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Nigeria: This
House Is Not For
Sale!
By
Ugochukwu
Ejinkeonye
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Why do I ever think of
things falling apart? Were they ever whole.—Arthur
Miller, Late American playwright and
essayist |
I am forced by some
very discomforting thoughts to remember today
Bessie Head, the late South African writer and her
1989 collection of short stories entitled,
Tales of Tenderness and Power. I remember
particularly one of the stories in that collection
captioned, “Village People,” especially, its opening
lines which reads:
| Poverty has a home in Africa—like a
quiet second skin. It may be the only place
on earth where it is worn with an
unconscious dignity. |
Now, this is one
assertion that immediately compels one to start
visualizing images of scenes and objects that readily
constitute benumbing evidences of “dignified poverty”
spread all over Africa, where people try to give some
form of shine and panache to a very horrible situation
they have somehow convinced themselves would always be
with them. In those two brief lines, Ms. Head states a
truth about Africa which we may find very demoralizing
and objectionable, but which would remain extremely
difficult to contradict.
But is poverty the
only thing we appear to have accepted as inevitable
component of life in this part of the world? What about
crime? How come crime appears to have gradually become
too natural with us in Nigeria here, that we even go
ahead to put up notices to moderate its operation? We
appear to relish more the very unpleasant job of merely
alerting people to it than doing anything to stamp it
out.
Now, if I may ask:
what usually occurs to your mind each time you enter a
hotel room in Nigeria and on the wash-basin, dressing
mirror, bed-sheet or towel you see the following
inscription: “Hotel Property, Do Not Remove!”
If you ask me, this
warning simply takes it for granted that guests would
naturally wish to remove those items, and so to
forestall that, care is taken to advise them not to
remove those particular items as the hotel is still in
need of them. In other words, the absence of such a
warning on any other item should be construed as an
automatic authorization any guest requires to move those
things together with his personal effects, if he so
wishes, at the expiration of his stay. That’s just the
implication. Or have we not also thought about that?
What are we then, by this practice, telling numerous
foreign visitors that use those hotel rooms daily about
ourselves?
Yet similar
warnings abound everywhere, but I doubt that it in any
way bothers anyone, even those public officers spending
billions of naira on their so-called efforts to manage
the nation’s image.
Indeed, it no
longer shocks us to see daily on virtually every
building, even rickety, dilapidated ones, this
inscription, usually written in very bold letters, even
at the risk of seriously defacing the structures: “This
House Is Not For Sale!!” And in most cases, they usually
add, for maximum effect: “Beware of 419! Beware of
Fraudsters!”
For goodness sake,
is Nigeria the only country that fraudsters can be
found? Is this the only country with records of
incidents of people selling properties that do not
belong to them? Are there no better, more decent, less
socially destructive ways of protecting people from
fraudsters than screaming on virtually every house out
there: “This House Is Not For Sale, Beware of 419!!”
Are these houses
not properly registered at the appropriate offices where
prospective buyers can go and verify their real owners?
Today, almost
every undeveloped, refuse-ridden land on every street
hosts at a prominent spot an imposing signpost informing
people the land is not for sale, plus the usual warning
screaming to prospective buyers to beware of fraudsters
and 419. The impression the continued proliferation of
these warning signs can only convey is that most
Nigerians do nothing else than wander all day looking
for each other’s properties to sell to unsuspecting
buyers; that our society is filled with so many rich,
dumb buyers without the slightest awareness that checks
ought to be run on properties before paying for them;
that the system here is so chaotic and unreliable that
people prefer to rely only on this very crude,
people-diminishing method of discouraging potential
property buyers with mostly badly written notices.
Out there,
Nigeria’s Information Minister, Dr. Dora Akunyili, is
shouting herself hoarse in a determined effort to
convince us that she is re-branding Nigeria or its
image; she claims that she is striving to give Nigeria a
positive image, but I doubt if it has ever occurred to
her that this unwholesome phenomenon alone can easily
destroy the best cultivated image. What for instance
would a foreign visitor think of us, after observing
this inscription on virtually every building he saw on a
particular street he visited?
There are some
crooks in Nigeria, like in every other nation, but, for
goodness sake, this is NOT a nation inhabited by only
fraudsters! Decent people like me also exist here, okay!
And it is somebody’s job to ensure that this point is
clearly underlined to every ear that can hear.
And because we
appear to demonstrate through our indifference to the
whole thing that these vulgar displays are in order,
foreigners living among us have gone ahead to add some
really ruinous sophistication to the ugly phenomenon. In
front of even some hardly known, struggling foreign
companies today, you must find notices screaming: “No
Waiting; No Loitering.”
The next time you
visit an embassy, try and look at the kind of notices
placed in front of the buildings. Indeed, United States
Embassy in Lagos here appears to be the most
enthusiastic offender in this regard.
Only recently,
while visiting the US Embassy, I was suddenly moved to
look at the number of large, gleaming notices in front
of the compound warning people against patronizing
touts, submission of fake information and documents etc.
I can’t really recall now how many notices I saw in
front of the same embassy gate saying the same thing in
the same words, and standing gallantly near each other,
in silent competition. I have not tried to investigate
whether this is what obtains at the US embassies in
other countries, but I am willing to guess that this
proliferation of demeaning notices may not be the case
in other lands.
Inside the US
embassy building itself, the rooms are generously
splashed with well illustrated notices warning people
that fake visas or passports or false information or
documents can open many doors and but close one
permanently. Even warning notices meant for the blind
and deaf could not have been so generously pasted!
Indeed, the thing
is so gratuitously done that I am forced to wonder if
the aim is really to discourage fraudsters or to
advertise a well-cultivated opinion about Nigeria to
visiting Americans and other foreign nationals who also
visit the embassy as often as Nigerians. I am tempted
to suspect that the latter is the prime motivation, and
as I look at Ms. Robin Sanders, (who was the US
Ambassador to Nigeria when these observations were
made), and observe the skin-colour and facial features
she shares with me, I am forced to wonder how she is
able to allow this clearly unhealthy profiling and
stereotyping to continue flourishing during her tenure
against the land of her ancestors.
Yes, we can say
that after all we asked for it by failing to contain the
vile activities of some Nigerians that clearly portray
here as a country of crooks. Indeed, there are
fraudsters in this nation, as in any other country, but
this is by no means, a nation peopled by ONLY
fraudsters. It ought to be clear that fraudsters
constitute only a negligible minority in this country,
but their evil deeds seem to speak louder than the good
works of the decent, hardworking majority.
And although the
fellows ruling us are mostly very low characters who
care very little about reputation and self esteem, and
whose understanding of being in public office is to loot
the treasury pale, I refuse to accept that any nation’s
politicians should form the basis for judging the
people’s character. Else, why do Americans still speak
contemptuously about the “Washington crowd,” and yet
hallow their country at any given opportunity?
Yes, we have a tiny
bunch of very corrupt politicians and their accomplices
who only know how to rubbish the country and give it a
monstrous image before the rest of humanity, but for
goodness case, this does not automatically consign all
of us to the refuse dump reserved for low, dishonourable
characters?
The time to do a rethink and act
accordingly is now. Enough of this debilitating
profiling, please.
Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye
is on the Editorial Board of Independent Newspapers (www.independentngonline.com
) Lagos, Nigeria. He writes a weekly column (SCRUPLES)
every Wednesday on the backpage of the paper.
scruples2006@yahoo.com / www.ugowrite.blogspot.com
posted 22 December 2010
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Afro- Pessimism By
Frank B. Wilderson, III
“Afro-Pessimists are framed as such . . . because they theorize an
antagonism, rather than a conflict—i.e., they perform a kind of
‘work of understanding’ rather than that of liberation, refusing to
posit seemingly untenable solutions to the problems they raise.”
“[The Afro-Pessimists argue]
that violence toward the black person happens gratuitously, hence
without former transgression, and the even if the means of
repression change (plantation was replaced by prison, etc.), that
doesn’t change the structure of the repression itself. Finally (and
this is important in terms of the self-definition of the white
person), a lot of repression happens on the level of representation,
which then infiltrates the unconscious of both the black and the
white person . . . Since these structures are ontological, they
cannot be resolved (there is no way of changing this unless the
world as we know it comes an end. . . .); this is why the
[Afro-Pessimist relational-schema] would be seen as the only true
antagonism (while other repressive relations like class and gender
would take place on the level of conflict—they can be resolved,
hence they are not ontological).”
“[The Afro-Pessimists] work
toward delineating a relation rather than focus on a cultural
object.”
“Something that all the
Afro-Pessimists seem to agree upon regarding social death are
notions of kinship (or lack there of), the absence of time and space
to describe blackness. . . . There is no grammar of suffering to
describe their loss because the loss cannot be named.”
“[The Afro-Pessimists] theorize
the workings of civil society as contiguous with slavery, and
discuss the following as bearing witness to this contiguity: the
inability of the slave (or the being-for-the-captor) to translate
space into place and time into event; the fact that the slave
remains subject to gratuitous violence (rather than violence
contingent on transgression); the natal alienation and social death
of the slave.”
“[T]he Afro-Pessimists all seek
to . . . stage a metacritique of the current discourse identified as
“critical theory” by excavating an antagonism that exceeds it; to
recognize this antagonism forces a mode of death that expels
subjecthood and forces objecthood [upon Blacks].”
“For Fanon, the solution to the
black presence in the white world is not to retrieve and celebrate
our African heritage, as was one of the goals of the Negritude
project. For Fanon, a revolution that would destroy civil society,
as we know it would be a more adequate response. I think the
Afro-Pessimist such as Hartman, Spillers, and Marriott would argue
there is no place for the black, only prosthetics, techniques which
give the illusion of a relationality in the world.”
Like the work of
Jared Sexton,
Saidiya Hartman,
David Marriott,
Hortense Spillers,
Frantz Fanon,
Lewis Gordon,
Joy James, and others, Wilderson’s poetry, creative prose,
scholarly work, and film production are predicated on the notion
that slavery did not end in 1865; the United States simply made
adjustments to the force of Black resistance without diminishing the
centrality of Black captivity to the stability and coherence of
civil society.—Incognegro
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African Farmers
Displaced as Investors Move In—By Neil MacFarquhar— December
21, 2010—Soumouni, Mali—The half-dozen strangers who
descended on this remote West African village brought its
hand-to-mouth farmers alarming news: their humble fields,
tilled from one generation to the next, were now controlled
by
Libya’s leader, Col.
Muammar el-Qaddafi, and the farmers would all have to
leave. “They told us this would be the last rainy season for
us to cultivate our fields; after that, they will level all
the houses and take the land,” said Mama Keita, 73, the
leader of this village veiled behind dense, thorny
scrubland.
“We were told that Qaddafi owns this land.”
Across Africa and the developing world, a new global land
rush is gobbling up large expanses of arable land. Despite
their ageless traditions, stunned villagers are discovering
that African governments typically own their land and have
been leasing it, often at bargain prices, to private
investors and foreign governments for decades to come. |
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Incognegro: A Memoir of
Exile and Apartheid
By Frank
B. Wilderson III
Wilderson, a professor,
writer and filmmaker from
the Midwest,
presents a gripping account
of his role in the downfall
of South African apartheid
as one of only two black
Americans in the African
National Congress (ANC).
After marrying a South
African law student,
Wilderson reluctantly
returns with her to South
Africa in the early 1990s,
where he teaches
Johannesburg and Soweto
students, and soon joins the
military wing of the ANC.
Wilderson's stinging
portrait of Nelson Mandela
as a petulant elder eager to
accommodate his white
countrymen will jolt readers
who've accepted the
reverential treatment
usually accorded him. After
the assassination of
Mandela's rival, South
African Communist Party
leader Chris Hani, Mandela's
regime deems Wilderson's
public questions a threat to
national security; soon,
having lost his stomach for
the cause, he returns to
America. Wilderson has a
distinct, powerful voice and
a strong story that shuffles
between the indignities of
Johannesburg life and his
early years in Minneapolis,
the precocious child of
academics who barely
tolerate his emerging
political consciousness.
Wilderson's observations about love within and
across the color line and cultural divides are as
provocative as his politics; despite some
distracting digressions, this is a riveting memoir
of apartheid's last days.—Publishers
Weekly
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