The Yoruba boast of being the most politically sophisticated people in Black Africa, nay Africa. The bragging and braggadocio are not without some solid merits. Urbanised for over a thousand years, with a cleverly nuanced traditional kingship system which abhors tyranny and despotism and which sets store by civility and courtesy, they have also produced some ancient world class philosophers that would have made the Hellenic civilisation cringe with envy.
The sad obverse of the coin is that every social and political advancement often comes with and at a stiff price. Urbanity produces its own social pathologies. In folk mythology the city is often demonised as the nearest thing to hell itself while city-dwellers are generally regarded as unreliable, wicked and devious in the extreme. To the urban sophisticates, the rural denizens are regarded as uncouth, ill-bred and dull-witted. This abiding polarization between the city people and the rural folks often plays out with great consequences in Yoruba politics
Yet it is also very likely that when urbanisation is not accompanied by a corresponding technological development and an increase in the store of scientific knowledge, the human imagination is driven back to mysticism and intellectual sorcery. As Karl Marx famously observed, all mythologies try to dominate nature in and around the imagination. It is the advance of science that dispels such rural idiocies.
There is no extant record to show that the Yoruba developed great demotic schools and democratic learning institutions to correspond with their great urbanising drive. Or to put things more cautiously, if ever there was such a thing, the colonial conquest killed it off in embryonic formation.
Consequently and despite the political sophistication, forests of a thousand demons abound. As everybody knows, mastering the Ifa corpus is not for the mentally deficient. It is a steeplechase of mental endurance and spiritual stamina. The privatization of knowledge often leads to the privatization of power which they had tried to avoid in the first instance.
For if knowledge is also power, the restriction of access to this power breeds a spiritual and intellectual aristocracy which looms large It is the land of a thousand deities and there are more gods to appease than human beings. The result is a “natural” ruling class comprising of savants, spiritualists, royalists and other enforcers of the writ of the realm and a permanent sense of siege and unending civil war which assumes several guises and dimension. Colonial conquest merely destroyed the political and economic basis of this anti-royalist royalism but not its ideological basis. Hence, the new Yoruba aristocrat still comes with a strong sense of personal entitlement.
Had the Yoruba been an organic nation in their own right, it would not have mattered. The nation-state project is a permanent process of either working out, sublating or supplanting national contradictions. But when a people with highly developed social characteristics and idiosyncrasies are thrown into the same roiling crucible with other people, the principle and process of homogenisation makes them very vulnerable indeed. Enemies without find common cause with bitter enemies within.
This is not a closet theory of cultural superiority or historical persecution. Every human society or culture has its own way of apprehending reality or dealing with historical exigency. But there are cultures within the Nigerian nation-space that have tried to grapple with the problems of modernity by evolving into empires in their own right. When the imperializing and centralizing motif of all empire builders take hold of their ascendant avatars, they are bound to come into direct collision with other empire builders and hegemonic wannabes cohabiting in the same territory..
This is the crux of the unresolved Nigerian National Question. It is like boxing the Germans, the French and the British into the same colonial cage and asking them to get on with the job. The human toll is going to be prohibitive. There are some sharply individuated cultures that cannot be easily ground into colonial homogeneity and conformity.
So is it then that every time the Yoruba seem to be on the verge of arriving at a consensus about their fate in a multi-national nation, vicious internal dissension and dispute arise. Every time there is some progress, the progress is cancelled out by forces within playing hosts to forces without. Every time a successful mobilization of the Yoruba people around a cause occurs, swift demobilization recurs.
As the hazy outlines of the next civil war in Yoruba land appear in some relief, we must pause and shudder at the implications. In at least three states, loyal dissidents are poised and primed to challenge their political chi to a wrestling match. It is bound to end in tragedy.
Is there then some ancestral curse working itself out.? Does it mean that this land will not know any peace until the kingdom comes? Or is there some banal sociological explanation at play that continues to elude us? Could there be some sub-ethnic tension still at play which leads to a permanent polarization of elite formations?
All over Yoruba land despite the stunning advances of the last half a decade, political warlords are preparing for battle. As usual, the loudest noise is coming from the fissures within the new dominant group. As it was the case in the distant and immediate past, progressives are up in arms against progressives and as it has been famously noted by the authors of The Gods that Failed, the final battle is not between socialists and reactionaries but between progressives and former progressives.
This is what has been happening in Yoruba land in the past fifty years or more with former heroes and sturdy progressives suddenly finding themselves as internally displaced persons, or worse still, as itinerant political hookers and electoral miracle workers.. Snooper once had cause to publicly warn the late Chief Bola Ige against allowing himself to be so internally displaced to the margins of political reaction and irrelevance. It is usually the land of the unreturnable, apologies to Amos Tutuola. In an attempt to get even things often get more uneven.
How one wishes that the surviving Afenifere grandees could learn from this maxim and the terrible fate that has befallen the internally displaced. Snooper appreciates that these grand old men are fighting for their political life. But there is a fate worse than quiet political death. It is living obloquy and disgrace. When these old heroes begin to plot with a much reviled central government against the dominant political tendency they themselves have spawned it doesn’t get more tragically ironic.
In fifteen years after the D’Rovan Affair, Afenifere itself seems to have come full circle. The hunter has become the hunted. The brand has lost much steam and stock value. From a post-military global dominance of the Yoruba political horizon, it is now confined to an obscure corner. It has also spawned a younger breakaway faction which is more militant and uncompromisingly regionalist in focus and orientation. The fate it reserved for its old erring members now seem to beckon the surviving titans. Could this be the final working out of the D’Rovan imbroglio?
As the emergent gladiators in the South West prepare to battle themselves onto death, let them remember the fate of similar gladiators of yore who gravely misread the political signals or miscued the tempestuous dynamics of Yoruba post-colonial politics. Many of these men and women started out as heroes in their own right but ended up as villains.
Painfully enough, this is not a matter that can be resolved by ordinary morality. You can be morally right and politically wrong. Every political opportunist will eventually get his come-uppance. But there are moments when a political opportunist can be properly aligned and in turn with the aspiration of his people. We leave our readers this morning with a portrait of the two major avatars of our political curfew.
