Will America ever erase the colour line?

By Ogaga Ifowodo

A  YEAR  to the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and the benediction of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, America reached for a brush, dipped it in white paint and freshened the racial colour line of which King’s predecessor, W. E. B. Du Bois, spoke so eloquently 60 years earlier in The Souls of Black Folk.

I am speaking of the murder on February 26, 2012 of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old African-American boy by George Zimmerman, a White-Hispanic American.

[caption id="attachment_411397" align="alignleft" width="217"] Martin Luther King Jr[/caption]

Martin had crossed the colour line by his sheer presence in Zimmerman’s gated community. Thus, though warned by the police not to follow Martin, Zimmerman would sooner damn the consequences, if any, than let a Black boy “get away” with the “crime.” An all-White jury acquitted Zimmerman.

Martin’s murder echoes the slaughter of the 14-year-old Emmet Till in the aptly named town of Money (after all, what was slavery for which racism was a necessary ideology but the unconscionable pursuit of lucre?) in Mississippi, a state King described in his speech as “sweltering with the heat of injustice . . . [and] oppression.”

Till’s crime was “flirting” with a White woman, Carolyn Bryant, by “speaking” to or “whistling” at her. Days after the encounter, Carolyn’s husband, aided by his brother, seized Till from his great-uncle’s house where he had been staying on a visit from Chicago, drove him to a barn, tortured and then shot him through the head. Bryant and his brother were acquitted of kidnapping and murder.

So has nothing changed in the racial psychology of America since the genocide against Native Americans (the true owners of the land), Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s? You would be an incurable cynic, an insufferable paranoiac, to deny the monumental progress since the unthinkable days of lynchings and “For Whites Only.”

But you would be a delusional optimist, a closet racist, to think that America is now in a post-racial epoch. The election and re-election of Barack Hussein Obama, giving him and his all-too-black family occupancy of the White House, is enough to cause such euphoria. Still, the racial cauldron boils over every now and then for the requisite reality check.

And when it does, we are reminded of the great paradox of America’s self-proclamation as the land of freedom, of the constitutional enshrinement of the equal humanity of all, stirring sentiments founded, nevertheless, on the twin evils of genocide and slavery.

Which leads to the inescapable fact of racism as the political unconscious of America. For to perpetuate the national myth of being the land of freedom, America has, necessarily, to deny its history that perpetually mocks the claim. The result, to slightly adapt Du Bois speaking of the Negro (African-American), is “a double consciousness”: the rousing declamation of freedom while committing unspeakable atrocities.

Thus, two ideologically “unreconciled strivings,” two “warring” claims in one body-politic for a classic case of trauma and repression.

As with every trauma, the only way to break its crippling hold on the present and the compulsion to repeat the original catastrophe in new, often unrecognisable, ways is to acknowledge it. But America’s refusal to confront its “collective unconscious,” as Carl Jung might put it, leaves every person of conscience wondering how, in the second decade of the 21st Century, the great miscarriage of justice in the Trayvon Martin case could happen. Or maybe not, since our world as currently constituted remains largely divided by the colour line.

In the “unconscious” depths of the mind of White America — and I speak generally, mindful that about a third of the 250,000 thousand that marched on Washington were White people —the African or coloured person is inherently inferior. Is this a cynical view? Well, then, join Toni Morrison in a thought experiment.

In an interview with the Guardian (UK) of April 13, 2012, Morrison disclosed that she performed the experiment, at the age of 17, in an effort to understand the kind of rage that led some White mothers in the south to try to overturn a school bus carrying Black children. “I didn’t know if I could turn over a bus full of little White kids,” she said. “I didn’t know if I could feel that… fury.

And I tried very hard to. This is what I did: I said suppose … horses began to speak. And began to demand their rights. Now, I’ve ridden horses. They’re very good workers. They’re very good racehorses. Suppose they just … want more. Suppose they want to go to school! Suppose they want to sit next to me in the theatre. I began to feel this sense of — ‘I like you, but …’ ‘You’re good, but …’ Suppose they want to sleep with my children?!”

As her interviewer thankfully informs us, Morrison was by this point “laughing heartily.” Then the clincher:  “I had to go outside the species! But  it worked, I could feel it. You know; don’t sit next to me.” This is the psychic state that keeps the colour line continuously whitewashed and bright in America. But it can be erased. America’s tantalising promise of one human identity, which affirms the dream of a common human destiny, demands nothing less.  But will the greatest power on earth even try?

 

A female Christ and other miracles of demo(n)cracy in Nigeria

By Ogaga Ifowodo
The ugly spectacle of the “street fight” that broke out in the Rivers State House of Assembly on July 9 gives further and better particulars of our determination to forever make nonsense of representative governance and a fool of ourselves.

In the even more shaming light of attempts at justification by a protagonist of the latest episode in our unending political theatre of the absurd, I restate my view that perhaps our political predicament lies in the insistence on practising democracy without democrats. And in far too many instances, with near-illiterates, which is worse — if comparatives make any sense at this point.

“Honourable” Evans Bipi, one of the chief brawlers in the aforementioned incident, is currently the butt of jokes for confessing that he was provoked into violence when a colleague blasphemed Jesus Christ in the person of Mrs Patience Jonathan.

[caption id="attachment_402954" align="alignnone" width="412"] Hon Evan Bapakaye at loggerheads with a Mobile Police Officer at the Rivers State House of Assembly during the crisis that rocked the House. Photo: Nwankpa Chijioke[/caption]

I am unable to say whether this is a tragic or a comic statement, but I see the laughable in it: unbeknownst to us and the world, a female Christ — and a black one at that! — not only chose Nigeria for her unheralded and closely guarded abode on earth, but also chose to reveal herself to one man alone, allegedly her cousin and die-hard loyalist.

After which, she swore him, at pain of hell, to secrecy. Until not even the never-quenching fires of hell could make him keep the secret. Such is the maddening power of an insult!  In the vortex of his rage, Bipi blurted out to those who tried to restrain him, thus: “Why must he be insulting my mother, my Jesus Christ on earth? . . . I can’t take it!” The “he” is “Honourable” Chidi Lloyd, majority leader of the house. It is not known what insufferably blasphemous words Lloyd spoke.

And, yes, I say that our greater tragedy, to attempt putting a metaphorical gloss on the point, may well be seeking to make democratic bricks without straw. On that Bloody Tuesday in Port Harcourt, the legislators had reconvened to discuss an amendment to the state’s 2013 budget.

The house had been forced to adjourn indefinitely due to the fact that the legislators were deadlocked in opposing camps created by the series of events surrounding Governor Rotimi Amaechi’s widely publicised difficulties with his Peoples Democratic Party and President Goodluck Jonathan. In the ensuing melee, some legislators were injured and property was destroyed. Curiously, the police, who had been invited by the speaker to keep the peace at this expectedly contentious sitting, and who had cordoned off the assembly premises, were content to look on.

It was not until Governor Amaechi arrived with a detachment of Government House security men that some order was restored. Upon his departure, a gang of five led by Bipi, sitting without their fifth member who was by now being treated in a hospital, impeached the “pro-Amaechi” speaker, “Honourable” Otelemabala Amachree, and installed the “pro-Jonathan” Bipi in his place.

Democracy without democrats: first, Mr Bipi not only indulges in contemptible idolatory with his confession of Mrs Jonathan as his Jesus Christ — his lord and personal saviour, as it were — but also goes on to top that with a poor orphan cry.

Second, the purported impeachment. By all independent accounts, it was done by four out of 32 members. The audacity of it, and the effrontery of seeking to claim any validity for the action even after passions should have cooled, is shocking beyond belief.

It does not come close to the pathos of the action to point to such obdurate impunity as just another instance of democracy without democrats. Something infernal, I think, has taken complete control of the minds of a fearfully large number of our politicians.

What this event proves is that our democracy, far from maturing the farther we go from the horrors of military tyranny, has, on the contrary, become in essence more infantile and crude. Majority of our politicians lack the necessary acumen, discipline and comportment — in a word, character — to be standard-bearers of democracy.

Thirdly, it is as a consequence of an insufficient appreciation of the finer principles of democracy and federalism that the House of Representatives moved, hastily, to take over the duties of the Rivers Assembly under Section 11(4) of the Constitution when nothing short of an emergency, as envisaged by Section 305 of the said Constitution, would justify such an extraordinary step.

While the event of July 9 is utterly shameful, there is no indication that the “situation prevailing” in the state was close to the sort of breakdown of law and order contemplated by the Constitution.

Lastly, the warts of our federalism were further displayed by the attitude of the state’s Commissioner of Police, Joseph Mbu. The incongruity of a governor, supposedly the chief security officer of his state, being saddled with a commissioner of police answerable to a federal authority makes mockery of the concept of federalism. And a faulty federalism can only produce a strange democracy. Or, “dividends of democracy” turned fearful miracles.

 

Tell me in what Egypt my people’s feet lie chained!

By Ogaga Ifowodo
IT took Egypt only two years after its first taste of democracy to give the latest demonstration of Africa’s abiding paradox: every flower of hope is turned sooner, rather than later, into the weed of despair.

On July 3, the Egyptian army deposed Mohammed Morsi, the country’s first democratically elected president.  This followed four days of massive protests by crowds exceeding the multitudes that massed on Tahrir Square for 18 days in 2011 to force life-president Hosni Mubarak out of power.

[caption id="attachment_402499" align="alignnone" width="412"] A sand sculpture of ousted Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, created by sand artist Sudersan Pattnaik. AFP[/caption]

For a country whose politics is as fused with the military as its famous pyramids are fixed to the ground, the 2011 uprising was not just one more chapter in the so-called Arab Spring: it was something in the order of a tectonic movement.  And it raised expectations of the new Egyptian democracy sky-high.

Entered Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, who won the ensuing election by the thin majority of 51.7% of the vote.  Morsi promised but failed to meet those (Pyramid of) Giza-large expectations by failing to lead a government “for all Egyptians.”

He succumbed to the disease of African leaders who interpret every mandate, however won — whether through “free and fair” or shamelessly rigged elections — as a licence to substitute the party’s will for that of the nation. Accordingly, Morsi sought in November last year to reserve extensive powers for himself through a constitutional declaration that would also entrench Islamic laws.

After the people called his bluff by returning to Tahrir Square, Morsi backed down but not without retaining enough of his intentions as to embitter and alienate his more liberal and secular-minded fellow citizens.

As it happened, they were the greater majority of Egyptians demanding bread and not burqas. Morsi’s first major test should have given him good warning about the danger of being seen not as the president of Egypt but of a nation called the Muslim Brotherhood.

And it is the problem of power and alienation that concerns me most about Morsi’s fall. For it is yet too early to say whether or not the manner of its occurrence signifies a victory for democracy or for autarchy — whether or not July 3 will henceforth be celebrated by Egyptians as the day the revolution which ended 30 years of Mubarak’s autocracy was re-launched, according to Mohammed ElBaradei, the most influential secular voice in quasi-theocratic Egypt.

What we know is that the people called on the army to sack their elected president, and that they cheered when a general obliged them. That, to me, leaves only one question to be asked: When did Morsi lose the confidence of the people, thus turning promise to betrayal so soon after the ecstasy of the revolution?

If Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood were capable of sober reflection on their brief sojourn in power, they would admit that it was the moment of their constitutional overreach. More precisely, when they failed even after the outrage that greeted it to understand the mood of the people.

Governed by the credo of winner-takes-all, of electoral victory as a licence to substitute ego for equality, the party for the citizenry, they could never acknowledge the folly of their beliefs and the petty politics it fostered. Consequently, such a fundamental issue as the delimitation of constitutional powers in a nation attempting democracy for the first time was turned into an opportunity for self-aggrandisement. After all, an electoral “victory” is a mandate to scorn the people’s will.

As in our beleaguered country where the PDP in alliance with the irredeemably selfish ruling class arrogates to itself, through the National Assembly — a majority of whose occupants are of questionable ability and character — the sacred task of drawing up a constitution that reflects the genuine wishes and aspirations of the people.

And that the process entails no more than a committee to review General Abacha’s military constitution of 1995. No surprise, then, that the President and his party are staunchly opposed to a sovereign national conference, the one option agreed upon by the reasonable majority as offering the most democratic process towards a people’s constitution for a secular, free, equitable and peaceful federal republic.

What they can’t see while blinded by their inordinate greed and will to power is that the anger and frustration caused by an insensitive government is bound to lead to catastrophe, as the chaos and bloodshed in Cairo make abundantly clear.

Even worse, the danger lurks always that the people, in their despair, would turn to the army or any rogue revolutionary band for their salvation. General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi made the most of this reality in his speech: the armed forces, he said, could not ignore the calls on them by the masses to save the country.

“Tell me in what Egypt my people’s feet lie chained,” wrote the late Congolese poet, Tchicaya U Tam’si, in his great poem, The Scorner, making indelible use of the fabled figure of Egypt as metaphor.

Nigeria and the rest of Africa had better heed the terrifying news from Egypt where a president and his party ignored the people. The history of coups in our country and continent urges every so-called elected leader to turn, as fast as possible, from the credo of self first and last, and nation not at all or only by compulsion.