- Clarifications, elaborations and amplifications
The Return of the Man from Birmingham
THIS is supposed to be a commemorative piece. Next week, it will be exactly fifty five years that is February, 1971, since yours sincerely published his first op-ed piece in a major Nigerian newspaper while still a teenager and a staffer with the Nigerian Tribune, then based at Pa Aminu’s house at Adeoyo, Ibadan. University education at the then University of Ife commenced later in the year in October. Titled Enoch Powell and the Coloured Immigrants, the piece was submitted to the Features Editor of The Nigerian Tribune, Mr Fola Oredoyin, who later in 1979 ended up in the Lagos State House of Assembly while his boss, the Editor in Chief, Alhaji Lateef Jakande, ended up in the gubernatorial mansion. A man of pure and noble heart, Oredoyin immediately published the piece in the features page while hinting the editor, Mr Olukayode Bakre, that his wonder-boy had done it again. In effect, this would mean a lifetime spent at the barricades of the mind in addition to other dangerous political sorties.
But this is not so much a commemoration of a personal benchmark, as significant as that is, but a moment of bemused introspection about the changing or evolving nature of the phenomenon of elite consensus. The concept of elite consensus is not original to the author. It was first noticed in the works of some leading scholars of Scandinavian and northern European politics while the author was a researcher in the Netherlands at the tail end of the nineties.
Readers of this column and some other writings by the writer would have noticed a scholarly obsession with the concept, particularly as it pertains to the postcolonial nations of Africa with Nigeria as primal focus of attention. Having closely studied what they observed as the virtually intractable and “pillarised” differences among the political elite of these Nordic countries, the scholars came to the conclusion that only skillful negotiations and “pacted” deals could have allowed the nations to transit to meaningful and impactful democratic order.
Without this elite consensus, elections are national fiascos foretold. We can then imagine the prospects for real and meaningful democratic order in a postcolonial Africa with its multiethnic armada, its cultural and religious polarizations and fractious political elite. An observer of the just concluded elections in Uganda noted with wry submission to fate that the country has had nine head of state since independence but none has ever handed over power to his successor. Yoweri Kaguta Museveni has been at it for a whopping forty years.
Theories of dynamic human interaction and political culture evolve not from scholars’ studies and closet libraries but by closely observing the dialectical collision and collusion of contending and countervailing actions in the theatre of politics as factions slug it out on a daily basis bending or altering concepts and received notions to human will in the process. This is where our Powell article assumes a significant analytical dimension for our troubled world and the whole notion of elite consensus. The only thing its youthful author recalls at this moment is the ringing phrase “resultantly negrophobist”as a sophomoric dismissal of Enoch Powell’s outlandish rant.
But who on earth is Enoch Powell? And why is his unquiet ghost disturbing the peace of the world from the Warwickshire cemetery where his illustrious bones are interred? As a person, Powell was as distinguished as they come. He was MP for Smethwick in Birmingham in the sixties. By consensus, the Midland politician with the manic glint of a possessed shaman, is regarded as the most cerebrally outstanding and intellectually gifted person to have sat in the House of Commons in the last century. He was as brilliant as they come. Having taken a Double Starred First at Trinity College, Cambridge, he was named a full professor of Greek at the University of Sidney in Australia by the age of twenty five and had ended the Second World War as a Brigadier in the British Army. A sympathetic and perceptive observer rued that Enoch Powell wasted his exceptional talents on politics.
Where fame crosses into infamy and renown dips into notoriety is easy to plot in this instance. On April 20, 1968 Powell delivered a speech which has turned out to be as historic as it is a landmark intervention in modern British politics. Dispensing with customary niceties, polite formalities, coded etiquette and the British admonition that a gentleman must wear his hat and opinion lightly, Powell tore into the heart of British post-war elite consensus by dismissing the whole notion of unchecked immigration by coloured people and the idea of integrated racial harmony in a society whose culture immigrants can never imbibe as a derisive hoax and a clear and present danger to the health of the nation. Deploying his immense erudition and unrivalled mastery of Classics, Powell dropped an apocalyptic bombshell: if the rot was not immediately arrested, Britain would soon resemble a River Tiber foaming with blood.
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Retribution was swift and exemplary. Edward Heath dismissed him from his post as Shadow Cabinet. Speaking invitations were summarily cancelled. Polite circles began avoiding him. He had infracted against the cardinal canons of British post-war settlement: no part of the society must be made to feel unwanted or unappreciated however small and whatever may be the race, colour or creed. That is an invitation to anarchy and social conflagration. The British learnt their lesson the hard way in bloody confrontations in their colonies. Fighting alongside their old colonial tormentors had also shown the natives that there are no superior races where suffering and pains are concerned, and a baronetcy is no armour against bullets.
The snag in this ruling class social engineering is that a survey of the time put the percentage of those who privately agreed with Powell’s gloomy prognostications at sixty which amounted to a dire forewarning of what the future held in store. Just around the corner lay Margaret Thatcher’s brutal rightwing intervention which felt like social Darwinism on steroids. While Enoch Powell did not believe so much in ideology as the driving principle of politics and human interaction, the puritanical daughter of a Methodist alderman was an astringent cold warrior who believed everyone could be pigeon-holed with ideological labels. This obsession with endless labeling powered by a deeply suspicious and polarizing mindset eventually led Thatcher to a political overreach. She bluntly declared that there was no such thing as society. This finally set the alarm bell ringing in Tory circuits particularly among the storied grandees who clung to the old liberal consensus like a waning talisman.
At that point in time, we were still far from the consequences of Margaret Thatcher’s open heart surgeries on the British patient, but not very far in real time. Enoch Powell’s Tiber was welling up with its gory contents but not about to overwhelm its banks. It will take the failure of Tony Blair’s anodyne, a mere leftwing sheen and gloss on Thatcherite Darwinism, and a series of incompetent and dismally limited Tory leaders hovering over the patient as if it is a fascinating cadaver, to tip the scale. This is not discounting unfavourable global developments particularly the resurgence of an economically buoyant China, Russia’s geopolitical malevolence, the rise of xenophobic nationalism and authoritarian populism all over Europe and America and what appears to be the fundamental inability of the British political class to reset the nation’s economic categories in the face of growing international encirclement. Britain has been living on borrowed times and borrowed largesse. The creditors have arrived. Harold Macmillan’s patrician ululations to his country people that they had never had it so good was predicated on an economic delusion without any foundation in reality and real time production.
Now, the man from Birmingham is back with an ear-splitting bang. Almost sixty years after his hair-raising prediction, Enoch Powell is moving to the centre stage of British politics once again after being banished to the margins. His prediction is about to come to pass but not in the way he himself could have foretold. People make predictions based on their own prejudices and the colouring of their imagination. And they come to pass not in the way they could have imagined. This is due to the cunning of history. Unless there is an apocalyptic meltdown, the streets of Britain are unlikely to foam with blood. But never in the postwar history of Britain has there been such open xenophobia, such foul and sullen distemper in the streets with the fabric of elite consensus completely rent asunder.
The circumstances of an enfeebled and exhausted lapsed empire unable to come to terms with its own historic superannuation which made Enoch Powell to issue his tempestuous edict have now manifested in the fullness of time. From the margins of elite disavowal, Nigel Farage and his Reform UK party have happened upon the funeral rites with the proboscis relentlessly probing and devouring the grisly entrails of the Conservative Party. Appropriately too, and with superb dark humour, the Conservative Party has gone ahead to enlist the services of a Black woman originating from Lagos to preside over the rituals of passage. Let no one deny that Kemi Badenock is doing very well. It was not for nothing that her father, a noted physician, was known as Iwosan, or healer. Enoch Powell who saw no difference between the two parties and who quit his party for the Ulster Unionist Party will purr with satisfaction wherever he is.
It is a collapse of the elite consensus which has held Britain together since the end of the Second World War. No one can be sure of what will replace it. This is what happens when political elites, within the limits and limitations of their talents and endowments, are overwhelmed by historical circumstances beyond their remit. It will be foolish and feckless to count out this great and gifted country, despite all its foibles and historical peccadilloes. No nation is perfect. Those of us who consider ourselves as avid Anglophiles will be rooting for its revival and rejuvenation. For now, the old order is gone. It will take a new generation of gifted and visionary political actors to put a new deal together based on extant realities.
There is a signal lesson here for the elites of postcolonial Africa. As we have seen from the above, forging national consensus is not a tea party. Political elites who have not reached a national consensus on the shared destiny of their nation cannot be expected to achieve the level of critical unanimity to effect a positive change when it comes to the political and economic direction of their nation. This is the consuming tragedy of many contemporary African nations.
