ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the Opinion category.

Encounter With a Brexiter

by Dèjì Tóyè

A Cambridge Union Speech. Photo by Dèjì Tóyè.

The first Brexit ideologue I met in flesh and blood was not as dramatic as the foul-mouthed Nigel Farage or mop-headed Boris Johnson. The novelist Fredrick Forsyth was at the Cambridge Union Society to talk about ‘the 7 Pillars of Freedom’ a pretty dainty title for a talk about the future of the UK in Europe. It was in the late autumn of 2013 and Forsyth, himself now in the autumn of his life, was a character from a different era. The Union hall which filled up to the brim and spilled into the lawns when crowd pullers like Jesse Jackson or, as I understand, Julian Assange visited, was sparse on that occasion. I even got a front-row seat in the motley crowd that occupied half an aisle of the hall. As I made my way to that event, Forsyth was for me still an image—that young reporter whose career took off with his coverage of the Nigerian Civil War in the 1960s, whose reportage of that event challenged official British policy much earlier than most analysts’ and whose two books on the war would become as important as any other in the much controversial historiography of that war. In short, I was going to hear this internationalist with an expansive view of the world. But oh, what autumn does!

‘The 7 Pillars of Freedom’ was really a nativist treatise on how only the Anglo-Saxon world now holds the hope for true democracy, and freedom, in the world. And, oh, how Europe is gradually dragging Britain down the path that leads away from all that. Although, in my view, many countries across the world would check the boxes of the so-called 7-pillars, Forsyth did not believe what passes for democracy in the rest of Europe and much of the world (he has interesting things to say about Africa, by the way) meets the mark. The speaker also papers over the fact that Britain does not balance two of the pillars well—that is, the Pillar of ‘Elective supreme power’ (elective executive government) and ‘Election by constituencies’, at least not as well as in her ‘Anglo-Saxon’ peer, the US, where both popular and electoral votes are better balanced in the direct choice of the executive authority. This should have been warning signal that democracies are not all the same. After all, Aristotle may not even recognise as representative of democracy a gathering where all eligible men of the town are not congregated in the agora, caviling all day.

Forsyth’s performance in Cambridge has something to say about the way the Brexit campaign had been carefully curated over the years. Farage may fume and curse in the European parliament, and Boris Johnson may scare the hoi polloi with the immigrant bogeyman, our speaker knew well enough to strike a more dignifying pose before this debating society, appealing rather to the finer, if somewhat exaggerated, elements of the British heritage. Subliminal in Forsyth’s speech – made to the more politically aware of the students in this university that, together with Oxford, has produced all of UK Prime Ministers with university degrees, bar four – was a reminder of ‘the good old days’ when all of Europe was fascism or socialism and Britain ‘alone’ spread the light of freedom and democracy from the Atlantic to the Pacific (never mind that that itself rode on the tailcoat of imperialism).

Fredrick Forsyth. Photo from thetimes.co.uk

That last point is important because Forsyth’s ostensibly more elevated argument also papers over the possible economic consequences of an ‘exit’ decision. It has been suggested that Britain got a better deal in the world when it was not constrained by the collective bargaining of the common market. What is forgotten is that the status quo ante has changed. The old empire has since disappeared and even that feel-good replacement for it – the Commonwealth – has now weakened. India, Britain’s most important colonial legacy is itself now a world power in both economic and technological terms (it launched 20 satellites into space in the last few days). China, that other Asian power, has since repossessed Hong Kong, the British Pacific holdout. Against the colonial dependency paradigm, the biggest European trading partner to Nigeria, Britain’s most important colonial haul in Africa, is, wait for it, The Netherlands.

But the UK has made its decision anyway. And as an avowed political determinist, I support it, just as I supported the Scottish referendum and even mildly wished the separation campaign won, if only to reinforce my belief that, as I stated then, a nation is an argument and not an axiom. It is a lesson for Nigeria and other struggling political inventions of, well, say Britain.

__________

Dèjì is a lawyer and creative writer, based in Lagos.

Meeting Zuckerberg

Not personally (though that would have been nice).

The CEO of Facebook dropped by Lagos, Nigeria yesterday – his first visit to the continent – to visit with the tech community and see for himself what they’re (we’re) doing. He also stopped by places where his foundation has invested millions of dollars, e.g. Andela. Read more here on QZ.

What I’m most pleased by, though (along with the usual delight at his interest in the growing tech space in Nigeria where a number of amazing things are happening every day by young people working very hard with very little) is the fact that he met Temie Giwa whom I’ve talked about on this site countless times – she’s someone whose company LifeBank is doing a lot of good things in the technology space, using a mobile app to connect hospitals and patients to sources of clean and affordable blood supply at record time, thus saving hundreds of lives around Lagos.

What she’s doing hasn’t happened in Nigeria before. Hospitals usually had to physically go around looking for matching blood, usually during emergencies. This has led to many problems, failed matches, and dying patients. The intervention of LifeBank comes to provide not only matching blood types with patients who need it, but also delivering said blood (which has been tested by the lab and by the state government) in record time, and in good condition, to the hospital 24/7. This is poised to change the way healthcare delivery happens in Africa’s most populous country.

Temie talks about the meeting here.

Getting investment from a person of Zuckerberg’s stature in such a startup will be revolutionary for the speed and expansion of LifeBank’s work – and I hope that he considers doing that. Getting it from anyone actually will. The possibility of such eventuality has now hopefully risen with such a public validation, and that’s delightful news. Also delightful is the reality of a dawning future in which technology is being adapted to different field in order to deliver outstanding results. This is the future. Nigeria, now officially in a recession, is certainly in need of such not-so-divine intervention.

This is what Mark has to say about LifeBank (around the 8.30 minute mark in this video):

“If everyone had the opportunity to build something like this, then the world would be a better place… I’ve been to a lot of different cities… people around the world are trying to build stuff like that. If she actually pulls it off, then she’d show a model that will impact not just Lagos, not just Nigeria, but countries all around the world.”

During his live town hall meeting referenced above with developers and entrepreneurs, Mr. Zuckerberg referenced a quote which he said guides much of his work: “The best way to predict the future is to build it.” From the amount of great changes now taking place around the country and around the world fueled by the power of imagination and the tools of technology, it’s hard not to wholeheartedly agree.

A Diligent Retelling: Reading Teju Cole’s Essay Collection

I’ve been reading Tẹjú Cole’s Known and Strange Things among other commitments. The book is a collection of published and unpublished essays by the acclaimed author of Open City and Everyday is for the Thief, two books noted for their essay-like forms that brilliantly blur the lines between travel writing and fiction. As a travel blogger, I can relate. He also follows in the tradition of many other writers famous for documenting their travel adventures in their literary output. The book is a compact curation of his own writing journey from many publications in which a number of them had first appeared.

In one of the essays in the book, Cole famously follows James Baldwin to a city in Switzerland in order to re-live that writer’s experience in the sixties while he was working on Go Tell it on the Mountain and to reflect on what may have changed over the course of time. In another, he documents his meeting with V.S. Naipaul in New York, being awed by him but not too much as not to be aware of the man’s occasional condescension that comes out at unexpected moments. “He speaks so well,” Naipaul says of the African author and we glimpse from the skill of retelling that it wasn’t that much of a compliment. In An African Caesar, the author does a nuanced review of a theatre presentation by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, but doing it against the background of other ironies and coincidences riding on the lives of Shakespeare, Caesar, Abraham Lincoln, and the all-black cast.

In the preface, Cole pays homage to one of his (and my) favourite tongue-twisters from Yorùbá (“Ọ̀pọ̀lọpọ̀ ọ̀pọ̀lọ́ ni kò mọ̀ pé ọ̀pọ̀lọpọ̀ ènìyàn l’ọ́pọlọ l’ọ́pọ̀lọpọ̀”) to illustrate his rootedness in his home culture properly balanced with his accommodation of other cultures and values. In another part of the chapter he expounds this more clearly:

“There’s no world in which I would surrender the intimidating beauty of Yoruba-language poetry for, say, Shakespeare’s sonnets, or one in which I’d prefer chamber orchestras playing baroque music to the koras of Mali. I’m happy to own all of it. This carefree confidence is, in part, the gift of time… I feel little alienation in museums, full though they are of other people’s ancestors… I am not an interloper when I look at a Rembrandt portrait. I care for them more than some white people do, just as some white people care more for aspects of African art than I do…”

The tongue-twister was, impressively, left un-italicized as have typically been the case in most books published abroad. It was, however, not properly tone-marked as Yorùbá words usually ought, and as I did above. Neither were any Yorùbá names referenced in the work. My initial assumption is that this is the publisher’s error, typically paying less attention to proper diacritical marking on non-English words. But elsewhere in the book (Furtwängler, Tété-Michel Kpomassie, Florian Höllerer, Tomas Tranströmer, Galápagos, etc) names belonging to other people in accented/tonal languages were properly accented with no eyebrows raised. Here, my initial elation at the central featuring of Yorùbá in this work was greatly punctured, and now awaiting sacrificial appeasement and repair. In 2016, we should no longer be apologetic about insisting on proper writing of African languages in literature. The writer, certainly, at this height of his literary career, stands in a great position to influence this change.

My favourite essay in the work yet is an essay titled Unnamed Lake which is a stream-of-consciousness-type narrative on the complexity of perception, art, and the role of memory. It is one I’ll also read again for its layered presentation that offers new gem each time. I like it also for its use of mixed metaphors from French/Algeria (Derrida) to Germany (Wilhelm Furtwängler), from Australia (the Adnyamathanha people) to Nigeria (Major Patrirck Chukwuman Kaduna Nzeogwu), from Bangladesh to Hiroshima (President Truman). The other essays more grounded in recognizable reality of the author’s work history: reviews (Wangechi Mutu), polemics (The White Saviour Industrial Complex), satire (In Place of Thought), and interview (A Conversation with Aleksandar Hemon), etc, are equally enchanting, and serve a purpose of providing a wide appraisal of Teju Cole’s worldview.

What are essays good for? Setting an agenda, making a point, codifying for a coming generation thoughts, ideas, arguments, and questions plaguing a specific time? Mr. Cole’s collection touch on many of these as a timely intervention not just for identifying his own outlook on the world – though this is relevant – but also for leaving a mark identifying this place and this time as his point of visiting. Like a traveler in the desert on the way to somewhere else choosing for a while to make artistry from the sand under his feet not only to delight himself (and how discomfiting would that be in a scorching desert?) but also to amaze overhead flyers and future visitors to the place with his own creative interpretation of what he had experienced.

In that way, essays are not that different from memoirs, which tap into memory and creative writing to attempt an understanding of the past through the narrative lens, except that they tell more than they show, opening to us directly the thoughts and opinions of the writer. What we take away is more than knowledge of the subjects and places we walked through with the writer, but also something about the writer himself. Known and Strange Things tell us that the brilliant Teju Cole is curious in his approach to life, attentive things that connect us with those who have gone before, of different colors, cultures and tongues, and diligent in his retelling of (or at least his arguments about) what makes them memorable or relevant, allowing us to walk in his shoes page by page. That makes the book an engaging, and important, read.

____

Photo credit: TheGuardian.com

Through Crocetta

Getting to the Egyptian Museum from central Turin was supposed to be straightforward, but the mapping of someone else’s city always looks easy on paper. What we planned, the five of us cramped excitedly into a small car in pursuit of the mysteries of the Torino archaeological museum, was to get ourselves into the city center, disembark, and then take one of the numerous city trams towards the museum itself. Simple enough. In reality, when we landed at Crocetta – which isn’t the city centre as much, but just slightly south of it, a few of us needed cash from the ATM machine, some needed a smoke, all of us were hungry, and time was ticking. Two members of the group had a plane to catch in a few hours.

The first impression of Crocetta isn’t notable, perhaps because the town wears a garb of normalcy that seemed out of place for some reason. But reading later that it is one of the most prestigious neighbourhoods in Turin puts that atmosphere in context. One thing I remember is how tall the buildings were and how much they seemed to extend into each other, with long corridors that stretched as far as the eyes could see. I realised, eventually, that this isn’t a localised phenomenon but an Italian thing. Not just the buildings, by the way, but the roads too. Inspired by the military strategies of the Roman empire, most streets and buildings were built in such straight lines as to allow an observer to see as far ahead as possible from one location.

The ride to the museum was as bumpy as most tram rides are, and sufficiently contrastive with both the earlier ride in a private vehicle and a typical city commute in another familiar city many thousands of miles away. A recurring thought in the traveller’s head in moments like this is the extent of work that would be needed to modernise a city like Lagos to this level of infrastructural development. A tram, after all, is just a fancy name for a longer-than-usual bus that runs on a designated track and with electricity. A weightier matter on the mind was something of far greater significance that had happened just a few days prior: I’d lost my younger sister in Lagos to preventable maternal mortality and the Nigerian healthcare system. Every opportunity for interaction with things signifying of the continuation of life seemed satisfying enough even in their imperfection.

It makes sense now, everything already said about loss and the perspective it brings. Being far away from the scene of grief, where nothing was ever going to remain as they were, was no consolation, and certainly no relief. So, going through the halls of the Egyptian Museum, travelling into the past where death and renewal were matters of natural law and importance only provided temporary but welcome succor. Sarcophagus, scrolls, mummified remains from hundreds of years ago still remaining intact in their exhibition cases spoke to far more than the ability of humans to preserve that which is no longer practically immediately useful, but also to the value of that pursuit itself, capable of revealing (or ennobling) something more about ourselves than about those already dead.

With over 30,000 artifacts, I often wondered how long it took to excavate much of the work currently exhibited in the museum. The first item received, according to Wikipedia, arrived almost 400 years ago. A more awe-inspiring question is about how much more of these types of work with spiritual-artistic significance from that ancient civilization is still left buried under the many ruins in today’s Egypt, and how much more they may still inspire us. And also, a little unnerving, what chance of survival would many of them have had they been left in their homeland rather than having been transported over the distance into this beautiful place in Turin. Perhaps many of these gods are glad to have been saved from the fanatic distress currently sweeping through the Middle East.

The ride back to Crocetta was, perhaps, slightly more animated than introspective, as the aftermath of spending two hours staring through enchanting history. We had plenty to talk about, gifts purchased at the gift shop to compare, and promises to make that we would return here at a later date for a more thorough exploration of an exhibition that couldn’t possibly be properly enjoyed in less than two hours. Then we alighted from the tram and couldn’t find our car. We had got down at the wrong stop. Ten to fifteen minutes later, we found the car parked safely where we’d left it, at a location similar to all the other spots on all the other similarly-looking streets we’d had to walk through, sometimes terrified of staring groups of strangers, and sometimes nervous about LS and her daughter missing their flight.

Having a street with so similarly-looking blocks of buildings, with very few (to a stranger) landmarks to help navigate, it turns out, had its negatives.

Paging Bill Gates! (And YOU Can Help)

This time last week I got an interesting, and pleasant, surprise: I’d been listed along with 31 other fantastic people around the continent in the Quartz Africa’s Innovator’s List. Thank you, thank you, and thank you! Two days ago, I got another one: Bill Gates, one of the world’s innovative (and richest) icons had shared the Quartz List on his Facebook and Twitter accounts.

My wife who had called my attention to it was half exhilarated that I was getting this kind of recognition, and proud of me, and half desirous of same for her absolutely wonderful and important company currently saving lives in Nigeria through her work with a small team (in cold chain supply of blood) and in need of serious funding support.

Her perspective and excitement struck a chord with me and I have decided to spend some effort trying to get Bill’s attention both on twitter and on Facebook, because having his clout and support for many of the ideas and work we’re doing will give way more practical mileage than just the exposure of a list (great as it is). His Foundation, for instance, has supported hundreds of great ideas around the world that have then gone on to thrive and change lives. We’d like to have that too.

So, I would like to have a conversation with him, wherever, whenever, possible. Here’s one more reason:

One of the motivations for my work on YorubaName.com and other language-related work we’ve been doing over a decade comes from an early frustration with Microsoft products which always drew this red wriggly line under names that it considered foreign, even when they were not to the local environment. When Microsoft Word was used in a Nigerian environment where Yorùbá is spoken as a first language along with many others, the red line never lets the user forget who made the rules. It created a feeling of exclusion, or not being recognised. It was similar to the attitude among teachers in Nigerian private schools who scolded children for speaking “vernacular” in the class. It had the, perhaps unintended, consequence of keeping users (and students) feeling constantly inadequate – second class. Thankfully, this part of my motivation was highlighted in the profile for Quartz.

Screenshot (40) In any case, I am interested in talking with Bill Gates about the work I’ve committed myself to in increasing the African language content in technology. His help will be greatly appreciated and I will appreciate any help in being able to reach him. My last employment was at Google (Nigeria), if this helps. One of the things I did there, apart from my primary assignment, was help improve the Nigerian language currency in Google Translate and some other Google products, for mobile and for PC. I would like to do the same for Microsoft, if possible (I’m currently unemployed, you see). But more importantly, I’d like to explore partnership opportunities between Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and our Yorùbá Name Project.

One of the things I was pleased to discover while going through Bill’s Gates Notes blog is that he’s also a fan of Dr. Richard Feynman who is one of my biggest inspirations. Feynman’s book/biography Surely You Must Be Joking is my all-time favourite book showing how one can be smart, motivated, and still have fun at the same time. His follow up work, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out is one book I’ve always returned to. It’s a collection of essays, thoughts, lectures, interviews, on a number of fascinating pursuits and thoughts. Dr. Feynman was an easy man to love, and to listen to.

So, maybe this collision is a good sign.

How you can help:

If you have direct access to Bill Gates (or if you ARE Bill Gates), and/or you’d like to connect us, please send me a mail at kt AT ktravula.com.
If you know any other way I can reach him, other than the grant application processes on the Gates Foundation website, please leave them in the comments below.
If neither of the above, please help retweet my tweet to him, and upvote my comment on his Facebook page. It might work (or it might not). Who knows!

Thank you.

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