ktravula – a travelogue!

A World In Intolerance

Saturday evening found me in a bar downtown Edwardsville for a quick drink. One particular conversation with a mere acquaintance present there with a few other friends eventually turned to discussion about careers, mine, and about what I would like to be doing as soon as I’m done with a Master’s degree. It then returned to him and what he was doing at the moment. He’s studying to be a health scientist and he would one day love to work on the African continent. “I would have gone to Ghana in the summer,” he said, “but I didn’t have the money”. “Great,” I replied. “I know a program called the Global Health Corps which sponsors interested health workers/scholars from the United States to parts of Africa in order to make a difference doing what they love. It’s fully funded, and it’s perhaps precisely what you need. As a matter of fact, my fiance lives in Uganda at the moment because of this program.” He was immediately enthusiastic for one second, and then stopped. “I can’t go to Uganda, Kola. They’d hang me there.”

It took me about two seconds, and then I got it. He is gay. This was my first time of hearing this admission directly from him. He was apparently already familiar with the laws in many states on the continent today demonizing that kind of difference. I recovered from my double-take and tried to assure him. “You’re a foreigner. Foreigners are usually more protected especially when they’re volunteering… Maybe your presence in local communities saving lives will be enough to help change minds… Or maybe you don’t have to wear the tag on your forehead…” No, he said. He doesn’t have anything to hide and would never live where he is forced to deny who he is. The conversation went on for a little while more with me asking a few more questions I’d always wanted to know from a self-declared homosexual: How long has he known? Has he ever kissed a girl and loved it? Has he ever had sex with a girl? etc It was surprisingly an open conversation without any awkward moments where the young man opened up with his fears, hope, dreams and pain at the kind of society that demonizes difference. I expressed my empathy to him, just a few seconds before I informed him that he wouldn’t be able to live in Nigeria either.

A few days ago, last week, a new law was passed by Nigeria’s Senators penalizing “homosexual activity” for up to 14 years in jail, and up to 10 years for those who support, conduct or witness homosexual marriages and association. Many things make this law stupid, but this makes it curiously draconian: there has never been a clamour for homosexual union/marriage in Nigeria. If anything, the derisive societal attitude has been previously enough to keep those with same-sex attraction in the closet. Societal acceptance – if it ever happened – would have been a very big leap forward. Many pundits have already written about this, and the conversation about the scourge of this state-sanctioned intolerance has already taken centre stage in the media, which is good. Looking through the various arguments put forward by citizen for the support of this legislative measure has however convinced me of the long way that society still need to go to overcome intolerance.

Back to America, at around the same day, Congresswoman Michelle Bachman of the United States House of Representatives was telling a group of voters that she has no problems with homosexuals or lesbians getting married, as long as they get married to people of the opposite sex. Read it here. Here is the summary then: If you live in Nigeria or in the US as a gay person, you risk being criminalized except you get married – to the people you are not attracted to. If you live in Uganda, there’s one step further, you may be brutally murdered by a mob of intolerant activists (as was the case of the human right activist David Kato). There is much more to say about the hypocrisy of these expressions of sadistic intolerance, but I will end this post here – a minor contribution to the dialogue. There are a lot more we can do to bring peace to the world than spending time demonizing other people because they are different from us. A lot more things we can do with our conscientious energy.

For Biafra – FYI

There’s a call for universal observance of a week of mourning in memory of Gen. Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu beginning on Thursday December 1.

In the spirit of reconciliation, use the Flag of the Republic of Biafra as your Facebook profile picture from December 1-6 or at the very least, on Thursday, December 1.

Even if you’re using his photograph now, swipe it for the flag on Thursday.

Remember, Ojukwu was not an Igbo chieftain or warrant chief, never mind all that “Dim Gburugbu” stuff.

He was an illustrious Nigerian soldier and administrator, and a battle General and Head of State of a multi-ethnic, post-colonial African nation whose Ahiara Declaration remains a visionary blueprint for full post-colonial self-determination. As some have pointed out here lately, he was also one of our unique Nigerians, born of parents from both the south and the north: born in the north, raised in the west, and fated to destiny in the east. He spoke all three major Nigerians languages, lived in all three regions, and served Nigeria as proudly before the war as he served Biafra during the war.

Whatever your position on the Biafra war, let’s bid Ojukwu farewell by hoisting this flag one more time. Like America continues to honor Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, let’s join together and honor his memory.

Share this with your friends and on your group walls and listservs. Let’s paint Facebook red, black and green with half of a yellow sun, in one rare moment of unity, and not discord. Thursday, December 1.

Olu Oguibe

Exceptionalism is Overplayed

There is this weird notion that Americans are exceptional among peoples. It is one of the oft-repeated catch-phrases one would most likely find among politicians these days. Something like “unlike our president who believes that we’re just like every other country, I believe that as Americans, we are exceptional.” I have paraphrased Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, but he’s not alone. Heard repeated again and again, it often begins to sound something like this, between two children on a playground: “My daddy will beat the hell out of your daddy!”

Here is a problem though: the vapid mantra has been taken so seriously by many citizens that a leading politician now thinks that it is something with which to impugn the credibility of an opponent. “Hear that America, he thinks that you’re human like everyone else. I, however, believe that you’re supermen. You’ve always been.” Before this post is accused of being anti-American, let me give a few more examples of these delusions of exceptionalism as I’ve found them all around the world:

Nigeria is the giant of Africa (said to a tone/attitude of superiority derived from nothing else than the fact that one in five persons on the continent today is a Nigerian or that the country has produced some of the continent’s most accomplished citizens.)
We are the chosen people (an oft-repeated phase associated with Judaism and Jewish identity. According to the bible, this conviction could be traced to hundred of wars and pogroms in the bible led by the leaders of the nation-states acting on direction of God. It is also a source of immense national pride).
A ji sebi oyo laa ri… (a saying from the Oyo people in Nigeria, translated fully as “Oyo is known only to be emulated. Oyo never emulates anyone.”)
We’re the superior race (from Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich)
Arab Exceptionalism (“a phase that prescribes that Arab nations are immune to economic modernization and democratization, or that these concepts form part of the ‘clash'”)
Polygamy is an integral part of our culture/Homosexuality is not a part of our culture. (One of the many vacuous polemics that surface around the African continent whenever any of those issues are raised in public discourse).
“Rang de Basanthi” (Hindi: “Colour it saffron” – a badge of nationalism, pride and racial exceptionalism among Indians to the exclusion of everyone else).
Once you go black, you never go back (A disgusting racial aphorism. Use google.)
I’m a man: that’s what we do/Don’t tell me what to do/What do you expect? (Gender exceptionalism?)

There are many more across different world cultures that I have come across but now forgotten. A thing common to all of them is the belief in a particular world outlook accepted as superior and as defining of the people who hold onto them. American exceptionalism, of course, falls into the same category as all of those above, and it is the reason for this post. The concept is usually defined this way: “Here is a country exceptional in its creation and survival, as well as its role in world affairs.” It is usually bonded with a demand for indemnity from all accountability. “Can’t you see? I’m American!” American television personality Chris Matthews, in debunking the Republican “slight” of anti-American exceptionalism on President Obama, often uses this defence: “Can’t you see? Didn’t you listen to the man’s election speech? He said that only in America was his story possible. President Obama himself is a product of American exceptionalism. Look at where he came from and where he is now…”

Where Chris Matthews got it wrong however is the better end of the same spectrum of Mitt Romney underhanded sneakiness. While America is really no more exceptional among other countries of the world with less colourful starting histories or world presence nor its people any more important than people in more obscure parts of the world, it is also not exceptionally unique just because a bi-racial young man from a poor home and a single mother could become its president after a long history of slavery. I agree however that these make for a very spectacular (albeit empty) polemics. There are a few more examples of such exceptionalism: Mother Theresa moving from Albania to live in India in service of the world’s poor, or Susane Wenger – an Austrian woman, who spent all of her creative life in the groves of Oshogbo learning and teaching art and spirituality (and in dying there become one of the forest’s eternal goddesses).

The undeniable fact is that humans will always thrive wherever they find themselves. The story of Steve Jobs making it out of an almost hopeless beginning to become an accomplished entrepreneur could equally have happened elsewhere (perhaps with much less flair). The son of a carpenter from a victimized culture becoming the most famous, venerated, victim of capital punishment (by crucifixion) is as much a story of Jewish exceptionalism as is the story of a black African from post-colonial Kenya making it through the ropes to become a PhD holder in the United States a case of Kenyan/African exceptionalism, as is the story of a previously obscure princess from a repressive patriarchal culture growing up in the world’s ugliest war finding herself, due to a series of coincidences, as the queen of a large empire on which the sun never set – a case of British exceptionalism. Here’s Brazilian exceptionalism: defy all odds of a third world/developing country and win gold in (almost) every World Cup in which your country participates.

My conclusion here – as might by now be clear – is that there either is something of a human exceptionalism – defined by great success in spite of all odds – common to every culture and people on the face of the earth, or there is no such thing as exceptionalism, and we’re all just as unique as we are different. Nationalism and patriotic/religious credos are usually more disingenuous than the words in which they are couched tell us, and they have not always led to an improvement on the condition of human well-being. Politicians should therefore find something more stimulating to spend their time talking about, as should all blindly-following fanatics.

Fun Stuff: Google Ngram

Google has just come up with a great product called the Ngram Viewer (discussed in this equally fascinating TED video). What the Ngram Viewer does is to give users around the world the ability to sit at home and search through a database of billions of texts. These texts have been scanned into the Google database from all the books published in the world to date. Among other things, what this gives us is the power to discover the rate of occurrence of certain words, phrases or names in publishing history. Extremely fascinating, right?

I have been playing around with the program and here is my first experiment: to figure out which of these men in Nigerian political/social history is most frequently referenced in text, and since when. The men are Olusegun Obasanjo (who ruled the country for a record 11 years and played a crucial role in its political history), Chinua Achebe – Africa’s foremost novelist whose first 1958 novel Things Fall Apart is the most widely translated texts in English literature from Africa, Wole Soyinka – the continent’s first winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and finally Obafemi Awolowo – nationalist, politician and visionary. The result is stunning and will offer nuggets for discussion among people who have argued (many times without proof) that one person was more famous than the other.

There are a few more I have tried out. This graph showed that the word “nigger” got more usage in the mid 1800s (just after Lincoln set the slaves free, which made sense), dropped in usage in the 1980s, and is now coming back into use after the year 2000. Go figure. The word “nigga” however is a totally different matter. The word “Republicans” was initially more famous than “Democrats” but eventually fell around 1900 and has remained stably lower ever since. And what about languages/cultures? This graph shows how much the African languages/cultures Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Swahili, Twi, Edo, and Zulu have featured in texts through time. Fascinating result, and not only because Yoruba leads the pack with a clear margin! Yoruba is not the biggest language/culture in Africa. The word “Nigeria”, according to the Ngram has been in use/print since around 1860 (contrary to what we have been told) although it finally gained currency at the beginning of 1900s. Finally, I did a search on my favourite comedians: George Carlin, Bill Cosby, Lenny Bruce, and Richard Pryor. The result puts Bill Cosby on top and George Carlin at the bottom. Oh well.

What Google has done with this project called the Ngram Viewer (I say again, an extremely fascinating project) is to endow the world with a new great tool to do anthropology and study history with nothing but access to the internet. Life, and history, just became even more enlightening.

The Davis Image

Two days ago, this image surfaced showing a campus policeman applying pepper spray to students of the University of California at the Occupy Davis protests who were just sitting still against police orders for them to disperse, and in compliance with their right to publicly demonstrate.

Words, it has been said, can’t successfully match the power of an image. The image of a student standing in front of a tank at Tinneman Square put civil disobedience in the face of brutal force into unquantifiable perspective. So did the images of soldiers hosing protesters in Egypt on a bridge in Cairo just a few months ago.

The Occupy protests all around the country haven’t always made sense nor always fully represented the outlook of all that are upset by the state of the economy in America today. They however have represented the genuine grievances of a country fed up with the state of things in government. Those who have criticized their methods have not been able to provide political alternatives, or successfully make a case for anything bolder and more effective than a public action that got everyone talking. There have been occasional loons and wusses, to use words from Fox News, and those who sought to paint the movement as anything but genuine and grassroots have used these isolated cases to demonize the movement. The real nucleus of this movement however has been a non-violent occupation of public spaces in order to make them uncomfortable enough for those concerned to take action.

When added to other pictures from around the world today where people are revolting against unsatisfactory government policies, the image above blends right in, except that the other places where brute unmatched force has been used on helpless civilians have been failed/police states. They have never pretended to defend or support human rights, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. America, this (more of the pepper spray incident in video) should shame you.

These students deserve credit for the extraordinary amount of courage and restraint it must have required to stay non-violent in the face of such brutal use of police force. Everyone should be disgusted. I am.

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