Translating the Nigerian Constitution into Yoruba

When I received Segun Akeredolu's message informing me that he had just finished translating the Nigerian Constitution from English into Yoruba, I knew he had accomplished something. I saw Segun the last time I visited Nigeria. He was one of the lawyers who came round to my friend's - Charles's - office at the Ministry of Justice in Akure to say hello to me. (Charles Olafimihan is a childhood friend and a barrister/advocate). Tony, another legal hotshot, was also a curious and shrewd questioner and listener. Another young man whose name now escapes me had also turned up, only to slink away a few moments later because he thought I was blaspheming his ancestors while atheologising his biblical ancestors like Abraham, David, Jesus, and Joshua!
Segun, whose office is next to my friend's, whom I had become acquainted with during previous visits to Nigeria, didn't tell me he had been working on rendering the Nigerian Constitution into Yoruba. When he sent the finished work to me, I was impressed by the integrity of the contents and the thoroughness implicit in the construction, and seeing that it took him five years to wrap it up, it was clearly a herculean toil. A somewhat heuristic exercise, too, because by the time he finished the job, he would have had a better, rounder and more nuanced grasp of Nigeria's laws. I have gone through Segun's Yoruba language Nigerian Constitution and it is indeed a remarkable feat of intellection. (Yoruba words are elaborately accented and Segun has gone to the trouble of marking every word).
This is also important given the pejoration of the Yoruba language over against English. A trend which began long ago - in days when Yoruba was by colonial impress described as a 'vernacular' - has now crescendoed in the complete inferiorisation of the language. Children born to Yoruba parents living in Yoruba cities cannot speak the language, and often, their efforts are twangily creolised and warped. I speak Yoruba to my children as frequently as I can in the UK, and no one can put anything past them in the language; they even try to converse in it. My teenage daughter was bemused when some children who came from Nigeria with their parents last summer could not speak Yoruba; these Yoruba post-millennials were also loath to be addressed in their supposed 'mother tongue.' The irrepressible Fela Kuti described this sort of behaviour as 'colo mentality' or, amply speaking, colonial mentality.
No, I am not a cultural essentialist and I know the English language has become global in its reach, the common patter of modern times. But then, I still consider the Yoruba language as important, just as a Frenchman or a German would take his language seriously and consider it worthy of preservation despite the superscription of another language, i.e., English. The Yoruba diaspora is larger and farther-flung than any from Africa, and echoes of the language can be picked up even in the heartlands of Brazil, Cuba and Haiti. This was why I thought I should congratulate another friend I saw on television in Nigeria. I knew Dr Olayinka Olatunde Ayinde through Facebook - an intelligent and reasoned thinker, and I could still recognise this sterling reasonableness when I saw him on TV offering medical counsel in the Yoruba language - his delivery was clean, urbane and eloquent. Beyond all, self-commisioned and labour-of-love acts like the translation of the Nigerian Constitution by Segun Akeredolu can reverse the slide of the Yoruba language into extinction.

Atheists can't be 'Worshippers' of Satan

Against my self-drawn rule, a few days ago, I responded to a friend's quasi-religious post. In a slightly forked-tongue way, the friend wondered why atheists always deny the existence of God and never that of Satan. I responded solely because the person who posted the piece was an old friend and classmate. Even though we have not been in the presence of each other for decades, I still consider him a friend, such was our buddyhood in primary school. Notwithstanding that, while my friend may very well have steeped himself in the nether reaches of the ocean of Nigerian religionism, I now follow the not-so-beaten path of irreligion. I also responded because of the reference to atheists. I am not an atheist simply because it would be a misdescription of someone who doesn't care either way whether or not there are gods or a God. But I have been called an atheist a few times, and, electively speaking, I do have an affinity with atheists. So, I thought I should respond to my friend's post.
Here is what I wrote. 'In the Bible or the Qur'an or the Torah, Satan is the spawn of God, Jehovah, Allah or however you wish to describe him, or her, or it - Satan is one of your 'creator's' earlier angelic androids. So by a process of entailment, the denial of Satan must be subsumed by the denial of the middle-eastern monotheist god who I imagine you meant when you wrote 'God,' in the same way that the affirmation of that 'God' presupposes the cognitive factor of Satan. Satan cannot be separated from the 'God concept'; it subsists within the theology of the 'first cause' god who, or which, I think you believe in. The person who commented first appears to have helped you to clarify what you were trying to say by stealth: that atheists are believers in Satan. This is not true - in most cases. For instance, as an agnostic, when I cast doubt - strong doubt - on the theology of the Abrahamic god, the doubt extends roundly to Satan. To me, both of these entities - non-entities - signify nothing.'
Of course, I knew I was only preaching to the unconverted when I wrote the above. All right, it is slightly teacherly, but it had to be so because I thought it should be as clear as day why 'real' atheists would not bother with Satan. Should it? Maybe in some places, it is. Satan, or the Devil, or the arch-demon, is big in Africa, with South America coming far second. In so far as most African Christians are now evangelicals, Satan is indeed a huge, loomingly leviathan on the continent. Of course, Western theologians had been writing Satan out of the Bible even long before Kierkegaard arrived on the scene with his avant-garde, up-to-the-minute Christianity and for quite a while before the religion was introduced to Africans. And contemporary theologians would go to hell first before expending any intellectual time on Satan. Although the practice of Satanism is more of a neo-Gothic paganism rather than any Augustinian exercise which seeks to apprehend the sly biblical Satan, Carl Raschke's attempt at analysing Satanism in America in his book, Painted Black, is monumentally flawed. And here, within evangelical circuits, Satan is no longer a regular referent - except in the frenzied liturgy of mucky charismatics and hucksterish African pastors. Even in the sterner religion of Islam, there has been more emphasis on heaven, fruits, flowers and fuckable virgins than on hell and Iblis (Satan).
I will not go into why Satan has always been a feature of life in Africa (because it will take a book to do that), but I'll briefly touch on why it'll remain that way for a long time. Christianity is in a state of intellectual stasis in Africa. In other words, despite the mushrooming of churches and the multiplication of God memes, the religion has not approached in sophistication the sort of liberal theology which prodded David Strauss to write his 'Life of Christ' (1808), a sceptical and revisionist theobiography of Jesus, or the open-mindedness of JW Colenso, Bishop of Natal (1853), racial equalitarian and rational reader and interpreter of the Bible. Even in the biblicistic and Satan-obsessed minds of African Christians, Strauss and Bishop Colenso would be burning in hell now.
  As I pointed out above, atheists shouldn't be in the business of denying the existence of Satan. The confirmation or denial of the existence of Satan should be the preserve of theologians. The refutation of the existence of God, a paradoxically unnecessary exercise, is just about enough for atheists because the very negation of God implicates the nonexistence of Satan. By the same token, anyone who describes himself as a Satanist in any Abrahamic sense is, by simple extrapolation, a theist, not an atheist. The incarnation or spiritualisation of Satan is contingent on the moral coefficient of an Anti-Satan, and that can only mean God. For Satan to be an adversary and an antagonist, he needs a protagonist and a principal: God. The ever-thoughtful Martin Luther agrees: 'The Devil is God's Devil.' In other words, Satan is no more than the sidekick that God uses to tempt and try his creatures. It was necessary from the first that the creators of the fiction of God must come up with a foil, a countergod, a baddie to offset God's improbable goodness. To use a loose analogy, you can only deconstruct a Bond baddie within the construct of James-Bondology, or shall we say the theology of James Bond?

The Meaning of Life (Or Its Meaninglessness)

                                 

Many years ago, I wrote an essay entitled The Meaning of Life, a consequence, I suppose, of being not so much a paid-up ponderer on such things - like a professional philosopher or a theologian - as being merely a thinking animal whose mind had been encroached upon by a rather cerebral matter. Without realising it, I engaged in abstruse reasoning in the piece. Since I could not - human that I was - truly define the meaning or purpose of life, I had merely skirted the boundaries of being and beingness (and, of course, those of nothing and nothingness) in the short piece. The essay was published in a newspaper I wrote for in West Africa. Much of the feedback I got harped on the essay’s indecipherability; in other words, the promise the title gave was not met by the contents; if I had proffered any meaning of life at all, it was lost in the complexity of the essay.

I was slightly surprised by this observation because I was under the impression that my ‘take’ on the meaning of life was clear and accessible. In so much as I would like to be seen as an essayist who had expressed his views as lucidly as he could, the imputation of intellectual esotericism and verbal denseness was not quite something to whoop about – although these days, I don’t give two hoots about how what I write comes across to anyone. Even then, how does one begin to write about the metaphysics of the meaning of life without running the risk of stylistic heavy-handedness or even piffling meaninglessness? One must necessarily walk a tightrope and be careful lest one fall into a dark intellectual abyss. 

But then, shouldn’t every essay or book entitled The Meaning of Life be approached with common sense, with the preknowledge that however eloquent and reader-friendly the author may be, she is never going to offer any substantive explanation of the meaning of life, even if the writing style is as clear as the retina of Gautama Buddha’s eye, the value will be opaque, at the very best. No Guru, no Teacher, no Polymath has been able to hazard a definitive and provable interpretation of the essence of life. No book either - not the Bible, Quran, or Vedas; neither Aristotle’s nor Spinoza’s Ethics, nor Collected Shakespeare or Shaw or Soyinka can offer anyone a conclusive explanation of all things. Of course, Christians might find a sort of meaning in the Bible, and Muslims might see the Quran as the book that sheds gnostic light on the shadowiness of being, but a neutral-minded reader of both books would only encounter bemusement, some poetry, contradictions, myths, antediluvian tales, reductio ad absurdum, cautionary bugaboos in the shape of hell and eternal roasting and a temperamental inadequate ‘creator’ and ‘controller’ of the world – and possibly wafts of self-induced spiritualism.          

   The question of the meaning of life came up again a few weeks ago (years now; this article was written a few years ago) when I ran into Professor Terry Eagleton’s book of the same title. Eagleton is a literary critic, not a philosopher, and maybe that is why his short introduction to this nagging, if pointless, question is not one of the most original. He goes over the same old grounds. Without explicitly declaring himself religious, hews the line of believers over against ‘unbelievers’ - he is, by the way, the arch-Anti-Dawkins. Although the book is fairly readable, Eagleton offers no meaning for life, and he actually warns against frequent posing of the question. He rounds on philosophers he considers nihilists, such as the profoundly pessimistic Schopenhauer. He touches on how modernism and its mongrel offspring, postmodernism, have been detrimental to the grand narrative of meaning. Enough of Eagleton now – he committed blasphemy with his reproof of Schopenhauer! Viktor E Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning, the author’s quest for meaning against the background of his experiences as a Holocaust survivor, makes for better reading.

Have I just had a brainwave of what the meaning of life might consist in? You bet - not. Isn’t this a triangulation we had better leave to the three Fates to deal with, particularly Atropos, who would inevitably cut off the thread spun by Clotho and measured by Lachesis? Does religion offer any meaning as ‘believers’ would like to imagine? Well, even when I was a kind of believer, the galleon that carries Minotaur of Meaning in its underdeck was very far from the offing. Even the finest explainer or interpreter of the Bible or Quran could not crystallise their readings into an epiphany of unassailable truth or summa. Like many things in life, religion offers some consolation and acts as a placebo, a potent narcosis, which may truly help some to cope with humans’ common Oedipean blindness. Rather than being the polar light, religion is no more than a bendable cane - a ‘walking stick’ - with which some try to feel their way through the vast dark jumble-room, or even charnel house, of life.   

Philosophy gives its own consolations, too, although less pompously than religion. As a matter of fact, philosophy offers no consolations – despite the flavoursome proffering of such by writers/philosophers from Boethius to Alain de Botton – what it does is to turn anyone who embraces it (or her, Boethius’s Lady Philosophy) into the ballast in the very boat of his/her life - you sink or float by your own devices. Philosophy does not attempt the concentring of life’s rather spiky spokes onto any hub – in other words, philosophy is only a cog and not the hub. Philosophy does not offer saccharine julep that kills the bitter taste of life. Philosophy offers counterpoison; it offers hemlock, which destroys the candied sweetness and light in your mouth and guts, which will not kill you and will not make you stronger, but probably savvier. Philosophy removes your milk teeth and especial sweet tooth and replaces them with nicotine-coloured wisdom teeth. Backgrounding any philosophical study of life’s meaning is the Socratic axiom that he knew nothing. Socrates would not have been able to offer any definitive meaning of life if you asked him. At best, he would ask you to tell him what meaning you thought life, or your life, had - loading the question so lightly that you would certainly be shown up.                

So how does one get a purchase on the meaning of life? One might as well shin up a slippery Babel-tall thread to Christian heaven to arrive at it. So far as I am concerned, there is no definable meaning at all to life; it only behoves every person to seek and define the meaning of his or her life (a very anti-Eagleton subjectivism). I see nihility in many things we give undue weight to, but I am not a nihilist in the sense of being completely enamoured of nothing and nothingness. I have a family and kin; I have friends. Even if I fancy myself a great understander of nihilism, I am a poor nihilist just like I failed to be a true antinatalist (a practiser of the Silenian ideal of better-never-to-have-been-born). I only try to give meaning to things within reason. For instance, I reject the possibility or existence of any god because even if there is any conclusive evidence of a ‘god’ being there, it will add zilch meaning to my own existence – as a matter of fact, the thought of any entity called ‘god,’ or worse, ‘God,’ detracts from any meaning I may want to give to life. In a way, the monotheist God reminds me of the story of Diogenes the Cynic and Alexander the Great, God being the latter: a distraction, a kibitzer who interferes in the treacherous card game of life – except, of course, that Alexander the Great was real and God is a figment of our imagination. Before the Distinguished Thing - the name Henry James gave to death - arrives to do the not-so-distinguished thing, humans do their best to shamble and blunder, Oedipus-like, for any kind of meaning for their lives. We quest for meaning in religion. In spiritualism. In food. In various forms of antifoodism. In friendship. In freemasonry and kindred organisations. In family. In love. In books. In art. In music. In bullshit and bullshitting. In drugs. In gambling and every kind of addiction, including the Internet. In procreation. In philoprogenitiveness. In childlessness. In many ruts and rituals of everyday life. In masturbation. In sex and its manifold kinks. Oh yes, in sex. Or why would the late English poet laureate, John Betjeman, say in his last days that the only regret he had was that he did not have enough sex? And the latest pop-psych weasel word, ‘sex addiction,’ is indeed nonsense. In my opinion, consenting adults can have as much sex as they can. Now, the once ragingly goatish Bill Clinton seems to have ‘mortified the flesh’ and zenned out, but in a rampant Freudian alter-world, the ageing man would not say 'no' if he were gifted an Abishag to warm the cockles of his heart – or some other cockled organ. However, whether these things offer any ‘real’ meaning is another matter. Again, take the primal sop we offer ourselves: sex. For good reasons, the French describe the act’s orgasmic finale as ‘la petite mort’ or ‘the little death,’ but then for many who recover from ‘the little death,’ post-coital tristesse, or after-sex sadness, melancholy, sometimes overtakes the momentary spasms of ecstasy.   

I like reading books, and I have immensely enjoyed reading some of them, even experiencing Barthes’ version of ‘le petit mort’ while perusing certain books, for instance, Tolstoy’s War and Peace. But what is the sum of meaning that I have found in the sum of every book that I have read? It is incalculable, and this is not because I have found in them a googol (or google?) of meaning that has led me to resolve and ratiocinate the surds of life, but incalculable because even now I cannot begin to unravel how the reading of George Eliot’s magnificent Middlemarch has contributed to the sum of my intellect. Or Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason – or Critique of Practical Reason, or even his Critique of Judgement. Or Achebe’s Arrow of God. Or American Psycho. When you throw the latter novel into the mix and yet another offbeat beast like Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, in which a character gets his kick from eating shit, then I think it becomes clear that one tittle of meaning you take from life is the bilge in its underbelly, the utter shittiness (notwithstanding that the books are fiction, I would imagine that murderous psychopathy and pathological coprophilia are humanly probable).  This is what depth psychology tries to help us to crystallise, sometimes with goodish results. Even though I am a keen reader of Freud, Freudianism and its offshoots, Jungian psychology is my guilty pleasure, guilt because, even with the best will in the world, I can’t embrace Jung’s God/paranormal placebo...

Now, why stop abruptly? Or isn’t that how the lives of many of us are cut off, suddenly, unwarned, even painfully. To conclude, I will quote Flaubert. ‘Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread and want to know the whole design.’ We simply can’t.          

The Starers of Prague: A Kafka-inspired Essay

There should be a word for the act of staring at people who do not look - racially speaking - like you. Xenoscopia? This is a neology that just came to me, but I am always very careful about giving the import of racism, or even the slightly euphemised racialism, to everything. When you shout and wolf-cry 'race' at every glance, wink, or even bodycheck, it will inevitably stew your mind into a witch's brew of paranoia, self-pitying prickliness, victimism and even inverted racism. Racism must be confronted and properly chastened, but to put the exponential of race and racism on everything is to teeter on the borderline of maladaptive neurosis - which most racists suffer from, anyway.
Prague is the capital of the Czech Republic in Central Europe - not in Eastern Europe, as the late Iron Curtain might have delineated it.  Perhaps this is why someone from the United Kingdom, say, would call someone from the Czech Republic an Eastern European (and for other reasons). The point I am trying to make is that Prague is not exactly in the farthest corner of Siberia or in some sort of bumpkinish Boratland where the apparition of a black person would call forth a million stares during a metro ride. I am fairly well-travelled in Western Europe: France, Belgium, Spain, Austria, and I can say that even in free-spirited Spinozaland (Holland), in Amsterdam to be specific, interracial gawpy stares have not exactly become passé, except that in a comparatively fair-sized city like Hamburg in Germany it is not as monomaniacal and zombie-like as in Prague. I daresay, though, that straying into the hinterlands of Bavaria or the steppes of Finland might, understandably, invite such spectatorial interest.
Patronage has not been wholly threshed out of the 'collective unconscious' of Europe and Europeans (not all), particularly concerning people from Africa. David Cameron, British Prime Minister, set off a squall of debate over the word 'swarm' when he used it for immigrants trying to get into Britain from France, the most visible of whom are Africans from the so-called 'horn' of the continent. Only a couple of weeks ago, editors of NRC Handelsblad in Holland thought it was cool to write: Nigger, Are You Crazy? This is clearly reminiscent of how the editors of Charlie Hebdo thought it was kosher to simianise a black woman as a kind of appropriative satire. Even so, I am instancing things that one might use the careless derivate 'casual racism' for (I'd call it 'cavalier racism'). But when you are stared at with such autistic automatism that the good citizens of Prague contrive to enact and sustain everlastingly, then I think it would be unfair on them to call it 'casual racism.' How do you begin to second-guess the thoughts of a young man, woman, or an elderly man or woman eyeballing you? Of course, you know it might have something to do with your race, your colour, your muchness of melanin - or, in my own case, my bald pate. After all, there has always been an under-discussed lookist dimension to baldness. It's even possible to give the stares racist overtones, but I am, alas, a thoughtful person. Now these are not dirty looks, not glowering, smouldering transfixions, not the sort of stares that followers of Santeria in South America would call 'evil eye.' These Prague stares are mostly chess player-like, dry, seemingly incurious, eyes-wide-shut deadpan. They are by no means friendly gawps, nor are they staringly unfriendly; they are neither cold nor warm, neither furtive nor shifty, not an astonished goggle nor the kind lovestruck gazey ogle you might direct at the object of your admiration.
My teenage daughter, who spent much of the time reading on the metro, exclaimed to me as we came out at a stop: oh, people stare here, don't they? I replied: yes, they do. Why? I don't know, I replied. Thank goodness she's always been a good reader of books; I would have thought she was trying to screen herself behind the book. This would not have worked anyway because if there was a word for anyone watching someone as they read, I would have used it to describe a young woman who eyeballed my daughter for so long that you might wonder whether she was furiously incubating a short story entitled 'Young African Girl Reading On Prague Metro.'
After all, Prague is the quintessential city of culture, writerly culture for that matter. The first thing I saw when the plane taxied to a stop was Vaclav Havel Airport. This had induced a favourable impression on me: here is a country naming its major airport after a writer. Can we have Chinua Achebe Airport in Lagos or Abuja? Then I remembered that Havel was not only a writer but also a 'statesman' who became the first president of the Czech Republic in 1990. Havel had brought up Milan Kundera and Ivan Klima. I recalled Klima's book of short stories set in Prague, in which I mainly read dark tales about ordinary lives in the city. It's not really hard to see how Klima came up with those stories. It's almost 30 years since the long death rattle of communism in Czechoslovakia lost all momentum, giving life to free-market openness with its accompanying palette of late-modernity. However, you could still see the signs of statist regularity and brooding amplitude in Prague's architecture. The hotel we stayed in, the International, is a huge secular cathedral, limestony, Soviet-built, its massive columns capstoned by sturdy simulacra of workers.
I did not go to Prague as a culture vulture, hungering for and grubbing through the rich entrails of the city's bohemian soul; I only went for a short break with my family. But I had to 'see' and 'do' Prague. There were the bookshops, so many of them. Posters advertising Mozart's Don Giovanni. Plays. Operas. Galleries. Museums. Alfresco cafes. The Jewish quarters. Medieval synagogues and churches. With its abiding images of Spring 1968, Wenceslas Square is a large screen showing films about the event. The square recalled Paris's Champs Elysée, a boulevard, foreshortened, like a monumental upended plinth at the head of which rests the huge National Museum. A quick visit to the Naprstek Museum of Asian, African and American Cultures - which has its own corner of 'African' artefacts. And the black-themed Franz Kafka museum, the piece de resistance of my touristy saunter. Kafka might not have been subjected to 'xenoscopia' in Prague, but -  as a Jew in a country full of Czechs, with a sizable German population, and at a moment in history when the poison of antisemitism which would culminate in the 2nd World War was marinating, he was, potentially, a 'marked man.'
Now back to the stares - I'd rather give the apparently compulsive, even instinctual, act an anthropological explanation rather than racial. Humans generally tend to subject the unfamiliar, the other, to 'the gaze.' If a Czech person found himself in a local market in Niamey, Niger, he might also attract glances and double-takes, not because some of the people who stared may never have seen a European but because the 'white man' looked different. Now some of the more irate race warriors might argue that there is always subterranean politics to stares. Implicit in one stare is innocuous curiosity, even slightly quizzical adoration, if not approbation, and inherent in another is detestation, even dehumanisation - since the stares I received were not indicative of Afrophilia, the reasoning might go, it was undoubtedly Afrophobia, there can be nothing inbetween. As an African I understand this prejudice very well: while it might seem black-and-white and not the sort of position I would take without good reason, it cannot be dismissed out of hand. The stares might very well be an expression of a certain kind of unease, discomfiture; it might be the bemusing attempt to grasp what some scholars have called the 'idea of Africa,' the Hegelian, louche idea of Africa conceptualised and nurtured by the European mind.
Rather than fling the word 'phobia' around lightly, I would  use the term 'betenoire complex' to describe the spectrum of unconscious responses to the 'idea' of racial 'blackness.' I had to plumb humanity's psychic depths to come up with this coinage. I'll illustrate. Close to midnight, I was walking down a well-lit, if solitary, street of the north Kent town I live in and a few meters before me, I made out the apparitions of two young women saying goodbyes as they descended from the porch of a house, making a beeline for a car which had just been smart-readied. As if by a cue, both women had turned to see the dark figure looming, and both had slewed on their stilettos and skittered towards the house like chicks who had glimpsed a bird of prey in good time. As I went past, I could see them disappearing into the porch. Would they have panicked and doubled back to the safety of the house if they had glimpsed a 'white' rather than a 'black' face? I don't know, but over against philosophical balance and dispassion, it would be difficult to argue that a dormant, if unreasonable, reflex had not been in play or undercut the fact that measuring the panic threshold of the women's response might borrow some percentage from pigmentation. Not so long ago, the 'black man' was used by some white parents to induce good behaviour in their children - here comes the nigger, the monster, the ogre. This is the sum of the 'betenoire complex', and those who suffer from it greatly, clinically, may still find the black-bogeyman cautionary stratagem useful.
The stares of Prague may be set down in the Kafka-absurd, vague, and minor end of the scale of the 'betenoire complex' - at least many of them. Because, again, the motive behind stare A may be different from that of stare B. For instance, in the concourse of Prague's central train station, there were posters depicting global 'cultures' and peoples. I noticed that the only representation of Africa was a montage of black-and-white pictures of Pygmies of the Kalahari, half-naked, 'primitive,' and peculiarly picturesque. In one of the frames, a white man stands amidst the Pygmies, tall, commanding, like Gulliver among Lilliputians, beaming with with paternal aplomb. Against the background of this poster, I'd caught a couple of people lost in a glaring brown study. I also found subliminal images of racialism in the lobby of Czech's Academy of the Sciences, where I was welcomed with images of Mursi women in various states of undress, dust-coloured, lips stretched out with large discs, disked dangling earlobes, cropped hair, and knocked-out teeth. Beautiful women all right, and one has to acknowledge the scientific good intentions and the anthropological truth-seeking which informed such displays. But you do not need to be a close reader of Chinua Achebe's disquisition on the politics of 'image' to know that if a child is fed with certain stereotypes, inoculated with single-coloured impressions of peoples of a continent, he might grow up to stare and stare again, puzzled, puzzling over this black being, mulling the dark vision he's just seen over, probably to validate the preconceptions he had. Even then, this cannot be defined as racism; some of the stares might very well be informed by other aesthetic, impressionistic or even anthropological rationales. 
After a few hours in Prague, I came up with a strategy. Stare back, hold your stare, and make it a grainless, straight-faced stare. Turn the whole thing into a staring game; do not be outstared; stare down whoever you entered into the game with. I actually wished I had a talent for hypnosis, to put those who stared for too long into deep sleep and make them miss their stop. I wished I had the power, African voodoo if you please, to turn anyone who overstared at me into stone or a pillar of salt.

PS: I had to end this piece with lighthearted satire. A lot is going on in the world. Hunger. Famine. Wars. Genocides. Untold human suffering. Racism in its most malign form. The so-called 'migrant crisis.' And, of course, xenophobia. With all these, why should I get myself worked up about mere stares? About mere xenoscopia. 

Coming Out

A few years ago, a nineteen-year-old youngster, a second-year university student in Nigeria, contacted me. He'd read stuff I wrote and was (according to him) impressed with my freethinking, irreligion, etc. He wrote that he had a problem and he'd be happy if I could help. Oh no, it wasn't a begging letter but something more spiritually affecting and humanely exigent. The problem was that he didn't know how to approach his parents. Come out, not as gay or a cross-dresser or a genderfucker of some kind, but as an atheist, a nonbeliever in God, in Jesus, the H. Ghost and all the Judeo-Christian jazz. Nigerians, as I should very well know, are heavily opiated with religion but his folks binged on the God dope. His father, a university teacher, was a part-time pastor who, like Adeboye and Kumuyi, considered giving up his job as a don for God and Church. His mum was not only a devoted Christian wife and mother but also multitasked as deacon, chorister, usher and all-around busybody for Jesus, or shall we say, dogsbody?
He was one of three supposedly godfearing children, the oldest. Indeed, he used to fear God - fear mixed with worshipful love, I would think. He used to pray as hard as any member of his family. Then, around the time he got into university, something happened - or began to happen - in him. He began to think beyond the Bible, prayer, God, Jesus, John, Paul, apostles, prophets and the horde of 'heavenly hosts.' At the end of the Platonic period, he came out of the cave of woo-woo shadows into light, into the sweet-sour reasonableness of rationality - although he was still trying to adjust his eyes to the light. But he could only do these things inwardly; he dared not show his hand or come out as a 'freethinker,' that wasn't an option. So far as his engineer-lecturer father was concerned, there was no such thing as atheism - theism was a given. The young man might as well go batshit first, streak onto the street, shouting 'God is dead,' then at least everyone would know he'd gone stark raving mad, which would be more comforting than knowing that he was sane yet 'blasphemous' - after all, the Yoruba Bible mistranslates the word 'fool' for 'madman'. The centuries-old amping-up of 'fool' into 'madman' shows that the Pavlovian dog of Christianity and God and Fear was not only let loose among Africans but that it has now spawned a continent-wide intellectual stupor and hysteria.
Clearly, the young man was caught in a bind, which wouldn't have been any better even if he were a few years older and fending for himself. Even then, he would have agonised over it, although since a certain degree of independence, even agency, would come with being self-sustaining, he might not need to get in touch with anyone. But now he was a university student: he still lived at home, and he still had to attend church - which he had to do because he was still tied to the purse strings of his parents; they also paid his school fees, so it was important for him to play along, even if he often felt like leaping up from his seat in the church to tell the smug-faced pastor that the 'man of God' got a lot of things wrong. I knew how unthinkable it would be to his parents that anyone would not believe in God, particularly under the banner of Christianity or Islam - and then to know that it was their beloved son who had spurned God! The parents would have raised hell if the young man had told them he'd become an 'idol worshipper,' to use that silly update of the colonial 'pagan,' but they would not just raise hell if he said he no longer believed, they would picture him right there in the inferno.
It's really a shame that, for some fogeyish reason, in 21st-century Nigeria, a 19-year-old young man cannot let his parents know that he has a mind of his own. It was also a moral crisis. The young man was in a quandary. Aptly, it'd brought a 19th-century autobiography by Edmund Gosse to me - Father and Son, the coming-of-age story of an adolescent son who rejected his father's religious belief and heavy strictures. But to the extent that Africa has stagnated, even abysmally antiquated, itself with religions which were midwifed into existence millennia ago from the antediluvian imagination and the historical womb of Semitic people, the adolescent Gosse was able to exercise more freedom of choice, more intellectual expressiveness, in fin-de-siecle Europe than a young intelligent Nigerian in this day and time.
I could fairly imagine the desperation, the seething frustration, that had driven the young man to seek advice and an irreligious paraclete to help him see his way through the crypts of false piety in which Nigeria and Nigerians have buried themselves. But in reality, I could not do much to provide any equilibrium to the dividedness which assailed the young man's 'soul,' soul in that 18th/19th-century sense. It was Henry Miller, I believe, who wrote at the height of modernism that the 'soul problem' perhaps went away with Dostoevsky or had, at least, been chemicalised. In Nigeria, 'soul' is still in that stage Dostoevsky left it - no, it's even pre-Dostoevsky, because here was a young Nigerian Ivan Karamazov, a contrarian, a budding atheist, made forlorn of soul, of voice, even of personhood. If you are not part of the Abrahamic mass orgy or do not wish to be part of the happy-clappy menagerie as in the case of the poor guy who got in touch with me, living in the whitewashed and rotting ark of Africa's parodic religiousness can be suffocating, even noxious. Even here in the UK, where there is a degree of sociological sophistication, it is not all that easy for a young Nigerian or Ghanaian, say, to segue into being an unbelieving 'black sheep' of his family, particularly if it is a family which prides itself on its piety.
I have a philosophical allergy to self-aggrandisement in any guise. I hate to take on the role of a 'wise counsellor,' I hate being a pastorish mouther of feelgoodisms. Anyway, I wrote to the young man that he must continue to dissemble, to deceive his parents that he was a Christian - pretend Christian - he should carry on with a caricature of filial piety and try to sustain it for as long as is necessary. This was an existential crisis, and for all Sartre wrote about 'bad faith,' about 'authenticity,' it would not be in the young man's best interests to announce to his parents that he had backslid (I'd call it forward-slid), or had taken a leap onto counterfaith. He lived in a society which provided no safety nets - a society where things like student loans no longer existed, so he needed his parents to do their duties, and if appearing to be a Christian was the quid pro quo, so be it. But only for as long as he was under his parents' thumb. He only had to wait for the right time to let them know that he no longer had any time for their Christian/evangelical baloney. No, it wasn't going to be easy, but if they had any generosity in them - which even the Nazarene showed in some of the stories written about him - they should accept that their son was now truly reborn, although there is no doubt that they would expect him to come crawling back, prodigal-son like. That is even being generous to the parents because if they had belonged to a fundamentalist movement like the Jehovah's Witnesses, their son might be 'disfellowshipped,' excommunicated, godsped onto the highway to perdition.
In my reply to the young man, I had no personal experience to draw on. As I had written a few times, I had slipped effortlessly into irreligion - no hangups, no familial feelings to spare. At 19, there was no need to express my doubts; the Nigerian society I grew up in - though considerably religion-minded - was not so obsessed and bloated with Abrahamism. I spent much of my free time in university drinking beer in a smoke-filled Student Union's 'buttery;' I never crossed paths with religion and the religious. Well, not to stray too far into gonzo territory, I should wrap up with the advice I gave the young fella. Be strong, don't buckle to the pressure; deafen yourself to the overwhelming and spellbinding drumbeat of 'God' and its heady accompaniment of pentecostal 'praise and worship.' And when the time is right, come out and free yourself from the chains and tyranny of religious faith.  

'Why Chuka Umunna will neither become Labour Party Leader nor British Prime Minister.'

If time had permitted, I would have dashed off - typed, really - a short piece entitled 'Why Umunna will neither become Labour Party Leader nor British Prime Minister.' This would not only have been prescient, it would also have come across to some as cynical, if not 'un-Nigerian.' 'Un-Nigerian' because last year, a prominent Nigerian newspaper had misreported that Umunna might become British Prime Minister this year. I made a brief comment under the link: well-meaning or not, this was a lazy, if not idiotic, piece of misinformation. Chuka Umunna was a member of the opposition party and however high-ranked he was he could not become British Prime Minister this year for the simple reason that he was not the leader of his party. As it turned out, even the leader of the party, Ed Miliband, did not become Prime Minister; he had to resign after the last election, trounced and bruised.
But I know why the false prognosis that Chuka Umunna would become prime minister was made. Like three other MPs in the British Parliament, he had a Nigerian parent - his father. Perhaps owing to a misplaced sense of ownership, Nigeria (personified) has always had this vain and prideful quirk of claiming someone born and raised in Europe or North America and has made good as its own. This is all very well. But that this attitude may be carried too far, as with the mendacious newspaper report. And certainly, some of these Nigerian ‘sons’ and ‘daughters’ abroad do not shy away from their Nigerian connections. Tinie Tempah, aka Chukwuemeka Okogwu, declared during a cookery programme that he likes jollof rice; Jimmy Akingbola likes dodo; David Oyelowo can do the Yoruba accent to 'gbam;' Chiweitel Ejiofor sees his participation in ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’ as homecoming.
And politician Chuka Umunna, Tempah's friend, isn't embarrassed by his Nigerian side, either. But that is where it all ends. These guys - or blokes - are British. Though they likely carry both Nigerian and British passports, I'll leave which of the two takes precedence over the other open. But before I go back to Umunna, I'll again detour. Idris Elba has Sierra Leonean and Ghanaian parents, so he is as African as Akingbola or Ejiofor, but in so far as he fits the bill for the 21st century James Bond better, his name has come up many times as a potential 007. Reactions in Britain have been muted and British - that is ironically demure. But the American radio rant artist and right-wing jerk Rush Limbaugh went to town on Elba; he argued that the Brit could not be James Bond because he was black - Bond must be white, eternally, essentially, white. It is easy for 'liberals' like me to dismiss Limbaugh as a Tea Party loony, but you may not be surprised to learn that what Limbaugh voiced out chimed with what many others did not, both in America and here. But then, despite Limbaugh and his fellow travellers, Elba, or some other black 'dude,' can be James Bond. Just as Obama could be - and became - American president despite Rush and the likes of him.
Of course, Rush Limbaugh would foam at the mouth and rave about Chuka Umunna not looking like the textbook British Prime Minister - as if it should matter to him what a British PM should look like. A radio presenter here fancies himself as the British Limbaugh, tubbiness and all, but he is a watered-down, shock-lite version of the American. His views about Umunna weren't overly poisonous – scabrously sour, certainly. Even the Daily Mail, an old-guard British rag and its proudly politically incorrect readers, commentariat and army of often spiteful commenters only used the feint of their overt support for the other main political party to lay into Umunna after he declared that he was going to stand for Labour party leader. He was derided for being a ‘champagne socialist,’ slated for being a jumped-up urbanite, lampooned for describing himself as 'British Obama,' accused without solid proof that he edited his Wikipedia page to reflect this, which was a subtle way of dismissing Umunna as a dreamer, a faux-Obama, a black Walter Mitty. There was considerable ethnic-baiting, too: in other words, Umunna had come in for Obama-Osama-type slurs, particularly with his first name, Chuka. Barbarisations like Chukka, Chuggy, and Chucky flew around, and there was the odd Chaka-Chaka Umunna and Chuka Lumumba. And it did not help that the young man showboated his new girlfriend a couple of days before he put himself forward as a prospective Labour Party leader, a girlfriend who, contra-Obama, happened to be white. There is no accounting for love or with whom one falls in love, but is it a coincidence that most black British men who belong, or aspire to belong, in the top drawer often parade svelte white women as significant others. I wasn't surprised to see Umunna stepping out with his, well, semi-svelte girlfriend (and there is no overlooking the fact that he is half-white, anyway). When someone called in during a radio show that being mixed-race might negatively affect Umunna's chances of becoming Labour leader and prime minister, the presenter disagreed. Britain is now the avatar of a post-racial society, he affirmed. Is it, I asked myself? Even though  Britain is not America and that ‘minorities’ constitute between 10 and 14 per cent of the British society (of which Africans and Afro-Caribbean are only 3.5 per cent), I still wanted to believe the presenter’s assertion, but all I could do was to leave it open-ended.
Then, suddenly, Chuka dropped out of the race last week or ‘chucked in the towel’ as a newspaper reported. I was as surprised as many, even the Daily Mail reader who had wryly suggested that Umunna should wait for scores of years before declaring that he wanted to be Britain’s prime minister would be surprised. The only reason Umunna gave was that he could no longer take the pressure of media ‘scrutiny’ - of his life and those of his loved ones. This is all very well, although the commonsensical question as to why Umunna should expect anything but scrutiny has come up a number of times. But this is the least uncharitable of the responses. The muck-raking is still ongoing in the right-wing press. What skeleton has he got in his closet? Speaking of 'closet,' there have been vague and rather specious speculations that  ‘metrosexual’ Umunna may be gay, which, of course, would not really have mattered had he not been escorted by a woman, with the implication that he was dissimulating. There has also been speculation that Umunna was embarrassed by his own image, his oft-reported slickness, dapperness, and the fact that he belongs to a London exclusive club that flaunts its decadence and opulence. There have also been reports that both Umunna and his mother have profited from the proceeds of tax avoidance - which is not illegal but a rather morally wretched thing to do. In the more shit-stirring newspapers, there is a tenor of reportage which depicts Umunna as all facade and that if the surface is scratched, the real Umunna will be teased out, scrofulous and rotten. Ultimately, only Umunna and those close to him know why he left the race, but it might just as well be that he could not muster up enough Labour MPs to support his bid. Aspirants need 34 members of parliament to gain candidacy. Anyway, Umunna is out and I hope I won’t be reading it in a Nigerian newspaper in the next four years that he is set to become prime minister in 2020 after Cameron.

And why did I come to the conclusion that he could not have become Labour Party leader, let alone prime minister? I can’t say with any certainty. His relatively young age of 36 and experiential brevity as a parliamentarian, which, of course, had raised a few eyebrows? However, Conservative Prime Minister Cameron became the leader of his party at 39, and few suffered conniptions on account of his age. Umunna's colour - mixed-race? Just like Obama, he is taxonomically and sociologically ‘black.’ Is Britain ready for a black prime minister? Well, enough Britishness has seeped into me to make me baulk at giving a negative answer to that question. For now, the Great Black Hope has retreated behind the barricades.                

The 'God Factor.'

Olusegun Obasanjo, former Nigerian president, reveals in his overly God-slathered book, My Watch, that the grounds of Aso Rock where Nigeria's presidential residence is situated, have all of four mosques and two churchlets, otherwise called chapels. It was one churchlet to four mosques but when Obasanjo got there, like a kind of retro-Levite, he said to himself: 'In the name of the Lord we Christians will not be outmatched here.' So, he built yet another Christian praying house. After Obasanjo, the state house has been tenanted by two presidents. The Muslim Yar Adua may have added yet another mosque before he died, and the ever-kneeling, equally God-proud Goodluck Jonathan may have tried to raise the tally of churchlets in the state house. Even if the statistic remains the four mosques and churchlets that Obasanjo left, six places of religious worship in the abode of the Nigerian president are still alarming. What is the point of four mosques and two chuchlets on the grounds of the so-called villa?

Constitutionally speaking, Nigeria is a secular country, and there shouldn't be any monument to religion in the president's estate or, if any, there should be balance. Or, if for the convenience of the distinguished tenured guest of that rarefied space, a church and a mosque were built - six of one and half a dozen of the other, if you ask me - then there should also be shrines to Ogun, Amadioha, Olokun and the thousands of deities that populate Nigeria's ethnic enclaves. After all, Obasanjo, who now struts around as a born-again Christian, was a self-proclaimed 'traditionalist' in his first coming as head of state; he even advocated the use of juju and voodoo as the sole armament against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Doesn't this again show how Africa has lost its way - honeycombing the so-called presidential villa and its surround with 6 sancta of foreign religions in one of the most important countries on the continent?

I am irreligious in every sense of the word, so I do not have any time for 'African religions' either; their shrines or altars should also not have any place in the government house. Okay, maybe a fire-belching, hawk-eyed head of Sango installed in a shrine would be better than the hypocrisy and the cultural mimicry inherent in building churchlets and mosques. If the presidents are superstitious enough to believe in a foreign god and build many shrines to it (taking cognisance of the fact that Allah and Yahweh are indeed Tweedledee and Tweedledum), it might not be beyond them to impute the powers of a purveyor of 'retributive justice' and sulphurous punishment to Sango like Obasanjo once did.
One has to read Obasanjo's book to know how fixated he is with what he describes as the G-factor or God factor: parrotlike he repeats God, sings God, snorts God, burps God, spews God, bloviates God, spits God, farts God, he blusters and bullshits with God, the portly former president of Nigeria sweats God from every pore of his Sir Toby Belch-like frame. The word 'God' is repeated in the book several hundred times, so much so that what Obasanjo calls the God factor I'd call 'God complex,' a kind of Freudian-Oedipal over-attachment to his 'heavenly father'. The project of making Mr Adeboye the Billy Graham of the Nigerian polity began with Obasanjo and peaked with lame-duck Mr Goodluck Jonathan, who used every opportunity during his presidency to kneel before the all but pontificated pastor, seeking some kind of benediction or 'favour.'
Now, I don't have any problem with anyone following whatever religion they like or namechecking God as many times as they want. I could easily stop and get on with something else if I felt too irritated by Obasanjo's life story. But I had to keep on plodding through the man's 1,000-page ego-trip out of curiosity and because of what I had gleaned from a couple of his earlier books: an attempt to reconfigure Nigerian history not only from his sometimes insightful perspective but also in his own self-adulatory image - although by all appearances this last tome may have been ghosted by any number of hacks. 
As I pointed out above, the presidents are only tenant-occupiers of the state house, and I think there is a certain satire, if not an absurdity, to the way the men are ingathering mosques and churchlets in (and around) their taxpayer-supported grace-and-favour residence. Beyond satire, it is simply lamentable. All right, there are worse ways to squander Nigeria's money than scattering religious follies around the presidential compound, but this is still evidence of the lack of accountability and the civic irresponsibility which drives decision-making in that country. In a saner secular state, building a single place of religious worship would call for debate, consensus and compromise. Niceties like the separation of religion and state have no place in a superstition-laden society like Nigeria. But this bombastic business of interplanting mosques and churchlets in every free soil of Aso Rock is very much symptomatic of the 'belief' and 'faith' meme which has eaten into the very core of our being. I shouldn't be surprised that Aso Rock boasts six Abrahamic temples, or even sixty; this is a reflection of how the whole society has tatted itself up in pious vestments; it is indicative of the collective religiose monomania that has taken root in the country. Would I be miffed if I heard that the president's living quarters had all of six libraries and/or reading-cum-quiet rooms? Yes, as I might argue, that six were too many - more so with the likelihood that they were underused. Even then, I would still feel better that the rooms and spaces were devoted to something more worthwhile than being shrines to the 'invisible man' whose more thoughtful worshippers now argue might not be resident in the sky after all but might be some kind of 'spirit' or 'presence' or whatever.

'I am not Charlie,' says a French friend.

    

I called a friend a few days ago to ask whether she was one of those who had gathered at the Place de la Republique (and Nation) in Paris to reconsecrate France's triune of 'values' - celebrating free speech and racial diversity. Incisively, and with all the Gallic passion she could muster, she told me that she wasn't interested in the march and was not by any means 'Charlie' - a la Charlie Hebdo.
Why, I asked? She said the magazine had been racist towards black people: a black female politician – the country’s justice minister, no less - was depicted as a monkey in an edition of CH. To her, this was an extremely offending caricature of a black woman, of black people. This had given me pause. I am uberliberal, if not ultraliberal, a fierce advocate of free speech, artistic freedom, etc. I told my friend I would like to see the cartoon before making any judgment.
However, before I searched for the cartoon, I called on the foreknowledge that artistic expression in France can be so liberal, even to the point of crude offence. For instance, no British writer, however 'mad' the persona he projects, would write about other races like Michel Houellebecq does. I shifted in my seat a bit while reading what Houellebecq - or his alter ego - thinks of Africans in his subnovella, Lanzarote. But then, I reasoned: this is satire, a savage one, written by a dour, glum and sour misanthrope. In the book, Europeans are not exactly dressed in clothes of glory - clothes of garish gold, maybe because, as you would imagine, the rich Europeans call the touristy shots on the decadent island of Lanzarote.
Anyway, when I put the phone down, I googled the 'offending' cartoon and immediately saw the point of the young woman's pique. An androgynous effigy - the black minister, Christine Taubura - glared at me with slightly-spaced simian eyes, ear-to-ear jumbo lips, not to mention the distinctly tableau-ed signature tail, ruggy coat, cornrows, and dangling from her earlobes are 'jungle loops' which recall the sort of 'tribal' bling the baleful black mistress of Kurtz wears in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Well, I told myself, I can easily understand my friend's reluctance to embrace 'Charlie.'
  You have to be black to know that the 'monkey' jab is not often a laughing matter for the person at the receiving end of it - the connotation comes with a lot of stereotypical baggage, a relic of late 19th century systematic inferiorisation of the black race. Darwin was made out as a monkey in the years following the publication of Origin - but then that was Mr Charles Darwin, and an argument can even be made for the religious blockheads who cartoonised Darwin as a monkey that they were only trying to lampoon the theory of evolution, of which they had a profound misunderstanding.
Almost two decades ago, I tried to trivialise the monkey slur in an essay, arguing that, with my understanding of evolutionary biology, I was no more a monkey than any of my Nordic human cousins, that we might as well be living on a 'planet of the apes.' The problem with my attempt at meliorating, or ‘owning,’ the monkey tag is that my Nordic human cousin does not have to be constantly reminded about his kinship with monkeys.
Far more often in mainland Europe (than in the UK, where they live), Africans, or darker-skinned people in general, are still mocked, insulted and vilified with the monkey slur. Italian footballer Mario Balotelli has had to deal with it both on and off football pitches. In a popular Belgian magazine, Barack and Michelle Obama faces were photoshopped into a most overcontoured primate-mugs. So, it was no surprise that Christine Taubura was morphed into a monkey in the Charlie Hebdo skit.

     So am I Charlie? It is easy to pipe up the pat parrot-cry of ‘Je suis Charlie,’  but now, days after the heinous murder of the journalists and cartoonists, I think I might very well allow myself a lag of deliberation before giving an answer. Of course, the monkey cartoon is not in the best of tastes (often cartoons are not); one might even hazard that its author, Charb, the late editor of Charlie Hebdo, was rather insensitive to the vicious overtones of the monkey gibe; after all, there are a dozen ways to reimagine a black woman than making a monkey of her. Cartoons, however serious the moral intention might be, should be stippled with a lightness of touch, and it is rather curious that Charb did not pay any attention to the dead hand of racial ridicule and historical dysphemism at the heart of setting out a black person in the guise of a monkey. But would I storm the offices of Charlie Hebdo to ‘avenge’ my race? Certainly not. I would even be careful about labelling Charb a racist – shall we say he had a crass sense of humour? If he had not been killed by the Brothers Koauchi, I might very well (if I knew him) have a reasoned chat with him about why exercising a sage sense of proportion when it comes to the matter of race should not be equated with being a wimp. But then he would still be within his rights to disagree with me (more likely). Something which has become clear about Charlie Hebdo is that it is more limits-bucking, laisser-aller than left-wing or liberal, and though its cartoons might carry a certain streetiness, CH is no street-living hugger, its journalism is posh ‘yellow’, and it is not in the business of sparing the feelings of the ‘minorities.’

  Even though there are now conscionable highlights of the disparate coverages of the Paris murders (saturation reporting) and the massacre of hundreds of people by Boko Haram in Baga, Nigeria (footnote reporting), I am yet no less Charlie than any of the girls kidnapped by the Nigerian terrorists, because what Charlie now represents in a broader, universal and human sense, is Freedom, or the struggle for Freedom, free speech, free association, freedom to belong and not belong to a religion, and a protest against religious extremism, pious censorship etc. I wouldn't have had any problem marching through Boulevard Voltaire in Paris if only for Voltaire’s humanist declaration: ‘I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it.’      

    

The Amorality of ‘Men of God.’

I know that Nigeria’s ‘men and women of God’ are not only allergic to commonsense and common humanity, they are also bereft of altruistic ethic, their amorality is abysmal. In 2009, I was probably the first person to question not only the truth but also the reasonableness of ‘Pastor’ Enoch Adeboye’s 'testimony' that he ‘miraculously’ drove his car without fuel for a couple of hundred miles. This had become a vexed question and the pastor had come in for a bit of pillorying, at least from those who, like me, could see the inherent falseness of the claim.
Again, this afternoon I happened on another ‘testimony’ of the pastor: now this is even more shallow and self-absorbed than insensible. He goes back to when he was living with an impoverished uncle in the 1950s, a man in whose house a mini-famine of sorts was raging. They were all blankly wondering how to slake their hunger one afternoon when a young woman – presumably someone’s ‘maidservant’ – brought a basinful of food into their home. The young woman told Adeboye’s uncle that the food was a ready-meal gift from her ‘master.’ Here is a rough explanation of a meal gift. In days of yore, before Nigeria drained its very soul into one vast economic and normative ditchwater, it was in keeping with etiquette to send hampers of prepared food to relations, friends, neighbours and acquaintances.
According to Adeboye, his uncle and the whole famished household were surprised to receive this manna – brought no less by a human. Frugal Socrates – certainly not Jesus – would have told the maid that there was a mistake and that the food was not meant for him and he would have rallied his household in self-denying stoicism (Jesus would believe his father in heaven, Jehovah, had sent it). But the man of the house gathered his quiverful of children and relatives around him and set about polishing off the food. But then, Adeboye’s uncle was not Socrates, and in so much as he and his household were starving, it would be problematic to put any moral blame on them, this might lead us onto the slopy realm of trolleyism. In as much as there is no way of knowing whether or not the hamper was meant for another starving family, I’ll easily cut off that supposition with Ockham’s razor. And even though Adeboye and his family discovered that the food was not intended for them, they had eaten it anyway.
Many decades later, Adeboye, desperate for any pabulum to feed his gluttonous god with, had thought it was time to regurgitate the matter of the food he ate almost 60 years ago. Adeboye had used the tale as a way of singing a Te Deum Laudamus to his god for being a provider, unexpected provider, a benevolent deity. Trifling as this might seem to many, it had brought up the moral philosopher in me. Far from being a gratuitous ‘attack’ on the ‘pastor,’ this response is meant to point out why evangelical Christianity often finds itself at cross-purposes with humanism and morality and how its topdogs are no more than purveyors of moral crap.
Agreed, there is nothing the septuagenarian Adeboye can now do about an occasion of decades-old happenstance. But why gloat over it now? A moral philosopher might add this ancient minor incident to his fund of anecdotage but he would also wonder, introspectively, what happened to the poor maid who made the mistake of bringing the food to them. Was she flogged, thrashed (not improbable at the time)? What about the family the food was meant for? How did they take the matter of the hamper that never reached them? Were they expecting the meal gift – and if they were would they not have further starved for some hours after the Adeboye family had wolfed down the meal that was meant for them?
No one expects Adeboye to rue the day he ate the food which was meant for someone else many moons ago, or immerse himself in a goo-filled vat of retroactive consequentialism, but is this something he should be mouthing hallelujah about and giving glory to God for? A more thoughtful person would have questioned his god why he made his Uncle poor, so dirt-poor that he could not feed his family in the first place? And what about the years they had been starving before the errant servant made the mistake of bringing the food into their household? Did any meal materialise the next day, and the next? (Well, not likely.) Didn't they continue to languish in hunger and want – at least for a while? Above all, why make a testimonial big-deal out of a half-century-old error? One can conclude that though Adeboye and his family did not commit any immoral act by eating the food, in the light of his recent preachment the pastor can be said to be deficient of philosophic moral sensibility, if not sensitivity. If Adeboye had retained a bit of his mathematical wit (he was a mathematician, I gather), he would have seen that there was nothing miraculous or preternatural about the mistake, long as they may be the odds of a misdelivered ready-meal gift are calculable. And that the prepared food ended up in Adeboye’s house can easily be set down within the moral confines of Nagelian circumstantial luck, the sort of luck which the maid also had in the obverse.
I have always argued that post-industrial ‘divines’ like Adeboye are doing more harm to people’s psyche – and intellect – than good, they are not only committing the ‘sin’ of grandiose acquisition in the name of religion they are also blunting the finer edges of people’s minds with their logicless, obscurantist and infantilising pulpit offerings. In their Christianised, evangelical way they preach and appropriate what Aristotle describes as ‘living well and doing well’ in Nicomachean Ethics, in other words, eudaemonia, yet they often overlook its moral and virtuous adjuncts which Socrates and the Stoics emphasise. Even the species of eudaemonia that Nigerian evangelicals peddle today is a far cry from the pious derivatives adopted by ‘early Christian fathers’ like Augustine and Aquinas, it is a belly-centred and earthier version.