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?