Africa

LANGUAGE

~ Che

Language is to group identity as spirit is to earthly personality. As the spirit grows weak you still see the body walking about as if the actual human being is still alive. But it is just an illusion – at physical death, the real human spiritual personality will disintegrate for good.

The same thing with groups. When a group loses its language, you will still see its indigenes walking around, congregating und socializing, and calling themselves the group name… but it is an illusion. A people without a language have ceased to exist as a people – what holds them now is memory and a wish. At the next tragedy that strikes them they will scatter and have no center of orientation that triggers a sense of belonging which pulls them back together again in any meaningful way. We witness the end of yet another branch of civilization.

The death of African languages was initiated when Africans stopped – or did not at all really determinedly try – translating and transsituating their rapidly expanding world view, new knowledge, science, technology and philosophy into their indigeneous languages. Thereby they caused a break between the African psychic identity which had indigenously developed over millenia and the new African mentality whose birth was being so forcefully and unnaturally midwifed. It was also a missed opportunity to embrace the challenge of exertion that catalyzes growth.

Any indigenous national psyche worldwide that has achieved the feat of transforming ITSELF on its own foundations into or towards a so-called First World Country, has not done so on the back of the scientific and philosophical lingua of a foreign language. They have instead forced their own language to expand, to deepen, to evolve, to grow, to be alive and exhibit the characteristics of a living thing – self-preservation through movement, exertion, growth, self-upgrade within a healthy sense of self. Thus these peoples did not just move, they took their cosmos and their roots along with them. Therefore, no matter to what dizzying heights of technology or abstract new thought they arrive, they always feel at home. They never feel lost. Because their world always exists in their language, and their language is the structure within which their world pulsates and expands.

Africa’s deepest, most intimate and most imediate break with the preservative Spirit and Act of INNOVATION therefore was the failure to translate and transfer new world knowledge into their own indigenous languages, and make their language the vehicle for transfering knowledge and civilization to the next generation. This was an act of indolence or carelessness of gargantuan proportions whose degenerative after-effects will continue to manifest exponentially from one generation to the next. In Igbo language, this is the true example of “i fu” – to become lost. Everything that is familiar to you feels simultaneously strange, and you don’t know why.

The fact that I am expanding and writing this thought in English and not in Igbo is the very evidence that I too am a product of that colossal careless break in transmission, and thus I carry within me also the unending thirst for rebalancing, that deep-seated African search for identity in a world, of shared human responsibility, in which aptly the Afticsn often feels MISUNDERSTOOD.

In Africa, African languages have for over a century rapidly lost their role and function as the medium via which knowledge and civilization are transfered from one generation to the next. Ancient proverbs and perception patterns, yes, but every other thing no. The African, as an agent of innovation and civilization, is today a divided personality. When the European colonialist wanted to give us his religion he translated it into our language. But when he wanted to give us science and technology, he kept it in his language and forced us to learn it in his language. The Arab colonizer went a step further and taught everything only in his own language. Little wonder then that we are masters of Christianity and Islam in Africa today, but not of Innovation and Invention.

And to those who will tell me that attempts have recently been made here and there with inconclusive or initially uninspiring results, to them I will say: Civilization is not a sprint, neither is it a game of materialism and quick profits where you jump trains at will in search of quick gratification and the illusion of fast progress – indeed that is what has brought Africa to where we are today.

Civilization is a long long race, a marathon, a movement of the people, like Moses’ Israelites wandering (and wondering) for decades in the wilderness on the way to their promised land. You are in it for the long haul; solid progess is slow and hard if you want it to be real, and you must be dogged, persevering and patient. And, above all – this is the crunch – you must trust and rely in your own creativity and abilities; and develop these.

Setting off onto the right path does not mean that you automatically take over the lead or catch up immediately with the rest. It simply means that you have created the right conditions for a growth which, no matter how initially hard, if managed diligently, will be lasting and always feel natural. A growth that will be indigenous and make you the master of your own fate in this uncertain future into which Mankind is currently herding.

Thus at the occassion of this World Igbo Cultural Day, I want us – as we eat and drink and make merry – to also recommit ourselves to the task of exerting ourselves into making our language the carrier of the new civilization which we hope to attain – spiritually, culturally, socio-politically, intellectually and technologically.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

INHERENT INCLINATIONS

~ Che

Why do Africans look down on their own intelligence, their own inventions, their own historical recognitions? What we disparagingly call primitive African religions today were the expression of search, perception of recognition done by the African psyche. That psyche still lives and works today in the subconscious of the so-called modern African. He has been made to believe, however, that there is something inherenrtly wrong in an inner world view that came up with the concept of an Amadioha or a Shango. And yet these perceptions at that time represented leaps in consciousness and expressed a willingness to independently break new ground spiritually, mentally, physically and technologically.

They expressed a desire to dare to understand and interpret nature through the agency of their own eyes and indigenous preceptions. They document an understanding of the inherent calling and duty to “explore” the world, to “dissect” nature, to search for patterns and laws, to align intellect with intuition, to look for the next boundary of civilization, to advance themselves, their world and their world view forward – in little steps or quantum leaps – from one recognition to the other, on their own, indigenously, self-driven and self-motivated. Just for the heck of it. Just for the fact of being alive and possessing the faculty of thought and of intuitive perception. They were Explorers, they were Inventors.

Quite apart from the fact that Shango or Amadioha really exist (but that is the subject of another discussion), this instinctive attitude and inherent inclination in the earlier Africans found expression in all walks of life. Be it in the field of what we now call religion, but which at that time was integrated science; be it in what is today called the arts, but which at that time was living culture; be it in architecture which for them was just common sense; be it in early technological advanes and dynamics; in well thought-out and varied political systems; in the arrangement of soceity; in military equipment and strategy; in the philosophy behind the structure and implementation of justice codes; in the orderliness in the fields of commerce, finance and markets; and in the practical relationship with physical nature to ensure survival.

Everywhere we see evidence not just of independent thought and not just of WILLING thought, but also of progressive and evolutionary thinking and applied recognitions. Africa was a continent of ambitious explorers who found joy in breaking boundaries, a place of restless thinkers, and of innovators and inventors.

If today there exists inside of you any of the indolence or lethargy that now impedes the re-awakening of thie Original African in you…, UPROOT IT! Go within your own soul and destroy it! Become an abstract and creative and hungry thinker and DOER again. Become again someone who can – yes – study, replicate, preserve and respect the past…, but who can then leave it behind in the past, if necessary, and strive forward in search of the next Amadioha! The next bolt of thunder that will ignite the next leap, the next JUMP of Africa into the future, independently, indigenously – without boarding one migrant boat, without receiving one aid package, without self-destructing.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Thoughts on Africa

PROGRESS

~ Che

When you ride the western star until you hit its heavenly glass ceiling, are unable to break through it, and then console yourself with the thought that, at least, you have done better for yourself than those who once started off with you back home in the deep global south… the question is: has Progress really been made?

You rise in the West
But Africa stays the worst.

If you shine moderately in the glow of the eastern star, but your own land of the rising sun is still struggling with twilight…

If like a lost moon you reflect dazzlingly the northern lights and it blinds you to your own northern people’s plight and they desert-roam in darkness and have no light…

If you drown power-drunk in the global financial waters, but your own lagoons are not overflowing with milk and honey, and your people thirst out of lack…

Has Progress really been made?

West, east, north, global are not necessarily far away places. They are the System and the way of life that rule and school you also at home, and force you to make a choice.

It’s easy to rise as a stranger.
It’s hard to rise as yourself.

As a stranger you just have to pretend and act the part and they’ll let you through and put you in a place that’s safe for them.

But as yourself you have to persevere; and refuse to compromise if it won’t help your People; and be content to inch your way forward, little by little, you and your world.

It might be slow, it might be painful, but that is true Progress.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

THE FROZEN LAKE

~ Che

There is a frozen lake. Once it was open and liquid in the land of summer and rain, but it was visited by the Ice-Queen, who breathed into it her imperial breath, to freeze it up. But there was fire deep in the heart of the lake and the fire fought back – and thus, only the surface of the lake froze over, not its heart. Underneath, it remains liquid, a lake, and the fish are still swimming. They just can no longer break the surface and make themselves seen. The owners of the lake walk on solid ice and think it is solid ground. They peer into the ice and sense that something is moving down there, but they cannot see it anymore. The lake is alive, though it looks rigid and frozen.

“Advanced” thinkers sniff derogatingly at the notion of occupying oneself with the subject of the fact and dynamics of the original indigenous African nations, swimming like restlass schoals beneath the surface of the tight lattice of the present day African Nation-states, formenting trouble, looking for a voice, sometimes exploiting and sometimes lamenting the lattice, and everybody wondering how things are going to go next. “Advanced” thinkers call them “tribes” or sometimes, indulgingly, “ethnic Groups”.

The inability to “shed” or “overcome” ones “tribal” or “native” identity and “rise” into the new modern African self-view, that has its beginning in the colonial re-engineering of the African psyche, is looked upon as a sign of smallness, backwardness and primitiveness, if not even wickedness. In truth, however, this notion is the modern day equivalent of our early School days when African languages were derogatingly classed as “vernacular”, while European tongues were the proper language.

Just like there was no need to demonize African languages or cultures in a bid to validate the Non-African ones, there is need today to take a critical look at the dynamics of Ethnic Nationality in Africa, in order to ascertain how best to interpret this field of reality towards the forging of a more realistic and stable peace in Africa. They have been long looked down upon as a nuisance to be suppressed and managed and, eventually, overwritten like an old piece of software on the way to socio-politically engineering an ostensibly new Africa – an Africa that was birthed through the injection of European spark during colonialism. However it is perhaps time to rethink and view them as the essential building blocks which homogeneously come together in a natural and unforced way to become the larger, inherently stable African Nation-states.

Because without arguing much about the merits or demerits of so-called African tribes in terms of size, it suffices to note that the very fact that they refuse to go extinct, continue to exist and exert themselves, and continue to determine the foundations of inner politicking in African countries by itself qualifies them as viable subjects to be examined in the light of the search for a proper restructuring within the African continent. There is nothing wrong with them. What we need is not to close our eyes and hope – or forcefully insist – that everyone obeys, but a conscious engineering of friendship amongst the cultures.

The Lake is frozen. One day it will surely thaw. When that happens, it is necessary that it does not dissolve into a chaotic mass of uncoordinated rivalry in waters turned opaque. We need a council of cultures in Africa, where the indigenous nations can deliberate frankly on their true desires, fears, natures and capacities. Right now we have many voices shouting, but there is no theater of conference and no common moderator.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije

UNDERSTANDING AMONGST AFRICAN PEOPLES

~ Che

Although Africans call themselves citizens of the 55 member states of the African Union (AU), the conflicts do not take place on that level. The conflicts, suspicions and animousities manifest on the level of the original African nations that existed before the advent of European and even Arabian-style colonialism. Those original Nations, still very much in existence, are today called Tribes and Ethnic Groups – and their indigenes, even in subsequent generations, and even when they can no longer speak the indigenous language, still often feel deeply beholden to them, or are made to feel so, or are made to understand that they are seen to be so.

And yet, although this is the level on which, national-identity-wise, insults and patriotism are most deeply felt, there is no medium, no active Organisation, no Instanz, no consciousness, no consensually constituted Authority, to mediate the debate, the cooperation, the healing and the upbuilding on that level.

Any mention of this is equated to a threat against the colonially created Nation-states, with the corresponding reactions of fear or uncertainty that this thought awakens, depending on the nature of the dependancy-or-exploitation-relationship each person has with a particular Nation-state. It seems as if Africams have become so weak or deeply afflicted by Inferiority Complex that they have no sense of self-confidence in managing or developing their affairs upon any other stage than that designed for and given to them by Non-Africans; even in matters regarding the interacting of their own core identities – core national identities and languages that formed and developed over centuries and eras.

The AU is not the equivalent of the EU. Whereas it is largely native indigenous European peoples who, under the appellage “nations”, are the member units of the EU, it is completely the oppposite in the AU. Here it is the colonially born countries that are the members. With the result, that the actual African peoples themselves, the indigenous nations, have no theatre of Consensus and thus no voice. This is what is direly missing on the African continent: A Union of African peoples. The sheer number of different african indigenous nationalities should not daunt us to the task. Conversely it only shows us the potential for misunderstanding and conflict which has been exploited for decades. It is simultaneously also the potential for harmony and would be worth every ounce of effort put into it. Anything to foster and further peace and understanding in Africa is of prime importance now.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije

SILENCE AND INSULTS ON THE AFRICAN STAGE

~ Che

Are the Igbo and the Yoruba united?
Are the Zulu and the Xhosa united?
Are the Hutu and the Tutsi united?
If hands and feet are not coordinated
How can you drive and steer the vehicle?

There is a level of identity and reality on which Africans have stopped building bridges to one another, and forging alliances with one another, and initiating peace amongst each other, and finding common grounds and respectful dialogue. – And yet that is the level on which they are really who they really are.
If you ignore reality, you will fall victim to it.

Are the Fulani in Nigeria beholden to the Fulani in Niger?
Are the Oromo in Kenya beholden to the Oromo in Ethiopia?
Are the Shona in Mozambique beholden to the Shona in Zimbabwe and Zambia?
Are the Yoruba in Benin beholden to the Yoruba in Nigeria?
If a foreigner is your brother
And your countryman is a foreigner
Who will you follow
When you come to the crossroad?…
Because you will.

There is a level on which Aricans ignore reality. They scold each other into being modern by lying that their roots are not still feeding their fruits. Yet that is nature.
It was naive inter-tribal non-cooperation and chaos in the ethnic map of Africa that made Colonisation so easily possible.
It is silence on this stage, in this theatre, that imppedes cohesion in Africa today.

And when the stage is not silent, then it is full of distrust and animousity as they are hurl insults at one another. You can see it on the internet everyday. It seems to be the only form of communication that we still have left between us.

No, it is time to reawaken the dialogue. The African multilogue.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

THE ORGANISATION OF THE TRUE AFRICAN NATIONS

~ Che

The members of the African Union are countries like Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, etc. But those are not the true African nations.

The true African nations are for example Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa, Ashanti, Zulu, Xhosa, Oromo, Amhara, Hutu, Mande, Akan and all the many rest of them. We need to also form an Association of the true African Nations, where we can again relate and talk to ourselves the way we spoke to ourselves before an exploitative volition conquered our minds and taught us foreign languages in which we misunderstand each other.

If you want to form an Organisation of the true African Nations, inbox me. It is time for Africa to start uniting and solving its problems again, the African way.

All the nation-people conflicts in Africa take place on this level, hardly ever on a post-colonial-Nation Level. It is never Nigeria vs Niger, it is Hausa vs Fulani. It is never Rwanda vs Burundi, it is Hutu vs Tutsi. It is never South Africa vs Botswana, it is Zulu vs Xhosa. And so on. So it is therefore on that Level that Africans must also forge an alternative parallel theater of dialogue in which to engineer the internal dynamics of uniting. Because, in all naturalness, these are the identities to which the African ethnies feel most deeply beholden.

Without political harmony and concerted interaction on this foundational and original African level of Nation-being, the post-colonial nation-states will remain unstable powder kegs waiting to self-destruct or hoping to de-escalate only through the deliberate eroding and gradual extinction of ancient african languages and ethnies, leaving only rootless and memoryless post-colonial constructs behind, erroneously called ‘African’ countries.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije

AFRICA BLEEDING OUT

~ Che

It is the hope in the eyes
Of the arriving refugee
That breeds the sadness of heart
In the one that welcomes him
For he knows the frustration
That follows and the humiliation
That hollows out…
And the silence.

Knowledge is a heavy burden –
To know that Humiliation is
The highest they will get
And yet they are ready to take it
In the hope of a better life
Makes one sad…
What made Africa do this to itself
And its posterity?

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

VARIETY

~ Che

I don’t make Afro-pop
Or naija-hiphop
Everything I do is
Alternative

Oil is not the only source
Of Revenue.
Nigeria, diversify
Tap your other talents

Build planes
Phones triggered by thought
Find a unique solution
To the problem of soil Erosion

Restless creativity
Is the mirror altar of the Higher God
Don’t run from yourself
Be a native of your Inner voice

Celebrate the different bird
Celebrate the alternative curious thought
Celebrate the bold Spirit of adventure
Make the celebration of diversity your art and culture
in perception, in Expression, in creation.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

NOTHING GOING ON BUT THE RENT

~ Che ~ 6 Comments

—-
A little familiarity with, even if not necessarily proficiency in, “nigerian english” might be necessary to understand this story. 🙂
—-
—-

My landlady was not a very bright person. Really, amongst all the stupid people I’ve met in my life, she must be the daftest of them all, or so it seemed to me at that moment. I stood behind her and saw the danger ahead. But this woman, instead of going left, she actually went right. Was she mad? OK, now that she had gone right, how did she expect to come out of this alive?

The truck was hurtling straight down upon her at blinding speed. Have you seen a speeding truck before? A monster, grim and merciless. The terror it awakens in the heart is raw, real, paralysing. You see death, literally. Death does not smile.

And into the path of this on-rushing death she stepped. Madam, you love death? Then, so be it! But then not even I am so cold-hearted, in spite of all the horrible things this terrible woman had wrought upon innocent me in the past. It would be good to save her life, to spare myself any future battles with my talkative conscience, and to put her in my debt also.

The slap I gave her sounded like a ringing bell proclaiming victory. I relished the slap thoroughly, my palm jubilated, the woman took off like Arik and flew to the left, out of the path of the on-rushing accident. As she went air-borne, she took me along with her, for my palm was still stuck to the side of her face. We crash-landed into safety on the sidewalk and I disengaged my jubilating palm from her warm oily face. The truck roared past. I had just saved a human being’s life.

Life. Is that not what it’s all about? You would have thought that she would be grateful. No, instead she took offence at the joy of my palm.

“Heei!” she shouted, “this my tenant want kill me oh!”

The word ‘kill’ is the code word. And the speed with which the crowd gathered showed practice in such matters. This is the land of jungle justice, staccato accusation and swift execution. Death, who had formerly been sitting on top of the truck, glaring at her as the truck rushed towards her, had now hopped down from the truck which had long disappeared into the wilderness of Ikorodu Road. Now Death sat cross-legged by my side, betwixt the crowd, and stared at me accusingly as if I had ever done anything against him in my life. The thought suddenly occurred to me that he might be upset with me for not having let the truck do his will.

Before I knew it, the crowd had pulled the woman, my landlady, up and I was still lying there, feeling the jubilation in my palm tingle away. The crowd crowded itself around me like a crowd. It was crowdy. From crowdy comes, rightly, rowdy.

“Hired Killer!” a strange voice, full of mortification and aggression, barked down at me.

“Eh?!?!” screamed the crowd and instinctively drew back one step. If I had been been Ben Bruce and in possession of any common sense, that’s when I should have made a dash for it – bolted away with the full spring and speed of all my unreduced athleticism, in that moment when the fear of a hired killer in flesh and blood in their immediate vicinity paralyzed the life out of them.

But I was distracted by Death. He was still sitting, cross-legged, there in front of me. As if he sensed the quick escape plan that darted into my mind, he scowled and gave me a very threatening look. If you dare try it…!

And in the moment of my preoccupation with Death’s awful mug, the very moment was gone. I did not see the first slap, I did not feel the first slap. Curiously, I heard it. It sounded like a whistle, but I’m not quite sure exactly what kind of whistle. A slap whistle. A whistling slap. In one register it vibrates the eardrum already one micro-moment before impact. You hear it once and then you hear no more. The first becomes the last.

I was confused. Is this what they call a mobbing? After I stopped hearing, I started seeing. Stars. They kept exploding. Why did they keep springing from place to place instead of just hanging still? That was when the pain kicked in. And not just literally. I don’t know why the government, who likes to ban rice and all sorts of other things, has not yet banned the importation of boots. Because the kick to my ribs, the kick that brought back the consciousness which the sonic slap had robbed me of, the kick with which the pain kicked in, the kick that returned to me my hearing, that kick was executed surely by a foot well lodged in a boot, a big strong boot, definitely imported, made I am sure in Russia or Germany.

“Yeeeeiiii!” I screamed, “I don die oh!”

I could not see the sun; dark shapes hovered all around me, hurting me, harming me. Why? And then I heard the dreaded words:

“Tire!”

“Fire!”

“Tire!”

“Fire!”

They were going to put a de-rimmed rubber car tyre around my neck, drench tyre and me in petrol, juice of the Delta, and burn me alive! My teeth went cold.

“Fire!”

“Tire!”

“Fire!”

“Tire!”

I looked to my right, to where Death was sitting down cross-legged, overseeing my extraction from the physical cloak. There was a peacefulness about his countenance that flowed over to me, into me, infected and affected me, a peacefulness that began to creep into my soul.

I seemed to hear a soft slow voice somewhere in the hall of my mind: Don’t struggle… don’t worry… it’s just a journey…

At that moment the tension slipped away from my body, my dogged determination to cling unto life was knocked out of me, aided by a rock, a rock it must have been, felt at least like a rock to the skull. A liquid running down my face, stinging my eyes, blinding me. Warm sweet blood on my tongue. An intimate smell. My blood. So this is how it feels to die.

That was when I heard her voice again, the voice that triggered this happening, bringing it now to its banal conclusion. The first again the last. My landlady was shouting again.

“Abeg, e don do oh! Thank you! My tenant don enter my trap today. Make una call police to arrest am, dem know what to do. Make una no kill am oh! HE NEVER PAY ME MY RENT FINISH!! My rent oh! Make una leave my tenant for me oh! See me oh. Leave my tenant! Abi, who go come pay me my remaining rent money now? Ah ah! I say leave am! Una dey craze? One year’s rent. See my wahala oh. Who send una sef? Busy body! Na so so busy body just full dis Lagos sef! Mchw! I go wound una oh. Ah ah! Police yee! Wey police now?! Which kind bad luck be dis?…”

**********

– che chidi chukwumerije.

**********