Our predicament is universal, and this is what we have
stressed from the very beginning. The nature of religious zeal that would
routinely maim, kill, or enslave the object of its proselytizing – that sometime euphemism for brainwashing –
rather than let it thrive and contribute to
humanity from within his or her limitations and uncertainties, from
within its questions or skepticism, a mental cast that equates the mere absence
of exhibitionist ardour or rigid conformism with impiety and apostasy,
punishable by death or mutilation, is no different, in effect, from the
tyrannical temper of the political dictator of any age.
Both can only grasp the substance of their being
through an inverse reflection of themselves, that is, in the complete and
evident submission of their citizens, their flock, their human charge, in every
aspect of their lives, without questions, without the concession of a possible
alternative order of social being to whatever ideology or religious absolutes
that they choose to peddle. Total submission, laced with adulation, remains the
driving goal of the authoritarian temper - never mind that it is covered in
mufti, khaki or clerical regalia.
The objective remains – Power over others!
And if ever there was an unholy marriage entered into to plague human
existence, it is the obscene wedlock of the theocratic and secular mandates of
power. Its issue has always been guaranteed as enslavement, misery, death and
destruction. It is this that represents the greatest threat to human freedom,
and its creative will.
Algeria has gone off the radar in recent times, but I must
continue to stress this, especially on the continent: we would do well to keep
our mind on that nation, not so long freed – and not even completely as yet –
from a malady that is currently consuming other parts of our continent and the
world.
In our own interest, for the
survival of our humanistic values, we could do worse than keep that nation in
our minds as a crucial cautionary template, so that we can begin to grasp the
enormity of Boko Haram, al Shabab, al Queda and other active carriers of the
same spore of human deformity.
It is only at our peril that we forget that we
have been here before, and elsewhere, that there is nothing new about the
extremes to which the power urge can exert itself. For those who perhaps were
not born during that prolonged internal struggle for a people’s total liberation
– and I am not speaking of the brutal struggle against French settler
colonialism – or who were miraculously shielded from its vicious and prolonged
intensity, or whose education has stopped short of the chilling testimonies of
its survivors, I recommend a sobering and thoroughly authenticated compilation
by Professor Karima Bennoune with the title – Your Fatwa does not Apply
Here.
All that is necessary is that we
immerse ourselves in the tragedy of that nation to enable us to grasp the
ruthless enterprise of terminal censors, the shadowy killers, the obsessed
enemies of creativity, crippled minds whose notion of a divine mission is the
eradication of all knowledge, and truncation of the reaches of the
imagination.
Then we would cease to be
surprised by the fate that nearly overcame, and still threatens our neighbour
Mali, that ancient warehouse of Africa’s intellectual heritage whose capital,
Timbuktu, became a household name even in the racially jaundiced histories of
European scholars.
Perhaps it is time that we constructed Walls of Remembrance,
on which we shall inscribe the ever lengthening roll-call of victims of this
ongoing resurgence, and their place names, in order to give flesh and blood to
statistical losses sustained to blind doctrine, victims young and old,
extinguished before the full bloom of their creative powers.
We are speaking of
musicians, cineastes, writers, journalists, intellectuals, even the consumers
of their products, condemned for daring to taste the forbidden fruit of knowledge. My mind immediately goes to – among others –
fellow authors like Tahar Djaout to whose posthumously published work, The
Last Summer of Unreason, I had the honour of contributing a preface.
The kind of monument I speak of is one that should occupy the centre of every
state capital of the African continent and of the African Diaspora. For those
who still believe in, or simply dream a resurrection of the pan-African idyll,
such a project offers us a purpose, a propelling motivation towards a holistic
self-recovery.
It will serve to remind us that we are a people to whom
tolerance is a norm, knowledge an eternal pursuit, and pluralism the foundation
of our communal ethos. Such monuments will represent milestones of the human
journey towards enlightenment, a shrine to the real martyrs of human
civilization.
They will restore meaning and dignity to that word “martyrdom” that has become hideously
corrupted, degraded and blasphemed against by those who wage war against
infants, yet wallow in their own perverse conception of bravery and valour. Nor
must we neglect those who survived their mindless onslaught, damaged yet
intact, and undaunted – the Malalas of our world.
The wages of morbid narcissism in the extreme – or should I
say ‘supreme’? - exercise of power remain the coveted prize for the
self-appointed warriors of a new blood-thirsting godhead that has been
extracted and distorted from the religion of islam. If this speaker had put
Abubakar Shekau – or any of his multiple incarnations – on stage, you would
only have granted him the grudging concession of a satirist, yet Shekau remains real, deadly and ludicrous, a
clown, yet a human obscenity.
Those of you who watched him taunting Nigerian
humanity and the world after the abduction of the Chibok girls will understand
my evocation of the banality that is power. Not indifferent to, but clearly
relishing the anguish of parents, family, and the trauma of victims, cavorting,
rather like one of those advertising balloon marionettes you may have
encountered in front of American gas stations, he gloated: We have your girls.
We are going to sell them off as slaves, and there is nothing you can do about
it”. Shekau felt that he had the entirety of the world in his palms to squeeze
as the mood directed him.
Shekau indeed, in those moments represented the
solipsistic totality of power at its most banal. So did the solemn assemblage
of the holy warriors in Northern Nigeria around a pit clotted with blood, as
they interrogated a captured Nigerian soldier before slitting his throat,
turning the chorus Allah Akbar into a parody of piety.
It is the same savoring of the trickle-down potion of power
that sustains the hooded figure, allegedly straight from a humdrum life in
faraway, sedate England, standing over a kneeling health volunteer or
journalist before beginning his gory task. It is what nerved the commander of
the killer squad in Peshawar to slaughter a hundred and thirty school children
and gloat: I want you to feel the pain. It is not piety, but the seepage from the
obscene communion of power that induced the massacre of twelve French
protagonists of the freedom of expression and leveling of divine afflatus in
the affairs of mankind - the Charlie Hebdo martyrs. The narcissists of morbidity – these are the
elite beneficiaries of the toxin of power and its pursuit.
Let us learn to repudiate the language of “Political Correctness” that attempts to dim
the incandescent rage that is justly felt in us as response to assaults on our
humanity, to pretend that history, or societal or state corruption justifies
the invasion of a community of children, blowing them to bits, then hunting the
rest down one by one as they cower under their desks. We are being programmed
to understand and accept their fate, and the fate of their peers in Nigeria who
are called out by name from their dormitories one by one in a sanctuary of
learning to meet their end. Often, the analytical language of media pundits
merely panders to, indeed encourages criminality, especially through misplaced
emphasis.
Without actually intending to,
it enfeebles moral outrage, nudges readers into accepting that the abduction of
over two hundred school pupils in Nigeria, whose fate is to be turned into sex
slaves, into suicide bomb conscripts, is a logical response to all kinds of
governance criminalities and infelicities, or indeed the brutality of a
military.
We are being inducted into the credo that the serial slaughter of
school children and their teachers across a widening swathe of Northern Nigeria
is an understandable response to the decadence of western society across the
globe, that the amputation of hands which clasped each other across the gender
barrier in Somalia under al-Shabbab, the live burial of women to be stoned to
death in Northern Mali under affiliates of al Queda, or the open decapitation
of aid volunteers in overrun parts of Syria and Iraq, the execution of
anti-polio workers, be it in Northern Nigeria or the Middle East are all
“traceable” to association with the devilish west and its ways, and usury on
the world markets. This is the language of appeasement, an indulgence that
urges Africa to accept a renewed condition of enslavement – this time by
religious overlords.
Appeasement is the diet of impunity. For those who seek
explanations for the intolerable in the role of memory, in historical
precedents, in distant causes and effects even from remote times – these are
all legitimate zones of enquiry, and corrective action in the present becomes a
social and political duty. So does the
whittling away of contradictions within society, thus cauterizing the breeding
grounds for future recruits to the ranks of homicidal maniacs.
Surely, by this
present, we should have learnt to stop parroting the time-worn clichés of
social disaffections as acceptable causative factors for the dehumanizing of
our kind. It is time to confront the long persistent question of what truly
fits, unsentimentally, into our definition of humanity. Definition by race,
colour, gender or faith have ever been derogatory and untenable, contributing
to the world’s current dilemma in furtherance of the agenda of power.
Our parameters must now transfer to social
conduct, to the manifestation of blind attachment to creeds that contradict and
dismiss our very aspirations as thinking, reflecting and expressing beings. If
the world shies away from that task, we on the African continent, should take
on that duty, and annunciate what, for us, constitutes basic humanity. From
those whose acts place them outside of such a definition, we must withdraw
recognition, protect ourselves and take the battle to all such outcasts.
Let me underline the foregoing in the specific language of a
political precedent. Once, under a president who was considered somewhat
intelligence challenged, the public in the United States evolved a short-cut
mantra for bringing the reality of a national recession to his notice.
That
mantra was “It’s the economy, stupid”. The world is not stupid, but I have come
to suspect that it often falls asleep, even falls comatose, and thus requires
some kind of wake-up call, a bluntly heretical viewpoint to check the assigned
primacy of economics as the material base of all social upheavals. What is
required today is a balancing of the economic catechism through a saturation of
vulnerable environments with variations of the complementary mantra that
becomes a mental ticker-tape: It’s the
power drive, sucker”!
After Baga, surely
no one can be left in any doubt: the world is confronted with the narcissists
of death. Study the killers as they
strike poses for the iconic photos before setting forth to earn their so-called
martyrdom in a terminal, dastardly act. Watch Shekau of Boko Haram prancing
about in his propaganda video as he taunts the world – We have your girls. We are going to sell
them into slavery. Share the testimonies of survivors as they grope for
language to convey the cultivated swagger of these killers as they go from hut
to hut on invading a hapless village,
where they massacre the men and herd the women before them for
enslavement, their studied posturing and
comportment of self-adoration.
The exploits of this breed bring to my mind the
apocalyptic acronym of the policies of power blocs during the Cold War - M.A.D.
– Mutual Assured Destruction, the doctrine of the balance of nuclear terror. At
least that madness was mutual - our ongoing orgy of destruction is anything but
mutual. It is arbitrary, dictated, one-sided, yet equally Doomsday determined.
The narcissists of morbidity contemplate their images in troughs of blood as
they slit throat after throat of their captives ululating with snatches of
praise songs to their Almighty.
The challenge is
out, and it is couched in anything but the language of spirituality. It is
humiliating, I know, but let us be sufficiently humble as to admit the truth:
this is one scourge that laughs in our faces, mocks the comfort zone of the
rational, the schematic, the contextual, even comparative habit of mind, defies
probability theories and historical precedents. And what choice of responses do
we imagine has been forced on us, the rest of humanity? The expression, I
believe, is – damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. This phenomenon understands only one
language:
Mobilize, or
perish!
Wole SOYINKA
Excerpted from recent
Overseas Lectures on our common concern, for the BRING BACK OUR GIRLS
Visitation, Jan 13, 2015.
Source: Sahara Reporters
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