X-pens

English, Colonial De-jobbing, and the Mapping of Victimhood

2012-02-03T10:08:00.000-08:00

by

Obododimma Oha

This day in history, 2nd February 1929, Asuquo Okon inyang, a colonial subject and employee of the colonial British government in Nigeria, wrote a very powerful letter to the British Embassy, protesting over his dismissal and appealing for reinstatement. The letter has come to be recognized as one of the significant documents of Nigeria's colonial history, especially with regard to the colonial subject writing back to the imperial authority. A confirmation of the letter's significance is the fact that it has been archived in notable repositories such as the online "Letters of Note." It is also widely consulted and read. Whereas many of its readers are excited over its author's unconventional and humorous use of English, some examine it as evidence of the emerging non-native variety of the language in the colonial environment, or as evidence of the proficiency levels found among the colonized people struggling to embrace Western culture and expressions. For me, it is not just about "good" and "bad" varieties of English. I am rather attracted to Asuquo's courage in trying to exercise the right to twist the language, creating words that are non-existent in English, even as a non-native speaker. He has been given this language as part of the project of colonizing and governing him, and as Chinua Achebe indicated in one of his essays "The African Writer and the English Language," he (Asuquo) would make English carry the burden of his "dejobment." A transcript of the letter which has been sourced from Letters of Note is as follows:

Calabar
February 2nd 1929.

Kind Sir,

On opening this epistle you will behold the work of a dejobbed person, and a very bewifed and much childrenised gentleman.

Who was violently dejobbed in a twinkling by your goodself. For Heavens sake Sir consider this catastrophe as falling on your own head, and remind yourself as walking home at the moon's end of five savage wives and sixteen voracious children with your pocket filled with non-existent £ S D; not a solitudery sixpence; pity my horrible state when being dejobbed and proceeding with a heart and intestines filled with misery to this den of doom; myself did greedily contemplate culpable homicide, but Him who did protect Daniel (poet) safely through the lion's dens will protect his servant in his home of evil.

As to reason given by yourself — goodself — esquire for my dejobbment the incrimination was laziness.

No Sir. It were impossible that myself who has pitched sixteen infant children into this valley of tears, can have a lazy atom in his mortal frame, and the sudden departure of eleven pounds monthly has left me on the verge of the abyss of destitution and despair. I hope this vision of horror will enrich your dreams this night, and good Angel will meet and pulverise your heart of nether milestone so that you will awaken, and with as much alacrity as may be compatable with your personal safety, you will hasten to rejobulate your servant.

So mote it be - Amen

Yours despairfully

Sgd. Asuquo Okon Inyang.

The colonial job of entrenching the values of Englishness is transmitted through a language which the colonized African did not share (or was not allowed to share) in the pride of its mastery. The colonial subject, it was assumed, would never measure up to the competence of the native speaker, even with the best colonial education, even with an Oxford training and foreign sojourn. Perhaps, Braj Kachru's Circles of English presents a clearer mapping of the location of the colonized in an English world. In the Kachru model, countries colonized by Britain and which have English as a second-language, are placed in the Outer Circle and regarded as "norm-using" while countries like the UK, the US, New Zealand, Australia, etc where English is used as mother tongue, are in the Inner Circle. These Inner Circle countries are regarded as "norm-producing," in other words, they dictate correctness in the use of the language. Countries such as France, Germany, Russia, China, and Japan, that were not colonized by Britain and which do not assign any official function to English in their government and public communication, are located in the Expanding Circle. Although the Circles of English in Braj Kachru sense represent an imagined geography of English language speech, the word "Outer" in "Outer Circle" already suggests a sense of exclusion and/or distancing. And so Outer Circle speakers of English like Asuquo Okon are greatly distanced from appropriateness in the use of the language and would therefore need to be "helped" through language teaching procedures, to minimize their errors and ascend to a level of intelligibility.

Asuquo Okon's letter was a symbolic case of the Outer Circle writing to the Inner Circle. Already, the Outer Circle suffers a disadvantage in not being recognized as an authentic source of good English. Its members are already dejobbed as transmitters of acceptable English, or at most needed to be monitored closely and "assisted," even when they can never be seen as measuring as high as native speakers. This dejobbing, sad as it may seem, has been an inspiration for determined and highly creative experiments with English in the cultural productions in the colonized environments. Rather than despair, Outer Circle users of English have gone ahead to make English do business for them in many aspects of their cultural lives, registering impressive results in the area of literature mainly.

The transcript of Okon's letter above exhibits an attention to the expansion of the structures of English words, both in acceptable and unacceptable directions. Perhaps, he might be said to generalize the affixation rules of English and therefore poor in his English lexicology. I am sure many readers of his letter would find his uses of words like "dejobbed," "childrenised," and "bewifed" strange, not because some English words don't have that kind of structure, but because those words are strange and have been created to solve conceptual problems experienced by the writer of the letter. Okon was creating and using words he felt would capture situations or phenomena he could not immediately find words for in his English. Ok, let's say his stock of English vocabulary was much limited but the interesting thing is that he did not treat that as a disadvantage; he rather went ahead to make English say it. Would you say he was a kindred spirit to Humpty-Dumpty who would insist that if he uses words, they mean what he means, whether the relationships between those words and meanings assigned to them are generally recognized or not?

But Okon's letter also indirectly calls attention to the irregular nature of lexical derivation one finds in English and how it could lead to the creation of strange and amusing patterns. If the plural of "ox" is "oxen," why is it not possible for the plural of "box" to be "boxen" in English? Why the hell is this language so unpredictable? If we can say "begotten" and "besieged," why can't we also say "bewifed"? And what about "childrenized" when we can also say "womanized"? Moreover, one who carries the burden of providing for several children that have probably resulted from a marriage he never wanted is not wrong in describing self as being "childrenized." And, if we can "reinvigorate," why would anyone ridicule a "dejobbed" Okon for asking to be "rejobulated"?

By the way, Asuquo Okon, as an Outer Circle courageous manipulator of the English language might as well be the precursor of today's African scholar who, in navigating between the post in post-colonialism and the post in post-modernism, has to attach the "de" and "re" prefixes here and there, in order to be properly read and endorsed by the colonial master and norm-producer. As the "postal" Asuquo Okons, we in the knowledge ilo have to try and speak the Master's voice, with the Master's little extra tricks with words!

Has Asuquo Okon not shown that he is an exciting poet and rhetor who would not spare any imagery that could turn the heart of his highly placed addressee to "rejobulate" him? Who but a heartless boss would not listen to the plea of an employee saddled with "six savage wives and sixteen voracious children" in "a den of doom"? The addressee is reassured of the high esteem in which he is held -- his "goodself," for whom a prayer is made that the "good Angel will meet and pulverize (his) heart to awaken" to the necessity of this "good" deed of "rejobulating" Okon.

Indeed, what Asuquo Okon's letter suggests to his addressee is that he is a victim: he is a victim of the culture that has orientated him to enter into polygamy and poor planning of parenthood; he is a victim of five "savage" wives who probably make his life an example of hell; he is a victim of an employment system that appears not to bother about the personal lives of employees and how the stress from those lives affect their work performance, in fact, an employment system that dispenses with feelings; and of course, a victim of the colonial system that does not understand the colonial subject, and does require the touch, indeed some "pulverizing" by the "good Angel."

Indeed, in cultural productions and oratory of public display in Nigeria, the tendency to play with and enjoy English as a "strange" language has long been in practice, typical examples being Chief Zebrudaya Okoroigwe Nwogbo's English (or "Zebrulect") and Igodomigodo rhetoric associated with the Edo State politician, Patrick Obahiagbon. Chris Okotie, the evangelist, also represents another case of an attachment to flowery gobbledygook in English.

Now, is Asuquo Okon only a victim of what Basil Bernstein calls "language deficit," the type we make him become when we regard the English in his letter as inferior to ours, just as the colonial power cancelled the authenticity of the colonized culture? No; at another level, Okon's letter as a cultural production signifies the struggle of power at the level the signification. As a subject of the English language, he is already a victim of the process that requires him to search for a semiotic that would ensure his being understood by the colonial master. It is this task of making oneself understood, even at the cost of being laughed at both in the colonial moment and in the online presence, that seems to me to be Asuquo Okon's highest level of victimhood.

New Years, New Yearnings: Discourse, Time, and the National Voyage to a Becoming

2012-01-31T04:22:00.000-08:00

by

Obododimma Oha

"What can be said in New Year rhymes
That's not been said a thousand times?
The new years come, the old years go,
We know we dream, we dream we know.
We rise up laughing with the light,
We lie down weeping with the night.
We hug the world until it stings,
We curse it then and sigh for wings.
We live, we love, we woo, we wed,
We wreathe our prides, we sheet our dead.
We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,
And that's the burden of the year."
   --- Ella Wilcox.

I stayed awake in the night of 31 December, 2011, as I have been doing all these years, to witness the transition from a retiring year to another taking over. I wanted to witness that split moment of transition that made the difference between an old year and a new one. I didn't notice any difference; I didn't even realize that any change had taken place. I looked and listened; only the sound of fireworks and hooting of triumphant entry into a new year filled the air. Always the same noise of triumph, with varying embellishments. In our Igbo village, I recall, such witnessing of a transition to another year had some interesting folk ritual performances to go with it: the villagers usually plucked leaves and marched round the village in the final hour of the dying year, chanting.

Afo gbara aka laa oo!
Afo gbara aka laa oo!
Afo gbara aka laa oo!

Roughly translated as:

May the year go without a mishap!
May the year go without a mishap!
May the year go without a mishap!

In its literal translation, the chant actually says: "May this year go empty-handed!" This end-of-year ritual, called ichu afo, considered an important deployment of the powers of human speech, indeed communal affirmation, means expelling whatever evil that is waiting to strike anybody in the community. The forces of evil, it is traditionally believed, always stand by waiting at that strategic moment like a year ending, to poison the joy of the community with terrible grief. But a communal speech, representing the power of the many endorsed by Chukwu-abia-amuma, can foil such a spiritual conspiracy. So, no one needed to be reminded to join in the communal ritual and "chasing away" the old year, asking the old year to go empty-handed.

So, caught in the unfortunate demands of my profession in the urban Nigerian environment, I was unable to travel home to my village to join the larger family in driving away the old year. That also came with the idle reflection of wanting to know what made the difference between an old year and a new one. An alienated soul is wont to seek such deep things, against its own happiness. And so it seemed to me that the idea of a "new year" is a mere fiction which human beings find convenient in trying to reassure themselves that a future is real, and that they are moving into it.

A new year supposedly calls for newness, for a renewal, at least. Coming on the heels of the birth of Jesus the Christ, whom Christians consider the Son of God and savior of the world, the New Year celebration becomes a moment for the renewal of vows, or the making of resolutions. For Christians, it involves renewing the vow of living the life of the savior and depending on the grace of God to experience greater blessings in the next eleven months and after. Christians and non-Christians make resolutions, which are supposed to be serious statements about what they must do to show that the year has some newness and difference. Whether the resolutions are kept or not is another matter, but the fact remains that many would like to be part of that ritual of moving into a future that is different from its past.

New years still have the old yearnings. When I look at the resolutions and prayers made on Facebook by my friends, I find that these old yearnings about personal dreams of greatness, of experiencing better days as a citizen in a troubled country and global environment, of overcoming the drawbacks experienced in the year just gone.

Here are some interesting randomly-selected samples of New Year wishes and messages posted on Facebook on January 1, 2012 and January 2, 2012:

(1) "We've stepped into a brighter light.
   Happy new year, friends."
   (Olisakwe Ukamaka Evelyn, posted 12.55am on Jan. 1, 2012)
(2) "01-01-12 watching my goodies coming."
   (Ayobami Omonijo)
(3) "I wish all Nigerians a Happy New Year. Now let's be reminded that this is a new year and in 2011 Nigeria suffered because we politicized religion. In 2012 this trend must change and we all must make a conscious and proactive effort not to repeat the mistakes of the past year."
   (Pat Utomi, Jan. 2, 2012)
(4) "My New Year Solutions, Not Resolutions
   This Year I want to be a monkey
   Jumping from tree to tree
   Next year I can be a donkey
   ...
   Why can't I be a bubble?
   Blow away and disappear
   Instead of getting into trouble
   Making resolutions every year."
   (Orok Duke, Jan. 1, 2012; 3.24AM)
(5) "This is the 12th year of the New Millennia (sic), let's write our
   future with Big Ideas, enquire into all problems that afflict us.
   Happy New Year, folks, friends and compatriots."
   (Abdul Mahmud, Jan. 1, 2012; 1.13AM)
(6) "Finally, 2012. Finally, a year with new clothes. Happy new Year
   friends!"
   (Chitzi Ogbumgbada, Jan. 1, 2012; 1.04AM)
(7) "YES!
   Time to knot my shoe lace.
   2012 ... another desert to be fertilized.
   As the journey begins!"
   (N'Time Joseph, Jan. 1, 2012; 12.55AM)
(8) "Thank you GOD for today -- jan 1st, 2012. 2012 the year of the
   Dominion and Manifestation of the WORD. The WORD. The WORD.
   The WORD. Happy New Year. This year is for you, by the power
   of the WORD."
   (David Ishaya Osu, Jan. 1, 2012; 12.43AM)
(9) "Welcome to the Year of the Dragon. This also shall be the Year
   of Sacrifice, and if it pleases the gods, a man who was born in the
   Year of the Dragon shall return through the Path of Thunder, and
   a People shall either rise like humans, or perish on their knees like
   animals."
   (Olu Oguibe, Jan. 2, 2012; 7.38AM)
(10) "I wish all a New Year filled with personal growth and
   professional accomplishment. And may the year be marked by
   peace and an end to senseless violence."
   (Okey Ndibe, Jan. 1, 2012; 8.54AM)
(11) "... he said to me 'drop ur map for this year (2011) cos tmrw u
   shall take up a new identity, and a new map for the new year.
   dust ur coat and tighten ur boot ... by this time tmrw, u shall be
   on the cool blue sea drifting on ur feet, without a boat, without
   an oar, without a lifejacket nor a float tyre ... cos the angel on
   the other side of d sea wud ve locked them in his barn.... but ... u
   shud fear no tempest, for thou at (sic) with the wind and a fair
   weather to comfort u ... a thousand shall drown by ur side and
   ten thousand by your right hand but shall not come near u, only
   with ur mind eyes shall u perceive it "...but he quickly added,
   'make sure ur eyes re closed thru d journey and only see with ur
   senses ... if you opened (sic) ur eyes, d fishes ll call ur name, d
   crocodiles ll give u gifts, d seagulls ll sing u a melodious hymn,
   and d sea ll wink at u ... then u ll go dancing after them ... then
   ... u ll begin again from d very start and the tempest ll rock ur
   nerves, and d wind ll not be ur friend and all ll conspire and give
   u a fear jacket ... but with eyes closed, u shall get to d other
   side of the sea and only God ll be mighty in ur inside.
   (Alake Titilope, Jan. 2, 2012.)
(12) "May 2012 be better than 2011 for those who believe!"
   (Hope Eghagha, Jan. 1, 2012; 8.49AM)

Light-Dark images feature in the communication of the New Year wishes, indicating that indeed the main issue is about the picture of the new year that we create or carry in our heads, pictures that reveal whether we have fears or hopes, whether we have chosen an optimistic orientation or a pessimistic one. It is particularly interesting that the new year, which represents a future, is configured as a sea of uncertainties in one of the Status posts. The sea has always featured as an archetypal imagery of fear in writings by poets, sometimes along with night, suggesting in a rather amplified way the magnitude of trouble for which deliverance is sought. This desired deliverance is imagined as Dawn or Light. Thus we find in Olisakwe Ukamaka Evelyn's post a resonance of that deliverance/hope imagery: stepping "into a brighter light." It is also noteworthy that her expression of deliverance is cast in a comparative degree -- "brighter" -- which suggests that we are already out of the zone of trouble; we are already in the "light" and not in the Dark.

This representation is in conflict with the posts that suggest that the "sea" of the new year on which we must travel is not the zone of light, or that it is left to us to create that future through the choices we make. The events following the removal of government subsidy on the local prices of petroleum products in Nigeria indeed indicate that Nigerians are not yet out of the Dark or tempestuous Sea configuration. They have rather just entered a trying part of their voyage through that sea and will have to make the kind of critical choices suggested in Alake Titilope's post. Alake, in her status post, presents a very interesting configuration of the new year as a dark sea populated by dangerous creatures, such that traveling through it requires a special protection from the Almighty. In her interesting narrative, she reports that on the very night of transition to a new year (a passover night), an angel of the Lord appeared to her with a leather box containing gifts, asking her to drop her map of the passing year and take the map of the coming year. And how is that new map read? The map, as seen from the angel's narrative, says her journey through the new year is not going to be smooth, if that was what she was expecting, but that it would be a journey through a rough and dangerous sea of crocodiles.

Alake maintains a highly engaging prophetic posture, her predictions apparently fulfilled in the violent experiences which occurred in Nigeria few days later. One, in fact, finds a disturbing relationship between the imagery of "the sea of crocodiles" in Alake's prophetic post and "the river of crocodiles," which is the English translation of the name, "Kaduna." Well, Alake might have been referring to what Nigerians would pass through generally in their journey to healthy governance and democracy, but, as in the Prophecies of Michel Nostradamus, this closeness in naming is highly suggestive, especially considering the violence and killings in Kaduna State recently, the Boko Haram terror, and the alleged conspiracies, which have set many Nigerians wondering if many people in government in Northern Nigeria are not secretly connected with the terrorist attacks. In fact, Alake uses the word "conspire" in describing the roles of certain mythologized figures in that imagined journey: "... the crocodiles ll give you gifts, d seagulls ll sing u a melodious hymn, and the sea ll wink at u ... then u ll go dancing after them ... then ... u ll begin again from the very start and the tempest ll rock ur nerves, and the wind ll not be ur friend and all ll conspire and give u a fear jacket...." Isn't terrorism about conspiracy and particularly the giving of fear (jacket)? Terrorism spreads fear, and, from Alake's prophecy (which applies to individuals just as it applies to government), this fear is meant to derail, to prevent one from focusing on one's goal and getting it accomplished.

It is interesting that she deploys a mythical technique, effectively appropriating patterns of agency associated with derailment of mission, as one finds in Homer's Odyssey (or in Jason and the Argonauts) as well as in African folk narratives. Her "seagulls" might as well have been Homer's sirens using a melodious song to seduce the person on the mission. Could Nigerians also not be called "Naijanauts" making a journey on a dangerous sea and facing many forms of deception, distraction and treachery?

This deployment of myth in prophesying about the New Year for the nation is particularly evident in Olu Oguibe's Facebook post. The author of A Gathering Fear, Oguibe has consistently demonstrated a very radical posture in his narration of the Nigerian nation-state. Perhaps the title of that collection of poems of his utters its own prophecy which has started unfolding in Nigeria. His Facebook New Year post cited in (9) above, in a Nostradamus style, warns that: "a man who was born in the Year of the Dragon shall return through the Path of Thunder." 2012, he informs his readers, is "the Year of the Dragon." So, who could this man born in the Year of the Dragon be?

The year 2012, according to Chinese astrology, is the Year of the Dragon. For the Chinese, the Dragon is a special animal and a symbol of power and uprightness. The following information available on the Sichuan-China.com is very helpful in this regard:

"... in Chinese astrology the dragon person born under this Chinese Zodiac sign tends to be a "doer" – they do things and achieve power by getting things done.

A dragon can breathe out fire so the person born in the Chinese Year of the Dragon can be a hothead. Watch out if you make them angry!

However, the dragon has a soft underbelly and so in Chinese astrology the dragon person born in this Chinese Zodiac year has a "soft spot" to them. They may get angry at someone who annoys them but they also show great compassion to people in need.

A dragon has a long tongue which is often seen.

So in Chinese astrology the dragon person born in this Chinese Zodiac year has a sharp tongue – they will say things that can be quite sarcastic and biting.

The person born in the Chinese Year of the Dragon can be quite a confronting person but if you can reach their "soft heart" they are worthwhile allies.

2012 is the Chinese year of the dragon. So what does 2012 hold for a person born in the Chinese Year of the Dragon?

Such people double their efforts in whatever they do - work, education and other projects. Their natural talent and abilities should stand out with great results.

However, watch out for that temper! Keep it in check and do not spoil your good work."

So, Oguibe's prophecy is about the fact that the new year is a historical turning point for a nation, a year in which citizens will either "rise like humans, or perish like animals." The Dragon avatar returns through the "Path of Thunder" (obviously a symbol of violence, derived from the work of Peter Abrahams with the same title and later the title of Christopher Okigbo's 1968 collection of poems, later included in Labyrinths), indeed suggestive of an opportunity for redemption (which could be lost, if there is no determination and conviction on the part of the citizenry).

Indeed, the New Year celebration calls for the making of resolutions, which involves setting goals and working towards them. This is obviously in line with the idea of the part the individual or society has to play in relation to the prophecies discussed earlier. Orok Duke in his poetic status post (see sample text (4) above) deconstructs "resolutions" to register his preference for "solutions." His erasure of "re" in "resolutions" shows that desire to remake things: it points to the idea of being fed up with the tendency to plan and not execute, to make promises without making efforts to fulfill them. Thus, Orok Duke's poem, sounding like a limerick, playfully interrogates this orientation which critics of the government in Nigeria have been reiterating. As it applies to individuals in the way they have to perceive the meaning of the New year, so does it apply to governments.

Wishing that good things come one's way (or happen to one's society) is just a prayer, which needs to be matched with action. In contemporary Nigerian life, it has become common for individuals, aided by Pentecostal narratives, to imagine a new year in various utopian forms. There are such slogans as "My Year of Restoration," "My Year of Glory," "My Year of Deliverance," or even "This Year Is My Year." The slogans are produced as stickers that are placed on automobiles and walls of buildings or sometimes printed on T-shirts. These days, they also appear as wallpaper on mobile phone screens and computer monitors, perhaps as a way of making the message so pervasive that it invades and occupies the viewer's mind. The origin is the advocacy by Pentecostal pastors that church members engage in positive thinking and positive talking, as a way of spiritually invoking good or positive things to happen in their lives. The slogans also advertise their users as being spiritually triumphant.

Positive thinking and positive talking may have their own good psychological advantages, but may end up being misleading if they are seen in themselves as the keys to miracles. Unless people get up and work to change their lives, no miracle-talking will transform them and their societies into civilized and progressive entities. That, by implications, requires that we do not repeat the mistakes we made in the past, mistakes that included making resolutions and not working towards solutions (as noted by Orok Duke). Quite rightly, Pat Utomi in his own New Year status post advises Nigerians to make "a conscious and proactive effort not to repeat the mistakes of the past year."

Nigerian New Year yearning on Facebook becomes very significant in the light of the crisis over the removal of subsidy on petroleum products consumed in Nigeria and the terrorist attacks by Boko Haram. The discourse generated by the Facebook status posts once more brings up the idea of a virtual Nigerian public desiring, questioning, correcting, and guiding the troubled Nigerian nation and how the online forum becomes a veritable tool for mass enlightenment and consciousness-raising.

The New Year invites individuals as well as a society to some newness, but this newness cannot happen without a reference to the past. Indeed, it may be futile to expect the past to be locked away, with a Time boundary, a rift that must not be tampered with. One must expect the presence of the past, for the present and its achievements are never complete without a reference to the past, as T.S. Eliot says in his essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent." If like Capt. Jack Harkness and other characters in "Torchwood," a BBC series, we try to prevent the unlocking of the rift and the consequent invasion of aliens (including the dead), how far can we really go? The Nigerian dead, as a matter of fact, have been discursively brought back to life in some of the Facebook posts focusing on terrorism and the possible break-up of the country. One has read several posts by Imo Eshiet, for instance, bringing back Alhaji Ahmadu Bello back to our realm/universe to say again what he had said many years ago about the Nigerian entity. So, the Nigerian past cannot be wished away easily, even in spite of the priestly advocacy about positive talking. Bringing back the past may be, in fact, very important in the project of rethinking and remaking Nigeria.

Multilingual Praise-worship as Pentecostal Triumph over Babel

2012-01-29T03:56:00.000-08:00

By

Obododimma Oha

A Christian group meeting in our neighbourhood appears particularly sensitive to its multilingual and multicultural membership this afternoon, as these “children” of God sing every one of their songs in two or more languages at the same time – that is, assuming their songs are meant for the ears of members. But if the songs are indirectly addressed to Almighty God (as I suppose they are, pragmatically speaking), then they either assume God needs to be confronted with the confusion he caused at Babel or needs to be entertained with the beauty of that confusion. The myth of Babel, which traces multilingualism back to divine action, remains part of Christian explanation on the role of God in human affairs. But it also serves as a means of re-uniting worshipers and postponing their cultural and linguistic differences.

This following contextual information might be useful to an understanding of the role that language choice is playing in the interactions at the fellowship meeting. First, the meeting is taking place at the residence of one of the professors in a university. The “federal type” of university in which this meeting is taking place in a Nigerian city is inevitably a multicultural setting: its staff and students are drawn from diverse ethnic and linguistic groups. It also has a predominantly Black population. The host is from the Urhobo ethnic group of the Niger Delta. He is giving his daughter away in marriage to a Yoruba suitor tomorrow. And the wedding has two segments – which represent the biculturalism and double-consciousness of both parties: the traditional wedding, which will be held in the professor’s premises tomorrow, and then the “White” wedding or Church/Christian wedding, which will be held at a church downtown. The fellowship group meeting now at my neighbour’s residence is his local fellowship branch of his church, Assemblies of God Church, and the fellowship has membership from various Nigerian ethnic groups such as Urhobo, Yoruba, Edo, Esan, Igbo, Efik, Ibibio, and Ijaw. The group, as his larger “family,” is meeting to provide a stronger spiritual support for the traditional and church weddings coming up. So, discourse in this setting indeed promises to be cross-linguistic and cross-ethnic; it has already started with the multilingual character of the praise-worship.

I listen to the Christian group singing in the neighbourhood and hear them re-unite some competing languages in the Nigerian political space: English, Igbo, and Yoruba in one song, Urhobo, Yoruba and English in another, and then English, Ibibio, and Igbo in yet another. Here are some of the choruses in which many many languages feature:

(a) The Lord is good
The Lord is good
The Lord is good
The Lord is good
Is good, is good to me

Chineke dị mma
Chineke dị mma
Chineke dị mma
Chineke dị mma
Dị mma, dị mma

Oluwa dara
Oluwa dara
Oluwa dara
Oluwa dara
Dara, dara.

(b) The Lord is so good
Is so good
The Lord is so good
Is so excellent

Abasi ayaya oo
Ayaya oo
Abasi ayaya oo
Ayaya nanando oo!

Onyenweanyi dị mma
Ọ dị mma
Onyenweanyi dị mma
Ọ dị ebube ee !

On some previous occasions, I had heard Christian choruses with other combinations of Nigerian languages, as in the following:

(c ) Nagode Allah aa!
Nagode Allah aa!
Allah sariki!
Chineke nna ndeewo oo!
Chineke nna ndeewo oo!
I meela!

Sometimes, choruses from various languages are combined and sung in a stretch, as an option to the singing of the same chorus in its various translations. Such combination of choruses gives an impression that the singers are speakers of those languages. It rouses some feeling of pride that one is finally able to identify with the other linguistically (even if one does not possess balanced competence in these other languages or that one has not pronounced the words in those other languages correctly!) Thus the Yoruba Christian shifting from Yoruba to Igbo and Ibibio choruses is excited with transcending linguistic barriers, thanks to Jesus and Christianity. Same for Igbo and Ibibio speakers shifting from choruses in their local languages to say Yoruba and Urhobo.

The complex language situation in Nigeria is partly played out in this combination of various languages in Nigerian Christian praise worship. In the first place, the praise-worship symbolically locates the religious activity as happening in a multilingual context and accommodates to the demands of multilingual differences even in the context of religious worship. It recognizes the fact that members whose languages are not included in the worship in some ways could feel marginalized, no matter what the leaders of the group have been telling them about oneness in Christ, and not minding, too, that they signify their close relationship in Christ through the metaphorical uses of the kinship terms, “brother” or “brother-in-Christ,” and “sister” or “sister-in-Christ.” Indeed, there have been cases where such feelings of linguistic marginalization have led to the break-up of churches. And so, in recent times, some orthodox Christian churches in Nigeria arrange for language-specific services, for instance Igbo language church service/bible class, Yoruba language church service/bible class, English language church service/bible class, etc. In some cases where there is a large concentration of people from a language group in a geographical area, such a population have been allowed to construct their own church buildings and to have their services solely in their language. The Igbo language Anglican churches in Ibadan are some examples.

Christian churches in Nigeria, therefore, try to turn multilingualism that appears to be a challenge to an advantage in its evangelization and accommodation of every culture/language in the family of God. The praise worshipers in our neighbourhood are thus essentially celebrating their linguistic diversity as strength in Christ.

At the wider political level, there has been a competition among the various groups of languages in Nigeria, a competition that has been worsened by the provision in Nigeria’s Constitution that Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba are the “major” languages that could be used for official purposes, in addition to English. At some point too, French was added as one of the official languages of the country. So, then we have some interesting patterns of the competition emerging: first, competition between indigenous languages on the one hand and European languages on the other; second, competition between English and French as European languages seeking stronger presence in Nigeria; third, competition between pidgin and English; fourth, competition between pidgin and indigenous languages; fifth, competition between indigenous languages and foreign languages such as Latin and Arabic that are particular associated with religious worship; sixth, competition English and Latin (in Catholic worship) and between Arabic and English (in the context of Islamic worship), and seventh, which is much more disturbing, is the competition among the indigenous languages that the various ethnic groups in Nigeria use in imagining and consolidating their identities, and by extension (which could be the eighth level), the competition between the so-called "major" Nigerian languages and the so-called "minor" Nigerian languages.

One should quickly point out that what is referred to as “competition” here actually happens as struggles, choices, and actions performed by speakers of those languages, which deepen impressions about discrimination. Some Nigerian sociolinguists, for instance Ayo Bamgbose, Ayo Banjo, and Efurosibina Adegbija, have drawn attention to the fact that attitudes to languages, especially the so-called minority languages, may be extended to their speakers. In that regard, speakers of such languages are not just made to feel inferior, but also denied opportunities in employment, admission into schools, and of course, the governance of Nigeria. It can also not be denied that such language-based discrimination could feature sometimes in the context of religious groups that pretends to neutralize ethnic and linguistic differences. It could be the case that when Jesus, Ethnicity, and Language play cards, Jesus is cheated out, as Ethnicity and Language form an alliance. Since Jesus has no ethnic group, at least in Africa, it becomes difficult to recruit him against himself. Yet, the Ethnicity/Language alliance would turn round and claim to be among the disciples of Jesus the Christ, especially when it could present local prophets that work wonders in the name of Christ.

If there is anything that could make groups to suspend their prejudices against others in the contemporary world of conflict, at least one hopes religion has that potential. Given that a religion like Christianity tells us that we were all created by the same God, shouldn’t such a religion encourage us to treat one another fairly as members of one family? As I listen to the multilingual chorusing in our neighbourhood, it occurs to me that that Christian group is essentially saying so symbolically, even if its members are not immediately conscious of it. Indeed, Christian denominationalism has tended to deny and endanger the very idea of one “sheep-one-shepherd” that signifies our idea of one family of God’s people. Further, presencing the local has been an issue in many churches in Nigeria, and that using local languages, either separately and combined, in a religious worship is part of the doctrinal and political challenges of signifying practices featuring in these churches, and which they try to handle to minimize or discourage internal disaffections.

Musical albums produced by Christian singers in Nigeria, which are sometimes the sources of these choruses performed in Christian fellowship meetings, also exhibit a multilingual character, either in individual songs or in the combination of songs in such albums. The multilingual style of the songs is, in one respect, a tactic for getting a wider, cross-linguistic audience and patronage. In other words, the Christian singer also considers the fact that the album would not sell as much as it should if speakers of other Nigerian languages are not accommodated in the listenership, or the possibility of the musician being classified as being ethno-linguistically oriented. Many Christian singers in Nigeria therefore try to be sensitive to the linguistic diversity of the country and what this means for the marketing of their music and their image as non-ethnocentric musical evangelists.

From multilingual concerns in the interactional situation to the aesthetic blend of the voices of many worshipers: this is what one notices in the singing of the multilingual choruses even in contexts where all the members share one of the languages in use or are from the same linguistic group. Perhaps in singing the choruses in many languages in which the song has been crafted, they identify with the multicultural concerns of their religion as well as try to promote them. In another regard, they may be singing such songs out of sheer fascination that they could now worship God in many languages – something that projects a picture of Pentecost when the Apostles of Jesus, filled with the Holy Spirit, started speaking even in languages other than their own and could understand these languages. In other words, the songs symbolically take them back to Pentecost experience as a triumph over Babel. Once more, Christianity unifies divided peoples under Jesus Christ, emerging as one important driver of globalization. Indeed, the Biblical Pentecost was a linguistic globalization, which suggests that the term “globalization” is just a new name for what started long ago.

Incidentally, these multilingual choruses and other types of Christian choruses were originally composed and sung in Pentecostal churches. Their singing in orthodox Christian churches were initially resisted by some conservative members of these churches, especially the clergy, who saw the songs and clapping of hands as signifying rebellion against the existing order of worship. They were worried about how the freedom exercised in spontaneous mode of worship generally constituted a threat to the idea of someone being in charge. They also criticized the choruses as being noisy and lacking in the type of humbling potential that the traditional church hymns held for worshipers. Some of the songs, some believed, said things that amounted to a corruption of Christian values. I recall one occasion when at St. Bernard’s Catholic church, Calabar, in the 80s, the then Bishop of Calabar, Bryant Usanga, who was concelebrating the Mass, stood up and silenced the choir that had started the following chorus:

Darling Jesus
Darling Jesus
Oh my darling Jesus
You are a wonderful Lord
I love you so
Oh my darling Jesus
Oh my darling Jesus
You are a wonderful Lord

His Lordship Usanga must have felt scandalized that the choir was singing a song that had amorous meanings and which, especially with the use of the word “darling” was capable of rousing deep feelings only associated with love affairs. He wasn’t going to tolerate a kind of signification that might cause some spiritual distraction in the celebration of the Holy Mass. His worries are understandable, but one wonders what His Lordship would have done if the choir had sung some choruses with strong sexual connotations, as found these days in Christian chorus performance in Nigeria. One of such choruses in Igbo performed by an Igbo gospel musician says:

Jizos, Ọ bụ otu a ka I dị e e?
Onweghi onye dị ka gi
Ihe gi atọgbue m oo
Ọ dị ka mmanụ aṅụ

Literally, the song says:

Jesus, is this how you are?
There is no one like you
The sweetness of your thing drives me crazy
It is like honey.

The Igbo expression “ihe gi” is used vaguely in referring to not only to someone’s possession (or thing, as in the literal meaning) but also to someone’s acts, ways, behaviour, etc. Obviously, it is not the literal meaning that is intended in the chorus, but the acts of Jesus as recognized by Christians and recorded in the Holy Bible too, in word, his "goodness". However, the appropriation of the context of discourse associated with love affair and other figurative associations, for instance the analogy “O dị ka mmanụ aṅụ” (It is like (the sweetness of) honey), conveys emotive meanings that make the chorus particularly unsettling. It is doubtful that listeners would process the meaning of the chorus without referring to situations in which this kind of expression features in actual human relationships. Perhaps this is where a pastor would argue that it is a matter of "as a man thinketh," that a thought life "touched" by the blood of Christ would not allow a corruption from sexual connotations! Well, well, well...men-of-God are not only in charge of biblical truths, they are also in charge of our minds and how our minds process experience. They also teach us how to take charge of our minds and their readings of the world.

Not that similar amorous expressions or associations are strange to Christian re/constructions of relationship with God. Songs of Solomon particularly features strong sexual images which have been viewed as extreme a representations of affection for the Almighty.The expression of love for Jesus Christ in some Christian songs may have started going beyond what many church leaders would be comfortable with. A conservative moralist may ask: even if the songs do not convey literal meanings, how can one be sure that some worshipers in singing them would not make some associations with actual reference situations and end up having their thought lives contaminated in the context of worship.

Such Christian choruses with amorous outlook are performed in many Nigerian languages too. One finds that Christian worshipers, at the spur of the moment, could translate the songs they are singing to provide some greater mix and reduce the redundancy of repetitiveness of the choruses. They may also find the need to provide such translations for choruses originally in their own languages, for the benefit of other worshipers who do not speak such languages. This, as explained earlier, is part of the Christian pursuit of being one’s brother’s keeper and design to include the ethno-linguistic other. As the amorous chorus travels from one language to another, it is capable of acquiring meanings and interpretations that might not have been originally intended by their composers. That, to some extent, suggests that the triumph over Babel is still incomplete, in fact, it could be a mere illusion that only temporarily supports an invention of Christian togetherness.

Christian accommodation to multilingualism in the singing of choruses in Nigeria demonstrates sensitivity to its Babelized membership and patronage, particularly the differences in the perception of language choice. In this case, the group does not want to take the collective acceptance of just any language for granted. Although it is not possible to render the choruses in all the languages spoken by all the members, or the languages they identify with, the fact that a chorus has been sung in some of the languages (in a kind of random selection of those languages) suggests some fairness already, it is assumed. Multilingual chorusing tends to signify the many-voices-in-one-risen-saviour and celebrates the fact that in Jesus Christ, linguistic difference ought to be viewed as an opportunity to build the strength of that one family of God. How one wishes that this same orientation in which the other’s language is found attractive and useful can be adopted in addressing the language problem that Nigeria still faces at the national level.

Beyond the Rhetoric of Self-Representation in the Interrogation of Governance in Nigeria

2012-01-21T09:46:00.000-08:00

By

Obododimma Oha

Suddenly, every Nigerian becomes a revolutionary, armed with rhetoric. From Facebook presence to listserv debate, from exchanges in street-side chance meetings to table talks in staff club unwinding, Nigerians are loud, combative, and amazingly creative as they critique the condition of the Nigerian state. For some, critiquing the nation state is already becoming a profession, as they explore one rhetorical strategy after another to impress their audiences. Perhaps this apparent renaissance of the spirit of revolution is part of the change that Nigeria, one of the most badly governed countries in the world, seriously needs. One is inclined to be sceptical, though, wondering if what one sees is the genuine spirit of change or some manifestation of a fraudulent desire to join the outraged multitude in saying what many want to hear and capitalizing on the popular emotions of the moment to achieve cheap popularity. Just as it is said in popular Igbo discourse, Ndi mekaniiki ekwezighi anyi mara ndi ara na-awi (Motor mechanics have made it difficult for us to know those who are truly insane), those who genuinely attempt to repair the broken down machine of the Nigerian civilization now seem to be competing with mad people in the art of wearing rags. Hasn’t it become difficult for us in Nigeria to tell the difference between the patriotic citizens and those opportunists who want to ride on the back of popular protest to answer revolutionaries, given that both seek legitimacy through their use of rhetoric?

Some benefit of democracy, we are told, is the right to free speech, the freedom to banish silence finally. Nigerians are talking. Yes, they have been talking and I like it. Nigerians are talking and asking questions, serious questions, about how they are being governed in their country. That is good. It shows that they want their rulers to be accountable to them. It shows that they themselves want to know how much about their country’s affairs they know. These days, when two or more Nigerians are gathered, some rhetoric about their failed nation state is on their lips. Goodluck Jonathan is on their lips. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is on their lips. Sanusi Lamido Sanusi and Diezani Allison-Madueke are on their lips. What else does one want them to talk about? What else? Is it about how to become committed themselves in their own personal assignments, subsidy or no subsidy? Stop for a moment to listen to the conversations and you would quickly find someone playing the role of a professor of Nigerian affairs, analyzing, explaining, pontificating, predicting. Every professor of Nigerian affairs is highly informed, knows all the theories of development and the appropriate model the government should have applied. Every professor of Nigerian affairs is telling the impressionable audience of discourse Nigeriana that they know policy planning at their fingertips and should have been the right advisers to government.

At a newsstand down the street, someone picks a newspaper that has been touched by several hands, flips through the pages, and starts talking about Nigeria’s bad government, ethnic rivalry, terrorism, industrial action, or any other hot issue that is associated with the contemporary Nigerian world. Other people who have congregated at the newsstand listen to this “lecturer” for a while and then someone loses his or her patience and interrupts the lecture. A serious debate starts. Isn’t it why it is called “the People’s Parliament”? Previously, the Parliament used to attract retired individuals and few unemployed, but now it attracts a crowd of idlers who, instead of helping to boost the day’s sales, only helps in creating a “bad market” for the vendor and for the newspaper house. Previously, it used to be a case of “read and return” with twenty Naira, the vendor smiling home with the gain and returning the unsold papers to the newspaper house. The vendor used to be happy doing this, not knowing that the problem of bad market he was promoting would eventually get to him. These days, the crowd would gather and the lectures would begin, later followed by endless debates, but after that, not many are willing to do the usual thing!

At religious services too, the sermon, expectedly, shifts to the state of the nation. And who has the right authority to speak about this in a way the congregation would believe than the ukochukwu, the mediator between God and humans, the” man-of-God”? It does not matter if the man-of-God is a teacher in an unfortunate Nigerian institution and has been sharing his time between teaching his students properly and “pastoring” or “imaming” his religious group. It does not matter if he barely has the time to prepare his lectures and teach his classes or to attend to his other academic responsibilities, simply because he has to hurry back to his religious location where he is truly doing the work of God, or if he has to return to his class later, too tired to be of any use to his students after conducting endless prayers and vigils. It does not matter if he enjoys our love offerings and tithes on behalf of God, given that the labourer is worthy of his pay. Now, given the much-talked-about failure of governance, the man-of-God or man-of-Allah must help the people of God to understand that God is not asleep and will raise men to change the country. Now, that’s consoling! The preacher is on our side, speaking as God-with-us!

As the” lecturers” and revolutionaries gather at the newsstands or other venues, performing their excellence as “knowers” and lovers of Nigeria, so do loud talkers gather in web environments to demonstrate their sainthood. What remains to be acknowledged is that these same Nigerians may have contributed in one way or another in making it difficult for Nigeria to experience positive change in public life. The Nigerian irony is amazing: the Nigerian that condemns ethnocentrism turns out to be its practitioner; the Nigerian that is complaining about lack of commitment in public service turns out to be the person who would not settle down and work to justify the wages received monthly; and so on. One, therefore, is worried: Who is really on Nigeria’s side?

The whole scenario is worth observing closely, with the various forms of rhetoric emerging, especially with reference to the widespread protest against the removal of government subsidy on petroleum products consumed in Nigeria. Expectedly, as the government and its agents deploy various strategies including news management, those confronting government have used the social media extensively. But within this use of the social or other media are subtle rhetorical pursuits that must be noted. There are many who never marched but have made the loudest noise about how they confronted security agents, backing up their claims with photographs taken here and there. Photographs and video clips are forms of rhetorical proof that we can supposedly easily accept, after all, “seeing is believing.” And they are even more persuasive if the narrators are located in the videos or photos. There are those who, like the character Obinna in Tony Ubesie’s Juo Obinna, never saw “the battlefield” of the protest but have been going around (even in online platforms) boasting about their heroic deeds in anti-government protest. There are also those who want to impress us with stories about how they religiously followed the debates in the media and how they displayed their anger by almost smashing their television sets and personal computers for relaying information they did not like, and how they have written “bad” rejoinders to question government propaganda. It is about heroism, it seems.

How I wish that every Nigerian that claims to have stood up against government’s removal of petrol subsidy actually means to stand against fraud, including the fraud in the presentation of their involvement in the discourse on the Nigerian crisis. How I wish that all those who waged a battle against the removal of oil subsidy and against government’s squandering of resources are actually not squandering their own resources and cheating employers in their places of work. It is interesting that the situation presented by Benjamin Franklin in The Way to Wealth so very closely applies to Nigerians in this case: just as the crowd at the bazaar sales mentioned at the beginning of The Way to Wealth get ready to squander their resources while complaining about government’s heartlessness in its imposition of high taxes, so do many Nigerians who complain about the withdrawal of subsidy and government’s extravagance and corruption also overlook their own lack of wisdom in the way they manage resources to (re)build their society and their personal lives.

Indeed, Nigerians must go beyond the rhetoric of self-representation in the recent confrontation with bad governance in their country, to be able to make the protest more meaningful and well-focused.

SubsiTalk: Subsidy, Subsidie, Subsidim

2012-01-15T04:38:00.000-08:00

By

Obododimma Oha

Some public commentators interested in life in Nigeria have observed that Nigerians generally have a good sense of humour and are among the happiest people in the world. Whereas being the “happiest” is not synonymous with having quality in life or being pleased with one’s circumstances, Nigerian humour and happiness may be just a therapy for the difficult and unimaginable circumstances that Nigerians have found themselves over time on account of bad governance and corruption in public life. Displaying a sense of humour may, in this case, be a sign of resignation to one’s fate, or to say, one has to learn to live with what appears difficult to change. But there is also something admirable in learning to cheer up while confronting terrible circumstances, what the late Afrobeat musician, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, humorously captures as “shufferin’ and smilin’” (suffering and smiling). Although Nigerians cannot smile away their social problems but must deal with them, they recognise, too, that humour could serve as a veritable sarcastic weapon in confronting the objectionable circumstances they have been living in. This presence of corrective humour has again manifested in the recent protest against the government’s withdrawal of subsidy on the cost of locally-consumed petroleum products in the oil-rich country. Nigerians embarked on a massive protest both within the country and overseas, deploying social media such as Facebook in circulating information and coordinating their activities, just as was the case with the Arab Spring.

Anti-government humour that has been featuring in the protest, it should be noted, exists in various modes such as still-life images manipulated with photo-editing software, cartoons, jokes posted as Status updates on Facebook, parodic adverts circulated as SMSed greetings, and several other creative pieces. Here is a sample of one of those humorous texts, this time parodying the advert of transport service (which is an aspect of life in Nigeria that would likely be badly affected by the removal of petrol subsidy):

Now available for sale in different sizes
-- Bicycle
-- Camel
-- Horse
-- Donkey
We can also train and equip ur dog, goat, ram etc to carry u around. They don’t use fuel or gas. Visit us at our office, No 1, Oil Subsidy Road, Alison Madueke Junctn, Goodluck Close, Off
Okonjo-Iweala Street, by Labaran Maku Avenue, Sanusi Lamido District, Abuja. Or call
080-ABUJA-GEJ. Enjoy the promised fresh air.

The parodist in the text above very effectively connects the proponents of the subsidy removal with the imagined location of the service provider/advertizer. Diezani Allison-Madueke (the Petroleum Resources Minister), Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (Nigeria’s President), Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (Nigeria’s Finance Minister), Sanusi Lamido Sanusi (Governor of Nigeria’s Central Bank), and Labaran Maku (Nigeria’s Minister for Information) feature in the deixis of memory and imagined spatiality of the crisis. They are therefore being presented to us as the “direction” to the crisis, invariably being held responsible for the consequences on ground, which also includes a return, an unfortunate retrogression, to crude means of transport, an increase in mass suffering instead of its alleviation. In that case, the last line, “Enjoy the promised fresh air,” becomes an irony, for the ride entails a return to hardship, and not necessarily an attempt to experience a holiday-like fun of donkey ride!

One also notices an interesting penetration of the subsidy issue into the lexical repertoire of popular Nigerian (bilingual) speech in English. One does not suppose that such words that have been humorously created to capture the temper of the time would stay and become acceptable in formal communication. As vogue expressions of the moment, they are definitely bound to drop off public communication with time, or be merely remembered when it comes to considering how language documents and interrogates Nigeria’s historical and political experiences.

But one should also be interested in the semiotic structures of these subsidy-related expressions, their explicit and implicit meanings, as well as the basis for their use in the current crisis in Nigeria. The English word “subsidy,” which is at the heart of the crisis, and is defined in Investopedia as "A benefit given by the government to groups or individuals usually in the form of a cash payment or tax reduction. The subsidy is usually given to remove some type of burden and is often considered to be in the interest of the public," is also central to the humorous lexical creations that have featured in the discourse in social media in relation to the Nigerian protest. Indeed, “subsidy” has already proved to be a slippery term which the major actors in the crisis have been wrestling with too. Following the widespread condemnation of the withdrawal of the subsidy as heartless, the counter-discourse that there has indeed been no “subsidy” on local consumption of petroleum, which means that government is deceiving Nigerians in continuation of the culture of fraud, and the counter-argument in the public debate that government is not sincerely looking for a way of improving the Nigerian situation but looking for more money to share among the corrupt politicians, government representatives in their rhetoric have tried to reinvent the term to convince Nigerians. Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, Governor of Nigeria’s Central Bank, had, during the public debate on the subsidy issue (prior to its removal) offered a reconceptualization of subsidy as “rent.” This shift in the semiotic of subsidy was mainly because he discovered in the context of the debate that the term “subsidy” was in trouble and that sticking to it endangered his pro-government position in that debate. The option he took, as a clever and perceptive debater, was to abandon the term and shift to another that he considered favourable to his position, and which, in our thinking, presented technical difficulties for ordinary Nigerians to deal with. Rent is not exactly the same thing as in “house rent; its clarity only depended on “experts” like Sanusi Lamido to provide to Nigerian masses. Is it not the elite, Plato’s “guardians,” like Lamido and Okonjo-Iweala, who should mint signs and signifiers and feed the people with their meanings, and guide them towards lofty political goals? So, no more “subsidy” but "rent," this shift midway in the discourse obviously revealing the slippery nature of government, a government that seems to see governance as a game of hide-and-seek, or more preferably what Wole Soyinka calls “hide-and-speak” in his poem, “Telephone Conversation.” In conversing with Nigerians, government would either prefer that meaning continues to shift, obviously demonstrating its unwillingness to cooperate and work in line with people-sensitive democratic principles.

In the emergent humorous subsidy-related lexis, Nigerians have demonstrated their disillusionment in democratic governance in the country, their perception of what government calls “subsidy-removal” as a national tragedy (or a sign of the beginning of national tragedy). The term “subsidie,” a phonological play on “subsidy,” effectively suggests that there is a thin boundary between the phonological spaces of the two words, and, analogically, a thin boundary between what the Government's term is supposed to mean and what Nigerians think it means. (Of course, the use of “subsidie” by some Nigerians in their being sarcastic about the Government’s notion of subsidy interestingly recalls the use of “subsidie” as the spelling of “subsidy” in Middle English). However, Nigerian users of “subsidie,” in narrating a contemporary national experience, are not really interested in the old spelling of the word but in the occurrence of “die” in its structure (SUBSIdie), even if this is merely a matter of orthographic resemblance. The semiotic of death in the subsidy talk, what I loosely call “SubsiTalk,” draws attention to the conspiracy theories and fears circulating about subsidy removal. One of such texts issued on 11 January 2012 by Economic Intelligence Press Forum based in New York, titled “Who Is Behind Subsidy Removal?” points towards a grand international conspiracy, alleging that the subsidy removal is a “Lethal Option” which is “plan by the Billionaires and their surrogates … to kill the Black African people directly by imposing high cost of living … lamentable even more because their presidents have shown total ignorance and lack of sensitivity” (Ellipses mine).National death is therefore foregrounded in the reinvention of subsidy as "SUBSIDIE."

Given the frightening and alarming nature of "the Lethal Option" mentioned above, wouldn't a spiritualization of hope for redemption or protection become attractive to embattled Nigerians? A friend circulated a joke about an Igbo person naming his son who was born during the subsidy crisis “Chibusubsidim,” which means “God is my subsidy.” Igbo speakers in Nigeria sometimes demonstrate their bilingual and bicultural attributes by mixing English and Igbo, even to the point of creating lexical items that are half Igbo, half English. Oliver de Coque, a major Igbo highlife musician, had, in one of his albums, condemned this speech orientation, which he calls “Engligbo.” The refrain of the major track in that album says, “Onye asuzila Engligbo o o!” (Let no one continue to speak Engligbo). What needs to be noted, however, is that Engligbo is not only a representation of Igbo cultural hybridity but that it also has some deliberate creative relevance in postcolonial Igbo speech. It also comes handy in the Igbo practice of language-based humour. Surely, Igbo speakers, just like other Nigerians, have cause to play with language and laugh at themselves and their situations.

In the coinage and use of “Chibusubsidim,” the fictional Igbo person that gave his son that name is actually continuing what has been there in Igbo cultural onomastics. In Igbo tradition, people could be named in remembrance of particular events or situations, or as a means of fashioning a philosophy of life for the bearer of the name. In this regard, there are such names as “Aghadi” (There is War, or War is On), given to a child born in wartime, for instance the Nigeria-Biafra War (1967 to 1970); Uzoaro ("On the road to Arochukwu," which registers where and how the bearer was born); etc. Some Igbo people, given their orientation to Western life and culture as well as the influence of Pentecostal Christianity, consider such names backward-looking or obsolete, preferring the use of Igbo names with “Chi” in their structure, or such names that have no Igbo outlook, like “Favour,” “Promise,” “Miracle,” etc. The name “Chibusubsidim,” stands midway between a modern Chritianization project in Igbo culture and an orientation to hybrid semiosis. The English word “subsidy” is harvested and inserted within the lexical structure of “Chibu—m” (Chi+bu+X+m), as in “Chibuikem” (God is my strength). In such insertion, “subsidy” is phonologically transformed to fit into the host Igbo phonological structure; in other words, it is by virtue of its transformation functioning in that context as an Igbo part of the compound word. It is therefore an Igbo-based lexical semiotic transformation, even when the ordinary Igbo speaker in the local area would find it difficult to figure out what that part means.

One can find similar lexical practices in Igbo Christian evangelical music. In one of Obi Igwe’s songs, one finds such forms:

I na-aga church na-ezu ohi
Ekwensu mere gi something
Ekwensu gburu gi nwaayo
Eziokwu o finishiri gi
Ekwensu deceivuru gi
…
Words like “finishiri” and “deceivuru” are as humorous as they raise interesting issues about the structures of English words patterned as Igbo words. One cannot help laughing at the recreation of the English suffix (-ed) Past marker as an Igbo Past marker, “-ri” and “-ru.” Nigerian lexical playfulness and creativity in relation to social experience is therefore a significant aspect of social semiotics in the country and which one needs to follow in studying trends and the life of signs in Nigerian public culture.

The name “Chibusubsidim” might as well be treated as a percolation of perspectives expressed in the media, especially social media, where many Nigerians go in recent times to share ideas and benefit from the views of others. I had, in fact, also written in my Facebook Status Update on 6 January 2012 (at 12.48AM): “God's SUBSIDY in my life has not been withdrawn. God isn't as heartless as those who present such withdrawals to their countrymen and women as a New Year gift!” Perhaps I am one of those already bearing the name, “Chibusubsidim,” without even realizing it!

The joke about petrol subsidy crisis in Nigeria also features in local greeting forms. One could hear neighbours and work partners in the South-Western part of Nigeria softening the tension of the crisis by jokingly saying to one another, “E ku subsidy!” (Well done for subsidy). Generally, Yoruba culture admits and encourages the use of greeting for almost every situation, indeed emphasizing the necessity for communion and the idea of being with the other in life experiences. So, there are greetings for existing human situations, as well as greetings for situations that are yet to unfold! There is greeting for working as well as for resting. Why shouldn’t every aspect of life matter? And why shouldn’t the removal of petrol subsidy be something encoded in the greeting ritual so that as people meet and mix, they have to reflect on emergent social problems instead of pretending they don’t exist, or that they don’t need to be confronted? E ku subsidy therefore suggests an invitation to action, a reminder of an obligation to think about a problem, as well as an opportunity to laugh at the idea of subsidy and governance in Nigeria.

Nigerian SubsiTalk is Nigerian public discourse telling the story of the country's travails in a way that invites closer attention to language and human condition in the contemporary Nigerian society. Mikhail Bakhtin, operating under the pen name “Volosinov,” argues in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language that the sign is a site of struggle, a location where meaning is contested, or is the focus of power struggle in society. That position is very true in relation to the semiotic of “subsidy” in current petrol crisis in Nigeria. It is particularly gladdening that many Nigerians are aware of the fact that government and its functionaries are doing things with words with the Nigerian people and are determined to interrogate it and demonstrate that their own semiotic also matters in giving the nation state a direction.

Texting Christmas and New Year: the Fun and the Craft in a Phatic Communion

2012-01-03T12:20:00.001-08:00

by

Obododimma Oha

Christmas often occasions the exchange of goodwill message between friends, acquaintances, relatives, and professional colleagues. The message has become quite stereotyped, not just in content but also style. A finely-worded Christmas greeting card could obviously add to the joy that a celebrant hopes for during the Christmas season. In spite of the stereotyped nature of many Christmas messages (which has been mainly caused by the copying and reprinting of existing messages for commercial benefits), some individual recipients of Christmas cards still pay attention to what those cards are saying, and try to imagine the senders of the cards as actually "saying" those words to them. Even when buyers of such cards are not the authors of those messages, they ultimately assume responsibility of authorship by selecting those cards from the stores, buying them, signing their names as those saying those things, and mailing them! In other words, even if one has not read the words on the cards before buying, signing, and mailing them, one has committed oneself by sending them. As a matter of fact, it is extremely risky to pick a card marked "Christmas Greeting" in a card store and simply sign and mail it with the assumption that it must be saying the usual good things of Christmas. That is extremely risky, for the card goes to represent the sender before the receiver without also saying, "Oh, he or she picked me in a hurry," or "he or she assumed the card could not have said the wrong thing"! What if the Christmas card is saying more than the simple words of Christmas? What if the card expresses a deep affection, the type that only a lover can say to another lover, and the sender, impervious of this fact, picks it and sends it to his or her boss, to a married woman or man, etc? Cards create lasting impressions!

In another angle, some of the Christmas and other greeting cards found in the shops today may have other language problems, for instance grammatical errors. If a professor of the English language should pick such a card printed in bad English and mail it to another colleague, maybe overseas, wouldn't that be terribly damaging on his or her reputation? The receiver may understand that the sender did not print the card, but cannot excuse the fact that the sender subscribes to the bad English the card speaks. An exception here, of course, is the deliberate use of dialect in writing the card, maybe to evoke humor, negotiate linguistic identity, etc. For instance, one can find some peculiar cards written in Nigerian pidgin, which say such things as: "Make we celebrate as Mary don born Jesus for Bethlehem to save man pikin," "Tank you Jesus for to come become like me," and "Dis na true love, Papa God come become man."

Further, the design of a Christmas or any other card is part of the language the card speaks. Senders of cards can and do select from a wide range of designs, each choice being dependent on the sender's personal preferences, assumptions about what the receiver would like, focus on how the design would communicate an aspect of the Christmas that the sender is interested in, etc. With the emergence of the personal computer and availability of photo editing software, senders can easily generate their own designs, edit existing photos or designs, or select from a range of templates available on the Internet.

Also, the emergence of mobile telephony and the sms writing has greatly affected both the tradition of buying and sending printed cards and the exchange pattern of messages at Christmas. Electronic writing of the mobile telephone type is a tradition of paperless communication. It also solves the problem of postal delay in some countries, which sometimes causes printed cards to get to their addressers only after the celebration. Further, whereas printed cards require expending energy and time to obtain them from shops, and do cost more, sms and other electronically relayed cards are far cheaper. An individual can also send just one type of card to 1000 recipients in his or her phone or computer contact list, at the click of a button. The sender doesn't have to address 1000 separate cards and post them, and still be able to enjoy Christmas like others!

One challenge that attends to electronic messaging in Christmas and other social celebrations is the deluge of such messages and how to deal with them. If postal delay is painful, at least it ironically postpones the stress of having to respond to all the messages from one's multitude of acquaintances. But with electronic messaging, one has to respond to all these coming in, at least to be fair to the senders. It would, of course, amount to an impoliteness and lack of civility for one to receive a message of good wishes at Christmas and not respond to them or to reciprocate! So, one has to share one's Christmas time punching the keys of one's electronic device, almost endlessly. With one hand one grabs the turkey leg and with another hand types a message to respond to an incoming good wishes of yuletide. And, as one is trying to complete one, another Christmas message arrives.

With electronic writing comes what one could refer to as "electronic Christmas," which requires special skills of navigating the computer or cellphone and creating images of Christmas that are, in their own right, a remarkable demonstration of creativity.

Some of messages are also particularly amusing and playful, adding to the design of cheering up the receiver during the period. One of such playful SMSed Christmas messages which I received from an old schoolmate read as follows:

"B4 pple begin to send u fake and insincere New Year wishes, let me send u & ur loved ones my family's original New Year Wishes. Belovd, in 2012 God will open up new horizons in ur life, turn ur pressures to pleasure & all ur obstacles to miracle, in Jesus name. Amen."

So, there are "original" as well as "fake" season's greetings? One could easily identify a re-registration here: the language of commerce used in Nigeria obviously becomes re-used here in referring to type of season's greetings. Nigerian business persons often try to draw the attention of their customers to the difference between the genuine products they have in stock and the fake versions also in circulation. The analogy implied in my friend's re-use of the language is revealing, for season's greeting comes to feature as something being marketed to service tenor, in this case to maintain close inter-personal relationship. I would obviously prefer to value an "original" greeting meant for me to a "fake" one merely transferred to me, it is assumed.

Competition is also clearly implied in the message, for the sender is not just sending what he feels I would treasure more, but is interested in the time of its arrival as a variable. What arrives first creates and maintains lasting impression in the recipient. In that case, the arrival of the genuine message in good time would make me treasure my relationship with the sender more than I would for later senders. Late senders, it is assumed, don't think highly of the relationship with the recipients!

I particularly like the poetry in the language of the SMSed greeting cited above. One notices internal parallelisms: "turn ur pressures to pleasure," ur obstacles to miracle." "Pressures" and "pleasure" share phonological features, with some minor phonemic differences --indeed those differences accounting for the expressed divine transformation. If the phonemic changes do not happen, no matter how minimal, then no (divine) transformation of the addressee's circumstances has taken place. One's pRessureS have to drop their significant "R" and plural "S" for the "pleasure" to emerge and happen as the acceptable semiotic. Similarly, one's OBSTacles have to dough off the first four letters (OBST) and allow a reinvestment with MIR for MIRacle of change and difference to happen. Indeed, a demonstration of the desired transformation through the structure of the verbal elements used!

Some of the SMS messages also try to introduce an element of surprise which, in fact, is connected to the whole idea of creating excitement and pleasant experience in the sharing of Christmas goodwill. Two of such messages I received read as follows:

(1) Credit alert. Acc. No: Year 2012
   Acc Name: The favoured by God
   Depositor: Holy Spirit
   Amt: Grace, Glory, and Peace.
   Avail. Bal: Good health, long life, prosperity and joy in the Holy
   Spirit. All for you and your household.
(2) ALERT: CREDIT! ACCT: 1/1/2012 of Dr Obodo Oha
   Amnt: Divine Fav'r.
   Depositr: Almi'ty Gd. Aval. Bal: Gud health long life, prosperity
   Remark: Congrats & Happy Nw Yr, Sir.

Obviously, the two messages above are variants of a type of Christmas/Christmas message with bank alert as its textual frame. The emergence of this re-registration of religious message as banking discourse in the Nigerian context is somewhat linked to the introduction of electronic messaging by banks in Nigeria, particularly through SMS and email alerts. As always, one discourse learns to borrow from another to support its own type of rhetoric.

The framing of the Christmas message as a bank credit alert is particularly attention-grabbing, partly because many people want to know what is happening to their money in the bank, what more when it involves information that deposit has been made. They want to know immediately the amount paid in, who made the deposit, etc. Second, at the time many people using cellphones are dealing with a deluge of Christmas messages and the frequent arrival of the sms becomes a disturbance for one wanting to enjoy the Christmas in other ways, some people may not want to bother to give fuller attention to what each arriving SMS is saying. They might say, "Oh, same Merry Christmas again!" So, an sms Christmas message crafted as information about money is a special trick to win attention.

it should be noted that there is already an existing sub-genre of Christian tract evangelization that tries to reinvent the Christian message about repentance, salvation, and the consequences of sin as a financial transaction. Some evangelical tracts in circulation in Nigeria are designed like currency notes or bank cheques. Interestingly, it is hard currencies like the dollar and the Euro that feature in such designs and not the Naira, the local currency. The reason is clear: the dollar and the Euro are stronger than the Naira in the market, and to be wealthy in the hard currency is to be above many other citizens. From that paradigm, one can imagine the Chrtistian tract saying implicitly that it offers a form of truth or salvation that is higher than some others being preached.

Ordinarily, the messages circulated during Christmas and New Year celebrations could become stereotyped and boring if the same old forms and contents are present. But the presence of Information Technology makes a great difference: IT provides opportunities through multimedia facilities for the same old content to be reinvented so that sharing them becomes a very wonderful experience that makes the season desirable to many. Visual and audio Christmas and New Year messages created with smart phones and PCs add to the artistic recreation of the season as cultural performance and help in compensating for the problem of message stereotyping.

Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle All for Wealth: Igbu Ozu and the Spirit of Christmas

2011-12-25T07:07:00.000-08:00

by

Obododimma Oha

For more than a thousand years, Christians all over world have been celebrating Christmas, a remembrance about the birth of Jesus of Nazareth who is recognized in Christianity as the Son of God and savior of the world. Christians value Christmas as a celebration of the love and mercy of God, as well as peace to the world. They attach particular significance to the name given to Jesus -- "Emmanuel" (God with us) -- as indeed a statement God is making through the birth of a savior, his son, who, as part of the Trinity, is also God Himself. So, if God is with us, how can we want in a country where politicians see their election as an opportunity for them to loot or share public funds? How can we be afraid of bomb attacks, abductions, armed banditry, etc?

Christmas, for some people, is not just a celebration of the birth of Jesus the Christ who is a symbol of love. It is also a moment to think money and how to make the other surrender it, willingly or unwillingly. This dimension, however, is often not considered in thinking about Christmas as it is celebrated today, or is lost in the dominant discourse on "joy to the world"! The fact is that someone makes someone pay for sharing in this joy to the world. Christmas thus largely become a commodity, as well as context for exchange of commodities. Many business persons pray and expect to have a large volume of sales, with significant profit. For aviation workers, it is high season and fares have to be high to "compensate" for the heavy traffic of clients. In a country like Nigeria, the expectation for prices of goods to rise has almost become normal and even acceptable, especially among business people. Priests and other religious gatekeepers give us the impression that they discourage this merchandizing of Christmas, but they themselves also do not fail to harvest from those who have come to share in the joy of the new-born king. They expect the offertory takings to rise beyond normal at Christmas season services -- especially on Christmas Day. There has to the Christmas thanksgiving, where every worshipper must come and financially express gratitude to God for "living to see another Christmas." One thanksgiving procession would not do; two, no three separate thanksgivings. And then the main offertory for the service. And then the special offertory for the church building. And then the offertory for church office. And then the "offertories" as may be required by the bishop. And then the special thanksgiving for those "abroad" (that have returned for Christmas, if it is a church in the local area). We don't see these people often; now that Christmas has brought them home, we must really bring them home! After that, members of the congregation can begin to troop out of the church showing their new clothes and running from the fireworks...

And what about those more eloquent settings of modernity where Santa Claus jingles the bells of the little town of Bethlehem? Surely, they have practices that signify that Christmas is still Christmas, not so? Discount sales in shops during Christmas, for instance, which many see as a show of goodwill, for some who do not have to be able to afford the cost and be able to share with others during Christmas. Perhaps in some cases there is such genuine motive behind discounting sales during Christmas. But in many cases, it is part of the strategy to deal with competition in the market, to attract more customers, to clear the old stock and prepare for a new season of getting people to buy. Furthermore, some that buy from discount Christmas sales also do so to be able to stock what they would use elsewhere to make more gain -- whether monetary or non-monetary. So, even discount sales are not always given to the spirit of Christian love.

Even if Christmas discount sales are that attractive and heartening as being in tandem with the message of Christmas, its contrast applies in some poor African countries where the orientation is to hike prices -- from fares to cost of chicken parts. At least in that respect, we may be reminded that the world isn't really any fool's global village. What we do here for Christmas isn't exactly what you do there for your own Christmas. Those who celebrate Christmas are symbolically being told by their exploiters -- who may also be Christians wishing to celebrate Christmas in a big way -- that they must pay dearly to have a merry Christmas.

The Nollywood movie, "Onwa December," in a very panoramic way, presents a sharp critique of what Christmas has become in postcolonial Nigeria. Instead of being a celebration of love, it has become a moment when some individuals enact their heartlessness in their exploitation and dispossession of others of their lives and property. In a society where being wealthy attracts respect, where not many people bother about has that wealth has been acquired, many individuals -- who incidentally bear Christian identity -- would want to be celebrated as they celebrate Christmas, even if they have robbed and killed other citizens, if if they have engaged in ritual murder, even if they have made away with valuables entrusted in their care, etc. As indicated in an Igbo slogan, igbu ozu (literally "committing murder') is their only creed.

Igbu ozu, figuratively, indicates a sudden and amazing acquisition of wealth. Often featuring in discourses about wealth among modern Igbo business persons, this slogan captures almost literally the lack of feeling that goes with arriving at such sudden wealth. Incidentally, igbu ozu, though shocking to our sense of decency and ethics, is very attractive to many young business persons who have almost lost confidence in the ability of God to intervene in their circumstances. It is quite clear that the choice -- a very costly one -- that they are making is to do just anything to get wealthy. Quite clearly, using one's igbu ozu to welcome Jesus the Prince of Peace and Saviour of the world is not just contrary to the Christian message; it is also against reason. One cannot use what Christianity does not stand for to celebrate Christ's birth.

The igbu ozu, as a means of achieving self-flagellation, is, however, considered a means of impressing one's local community which, on its part, has turned the Christian feast to a moment of comparing and contrasting between Okeke and Okafo, and celebrating individuals from whom they can receive a handsome piece of pottage. In this case, instead of encouraging a sense of community as known in Igbo traditional festivals, the new Christmas has becomes a poison that endangers community. And, indeed, some who travel to their villages to display their igbu ozu, or to know who has achieved igbu ozu, may become the ozu that would never return to their businesses in the cities. The igbo society, it must be acknowledged, encourages genuine industry and healthy competition with one's peers. Igbo persons that refuse to work hard to catch up with their peers (as one finds in the life of Unoka, Okonkwo's father in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart) become a disappointment, indeed a source of shame, to their families and communities. So, this spirit of struggling to be a success is already part of what igboness means. But its misapplication in the form of igbu ozu is quite an embarrassment and a scandal that the contemporary Igbo society should be interested in confronting, as one finds Igbo cultural productions, for instance the movie, "Onwa December," already doing.

Those who celebrate igbu ozu within Christmas essentially try to subvert the message of Christmas from salvation to damnation and also destroy the sense in which community feasts in Black Africa help in servicing the spirit of community. Communities that directly or indirectly encourage igbu ozu have become like nwanza the bird that prefers to eat beyond measure and later fall dead on the road.

This Netizen Is a Virus

2011-12-18T00:40:00.000-08:00

By

Obododimma Oha

I have read about Netizenship becoming an addiction, indeed a mental health problem, since such Netizens cannot have peace of mind until they have read or responded to this or that material on the Web. Of course, responding to a post on the Web -- say a Status update on Facebook or listserv post -- also invites its own condition of loss of peace of mind, since the Netizens responding have to return again and again to read responses to their own responses. Their work lives suffer tremendously too, which is one reason employers of labour want to block Social Network access in their organization's Internet networks. Not that Social Media like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc have no relevance to productivity in the workplace. But when an employee can no longer concentrate on specific tasks in the workplace and spends most of the work hours chatting with friends or fighting listserv wars, it becomes a big problem for an organization.

Netizens that cannot resist responding to issues on the Web could, figuratively speaking, become viruses, infecting other Web users' minds, luring them into endless controversies on the Web. We are in need some immunity against such virus infections. First, one needs self-control to be able to resist responding to such viruses that come in the name of free speech, even when one or one's group is directly mentioned in the message.

It is also important for one to be sufficiently discriminatory in consuming messages found on the Web, or messages that come into one's inbox. Indeed the Web -- let's say a listserv specifically -- witnesses a deluge of messages, most of them quite distracting and injurious to one's orientation to decency. The option then is to IGNORE messages with subjects that relate to controversies. Virus Netizens like and do circulate such controversial messages and wait eagerly to get responses. Indeed, they set traps for particular targets, hoping that such targets would lose their cool and get involved.

Virus Netizens belong to various web-based groups and often unethically circulate posts featured in some groups mainly as a way of spreading the controversy beyond the borders of specific groups. Proliferation is their orientation. In other words, virus Netizens could cause an epidemic, a discourse epidemic. From a legal angle, such mass distribution of group-based discussion or post without permission from the group, or from the specific authors of the posts, in the name of quoting them, should attract litigation. It is a violation of rights to privacy in discourse. You don't eavesdrop to a person's (or group) conversation and then rush to the marketplace to retail it! If "The Web is a free place to die/A dead place to be free," as I have reflected in a poem, "Online Lines," published in Sentinelpoetry, #40, December 2006), it is also a place where a Netiquette exists to differentiate personal freedom from lawlessness and recklessness. The core rules of Netiquette, taken from Virginia Shea's book, Netiquette, are as follows:

THE CORE RULES OF NETIQUETTE

Rule 1: Remember the Human
Rule 2: Adhere to the same standards of behavior online that you follow in real life
Rule 3: Know where you are in cyberspace
Rule 4: Respect other people's time and bandwidth
Rule 5: Make yourself look good online
Rule 6: Share expert knowledge
Rule 7: Help keep flame wars under control
Rule 8: Respect other people's privacy
Rule 9: Don't abuse your power
Rule 10: Be forgiving of other people's mistakes
(www.albion.com/netiquette/corerules.html )

Individuals operating on the Web have a right to be left undisturbed (a requirement covered by Rules 4 and 8 above), in spite of the fact that the Web is constructed as an open highway, or even a marketplace where one is free to sell one's wares. But you don't get to this highway and begin to drive recklessly, making it impossible for other road users to enjoy their use of the road. You also do not get to the market and impose your wares on the market folks. You don't even have the right to make so much noise in the market, even if you are a gbanjo-gbanjo hawker brandishing a bell in a local African market. You simply do not have the right to intrude into the peaceful lives of others, to ruin such lives with noise and rancor through cross-postings and mass-circulation of messages.

Virus Netizens indeed try to turn the playground into a battleground. If they cannot win at a given battleground, they try to infect other groups, ruining their ongoing civilized conversations. They infect you to make you their weapon (even against your own interest, when you become a virus Netizen too).

I would suggest to moderators of listservs not to be in a hurry to subscribe individuals to their groups for the sake of expanding their membership. They should first research the background of those intending to join. Since virus netizens cannot hide on the Web -- indeed they expose themselves on the Web -- they can easily be identified through a simple Google search. Since it appears that a cure for this human virus is difficult to find, the best option is to keep the virus out. As always, prevention is better than cure. Prevent the virus Netizen from attaching self to your group and to your civilized mind.

A Hiding Place for My Dough

2011-12-15T10:51:00.000-08:00

By

Obododimma Oha

Money, bucks, quids, dough ... Call it anything. This lexical field is very productive in English and other languages, the reason being that it features frequently in our lives, its connotations therefore proliferating. In the same way, its many hiding places are so varied and do communicate the values, fears, and interests of those who own or keep it. The safe, the wallet, the pocket, the bag, the woman's bra, the underwear....

The word "safe" -- a noun for where the dough is kept, either in a bank or house -- already suggests the underlying factor of fear about what could happen to the dough. Its housing speaks about its security. Where it is kept speaks about the fear of its owner.

Growing up in a world ruled by the power of dough appears to require having some education on how to accumulate and protect one's dough. And so our parents introduced us to the culture of nche ego, the money keeper, which in our own case was either a small box with only a small hole through which the pennies passed, or a small clay pot with a similar hole. The real test was the fact that one needed the pennies but had no access to them except when one eventually decided to break the pot or force open the box. But it was always at a time one was convinced that one had saved enough, or when one was forced by circumstances to retrieve and use the pennies. In our own case as children, that moment of need was mostly a festival period, when the "little adults" would proudly demonstrate to their parents that they could save to provide their own needs.

In those days, the akpa nwancholonwu, that plastic pouch highly prized by the girls in town -- looking much like the vagina -- housed the precious pennies for the village belle. The name nwancholonwu -- captured it all -- the purse received the rewards on behalf of another "purse" -- and the person who carried it "wanted" something -- that something was a metaphoric death -- "onwu." Sex was a figurative death.

In those days, too, a man's pair of pants was never properly sewn if it lacked the akpa alaehe -- that small shallow pocket that rested right on the right side of his groin and in which the precious pennies and farthings took refuge from the risky banters. A man's pennies needed to be closer to his penis. A man guarded his pennies with his penis, with his life. Even when banks have promised to take over the risks of looking after a man's dough, he still feels uncomfortable that his pennies are far from the daily watch of his penis.

A woman's attachment to her dough is even exceptional. Just as she is narrated in the culture as not just a bringer of dough but indeed the dough, she seems to have all her life in her dough and in what she uses in hiding her dough. She has her reasons.

The woman's dough is never safe in an environment policed by patriarchy. A married woman and her possessions belong to a man, it is assumed. She is his possession and so has no right to keep her money away from his reach. Anyway, she is not pleased releasing her dough to him, especially if she has to share his favors with another woman. If he has many wives, she knows she has to keep and guard her dough to her needs which he would not provide readily. But he still has his eyes on her dough, just as his heart guards her other secret places.

He borrows from her, promising to repay, but never does. "Are you on a business trip to MY house?" he would ask her sometimes. So, she gets wiser and guards her dough determinedly. She ties the dough at the end of her wrapper cloth, which is tied around her waist, and watches over it the way Eke the sacred python watches over her eggs. Anyone who wants it must first untie her wrapper -- and that means untying trouble!

Well, the knot at the end of her wrapper is now well-known as the knot of treasures. So she has to think of other safer places, other riskier places! The bra, which keeps her other untouchable treasures, is a good candidate. She squeezes or folds the dough and packs it away inside her bra. There the nipples of her breasts watch over the treasured currency notes. Any thief that dares go to the zone must explain what he is looking for. The touch is criminal enough. The search for the dough housed in the bra is simply scandalous.

Ok, if her man, by virtue of the license granted him by culture, extends his voyage of exploration to that sea route to India and finds the dough, other men unlicensed simply cannot dare. And by the way, she is wise enough to relocate the dough before the explorer arrives!

I have heard, too, that some women, knowing the adventurous and daring nature of the predators, even "bury" their dough deep in their underwear -- indeed in the thicket of their sacred gardens. No explorer dares get to that sacred garden, unless such an explorer is looking for trouble.

The dough has seen things and places. The dough has really travelled. It certainly deserves the special attention many people give it. It deserves the awe.

A Risen Sun That Shines Forever

2011-12-01T00:54:00.000-08:00

by

Obododimma Oha

When some days ago Olu Oguibe -- a poet, artist, and public intellectual -- called on his fellow netizens on Facebook to honor the memory of General Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, Biafra's leader who died in London recently, by using Biafra's flag as their personal profile image, it suddenly occurred to me that the Internet as a liberating medium has once more made it impossible for Nigeria to win the war that it fought with Biafra from 1967 to 1970. Of course, General Gowon had, at the end of the shooting war, proclaimed that there was "No victor, no vanquished," a statement that many interpreted as an expression of his largeness of heart, but which I see as an eternal truth that the mighty forces that control the history of humanity forced him to utter, even if he did not understand what he was saying. General Gowon had, in his experience of euphoria at the end of the war, proclaimed to the world that Biafra's "Rising Sun" had set forever. It was not just a chest-beating type of announcement; it was indeed an attempt at mocking Biafra's leaders and those that held Biafra as their pride. What Gowon did not see immediately was the fact that the Biafran Sun was shining and will continue to shine in the memory of those he was mocking. His attempt at extinguishing that risen sun was futile.

In the madness of making sure that the Biafran Sun had set forever, Gowon and his war commanders set about destroying whatever relics of Biafra that the Biafran population had salvaged from the ruins of war. Even art objects carrying the emblem of the Rising Sun were destroyed. I recall with great pain how my late father -- a leader in the Biafran civil defence corps -- was made to burn his walking stick that carried both the image of Odumegwu-Ojukwu and Biafra's Rising Sun. The destruction of my father's Biafran walking stick was for us in the family such a terrible experience, painful much like the death of a relative, for the artistically made stick was for us a representation of the Biafran vision and our pride as survivors. Years later, the Nigerian government shamelessly started looking for Biafran relics to equip the war museum at Umuahia. They started looking for objects that they had previously viewed as evidence of betrayal of the Nigerian nation-state and which they used in frightening the survivors of the war! The war after the war was extended to art and the memory of Biafra!

Now that Odumegwu-Ojukwu is dead, that memory that could not die has erupted to live in his place, or rather to live as him. Every burial provides an opportunity for a resurrection and for an idea to live forever. No one can extinguish an idea. Odumegwu-Ojukwu identified with that idea called "Biafra" and has now come to symbolize that idea itself. He was not just fighting to liberate the peoples of Eastern Nigeria, but trying to communicate that idea which even his enemies, the enemies of Biafra, were later to recognize following the liberation of Eritrea, South Sudan, etc. So, you see, it was not just a Biafran war; it was a universal war of self-determination. That's the idea!

Olu Oguibe asked his fellow netizens to make the Biafran Rising Sun, the Biafran idea, viral; to make it "occupy"" the very arena where it would continue to give stomach ache to the enemies of Biafra, the enemies of self-determination. He wrote: "Share this with your friends and on your group walls and listservs. Let's paint Facebook red, black and green with half of a yellow sun, in one rare moment of unity, and not discord." And it erupted: many on Facebook changed their profile pictures to the image of the Biafran flag. I changed mine too. i immediately became one with the Biafran idea by disappearing into the icon of the Biafran flag. The possibility of changing Facebook profile picture is such an appealing feature of the social media to people like me who would want to keep representing their unstable and multiple identities in a visual mode.

The change of the profile pictures to the Biafran flag also raised an interesting issue about visual differentiation of idenity in that virtual environment. For someone like me with three Facebook accounts, it became difficult for me to differentiate between one account and another. The three accounts -- which I refer to as my Facebook Trinity -- became one, just as I became one with Biafra, and one with other Facebook netizens that had changed their profile images to the flag!

Well, it is proper -- and indeed gladdening -- that the Biafran idea is the unifying element of my trinity, and the unifying element of Facebook netizenship. This is essentially the meaning Oguibe was looking for -- and which he signified as "one rare moment of unity, and not discord." Although Facebook netizens would have difficulty in visually differentiating one interactant from another -- since every interactant is now the Biafran idea -- one sees clearly that the Rising Sun is shining in spite of Gowon and Nigeria on Facebook today, 41 years after Gowon had proclaimed that that Sun had set forever. It is also shining in the hearts of many, more than it has ever shone before.

The option that the enemies of the Biafran idea and the Biafran memory have now is to shift the battleground from Umuahia Sector, Uli Airport Sector, Nsukka Sector, Nkpor Sector, Owerri Sector, Uyo Sector, Ikot-Ekpene Sector, etc to the cyberspace where the Biafran idea has suddenly become viral. But even if they are able to beat their chests later and say, "We have been able to make the Biafran Sun set forever," they still need to log into the disk of human mind and try to erase the memory of the Biafran idea.

I join Olu Oguibe in asking netizens to make the Biafran idea viral. If the name "Biafra" makes someone somewhere begin to experience a stomach ache, let's cure that fellow permanently by screaming the name louder!

The Crude Business of Oil

2011-10-23T00:47:00.000-07:00

By

Obododimma Oha

Crude oil is very crude when it wants to deal with an environment. It kills everything on its path. It prevents everything that has life from breathing. Those who want to get it as a way of getting power and influence can also be extremely crude when they want to deal with those that try to prevent them. The crude business of oil spreads poverty even when it enriches.

In the crude business of oil, you scorch everything that stands in your way, everything: environmentalist, plant life, wildlife, aquatic life. Crudely means that you do it without any aesthetics, without ceremony, without culture. Crudely as can be. You bleed the earth to death.

Because the business of oil is very crude, it generates war. Buy wars. Market wars.

In this crude business, there are games and there are risks, and the games are the risks. Take the crude from crudeland across waters, bring it back as refined trouble. Bring back refined trouble as politics. Bring back what was here as what has come from there and make everyone pay dearly.

In this crude business of oil, blood mixes with oil. If not the hide-and-shoot, then it is give-me-the-chance-to-kill-myself. The swamp warrior soon begins to fight for himself. The swamp warrior soon kills himself as he fights everyone crudely. And as the oil flows uphill, the villagers congregate to fetch their cheap death. No one can stand between them and their destinies. They have vowed to die today and die tomorrow.

In this crude business, even lifters and those that help us to lift have muscles. Ike keta, o rie: what you hustle out, you possess. And you dispossess to possess, and watch out for trouble.

In this crude business of oil, everyone is welcome to deal. If you are a carpenter, no problem: there may be the need in the business to nail some people, or at least their coffins. If you are a hunter, very good: there will surely be some game to be hunted down and shot. The business is the crude way; the crude way is the business.

In this crude business, the market is the battlefield, is the school for scandal too. And all your patriotism ends, the house collapses, when the oil ceases to be crude.

No one that lives the crude remains refined again.

On Being Bode-Georged

2011-04-02T11:21:00.000-07:00

By

Obododimma Oha

The roosters in my neighbourhood could see and say things. In the ancient, élan and mystical tradition in which talking animals lived side-by-side with humans and inter-married with them, these roosters have been consistently crowing “Bode George ee!” One is therefore forced to go closer to them to ask why. Is it that these roosters have joined in celebrating his return, or that they want to say something to him? Or do they feel scandalized at the noise of the celebrations associated with his release from prison?

Out there, human beings have been crowing too, about Bode George’s completion of his jail term. Some are crowing his heroism, with fanfare and drums. Some are crowing against crowing for Bode George as hero. Yet, some others are crowing about their being made to crow for Bode George against their will. Perhaps the talking roosters of my neighbourhood are bored with all this types of meaning humans have given to their Bode George crow.

Let us get certain things straight: there is nothing wrong in members of a family celebrating the return of one of its members from prison. Such a celebration is a friendly post-imprisonment strategy, indeed a means of rehabilitation. Nigerians get it wrong when they think that imprisonment is only about punishment and the prisoner has become an outcast. No; the prisoner is still a human being, and may even be far better in morality and sense of justice than many individuals who walk the streets as free and law-abiding citizens.

Bode George will, for a long time to come, be a reference point in Nigerian social and legal discourses. He will, for the justice system, represent a major victory, courage, and freedom from a political system many thought had become omnipotent. Anyone could be “bode-georged” or better still, “bode-judged” and put away for a while if they think that there is no law in Nigeria to hold them accountable for their conducts.

Seen this way, the roosters in my neighbourhood could possibly be disseminating “Bode George” as a code of correctional culture, both in terms of the triumph of the justice system that imprisoned him without caring whether he was a PDP chieftain or not, whether he was billionaire sacred cow or not, and in terms of societal misinterpretation of the idea of the ex-con.

Those who are celebrating the release of Bode George as a way of “laughing” at his critics, or as a way of saying, “See, the jail term could not destroy him; he is still around and powerful, and so the court is a joker!” are even worse in the interpretation of the Bode George semiotic. For these friends of our friend, a fearless justice system means nothing and cannot achieve any difference at the end in trying to handle people considered untouchable in Nigeria.

It is in this regard that one gets worried when the roosters crow “Bode George ee!” as if Bode George has become a measure of time. One is particularly worried that some elder statesmen at Bode George o’clock tell us that attending the post-imprisonment reception organized in his honour was not their will, that they were “tricked” into attending. That obviously smacks of untrustworthiness. Sometimes when Nigerian public figures make public utterances with the mind of clearing their names, they fail to realize that such defensive postures could backfire and do some harm on the ethical aspects of their personality. There is always an ethical side to self-representation, whether such self-representation is direct or indirect. Accepting that one is responsible for being present at the reception is a better and courageous way of crowing “Bode George ee!” Perhaps being there and using the opportunity to tell Nigerians that no one is above the law would have made a difference.

I, too, crow Bode George, to add to the confusion of what it means to be an ex-con in Nigeria and what it means to crow in the neighbourhood of the politics of the “rule of the raw.” What worries me though is that Nigerian citizens as prisoners of the so-called democratic politics may not be aware of the fact that the entire country itself is a big prison yard and that their own jail term is endless, or so it seems. The Prisoners housed in the boys’ quarters at Ikoyi and elsewhere are merely there because they have, through their conducts, indirectly requested for some personal retreat.

I, too, am a prisoner. Onye gbube achara, onye gbube, onye akpola ibe ya onye ikoni!

Talking Jonathan, Feeling Atiku

2011-01-10T20:15:00.000-08:00

By

Obododimma Oha

Do you feel Atiku when you are talking Jonathan? I hear they are going to have a debate. Going to? That debate has already started, has been going on, will continue. I think Atiku thinks Atiku. Too much of everything is bad, especially looking down when one should be looking up. Too much politics, less thinking. Too much blame, less responsibility.

If one cannot kill oneself, Nigerians would help one. We know how to do it. Nigerians get wiser by the day; if you want to use them, don’t use the tactic you used yesterday. Research well. Think the moment; execute surprise.
They say attack is the best form of defence. Sometimes it is the best way to defeat oneself.

Do you see how laughing has become an idiom here? I am laughing. Are you laughing? Are we laughing at those who are not laughing? Are you laughing because you are laughing? Are you laughing politics? Here they politick with laughter, especially because someone is going to dance naked. Oh, I am laughing my laughter. Dis kontri, my broda, na lafta.

And, oh, how painful: someone tries to laugh at someone at the wrong time, with the wrong crackle. Too much search for opportunity to laugh at the other, which gives the other the chance to laugh at us.

Bombs, bombs, bombs: has this become a method or madness, or a method in the madness? A future that explodes now, is it? Don’t point your voices at opponents when you have not understood the colour of their laughter.

I ask: isn’t there a future beyond politics, a nation beyond party?

The playground is also the learning ground. Some learn better and faster with bruises. I watch how your rhetoric achieves desperation, boils over, extinguishing itself.

A Gospel According to a Stolen Book

2010-09-11T02:32:00.000-07:00

By

Obododimma Oha

Many scholars and knowledge workers get extremely hurt when they lose their books to thieves, fire, flood, and other disasters. For them, it is indeed a great tragedy, especially if the books they have lost are very rare and cannot be replaced easily. It could be frustrating to realize suddenly that a particular book one needs for an academic article or for some other kind of writing has walked away from one’s personal library without one’s permission! Thus many teachers, apprehensive of losing their books either to their students or their colleagues, try to guard those books jealously, and try to keep lending registers to be able to keep track of them. They have learned from experience that some “friends” borrow books and forget to return them. Some borrow and do not return them, hoping that the lender would forget to ask for their return, or keep promising to return the books and hoping the lender would grow tired of asking for their return. A game of forgetting to remember and remembering to forget to remember!

Lola Shoneyin, a Nigerian poet noted for her exploration of very interesting sides of human behaviour that many of us often take for granted, writes about this experience of losing books to one’s friends in a poem, “Plunderer of Bookshelves,” which appears in one of her volumes of poetry entitled, So All the Time I Was Sitting on an Egg (2001).The irony in the presentation of a “friend” as someone who uses tricks to steal one’s books is unmistakable in Shoneyin’s poem. The trickster-friend named Charles comes begging to be lent a book, seducing the owner with the act of praising:

After begging and pleading,
his eyelids changing channels
like an electrically underfed TV,
he seduces with lore,
tales of what a gem I’ve always been,
then swears by his first-born son
to return my book after a sleep-fast of forty-eight hours.
I succumb.

The power of rhetoric, the ancient art of persuasion, works well for the trickster-borrower. Who wouldn’t lend a “friend” a book after being shown through language use that the “friend” thinks about him or her very highly? To refuse is to suggest the self as being unworthy of the friendship and as being extremely selfish, or what in the idiom of Nigerian English is called having “the hands of glue.”

But the trickster-friend would not return the book after forty-eight hours as promised, not even “six or ten fortnights.” The performance of forgetfulness and contrition follows months later when the trickster-borrower and the unhappy lender meet elsewhere.

Then he spots me approaching
at some accidental social engagement
and puts up a brave embarrassed face.
He proclaims he’s been in a coma or some other continent,
he vows to deliver first thing the next morning.
I believe.

Who wouldn’t forgive someone who is sorry for forgetting, especially when that “someone” is a friend? Human beings can forget sometimes; not so? Human memory, even as a computer, could have “technical” problems and some files may be deleted! Also, to err is human; isn’t it? To forgive has to continue to be divine. Moreover, there are understandable incidents also contributing to the non-fulfillment of the promise of returning the book. And now, the promise is renewed. Why won’t you be happy that your book is coming back after all?

Well, forgetfulness could be recursive. And since time changes everything, the signification of the ownership of the book also changes, to the chagrin of the original owner-lender.

At another friend’s house,
fifteen months later,
this other friend rattles on
about some fantastic text he’s read
and shoves it triumphantly into my face.
I take a look at it and sigh.
My name used to be on the clinically-cropped corner
Didn’t need to ask who lent it to him.
A violet personalised stamp rainbowed the print
On every other page.

Repetitiveness in identification is both a warning and a suppression of other narratives against ownership. Repetitiveness has to be read before the reading of the book, or at least along with the reading of the book. Ownership is part of the meaning constructed by readership, even in subtle visual iconicity or symbolization. Every page of the reader’s mind acknowledges the book that acknowledges the marked ownership. It is credit-giving that debits the relationship between a friend that remembers to forget and another that forgets to remember.

The poet-persona warns:

And if you encounter that friend of mine
Do make sure you take a stand.
Don’t be softened by histories fine
Just tell him straight,
“From MY library, YOU’VE BEEN BANNED!”

But it so happens that owners of books cannot stop lending them out. It seems that it is even when they refuse to lend out those books that the books may decide to walk away with someone else who keeps a glittering eye on them.
The tactics of practised book pilferers are well-known: they come to your office and pick a book, or you bring out the book yourself to explain a point, and they take it to examine it. From examining it, they hold it tighter on their minds, and then try to engage you in a long attention-distracting conversation. When they feel you have relaxed your alertness, they place something else they are holding on top of the book; in other words, pretending to have mixed the book and their own possessions in error. Who would not understand an error as an error?

But beneath this canvas of error is a “prayer” that you the owner do not come back to your watchfulness or remembrance that a book was brought out from the shelf. Very soon afterwards, your book would be on its journey out of your intellectual prison.

A colleague in one of the universities where I have worked once confessed to me that he liked stealing books from other people’s libraries, not because he needed them or wanted to read them, but because he loved seeing them as his own possessions. Stocking the books was what gave him a sense of satisfaction!

These days when values of many seem to have changed in the university environment, and asking students to read a particular book seems to be a punishment, one is no longer so much afraid of losing one’s books to them. One is no longer afraid of leaving students in one’s office while away to the restroom for, indeed, they would not be tempted to touch or steal the books. If they steal the books, of what use are such books to them? Are they going to read them? Re-sell them? Wouldn’t the books become unnecessary luggage? Well, except maybe the particular student in question is like my bibliomaniac colleague mentioned above? But such bibliomaniacs are rare these days! On the contrary, keep your mobile phones of superior quality or an iPod in your office and allow students to come in and go away without being monitored. As universities become more and more interested in entertainment than in reading, books also became less and less unmarked as targets of the pilferer.

Interestingly, books that walk away with friends or foes sometimes manage to find their way back home to the libraries where they rightly belong. Sometimes the “custodian” of your book for years receives a religious feeling and becomes “born-again” and the spirit tells them to return their neighbours’ goods in their possession. And so, one holy afternoon, there is a knock on the door and it is a parcel of words you have missed so much.

Stolen books know that “No condition is permanent,” for those that stole them may close their eyes and never be able to open them again someday. And so, the books in captivity rejoice, hoping that someone filled with the spirit of justice would liberate them and send them to whence they came. It has been happening.

Work Cited

Shoneyin, Lola (2001)So All the Time I Was Sitting on an Egg (2nd edition), Ibadan: Ovalonion House.

Arrested Arrests & the Rest of Un/certainties

2010-05-02T07:26:00.000-07:00

By

Obododimma Oha

Who writes, reads, rewrites arrest?

It seems normal for security agencies in a country like Nigeria to create a mystery in order to be seen to (be busy) solving it.

The ways of the police in Nigeria baffle me sometimes. They want to arrest someone and would not do that quietly, at least to make sure the operation succeeds. No, they must first make it public knowledge. They must first go to the village square, beat their loud gongs, and announce that so-so-and-so is wanted, perhaps in the false pursuit of their own heroism. In spite of the assumption that accused persons who believe that they are innocent do not need to run from the Law, the reality is that, as the Igbo proverb says, “ọ bụ naanị osisi nụrụ na a ga-egbutu ya wee kwụrụ” (Only a tree hears that it would be cut down and stands where it is, instead of escaping). James Ibori is not a tree. He is a human being and knows at least the damage his arrest and trial would bring to him. So, at least, why shouldn’t he think of postponing that embarrassment, since in Nigeria “No condition is permanent”? In Nigeria, one could be a convict today and tomorrow become a chest-beating president or minister. No condition is permanent, except the Nigerian type.

The design to arrest someone like Ibori is already arrested. The noise that one hears is only a performance. The arrest makes sure that there is no arrest.

The arrest in an arrest is much like sending someone to the local market with a basin of salt and then going to the rainmakers to ask that the heaviest of rains be brought down.

And, by the way, who is arresting who? Can the Party be arrested? I gwọrọ ajụ, sị m bo gị ala, a na-ebu ala ebu? (Do you prepare a pad and ask that I lift the earth and put it on your head, does one carry the earth?) The guinea fowl may be very beautiful but no one in their right senses sacrifices it to the gods!

In the name of Sanni the son of Abacha, why are they acting this type of poorly scripted play? The plot is too simple and the surprises predictable!

The arrested nature of a nation’s moral reformation may have an Ibori script as its metaphor. Seriousness is not measured by noise in the tidiest war.

Our narrative has atrophied, with carnivals of things speaking with authority against authority.

Nigerian Christian Gospel Music and the Discourse of Discontent

2010-02-21T06:56:00.000-08:00

By

Obododimma Oha

Contemporary Christian gospel music in Nigeria may annoy many people who have respect for originality and creativity with its tendency to recycle earlier songs played by other well-known Christian singers like Voice of the Cross and Patty Obassey and Obi Igwe. And if recycling the songs of earlier Christian singers is not a violation of “Thou shall not steal” commandment, what about the recycling of say the Dynamites’ Christian Makossa album into a Yoruba Christian gospel by another group of Christian singers, barely a year after the appearance of the original? Perhaps, in the logic of Christian entertainment, no one owns the Christian song except maybe the Holy Spirit and so there is nothing like violation of copyright.

If this tradition of recycling and pastiche making raises moral questions about what the Nigerian Christian singer is saying in recent times, the very discourses presented in some of the songs simply make the songs difficult to ignore, at least from an academic perspective. The Christian gospel singer knows the need to create a market and so makes efforts to let the song have an orientation to tenor, targeting the interests of specific groups of listeners and directly addressing such groups. The Christian singer talks to the barren woman, the unemployed person, the student wrestling with academic problems, the employed person looking for promotion, a lady looking for a husband, a man looking for a wife, the Nigerian looking for a visa to a foreign country, etc. Sometimes such a singer speaks to Jesus in place of these named groups and sometimes preaches to such groups about the wonders of having Jesus as an advocate. Obviously, the Christian singer as an advertiser of Jesus Christ or marketer of God is well in line with the evangelical assignment by identifying these target customers and presenting the wares in the assumed rhetorically attractive ways.

One needs a gift of patience to listen from the beginning to the end of the song, enduring the monotony of rhythm, exasperating repetitiveness and formulaic patterns, in order not to miss the logic of the discourse entirely. Here is one example: King Innocent Eziefule’s ablbum entitled My Year of Promotion is playing in my sitting room. It plays almost every day and I think someone between my wife and my children likes what the Christian singer is saying. It is not my kind of Christian music but it would be wrong to go and stop it. I am sure you can guess why. OK. It is not for me, but my ears have to listen anyway. Sometimes one benefits from what one does not like.

What? Listen to what the singer has just said: “Ekpere na-eme ka agbọghọbịa wee lụta di obodo oyibo” (Prayer makes it possible for a lady to get a husband from overseas). Jesus Christ! I check the jacket and find that the track is called “Ekpere na Abụ” (Prayer and Hymn).

This Christian gospel singer must have the impression that husbands from overseas are far better than husbands back here in Nigeria! Simply put, suitors back home are not suitable for the lady based in Nigeria. The hope and prayer of such a lady is to get a husband from across the oceans. It is an economic thing in marriage: dollars and Euros perform better at weddings these days in Nigeria than the local wall paper called Naira. Local suitors stand no chance when it comes to competing with dollar or Euro-laden suitors from overseas. Most fathers-in-law won’t hesitate to set their dogs on you if you insist on trying your luck with your Naira when the “di obodo oyibo” has already sent an email saying he is coming on the next flight!

Thank God my marriage is fifteen years old now. Otherwise, how could my wife still agree to marry me after listening to this Holy-Ghost filled, tongue-speaking gospel singer? Surely, I would have stood no chances competing with my Nigerian friends based in the US and UK such Olu Oguibe, Afam Akeh, Ikhide Ikheloa, Obiwu, Sola Osofisan, Pius Adesanmi, Biko Agozino, Chiji Akomah, and many celebrated scholars out there. Thank you for saving me, thank you my God!

But wait a minute! This singer does not also say that with praying and hymning a bachelor back home in Nigeria could get a wife from overseas! Why? Is miracle marriage for women alone? Is being married to a Nigeria-based husband a condemnation? Oh no. This is unfair, very unfair.

I continue to listen, although I am boiling with rage. This guy is also talking about getting a visa to ship out as one of the miracles of prayer! I am really mad with him now and will turn off the music soon. I could apologize to whoever is playing it much later. Imagine, getting a Nigerian visa is not a miracle but overseas visa is! I think I have also seen a similar celebration of foreign visa (especially visa to the US) in some Nigerian Christian video films. So, it appears Nigerian Christian evangelical rhetoric is literalizing the idea of an American “Promised Land” and is already constructing the Nigerian space as its sharp contrast! I don’t like this one bit. I’m still a patriot and cannot consume this crap!

There! Electricity failure! Thank God for answering my unsaid prayer! Who says miracles of prayers don’t happen in very mysterious ways?

A Voyage to English

2010-02-14T07:34:00.000-08:00

By

Obododimma Oha

For many speakers of English as a second language, especially those encountering the language from the double margins of the rural context in Nigeria, learning to speak and write the language is a kind of voyage with its many experiences of bewilderment, strangeness, adventure, shock, and even pain. Many learners of the language indeed struggle to identify ways they can transfer meanings of expressions in their first languages to English and vice versa. Our teachers in their wisdom thought that it was best to compel us to speak English in class. If we were to make a successful trip to English, we needed to leave behind, at least temporarily, the luggage of the first language, identified as “vernacular.” Laws always have to reinforce impositions, and so our teachers decreed that anyone that spoke vernacular instead of English in class was to pay a fine. In some classes the punishment was manual labour: either removing the bucket of urine from the urinal and pouring it on the compost heap and turning the heap that gave out a pestilential odour, or cutting the grass on the lawns (which was always in generous supply for offenders at school). A voyage to English was, in my elementary school days, a divestment of one’s right to speak the language that one liked or was familiar with.

Our teachers took no chances and welcomed no excuses from us their captives. They knew our problems, our needs, our fears, more than we knew. They were determined to deal with these, to liberate us, or rather to liberate our tongues that were supposedly tied by Igbo our native language, for indeed our main horror was in being asked in class to stand up or come to the front of the class to speak English. Naturally, we considered it a great misfortune to be picked to speak English, especially while facing other members of the class. If one uttered the wrong thing, one was sure to get a terrible boo, even from those who equally couldn’t express themselves in acceptable English! What more, whatever wrong English one uttered was sure to be a source of an annoying nickname that members of the class would start using in addressing one. Good God, it was really a misfortune to be picked to utter what one didn’t have a clue how to utter!

One day, our teacher in Elementary Four took everyone by surprise by calling our names at random and asking us to stand up and say in English what was going on in each picture he displayed in front of the class. He brought out a picture of a man taking snuff and asked one of us what he saw in the picture. The fellow was visibly terrified beyond measure. He scratched his head. He bit his lips. He looked up, as if to find out if what he needed to say was written on the ceiling. Then he looked down on the floor, as if the right utterance eluded the ceiling and rested on the floor. Beads of sweat started running down his frustrated face. “Speak!” the teacher barked, reaching for his cane. With this jolt, the pupil simply said, “This man is kpoo otaba!” The class burst out laughing. Even the teacher could not help laughing too. Our colleague was really clever, having combined both the familiar and the unfamiliar, at the same time inserting the unwelcome vernacular into the authorized English expression. He didn’t know the word “snuff” or how to say “taking snuff” in English. Just like the rest of us, he was not really expressing what he saw in the picture but translating what he saw from Igbo to English. And somewhere along the way, the journey to the appropriate English expression ran into lexico-semantic trouble. Which escape route would have been better (in his thinking) than code-switching, which required making a convenient diversion from the route to English to that of the Igbo language? At once, I later realized, our fellow pupil eloquently expressed, beyond the semantic sense of the sentence, a meta-message about his cultural circumstances as a speaker of English as a second language. Of course, our teacher had no interest in this additional meaning of the pupil’s expression in English. What mattered to him, I could imagine, was the fact that the pupil’s utterance revealed a deficiency in the latter’s knowledge of the right English words to use in naming things or representing experiences. Surely, we the pupils lacked such knowledge, but we were also puzzled as to the relationship between the English we were forced to speak and the Igbo language we knew but were not allowed to speak in class.

The torture did not end with the English of snuff-taking! Our teacher called another pupil who was sitting next to me. You can be sure that I almost got a heart attack, for I was afraid that I was the one asked to disgrace self this time around! The teacher displayed a picture of a doctor examining patients and asked my neighbour to say in English what he saw in the picture. This time the fellow did not waste any time and thinking through his answer. Right away he answered: “The doctor crock. The doctor say. The doctor ….” Before he could say more, our teacher signaled him to stop, and as usual the class had a good laugh. In this second case, there was no mixture of English and Igbo. Perhaps our friend had concluded that the teacher’s objection in the previous case was the mixture of English and vernacular, which we naturally saw as being few inches away from the forbidden Igbo speech. Anyway, the greater fun, for us, was not as much in knowing the right thing the boy should have said as in providing some comic relief in a captive, tensed up class, and by extension, the source of a new nickname we would celebrate outside during the break period! Our friend became “The doctor crock” right from that day.

The voyage to English was a voyage to humour as much as it was a voyage in fear. Perhaps the fear was a necessary element for the realization of the humorous side of learning a second language.

Even if our classroom encounters with English did not produce enough effect about the importance of the language in our lives, our encounters with children who returned from the city for Christmas and Easter celebrations did. The returnees were very proud and haughty. They had fine clothes on and spoke English (or a variety of it), to our great dismay and shame. They deliberately spoke English to us, mostly using abusive words, to suggest to us that we were not the same with them. Language difference at the playground became a weapon for subduing the other, for excluding and decivilizing the other. We saw being picked to speak English in class as a misfortune, but here, staring us in the face at the playground, was a greater misfortune. There was nothing as painful as being denigrated by one’s peers. Some of us started avoiding the city children. Those that opted to stay sometimes offered to settle the question of language superiority through exchange of blows. Being able to speak English was not the measure of superiority, they argued. A good fight was the right way!

I didn’t want my voyage to English to end with a fight at the playground and so I devised what I considered a better way of liberating my tongue from its “villageness” and vernacular hold. Back home, I would retreat to the forest where no one would see or hear me and then start uttering anything that came into my head as English. I spoke and spoke and spoke my nonsense English until I became tired but happy that I had done it. I was the addresser and the addressee in these strange spoken English episodes. Gradually, I started gaining some measure of confidence and got ready to speak English to the city children whenever next we met. The opportunity came one day and I put a vigorous display of prowess in my strange glossolalia. The reaction that I received somehow encouraged me: instead of laughing at me, everyone listened and seemed to be making efforts to understand what I was saying.

I did not stop with such glossolalia, for I knew that I was talking nonsense and that one day I would receive a disgraceful treatment from my listeners. The next move was to turn to the junior dictionary by Michael West. This helped me in building my store of English vocabulary. I also asked people whose knowledge of English I trusted what particular objects or ideas were called in English. A turning point in the voyage came when my elder brother who had gained admission into the secondary school acquired a copy of Students’ Companion. Whenever he was not around, I would fish the book out of his bag and start reading it. The section that attracted me most was the one on synonyms. It contained simpler words that were matched with longish strange words. I was excited, greatly excited, for I realized that I could, as a substitute for my glossolalia, memorize these very long words and utter them whenever the need arose, to mesmerize my schoolmates. I did just that: I memorized “cantankerous” as a better word than “quarrelsome,” “cacophony” as a substitute for “noise,” and so on. The most treasured perhaps was the word “tintinnabulation.” I did not hesitate to try it out on my elder brother who owned the book from which I harvested it. He dismissed me as speaking nonsense, saying that it was not an English word. I did not have any proof to win my case, for I did not want to expose the fact that I had been searching his schoolbag in his absence. Elder brothers and elder sisters (who always had secrets in those days) would not tolerate that kind of violation of their privacies!

I continued the voyage, armed with “big” English, giving my schoolmates a false impression that I had reached the island of English and had returned with the hidden treasures of expression. Anyway, the important thing is that I gradually lost my dread for English and my tongue became loose. I found, to my surprise, that I could express myself in English, even if it was a bad one. What is a voyage after all, if not a deliberate attempt to befriend fear, learn from errors, and recognize the difference between compulsion and the discovery of necessity!

Pronouncing Haiti robertsonically

2010-01-18T07:23:00.000-08:00

by

Obododimma Oha

HAITI sounds like HATE when Pat Robertson pronounces it.
The boundary between error and terror is diminishing, so Pat cooks for the devil and serves it to God Almighty.
Who uses the other against Haiti, God or Satan?
Whose Robertson speaks?
Whose Logos wants logic in the Presence of violent History?
Which otherness witnesseth the pact?

It is safer to play God's coward than to be Satan's advocate. Otherwise, why not blame Satan as usual? A clever Robertson should fear the stereotypes of his discourse,
For if freedom comes too early, it cannot recognize Blackness
If Black freedom comes at all, its reward is poverty
If poverty lingers, there is a narrative of the Fall in the rising sun.

The semiotic of natural disaster must learn to feed on the surplus of myth,
So that some god's anger makes the earth quake, makes the mountains vomit fire, makes a hurricane hurry to cane the survivors of the Deluge.

It won't be the end of literacy, even if it is the collapse of logic.
It won't be the end of language, even if it is the signal about the post-human.

On the Sickbed of National Falsehoods

2009-12-04T21:24:00.000-08:00

By

Obododimma Oha

The many headaches of a nation can roast a healthy kidney; can knock out a good heart. A nation that glorifies falsehood is already a sickbed and no one can rule her unless they are already sick.

One can recite a litany of falsehoods:

The falsehood of stopping corruption when indeed it is being encouraged;

The falsehood of running a democracy when elections are almost always considered unnecessary;

The falsehood of having a National Assembly which meet few times with few individuals that have few ideas to debate;

The falsehood of being a nation that is not qualified even to be a country;

This falsehood and that falsehood and those falsehoods waiting to gain national acceptance.

It’s a horror film worse than a vampire story.

While the president is still on his sickbed praying for recovery, they have already buried him at home. It should be possible to think someone to death. Why look for coherence in a discourse of discords? Another sick fellow is in a hurry to tell the story of a national sickness from their own sickbed.

You see, my friend, the casket maker is praying for someone to die, for the market to be good. The doctor prays that patients may consult; after all, it was a serpent that turned to healing staff in the desert. The patient in a hospital ward is praying for recovery. And God almighty is wondering which prayer deserves to be answered first.

Tell me which is better: a sick president or a sick nation?

Which dies first: a sick president or a sick nation?

That big sepulcher called the State House is Frankensteined for widowhood. Sometimes when I look at its dome, I see a thousand burials cast their votes.

I think Nigeria needs more mortuaries and more cemeteries. The available ones are already test cases in Crowd Phenomenon.

Sick nation is attitude.

Sick nation mocks itself.

Sick nation consumes itself.

Poetricks

2009-10-24T15:14:00.000-07:00

Good poets don’t read others; they read only themselves. Their own works are always the best. Their own works deserve the prize; those of others deserve just a mention, otherwise the trash can. Praise the work of another poet and you lose your poetricks!

Good poets think their importance first, work their importance first, lest they become the least. Does it matter if a poet wants to remain the only champion in a village of jealous voices?

Good poets have the best language already; others are learners. Others have to be taken by the hand and led through some darkness of an inexpressible idea.

Good poets are gadflies; others houseflies already part of the rot.

Poets are saints, others devils or stupid fellows or both.

Poets know everything already; you fault them because you don’t know.

Because I am not a good poet, my noise is less onomatopoeic than yours!

An Apology to My Students

2009-09-15T02:19:00.000-07:00

By

Obododimma Oha

I have been on strike for quite sometime now and a number of things have suffered: the lectures, the experiments, the class seminars, etc. You have also suffered emotionally especially because you were about to commence your examinations when I suddenly put down my red pen and banged on the table and said, “Damn it, I’m going on strike!” And I went on strike. You were surprised, but humbly believed that I must have done it for your own good and that it would be over soon. You put down your pens too, just after writing your matriculation numbers on the answer booklets. Our conversation was thus interrupted, and I am sure that surprised you too, for you know me for hating the interruption of conversations, especially “academic” conversations. I am sure you have not forgotten my long lectures on how learning and all knowledge work have to be a continuous and coherent thing. I need to apologize to you for this behavior of mine that is neither in tandem with my character, nor with learnedness. I need to apologize to you also for the more painful interruption of our highly valued, examination-type of conversation. You know me for having special regard for evaluations, which I always insist are experiments that must be allowed to produce reliable results, results that should be used in making the learning process better and better. With my absence from the classroom for weeks now, you must have started searching for the meaning of all my theories and philosophies about the non-negotiable necessity for creating a healthy society through the production and transmission of knowledge.

I do not want to defend my action in rendering this apology, for that would greatly undermine my purpose here. Moreover, you are already familiar with the powerful and convincing argument I offered when I commenced the strike – the fact that Government has to touch up my salary and also provide facilities for a more effective and result-oriented university education in Nigeria. I would, however, like you to take this whole painful episode as part of the learning, for indeed, our nation is a school where we all can learn some very crucial life skills. Nigeria is both the school and the challenging subject to be studied. In that regard too, the Government of your country is already a case study. Your politicians are case studies on democracy and its hijack. I, too, should be considered a case study on knowledge production and its contradictions, especially given the litany of strikes that characterize my professional life in Nigeria. So, I would like you not to be idle but to see yourselves as being on a serious fieldwork.

I know I have failed you in a number of ways and must take responsibility for your inclination to look for heroes among politicians, armed robbers, kidnappers, and other groups that do dark things. I know that I always told you how hardworking my own teachers were, how they loved their profession, and how people knew and respected them for the quality of their minds, their preferences, and actions. I am not quite sure that I have fared well enough to make you want to become a teacher like me. Is it my new-found interest in “pastoring” a church or” imam-ing” a mosque instead of giving good attention to my lectures and supervising your projects properly? Is it my new-found desire for flashy cars, which I change like Christmas dress in order to show other lecturers that I am in a different class? Is it the less attention I now pay to books? Is it my gradual transformation to a businessman? Is it the tendency to begin to check my lectures and other academic inputs in terms of Naira and Kobo? Is it the casual way I do my job, going into the class to teach unprepared and without updating the ideas that I present to you? Is it my inability to challenge you intellectually to make you have respect for learning? Is it my preference to belong to various committees and devote more time to meetings than to academic activities?

I have always told you that we do not just teach what is in the books but that it is through our lives that we teach, or that it is our lives that (we) teach. How true, though ironical! I am asking the Government to provide physical facilities that would make my work really begin to work – and that is quite rational and legitimate – but I have also performed the act of contrition as recommended by my confessor and have realized that I also need mental and behavioural facilities to demonstrate fairness to you as my students, to your poor parents who are also victims of bad governance, and to God who is actually my employer.

I know that in our country in these strange times, we seem to lack the capacity to say “sorry” when we err. I want to depart from that arrogant posture and tell you sincerely that I have erred in my tactics. I wish to let you know that I will soon call off this painful strike, as a sign that I care for you and that, even though my request that Government should see education as a priority is legitimate, I am also concerned about my own image as a teacher. I am concerned about how my life and conduct as a teacher would help you to learn to have respect for learnedness and interest in the future of our society. May you continue in the love and pursuit of wisdom.

A Malcolm without an X

2009-08-16T09:38:00.000-07:00

(an inverted performance in Njakiriology)

By

Obododimma Oha

As children growing up in a society torn between a fairly familiar African world and a strange but alluring western world packaged and circulated through films, my friends and I had a little problem in deciding who would become our heroes. We needed heroes very badly. The heroes of the African world were not particularly attractive. There was Lance Spearman of Drum magazine. Lance was doing heroic things, fighting with criminals and surviving miraculously, and so had the right credentials. One could remake oneself in his image and command respect as the invincible. But his skin was same as ours – familiarly black! He also wore a hat that was unique, same as James Bond. But local chiefs also wore that hat! So, that uniqueness suffered. The environment in which he operated was also familiar: same bushes we knew; same quaint parks; same houses… How could anything familiar produce sound heroism?

One needed a rare, foreign hero, operating in a foreign location. And we found these heroes in the films we watched, films that we literalized and located in everyday experience. There was James Bond. Oh, James, always taking risks, chasing criminals, outgunning them, and having free sex with ladies he has rescued or has converted through his chivalry. So, someone among us went for a James Bond identity. He took the name and patented it, which means that no other boy would answer it. Once a hero’s name was taken, it was taken. There was only one special guy at a time; others had to migrate to other celebrated identities, or keep searching. We took all kinds of names, some derived from these film heroes, some made-up. But those taken from known film heroes had greater impact and respect, as the original attributes of the film heroes could be copied to the adopters. An invented identity raised a difficulty for its bearer who had to work hard to define the fictive heroes’ attributes, uniqueness, and framework of respect.

My elder brother liked Westerns, mainly because of the gunfights. He had been shopping for a name for a while and was lucky one day when the Federal Ministry of Information came to our community to show a film at the primary school playground. The jeep carrying the ministry staff came early enough and drove through the town playing some ikwokrikwo music, their megaphones blaring loud and bringing a sense of some-real-thing’s-gonna-happen into the little community. The announcement that there would be a free film show at the primary school playground was such exciting news. People hurried the rest of the day’s activities, to make sure they got to the venue early and secured good viewing positions.

That evening, my elder brother got a name: Captain Idea Murphy. He said that was what the best gunfighter in the film was called. Years later when I became familiar with the name Eddie Murphy, I started suspecting that my elder brother probably refurbished the name, changing “Eddie” to “Idea” and also adding “Captain” so as to underline some commanding aura in answering the name. A captain was in charge and there were never two captains in one boat.

I didn’t have a name, so someone suggested Malcolm X. At first, I didn’t like the name, because it was very strange. I even thought it was incomplete. What was that X? None of my friends knew. They said that was what the fellow was called in the film. They said he was fearless and tried to challenge White people. How could a Black man have challenged White people? And in the Whiteman’s country for that matter! How could anyone in his right senses have challenged the White people who made the cars, the planes, and, as we were told by our teacher, had even gone outside this Earth and had come back alive! My friends said that made the name worth taking, the name of a fearless challenger. I was worried: didn’t that mean that I would be regarded as a trouble maker? Malcolm X? What was that X?

My elder brother, now Captain, said I should take it, after all I was a trouble maker, always challenging his authority. He said if I didn’t like the X, he could keep it for me. I could just be Malcolm. But one of my friends said the power of the name would be gone without its X. How could I be a hero without the X? So, I became Malcolm X, but with great concern for the stranded X.

Forty years later, I have found myself in the Whiteman’s country, enjoying his hospitality, his dollars, his well-kept environment, his Internet, in short his technology. I am glad that I looked at that X with great suspicion. How could I have managed if I lost all these opportunities and ended up with the kind of messy life that my not-so-lucky friends live back home now? Imagine being a classroom teacher in one primary school and riding a bicycle to school and praying for your salary to be increased! Imagine standing in front of those noisy children with a cane in your hand and your hungry stomach asking you to transfer aggression to those urchins! Imagine using the break period to do some okada runs to augment your salary! How could I have been a hero in such circumstances?

Certainly, I am a hero. I don't have to ballot-or-bullet back home to be one! Imagine the number of mails and phone calls I receive from home. Everyone at home thinks I am a millionaire and wants some dollars. They think dollars grow like grass over here! Maybe I am partly responsible for this, for I once announced in a mail that I am a big time professor over here, and that I direct several programmes. They really believed me! Or is it the popularity I have won as an Internet warrior and the courage I have shown in using abusive rhetoric, flogging this imagined adversary and clubbing that vulnerable debater? Boy, this Malcolm really has no X! They must think I am a very important person, for me to have the courage to write all those offensive posts. And there’s that stupid Obododimma, stupid to the bone! Local teacher! Sorry, local teacher-farmer, who measures the merit of intellectual arguments in terms of tubers of yam! He thinks he is more patriotic than I am, simply because he is unfortunately trapped in that kingdom-gone. Those guys back home must be dead dumb!

I am a Malcolm without an X and I am not going to fall for any local fool who wants to tag on to my name and steal my heroism.

Un/Translatables

2009-07-10T12:05:00.000-07:00

by

Obododimma Oha

Translation is a journey from language to language. Or rather, a journey that language makes to language. Does language find language when it gets to language? Does language freely find language, or is it afraid to find it? Is it warned not to get too close to it, to finding language?

When language cannot find language when it gets to language, we say it is untranslatable. We often imagine that languages have limits where they stop and stare at other languages, stopping points supposedly manned by culture.

Translation rewords the world, reworlds the word.
Translation threatens worlds that wish to remain originary.
Translation could be radical, conspiratorial, mischievous, wanton.
Translation may be outrageous and too eager to expose.
Translation may leave behind, suppress, to impress.
Translation may strip bare and demystify.
Translation may distort.

Translation creates access and makes available. This seems too bad for the worship of Logos, at least in the province of the Revealed Message. Indeed, translation enacts the politics of otherness...

Translation can also prevent access, a step away from the untranslatable.
The "untranslatable" thus is not always that expression which cannot be "translated" but a preferred closure. The untranslatable reassures us that the boundaries are safely maintained, the power strong.

The untranslated is the poetry of limits, at limits.You cannot read it too confidently!

Translate it at your own risk.
Translate it and upset an order.
Translate it and let it translate you into a difference.
Translate it to let it.

On Being Married to a Man Who Is Married to Books

2009-07-03T05:15:00.000-07:00

By

Obododimma Oha

I have heard it said that an intellectual is a polygamist, for s/he may not just be wedded to a human being whose needs and desires must be given some consideration, but also be similarly attached to books, to academic activities, to the endless pursuit of knowledge. These two commitments do not always submit to each other peacefully and may become the cause of serious agony for the married intellectual. As it is for men who are academics, so it is for their female counterparts. Perhaps, viewed from the perspective of women who are academics, the conflicting demands are more intense in their own case than in the case of men who are academics. In spite of the changes brought into the family by gender sensitization in modern life, women still have to make the home, catering for their husbands and children. And this does not excuse them from living up to the demands of their jobs: as academics they still have to carry out research, read books, teach students, supervise projects, publish articles or books, and engage in other professional activities. Indeed, as Virginia Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own the woman as a (literary artist) needs a space of her own, economic freedom, and freedom to use her mind, in order to function productively and meaningfully. It is certainly not an easy thing for her to have a “room of her own” in the space of her husband when she functions as a scholar. As a male scholar, I imagine, therefore, that it is not very easy for my female colleagues.

As a male scholar married to a woman and to my books, what does my “polygamy” orchestrate for me in my family life? Am I not like the man invited by his chi and his father-in-law to work on their farms on the same day at the same time? If I ignore my father-in-law and decide to work on my chi’s farm, my father-in-law would be mad with me and withdraw his daughter (at least, as culturally permitted in the Igbo society in which I was born and raised). If I ignore my chi and decide to work on my father-in-law’s farm, my chi would also be mad with me and take my life. So, my tragedy is located somewhere between the possible loss of a wife and the loss of my life. And, being a faithful husband (oh yes I am!) I don’t want to lose my wife I swear, neither do I want to lose my life and leave her a widow!

It is 2.00 am and I am in my study, working at the computer again, fighting back the hands of sleep that have been trying to shut my eyes for me. I have to finish reading an article sent to me for assessment and feed in my report on the e-page of an electronic journal. Deadlines are deadlines, especially for electronic gatekeepers. Moreover, I have to prove to the editor of the journal that scholars based in Africa are not as “dead” as the world is made to believe. So, I am here, not really in my study anymore, but in cyberspace, mutually hallucinating with other cyborgs (thanks to Mel Gibson for that idea). I don’t know whether I am asleep or awake again, just as I can’t say whether I am really Here or There, whether I am real or unreal! Well, in my nowhereness, I see her on the screen of my laptop, first as a pop-up, then as an emoticon. She is snoring and her snores are angry words. A software now, she jumps out of the screen and gets installed on my mind the real computer. I am browsing my mind now, my laptop has vanished and my mind is saying to me …

Are you real? Are you really here? Are you really unreal? OK, she is your art now, she that you cannot browse. She is the message now the medium , she that cannot give you a deadline. Are you not just another brand of falsehood? Sometimes when she needs your attention, you have a book in your hand or you are sitting before a computer, and you must chase that idea through the paragraphs and pages of some fields of thought. Sometimes she is kept waiting in the bedroom, and you are trying to finish writing that article to beat a deadline. Sometimes the food kept for you on the dining table – because you could not join the family at mealtime – gets cold and you have to eat it quietly like a dog, afraid to complain, so as not to start a war. After all, if you didn’t want it cold, you should have come to eat it warm!

Books and books and books everywhere. Books on the shelves. Books on the floor. Books on the table. Books in cartons. Books sitting on books. Books inside books, to mark where you have to return to, after angrily going to find out what she wants you to come and see. Books in the study. Books in the bedroom. Books and books and more books arriving. You cannot provide more money for weekend shopping, for you say the pay is low, the tax is high, and you have children’s fees to pay soon, but you can’t remove your eyes from books. You buy more and more books and smuggle them into the house! Sometimes you claim you got the books for free, even before she accuses you with her eyes. You keep buying books, sometimes three or four copies of the same book. Some copies for yourself; some copies for your students to borrow and disfigure through photocopying or sheer carelessness.

This conference and that seminar and those workshops … where you shop for ideas on how to stay away from her! Absentee husband, you nickname is Professor Awayness, for you are busy providing awareness away from her and the children. Sometimes a week. Sometimes two weeks. And when you are returning from this one, you are leaving for that one. Sometimes you trans-conference or trans-seminar, after all, what’s the point coming home to say you are leaving soon?

And your way of thinking! Haven’t you been hardened by all those crazy ideas and tortured language that communicates them? So, what do we have here: a human who can really sleep when he is asleep, play when it is playtime, and do stupid things when fun demands it, without caring so much about what this or that theory says? You are discussing a point with her. Just a little argument and you take off as if you are in one of those crazy listserv debates, quoting this book and that book you have read. You see; that’s a symptom of the illness that I mentioned earlier! Can you similarly quote her, your wife? No, not all! Has she got quotable ideas? It is books that tell you what to do. It is books that are right enough to decide a little exchange between a husband and a wife!

Yes, she needs a husband, not necessarily an academic hero. But you think that being an academic hero counts much in satisfying those needs of hers. And that’s one problem: who determines her needs: you, your books, or she? She wants you to include her in your scheme of things, if not the main programme of your life. And you are uncomfortable about this, very. You think your academic life and pursuit could be hindered, if not ruined, by your focus on a human wife or family. Didn’t you even once whisper to yourself: a writer married is a writer marred? Another idea you picked from those crazy associates of yours, those apostles of aloneness!

And now you have discovered another opportunity for keeping her lonely (or another opportunity has discovered you the ready tool!): the Internet, with all those blogs you must update, those emails you must read and respond to, those chats (sometimes three or four going on simultaneously), those skirmishes on listservs you must engage in, those downloads and uploads that increase the weight of your mental luggage. So, has she not suddenly become a widow, an “Internet widow,” as Clifford Stoll calls it in Silicon Snake Oil?

At the mention of the word “widow”, I wake up and I am right on my feet. My wife opens the door of my study and walks in, fear written on her face.
“Why were you screaming?”
“Screaming? Did I scream?”
“Of course, you did! I came to find out what was wrong. And don’t you think it’s time for you to come to the bedroom and lie down?”
And, suddenly, there’s an electricity outage. 4.00 am. Indeed, it is time to go to bed.

On Being Too Igbo

2009-06-12T06:49:00.000-07:00

By

Obododimma Oha

Egbe bere
Ugo bere
Nke si ibe ya ebela
Nku kwaa ya!

-- Igbo proverb

My performance of my Igboness, as in my possessing and announcing a name that is proudly and loudly Igbo, my mode of dressing, my attempt at using some Igbo configurations in public discourse, my claim to some knowledge of my Igbo culture and attempt to use such knowledge in my academic life, all seem to annoy the Nigerian ethnic Other sometimes, and even some Igbo people for whom denial of ethnic selfhood is a better means of presenting the self before the Other. One finds traces of such annoyance in their comments that refer to my “unduly” performed Igboness. Is he the only Igbo person around? He wants to be more Igbo than every other Igbo person! He is an Okonkwo! Or even in the way I am hailed when I appear in Igbo traditional attire: “Onye Igbo!” Igwe!” “Okoro!” But when I accept assimilation by putting on the traditional attire of the ethnic Other and speaking the language of the ethnic Other, I do not attract any attention and do not receive any hailing! And I begin to wonder: how much Igboness is enough? How much Igboness is tolerable? Can one be too Igbo? Do I have to apologize to other people for my being Igbo and wanting to show that I treasure my Igboness? Do I have to deny my ethnic self in order to make other non-Igbo people happy? Does my being Igbo prevent the Other from achieving a fuller, different ethnicity? Why is my Igboness considered offensive, to the extent that the Other wants it erased or silenced?

I am indeed puzzled when I am told that I am too Igbo, or that I want to be more Igbo than other Igbo people. So, if there are other Igbo people who want to deny their Igboness, or want to opt out of the Igbo nation, I should also deny my Igboness, or perform a perfunctory Igboness, in order to be approved by the Other? How can the ethnic Other now have the measuring rod for determining moderate Igboness and excessive Igboness?

When I am hailed as “Onye Igbo!” because I have manifested my Igboness, I am being told that my Igboness is a liability. I am being told that my Igboness is a deviation from the norm that is the cultural identity of the Other. I am being made to feel ashamed of being Igbo (which is why perhaps some Igbo people think that they are being praised and considered desirable when they are told, “Oh, you don’t look Igbo,” or “You don’t behave like Igbo people”). And I wonder, how can my celebration of my identity in speech and appearance be such a problem for the Other, while the Other’s celebration of his or her identity is not?

Being Igbo has not become pejorative (which the Other indirectly wants me to believe) and will never be. Pejorative Igboness (as being constructed through contemporary commercialized humour in Nigeria, through media hypes about what happens in the governance of Igbo states in the Igbo homeland, through Nollywood fictions about the cultism of Igbo businessmen, through insult on Igbo traditional religion, etc) will always be a continuation of war against the Igbo by other means.

Perhaps the presence of the ethnic me is enough to annoy, my presence instead of absence. Instead of self-with-the-other, it is self-without-the-other. Presence appears threatening, already always. Presence here and there. Presence in the same postcolonial nation-state. Presence even in cyberspace, which, in its illusion, promised an exile from contested physical spaces. It is as if the Self prevents the fullness of the Other. But the Igbo have a theory for it, a theory encapsulated in the proverb, “Mbe naabo zua ahia, uru anaghi adi ya” (When two tortoises do business with each other, none of them walks away with a profit). The Theory of “Tortoise to Tortoise,” as I would like to call it, asserts that one tortoise never likes the presence of another, so that tricks won’t fall in price.

Does the ethnic Other recognize me? Can the ethnic Other still accept to recognize me when I am present?

I am located at the margin of phonic error. I am the error. And also the imagined terror. The Other cannot articulate me and my Igbo name, or pretends not to be able to. Watch how the ethnic Other deliberately tries to make me appear strange and unwelcome. Decidedly, I am pronounced wrongly; pronounced wrong. Even if the Other knows how to pronounce my name right. Even if the Other can try. Even if. I am better distorted. I, the Igbo, a distortion.

This distortion is the Other’s horn of humour. The Other drinks me down, I the strange. There was once an Igbo man who did this and that and those. There was an Igbo woman who did this and that and those. There was an Igbo chicken that did this and that and those. And the audience laughs and laughs and laughs. It is a night of a thousand ethnic bites!

And beyond humour, I am considered a risk. And we know risks are very risky! Which is why people always try to deal with them before they can have a rest of mind.

Having a name whose sound disturbs is bad enough. Worse when one holds on to Igbo culture and values. A greater risk is the one that wants to promote some intellectual Igboness. Have the Igbo got any ideas? How can he talk about Igbo ideas? The gods and goddesses of the Other are very divine, very scientific, and have got all the answers to civilization. The gods and goddesses of the Other wear jeans and eat at McDonalds; Igbo gods and goddesses drink blood in groves and shrines at Okija. The gods and goddesses of the ethnic Other speak poststructuralist language and own the Web; mine are represented as blockheads. The shrines of the gods and goddesses of the Other are international tourist sites. Igbo shrines are only remembered in discourses about corruption and its link with the occult. Igbo gods and goddesses are terribly guilty of Igboness and must be violated, if they cannot be stripped of their Igbocentricity.

Being Igbo, bad enough.

Using one’s Igbo ideas, annoying.

Making one’s Igboness visible, unsettling.

X-change

2009-03-04T00:23:00.000-08:00

My wants want me
My needs need me

My wants tempting, armed with the best logic
My needs too arrogant, sometimes angry, too righteous
To be wrong

My wants eloquent – in that hot advert
Too much a doctrine to lose its truth
My wants too fashionable to be wrong:
Today a flowing gown to dazzle the town
Tomorrow a skirt, shy & brief
To know the frustrations of turbaned ideas

My want thinks japan & asian tigers, in shifting shapes
My need utters germany in forever-yours

Can I have a multitude of attitudes
In the tributaries of exchange
Desires craving, necessities frowning?
Could my needs also want?
Could my wants also need?

My want says:
Get hold of that prose, drug it
With the need to want

My need says:
Fry that poetry, spice it with mild strangeness
Inspiring history to hate itself

And the last breath says:
The want of needs, the need to want
Forever

-- Obododimma Oha

Eight Principles of Pious Prodigality in African Studies

2009-02-17T10:46:00.000-08:00

(1) Say something horrible about Africa.
(2) Dress up your tongue to mystify knowledge: speak a language that is not yours.
(3) Theory does: there are spices from Derrida to Bhabha.
(4) Don't smell native.
(5) Squander yourself in others like yourself.
(6) Insist on getting lost.
(7) Don't investigate; it is already in your head.
(8) Return to your father only when you find that you cannot swine your identity in spite of your stomach.

-- Obododimma Oha.