Esu sleeps in the courtyard, it is too small for him/Esu sleeps in the bedroom; it is still too small for him/Esu sleeps inside the kernel of a palm fruit; now he has space large enough for him to sleep in From praise chants to Esu, the trickster god of fate, contradiction and paradox
Less is more Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
If, as the well known saying goes, too much of anything is bad, too little of everything is worse. Who prays for less of health, wealth, life, beauty, luck or fortune? Between abundance and scarcity, every woman and man alive in the world will gladly choose abundance. It seems a universal trait, doesn’t it, that we all pray for abundance and give thanks for it if it comes our way. Between having one child or two children and having five to eight, most of us would choose the latter, including people who do not have the material means to raise their children in comfort or in adequacy and security of life’s many necessities. As a matter of fact, and at least in our society and many other developing nations of the world, the poorer the man or woman, the larger the number of children desired. There is no doubt about it: most people alive now and that have ever lived almost always prefer/preferred abundance to scarcity, more to less.
Postcolonial or neocolonial Nigeria seems to have taken the application or realization of this truism much further than possibly any other society on the planet, with the possible exception of America. Thus, like the Americans, our obsession, our delight in number, size and scale is extreme to the point of being self-defining. The manifestations or expressions of this observation are legion. The previous ruling party, the PDP, used to boast that it was the biggest ruling party in Africa, even if it was also probably the worst and most decadent ruling party in the African continent and possibly in the world. Now, ideologues and opportunistic and sedulous supporters of the new ruling party, the APC, have taken up and appropriated that boastful and empty claim of being the biggest party of all. We have thirty-six states or mini-countries and against the charge by many concerned patriots that this number is too large to be sustained by the pressure of our population size, there are loud and clamant demands for still more states to be created. Too often we read smug, self-satisfied accounts claiming that Nollywood, the national video film industry, now produces more films per annum than any national film industry in the world save Hollywood. But this claim leaves out the fact that we also produce more trashy films than any other country in the world. We have far many more universities now than any other country in the African continent, and yet in the same period that we consummated this “achievement”, the ranking of our universities has taken a nose dive not only in the world at large but also among the universities of or in Africa.
Perhaps at this point in the present discussion, dear reader, it is important for me to let it be known that it is not a platitudinous jeremiad about Nigeria’s obsession with number and size that I intend in this piece. This obsession is certainly worthy of critique in its own right, most of all in its most debatable expression in the boastful claim that we are “the giant of Africa” simply because we are the most populous nation in the African continent. But far beyond platitudes, what I have in mind in this piece is a conversation in which size, number and scale might be put into conversation with their opposites – smallness, littleness and even minuteness – so as to show that our national obsession with size is not a “natural” or logical effect of our peculiarity as an African nation but is part of an ideological system that our political and social elites deliberately promote in order to run our society as their fiefdom, their modern day slave plantation or makeshift refugee camp.
There are many discursive steps to take toward a convincing demonstration of the veracity of this claim. The first step is show, in line with the two epigraphs to this essay, that in many aspects of nature, society, mythology, science, technology and art, less often leads or conduces to more; indeed, it is far more generative than gigantic or super scale and size. Moreover, it is precisely because even though it is little known or talked about, this idea that “less is more” or “small is big” pervades so many areas of life and society that I am calling it a “counter-memory” of humankind. The idea is “counter” to the apparently universal belief that abundance and bountifulness are always to be preferred to scarcity and want. Precisely what do I have in mind in this act of reclaiming this counter-memory that we may simply call “less is more”? To answer this question, we must go to our two epigraphs, one at a time.
First of all, I readily admit it. For a long time that lasted over about a decade, although I was greatly fascinated by the paradox, the enigma of the first epigraph to this essay, I did not really understand the profound meaning of the idea of Esu at last finding a space large enough for him to sleep in inside a palm nut kernel when much larger spaces like the bedroom and even the courtyard had been too “small” for him. This “meaning” is of course the idea of germination in human life in particular and all existence in general: inside the infinitely small space of a kernel or a seed, life can and is often regenerated on an almost limitless scale. Thus, in a literal and rather trivial sense, the space inside a kernel is small; but in a metaphoric and extraordinarily consequential sense, this same space is vast beyond measure.
A similar notion of infinitely small spaces and their inverse vastness is the founding basis of a large sub-discipline of the science of physics, especially so-called “particle” or subatomic physics. The spaces and entities studied and tapped for their powers in this branch of physics are so small, so minute that they cannot only not be seen by the human eye, they can be apprehended and explored only by super-microscopes powered by high-speed electron magnifiers. Moreover, this process has led to what is now known as “nano-fabrication”, a process that measures and uses possibilities made available by spatial and temporal measurements of one billionth of a second or of a meter. To normal or “ordinary” human sensory and temporal perception, a hundredth of a second or a meter is already mind-boggling. But a billionth? Yes, that is what “nano-fabrication” and “nano-technology” have now made not only possible but a vital part of scientific and technological modernity or even postmodernity. The mapping of the human genome and indeed, cloning and other spectacular forms of gene splicing in use in fields as diverse as agribusiness in the production of super harvests from genetically modified crops; resonant imaging that makes it possible to probe into the innermost recesses of human organs and tissues; and the digital revolution in the production, storage and reproduction of words, images, texts and sounds endlessly in 21st century Information Technology (IT): all these fields and processes are made possible by “nano-fabrication”, the ultimate scientific and technological realization of the mythology of Esu’s preference for infinitely small spaces that generate bountiful harvests that are not limited by time and space. Germination and regeneration through and by small seeds is for all time and all places, including seemingly desolate regions like arid deserts and frigid arctic zones.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the man from whom comes the second epigraph to this piece, was a world famous architect who was a leader of a so-called “minimalist” movement in modern art and architecture. To the baroque splendors and ornate excesses of feudal and early modern bourgeois architectures, van der Rohe and his followers substituted an austere minimalism that in form, style and function placed emphasis on as little as possible in materials, space and decorations used in the construction of both public buildings and individual dwellings. In modern African drama and literature, the greatest practitioners of minimalism are South African playwrights who were forced by the rigors of apartheid censorship and repression to use as few actors and performers as possible so as to be able to quickly disband and escape when they were raided by the regime’s goon squads. What arose from necessity became a great artistic achievement when opponents of the regime in theatre and performance created two- or three-character plays that used techniques of plays-within-the-play and role-switching to create the impression that many characters, many performers were on the stage when the actual number of the cast was one or two.
One of my personal favorites in the many expressions of this minimalist principle of “less is more” in the domain of philosophy and theory is the idea present in fields of knowledge and ideas as diverse as semiotics, structuralism and poststructuralism that the generation of reference and meaning takes place through a very limited set of rules and procedures whose combinations are however endless. On this account, if you know and can “play” astutely with the few rules and procedures, you can generate reference and meaning endlessly. What is particularly exciting about this “theory” is the contention that though experts may be able to expound on its operations more than laymen and women, by the very structure of our brains and minds as human beings, we are wired to create, change, play with, revise and renew meaning and reference as much as we like or are compelled by circumstances and/or intention. In other words, every woman and man is a potential activator or beneficiary of this principle of “less is more”. Halleluiah!
It is necessary at this point to say with as much emphasis as possible that these reflections are not limited to and by ultramodern, millennial scientific, technological and artistic developments. Thus, I do declare that the idea that less is more and can be regenerative, that life can be enriched and or renewed by wanting and consuming as little as possible has always been around in nearly all the cultures of the world. Nearly all the great thinkers, visionaries and moral reformers of the world made it a habit, an obligation on themselves and their followers, to want and own as little as possible. And there is a saying, an adage that is found in almost all the folklores of the world that says that the only real and true way to be “rich” is to want, need and own as little as possible. The late Ulli Beier used to say that the real “Babalawos” or “Dibias” of our traditional precolonial societies never made accumulation of wealth their passion or mission in life. Jesus famously asked of all those who wished to follow him and be his disciples to sell off all their belongings and like him, take the vows of poverty.
I am not romanticizing poverty and condemning wealth and abundance as values in and of themselves, compatriots. It is the worship, the idolatry of money and wealth that I identify as an obsession foisted on all in our society by our political, social and religious elites that I condemn and unmask in this piece. More specifically, it is the perpetration and perpetuation of this idolatry of money and wealth through our national obsession with number and size that I explore and condemn. We do not deal in small, modest numbers and scale, compatriots. Looting that is countable in millions and not in billions does not get our attention and concern. With us, wastage and squandermania that do not astonish in their scale do not cause outcry and outrage. In next week’s concluding piece in the series, we shall link this obsession to the hegemonic ideology of a demographically and socially tiny elite that sees the country as its fiefdom.
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
