Soyinka: Religion Is Not the Problem With Nigeria
Soyinka: Religion Is Not the Problem With Nigeria, By
Francis Anekwe Oborji
Our renowned Nobel laureate in Literature, one of Africa’s
most respected intellectual giants, Prof. Wole Soyinka, was recently quoted as
having accused religion as the cause of Nigeria’s woes and, indeed, of the
world in general. Soyinka asked that religion be tamed and stigmatised.
According to the Nigerian Punch newspaper of January 13, 2017, Prof. Soyinka at
the presentation of a book, Religion and the Making of Nigeria, written by
Prof. Olufemi Vaughan, said, among other things:
This piece was
written by Francis Anekwe Oborji. The views and opinions expressed here are
those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or
position of 360Nobs.com.
“President Muhammadu Buhari had said if Nigeria did not kill
corruption, corruption would kill the country.”
Condemning killings in the Southern Kaduna in the name of
religion, the Nobel laureate stated, inter alia:
“I would like to transfer that cry from moral zone to the
terrain of religion. If we do not tame religion in this nation, religion would
kill us.”
“I do not say kill religion, though, I wouldn’t mind a bit
if that mission could be undertaken surgically …” (Wole Soyinka, Abuja, January
13, 2017).
One must admit that this is not the first time our learned
and renowned Nobel laureate, Prof. Soyinka has made such a round-table
condemnation and accusation of religion as the problem of our nation and the
world in general. In one of his international Television interviews a few years
ago, Soyinka made similar allegation as follows:
“Organised religion in my view is more a curse than a blessing.
I believe that religion should be very personal.”
Referring to the Nigerian context in particular during the
said interview, Soyinka added:
“Nigeria does not want to confront its history. Nigeria is
living in denial … as long as it refuses to confront the wrong it has done to
the Igbos”.
I purposely decided to add this last quotation because, I
think, that is where he demonstrated the courage to call a spade by its name
and hit the nail on the head. However, for his stigmatisation of religion as a curse
other than blessing, and as the cause of our nation’s woes, I beg to differ. I
have never disagreed or criticised our revered literary giant and I do not
intend to do so in the present article at all. Because, no matter what, the
person of Soyinka is one good news, we as Nigerians and Africans in general
will continue to be proud of. Soyinka’s literary achievement and stance in some
critical moments of our turbulent history as a nation and continent is
something every relatively conscious individual should always appreciate and
applaud. However, I disagree with Soyinka on this particular issue of his
stigmatisation of religion as a curse other than a blessing. As an
intellectual, however, I guess, he raised that issue in order to awaken our
consciences and intellectual curiosity to a deeper problem of our Nigerian
nation-state. So, my article is only a contribution to that debate which I
think, is what Soyinka himself is calling for when he made the accusation
against religion. Our intention, therefore, in this article is not to pick
quarrels with our Nobel laureate but rather to respond to his call for debate
on the leadership crisis and social problems confronting our fragile
nation-state, Nigeria.
For me, Nigeria’s problem is NOT religion! Neither is it
corruption. Rather it is the unwillingness of its political leaders and elites
like Wole Soyinka and us all to confront our history as a nation-state. I
stated this fact vividly in my last two articles published during the last
Christmas and 2017 New Year festivities. One could have expected Prof. Soyinka
to use that occasion of the book launch on Religion and the Making of Nigeria
to address the problem of the failure of leadership as the main reason for
Nigeria’s woes as a nation-state. Soyinka would have told the Nigerian
political class and leadership that corruption is not really our problem,
because there is something much deeper, which is fueling both corruption and
religious violence in Nigeria. Rather than launch an unnecessary attack on
innocent religion, Soyinka could have made use of that occasion of the book
launch, to rise to the hallmark of personal example, and tell the centres of
power in our nation that they themselves are the problem of the nation and not
religion or corruption. Human beings’ manipulation of divisive elements in
culture and religion for selfish political gains and power is the demon we are
to fight and kill, not religion per se.
In other words, Soyinka’s unmitigated attack of religion
does not get to the heart of the Nigerian story, our founding story as a
nation-state. Moreover, his attack does not pay sufficient attention to the
possibility that politics in Nigeria in particular, and in many other African
nation-states in general, have not been a failure, but have worked very well.
Chaos, war, violence, the killing of innocent people in the name of
ethno-religious bigotry, and the tragedy of corruption in our political
landscape are not indications of failed institutions or the nation-state
itself, they are ingrained in the very imagination of how nation-state politics
works. In other words, even though we condemn religion as a cultural element
that could easily be manipulated by religious bigots and political jobbers for
selfish-interest to cause violence and disorder in the society, it is not the
whole story. Soyinka, in his stigmatisation of religion, paid very little
attention to the story of the political institutions of Nigeria as a
nation-state: ‘how they work and why they work the way they do.’ It is at this
narrative level that a fresh conversation about the place of religion and its
social engagement in the Nigerian nation-state politics must take place. This
is a new conversation, which we need to confront to address the enduring issue
of relationship between politics and religion in the making of Nigeria as a
nation-state.
In the first place, what is religion? According to Oxford
Advanced Learner’s Dictionary:
“Religion is belief in the existence of God, who created the
universe and gave human beings a spiritual nature which continues to exist
after death of the body.”
The dictionary goes further to say:
“It (religion) is a particular system of faith and worship
based on such belief: the Christian, Buddhist and Hindu religions or practice
of one’s religion.”
Therefore, religion is about God and our worship of Him as
our Creator and source of life, both here and hereafter. Religion is ingrained
in the fabric of human nature and therefore, divine. In other words, for
Soyinka to say that we should tame religion is like asking that we tame the
existence of God in our lives and our worship of Him as our Creator and Source
of life, both here and hereafter. This is impossible. As John Mbiti once
remarked, Africans are notoriously religious. Religion pervades the entire
existence of the African. This is true not only of Africans but also of all
human beings and the created reality. We cannot live or even be without
religion. Religion is the soul of our being and existence. Religion is also the
spiritual ferment of the world. Without it, we are nothing and the world has no
meaning in itself without religion. It is only for intellectual jingoism and
debate that one could say he or she is not a religious being or does not
believe in the existence of God and the life-after. Therefore, Soyinka’s call
that religion be tamed raises some fundamental questions than the problem it
pretends to respond to. Again, we can ask, “Is it religion or the human person
that needs to be tamed?”
True enough, there are causes of violence impeded in some
religious beliefs and elements. This does not mean, however, that there is a
direct link between religion and violence. Because to hold the view linking religion
with violence is to obscure the authentic thought about people’s belief in the
One True God, who is the Creator and Father of us all. The purity of religious
faith in the One True God must, therefore, be always recognised as the
principle and source of Love between human beings. This observation is
important because it helps to correct the wrong impression created in some
modern scholarship since the rise of violence and religious fundamentalism in
recent times, about relating monotheistic religions like Christianity to
violence. It is absolutely wrong to say that there is a direct link between
religion and violence.
Again, this last point is important because it helps to
evaluate, critically, a major misconception in dealing with the contemporary debate
on religion and violence, which some scholars would want to avoid. It is the
refusal, particularly in the mainstream scholarship and among secular elites,
to see the link between the rise in religious fundamentalism and violence with
the current geopolitical and economic systems that have impoverished many
countries of the southern hemisphere, where religion is still taken very
seriously and distinction is hardly made between it and other aspects of life.
Some contemporary scholars mistakenly blame religion, as a matter of fact, as
responsible for most of the contemporary violence and conflicts. These are
scholars who see the present situation of religious violence as a clash of
civilisations, one secular and the other primitive, with violent religious
systems. But this view is another attempt to reinforce the cultural superiority
and purity of one group on the other, which were discussed in my previous
articles.
Some modern scholars may also like to argue that religious
faith is waning. Thus, diplomats and academics “want to separate religion from
economics or politics and blame everything on poverty or politics but would
argue that violence is part of religion and economics and politics draws them
out.” This view claims that it is religious history, religious sensibilities,
and religious passions which drive religious conflict and turn other
disagreements into violent confrontations. Again, this type of reductionism
misses the key issues in the conflict and can lead to major international
misunderstandings and catastrophes, of which the September 11 terrorist attack
on the World Trade Center in New York City is the most egregious example.
Therefore, it is incorrect to blame everything on religion,
as far as the present social conflicts and violence are concerned. We need to
take religious claims, histories, and passions seriously but without making
judgments about the legitimacy or ultimate morality of any particular religious
position in fostering violence. In this regard, we have to acknowledge that many
works on religious conflict and violence are avowedly partisan and judgmental,
sometimes in fervent defense and in others in militant opposition. Our position
in the present article, however, is that we take a more balanced academic view,
in which we seek to better understand the unique confluence of history,
culture, manipulation of religion, politics, and group psychology that gives
rise to violence, and avoid any stigmatisation or stereotyping judgment on any
particular religion or group of people. The goal of viewing religion and
violence from this perspective is to present reasoned interpretations that will
make sense of the present global religious conflict and that will provide
much-needed information for informed and reflective decision-making in social
reconciliation and conflict management.
The Historical Dimensions
Historians and political scientists have shown that most of
Africa’s problems today are rooted in the continent’s colonial past. It is
today compounded all the more by the unwillingness or, rather, incapability of
African ruling elites and intellectuals to rise up to the challenges of
personal example, to right the wrongs of the past, and save the present and
future generations of Africans from sinking further into the abyss of despair
and hopelessness. This is the problem of Nigeria, as with other African
nation-states created out of the arbitrary colonial partition of the continent
in the spirit of the European Berlin Conference of 1885. Until we address the
historical injustice on which our Nigerian nation-state and indeed the modern
African nation-states in general, is founded, we will continue pursing shadows
and living in denial. Therefore, our problem is our ‘history’ as a nation-state
and NOT religion!
One should not forget that the few African intellectuals and
political leaders who had attempted in the past to address this historical
wrong of the arbitrary colonial partitioning of the continent were either
disgraced out of office or denied international recognition of their literary
achievement, as the case may be. It is no longer secret that this is the major
reason Prof. Chinua Achebe, the father of African literature, was denied the
Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature, in spite of his unparalleled achievement in
that academic field in recent world history. Achebe’s uncompromising stance in
his writings, especially the novels, in revisiting and denouncing colonial
dispossession of African culture and traditional societal organisation, is
unpalatable news for the world powers and their local spinoffs, as well as
stooges they had planted in the continent.
Again, on the political front, great and pro-African leaders
like Patrice Lumumba of Congo, Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso, and a few
others, were brutally murdered and disgraced out of office. Their offence was
that they dared and wanted to negotiate the arbitrary colonial arrangement that
gave birth to the fragile nation-states they found themselves in after the
so-called political independence of the 1960s. Moreover, in recent times,
African leaders like Charles Taylor of Liberia, Laurent Gbagbo of Ivory Coast,
among others, were disgraced out of office and charged to the International
Criminal Court in The Hague in The Netherlands, on an exaggerated accusation
that they committed crimes against humanity by killing their own people. Even
though, there may be some elements of truth here, however, this is not the
whole story. It is not also the main reason why they were arraigned in the
first place before the International Criminal Court in The Netherlands. No.
The fact is that every discerning mind knows that any
African leader today with a pro-African agenda, who could dare to request to
negotiate the colonial arrangement and management of African natural and
mineral resources in his or her country, hardly lives to see the next day in
office. The brutal murder of Gaddafi of Libya by the combined Euro-American
NATO forces, and the concomitant civil war in the country since then is a
classical example of what awaits any African leader that dares the modern
imperial nations’ interests in the continent. This is why most of present-day
African political leaders and Heads of States chose to behave like yuppies and
sell-outs to avoid being disgraced out of office. None of them has the courage
to hold the bull by the horn and lead their people across the Red Sea – out of
servitude in their own land. This is why Zimbabwe is suffering today. In spite
of all the shortcomings of the maximum leader and old-man there, Mugabe’s sin,
no doubt, is that he wanted to secure African land for his people after over
200 years of deprivation and subjugation under Apartheid regime. He felt that
after about twenty years of their so-called political independence, the
Apartheid structure and colonial arrangement that left the control of the
arable and fertile land of Zimbabwe at the hands of the White minority, has to
go. The indigenous and ethnic Africans of Zimbabwe have been living in a
constricted non-fertile land. Mugabe felt that this unjust arrangement must be
renegotiated and corrected too. Mugabe’s attempt to right the wrongs of the
past, and the refusal of the modern centres of power to that African request,
is the major reason for the economic isolation of Zimbabwe today and therefore,
the suffering of the people of Zimbabwe. Period! No attempt to demonise Mugabe
will ever succeed to remove this historical fact and injustice Zimbabwe, had
been subjected for years now.
This means that the African leader’s pro-African stance to
dare and question the past mistakes against his or her country is at the root
of modern African problem, and NOT religion. The African leader who chooses not
to address the historical mistakes in his country and correct it in the light
of the present suffering of his people, has never received any rebuke from any
of the centres of power that still regard themselves as friends of Africa. Even
when such an African leader or Head of State is committing various kinds of
crime against humanity in his domain (for example, as it is presently being
experienced in Cameroun and Nigeria, among others), nobody cares. The world’s
centres of power look the other way. The International Criminal Court at The
Hague is not for such a ‘good boy’ African despot, even if he may be killing
his own people extra-judicially on a daily basis. The important thing is that
the African despot protects the foreign interest and so saves his own parochial
local political domination and interest. The Court at The Hague in The
Netherlands was not created to promote African interest. Rather, it is there to
handle any pro-African leader who may dare to question colonial arrangement in
any of the modern African nation-states. The denial of this fact is part of our
problem as a people today in Africa.
Added to the above point, is the fact that the modern world
is NOT governed by religious principles or even sentiments. The world as we
live it today is controlled by the politics of race and economic supremacy. The
military supremacy and arrangement of the modern centres of power – including
the so-called international organisations and multinationals, are created to
serve and protect these fundamental interests of the modern imperial nations.
Therefore, the enemy is not religion, if we can use that term. The real enemy
and problem of the modern world and by extension, our nation, is racial
politics and economic dominations as well as ambitions of the presumed superior
races and world modern centers of power.
In the African context, for example, it is no longer secret
that the world’s centres of power, which often pretend to be our friends, have
never supported indigenous peoples for self-determination! Yes. Of course,
self-determination as a human right for indigenous peoples was recently
recognised in the United Nations Conventions, and even African Charter.
However, that is where it ends! Recent history tells us that the world’s
centres of power have always worked against the emergence of indigenous people
as nation-states in its own right. Without delving into details, and leaving
aside the tragic experiences of the natives and indigenous peoples of the
Americas and the Pacific, of what is today known as Australia and New Zealand,
at the hands of foreign settlers and colonisers, it suffices to mention a few
examples of the African experience. The Berlin Conference of 1885, in which
Africa was arbitrarily partitioned by the colonial powers without any reference
to ethnic and indigenous Africans themselves, was a joint venture of the West
and the Arab power, which was represented at the conference by Turkey. It was
the second stage in the suppression and subjugation of indigenous and ethnic
Africans by the two self-proclaimed colonial superior races that invaded the
continent in our checked history. The first in recent times, however, was the
Trans-Saharan Slave Trade carried out by the Arab merchants. After the early
centuries rampage of the Arabs in Northern Africa, which had changed the demographic
and racial contour of that part of Africa forever, the original inhabitants of
Egypt and the Maghreb Africa who were really Black ethnic and indigenous
Africans were forced further back into the southern regions of sub-Saharan
Africa. The merchants of the Arab Trans-Saharan Slave Trade and European
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade that came later through the Atlantic Ocean, all
invaded sub-Saharan Africa, enslaving and exporting the human resources of
Africa as slaves in the foreign lands for economic enrichment. That was the
beginning of the denial of the human dignity of the African person. The
dispossession of our humanity by fellow human beings. This is what Engelbert
Mveng, an African theologian from Cameroun calls anthropological poverty, the
indigence being – “which has banished Africans from the world history and the
world map. It is impoverishment of Africans through Slave Trade and
colonialism, which is structural, comprehensive, total, and absolute, on the
continent, in the states, in cities as in the countryside.” For Mveng, the
anthropological and structural poverty have neither moral value, nor spiritual
value, nor any other kind. They are simply evils that must be torn out by the
roots.
The Salve Trade and colonialism, championed by the Arab and
the West in Africa, was a racial trade and subjugation of indigenous ethnic
Africans. Simply! The Europeans never enslaved the Arab Africans, whether
Muslim or Christian, and so did the Arab slave merchants themselves. Only the
Black, ethnic and indigenous Africans were subjected to slavery by the Arab and
Western slave merchants. Only the Black ethnic indigenous Africans were treated
as commercial commodities for the economic enrichment of the self-acclaimed
superior races. The Arab Africans in Egypt and the Maghreb, as well as the
Fulani Arabs that later settled in the Upper Guinea of West Africa and Sudan,
were never subjected to the slave trade as the ethnic indigenous Africans.
Furthermore, during the colonial era of the 19th century,
when Slave Trade was abolished, and Africa came to be partitioned by the two
colonial centres of the Arab and the West, the new African nation-states, like
Nigeria, were created by the colonial masters to favour themselves and their
Arab friends, Fulani settlers who migrated from the Upper Guinea. This means
that the new African nation-states were partitioned in such way as to favour
the Arab settlers, such as the Fulani in West Africa and patches of other Arab
settlers in other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, as well as in the North of the
continent, which is already controlled by the Arab chiefdoms and caliphates.
This is how Nigeria came to be created as a nation-state and handed over to the
Sokoto Caliphate by the British colonial overlords. This is the root of
Nigeria’s problem.
Have we as a nation ever wondered why the intellectual
giants and our pan-African frontline politicians, such as Nnamdi Azikiwe,
Obafemi Awolowo, and other freedom fighters in the struggle for independence,
were not given political power at independence in 1960? The government of
Nigeria came to be handed over to individuals and a geographical zone that did
not participate in the struggle for independence. Those who refused to be part
of the ideals of African liberation, who never believed in Africa and in the
human dignity of Africans, were handed over power after the political
independence of an African nation-state? This is the bane of our problem. Not
religion.
Our elites, intellectuals and political leaders are yet to
have the courage, and capability, to address our country’s problem as a
nation-state in a creative way for truth, peace and justice to reign in our
land. It was for this kind of naïve approach and attitude to our perennial and
unresolved historical problems that we had the 1966 military coup, and the
counter coup the year after in 1967. The first pogrom against the Igbo and
other Easterners living in Northern Nigeria in 1954 was in furtherance of this
unresolved historical problem. The second Northern Nigeria pogrom of 1966 – the
mother of all pogroms against the Igbo and other Easterners living in the North
– owed its root cause to this unresolved historical problem of Nigeria as a
nation-state. The Nigeria-Biafra War that claimed over three million innocent
lives, especially, of the Easterners (mainly through starvation and blockade),
has remained the most tragic expression of this unresolved Nigerian problem.
Almost after about fifty years since that war between Nigeria and Biafra was
fought, we have not been able to come to terms with our history and reality and
to address it creatively for the sake of our children, the future generation.
We have continued to pretend as if nothing has happened or as if the war has
really ended.
By the way, have we forgotten that Egypt represented the
Arab world in the execution of the Nigerian Civil War of 1967 to 1970. Britain
and Russia (two Cold War arch enemies) all united as friends and invited their
Arab friends in the execution of the Civil War in favour of the federal
government then in Lagos against the indigenous Africans of Eastern Nigeria. I
still remembered vividly from where I was hiding as an eight year old boy
during the civil war in Eastern Nigeria, seeing the face of the Egyptian pilot
in a war jet-plane made in Great Britain, when his plane descended so low and
dropped a very heavy bomb in our village square very close to our house in
1969. On other occasions, I had also seen the face of a Russian war pilot
hovering over our village with his jet plane. This is to show that the Civil
War was more than the slogan: “To keep Nigeria One is a Task that must be
kept.” There is also the racial undertone to the Nigeria-Biafra War. The
self-acclaimed superior races united among themselves during the Nigerian Civil
War and vowed that indigenous Africans of Eastern Nigeria must never be allowed
to attain self-determination. The colonial boundary of Nigeria they vowed must
be respected at all cost. In this way, the subjugation of ethnic indigenous
Africans of that country is a permanent project.
In other words, instead of accusing religion as the source
of our problem, why can’t we talk of unraveling those elements of our history
that still haunt us as never before. Why can’t we also unravel those elements
in cultures and religion that are often manipulated to induce people to commit
acts of violence and conflicts in the society? The Nigerian context, which
Soyinka seems to be addressing, points to a deeper problem. For instance, if
religion is really the problem, we could not have gotten the June 12 election
annulment. Abiola, could have been declared the winner of that election which
was judged the most free and fair in the history of Nigeria. In spite of the
Muslim-Muslim ticket, Abiola’s election was annulled. I remember A. Nzeribe,
the Maverick politician and senator from Oguta in Imo State, asking Abiola
during the electioneering campaign, what had he (Abiola) for his people. Abiola
was quoted as having replied that ‘he does not need the Igbos to rule Nigeria.’
So, his choice of a Muslim-Muslim ticket to appease the Northern oligarchy and
the Muslim population from there. Abiola himself was a devout and an avowed
Muslim. He made a lot of contribution for the promotion and spread of Islam in
Nigeria. I remembered how Abiola’s then Newspaper, Concord was used as an
arrowhead in attacking Christianity in Nigeria, in particular, the Catholic
Church at the time. The newspaper’s attack on the Catholic Church, especially
the person of the Pope, was very disgusting that the retired Catholic Archbishop
of Benin City, Most Rev. Anthony Ekpo had to ask Nigerian Catholics to stop
patronising Concord. In spite of all these, Abiola’s rooting for his Islamic
faith in Nigeria against Christianity and Igbo people, however, at the most
critical moment of his quest for power, his Muslim brothers from the North at
the helms of nation’s affairs, annulled the presidential election in which he
was the clear winner. So, where is the religion here? The fact is that Abiola
was a Muslim, quite right, but fundamentally, he was an indigenous ethnic
African, and therefore not from the ‘superior race’ of the Arab Fulani Muslims
or oligarchy in the North that controls Nigeria.
Even the last election, which brought Buhari to power,
shares the same index as that of Abiola. Senator Tinubu, the national leader of
APC and the man thatwho was the brain behind the Western Nigeria rooting for
Buhari to win the last presidential election against Goodluck Jonathan, an
Ijaw, a minority ethnic group in South Eastern Nigeria, was sidelined immediately
after the inauguration of the Buhari regime. Tinubu is a devout and avowed
Muslim but he forgot history. He forgot as King Yunfa, the Hausa Sarkin of
Gobir (now called Sokoto) did when he hosted a Fulani immigrant called Dan
Fodiyo and his group in February 1804. As a result of this and since 1808, the
whole Northern region lost its kingdom and were replaced by the Fulani
emirates. King Yunfa is said to have been killed in 1808 and the Fulani warrior
(Usman Dan Fodiyo) established the Sokoto Caliphate, making himself Sultan. In
a similar way, the Afonja Yoruba dynasty of Ilorin compromised by allowing a
Fulani warrior known as Janta Alimi to settle in Ilorin. The Fulani guerrillas
later killed Afonja in 1824. And Ilorin, a Yoruba town under the Oyo Empire,
fell into Fulani hands, becoming an emirate under Sokoto Caliphate till today.
Furthermore, the choice of the Northern states in Nigeria to
superimpose Sharia legal system over and above the Nigerian Constitution in
their region is another manifestation of the permanent symptomatic problem of
Nigeria as a nation-state. It has a political undertone more than the religious
sentiment it often invokes. What is at stake in that action of Northern
Nigerian states is nothing but disregard of indigenous ethnic Africans from
that zone and the presence of other Nigerians from the South living with them!
The enthronement of Sharia legal system over and above Nigeria’s Constitution
by a section of a country, which pretends to be running a secular state, is a
camouflage of a deeper problem Nigeria as a nation-state is yet to address. The
continued massacre of other Nigerians resident in the North at any least
provocation, the creation of terrorist groups like the Boko Haram and Fulani
herdsmen foot-soldiers by the Northern elites and political ruling-class, has a
political undertone other than religious. The fact that none of these
terrorists (whether Boko Haram or Fulani Herdsmen militant) has been arrested
and brought to justice shows that they are working for their pay-masters, who
may be those controlling the government machinery of the country. But it also
points to the fact that for those in power, the lives of those terrorists from
the North is valued more than the lives of other Nigerians who are judged to be
from the inferior race.
The same is with the marginalisation of other ethnic groups,
especially, the Igbo, in the present federal government political appointments
and denying them of infrastructural allocation. Any group that is viewed as
antithetical to the ideals of the superior race is immediately sidelined. Does
it surprise anybody that our elites and the so-called international community
seemed to have awakened from their slumber to the on-going state sponsored
violence and disturbance in Nigeria simply because, it has just happened in the
‘North.’ Last year alone, for example, many villages were reported to have been
wiped out by the Fulani herdsmen militia in the Idoma zone of Agatu in Benue
State, still within the North central region. But perhaps, because the Idoma
people are close neighbours to the Easterners, the so-called international
community and our revered elites and intellectuals left them to their fate. The
same last year when many villages in Uzo-Uwani local government area of Enugu
State in Eastern Nigeria were burnt down and many lives lost caused by the same
Fulani Herdsmen militia invasion of the area. How many people raised alarm then
from other parts of the country about the killings of innocent people in
Uzo-Uwani, Enugu State? Where were all these prophets and intellectuals now
pontificating about the killings in Northern Nigeria? The military and other
security agents have been implicated several times in the continued
extra-judicial killings of unarmed Igbo youth in Eastern Nigeria who are
carrying peaceful protests for self-determination of their people. During last
Christmas and New Year celebrations, the whole Igboland in Eastern Nigeria was
militarised. Where were these are intellectuals and prophets who are talking? None
of these our intellectuals and self-appointed prophets has openly come up to
condemn either religion or politics or anybody at all for the carnage the
military and police are doing in Eastern Nigeria since the present regime came
to power in 2015. Now everybody is pontificating because something of that kind
is increasingly mounting in the North. Who is fooling who? I am yet to fathom
whether by our action so far, are we not saying that Britain did not make any
mistake in handing over Nigeria to the North at our political independence? I
am confused here!
There are other examples, more disturbing than the ones
recounted above. But these are sufficient to tell us that religion is not
really the issue. Mind it, evil must be condemned whole sale, wherever it
raises its ugly head. So, we are not saying that what is happening in the
North, the killing of innocent citizens there should not be denounced by all
and sundry, and justice be done. No. Our point is that our approach to such a
national problem as nation-state should be a common concern. We should stop
practicing selective response to what in real sense should be a common concern
and problem. Till now, our approach to such issues that should in normal
circumstances arouse our collective condemnation and response, has remained
selective and ethnic bias. This is the Nigerian problem! It is the ethnic bias
that has continued to underpin the emergence of Nigeria as a liberated, free,
peaceful and united nation-state.
The Nigerian Story as a Nation-State
We have been behaving as if ours is a homogenous
nation-state and as if indeed many African nation-states today, actually, fit
into the traditional definition of states by social scientists. We pretend
still as if the consents of different ethnic nationalities logged together in
that geographical expression called Nigeria mattered at all in its creation as
nation-state by the foreign colonial powers in 1914. No. Nigeria is a
heterogeneous nation-state and so must address its problem from the perspective
of its history as a multi-ethnic nation-state. Traditionally, political
scientists have employed two terms to identify the structure of the political
entity known as the state: Homogeneous and heterogeneous. The homogeneous state
– the nation per se, is defined as ‘a single people, traditionally living on a
well-defined territory, speaking the same language, practicing the same
religion, possessing a distinctive culture and united by many generations of
shared historical experience.’ Japan and the two Koreas are good example of
homogeneous states. A heterogeneous or multiethnic state or nation comes about
after the gradual fusion that may occur between the diverse national and
cultural groups within the state after a prolonged maintenance of political
control by the central government over a given territory and its inhabitants.
United Kingdom (or Great Britain) is a classical example of a heterogeneous
state, though the call for devolution and continued struggle of the minorities
within the kingdom shows that all is not yet well with such a fusion.
Today, political scientists argue that most African states
lack at least three elements necessary for nationhood: a national language, a
predominant religion and a long history of organised cohabitation among its
various peoples. Thus, many political scientists are beginning to suggest that
the African problem will only end with a permanent separation of the ethnic
groups involved. They argue that the real situation is not as a result of
corruption or religion, but a struggle for second independence of the
indigenous Africans from the domineering ethnic-group. Thus, the advocates of
this view believe that the issue of nationhood in Africa must be resolved
before genuine democracy and community development as well as real
relationships among neighbours can take root in the continent.
All this implies that understanding the stories and
imagination that lie beneath the founding of Nigeria as a nation-state and the
ability to interpret them in light of our present struggle as a people and
nation, may aid all of us to rise to the demands of nation-building and
leadership of inclusion founded on truth, justice, freedom and honesty.
Stories not only shape how we view reality but also how we
respond to life and indeed the very sort of persons we become. In other words,
we are how we imagine ourselves and how others imagine us. But this imagining
does not take as an abstraction in the world of fantasy or as the unbounded
free play of a mental faculty called the imagination. The idea that we can be
anything we wish to be is one of the most insidious lies we can ever entertain.
Who we are, and who we are capable of becoming, depends very much on the
stories we tell, the stories we listen to, and the stories we live. Stories not
only shape our values, aims, and goals; they define the range of what is
desirable and what is possible. In other words, stories are not simply
fictional narratives meant for our entertainment; stories are part of our
social ecology. They are embedded in us and form the very heart of our
cultural, economic, religious, and political worlds. This applies not only to
individuals, but to institutions and even nation-states like Nigeria. As the
Ugandan African theologian, Emmanuel Katongole puts it: “That is why a notion
like “Africa” names, not so much a place, but a story – or set of stories about
how people of the continent called Africa are located in the narrative that
constitutes the modern world.”
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, in one of his lectures, points out that
image resides in the memory and that the story we tell about ourselves, as it
were, is a process of helping the African people to draw their own image
unfettered. Images are very important. This is the reason why many people like
looking at themselves in the mirror and like to take photos of themselves. In
many African societies, the shadow is thought to carry the soul of a person.
But in our context, we are talking of the image of Nigeria as a cultural,
religious, philosophical, and even as a physical, economic, political, moral
and intellectual universe. In the conversation with Nigeria as a nation-state,
there is a tendency to show that this image resides in the memory. So also are
dreams and hopes, as well as the Nigerians’ concept of life and struggle for survival.
The question is how are we as a people remembered in our own consciousness and
in the consciousness of the outside world?
This implies that even though the stories we breathe and
live may, on the surface, appear invisible, yet it does not mean that their
hold on us is less powerful. On the contrary, to the extent that the stories
which form our imagination remain invisible, they hold us more deeply in their
grip. This is what makes the story of the institution of a nation-state like
Nigeria even more powerful than has been acknowledged. Chancellor Williams, an
African American scholar, in his seminal book, The Destruction of Black
Civilisation, cites a passage from a Sumer Legend (an ancient Black People)
that may best explain the point we have been trying to stress here:
“What became of the Black People of Sumer?” – The traveler
asked the old man, “for ancient records show that the people of Sumer were
Black. What happened to them? ‘Ah’, the old man sighed, they lost their
history, so they died.” – “A Sumer Legend.” (Cf. C. Williams, The Destruction
of Black Civilisation, Third World Press, Chicago 1987, p. 15).
Here a question easily suggests itself: “how many of
Nigerian young generations today are conversant with the founding story of
Nigeria as a nation-state – the founding stories of the nation’s institutions
and social systems? How many Nigerians of today have a clear knowledge of the
history of the evolution of Nigeria as a nation-state, and the role played by
our past heroes in the birth of Nigerian nation-state? The present reality of
Nigeria challenges us to dig deep into our past as a nation-state in order to
rejuvenate it based on those values and ideals which our founding fathers and
past heroes have labored and died for.
According to Bievenu Mayemba, a Congolese Jesuit Priest, a
story tells us about the past, supports us in the present, and prepares us for
the future: “It involves the memory of the past and the memory of the future…
It also involves a promise and tells us we should not move forward without
looking back.” Since our African memory is future-oriented despite John Mbiti’s
phenomenological interpretation of the African concept of time, we look back to
the past, to the myth of our ancestors, for the sake of the future and future
generations. This is an essential task, especially in the Nigerian context,
that is a classical example of colonial dispossession of Africa’s cultural
heritage. Chinua Achebe in his magnus opus novel, Things Fall Apart, which has
its setting in Nigeria (Igboland), captures very well this colonial
dispossession of our heritage as the founding story of the crisis we are living
today in Nigeria and in indeed in the whole of Africa:
“He has won our brother and our clan can no longer act like
one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together, and we have fallen
apart”.
The Nigerian Jesuit Priest and theologian, A.E. Orobator
from Benin City, recently, made a very significant theological re-appropriation
of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (cf. A.E. Orobator, Theology Brewed in an
African Pot, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York 2008). In fact, Achebe’s Things
Fall Apart could serve as a starting point for diagnosing the maladies of the
present-day Nigeria from the point of view of the power of the founding story
and memory of Nigerian people and nation-state. Achebe’s novel, though
published many years ago is yet to be read and taught to Nigerian children with
a prophetic vision. Things Fall Apart is Achebe’s contribution towards the
socio-political and cultural regeneration of Nigeria and indeed the African
continent. Could the present generation of Nigerians take up Chinua Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart and make it relevant to the emerging Nigerian society?
Conclusion
The Nigerian problem is deeper than the accusation of
religion. Cornelius Tacitus made the following timeless remarks: “The lust for
power, for dominating others, inflames the heart more than any other passion.”
It is the politics of power and domination being pursued by the North and Fulani
herdsmen terrorism and not religion and corruption (or even agitation for
self-determination of any indigenous ethnic entity in Nigeria), that would kill
the country. All this means that we are dealing with a lust for power of a
privileged minority, who use religion and ethnic difference to manipulate power
and control over others. Emeka Ojukwu left us this legacy of his words of
wisdom:
“The person marginalising me is the person who thinks he has
something to gain by maintaining the war situation without the fighting. They
don’t allow you to fight but they want to keep the war situation alive”.
In other words, part of our problem as a nation is the
continued inability of our elites and intellectuals to point out these things
and speak directly to those responsible for a change of mentality and approach
in their pursuit of power and leadership style. This is actually, what prompted
me to write this article and share with Soyinka how his book, The Man Died,
inspired me as a young Nigerian secondary school student in the 1970s.
Soyinka’s phrase that inspired me most is as follows:
“The man died in him who remained silent in the face of
tyranny.”
In another context, Soyinka says, “The greatest threat to
freedom is absence of criticism.” In reading these marbled words of Soyinka and
hearing him today, hide under attack on religion to address the social maladies
of Nigeria as a nation-state, I felt confused! I am yet to reconcile Soyinka of
The Man Died with the Soyinka of “Kill the Religion.” Shakespeare’s Julius
Caesar tells us that: “Cowards die many times before their death but the
valiant die but once.” Our own Martin Luther King Jr., says it all in the
following words: “The moment we are silent about the things that matter we
begin to die.”
In the African context, a story is about “yesterday”,
“today” and “tomorrow”, at the same time. According to the African theologian
Jean Marc Ela from Cameroun, such a double “regard” or “view” of the past and
the future requires fidelity to the past, to our “dangerous” memories and our
pathetic and heroic memories. It also involves creativity to make new paths
into the future with hope and optimism. This creativity is what Jean Marc Ela
calls the “ethics of transgression” for the sake of epistemological rupture.”
With that, Ela was able to create a new story, an African story in Christian
theology and pastoral praxis. He triumphed over the warning of what the Nigerian
author and novelist, Chimamanda Adichie calls “The Danger of a Single Story.”
According to Adichie, the modern story of Africa is always replete with a
single story. A single story of catastrophe and corruption: ‘But it is
impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. Power is
the ability not just to tell the story of another, but to make it the
definitive story of that person, the simplest way to do it is to tell the
single story over and over again.’
The Nigerian problem is to be located in the right place
where it belongs, namely, ‘the lust for power and domination by the privileged
minority.’ This is what we should all struggle to tame and not religion in our
nation. I rest my case!
Francis Anekwe Oborji is a Roman Catholic Priest. He lives
in Rome where he is professor of missiology (mission theology) in a Pontifical
University.
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