By Olatunji Ololade
Life as a freeman is simply unthinkable to a Nigerian nigger. Outwardly, he lives to a devastating stereotype. Inwardly, he brawls against typecasts as the ram thrashes in its soul at the descent of the butcher’s knife. But he is neither brawler nor ram. He is a human living like livestock because he thinks it’s shrewd and dapper.
The Nigerian, channelling his freedoms wholesomely and with integrity might have no gripe about this. But who determines what it is to be free? What determines a Nigerian nigger? Some would argue that it is somewhat tyrannical to deny a man of his rights, particularly the freedom to answer as a nigger.
Freedom, indeed, has a thousand charms to show that slaves, however contented, never know, writes Cowper. The tragedy is in the details. And the details are all around us, in our past glories and defeat, infinite quirks and measured sobriety.
It is in our fabled heritage and defunct humanity, colourful history and grand inadequacies. It distinguishes our mistakes from what we term fate; our mental inferiority and political expediencies.
Necessity, like William Pitt the Younger, would say, is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants and the creed of slaves. Slaves like the Nigerian nigger.
It is not what you call him, however, but what he answers to that defines him yet this minute, another innocent child is born into the world as a Nigerian nigger. His parents shall name him Clinton, Dave, Cregg, Oliver, Richard, Lovett, Colet, Da Silva, Humphrey, Jackson, to mention a few. His real names: Akanbi, Chiedu, Ijeoma, Chimaroke, Isichei and so on shall become his “native names” or “middle names.”
At a tender age, he shall be taught to despise most things Nigerian, by parents who would eventually bemoan the erosion of the Nigerian culture.
He will be enrolled in schools that teach the superiority of western civilisation and be taught to accept his place as member of a hostage race and generation. Growing up, he would learn to evolve a masochistic appetite for racial rebuke and fashionable humiliation.
Time and over again, he would learn to assimilate and project “imported condescension” as the next best palliative to his innate malaise.
In time, he would get too impatient for his dosage of indoctrination and imported disdain and doggedly sweat his way through standoffish, ill-bred and disdainful immigration officials in order to enjoy his share of dishonour and racial profiling overseas.
Abroad, he would labour to be part of what kills him, trying the patience of unwilling hosts by his fractious misconduct and commitment to disgrace. He shall seek a better life sweeping the streets, doing the dishes, driving cabs and washing the anuses of elderly Caucasians with the desperation of one who would rather die in penury abroad than return to Nigeria.
If he were born into money and enjoys the good fortune of schooling abroad, he shall dwell fostered by the lowliness of his mental skies. He would die to impress judgemental class mates and neighbours by insane parties and acquisitions.
He will wander well kept streets – by immigrants like him – of London and New York to purchase forgetfulness at the mall.
So pronounced is his inferiority complex that the tragedies of his civilisation perpetually wail in the slightest details; he will host extravagant weddings and birthday parties often to the benefit of his host country and obsess about foreign football leagues, politics and disasters.
Like a tadpole in an Iju-Ishaga pothole, he would bathe in puddle and muck, hoping to grow scales and scissor-tail like an alligator in the English wild.
An inelegant grifter, he channels joy and fulfillment from the attainments of his exploiters while cursing his homeland on social media.
Ultimately, he seeks escape by renouncing his roots. He conveniently forgets that, no matter how long the tabby cat postures as a lion, it will forever remain a cat, a pitiful, whiny parlour pet.
He will justify his entitlement to ‘greener pasture abroad’ arguing that the so-called “first world” was built from the blood and sweat of his slave ancestors. Through modern servitude abroad, he shall endure verbal nettling as a ‘third world nigger’ by less enlightened employers.
An arrogant fellow, he considers himself a higher specie than the Asian, whom he derides as ‘Chinko.’ In turn, the Asian views him condescendingly as a ‘lazy nigger.’ While he hustled across the Mediterranean to serve his exploiters in the West, the Asian built from the rubble of his exploitation by the West, till he became an exploiter of his exploiters.
China, for instance, has risen from the detritus of its sweat factories to colonise her exploiters and recolonise Africa. The Nigerian nigger, Giant of Africa, is busy making excuses, blaming capitalism and hugging it in one breath thus personifying Chika Onyeani’s “Capitalist Nigger” depiction of the black race as a consumer race and not a productive race.
“The Black Race depends on other communities for its culture, its language, its feeding, and its clothing,” argues Onyeani, adding that blacks are economic slaves because they lack the ‘killer-instinct’ and ‘devil-may-care’ attitude of the Caucasian and the ‘spider web economic mentality’ of the Asian.
Contrary to Onyeani’s claims and Western propaganda, there is no perfect nation to be born. The crises in modern Europe and America: financial meltdown, unemployment, homelessness, extreme narcissism, sexual perversions, state-sponsored terrorism, racism among others, puncture far-fetched arguments about their invincibility and wisdom.
In order to halt the exodus of our wards overseas, where they answer to the modern nigger stereotype, Nigeria must seek economic liberation through hard work, self-reliance, entrepreneurship, and fiscal discipline. We must build better Nigerian neighbourhoods to prevent our youth from moving to hostile white neighbourhoods. We must learn to seek progress in unity too, because when spider webs unite, they attain the strength of a lion, according to an Ethiopian adage.
Then let us seek to be honest and good. Good people produce good leaders. Bad people produce and ennoble bad leadership. The attitude of the Nigerian mind towards citizenship and democracy as political measures of self-determination must be divested of the toxicity of greed and bigotries.
It is time to heal. The youth must seek progressive engagement in President Muhammadu Buhari’s government even as they unite on a new political platform, immune to the ravages of ethnicity, materialism and greed.
The tragedy of our generation subsists in our prospects and desperation to be lorded over and contained, at a price.
The offshoot is grisly. It made a Nigerian President nurture insults from reprobate Caucasians threatening to withdraw financial aids if Nigeria fails to legitimise same-sex marriage. It makes a misguided money-bag vie to purchase a British club even though his planned splurge might conveniently improve the fortune of his home league.
It is what excites the Nigerian lust to be less-than, to the perverse pleasure of the so-called “first world.”
It is an emotional attachment, a bond of interdependence between captive and captor that develops when someone threatens your life, takes away your freedom, and doesn’t kill you.
It is what causes the Nigerian to bark like a stray dog, pitifully seeking the collar end of the leash of the “first world.”
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