There are moments in history such as we are when events move forward like a tape unspooling without reason or rhyme; when the agglomeration of unseen forces takes on the conglomeration of extant forces in a bid to redefine human existence. This is the time when events testily warming up in the background suddenly seize the front burner jolting humanity into a rude awakening. There are current developments which feel like the new frontiers of magical realism or some secularized versions of science fiction. The whole notion of nationhood is undergoing some radical reset, opening up new vistas of citizenship, nationality, multiple belongings and hereditary bonds with home countries. Homelessness has become a universal phenomenon and a new badge and category of identity.
Statelessness is homelessness personified and made worthy of United Nations protectorate. Nothing will happen, as the old Tibetans and their Dalai Lama are finding out, just as the recent Palestinians and the newly ennobled denizens of Gaza will before the fullness of time. In the brave new world, it is possible for nations and people together with their civilization to disappear without trace and without a major earthquake or a major asteroid strike such as did it for the dinosaurs. The Taiwanese will soon learn to eat crow and keep quiet. Donald Trump has promised the ancient Persians a civilizational erasure. That may still happen if the mercurial and irascible American Czar wakes up on the wrong side of the bed, or if the Persian God decides to take a nap too many. Welcome to the brave new world of nations and supra-nations.
The grim irony of it all is that the homocide is being directed and supervised from the most civilized and advanced sections of humanity. Walter Benjamin comes to mind again: there is no record of civilization which is not at the same time a record of barbarity. When shall we see our good old world again? A global ferment seems to be underway. Everything requires a second look as nothing is what they appear to be in the final analysis. Even the whole notion of war and peace appears to be changing, or how else does one explain the animated stalemate, the violent stupor and stasis of the conflict between the US and Iran, a war fought mainly without troops which seems like an oxymoron or a direct contradiction of the cardinal canons of warfare?
Or consider the overnight summary blitz and decapitation of the Venezuelan state which led to its surrender with the more formal fist cuffs between nations which characterized the war and hostilities of yore. But in the same epoch, the Israeli-Hamas conflict lasted almost two years although after the first two weeks, it was a dismal entirely one-sided brawl whose outcome could never have been in contention. As it is always the case with the dynamics of change, the old is still very much embroiled in the new, but there can be no question about which is the more dominant.
There has been a considerable buzz about the series of articles that appeared in the recent past in this column about liberal democracy and its prospects. Some have called for greater details. Others have demanded for greater elucidation. A few have argued for a more rigorous infusion of African autochthonous democratic ethos. A respected Nigerian author and statesman wrote to inform the columnist that he had read the last piece several times and would be ready for a lengthy discussion very soon. These robust interventions reflect the contradictions and antinomies of modern democracy itself and the problematic of postcolonial nationhood. A contradiction is a set of conflicting propositions which appears irrefutable and irreconcilable on face value but which can only be resolved by a shifting of the dialectical gears of reasoning which displaces the original conundrum to higher sphere.
On the other hand, an antinomy is a tougher proposition because the conflicting propositions are equally plausible and hence cannot be resolved by the thought process and logical reasoning however sophisticated and mind bending in dialectical density and thoroughness. This is what is known in Philosophy as the Kantian realm of the unknowable as proposed by Emmanuel Kant. Certain things can never be known by merely thinking about them; neither can the solution to certain problems. Whatever the human wishes, the cerebral cogitations and fanciful drapery, modern nationhood and democracy, the most notable products of state engineering in the last six hundred years, play out in real time and in the theatre of agonistic contention. It is the mind of passion itself and not a passion of the mind, as Karl Marx would put it. It reminds one of Mike Tyson’s famous observation that in boxing everyone goes in with a plan until the first blow explodes in your face.
Marx’s ringing riposte to Kant’s notion of the unknowable was that the unknowable was nothing but a grand mystification, a cunning interposition of the mystery of God himself and was therefore vulnerable to human praxis. In other words, what is unknowable will be knowable by force or by fire through the power of human agency. By this he meant unrelenting struggle among the classes and revolutionary interventions by agents of compulsory change. The radical German philosopher signs off with a defiant war-cry: ‘wielded hammer speaks poetry!’ Given the scale of human achievements in the last two centuries and the unimaginable heights that agency has pushed humankind to scale, it is hard to fault Marx’s rousing anthropocentric rally. But the obverse of the coin is equally plausible. Given the depravity of human conduct in certain spheres of endeavours, the recorded bestiality of humans in war, the sheer cruelty of modern politics and the xenophobic savagery of some economic policies, the Kantian unknowable remains a valid testament of the unfathomable mystery of human existence.
What remains to be said at this point is that despite its much-ballyhooed notion as the government of the people by the people and for the people or its formulation by the ancient Greeks as demos cratos or people’s power, democracy remains very much an elitist affair whose undeniable dividends can only trickle down to the masses when well managed. The Athenian democracy was founded on a slave-holding economy. Democracy remains the property of property-owning classes. It was only in the last century or so that adult suffragette was extended to women and the lower classes in Britain as a result of relentless struggle and the changing dynamics of power. For centuries after the American civil war, women and former Black slaves were regarded as sub-human entities and accordingly denied the right to vote or be voted for until the entire country erupted in street violence and mayhem as the civil rights movement got underway.
Yet amidst the wreckage of hope and the mismanagement of expectation, there are stories of heroism and extraordinary courage. On August 9, 1965, Singapore was expelled from the union with Malaysia following months of economic, social and political turmoil. The tense face-off had played out between leaders of the two countries over fundamental differences of vision and approach. Tunku Abdul Rahman, the prime minister, was an ethnic Malay. Cultured, aristocratic and sold on old ties and privileges, the Tunku could not understand why the dirt-poor and miserable descendants of Chinese castaways led by Lee Kuan Yew could be so uppity and uptight. In a bitter exchange, Abdul Rahman dismissed the Singaporean leader as a man who would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven. It was the same problem that has plagued multi-ethnic nations with clashing and countervailing cultures and history which had seen their people through many epochs.
In the event, the forced separation and expulsion turned out to be the best thing that has happened to either country. Freed of his obligations to a more sedate culture and a more traditionally calibrated society, Lee Kuan Yew, in only one generation, jump-marched his tough, congenitally thrifty compatriots from their backwater Third World hideout to First World reckoning. But Malaysia has not lagged very far behind either. Leveraging on its monarchical institution as a symbol of national unity and cohesion, it has been able to achieve a great measure of political stability and prosperity through its unique combination of traditional authority, military hegemony and political subalternity.
It is a unique contribution to evolving notions of local democracy while Singapore is the more classically meritocratic society that combines features of formal democracy with the tenets of Confucian teaching. It would have been impossible to impose this model on the oriental Malays while Lee Kuan Yew would have chafed with rebellious intent under the Malaysian monarchical yoke. In the final analysis perhaps what made it easier for everybody was that it was a voluntary union of equal nations in the first instance and not the unequally yoked colonial monstrosities imposed on Africa in the guise of nations by the imperial masters. The association or union between the two nations lasted only twenty three months before it briskly disintegrated. No violence or hostility ensued. It was a model of peaceful separation.
What is often forgotten is the fact that in Africa, such peaceful separations between already constituted nations also took place, the combination and recombination being entirely at the mercy of economic considerations of the colonial masters. Such an instance was the Federation of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland which lasted for ten years between 1953 and 1963 and was unbundled into three independent nations, namely Malawi, Zambia and Rhodesia, later Zimbabwe. In old Ghana and Volta Region after 1918, some sections of the Ewe people were forced to learn how to speak German, French and English in rapid succession and within a spate of six years as a result of changing colonial overlordship arising from defeat and dispossession of the German masters. This was to create lasting colonial resentment in the Ewe populace. But the people never openly advocated a break up of Ghana. Stranded among their genetic cousins in Togo, Benin and their remote Nigerian ancestry, they nursed their wounded pride in silence. One is not sure whether the advent of their son in power ameliorated the hurt. Rather than break up the country, JJ Rawlings, born of a Scottish father and an Ewe mother, simply smashed up the old power arrangement.
Let us now tie up the loose ends. In a daring inversion of Tolstoy’s famous observation, all happy nations feel the same, but every unhappy nation is unhappy in its own unique way. In happy nations, public transportation, electricity, water supply, public schools, health care systems and overall national security work with seamless efficiency and clockwork conformity. In Holland where this writer once lived, a two-minute delay to the inter-city train could induce panic on the platforms. In these nations, elections are seen as the culmination of rites of national renewal and democratic redemption; a gathering of the multitude to renew the national oath of survival and unity.
The losers quietly go home to plot their revenge, no baboon soaked in the blood of mongrel dogs. But in Africa, elections without foundational cohesion, is often a signal for the resumption of ethnic, religious, regional and cultural hostilities leading to civil wars as it has done in Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Cote D’Ivoire, Gambia, Central African Republic, Chad, the two Congos, Zimbabwe etc. Yet the problem is that these countries are too deeply imbricated in their ethnic, religious and socio-cultural categories to be easily prised apart without inviting some apocalyptic end of history disorder.
This is the dire situation in which Nigeria finds itself after over a century of forced cohabitation of the extant nationalities by the colonial masters. For centuries before the colonial conquest they traded with each other, exchanging cultural and religious goods and learning a lot from each other. But for the occasional minor skirmishes, none of them tried to obliterate or politically subjugate each other until the foreign zero-summers and local hegemonists arrived on the scene. Whatever the level of our current disappointment with each other, these distinct societies existed at a level of haphazard integration before colonial diktat coerced them into the procrustean bed of compulsory nationhood where competition for resources and political domination ensued. Competition for scarce resources normally brings out the worst in people.
This is our subsisting situation. Unlike the twenty-three months shotgun wedding of old Malaysia with Singapore which ended in teary divorce, Marshal Tito’s Yugoslavian concoction of deeply suspicious and deeply demarcated societies which lasted as a magnificent anachronism until the Serbian warlord breathed his last and the forcible cooption of the Czechs and the Slovaks under the rubric of one nations called Czechoslovakia after the dissolution of the Hapsburg empire which ended in the so called Velvet Revolution, the entities that make up contemporary Nigeria are too culturally and economically interwoven to disintegrate neatly, except in circumstances of world-historic disorder. What is needed is for the political elite to find the strength and the presence of mind to come up with an acceptable political formula which guarantees the security, economic independence and political integrity of all units that make up the entity.
This is the age of global banditry and international disorder. The illusions of liberal democracy and the entire nation-state paradigm are being eaten up alive and before our very eyes. The very idea of the big nation as big brother has only found fulfillment in the reverse order. The big nations have turned out to be a colossal mirage, vast criminal enterprises in their own right as most of them are proving. You cannot turn to them for protection except in moments of touching and suicidal self-delusion. Not even the idea of a good revolution is of help or use anymore. The old proletariat has been upended by encircling adversity having been drained of its vitality to the point of terminal exhaustion. In 1986, the entire Filipino society, army, clergy, workers, students, rose up as one to chase out a monstrous and murderous tyrant known as Ferdinand Marcos. Forty years after, his son and heir is back in power, elected by the people. The same scenario is just about to repeat itself in Peru where the daughter of the fugitive and thieving tyrant, Albert Fujimoro, is about to return to power in democratically ordained elections. Talk of the unfathomable mysteries of human existence.
One can understand if some of Nigeria’s ancient revolutionary avatars and titans of radical change feel tired and exhausted in their crumbling bones. History is a process without a subject, according to Louis Althusser, the famous French radical philosopher. After a domestic tiff, Althusser himself killed his wife and livelong partner and was promptly committed to a mental asylum. But this is not the time to give up. More than at any other point in history and not even in the run up to independence, this is the time Nigeria needs its stellar array of philosophers, thinkers and native cognoscenti most. As we have demonstrated, if we do not do it for ourselves, it will be done for us in circumstances of dire and apocalyptic meltdown. That will be the end of the Black people for now. Did MKO Abiola see something we did not see when he began his crusade for reparation?