'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.