political order throughout his tenure.

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But ten years after in 1993 against a background of accelerating economic misfortune, escalating political disorder, institutionalized corruption and a widespread climate of insecurity, the entire country appeared to be up in arms against military rule. Military messianism has turned out a pious fraud on all fronts. The bursting and burgeoning Nigeria youth populace was becoming increasingly restive. An inevitable confrontation was shaping up inside and outside the barracks.

Acutely aware of the prevailing balance of force and a military establishment that had become the proverbial bull in a china store, the overwhelming majority of Nigerians, particularly his Yoruba compatriots, queued behind MKO Abiola, the business mogul and philanthropist. He was not the best candidate and neither was he the most qualified. Like a perennially off-message prodigal son, he had been caught several times infringing against the common weal and the political fortune of his people.

Ten years earlier in 1983, his first wife had contested a senatorial seat against the far more popular UPN candidate and was resoundingly trounced. But at that point in time, the Yoruba people and majority of Nigerians saw him as their best choice to get the military off their back. Just as he was a product of military culture, he was also a product of Yoruba culture. He had cut many deals with the military before. One more political deal to get his friends back to base should not be too hard.

In the event, it was to prove a bridge too far. Abiola not only lost his mandate, he was to lose his life in the ensuing political conflagration. As it turned out, the military might have lost its messianic posturing but not its appetite for power. General Abacha insisted that it was his turn at the till even if the country were to be reduced to smithereens. Once again, it was not what was fought for that was to become the extant reality.

After five years of low intensity warfare, a humbled, disorganized and demoralized military establishment was forced to eat the humble pie but not before mustering enough might to impose one of its own on the nation. It was a facsimile of the original copy. Once again, the Yoruba political establishment demurred but was briskly overwhelmed by sheer military and economic muscle. Again, the hard political reality was different from the rosy dreams of political idealism.

Almost thirty years after the June 12 debacle, a similar political conjuncture is unfolding before Nigerians with another Yoruba son as leading protagonist. Unlike thirty years ago, the current atmosphere is soiled and sullied by widespread economic indignation, unresolved aspects of the National Question, worsening ethnic polarization and the arrogant manipulation of national fault-lines.

But let us get our political bearing right. The main issue before the nation is how to bring back inter-ethnic harmony and intra-elite conciliation which is a sine qua non for political stability and economic development. The second is how to restore the nation to the path of economic modernity which must involve economic prudence and zero tolerance for corruption. The third is how to restore religious equilibrium to the polity.

As the preferred candidate of the actually ruling group, Tinubu , warts and all, is the candidate to beat. Like Abiola before him, he has used his economic might to build pan-Nigerian bridges and to foster intricate elite alliances. It is a tad short of a pan-Nigerian elite consensus but it will stand him in good stead if he manages to avoid the lure of hubris and premature triumphalism in the coming weeks.

Unlike Abiola who was regarded as an economic mammoth but a political mouse, Tinubu is a political pachyderm, a formidable poker player who has acquired equally formidable foes both within and outside his ethnic redoubt. But in the statutory political jungle that Nigeria has become, there is no room left for political idealism.

In the sullied and muddied environ, the wager is that Tinubu’s people are likely to file behind him as the game progresses. That is the way of his people. It is the way of nationalities perpetually under siege. Those who cited Abiola’s earlier political infractions and dubieties as justification for working against him in the June 12 imbroglio are still subject of excommunication and political exclusion in the land.

Just as this column was being put to bed, the report came of an attempted coup by some rogue far right elements in the strongly democratic and very progressive Federal Republic of Germany. The apparently well-heeled plot which was already at an advanced stage before security forces pounced on the plotters involved the arrest and summary execution of the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz. There were eleven others on the hit list. Scholz would have been supplanted by a seventy one year old provincial prince.

In the Germany of the twenty first century? Anybody can be forgiven for thinking that this is the stuff outlandish drama or some outstandingly imaginative fiction. But it is the truth. Not since Adolf Hitler’s infamous Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923 has there been such a witless and cack-handed attempt at unseating a highly regarded government.

It will be recalled that in the aforesaid coup attempt, while Hitler took to his heels at the approach of security forces, General Erich Ludendorff walked through the hail of bullets as if he was taking an early morning stroll. Almost a century after, Germany is embroiled in another farcical coup attempt.

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Readers of this column will recall that only last week, we broached the issue of why certain Northern European countries, particularly Britain, France and Holland, were able to withstand the fatal attraction of fascism as a result of strong institutional mooring while Italy, Germany and Spain were unable to. Germany was in fact the last of the big European states to evolve into a coherent nation-state.

There will always be a return of the repressed. It can be seen in Germany’s history of brutal colonization in Africa and two ferocious world wars of the last century. As the great psychoanalysts have taught us, in every human society there is always a steep political unconscious which is the murky realm of childlike fantasies and murderous daydreaming. This is where superior reality has banished its recalcitrant alter ego. But it pops out occasionally. Welcome to the Bavarian barbarians once again.

Since Okon has been released on police bail to face trial for affray and battery and conduct prejudicial to public order, the house has been swarming with serial bootleggers, from Jamestown, drunken well-wishers and other colourful crooks from the creeks. One of these is a crazy old fellow clad in snow white suit who claimed to be a former officer of the Imperial Navy and who insisted that snooper must make him a good cup of Ceylonese tea every morning. When he was informed that snooper was actually Okon’s boss, the old bugger shrieked in Queen’s English: “Landlubber, get out of my mooring or I’ll torpedo your mother!!”

On the D-Day, the court was swarming with noisy wannabes and smelling of antique perfumes from a Portuguese shipwreck. Dressed like an old sailor, Okon was brimming with mischief and radiant with irreverent pluck. By some miracle, the mad boy had smuggled a giant disused battery from a cannibalised jet into the courtroom as a principal exhibit. The fireworks began immediately the charges were read to the crazy one.

“That you Okon Anthony Okon is committed for battery and affray and for conduct prejudicial to public order. On Thursday, the….”

“ Point of incorrection”, Okon screamed, pointing at the battery. “How you fit charge me for battery when I get dem  Obonge battery? Okon no dey steal battery at all at all. And I no dey afraid of nothing. Ten Yoruba wrestlers no fit challenge Okon. And I don tell una say I no be conductor. Okon be houseboy and him /Oga dey court.”

“ I see”, the lady magistrate began with demure elegance and bemusement. “I think I know this troublemaker. Mister man, have you ever been up before me?”.

“My sister, how I fit answer dat kind question when we no dey sleep together?” Okon demanded with an irreverent smile. “If to say we dey bed together, I fit sabi when una dey wake. But sha for Lagos I wake up for six and for Calabar I wake up for 2 p.m”

“Stupid man”, the magistrate snapped, losing her cool. “I mean whether you have come before me”.

“Egweee!!! See man see trouble ooo”, Okon began with a subversive frown. “As I no dey hammer you, how I fit know dat one? I don ask una before whether you be dem Yoruba woman I dey see for Aguda”

“Idiot”, the lady magistrate spat as she lost her cool and the entire court dissolved into laughter and wild cat calls. The shout of “order! order!” rent the entire court room.

“You see now, the last time dem say make we order like dat in court and I say make dem give me  Apu and 404 dem police say I be stupid man”, Okon lamented bitterly, fuelling more caterwauling in court.

The magistrate seemed to have had enough. She began packing her papers. “The accused person is hereby remanded in custody until the next hearing”, she shouted amidst the inglorious din.

“Haba wetin be dat one now?  So Okon no go home and Okon no go jail? Which kind acting palaver be dat? Na dem Jonathan Badluck be dat”, Okon protested.

“Just shut up” the poor woman screamed.

“How about dem feeding arrangement?” Okon demanded as the lady retreated to her chambers.

“Idiot”.

“Wey dem Falana and dem woman rights lawyer now?” Okon snarled as he was being led away. “If to say Gani no kaput he for done scatter dem yeye court by now. Abi na becos Okon be Efik boy? Dem yeye Yoruba lawyers, wey dem dey now?”

The death of Olu Adegboro a few weeks back and the iconic Dr Seinde Arigbede shortly thereafter has drawn attention once again to the plight of intellectuals and men of ideas in the postcolonial crematorium. In the case of the celebrated singing doctor, he was every inch the nearest incarnation of a Renaissance man.

Through music, singing, dancing, acting and cutting edge medical research, Arigbede had sought to energize and galvanize his society towards a more productive and redemptive ethos. When compelling failure appeared on the horizon, he was not the one to put up with such nonsense. He had decided to live and act out his dream in the bucolic and pristine environment of Oogi, in Osun State. Rather than put up with banal reality, the entrancing thespian went native.

Adegboro, in his own case, had sought to change the fortunes of his country through student union activity, locally as a union leader at the then University of Ife and more spectacularly as a president of NUNS, the old umbrella union of Nigerian students. It must be recalled that his younger brother, Banji, took to the same beat and became an influential student leader at the University of Ibadan. He was later to die in a car crash.

It is to be noted that in the perpetual struggle between the forces of political freedom and economic advancement on one hand and the forces of reaction and retrogression on the other, intellectuals are always an endangered species and prime candidates of state oppression.

Yet this has not always been the case in traditional African societies before the colonial irruption. These pre-colonial societies bubbled and bustled with traditional intellectuals:  bards, griots, musicians and poets, who served as organic philosophers, historians, repositories of societal values, in short they were ideological accessories of the old state that also acted as barometers for gauging the health of the society and its political stability.

The destruction of the old traditional system of governance engendered a fierce power struggle among the new social forces unleashed by colonization. The imperative of a new order compelled the colonialists to empower the new ruling classes their rule had spawned. Consequently, intellectuals as a group became a subordinated subclass of the new ruling group.

In the rare and unusual case where intellectuals come to dominance and political supremacy in postcolonial Africa, such as Leopold Senghor’s Senegal, Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania, Nelson Mandela’s South Africa and Sam Nujoma’s Namibia, you had a measure of political liberalization and the unfettered flowering of political expression. In Dakar, the widest and longest boulevard is named after the country’s iconic intellectual hero, Cheikh Anta Diop.

But when repressive military and civilian hordes take over in many African countries intellectuals have their worst nightmares such as happened in Nigeria under General Abacha, Central African Republic under Jean-Bedel Bokassa, Uganda under Idi Amin, Ethiopia under Mengitsu, Togo under Eyadema, old Congo under Mobutu, Cameroons under Paul Biya, Gambia under Yahya Jammeh, Burkina Faso under Blaise Compaore  and more recently in Guinea under Dadis Camara. Famously, Idi Amin was said to have noted that while he could guarantee freedom of speech, he could not guarantee freedom after speech.

It must however be restated that freedom-hating tyrants are not the exclusive preserve of postcolonial Africa. It is always a function of how the contradictions that tug at the underbelly of human societies as they negotiate their path and passage to modernity shape up.

As we have seen with early twentieth century Europe, where a society and its political elite embrace ultranationalist mobilization otherwise known as fascism as a way of evading the contradictions of capitalist modernity, despotic tyrants must be thrown up to manage the stress and strain.

This was exactly what happened with the eruption of fascist movements across Europe in the third decade of the last century.  In Italy, Benito Mussolini sent Antonio Gramsci, journalist and leading thinker, to prison with the war-cry: “We must prevent this brain from thinking for twenty years!” In Spain, Frank Franco pursued and liquidated intellectuals at will for forty years.

Hitler, who did not do things in half measures, presided over the pogrom of intellectuals and their exodus from Germany. Walter Benjamin, the iconic left-wing intellectual, Rabbinic scholar and philosopher committed suicide at the Spanish border when his papers were rejected. He was fleeing the scourge of Nazism.

It must however be noted that many European countries, particularly Britain, France, Holland and the Scandinavian countries, whose evolutionary trajectory was different from Southern Europe and whose political elite embraced a different political philosophy were able to withstand the onslaught of fascism. In Britain, Oswald Mosley, the leader of the fledging fascist movement, was detained in the public order.

In France, De Gaulle, a military statesman and intellectual of no mean repute himself, went out of his way to cultivate writers and intellectuals. The great writer, publicist and war hero ,Andre Malraux, was his closest political confidante and collaborator.  The man of action who was also a gifted writer was the perfect foil for the man of letters who was also a man of steel.

When De Gaulle was asked to put Jean-Paul Sartre away as a public nuisance, De Gaulle retorted that he could never contemplate such a thing because Sartre was also France. Great soldier-statesman and great intellectual cordially disliked each other but they also knew that they both represented different aspects of their nation’s exceptionality.

It must be seen from this brief excursion into history that ideas not only rule the world, they also shape the evolution of individual nations. The lesson for a nation like Nigeria is that ideas and knowledge production rule the world. Consequently, the more we try to ignore ideas and their purveyors, the harder they keep thumping us in the face.

As the presidential duel in Nigeria stalemates into a deadly dogfight, rancor and ethnic baiting, one cannot but lament the paucity of transformative ideas to illuminate our path. The central crisis of nation-building in Nigeria is the crisis of knowledge production.

The crisis in our system in all its multi-dimensionality affects and paralyses everything else. It explains our inability to produce a political organogram that will lift the country from the trough of bitterness and polarization; our inability to come up with economic ideas that will genuinely lift millions of our people from the dungeon of depression and finally it speaks to the virtual collapse of our educational system after years of pretenses by those at the helm of affairs.

After years of pretending to lift millions of Nigerians out of the poverty trap, the federal government, in its last gasp, is now blaming the state governments for the deepening immiseration and biblical squalor in the land. Whatever happened to the certitude and bravura with which the original promise was made that millions would soon be economically liberated?

Only the deep can call to the deep. One must pity and sympathize with any government that is going to inherit this economic fiasco. In addition to functioning universities, private individuals must come up with institutes, think-tanks and organizations that will throw up the right ideas about how to resuscitate our polity and economic system.

This was the gap people like Olu Adegboro and Seinde Arigbede sought to bridge and the lacuna they tried to fill before they were overwhelmed. The man of ideas in a postcolonial polity dominated by anti-intellectual sub-classes is a political orphan.  His reward range from exclusion, humiliation, exile or actual death when all else fails.

Before age and bitter experience mellowed him down, Olu Adegboro’s romantic idealism about changing the society for the better led him to consider a career in the military after graduation. Up till that point in time, the military were considered a fine breed of patriots destined to rescue the country from the morass of economic quagmire and political instability.

Alas, it turned out a damp squib and Olu himself almost came a sad cropper. Having viewed the military with rose-tinted glasses from the outside, the encounter with actual reality in all the harshly regimented ethos was a bridge too far. Only a divine reprieve saved him from what could have been a life-threatening fiasco. For a proud son of Oyemekun land, it was a humiliating debacle and Olu was forced to leave the army in distressing circumstances. It left a permanent scar.

Having beaten a retreat from the notion of the military as a messianic institution, Olu’s approach to politics was marked by a gingerliness and tentativeness which betrayed the depths of uncertainties and doubts about the pursuit of politics as an ameliorative profession in Nigeria. Perhaps this explains why he never made much of his later day career as a politician.  The fire of yore was gone forever from the illustrious student union activist. In its place was a prematurely sagging old man, shuffling and shambling towards the darkening evening of existence.

Perhaps we must close with one particularly distressing episode which signposts the great irrational dynamics of postcolonial politics and the tragic consequences of its political and ideological rollercoaster.

Sometimes in 1973 at the premises of Premier Hotel in Ibadan Olu Adegboro was physically roughed up by Tunde Agunbiade, the then president of the Ife Students’ Union for daring to insult Chief Obafemi Awolowo . Agunbiade , a veteran Action Group youth activist of the E Stand by school of proactive violence,  had made it to the university as an adult student. Although normally affable and easy going with his provincial bravura, he took no political hostage.

Exactly ten years after in 1983, Agunbiade was pounced upon on the street of Akure by an irate mob as he began openly jubilating about Omoboriowo’s purported victory in the Ondo state gubernatorial election. He was summarily beheaded and his head paraded as a political trophy. This is what happens when a political elite surrenders its responsibility to a rampaging mob.  May the soul of the departed rest in peace.

By Tatalo Alamu

As we were crawling into bed, the full investiture of Okon Anthony Okon as the Babajiro of Yanmuyanmu took place at a colourful ceremony at Orile Yanmu on the ancient route to the old capital of Oyo Empire. Dressed in traditional regalia and adorned with the ancient Akoko  leaf, the impossible Calabar boy was quite a sight to behold. An elated and tipsy Okon took a look at snooper and yelled: “Oga, se you know say I don become your oga now?”

An embarrassed and crestfallen snooper quickly disappeared into the crowd before the mad boy could compel his master to pay him traditional homage. God forbid this desecration and abomination. Rather than prostrating for Okon, snooper would be willing to join his ancestors. If this was what things have turned into, the country has truly gone to the dogs.

As snooper was ruminating in humiliation, Okon suddenly mounted the rostrum to give his acceptance speech. After thanking his childhood crony, the Oniyanmu for the honour, Okon suddenly launched into a tirade against leading traditional rulers in the country for selling their souls for a mess of pottage.  Their palaces, the mad boy thundered, will be converted to museums of atrocity for future generations to behold.

By this time, the inevitable Baba Lekki had miraculously surfaced by Okon’s side, heckling the hecklers and cheering Okon on in his social abomination. He was impressive in his native Kembe and traditional Abetiaja cap. As the stale palm wine and prohibited weeds ransacked his brains, he became more and more offensive and abusive of authority.  The crazy old man began singing in drunken revelry.

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A moye yi je

I wonna, I wonpapa  I wonna

A moye yi je

I wonna I wonpapa I wonna

At this point, two reporters from a local newspaper approached the old man.

“How do you see today’s investiture sir?” they asked him.

“I don’t see nothing. This is bourgeois jiggery-pokery laced with feudal phantasmagoria”, the old man shot back in perfect English.

“What?” the two chaps exclaimed almost at the same time. Thinking that they had a perfect copy, they quickly turned the argument into politics.

“The senate has announced a ten percent cut in salary”, one of them noted warily.

“I see. What is their cut? “ the old man shot back again.

“I said ten percent sir”, noted the reporter.

“No, no no. It doesn’t work like that. Mr Reporter, you are a fool. The question is how much cut the crooks took before agreeing to a cut in salary. They must put all the figures on the table, otherwise they are just using Abu’s money to entertain Abu”, the old man snarled with much vitriol as he began to crawl away. “By the way, I don’t want to see myself in your bourgeois rag sheet, you hear?” he screamed at the boys.

A fool and his intellectual capital are soonest parted.  As it was in the beginning, so it is proving to be at this late phase of western domination of the universe.  Dear readers, for a committed writer, there is nothing like intense and unrelenting self-interrogation. It leads to the clarity of mind that comes with continuous evaluation of situations and circumstances.

When an earlier draft of this piece was written eight years ago, the situation of the colonial subject was not as dismal as it appears at this point. There was some ground for cautious optimism. Somehow, and against all the empirical odds, a Black renaissance seemed to be underway. The universe of the coloured appeared to be on the road to self-recovery and self-retrieval. Eight years later, it is beginning to feel like a damp squib.

Once again, Europe is slowly succumbing to the resurgence of extreme right-wing fascist populism fuelled by an anti-immigration nationalism. Despite a miraculous reprieve from mid-term electoral evisceration by a manic right wing, America totters on the brink of recapture by an unhinged anti-democratic narcissist straight out of the manual of Latin American caudillos.

But with Nigeria, the largest and most consequential black nation on earth, on the cusp of the most important presidential election in its post-military history, it is appropriate to dwell on the issue of intellectual slavery and the mental constitution of the colonial subject once again.

The greatest wars, it must be remembered, 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. Whoever wins the war of the mind is in a pole position to prevail over others.

The immediate trigger of all this is a series of exchanges between this columnist and two of our friends who are avid Black nationalists and champions of the emancipation of the Black race anywhere in the world. These are people who have committed their God-given resources to the project of Black redemption.

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One of them is a celebrated philanthropist and the owner of arguably the richest private collection of indigenous art anywhere on the continent. The other is an engaging intellectual and former professor in a foremost American institution who has dabbled into local politics as a local government chairman, a member of the House of Representative and a two-term senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

The collector of vintage art writes:  The human brain is the main dominance that God has given man over all other animals. Those of us without vision, knowledge, competence, critical and rational thinking abilities, are not the ones with such dominion over animals. Indeed, such humans are inarguably subservient to animals. Only those with superior mental, scientific, technological, engineering, mathematical, economic, financial, medical skills, competence and centuries of accumulated discoveries, in human existence, that have, and are, giving effect to God’s command of human dominance over animals. But in all sincerity, where have Black Africans played key roles in this historical accumulation of human dominance over animals? Where? YS.

As if to rub it in, the cerebral politico rallies: I have spent  more than 8 days diligently studying A Suitable Prime Minister ( An earlier piece on Rishi Sunak’s political ascendancy in Britain). Alas, with knowledge comes sorrow. Yet I am hyper-allergic to the bliss of ignorance. Preoccupation with digging into the language, persons, places and other contents of A Suitable Prime Minister has me totally gripped. You would think I was required to do what is known as the Literature Review of a paradigm  among scientists. I must confess to envying the men and women of letters.

Yours sincerely responds: Knowledge brings sorrow. But it also furnishes uncommon clarity. It is what Hegel calls the unhappy consciousness. I salute your efforts not to be ignorantly blissful. But what I know makes me a profoundly unhappy person.

Let us now attempt to bring the strands together. 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 not often amused by the antics of the mentally colonised. But one must not fail to notice when some wicked ironies appear in the horizon to lift the universal gloom about the unhappy fate of the Black person.

Let us illustrate. In 2014, just as the Black month of February 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”. As this columnist noted then, we would have liked to ask the burly and amiable, Anyim Pius Anyim, the then Secretary to the Federal Government,  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.

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 the 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 was 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, were 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.

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While in a new book, Wole Soyinka was 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 was 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.

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 had 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. Georg Lukacs, the great Hungarian Marxist aesthetician, described the subjugated communities of the Third World as akin to a colony of ants headed in the wrong direction which had to be forcibly turned back.

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.