'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.

'G' For God?

I've been asked this question a few times: Why do I use the upper case ‘G’ when writing about the monotheist deity? I think the answer to this is simple. The monotheist God is no less the name of a thing than Sherlock Holmes or Big Brother, and if I do not begin the names of these two fictional characters with small letters, why do it in the case of Yahweh or Allah or Olodumare – or God? To show that I do not believe in It, or that It does not exist? Well, I do not look up to Sherlock Holmes for moral or intellectual guidance (in spite of his keen intelligence!), nor do I believe that Big Brother is more than a figment of Orwellian imagination. 
By the same token, if I write the initial letters of the title of a fantasy novel like Lord of the Rings or Stephen King’s It in capital, why begin the word Bible with the lower case (except, of course, in the case of the figurative bible: the bible of foodies, for instance). I write the ‘G’ in God in capital because whether It exists or not, It is an entity. I’ve seen someone write ‘Ogun’ and ‘jesus’ in the same sentence. I was rather amused because so far as I am concerned, both figures are semi-mythical, and while Jesus has the advantage of being scripted (though he might as well be fictional), Ogun is orally storied. 
But then I am not being prescriptive or anything - let’s not turn this into a kind of Swiftian war between upper-casers and lower-casers. If it takes your fancy, write God with the small ‘g.’ After all, ee cummings wrote everything in lower case - it might as well be a matter of style and expediency in this age of textese. Why go to the trouble of tapping ‘caps lock’ to write about a deity you dislike, even abhor, the deity you want to damn, that you want to give some well-deserved slapdown. For a lot of people, it is also lexically trendy to write God with the small ‘g’, it is now a noticeable inflection in atheist-speak, one of whose salient characteristics is lippiness. But I think the parodic belittling that the small ‘g’ is supposed to achieve if the article ‘the’ is used before ‘god,’ or even ‘that,’ so that it reads this way ‘the god who created the world in six days.’ Although, in my opinion, it is better to differentiate, for clarity, the monotheist God and Its polytheist friends with upper and lower cases (being proper and common nouns), it is fair to say it’s easy to deduce the deity the users of the lower case ‘g’ are writing about when it is used, what other god would atheists have time for if not the so-called ‘sky-daddy?’ Indeed, that great philosopher of Language Game, Ludwig Wittgenstein, would be proud of lower-casers.
I’d like to believe I am not a purist, I make free with language. Unlike prescriptivists, I believe nothing about verbality should be fixed. So why not slip into the emerging in-thing of using the small ‘g’ for God? I don’t often do this because I suspect that there is an underlying and unsuspected fear beneath the foregrounding of the lower case ‘g’ for monotheist God. Oh no, not the proverbial Fear of God, but the fear of embarrassment. Fear of what fellow ‘unbelievers’ might think of you if you constantly write ‘God.’ Fear that you might be seen as still having a vestige of belief and faith in God, that you still think It is - or why else would you dignify It with capital ‘G’ if you said you did not believe in It. But the fear I am talking about is subliminal, slippery and reversed, because if you ask anyone who writes God with the small ‘g’ that she does that because of fear, she’ll say no and may go on: ‘I just don’t give a fuck about god’ – which, again, is true, just as the subfear of being judged for being too polite with and about God. 
I use the big ‘G’ for the human-creation that is God because I believe it is better to do this and yet be objective and clear about your lack of belief in It. I use the big ‘B’ for the human-written Bible and Quran because I believe it is possible to do this while pointing out the absurdities, contradictions, archaisms and fictions in the books. I use the big ‘J’ for the biblical Jesus because it might as well be the name of a ragtag roving rabbi who lived some time ago in Palestine, or the name of an entirely imaginary man-god like Zeus. Wouldn’t it be silly of me to write ‘zeus’ in order to prove that he never existed and that he was a creation of Greek imagination? What could be more compelling and pointed than Dawkins’ pronouncement on ‘God?’: ‘The God of the Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust..’ and so on

Philosophy Masterclass from my 5-Year old Son

There is a trinity of books that I like and find associatively memorable. Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. And an out-of-print book entitled Travels with A Son. The first two are classics in their own right: the pacy epitome of philosophy chic, Zen, and the lavishly dark The Road. These two books have one thing in common, summed up in the title of the third, Travels with A Son. While stylistically workaday, the latter has its own charms - for me, at least. Father and son travel through West Africa, my native land. I read two of these books even before I had a son, but there is something at once latent and lateral about the romance-tinged desire to go on a journey of some sort with my son (the first of two), maybe a philosophy-flavoured one as in Zen or a touristy ‘grand’ trip as in Travels with A Son. McCarthy’s ‘road’ and apocalyptic counterworld is a different literary beast - it is fiction, no less fascinating, though, for its exploration of father/son fellowship.

I travelled with my five-year-old son a few days ago. Oh, but the 4 am world I took him into was unlike Cormac McCarthy’s understated chaos in The Road. The London we drove into was a semi-empty world, sparsely peopled by zombie-quiet early-shifters, mostly smileless immigrant faces. I wanted to go and collect a car some 300 miles away. I set out in another car, but since no one can drive two cars at the same time, we switched to a red London bus somewhere along the line before finally settling in another red Virgin train at Euston.

We arrived in Hartford, collected the car and set out on a return journey to Kent. Would the five-year-old help relieve the drudgery of almost a quarter of a day’s journey? Well, perhaps in no better way than he relieved the train journey outwards. Daddy, where are we going? Why did we leave your car in London? Do trains speed faster than cars? I am bored. Can we go and see whether the restaurant is open now? Is the train going fast? I am bored. When are we going to get there? One minute? Two? How long is one minute? The poor boy is yet to grasp the speculative economy of time – he always lops time into simple nano-units. As for the antsiness - how else do you want a boy of five to orient himself to a suddenly messed-up biorhythm?

He was more settled during the return journey. While I was not too eager to begin a 4-odd hour drive, my beloved urchin was looking forward to the stops that I promised him at KFC or some other fast-food joints. I zapped the car radio from one channel to the other, impatient with everything I found; I was also looking for something that would interest my son. Anthemic Coldplay’s Paradise? Beethoven’s 7^th on Classic FM? And there was my favourite leftwing rambler on a talk radio station taking calls about the illegality of human taxidermy in the UK. I hate the idea of swaddling children up inside a draped cot of moral and visual pleasantness (a bed of roses, as it were); I’d rather they see the world for what it is - good and bad, ugly and beautiful. But I would not subject my eternally ‘bored’ son to a long radio discussion of why human cadavers are not stuffed and mummified for display purposes.

Then I’d run into Michael Jackson’s Man in the Mirror on a retrocast station.  

Me: You know who this is?

Son: Michael Jackson.         

Me: You like him... His music?

Son: Yep. (A pause) What year was he born?

Me: 1958.

Son: When was he a toddler?

Me: Late 1950s... Early 60s.

Son: When was he a boy, a boy like me?

Me: In the 1960s.

Son: When was he a teenager?

Me: 1970s.

Son: When was he a man?                                                                                   

Me: 1980s, 90s and the noughties.

Son: And when did he die?

Me: 2009.

Son: Why do people die?

Me: People have to die, or else there will be no houses for babies and toddlers to live. The world will be too full.

Son: Sometimes babies and toddlers die.

Me: Yeah, they do.

Son: Why?

Me: That’s...

Son: It’s not nice to die.

Me: Often, it’s not.

Son: Do people wake up when they die?

Me: No, they don’t.

Son: But Mrs Watson (his teacher) said Jesus woke up when he died.

Me: Did she?

Son: She said Jesus was woken by his father. Is that true, Daddy?

Me: What do you think?

Son: I don’t think it’s true. People don’t wake up when they die.

Me: No, they don’t.

        

Femi Fani-Kayode: 'God's' Gift to Nigerian Women?

 In a curious way, I find Femi Fani-Kayode fascinating. Intriguing might be a better word, really. If I were to write Stracheyan portraits of certain Nigerian personalities, Femi would be factored in as the surprising and divisive choice for an Eminent Nigerian. My interest in Nigerian politics and politicos reached the nadir of utter uninterest a few years ago. To me, someone like Fani-Kayode is as representative of the thieving run-of-the-mill Nigerian political class as James Ibori or Bode George. I think it is a waste of time and brain cells writing or talking about the pack of them.  

However, I must confess that I have been buttonholed by Femi Fani-Kayode a few times – and not so much by his politics as by his sociology. He seems like the sort of man you would like to meet in a pub or ‘beer parlour’ and have a long, beery and blokey chat with – that is, if he were T-shirt casual. But then something also suggests itself to you when you read Femi’s works or see him speak – particularly when he is suited, you get a glimpse of someone who furtively anoints himself with the ointment of cant and artifice, reminiscent of a pentecostal pastor.  

I occasionally read his essays, and while I find some of his views slightly off-the-beaten-path and idiosyncratic, I think he makes as much sense as any rational being. He is opinionative, all right, but who among us is not... to varying degrees?  Even his overt-covert Yoruba nationalism should not just be dismissed out of hand. It is no more than an idiosyncratic and useful ventilation of the Nigerian question. But then that is politics, Nigerian politics, which I refuse to have any truck with for now.

And what is Femi’s sociology? As it happens, two instances of Femi’s sociologising have had something or the other to do with women. A couple of months ago, I happened on a thread on Facebook wherein a tattle of tireless Facebook denizens were wrangling over the propriety of Femi’s seemingly paltry aside that he’d had the honour to ‘date’ three Igbo women. One of these women was Bianca Onoh, later Bianca Ojukwu. So far as some of the commenters were concerned, Fani-Kayode had committed not just a castration-worthy offence but hanging treason: he dared boast that he was once romantically involved with the widow of the Nkemba, the Dim, the Generalissimo of the Republic of Biafra: Bianca, the sculpturesque grand dame who had become the Nigerian Ambassador to Spain at the time picayunish Fani-Kayode blurted out his long-doused ardour for the former Most Beautiful Girl in Nigeria.

I was amused by some of the responses to Fani-Kayode’s retrospective and needless kiss-and-tell. And it was clear that tendrils of ethnic atavism had begun to weave themselves around the Facebook thread. You could pick up the raging, if suppressed, static: a jumped-up Yorubaman dared insult the widow of Nkemba! This was when I thought I should not comment and leave well alone. Because however much balance I tried to bring into the flame war, there was the possibility that I would be seen as taking the side of someone from the part of the country where I, incidentally, also came from.

But then, while it was rather foolish for Fani-Kayode to introduce his bygone boyfriendhood of three Igbo women into an argument about ethnocentricism, the indignation some people showed over his particular mention of Bianca Ojukwu was comical. Now, I am coming from an ultrahumanist, albeit commonsensical, position where I see every human as biologically equal. Before Bianca began to bear the imperial spousal cachet of noli me tangere as Ojukwu’s Wife, she was a young, beautiful woman – and free, free to date anyone she liked.

No, I might have been challenged, I thought. It wasn’t about who Bianca dated or not dated; it was the pointlessness of Fani-Kayode’s resurrection of the phantoms of these late relationships. A counterargument which would have held some water. But I would have posited: what if Fani-Kayode is a cad (pardon the archaism, it is the mot juste), an amoral, cavalier kiss-and-teller? After all, what he did was less obtuse than the tomfoolery of a comedian telling jokes about 90-year-old grandmothers begging to be raped by a group of young armed robbers. Perhaps Fani-Kayode only wanted to aggrandise himself as a kind of semi-retired cosmopolitan Casanova who could count three Igbo women among his conquests! I remember Fani-Kayode bringing up the image of another modern cad to my mind – silver-tongued James Hewitt, who only stopped short of describing in graphic detail how he shagged Princess Diana.

A few days ago, an old friend sent me a Facebook round-robin, an upended confession written by Femi Fani-Kayode. It is called ‘A True Story.’ The ‘true story’ is about how he fought off the seductive wiles of a friend's wife, who was detained at the pleasure of Obasanjo’s government. Fani-Kayode begins the essay with a reference to his poem, ' Power of Women’ – a title which recalls Chinweizu’s farcically misogynist treatise, Anatomy of Female Power.

Fani-Kayode tells the ‘true story’ of how he went to visit the wife of the jailed friend and how the woman had tried all she could, including stripping off, to seduce him. But Femi, an upstanding and devout man that he believes he is, had resisted like a kind of 21st-century Joseph fighting off Potiphar’s wife; he had pleaded and reasoned with the woman and had (of course) prayed! When all of these availed nothing, he had fallen back on his security detail, who was at the ready outside and, like the Praetorian Guard, the men had stormed the woman’s house to save Mr Fani-Kayode. Now, rather than coming across as a cad, Fani-Kayode would like to be seen as a man of honour, loyal to his friend, and strong enough to vicariously mortify the flesh of his poor friend's wife. That is what comes across from the tenor of the essay.

Fani-Kayode makes the point in the essay that what shocked him about the nonevent was the loathing and disgust the woman expressed towards her husband and how she confessed that she was only sticking by him because he was rich. Although Femi does not express this, I suspect this is a critique of not only the woman but women in general, particularly Nigerian women, with whom Fani-Kayode has more contact these days. But would I, for instance, have been surprised by the woman’s behaviour? No. She is human, and humans do curious and unexpected things, including trying to seduce their spouse’s best friend or expressing detestation and disgust towards their husband or wife. As a matter of fact, one of the most depredating cankerworms that eat into the fabric of marriages is Disgust – it is the antithesis of Love. 

Even then, Fani-Kayode’s shock is understandable, although it is hard to suppress the hunch that the essay is also a tad self-serving. Because while the man has the right to write anything he likes, the question may still be asked: What is the point of it? To let people know that women are not to be trusted? A cautionary tale about women’s capability to deceive, lie and dissemble? Of course, the essay is slyly phallocentric. Having offered a prayer up to his God to ‘help us all, particularly we men,’ Fani-Kayode couldn’t have been sending out his quasi-biblical message to women, or could he? After all, within the Judeo-Christian tradition in which Fani-Kayode proudly belongs, both men and women are supposed to read the story of how Eve inveigled Adam into eating the ‘fruit of knowledge’ and marvel at its profundity. But what I really find funny about the whole piece is how Fani-Kayode avows and re-avows the discretion he has displayed so far about what happened between him and the woman. Really? I mean, this guy describes where the woman’s husband was when she tried to snare him; he let it be known that the nearly cuckolded man is a politician, an influential politician.

And what did he tell his bodyguards after they’d saved him from the Nigerian avatar of Jezebel? Probably something – on the off chance, I’d add. Would Fani-Kayode have let go of the opportunity to further enigmatise himself before his henchmen: a keen lover of women who had suddenly rejected a member of ‘the fairer sex’? And did he really scruple at writing ‘A True Story’? Did he have any Hamlet-like introspection: To write or not to write? Probably not. I think Fani-Kayode knew exactly what he was doing; he knew that in spite of his feeble attempt at making the woman nameless, it wouldn’t take a supersleuth or a summa-cum-laude graduate of Sherlock Holmes Studies to work out who the woman was or at the least, who her husband was. But here is the dramatic irony in ‘The True Story.’ Chances are that Fani-Kayode’s friend, the husband of the femme fatale, will read the story, and he must be a prize bonehead not to deduce that the Parable of a Good Friend is, in the obverse about him and his beloved wife. So Fani-Kayode writing that he has kept the secret close to his heart is absolute bull, Irish bull - or even pure bullshit because he must have been well aware of what he was doing; he knew he was about to carry out an elaborate stage whisper.

Which is why I find Fani-Kayode intriguing. While I wouldn’t go as far as describing the politician as a consummate bullshitter, to a degree, he has the flair and facility of one. You only need to read a few of the articles on his website to pick this out. But then again, why would I not find a Nigerian politician who writes poems and prose-poems interesting? I am, after all, a litterateur. As an essayist, Femi Fani-Kayode is prolific and promiscuous in his interests. His prosaic poems, taken together, read like a cross between The Psalms and Songs of Solomon. There is one entitled ‘An Ode to Jezebel.’ Okay, this is an ironic piece of free verse. Still, it represents, more than all, the author’s moral attitude to women, a monologic psychopoetry, a pious jeremiad against a certain woman.

I have also gleaned from Fani-Kayode’s website that he is a very ambitious, politically ambitious man. Uncommonly enough, he dabbles in culture. In other words, he is sidling towards positioning himself on the plinth of Plato’s philosopher/king. Well, his feet of clay might not give him a solid foothold on the plinth. He also writes poems, I mean those slobbering ditties, so he may not even be allowed in the Republic.