Ademola Araoye
The misfortune of Africa is ingrained in the evolution of its society. From time immemorial this misfortune has stemmed from the penchant across the continent to deify charlatans, idiots, crooks, and thieves as the preeminent deities and the gods of its universe. The permanent reign of the indigenous and home bred traducers of the land had spawned mass disenchantment of the people and given rise to a disoriented society that is disaffected from all the moorings that defined the self and its humanity. This demands of an ancient era that called for survival of the individual in the sanctified hierarchies of god-kings and a threatened humankind gave rise to disquieting morality of self-preservation, the wisdom of dubious values of interacting sycophancy and hypocrisy that long characterized relations between traditional structures and institutions of power on the one hand and of the perpetually subjugated people throughout the continent on the other hand.
A crisis of the value of the individual self was pervasive and implicit in the subordination of the individual humanity to the requirements of survival in that despotic environment of the crude charlatan god enthroned by society. That predated the total subversion of the integrity of Africa’s wholesomeness through the first globalization. The first globalization, a brutal interface of the powerful External Other with a subordinated Africa, ultimately entailed the complete denial of the humanity of the black self and the resulting commodification of the physical being of black humanity. That conquest by the overpowering invading External order was greatly facilitated by the entrenched unequal balance in the relations of power that was integral to interactions between people and power in the communal universe. Black humanity was trapped in its permanent dilemma. Not much has changed since as the modern state as the imposed mechanism of social organization with its structures and institutions hijacked by these subsisting dominant principles, inherited and deftly codified these historic imbalances to truncate the clamor of the people for liberty and emancipation. The anti-colonial resistance was barely a struggle for liberty and emancipation. As illustrated half a century plus since the emergence of African statehood, emancipation has remained rhetorical and demonstrably perceived as antithetical to the struggle against values of an African universe governed by the deified charlatan god king.
Africa has remained trapped in the dominance of the historic rule of the super human god-king. The scourge of vectors of a debased humanity preying on society may also have been the inevitable impositions of the peculiar encounters of African society with the outer universe of a dehumanizing humanity in the External other to perpetuate a new Externally oriented order. That may be in reference to the latter day globalization. The historicity of the imposed encounter is replete with strange maxims and doctrines. Africa’s trajectory to contemporaneous nowhere destinations was dictated by the economic interests, often couched and aided in the potency of the ploy of spiritual denunciations, of the dominant external others that invaded from all sides; the near Orient and the far West. Native quislings, with great absorbent capacity as proselytizers of the unsettling new mantras, were required as the local lords. These were the vanguards of the new faces and bizarre faiths, head porters and headmen mobilizers of the new ways. They were the first defectors from the fold in the epochal denunciations of the self to the presumed new selves. In time, they were sanctified in the imported togas of distorted wisdom in spoken shrill ululations. The lineage of deified tools, in various guises and expressions, has remained unbroken to this day. Yet, these circles, oftentimes of just scum, so delinked from the harsh terrestrial realities of the larger society, inhabit the rarified clouds of society’s ignorant adulations. They, given the inherited privileges associated with the hollowness of their gilded existence, often exude a false air of sophistication but essentially are possessed of doubtful intellectual acuity. A case of the inherited preference for shining foil against the hard toil of mining for gold. These human afflictions are products of the peculiar accidents of black history; a tortuous relay of events and epochs motorized by the contortions of new contesting external orders for the soul of Africa. It is this process that enthroned the wounding fathers.
Instituted as bulwark against radicalism and futuristic endeavors, the wounding fathers have been the source of the stagnating drawbacks historically associated with the continent. They resist as certain impediments to the thrusts of the continent’s positivity to a transformed future. The wounding fathers who by the faux illustriousness of gullible antecedence, were thrown up as central players in the face of their bewilderment, confusion and perverse understandings of the pivotal processes in which they were engaged. They and their scions have since densely and permanently occupied the critical public hierarchies. This class of restive opposites of natural human emancipatory impulses have and continue to suffocate all the critical spaces and functional spheres. Thus, they constrict out of contention the truly capable as catalysts for holistic emancipation of black humanity. The implications of their preeminence in the trajectory of the universe of black humanity everywhere has been catastrophic. To be sure, they are clearly distinct from a more authentic minority group of scions with greater mental rigors that are products of the same historical accident, with proven ingenuity and vision. Inherent in the African public sphere is a real tension between the demands of modernity for gifted and trained intellects that are accomplishment oriented and individuals who count on antecedents and the fame of name and pedigree to climb the ladder. The parameters of success are diametrically opposed.
The balance in Africa is in favor of those who have success bestowed on the basis of name and antecedents. The spurned highly honed functional intellect has the leeway to emigrate. They are welcome in places where there are dreams to be harvested. The entrenchment of the privileged curses of humanity and the permanent dislodgment of the very best from the affairs of black humanity, especially on the continent, is a sad reality. This unmitigated tragedy has been imposed by a haphazard historical process outside the control of a prostrate African society. That process thrust the accidental questionable black humanity, no matter the personal deficiencies, into leadership cadres in the continent’s incipient modernity and westernization process. The evolution of black humanity, since its forced engagement with the first globalization in a subservient role, to its contemporaneous cul de sac everywhere, has had to contend with the perpetuation of the reign and rule of such accidental characters, often with no assured qualitative human acuities, as sanctimonious priests, infallible diviners to the precipice of doomsday.
In all this, the fundamental maxim of the continent seems to enjoin all to refrain from assailing glorified miscreants, thieves, jesters and fools who are bedecked in trashy honors by society. In fact, the intellectual fad of afro-positivity is understood as not to wash our dirty linen in the glare of a cynical international public. It is a self-deprecating image laundering. The key poser then is to whose benefit is this ridiculous policy of image-laundering? Accordingly, the preeminent vermin who are dominant movers and shakers directing the very trajectory to the ugly destinations of Africa have a free pass. However, it must be admitted, are very good at dissecting victim societies and deftly exploiting its weaknesses to entrench what they represent as the dominant ideas and their stinking odious lives as iconic representation of the good life. In society acquiescing to its own debasement, it has produced a well-codified paradigm of sycophancy that is endemic and institutionalized, in the service of mediocrity across all planes of human endeavors and existence.
*Professor Ademola Araoye is a retired official of the United Nations and former Director of Abuja Leadership Center, a TETFUND Center of Excellence in Public Governance and Leadership at the University of Abuja. He is author of Sources of Conflict in the Post- Colonial African State (AWP, 2012).