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Prof. Wole Soyinka's Lecture at Storymoja Festival 2014
PARABLES FROM WANGARI MAATHAI’S TREES.
Nairobi, Kenya
Trees
bring out the whimsical in a variety of human sensibilities. Also the lyrical,
the rapturous, or the simply reassuring, as in family belonging. Lately
however, that is, in the past decade or two, trees have attained apocalyptic
dimensions – sitting in judgment over humanity – will the proceeding end in a
reprieve, or a death sentence on the planet itself? No wonder I have also been
lately struck by the fact that, even without their newly conferred powers, trees
have played an intimate, even dynamic role in the evolution of human culture –
and history – especially on this continent. To go all the way back to
beginnings, it would not be out of place to speculate that it was under one
such an accommodating canopy of boughs that our great forebears underwent the earliest formulation of
community. That seems quite plausible, even inevitable, since trees offer not
only land bearings, but shelter against the sun. This primordial subconscious,
I propose, is why we are hardly ever content to let a tree be - a tree - just a
tree in itself and for itself, a replete presence in its own right. Apart from
obvious utilitarian ends that the tree offers
- shade, protection, food, material convertibility etc etc., we even
impose on it the burden of reference points, metaphors, ethical abstractions
and injunctions in forms of proverbs, analogies, celebrate the tree in reams
and reams of poetry, entrenching it in social consciousness through the
painterly arts and numerous other forms of cooption to the ends of aesthetics
and iconography. Following on the heels
of painters, trees remain irresistible to possessors of the latest,
state-of-the-art gadgetry – everyone seems to possess one these days, even if
it is no more than an i-phone - those ubiquitous objects that make every
individual an instant photographer, with or without a sense of arrangement,
texture, light or occasion, conferring only the right to intrude. Unlike humans
however, trees do not appear to mind – you can click away a thousand times on
your i-camera and they won’t complain. The more discerning wielders of those
gadgets however, are so struck by such a singular, often dominating phenomenon
known as a tree that they seek out the dramatic angles, search out the best
position for capturing and preserving, not just the physical attributes of a
tree, but its elusive, ephemeral disposition – some indefinable essence that
quarries into hidden depths of the human psyche. Permit me to indulge in the
unique facets of the tree for a few more moments.
One would concede that mountains and
other picturesque vistas – gorges, waterfalls, rivers, sunsets etc – exercise
equal, and even often more spectacular powers of seduction, but among the
special claims of a tree is that it seems more companionable, more snugly
fitted into the human sense of proportion and dimensions. That is a subjective
claim of course but I think it is sustainable.
Of the myriad Nature self-expressions, the tree possesses, in my
estimation, just the appropriate size, so that one can actually think of
physically embracing, or reproducing trees. And we do. It is within human
scope. You feel you can put your arms around it, around any tree, however huge.
I cannot imagine anyone who would think of embracing the Kilimanjaro mountain,
or attempting to recreate one from Ground Zero.
Or transplanting Victoria Falls to Abeokuta where I live. By contrast
you can actually reproduce an Australian fir tree in Nairobi - well, at least
provoke Nature into collaborating with you in the effort. The art of the
bonsai, for instance, cannot be transferred to any other feature of Nature –
just try reproducing the Jos plateau or the famous Lebanese grottos in your
garden or in a pot on your window sill – the absurdity of it hits you right
away. A tree on the other hand – simply Google for the nearest a Japanese
bonsai artiste.
Film directors cannot resist them –
and not just in westerns where they come useful when the battling cowboys need
to duck behind a cover and re-load their six-shooters. The insatiable cineaste will milk trees
endlessly for effects – recall how many shots of leave-taking at sunset you
have seen as the camera turns boughs - leafy or dessicated - into refraction
devices for one last, lingering wistful statement on all that has gone before.
The camera is never satisfied simply to daub the screen in seductive
tonalities, no, it will point its lens at an intermediary tree through whose
branches the sunset is filtered, squeezing out the last emotional drop until not
a dry eye is left in the theatre. And so on and on.
There is of course the reverse side
– several, in fact. For instance, I sometimes wonder whether trees should not
be held responsible for capital punishment – if they were not around, perhaps
no one would have conceived of hanging as a way to place human beings
permanently out of circulation. No, on
second thoughts, I am certain we would still have found other ways of
desecrating Nature – thrown our
problematic members over cliffs perhaps, or tied stones around their necks and
drowned them etc. etc. – except of course if they happen to be women – then we
would simply bury them up to their necks in earth, and stone them to death, for
the earth shaking crime of begetting a child out of wedlock. Or even for more
heinous crimes – such as showing an inch of flesh in public.
We shall return to that theme in a moment. For
now, let’s steer away from negative distractions and place our accents on the
productive. I hinted earlier at that positive, indeed creative tendency of
humanity towards drawing out ethical pointers or exhortations from Nature, and
here is one, tailor-made for what became Wangari’s life mission: “A tree
does not make a forest.” Depending on whoever is speaking, to whom, and the
occasion, that could mean a dismissive, put-down commentary, such as - don’t
think one solitary achievement makes you anything special. Or, let us say a
cabinet minister comes to declare open a village clinic and goes on and one
about it, you might indeed shut him up with - Mr. Minister, one tree does not
make a forest, meaning of course one clinic does not amount to a national
health service. Such an admonition from Wangari Maathai would of course be a
distinct call to action, to be taken literally:
get on your hands and knees and - plant some more trees! We need
reforestation.
I had to get that message in
somewhere before getting carried away by my incursion into histories and even
lessons from both the obvious and not so apparent lives of trees, since I must
confess to being an unrepentant, even mildly obsessed tree advocate from
childhood. And let me state that my affair with trees began long before I
encountered the devotional verses of Joyce Kilmer, rendered in that unique
subterranean rumble of a voice by Paul Robeson – I think that I shall never see/A Poem lovely as a tree. Somewhat sentimental, even treacly admittedly
– I have come across some irresistible parodies of that poem - but I doubt if
there exists a child who hasn’t been drawn to, and drawn a tree. Trees define
the earth in the mind of most children all the way from infancy. It is only
afterwards that the tree loses its innocence, diversifies, becomes so many
things to many people. At the beginning, it simply spells, unambiguously – Nature.
Land speculators – even when
disguised as government - are of course a breed apart. When they see a tree, they see an obstacle –
to be eliminated by the most efficient agency – the bulldozer. On the other
side of the divide are the fanatics who
have to be restrained as they
watch the bulldozer ripping through a green belt without a thought for the void
that is brutally opened up in a landscape that has become an integral part of
what we are – or, if you prefer – a landscape of which we have become an
integral part, through which we sense ourselves as breathing objects and thus,
a meaningful part of a humbling network of Nature actualities. This claim is
made without prejudice to negative evocations for others with painful
histories, histories that some of us also share vicariously. The plantation
slave, for instance, is part of the total canvas of American history – we
cannot escape these gloomy recalls, which is just as well, since they have not
completely vanished from our midst, even in our so-called era of renewed
enlightenment. For the slave descendant in the so-called New World for
instance, the tree, any tree, was a brooding, menacing presence. In the head of
a black descendant, even today, Paul Robeson’s song of praise would ring in
antithetical cadences to Billie Holliday’s
eerie blues - “Strange Fruit”.
Even in this post-slavery era, a
visitor to the United States, with an average capacity for empathy, on
encountering the overpowering fragrance from a tree for the first time, and
learning that the source is none other than a magnolia tree, may actually
undergo an involuntary shudder, since the ‘strange fruit’ of Billie Holliday’s
dirge refers to the putrifying body of a lynched slave – sometimes
several. It does not require much
exercise of the imagination to project the interior lives of the African slaves
themselves, unable to escape that symbol of arbitrary terror and
dehumanization. The luxury of internalizing and celebrating relationships with
trees is therefore not quite as universal as one would wish, even among poets,
artists and mythologists. History and
memory remain primary tributaries of art and its symbols – again painfully
demonstrated in Toni Morsion’s Beloved,
where the weals on the back of her protagonist have taken on a life of their own
and formed a pattern permanently embossed on her back in the form of a tree. I
am carrying a tree on my back says the main character, Sethe. That is, I carry
a permanent reminder of my status as a being born without a voice, without
volition. It is a disfigurement, not merely of the body but of the spirit, one
that reminds us of what it is like to be born into that sole destiny – no
different from a tree, open to being scarred, abused, amputated and cut down at
will, just one among other owned utilities.
Toni Morrison, and Wangari, both of
the female gender, are products of far more enlightened times. They could order
and re-order their lives. They could and did enrich the lives of others. Both
transcended their antecedents – colonialism and slavery being siblings of the
same human disorder, not forgetting that additional gender disdain that still
does not quite know itself as part of the family of misbegotten human
relationsips. Even those who considered Wangari’s commitment as eccentric at
best, or obstructionist and subversive
at worst, acknowledge the utilitarian value of the very cause against which
they ranged their priorities – they simply would have preferred that she went
and planted her trees elsewhere. Those who, even today, still fail to appreciate
the larger context of her work must be totally immune to the world of
anxieties, having unbelievably missed out on expressions of concern such as
climate change, ecological degradation, holes in ozone layers, global warming,
melting of the ice cap etc. etc. - all now household expressions. But does one
even need such incantations to remain mindful of the communal role of the tree
in mundane existence? We take it for granted.
The virtues of that sturdy unit of Life extend in multiple, infinite
directions, deeply and extensively, so that when some of us conceive Nature, we
apprehend her effortlessly, as a rich, ordered medley of growth that reaches
into infinity, a medley into which we immerse ourselves for sustenance, and for
healing, as a canopy of serenity that restores us after the depredations of
modernity on our frenetic existence. The tree still stands as a primordial
presence, but now it has also become an eloquent critique of ill-conceived and
often, ill-fated social engineering experiments that involve human uprooting,
are based on the text-books of ideologues who fail to relate social theories to
the precipitates of accumulated history, human psychology, a reality so simply
but profoundly captured in Jeremy Cronym’s lines to which I often make
recourse, even to the point of seeming addiction:
To live close to every
tree you had ever planted
Our century has been the
great destructor of that,
The small and continuous
community, lived in solidarity
With seasons, its life
eked out around
Your fore-mothers’ and
-fathers’ burial-ground
‘Our century’? Jeremy Croynm wrote
those lines in the last, so he was referring to that century, not the present.
If he and similar poetic alarmists scattered round the globe had been
heeded, Wangari may have been spared to expend her energies on other concerns.
She would not have needed to abandon classroom and begin re-planting trees that
should not have been cut down in the first place. Not that she minded – that is, minded such
‘lowly’ chores. On the contrary, Wangari declared:
Although I was a highly educated
woman, it did not seem odd to me to work with my hands, often with my knees on
the ground, alongside rural woman. Some politicians and others in the 1980s and
1990s ridiculed me for doing so. But I had no problem with it, and the rural
women both accepted and appreciated that I was working with them to improve
their lives and the environment. After all, I was a child of the same soil.
Education, if it means anything, should not take people away from land, but
instill in them even more, respect for it, because educated people are in a
position to understand what is being lost. The future of the planet concerns
all of us, and we should do what we can to protect it. As I told the foresters,
and the women, you don't need a diploma to plant a tree
Perhaps the most easily apprehended
distillation of the affinities we bear to trees – as poet, teacher, activist
and so on, or just plain citizen - is
that, even when ignored, taken for granted, even neglected, trees transform the
environment, just like humanity. They metamorphose. Like humanity, they pass
through transformative stages – from seed where they may be tended in a nursery
– the very expression we apply to infants - to the young shoot, to shrub and
eventually to the majestic entity that creates its own aura – alone or with
others. Both can enhance, degrade or dominate the environment. Trees carry
their own diseases and can infect other trees, just as – as we have reminded
ourselves from history - they can enhance or degrade both environment and
humanity. We could claim that both are socialized phenomena, not inert, not
passive. On the contrary, both are productive and dynamic. Humans have even
appropriated the very image of a tree to encapsulate their family line – known
as the family tree – a narrative of the surviving, the missing and the
deceased. And finally, most poignantly
when a death is considered untimely – through diseases, violence or accident -
untimely that is, in human expectations, we then resort to the same common
expression – felled. Yes indeed, both organisms age, both submit to stronger
forces from nature – storms, floods and subsidence – but, at other times they
are simply – felled. Like Kofi
Awoonor. A poem lovely as a tree, intoned Paul Robeson. And that was indeed
what was most often voiced about Kofi
both individually, and by those who gathered to mourn his demise:
“A mighty tree has
fallen”
A great
tree has been felled. A great and lovely tree that yielded a constant harvest
of poems to engage the minds of the world. That is, the world of the mind, of
freedom of the imagination. Poems which,
however, cannot be felled, that continue to echo in the vaults of the mind.
And so we should not remain too long within
the chamber of loss since, in celebrating the tree, we celebrate the man, and
in the way a Community reads in its favourite tree the scroll of a collective
self-affirmation that reaches beyond the physical, a repository of the
Community’s vital essence, embodying and reflecting its fortunes, its soul and
history. You need only see how a town or village responds when a revered tree
is felled – here, if only to interject a milder tone, is one episode from my
part of the world, straight out of the colonial narrative, in the year just
after I left secondary school.
With that habitual insouciance that
comes with a contract to build a fly-over, a bridge or a factory, this British
construction firm moved into an alien environment and began to level everything
within sight. Alas – in this instance, the company failed to reckon with one
nondescript tree with gnarled roots and branches, an overgrown head in dire
need of the services of a cosmic hairdresser.
Never mind that, to all appearances, the tree appeared to exist solely
for its generous shade and a permissive base that served as a makeshift market,
the Britishers soon learnt that even if, where they came from, a rose is a rose
is a rose by any other name, in some parts of their possessions, a tree is a
tree is a spirit is ancestor is guardian is a deity is shrine etc. etc. Touch a
hair of its head and - well, why don’t I
simply read you an extract from the archives on that incident – the felling of
the tree of Emotan:
In 1951, the British colonial administration officials
injected the tree with poisonous chemicals and uprooted it. This action almost
led to a violent mass reaction. After which the {37th} Oba Akenzua II (of Benin) -1933-1978 - vehemently protested
the destruction of the Emotan shrine. This
tree had been there since the 15th century. Consequently, the
colonialists acceded to the request for a replacement. A life-size statue was
cast by Mr. J.A.Danfor in London from a clay marquette modeled by Enomayo,
professional brass caster from the Igun-Eronmwon.
The new Emotan statue was
unveiled amidst pomp and pageantry by the Oba Benin, Akenzua ll on March 20,
1954.
Mind
you, opportunism is never fully absent in such matters. Indeed, such outrages
have proved powerful tools for political re-positioning - in this case, holding the colonial powers
to ransom and extracting some concessions from them. Why not? Wangari Maathai would have cheered,
identified fully with what we might call – the Spirit of Emotan. She was one of that breed who transcend the sturdiest of trees
because they gave birth to them, and thereby to a movement, and far beyond mere
sentiment or totemic impulses. Maathai
planted trees, yes, but trees were not simply environmental ornaments or
historic bookmarks for her, or a defence of eco-diversity as a faddish
undertaking. The tree meant –
livelihood. Sustainable and self-renewing source for the reproduction of human
existence – most especially for women, a tool in their empowerment. In short, economic asset of a hard-nosed,
quantifiable kind, one that could be measured in material returns. For her,
there was no self-indulgent separation between ethics and aesthetics.
Let us not de-emphasize this –
indeed, for a being of such a combative temperament it would be a crime to fail
to admit that the tree also served her as a political tool, one that drove, and
was driven by, her dedication to humanity, to equality of man and woman and the
uplifting of the downtrodden – all were inextricably interwoven. Her humanity
was wrapped up in the dignity of the humanized environment – a preoccupation
that was holistic – no one should have been surprised that her career and
political trajectory ran parallel with that quest for a humanized existence
that was not alienated from its living space. Harrassed, hounded, subjected to
sexist abuses even from high places – President Arap Moi personally had some
choice, unpresidential expressions for her -
she chose to plant her trees at the feet of the very thugs who had been sent to intimidate her,
enduring humiliation and physical injury in the process. However, Wangari was
not one weak sapling that could be wilted by all the poisonous chemicals of
sectarian politics or indeed the storms of crude power that uprooted others.
She was one sturdy tree that spread her seedlings far and wide, transforming,
revitalizing – and not from the detached
rostrum of her classrooms and international podia but, right among the people,
on her knees, with her hands deep in
earth and dirt. Until, like an Emotan
matriarch, Queen mother of the kingdom of trees, she succumbed – but to an
internal frailty.
Unlike trees however, the felling of
the human is only a trick of absence that leaves no void. Tree or poem, the
product of mind and will remains. That
is a message we have to pass on to the gloating psychopaths bestriding our
earth, yes – This Earth, my Brother – in Kofi’s salute to earth - no matter
what axe they think they have to grind with the world before wielding the
literal axe – or its even more deadlier modern versions - with reckless
abandon, indiscriminately, and with fanatical zeal. Those killers are the
bulldozers of our earlier identified land speculators. They bulldoze humanity
in the name of an illusory land development – clearing the ground for a
vaporous Paradise. What they are however, is no more than tawdry, material
speculators in the stakes of salvation, their heads and minds swollen with the
promise of sensual pleasures in the afterlife, for which the present is
disposable. And that should raise the question: what becomes our duty whenever
one or more of us are unjustly felled, since we, as community, also undergo a
felling by attrition, through an arrogant exacerbation of those palpable and
psychological blows that we daily endure, blows which then reach into the very
basis of our collective being, a depletion of the aspirations that constitute
one’s self, one’s own self-cognizing, one’s relevance to community, environment
and humanity? What becomes our duty?
Let us mull over that question as we shift geography and, at the
same time, restore the balance between the palpable and the symbolic – not that
the two are trapped in a dichotomy - but first, come with me on a visit to yet
another tree of history, a contemporary one, at once a symbol and a
life-preserver. Permit me to turn your gaze backward a decade and a half to
that iconic tree – for the African continent at least – an image provider that
rounded up the twentieth century, was beamed round the world from a continent
trapped in the yet unrelenting vice of brutalizing conflicts. Invited by a Dutch journal at the turn of the last century to
nominate what, for me, would be the prime candidate for the defining image of
the twentieth century, I unhesitatingly opted for that intensely narrative
symbol of hope that was however a product of Nature’s
malevolence. Perhaps you can already recall – once you focus on the fact that
that it was indeed a tree! For
believers, it was the kind of image that would be designated a Divine Sign.
Still, believers or not, we all converge on one destination – humanity. That
image – let me relieve you of further uncertainty – that image was pressed upon
the landscape when the banks of the Limpopo River burst in the year 2000,
flooding vast areas of the African eastern seaboard. Mozambique took the brunt.
Its capital, Maputo, was flooded, as were hundreds of hectares inland. Major
road arteries were cut off, making relief inaccessible to many. Over a thousand
human lives were lost, with thousands of heads of cattle and other
livestock. Schools were washed away,
hospitals inundated, over a hundred thousand households wiped off the land.
Those are no mean statistics! It was a flood of epic, biblical proportions,
reputed to be the worst flooding ever experienced in Mozambique for over fifty
years – of which over three decades had been spent on warfare!
It was within that flood – most of
you will recall - that a woman was marooned up a tree, surrounded by nothing
but water. She gave birth in that tree. That iridescent image was flashed
around the world and overcame the viciousness of the cyclone and the
destruction it wreaked. It also overwhelmed a destructive past. I found it an image that asserted, in the
very circumstances of its emergence, an unassailable right of being and
compassion ranged against all other images of denial that compete for place on
the continent. It administered, it struck me at the time, a transcendental
rebuke on that infant’s adult progenitors who, like others after independence,
had chosen to inaugurate an even more intense, more brutal civil war for
sixteen years, following ten years of armed struggle for the liberation of that
now inundated land. That second war had ended barely two years before, and thus
the Nature affliction found a united people, enabling them to cope, in a manner
that would have been considered hitherto unimaginable, with a catastrophe of
such proportions. That deluge may not have produced a Noah's Ark, but it did
materialize a helicopter out of the skies, a helicopter from a historic
adversary, apartheid South Africa – but this time, it was not on a bombing
raid.
Yes, an inundation from horizon to
horizon. A solitary tree. A woman and
her new-born infant. A deus ex machina - but unmistakably of human counsel and
ingenuity - rappelling down from whirring blades to the rescue of the hapless
pair. Yes, that was inevitably my chosen image of
the twentieth century, and as yet
unsuperceded, a symbolic harbinger of the yet elusive people’s resurgence, the
much awaited restoration of an African Humanism.
Now come with me to Northern
Nigeria, to the land of Boko Haram. Not the most comforting of exercises but,
have we any choice? I invite us to picture the Lake Chad overflowing and inundating
Borno State, or a sector of the River Benue overflowing its banks and cutting a
destructive swathe through the states of Taraba or Adamawa. I want us to
picture a woman stranded in the branches of a baobab tree, that champion for
longevity in the arboreal kingdom. The Chad waters rise, and swirl around
Borno, moving towards Maiduguri. Now picture a band of the new would-be
liberators and purifiers of the African soul passing by, and encountering this despised object – a female - clinging to
life, and a baby clinging to her in her near nudity. Well then, what do you
imagine would take place?
First of all, you should be aware
that she has been guilty of haram - the forbidden – her exceptional
circumstances notwithstanding, her religious affirmation irrelevant. Not merely unveiled in public domain,
but rendered virtually naked into the bargain. She has transgressed the
commandment of Allah – as transmitted by the prelates of Boko Haram - that is
the sum and interpretation of an image of which, for the rest of us, would
constitute Allah’s gift of compassion, a transfiguration. Now, let us
conjecture the nature of their response, for which we can only go by the
examples and pronouncements provided us by these self appointed spokesmen of
God. So, how would they react?
No
doubt whatsoever in my mind, but that a roving band would instantly riddle her
with bullets for polluting the
sight of God. Or perhaps they would gleefully settle down to some
entertainment, some stoning exercise to see whose missile would bring down the
rotten fruit. If a choice was made to rescue her, it would only be to conscript
her into service as a sex object, or else turn her into a walking bomb to
purify her sin-saturated existence in a Maiduguri market, taking with her
fellow sinners whose sole crime is to eke out a bare living from the products
of their hands. Nothing strange about this in the history of soldiery, but
others do not cite their scriptures as divine authority for such secular
depravity.
For those who consider my projected
scenario an exaggeration, a writer’s resort to poetic licence, I invite you to
browse through the abundance of narratives from Algeria’s own history of
trauma, one from which that nation is yet to fully emerge. The account of this – among a hundred allied
episodes – is amply detailed in one of the most recent of the courageous
narratives of those years - it bears the unambiguously defiant title: Your Fatwa does not Apply here, its
author - Karima Benoune, a woman professor now teaching in the United States. This specific event took place in – of
course - a girls’ school, overseen by
the Virtue Vigilantes – or equivalent – who kept watch outside the school
gates. Now, the pupils would not dare
leave their homes for that barely conceded learning institution without their hijab. Once within the school confines
however, they could take them off, which they routinely did. On this day, the
school caught fire, which spread rapidly. With smoke billowing everywhere, the
girls made the instinctive rush for the exit, hijabs forgotten. Not by the
Virtue Vigilantes however. They pushed the girls back into the
building and, as the pressure increased from the inside, latched that sole exit
against them. Several perished in the
inferno. These, and like records, are in the public domain. Well then, what do
you think would have happened to that naked woman so sinfully isolated in the
tree against the skyline of Maiduguri?
My dear colleagues, friends, fellow
earth inhabitants, it is time we stopped beating around the bush, or debase
language into a mere palliative, least of all by those of us who live without
direct daily contact with the effects of this human aberation, what I have
tried to bring starkly to your consciousness in its total, inhuman and dehumanizing
horror – that episode in Algeria - summarizes the moral delirium in which Boko
Haram exists, not merely declared in barely translatable rant, but fleshed out
in the act, daily, hourly at the cost of thousands of lives, and not only for Nigeria but as the agenda
for the vastness of this African continent. This is the meaning of Chibok, and
the Sambisa forest where over two hundred school girls are still held prisoners
and slaves. It is the meaning of al Shabbab and its godfathers like al Queda.
It is the meaning of the death of Kofi Awoonor far from his home in the distant
mall of Nairobi. It is the meaning of cold deaths in London underground, the
meaning of the shredding of human bodies in the Central Railway station of
Madrid – same as for the Nyanya motor park in Abuja, Nigeria, in which same
city the conferred immunity of the United Nations Headquarters was violated. It
is the recurrent language of human putrefaction that is being forced down the
throat of humanity by something that calls itself ISIS or ISIL. It is the
language of the fate of the minority Yazidi, an ancient people of Iraq, and of
the people of Bama in the land of Boko Haram, their men methodically
slaughtered, virtually to a man, their women preserved only to bury the dead,
serve as drawers of water and sex chattels.
Let us not be complacent, and let us not be
foolish. Let writers and all who still boast a function of the mind understand
that the occasional would-be shoe bomber is not an aberration that is soon
contained, nor imagine that the most sophisticated policing and detection
gadgetry emplaced by their governments will be effective substitute for that
internal purge and massive re-orientation – on a universal level - that is now
mandatory for the enthronement of free beings in the free world. One pin-prick
alone, then another, then another soon expands into a quilt-work of mental
occupation by alien forces through methodical indoctrination and/or forceful
conversion, building up to the massive
subjugation of the human will through the agency of terror. Fear destabilizes society and debilitates its
collective will. It is time that the words complacency and rationalization should be expunged from the dictionaries
of all languages.
Do I address governments here?
Regional alliances? The framers and executors of national and international
policies? Am I addressing our familiar
enemies, unrepentant inheritors and would-be perpetuators of the imperial
mandate, east or west of the vanishing ideological divide? No, not at all. We
know them. The people of this continent have fought them internally and
externally. We have liberated ourselves from them – incompletely obviously, but
in a process that is irreversible, otherwise the greater shame on us. Since the
so-called independence of African nations, we have continued to fight their
internal surrogates, the petty dictators and butchers of their own kind, and if
they think to profit by a situation of global apprehension and shotgun
alliances for self-preservation, then we must also do battle with their
treachery.
I am however addressing none of these, at
least not primarily. Today I address my fellow crafters of images by which we
render the world of reality tolerable, even dignifying, as well as allied
members of my creative tribe, and today, very specifically, I call on the
moslem writers among us – I speak to the of the testifying breed – heirs to the
legacy of Tayeb Salih, Ousmane Sembene,
Amina Sall, Tahar Djaout, Naguib Mafouz, Mariama Ba and others : you
cannot afford to tire, or fail to raise your voices unambiguously, in commitment to the purification of what is
being mangled and distorted in your Scriptures, restoring it to a healing, from
a killing book. I address my colleagues of the intelligentsia some of whom, for
decades now, often responded to our raised warning voices with emotive
religious demagoguery. On behalf of the creative mission which is life, we must
continue to assail the attempted impositions of retrogressive world-views that
impinge upon, and seek to curtail even the choices of outsiders to that faith.
“You cannot condemn this or that act
since you are not one of our faith. You cannot even comment. You cannot fault
our position in this or that, otherwise it means that you disrespect, or even
insult our religion.” That era of religious blackmail is over, of
exclusionist tactics in order to lay claim to immunity. It never existed. It was always a delusion.
Just when did one cease to be a member of the human community? And a writer at
that. Some, even where we invoke
history, our history as recorded and as verifiable within living memory, have
accused us of conspiring to re-enslave our own people in the interest of an
East-West contest for the recovery of old grounds. So easy it is to wallow in
historic elision, where one wears an eternal eye-patch and refuses to see what
is not immediately in the line of vision. This has been largely the regard of
African immediate post-colonial history where colonization has been presented
for viewing only as a uni-directional phenomenon. That is a fallacy, and the
chickens of that elision have come home to roost.
Today, we must understand that there
is no covering fire for murder, for humiliation, for deprivation of volition
and dignity. If we say, it is degrading to compel a woman to sheathe herself
from head to toe, leaving only slits for the eyes, as long as we do not pounce
on her and yank the tent off her body,
do not insult our viewpoint and deny our realities by attributing such sentiment
to foreign teaching – first obtain a truthful picture of our pre-colonial,
pre-christian, pre-existent actualities, especially as reflected in the
contemporaneous arts and literatures of that era. If we claim that it is cruel
and repugnant to bury our mothers, our sisters, our daughters up to the neck
for some infraction and stone them to death, we are merely declaring that we
have stayed faithful to the humanity of our traditions, for whom humanity
remains indivisible, and that we feel for woman or man, just as we feel for
ourselves, for our own bodies, for our own realities and aspirations. And if
you insist that, for such articles of faith, we deserve to be blown up and our
children have their throats slit, then we, on our part, must come together and
take needed measures to defend our own right of belief and right to exist – by
whatever means. Before Islam, christianity existed, and before christianity,
the spirituality of the orisa of the Yoruba, and even before the orisa, how many shall we count in the
search for the pathway to Ultimate Truth?
There is always an irreducible core
of universalism wherever the human organism is placed at the centre of
existence – which is where we choose to place it. Similarly, we have come to a
pass where we insist that Reality must be founded on what is proven to be the
undeniable animator of humanity,
its existence and continuity, a common,
palpable, ageless denominator of the very phenomenon of existence –the creative
urge in humanity and its sustenance.
Just as a tree does not make a forest, so does one gender NOT make
humanity. And when you compromise, when you pander to fragmentary notions like
cultural relativism, you are merely opening wide the gates to your own
destruction. You have taken the first step – however long it takes – towards yourselves
of becoming relative and thus, expendable. This is when you wake up to discover
that you have become first-line designated victims. The world salutes all those
who, like Kofi Awoonor, did not betray their calling to accommodate evil under
this latest guise of religious permissiveness and the spineless language of
Political Correctness. They may be victims, but their spirit in the language of
affirmation for humanistic values did not bow to the slavish wind of
double-talk and glamorization of surrender.
Let me solemnly affirm that, bitter
and lacerating as is that memory, it is not the murder of our colleague, the
late Kofi Awoonor that has instigated these remarks. They are reminders – sadly
– mere reminders of what has been said often, what has been warned against
ad nauseum, but appear to
vanish rapidly into the slip stream of memory, no sooner uttered. But History
is the reality into which we were born, and that History has already fashioned
its template, and there is no deviation between its oscillating axis of
impulsion – Power at one end, Freedom on the other. The spores of religious fundamentalism are
everywhere, flying invisibly across nation boundaries, taking root silently,
watered by past masters of extreme indoctrination, until blossoming time when,
towering above complacent spires, steeples, cupolas and ivory towers and
lately, even silencing and pulverizing minarets, they belch out their flowers
of evil. And the process continues - those spores momentarily vanish into one
obscure spot, only to erupt on the other side of the globe in sanguinary
fountains – Al Shabaab, Boko Haram, al Queda, ISIS and all, generic mutants of
one another, striving to outdo the last in degree of butchery, human
degradation and insolence.
But at least, I believe we can claim
some measure of progress, moving towards
abandonment of the language and conduct of “holier than thou”, the canonization of ego
against ‘the other’ as the fundamental
basis of human and communal relationships, dooming that other, or conceding it
to the disposal machine of the “holier”, and thus buying oneself a space of
immunity. Sooner or later, along will come others of a far more viciously
uncompromising tendency who burst upon your routine, your occupation, your
domestic and/or professional complacency, who break through your protective
carapace that is no carapace at all but a mere fragile, holding device. The
newcomers conclude that you have deviated from the strict path of adhesion.
They employ a narrower gauge of definition and an enhanced language of
separatism that you had once administered to ‘others’ . They declare – “Holier?
What is that? Purer, that’s what we are. We are purer than you.” Thereafter,
you join the ranks of theunclean. Of
those who blaspheme by their very existence, even by silence. You are herded
together and labeled: for arbitrary disposal.
Do not be deceived however, they who preach
that their gazes are solely fixated on the hereafter, that this present world
holds no attraction for them – they are liars! It is the present that actually
holds them in thrall. The domination of that coveted space, that humanity in
the here and now – otherwise why do they bother to enslave, to kill, to
destroy? Why not the option of detachment, the silent abandonment of the “impure”
to their ways till Judgment Day in the hereafter? As writers, we must debunk these pretentions.
We must tell them they lie in their teeth, that the dominion of their quest is
not in the thereafter but in the power of domination in this most palpable
present.
There is no in-between. The unstated
religion that animates all truthful creators – human freedom – is indivisible.
And perhaps it is about time that we adopted the language of those very enemies
of humanity but, this time on behalf of humanity – fundamentalism. Yes, perhaps
it is high time we declare ourselves fundamentalists of human liberty. Not
libertinism but simply - liberty. Freedom. Either this is what we fought for on
this continent – against foreign invaders, against enslavement, against
imperialism – or else we have fooled ourselves. We have fought merely to hand
over the millennial keys on our chains to a new set of imperators. In that
case, it may be admissible to begin the rounds of history all over again, to
accept that the first, second and subsequent cycles of enslavement have yet to
run their course.
This is the reality of widening
swathes of the Nigerian environment today. It is the predicted scenario that
overtook Northern Mali whose initial insurgents, with genuine internal
grievances, first committed a near fatal error: they made common cause with
external religious predators and together easily overran the northern part of
that nation, threatening the capital Timbuktoo. Those outside forces of
religious imperialism, ousted from elsewhere
– Libya, Afghanistan, even Egypt – or simply seeking territorial
expansion, responded greedily to the prospect of a prostrate nation ready for
occupation and poured in from all corners. And what was their priority? To turn Mali’s historic centres of culture
and learning – and of Timbuktoo especially - into deserts of the mind. They raced to turn its treasures, largely of
islamic genius, into rubble and ashes, and its people into serfs. Yes, that especially,
to weigh them down with the brutality of laws that had become their trademark
everywhere, laws under which the human personality is degraded and the gift of
freedom is nullified. The acts of these invaders often portray them as aliens
from outer space, since they do not conform even to the minimal expectations of
a humane regard for the autochthones whose land they have invaded. Alas, they
are only too real, only they are mutants.
Mutants, yes, but programmed. They have become veterans in the automatism
of terror, and they understand that suicidal mental cast of settled
communities, that tendency to shrug off the distant flickers of flame with the
words: “It can never happen here”. My dear friends, it can, and it has. It will
again. The mission of enslavers is never ended.
In seeking a clarity of direction,
let us, whose race has only recently begun to emerge from centuries of disdain
inflicted both within the continent and without, ask ourselves some questions,
backed helpfully by projected images. Such as: those who gunned down Kofi Awoonor
and - are they different from the plantation masters of the Americas? Are their
ideologues separate as a breed from the Ku Klux Klan of the United States of
America? Are they different from the slave merchants of Aleppo, Cairo,
Marakesh, whose pre-european enterprise littered the Sahara with the bones of
our ancestors? Are they different from
the torturers, gaolers, murderers of Apartheid South Africa? That Limpopo tree – attempt its
transformation in your mind in a different historic role and geography: a
runaway slave ‘treed’, as the expression goes, by bloodhounds, clinging to its
top branches for safety. The slave hunters know it is only a matter of time before exhaustion sends him plummeting
down into the slavering jaws of the animals. Their owners love the sport.
When is tyranny? What colour does it
wear? What race does it claim? The answer is: None, and All. Is there ever a
graceful way of succumbing? When those tree images are faithfully superimposed,
the African continent will be left with only the irreducible in the choices
that guide her destiny – not as theory, but as pragmatic indications to what
our present times demand. Where lies the difference between those ancient slave
camps and that camp currently retaining our children in the midst of a sparsely
forested enclave called Sambisa, right in the heart of a once thriving state –
Borno, in Northern Nigeria? Are we not
also held slaves in that enclave? The rest is superfluous - images of shredded humanity in teeming motor
parks, markets and motor garages in the heart of a nation. But perhaps we are the kind who are easily
lost in numbers, overwhelmed by the daily accumulation of statistics, needing
the aid of one immediately recognizable, non-anonymous statistic in the midst
of mass carnage, yet representative of a general, but intimate humanity. For
all such, there was a poet and citizen known among us whose name is Kofi
Awoonor, a tree that was felled in the glass and metal jungle of Nairobi.
It is true, a tree does not make a
forest. There is however, one tree that is common to every forest, visible to
some, invisible to others, visible in some seasons, shrouded in others, but a
presence, a landmark, a beacon always and a destination for all beings of
dignity and volition. It is a tree for all seasons, visible or invisible. Rare
is that school pupil who never read of it in history classes or never heard it
invoked during seasons of political turmoil, always in the context of a famous
saying which is just as often misquoted. The beginning however survives all
distortions, the part that reads “The tree of Liberty….” That invocation remains constant, and no wonder -
it is the very heart of human history. Regarding the rest, you know what kind
of potion – it warns – with which that tree has been watered throughout human
existence.
Writers do not preach violence.
There is always the exception or two but, writers consider violence the last
recourse of failed humanity. Writers however – and again conceding a meager
handful of exceptions – writers understand that the Tree of Liberty provides
the roof under which we shelter – just like our progenitors - in the forest of
creativity. We have a profound call to arrest and neutralize any hand that is
raised to cut it down, no matter what label is embossed on the rampaging axe –
that of secular ideology, or of religion. We must protect that tree, or we
cease to be what we claim to be. We must rally behind its banner – since it is
the home of our universal Muse. We must adopt whatever needful means and
strategy to protect it, since it is the sturdy growth from the bodies of our
own martyrs, our mission, our very reason for existing. We must fashion and
re-fashion the weapons of resistance, but also break through the repetitive,
sterile cycle of aggression and self-defence.
The Muse of Creativity remains our common deity. It is time we took the
battle to the infidels.
WOLE
SOYINKA
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