Follow Us on Google
By Chris Anyokwu
Nigeria’s Vice President Yemi Osinbajo (SAN) was on a 3-day visit to Canada recently. Among the welter of events lined up for his visit and his interaction with the Nigerian community in the North American country, was his momentous comment to the effect that the current administration was doing its best to address the negative image of Nigerians globally. Given the extremely important nature of the matter, Yemi Osinbajo appeared to have touched the matter with the delicate sensitivity of a snail’s horn. Beyond the reverberations of the political correctness of these pieties vouchsafed by the Number Two man in power in far-away Canada, the main ideological, national and racial thrusts of his comments go to the very core of our identity as a people and our individual as well as our collective place in the contemporary world. The Vice President’s intervention was coming on the heels of decades of opprobrium, persecution, and xenophobic attacks launched against Nigerians, especially in the Western world – the USA, Canada, Europe and the UK. Nigerians have not fared any better in Asia and Latin America, either.
China’s long history of persecution and maltreatment of Nigerians, especially traders in Guangzhou Province, is well-documented. Yaqiu Wang writing in MSNBC on February 18, 2021 in an influential article entitled: “From Covid To Blackface on TV, China’s Racism Problem Runs Deep”, reveals the egregious and dehumanising treatment of people of colour, Nigerians inclusive across the Asian behemoth. Nigerian citizens and other Africans are the main victims in the sex-slavery and human trafficking rings in the Middle East. Places such as U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon are notorious for this unholy trade. But it would seem Asia is simply borrowing an idea from the European chap-book as continental Europe has been shown to be in the lead in sex slavery and human trafficking (see Chika Unigwe’s novel On Black Sisters’ Street and Akachi Ezeigbo’s Trafficked). Recently, a meme trended on social media showing a young Nigerian lady who had apparently relocated to the UK to pick up menial work as a toilet cleaner. She confessed how she always retired into a toilet room to cry her eyes out, every other day, because of the horrendous hardship and the sheer horror of living in bondage overseas. This hapless lady’s example tends to give the lie to the chic mythology of the Japa Movement: the idea that the grass is always greener on the other side. Stories abound of Nigerian professionals who sell off their worldly possessions to emigrate abroad in pursuit of Eldorado and life more abundant. The fact of the matter is that most end up doing the most dehumanising jobs such as mortuary attendants, fuel attendants, care-givers, especially to invalids and people living with disability and children with special needs – all for a pittance. From London to Paris, Rome to New York City, Tokyo to Dubai, it’s the same story of grim and pitiless exploitation and dehumanisation of the Nigerian as expendable chattel.
Simply visit any subway station in Europe during winter. You would weep when you see the endless sea of fellow Nigerians in mad rush to work, their nostrils streaming with snot and steam oozing from their mouths as their gritted teeth clatter in an effort to fight the bitter cold. This could be the night shift and, possibly the third or fourth job for the day. All for the money. To pay the ever-rising bills. And in the end, they are all left high and dry. Yet folk back at home in Africa, like birdlings crying to their mother-birds for bits of offal and comestible twigs, keep warbling over the failure of their relations in Diaspora to remit Pound Sterling, Euros and Dollars to them. Sadly, without these remittances life in motherland Nigeria would be brutish, nasty and short, indeed. Thus, given the eternally badly-run Nigerian economy by our patriotism-challenged political class (whose family members are sitting in the lap of luxury, their futures secure), the road to Europe, America, Asia and Latin America is constantly busy with footloose human flotsam and jetsam, like discarded detritus, drifting towards a Bethlehem of questionable redemption. It is anywhere else but Nigeria for them as these folk try to flee the throes and thraldom of Biblical immiseration and apocalyptic misery which is the permanent living condition in Nigeria. Small wonder, Nigeria’s professional class prefers menial jobs overseas such as being a watchman or a gateman (or as we call it here a maiguard), a security guard in front of, say, McDonald, KFC, Sainsbury, Tesco, or Lidl, etc. to white-collar jobs here in Nigeria. They would give an arm and a leg just to land a taxi-driver job, a vegetable farm-hand job, a truck-driver job, a care-giver job and the lowliest – the job of a street-sweep or toilet cleaner. Theirs are the jobs reserved for the wretched of the earth. What do they care about being addressed in the hell called Nigeria as lawyer, doctor, banker, Nollywood star, or an engineer but have absolutely nothing to show for it?
A sister-in-law of mine confessed to me in London recently, when I expressed worried concern over the sheer suffering she and other Africans endure to get by: “My brother, there’s nothing or nowhere like home; there’s no place like Africa. We are here only for the almighty Pound Sterling. That’s all!” You may substitute Pound Sterling with, say, Euros or Dollars, depending on context. Accordingly, when you go to the cities of Europe, you would see many Nigerians looking woe-begone and completely worn and weary with drudgery. They are all there for the money. Folk back home must eat; they must pay the bills, school fees, hospital bills, build houses, get married, and give the dead a befitting burial. The unequal exchange between the Naira and Pound Sterling or Dollar/ Euros is what is forcing most (usually our best and brightest) to relocate overseas in search of the fabled greener pastures.
Unfortunately, some of them end up doing bad things; some go into the drug business, peddling narcotic substances such as cannabis, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine. Some go into international sex trade. And others create a niche for themselves in internet scamming and identity theft (see Adichie’s Americanah). Some Nigerians have, sadly, given their country of birth a bad name by engaging in criminal activities such as armed robbery, mugging, pick-pocketing and the like. In public places overseas, announcements are usually made every minute that people should be security-conscious, to keep their belongings safe. Whilst it is regrettable that few bad eggs from Nigeria are guilty of the crimes highlighted above, it is, however, disturbing, to say the least, that Nigerian citizens are usually singled out as the main culprits. Some Blacks from say, Ghana, Sierra-Leone or South Africa do claim to be Nigerian when they run out of luck in their nefarious and illegal activities in Diaspora. They, thus, give the impression that every criminal of colour is Nigerian! This is national profiling at its worst! And it’s utterly unacceptable. This is a sick product of poor judgment, mental laziness and disrespect. Clearly, this national/racial profiling feeds off from centuries of othering by white supremacy. According to the late Palestinian-born American scholar, Edward Said in his magnum opus, Orientalism: “In a sense, the limitations of Orientalism are […] the limitations that follow upon disregarding, essentialising, denuding the humanity of another culture, people or geographical region.”
Said argues further that the West imagines itself to be liberal, democratic and rational while it considers the Orient (read: Nigerian) as backward, despotic and emotional. This imperialism of History seems to re-echo the Cartesian Manichaeism of European rationality versus Black emotionalism. The overall implication of this is that everything bad and evil is projected and attributed to the Blackman whose skin colour is cosmic taint of recidivism. Accordingly his “black skin, white mask” sentences him to the lunatic fringes of polite society, the margins of civilisation. His presence, notably in the White sun, is an uncomfortable reminder to the White man of his own primitive and barbaric origins. But, thankfully, science and technology have delivered him from all that mumbo-jumbo, the dark world-womb of unspeakable mysteries. A tad better than an antiquated curio piece, the Nigerian is merely tolerated and humoured by white liberalism. The memory of conquest, pacification and colonisation is never too far from the surface of things. This is not to talk of the over 400 years of the infamous Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the abhorrent corollary of the Middle Passage. From the Ethiopian Eunuch and Queen of Sheba to Caliban and Equiano; from Black slaves (Kunta Kinte) in the New World and Europe to their descendants scattered all across the world to the “Lonely Londoners” (read: Nigerians in Diaspora), the Nigerian image has endured a lifetime of brutal mutilation and disfigurement. It matters very little whether you are a Wole Soyinka or an Adichie, a Kanu Nwankwo or an Ahmed Musa, you are all tarred with the same scabrous brush. In 1975 or thereabouts, at Cambridge, Wole Soyinka with his gospel of African Literature was pooh-poohed as primitive, his burgeoning oeuvre as “a mythical beast”. (See Wole Soyinka’s Myth, Literature and the African World). This paternalistic one-upmanship of the Western imaginary draws endlessly upon the abubuutan (inexhaustible) well of white cultural and intellectual arrogance, its ethnocentric universalism. Much of this is thanks to Hegel, Sir Edward E. Evans-Pritchard and Hugh Trevor-Roper, inter alia. Africa is not among Hegel’s four cultures or civilisations. From Hegel’s perspective, Africa is said to be unhistorical; undeveloped spirit – still involved in the conditions of mere nature, devoid of morality, religions and political constitution. For Hegel, therefore, Africa is completely innocent of zeitgeist: a spiritual void and a moral tabula rasa. Sir Edward E. Evans-Pritchard’s Social Anthropological theses on primitive cultures and societies draw essentially upon Hegelian doctrines. Further, British historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper was quoted as saying: “Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none; only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness.”
Many scholars from Nigeria who worked and are working in America and Europe, particularly, scholars such as Soyinka, Achebe, Isidore Okpewho, Abiola F. Irele, Biodun Jeyifo, and Niyi Osundare have consistently bemoaned the poor reception and treatment of African letters. Their works are, thus, labelled “Minority Studies” and are shunted to the fringes. If you like pen a masterpiece or a Blockbuster, no mainstream publisher will touch it with a ten-foot long pole! Only ethno-racial small-time publishing houses will give your work some publicity and, thus, give you your time of day. For decades, much of African literature has been dismissed by Western critics and researchers as ethnographic and anthropological, thus lacking in scientific rigour, psychological penetration and cosmic sweep and depth of human experience.
Our political elite over the years have done their level best to help solidify and cement the negative image of the Nigerian, what with the historic collusion of traditional institution with enemies of life, the white slavers; the latter-day conspiracy between our erstwhile colonisers and our ruling class, from Independence to date; the long history of institutionalised larceny and kleptocracy emblematised by the Sani Abacha leitmotif; oil theft and other cases of the pillaging of our commonwealth, mineral resources and so on. Our rulers love to play court jesters to their metropolitan puppeteers who call the shots for us, after all said and done. Colonialism is dead, but neo-colonialism is alive and well! Besides, our inability to wean ourselves off our addictions to western products and tastes – automobiles, fashion, music, culture, political institutions and religion – is our undoing. This is what Indian-born postcolonial cultural guru, Homi K. Bhabha calls mimicry. We are mere apes and parrots! To redeem ourselves and improve our negative image as Nigerians, our rulers must lead from the front. They must demonstrate the power of example. They must stop the Big Steal. Keep our common patrimony at home. They must stop all forms of tourism – medical in particular and patronise “Made in Nigeria” products. We must invest in our youth, for theirs is the future of our country. We must criminalise bad behaviour both home and abroad; and endow our passport with respect and dignity through exemplary conduct. And, finally, our political class, managers of humans and materials, must re-establish a culture of equity, inclusion and egalitarianism. The road to recovery starts with the 2023 presidential election. Let’s vote wisely.
Chris Anyokwu writes from University of Lagos.
