Tag: Winston Churchill

(The crisis of colonial consciousness in Nigeria)

The bust of Winston Churchill has been in a heavy traffic in the White House of late. George W Bush, the son of George Herbert Walker Bush, a distant cousin of the reigning queen of England, installed the finely sculpted figurine head of the greatest Englishman of the last century on his desk in the Oval Office. It was perhaps to serve as an iconic talisman in times of martial stress and a minatory reminder that people should not “misunderestimate” George Bush—as he himself infamously put things.
Warrior, statesman, political gladiator and literary genius, nobody could accuse Churchill of ducking out of any hostility or confrontation particularly when it had to do with perceived insult or contumely to Her Majesty’s Empire. Churchill saw action in Sudan in the great reckoning at Omdurman against the Mahdi and the killers of General Charles Gordon aka “Chinese Gordon.”
He went on to fight against the Boers in South Africa and was a commissioned Colonel in Gallipoli during the First World War before finally routing Adolf Hitler— or Corporal Schicklgruber as he preferred to call Hitler, thus reminding the crazed Aryan supremacist of his lowly origins as a non-commissioned officer in the bottom rung of the Austrian army.
Barack Obama, the son of an African immigrant, removed the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office and kept it in a cupboard for the remaindered. Obama, the son of an African immigrant, was not a gung-ho war-monger. Obama had a cool dispassionate disdain for the rampart militarism which has brought so much grief to America and destruction to many parts of the world. When all has been said, the fact remains that America was not founded as a warrior nation but as a lodestar of rationalism and enlightenment to other societies.
But now the bust is back—literally and perhaps figuratively. America has gone bust again. Donald Trump has restored the bust of Winston Churchill to the Oval office and to its rightful position. Perhaps Obama was just a delirious aberration, a troublous cipher or nasty glitch in the system. Parity and order have now been restored with the installation in the White House of a man who does not take hostage, a happy warrior who hits first before asking question. With the Don, you always know where you stand and where you are likely to fall.
But the truth and reality may be more nuanced than this blunderbuss analysis. There is a meeting of mind and the grinding conformity of American institutions that spares no one among these presidential exemplars, no matter the temperamental differences and dissimilarities of global outlook. Unlike Bush who is an internationalist cold warrior and like Obama, Trump has said that he would put America first.
But anybody who believes that this is a Trumpian retreat into the splendid pacificism of the Obama years will have to have a rethink. Like Bush and unlike Obama, Trump will not hesitate to commit American troops and military supremacy abroad whenever he thinks that American power and prestige have suffered an infraction particularly from the Islamic world. He had already ordered his military blue chips to come up with a war plan to contain and neutralize the ISIL threat.
Yet the irony of it all was that it was under the supposedly pacificist Obama that Osama Bin Laden was taken down in a bold and brilliant military operation which left the entire world awed and speechless. No matter what, the institutional iron grid of America will not allow any president to stray too far afield in idiosyncratic delusion before its timeless disincentives kick in.
This, however, will not be the first time the bust of Winston Churchill will be causing trouble. Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian Nobel laureate, famously remarked that it was an encounter with another bust of the celebrated British Prime Minister that roused his literary muse to pen his classic, Nobel-winning play: Death and the King’s Horseman. Great literature often shadows great historical events. Soyinka and Churchill also share another thing in common. They are both Nobel laureates in Literature. But that is a story for another day.
Surfeit with great lyricism and rousing poetry, the play zeroes in on a moment of acute historical paralysis for the embattled Oyo Empire of the Yoruba race with its territorial space already subjugated by the colonial conquerors and the ancestral sacredness of its royal domain infiltrated by the totems and tawdry tropes of metropolitan power. Consequently, what played out was an unequal contest; a clash of culture and civilization whose outcome had already been decided on the battlefield. Consciously or otherwise, Soyinka found himself working out the terms of surrender.
Yet despite this unequal exchange of cultural commodities, and in fact because of it, Soyinka was able to expose the intellectual arrogance and cultural chauvinism of the colonial conquerors who despite the hard evidence of ancestral savagery believed that other people are not entitled to their unique way of apprehending reality and making sense of history. Like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, this was a stirring work of cultural nationalism and historical self-validation.
But intellectual assaults often precede and sometimes go side by side with physical conquest and formal subjugation. Long before the European colonization of the continent, many European writers, historians, philosophers, sociologists and sundry commentators on the right and left wings of the ideological spectrum tended to dismiss the continent as a historical void teeming with savages and cannibals. George Lukacs, the great Hungarian Marxist philosopher, noted that pre-colonial Africa was like a column of ants heading in the wrong direction which had to be forcibly re-routed in the interest of humanity.
Almost five hundred years after this forcible re-routing, Africa has still not fully re-joined the mainstream of humanity. Its political, economic, intellectual and spiritual institutions are still in a shambles, resembling miscegenated hybrids that are neither wholly African nor fully westernized. Indeed it may be no exaggeration to claim that the current crisis of the state and the nation in many parts of Africa stem from unresolved conflicts arising from colonial trauma.
To be sure, Africa was already in crisis before the colonial conquest. While its traditional institutions remained mired in stasis and superstitions, the rest of the world was gradually pulling away towards modernity. It can be argued that the colonial conquest deprived Africa of an original and indigenous solution to the crisis. If left alone, Africa would have fumbled and figured its way to some version of modernity.
Yet the failure may also be a pointer to the fact that the traditional institutions were too weak and stalled to evolve on their own. History has never been a race in which the strong wait on —or wait for— the weak. Having been decimated by the colonial incursion, traditional African institutions can no longer act in political or economic concert with the African society.
Yet in many parts of Africa grafting western organs on the native body politic has proved a signal failure, a case of organ rejection by a hostile recipient. The result is an identity crisis manifesting in several theatres of human endeavour, particularly in the political, economic and spiritual departments.
In many parts of Africa, this crisis is so severe that it has made it impossible for the nation to chart a new political course or come up with a rigorously worked out economic policy which will reduce the misery of the people even as it has proved impossible to forge a new spiritual identity to rescue the populace from shamans and charlatans that feed on their religious insecurities.
In Nigeria, this crisis often manifests in the most unexpected ways. In the south it has led to anti-social deviancy as seen in the phenomenon of kidnapping, ritual killing and economic sabotage. In the north of the nation, the crisis has eventuated in the Boko Haram tragedy with thousands dead and the entire landscape devastated as a result of a purported rejection of western intellectual tradition by a vicious sect which mutated from a local militia funded by rogue politicians.
This violent antipathy to everything western which is automatically framed as anti-Islam often finds conducive soil in the ancestral hostility of the northern elite themselves to any form of modernization. Yet they have to cohabit in the same nation-space with a more western-friendly south with a fully developed syncretic culture which allows them to incorporate and domesticate extraneous matter without much damage to the integrity of their social fabric.
The question that should now be asked is why despite formal conquest and brief colonization, countries such as India, China, Japan and Indonesia never seem to suffer the colonial trauma, the economic, spiritual and intellectual disorientation that seem to be the lot of African countries. The answer is that despite the loss of physical liberty, these people and nations never surrendered the essential cultural initiative to the totalizing logic of the colonial invaders. They retained their language, their names, their cultural tradition and the religions which are the basis of their spiritual conditioning and wellbeing.
Having surrendered the cultural and intellectual initiatives to the antagonistic logic of the conquering imperialists, Africa has been in a state of traumatic transition ever since without the prospects of full westernization or the possibility of returning to the pre-colonial age.
In order to negotiate this existential quandary, African political elites take refuge in what we propose as the post-colonial Unconscious, a deliberate regression into a child-like world of make-belief and delusion in which hybrid institutions which cannot pass muster appear natural, timeless and divinely ordained. The post-colonial Unconscious is a factory for the production of alternative reality. For example, it doesn’t occur to them that the two religions that have caused so much havoc and destruction on the continent are not even indigenous to the people.
Only a programme of aggressive modernization can rescue the continent. The future is full of opportunities and possibilities for those who dare to confront it with futuristic weapons. This will involve nothing less than a drastic overhauling of our current economic, political, intellectual and spiritual categories. This major re-engineering cannot be carried out under the current structure of Nigeria. If we do not come to this reality soonest, the reality will come to us sooner.