Writers and Governance in Africa

Okello Oculi argues that the continent is afflicted with a new virus which disrupts the social order

One school of history advises that the occurrences of bizarre social activities are signals that a society is nearing convulsive changes. Such events are jumping at us through the media. In London, a man who, on August 8, 2017, was jogging run past a man without an incident but five steps later turned to his right and violently pushed a woman walking in the opposite direction. She fell and rolled across the pedestrian walkway. A bus driver saved her life by swerving the front tire of the bus away from her head. The man who pushed her did not look back to see the impact of his act of hostility. Passengers in the bus did not rush out to effect a citizens’ arrest.

The following day in Paris, France’s capital, a person drove his car into a group of soldiers, in an act of “terrorism.’’ On that same day in eastern Afghanistan over 50 people – labelled as “Shiites’’ were allegedly slaughtered by ISIS and Al Qaeda. About the same period Al Shabaab exploded a car bomb in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital. Likewise, at Ozubulu village, Anambra State of Nigeria, a man walked with a gun into a Catholic Church and murdered over 11 worshippers. The victims were caught up in a war between two “sons of the soil’’ who make their millions of naira from operations in far-away South Africa and North America.

In India came the revolting story of a man who had repeatedly raped a 10-year- old girl and made her pregnant; while in another corner of Nigeria a man raped a sixmonth-old baby to death. In South Africa, angry rallies of women protest against a pandemic of killings of women. Men who had existed under intense humiliations since 1948 - when a virulent “crime against humanity’’ became official policy in the hands of European tribe of immigrants – woke up to regain their long suspended “manhood’’ by murdering and violently raping their women and girls.

Several leading African writers had offered clues to this crisis in losses of humaneness. Nadine Gordimer had penned the following lines: “Hah! So Brotherhood is only the condition of suffering. Doesn’t apply when you have choice, and the choice is the big cheque and the company car, the nice perks of Minister’’. She had seen wealth shatter solidarity and caring among a people. As a white South African, she had looked past skin-colour and fingered the poison of money in social relations.

The Senegalese writer and famous film-maker, Ousmane Sembene, had written that: “It’s easier to pray when you’re sure of having a full belly. Rage possessed him, and he ran off like a madman into the desert, his torn boubou flapping in the wind. He had just realised that there is no need to believe in Allah in order to be a thief!’’ Those religious “Men of God’’ who are making millions from selling blessings to corrupt officials and drug traffickers would recognise the false prophet that Sembene writes about here. The loss of moral restraint is a key to their bad wealth.

Wole Soyinka wrote about the power of sex appeal in a woman desecrating the sense of duty to the welfare of a people by a King’s Horseman who decided to dodge the ritual of being buried together with his dead master. Chinua Achebe set up Okonkwo as a man who violated the moral power of being a father to a child who had made the transition from being an object of communal ritual murder to one who “calls his father’’. His fear and dread of being seen as a “weak man’’ – his blind vanity – made him shatter the restraining power of collective social morality.

Evans Pritchard concluded that social order among the Nuer people of Southern Sudan was censured by what he called “balanced antagonism’’. Children are taught to push back any attempt to use insult and physical assault as a tool for another person to accumulate power over them. This form of social engineering is widespread in Africa, with the Balante (in Guinea Bissau, Casamance and Gambia); Tiv and Igbo (in Nigeria) and the Nuer (in Sudan) being the most reported about. This makes it a matter for urgent and deep analytical attention.

The power of the gun has, however, repeatedly upset this balanced antagonism for defenceless worshippers in churches in Ozubulu (in Nigeria), Wei (in South Sudan) and Kigali (in Rwanda during the genocide). There have been persistent reports of discrimination against persons who own cheap personal vehicles. They are forced away from attending community meetings where drug barons arrive with convoys of jeeps and flashy vehicles. Drug trade, Internet-based fraud, and corrupt practices in public and private institutions create access to wealth which upsets traditional “balanced antagonism’’ as the basis of respect and equal human dignity.

We are faced with a new virus which disrupts social order and pillars of ancient social engineering. Colonial officials unleashed anthropologists on African societies in search of areas for strategic attack and disorientation. Those who insist that colonial rule was “a mere incident’’ only scratched and did not fatally wound ancient social tools of order, survival and reproduction, must face the challenges to the moral integrity of communities arising from unequal access to guns, drugs, election rigging and corrupt wealth, as viruses.

In South Sudan the Nuer have married guns to their ancient code of “balanced antagonism’’. The notion of “political consensus’’ may be drowned by fears of accepting submission to the numerically larger Dinka and their ethnic allies. In Nigeria, the resort to “kidnapping for ransom’’ may be feeding on the virus that afflicted Achebe’s Okonkwo. This problem demands as much creative counter-measures as the “restructuring’’ of political boundaries and access to economic resources. Africa’s writers must move from counting wounds on the Continent to returning to ancient challenges of inventing and planting new seeds; smelting new pillars for holding up shelters, and weaving new baskets for bringing harvests to homesteads.

-- Prof. Oculi is a member of THISDAY Editorial Board

Drug trade, Internet-based fraud, and corrupt practices in public and private institutions create access to wealth which upsets traditional ‘balanced antagonism’ as the basis of respect and equal human dignity