IN THE HOUSE OF MANDELA: A SILLY CRY FOR REPARATIONS
By Prof. Chimalum Nwankwo

 Special and Exclusive to USAfrica The Newspaper, Houston
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y, ongoing, involving Jonas Savimbi and all the extenuating or aggravating Marxist mess in Angola; the genocidal and holocaustal spurs which birthed the fratricidal mess of Nigeria-Biafra; the lunacy of Master Sergeant Doe and Samuel Taylor; Sierra Leone's present carnage and mindless brutality; the apocalyptic images of Goma, the internecine wreck enjoyed by the Hutsis and Tutsis; the decades of religion-driven mess in the Sudan; and the present stone age irruptions in Northern Nigeria. When and where will the catalogue end? In a hundred or fifty years from now, to whose gates shall the black man carry new crazily scripted placards of blame? To whose gates the next generations' strident cry for reparation?

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The gathering at Durban also reminded of the recent University of Nigeria's celebrations at Nsukka to mark the fortieth birthday of what was once a great Campus. Various student groups and their leaders followed me around asking with concern and fear for their future about how to make their voices heard and felt in the light of the ugly politics of the campus that was distributing moral black-eyes to faculty, staff and students, sullying even those who least deserved sullying or sometimes making tinpot heroes from bootlickers and sycophants.

The whole thing appeared to depend on the choice of when to mount or dismount and flee from one bandwagon or the other. Ideas erected with trumpets in daylight became great totems of greed at dusk. And dusk was good time for villains and heroes to merge identities into an amorphous and ghostly confusion of gamblers dreaming only of the big tomorrow of elevated places of privilege and spurious distinction. The spirit of the deathless thing called Institution no longer mattered. What mattered was the individual. And who resorted tenaciously best to the universal animal instinct always won the day. How to navigate through that murk toward a future of hope was what those hapless students of a hapless generation of academic and indeed national life wanted to hear from me. And , of course, in my trademark bluntness, I declared consistently to one student group and the other that we are a great arrangement of cowards.

"Who?" asked one brave student. I stated emphatically as I state here about Nigeria and perhaps most of the present generation of black leadership anywhere. The worst kind of cowardice is not the cowardice of the guy who drops to grovel on his fours at the possibility of death, like one of Nigeria's famous generals who was crying to save himself from a more powerful military crook. No. The greatest cowards among us are those people who neither have ideas and ideals to live by nor the courage to stand by the rare person who comes up with an idea or ideal.

Nigerians and the black man love the defense and idle celebration of vacuous primordialities, but baulk at any chance to deploy the same primordialities as ropes for collective rescue in the numerous crises bedeviling the black world.

Are Nigerians and the character of Nigerian politics really different from their minuscular counterpart at the University of Nigeria? Think again.

During one of the stops of the numerous planetary trots of Nigeria's President, retired gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, in Atlanta, Georgia, in September of 2000, his reported response to the anguished question of another Nigerian about his attitudes to the 32 million Igbo people and the topic he would rather not discuss called Biafra was "Go to hell!" Happily for all and sundry, the offender was confirmed to have walked out of the hall safely, with other baffled sympathizers, unpursued by any wave of hellfire. They cared more about the insult from the self-styled God-sent shepherd of Nigeria's new democratic dispensation and the import of his tantrum. What a response from within the United States of America ! Can you understand what would have happened to the career of any American politician, from city council to the Presidency who dared that kind of response to any human being on this planet? That kind of drama can only happen among democratic Nigerians. No where else. These Nigerians seem to be true democrats! You cannot help loving Nigeria and Nigerians. It is only at Nigeria's Oputa panel that people would laugh nervously when they listened to a former top-ranking army clown state that after Abacha's death, it was agreed that Abiola should also die, "to make it one-one"!!!

You would have expected a mob to leap over the benches but nervous laughter won the day. No where else but from Nigeria can a leader, any leader speak in such a manner.

Here's yet another one, again in September but in 2001. Did you read the almost bizarre presentation of a certain retired Arewa retired Gen. Haruna on behalf of the Arewa Forum at the Oputa panel claiming the "destruction and marginalization of the North" by Igbo people? He even made his presentation in tears!!! That kind of drama is only possible in Nigeria. Did you read recently about retired Gen. Yakubu Gowon's own version of the history of Nigeria and his enviable role in that strange and tragic history? The man who, in concert, with his colleagues murdered Ironsi, and soon after declared that there was "no basis for unity"; the same man, former military head of state who famously thanked God for the leadership of Nigeria falling into the "hands of another Northerner"? After reading Haruna's "presentation at the Oputa panel, I am left with one simple question: Am I reading historical facts here, my friend, or are you about to christen those claims by Harun, the Arewa group and Co as sheer wishful hallucinations? This same Haruna only came short of calling for apologies from the murdered Aguiyi Ironsi. That kind of drama can only take place in Nigeria. Nigeria is a nation of very imaginative "thinkers." That is why there is no way, legal or political, to compel the three ex-Heads of state, even if simply as another gestural or comic fart, to appear at the Oputa panel. That is exactly why Nigerians cannot find a way of saving millions of innocent citizens from the cumulative effects of Nigeria's rapid degeneration and decline into unbelievable savage conditions, to the extent that many openly cry for the resurrection of Sani Abacha!

What a nation ! Nigerians can easily track down elusive Ganiyu Adams of OPC. And quite as easily pick up MASSOB'S Uwazurike at a snap. Fill up Kirikiri at will with their wretched of the earth. Do you remember the ease with which Lanre Shittu was picked up from Lagos and spirited out of Nigeria to answer charges in the United States? But there is no way ever of husbanding accountably the stupefying largesse accruing from the country's immeasurable oil wealth. There is not even a way of having Nigerians and their foreign guests to enter or exit that nation with the ease one finds in other nations of meaner purse, and without fear of their lives.

What stops real international access direct to commercial nerve centers like Port Harcourt, Enugu, and Onitsha? By the way, reader, please remind me of how many Nigerian politicians have been arrested for the money stolen during General Abacha's reign of terror while masses were suffering and are still suffering as a result of that theft.

Nigerians can lead international crusades boldly, and think about justice and fairness from the case against dead and buried Europeans for the wrongs from the slave markets organized by European kings and some of our own crooked ancestors, but do not know exactly how to proceed with cases about the present day thieves who are robbing the nation silly with more shocking and sanitary ease than the slave masters could even design. What slavery or bloody thieving and dehumanization of a people, past dead or alive, could be worse than what is going on in Nigeria today?

Has Lagos not been virtually a war front as a result of the freedom claimed by armed desperadoes? And pass beyond Lagos and inland, what is guaranteed? Good access roads? Steady water and electricity? Access to usable telephones and that wonderful and cheapest of toys called the Internet? Good schools and hospitals? Does the Nigerian leadership, with all the counted and uncountable billions flowing easily from the bowels of nature understand the meaning of the word University? Oh yea! The leadership does, hence its members prefer their children in foreign universities. So what stops Nigerians from sitting down to fix their own home?

In this twenty first century, after centuries of lashes of blood and variegated dehumanization and bizarre death, through desert heat or the nightmarish Atlantic, black people are organizing a cry for reparation from the children of erstwhile masters, in the house of Mandela. The great nation called Nigeria is at the fore. Hurrah!!! Are they qualified to be in Mandela's house? Are we there as relatives of the dead, concerned like some insurance claimants, more for the money than for anything weighty or spiritual. The questions which torment, generate cataleptic incubus, about all that are many. But consider these samples. Are black people crying for this money so that they would use it to begin to prove that they are worthy descendants of Touissant L'Overture, Denmark Vassey, Nat Turner, Harrieth Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Julius Nyerere, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Adegoke Adelabu, Herbert Macaulay, Aminu Kano, Joseph Tarka, Adeniran Ogunsanya, Kwame Nkrumah, W.E.B. du Bois, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks and so forth. Those are some names evoking other names and memories of those black people who when the storm for freedom rose in their time, also rose to be counted, even if their very lives depended on that moment of decision.

Standing up was not for their lives. It was for the lives of others. Are Nigerians, Africans, black people, crying for money so that they could now begin to understand the meaning and value of the word sacrifice for their own kind, like those names before them who understood the meaning of losing one's self to save one's self?

What are black people really gathered for in the House of Mandela? And what in the world are Nigerians doing there?

The Oputa Panel, a mocking ghost of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation panel, sounds nice in Nigeria for Nigerian drama, an all too familiar drama regarding the feared and stony way toward truths that are constructive. That panel and what Nigerians are doing with it in relation to the bigger drama of reparation in South Africa, in the House of Mandela, suggests and points at a penchant for the meaningless pantomime, the comic relief in the fearful fight to flee from the real devils inside us.
Nwankwo, acclaimed poet and critic, is a Professor of English at the North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Prof. Nwankwo has joined as a contributing editor of USAfricaonline.com and USAfrica The Newspaper where he will contribute poems and commentary on public policy and issues in the news. This is his first commentary for our web site. Links to but not archiving of this essay on any web site is authorized by USAfrica's publisher. copyright © 2001

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