Kemi Badenoch: Failing at being a self-hating Bad-ass

 

Kemi Badenoch, the British Conservative Party leader, is trying to insinuate herself into a club that does not want her as a member. No, I am not alluding to the Conservative Club, which has many chapters across Britain. To be sure, a number of these politically incestuous clubs would not accept her as a member. She became the leader of the Tories thanks to complex internecine rifts and disarray within her party. For all her extravagant attempts at foisting her sense of belonging on everyone, Kemi is as British as Rishi Sunak or Boris Johnson, who, by the way, was born in New York.

The club Kemi is intent on joining is neither that of Britishness nor even Englishness (after all, she was born in England), but that of 'whiteness' or Europeanness. And she's not just appealing to the mainstream; she has been brazenly playing to the jerks’ gallery of white supremacists and racists. She harps on racist talking points like the hierarchy of cultures and humans – 'lesser culture' over against 'higher culture', 'civilised people' vs ‘peasants and sub-communities’, etc.

Her negative references to Nigeria are not as off-the-cuff as some might think. It is an orchestrated, barely disguised game of racial and cultural one-upmanship. She tells her target audience: see how rotten and barbarous Nigeria is, compared to ‘our’ beloved, supercivilised Britain. She is getting away with the disingenuous ruse for a number of reasons. She carries a Nigerian passport and had spent some of her early years in Nigeria. Her critique of the Nigerian polity, even though exaggerated and cynical, has a ring of half-truth about it. Thirdly, she may have calculated on the echo-chamber syndrome among some Nigerians, on which her views would bounce off and resonate: 'oh, she's telling the truth about the state of Nigeria.' And that is all there is to it.

Of course, the cobbled-up space called Nigeria is indeed in a sorry state, owing to a long relay of dreadful leaders, including the current vice president, who scolded Kemi and suggested that she drop her Yoruba name. I have no time for the reprobate Nigerian ruling class, so I no longer waste any breath on them. Even then, if I were called upon to speak about Britain, as a private British citizen, I would not start babbling about Nigeria, still less about Nigerian politicians. Kemi is the British Leader of the Opposition and has absolutely no business denigrating another country, whether she carries the country's passport or not. It is undiplomatic and in bad taste.

Kemi is more of a glib panderer than an honest truth-teller. It is not so much about the truth or untruth of what she says about Nigeria but its pointlessness and vicious point-scoring. She is a heavy-handed political climber, and all she has done is use Nigeria as a foil for her rose-coloured, over-romanticised view of the 'greatness' of Britain. She is asked what she thinks about the British police and she pivots straight to how the Nigerian police officers stole her brother's shoes. This is not just unnecessary, but it is also infantile and pettish.

Dragging Nigeria into British political topicalities is the very definition of dishonesty. It is a pushy, validation-seeking ruse; it's all about showing her audience that she is eternally grateful and beholden to them for allowing her to inhale their 'civilised' ozone. It is indeed an explicit appeal to the racist and white-supremacist wing of her party.

Recently, Kemi tried to live up to her punned marital name, Bad-Enoch – in other words, a misbegotten heir to racist and xenophobic Enoch Powell. She should be embarrassed by this comparison, but being utterly lacking in self-awareness, she has failed to see the irony of her situation.

Recently, she came out with some batshit anti-immigration proposals, which are not worth repeating here. With her characteristic smugness, she seems to rejoice in channelling the anti-immigrant hysteria in a country whose recent imperial history makes it a fair destination for a quarter of the world’s population. A few days ago, Kemi again tried to outdo herself by submitting that Palestinians are less human than Ukrainians, so they should not have the right of political asylum in the UK.

There is no doubt that Kemi is proud a member of the vile Trump Fan Club – she is a Trumpette who conveniently reckons without the fact that she would, if she were American, have been a target of Trump's and Musk's DEI witch-hunt.

Kemi’s Thatcheresque pose often falls flat, and we should not forget that Thatcher herself was a class-hopping posturer. Kemi wants to be seen as the latest incarnation of an unshifting, uncompromising iron lady. I can't imagine her having the forethought to know that she will suffer a fate worse than Thatcher's because she will not be prime minister before she is eased out of her over-big boots.

Kemi wishes to be seen as a moral exception to prejudiced presumptions of her right-wing fellow travellers, but at best, she has made herself out as the idiot referent of racists and supremacists – a signifier of unrequited racial foot-washing. At worst, she is a bad-faith actor who blurs the line between a lack of sense of proportion and a bankruptcy of common sense. She has only succeeded in showing herself up as white supremacists' performing monkey, which is why her arrogance jars and is laughable.

If Kemi is thinking of Englishing her name, she may try Stephanie – witness Stephen, the slimy, deplorable house negro in Tarantino’s ‘Django Unchained.’ That is the way she comes across. How does she see herself? A ‘human stain’, a la Philip Roth?

‘Psychoanalysing Kemi’ might be a good topic in a decolonial classroom, but decades ago, Frantz Fanon had done that in ‘Black Skin White Masks.’

The Curious Case of Nigerian Trumpians

That many Nigerians love Trump is no longer news. It is a given, sadly so. A few days ago, I was compelled to respond to some Nigerians commenting on a post whose woman-hating riffs were attributed to Trump. The post was indeed fake: the overload of ‘Nigerian English’ and register leapt out at me from the first sentence. But of course, my gentle reproof meant absolutely nothing to the Trump rapture-heads who continued to chorus their ‘Heil Trump’ hymn. They were already far-gone on the high of Trump worship.

In 2016, when Nigerians gravitated towards Trump, I wasn’t surprised. A population who had been ruled and ridden roughshod over by robber-politicos, piratical dictators and patriarchal rogues like Abacha, Babangida and Obasanjo would undoubtedly find something worthy of worship in a morally challenged, fake-ass, unprincipled, convicted criminal like Trump.

In 2024, Nigerians who love Trump upped the ante. They moved the adoration of their putatively God-avenging magus from the secular to the ridiculous – that is, faux-religious. After all, Trump does not even pretend to be religious; he only stoops to indulge the cognitive blindness and tone-deafness of his flock. When I asked someone who lives in Nigeria why they loved Trump, they replied: ‘Because he is going to ban gay-ism, trans-ism and woke-ism in America.’

Well, Trump indeed attracts strange bedfellows, and not only within the curious mix of stateside Magadiots but also a global ragtag of ultras: racists and racial supremacists, culture warriors, stiff-necked evangelicals, counterintuitive Muslims, wilful anti-wokes, hypocritical homophobes, strongman-loving Africans and many others. Indeed, two Nigerian ‘pastors’ made an Inauguration pilgrimage to Washington to contribute to the consecration of their infallible popish idol.

I ignored the pitiful answer the Trump-loving person gave me and moved on to something else. My general attitude to Trump’s second coming has been shoulder-shrugging boredom. The day after Trump was elected, someone I know in the US called and tried to gloat about the victory of his hero. I told them I did not care whether or not Trump won, nor did I ever labour under the assumption that he would lose.

If America, or half of America, decided to choose a vain, vacuous and crass chancer, why should that be of any concern to me? I am only intrigued by the psychopathology of human folly, by the phenomenon of human unreason and herd instinct. Here is a man who wishes to turn America into a neo-imperial leviathan of yes-men and women, fear and loathing, and racistocracy. For all the curated hype about the wonders of his first term, there are ample signs now that Trump will plumb new depths in his second term. More so now that he has belly-flashing Jumping-Jack Elon Musk and other kowtowing oligarchs and millions of Maga running dogs to lick his spittle – well, to put it mildly.

It is also not a surprise that Musk is popular among Nigerians – Musk, who could very well have been a cross between a supremacist character from The Turner Diaries and a pompous jackass from any of Ayn Rand’s sub-literary rants. Of course, Musk, who was raised in apartheid South Africa, is the richest man in the world. Quite a good few Nigerians are worshippers of the golden calf, and while Musk is a global golden manchild, Trump is a real-life, if unregenerate, Mr Goldfinger.

The point a lot of Nigerians miss is that Trump as cartoon Superman might be the perfect religio-political messiah for them, but Trump as Nietzsche’s ubermensch (overman/superman) would consider them human trash, not worthy of notice. Well, even though Trump is only a caricature of Nietzsche’s Superman, he no doubt still considers Nigerians who love him unuseful idiots.

In 2016, when a fair number of the world’s population still thought we were living in a rational world where propriety mattered, many people believed that Donald Trump was an aberration that would soon be chucked into the dustbin of history. Well, simply put, the rest is history. Trump won in 2016, lost in 2020 and instigated a violent insurgency, was convicted in a civil court for sexual assault in 2023, and convicted in a criminal court for cooking the books in 2024, but yet he won the presidential election in 2024 and has, like a rough beast from the marshes of Mar-a-Lago, slouched his way back into the White House. Surely, we are not living in as sane a world as we would like to believe.

In 2016, the Nigerian Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, declared that if Trump became president, he would destroy his ‘green card’ - in other words, give up his American residency. Even at the time, Nigerian Trump lovers ‘threw shade’ at Wole Soyinka; they questioned the man’s motive in making a profoundly personal, if not moral, decision.

After Trump was re-elected, I found myself returning to Soyinka’s Green Cards, Green Gods, the seventh instalment of his Intervention chain, published in 2017. In the book, Soyinka gives Trump short shrift, but he savagely lights into Nigerian trump-bots who doubt his bona fides. Soyinka does not suffer fools at all, to say nothing of gladly. I would say that he is the most combative and combustible writer of significant stature in the last sixty years, and his thirteen Intervention chapbooks are one weighty corpus of socio-political diatribe. Of all the books, Green Cards is the most acidic. I will conclude with a quote from the book:

‘I was in New York during the run-up to (2016) elections. I watched this face, its body language, listened to his uncouth, racist language, his imbecilic harangues, the insults to other peoples, other races, especially the Hispanics, Africans and Afro-Americans, even citing once…Nigeria as an instance of the burdensome occupation of global space.’

Well, Baba Wole Soyinka, some of our fellow Nigerians would not care even if Donald Trump took a dump on them.

Why Pastor Adeboye May Not Be A Liar – A Kind of Defence.

 Pastor Adeboye may indeed not be a liar. First, a caveat for those on whom simple irony may be lost. This (me) irredeemable anticlerical defender of the faithless has not suddenly become a friend of the church – nor that of Pastor Adeboye. I would not even deign to damn the ageing ‘man of God’ with faint praise. Nonetheless, I would not be surprised if someone only glanced at the title and went away gloating to himself: Ah, the atheist old dog has lost his bark and bite – he has been brought to heel by God!

Recently, a few faithless folks have been ‘blaspheming’ Pastor Adeboye. Not only has he been called out as a fraud, but he has also been labelled a liar. As for being a fraud, clearly he is an Abrahamic shepherd whose large robes have a million pockets in which he stuffs the shekels and tithes he collects from his sheeple. To be sure, Adeboye cares nothing for ‘liberation theology’ or for what I'd call feeding-the-hungry gospel. He obsesses over tithes and how obligatory they are. Recently, I saw a video where he called on the Nigerian thieving political elite to remember the suffering poor – it was like watching a ham actor struggling to sustain the role of Fagin. Adeboye would rather be friends with Dives than with Lazarus, and there he was snivelling at Dives to forgo the measly droppings from his high table for Lazarus.

As for being a liar, this is far more complex. Anyone who said he drove a car for 200 miles with an empty tank would lay himself open to critique, and he would only have himself to blame if he was called a liar. Fifteen years ago, the empty-tank abracadabra piqued my curiosity. Even though I did not use the word ‘lie’ to describe the implausible assertion, I called it into question – maybe because this cloud-headed sky pilot’s miraculous ‘testimonies’ were not as well-advertised as they are now.

Thanks to the internet and social media, Adeboye’s incredible God-induced figments have become viral fodder for ridicule and mockery. And rightly so. Let’s start with the pièce de résistance. The old man purports to have had tea with God or that God had barged in on him and his good wife and had poured tea from their teapot. As he had done with Joshua, God, in his omnipotence, had flipped the weather and temperature a couple of times solely for Apostle Adeboye – a veritable moveable feast of miracles made only to suit Adeboye’s whims. God had widened a narrow bridge so that Adeboye’s car could wormhole its way round a juggernaut, which had completely hogged the bridge. These are happy-clappy old wives’ tales all right, but then the question may still be asked: Is Adeboye bullshitting? He may not. Before I continue, I would like to say that I will indulge myself in a bit of psychologism here. This is simply because, for all its pretensions to normality and tradition, religion – particularly the so-called ‘revealed religions’ – is received psychosis.

So, is everyone who is religious mad? I will use a paradox to answer the question. The story of Emperor’s New Clothes loses its gist in a town where everyone struts around in their (naked) glory. In such a town, to be clothed is to be mad. Nothing exemplifies this more than the psalmic foolery that is still being echoed down millennia by bible-bashers, which goes, ‘A fool says in his heart that there is no God.’

To a god-worshipper, godless people are not only foolish, but they are also stark-raving mad. Pray, what could be more foolish and schizoid than kneeling in the corner of your room and murmuring to the wall but deceiving yourself that you are appealing to something called God? Or believing such nonsense as a talking donkey (and my Christian friends would never accept that The Donkey in Shrek does indeed talk!). Or the virgin birth. Or the resurrection. Or a man seeing an angel who dictated an unoriginal piece of mythology to him. Or the story of the same man riding a winged horse into the clouds. Or the parting of the Red Sea. Or the utter bunk of Noah’s ark. What religion has done is to make foolishness legit. Religion is an illusion, says Freud; God is a delusion, says Dawkins.

One of the two books I alluded to above is the wellspring of Pastor Adeboye’s inspiration. The import of saying Adeboye is lying is that his reasonableness has been taken for granted. However, just because someone is a former maths teacher does not mean they are an Einstein of reasonableness. It takes a certain self-awareness to lie – to fabulate. Fabulation is another word for lying. To fabulate is to invent false and fantastic tales or fables, just like the first tellers of the Adam and Eve story when they came up with the Garden of Eden horse-manure.

There is another word: confabulation. It’s easy to see this as a pun, a play on con, or conman, and fabulation – a conman who uses tall tales from the Bible and the name of God to steal from the people, for instance. But I am not playing with words. Shrinks use confabulation to describe fabricated rememberings believed by the fabricator to be true. Does Pastor Adeboye believe that a bridge widened into a vast swathe to let his vehicle magic its way round a truck that should have steamrollered it? Maybe. Does he believe that he had tea with God? Maybe. Does he believe that God changed winter into summer for him? Probably. The pastor has been so steeped in the psychosis of religion that he may very well be confabulating rather than fabulating. It's all a function of delusion. Or maybe it's a conflation of fabulation and confabulation. God, as we all know, moves in mysterious ways.

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7Yemisi Abisogun-Oriku, Olushola Adeniyi and 5 others

Of Fraternities and Cults: The Scapegoating of Wole Soyinka

 

Last month, I finally picked up Wole Soyinka’s 2021 novel Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest Peoples on Earth. The novel gave neither joy nor sweetness and light. Besides its darkish subject, the style is heavy-going, baggy and constipated. Anyone unfamiliar with the Nobel Laureate's genius and prowess as a poet, dramatist, life writer and essayist would seek to get him out of their system and never return to him.

However, Soyinka is not only brilliant, but he is also prolific. His memoirs and autobiographies are some of the finest offerings in life writing. Therefore, after a brief post-Chronicles decompression, I pitched into Isara: A Journey Around 'Essay,' ‘Essay’ being Soyinka's epithet for his father. Isara is a marginally novelised narrative about the lives and times of ‘Essay’ and some of his townspeople. Again, like Chronicles, Isara is not Soyinka's lithest creation. Atmospheric and episodic, the book is overloaded with 'Ijegba' local colour.

Last week, in a work-in-progress, I referred to how Soyinka and six other undergraduates inaugurated the Pyrates Confraternity at the University of Ibadan in the early 1950s. And only a few days ago, I stumbled on a clip in which Soyinka returns to the University of Ibadan and reminisces as he accesses the 'alcove' where he and the other young turks launched the countercurrent Pyrates’ galley, propelled by the sea-change that was about to happen in colonial Nigeria.

I have never had the time to 'read' comments on social media posts, although sometimes I glance over a few to take the measure of human wisdom and idiocy – the latter is often more in evidence. I expected such adverse and ill-considered sentiments in responses to Soyinka's video, particularly from a section of the Nigerian society that harbours those whom he described as 'fascists.' I will not digress into the recent wrong-minded politicisation and coarsening of the Soyinka persona by the featherbrained, mickey-mouse fascists – they are not worth wasting precious time on.

However, for some years, I had wanted to write something about the misapprehension and misreading of 'fraternities' and the blaming of Soyinka for the irruption of vile, bloodthirsty and murderous secret cults on Nigerian university campuses and its overspill into the streets of cities and towns. There is a certain small-mindedness about this imputation. It’s an illustration of how incuriosity and philistinism have eaten into Nigeria’s body politic. A cursory reading of the history, definition and configuration of university fraternities and societies would easily have shown that Soyinka and his friends were only reenacting a centuries-old tradition of collegiate convergence, fellowship and camaraderie. American universities borrow classical terms like Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Chi, and Kappa Alpha to name their fraternities. In Germany, fraternities are called Studentenverbindung. Britain settles for societies.

Many years ago, I read a biography of Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970). One of my takeaways from the book was his membership of The Apostles, a Cambridge University society that was founded in 1820. Otherwise called The Conversazione Club, Cambridge Apostles is essentially a debating society. In the biography, I read about how members would brainstorm through the night on philosophical problems, mathematics, literature, etc. When Russell was a member, he fraternised with G.E. Moore (author of Principia Ethica) and others; a decade or so later, John Maynard Keynes invited Ludwig Wittgenstein to be a member. These were some of the most remarkable intellects of the early 20th Century.

As Soyinka clarifies, the Pyrates’ raison d’etre was (and still is) playful and ‘fun’ nonconformism and a ‘rebellious gesture’ against a ‘colonial, rather staid and stuffy atmosphere’ of pre-independent Nigeria. Even though it is almost always a civil and social affair in the UK and continental Europe, I am by no means implying that fraternities or societies are steeped in trouble-free child’s play all the time. College fraternities in America are considered the bosom of elitism, cronyism, racism, misogyny and binge drinking. Death via initiation hazing has been known, although this is rare. Even then, these are America-specific issues, and no one blames the founders of fraternities in American universities for these drawbacks.

Etiology – the study of causes of diseases and abnormal conditions – can only go so far. Who brought the idea of kidnap-for-ransom into Nigeria? When? Should we blame Festus Okotie Eboh and his train of drapery for the corruption and conspicuous consumption among the current cabal of Nigerian politicians? Who do we blame for the retrograde religiosity and God-parroting that are ruining Nigerians' collective psyche and intellect? European missionaries? Ajayi Crowther? The jihadists? Othman dan Fodio? The perverse scapegoating of Wole Soyinka for the explosion of cutthroat cultism on Nigerian campuses and streets and the atrocities they wreak would be puzzling if I did not know where it comes from – sheer lazy thinking.

Let’s attempt a counterfactual: if Soyinka and his friends had not set the Pyrates’ boat afloat, would all Nigerian undergraduates and youths be prim-and-proper, overwhelmingly acquiescent sheep today? Rabid cultism reflects the sociomoral state of play in the country - what Soyinka calls ‘anomy’ in the title of his 1974 novel, Season of Anomy. The season of anomie endures and is now acute and desperate. According to Soyinka, chivalry was one of the Pyrates’ terms of reference, and, as the great man gibes, today’s university cultists would spit on chivalry if it was offered to them on a plate. I daresay the word would sail over their doped heads.

Soyinka, Sartre and Style

 

Stylewise, Wole Soyinka's Baiting Igbophobia: The Sunny Igboanugo Thesis, the latest (and twelfth) outing in the Nobel Laureate's Intervention series, is strong meat. The book is strong meat, not exactly in the British sense of being so indelicately shocking and off-the-wall as not to everyone's taste, but strong meat, tangentially, in the biblical sense. In the Yoruba sense, too – Eran tó yi – strong, gristly, chewy meat. Of course, any number of readers would pass on Wole Soyinka as any random peruser of books would pass on any other author. It is simply a matter of taste. Some people would consider Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary unreadable or not readworthy, even in the sublime French original. Beyond the chasm of time and space that separates them, Soyinka is not Flaubert, and I would not even begin to compare the masters - both are terrifically larger-than-life figures.

Jean-Paul Sartre testifies to Flaubert's existential vastness and genius in the unfinished biogra-fiction The Family Idiot. The 5-volume, 3000-page literary alchemy is a nonpareil. Again, I will not attempt the merest aperçu into The Family Idiot. Not only would it smack of readerly showoffishness (more so in these unreaderlike times), but it is almost impossible. Joseph S. Catalano's attempt to condense the tomes into a smaller readable volume is effective and handy - handy in more ways than one. (By the way, speaking of taste, Catalano wasn't as taken with Madame Bovary as he was by Moby Dick.) Setting aside the potted edition, few mortals have indeed read all the five volumes of The Family Idiot. There is no sprinting through three thousand pages of text, still more when it is allusive and erudite. And not only are they as rare as gold dust, but they are also as pricey as gold bars, save the first volume, which is inexplicably reasonably priced. Anyway, enough of bibliophilic diversions.

The above is not as digressive as it seems. Soyinka recalls Sartre in a lot of ways. Sartre bestrode French literature and philosophy in the 20th century. As a litterateur, he wrote plays, novels, autobiographies and essays and was a giant of philosophy. Although he is a 'thinker' and intellectual in the Aristotelian sense, Soyinka does not write philosophy. But there are parallels between the men. They are similarly prolific; they are hugely brilliant; they are monstres sacré (sacred monsters); they are non-politically engagé; and they would have been fellow Nobel Laureates if Sartre had not rejected the prize in 1964. Some of their writings are dense, difficult, and well and truly caviar to the general. Soyinka's The Credo of Being and Nothingness may be a minor opus but the intellectual ballast - and bombast, so to speak - at its core is no less weighty than Sartre's summa existentia Being and Nothingness.

Now, here is the rub. How do I write about Soyinka's literary style without turning it into a parody, a parody of purple prose? And not just a parody of Soyinka's prose but also of the pastel shades of my own writing! Anyway, speaking of purple prose, in the tenth Intervention, Soyinka recounts how an English professor, whom he showed his collegiate attempt at writing a play, described his prose as 'purple.' Well, the don lived long enough to witness how purple became the new and rewarding black for Soyinka when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986.

Beyond purple and black, how well does Soyinka's word-painting read and leap out from a canvas? For one thing, unlike, say, Vladimir Nabokov, Soyinka is not a prose stylist. Contrary to what some might think, he does not strain after effect. He is a writer whose genius errs on the side of tough-grained brutalism. If you possessed a fair amount of vocabulary, Soyinka would not send you to the dictionary as often as you might fear, but he might make you sweat, swear and hyperventilate because you could not make your way out of his labyrinthine constructions.

This is not the place and time to analyse Soyinka's redoubtable style. Where does one start? His plays? Poems? Novels? Life writing? Essays? The great man will be ninety this year, and something seems to be happening to his prose. No, it is not mellowing - it is indeed simmering, bubbling over. You could glean that from his Intervention series, which he began about fifteen years ago. The first five books are combative, vivid and reader-friendly; the middle three are brooding, adversarial and not reader-unfriendly, but the last four are... Well, they read as if they were written with ichor (golden blood) taken from the veins of Ogun, Zeus, Sango and Prometheus.

Pastor Adeboye, Grigori Perelman And Poincare: the Mathematical Degrees of Separation. (First published in 2010)

When I read the report of how the Russian mathematician, Grigori Perelman, turned down the 1 million dollar Millennium Mathematical Prize for solving one of the most redoubtable mathematics problems, I was again reminded of the knotty linear continuum, otherwise called Africa. What has Perelman got to do with Africa? A lot more than you would guess. All right, he is not a descendant of the poet Pushkin, who had an African great-grandfather. But then, who says Perelman does not have his own African ancestor, lost in the reverse offing of time? Anyway, soon after he resolved the mathematical problem (Poincaré Conjecture), Perelman resigned from his teaching job at Steklov Institute and has since eschewed what he sees as the seamless materialism of modern life, he has escaped into a kind of temporal semi-monastic existence in a verminous flat in St Petersburg, a neo-Tolstoyan figure time-travelling into an unwritten Dostoevsky's epic.

After Nigeria's Pastor Adeboye was named one of the People of the Year in 2009, I wrote an article in which I mentioned the Millennium Mathematical Problems. I submitted that it would have been a more worthwhile achievement if Adeboye had solved one of the problems instead of winning plaudits for pronouncing the profound obscurantist drivel of hoping to plant churches in every corner of Africa. I took full cognisance that Mr Adeboye has the freedom to act according to his lights or what he considers the lights of his god – if his great God had told him to supplant mathematics with religion, then one should better leave well enough alone. After all, if there is such a saying that the road to hell is full of good intentions, I don't think it would be entirely facetious to suggest that the road to heaven may indeed be full of daft intentions.

I found it ever so slightly bemusing that it was not only Mr Adeboye who had given up a career in mathematics for a calling as a scriptural shepherd corralling flocks of Nigerian Pentecostal sheep. I understand that Mr Kumuyi, head of Deeper Life Church, was also a mathematics teacher (probably a colleague of Adeboye's) before he became yet another shepherd overseeing a huge flock. I remember someone parlaying his Christianised commonsense into my rueful observation of this coincidence: Isn't it a good thing, he argued, that mathematics loss is God's gain? Being a born-again bonehead, this person failed to reason it out that mathematics' loss is not just God's gain but yet another instance of Africa's reversion to the state of ante- or anti-enlightenment. Would it have mattered whether or not Pastors Adeboye and Kumuyi had remained run-of-the-mill mathematicians and were not even capable of solving the merest mathematical problem? Probably not. I just don't see any point in celebrating the sacrifice of mathematics to religion.

And this would not have meant anything if these two had not set a lamentable precedent that it is something to be rapturous about when someone brilliant enough to be a scholar gives academe up for preacherly calling. Today Nigeria is full of doctors, engineers, architects, lecturers and ‘professors,' who are either honorary or part-time pastors, or deacons, to use a happy-clappers' parlance, or who have given up their old professions to become full-time bible-cramming gospellers. Again, there would not have been anything wrong in a handful of well-educated lay Christians taking preferment, but for this to have become a fashion, a badge of respectability and wisdom, is pitiful. For one thing, it would seriously undercut the chances of anyone from such a society ever winning anything as rare and crucial as the Millennium Prize.

And what is this Millennium Prize, and why am I going on about it? This is a very important Prize, and considering that it is not won every year or even every four years like the Fields Medal, it may even be said that it is more important than the five intellectual Nobel prizes, more important than the latterly instituted Abel Prize. I am not the most mathematical in the village; my handhold on the finer points of maths has always been slippery and very weak indeed. While I would not presume to compare myself with such literary colossi as Updike and Soyinka, I have read both men express how the love of maths was lost on them. Possibly, the DNA sequence of the denizens of the literary republic carries an elision in numeracy, so there is no point in fussing over an expatiation on any of the Millennium Mathematical problems.

Nevertheless, I appreciate and even have an apprehension of the power of mathematics, its omnivalence, its overarching immanence in the exploration of the morphology and meaning not just of the earth, but of the whole universe, maths is the ethereal (as well as real) equivalent of carbon. From Pythagoras to Ptolemy to Newton to Einstein and even to Hawking - maths has been the instrument of choice in these men's effort to untie the few they can among the billions of knots and skeins and the mysteries of the union of space and mass. To render it further down, there could not have been such an invention as the computer I am writing now without mathematics – plus millions of other things. And although applied maths could bring forth such a beautiful – or at least useful thing - like the computer, in its pure form, it is notoriously difficult; it is dense, deep, and to a lot, metaphysically runic.

The Millennium Problems are the apogean problems of mathematics, the eminently bull-headed cruces, the bitch septet. One of them is the cognately complex Poincaré Conjecture. This conjecture is no more or less complex than the Riemann Hypothesis, P versus NP Problem, or Yang-Mills Existence and Mass Gap. In 2003, Grigori Perelman cracked, or shall we say, second-conjectured the Poincare conjecture. In his time, the Frenchman Henri Poincaré was a mathematical luminary; his contributions to mathematics were (still are) massive; among dozens of formulations, he conjured up what is now known as the Poincaré Conjecture. Like all Millennium problems, this is all but humanly unsolvable and extremely prickly. This is why the Clay Mathematics Institute offered a million-dollar prize for the solution of any of the seven.

Perelman was the first person to solve any of the long-unsolved problems - the Poincaré conjecture was proposed in 1904. In 1996, it had been proved and verified that Perelman had marrowed out the conjecture; he was awarded the Fields Medal. However, Perelman declined the award and refused to appear at the International Congress of Mathematics to accept the medal. Several years before he was awarded the Clay Millennium Prize, he had given up mathematics, describing the subject as too painful to discuss. And again, like the Fields Medal, he rejected the Millennium Prize with its million-dollar premium, saying, 'I'm not interested in money or fame. I don't want to be on display like an animal in a zoo.' He believes cracking the theorem is enough reward.

What piques my fascination is how Perelman has reacted rather than his gargantuan algorithmic achievements. Well, crackpot and idiosyncratic, you might say. But we should not forget what had come from that crackpot mind in the first place. And despite the odds, Nigeria, or maybe Africa as a whole, needs a mathematical crackpot like Perelman rather than ex-mathematicians who have chosen a no less crackpot religious persuasion in which they see nothing wrong in praying for miracles or to the ‘unmoved mover,' to move cars. As I wrote earlier, someone like Mr Adeboye has all the right in the world to give up maths for the pulpit, but the effect of such personal abdications is part of the problems of Africa today, and we are yet to thoroughly examine where this sort of teleological drift would land us. Ours is a continent slumbering in the belly of the whale of time. I fear that it might be too late by the time Africa is disgorged; the continent might find itself islanded, arid and sterile, a metaphorical Jonah.

And there is a paradox to the connections I am trying to make. Perelman, the mathematician, worked his backside off, solved a thumping mathematical problem, and won a prize, but chose to live a hermitic life, spurning the million dollar gift, an attitude which mirrors the scriptural Jesus Christ than that of a man who gave up mathematics for charismatic Christianity and thought nothing of buying a billion naira aircraft. At the same time, several thousand members of his congregation might be unable to send their children to school for want of money or feed themselves squarely. This sort of parable is one of Nigeria's subtle tragedies. And when the final tally of the most influential people of this century or even millennium is made, I don't think it will be too hard to separate the grains from the chaff. No Nigerian ‘pastor' – not even Adeboye – has done anything worth celebrating in a high-minded, even humane, way. The likelihood is that these men and women would feature in lengthy footnotes when the story of the failed state once called Nigeria is written.

M

My fascination with the pun mummy
the mother and mummy the embalmed
Egyptian soul endures.
Time and sophistication have not erased it,
much more so when mummy
the mother abides in time, well-preserved,
cherished, honoured and full of soul.
We never grew out of calling her mummy.
Even now after she's gone...
Gone.

Sometimes you wonder:
Is that it? Is that all there is to it?
Yes, it is.
This is something grave philosophies
and pollyanna religions
do not prepare you for.
For we all measure our time
against the span of our parents' lives,
still more so against the parent
who lives longer, long.

She left in her 90th year,
yet everything looks foreshortened
and brief.

At last, sooner or later,
time's arrow pierces every heart:
in one fell swoop Thanatos
eases out Eros;
the wrecking ball of Earth
smashes us against the bosom
of nothingness and nonexistence.

My fascination with Allan Ginsberg's
Kaddish endures, the poet's song
for his late-lamented mother.
But where Naomi Ginsberg was the very
sea itself, stormy and calm by turns,
Sade Oriku was at once
an oasis and a dune, harbour
and haven for us all.
You would think the words,
'Oh you look like your mother'
feel less bemusing now.
They do not, not when mirror
and reflex tell you otherwise.
Well, aren't we all flickering shadows
of the dead?
Aren't we guttering candles
planted on shrines to the dead?
Aren't we merely one of
the multifarious mutations of evolution?
But here we shall stay with things
sub-specie humanitatis...

Her anima enriches me, stuff
from which my marrow was made.
Her humane gene endures
but the meme of Christianity
that was foisted on her foreparents
has gone awol in me.
I recall her heartfelt Abrahamic prayers...
My forced, knowing, bad-faith 'amen'
now ring hollow.
But that was duty, filial duty,
and she knew - the soul of kindness
and care, Mother.

We still call her mummy
even though she's gone,
even though in her last
testament and autobiography,
she mutes mummy, calls herself Mama.
Isn't Mama better, sturdier, realer,
solemner and mother-earthy?

Mama, you're forever
mummified in our hearts.