Looking like the Other to Deceive the Other

By

Obododimma Oha

Is it always an act of honesty when the self wants to look like the other, to resemble the other? It is good to try to give up all the inclinations to the practice of homo hostilis (the enemy-making mammal inclined to hostile imagination), to give up the spirit of shibboleth, and to try to be one with humanity. But not when yesterday a candidate in an election told the plural electorate to vote for only candidates who favour a fanatical imposition on a country, and not when, since winning power, the politician has been known to carry out many acts of mediocrity and to favour his or her ethnic group, religion, or region, or as has been presiding over a large cemetery in which citizens from other ethnic groups are massively slaughtered by his or her own kin, and they are buried in mass graves! Not when a politician, in order to protect mass murderers he knows, tells us unbelievable stories about their origin, as if that is an excuse not to get them and bring them to book. I pointed out recently in a Facebook comment, when I could no longer bear the manipulation of the thinking of the people (as if they are an incurable mumu – a Nigerian pidgin term for disgraceful simpleton) that “It is time to look like the other, in order to try to deceive the other.” My little knowledge of the use of signs tells me that when politicians who are clearly against you and have done everything against your interest, pretend to be one with you, to share some iconicity of origin with you or try exploit your cultural values to pretend to share values with you (like wearing the dress associated with the ethnic group against whom he has openly demonstrated hostility), I should make sure I am close enough to a semiotic competence to understand what is happening, or, at least to be able to  understand the multiple meanings chasing me around. I also think that the reliance of that outdated strategy in campaigning for support in an enlightened world is perfectly a confession of poor education and backwardness.

Deception is one strategy we can use in differentiating the mumu from the clever. It is with deception that the clever uses the mumu, and not with sound reasoning. I am convinced that book people are free from this, but if you find any book person who is easily deceived with appeals to feeling and facile bandwagon appeals, that book person has has not visited the Kingdom of Learning. Maybe the book person merely used the books for decoration in his miserable life! 

 In Africa, deception in most of the folklore is attributed to the trickster (who in Igbo is the mbe or tortoise, in Yoruba ijapa (tortoise) and Esu Elegba, in Ghana the anansi or spider). The deceiver may be admired sometimes to cleverness, for outwitting other bigger creatures), but this deceiver sometimes fall victim irreparably to its deceptive craft. It becomes a victim of the medication it has prepared to deal with other. Is it not call Karma, nemesis, or retributive justice?

Indeed, deception is a signifying practice -- from the crafting of words to sweep the targets off their feet to visual culture (which is even more persuasive because many of us still think that seeing is believing. But what one is made to see is sometimes a means of consolidating one's servitude to the power of signs!

As a sinful and adulterous generation looking for signs and not ready to allow myself to be mistaken for a mumu, I am interested in what a politician that has been demonstrating his hostility against a people, precisely putting on an Igbo cultural dress to deceive the Igbo or other ethnic mumu where such a polititician thinks he or she has a bigger problem overcoming what appears to be an inclination to cultural mumuness. Obviously, putting on the Igbo cultural dress signifies the cultural use of Ndiigbo, an exploitation of the Igbo that is too lazy to look for signs through even dressing. It is one thing to dress like the Igbo, the Edo, the Esan, the Yoruba, the Tiv, the Idoma, etc. during an election campaign and another thing to work against their interest, including joining in the conspiracy to kill them at  the slightest excuse, after the election.  The Igbo or ethnic mumu in their simplicity and hasty logic would conclude that he that is against us is with us! Why won’t they celebrate like baboons? Why won’t they look at the act at the surface and conclude that it means solidarity? But everybody is not a fool or a baboon which is naked in spite of the human costume but does not know it.

It is all in line with the assumption that the majority of a population are mumu or that darkness has eventually conquered darkness; ignorance has overcome enlightenment. Is it not evident in the mass slaughter of citizens in which some highly educated or the so-called radicals could not loudly condemn the killings and call upon the rational world to do something? One person would unfortunately be shot in Europe or America and these radicals would be up in arms in Africa! A cartoon would be drawn in Europe by a white person but in Black Africa people would be slaughtered for it.

Is this appeal to cultural emotion not in line with an assumption that the electorate can now accept just anything, any behaviour? Is it not based on the assumption that your thinking is very shallow, your logic disabled? Is it not based on the script that you will quickly draw a conclusion that the tunic makes the monk? If unacceptable things are done are the population behaves as if those things are acceptable, or where the abnormal is normal, is this not clearly a drama of the absurd, and costuming is just part of the absurdity? In the drama of the absurd, the saint should feature as a villain and a villain should feature a saint. They can express the absurdity in the costumes they put on, as long as the drama lasts!

At an absurd level, any baboon can put on a costume to act in a social drama of the exploitation of the mumu. If you have been observant while in Nigeria or other parts of West Africa, you would notice that some people try to put up public displays with the baboon, dressing it sometimes like a human being – shirt, sunglasses, etc.. You would say that is part of the society’s orientation to entertainment, to performance. But, even though the baboon cooperates (it has been trained to do so – remember Pavlov’s conditioning of animals), I do not think it likes the covering of its arse! It arse is one the things that make it a baboon. It has to spot the arse that has suffered through squatting anywhere and symbolically that it is naturally a naked and aggressive creature. Anyway, the baboon is already a Nigerian  or West African public drama, and if it this aggression is demonstrated in costuming it in one’s cultural dress, it is, for me, a continuation of the war by other means. Tell the aggressive baboon to hand over your cultural dress, your identity.