1. Libation to Foreign gods: A society that imports her gods, has
offered to live under the caprice of foreign pestilences. She has
mortgaged her destiny to the insular enclaves of alien theologies. Her
doctrines and dogma are overthrown by derivatives of alien thought
patterns, rendered canonical by capricious and absentee conclaves. In
such a theatre, foreign metaphysics rises to displace local values.
Irreverent incoherence isolates and devastates local cosmologies. Local
mores are alienated to make way for the import to march to supremacy.
Such is the trajectory of the contact between an occupying power and
native reality. This inheres in the fact that conquering powers are also
epistemic imperialisms. For every conquest to be total, it must
principally devastate the mental universe of the conquered; making it an
ideological no-man’s land or tabula rasa, upon which the conqueror and
its agents proceed to rewrite or rewire the conceptual genetic blueprint
of the conquered, to suit the designs of empire. This is why every
imperialism battles to dethrone local conceptual schemes, usurp the role
of local values in the lives of the conquered; lording it over local
pedestals of meaning and theories of value, with all the inquisitorial
decisiveness and totalitarian recklessness that has underwritten every
enterprise of imperialism.
If not, how can a society commission its own collapse? How can a
society hand over its head on a platter to a conqueror because he asked
for it? How can a people yield their gods to be decapitated or burnt at
the conqueror’s fires simply because the conqueror just showed up,
knocked on the door and politely asked for that? No society commissions
its own self-destruction. Any society that ever collapsed succumbed to
some force or pressure. Those societies were conquered; either from
within or from without. They bow to the onslaught of one or more complex
set of factors. Most of them succumbed either to the conquest of
invincible ignorance; the arrogant over, or underestimation of its
capabilities and chances in the face of novel threats; or the
overwhelming firepower of conquerors guns, germs, treachery, or steel as
Professor Jared Diamond tried to articulate.
By conquering the native epistemic authority, the conqueror secures
either their timid acquiescence in the face of their exploitation, or
the collaboration of their ignorance in their own destruction. To that
end, whenever imperialism makes a landfall, it shocks and awes local
sensibilities with the crude violence it advertises, the superlative
savagery it consults, and the ruthless perfidy it deploys. It massacres
opposition into submission. Treachery is the software of its
transactions in such instances. The ruthlessness of the violence shocks
the recipients into psychological immobility. It knocks their resistance
cold. They are frozen in awe of the new phenomenon. It assaults the
citadels of local meaning. It rapes local epistemologies, which have no
response to this onslaught. It mocks the local deities which neither
anticipated such catastrophes, nor have responses to them. This creates a
social psycho-trauma that packs the destructive equivalent of Giga-tons
of Hiroshima-grade nuclear explosion. Many societies cannot but succumb
to this ruthless force or risk instant extinction. At this, the
conquering power then gains a foothold. With this foothold, the
conquered society is then ‘invited’ to cannibalise itself; pressurized
into participation in its own funeral; or genetically re-engineered into
convoking its own self destruction by instalments.
One major reservoir of a culture’s epistemic authority is its
language. And a culture is conquered when the conqueror succeeds in
imposing its own language as the vehicle of meaning upon the conquered.
At this, the accreted putrescence of other climes rides roughshod
infecting native conceptual flora; engendering some toxic erosion of
local meaning and significance. It is just a matter of time before such
societies end up importing every other thing; from the pseudo-sublime to
the most ridiculous rejects of the conqueror. This is a normal
trajectory. Since such a society has ‘chosen’ the pontificating
pronunciations of foreign epistemologies to interpret her values for
her, she has offered to see reality from the eyes of her conquerors.
Everything the conqueror canonizes, even if that piece of shit does not
speak to local realities; one usually sees the conquered falling over
themselves to incarnate it in their lives, and re-echo it in their
circumstances. There have been cases were the conquered even began
loving their conqueror’s in a Stockholm syndrome gone awry. Such
slaveries are total. They last forever. Liberation from such chains is
almost impossible. This is because the conquest of a society’s
epistemology means a total control of its perceptual faculties, value
system, and sources of psycho-social legitimacy. Whatever would compel a
society to exile its own gods and assume that of its conquerors; keep
silence at its own plunder; participate in its decimation; help its own
cannibalisation and finance its own funeral; must engender some tsunamic
bout of self-destruction, before it can succeed. Ndiigbo of Southern
Nigeria has it that whatever can out-bite a dog has got quite some
teeth.
Whenever or wherever this is achieved, local gods are then coaxed to
speak in foreign tongues. Alien ceremonies are convoked on hills where
local ancestors, once poured libations to the memory of their forebears.
Communion wafers are eaten in temples built upon the demolished shrines
of our spirits; where our ancestors celebrated their kolanuts in
commensality and brotherhood, with the gods of our land in attendance.
Wines pressed off European grapes solemnly displace the nourishing and
ritual potencies of the fruits of our palms. As temperate wines
displaced tropical gins, our Earth Mother was denied her due libations.
Not only that we could not offer sacrifices to our ancestors due to the
indisposition of our chained spirits, the imported deities and their
armed convoy of mercenaries, in time, rose to criminalize even our
thinking about the august memory of our forebears. We were forbidden
even to sit down by our own tropical equivalents of the Rivers of
Babylon to weep over our lost innocence. There was no funeral to
propitiate our pain. We were not even allowed the luxury of mourning. We
are even compelled to forget our mother-tongues, without our tongues
cleaving to the roofs of our mouth. The earth housing our umbilical
cords in its bosom was desecrated. The buccaneers conscripted by
foreign realms mocked us as the guardians of our land lay in their
conquered state. Our earth was cosmic in her anger. She craved libation
to appease her. Since the conquerors could not bring themselves to offer
Her ‘Nkwu enu’*, they resorted to water-boarding her with the blood of
her sons and daughters as an abominable libation, which she tearfully
swallows; not to nourish herself, but to deny abomination a place in the
sun, and spare the elements the pain of that desecration.
Africa is now a society of imported gods!!!!
This explains not only the massive violence with which foreign gods
implanted their feet on our firmament; and with which they sustain their
precarious hold on the minds and bodies of our people, but also the
ease with which we tend to all things foreign as if to say that foreign
is synonymous with good.
The soul of the African is now a battlefield for competing
epistemologies; a casino for the rogue gambling of foreign nonsense. And
we are paying for it in the blood of our people, massacred at the
altars of rogue ideologies, to assuage the tenets of foreign dogmas. We
are paying for it in the heritage of cognitive dissonance and
inferiority complex that dog our individual and collective existence. We
are equally paying for it in the destruction of millennium old
heritages of our culture and civilization. We are also paying for it in
the proliferation of various dysfunctional ideologies, arising out of
the crosspollination of various tenets of defunct cultures, which we
grant relevance in our lives, and which has continued to weigh down our
march to true independence. We are paying for it in the eternal
disharmony between our realities and the foreign ideas we profess as
valid, even in a continent where many of them will never gain relevance
due to the toxicity of these species to the local soil.
This recurring decimal of violence plaguing the relationship between
various imported dogmas all over Africa is testament to the fact that
the pantheons of our ancestors have been demolished. Our gods were
forced into exiles. The deities that sanctioned our consanguinity seemed
to have been conquered by the same forces that conquered our lands. We
became estranged from our roots, and our most intimate acquaintances.
Our brothers in this new conceptual scheme metamorphosed into games for
our sport; commodities for our exploitation; and enemies to be massacred
at will, because they fly the banners of a dissimilar, imported
ideology. The Christian-Muslim conflict that paralyzed Jos, Plateau
State a few days ago; and many other such explosions in other parts of
Africa, are simply footnotes in this long history of violence that
Africans were conscripted to inflict on each other, on behalf of foreign
doctrines.
2. Egbe eburu Mbe!! (The Kite has Devoured the Tortoise)
The hawk can devour the chicken for breakfast. Nature ordains that.
But nature must have definitely gone rogue, for a kite, instead of
grabbing a chick for its meal, carries off the tortoise. It is
symptomatic of uwa mmebi-nature gone rogue! The natural equilibrium of
things is disrupted when nature goes rogue. The elements are not in
harmony anymore. They run haywire. The gods are angry. The things that
were not normal, graduate to daily occurrence. It is in contexts like
this that abominations become tradition.
As Africa fell apart at the advancing pestilence of Arabian and
European colonial incursions, African gods were sacked and exiled from
their abodes. Some of them are now resting as lifeless relics of a
primitive past in some European Museum. Our ancestors and living Deads
were forced into secretly drinking libations of imported whisky, in
cases where they are lucky to get some. In most cases, they were
banished to drinking from whichever corrupted stream they could lay
their tongues on, or risk an existence characterized by dry throats.
They had no choice since our good old palmwine was dismissed by
foreign forces as an instrument of paganism. In this melee, the Ikenga
was thrown overboard. Many of them were abandoned, broken, and
supplanted with foreign statues, in homesteads, where they held sway
before the pestilence. They were broken by their sons, at the nudging of
visitors they welcomed with open arms. Insults were heaped upon
injuries as their sons became intimate bed mates of the conquering
ideologies. To that end, they took to hovering around their former
homesteads as strangers would. They were forced into doing the round of
Ofekes. Their sons and daughters abandoned them for the Whiteman’s
religion. Our feasts and festivals were abandoned as the hangovers of
primitive infancy. Our chants and incantations were labelled pagan. Our
shrines were left unkempt and allowed to be run over by wild bushes.
There was no one in attendance any more at our shrines, groves, and
feasts. The Eze muo(s) and Ezeulu(s) were abandoned by the people. The
sons of the Eze muo(s) and Ezeulu (s) entered seminaries to become
catholic priests. That compromised the future of the Eze muo tradition.
Our sacred forests which testified to the ecological foresight of our
ancestors lost the battle for relevance to the bugs of bulldozing greed,
which preferred concrete blocks to an integral environment. Soil
erosion, floods and hitherto unknown climatic phenomenon, all rose to
attack our ecological apostasy. We chose the conqueror’s system of
government, although it never spoke to our reality. We adopted it
although it was fundamentally ignorant of our history. And we practise
and are still clinging to it, although it has corrupted our will,
destroyed our land and bequeathed us a legacy of mal-development. It was
the supreme apostasy. In the fullness of time, we all rose in unison to
genuflect subserviently and bow our heads at the altars of foreign
gods.
Europe and Arabia conquered not only African lands. They seemed to
have conquered the wisdom of our “Chi”** as well; bequeathing us the
bloodthirsty fooleries accumulated by these religions in the course of
their various histories. Instead of African deities like Agbala***
inhabiting our caves to guard our lands, we were mentally re-engineered
into rejecting and displacing Agbala and her ilk, with the tenets of
some borrowed faiths. We even captured the potent symbols of our deities
and sold them to the Whiteman. Instead of our sacred forests and
shrines, our deities are now displayed naked, to be mocked and admired
by the uncircumcised eyes of foreigners, in profane exhibitions at the
British Museum or the Vatican archives. Deities like ‘Ikenga’ that bade
us purchase our manhood with the currency of honourable deeds, were
overthrown by irrationalities like the suicidal cowardice that seeks sex
in a paradise of 72 virgins, when we must have finished killing off all
those who disagree with the irrationalities we peddle as religion in
Allah’s name.
Be that as it may, contemporary events have shown that Africa bowed
to the power emanating from the conquerors guns, and not to the logic of
their theologies. Till date, no one has been able to convince Okonkwo
and the host of other elders gathered in the village square on that day
pictured in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, of the illogicality of the story
that God could have a son without a mother. That and many other such
dogmas remain constructively illogical to us is never in doubt. But we
are asked to believe and propagate them, because they are dogmas!
–namely: some truths revealed by God, but transcending human
comprehension. Remember, they are still trying to explain it to us. I
wonder how a reasonable person would spend his time trying to explain
what purportedly transcends human understanding to us. Has he understood
it? If yes, what does that make of the “transcending human
understanding part”?
3. We Question because we bear the Scars!!!!
Descartes started his revolutionary philosophy with a query. He
queried the basis of reality. He did this by querying the apparatus of
our knowledge. He questioned our epistemic facilities. He questioned our
perceptual faculties. In one swoop, he turned the epistemological basis
of metaphysics on its head. How do we know what we know? He arrived at
Cogito. He thinks! That he thinks suffices for him to explain his
existence. He thinks, and for him to think presupposes that he exists.
He thinks, therefore he is. I think, therefore I am. Cogito ergo sum.
Descartes in spite of his other philosophical, scientific and
literary achievements, gained admittance into our most august memories
as cogito ergo sum! With that, he was fossilized in the minds of modern
man. Descartes was a great. Why would he question reality and existence?
He could do that not only because he could think, but because he is a
part of reality and existence.
Africans have been questioning their predicament because they have
been a part of that predicament, both as victims and sometimes as
perpetrators of actions that consolidates the predicament. We question
because our frame bears the scars of our predicament. African sons and
daughters have been asking where this rain started to beat us. This is a
word in that long strain of questioning. The queries gain more
relevance today due to the insistence of our predicament.
Today after years of allegiance to imported deities, the jury is out.
We are not developing. We have not attained the utopia that was
promised us by these deities. Rather, we have been sucked into a vortex
of imperial ruthlessness, where we are used and abused for the amusement
of other parts of the world, both by internal and external exploiters.
Uhuru has eluded Africa. Alien religions did not bring down their
heavens upon our earth. It rather bloodied our earth with the blood of
our relatives. Foreign creeds did not cure our petty thieveries. It
rather gave us tools to elevate them to the ontological level. Instead
of giving us a good life for all, it rather taught us to become robber
barons in the name of good economics. It neither banished the human
propensity in us to covet; it rather sanctified our covetousness with
the holy waters of cant. Instead of stealing to feed our hungry
stomachs, we can now steal to feed our avarice. Where Igbo philosophy of
man counseled “onye aghana Nwanne ya”, imported ideologies canonized
greed the basis of good economics. It compelled us to dismantle our
social ties to feed individual greed for profits. Where our social
anthropology counseled “Egbe belu ugo belu”, imported ideologies
countered “rout the competition”.
And the results are there for all to see! The scars are scandalous!
We were co-opted in the sale and marketing of our brothers. We were
compelled at gunpoint, into trading our future in the unfairest of
terms. Africa was depopulated to make Europe and Americas flow with
wealth. The crème la crème of Africa’s posterity was eviscerated. The
bridge between the past and the future was torpedoed. The youth that
learnt from the elders to hand over to the unborn were forcefully taken
across the great ocean; never to come back again. Never to ever fulfill
their evolutionary function. With that evaporated millennia-worth of
knowledge and experience. Lost forever and never to be regained again.
Our homesteads were deprived of defenders. The youths who filled in this
role disappeared as if the earth opened up to swallow them. Ours became
a society of the old and the infants. That trade decisively changed
Africa’s nature, culture, and future. With the slave trade, we allowed
and participated in the celebration of a historical atrocity on our
soil. We, as a society was conscripted in the sale of our brothers to
profit foreigners, as many of us have continued to do till this day. The
wailings of our sold brothers and sisters continues to suffuse our
ancestors with supplications mourning our stolen heritage. Their backs
were broken by drudgery. Their humanity was ripped off them. Many of
them were fed to the fishes. Many never got the dignity of a funeral.
Many of them died in their chains.
When the industrial revolution rendered slavery unprofitable to their
greed, they came for the products of our land. We were forced to sell
our commodities at their price. Some of our littoral regions became the
Oil Rivers. That name was instructive. We yielded our products to oil
foreign economies and the pockets of their robbery gangs, christened
traders. We learnt the trade and decided to control our resources. The
imperialist grew livid at our quick realization that we could turn the
tables to our advantage. Their artilleries were trained at our
habitation to lay it to waste. We succumbed to a military invasion
designed to control our trade routes. They sacked our kings and exiled
our chiefs. Jaja Opobo died in exile. Ovaremwhen Nogbaisi was forced to
swallow the defeat of the stool of his fathers. Then the Whiteman took
over our government. He hired those at the periphery of our societies
and ordained chiefs over us, by his fiat. Colonialism planted its foot
firmly on our soil. We left the ways that gave us food without poisoning
our environment, polluting our waters, or depleting our soils. We were
brought into using chemicals to grow our food and poison our bodies.
They brought us diseases we never knew. Instead of cultivating our land
to grow our food, we were compelled to cultivate our land to feed
foreign industries.
Our motherland still bears the impress of this beast. We are now
speaking the language of those who raped us. We were compelled to bury
our mother tongues as unprogressive vestiges of inferiority in order to
sound modern. At that, we surrendered meaning to what the alien
conclaves canonized as such, although local reality kept on exploding
our stupidity in this regard. In time we were reduced to murdering our
beautiful dialects with dysfunctional embroideries of foreign citadels
of meaning.
As all these settled on our embrace, we started believing the view,
which defined us as modern and developed, to the extent that we are able
to successfully ape the ways and pretensions of the conqueror.
With this dissonance, we internalized the manufactured narrative of
inferiority peddled about us. We started arranging and conducting our
lives on other people’s terms. As we scrambled to come to terms with the
shock that has rearranged the tectonic plates of our society, the next
shock loomed on the horizon. We were thrown into a dangerous dilemma,
and forced to take a stand. Either we define or allow ourselves to be
defined according to the canons of this narrative, or we spend our time
vehemently rejecting the image of us constructed in this narrative.
Either way, we are forced to a reactionary position. It is a dangerous
position. Here we can never win, no matter how hard we try. History is a
weapon. Whoever tells your story has the keys to your destiny. He can
deploy that story to the ends and aims of his choosing. We ran the risk
of being conjugated in foreign verbs by narrators, who pontificates over
our history to direct our destiny. Or we resist their badges and create
our own. Our attempts to create our own were immediately dismissed as
heretical dissimulations of victimological nature. The microphone was
pried off our hands before we can even announce our names. Our voices
and literatures become banished to be read in the dark basements of
leftist radicals.
It was a Machiavellian gambit. Imperialism knew that the more time we
spend trying to define ourselves or defend ourselves from the
definitions peddled about us, the more we lose sight of the big picture.
Imperialism subsists on the oppressed losing sight of the big picture.
For any imperialistic enterprise to be successful, the target audience
must be kept busy pursuing rodents. This keeps them amply busy, while
the rogue power delivers the viral software that brainwashes them into
believing that it is in their best interest to serve the rogue willingly
and religiously.
The conqueror put a knife to cut all that held us together. Our
society was torn apart. Our beings became a warfront for conflicting
allegiances. This dissonance opened the gates for poverty to invade our
experience. Atavistic competition that hallowed individual greed above
the common good rose to impious prominence. We joined the orchestra of
greed. We learned the philosophy of destruction. To prove our
proficiency, we started singing symphonies of exploitation. With
poverty, we condemned many of our kind to crime. Our resources could no
more finance our existences. We were marched like herds of goats into
urban pens, to rip open the bowels of our earth, so that the conqueror
would have coal to drive his industries and war machines. We were
configured into yielding our labors and resources to service foreign
economies. We were rewired and re-tooled into abandoning our needs and
aspirations to devote our lives and entire existences to servicing the
conqueror needs. None was left for our lives. We called it modernity and
civilization. In time we started competing for the most basics of
necessaries. Competition invited a jungle. Before we knew what was
happening African children were marched off to war; pumped full with
drugs and ordered to rape their mothers, cut off their father’s
genitals, chop off their brothers’ hands and feet, and shoot their most
intimate acquaintances in a surreal theatre of oedipal perversity: all
in defense and/defiance of geopolitical monstrosities bequeathed to us
by Europe as states and nations. Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Uganda, all
played hosts to this dimension of bestiality. Our country-sides were
turned into murderous battlefields, where we kill each other in the name
of our various gods. Jos, Nigeria is one such theatre. African
politicians are empowered by the imported cant known as western version
of democracy into going up to the capital cities, which ape imperial
power centers, to steal legally from the commonwealth, in service to
their individual greed. There, they go to execute and crucify the
African principle of community, which counseled that the individual
exists because his community exists.
The list is so long as to defy enumeration!
4. The Neutrality of Ideologies?
Importation of theologies or ideologies is neither positive nor
negative in itself. After all, every theology is an agglomeration of
borrowed myths and contrived projections. Some are fractionally
distilled legends echoing subconscious wishes of the human heart. Others
are primitive needs and will to power elevated to the ontological
level. But be that as it may, each of these must acquit itself
positively if it is to assume some relevance in its new abode. It must
conduce to the use designed and intended for it by its importers. If
not, it would be jettisoned in time. Human experience has shown that
culture is dynamic. Cultures borrow and lend to each other across time
and space. They import and export some of their pedestals as contact
with others increases. To this end, some have arisen to define
civilization as culture at an export level.
I have personal reservations at this definition.
Epistemic Imperialisms and cultures of nihilistic savagery have been
exported across cultural lines over time. Besides the fact that my
philosophic vocation would never permit an unexamined acceptance of any
definition that offers itself up for consideration; I wonder if I would
accept that as civilization, without any qualification. I eternally
refuse to accept the slaughtering of the Mesoamericans into extinction
by the rampaging avarice of a buccaneering Europe, as a civilizing
mission. If I am to accept that, what would I in justice, tell the Sapa
Inca and his Inca people of Peru and South American Andes? Should I tell
them to accept their massacre in good faith, as that is the price of
civilization? How could I ever justify the plundering, dismembering; the
physical and mental enslavement of generations of Africans? Is it
civilization that African humanity was packed in the putrid holds of
ships; in chains that reeks with inhumanity, and sold off as articles,
to masters who would rape their labours, their genitals and their
humanity?
Could anyone be justified in labelling that civilization?
I forever refuse to utter or invoke the names of Pizzaro, Cortes,
Columbus, Francis Drake, James Cook and other arrant pirates of expired
European Empires with any reverence in my breath, no matter what the
doctored historical books pretend to tell. Justice and the deities
guarding her portals forever hold that the ghosts of megalomaniac
rapists like Leopold II, the butcher of the Congo would never rest in
any sanctuary of good odour. If Leopold II and other such imperial
sadists are not manifestations of savagery, why the pyramid of chopped
hands harvested at his orders in the Congo? Is this guy, and every other
such knave, not the perfect proof of the obverse of what civilization
should be? On the contemporary front, I wonder if I would ever accept
the fraudulent falsehoods peddled by Washington under George W. Bush,
and Whitehall under Tony Blair to explain away their bowing to the
rapacious covetousness of their elitist constituencies for Iraqi Oil, as
an operation to give Iraq the gift of democracy. If all these could be
accused of being civilizing missions, then we must elevate Adolf Hitler
to the sainthood. We should then apologise to the Nazi henchmen executed
at Nuremberg. We should beatify the psychotic tyranny of Josef Stalin
and all other scoundrels of history.
5. Signature of Epistemic Pathology
I was aroused to consider our experience with our imported ghosts due
to what has become a consistent festival of socio-cultural disharmony
in the interaction between local realities and the constructs we
inherited from elsewhere in the recent past. We can confidently say that
Africa is now at a great crossroads. Our imported constructs have
refused to mix well with our local realities and experience. Imported
experiences have continued to settle like oil atop the waters of our
indigenous reality and social experience. They have not mixed well. The
cognitive dissonance engendered by this situation on the sources of our
social legitimacy and epistemic authorities in Africa have been very
grave.
Very clear instances of this could be seen in almost all facets of
our lives. It could be seen in the way we practice our borrowed faiths;
the way we practice our borrowed democracy; the way we practice our
borrowed ways of life. The Christian religion for instance, enjoys
patronage on Sundays and attracts huge followership, at least nominally
across our land. But the Babalawos; the Ezemuo(s); the guardians of our
abandoned gods, equally enjoy a business boom. The two pedestals are
supposed to be mutually exclusive. But in Africa, one does not exclude
the other. We mix the worst tenets and dimensions of them together and
the dissonance continues. Another proof of this chaotic and toxic brew
emanating from the mixture of these two worlds can be seen in the life
of a typical Nigerian car owner or the average driver on the Nigerian
road. Many drivers sitting behind the wheels of many cars in Nigeria on
any given day never had any formal driving school experience. Many of
them don’t even know how to drive, except moving a car from A to B;
whatever happens in-between is not their business. Yet, their first port
of call on buying a car, is not to the driving school to get some
driving lessons, but to pastors, priests and other henchmen and women of
God or Satan as their inclinations dictate, to have the vehicles
blessed, or evils cast and bound off the cars, so that they would always
arrive at their destinations safely, even though they don’t know how to
drive.
If we accuse the conquerors of conceptually colonizing us, what do we
make of the consistent attempts of our compatriots to massacre meaning
at the altars of ignorance? What do we make of those whose delight is in
imposing ignorance upon the gullible? In which category should we
classify those, who canonize the irrationality of their private
neuroses, as pious declarations of the Christian faith? If you think
this is a metaphor, then you have not encountered the average Nigerian
pastor of a “mushroom church”. They have names like Helen Ukpabio, Emeka
Ezeugo King. These guys are traders and marketers of mass ignorance.
Many catholic and Anglican priests have become vanguards of this
charlatanism. Some of them have tapped into this huge reservoir of
superstition that the African mind is susceptible to; to wreck
inestimable havoc on our posterity.
The greatest crime that these insanities on religious steroids are
committing is labeling our children as witches. In the Cross Rivers
region of Nigeria, one crazed psychotic declared that we have over
400,000 witches and wizards in Akwa Ibom State. These charlatans
commission a heartless assault on childhood. They market sorcery and
stigmatize our posterity as witches, thereby handing their ignorant
relatives the blank cheque to murder innocence.
Europe hunted women and children down for centuries as witches.
Humanity wallowed in this dark recidivist grotto until renaissance came
with its enlightenments. We realized the superstitious base of such
exorbitant ignorance dressed in the exquisite robes of false
spirituality. Before that, millions of men, women, and children have
been massacred. Today, these religious henchmen and henchwomen; ignorant
scoundrels who are allergic to common sense and the lessons of history,
have created a religious abattoir where the psychosocial well being of
Nigerian childhood is slaughtered. With this Awka Ibom State in
Nigeria, and every other such places on our continent have nominated
themselves the cemeteries of childhood.
These are signatures of some deep, epistemic pathology that inspires
behaviour and action across a broad spectrum of the African population.
This is rightly identified because every religion or ideology comes
armed with an epistemology. Every imported god comes with its own
baggage. Why wouldn’t that be the case, when even the most materialistic
expression of empiricism is capable of constructing a metaphysics. This
is very simple to see in the daily lives of African societies of
contemporary times, as our example above shows. But suffice it to say
that such arrant importations of foreign gods, to wear the garbs of our
abandoned gods, never bid us refine our iniquitous propensities. History
has shown that it rather seems to brew a toxic mix of superstition
superimposed and hawked upon a veneer of sciento-technical rationality
at best. Or at worst, it essays to displace local value system totally,
and imbue the adherents of the new gods with such an epistemic arrogance
of absolute proportions; a dogmatic bigotry that is superlatively
impervious and allergic to reason; a murderous hatred of contrary
viewpoints; and an impulsive readiness to murder opponents on their
gods’ behalf. In such contexts, we are not urged to change our
cannibalisms, but are better equipped with new conceptual tools to
elevate them an ontological notch higher. We are now better equipped to
commit our cannibalisms with cutleries instead of the good old fingers.
Instead of committing murders in petty forms, we now commit mass murders
with better weapons, and better PR managers to ensure an invite for
peace talks from the UN.
The list runs through the roof.
The only difference between our old situation and our new status is
that we are now armed with a more refined repertoire of hypocrisy to
deploy with a clear conscience, whenever we are sinning to our hearts’
content. We are now predisposed to consult these dispositions that are
at variance with reason; while advertising our creeds as peaceful. And
we do this most solemnly, with the most convulsive and the most obscene
version of hypocrisy that is accessible to human stupidity.
This explains why a Christian would steal, rape, plunder lands,
exploit peoples, abuse children, and barbecue opponents in bonfires; all
in Jesus name. It also underwrites many a Muslim, murdering opponents
of his faith while screaming Allahu Alkbar. It confects a justification
for many a Jewish agent, putting a bullet in the head of an enemy of
Israel while chanting the Shamma Yisrael. This equally explains why
religious history has been a pornography of bloodletting. Muslims and
Christians have been slaughtering each other and other lesser mortals in
their vicinity since both religious attained power and
institutionalisation. With hindsight we can say that Achebe’s Okonkwo
was right in fighting the marauding bearers of foreign gods that invaded
his land. These imported gods seem most times incapable of exorcising
us of our worst natures. As many an Islamic terrorist dreamt of sex
orgies involving 72 virgins in a paradise, where I doubt they would have
need for their penises; as reward for blowing off the heads of innocent
men, women and children; Mahatma Ghandi was forced by Christian
behaviour into confessing his love of Christ, but disdain of Christians,
since his observations taught him that being Christian seems to mean
being unlike Christ in all things.
If the cryptic desire to express their repressed sexualities in a
heaven of 72 virgins is their only motivation for murder, these guys
would have long revised their pretensions. Swing clubs are everywhere on
earth to cater to their repressed neurosis. Prostitution happens to be
the oldest vocation in history. They knew that they need not murder to
gain admittance to a heavenly swing club. Some few dollars or Euros
could buy one that pleasure here on earth. But that is not the only
motivation. Foreign gods have a knack for blood also.
6. Foreign Gods also Drink Blood!
Truth is reality staring at us in its nakedness. She stands on the
integrity of her own majesty. Truth needs no violence to peddle her. The
audacity of truth is unbearable to false hearts. That is why truth
calls for courage to express her. But she needs neither armies nor
warriors to peddle or defend her. Inversely, truth requires
extraordinary violence to suppress her. But falsehood requires force and
the arms of might to peddle her unto acceptance. The unreasonableness
of an idea is most times directly proportional to the violence it
requires for its defense. This is to say that the more unreasonable an
idea is, the more violence it requires to peddle it.
This explains why gods of crooked religions drink blood, lots of it!!!
Thousands of Africans have been slaughtered; offered as unwilling
holocausts at the bloodthirsty altars of imported gods. More Nigerians
have been killed in the conflict between Christians and Muslims in
recent times, than any other singular factor. Every religion sacralizes
blood, both actually and metaphorically. But religions with Abrahamic
roots seem to be in love with blood.
Not that the same could not be said of many other religions, but its
Abrahamic manifestation underwrote and has had more influence in the
history of the major imperial enterprises in history, whose heritage we
have been forced to share. The Bible; a resource drawn upon by Jews,
Christians, and Muslim was a documented odyssey in bloodletting,
culminating in the Christian God taking his son to the Mountains of
Skull to have him villainously executed, for what Christians construe as
a cosmic redemption of mankind. Although this has been another strain
of the perennially recycled myth, which can be traced back to the
ancient Egyptian god Horus, Jesus the Christ went a step further to
elevate love of neighbour, forgiveness, and turning the other cheek, as
the centrepieces of his faith. But Christian history has been anything
but about turning the other cheek or love of neighbour.
Prior to that drama at Golgotha, Abraham, the father claimed by Jews,
Christians and Muslims as the Patriarch of their faiths; in a brutal
renunciation of all the natural affiliations commanded by consanguinity,
took his son Isaac; his only son, to the plains of Moriah; just like
Okonkwo of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, did the son of his house,
Ikemefuna; and there to murder this son of his loins, who calls him
father. All because his God decreed it!!!
This may have been where Christians and Muslims of Jos Plateau State
borrowed their ideology, of pouring libations with the blood of their
fellows, at the altars of these imported gods. If my God who is an
absolute value for me, could ask me to renounce my nature; relieve
myself of responsibilities of the most intimate bonds of relationship
imposed on me by consanguinity; and murder my child for the sake of
paradise or to prove my faith; then there are no more restraints holding
me back from massacring my neighbour with reckless abandon in the name
of my faith or paradise; no matter how neurotic that sounds to rational
sensibilities.
Where African gods made do with the bloods of chickens and goats, the
imported Deities demand our hearts, our wallets and our blood. Since
Islam and Christianity came to Africa, we have witnessed the good, the
bad and the ugly. The good have been many. But the bad have been many as
well. On the bad side of the ledger, we have been converted into an
extended theatre of nihilistic savagery that has characterized the
history of both religions from the Middle East through Europe and Arabia
respectively. Nigeria for instance, has become the new frontier in the
war of one religious ideology over the other.
On the Christian side, we inherited a Christianity armed with over
six centuries of experience in murdering its opponents, repression of
opposition, epistemic tyranny, crusading, fighting for pieces of choice
real estates and getting empires and kings to do their killings for
them; spying and torture. It was a Christianity compromised by its
schisms and political splits between Anglicanism and Catholicism and
their various splinter pockets. This history is equally one, which saw
Protestant England and Catholic Northern Ireland murdering each other
for God and country over the course of centuries, even to the thresholds
of contemporary times. Europe was Christian during the longest period
of the celebration of savagery, ever seen by human history known as the
30 year war. It was the Christian Church that bequeathed history the
abomination of the Inquisition. Islam is not any better. Islam came with
a twelve century old heritage of murder and massacre of those the Koran
identified as infidels. Islamic jihads killed millions over 12
centuries.
The cycle of violence at the instance of religion in Africa has been
so nauseating that it seems, that every African should now abandon these
foreign gods and go back to the gods and goddesses of our fathers. Our
fathers’ gods were not gods with imperial pretensions. They had no room
in their various Theodicies for categorization of peoples into infidels
and believers. Freedom of thought and conscience is the hallmark of
their various amphitheatres. They are potent gods that fought for
themselves. They never needed the arms of flesh to fight their causes.
Yet they were deemed powerless. But they were wiser than the Christian
and Islamic gods, who required their followers to fight for them.
African gods were thunderous whenever they rise to do battle with their
adversaries. They wipe out the families and homesteads of those who
committed abomination. They don’t have a problem with those who disagree
with them. The pantheons of African gods are democratic and never
imperial. That explains why an African can worship so many gods at the
same time, without any of them being jealous of the size of sacrificial
piece of meat the other one gets. But since Africans embraced the
religion of the one who called himself a jealous God; they have been at
the forefront of being so murderously jealous on their god’s behalf and
murdering their brothers pursuant to that insanity.
7. Mercenaries of God
Our ancestors never needed the dogmas of Vatican or the Fatwahs of
Mecca to tell them what is good and what the obverse is. Today, our
noveaux religieux are simply satellites of the Vatican and Mecca, or
other such power centres that dictate on doctrine and dogma. Time was
when Vatican told the world “Extram Ecclessiam, Nulla Salus est”-
Salvation could not be had outside the Church. I wonder which salvation
that meant. That was conceptual imperialism at its finest. Centuries of
Christians believed that papal nonsense.
The renaissance in spite of the impeding conservatism of the Church
happened. It gradually eroded the basis of ecclesial authority. The
church sought to hold itself in balance. It fought losing battles with
the new epistemic authority availed humanity by science. It was not
until an aggiornamento happened that the church really considered some
of the impious nonsense it peddled in the past. John XXIII was
compelled by modern circumstances to ventilate the stuffy entrails of
the church. He opened the window. He let in some fresh air. It was at
this time that the Christian church searched for voices within her
ranks, which would have been condemned to slow bonfire by the
Inquisition, were they born a century earlier, did she try to salvage a
little credibility.
To offset the faux pas of the Extram Ecclesiam assertion without
losing face, the Church borrowed heavily from one of her sons. Karl
Rahner was a brilliant Austrian theology professor, who believed in the
church and her salvific mission. It was he who reworked that assertion
with all its theological implications. He believed the assertion that
salvation could not be had outside the church. But took it a step
further to account for the fate of all those who found themselves
outside the Catholic Church and millions of other who would never come
into that faith. He then extended the definition of the Church. He
extended it to include everybody, whether baptised or not. The only
ticket now for admittance, unlike in the past definition, is that this
person must do good according to the dictates of his conscience, even if
he had never heard the name of Christ. He comprehensively baptised
everyone a Christian, even those who were born before Christ came. He
called them “anonymous Christians”. (Lumen Gentium 14-16) That signified
the church’s readiness to moderate that stand. The Lumen Gentium, the
Second Vatican Council Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, gave an
apostolic blessing to that modification.
The former stand is akin to the baloney sold by Muslims that only
Muslims will be in paradise. In this purview, which is a licence for
conversion or murder, one is allowed either to become a Muslim, risk a
second class status or face the sword of the believer.
The Christian Church has been a great conceptual and cultural
imperialist, thanks to the amorphous nature of its message. This message
has the ability of utilizing the vehicles of other cultures to
propagate its own. This is what has ensured its survival across time and
across various cultures.
Time was when the church needed to go against opposition of learned
men, who were busy deploying the intellectual resources and patrimonies
of the ancient world in their apologetics against faith. The “heretics”
quoted Aristotle and Plato to back up their assertions. Instead of
yielding ground to these voices of discontent, the Church rose up to
baptise those strains of Aristotle and Plato that conduced to her
message and mission, thereby cutting the ground off the feet of the
dissenters. Thomas Aquinas took Aristotle to the baptismal font, while
Augustine dragged Plato there.
That has been the methodology of the Christian Church since that day
in Athens in AD 51, when St. Paul; the very intelligent, epileptic
lawyer from Tarsus, and one of the greatest Christian proselytizers;
stood in the Acropolis of Athens, rode roughshod on the Athenian concept
of the unknown God, to sell them his own version of it. At that
encounter at the acropolis, they argued about arguments, but Paul
exercised his most delicate craft masterfully. Unfortunately, the Bible
did not give us an unbiased account from the side of the Athenians.
Islam does not fare better in this regard. A glance into history would apprise you of this.
To make most of these illogical theologies persuasive to logical
minds, who would normally resist these cocktails of myths and borrowed
tales, these religions created militant mercenaries out of their
adherents, who would be ready at a moment’s notice, to lay down their
lives to fight for what the priestcraft of their various persuasions
tells them God’s will is, at any given point in time. The Christian
church even went a step farther to make jingoistic militancy and the
ability to inflict unrestrained violence on adversaries in Jesus’ name a
sacrament. They called it confirmation. When confirmation couldn’t
raise enough soldiers to crusade for that choice piece of real estate in
Palestine called the Holy Land, the Holy See resorted to selling
indulgences and other heavenly real estates, to raise cash to finance
the war for the Holy Land. That would not be the end of selling for
sordid money, heavenly graces and other mythical appurtenances that
confers hope on the people in this vale of tears, while the priestcraft
indulged all their appetites here on earth. Islam took it equally a
notch higher. It decriminalised murder, in as much as it was committed
against an infidel. A crime was cooked to religious palatability. Those
who killed for their faith became virtuous. And those who died for it
gained an unimpeded access to paradise.
Suffice it to note that religion has effected some of the greatest
whitewashings of crime in history. From temple prostitution to the
anathematization of sex-one of the most beautiful acts of our natures,
religion has most times been at the forefront of delegitimizing every
natural delight that makes human life pleasurable. In religion’s name,
violence has been baptised and canonized; roguery and plunder
whitewashed. In fact, impious neurosis of various shades and forms have
been given religious blessings, and forced upon large swathes of
ignorant humanity, as absolute truths at which they must bend their
knees, in absolute obeisance.
What about the priestcraft of religion?
History has not been kind on the institution of priestcraft of
religion. The priestcraft of various religions have been summaries of
debauchery. Some priests have been experts in the darkest villainies
known to history. Honesty and probity has been foreign to many of them.
Total impiety constituted the religion of many of them. Many of them
preached virtue on pulpits, while all vices fought for supremacy within
them. Many worshipped avarice, ambition and debauchery, using every
instrument of treachery, perfidy, flattery, ass-kissing, and so on. In
spite of great host of good and holy men and women of various religions,
there are many men and women of God, who preached moralities on pulpits
and religiously violated every single one of them immediately the light
is turned off. Several priests were prominent patrons of irreverent
circles. Many of them lie with infernal ease; spent monies skimmed off
impoverished people on impious pleasures; affect scandalous piety as
respite from adultery; and have Bacchus as the only true god they
worship.
Till date, in spite of contemporary catholic attempts at sublimating its
violent past and propensities; a departure engendered by the
aggiornamento of the Second Vatican Council, which reached its apogees
in John Paul II apologising to the whole world in 2000 for all catholic
atrocities in history; imported theologies have always spawned
mercenaries for God since that day at the portals of the garden at
Gethsemane, when Simon Peter drew his sword to harvest an ear in defence
of his master.
Almost all imported religious are guilty here. They have their
soldiers of Christ; soldiers of the cross; God’s army, Hezbollah-Army of
Allah, and so on. Military divisions or armies are never created to
serve ice-creams. They are killing machines. Throw religion into the
mix, and the most incomprehensible motivation for murder arises. With
such armies massed on both sides of religious disagreements and
conflicts in Nigeria, blood will continue to flow on such frontlines of
war between Christians and Muslims like Jos, Nigeria. Such conflicts
will always have hideous results. ‘Holy thieves’ is not only oxymoronic
or a conceptual monstrosity, thieves that pretend to holiness are in
actual fact the most dangerous of crooks. This would tell you what
happens when murderers in the most proximate potency, are offered
religious reason to practice their trade.
8. At the Mercy of Alien Doctrines: The Example of ‘Hardship’ Allowance
Stealing is an ignoble vocation. But it is a very hard one. I am all for
a guy who does the dirtiest job, getting seriously remunerated for his
troubles. I mean: he is entitled to hardship allowance. But that job
must not be criminal. It must be a legitimate, noble, productive and
edifying occupation. A thief will never qualify for hardship allowance
in my consideration.
No ethical tradition or responsible disposition would ever justify that.
Paying a thief some special allowance to compensate him for his
troubles of robbing us, empties productivity of meaning, and plunges
society into the paths of retrogression. No society has ever advanced,
when its citizens are empowered and remunerated to prowl on the lives
and property of their compatriots. No society subsists or survives on
robbery. Remunerating robbery compromises social progress. And we would
never subscribe to that.
Thievery is a base occupation. I can only consider some allowance for
a thief; who reserves no other means to survive, outside petty stealing
to forestall gastronomic emergency. This allowance would be to wean him
off his disreputable occupation, and stabilize him enough to get back
to positive employment. Apart from this, I wonder how any sane mind
would countenance “hardship allowance” from the community treasury, for a
monumental thief, who solemnly steals way beyond the limits of his
greedy elasticity. I wonder how the people could keep quiet in timid
acquiescence, as thieves stake claims to hardship allowance from the
commonweal, for the most ‘difficult job’ of robbing us with their pens.
If you cannot fathom this, you are in great company. I am also in the
company of many normal thinking people, who cannot fathom the Nigerian
politician.
The introduction to this piece made it very clear. A country that
imports everything including its ideologies is a country enslaved to the
capricious whims of the sources of its imports. A country that produces
nothing save recycling expired ideologies; regurgitating failed
policies; and canonizing her geriatric crooks has nothing of substance
to contribute to the march of human civilization. That country deserves
to lose its name; be swept into forgetfulness by the ebbs of history, or
allowed to disintegrate into its component parts, to see if any
productive renaissance could sprout out of such decay.
Nigeria is a case in point here!
We imported Western style democracy. Instead of edifying us and
leading us to the fertile shores of development, it has denuded us of
our humanity and nourished our greed and avarice. The western style
democracy we imported protects neither our lives nor our property. Our
ancient African ways kept our society whole, helped us preserve our
environment and guaranteed the ecological integrity necessary for
integral existence. But the one we imported was the robber-baron
version, which canonizes only capital and decapitates men.
To that end, even till today, the crudest version of dysfunctional
politics that characterized the medieval courts of Europe, and the
corresponding sycophancy that it spawned as it ravaged and pushed Europe
into the dark ages, are unfortunately the two most lucrative cottage
industries in Nigeria of contemporary times.
These industries promise the greatest return of profits on
investments. Godfathers invest their money to buy office in a primeval
version of political simony. Influences are traded, sold, and purchased
with thuggery, assassinations, threats, inflammation of ethnic
allegiances, treachery and an overabundance of backstabbing and perfidy.
These two industries employ many otherwise intelligent minds and
convert them into citadels of corruption; purchasable consciences only
there to attend to the needs of their avarice.
To get to office, they are ready to sell their souls to the infernal
powers. Here political simony is the surest route to power. They kick,
kill, bite and bribe to get into office. Once in office, instead of
taking care of the business of the people, whose supposed mandate they
enjoy, they spend their office, principally stuffing and satiating their
greed with resources cornered and skimmed off the commonweal. Their
second vocation is then settling all the capricious matrices that bought
or smoothened their ways to power. Little time and consideration is
dedicated to the people’s business. They people are never an important
consideration in such a scheme. They people are used as cosmetic slogans
to hide the rotten metaphysic, which inspired and nourishes their
concept and grasp of power. Power is for service, only if the god that
desires their genuflection or service is their avarice, and every other
minor deity that panders to that.
To this end, the Nigerian politics has become an essential arena where
greed marries audacious impunity. We have virtually no opposition party
in parliament. This is because the ruling party equally rules the
electoral umpire. To win an election anywhere in the country, one must
sell his soul to the ruling party. Many of the politicians have no
convictions or ideologies of the kind of politics they want to play or
represent. All they want is power for its own sake. And they march into
the ruling party in droves. They are content in getting into office.
They are not content or concerned with achieving anything of substance,
while in office. They are clever in their rogueries. Nigerians have been
out-dribbled into keeping their eyes shut, while the ruling party runs
the affairs of the electoral umpire. And the electoral umpire allows
only those who are marked with the signs of the ruling beast. I wonder
how the beast would ever allow credible elections, since even kids are
suffused with nightmares since they got acquainted with the face of the
Nigerian beast. The beast must then rule with the sceptre of iron, and
give us scorpions and stones, whenever we ask for bread.
You need not go farther than looking at the quality of debates in all
levels of our legislature in Nigeria; from the local councils; through
the state houses of assembly to the National assembly. The only debates
in these houses that attract strident and vociferous debate, sometimes
conducted with fisticuffs is when it comes to the salaries and perks of
office of the members of parliament, their budgetary allocation; or the
impeachment of a chief executive that refused to bribe them. Other than
that, no legislation of substance that has the people as it centre has
ever emanated from our senate or house of Reps. But these men are women
are paid allowances in excess of what we as a country budget for the
education of our children and posterity. It towers over what we budget
to eradicate the artificial poverty that our politics and its
international supporters have plunged the majority of our people into.
It transcends what we budget for agriculture and feeding of our
population; it dwarfs what we budget for infrastructure development or
in restoring the ecological integrity of the Niger Delta, which has
remained a placard of our collective callousness.
These representatives collect sitting allowance for every sitting,
even when they are not present. It is a cool investment. You can stay in
your house and sleep all day and your sitting allowance keeps on
flowing into your account. I wonder how an employee, who plays truancy
at work without adequate explanation, could keep his job although his
employer is well aware of his antics. It is either that the employer is
stupid, irresponsible or compromised. If not, the employee should have
been thrown out long ago. If you watch sittings of the Nigerian senate
on TV, one is something repulsed by the lackadaisical approach of the
Senators to what should be a very serious business. Empty seats stares
you in the face. You cannot but ask yourself, where the guy who is
supposed to represent your interests seats to do that. He may be
representing you by servicing his phallic needs on top of one of his
mistresses in a hotel room in Abuja; or he may be busy junketing from
one South American capital to the other, since this has become their
choice destination for money laundering since Europe and America started
trying to set an example with Ibori and Atiku.
The greatest insult to the Nigerian suffering masses, is that these
guys who are deluged with unmerited pleasures and perks of office, are
in addition to that, skimming serious money off the Nigerian treasury as
“HARDSHIP ALLOWANCE” for doing simply NOTHING! Quote me: They do
nothing!!!
They collect hardship allowance for riding air-conditioned cars, and a
kilometre long retinue of security, hangers on, and assistants, when
Nigerians have no roads to drive their cars, or an efficient
transportation system to cater to their needs.
Many of these guys are conscienceless jobbers. Added to that is their
lack of integrity and shamelessness. Many of the Senators have never
introduced any bill in the senate since they got in there, in spite of
the extreme wastage of resources in maintaining offices that many of
them have never sat down in. Many of them have never been to their
constituencies except during election campaigns, to get to talk to the
people whom they represent about their needs and problems. Yet, many go
home with chunky funds for constituency projects, and accounts to no one
about that, even though we have never seen many projects across these
constituencies to justify these funds; and no one is asking questions
about these monies.
Yet we have the scandal called Hardship allowance!
It is simply remunerating robbery. We are paying our politicians for
robbing us. That is Nigeria! And this explains why the country is not
developing.
* Igbo for Palmwine.
** Chi is Igbo the god guarding the portals of destiny
*** Agbala is Igbo goddess of the caves, which guards our community; a powerful spirit that does great things. (Credit to Sahara Reporters)
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