DSK et sa pipe

Peeping Dom
‘Wiping the unbelieving suds from his eyes, Dominique peeped once more through the judas hole in the bathroom door. He saw the panty-hosed assassin sent by Nicolas lean forward to pull out a gold-plated .22 derringer pistol from her patent-leather boot. She was standing near the door, her back turned to it. He knew he could easily handle this one. Instanter he jumped out naked, taking firm hold of, and screaming L.H.O.O.Q! at, her protruding derrière. They crashed onto the floor of the hotel room, entwined…’ (alias Nick Carter)

Déjà vu?
‘In 1958 France under Charles de Gaulle, hoping to get laid, propositioned, among other candidates, the people of Guinea—the reply was an emphatic NON! with Sékou Touré as leader of the negative chorus. Angry, France raped and demobilized Guinean infrastructure before scampering away, leaving the country with an independence that was well-nigh meaningless. 2011, and history seems set to some sort of playback mode. A moneyed French lecher propositions a Guinean hotel maid. Her answer is the selfsame Touréan NON! Monsieur Le Propriétaire gets very très angry and attempts to lay waste her infra-, meso- and superstructure alike. After which he tries to vamoose—but that is where the tape in history’s cassette gets twisted. If only Strauss-Kahn, luminary of the French Socialist Party, had spent time imbibing Marx, instead of organizing the global capitalist cash nexus, he would have come across the warning that history never repeats itself in exact pattern…’ (alias Frantz Fanon)

Ijioromi and Idominiiki
‘Idominiiki’s career is akin to that of Ijioromi, the celebrated wrestler in Edo mythology. They both share a love of slamming others onto the floor. One day, against the better judgement and admonitions of his brother Ekpofi, Ijioromi, having rubbed the back of every contender on earth in the mud, decided to pursue his cruel delight in celestial realms. He took flight to the land of the spirits and challenged all and one to a wrestling match. It was a risk he barely survived. At the end of the misadventure he had to flee for dear life. However, there’s one difference. Ijioromi fought men; Idominiiki fights only women. He fights them whether they are willing or not. Idominiiki has conquered all the women of Gallia and some parts of Europa into the bargain. Recently, despite the warning of his friend and rival Sakozi, he decided to take flight to the land of the Nacirema, a people who lay claims to being the custodians of the trust of the Gods. His goal is to slug it out with all the women there. Will he survive the consequences of his hubris? His very first abortive bout with an unwilling woman of the underclasses of the Nacirema has seen him lose courage and attempt to cut and run back home. But the Nacirema have their own rules. He must stay and fight. And he will fight henceforth with his arms pinioned behind his back. And he must fight all comers—woman, man, lawyer, liar, scribe and blind justice armed with a two-edged sword and scales for measuring your bollocks after harvesting them…’ (alias Euhemerus)

A rejoinder to Yomi Ogunsanya’s Jos and Maiduguri Attacks: If not ethno-religious, then what?

Well Yomi, I believe that there is more going on in different parts of the north than a neat struggle between Muslims and Christians, or between ‘indigenes’ and ‘settlers’. In some parts of the north, ethnicity overrides religion. (E.g. Yoruba Muslims are not safe when the violence starts in these places. Sometimes what we have is violence against ‘southerners’ perpetrated by ‘northerners’ of all manner of religious persuasions, but usually with Muslims as ringleaders and majority of the attackers. In Jos, southerners, especially the Igbo, have willy-nilly been lumped into the same category as the Berom in a struggle that is supposed to be between the latter and the Hausa-Fulani. And please note that there are Hausa Christians and Berom Muslims in Jos, no matter what is the predominant religion in either group.) In other parts of the north, fundamentalism overrides ethnicity: i.e., Islamic moderates of whatever ethnicity are not safe; in point of fact, they may be the principal targets of enactments by fundamentalists and radicals. Sheik Gumi was the scourge of the Sufi brotherhoods of the Tijaniyya and the Qadiriyya.

But let me point out that ethnic purism and religious fundamentalism do not necessarily lead to pogroms. There are Jews, for instance, who are purists in terms of ethnicity and religion. They will not marry Gentiles or break bread with them or even enter a Gentile home. But that doesn’t mean that they are committed to killing off every Gentile they come across in their society. The ultra-fundamentalist Jew does not mingle with moderate Jews as well as with Gentiles. But the fundamentalist Jew is not committed to a policy of pogrom. So it boils down to what people decide to do with their ethnic purism and religious fundamentalism. I think that the ‘will to dominate’, that is, to forcibly have the upper hand in power relations, or politics if you like, plays a role in how people parlay ethnic and religious differences into material for building a formidable architecture of violence against the Other. I don’t have firsthand ethnographic data and details on the north. But I have thought and read about these things at length, and have considered them in light of what I have learnt about other societies. My friend Asabe Johnson-Ali (she is a Christian but her family on both sides is made up of people who hold different religious views, plus she is Chibok/Fulani) recently lost an uncle and a cousin to the Boko Haram in Maiduguri. It is not the first time she will be losing members of her family to this kind of stupidity. She says that the Boko Haram are targeting prominent Muslims and police officers more than they attack Christians. The Muslims who give in to ‘western’ education seem to be more despicable in the sight of the Boko Haram. The way I see it is that Christian extermination is the ultimate goal of the Boko Haram; but first they must deal with the traitors in their own fold.

Why are the Boko Haram against ‘western’ innovation? I don’t think it is as a result of something inherent in the Muslim faith. There was a time when the Muslim world was the custodian of ‘western’ thought. They preserved the traditions of Plato and Aristotle, and even based their innovations in mathematics and science on what they took from the ancient Greeks. They must have seen that the dichotomy between the west and the east was not helpful. Didn’t Solon, Plato, Herodotus, etc., etc., acknowledge the Egyptian springboard of Greek philosophy and science? And didn’t Egypt derive some of the ingredients of its civilization from Mesopotamia? The ecumenical spirit was very strong in Muslim societies. In some Muslim societies today, the ecumenical spirit is on the rise. I look to such forums as the Doha Debates hosted by the BBC’s Tim Sebastian in Qatar. The Doha Debates shows that the religion of Islam does not stop Muslims from exercising their human capacities of intellection and ratiocination. Many Muslims in the audience of the Doha Debates display an intellectual horizon that stretches to the frontiers of critical thought beyond the delimited spaces of their immediate societies and religion. They are not afraid to speak of the political reasons for the suppression of freedom of speech and thought in much of the Muslim world. The reasons are never simply religious. They are political and cultural. Religion is used to achieve ends that are political and cultural. The hatred of innovations in much of the Muslim world is a politico-cultural reaction.

From your own argument, the case of Sokoto serves as an example of how politics and culture are very relevant as frames for viewing the situation. The Muslim establishment in Sokoto feels no threat of rivalry from the Christians because the latter make up an insignificant minority in that state. This is the ‘politics window’ on the situation. But suppose the Christians became a significant minority in Sokoto: what would result? Violence? If violence is the customary reaction of the northern Muslim establishment to the rise of significant minorities, then I think that we must always keep the cultural window on this situation open. It is the encompassing window because it makes us see how that Muslim establishment treats minorities in the political arena, whatever the strength of the latter’s significance. So the politics window is but one shutter in the culture window. You seem to be arguing that there is a mentality, indeed, a culture, of violent mistreatment of significant minorities/the Other among the northern Muslim establishment. When these minorities/the Other are not significant, they are not treated violently; when they grow into significance, then violence becomes their portion. If this is the established modus operandi, and if the institutions of society in the north facilitate the execution of this modus operandi, then what we have is a system of doing things adopted by an important section of Muslims in northern Nigerian.

A system of doing things is also known as a culture. And cultures are made by people; people also manufacture their praxis of religion and ethnicity, and not the other way round. Ethnicity and religion do not manufacture people. I don’t think we can safely say that mere ethno-religious differences have led to the present shape of things in the north. These differences are to be found in any society, but they do not eventuate in the same results and consequences everywhere. These differences become violent factors when they are embedded in a framework of troubled power relations. From there, things can degenerate to a level where, sorry for my reversal of the common feminist maxim, the political becomes the personal. As positions harden and ossify in public discourse and the rhetoric of violent mobilization saturates the social atmosphere and consciousness, neighbour comes to detest neighbour and to prepare for that day of bloody reckoning. I don’t think we can easily divorce the political from the religious in social crises of this nature. Reports in the media tell us of how people of this or that religious and/or ethnic affiliation are responsible for disparate and concerted acts of violence. They are acting out their religious and/or ethnic hatred of the Other. Yet they can think up and execute these actions only because of the structure of violent power relations within their society. They can say they are advancing their ethnic and/or religious positions through these acts of violence only because their formations are engaged in a political fight to the finish with the Other. They are using religion for purposes that are ultimately political.

As the political becomes the personal in ethnic and religious violence in the north, people draw upon savage recesses in the human imagination to inflict grim horror on one another. Eye-witness accounts and media reports are replete with details of the variety of terror being enacted in these places. Neighbour pelts neighbour with stones and rotten tomatoes. Wells are poisoned. Wedding parties are attacked. Villages are stormed in the middle of their nightly sleep. Busloads of commuters are offered up as burnt offerings to this or that deity. Foetuses are captured from wombs and executed.  Etc., etc., etc. In Borno state, moderate Muslims, law enforcement officers, Christians avoid public spaces and even their own verandahs.  Asabe tells me she feels safe only indoors. But she must go to work and go to church and go to the market. She must personally run the gauntlet of violence every day in Maiduguri. She says she saw the governor on TV and he was visibly shaken; she says many of the Boko Haram foot soldiers are youth, lumpenproletariat, who used to do ‘election work’ for the big politicians.

It is important to factor in the recruitment of foot soldiers for the purpose of doing this violence. It has always largely been among the poor and the underclasses. Mutallab, whom you cite, is the exception that proves the rule about the recruitment of actual fighters in the north. And Mutallab did not risk his life in a Nigerian fight, even though that point is not relevant to this argument. The pattern in the recruitment of people to carry out acts of violence reveals an economic angle that must not be ignored. From the days of the Maitatsine, this pattern has been a constant source of concern, for it points up the sorry fact that so long as there is a vast army of people who have nothing to lose in a life of abject poverty and deprivation, the task of recruitment is made easier for the political entrepreneurs of ethno-religious violence in the north. But a new pattern of recruitment is unfolding before us. I refer to the sophistication of the weapons used by these new ‘Islamists’, especially in Jos. I refer to numerous eye-witness accounts that the attackers come attired in military fatigues. The new recruitment is done among people who have good knowledge of the use of assault rifles and bombs. They show mastery of military precision and ample field experience in scorched-earth policy. There is somebody investing in these new fighters. These are no mere Fulani herdsmen armed with bows and arrows, amulets and incantations. There is plenty of evidence that the power game has entered a new phase.

I can speak of political Islam in Nigeria because not even Uthman dan Fodio’s movement and jihad were simply religious events. The most important motivation and outcome of the jihad led by Sheik Uthman was political and not religious reform. Just consider that some his generals even tried to take control of Borno, a Muslim state. And today, the Sokoto Caliphate is a crypto-state within Nigeria. You make mention of local and international conspiracies to ‘institute a theocratic order in Nigeria’. That puts me in mind of the statement that the aim of the jihad started by Sheik Uthman was to dip the Koran in the Atlantic Ocean down south in Nigeria. Really, it is noteworthy that you say that establishing a theocracy in Nigeria seems to be the aim of those who sponsor the present wave of terror in the north. What is a theocracy? It is a political system in which religion is used to manufacture and underwrite the authority of a power formation. In a theocracy strict control of religious beliefs subserves the agenda of the political authorities. So you see, even you admit that politics is the issue. In any case, although I characterize the Sokoto Caliphate as a crypto-state within the Nigerian system, I am not willing to say that it stands to gain anything from the kind of political Islam that is on the rampage in many parts of northern Nigeria. Its fate is that of Frankenstein. The monster, having come to realize the strength of its capacity for violence is now berserk, and Frankenstein is even more threatened than the rest of us by the aggressive indiscipline of an agency that ought to be under its control.

But what about the Nigerian state? Its culpability cannot be doubted for one moment. The Nigerian state and its agent have always acted in the most inept manner, treating wrong symptoms and only serving to generate even more resentment at the end of the day. The other time in Maiduguri, the armed forces and police moved into a certain district of the city after one episode of Boko Haram carnage. They went from house to house culling adult males in varying states of physical health, youthful and aged, able and disabled, all of them unarmed and ferreted from behind closed doors in their homes. These men were made to lie down in batches in the street, and then shot dead in the open. The supposed leader of the sect was apprehended in that police action, and also shot dead. It wasn’t that the agents of the Nigerian state did not know that they ought to have kept the man for interrogation in order to get useful intelligence from him. No. They knew what they were doing; I mean they did the same thing to the leader of the Maitatsine during the Yan Izala uprising in the early 1980s in Kano. Their modus operandi in such situations is not to get useful intelligence. They don’t need anybody to tell them what they already know, namely, that powerful people are complicit in the savagery; indeed, that powerful people are the sponsors of the savagery.  To have kept the man for interrogation would have been to expose the puppet masters and the inner structure of political Islam in northern Nigeria. The state and its agents do not want that because the state and its agents are complicit. The state and its agents will never act on any of the findings and recommendations made by panels of inquiry set up to look into every episode of pogrom because the state and its agents are not willing to punish friends, allies and associates. Or the state is too weak and fragile and thus is afraid of confronting powerful individuals and formations? I see politics in these things; not just ethnicity and religion. The political situation looms large.

Of course, we must also look at such cases as when Muslims and Christians lock horns violently over, say, the open display of a convert from Islam to Christianity at a Christian convention, as happened in Kafanchan in the 1980s. These are very stupid acts and frightening events, but their stupidity and capacity to frighten derive from their being the epiphenomena of something deeper: something I see as the violence in the power relations between adherents of these two religions, a violence that ultimately emerges from the quest for or the fear of domination.

My view is that, if the line of reasoning outlined above is right, then religion is an instrument of power relations in the north, and that the power relations play out in culturally ‘approved’ ways, with violence against significant minorities or the Other being the way approved by certain formations in the north. We must not lose sight of the fact that many, indeed, most, northern Muslims do not at all operate along these lines. But the practices of these ones do not achieve much saliency and do not determine outcomes when decisions are taken to teach the Other and/or the traitors a lesson. I believe that the fundamentalists are the minority. But their acts are very salient and their rhetoric vociferous because they have opted for naked, unmistakable violence.

Although I will never be caught advocating full belief in and adherence to Holy Scriptures, I would recommend moderate Muslim toleration of Jahiliyya to any fanatical idiot any day. The moderates know that ‘There is no other god but God, and Mohammed is his prophet’. They know that the true Muslim, which is what they aspire to be, can only live under sharia. And many Nigerian moderate Muslims are not willing openly to rank the secular constitution above sharia. For these ones, there can only be toleration of the secular constitution, until such a time when things can be done in the proper way. But in actual fact, one feels that the hopes of moderate Muslims in the south that sharia will one day be established as the supreme law in Nigeria have been postponed to the Greek Calends. I remember reading somewhere that some Yoruba Muslims were opposed to the establishment of the sharia court during the constitutional debates in the late 1970s (while some Yoruba Christians supported the idea). This is the attitude I will recommend that the Boko Haram and the Caliphate alike respect if not adopt.

But for many in the north, hopes of living under the sharia of koboko and sword, of maimed limbs and imprisoned womanhood, have not been postponed. It is constantly rekindled by acts of violence launched against Kafirs. This recrudescence is the thing we are concerned about. It is fuelled by something beyond being a Muslim. Islam is not the religion of peace; but it is not the religion of violence as well. Islam is but what Muslims make of it. It has the potential, like any other ideology, to be what it is made to be in real terms. In northern Nigeria, a certain Jihad Complex was inaugurated by Uthman dan Fodio more than two centuries ago. The Jihad Complex is political, as we know from the history of Islam down the ages. Mohammed’s jihad brought the Muslims to power in Mecca. Wars brought the Muslims to power in The Middle East, North Africa and the Mediterranean. But, as we know, war and conquest are not the only means by which Islam can spread. Its earliest penetration into West Africa was by the mechanisms of trade, travel, and learning. And it is not as if Islam has historically displayed an inordinate penchant for aggression compared with other so-called world religions. This is the reason why I think that we cannot overlook the political situation which is informed by a cultural complex that sees violence as the road to power and domination. I fear for our country, and the world too.

For me, the thing to do is pay attention to the political and cultural situation, after having taken into account the historical and material conditions of social life, in order to find out how affairs between people of different ethnic and religious affiliations in the north can be made better. We should not throw our arms up in the air in face of adverse material and historical and even ideational conditions and constraints. Things were not always this way in the north. Things are not always this way wherever we find people of different ethnic and religious affiliations living within the same space. They do not have to contend for this space in such violent ways. They might as well share the same space. Otherwise, we would be saying that ethnic and religious differences can only eventuate in one and only one outcome: violence. I don’t for one moment think that that is Yomi’s intention, but it is a conclusion that can be derived from his argument. Religious texts, the Bible, the Koran, the Ifa Corpus, etc., etc., are marked by violent passages. They are also elevating in their musings on the higher ideals; sometimes they even get cloying for a person like me. In their day-to-day preachments, religious teachers decide on what passages to cite. They make such decisions on the basis of the effect they wish to produce in their audience. If they want violence, they select the right chapters and verses. Same thing with ethnic myths of origin and manifest destiny: they are malleable charters, never static in content and interpretation. Therefore, it is not the religion and the ethnicity. As I have said, it is what we do with them.

You are concerned with the ‘facts of our differences as a heterogeneous socio-political entity’. The cautionary tale is Somalia. Somalia today is mired in chaos and violence. This is a country mainly made up of Muslims (Shafirite Sunni) who are largely nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoralists, with the Somali language spoken throughout the length and breadth of the land. Homogeneity of religious and ethnic affiliation in Somalia is high. But the Somali are engaged in internecine disagreements; and in the clan-structure of their society they have found a basis for mobilizing the forces of violence. When people are determined to disagree, they find or manufacture the social means of mobilization. Nuruddin Farah describes the Somali as engaged in ‘a war on all and everyone, Somali killing Somali’. The war there has gone on for decades, and Farah adds: ‘You could say that we have more of a penchant for obsessing about each other’s family origins than for building a viable, modern, democratic society… Our faith in the family-based ideology, which once determined all, is no longer supreme. Nor are there any longer certainties when it comes to identifying our enemies or friends based on clan affiliations.’ This is Somalia, a largely homogeneous society in terms of the parameters of ethnic and religious belonging, and now it is so fragmented that nobody knows who is who any more.

With its current culture of violent power relations, I don’t think that things would be different in the north if everybody was a Muslim or a Christian or an Animist, Pantheist or Atheist. People who want a fight will create one, no matter what they share in religion and ethnicity and language. If things continue this way in the north, very soon the certainties of identification, to paraphrase Farah, will be eroded and deleted. In these crises in northern Nigeria the variables of religion and ethnicity are interpenetrating and cancelling out one another. Soon, all that will be left as social residuum is the commitment to do battle on one side against all others. In this connection, I think the Caliphate has already read the auguries for the future and is afraid for its own safety and continuity. There is much to be afraid about what with the Boko Haram and Islamists dressed in army uniform sacking police stations and razing villages, throwing bombs all over the place, and storming military installations with confidence and impunity. And it could get much bloodier—people could get much blinder—as the political completely insinuates itself into the personal. Yomi, may the day never arrive when somebody gets it into their head to charge you with being a Muslim fundamentalist or an apostate from Islam simply on account of your admitting to have once slung a slate around your neck to attend a makarantar islamiyya. I fear for you and for all of us.

Benson Eluma

I have cast around for how best to characterize Nigerian literature 50 years after Independence, and I have decided to settle for the Abiku motif. Abiku or Emere is the colleague of Ogbanje, and these are personages that have played central roles in Nigerian lore and literature. They have also enjoyed a respectable filmic presence, at least in recurrence of use if not in potency and beauty of treatment. There was this film titled ‘Abiku’ which was all the rage in the eighties. It won first prize in the Nigerian film festival held in the year it came out, or so I think. I was a little boy then, and was terribly in love with Tara, the Abiku in the film. She was beautiful and fascinating. But I couldn’t sleep at night because Tara and her entire coven always came for my soul at the witching hour. Yet I never tired of viewing the film whenever it was shown on NTA. A couple of years later, I was disappointed by Ogbanje in the TV serialization of Things Fall Apart. Okonkwo’s impatience with his Ogbanje daughter was not what I had expected from reading the book. Again, the damsel was beautiful, and I quickly developed a painful crush on her. But she lacked Tara’s promise of everything evil and forbidden veiled in a façade of sweetness and innocence.

There is always plenty that Ogbanje and Abiku have going for them. To thwart one’s adult minders, to make a mockery of adult games and severity, to bear a secret that torments everybody in the household, nay, the community, to have the power of coming and going as the spirit moves you—what more can a child desire! Abiku’s hold on me became final and unbreakable by the time I had memorized every line of Clark’s cadence and pathos and of Soyinka’s incantation and defiance. With Okri’s donation of that epiphany of his to world literature, Abiku became part of the toolkit for understanding the trouble that is Nigeria.

The claim can now be made that Abiku is not just a motif in our literature; it is not just source material for a good plot or subplot. That motif is also a barometer. One can use it to measure the literary and, indeed, literal temperament of major Nigerian writers and poets, from Tutuola through Achebe, Clark and Soyinka to Emecheta and Okri. These giants have not only used Abiku in their works, but have re-enacted stations of the passion of Abiku in their respective writing careers. You ask for proof? Recently, JP Clark has come to life all over again, taking his literary production from where he left it after the diminuendo of All For Oil. That crowds of the literati in Lagos and Ibadan have found much to enjoy anew in Clark’s oeuvre, which covers more than fifty years, is evidence of the Abiku qualities of both work and author.

Abiku’s logic is the supreme confrontation of life, and of death. It goes beyond what Mark Twain noted: ‘All say, “How hard it is that we have to die” —a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.’ Abiku says that we have to actively engage both life and death, not just accept them as they come to us. Life and death are things we have to do. This is an epic affirmation of Eros and Thanatos in the self-same breath. Nigerian literature in the past 50 years has displayed a wilful and headstrong nature like Abiku and Ogbanje. Part of its stock-in-trade over the five decades has been to wax strong and then feign death, sometimes so convincingly in terms of how corpse-like it would lie in state. But you could depend on it to suddenly resurrect after the criers have expended a deluge of tears and are deservedly expectant of ample helpings from the regulation feast. The funereal mood transmutes into a naming ceremony.

Lately though, with the sanitization of our conscience by certain influences, some of which I will identify below, there has been a waning of the Abiku live-die spirit in Nigerian literature. These days everybody is winning or awarding some writing prize or the other, and everybody out there who updates a blog considers her/himself a literary phenomenon. We now have a live-live situation in which nothing dies. Nobody wants to die and nobody wants to administer death. There is a timidity of approach in many of those who claim a literary vocation; there is a certain Christianly charity that preaches love for and peace with all men when we should be screaming for a frank reckoning, the kind of reckoning that deals death blows to any corpus that deserves to die for something more potent to be born in its place. Literature dies, and dies permanently without the infusion of a frank reckoning into the literary body politic. I need to make my point clearer. What I want to say is that we will be left with an impressive body of verbiage, and that is all we will have to gaze upon as the gatekeepers of the literary directorate in Nigeria disband the department of criticism, setting up in its place a claque of review writers whose job description should shame even Ovation magazine. The trend is there for all to observe. Just look at the review articles published in many Nigerian newspapers if you have that kind of long-suffering. Abiku’s powers of wilful death and wilful rebirth are lost once he is converted to the live-live logic which—and the paradox is indeed painful—results in permanent death for all at the end of the day.

The trouble with Abiku or Nigerian literature seems to have started in those dark days (we are still in the darkness, mind you) when publishing in Nigeria ran aground. The only people who could bring out books on a regular basis were plutocrats with a sense of their abject need to deceive posterity. The book launch became a recurrent potlatch where ‘big’ people gathered to exchange falsehoods about the glories of ‘The Life and Times of Chief or General XYZ’, and to endorse their falsehoods by buying two copies of the book—‘for my wife and my children’—at N500,000 apiece. The charade would not stop there. Some hack, who must have also ghosted the autobiography largely from imaginary materials, could be depended upon to write the required review for publication in the papers. The poor chap would throw all he had into the task, looking at ‘style’ and ‘narrative thrust’, ‘overall literary merit’ and even ‘the place of the work in the curriculum of the future’. It did not take much time for this business model to be adopted by writers who would have us believe that they are self-respecting and serious about their craft. Where is the colobus monkey that blames them too much? Writing had become the job of the mad and the hungry in Nigeria, and as the popular saying goes—‘Man must wack’. Writers with support and connexions in the plutocracy have benefited immensely from this business model. Chief or General XYZ is always there to ‘generously’ buy two copies—for the writer and the writer’s wife. Needless to say, such support does not come gratis. Every plutocrat in the country today has his official ghost, and most ‘big’ men are published writers, many of them filling up weekly columns in the papers with tripe from the overworked guts of their respective ghosts.

Part of the publicity for the work of the ‘serious’ writer who applies the book-launch business model is to have ‘promotional’ reviews written by fellow writers and circulated in the papers. These are often done in friendship, sometimes for a fee, always with the intention to peddle lies about imagined merits and brilliance. In this way the weed of mutualism has been sown and watered on Abiku’s stomping ground. And it has since taken over the entire expanse of territory occupied by the reviewing directorate, and has also spilled into the training grounds. In many a Nigerian secondary school and university, Lit. Crit. is now anathema, unfairly accused of impudence like the clitoris and then excised. Pupils are informed that literature is meant to be appreciated, not criticized. So we now have Literary Appreciation, that euphemism for mutual dependence on the live-live weed.

And the weed is even overgrowing into the expanse of territory occupied by Nigerian literature in the age of the Internet. One would have expected such new media as online publication to give back to Abiku, to Nigerian literature, the power of life and death. But the logic of live-live, the business model of the book launch, has so overwhelmed and tied down Nigerian literature that Abiku finds that its limbs are firmly earthed, even in virtual space. We can find examples of this dependence on the weed in some of the responses to Chris Ihidero’s review of Adaobi Nwaubani’s I Do Not Come to You by Chance. Chris more or less declared that some things must die. Many of the commentators, champions of live-and-let-live, crowed no. Humph! And yet there are much worse examples of what I am talking about. For instance, it is only in this situation of live-live mercantilism that a business-card litterateur like Wole Oguntokun would unashamedly style himself on Facebook as ‘Half-Nigerian; Half-Genius ©’ even though all he has ever brought to the stage is endlessly apish and/or driven by the craze to quickly seize and secure any niche or opening he can ferret out in the marketplace, e.g. his brilliant idea—The Tarzan Monologues. Compare what our writers were doing in the 1960s with much of what is being done today and you will begin to understand why I feel that this impresario needs to be chided. By all accounts, however, Oguntokun is an exemplar, so let me omit him from all of this.

Nothing dies anymore but the paradox, as I have said, is that everything faces certain death in this new eschatology. After 50 years, in which period there has been much to celebrate and regret, we need to realize that death and rebirth enter literature through criticism. Maybe I exaggerate in much of what I have said. But our Abiku is too alive, if I may further exploit the conceit. Abiku is now content with the live-live business model. Abiku is no longer the delinquent looking for things to steal and hearts to break. Abiku is that besuited corporate executive who knows that image is everything; he gives to others so that he can receive from them. Abiku is no longer the errant kid. That kid has been demobilized into adult gentility. No longer capable of going away and then coming back in renewed capacity to fascinate and task the household, this adult has a largeness of heart, an expansive spirit. He has fallen in love with life and earthen encumbrances, and now repudiates death—thereby losing the gift of rebirth. Thus all kinds of works are guaranteed stardom and a stretch of life, even those ones that are actually stillborn. Everything gets numbered in the living canon. This is not magic; it is dormancy, torpor. It is a pretence that some things are living when they are in reality long dead. It is a farcical tragedy of the commons in which many animals that can’t even digest grass are allowed into the grazing field on a daily basis.

There should be some death so that there can be more life. I am tired of hearing variations on Mark Twain’s ‘Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated’ in relation to every work by a Nigerian writer. I don’t know about you but I would love to witness for a change the killing cry at some of those glitzy Lagos venues where much of what passes for Nigerian literature is celebrated. Then and only then will I scream: Happy Independence Abiku! Right now there is just too much dependence on the live-live weed.

This stark story of primitive violence has to it the quality of elemental fable. It is told in prose that is hewn often with a precise chisel. Yet I couldn’t help feeling shortchanged by the writer as I read the story for the third(?) straight time. Olufemi Terry’s construction of a landscape of urban dystopia peopled only by underage boys cannot be taken for granted. It must be accounted for, however thinly or vaguely. No doubt, emplotment and motivation in the story are superbly handled, and the scenes of brutal fighting linger in the memory like graceful movements in stylized dancing. But there is a basic lack. How can we read this story and be comfortable with urchins who are schooled in Tolkien and in the history and manners of Laconia and its capital Sparta? It is not enough to say that Salad taught them all of these things. Who taught Salad? And I was aghast at this sentence from thirteen-year-old Raul, the narrator and self-confessed street urchin: ‘I know that what I did wasn’t technically illegal, but I feel an apology is needed.’ This is from a dialogue. Raul is not here addressing the reader. He is talking to another street urchin like himself in the language of a barrister! The landscape in which the boys dwindle their violent existence is deformed and bleak through and through, but their language now and again crests on a literary, indeed erudite, height. I mean just listen to the urchin Lapy deliver this line: ‘Psychologically that would have demoralized Markham too much.’ If he can say ‘psychologically’ then he might just as well say ‘anthropologically’ or even declare thus: ‘By the principles of aerodynamics, I think you have an excellent rapier in that Mormegil of yours.’

My theory is that this problem of incoherence, for incoherence it is, has been created by an author who has refused to furnish any kind of larger social backdrop for his construction of a terrain of urban terror. There is an ‘outside’ to the world of the dump, an outside where people clutch their purses in fear when they see an urchin, an outside that ‘wants to pity but can’t’. Not only is this outside briefly brought in only to be banished forthwith from the frame of the story, but the world inside the dump is hermetically sealed off from social variety—no men, no women, no girls, and there is no explanation or excuse for this. The concept of boys, more or less isolated, living out a fable of brooding or stark evil has been material for great literature before. For instance, this short story calls up to my mind William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. I daresay it is obvious to any of us that Olufemi Terry’s ‘Stickfighting Days’ shares a genre affinity with that masterpiece. All the same, the recall comes to me with a feeling of disappointment at what Terry does not achieve by isolating his boys in a socially wrecked never-never, and expecting that we will take at face value their being cut off from the rest of the world. That right is denied these boys because they allude to our literature, not a literature of their own manufacture. How did they come to know it so well as to domesticate it in their never-never of abjection and terror? This query may seem extraneous to the all-important question of craft in the short story. But then consider the formal language of much of the dialogue, consider the ‘deep’ learning of these urchins in Tolkien and the classics, and it becomes clear why I think the story has not been fully, and I should say fully well, told until we know something of the educational background of these slum-dog professors.

What is more, we can’t be content to hide behind the curtain of print and watch these boys clobber one another into the dust and slime. We need to be told, however dismissive the manner of the telling, why we are incapable of intervening. After all, these boys could not have been wholly responsible for the original wreckage of their social milieu. Yes, unmediated isolation makes for a striking and intense tableau of terror; yet it all seems contrived, artificial. For boys do not come into such atrocious being by themselves even if it saves us much narrative labour to assume that we can pluck them out of the corrupt air and dump them in a place where they cannot be reached by the PTA, by sisters and girlfriends, by laws, regulations and morality—a place where boys may safely inflict on one another stark-naked violence.

True, Olufemi Terry achieves universality by leaving out a plausible larger social backdrop for the action and existence of these boys, but it is a universality that encompasses not the world of genuine people but rather conjures up a species of chimeras that not even fiction can bring fully alive. Street urchins in Lagos whose argot is in Mandarin Chinese cannot be taken for granted, nor would we take for granted yobbos in Dundee who hold street corner readings from the poetry of Adebayo Faleti. It is in this sense that I feel the author shortchanges us, though by that very act the imagination is fired to speculate ad infinitum on how urchins may acquire an education that gives such literary shape and clothing to their rituals of naked violence.

So I confess that ‘Stickfighting Days’ provides an example of what a piece of good literature, however inadequate we deem it, does to the imagination. It presses one’s imagination to engage it and to retell the story in a way that makes one begin to see an outline of the larger picture, if not the larger picture itself. I believe it is through this kind of exercise that we can compensate ourselves for the fast one that Olufemi Terry pulls on us in his story. And it is not the classic Barthean death of the author I am talking about here. My concern is with the dearth of the tale. Part of the gist which my imagination has supplied as background to the story is that somehow Salad, one of the oldest boys who, by the time we meet him in the story, is now the only man in the dump, long ago pillaged the library of a Professor of Literae Humaniores living on the outside. He is thus able to give a proper finish to his own education and to supply the other boys with the necessary rhetoric and metaphysic for making sense of the culture of violence which they live out in that milieu of utter desolation. The brutish life is coming to an end one of these days for all of these boys. But even as they poison and maim and destroy one another—the sticks that Einstein famously feared a Fourth World War will be fought with enjoy pride of place in their retrenched arsenal—they still have literature to fall back on. One of the themes of this fable, then, is that literature will always have a place in the world, no matter how terribly things deteriorate; in fact, the fable tells us that literature provides a frame for how violently we live our lives and that we will always find it hard to explain how people get their stories.

The writer of this story has won himself a prize by serving up fare that catches fire in the imagination. And I congratulate him, but with the reservations contained herein.

Today, I will be recalling sections of Karl Maier’s This House Has Fallen: Nigeria in Crisis for the nth time. It always baffles me how it has been successfully seared into the annals that the election of June 12, 1993 is the freest and fairest of them all. I hold up the face of that election, its historical background and vital statistics, I hold it up to my mirror and it shatters in a million pieces. Imagine an election marred by grievous voter apathy, recording a turnout of no more than 35 per cent of the registered electorate, i.e. the Nigerian people, using or not using their legs, passed a vote of no confidence on June 12, 1993 and rejected a transition programme that had lost every iota of credibility owing to the disgraceful manner in which it had been stage-managed by the military puppeteers. Imagine an election the lead-up to which had been marred by the disappearance of the freedom of political association and political thought both for those seeking the vote and, by implicature, for those giving it. The SDP and NRC were the two remaining fingers of a leprosy-ravaged hand, bankrupt manifesto-wise and peopled with all manner of strange bedfellows with an eye for the main chance. Imagine an election in which all the political sluggers that could have matched Abiola blow-for-blow (or is it dough-for-dough?) were disqualified from the fray while an unknown apparition was conjured and superficially propped up for the pretence of a contest with Abiola. This is the election that we hail as Snow White, the freest and fairest of them all. Today many people will beat their breasts in that predictable and silly ritual, and claim they are willing to die in honour of whatever it is Abiola stands for in their imaginings. I, being aware of the iniquity into which I was born and have lived in happily ever since, prefer demonologies to hagiographies. So, drawing from the demonology built up before June 12, 1993 by Nigeria’s progressive bastion, what I prefer to recall of MKO is that he was promoter and financier, a veritable diabolus ex machina, of the NPN, that constellation of the most cussed diehards and dyed-in-the-wool holdouts in the reactionary firmament of Nigerian politics. I also recall that his middle-name used to be military collaborator and his cognomen International Thief Thief.

And each time, before I hold up this construction of his reputation to the mirror, I do not forget to add as addendum to his demonology the fact that he became a ‘progressive democrat’ only after what he expected to receive on a platter, like the head of Saint John the Baptist, began to prove unfortunate for his ambition. I recall the media blitzkrieg of his campaign. I remember the ‘Na for bingo’ TV advert in which it became clear that the NPN’s erstwhile financier had ‘finally’ acquired the knowledge that contrary to the false image of a rich country with a contented citizenry whose high standard of living could underwrite the extravagance of moneybags who owned houses in all the capitals of the West and fornicated in every galaxy in the universe, the vast majority of Nigerians were vying with dogs for bones to crunch. I marvel at the expertise and alacrity with which a completely new image, that of an ‘a luta continua’ fighter, was well-nigh successfully minted for MKO, the hitherto proverb-munching and skirt-chasing Aare Ona Kakanfo—he cut a figure close to Elesin, didn’t he?—as it dawned on him and his fellow progressives that his friend Abacha had not ousted Shonekan from Aso Rock so that Abiola could retrieve his stolen mandate. Abacha, Abiola’s friend, had gothic things in mind for his own kakistocracy, including show trials and kangaroo courts, dungeons, roadside murders, séances with marabouts, and regular soirées featuring nautch dancers from India. ‘A looter continua!’

It is a short distance from the NPN to the SDP. Abiola actually ignored that short distance and took a shortcut made even shorter by the media power, the connections within the military-industrial complex, the philanthropist’s clout and, not least, the vast marital and fornication network he had amassed over the decades. Maybe there was no distance to travel at all, as Atiku’s example now convincingly instructs us. Indeed, under the barefaced puppetry and magomago of the demiurge IBB-Maradona, there was no line, thin or thick, between the NRC and the SDP. Those two parties were tighter than Siamese twins walking a little to the right and a little to the left; they were thick as thieves. The political players of that era, minus, of course, the apparition Bashir Tofa, are still at their nefarious worst, evenly and interchangeably spread over the landscape of party politics, all of them ancient rogues and toughs ruining the ‘nascent democracy’ and kicking the battered ball that is Nigeria here and there and nowhere in particular because the goalposts have long been dismantled. (Aside: FIFA ought not to have fixed a world cup match for Nigeria today June 12 when it is most likely not to score any goal. Tatalo Alamu has written a fine article on this ominous mistake here.)

If Abiola had survived those fateful sips of hemlock… sorry, I’ve just crosschecked that against the official record, it says ordinary tea… but if MKO had survived those trembling mouthfuls he managed to swallow that fateful day in July 1998, he would most likely have signed up as a player on the PDP team like his running mate Babagana Kingibe. I dare anybody to contradict me on this. Africa’s ‘Pillar of Sports’, founder and owner of Abiola Babes FC, would have been a PDP playmaker today. And if he had ended up in the AC or ANPP, what degree of difference would that have signalled? Let’s ask Atiku who’s been there and done that. Or, for that matter, Bola Ige who served as minister in the PDP government of OBJ, that ‘nest of killers’, even though he was chieftain of the AD, a party that was supposed to stand for everything the PDP was the antithesis of. Or prithee let’s ask our ‘new-breed’ political parvenus, from Speaker Bankole to every harried AC rep, all of whom share the same mind, the same ‘long throat’ cloned from an extinct species of giraffe, insofar as the issue is jumbo allowances for the asses at the National Assembly. And what else besides their obese earnings and bulging ‘Ghana-must-go’ booty is always on the agenda of those asses at the Assembly? Eh, what else do they aye and nay and bray about?

I agree that people have the right to construct and recall their history however it pleases them. In the case of Abiola, it is sure that the progressive hagiography has both overtaken and overpowered the progressive demonology. The man is a saint, and the election he won is our Snow White. This is the dominant political history of June 12 in both expert and popular discourse in our land. But I also say that whatever the edifice of historical syllabus people construct, it is susceptible of critical inspection, and when we can, it is our duty to deconstruct every such construction in order to understand it. Brecht wrote the words: ‘Unhappy the land that needs heroes.’ The desperation in our land shows up in the way we have clutched at the straw of MKO. In the absence of Snow White, haunted Prince Charming embosoms the queen. I wonder if the same unhappy desperation does not explain the beatification and eventual deification of Shango the marauding fire-breather. Anyway, I would sooner look to Shango for heroism than join the breast-beaters of the annual June 12 ritual. At least Shango repented of his belligerent ways and regretted that he had got his two strongest generals—IBB and Abacha?—overly accustomed to slaughter and plunder in addition to the worse crime of militarizing the imagination and ethos of his people. Shango ‘Oba Koso’ willingly took his own life. And then the ebullient bata rhythms of Shango worship—where is the colobus monkey that prefers the flying spittle and grating mendacities of the June 12ers to that? In matters heroic I prefer myths because we can always metaphorize them and distil some nuanced essence from their offerings. As Auden warned, ‘Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction.’ The admonition should be extended to the pedagogy of adults as well. Especially those adults who, when they look in the mirror, find that like Dele Momodu they have regressed into adolescence.

The South Africans in the film do not all behave in the same way; nor do the aliens. But not so the ‘Nigerians’.

But then, I think that that aspect of the film is not about us. The ‘Nigerian’ characters are not convincing at all. They look to me, in their get-up and mannerisms, like the South African criminals who murdered Lucky Dube. Their accents in English are variations on classic Channel O-speak, not to mention their ‘mother-tongue’ chatter which resonates as an insult to what one knows of the sonority of the languages of SA.

What is more, their violence is the carbon copy of what we have been led by the international media – SABC included in that ilk – to expect of South African black street gangs in the post-Apartheid era. And their ‘black magic’ and cyborg obsession seem to have been taken straight and undiluted from the writing of the Comaroffs on the phenomenon of the ‘occult economy’ in South Africa (Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, 1999, ‘Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony’, in American Ethnologist, Vol. 26, No.2, pp. 279-303).

I heard that Dube’s killers said during trial that they attacked him because they had thought his social poise and palpable sense of control over material wherewithal marked him out as a Nigerian who was flaunting his wealth and rubbing their noses in the rude fact that he had beaten them to ‘it’ in their own country. Those urban SA brigands are the prototype for that ‘Nigerian’ sub-underworld in the underworld of ‘District 9’.

If I regret anything in the film it is the myth of its storytelling framework. It is clear that crucial parts of this mythic framework revolve around the laager mentality and a fascination with miscegenation that beggars belief and neurosis, hence the film’s inevitable interjection of science fiction into the stream of everyday life. These are themes that were prominent social issues in South African society in the Apartheid days, and the film just seems unable to get beyond them. Is that the way their society still is? God help us.

The insight of the film is clearly about South Africa. It is the nightmare of that country of otherwise great promise whose current president is Jacob Zuma – fucker of anything, the Zuma stereotype would, indeed, have brazenly fucked the aliens in the flick and damned and, perhaps, survived the consequences to boot.

(Let me add that the Obasanjo stereotype would do the very same thing. His son Gbenga knows it, and OBJ’s first wife has confirmed in her tell-all that her husband is a sex monster.)

‘District 9’ is about that country where some variety of folk medicine prescribes the rape of virgins, old women and day-old infants as cure for HIV/AIDS; South Africa whose medical establishment once boasted a ‘Doctor Death’ among its membership; that country one of whose favourite exports to the rest of the continent is deadly weapons and even deadlier mercenaries; South Africa many of whose citizens, caught up in the delirium of how to deal with the turbulence of life in a long period of social transition, have in the very recent past maimed and massacred Nigerians and other foreigners residing in their country. This film could make me shed some tears for that otherwise beloved country.

The fictive concept of ‘District 9’ is that it is cast as a documentary on one defining event in the history of SA in the twenty-first century. Yet the themes that propel this concept make up, as I have said, a neat raft of South African déjà vu, thinly ‘alienated’, à la Bertolt Brecht, by the techniques of science fiction and pseudonymy.

However, the use of the term ‘Nigerians’ to label a particularly worrisome element in the society of the film suggests that the filmmakers are missing something in their faculty for self- and other-awareness as regards contemporary SA society. It is not as if real-life Nigerians cannot be gangsters. They can be; in fact, as is well-known, many Nigerians are terrible and shameless gangsters at home and abroad. And there are, for sure, Nigerian gangsters in Jo’burg who bring the already tattered image of their country into further disrepute, if that is still possible these days. The trouble is that these people in the film are called ‘Nigerian’ gangsters and prostitutes, but they play their roles to the hilt as the South African version of a social problem that is common the world over. They do not seem and sound Nigerian in the least. Well, since disguise is part of the skills-set gangsters require, this problem has resolved itself. And it is a very poor disguise, indeed, one to which we cannot apply the standard ‘voice of Jacob, hand of Esau’. Call them what you will, the lumpen elements in ‘District 9’ are one and all South Africans. This looks like a classic case of Horace’s Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur (Though the name has been changed, the story is still about you).

But is there or is there not something in the fact that the latter point is lost on so many of us Nigerians? What if a group of Neo-Nazis in some film set in Europe decide to call themselves ‘Nigerians’ and give their leader the name Obasanjo: would we as citizens of the UN-recognized state of Nigeria feel that it is our lived experience that is being alluded to? What does that kind of reaction say about some of our inmost fears—the paranoia that one of these days we might just be found out to be what we are not?

Apart from the skilful use of FX (Nollywood, shame on you!), I think that the filmic qualities of ‘District 9’ are high enough. It harks back to Orson Welles and the ‘War of the Worlds’ in its use of the concept of the TV documentary and news report to give impact, immediacy and verisimilitude to its narrative sequence of dystopian cyborg fiction.

‘District 9’ is a film that seeks to propagate an enlightened view on alien treatment, with the message: If only we understood them, we would know that they want to go home. But all of that enlightenment is undermined by the name-calling or pseudonymy that tries to gloss over one of the most serious problems of urban life in the country. The gangster problem in SA is not merely an immigrant thing. And it is high time this reality was bluntly faced and tackled. The South Africans can learn a thing or two from Ghana and Nigeria. Either country, at some point in its history, attempted the self-deception of blaming immigrant bloodsuckers for its real woes and hallucinatory terrors; both failed.

A couple of years ago, we saw what xenophobia wrought in South Africa. Obviously, there are other things besides xenophobia in this film. But the depiction of the ‘Nigerians’ cannot be downplayed as a minor event. It is one of the components propping up the action in the plot, giving it dimension as well as a visible force field of tension. It is also a fictive missile that bears scorn and contempt intended for real-life Nigerians. I don’t feel perturbed by it because I am aware of its ultimate failure—the ‘Nigerian’ characters are phoney; they don’t come alive as such. Instead, they tell me a South African story in SA style and voice. Too bad for the intentions of the makers of the film, but the Nigerian version of the malaise of gangsterism does not come out in what they portray.

But how many other people can see through it all? And I don’t mean how many others of us Nigerians; I mean how many others in the world at large see it like I see it? Will the Somali who doesn’t know our Nigerian ways notice that the name-calling in the film boomerangs as a witless joke on the South Africans themselves? Will the Indian, the Finn, the Chilean, the Moroccan demand their money back on witnessing the collapse of the cheap trick in the very first scene in which it is mounted? Are the Israelis aware that the South Africans have not been able to reproduce our Nigerian shibboleth?

Who amongst us thinks that everything in a film is taken as fictive by every viewer? Any resemblance to persons and places blah, blah, blah.

Well, I have to admit that those who made this film somehow chose their target well. Surely, it would have been a different matter entirely if the kingpin of the ‘District 9’ Nigerians is named Emeagwali or Margaret Ekpo or Osundare or Oshiomhole or Aminu Kano or Claude Ake or Mary Onyali or Fawehinmi or Saro-Wiwa or Anikulapo-Kuti or Buchi Emecheta.

Just as many of us who are citizens of Nigeria, suffering from some Jekyll-Hyde syndrome, are afraid that we might be caught one day doing what we never did – hence our indignation at this image that is not us; this image that we could have pooh-poohed and laughed at – so are we hardly bothered to demand, even if only in a face-saving routine, an apology from the ‘District 9’ filmmakers for naming their leader of thugs Obasanjo.

Of course, that thug leader doesn’t even begin to function as a lampoon of the Nigerian leader. Only comic farce can stand the tragicomedy of OBJ on its head. But that is beside the point, which is that the vast majority of Nigerians are not going to request that SA apologize for the abuse of OBJ’s name. His name cannot be abused, as it were. And Nollywood won’t dare repay the compliment by desecrating, say, the name of Mandela or Desmond Tutu in one of its demon-infested absurdities.

So isn’t there something in ‘District 9’ that speaks the truth about one aspect of our social experience, something that we are living with at least until our much delayed ‘revolution’, er, er, happens—that the Nigerian head of state or governor, minister, rep, senator, etc. often doubles as the chief of the bandits who menace the rest of society?

There is something in this film for us, no matter how badly done the stereotyping is.

But good luck to any of those South Africans who do not want to call a spade a spade. They might as well eat their corn meal porridge with a shovel and brand it a ‘Nigerian’ spoon.