They come to us in the name of God, for evil has taken the guise of virtue. They say they are speaking a collective language, premised on restating the religious utopia created by their prophet. Their prophet. Clearly, their God and their prophet are imagined. Evil has taken the guise of virtue.
I realize that, in the final analysis, what Boko Haram wants is to silence our freedom. They want to introduce a regime of creative stagnation. I understand that creativity begins at the threshold of freedom. Let me explain.
There is a story of vines that have a life of their own. It was said that in a certain Mayan ruin, these vines would screech and vibrate like ringing phones, luring the innocent tourist into the forest of vines. In the forest of vines, the tourist is unable to move again because the vines have wrapped itself around that tourist’s body. And if the tourist were to escape the forest of vines, below the ruin there are armed Mayans, who will not let any person touched by the vines to escape. It is, therefore, a question of the carnivorous vines or the murderous Mayans.
The absence of freedom, then, is the absence of the creative option. It is a demeaning choicelessness. This terrorist group will create a dystopia, a state of nature, first, and then they will give us no choice but to follow their dogma. They will kill hundreds of people in the wake of their dystopic agenda, each bombing increasing in the intensity of its barbarism and the extent of its carnage. All of that killing leads to the moment when freedom (of thought, religion, and speech) is exchanged for life. [click to continue…]
David Kato was burgeoned to death on January 26th 2011 in his home in Kampala Uganda. He was an out gay Ugandan LGBTI activist and human rights defender and security officer for Sexual Minorities Uganda [SMUG]. I knew him personally for just over one short but intense year and in that time I came to love him dearly.
Dear David
Its been one year and one day since your last email which turned out to be your final words. You wrote you had a new email as someone had been tampering with yours. For weeks I wondered whether there was a connection with the tampering and your murder. The man who brought death has been tried and sentenced to prison. He pleaded guilty and tried to soil your name in the process but we know this to be untrue. Honestly I don’t even think of him, I don’t know his name and don’t want to. He is nothing. The courts said it was not a homophobic crime trying to avoid any connection to the AHB and all the incessant cruel homophobia you and others in the family have faced. Many were angry with the decision. They want you to be a hero and your death to stand for something. But your status as a hero is not dependent on the reasons behind your murder. You are hero because you were a good friend and because you were 100% committed to the struggle and never ever wavered, whatever the obstacles or disappointments and even in the very short time I knew you, there were many. [click to continue…]
Former South African President,Thabo Mbeki has criticised the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill [AHB] in Kampala. Mbeki was speaking in response to a question by academic activist, Sylvia Tamale on what he would say to “Mr Bahati about the plight of a lesbian woman seeking recognition of her divergent sexual orientation”. Thank goodness there are still pockets of sanity amongst African leaders even if they are ex-leaders.
“I would say to the MP; sexual preferences are a private matter,” said Mr Mbeki. “I don’t think it is a matter of the state to intervene.” Mr Mbeki said he was certain that Mr Bahati would disagree with his stand and argue that African culture does not permit same sex relations, a reason at the heart of the continent’s wide spread antipathy towards homosexuals.
Mr Mbeki said apartheid South Africa prohibited sexual relations “across the colour line” aided by The Immorality Act which handed the police legal ground to raid “people’s bedrooms” before dragging them to court for prosecution.
“I mean what would you want? It doesn’t make sense at all. That is what I would say to the MP. What two consenting adults do is really not the matter of law,” he said. Mr Mbeki also responded to a series of questions about the failure of Africa’s present day intellectuals to cultivate ideas for progressive movement of change on the continent and the weakness of the African Union in defending and promoting the interests of Africans.” He said a weak and selfish political class, responsible for collaborating with Western imperialists to lead external intervention for selfish end on the continent, had played a leading role in clamping down progressive intellectuals since viewed as opposition to their hold on power.
The real danger lies in the merging of religion with politics which seems to be a growing trend. Nation building as a religious project, even one which speaks out against a kleptocratic pseudo military government, is a haunting scenario!
I was excited to come across [Via Shadow and Act] “Say Grace Before Drowning” a film by Sierra Leonean/American Nikyatu Jusu. The film tells the story about a woman’s struggle to overcome the insanity of war as she tries to adjust to a life in exile. Whatever positive expectations Grace had about her new life, including uniting with her 8 year old daughter, Hawa, are shattered with the realisation that a new life brings new challenges not least that memories of violence are not easily discarded.
“Sierra Leonean/American filmmaker Nikyatu Jusu recently received her MFA from NYU/Tisch School of the Arts and has written and directed a series of award winning short films, including African Booty Scratcher and her thesis film Say Grace Before Drowning. Both films have premiered on HBO. She is a Princess Grace Foundation recipient, Spike Lee Scholarship awardee and a two-time DGA Honorable Mention. Presently she is in development on two feature screenplays. Nikyatu will co-direct her first feature film, F*CK MY LIFE, in Atlanta Fall 2012.”
Something dies in you. You feel disconnected from your dream of a glorious aftermath. For the first time in your life you felt whole, framed within a bigger picture. You spoke, chanted, demanded. You were a witness, you and a million others. You were a revolutionary. Now things have returned to normal. Normal because there are moving cars, stores are open; the street is calloused, as before, by the movement and the people. And the normalcy. You hate that things are normal. This was not what you dreamed of. At all.
But what did you dream?
The horizon of your dream was of a better life, a different form of existence, a tangible and measurable difference. You saw that the debate about fuel subsidy removal was the opportunity to dream of change, because this was a protest above all protests, because this protest seemed naturally logical. But you forgot that in dreaming one does not feel, the night happens so fast, and very soon you are awake. [click to continue…]
KSW reminds us of a struggle Nigerians have largely ignored or at best dismissed. The Nigerian media [pre social media] has to take major responsibility for the lack of information and analysis no doubt bullied as usual by military and pseudo military governments including Goodluck Jonathan’s. He reminds us of our right to stand up to oppressive leaders. He reminds of the misery oil has brought to people’s lives and how this has been ignored by multinationals and western governments. He reminds us of the existence of a ‘political cabal’ and an ‘oil cabal’. He reminds of our right to the fruits of our land and our resources and that we as people are part of an ecology system not outside of it.
We know that nothing has changed since this interview in 1995 except today we the people have the media in our hands. We can, if we choose and are prepared to make the effort and the sacrifice, do things differently so people do not have to feel they have no stake in this geospace called Nigeria and therefore have to chip a bit off and create their own space. The Niger Delta IS an Occupy Nigeria issue so far as it is part of Nigeria and so far as it is the source of all Nigeria’s income for the past 55 years. Oil is and has always been central to the Nigerian political economy and one cannot act and speak as if the source of that oil is not central to the oil equation.
There is no such thing as a “Niger Delta” issue that is not a Nigerian issue – to say so is to imply that the region is not part of the country and the people are not Nigerians. To do so is to disconnect the misery oil production has brought to millions of Nigerians from those who have benefited at their expense; from the benefit of free flowing oil including fuel subsidies; from political corruption, government waste, the terrible poverty in the north, south east and west and all the other social and economic ills we have faced as a nation.
This could be an opportunity for Nigerians to finally stand up and support the struggle of all Nigerians not just their own little corner and this works all ways. I hope people will have the imagination and vision to really move beyond the status quo. Because if petrol returns to N65 and political salaries are halved, fraudulent oil marketers are prosecuted but gas flaring and oil spills continue to destroy peoples lives, then we havent moved very far!
“La résistance est une forme de collaboration” – Albert Camus
There are no groupings in my head.
I am not being spoken for.
No one will speak for me if I do not speak for myself. Tell this to those who have formed groups and begotten labels in my name: I will join you if only I hear my voice in yours. Not earlier. In this regard, I refuse to be called ‘the Nigerian on the street’ because there are Nigerians OUT OF the street.
If I am on the street it is not because of anybody. It is because of me.
I say this because I must divest myself from every resistance that collaborates. Clearly, there are those who wish that a revolt continues because it creates for them an ‘other’, thereby perpetuating their actions, their desire to stay on. These people wish to look at me and nod their heads, ‘yes, someone is agreeing with me in my irresponsibility.’ [click to continue…]
You tell me that if I speak I will not be heard. No. I will speak and I will be heard. I am not a writer only by talent. I am a writer because I want to be a witness, a real witness.
You recall Edward Said, “There was something wrong with how I was invented.” Yes, you do. So you understand that I have been out of place for too long. Yet, I am taking the chances of return. When I was invented I was told I was less because I am Nigerian, that I did not have certain opportunities. I will not go to a good school. I will live with the fact of darkness, without electricity. Etc etc. Now I am reinventing my own dialogue, I am taking apart my absence-and-hole-shaped existence. I am filling up the blank spaces. I am writing my story, my essence, my self.
I am a young Nigerian. “Out of Africa always comes something new,” some ancient Roman historian is supposed to have said. Because I am young I am burdened by the New. I know of the past injustices, the failed sunsets. I know of being labelled, being called a money-monger because I am Ibo, a fraudster because I am Nigerian, futureless because I am African. Yet, I am willing to look to the New, I am willing to constructively forget, to walk through the past and leave the past in the past. I am willing to argue into being this newness I speak about. Because being Nigerian is being New.
Don’t think of me as a Facebook protester. I am not. I have gone past updating my status, commenting, posting notes, for the transient reason of being counted amongst a number. I feel embarrassed that you think of me as a young man seeking fame. I am wary of that word. I am wary of being ‘liked’ by a myriad of people who know nothing of my motivations, my aches, my processes. Instead I am conscious that each Facebook activity or blog post contributes to the historical statements I am making. I will not seek cheap fame. I will contribute to real change.
Which is why I will write and write until my hand is blistered and sore. I will write of the Nigeria I am seeing, of the deconstruction of labels. Of possibilities, of equality, of a new youth. I will write of the shaming of the prodigal fathers, whose failure has been that they forget too easily, too quickly, that no injustice will outmanoeuvre human resilience, or collective will.
Three excellent insightful articles by Nigerians on Nigeria with my brief comments.
“People In The Niger Delta Now Recognize That Jonathan Is A Waste Of Time” – Isaac Osuoka
Issac Osuoka is a long time environmental and social justice activist from the Niger Delta and a founding member of the IYC and more recently Social Action. He is someone I have great respect for. Here he is interviewed by Sahara Reporters about the Occupy Nigeria movement and President Jonathan’s standing in Nigeria and significantly in the Niger Delta his home region. His conclusion is that Jonathan is “the worst president that the ruling class ever fostered on Nigeria” He is clueless, inept, passionless and with the mentality of a “local government committee chairman”. Based on two brief conversations with colleagues in Port Harcourt yesterday and following Twitter there seems to be very little protest actions in the region except for in Delta State [Warri and Sapele] or in the south east generally. There could be a number of reasons for this such as the lack of support or consciousness by Nigerians with the 20 year struggle in the region and maybe people dont feel they are part of what is happening. Maybe they dont feel they are part of the country. Maybe they are against the fuel subsidy being removed but dont want to be seen to be critical of the president. These are just suppositions and personally I am disappointed with what appears to be the low level of participation in the Niger Delta core states and hope I am either wrong or this changes over the next few days. UPDATE: [5.15 GMT+1] Pleased to see I was proved [partially] wrong as total shut down in Port Harcourt:
“IO: The removal of fuel subsidy demonstrates again that the Jonathan presidency does not care a bit about the welfare of Nigerians. Can you imagine the puerile argument that fuel subsidy does not benefit the majority of the Nigerian people? Only those that see benefit in terms of how much you loot can make such a stupid argument. You see, since they know that the figures of how much the government is expending on subsidies is over bloated because of the corruption in the system, and they know the few individuals that have benefited from all the fraud, they have come to associate benefit with whose hands are in the lucre. That is all they see. The loot. That is all they are interested in. From their exalted position, they don’t see the mass of the Nigerian people who are mostly unemployed or have the lowest incomes anywhere in the world. That is why World Bank sponsored economists like Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala will ask during one of her meetings with the NLC why people were so worried over subsidy removal when about 70 per cent of Nigerians don’t own cars! Continued…
