One is a priest of the tribe. The other is a priest.
Both, on the surface, do not belong to the same vortex or syntax. But they can hardly be different. No wonder, it was once speculated that Nnamdi Kanu, who this essayist has called an ethnic entrepreneur, played host to Abubakar Gumi in his Sokoto captivity. “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” asserted Albert Einstein. Imagination can also mislead to war and death, like the Spanish-American war triggered by a rumour.
Gumi is a fire-mouth like Kanu, but that is not their only point of embrace. Both are kindred spirits. That explains why they hate each other very much. If Kanu is an apostle of the tribe, Gumi hoists a double banner. He is a torchbearer of tribe and faith. He is a double-barrel bigot.
They both fascinate more with their sense of humour. Dark, perilous humour. That is where we find their embrace more. We may describe the two as weaponeers of violence, and we are right. We can say they enjoy cult following in their different domains. Of course. We may say both are charismatic, and who will doubt us. We may say they are rabblerousers, and that is bulls ‘eye.
Kanu loves his media. He has operated as the mainstay of the Biafra movement. That cause has had a voice but a staid and conventional one under the now muted MASSOB. He brought a brutish gravitas to the idea. Ralph Uwazuruike laid the egg. Kanu hatched it, but the MASSOB leader did not like the bird that erupted out of the hatchery. This is a parody of the age of Reformation in Europe. The rebel Martin Luther pivoted the fight against the Romish Church by challenging its orthodoxies. But he was following the path of another upstart Erasmus, who had nudged the Christian hierarchy with his treatise, The Praise of Folly. But when Luther rose, Erasmus disowned him and asserted that Erasmus laid the egg that Martin Luther hatched but that the colour of the bird was not what he intended.
Same may be said of Kanu. He brought blood and death to the Biafra struggle. He technologised it, seizing the language and sulphuric fury of the social media. His rhetoric is savage and wry, stoking fire and raining brimstone. His folks love him. His foes admire him. One of his great admirers, as we have seen recently, is Sheikh Gumi.
Gumi has asserted that he would be his chief advocate if he renounced his position. It may be a way of acknowledging Kanu. It was the first statement of note from the bandit priest to the warrior of the East. It may sound as a note of condescension. Gumi spits envy because Kanu is the one in jail, and not himself. He may see it as a form of recognition, what the Marxist Georg Lukacs calls reification. The man has been elevated close to a martyr. He, the Sheikh, has been a vocal crow on the rooftop. But Kanu is bemedaled in official cage. Gumi craves Kanu’s remorse. Maybe he wants Kanu to recant, so the fellow can be demystified. To recant is to be decapitated.
That is a place even Kanu cannot go. He has raised his scale beyond repentance. It was like in the days of June 12. Many thought M.K.O. Abiola would back down from his mandate. At one point, it seemed he would. Some of his associates, like Babatope and Jakande and, of course, Kingibe, had started supping with the grim-eyed spectacles of Abacha. But Abiola happened on an existential moment, an epiphany of redemption. He had nowhere to go but the ring of battle. Enter Epetedo declaration. Enter martyrdom.
Kanu would not return to his vomit, even if he wanted. The army he formed has fated him to the cause. He will have to be faithful unto death. Or he will die a pariah. It is the servitude of the hero. It is like the injunction of Christ: “Remember Lot’s wife. Never look back.” Kanu may not want to be a pillar of salt in Igboland. If Kanu considers this point, he may arrive at the conclusion that Gumi was waging the ultimate war against him. That is, against his prestige and honour. He will not flinch. For Kanu, it is more than a war against Igbo irredentism. If Kanu loses honour, he dies inside. The man dies in him. The next victim will be IPOB itself. Kanu is the metonym of Biafra today. For the Biafrans, both closet and in the open, it will be an inheritance of loss. It was like what Okigbo said in the furious hours of the pogrom. He said if Ojukwu renounced Biafra, market women would stone him on the streets. My paraphrase. So Gumi’s offer to Kanu is not out of virtue but malice, a scheme to paralyse him.
If Kanu comes across as a colourful brute, Gumi is more impresario than colourful. Gumi, unlike Kanu, is the inheritor of his father’s mystic grandeur. His priesthood is a mystique in the blood. His father was a priest. He too is a priest. The father held the torch of tribal hauteur. He too does. In this oedipal story, flesh and spirit cohere. It makes his inheritance ominously genuine because both have advanced the supremacist credo of tribe and faith. His father was of a different era. There were no bandits to sup with in the past. Now, this sheikh betrays no apology for his symmetry with the forest vermin.
He speaks with the aura of an untouchable. He burps in a sanctuary. He does not need any army of protection. His beard is more armour than bullet proof. His fingers abhor a trigger. His ears forbid bomb blasts. So, he fears no police at his doorstep. He anticipates no assassin. He rides media affray and tools reporters to channel his defiance. He is immune to governor and president. No one can accuse him of material quest. The mighty and small in the north swathe him in a veil. Everyone sees the veil but does not see it. That makes him impregnable.
If Kanu is a haunted subvert, Gumi is a patrician rebel. In this era of violence, Kanu stokes the crowd. Gumi blesses his followers. The Sheikh holds no court. He does not recruit nor organise. He holds no ledger nor await a bank alert.
Gumi and Kanu ride privilege. Gumi was born in it. Kanu seems born for it. Gumi is a radical in privilege. Kanu is a radical for privilege. Gumi shakes the bottle to blend it. Kanu breaks the bottle. Gumi wants to save tradition. Kanu wants to exploit it. Both are cynical.
Here is where the humour lies. Gumi still envies Kanu because Kanu seizes history. Fortune does not fall on his lap. He took the struggle from history. Kanu does not descend from Ojukwu’s bloodline. He takes Biafra as an inheritance and a truth. Gumi inherited a rage. The privileged rebel versus the self-made subvert. Kanu is in jail. Gumi cannot even be arrested. Hence the envy. For all his malevolence, Gumi sees Kanu is better rebel. But they are both rebels of division. So they are soulmates on either side of today’s trauma.
