Ali Mazrui

Russell’s prescription is the doctrine of liberalism which is an effort to fabricate or distil a social order not based on irrational dogma but insuring stability whilst avoiding such restraints as may inhibit the coalescence and preservation of the community. This, roughly in the language of modern transformation studies would be called communitalism.

In the discussion of the state as a commonwealth, I shall like to touch on Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan(1652, 1972) which is one of those instruments of statecraft that will fit our present bill on patriotism and nationalism and which also comes under Russell’s scalpel. Hobbes, of course, believes that all men are essentially selfish and we enter into the contract of state formation to avoid anarchy. This, I believe is true for my countrymen as they are to this day. Were Hobbes to be Nigerian or African, he couldn’t have found a better nation for his intellectual experimentation. Hobbes believes that in politics there are two major questions: one appertains to the form of the state; the other is to the extent of its powers in relation to its citizens and subjects. For him the best form of governance is the monarchy but he is often careful to say that a man should not submit to a sovereign who cannot protect him and, by extension that cannot feed him or provide for him.Hobbes recognizes that there are two dangers facing a community or a commonwealth – those of despotism and anarchy.

These are analogous to the tension to which we earlier referred except that they slightly differ from that between patriots and nationalists. One is systemic and the other is technical. Hobbes’s undue support for the state is mainly due to the fear of anarchy. But it is quite clear that a nation may be so chaotic that temporary anarchy would be a most welcome panacea to its woes. For instance Nigeria of 1966; Rwanda of 1996; or much farther afield, France of 1789 or Russia of 1917.

Russell’s two major criticisms of Hobbes are eminently valid. His concern for the monolithic state hardly makes a differentiation between classes in society as if the interests of all citizens and subjects are the same. This Karl Marx has recognized as the impetus for social change. The only other limitation in Hobbes’s philosophy is his lack of the relationship between international states except only in relation to war and conquest. In Leviathan, he sees the different nations as being in a state of nature and constantly warring against each other. Russell is therefore right in observing that so long as distinct national States exist and constantly war against each other, then that is a recipe for a holocaust or the destruction of
the human race (1984: 541).

III
Next is to turn our attention to the literary and dramatic exploration of the concept of patriotism and nationalism in the art and craft of a few classical writers –the Greeks and Shakespeare – then see what cultural and intellectual dimensions emerge from the tension generated by the two concepts. There is no better place to examine the psychology, the motives and the human elements of society as in plots and characterization of the literary arts. Naturally, I shall start from the Greeks, who incidentally lived in traditional societies somewhat similar to what we have in present day Nigeria and much of Africa; which therefore offer comparative advantage to the understanding we seek in those social and cultural concepts.

To graphically illustrate the twin concepts of patriotism and nationalism as exemplified in the royal house of Thebes,I shall summarize three thematically related and historically contiguous plays:Sophocles’Antigone (440BC), Oedipus at Colonus(401BC); and Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes(467BC).The three plays actually constitute a triptych, so I shall summarize them to abstract the sequence of their historical and dramaturgic details. After the tragedy of Oedipus the Kingwritten about 430BC, Oedipus was exiled from Thebes and moved with his four Children to the neighbouring city of Colonus. His brother-in-law, Creon, became the regent of Thebes. His two male children, Eteocles and Polyneices, heir to the Theban throne were to alternate the title to the throne starting with the elder, Eteocles. However, when it came to the turn of Polyneices to rule, Eteocles refused to back down. A protracted conflict ensued and the younger brother enlisted the support of six warriors from Argos in support of his expedition against Thebes, his fatherland. Both brothers died in the war and Creon once again became the regent.

He thereafter enacted a decree that Eteocles who successfully defended the city would be granted honorable burial whereas Polyneices who led an invading army of the Argive against his city should be left to rot in the fields, stripped of all funerary honour. Anyone who contravened the decree to bury Polyneices was condemned to death. However, their younger sister, Antigone who had, with her elder sister, Ismene heroically looked after Oedipus, their father, was as committed to family honour as she loved her city. She was therefore torn between the virtues of civic and filial duties as well as family honour. She chose to bury her brother damning the consequences of the decree. Even though she was engaged to be marriedto Haemon, Creon’s son, the law took its course. She was martyred and her fiancé, in fatal sympathy. Eurydice, Creon’s wife and Antigone’s anticipated mother-in-law, heartbroken, also killed herself. Now, this Greek tragedy has prompted so many questions, especially in regard to the strength of its choric and dramatic characterization:

i. Were the two brothers who inherited their father’s throne patriots or nationalists? Were they pressing the love of their country or were they ideological egoists?
ii. Should a patriot uphold the force of arms to defend a principle or an ideal against or in support of his fatherland as the two protagonists did?
iii. In seemingly upholding the law against the general principles of culture as Creon, the Theban regent, did against Polyneices and Antigone, was he a patriot or a nationalist?
iv. Where should the linebe drawn between the devotion to individual principles and the laws upheld by one’s commonwealth?
v. Can a conscientious objector be a patriot?
vi. Does patriotism flourish better in a federation or in an oligarchy?

As far back as the 5th Century BC, these questions were already being debated in the human communities and the commonwealth of the time; just as much as we are doing now. Having discussed the Greeks, let us turn to a comparative example in the Roman state of the same period which Shakespeare subsequently adapted for the Elizabethan stage. That was the story of the legendary Roman patrician and soldier, Gaius Marcius Coriolanus. He loved his country and had led her through notable military expeditions and exploits. Like most heroes, he had his tragic flaws. He was short tempered and was overbearing towards persons of lower status or social class.He fell afoul of the law and was exiled from his nation state. He later led the Volscian army to march on the gates of Rome but was dissuaded from occupying the city by his mother, Volumnia, and his wife, Virgilia. Though some other authorities named his mother as Veturia and his wife as Volumnia, this is of very little consequence in the present context.

Thinking aloud, as Shakespeare had tried to do, could Coriolanus, a man obviously caught in the web of patriotism and nationalism truly march, with the Volscian army on Rome, his home? It is clear that Coriolanus violated the boundaries of patriotism and might have re-established the definition of nationalism in his virtual attempt to merge two historically disparate civilizations and cultures after an ill-conceived campaign. Besides, to preside over the senators, patricians, plebeians of both culturally and historically diverse states might have presented a classic study of statecraft, state making and chivalry in the 5th century BC. In addition, it might have been a classic representation of what we referred to above as the recidivist temptation for the patriot or the nationalist to render injudicious service to his fatherland.

IV Beyond Peter Ekeh’s Two Publics
It is of broad significance to reference at this point Peter Ekeh’s 1975 path- breaking concept of what he calls ‘the two publics in Africa.’ The article has been somewhat over-referenced but it is rightly so. The colonial or vassal state is bound to regurgitate this principle where a citizen’s loyalty is always at cross purposes between two publics in a nation-state. The first or primary public will always be one’s kith and kin while the civic public is the public service or government to which one owes a secondary allegiance. Corruption festers because when a public servant steals public funds to satisfy his/her relations, friends or lovers, nepotism is always in the wings to protect him because his loyalty will be first to his ethnicity or kinsmen and then to the larger amorphous nation of which he is an artificial citizen by colonial fiat. The two publics are hardly congruent; one is preferred to the detriment of the other.

As the saying goes: ‘Government work is servitude; the labourer must feather his own nest!’ in traditional parlance, it states: ‘Osiseijoba fi ara e s’ofa’. To escape or abridge Ekeh’s ingenious classification, you would have to make yourself a trader or a contractor where you can assuage your conscience by showing loyalty to one of the two publics at a time rather than sharing your loyalty between the two. The resolution of Peter Ekeh’s typology has, in our peculiar context, put both patriotism and nationalism beyond redemption; rather, a new form of pan-Africanism will have to be constructed such that the identity crisis is resolved by the individual in a new form of individualism. Public morality helps but it stalls in the face of mob pressure, primitive acquisition, conspicuous consumption and spiritual or intellectual poverty or decay. The eradication of one public or the establishment of many publics is necessary in the context of a new nationalism.

The atavistic obverse is easily found in the refuge towards renegade religiosity or blatant terror as in kidnapping or massacres. According to Johnsonian dictum, the renegade or scoundrel will always claim to be a patriot under a faith-based or ‘ritualistic’ ideology.Ekeh argues that the primordial public has its seat and identity in ethnicity. The individual seeks to materially endow his ethnic group or his primordial public in return for ‘intangible immaterial benefits in the form of identity or psychological security (1975: 107). The implication of this is that the state itself as an institution is hardly strong enough to give moral and psychological security to its members, hence their having to fall back on the structures of their ethnic groups or primordial communities.

Because of the peculiar crisis of identity engendering a conflict of loyalties which postcolonial nationalities often suffer, two countermanding statements from both Samuel Johnson and Thomas Hobbes are worth examining.

(a) Samuel Johnson, among other things, said in his 1774 address to the electors of Great Britain that: ‘He that wishes to see his country robbed of its rights cannot be a patriot.’ Fine, we would say. But then his countryman Thomas Hobbes had affirmed a century earlier in the justification of self-defence that:

(b) A man has no duty to a sovereign who has not the power to protect him. This, he says in the justification of his submission and loyalty to Cromwell when Charles II was sent on exile. I have often regarded this assertion of Thomas Hobbes as ‘guarded opportunism’ whereby one might become the stooge of any government in power, be it benevolent or inimical to good governance. For in reality some governments mean well but are not able to give generous provision while there are dictators promising short-term largesse.

If we bring this in comparison to Peter Ekeh’s thesis: Is it that the Nigerian or Ghanaian citizen fails as a patriot because his/her country could not provide for him? Would he be considered a patriot by the kinsmen to whom he brings the stolen national cake? Or, still, can he be considered a nationalist rather than a patriot in this peculiar circumstance?

Chinua Achebe

The Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe presents two classic examples of a complex issue of conflict of interest in regard to patriotism or nationalism that has helped to further theorize Peter Ekeh’s principle of the two publics. In his short story, “The Voter”, a typical Nigerian voter finds himself torn between the factional interests of two political parties from which he had received bribes and sworn to an oath which he can only break on pain of death. The voting is by secret ballot. At the same time he is worried for his personal safety in case both oaths are potent. In the voter’s tent, he checks that no one is looking and decides to tear the ballot into two equal halves – one for each ballot box – and thereafter holds the two pieces up for the deity to see that he has been loyal to both parties to obviate the consequences of his oath. In this case there are actually three publics established and the three disenfranchised.

They cancel out their respective interests because the ballot is not only voided; he has also violated his oath at the same time as he subverts his own interests. But he establishes pecuniary gains from his two publics at his own expense. The point I seek to make is that in the various interests cancelling out themselves, everything is lost and a fractured, battered and disembodied identity is firmly established.The second instance is from his novel, A Man of the People (Achebe, 1966). The main protagonist, Chief Nanga, seeking to compromise a younger, more credible rival, Odili Samalu, takes a bribe to Odili’s father’s home in the village and establishes his primordial public thus:

I am no guest here. I regard here as my house and yourself as my political father. Whatever we achieve over there in Bori is because we have the backing of people like you at home (p.130).

As soon as his more articulate rival debunks his true claim to that primordial space, he accuses him of being a nationalist! The obvious inference is that he, Chief Nanga is the real Patriot.

The questions arise on account of the emergent nation-state:If, as Samuel Johnson states, you rob your country or wish to see your country robbed of her rights, you are not qualified to be a patriot. But if, as Thomas Hobbes avers, your country robs you of your rights by not protecting you or providing for you, are you qualified to aspire to be a patriot? Or as the fictive character in Achebe’s novel, to be called a nationalist?

There have been numerous instances in contemporary Nigeria where school children quietly sleeping in their hostels have either been slaughtered or abducted and taken away. Many were either not seen again or have become the subject of plea bargains and ransoms. The most celebrated of these cases were the 219 school girls taken away from their schools in Chibok, Borno State of Nigeria in April 2014. Many are yet unaccounted for three years after their unfortunate abduction. A number of other horrific incidents have been recorded in Lagos since June 2017. It is also true that communities bereft of social and psychological security within the state have had to resort to the services of primordial vigilante groups rather than Nigeria’s law enforcement agencies. Many around the Bakassi area of the Cameroonian borders have been stripped of their national identity and have become stateless in the context of their own nation state. We are urged to believe that we derive our identity through ethnicity, linguistic grouping or our nationality. But the nation state is a domineering factor of the modern world, not ethnicity. Allegiances are to a national constitution, flag, anthem and travel document. Where day-to-day living has become precarious and citizens are unable to find security and a sense of belonging, patriotism suffers, and there is the resurgence of various degrees of nationalism. This once again reinforces Samuel Johnson’s and Thomas Hobbes’ affirmation that a citizen owes no allegiance to a nation that cannot provide him with livelihood and social security (Johnson, 1913; Russell, 1984; Layiwola, 2007).

There have emerged other interesting advances following on Peter Ekeh’s thesis in, for example Basil Davidson (1992) and David Laitin (1998), where there have been discussions on the historical crises of the modern nation state especially in regard to ethnicity, language and the crossing of geographical frontiers. My take on the matter is that the modern state will increasingly develop along multi-national lines and that the boundaries in between patriotism and nationalism will continue to narrow until an infinitesimal point is reached where ethnicity and nationality will merge and conflate. Then the task of nation making and nation building, identity multiplicities, identity mutations and diasporic tendencies will be easier to contain in shared geographical boundaries. In our present era, the concept of Francis Fukuyama’s end of history is still far ahead as issues in the concept of primordial humanity is a strong and potent factor of politics and politicking. We are not yet a race of angels, deracinated and without nationalities and identities.

V Conclusion: Omoluabi, Ubuntu and the Global Negritude Movement
I cannot end this lecture without articulating the aspirations and the ideal of home-grown theories that had emerged in the last century or so. Historically, the context of the homegrown theories in regard to social and institutional frameworks is important because they constitute a philosophy and an ideology. They also represent an important strand of cultural nationalism which needed articulation as the intellectual component of the liberation movement from colonialism and the stigma of slavery. In a sense it also is a patriotic move not in the sense of the love of a single country but of a race or a conglomeration of countries. The fundamental impetus was both economic and social since slavery, subjugation or discrimination always has to do with status as well as social class. The resort to a form of cultural nationalism was justified and justifiable. In this case the purpose of this nationalism is not to fit persons of the same language and culture into a nation state but to fit persons of identical cultural backgrounds from diverse geographical locations into one ideological fold. Negritude is a reaction to the collective experience of black people to western domination. The etymology of the term rightly connotes that skin colour and pigmentation is a crucial factor.

The History of prolonged European contact with Africa, and subsequently with the rest of the African Diasporas, saw the development of trade but the establishment of conflict, agitation and domination.Abiola Irele has rightly observed, in agreeing with Georges Balandier that:

The establishment of colonial rule in Africa brought with it a drastic reordering of African societies and human relations. The fact of domination, and all that this meant in the arbitrary political and social reorganization of the African communities, along with the misunderstandings that naturally followed, created “a state of latent crisis.” Colonial rule also substituted new poles of reference for social organization and individual life, which were often in conflict with the established traditional pattern, and thus created a society which, in Balandier’s words, “appeared to possess an essentially non-authentic character” (Irele, 2011: 3).

This peculiar condition which led to the upsurge of intense nationalist consciousness began at different points and in different ways on the African continent and with the African Diasporas in the Americas.At first, the movements were aggressive and often violent. This method achieved a measure of success and created its heroes. A very celebrated example was the revolution led by Toussaint L’Ouverture which founded the first Negro Republic of Haiti in 1804 (James, 1989). This is of immense significance as this has proved to be one of the inspirations behind the Negritudinist movement as one of its founding fathers, Aime Cesaire, had affirmed (Mannoni, 1950: 10 – 30; Irele, 2011: 6 – 7). The other founding fathers include Leon Damas,Sedar Senghor, Rene Maran and Etienne Lero. The first three are, however, the best known, with AimeCesaire always put in the lead and Sedar Senghor being the only mainland African amongst them.

It is interesting to note that Ade Ajayi (1960, 1990), E. A.Ayandele (1970), and James Coleman (1971) in their excellent analysis of the background to, and definitions of, nationalism emphasize that Nigerian nationalists owe their inspiration to European nationalists of the 19th century. It is now increasingly clear that a number of Francophone intellectuals found inspiration in the works and activities of nationalists in the African diaspora. Most of these intellectuals were largely writers, historians and poets. The complete history will therefore show a complementarity which we have not assiduously acknowledged or emphasized. The third factor which we need to increasingly theorize is the folk derivative of patriotism and nationalism as enshrined in two Africanist terminologies: Omoluabi and Ubuntu.

The first is a Yoruba concept for a thoroughbred; the quintessential person. Yoruba philosophy believes that this essential quality of being is intangible and is a quality taken on at birth, by tutelage or by training. This is encapsulated in the etymology of the word when broken into syllables or morphemes – omo Oluiwa bi. That is, Omo Olutiiwa bi. It is the holistic or ramifying concept of a complete gentleman or woman (cf. Awoniyi, 1975; Kehinde, 2016). The concept is about the theory of being in a society and a cultural commonwealth. It therefore also encapsulates the love of society and its other inhabitants where the benefits of life are composite and reciprocal. AnOmoluabi is therefore a patriot. He or she may or may not be a nationalist.

Among the Bantu of the lower Congo, the term Ubuntu/Umuntu is the concept which represents that oneness of being and sociation in human society (Tutu, 1999; Wilson &Jarikre, 2016: 293). The principle is based on the simple logic that: ‘I am because others are;’ ‘I am because you are.’ It is the main pillar on which the very basis of being and society is constructed. This concept recognizes the reconciliation of virtually opposing patterns and the basic interconnectedness of the mutually exclusive. It, therefore believes that human existence and survival depends on it. There exist, among various ethnicities on the African continent, variations of this concept which emphasizes the unity and collectivity of ideals in human aspirations and society. The philosophy is meant to locate metaphysics within the context of praxis. These concepts, in their holism surpass the Cartesian logic of: ‘I think, therefore, I am.’

They further emphasize that man finds meaning in society because others, in a collective league, are there with him. They see the unification of ontology and epistemology and believe in the ultimate unity of all humanity. That is, in society, we partake of multitudes. They believe also that anyone who fully imbibes any of these principles is bound to be a patriot. It is my firm belief that in further theorizing these concepts, and not necessarily excluding those from the western hemisphere,we can realize the real purpose of patriotism; that ideal which has remained the ultimate goal of citizenship in humane societies.

19th Convocation Lecture of the Nigerian Academy of Letters, 10.08.2017.