#Rant961 (On America) by Joy Isi Bewaji.

In America, you forget your shame, your fears; the things that keep you quiet in Nigeria, the laughter that was so awkward walking down the streets of Lagos for fear of being judged mad. Because in Africa, everybody is everybody’s neighbour; so we look out for ourselves in ways that are intrusive and aggravating.

The old woman from across the street has a right to rebuke your child for wearing shorts too short; people have a right to demand you get married and be happy. They also have a right to insist you are not happy with being alone. The African life is a life of mass approval and applause.

America is different. I ate a burger at a park, and nobody saw me. A lady walked in with only a bra and a pair of shorts to McDonald's, and the black male attendant looked straight at her without blinking, without the African twitch of discomfort, or the desire to judge or criticize. A man may decide to walk down the street naked, and I bet the entire Manhattan populace would ignore him.

I met a gay couple – one in boxers running towards another dressed in a suit after work hours. Boxers jumped on the suit, wrapped his hands around him as they kissed under the Manhattan sun that never sets. They walked hand in hand back home. Nobody saw them. Except me and my Nigerian eyes, wide open.

I saw naked women tanning, reading, living under the sun, near the water taxi. Dogs take walks with their white owners and want to pee by the corner. People take a break and have conversations on a bench under a tree. Everyone drinks Starbuck coffee as they walk to and fro wherever. People rent bicycles to work. I met a 40+-year-old executive in a smart suit heading to work on a skateboard.

No one sees anyone, yet everyone is aware of everyone’s existence - the right to be seen, to be heard, to live. The right to pursue the happiness that you want.

America is beautiful because if the only thing that a country gives you is the freedom to be, then it’s a beautiful license that can get you anywhere. In America, you forget your fears and your cares. But you never forget your skin colour. It is so bad that even in innocent gestures, you imagine race is at work.

I walked to a taxi once who wouldn’t take me. The first thing I thought was skin colour. But only a few walk down. A white lady was also turned down by another taxi driver. I later realized after-work hours are the worst experiences you can find and drivers just do not care enough to make any extra dollar faced with traffic that never wanes.

America is the dream of every child born in Africa. Every child. Pounds and Euros are better than the dollar on the exchange rate, but everyone wants a dollar. Even Canadians, with a more stable country and less dramatic political clime, still want the American nod, passport or invitation.

America is perhaps the best work of PR after Coca-cola.

It is America that keeps us alive. The thought of a “perfect world”, of a dream that needs to be accomplished before death – a dream of stepping on the soil of a country owned by God.

The world deserves the utopia that we have created in America, and to see this continuous disgraceful racial arguments and confrontations and injustices and narratives that make black people feel less human, is so sad. So sad.

A dream is fading away right before our eyes. I have watched videos of whites screaming to African Americans to show “gratitude”. Gratitude on what account? For having slave relatives who made it possible for them to breathe the American air. But…there is no America without the beauty of diversity.

Now that horrible man called Trump is attacking blacks for #TakeAKnee - a humble approach to addressing racial injustices. This world is finished.  

America is Hope – something you wish for, and even if you don’t get it, you are happy it exists. Just by being. It’s like wealth and the promise of it; even if you die poor, there are moments you would have thoroughly enjoyed knowing that someone else was able to find riches; that in itself is satisfactory.

America is breaking my heart. Trump should be impeached, really.

Joy Isi Bewaji, a prolific writer, columnist, and the managing director of Happenings Radio and Happenings Magazine.

Source: Facebook.

You're Not A Country, Africa: A Personal History of the African Present by Pius Adesanmi.

AUTHOR: Pius Adesanmi
PUBLISHER: Penguin African Writers.
DATE OF PUBLICATION: November 30, 2001

SYNOPSIS:  In this groundbreaking collection of essays Pius Adesanmi tries to unravel what it is that Africa means to him as an African, and by extension to all those who inhabit this continent of extremes. This is a question that exercised some of the continent's finest minds in the twentieth century, but which pan-Africanism, Negritude, nationalism, decolonization and all the other projects through which Africans sought to restore their humanity ultimately failed to answer. Criss-crossing the continent, Pius Adesanmi engages with the enigma that is Africa in an attempt to make meaning of this question for all twenty-first century Africans.

BUY BOOK

Pius Adesanmi, an acclaimed literary and cultural critic, was born in Nigeria and now lives in Ottawa, Canada, where he teaches literature and African studies at Carleton University. He is one of Nigeria's major intellectuals and writes two weekly columns for the influential Sahara Reporters and NEXT newspaper. His first book, The Wayfarer and Other Poems, won the Association of Nigerian Authors' Poetry Prize in 2001.

 

El-Rufai’s Morbid Fixation with Death of His Political Opponents By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

There is no doubt that Kaduna State governor Nasir El-Rufai embodies one of the most morbidly toxic strains of political intolerance in Nigeria. He exteriorizes his discomfort with opposition by literally wishing death upon his opponents or claiming credit for their death.

At a Kaduna APC stakeholders’ meeting last Saturday, he told political opponents that should they insist on fighting him, they would die like the late President Umar Musa Yar’adua did. “I had fought with two presidents,” he said. “Umaru Yar’Adua ended in his grave, while President Goodluck Jonathan ended in Otueke.”

Several groups in Katsina have taken this statement as El-Rufai’s self-confession of culpability in the death of the late president. This is, of course, an inaccurate interpretation of his words.

Apparently, El-Rufai cherishes the illusion that the late Yar’adua died not because he was sick, but because he opposed him politically. He imagines himself to possess supernatural powers that send his opponents to their untimely graves. This means, of course, that El-Rufai did rejoice when Yar’adua died he thought he was responsible for his death, although not in a physical, corporeal sense. It also means that he fancies himself as some invincible, immortal man-god who is beyond censure, and who deserves only worshipful admiration from everybody.

This is dangerous and disturbing on so many levels. There are at least three reasons why this should worry us. First, that someone of El-Rufai’s exposure and education thinks the hurt emotions of his punny, fragile, insecure ego have the supernormal capacity to kill political antagonists shows the depth of superstition and ignorance into which he has sunk. I confess that although I am not a fan of El-Rufai’s politics, I used to give him credit for clear-headedness. Now, he has shown that he has a pre-scientific, atavistic mindset that makes him indistinct from the unwashed masses.

Second, it betrays the shallowness of his humanity that the only thing he thinks his opponents are worthy of is death. That’s an outward manifestation of a disturbingly murderous inner disposition. In hindsight, this isn’t surprising. This is a governor who endorsed, defended, and even celebrated the brutal, cold-blooded, and unjustified mass slaughter of hundreds of Shiite Muslims in his state.

Third, it seems to me that El-Rufai is suffering the early onset of a condition some psychologists call “megalomania with narcissistic personality disorder.” He obviously has grandiose delusions that lead him to think that he deserves unquestioned obeisance from everyone. He also thinks he has a special relationship with imaginary supernormal powers that fight his opponents to death. Those are classic symptoms of malignant megalomania. The American Psychiatric Association defines megalomania, which it also calls “delusional disorder, grandiose subtype,” as “delusions of inflated worth, power, knowledge, identity, or special relationship to a deity or famous person.”

Mayo Clinic, a go-to site for medical research, defines narcissistic personality disorder as “a mental disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of empathy for others. But behind this mask of ultra-confidence lies a fragile self-esteem that's vulnerable to the slightest criticism.”

El-Rufai’s claim that Yar’adua’s death was the price he paid for opposing him politically, his oversensitivity to even the mildest criticism, his legendary lack of empathy (evidenced in his perverse love to remorselessly destroy people’s homes, the joy he exudes when people he hates die, etc.), and his exaggerated notions of his importance, for me, show symptoms of a man held hostage by megalomania and narcissistic personality disorder. And this man is scheming to be president. Good luck, Nigeria.

This isn’t the first time El-Rufai has demonstrated morbid intolerance of criticism. In 2015, he also told his critics to go die. Here is an excerpt of what I wrote about it in my November 1, 2015 “Politics of Grammar” column in the Daily Trust on Sunday titled, “El-Rufai’s Kufena Hills and Metaphors of Death in Nigerian Public Discourse”:

“On October 16, 2015, Kaduna State governor Nasir el-Rufai joined a long list of public officials who invoked bloodcurdling thanatological allusions to shut down criticism. ‘All of us in Kaduna State Government has sworn with the Qu'ran—Christians with the Holy Bible—to do justice and we will do justice,’ he said in Hausa during a town hall meeting in Kaduna. ‘We better stand and tell ourselves the truth. Everyone knows the truth. No matter the noise, the truth is one. And as I stand here, no matter who you are, I will face you and tell you the truth. If you don’t want to hear the truth, you can climb Kufena Hills and fall.’

“Falling from Kufena Hills is a chilling local metaphor for death. No one falls from a tall, steep hill and survives. That was why Sunday Vanguard of October 17, 2015, interpreted el-Rufai as asking his critics to ‘go and die.’ Although Governor el-Rufai didn’t directly utter the word ‘die,’ Vanguard’s interpretive extension of his thanatological metaphor is perfectly legitimate, even brilliant. It’s interpretive journalism at its finest. It helped situate and contextualize the governor’s utterance for people who don’t have the cultural and geographic competence to grasp it.

“Since anyone who jumps from the edge of a hill will naturally plunge to his death, it’s impossible to defend the governor’s choice of words with the resources of linguistic logic. Plus, text derives meaning from context. The video clip of the town hall meeting where el-Rufai enjoined his critics to go climb Kefena Hills and fall shows him in a combative and livid mood. He wasn’t joking. That’s why I think it is singularly disingenuous for El-Rufai’s media team to insist that their principal didn’t ask his critics to go die.  

“El-Rufai’s intolerance of criticism is particularly noteworthy because he is famous for describing himself as a ‘certified ruffler of feathers,’ and his political rise owes a lot to his trenchant criticism of political opponents from the late President Umar Musa Yar’adua to former President Goodluck Jonathan. That’s probably why he thinks ‘the truth is one’ and only he is its custodian. All else is ‘noise,’ and whoever can’t stand the one and only truth that only he embodies is worthy only of violent death. This takes arrogant discursive intolerance and rhetorical violence to a whole new level.”

Can you connect the dots between his October 16, 2015, utterance and his September 16, 2017, utterance?