This must be a depressing hour indeed for the man who “fashioned the drama of existence” and first black Nobel prizewinner in Literature, Professor Wole Soyinka. A comment uttered in what could only be a protest against the willful trampling on the dignity of the African immigrants and other “underdogs” has, alas, been twisted out of its moral joint and now forms the singsong of some idle parrots, the horde of little minds, barricading the social media.
Ahead of the now historic November 8 (2016) US polls, Kongi told a gathering of students in America that in the event that that loose-cannon Donald Trump won he would not wait to be reminded before ripping his Green Card and evacuating the acclaimed God’s own country, his present station.
Asked again by The Interview (Nigeria’s wave-making monthly magazine) amid the widespread shockwave that trailed the news of the Republican candidate’s victory, the literary giant neither quibbled nor wavered.
But that did not seem to impress the cyber stalkers who, akin to the typical lynch mob lurking in Nigeria’s urban centre forever itching for a chance to festoon someone with a burning tyre, cannot wait to see the much esteemed octogenarian descend into the obscenity of publicly shredding what many would lie, if not die, to possess.
Never one to shy away, particularly when epistolary rats are foolish enough to disturb his tail, the literary lion has since tackled his cyber assailants efficiently and effectively in a vigorous rejoinder entitled “Red Card, Green Card – Notes Towards the Management of Hysteria”.
But this is beside the point. For me, I think the real tragedy is two-fold. For “the hysterical” not to see the Trump’s rise clearly as an urgent invitation to debate Nigeria’s place in a putative new world order defined by a man that can technically be certified as a mad man and, instead, be more obsessed with the banality of watching Soyinka physically tear his Green Card is very, very alarming indeed.
Second is the possibility at all that a generation of Nigerian Pharisees now exist and are so blissfully ignorant of the history of their own very fatherland to, even for a drunken moment, ever doubt Soyinka’s words once the issue borders on the defense of human dignity.
So, as we can now see, it is not only America whose moral capital seems on the decline on account of Trump’s thunderous disavowal of all the lofty values the rest of the world had associated with her in the last half a century; same ethical atrophy is clearly discernible in contemporary Nigeria with the rise of youths with neither a sense of history nor a social conscience, but more conversant with even the minutest details of, say, the soccer celebrities of European soccer leagues.
If they had bothered to read and understand their nation’s history, they would not have easily forgotten that Soyinka had in the 90s cast away the coveted national honour CFR medal earlier bestowed on him in 1986 by General Ibrahim Babangida in protest of the June 12 annulment and the subsequent clampdown on dissent. He later risked death in leading a global campaign against Abacha despotism – was actually sentenced to death in absentia – until democracy was restored in Nigeria in 1999.
So, could anyone have forgotten so quickly the legend of “the mystery gun-man” who stormed a public radio station in 1965 and forced the presenter to play a pre-recorded statement censoring the ruling party over perceived repression of the opposition? Again, when it was most dangerous, someone visited the Biafran enclave from the campus of University of Ibadan with a view to persuading the secessionists to return to the peace process.
For this, he was clamped into solitary confinement by the Gowon regime for more than two years. The title of his prison memoirs “The Man Died” was inspired by revolutionary George Magaski who in his own “Letter To Compatriots” memorably declared, “The man dies in him who keeps silence in the face of tyranny.”
So, to the cowards who today luxuriate in the anonymity of the cyber space, against the aforementioned heritage of uncommon sacrifice in pursuit and defense of noble values and honour, how much weight does a mere American Green Card carry?
Today, these spoilt brats sired in philistinism, immersed in cheap intoxicants of ignorance, seem least troubled by the farrago of nasty things Trump said about vulnerable African immigrants, especially Nigerians.
But all decent people like Soyinka, who treasure their own dignity as members of the human race, should be appalled. Racial integration thought irreversibly cemented in US on account of the Obama ascendancy eight years ago is what is invariably called to question by Trump’s tantrums.
Kongi would then seem to find it exceedingly hard continuing to inhabit a space, however alluring, where a bare-faced racist holds court. Ordinarily, given his world celebrity status, Soyinka would not have needed to beg or lie to get visa into America. His offer to rip his Green Card once the US falls under Trump’s shadow should, therefore, be properly seen as a symbolic gesture of protest on behalf of his nameless compatriots among other vulnerable categories about to be meted undeserved humiliation.
Now, as the rest of the world braces for an uncertain future, it is most logical that we first attempt to locate the trigger to the present meltdown. Prophesy two decades ago by Samuel Huntington in his seminal book, The Clash of Civilizations, on the perils of globalisation is coming to pass with chilling accuracy.
Obsession, as he put it, of triumphalist west upon the collapse of the old Soviet Union and the socialist/communist tradition in China and elsewhere to export and implant its cultures and values around the universe with little or no regard for local sensibilities in other civilizations meant the battlefield would inevitably shift from old geographical borders to the temples of faiths and the shrines of ethnic nationalism.
As a corollary to Brexit which shook Europe four months ago, Trump’s triumph was undoubtedly fueled by the rising tide of ethnic nationalism. The hell-raising far-right rabble are also already out in Hungary, Poland, France and Germany, baying for blood. The aborigines of affluent western nations are simply no longer willing to accept massive immigration into their countries as part of the price for globalization. Hence, the new battle cry – “Take back our country!”
But the great paradox is that it is all a self-inflicted pain. There is no way the immigration flood largely from Syria recorded at the borders of recognizable western nations in the past two years can be isolated from the miscalculations a decade and a half earlier by the allied powers with the frenzy of “regime change” after September 11 in 2001. For instance, rogue Saddam Hussein was hurriedly uprooted from Iraq in 2003 in pursuit of a phantom weapon of mass destruction (WMD) without a coherent contingency plan to manage the aftermath in the highly combustible Middle East.
Eight years later, the social media, a powerful tool brought by globalization, helped stoke the fire of the Arab Spring which paved the way for eccentric Moammar Ghaddafi, but a stabilizing influence in North Africa and parts of the Arab world, to be bludgeoned to death on the street of Tripoli.
In neighboring Syria, Bashir Assad has managed to survive the Arab Spring for six years, but at a horrific human toll.
Now, the lethal arsenal Ghaddafi left behind have been harvested by Hussein’s demobilized fighters who formed the core of ISIS, which straddles a chunk of Iraq and swath of Syria.
What then seems utterly insufferable to Soyinka and other men and women of conscience around the world today is the unwillingness of the resurgent nativists as privileged members of the western establishment to accept that intolerance of others’ values and faiths from the outset is at the root of the moral crisis that has engulfed the world community in the past decade, of which Donald Trump is the latest mutation.
