Very old Nigerian sculpture -- this area had early bronze casting
1100 - 1700 CE
Sometimes writing about something by seeming to write about something else is a wise thing to do. Often the people who are assigned to snoop and interpret and monitor groups other than themselves are unable to figure out culture codes that everyone in that monitored group understands very well. This is where “magic realism” comes from, a practice in South American novels when dictators were paranoid and their stooges were childish. As usual.
Boko Haram is entirely opaque to me, except that they seem like junior high kids -- not entirely reasonable and obsessed with the great sin/privilege of sex. Why is it that the human force of sex so obsesses people instead of another even more basic force which is hunger? Why does sex symbolize violence so that violence becomes a substitute for sex? Why aren’t we using the same dynamics on who can afford to eat, who is starving, and who is bulging with over-consumption? Why are we not stigmatizing the eating of bats, since they carry deadly disease -- isn’t ebola worse than HIV? At least it’s quicker.
Where I am, on the edge of the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, much of what keeps stirring the political pot is the same just below-the-surface residual of 19th century imperialist hunger for raw materials, disguised as “development” -- and the enabling Christianity. But if I were to begin exposing today's lingering racism, which is often expressed in things like sexism or prosperity markers or surface morality (propriety as opposed to justice), I would become a target. Therefore, I thought, I will read about another continent and put the same reflection into their dilemmas, since they are roughly the same as here: that is, managing the forces of residual tribes, aggressive resource removal, strong families in competition, and so on.
Goodluck Jonathon
Boko Haram is just now counting the votes in an election. Goodluck Jonathon is not a fantasy name but a real person and on the side Westerners seem to be encouraging. (That might lose him some votes at home.) He has been in power since 2010 when the previous ruler left the country for his own reasons and Jonathon took advantage of being left in charge.
Here’s his education: "Jonathan was born in what is now Bayelsa State to a family of canoe makers. Jonathan holds a B.Sc. degree in Zoology in which he attained Second Class Honours. He holds an M.Sc. degree in Hydrobiology and Fisheries biology, and a PhD degree in Zoology from the University of Port Harcourt, which he did not finish according to Olusegun Obasanjo. Before he entered politics in 1998, he worked as an education inspector, lecturer, and environmental-protection officer."
Bayelsa State
Bayelsa State is a coastal sub-division where there is much oil wealth, little transportation, and many poor people. Arrangements that are supposed to help the great majority of poverty-stricken somehow do not. Education is mostly a ticket out to the developed world. Jonathan is a handsome man who dresses in a seeming cassock and a brimmed hat, sort of halfway between a fedora and a bowler. He “speaks” wardrobe. If you are in a major American city, you may notice black men dressing this formal way, which suggests prosperity mixed with propriety. Rather Chinese somehow. Is that chain a watch fob?
Looking at an area in terms of their natural resources is one way. Looking at them in terms of language is another: in Nigeria there were originally many tribes and therefore many languages, which often were the main source of identity. (In first-contact days, anyone who spoke Blackfeet could be pulled into the group, seen as friend.) This was an opportunity for a second unifying language, in this case English, which seems to be developing into a worldwide trade, business, and technological language. But then the competing Euro-languages (French, Spanish) also create alliances and animosities, keys to identity that can quickly reinforce a sense of enemy competitors, like the deadly Hutu/Tutsi genocide.
Euros in the empire-building years imposed boundaries that responded to their interests. They did not fit the natural boundaries of tribes, which were, in any case, fluid and fluctuating. Euros like battle-lines, as though roommates irritated with each other defining “your side of the room” against their own side, even though they’re (or BECAUSE) in the same room.
A major tribe of Nigeria is Yoruba. We know two Yoruba faces because they are famous singers. Seal and Sade, male and female.
Seal
Seal was born Olusegun Olumide Adeola Samuel on 19 February 1963 in Paddington, London, England to a Nigerian mother, Adebisi Ogundeji and a Brazilian father, Francis Samuel. Seal's first and middle names are in the Yoruba language. Olusegun means "God is victorious", Olumide means "my Lord has arrived", and Adeola means either "rich crown" or "a crown of wealth". He received a two-year diploma, or associate degree, in architecture and worked in various jobs in the London area. Although there have long been rumours as to the cause of the scars on his face, they are the result of a type of lupus called discoid lupus erythematosus – a condition that specifically affects the skin above the neck.
Sade
Sade was born in Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria. Her middle name, Folasade, means "honour confers your crown". Her parents, Adebisi Adu, a Nigerian lecturer in economics of Yoruba background, and Anne Hayes, an English district nurse, met in London, married in 1955 and moved to Nigeria. Her parents separated, however, and Anne Hayes returned to England, taking four-year-old Sade and older brother Banji with her to live with their grandparents just outside Colchester, Essex. . . After completing school at 18 she moved to London and studied at Saint Martin's School of Art.
These two singers seem to be part of a neo-creole group -- that is, people who are a mixture of cultures, often welcomed and expressed in the arts. The contemporary Brit-African mix is quite different from the same cultures mixed in the time of slavery in the American South. The “gentlemen blacks,” these genteel actors, are suddenly very popular among American whites. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/28/9-black-british-actors-you-need-to-know-_n_4875041.html? Idris Alba has been suggested for a black version of James Bond.
Both Sade and Seal are gentle, rather androgenous singers, though Seal’s gnawed face makes him look a little dangerous. He’s not as fierce as, say, Miles Davis. I wonder whether Davis has Yoruba genes.
Both Sade and Seal are gentle, rather androgenous singers, though Seal’s gnawed face makes him look a little dangerous. He’s not as fierce as, say, Miles Davis. I wonder whether Davis has Yoruba genes.
Miles Davis
Getting back to the subject of Yoruba in Africa and their current election, try this link for a recent photo story. So far there have been no serious problems, but things change daily.
Nigeria is split, as so many countries are, between the highly prosperous part (southwest) and the poor part (northeast). The Yoruba are in the SW. These N/S splits are so strong, even in the US, even on the reservation, and even in the Biblical histories, that one wonders whether the difference in wealth is the only cause of the dynamics of war. Few are aware of the north/south split on the Blackfeet rez and so far I’ve found no one that can really explain it, even among those taunted and excluded for being from the south. Maybe it’s a split between those who identified with whites and those who clung to the old “blanket” ways, but in fact the old timers were in Heart Butte (south) and Starr School (middle).
(All this will be continued later.)
(All this will be continued later.)
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