Culture and Its Christian Enemies

The notion that the Second World and Black Festival of Black Arts and Culture (FESTAC), which took place in Nigeria in 1977, called down a curse on the country has been in the air for some time. This muddleheaded underthinking was broached in the late 1980s as Nigeria began to trundle towards the morass of economic depression, sociomoral decay and the corresponding weedlike flowering of a species of Christianity - pentecostalism - and its dopey consolations. When this hypothesis was first hazarded, it erred on the side of causation: the economic troubles Nigeria was experiencing could be blamed on the overspend on FESTAC. Crude calculus, of course, but it was relatively semilogical, marginally more sensible than the daft supernaturalism of blaming the shitty wicket in which Nigeria finds itself on the Festival of Arts and Culture. I heard the latter argument 20 years ago, and someone, an evangelical pastor, tried to impress me again last week. Here's the routine: Nigeria is in this state because we turned the country into a vast Baalist basilica dedicated to the worship of 'traditional' idols, images and false gods in 1977. To say I nearly lost it is to understate it - overstate, in fact. Because all I did was shrug and say to myself: why waste my time, breath and vocal chord on trying to educate anyone so superstition-bound as to sacrifice arts and culture on the altar of a foreign religion foisted on and fed to us with the opiate kernel of cultural supremacism?
In 1966, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Senegalese president, poet, homme de culture and honorary Gaul, hosted the first Festival of Arts and Culture in Dakar. In those post-independence years, Africa was awash with hope and cultural pride; the continent felt it was ready to show and tell the world that it was not the cultureless Conradian Black Chaos whose occupiers were only capable of unlanguaged gibbering while wallowing in the barest jungle existence. The budding African culturati repaired to Dakar to celebrate Africa. The black diaspora also made an appearance, and a few dashikistas and cultural pilgrims made their way to Dakar, reconnecting with Mother Continent. It was a high-tone spectacular and cosmopolitan, too. Even the hard-to-please Wole Soyinka, who attended the event, testified to it as a succès fou. In one of his books, he gives Senghor a grudging pass for curating a cultural do which went beyond the ambit of the poet-president's ideological preoccupation: negritude. Contrariwise, Soyinka often trashes the Festival of Arts and Culture that the Olusegun Obasanjo military government staged in 1977. Although the Nobel Laureate had participated in the month-long festival, his later postmortems and revisits of the event are damning. The degree to which this has to do with his animosity towards Obasanjo can only be surmised. Soyinka thinks the Black Arts Festival 1977 was not 'cultural' enough, too low-brow, too derivative. But I was around in 1977, although a preteen, a curious, intellectually ambitious youngster (what you'd call a nerd today). However, no quotient of curiosity or precocity could have pushed my interest in FESTAC 77 as far as it went if my dad had not been there. The old man had made sure I was distracted from mere play to watch and sit in on what was happening on TV. The opening ceremony. The songs. Miriam Makeba. Odyssey. Osibisa. Dramatic performances like Langbodo. With his early-type tape recorder, Dad recorded many of the musical performances, particularly Miriam Makeba, and in the next few years, the distinctive Makeba lilt suffused my world. For all its blemishes, FESTAC 77 was a leaven for my cultural sensibility. It helped to shape my appreciation of the arts. So one wonders: How could a festival celebrating African traditions and cultures be bad? Where did that come from? To blame the foreign religions of Christianity and Islam is to absolve most of their Nigerian adherents, slavish, forbiddingly hollow adherents. Why would any self-respecting human pay so much obeisance to the cultures and religions of others at the expense of his own, regretting the celebration of the ways and world in which he was born and raised?
The FESTAC mascot was the ivory pendant mask stolen from the palace of the Edo (Bini) King by the British. Only the representation of the mask was used: the British Museum, which has been its home for almost a hundred years, would not allow Nigeria to have it, not even on loan. Some cultural imperialists have argued that artefacts stolen by the British are better kept and safer in the British Museum. At first, you want to yell and swear at the superlative carefreeness with which this lofty paternalism is expressed, but when you hear Nigerians describe such an artefact as an 'idol,' you baulk. The mind boggles when it contemplates Isis barbarians smashing up and destroying museums and ancient sites, but it boggles no less when it ponders the cultural illiteracy and ignorance-driven iconoclasm of Nigerian Christians. The phrase 'when I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver' has been attributed to a few sources (mainly German), but not to muddy the waters even more, I will rest content with the transposition: 'when I hear the word culture, I reach for my Bible' - apropos of the Merry Christians of Nigeria. The problem with this kind of attitude is how the apparently educated, those who have been through university classrooms, still choose to get blissed out on a cocktail of ignorance and religion-concocted pigswill. In 1977, the barbarians were at the gates, raring to overrun the country; now, they have fully occupied the whole of Nigeria, all of 170 million, give or take a few. In this light, I think Soyinka's stingy appraisal of FESTAC 77 as less than perfect is superfluous - after all, a diamond is a diamond, even if it is rough. For all it might be worth, a jamboree-like arts and culture festival, even one as grandiloquent as 77, would today be wasted on Nigeria. In his Freedom and its Enemies, Isaiah Berlin analyses six thinkers who stood athwart freedom in Enlightenment Europe: one of the men is Hegel, a dismisser of Africa as a place devoid of history and, consequently, culture. Isn't it shameful that we have turned Hegel's 300-year-old postulate into a self-fulfilling prophecy? No, I am not about to argue that cultural and artistic refinement and Christianity are mutually exclusive. The high priest of high culture, TS Eliot, indeed made cultural and poetic capital of his almost ideological devotion to Christian Neoplatonism and the High Church. But while new-wave Pentecostalism in Nigeria does not (and cannot) even pretend to be Low Church, it is obscurantist and anti-knowledge; it is a movement in which the common denominator is marked so low as to be merely imaginary.