God’s scattered bits of wood in Dakar
The above title is taken from the novel, God’s bits of Wood, a classic rendition of a seamlessly organized workers’ uprising in Senegal written by the great Senegalese writer and filmmaker, Ousmane Sembene. The smooth and seamless transition in Senegal from a reckless authoritarian presidency to a more liberal and constitution-based governance powered by youthful idealism and visionary resolve now appears in retrospect to be too good to be true, particularly given the precarious circumstances in most of the continent. But then Senegal has always appeared to be an exception to the general rule in Black Africa. Give it to the youths and surviving progressive cadres in the country. They have always risen to the defence of the fatherland whenever danger and civilian dictatorship lurk.
There was no trick in the handbook of civilian despotism that Macky Sall, the former president, did not employ to stay put in office. It ranged from the murder of protesters, detention of opponents, emasculation of the press, to other grave infractions of the constitution. But in the end, he was forced out by the people’s power amidst burning tyres, smouldering rubbish and a social combustion so severe that it tested the mettle of the law-enforcement authorities. As usual, the disciplined and thoroughly professional Senegalese armed forces stayed out of the fray. Not for once in the history of the nation have they been forced to intervene in the domestic affairs of their nation.
Old demons have now reappeared on the streets of Dakar. After months of rumoured tension, the President of Senegal, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, fired his former mentor, Ousmane Sonko, the Prime-minister, from office. But rather than go home quietly, the former prime minister, a seasoned master of agitation and political rumpus, has now shown up after some deft foot works as the Speaker of the parliament, a position from where he can launch a terminal offensive against his former mentee, friend and comrade in arms. The two men had fought together in the trenches and on the streets in the struggle to deepen democracy in Senegal and prevent the emergence of constitutional despotism. As a matter of fact it was only because the former prime minister was in jail that his loyal deputy was nominated to run in his place. He won by a landslide not on account of his personal popularity or standing with the populace but because of the general acceptance of the brand and the charismatic intransigence of his mentor.
In such circumstances, power-sharing between two heady and headstrong youths particularly when it is based on raw courage and aptitude for political affray and not on deep ideological bonding and shared vision is bound to be problematic if not outright perilous. Once again, we may be witnessing the perils of liberal democracy based on the elective affinity of personality and not on deep institutional scaffolding. It will be recalled that the last three presidents of Senegal, Abdou Diouf, Abdoulaye Wade and Mack Sall, were all driven from office in humiliating circumstances because they failed to read the signals correctly.
Leopold Sedar Senghor, the country’s founding president and a minority Christian in an overwhelmingly Moslem country, escaped the hammer because he had a second address preferably in France. He was more of a celebrated poet, scholar, intellectual and global statesman rather than a do or die politician. He knew when to draw the curtain on his own rule.
Perhaps it is now time to sing Ebenezeri for the two friends or at least one of them. How this one will play out remains to be seen, since they both draw their strength and energy from the same constituency which is the street and implacable youth. In the event and as Shakespeare famously noted, youth is a stuff that will not endure. After Senghor’s benevolent paternalism, the streets have always played a big role in refining, modulating and moderating the Senegalese model of liberal democracy. It has always been so and it will always be so. The big irony this time around is that since this is shaping up to be an epic confrontation between two major street fighters, the matter may be settled in the Senegalese parliament. Let us now look at another contrasting paradigm.
The Japanese soldier who refused to surrender
Ever heard of a Japanese soldier by the name of Hiroo Onoda? The story is as strange and unnerving as they come. But it is also an unexampled instance of patriotism and fanatical devotion to the good of the fatherland that has since gone down into Japanese legend and folklore. It should command the attention of nations with weak institutions and those with disputed and ambiguous genealogy which render them impotent in the face of overwhelming adversity. It also shows how institutional memory and a strict and rigid adherence to a national code of honour and patriotic valour can alter human consciousness and behavior over time.
Towards the end of the Second World War, Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda and his men were dropped in a remote jungle island in the Philippines behind enemy line. Their order was precise and to the point. They were to sabotage and cause maximum damage to enemy supply lines and disrupt their communication facilities in order to slow down or halt completely the rampaging and rapidly advancing American military machine. Surrendering or ignoble defeat was out of the question. Suicide or sepukku, or self-disembowelment as it is known in Japanese parlance, was a better and more honourable option. Onoda, a battle-tested veteran, ardent Japanese nationalist and expert in jungle warfare, felt very much equal to the task. America and its arrogant and overbearing army must be brought to heel.
But it turned out a bridge too far. Hiroo had hardly settled down when the war ended in emphatic American victory as the Imperial American Army under the command of the equally imperious General Douglas MacArthur swept everything before it. That was the beginning of the real drama. Hiroo refused to surrender. Despite repeated broadcasts, leaflets and flyers dropped from aircrafts into the remote Filipino jungle that the war had ended, the old soldier stuck to his gun insisting that he was obeying the last order from his commander and that as long as that order subsisted, hostilities must continue. And so for the next twenty nine years, Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda roamed the wild jungle on the remote Philippines island, living rough and feeding on wild fruits, primeval roots and domestic animals stolen from the local people. Occasional sightings spoke of a wild feral man so completely dehumanized that he was hardly distinguishable from animals in the jungle and he could not be confronted because he was so dangerously armed that it could be said that he had crossed the borderline into animal savagery.
In 1974, an American journalist and adventurer visited the remote island and actually met with the wild man of Lubang Island. In an interview, Hiroo insisted that the last order given to him could only be countermanded by the same commander that issued the order and not by wild American propaganda that the war had ended. Luckily, the ancient soldier was still very much alive although no longer in mint condition. A rescue party was quickly scraped together by the Japanese authorities and flown into the jungle island whereupon the old commander called out his former military ward on a loudspeaker. Out came the old soldier, looking like a wild primate as he formally capitulated to his old boss.
When the search party returned to Japan, it was to rapturous ovation. It was a landmark hero’s reception which was quite remarkable for a normally sober, prim and proper people like the Japanese. Hiroo in particular was singled out for wild adulation, becoming an instant national hero. Time magazine of the era, with inimitable panache, described it as “Hiroo-worshipping”. There can be no doubt that Onoda’s act of bravery and heroic defiance resonated with the psyche and institutional memory of the Japanese people even in their moment of supine submission to superior American firepower. This is a land that has been coming together for almost a thousand years unlike makeshift African countries.
After the war, the only concession the defeated Japanese asked of the victorious Americans was that they should be allowed to keep their king since he could not be held responsible for the gung-ho militarism that had infected the entire society. Within a decade, the Japanese were tugging at the heels of superior Western technology. It is regnant nationalism at its most supreme. But it also goes to show the dangers of extreme fanaticism when combined with extreme nationalism on the global theatre. In fractious and fragile multi-ethnic nations still struggling to find coherence and cohesiveness, extreme fanaticism in combination with extreme ethnic nationalism leads to delusions of Exceptionalism, inability to tolerate other groups and perpetual nation-wrecking.
In the lion’s den
To Isapatoromoyan, the ancient Yoruba town, through the ancestral homesteads of Eko-Einde, Eekosin and Iwere-Ile for the annual pounded yam festival with the rogue Okon in tow. This annual festival is a Yoruba rite of passage and the equivalent of the American Thanksgiving which began centuries earlier when some intrepid descendants of Oduduwa settled in the northernmost fringes of the new empire among hostile tribes who viewed them with dread and trepidation as bearers of a new type of civilization.
In gratitude to their mighty deity who had helped them to survive another season among implacable warlike marauders who were bent on exterminating them to the single person, they often gathered at this historic site among huge rocks and Olympian crevices with their best yams and the plentiful venison abounding in the sprawling plains to jollify and to make merry as well as to give vent to the more playful and gregarious side of their nature. Very soon, it became routinized and regularized as an annual festival of hope and renewal.
It was an epic feast of a feeding frenzy beginning at sunrise and ending when even the cooperative moon began to complain of tiredness and exhaustion. It is all too reminiscent of the magnificent pounded yam festival in Things Fall Apart where it took three days for feeders on all sides to behold each other. Replete with rare venison of extinct herbivores, wild mushrooms which tasted like upmarket sand grouse and some aromatic vegetables now out of historic circulation, it was a moveable feast indeed.
But it was also a celebration of spectacular heroism, incredible self-sacrifice and the ancestral spirit of all those who gave up their life so that others can survive. It was the hazy beginning of armed empire and fiery battlements. Yet it resolves the post-Oduduwa paradox and the Oranmiyan Question: How a people who had conquered and grown their old empire through the force of persuasion and superior civilization could now resort to fierce conquest and slaying on an industrial scale.
The empire rose like a comet, subduing and subjugating far and wide beyond the realm of possibility and human endurance, incorporating in its mighty and minatory embrace strange territories and even stranger people leading to an incredible miscegenation of tribes and human tributaries. Yet like all empires, it also eventually fell like an expired meteor as the aulde enemies joined forces with superior cavalry and the bearers of a new civilization who felt that the old one was a threat and nuisance to its own version of history.
Empires rise and fall. And the rest is history. History was the farthest thing on the mind this morning as a historic fog laid its icy fangs on the entire country. The motoring condition had become simply atrocious. You could hardly see beyond your nose. Even some international flights had to be diverted to neighboring and more inclement climes. With Okon in tow, history and harmattan were the least of the problems, human nuisance was.
Before snooper lay an ancient map of the magic route. You journey from Lagos to Ibadan and then to Moniya, Iseyin, Okaka, Otu and then veer off through an old mystery route known only to old empire hands and noblemen which eventually led them back to the ancestral shrine at Ile-Ife. You then come back through Iseyin, the scenic and spectacularly picturesque Ado Awaye, Eruwa, Igbo Ora, the “Randa” intersection near Abeokuta and then back to Lagos through Ewekoro, Orile Wasinmi—Segun Odegbami’s ancestral hideout—- and Sango Otta.
The journey had hardly started when Okon began making subversive commentaries in his rasping breathless monotone. Irreverent and caustic, Okon does not take hostages.
“Oga, I just say make I tell you say dem dey sell diesel for 245 naira for today. Petrol revenue dey rise and naira still dey fall. Na dis year we go know who get dis yeye kontri. If dem like make dem send dem soldier everywhere. When soldier don finis for barak, he mean say katakata don come be dat.” The mad boy yelled.
“Okon leave me alone and leave the government alone. At least they have started paying the very poor and aged people the money they promised”, yours sincerely snapped.
“ Oga, no be yeye nonsense be dat one? Dem for build food shelter, employ Okon as Chairman for Belly Infrastructure make I dey feed dem old people. Na food dem people need. Na dis dem one –chance boys dem find find food for”, the crazy boy sniggered.
“ By the way, Okon what do you think about the prophecies this year from the men of God?” snooper asked trying to steer the mad boy away from the path of subversion and sedition.
“ Ha oga dat one he be like say oversee come oversee overseer”, the mad boy crowed and burst into deranged hiccups.
By now we were approaching the bridge after the Shagamu intersection. All hell suddenly let loose as some hoodlums jumped out on the road from nowhere, forcing the car to a screeching a halt just before a crater.
“ Come out!! We are kidnappers!” one of the thugs screamed.
“ We no be kid, so make you just go nap dem kids”, Okon bravely shouted at them.
“ Shut up, you fool!” one of them screeched and hit Okon with the barrel of his gun. Snooper jumped up and hit the edge of the bed. Snooper has been dreaming. Yours sincerely has been hallucinating. Happy New Year.
First published , January 2017 and now republished due to overwhelming demand.
