Where one thing stands, another thing will stand beside it – Chinua Achebe
Where one thing stands, another thing will stand by it. This simple but profound truth that the late Chinua Achebe liked to use to critique dangerous forms of literal-mindedness was extrapolated by the novelist and thinker from traditional Igbo oral sources. To understand and appreciate its deep insight into human motivations and behavior, we have to recognize that Achebe did not mean that people are so blind, so dim-witted that they see only one thing where two or more things stand together. No, what Achebe meant is that where you see only one thing, look carefully or deeper and you will find that another thing that you hadn’t noticed at all is there, standing in complication or even contestation of the thing you had noticed. To give some examples, where courage stands, you might also find weakness or irresoluteness if you look carefully enough. Similarly, by the side of joy may lurk gnawing intimations of sorrow.nd where defeat seems all but inevitable, the seeds of victory may be there to be harvested if only you can sense their hidden presence. This broad emendation of Achebe’s intriguing adage provides the basis for the link that I have in mind between life expectancy and HDI, which is the acronym for Human Development Index. Before I go fully into this link between the two as the topic of this week’s essay, permit me to give a brief explanation of how it came to my mind as a necessary subject for the column this week.
Some of the members of the UI Class of ’67 called me after reading last week’s essay on death or mortality itself as something that lurks in the minds of virtually all members of our generation. For the most part, those who called me expressed an appreciation for the mixture of humor and pathos in the piece. But quite a few questioned how, at the end of the essay, I seemed to them to have rather too easily or even cavalierly contrasted life expectancy in the United States and Nigeria. One caller observed that even in America, even in countries where the statistics for life expectancy at birth are very high, death comes unannounced and unheralded at any point in life. Echoing this observation, another former classmate stated that the mystery, the harrowing enigma of death when it comes cannot and should not be reduced to abstract, statistical figures. To these two callers and a few others that more or less proffered a similar critique of last week’s essay, I readily accepted their insistence on the phenomenal or existential irreducibility of death for all human beings. But I insisted that the point I was making in comparing the life expectancy figures of different countries and regions of the world was not only valid but necessary. It is this validity, this necessity that I wish to explore in the link that I am urging in this piece between life expectancy and HDI, the human development index. Thus, following Achebe’s adage, I suggest that where life expectancy stands, other indicators of HDI always stand beside it even if, for the most part, we often don’t see the connection, the tension between the two.
In this discussion, there is space for only a brief discussion, a succinct explanation of what HDI means and how it came into the theoretical discourse of development economists and sociologists. Going beyond conventional measurement of development primarily through economic indicators like per capita income, gross national product (GNP) and gross domestic product (GDP), it was some social scientists associated with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) that came up with the HDI as a more satisfactory measurement of development both among the nations and regions of the world and the individuals and groups that populate them. For these development economists and sociologists of the UNDP, in addition to the narrowly economic indicator of per capita income, we have to add indicators of education and life expectancy in order to get a fuller and more useful measurement of development. In other words, where for instance development had conventionally been measured by how large the middle class of a nation and its national economy is, educational attainment and lifespan were added to give development a more humane, more just and dignified resonance. On this account, to gauge how really developed a nation is, we should bring how long its people live into consideration with how well educated they are and how much they earn and keep as wages, salaries and assets. To apply this observation to the topic of discussion in last week’s column, I seek the reader’s indulgence in going back to the central metaphor of the departure lounge of life. In doing this, my informing idea is that the three indicators of HDI – per capita income, lifespan and education – stand together in that metaphor of the existential departure lounge. What do I have in mind in making this suggestion?
Well, for a departure lounge, let us substitute a “Danfo” or a “Molue” bus as a metaphor for life and death in our country. Along all the stops on the route of this metaphorical bus, the passengers get off one by one when each man or woman gets to his or her destination, to the end of the road or the journey for him or her. While the journey lasts for each and everyone in the bus, it is a very rough and sometimes perilous ride. It is often also boisterous, mixing laughter with anxiety, gaiety with all manner of unpleasant sensory experiences. It is not unknown for fights to break out, for pockets to be picked clean and for female passengers to be bodily groped by total strangers. Bearing these things in mind, it can be readily seen that as a metaphor for life and death, the “Danfo” bus comes from another region, another location of class and social hierarchy in our country than the metaphor of the departure lounge of life. Not to put too blunt a marker on it, only the elite, only the members of the “traveling” or “jetsetter” class can find the metaphor of the departure lounge revelant to the experience of their social group. Why? The great majority of Nigerians have never traveled – and will never travel – by air.
I should perhaps remark here that I do not proffer these two contrasting metaphors of life and death gratuitously or hypocritically. Yes, this column is named for Nigeria’s and Africa’s “talakawa” but I do not romanticize poverty; I work to either substantially reduce it or end it completely, believing fervently that this can and ought to be achieved in my lifetime. Moreover, I am one of Nigeria’s “jetsetter” elite and it is more than thirty years since I last traveled in a “Danfo” bus. In other words, I bring the two contending metaphors of the departure lounge and the “Danfo” bus together not to shame the elite into facile feelings of guilt about elitism but to argue that even in a phenomenon like death that is profoundly existential and cannot be reduced to abstract statistical figures, there is more than one way of dying – and of living. Again, to recall Achebe’s adage: where one thing stands, another thing will stand beside it. Yes, death is an irreducibly existential phenomenon common to all of humankind; but standing right beside that fact is the reality of death as also a profoundly social phenomenon. Above all else, standing right by the side of death is life.
It cannot have escaped the careful reader that life expectancy and education are two of the three indicators of HDI, the third being per capita income. We, the members of the UI Class of ’67 and our entire generation of Nigeria’s educated elite have benefitted enormously from our country’s resources. I do not wish to go over the incredible details of amenities and services that we enjoyed as undergraduates, things that the current generation of university students in our country cannot even dream about, let alone enjoy concretely. If this observation is incontestable, it is not, however, the main thing that I wish to emphasize about the privileges that we enjoyed generationally; rather, my main impulse here is to throw into the discussion consideration of the probability that education (and per capita income) has played a role in our collective life expectancy as a social group and a generation. This is because, thanks to perspectives introduced into development studies by the concept of the HDI, we now know that life expectancy itself is experienced differently by the social groups of a country, indeed of all the countries of the world. Compatriot, think here again of the two metaphors of the departure lounge and the “Danfo” bus: who does not know that far many more people die by road transportation than air travel? Indeed, who does not know that among all forms of road transportation in our country, the lorries and buses serving the urban and rural poor cause far many more deaths than the means of transportation available to the elite?
In bringing these observations and reflections to a close, let me emphasize as strongly as possible that I am not privileging death as a social phenomenon that is experienced differentially by upper, middle and lower social groups over death as an existential phenomenon that is deeply personal to every human being. To the contrary, my suggestion is that one does not exclude the other and for this reason, we should keep both together when we talk about individual and generational experiences of living and dying in our country and our world. Indeed, in this spirit, why not end the discussion on the possibility, the necessity of bringing the metaphors of the departure lounge and the “Danfo” bus closer together? How do we do this, you might ask? Well, isn’t it possible to substantially narrow the gap between death through “Danfo” buses and death by air crashes? Has this not, as a matter of fact, been achieved in some parts of the world?
This much is clear and I readily admit it: each woman and man dies her or his death and mortality is a profoundly existential phenomenon. Even where people die together in catastrophes involving tens, dozens, hundreds or thousands, the death of each person is experienced as a deeply personal occurrence. But then, don’t we all come together when one person dies? Don’t we seek comfort and community even in the grief that death causes? Don’t we cherish the fact that life continues after death – literally in those that the dead leave behind them and symbolically and psychically in those whose lives the work of the departed has profoundly touched? Where one thing stands, another thing will stand beside it, compatriot.
Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
