|
Books by Chinweizu
The West and the Rest of Us
(1975) /
Decolonising the African Mind
(1987) /
Voices from
Twentieth-century Africa (1988)
Invocations and
Admonitions (1986);
Energy Crisis and Other Poems
(1978);
Anatomy of Female Power
(1990)
Towards the Decolonization of
African Literature (1980)
* *
* * *
Explaining
the African Predicament
A Letter to Chinweizu and Rudy by
Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh
Dear Chinweizu and Dear Rudy,
I am humbled that
my work excites commentary from both of you; an
authority I revere and a genius I admire.
Chinweizu
awoke me from my intellectual childhood with his seminal
work and what I characterize as his Opus Magnus; The West and the Rest of Us. He went further to purchase my
eternal respect with “Anatomy of Female Power”. Both of
which are Vade mecum for me till today. Rudy caught my
admiration with the variety of authorities he is able to
bring together under one umbrella. ChickenBones is a
conception native to genius. I salute both of you! You
have earned my respects and that of all right thinking
men of goodwill! May your inkwells and fountain of ideas
never run dry!
Your debate and the
seemingly radically opposed positions that both of you
are towing is simply a testament to the genius of the
participants. I cannot lay claim to your kind of genius
or competence, but I wish to intervene in your debate
with a mediation. I am an Emmanuel but not a Kant. Igbo
lingual metaphysics has it that when two elephants
fight, the grasses suffer! But if I am in the company of
the grasses that hosts your fight, I would apply to
debate this proverb. As both of you examine the
positions I took in my last article “Nigeria: The Making
of a Failed State?” in order to buttress your stands,
against each other, I am not suffering like the grasses
would. I am rather humbled.
Borrowing from
Patrick Henry, I wish to say that “No man thinks more
highly than I do of the abilities, of the very worthy
gentlemen who” are debating the causes of the Nigerian,
nay African predicament in forum. “But different men
often see the same subject in different lights; and,
therefore, I hope that it will not be thought
disrespectful to those gentlemen, if, entertaining as I
do opinions of a character very opposite to theirs, I
shall speak forth my sentiments freely and without
reserve”.
In the light of
this, and with profoundest respects, I wish to state
that both of you are taking extreme positions. And
extreme positions have this uncanny character of
evolving into some narrow insularity, which blinds
itself to other equally potent forces at play in the
evolution and sustenance of the African predicament as
made manifest in Nigeria. But we must always bear in
mind that reality is a very complex thing. And attempts
at explaining a reality like the African predicament
from a mono-factoral angle, embezzles a whole range of
other equally potent factors at play in the evolution
and/consolidation of the African predicament, which
Nigeria is a terrible example.
I am of the opinion
that no mono-factoral explanation can adequately suffice
as the explanation of the Nigerian political
predicament. Nigeria and Africa the way it is today is a
product of a conglomeration of retrogressive factors.
This implies that both of you are right in your
contentions, and wrong at the same time by holding that
as the only explanation. Both of your ideas and
standpoints are right in that they constitute a part of
what causes the Nigerian problematic. But since a part
cannot be the whole, your assumption of your points as
the only explanations to the problems is notoriously
inadequate to account for a wide variety of issues that
faces one, when the Nigerian predicament is on the table
of discourse. It is like blind men of Hindustan, who
went to visit an elephant and each ended up thinking
that the part of the elephant he is able to touch or
feel is the whole elephant.
This multi-factoral
explanation is what my body of work has essayed to show.
I essayed in the following works to address the causes
of the African and Nigerian predicament:
I agree with Chinweizu when like
him, I designated imperialism as the metaphysics of
exploitation, which never gets its fangs off the
bleeding flesh of its victim. Chinweizu and Walter
Rodney (How Europe Underdeveloped Africa) were
right here on the money that neo-colonial power centres
never granted Africa independence. Contemporary works
like Jeffrey Sachs’
The End of Poverty, Joseph
Stiglitz
Globalization and its Discontents,
John Perkins
Confessions of an Economic Hit-man, Noam
Chomsky’s classic pieces, and Karl Maier’s
This
House Has Fallen all lend credence to this. They
are all testaments to the fact that neo-colonial power centres are not sleeping in their avid desire to exploit
Africa unto extinction.
The war over Coltan in Congo today
financed by Western trans-national companies and their
surrogates is a direct instance of where the voice was
Jacob’s and the hand Esau’s in explaining the African
predicament. Chinua Achebe in ‘The trouble with Nigeria’
laid the origin of Nigeria’s political problems at the
door steps of the colonial masters, whose neo-colonial
designs ensured that at the pre-independence elections
of 1959, that the elections were rigged as to engineer
and concentrate power in the hands of the conservative
elements, who would ensure that Nigeria would remain
perpetually a colony in everything but name. Odumegwu
Ojukwu in “Because I am involved” equally towed the same
line, when he saw Nigeria as replacing white
imperialism, with white imperialism in black skin at
independence.
That neo-colonial power centres
would never let Africa and the rest of the world become
truly independent is exemplified in the brutal death of
Patrice Lumumba at the hands of the CIA and their
Belgian surrogates, using Mobutu as the hatchet man.
They couldn’t endure Africa escaping their exploitative
grips; which Lumumba’s ascent to power would have
signified. In Lumumba’s stead, they propped Mobutu up,
as he auctioned off his land to the combination of his
greed and American strategic interests. Most of the
coups in Africa are thanks to the result of these guys
not comfortable with any semblance of the rise of
progressive elements on African power centres. They
prefer their own stooges to any progressive movement
that threatens the inglorious status quo sustained by
neo-colonial intrigues and military and economic
arm-twisting.
On this score Chinweizu is correct.
Rudy is correct in that African
leadership and politicians are major furniture of the
African predicament. This is because they have raped
their lands in obeisance to their vaulting greed. They
are to blame to the greatest extent of that construction
because no amount of bribery or intimidation can make a
child rape his mother in good conscience. But African
politicians are incestuous kids, who are willing to rape
their nations for fun and for the lewd enjoyment of
their avarice. African politicians qualify to bear that
vulgar slang that pedestrian America reserves for ne’r’-do
wells. That word is “MOTHER-FUCKER”. This word is so
lewd that I have never used it in print save for now.
Anybody who rapes his mother is qualified for the
appellation: motherfucker! And this is what African
politicians are. They have raped their lands in
obedience to the various gods in the amphitheatres of
their greed and cowardice.
Leaders are those who should look
intimidations and bribery in eyes and refuse to betray
their convictions. This is the mould that men like
Nelson Mandela are cast in. Years of threats,
intimidation, blackmail, bribery could not break his
spirit or make him abandon his struggle against
“Apartheid” in South Africa. He held firm and was ready
to die instead of living in slavery. Leaders are men
like Patrick Henry who would ask and say: “Is life so
dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price
of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know
not what course others may take; but as for me, give me
liberty, or give me death!” And Africa has had a few of
those leaders who are able to choose death instead of
betraying the liberty of their lands and people.
On this score in
relation to Nigeria, I agree with Rudy.
But I crave that
none of these positions on its own is potent enough as
an explanation of the African predicament. I anticipated
and reconciled both viewpoints in “Africa: The Ontology
of Failed States,” where I wrote as follows:
|
The
African continent is littered with failed
states. Most of these states are economic
backwaters, social apologies and political
ruins. This landscape runs from the
Casablanca to the Cape Town and from The
Horn of Africa in the East to the Island of
No Return in the West Atlantic. Most of
these states true to type were the creatures
of imperial convenience. To that end, they
were meant to serve a purpose after which
their ontological legitimacy or raison d'
etre would then expire. At this expiration;
the states, naturally not designed for
self-propulsion; were condemned to tether on
the brink, and finally implode upon the
inglorious weight of their inherent
contradictions. Colonialism designed and
inspired the problems.
But the
decadence was then driven along by a horde
of native pirates; trained in the fine art
of piracy. These set of political actors
were rogues personalities, weaned on
selfishness. They were brilliant students of
kleptocracy and political perversity. In
about four decades they completely
outclassed colonial perfidy and bested them
in thievery. They did an inglorious job of
mismanaging Africa, so much so that she is
today the laughing stock of the world.
The advent of the White man was tsunamic for
Africa. Chinua Achebe captured this well:
Things fell apart! Africa and her centre
could no longer hold. She became embroiled
in a dynamic, which would change her
structure, her culture and her future
forever.
The former league of tribes coagulated into
pseudo-states, at the instance of
colonialism. Strange bedfellows became
fellow citizens over night. Consanguinal
relatives find themselves facing each other
as citizens of different countries. The
African psyche was ripped apart. The changes
were too radical, as his culture was
demonized and labelled as inferior. He had
to forfeit his language in so many cases. He
was equated to dogs, when he seeks
admittance into drinking parlours because
dogs are not admitted. There arose a
miseducation on the socio-cultural level,
which as was well articulated by Chinweizu,
deformed the collective African psyche from
which it is yet to recover.
To carve up Africa, drawing boards were
built in 1885 Berlin. Africa was scrambled
up among the occupying powers. The aim was
to ensure each power an unimpeded and
unmonitored freedom to loot as much as they
could in their area of influence.
The Belgian-Congo became an abattoir, where
King Leopold's polymorphous perversity,
sought and obtained unrestrained
ventilation. For the sake of rubber,
Leopold's men sacked villages, decimated
cultures, and harvested a pyramid of chopped
hands, in an orgy of brutality, unmatched
even by Hitler's men. Congo bled, and
haemorrhaged her resources into Belgian
coffers. The Germans tried the annihilation
tactics on the Herero of Namibia. British
piratical treachery blossomed in Nigeria and
her other territories. All in Europe, Africa
bled, so that Europe could have a river of
wealth flowing through her.
To effectively continue this when their
various suns must have set, they created
states; which were simply neo-colonial
dependencies. And to run these states, they
mass-produced a semi-literate, middle-class
of yes-men, to complement the paucity of men
they have on the ground. This crop of
creatures became the collaborative vehicle
of colonial exploitation. Hatred for them,
which was a rampant phenomenon, sometimes
took deadly proportions, as was mirrored in
Achebe's Things Fall Apart, where Okonkwo
had to kill a court messenger, to vent his
anger on an invading establishment that has
despoiled the land of his fathers, and
insulted his culture.
Almost all the Modern states in Africa today
were built on political ontologies, oozing
from this engineered political metaphysic.
The people never dialogued their differences
as a basis for federating. They never talked
to each other about a political union. They
woke up one morning, and saw themselves
conscripted into geopolitical constructs
they neither chose nor bargained for. For
the natives, it was a bazaar of unfunny
jokes, and for the colonial officers; a duty
for country and queen.
African states were created to facilitate
and ease the efficiency of rapid colonial
exploitation. That was their raison d'etre.
They were never designed to be independent,
or cease being a source of cheap raw
materials, and slave labour for colonial
industries. They were equally meant to be a
cheap market to cushion the inflationary
effects of mechanised mass production. The
colony was a laboratory of caprice. Every
socio-economic, geopolitical or cultural
hypothesis was subjected to clinical trials
on the hapless colonies. This accounts for
the fact, that every discredited
socio-political, economic or eugenic theory
was once tried out in Africa.
Every
failed social edifice translates into a
jungle. The core operative principle across
its embrace perfectly mimics that native to
the forest of unreason. For us to appreciate
the dangers posed by a failed social
construct, we must apprise ourselves of the
transactions obtainable in the markets of a
jungle.
A jungle is an amorphous piece of territory
governed by anarchy. In this arena, survival
is of the fittest, while the operative
principle anchors on the currency of "Might"
is "Right". In every jungle, law and order
are alien concepts. The Orwellian principle
of "some animals, being more equal than
others" abundantly holds sway in this dark
world of inchoate randomness. In a jungle,
nothing is predictable. The only constant in
this huge stew pot of irreconcilable
variables is lawlessness.
Any
participant in this concourse of crudity who
is able to carve out a territory for his
whims by the agency of raw and naked might,
positions himself to intimidate the lesser
mortals within his vicinity, with threats
and abundance of fear. Peace here is only a
calm pond with a subterranean current of
turbulence and dissensions boiling like
volcanic lava underneath. It is no peace, as
the least excuse is utilized to ventilate
the suppressed angst of the oppressed
powerless. Stability is absent as anybody
who has the power is allowed to prey on
those who are unfortunate to be powerless
around him.
He is
obliged to feed on them without qualms.
Violent death is a norm as fear rules. The
only semblance of order is that predicated
on a balance of terror. Every one here by
necessity sleeps with one eye open, if not
for anything to be conscious enough as to
take flight before the predator floors him
or to be a conscious witness to the
onslaught on him; or to be in a position to
negotiate an escape from the grip of those
who have the power to do him in. This was
the Hobessian state of nature where the fear
of violent death paralysed development,
rendered life nasty, brutish and short.
In the jungle there exists no common weal,
public good, or social service. Every animal
in this arrangement strives to survive.
Survival is the word. The weak are crushed
and eaten out of existence by the stronger
predators. Every one consults the instincts
of survival in all transactional situations.
Joy here is of the instinctual order, while
Love is fundamentally absent. Self survival
commands procreation, and the offspring
commences his own independent struggle for
survival the moment it arrives. In a society
that has degenerated into a jungle, all
these features are activated, enabled and
are abundantly obtainable.
In
Nigeria for example, law and order exists
only in the statute books; reminiscent of
the jungle. The only law is survival. The
stronger individuals swallow up the weaker
ones. The rich get richer by gobbling up
what belongs to all, while the poor are
further impoverished into powerlessness. In
this kind of social situation, individuals
make their own laws, interpret and implement
them according to the dictates of their
caprice. This is a situation where a man for
example could get up, equip a private army
drawn from the National Police, and kidnap a
democratically elected Governor, in a brazen
contravention of the ground norms of the
country; and yet he is feted by the powers
that be. This is a situation where anyone
who dares criticize the President, is
framed-up, disgraced and sacked from office,
without due process; and beaten up by armed
robbers in his house.
This is
a situation, where an auditor-general would
sack for auditing government accounts and
revealing that unrestrained corruption
thrives in the presidency. And this same
presidency that has lost every moral
authority to talk about justice empowers a
bulldog of an agency to track down his
opponents, both real and imaginary and
blacklist them so good, as to sabotage and
compromise their political careers. Some
instances later will bring these from the
pinnacle of arid theorizing to the tables of
normal discourse.
Man engineered an escape from this primeval
broth of unreason, when he hewed society and
developed law and order out of this assured
destructive tendencies. Reason and
experience taught man that there needs to be
a guarantee for the sustenance of this
order. It bid him invent government as a
safe bastion for the sustenance of these
ideals. Government to that end arose as the
last line of defence of the society from its
primeval tendency to destroy itself. It
equally rose to guarantee rights and
responsibilities of all participants. It
rose equally to foreclose forever, the
possibility or the ease with which violent
death lurks around every social nook and
cranny. It became the bulwark against
retrogressive and anti-social forces that
seek to overthrow the social order by the
forces of might. That was the raison d'etre
of government; the common good of its
subjects.
In a situation, where a government fails to
live up to its ontological raison d'etre,
that government has really failed. That
government cannot lay claims on its being
overwhelmed by social forces as an excuse
for its failure. This is consequent upon the
fact, that it remains the Leviathan, to whom
we leased some of our powers and rights; to
whom we gave up most of our privileges, to
enable him agglomerate and wield an
influence unparalleled or unequalled by any
constituent of the social order.
To this
end, no excuse is admissible for any failure
to act in defense of the social embrace left
in its charge. |
I salute you all. May the debate
continue with mutual respect for each other’s viewpoints
and in the recognition that a part cannot be the whole,
but is necessary in the understanding of the whole.
*
* * * *
Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh
was born in Nigeria and currently lives in Germany. He
had his Bachelors in Philosophy from the Pontificial
Urban University Rome. Mr. Ogbunwezeh is currently
working on a Ph.D. in Social Ethics and Economics at the
Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main,
Germany. His book The Tragedy of a Tribe: The Grand
Conspiracy Against Ndigbo and the Igbo Quest for
Integration in Nigeria was published in 2004. "Shots
at Immortality: Immortalizing Igbo Excellence" and "The
Scandal of Poverty in Africa: Reinventing a Role for
Social Ethics in Confronting the Socio-economic and
Political Challenges of Africa of the Third Millennium"
will be published in 2005. Additionally, Mr. Ogbunwezeh
published dozens of articles in newspapers, magazines,
internet sites, and trade journals.
* *
* * *
posted 13 March 2008
|
