Yinka Shonibare's Art

Yesterday, I went to Turner Contemporary in seaside Margate to see the exhibition of Yinka Shonibare's 'Empire' doublet. Although my little boy got underfoot a few times, it was still a treat. I like some of Shonibare's works. For instance, Nelson's Ship in a Bottle: a warship immured, like a genie, in a blown-up glass wine jug - a montage of art, craft, and history. But do I like everything Shonibare does with the so-called 'African wax fabrics?' Not quite. The multiplicity of colours is pleasing but not always to my taste. The polychrome overload dazzles, but not always in a wow way. Well, even if I were to paraphrase George Braque and remind myself, 'Hey, art is meant to disturb,' I am, sadly, neither disturbed nor perturbed by much of Shonibare's print art. Anyway, I think Braque overeggs the art pudding with the 'shock' saw. Art is meant to affect. Despite its colourfulness, Shonibare's vibrancy of expression falls between the stools of overwhelming and underwhelming. Whelming? Probably to a degree. (Recognising that besides the quirk of currency and incurrency, 'whelm' and 'overwhelm' are much and muchness). But to quickly double back, a few of Shonibare's works pack affect, particularly when they reach beyond hyperaesthetic chic.
By the way, is the 'African print' fabric he works with truly African? I'll look for an answer through the Yoruba lens because I, like Shonibare, am Yoruba. I don't know how the people of southwestern Nigeria came up with the name 'ankara' for the fabric - probably some Turkish traders, or 'drapers' as they might be called, used to sell them in Yoruba markets. Even so this sort of cotton print is not native to Turkey, or its city of Ankara. Maybe ankara is a corruption of Accra; the Yoruba moniker for the fabric may have descended from the capital of Ghana rather than the capital of Turkey.
The fabric has its provenance in Indonesia. It's a species of Indonesian batik. The Dutch liked the art of the design. As colonial intruders in what was then Java, or Dutch East Indies, later Indonesia, they took both the fabric and the idea back home and started to mass-produce batik in their factories. Often by way of Rotterdam, once the largest port in the world, the fabric found its way to Africa.
The issue of autochthon - that is, origin, authenticity, indigeneity - is crucial in postcolonial, post-imperial politics. Is Indonesian batik or Dutch print or ankara or African print African? One shouldn't be too bothered about this, really. Dutch interest in the cloth was and is only mercantile. And while its popularity has waxed in most of Africa, Indonesia has had a kind of fast-and-loose relationship with it for some hundred years. Would anyone escape the snort of pedantry or pettiness if they got into a huff about the roots of a certain kind of fabric? The word batik may be Javanese, but how could one know for certain that wax-resist dyeing began in Java? Might it not have begun in China? Japan? India? Finland? Or even somewhere in Africa. The tie-and-dye Yoruba adire shares cognate technology with the batik, with starch replacing wax.
Would it have looked and sounded more 'African' if Shonibare were using adire? Maybe. But what difference would that make? Probably none. Although Shonibare works on a more cerebral level, Nike Davies-Okundaye is doing wonderful things with the adire, some brilliant palettework reminiscent, somewhat, of Frida Kahlo's nature arabesques. Even so, Davies-Okundaye sometimes drifts into pastiching batik style and design. The cultural town of Osogbo overflows mainly with adire artists - artisans. Besides being intellectually do-as-you-please, I am also against pointless nativism; I don't subscribe to the bad faith of drawing the juices of inspiration from any localised parish pump. Although the batik may have its font in Indonesia or Java,  Shonibare can own it - as he has - in the same way that Africa, especially West Africa, has appropriated it, splashing the batik with narratives and themes, ranging from the dramatic to the sublime.
Shonibare's The British Library exhibited alongside The End of Empire, is fantastic. Both works are great, but The British Library 'affects' me more. Call me a bibliophile if you like, but not in the way of liking books for the sake of it, but liking books because of what I can get out of them. I have gone past the juvenile stage when I'd allow myself the indulgence of being called a 'bookworm,' or a bibliophage, literally bookeater - although there is something almost decadently scrumptious about the confection of books on the lofty shelves. But 'The British Library' must be judged beyond the book covers. It is a work about how the British Empire almost made Britain, made London, where the British Library is situated, the centre of the world. And there is something yet still 'central' about the library, the hub of cosmopolitan bookery. I have dropped in and out of the library a few times - frequenter, lately. The library: the books, journals, authors, readers, researchers, a reliquary of literaria, ancient and contemporary - it's where the world and his wife meet. And that is what Shonibare's 'The British Library' is all about how the library represents the home where the chicks of the Empire have all come to roost. The manifold colours of the books, the different shapes and sizes, and the 'multiculturalism' inherent in the names on the spines of the books: Olufemi Majekodunmi. Anne Bronte. Otto Neurath. Majita Nastasic. Indigenes. Immigrants. Émigrés. Authors. Artists. Scientists.
And concerning cultural appropriation, sometimes what Shonibare works with is described as 'African print fabric,' sometimes as 'Indonesian batik', and in the Turner exhibition, it is described, wordily, as 'Dutch wax printed cotton textile.' Which seems to have given the word 'transculture' a fresh, interesting value. This, I think, should serve as an object lesson to that ditzy African-American girl who was apparently peeved that the cool-looking Jewish dude wore dreadlocks - and sadly, on a university campus. That's profound miseducation and racial tunnel vision. She should come round and see Shonibare's humane multicoloured canvases. By the way, my children and I were the only Africans pottering around the two exhibits on that balmy mid-spring Friday afternoon. Perhaps I should have scolded the European and Asian co-potterers in the gallery: why are you looking at the works of a man who bears a Yoruba name and who wears dreadlocks!

Now I am done with the God-debate: It's Pointless.

I have just finished reading Gary Cox's The God Confusion: Why Nobody Knows the Answer to the Ultimate Question, and I think I am now done with reading books about God - for or against. Gary Cox is an agnostic, an atheistic agnostic who prefers to be called an agnostic, so his book is more against than for it. In fact, The God Confusion is a well-written and philosophical counterargument about the dusty entity called God. You could describe the book as popular philosophy, and this is not to undercut the integrity of the contents or the bona fides of the author, a reputable philosopher, but to stress his uncomplicated, slightly primerlike writing style.
Cox grounds his agnosticism in philosophy or being a philosopher because, according to him, doubt should be the default position of every thinking person. He thinks atheism is as absurd, if not impossible, a position to take as theism - you cannot strike the attitude of negating the existence of a god whose nonexistence defines your position; therefore, he gives short shrift to 'new atheism' and its popularisers like Richard Dawkins. But like the secular philosopher he is, he is not particularly interested in setting Richard Dawkins or his imaginary enemy, God, down from the pedestals on which some people have installed them. He only tries to offer empirical and invariably contrary datums to the question of God.
The God Confusion is worthy of review, but I will let that pass because that is not the point. As a matter of fact, to attempt to review or critique this book is to squelch the very purpose of putting this down. However, while solidly ensconced in his sceptical stance, Cox upends the many fanciful building blocks of the entity called 'God.' The idea of God. The concept of God. Ontological argument. Cosmological argument. The Unmoved Mover argument. Theodicean argument. Teleological Argument. Evolution. And many more. And the many dramatis personae in the God superdebate. Bishop Berkeley. Anselm. Pascal. Voltaire. Descartes. Darwin. Aquinas. Augustine. Nietzsche. Kant. Hume. Durkheim. William James. Freud. Even bit players like Aristotle, Gaunilo, Wittgenstein, Plato, JL Mackie. Cox's conclusions are balanced and unhysterical but surefootedly agnostic and sceptical.
However, in spite of the book's satisfactoriness, halfway through, I had a sort of reverse epiphany: now I am getting bored by all this, I thought. This eternal God Argument. By the time I finished the illuminating book, my mind was made up. I will not waste time and dissipate mental heat on books about God again - I am done with them. This is probably an unintellectual attitude, but seeing the number of books I have read, pro and con, about something patently a chimaera, I thought it was about time to pack it in. Note that The God Confusion is a play on Dawkins's The God Delusion, which itself is an allusion to Freud's religion-is-illusion observation. Being the urtext of 'New Atheist' thinking, Dawkins's The God Delusion has spawned mostly alliterative textual responses, what I'd call 'Delusion industry,' anything from the two theocentric 'Dawkins Delusion' to the utterly misbegotten 'Deluded By Dawkins.'
The God Confusion is in a different league, as it neither seeks to counter Dawkins nor recompound his heady atheistic absinthe, it's only a book which points out the irrationality of thinking, or believing, in any being called God. I am an agnostic of sorts, so that argument agrees with my thinking. But even a fine, well-written book like this would not help relieve the intellectual bloatedness I now suffer about the question of God, having ingested and engorged spoonloads of treacle, bile, pap, and even heaps of crap, owing to a hunger for understanding, clarification, for better insight into the nonthing described as 'God.' From the Bible to the Qur'an, to GB Shaw's Black Girl in Search of Her God, to Kierkegaard and many books by atheists, agnostics, philosophers, and theologians. A few weeks ago, I picked up Karen Armstrong's The Case For God (why she used 'The' and not 'A' I don't know). Armstrong's lawyering in God's behalf is very much in character: slipperiness, jargoneering, a shuffling of apriorism and aposteriorism, clever apologetics, heavy deployment of 'dead languages,' I mean Latin and Greek. God the Being itself is ipsum Esse subsitens, God as the Prime Mover...the Necessary Being is quod omnes dicunt Deum. I guess it would be seen as facetious if I translated the latter into 'God is a Fat Bearded Cunt,' but then that was as much sense as Armstrong's book made to me. Not too long ago, I read Terry Eagleton's 'Culture and the Death of God.' Now, this is one of the more cryptic and difficult parts of Eagleton's high-tone tomes. In the book he stylisedly skirts the death of God and he uses an elaborate trudge through the lush historical meadows of the French\English Enlightenment, German idealism, and Romanticism to confront, in a backhanded way, the death of God.
By the way, every book written by every atheist, agnostic, apatheist - antitheists in sum - in the last 150 years or so has been a kind of variation on, and a rehash of, searching intellectual firstfruits of freethought by early 'disbelievers' like Baron D'Holbach and Jean Meslier, or a comparatively latter one like Ludwig Feuerbach. Although I will continue to read books about the inanities of religion, which, of course, will always carry with it the negation of God and its existence, I don't think I will again spend time reading any book that seeks to prove or disprove the existence of God. Now, so saturated with the anodyne reagent of God-debate, I might very well go John Updike's Dale Kohler one better and try to extrude a cast-iron God from the entrails of my computer.
In spite of having always preferred the label agnostic to atheist, I have never truly been an either\or person - 'either-there-is-God-or-there-is-no-God' person. By the time I reached high-noon as a nonbeliever in God or gods a few years ago, the golden mean had become neither\nor, and it still is: I no longer err on the side of doubt nor certainty. For me, the question of whether there is or there is no God is superfluous, time-wasting waffle. This attitude somehow bears on what some have described as ignosticism or igtheism, meaning, broadly, that the lack of a clear definition of the term 'God' tends to make any debate about it unnecessary. Oh, I am not about to suggest that I should be described as an ignosticist or igtheist or a contratheist or antignostic etc. An alternation between agnostic and apatheist is just about enough. Is it? So, how would you describe yourself if you spurned all debate about God because you thought it was nonsense? An I-dont-give-a-fuckist.

Deconstructing Prayer Before Connecting to The Internet

Almighty and eternal God,
who created us in Thy image and bade us to seek after all that is good,
true and beautiful,
especially in the divine person of Thy only-begotten Son,
our Lord Jesus Christ,
grant we beseech Thee that,
through the intercession of Saint Isidore,
bishop and doctor,
during our journeys through the internet was  , we will direct our hands and eyes only to that which is pleasing to Thee
and treat with charity and patience all those souls whom we encounter.
Through Christ our Lord.
Amen.

I couldn't believe the above when I saw it. An English translation of Prayer Before Connecting to the Internet was originally written in Latin by a certain Father, John Zulsdorf. This was and may remain my greatest WTF moment this year. I thought it was a kind of popish joke, the work of a clowning lapsed Catholic, probably Dave Allen. If you know you'll be 'tempted' when you use the internet, why use it? Why not get yourself cloistered, throw on a hairshirt or a sackcloth blouse, and whip yourself all day? And the Guardian spirit of the Internet! Isidore - who lived hundreds of years before the Internet was dreamt up.
I know that religion, more so Catholicism, is an anachronism, but to try to father the guardianship of safe browsing on a medieval religioso is the height of religious pomposity. And what has happened to freewill, the theological cheat that Christian apologetics always try to palm off on us? Because if having a computer in your house, a phone in your pocket, or a tablet in your bag is a matter of choice, shouldn't the choice be left to you what you would do on the phone or computer?
A man could very well pray that 'Lord, as I go out to sit and drink some wine on the porch of my house, help me to avert my eyes from the sizable derriere of neighbour's wife when she walks past.' Now the problem is, the man had consciously gone out into the porch to stake out the ass of his neighbour's wife. Before you blame the man for exercising his free will to sit on the porch in the first place, reread the line in the 'Lord's Prayer' which says, 'Lead us not into temptation, deliver us from evil.' If God had had the power to lead the man into temptation, despite his silly little prayer, who is to say it wasn't the great 'He' who had made him commit the 'sin' of leching after the ass of his neighbour's wife from the first time he saw the woman, or saw the ass itself? By the way, if people still read the 'Lord's Prayer' and can't see the absurdity embedded within it, why would a Catholic priest not write Prayer Before Connecting to the Internet and not expect anyone to read it with a straight face? Would anyone?
Think of a callow pubescent Catholic boy brainstorming for pristine, clean internet sites to visit, praying to Saint Isidore to help him direct his eyes and mind to nothing but...But what! The Sound of Music? Sister Act? Who knows what he would find on the tenth page of 'Sister Act' search result? Perhaps a sorority of nuns cavorting with a brotherhood of friars - or even cavorting among themselves with sapphic abandon. Let's face it, when the Catholic Father Zulsdorf sat down to write his prayer before using the internet, the mortification of porn, or the flesh, couldn't have been far from his God-clouded imagination. Since I know there's no avoiding what the priest seeks to suppress, I'd advise the Catholic youth that instead of wasting his time on such a prayer, he should recite the last movement of WB Yeats's poem, Long-Legged Fly:

That girls at puberty may find
The first Adam in their thought,
Shut the door of the Pope's chapel,
Keep those children out...

By the way, if prayer before using the internet does work, Arab countries will not be recording high tallies of visits to pornographic sites - extreme, kinky ones, for that matter. These are countries where praying five times a day is mandatory. However, somehow, between those quintet of devotions, the antsy denizens of Greater Levant still find a way to commit the grave sin of onanism with the aid of their computers and whatnot. Or maybe they are not exactly praying that Allah should help them avert their eyes from earthly infidel whores online. By the way, why should anyone who has three scores and some virgins waiting for him in the afterlife waste his time on porn?

'So you think there is no supernatural force, the metaphysical?'

I have been asked a few times: So you think there is no supernatural force, metaphysical force, unseen energy, etc.? I'll give a brief answer. One man's supernatural force is another woman's mumbo-jumbo, and what you consider 'the metaphysical' may not be more than what an illusionist will conjure from his bag of tricks. Derren Brown is a British illusionist who always tells his audiences that what they are about to watch is no more than tricks, the sleight of hand and plain illusioneering (which includes endlessly fascinating mathematical magic). To many people, Derren Brown can only be nothing but a jujuman, a wizard, someone who got his wondrous 'powers' from mammy wata (water nymph) or from behind a burning bush or some otherworldly thing. But this is not the case: everything Brown does can be unpacked. In my book, Schopenhauer's Child, I describe him as a mindfuck artist. He does that very well: mindfuckery. Which is another name for metaphysical claptrap. One of his easier routines is hypnosis and mind control. To many, you can only make someone 'go to sleep' or behave in specific ways with juju or by some kind of fetishised drivel. But even I, though magically untrained, am au fait with the trick of hypnosis; it has nothing to do with the supernatural; it's a suggestional trick of the mind.
So, can anything be described as preternatural, hyperphysical or paranormal? The simple answer is No. Anything possible, doable, conjurable, and achievable is natural, immanent within nature, not extranatural. I'll use astroscience - simply because it's science - before I begin to speculate on voodoo, animism, miracles and other forms of superstition. Many pragmatic achievements in space travel and orbital mechanics are decidedly and literally out of the world. Not only cargo-cult islanders who see England's Prince Phillip as God would marvel at the science of space travel, but the majority of other humans, including those who understand the physics, would find it intriguing - and even if humans were to conquer Mars, tame it, transplant themselves there, that would count as a phenomenon, a signal human phenomenon. Although the trajectory might be squiggly, tortuous and complex I will always double-back agential responsibility on the human.
Besides the fantastic accomplishments in space science, the antics and farcicalities of voodoo, juju, and muti are paltry and insignificant. But hundreds of millions of people, many from my dear continent, still take these things seriously despite their overappropriation of foreign religions like Islam and Christianity. As it is, these Middle Eastern religions have further metastasised belief in Africa's primal shibboleths. But for the sake of philosophical argument, I will not dismiss out of hand what millions and millions of people hold true; such absolutism does not have a place in philosophy, not even in science, although secular positivists like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking uncompromisingly and rightly pooh-pooh supernaturalism. Even then, using philosophy to prove or disprove supernaturalism is all but impossible - which is why the occasionally forced consilience between philosophy and theology is forbiddingly loose. The weakest link in the vast galaxy of Immanuel Kant's philosophy is where, in Critique of Practical Reason, he clumsily tries to manipulate transcendence and God into being.
In the same way that the burden rests with theists to prove the existence of God, so does it rest on the believer in juju to prove its virtues, efficacy, and, above all, preterhuman potency. But proving this is as impossible as proving the existence of God. If someone came to me and said a young girl who died yesterday was killed by a witch through invultuation - sticking pins and needles in her mini graven image - I would tell the person to prove the truth of his statement to me. In the best of all philosophical worlds, proving or disproving this assertion would necessitate a rollout of arguments, which might include anyone from Aristotle through Hume to Sartre, anything from causality to counterfactuality. But we do not live in the best of philosophical worlds; we do not even live in a philosophical world; as a matter of fact, maggots like paranormal investigation, shamanism, and other religions not only thrive on the corrupt meat of antiscience but also on the ordure of antiphilosophy (in its pure literal sense). If no concrete evidence has been provided for any kind of 'paranormal activity,' if no one has been able to win the 1 million dollars prize for solving the Miracle Question from James Randi Foundation, if no substantiation has ever been provided that the 'witch who cackled last night when she flew past caused the death of my neighbour's child' then I will never get any tangible and satisfactory explanation from the person who purports that a witch had killed a young girl. Hume's scepticism about what he called 'the idea of necessary connection' still holds true today, and nowhere is this more relevant than in the attempt to anchor the galleon of reality in the quicksand of irreality. All I would expect from the dewy-eyed supernaturalist is obfuscation, mystification and a regress into infinite idiocy.
If I felt pain, a growth, anywhere, for example, I'd prefer to go and see a doctor who would make the correct diagnosis and prognosis rather than a babalawo, a sorcerer or a witchdoctor who would maunder about a poison-tipped arrow shot from the invisible bow of an 'enemy,' who would then fob snake oil on me after extorting shedloads of money. Or a 'pastor' or 'prophet' who would offer another kind of greasy placebo. There has also been a rather clever argument that juju, or mojo, might work owing to a sort of telepathic synchronicity between wishful thinking and wish fulfilment, that in societies which believe in these sorts of things, a critical mass of magical thinking might on occasion trigger results. The submission is if Africans stop believing in fantasia like curses and spells, juju and whatever horseshit is out there, they will no longer have no effect - just as it has happened in Europe over hundreds of years. Is this really the case? Did the slippery hacceitas, thisness, of witchcraft, spell-casting, and vampirism ever come near the testability, for instance, of Newton's laws of motion? Did alchemists ever find the philosopher's stone, the elixir? Did 'witches' ever use broomsticks to fly in Pendle, and were there 'possessions' in Loudun? A mere browse through the protosadistic and sinister document called The Malleus Maleficarum would show the houndlike cussedness, the utter ignorance, at the heart of the medieval embrace of superstition and the supernatural in Europe.
For argument's sake, let's put the problematic of causality aside, cool the ardour of our scepticism and hazard belief in the supernatural, but then the measliness, the limitations and the poverty of the signifiers of 'fancies' like witchcraft are enough to short-change any argument for their importance. Even if juju, or witchcraft, did succeed in killing one person, or two, or three, could it have been useful in winning the First or Second World War, or even any war for that matter? A Yoruba politician who was once seen as the embodiment of juju, the incarnation of an ancient Yoruba shogun-like General with occult powers, was routed and blasted to eternity with the guns of young soldiers during a coup after his mojo failed him; he had picked up a gun and used it to defend himself - to no avail. And just as Christian miracles and faith healing cannot help bring back a missing limb, witchcraft can only do so much in killing anyone. This is the biggest argument against superstition, its insignificance, its blurred myopic scope - the worm's-eye view captives have of the world around them. Put a coven of shamans and sorcerers in a dark room with a group of physicists and electricians and challenge either side to bring forth light...

‘What god do I worship, what do I believe in?'

This question, unexceptional though it seems, plumbs the depths - the depths of depthlessness. Fewer people ask me the question now than, say, 25 years ago - this may have to do with the fact that I now live in a country where you don’t need to worship any god or believe in any religious idol or any newfangled Neoplatonic idea, or seek the validation of a heavenly superwanker, aka the Almighty, to be reassured of your humanity.
But then, occasionally, a religionist (a Nigerian often) does fling the question at me. A few days weeks ago, I was again assailed with the rather needless poser. Below is the give-and-take:
'What god do you worship? What do you believe in?’
'Why must I worship any god? Why believe in any deity?'
'One must believe in something, anything.'
'Why?'
'Because one must.'
'Why?'
'One cannot just be like that?'
'Like what?'
'Be without anything – without God, it’s like being empty.'
'Empty of what?'
'Of God, spirit...'
'Do I look spiritless to you?'
'Not that kind of spirit, the spirit of God.'
'Aha, that.'
But I had stopped because I could not continue the metaphysics-light exchange with the person beyond that point. For one thing, I’ve made the decision not to engage with anyone who possesses neither the liberal imagination nor the moral breadth to know that the choice between belief in God or gods and belief in the existence of dogs is not exactly analogous to a choice between Gog and Magog - or argue with someone who could not cotton on that her declaration that I was ‘empty of God’ was doctrinally self-defeating. Kenosis is a theological term for ‘self-emptying' - particularly how Jesus, the Nazarene, is said to have emptied himself of divinity and godhead to become human. If Jesus made himself 'empty,' why could I not?
Okay, enough irony. Enough of digressive strawmanship. Not believing in God or not worshipping anything does not make me ‘empty.’ As a matter of fact, I have never felt more ‘full,’ whole, more self-contented and relaxed, within humanly possible bounds. And let me repeat: I do not need religion or God to achieve plenitude; all I need is to get to grips with my inner Buddhahood. Needless to say, I am not a Buddhist (even though I see the point of Arthur Schopenhauer’s dalliance with Buddhism, I have no interest) and no time for any new-age east-meets-west eyewash. 'Inner buddhahood,' if you will, is a playful metaphor for chilled-out godlessness. But then I am still often asked what I believe in because it is received wisdom in most of Africa to see belief, faith, worship and sacramental mush as an existential necessity.
And what about the gods and religions of the Yoruba world? After all, I am Yoruba, and someone had once made a curious assumption that my rejection of Semitic religions and their ethnocentric god equals an embrace of Ogun, the iron-clad Yoruba deity, or Sango, the belcher of fire and brimstone, or any of the scores of he- and she-gods in the Yoruba pantheon. This thinking is not as far-fetched as it seems. The eminent Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka makes a virtue of being an Ogun votary. I will not second-guess what Soyinka finds in Ogun (although it's easily parsable), but I have never felt there is a need for any back-to-the-roots posturing; I am as unconcerned about Jesus or Mohammed as I am about Ogun or Obatala. And if I do not see anything in the divinities of the Yoruba world, I can't see myself gathering with tunic-wearing 'neopagans' to worship the sun at Stonehenge or becoming a Freysgodhi, although I have been giving Jediism or the Way of the Jedi, a cool and considered thought lately. What with the hoopla around the latest instalment of Star Wars! Well, if I wrote it down for a Yoruba person that I am a Jedi, the likelihood is that I would remind her of the trots, okay, diarrhoea, before Star Wars because that is what the word 'jedi' means in the language. Oh, this is becoming too anal-expulsive now.
And being from a society in which there is the instinctual desire to mystify everything masquerade reality behind the shroud of the supernatural, the unsayable, the unreachable, the unknowable, it is not unlikely that some would surmise that I may very well belong to a 'secret society,' that I am an allegiant of some fraternity or some hugger-mugger cult. But then the very thought of this is as laughable as giving a thought to becoming a serious devotee of Dudeism or the Church of SubGenius and its great god, Jehovah 1. Even then, these latter two 'religions' make more sense to me than any fraternity or cult with its self-important, sobersided ceremonials. After all, I like the Coen brothers' The Big Lebowski, which is the matrix of Dudeism, and I find Momus, the true god of SubGenius, amusing.
So what god do I worship, to which religion do I belong, and in what faith do I have? To answer 'nothing' to all these questions is to snare myself in the ideological slough of nihilism - nothingness for its own sake - which is a philosophically tricky situation to place oneself in if nihilism is broken and ground down to its brutally dusty lowest common denominator. But then, I do not worship any god or belong to any religion. As regards faith,  I have none except faith and belief in humanist ethos, sustained neither by ritual, worship nor by a cacophony of self-indulgent pieties. This is why I would not also think of becoming a member of August Comte's Positivist\Humanist Church, a needless parody of Abrahamism, or even its hipper, newishly laidback offspring, The Sunday Assembly.

 

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?