From Wounded Knee to Wounding Knee
**Men without ears
Tatalo Alamu
It is a consuming paradox that genocide is never far away from modern civilization. It has occurred everywhere: In the two Americas, first with the arrival of Hernan Cortes and the conquistadors and then the genocide of native Amerindians by the builders of modern America.
History bears uncanny witness to the industrial scale extermination of native Africans by King Leopold of Belgium in the egregiously named Free State of Congo, the attempt by the German imperial Command to obliterate the Herero people in modern day Namibia. Many of the survivors fled to what is now known as Botswana.
Africans have also exterminated other Africans in several wars of ethnic hegemony in the last two centuries, particularly in Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, Sudan and Nigeria. In Cambodia, a Marxist crackpot known as Pol Pot set about decimating his own people with cruel sangfroid. There was also the savage expropriation of the Australian Aborigines all in the name of a messianic civilizing order.
The bearers of modern Western civilization never felt any compunction about eliminating any human impedimenta to their notion of human and historical advancement. Based on this foundational prejudice, any laggard human species is summarily dealt with for standing in the way of the manifest destiny of humanity as reflected in occidental history.
For many who placed premium hopes on Nigeria as potential Black haven; a political, cultural and intellectual Mecca of the Black people, the country sucks and stinks to high heavens. To them Nigeria ought to have served as a countervailing rally for the Black race against the excesses of western civilization and its aggravating pretences as the sole bearer of modern civilization.
Many of the disappointed lovers point at the virtual implosion of the Nigerian post-colonial state in all the indices of state validation, the collapse of the nation’s security architecture as seen in the inability of the military to defend the nation’s territorial integrity against a religious insurgency that has lasted more than a decade. They also point at the display of cosmic buffoonery by the political class all in the name of politics.
One can understand the current global disappointment with Nigeria. Yet there is also a lot of misplaced anger abroad. The current Nigeria may just be serving the purpose for which it was created by the colonial masters. African researchers trapped in the discursive formation of western intellectual history and formation may be searching for the wrong answers in the wrong place.
The recent slow-motion execution of George Floyd by a racist cop through a vicious knee-clamp and the global outrage this has elicited has brought in its wake a whole range of associative recalls and wild juxtapositions of seemingly unrelated events.
In its bid to arrive at a deeper understanding of contemporary events, the human mind often transports tropes from past events to bear on current developments in a way that stuns the common sense and conventional expectations.
Wounded Knee was the site of a horrific massacre of native Indians by the American army in the last decade of the nineteenth century. It was a thoroughly one-sided encounter. Already serially humiliated in battle and subjected to brutal repression, the American Indians were looking for a last ditch solution to a colourful way of life which was crumbling all around them.
They thought they had found the solution in an old ritual dance known as The Ghost Dance which would revive ancient tribal honour and dignity as well as restore the pride of the American Indian nation. The movement swept across the American plains, igniting native passion and nationalist nostalgia.
The American colonial authorities would have none of that. They saw in The Ghost Dance Movement a sure route back to native cultural nationalism and subsequently to the pride and ferocity with which the American Indians resisted the extermination of their person and culture by the invading White supremacists.
As with every other thing they found strange and threatening, the American bearers of western modernity went after the moving spirits behind the Ghost Dance with maximum force and severity resulting in needless bloodshed.
At the end of the armed confrontation, Big Foot, the veteran Indian American warrior who had not even taken an active part in the dispute, lay dying in the snow. The conquerors had not forgotten or forgiven the humiliation of General George Armstrong Custer less than fifteen years earlier. It was the last sigh of the American Indians.
A century and three decades later in 2020, the same combination of fear and fright of the threatening other as well ingrained prejudices against the American of African extraction has led a racist cop to snuff life out of George Floyd in Minneapolis. It has been a long ride from Wounded Knee to Wounding Knee.
After being physically subdued, what the giant African American asked for was some breathing space. But fear and fright of the other, particularly the threatening Black bulk they have held down for centuries, will not allow them to give their former slaves a breathing space. As the saying goes, you cannot pin somebody down without staying on the floor with them.
This is why despite enviable strides of civilization and astounding progress in many departments of human endeavours, there remains many aspects of western society which are a throwback to Stone Age savagery and social cannibalism. Taken together in their brutality and offensive disregard for the sanctity of human life, they represent a frank window into the heart of darkness still entombed in all human beings irrespective of race, religion or civilization.
The question must now be asked why within the different strata and segments of human society, it is the western mind and imagination that seem most exacerbated and most exercised by the fear and fright of the other, bearing in mind the frightful savagery and homicidal frenzy this often provokes. The history of western modernity may tell part of the story, but not the entire story.
Of all the historical exegeses of human progress, western modernity is unique in projecting the illusion that it has no predecessors, competitors and possible successors. The usual myth is that it arrived on the world stage fully dressed and well-costumed for the historical task at hand. Yet its heirloom is so evidently freighted with massive indebtedness to other cultures that it is frankly absurd to argue the contrary.
The problem is that the myth of European Exceptionalism which propels western modernity and drove it to appropriate other people’s land from North and South America to Asia and Africa in the name of a new civilizing order does not give room within its narrative compass for any predecessors, competitors or successors. Before it, the world was a void. After it, everything came alive.
Yet it is obvious that before it gained unrivalled ascendancy over its competitors, western modernity was only one out of many countervailing modernity struggling for supremacy. These historical developments were obeying an internal logic of their own which depended on the objective state of the societies.
For example, but for the advent of colonization which violently disrupted their internal process there is nothing to suggest that certain African societies and people would not have intuited and second guessed their way towards some form of modernity. This is even more so in the case of India, the Latin America and China.
The problem with these ancient empires, expiring fiefdoms and superannuated kingdoms was that they were actually at the end of their historical tethers; politically and economically exhausted and lacking in fresh insights or initiatives.
By contrast, the emergent bourgeois masters of Britain, the hardy burghers of newly unified Germany, the radical homme libre of post-revolution France, the wealthy seafarers of Amsterdam and the strutting and swaggering Americans projected fresh energy and new vision.
The fact now speaks for itself and it is a damning indictment of western civilization. Having confiscated the intellectual property of earlier societies, having appropriated the historic insights of other cultures without acknowledging its indebtedness and having expropriated their land with aplomb, it is entirely understandable if western modernity views the other with fear and apprehension.
To nudge western civilization out of this historic conundrum the way forward for non-western societies is not to seek revenge or a settling of scores. The way forward is to develop counter-narratives and countervailing projects of modernity which will put western notions of a single narrative of human development and innate western superiority on the spot.
Western modernity contributed immensely to the advancement of human civilization as we now know it. It brought a sense of mission and manic urgency to radical innovation and technological overreach without which some of the startling achievements of humanity in the last five centuries would have been impossible.
But there was nothing inevitable or preordained about its ascendancy. Consequently, it cannot aspire to succeed itself. This will run contrary to the very logic of events that threw it up. Having smashed up its earlier competitors, it is normal for other societies to view its overwhelming superiority as natural and divinely ordained. But not forever as we are witnessing.
America’s nervous and frightful reaction to the rise of China is very instructive. Long accustomed to serial humiliation and racist scorn in the hands of western powers, China took it in the chin and never raised its voice while the balance of power was against it.
An ancient civilization that never lost its sense of self-worth and national pride despite the callous indignities visited on it by the western imperial powers, China understudied and stole what it could from the west until it was ready to face it down. As inscrutable as ever, no one knows what ace China has up its sleeves.
To arrive at a global geopolitical equipoise, there can be no doubt that Africa needs a magnetic hub; an economic, political, cultural and intellectual epicentre that will project Black power and possibilities as a countervailing model of modernity and human development.
America’s imperial and imperious strutting on the global stage has been checkmated by the rise of a Chinese model of state capitalism which delivers faster services to its bigger populace and is far more serious about eliminating inequality and the concentration wealth in a few hands. There is also the minor problem of a Russia buoyed by hyper-Slavic nationalism which is bent on cocking a military snook at an exhausted America.
The unfolding global ascendancy of China, the advent of the Asian Tigers, the rise of Arab capitalism as seen in UAE and some of the Gulf states and India’s bearish supremacy in aspects of technological revolution, all underscore the contemporary tragedy of Nigeria as the failed hub of Africa. As it was foreseen by some of the continent’s wisest rulers, the tragedy and under-achievement of Nigeria is a tragedy for the entire Black race.
But as we hinted at the beginning, we may all be barking the wrong tree here. Nigeria was never created by the colonial masters to serve the aspirations of the Black race. Nigeria was created as the biggest overseas retail outlet for colonial goods and largest concentration of raw materials, both human and non-human. The imperialist overlords were not in this business for sentimental reasons.
This is why since its creation, Nigeria has played host to waves after waves of armies of occupation, both colonial and native and both military and civilian for the sole purpose of extractive predation. Whenever we think we have seen the worst of them all, a worse specimen of humanity is just around the corner.
The country has fulfilled the aspirations of its original founders beyond their wildest imagination. Nigeria is the greatest Slave Bazaar that the world has seen. The fault is not in our greatest heroes and avatars. But they misread the historical cue. Anybody hoping to make Nigeria as currently constituted and configured to serve the aspirations of the Black race is living in a fools’ paradise.
Here are the drastic options. As the empire of his forefathers crumbled around him at the tail end of the First World War, a brave and brilliant army officer, Mustapha Kemal, rallied the troops to carve out an authentic Turkish nation from the collapsing Ottoman Turkish Empire. The eccentric colonel who is widely regarded as the founder of modern Turkey stood his military ground against the imperial armies. A modern Turkish nation rose from the ashes of the old empire.
At the tail end of the 90s and the last century, the Soviet behemoth that had held several European nationalities in Socialist thraldom began to crumble. Mikhail Gorbachev, the enlightened and visionary Soviet ruler, knew that he had only one realistic and pragmatic choice: to engineer a radical deconstruction of the monstrous albatross from within. And he did. The Soviet Empire crumbled giving way to a resurgent Russia.
Nigeria needs either a Kemal Ataturk to reinvent it or a Mikhail Gorbachev to put out of its endless miseries.
Men without ears
IN this column’s only public comment on the Oshiomhole- Obaseki imbroglio, we had admonished the two political gladiators to sheath their swords. As yours sincerely surmised then, the only possible logical outcome of the bitter feud is Mutually Assured Destruction. Having done our duty to nation and humanity, we decided to watch from the side lines as the two camps were egged on by a motley array of political hyenas, literary assassins and tribal principalities.
In the said piece, we urged Obaseki not to succumb to the snares of the famous Oedipus complex in which a son is driven to kill his father in order to marry his mother. Freud believed that all modern feuds between godsons and their godfathers are driven by this roiling psychological and political imperative.
But there are also godfathers who never wish their godsons well out of fear, anxiety and apprehension. It is not heart-warming to be surpassed and outflanked by one’s creation. It takes the most generous and wisest of men to acknowledge this and to live with it. This column drew Oshiomhole’s attention to the pitfalls of the master-builder syndrome.
Famously adopted from Henrik Ibsen’s play, The Master-Builder, it is a situation in which a renowned genius does not wish to be surpassed by his own students and creations. The world of politics and Literature is littered with such fratricidal contentions which only end in tragedy and mutual disgrace.
Since last Thursday after General Buhari wielded the big stick, all is now eerily quiet on the Mid-western front. There is no point belabouring the legality or wisdom of this sledgehammer treatment. You cannot expect a man with a military cast of temperament to stand aloof for long as party and nation descend into anarchy and judicial chaos.
The main combatants have since retreated to lick their wounds. Whether they survive to fight another day is a different matter entirely. Oshiomhole has been dramatically unhorsed with serious collateral damage to his political judgement, moral probity and ability to multi-task in a multi-ethnic coliseum.
In the case of Obaseki, he has survived somehow by carpet-crossing but in vastly diminished circumstances of moral impairment and integrity deficiency. Beyond his Benin moat perimeter, nobody in his right senses will give him any consideration when it comes to future national engagements. Oshiomhole has his faults, but in this particular matter Obaseki has behaved with execrable vileness and arrogant licentiousness. This is not the finest hour for politics in post-military Nigeria.
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