Category: Tatalo Alamu

( A Diamond Jubilee for Renegades)

 This past week has been quite remarkable in the life of the columnist and writer. Yours sincerely received a ticking off from his first daughter for what was perceived as the unrelenting gloom and despondency of the column, particularly the last one which seemed to have crossed the line with its bile and implacable bitterness about the fate of the Black person in the epoch of globalization.

For a moment, snooper thought his own fate might not be dissimilar to the lot of Soren Kierkegaard, the great Danish philosopher, who was often banished from the family dining table and sent upstairs when visitors came around lest he infected the great atmosphere with the virus of unrelenting gloom and pessimism.

The letter reads:  “Permit me to intrude, sir, but I have noticed a somewhat melancholy tone to many of your written pieces of late, particularly in relation to the 21st century. Whatever happened to optimism of the will? Good night my dear father. Have a great week ahead”.

Not to be fazed, yours sincerely shot back:  “A worthy and noteworthy intervention. What you should ask yourself is why your father is still in the trenches despite the obvious melancholia. According to Gramsci, optimism of the will must be accompanied by pessimism of the intellect…..(some personal details omitted)…. Thank you and bless you my beloved daughter.”

Snooper now opens his defence proper on this weighty matter.   In November 1997, exactly twenty years ago, a historic conference took place in London to commemorate forty years of the Black Star, that is, the independence of Ghana and the lowering of the colonial flag. It was the culmination of an epic struggle for decolonization in Africa and was to open the floodgate for the formal independence of many countries in tropical Africa.

1997 was a great time to be an African. A slow but inexorable wave of demilitarization and democratization was unfolding in many African countries.  Despite the fact that Nigeria lay cowering under General Abacha’s despotic hammer, South Africa had just come in from the Apartheid cold, boosting hope and morale. On the economic front, countries such as Ghana, Uganda, lately genocidal Rwanda, Senegal, Cote D’Ivoire and Tanzania were beginning to emerge as poster children of World Bank economic reform.

Consequently, the historic conference took place in an atmosphere of great euphoria and optimism. The chairman, Chief Emeka Anyaoku, as at then the Commonwealth Secretary General, delivered a rousing speech brimming with hope and enthusiasm. The consensus was that Africa was turning the corner at last.

The slew of international businessmen who graced the occasion appeared willing to take a plunge into the storied Dark Continent. This heady optimism was reflected in the communiqué which urged Africans to do away with afro-pessimism and adopt the doctrine of afro-pragmatism, a realistic appraisal of the possibilities and prospects of Africa in the light of emerging realities.

Yet in a paper delivered at the conference, yours sincerely noted that while the lowering of the colonial flag in Ghana forty years earlier was a tribute to the resilience and heroic doggedness of African freedom fighters and anti-colonial avatars, it was an even more profound tribute to imperialist rule, particularly its ability to territorialize, de-territorialize and re-territorialize African territory at will. The lowering of the colonial flag may well herald the raising of another type of flag.

Twenty years after, a new type of colonial flag which does not require physical strength or actual presence to secure its imperialist suzerainty is blooming at full mast all over Africa. As the rampaging momentum of globalization seizes control of the continent making nonsense of the old colonial borders, the youths of Africa and its hopeless vagrants flee from the hell-hole only to end up as slaves in the Tripoli Slave Terminus.

According to an Arab proverb, to flee your fate is to rush to find it. Popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia have led to a consolidation of the status quo. In Libya, a revolt against Muammar Ghadaffy  has eventuated in chaos and stateless anomie. After sacking Mobutu, the old Congo has become a war circus with a rogue tyrant superintending the murderous farce. CAR, Somalia are murdering and bombing their way back to regular statehood.

In neighbouring Cameroons, Anglophone protests against the Francophone oligarchy have taken a murderous turn. In post-military Nigeria, we are learning that something may just be worse than an army of occupation, which is a civilian army of occupation far more predatory and depredatory than military rule.

This, admittedly, is not the full picture and Afro-optimism and Afro-pragmatism enjoin us to look at the total picture and see the few oases of continental rebirth. But this is what we have been doing for the past six hundred years since the advent of the first wave of globalization that accompanied the internationalization of the slave trade.

It was said that when the great Mohammed Ali finally arrived at the feral slum and its human fiascos which was downtown Kinshasa, he was known to have knelt down to thank God that his ancestors didn’t miss the slave galley. Human beings are no better than their animal cousins where and when the institutions put in place to secure and safeguard civilization have all but collapsed.

When the Portuguese arrived at the old Kongo kingdom six hundred years ago, they met an African society far superior in organization and far more sophisticated in hierarchical order than the one they left at home. They loitered around to encounter the army that gave military teeth to the wondrous societal arrangement. Alas, there was none.  In the next decades, the entire populace was transported to Brazil as slaves through the new slave port of Luanda. As at the moment, the old kingdom has played host to three different types of colonial rationalizations: Portuguese, French and Belgian.

If the truth must be told, the full picture is very damning indeed.  For any entity to remain viable and sustainable, it must be able to reproduce the minimum condition of its own possibility. Many nations in Africa can no longer satisfy this iron law of self-validation and renewal.  Ravaged by hunger, want, disease and incredible mismanagement of human and natural resources, they have become carcasses and grim caricatures of authentic nation-states.

So, where do we go from here?  If you find yourself in a hole, the minimum condition for survival is that you must stop digging. Yet many African nations are digging furiously, from the Atlas Mountains right to the mouth of the Zambezi River. The only hope lies in the emergence of a new generation of African leaders who will drag the laggard continent screaming and kicking from the hellhole               of millennial suffering to the threshold of compulsory modernity. That is a tall order indeed.

The much-rhapsodized peer review mechanism of the African Union is a miserable misnomer; a grotesque racket for self-protection and the perpetuation of the old status quo. When was the last time anybody heard any African nation speaking truth to fellow oppressive power?  When was the last time the doctrine of non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states gifted them the collective moral and political resolve to put their foot down in a clear case of democratic rape?

In the case of Yahya Jammeh of Gambia, it was only because the progressive nation of Senegal vehemently demurred. Yet we were all alive when Tanzania under the leadership of the great African nationalist titan, Julius Nyerere, invaded Uganda to restore order and sanity.

Even in the recent Zimbabwean debacle, all we could hear from many African capitals with the glorious exception of Botswana was the canard about lawful transition and respect for national institutions, as if it was not the violent assault on these by Robert Mugabe that led to the crisis in the first instance. Left to these African leaders, the old wizard of Harare would still be in power waiting for the inevitable biological coup d’etat.

Senegal and Botswana could afford to put their foot down and damn the consequences because they have the moral and political capital to do so.  No old woman likes to hear the talk about creaking bones when she is passing.  For decades, Senegal and Botswana have been regarded as shining exemplars of good governance and economic empowerment of their people.

There is a direct correlate between the internal structure of a nation and its capacity to wield external influence for good. Nigeria can only wince in pained silence as the Stone Age despots of Togo and Cameroons crack down on their own people. In the countries mentioned, a minority power elite and ethnic hegemonists have turned life into hell for their own people. You cannot offer what you don’t have.

Yet, it should now be obvious from the events of the past sixty years since the colonial flag was lowered in Ghana that if African leaders, particularly those of the war-ravaged zone of Tropical Africa, fail to find the courage to put their houses in order through internal reforms and political reconfiguration that accelerate social justice, democratic parity and economic empowerment of their people, it will be done for them under circumstances beyond their control and their ken. Nobody can hold history to ransom. The global patrol recognises only troubled zones and not zoning troubles.

Those who are unprepared to face fresh challenges of history will become its perpetual victims. History does not deal fair cards when it comes to geography, the location of natural resources and the disposition of human resources for that matter. It is the responsibility of political elites to find the strength, the inner resources and the visionary impetus to creatively adapt to the circumstances they have found themselves. Nobody ever hears of the modern Israeli moaning that they have been stranded in a desert, or the Scandinavians complaining about the scourge of ice or shortened day time.

Sixty years after the lowering of the flag in the former Gold Coast, it is obvious that most countries in sub-Sahara Africa have failed to adapt to their unique circumstances either through necessary internal reforms or the radical restructuring of the colonial torture wracks they have inherited. The results are the horrific brutalities of the new Slave Trade, the apocalyptic internal cruelties, the political sadism and social cannibalism that have been the lot of their people in the early twenty first century.

But we must never and will never give up on Africa. Optimism of the will suggests that we must never abandon the project of continental redemption even in the face of daunting prospects. If we do, the Second Partitioning of Africa will become a horrendous reality as the third wave of globalization knocks at the door. Unfortunately this time around, there will be no Berlin Conference or international do-gooders, only undertakers and pallbearers of continental exhaustion.

Arguably the most depressing and heartrending spectacle of the early twenty first century is the sight of desperate Africans floundering to a watery end in the deep seas off the Mediterranean coast  and of Black people being openly sold into slavery in Libya. For many of these luckless vagrants fleeing from virtual state collapse, it is no longer a long walk to freedom but a short jump to death or enslavement.

But unlike the past when Blacks were forcibly abducted on their farms and in their villages and transported in subhuman conditions to the metropolitan slave-markets of the western world, it is now the Black people themselves who willingly deliver themselves to slavery. Somebody with a grim and ghoulish sense of humour has actually described Libya as the new Black market of the Maghreb.

No!! The twenty first century was not supposed to take this dismal turn. This century was hailed and heralded as the century of Black renaissance. But the dream is turning sour and nasty. Despite advances in science and civilization the heart of darkness remains with humanity. As we have seen in the Congo of King Leopold of Belgium and the depredations of Arab slave raiders in tropical Africa of yore, there is an irredeemable savagery in the heart of those who enslave fellow human beings or sell them into slavery for the purpose of economic advantage.

Yet when all has been said, there is a limit to which a race or a people can play at perpetual victimhood or become permanent wailers at some fallen wall of aborted progress. History is not a tea party. It is a chronicle of opportunities seized and opportunities spurned. The slave trade might have damaged the African psyche. But it is not western abductors or Arab slave raiders that have turned most countries in tropical Africa to modern hellholes for their people. It is kleptocracy and political cannibalism.

Dear readers, what you are about to read was first published in 2002 when the modern slave trade manifested with Africans journeying across the harsh, hostile and inhospitable wasteland of the Sahara Desert to reach what they thought was economic freedom in the west. Despite the bone-chilling actuality, the article ended on a note of optimism wagering that the tide could be stemmed if African nations with the capacity like Nigeria could free themselves through economic devolution and appropriate political restructuring to become continental hubs. Fifteen years after, the situation has worsened dramatically. For the Black person, the omens are very dire indeed.

At any rate, we shall no longer accept tragedy in which God gives orders and man meekly submits. – Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution

AS we are discovering in Nigeria, Africa and many other Third World countries, it has never been easy transiting from one epochal order to another. The hurdles and hiccups are so monumental that you want to give up. Watching nations embroiled in the drama of self-regeneration from the ring side, one is bound to come to gloomy conclusions about the prospects.

Yet the “longer history” perspective suggests an ultimate rationality to human evolution which makes societies to get it right eventually. No man has been born who will stem the tide of history. No matter how exceptionally important an individual is to the scheme of things in his particular society, he or she will eventually have to bow to the implacable and impersonal forces of history.

Feudal and semi-feudal societies transiting to modern liberal democracy face perilous prospects indeed. Apart from the grim reality of economic inequities which makes utter nonsense of adult suffragette, there are also cultural, structural, systemic and ideological impedimenta which make societal progress not easily realizable. Often, this is due to the regnant residue of the old expiring order and their lingering political and ideological efficacy.

Of all the problems faced by democratically developing societies, none is more crippling and disempowering than the phenomenon of authoritarian master-voices. Authoritarian master-voices are the voices of the autocratic traditional masters and despotic enforcers of the subsisting order that brook no dissent or dissension, no plurality of perspectives and no multiplicity of alternative views in the way a society is structured or the manner its democratic transformation is processed.

There is a compelling and intriguing nexus between politics and letters, between the way a society is structured and its literature or “orature” for that matter. Neo-colonial literary scholarship and criticism, no matter how it is garbed either with Oxbridge institutional ballast or Ivy League metropolitan menace, often disavows this connection in order to prevent what has been called a totalising perspective which leads to an enhanced awareness of one’s historical and material circumstances.

Anybody who desires a deep understanding of how Igbo society was structured and organised at the point of contact with western colonization should look no further than Chinua Achebe’s classics: Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. And those interested in the organic tensions, the contradictions and uncertainties that played out as the Yoruba people of empire squared up to their new colonial conquerors and tormentors must watch Soyinka’s timeless Death and the King’s Horseman.

In Achebe’s novels, there is a multiplicity of voices which hints at a fierce republicanism that entertains no despotic chancers. In traditional African drama, audience participation is crucial and critical. Even while valorizing the dominant order, the Yoruba talking drum is also simultaneously panning out subversive lyrics which undermine its hegemony. All of this tends to suggest that many traditional African societies figured out how to deal with home-grown tyrants before the advent of western imperialism.

But it was in Tsarist Russia just before the Bolsheviks arrived at the feudal state banquet that we witnessed perhaps the most compelling evidence of the tension within the society being manifested and reflected in its literature. Despite its political and economic backwardness, Russia threw up the most outstanding novelists of the late nineteenth century. It led Engels to the famous observation that backward nations may play first violin in literature and philosophy.

Despite the carping from Henry James and other western critics about “loose baggy monsters”, the unwieldiness and ungainly superfluity of the Russian novel, there is a solid consensus that both Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky represent the literary apogee of Russia and are the greatest novelists the world has seen so far. From mid-nineteenth century till their death in 1910 and 1881 respectively, the duo bestrode the Russian literary world like colossi.

No two great writers could be more dissimilar in outlook and temperament. While Tolstoy, descended from a long line of Russian feudal nobility, was patrician, cool, methodical, implacably finicky and genuinely desirous of reform, Dostoyevsky was irascible, rebellious and prone to violent outbursts, often alternating between prodigious bouts of drinking and gambling and equally prodigious bouts of writing. He was as temperamentally unstable as they came, and there is hint that his land-owning father was murdered by his own serfs on the grounds of exemplary cruelty.

What concerns us here is the novelistic technique they have bequeathed to posterity. While Tolstoy is the master of the monologic dialogue in which a dominant and authoritarian master voice presides over proceedings with a no-nonsense sternness which suppresses other voices, Dostoyevsky is the avatar of dialogic or polyphonic conversations in which a multiplicity of voices and plurality of perspectives cancel out each other in a democratic Babel.

It is no gainsaying who commanded the greater respect and adulation from the Bolshevik revolutionists. While the new masters of Russia treated Tolstoy with reverence and adoration as a master of controlled explosion, a visionary, worthy reformer and icon of the revolution, Dostoyevsky was accorded a grumpy admiration and stony respect; a master of subversive literature, his polyphonic voices regarded as an invitation to chaos and anarchy which had no place in the new society.

Playing out in both novelists of genius were the contradictions of a rigid feudal society in an advanced state of moral, economic and political decay. It was no surprise that one of the first things the triumphant Russian revolutionaries did was to banish what they considered to be counter-revolutionary literature, particularly the type that induces revolutionary paralysis and religious mystification. Dostoyevsky would have been a candidate for Siberian Gulag.

There is a lot about contemporary Nigeria which reminds one of Tsarist Russia, except that the contradictions are deeper and more perplexing. Unlike Tsarist Russia which was ethnically homogeneous and culturally monolithic, contemporary Nigeria is a roiling coliseum in which a dominant feudal order perpetually collides with a semi-feudal order buoyed up by the gains of aborted modernity even as other societies in various stages of radical ferment are bent on putting the regnant nuisance to economic and political sword. It is a game without rules or etiquette of engagements.

Superintending and forcibly imposing themselves on this classic tapestry of chaos and disorder are pan-Nigerian master-voices perpetually hectoring the populace about discipline and patriotism even as many of them loot and re-loot the nation to a state of stupor. As long as their version of the country lasts, as long as their hegemony prevails, the authoritarian master-voices will never allow countervailing voices to come to the fore or for alternative visions of a more plural society to gain traction in Nigeria.

Yet for their version of reality to continue to prevail over a wrecked nation without a further erosion of freedom and the democratic regression of the polity into a real feudal fiefdom where only coercive repression matters, it needs a jab in the arm of fresh political initiatives or an intellectual magician who will explain to the world how a notion of human domination rooted in an ancient epoch of history and whose material, economic and political basis has been supplanted everywhere else can still be relevant for nation-building in the twenty first century.

Here lies, and paradoxically too, the window of opportunity for the salvation and emancipation of the country. As the debate on restructuring has so far demonstrated, authoritarian master-voices in Nigeria are so historically enervated, so intellectually famished, so psychologically demotivated that they can only come up with tragic shibboleths such as the unity of the country being non-negotiable or the nonsense that the forcible union of Nigerian nationalities is a marriage contracted in heaven when confronted with the implacable evidence of the need and imperative to modernize and energize the outworn political and economic structure of the nation.

As we have hinted in this column in the past, rather than make a dent on the political and economic misconfiguration that hobbles the nation, the authoritarian master-voices that control and modulate the Nigerian narrative will stall and stonewall before suddenly unleashing the anodyne of electoralism on the poor nation all over again. This is what has played out this past week as subtle campaigns for a distant presidential sweepstakes miraculously assumed an unworthy centrality in the national political discourse.

But let us restate for the umpteenth time that electoralism, or an obsession with mere elections in the face of daunting national challenges, is a phantom medication for a real and pressing national ailment. Elections do not resolve an urgent National Question. Often, they merely exacerbate it because they are no more than ethnic censuses designed to reaffirm and revalidate the hegemonic domination of master-voices. As we have seen in Kenya, Burundi, Liberia, Gambia and many other African countries, elections in the face unresolved agitations by restive nationalities can only lead a nation to a historical cul de sac. Nigeria cannot be any different.

Let us in ending return to Count Leo Tolstoy, the Russian avatar of controlled explosion and authoritarian master-voice. It is obvious that the authoritarian master-voices in control of the Nigerian narrative are afraid of opening up a Pandora Box that leads to anarchy and chaos. They have our sympathies. But two failed national conferences deliberately rigged with precision-timed explosives suggest that they are afraid of their own shadows.

The real problem is that Nigerian master-voices failed to factor into the game the rise of counter-hegemonic knowledge in Nigeria whose intellectual sophistication and superior political nous about how to make a troubled multi-ethnic nation work cannot be lightly discounted. As battle-hardened veterans of the many wars against military and civilian despotism who have earned their spurs and epaulettes are joined by fresh converts, they are not likely to be fazed or daunted by mere state muscle flexing. They will continue to howl and shriek and subject the polity to fierce intellectual bombardment until they get a fair hearing.