Oromo Proverbs (Ethiopia and Erirea): 103 in Total

Oromo, Ethiopia Proverbs 1. Garagalci milli mata  hoqa. “The opposite part, the feet, scratch the head.” When undeserving people have an office or obtain an unexpected victory over deserving people. 2. Ya gowa, si dubban bowa! “O fool, there is a precipice at thy back.” For one who is pleased with false flattery. 3. Olan […]

Oromo Proverbs (Ethiopia and Erirea): 103 in Total

Àdùfẹ́’s Art

The Candle and I Are One

Or A Mimetic Reenactment of Light

Review of a performance piece by Adufe

Tell no lies, claim no easy victories…this was the exhortation of Amilcar Cabral. Recently, at the storied Demas Nwoko New Culture Studio, Ibadan, a new generation of young Africans gather to infuse themselves with the essence of the arts. On Saturday the 16th of December 2023, the bowl of the amphitheater witnessed a number of young poets and even a mathematical genius at work. The main occasion was the public reading of Aremo Yusuf Gemini’s new novel in Yoruba, Segilola Aromire Ogidan (SOA) which various young artists and art enthusiasts came to support.

Then there was a haunting solo dance drama entitled The Candle and I Are One. The aural backdrop to the performance was of a chanteuse, most probably of the provenance of South Africa. The artist, Adufe, opens her act clad in black, lighting a set of candles and setting them down in the shape of a half sphere, then lays herself down as if to seek repose.

It is not to be. The lit candles are buffeted by small winds and the chants of the lone chanteuse run a current through the prone figure so that we see not peaceful repose but fitful, startled attempts at sleep. And then a primal scream, coming not from the chanteuse but the restive figure, in a manner worthy of Edvard Munch.

She pulls herself up and runs a full lap with invisible forces in pursuit before returning to the assurance of the half sphere of light. She lays down again as if seeking rest but is restive still. Soon she rises to battle the invisible forces with well executed mime and seems gradually to be standing her ground with the passing of the time.

Gradually, the initial grimace is replaced with a confident, settled look on the face. She then takes one candle and, approaching the audience, consigns a light source to the care and custody of the chosen. Then the face lights up at a realization. Then she takes another candle and approaches another segment of the audience and consigns a candle. And so on.

By the time she is no longer bewildered in her demeanor, there are light bearers, custodians, everywhere in the audience. Then she brings her performance to a close, always as at first, with the chanteuse in the background.

The audience claps in appreciation. She then interprets the performance thus: the protagonist is herself. Her story is how she learnt to overcome the terror of the dark, working through what may come. She learnt to recognize that it was her duty to lend the light to those who may need to walk through various doors of the dark. She learnt to recognize that there are candles to be lit around her but also, and very importantly, to recognize that she, too, is light.

What was interesting was that by the time the performer gave her interpretation of the performance, the audience was coming up with their own interpretation. I, as a member of the audience, had made my own interpretations, and had convinced myself of their validity.

To my mind, the protagonist, dressed in black, is Africa. There is historical allusion here to Conrad who infers that the continent is the heart of darkness. But Africa always was home to the muses hence the candles and the light. She always had to face terrors of the long night of history. She fled her own rest and yet had to rest, she fought the darkness and its minions with growing confidence. Then, she, Africa, discovered that she can entrust the custodianship of her lights to her various manifestations, what we call countries. So that Ghana may be assigned the custody of African light as well as Tanzania or Mauretania or Angola. 

Counter intuitively, as Africa hands her own constitutive elements the custody of her light, she is not diminished but emboldened and even stronger. Not only is there no more night terrors to fight but she is now in a position to enlighten every aspect of herself. One candle does not get diminished by lighting another. The pejorative ‘Heart of Darkness’ often applied to Africa is ultimately shown to be hollow and shallow in the extreme.

If this interpretation seems so far off the declared message of the performance, the audience is reminded that two things can always be simultaneously true. The claim and personification of light beyond what a candle gives is within the reach of all of us individually. It is also within our reach as a people. 

The essence of the performance, for me, is to expect to contend against the darkness but to be assured of prevailing as the light. We cannot claim any easy victories, the art of Adufe suggests. We will contend and we will prevail, against the odds.

Tade Ipadeola. 

A Plural Challenge: Rethinking Civil Society in Nigeria

By Tade Ipadeola

Humor, Silence,

and Civil Society in Nigeria

By Ebenezer Obadare

University of Rochester Press, 2016, 177pp

Legend has it that after Stalin’s death and the bitter three-year power struggle to provide leadership for the Soviets, Nikita Khrushchev summoned a meeting of Soviet top brass in which he elaborated on the programme of the new administration. He denounced Stalin’s crushing purges stating that his administration would be by far more humane than hitherto. Many reacted viscerally, falling physically ill as the ‘Secret Speech’ was delivered and there were no questions entertained for the four hours that the speech lasted. 

An apocryphal account of the same event however states that among those present was a particularly aggrieved man who wanted to know why, all those years of Stalin’s terror, no one spoke up or stood up to Stalin even as Khrushchev denounced the purges. The man spoke out of turn and was initially ignored. But, he felt very strongly about his grievance and heckled Khrushchev with the question once again, out of the crowd and out of turn. Then Khrushchev bowed his head and paused. He didn’t look at anyone particularly but asked in a very clear voice ‘Who said that?’ 

Silence fell on the entire hall. Thirty seconds passed. A full minute. Two minutes. There was pin-drop silence in the hall. After the third minute, Khrushchev drew himself to his full height (he was not a very tall man) and with his eyes sweeping the rank of officials, Khrushchev finally spoke and said ‘I believe you have your answer there.’ No one spoke or coughed again until Khrushchev finished.

In the evolving discourses of civil society all over the world and especially in Africa, the essentially plural nature of society, the dynamic influences of world politics and the peculiarities of individual nations and their leadership, charismatic or colorless, continue to throw up new perspectives and to shape the directions of inquiry and thought. With Humor, Silence, and Civil Society in Nigeria, Professor Ebenezer Obadare has opened up new vistas in the growing discourse. The book is primarily designed for academics but it does have far reaching implications beyond academia. It should be of interest to anyone interested in how the last three decades have shaped our perception of what civil society is and what we can do to reclaim lost swathes of intellectual ground.

Can humor and silence form the essence of the enduring warp and woof of civil society in the way that the Agbekoya and traditional civic organizations cannot? Other than as a tool of oppression, can silence be subversively engaged in the reinvention of society generally? How much damage has the dominant associational interpretation of civil society done in Africa and in Nigeria? What are the limitations of ‘soft’ instruments such as humor and silence? These are some of the issues tackled very deftly in the book.

The author starts out by showing how the scholars and the public tend to portray civil society. He expends considerable time and energy showing that whereas the emphasis on voluntary associations has been a neat and pragmatic way to summarize civil society, it is not an adequate model for understanding what constitutes civil society or its essence in Nigeria or Africa. Drawing from developments in Eastern Europe, the author maps the rise of non-governmental organizations, community based organizations and even state-sponsored ‘civic’ associations and shows how over the closing decades of the 20th century into the 21st century, an associational paradigm for civil society effected a shift in the civil society discourse, becoming so dominant as to push non-associational components of civil society into the fringes. Outside the direct influence of the fallouts from the cold war, the traditional forms of associations in guilds and age grades also feature in cameo roles in how sub-Saharan Africa particularly has come to embrace a professionalized civil society regime. 

Anyone who has studied the damage that the Association for Better Nigeria did in 1993 or the monstrosity that the claque-inspired and driven Youths Earnestly Yearn for Abacha was until Abacha died suddenly, would understand, for example, the perfidy that is the #SupportSARS in 2017 Nigeria. Are these associations also part of civil society? They tick the boxes. They are voluntary, they are ostensibly non-governmental and they are to all intents and purposes associations by citizen of the country. That some of these are registered by the Corporate Affairs Commission appears to lend much needed ‘legitimacy’ for with this extra element, accounts, structure and functions are all very well defined. Does it matter, then, that there is a huge outcry when the Nigerian Senate proposes to pass an additional NGO Bill into law which puts greater scrutiny on the activities of these star players in the civil society game? Does it matter much that the proposed NGO Bill has many similarities with substantive legislation in contemporary Russia? Can true civil society be so easily blinkered and bridled? 

Not, according to Obadare, if we dare to reincorporate non-associational components such as humor and silence. Phenomena such as these, though too tenuous for registrability in ‘Corporate Affairs’ apparatuses anywhere, nevertheless form the very essence of the pulse of what civil society is. Using the sole but supernally significant instance of Siddon Look and Tanda Look invoked by the late Chief Bola Ige at the height of the struggle to wrest back the reins of politics and governance from the duo of General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida and General Sani Abacha, the author underscores the potent uses of silence. Similarly, the author marshals many instances of citizen humor from the late 1970s up to year 2011, a span of time including both military and civilian rule, to illustrate the profoundly important nature of humour of all varieties.

Recent happenings in Zimbabwe, Uganda and even Rwanda seem to support the central thesis in Obadare’s work. By the time Robert Mugabe finally was dragged away from the seat of power, he had become one of the most joked about heads of state in history. Social media was awash with memes of Uncle Bob literally slipping out of power or offering a wisecrack meant to be understood in purely ironic terms. As the humor machine all over the world went into overdrive, a pall of silence concomitantly descended internally on Zimbabwe. With sophisticated social media monitoring units, no resident of any town or city in Zimbabwe could afford to be careless with speech or gesture right up to the final confirmation of Mugabe’s exit from power when tweets and Facebook posts from within Zimbabwe went to top gear as well. 

In Rwanda, the incumbent reportedly won by a 98% margin at the polls and there is a virtual pin-drop silence about the implausibility of this occurring anywhere on earth least of all in a Rwanda in which young aspirants to top political office have been jostling in the wings. In 2016, a ‘banana joke’ ostensibly  directed at Paul Kagame earned the maker of the joke a 20 year sentence in jail. The savage/gallows humor in Rwanda reference the mysterious deaths of opponents of the regime in places as far away as South Africa and Europe. And who but a lunatic would want to change what isn’t broke aha aha? Tyranny too has a sense of humor and revels in silence. In the macabre case of Nigeria, the military at the height of their oppressive rule installed an interdiction center at the heart of one of the more cosmopolitan cemeteries in the city of Lagos, making their ultimate aim abundantly clear.

There is rigor in the nuanced arguments made in this book but I will argue that there is revanche as well. Delimiting the provinces of humor and silence isn’t an easy thing to do in any context but here the author pulls it off remarkably, adding to our understanding those insights about what differences exist between the polis and the civis. Copious scholarly references to what has gone on record in Eastern Europe illustrate contemporary developments in Nigeria where a near copycat approach has been the modus vivendi for a while.

The revanchivist element in the book may well be, in the view of this reader, an expression of the collective consciousness of all Nigerians who came of age at that critical juncture of the country’s transition out of overt military rule of which the author is one. The tipping point of this transition was the death of General Sani Abacha, a man so forbidding in his very countenance and bodily presentation as to erase any notions of humor on sight. This man came to power after his psychic opposite ‘stepped aside’. President Babangida was known for a form of humor which was rare among practitioners of violence, encouraging ‘debates’ and ‘public contributions’ only to turn around and literally hunt dissenters down. These military men scarred the public consciousness but, as the book under review abundantly shows, failed to eschew the subversive and negative capabilities of humor and silence in a thriving society. 

It is interesting that Obadare offers these vistas now. Moving away from the templates from Eastern Europe back to home turf, the salience of Obadare’s offering comes to light when juxtaposed with a passage from the fiction of one of the foremost Nigerian novelists, Daniel Fagunwa. Fagunwa had written of a society called Ilu Ero Ehin, literally The Backward Thinking Town. The distinguishing feature of this town is the town-crier who announces what time it is and what the citizens should be doing. Thus, the town-crier can sound the gong and announce ‘It is time to eat!’ or ‘It is time to fight!’ or ‘It is time to laugh!’ or ‘It is time to weep!’ with denizens complying instantly. No such society exists on the planet, even North Korea wouldn’t make the cut (though it comes close) but the moral is clear: ultimately, what makes a society function as Civis is more than the sum total of legislation or regulation in that society. Those are the things Obadare has broached in this book and we do well to meditate on their implications.