When we read Charles Dickens’ “A tale of two cities” in 1960 as one of our West African literature examination books for that year, we did not quite appreciate what picture the author was painting about Europe towards the end of the 18th century when he wrote it was the best of times and it was the worst of times, we were all going to heaven and we were all going to hell and so on and so forth in contrasting images of those times.
Our knowledge of pre- French revolutionary Europe was not quite deep. In any case, how could we in the backwoods of the world understand what happened in European history unless we were students of history? Like most of our subjects in pre and post-independence Nigeria, we were poorly taught including not only the sciences and mathematics, but also the liberal arts especially literature in English. We made do with memorizing whatever we didn’t understand because some of our teachers probably didn’t understand what they were teaching us. One teacher of mine trying to explain “cross gartered” stockings started twisting one leg on top of the other like a Yoruba masquerade until he fell to the ground to the embarrassment of everyone. Explaining the pattern on the stockings of a noble man was simply beyond his ken!
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Our English literature teachers in secondary schools in Nigeria in 1960 were Africans who had never stepped out of Africa before. Some schools were lucky to have English teachers teaching English language and literature. People reading our scripts after examinations probably would not have known about how superficial our knowledge of the subjects we offered was. But later on, from our travels, we understood the interface between most of our school subjects and lived experiences in Europe and this may be why many of our children nowadays do very well in foreign countries when exposed to better facilities, museums ,libraries, laboratories, mass media and appropriate pedagogy. My generation and those before us struggled gallantly to acquire Western education despite the inappropriateness and inadequacies of it as we now find it.
I hope my readers will permit this diversion from the core of my message. All I can say for these times is that we are living in the worst of times at least in most underdeveloped countries but most in particular, in Africa. We have never had it so bad! In my life time up to date, we have seen our country become independent and a sovereign nation. Those of us young at that time inherited the deep state so to say. Our generation became professors, captains of industry and commerce, administrators, governors of states, permanent secretaries, military generals, state ministers and commissioners and even presidents before the whole state structure collapsed on us because of poor management, greed, corruption, roguery, selfishness lack of patriotic fervour and other negative things that can pull a country down.
We have now thrown our country into economic downturn and doldrums and reduced our countries to playthings in the hands of operators of international finance and manipulators of racist global pecking order in which the fairer skin you possess, the better chance you have for personal and national survival and advancement.
I read an article in an English paper that seriously said that the problems facing mankind is due to overpopulation, overdependence on governments, indulgence and too much freedom which we have taken for license and that only wars can solve our current global problems. The cynical writer went through several episodes of global revolutionary changes and catastrophes leading to drastic reductions of population by direct consequence of wars and collateral damages and through diseases and pandemics like the Spanish influenza that came after the human wastage of the First World War and recently the Covid-19 which killed seven million approximately in the world. Even though the writer welcomed advances in medicine that have cut the deleterious effects of diseases, he nevertheless suggested that reduction in deaths was not necessarily good unless accompanied by controlled population increases and not the geometric rise we have seen in global population which has become a ticking bomb that is waiting to explode anytime soon. The writer was convinced that unless we go through such global cataclysmic population reductions as experienced in wars and pandemics, we would continue to have the challenge of growth and development occasioning environmental abuse and serious and threatening climate change as we have in today’s world.
The question then is should we welcome and embrace the civic and humane collapse of international order in which stronger nations attack weaker ones with all the ferociousness that modern weapons short of nuclear weapons can inflict? The war of Russia on Ukraine, a smaller country just wanting to survive is a case in point. Russia may justifiably feel threatened by an ever expanding NATO but unleashing ferocious war on a smaller and hitherto fraternal neighbour is not and cannot be justified under international law and protocol. The same goes for the genocidal war of Israel on Gaza and Lebanon and the unrestrained Russian bombing of Arabs in Syria in aid of so-called Syrian regime, whether provoked or not cannot be justified on human level.
The internal violence in Myanmar between the government and rebel forces cannot be justified solely on preservation of national unity. How many people deserve to be killed because of the struggle for national unity? Does the dead unite with the living in this case? Thank God we don’t have many of these wars in Africa but we have ethnic wars fuelled by the search for precious metals needed in developed countries for electric vehicles’ butteries and mobile phones and other gadgets needed in the technological world. The DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) for almost two decades has suffered because of such wars leading to loss of millions of souls there and neighbouring countries like Central African Republic CAR, Angola, Chad, Southern Sudan and Sudan itself. Even though Africa’s borders are poorly defined leading to feeling of irredentism in parts of the Maghreb and the Horn of Africa, for now, Africa has been largely spared of such wars that have sometimes ruined relations in Europe and South America. This does not permit smugness on the part of Africans that we are spared the destructive wars of other lands because Africa was not only drawn to both the first and second world wars, it will surely be drawn to any major breakdown of international order whose origin may be far from the African continent because the world is a global village.
The United States increases its already overwhelming arsenal on the grounds of need to defend democracy in Taiwan against China while the Chinese are doing the same on the grounds of the need to bring Taiwan into union with the people on the Mainland of Peoples Republic of China. The Chinese wants to dominate the South China Sea and rightly sees the Americans as interlopers. The Americans would resist the emergence of China as a global and economic power.
The point to make is that the sky is big enough for all birds small and big to fly. Why should America arrogate to itself the role of global gendarme? The America of Donald Trump and its Make America Great Again (MAGA) mission of going it alone and doing whatever pleases it on global issues of the economy and the environment does not augur well for global peace. International order since 1945 has been maintained by well attested global system based on international law and justice and no one country should change it, because as fragile as it is, it has worked reasonably well all these years. North Korea even though demographically smaller than South Korea is building a nuclear arsenal to force a richer South Korea with its poorer self without asking the crucial question of what the people want. At the rate the world is becoming unsafe for non-nuclear powers, it is only a question of time before Japan, Germany, Brazil, Iran, Turkey, Argentina, Ukraine and possibly Saudi Arabia force themselves into the nuclear club. Already, nuclear India is poised on jumping on nuclear state Pakistan in a war of mutual annihilation.
If we are not careful, what we will have is a strategy of the grave in which the whole world unites to self-destruct. Unfortunately, even though we seem to foresee this scenario, it will take superhuman efforts and intelligence and international movement and willpower to summon the political courage and effort necessary to prevent global self-destruction. That is if before that time the environment has not collapsed because of the present sustained level of abuse and degradation leading to eventual self-destruction.
