Spirit of the Artist 3

THE DANISH CARTOON AND THE NIGERIAN CARNAGE
On cartoon and Bigotism
By Niyi Osundare
"Tell me, Niyi", enquired a worried American
colleague who ran into me in the long corridor of the
English department here a couple of days ago, "why all
these terrible killings in Nigeria over a cartoon
published in far away Denmark? Since I heard that
horrible news yesterday evening, you and your country
have been on my mind. But I just can’t figure out any
reason for the killings in Nigeria!. . ." I thanked my
colleague who, only the previous day, had, in that
same corridor, given me a warm embrace and fortified
me with kind words in full commiseration over my
Katrina calamity. She had talked most concernedly
about the frightening circumstance of losing one’s
library, and offered me free access to her book-stock
any time I needed a book she might have.
I walked quietly into my office, and sank into
the chair like a sack of lead. For a painfully long
moment, my Katrina-begotten woes faded into a corner
of my consciousness, as the freshly reported massacres
in Nigeria assumed center-stage, and the drama of our
country’s fatal stupidities unfolded before my mind’s
eye. I was still in the grip of this negative reverie
when another enquiry arrived, this time in form of an
e-mail from a European media acquaintance who wished
very earnestly to know the underlying reasons for the
recent mayhem in Nigeria, and the links, if any,
between these incidents and the violence in the Niger
Delta. In a manner of speaking, my two colleagues
jolted me into another harrowing contemplation on the
so-called Nigeria project.
Nigeria is an accident waiting to happen. The
house that Lugard built for the glory of British
imperialism has creaked in every joint since the
Amalgamation of 1914. I have always wondered whether
the British actually conceived Nigeria as a permanent
nation-state or some bogus contraption knocked up for
the satisfaction of ephemeral imperial interest.
Unlike many of the European countries which had the
chance of fumbling through different stages of
political and social evolution, and whose eventual
composition took long and rigorous processes of
constitutional engineering, Nigeria (like nearly all
other African countries) was promulgated into
existence with little or no regard for its ethnic and
religious peculiarities.
This "gathering of the tribes" as the prescient
Soyinka tagged the nascent state in A Dance of the
Forests way back in the late fifties, has really never
known genuine political integration and social
cohesion. To put it rather bluntly, Nigeria as it is
constituted at the moment, is not a nation. Its claim
to countryhood is even in doubt. There are too many
cracks in the wall of the Nigeria house; the windows
are askew; the doors do not know where to stand; the
foundation is a mix of quicksand and quagmire. Because
its imperial architects were self-serving and
disingenuous, and its native contractors (past and
present) are short of integrity and vision, the
Nigeria house has really never stood with all its
parts in place. A gruesome civil war brought that fact
fatally home between 1967 and 1970. But as must be
clear even to the blindest observer of Nigerian
affairs, the civil war neither ended in 1970, nor did
the welter of factors that brought it about in the
first place. Below the ostensibly cool façade of the
Nigerian landscape, there is always a crisis
simmering, rearing to erupt. The triggering factors
are usually ethnic and/or religious. Always, a lurking
trouble in the house.
And so, back to my American colleague’s question:
how could an offensive cartoon published in far-away
Denmark have resulted in such mindless mayhem in
far-away Nigeria? Two major points are competing as
answers to this question: one, the rickety,
crisis-prone condition of the Nigeria state; and two,
the nature of the two so-called world religions, with
the "jealous" God they proclaim, and the violence of
their evangelism. For, let’s face the fact: neither
Christianity nor Islam can lay claim to any innocence
in the annals of war and waste, of madness and mayhem
that have afflicted Humanity in the last two
millennia.
Sanguinary crusades have traded places with gory
jihads, the blood-letting in each case purportedly
done in the name of God. These two religions have
affronted Humanity with the blatant contradictions
between the theory of their credo and the actualities
of their praxis. For instance, both claim the God they
worship is a God of peace, but we are left to wonder
why they routinely wage wars, destroy human lives and
property in a bid to win adherents for that God. If,
as they preach, all human beings are God’s children,
and all human lives are precious, even sacred, how can
fundamentalists hope to please God by destroying those
children, those lives? Does anyone really see the
fatal oxymoron in the term "holy war"?
I, nobody else. My Self, no Other. My way, no
other way. I am the only source of salvation; all
other sources are routes to perdition. The only key to
heaven/paradise/ is in my keeping.. . At the very core
of monotheistic religions is the seed of a
self-absorbed, self-seeking, self-propagating,
other-negating creed of intolerance. Zealotry is its
basic principle; evangelism its roaming rubric. Not
for the fanatic the universal credo of
live-and-let-live; believe-and-let-doubt. Not for
him/her the inevitability of anti-thesis in the
running dialectics of human ontology and its
mechanisms of knowing and believing. But the rules of
Nature and the rainbow order of universal practices
run counter to the zealot’s monochromatic
perspectives. For Nature manifests itself in a
diversity of phenomena, a myriad of mutations, a
battery of nuances and grey tonalities, a polyphony of
voices. Whatever idea exists only on the basis of
self-reproduction and self authentication soon
stagnates through in-breeding, or ends up in
narcissistic internal combustion.
The Yoruba understand this in all its intricate
ramifications. Which is why one of the most prominent
aspects of Yoruba worldview is pluralism: Ona kan o
wo’ja (Numerous roads lead to the same market); "Mee
l’Oluwaa wi" (Many, says the Lord). In the Yoruba
perspective, the sky is wide enough for a thousand
birds to fly without colliding (unless some of them
decide to be unusually greedy). The availability of
alternatives, the possibility of preference, the
matrix of choice, are all vital aspects life and
living. These and other optative parameters
contribute significantly to the human power of
discretion, his/her will to freedom. Since you can
never choose between one thing, the absence of an
alternative negates the principle and possibility of
choice. That absence institutes the tyranny of the
monolith and the violence of the sole-supreme. The
destruction of the Other invariably leads to the
nullification of the Self.
Any wonder, then, that the Yoruba spiritual world
is populated by a pantheon of deities, useful,
secular, anthropomorphic, existing in keen and
intricate complementarity among themselves and close
communion with humans beings. This liberal attitude
informed religious practices in many other indigenous
African societies that come within the compass of my
knowledge. Of course, through a sustained and vicious
process of deliberate misapprehension and
misrepresentation, both Islam and Christianity
demonized the liberal, accommodationist ethos of
traditional religions and used their enormous military
and political powers to suppress their pluralist
philosophy, then imposed their own "civilized"
mythology of the "one and only", the jealous
Sole-Supreme. The scramble for the soul of the
beleaguered African by these two religions has been
the source of much of Africa’s woes. To the best of my
knowledge, there were no religious wars in Africa
prior to the momentous advent on the continent of
these rival Juggernauts from the Middle East.
And now back to Nigeria, and the recent religious
"wars". Observers and commentators have wondered why
an offensive drawing by a Danish cartoonist, published
in Denmark several weeks ago could have generated so
much furore in Nigeria, resulting in the deaths of
hundreds of people and the burning of numerous
churches and mosques, and the gross undermining of
national security. After all, no mayhem of that
proportion was precipitated in Saudi Arabia, Islam’s
ancestral home. Why has Nigeria, an outsider of some
sort, wept louder than the bereaved?
As I hinted earlier on in this piece, the real
causes of the recent crises in Nigeria go beyond the
Danish cartoon (though it must be emphasized that by
itself, that cartoon is insensitive and quite
provocative). Those familiar with the history of
Nigeria will notice the chilling familiarity between
these crises and the ones that immediately preceded
the Nigerian civil war. Only this time around, the
killing of Easterners and the destruction of churches
and business in some parts of the North have exacted
reprisal killings of northerners and the destruction
of mosques in some parts of the East. A dangerous
tit-for-tat policy is here; an ominous
an-eye-for-an-eye warfare that, if not addressed
appropriately, may hasten Nigeria into blind
disintegration.
The signs are already there in the spawning of
such organizations as MASSSOB (Movement for the
Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra), OPC
(Odua People’s Congress), the Arewa group in the
north, and the countless, intractable militias of the
Niger Delta. At no time in Nigeria’s history have the
campaign for self-determination and cry against
marginalization been more multi-pronged, more
blatant. Nigeria’s federalism, which has never enjoyed
any measure of sound health, is showing signs of
serious strain and a potentially fatal fatigue.
Unfortunately, the country’s rulers do not seem
to be able to read the proverbial handwriting on the
wall. Consumed by their money-grabbing, vote-rigging
addictions, they are "too busy" to notice the cracks
in the wall of the Nigeria house, and the festering
disaffection of the people who suffer under their
misrule. Right now, the President of the "Federal"
Republic of Nigeria is too preoccupied with scheming a
constitutional amendment that would extend his term in
office. He is busy rewarding supporters of that
stratagem and punishing those audacious enough to
oppose it - a maddeningly manipulative act that has
further polarized an already fractitious country.
Can’t President Obasanjo see the link between his
toxic ambition, the mass poverty in the country, the
skewed structure of the Nigerian "federation", the
guerilla war in the Niger Delta, and the alarming
spate of the recent massacres? With luck, we may be
able to douse, this time, the conflagration sparked in
Nigeria by the Danish cartoon. The fire next time may
defy all effort at extinguishment.
Niyi Osundare, March 5, 2006. Osundare is poet and university teacher
• First published in The Guardian Lagos