A Southern Nigerian Community : Case Study Ughelli [1 ed.] 9781443852111, 9781443849548

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A Southern Nigerian Community

A Southern Nigerian Community: Case Study Ughelli

By

Frederic Will

A Southern Nigerian Community: Case Study Ughelli, by Frederic Will This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Frederic Will All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4954-5, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4954-8

Dedicated to my wife With lasting thanks to Tanure In memoriam: Bigman, David, Edith

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ...................................................................................... ix Introduction: A Southern Nigerian Community: Case Study Ughelli ........ 1 Part One: Ughelli: The Enlightenment Project ............................................ 9 Part Two: The Societal Weave Essay One: Working Through: Ughelli 2012....................................... 43 Essay Two: Standing into Time: The Case of Ughelli ......................... 65 Essay Three: Abjection into the Fall .................................................... 85 Essay Four: Self-Righting in Stormy Weather................................... 105 Epilogue................................................................................................... 133 Collateral Reading ................................................................................... 141

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Earl Miner, International Studies Bibliographer, Univ. of Iowa Libraries; Ericka Raber, Univ. of Iowa Libraries; Bob Sayre; Jen Rouse, Greg Cotton, Andrea Dusenberry, Brooke Bergantzel, and Paul Waelchli at Cornell College Library; Susan di Giacomo; Frank Menchaca; James Evwerhamre; Carolyn Adams, Champaign County Historical Archives; and David Hamilton.



INTRODUCTION A SOUTHERN NIGERIAN COMMUNITY: CASE STUDY UGHELLI

The modern navigators only have one objective when they describe the customs of new peoples: to complete the history of man.1

Preface I’m a product of the American Midwest, after some twenty years in the U.S. state of Iowa, preceded by twenty years, earlier in life, in the equally midwestern state of Illinois. I know what sunset looks like in those places, how the ground smells after rain, what kind of excitement still accompanies the upburst of crocuses in April. I have traveled considerably, taught in Europe (Germany, Greece) and Africa (Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Chad, Tunisia), but have remained a localist in spirit. My heart belongs to urbane small-town America. Nonetheless, after some experience of marital failure, after striking out in many of the middle class expectations of fatherhood, I decided nearly twenty years ago that I would like to marry an African woman. (The next chapters will explain why Africa was my field of choice.) At first I made some efforts on my own. I traveled to Mauritania, was offered a desert bride, but decided against her when I learned “she would never be able to leave her home village.” Then I turned to a good African friend, a Nigerian writer, and asked him to help me find the right woman. He did. I found that woman. We courted longdistance for a year, laid foundations of trust, and lo and behold we were wed in an Iowa courthouse in 1995. The following book is about a community in Nigeria, Ughelli, but more deeply it is about the woman who brought me to that community; she will spread like a creative shadow over every insight I can offer here. Even when I am trying to figure out who I am, she will be part of the figuring out. And have I gotten smarter and better, from this adventure outside my home town? Was I right to travel so far, seeking the bluebird of happiness? Inside, I feel roadblocks opening up to let a self out. I am better than I used



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to be at hearing others; people tell me things. I have shed some of my deaf ear for social organization, and for the way society is put together. (This may seem elementary, but in the following text I will speak of the narcissistic background I emerged from. Hearing others was tightly connected to appreciating what it means to live in a society.) The most important revelations, I am sure, were strewn over the minefield of marriage. I have learned to give and take with another person. Siblingless, spoiled, neurotically art-and-idea centered, I had blown two marriages by bad choices. Without my wife’s astounding care I would not be here writing this!

Religion I was raised as a sensualist only-child waif without much exposure to the human condition. Never convinced that life has lasting meaning, I nonetheless joined the Catholic Church at the age of thirty-three. That leaves a lot to explain. When I went away to prep school and college I was lonely and sought out areas of nature, embracing cults like the Vedanta temple near Harvard Square, Boston, in which I found peace. That was a step toward the eventual invitation of Catholicism, to which, at my entry into the Church in 1961, I brought my academic study, Latin—little knowing the Church was about to abandon the language—my residence (at the time) in an old-fashioned Hispanic Austin, Texas, and a fascination with devotions which forced the body to testify to the spirit, like the devotions of the Virgen de Guadelupe. (I had been moved, in the Byzantine spirituality I met in Greece as a Fulbright student in 1951, and in occasional glimpses of the cult of the Virgen de Guadelupe, by a lachrymose susceptibility of which my early-in-life experience of Protestant Christianity had evoked no hint. In the process of joining the Catholic Church I gradually realized that I am a natural friend of the archaic, ritualized, non-discursive in religion, and instinctively uncomfortable with a turn, which I take to be central to Protestantism, toward discussion with God.) But that Catholic move was spirituality in name only. As I said, I was a narcissistic thirty-three-year-old waif. I was attracted to the only route I could tolerate, into the treasures of insight Christianity offered me. (Even at that time I wondered constantly whether the ancient Greeks, with their humane mythology, “had it right after all”.) I am still arguing with myself about Hellenism and Hebraism. I try today for a more mature version of the Catholic faith, with less narcissism and aestheticism in it. The results of that effort may someday breed in me a more mature theology. As things



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stand at the moment it will be apparent that I find in Ughelli, Nigeria, more than enough of the credent passion lacking in the midwestern Protestantism I was surrounded by in childhood. I have found the passion toward which I believed I was fleeing, in seeking the Catholic. True, almost daily in the Ughelli from where I write, I have cause to cry out, God is not deaf, God’s passion is too noisy here, and yet in the end I like to know that the pain and jubilation of existence are being recognized. In the religious communities of Ughelli, I have grown acquainted with areas of Christian praise, sure, for this is a roaringly praiseful community; but also with interfaces between such archaic Christian praise and the dark edges of another planet which circumscribes the praise zone, and whose depths are no less than those of the Black Holes that pockmark our universe. Witches, wizards, peanut shells that fly through the night, baneful spells, charms, sinister glances that cause illness: the bric-à-brac of the dark, the Halloween tale pallidly simulated once a year in American suburban neighborhoods; all this has opened out for me. I have felt links between African “animism” and the Hellenic animism I for decades taught at my students. I have also formed some educated guesses about the differences between the two kinds of animism.2 I have realized that Hellenic animism works a different territory from the African—more nearly a physics, less a zone of transformative energies—and today it is the “African” animism that leads the way in making sense to me, as a way society and its worldview put themselves together. The African, more than the polytheistic Hellene, lives a life lived into him/her by nature, the environment, and a socially grounded imagination.3

Society Ughelli has helped me see how society in general is put together, and where its glue is strongest. This has been a disclosure, by a foreign culture, of what society is—what any society is; an intricate and muted set of assumptions brought into existence by a group, deposited together by common interest at a certain point of history. We are linked to political society by something that somehow escapes our immediate consciousness: by a whole tangled skein of pressures and motives, some rational, many more not so.4

A complex of societal strictures and stimuli is palpable in the fabric of Ughelli’s Urhobo culture. In my Catholic church, Saints Peter and Paul, I try making my offering with the left hand, and am told it is “an abomination”. (I should have known.) In my own guest house I ask too



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many questions of people, about why they believe or dread this or that, and am told not to ask too many questions. (Editorial note: the origins of empirical science are related to persistent questioning, the absence of which has for long cut off African tradition from the Enlightenment project, so active in the West since the seventeenth century.)5 A funeral is held, merry and extravagant and at the same time minutely regulated by the expected offerings, expressions of condolence, and dancing savvy pertinent to the rules of the occasion—rules which are of Byzantine precision, not to be varied, while gloomy old Fred, used to the down-inthe-mouth burial ceremonies of midwestern America, is left gaping on the sidelines, as he is when discovering that funerals are the weekend parties in Urhoboland. In a Nigeria frequently careless about law enforcement, the picayune concern for regulations—just the right forms for the numerous driving papers required, just the precise compliance with chassis numbers and insurance papers—is prioritized by the custodians of public order. Nor is this weave of distinctive practices, which comprise the social in Ughelli, an arbitrary pasting-together of ways things are done. There is an internal logic to the way Ughellian culture plays out which constitutes a “societal weave”. It is that same kind of societal weave, wintered-in Iowans waving pallidly to one another on an ice-covered February street, which at first struck despair into the bosom of my Nigerian bride. What I discover about how Urhobo society is put together is that great concern for the rules can blend with a society which is laissez-faire to the max—limited taxation, no de facto rules of the road, no oversight over budgetary practices recklessly carried out by state governors, to whom the federal budget is doled out as their own spending money. The rules, the strict hand of control which reaches back to the ancestors, who are forever supervising the living, and to the evil, who are forever threatening their living fellows—the rules are always there, and leave behind them what is arguably a happy culture, the quirky claim of Essay One, ahead; a culture happy because it gives itself little room to “break the rules”. The essays in this book will indicate the kind of weaving of assumptions that guarantees wholeness to the diverse conditions of Ughellian society—its happiness/ sadness moods, its temporal setting, its distinctive kinds of fallibility/ corruption, its distinctive recourses toward the security needed to support “happiness”. The culture I bring to this meeting with Ughelli, American culture forged in the white mainstream of the late nineteenth century, and sharply inflected by my private life in a pre-WWII academic family, seems to me like what the German art historian Johann Winckelmann called the “purest water drawn from the center of the well,”6 transparent and invisible.



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Maybe mine is thus the story of all wannabee longers toward the foreign, that they are impelled by a defective sense of what they themselves come from, of any sense of the societal weave in which they are so embedded. In any case, it has taken foreign travel in the past, and in the present foreign residence, to help me begin to see the patterns that regulate the social milieu I am from: one both stoic and optimistic, like the Urhobo, but far less god-drenched, far more can-do, and far more confident than the Urhobo that it belongs to the direction of “history”; traits marking the American white middle-class of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. (But manifestly no longer valid. Blood-letting wars, financial crises, epidemics of anxiety and depression, tumultuous immigration pressures, the expensive and unprofitable War on Drugs—the direction of history is no longer obvious to us white Yankees.) Seeing this profile of my own world has been sharpened by what I have seen inside Urhobo culture.

Marriage From the start of our international marriage, twenty years ago, my wife and I planned to live one another’s worlds. For a long time we lived my world, while she lived both her world and mine. I entered her world only as a part of the travel horizon that has long been pervasive in my life, the occasional visit, the obsessive eye of curiosity. Now my wife and I have attacked that misbalance. I have muddled around in her cultural seedbed. This book is proof of that effort. To reach out in this way the other must have become me enough for me to look for it.7 Finding even what little I have found has changed my life.

Life and Book Style The foregoing makes an easy segue into the issue of this book’s style. The author is in the text, as he has been in his texts throughout his writing life; being the other as his language, being himself personally doing the other. A good friend, kindly misestimating this author’s limits and desires, suggested a reframing of the present work, taking a clue from the novelist Graham Greene. By this action the author would become a maker of fiction in a sense more formalized than in fact he makes of himself by making this fiction of a sub-Saharan community. (Yes, there is here much reshaping of fact.) He is in fact too many things besides a fiction writer, in that formal sense, for the purpose of the present text. He is the same poet he has been, ready always to press certain extravagances out of language;



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he is the sociologue recently nursed to strength by the experience of teaching in the social sciences; and he is the face-to-face interviewer he was in Big Rig Souls and other books, in which he probed the cross-section between himself and others at work. Can he now say that he is more than all this, that he wishes to be a gift-giver through his work? Yes, he will enlist that possibility, too, aspiring to make a space in language where others can find room to deploy and refresh themselves. Each of these presences of him wants a hearing for itself as style, and aspires to become part of a shifting register of languages, the site of a kind of fiction. Best I can do, Graham Greene! Frederic Will Ughelli, 2012–2013

Notes 1

La Pérouse, cited in Sergio Moravia, “Philosophie et géographie à la fin du 18è siècle,” in Studies on Voltaire and the 18th Century, 57, 1967, 937–1011. 2 Cf. Christopher Gill, Greek Thought (Oxford, 2006), 3. 3 Frederic Will, “Amulets,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 49/50 (Spring/Autumn 2006), 249–60. 4 Peter Brown, Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine, 1972, p. 17. 5 Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science, and Religion (1954). Science is found in all cultures; in the mind of the traditional African when, for instance, he calculates his seeding and ploughing practices to correspond with the observed cycles of the seasons. But the question is, how does the African scientific project differ from the Western? 6 Johann Winckelmann, Werke, vol. IV (Donaueschingen: Verlag deutscher Classiker, 1808), 54. 7 Frederic Will, “Anticipation,” Dalhousie Review, 6(Summer 2008), 169–78.



PART ONE: UGHELLI: THE ENLIGHTENMENT PROJECT

UGHELLI: THE ENLIGHTENMENT PROJECT

The influx of the population created a strain on municipal resources which became much graver after independence. Water and power shortages have become part of the pattern of life for many; as have inadequate or nonexistent rubbish collection; congestion and immobile traffic in the streets and grossly overcrowded and insanitary city primary schools. The blame is usually put on management; “NEPA” [Nigerian Electrical Power Authority] has become a cartoonist’s folk villain.1

1. Enlightenment The Enlightenment project refers to that thrust toward the light of social reform, and toward reason in human affairs, which runs worldwide throughout philosophical, religious, and artistic expression. Plato’s imagery of the cave depicts relatively benighted citizens, who can only see images of the true cast as shadows into their subterranean domain. The light, where the truth rests, is only indirectly interpreted from below. Le Siècle des Lumières (“The Century of Light”) was Europe’s turning to reason in the eighteenth century; reason being (it was assumed) the twin to the light. The major religions, often using imagery of light—Buddha is “enlightened” under his bodhi tree, Jesus Christ is the “light of the world”, the winter equinox promises longing hunter-gatherers a return to light and sun—constantly contrast the brilliance of truth and heaven with the darkness of hell or ignorance. Think of the transformation of ordinary light in Chartres’ stained glass windows; the holy is made sensuous. Think of the power of the light in Cézanne or Van Gogh paintings, where the created world is creased with new meaning. Light, with its brother reason, has functioned universally to symbolize the path through and out of human darkness. We will be looking for the light in the streets and hearts of Ughelli, both in the present introductory essay and throughout this book. We open with vignettes of life in Ughelli, in Delta State. We see traces of Enlightenment in that town, but those traces are flickers of oscillating light, glimpses caught and lost in the turning of an eye. (This chapter’s superscript gives a bird’s eye image of the anti-Enlightenment environment facing Ughelli itself.) If this book has any practical motif, it

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is to contribute to the awareness of what life might be, but usually isn’t, in Ughelli; and, of course, to the awareness of what life might by extension be anywhere; for to talk of Ughelli is to talk of mankind in community.

2. Ughelli Profile The Ughelli on which we reflect is a rough-looking place, 700,000 or so souls, located near the Niger Delta in southern Delta State. That places it not far from the areas of Western offshore oil-extraction and militant indigene rebellion, which have for twenty years—say since the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995—attracted the horrified attention of the Western media.2 While Ughelli itself is little known, except to itself, the Niger Delta, thanks to the intrusions of Big Oil and the rapacious exploitation of the indigenous areas lying in the midst of oil country, is known worldwide. While we will be concentrating on the “case study of Ughelli”, which is already a stretch for the competence of the author, we will be regularly referring out to the larger unit of Delta State as a whole, which involves not only the Oil region but a considerable landmass (17,600 square kilometers), a population of some eight million, and a number of ethnic groups—Urhobo, Ijaw, Itsekiri, and a slice of the North Ibo (in Anioma). The people of Ughelli themselves are predominately speakers of Urhobo, a Niger-Congo language spoken by a dwindling ethnic minority (four million) among the more than 200 distinct ethnic groups in Nigeria as a whole.3 (But the Urhobos are surrounded by smaller tribal groups, as we have said—Ijaws, Itsekiris, Isokos—who follow their own customs and speak their own languages, though they share with the Urhobos, and with most peoples of West Africa, a common pidgin language, not to mention broadly similar tastes in food, dress, style of worship, and outlook on destiny.) This Urhobo city of Ughelli, which is only one of the several sizeable cities of the State—Warri, the commercial center, Asaba, the state capital, Sapele, a commercial city on the west border of Delta State—lies roughly in the center of Delta State, is a market center, and supports a few commercially successful enterprises—glass (Delta Glass Factory), pressed rubber for export (Imonyami Rubber Plant), some wrought-iron industrial machine parts (Alcon Construction). There is also work here servicing the National Electric Power Authority (NEPA)—as there are any number of much less highly organized enterprises: semi-skilled labor available for any kind of work, from plumbing and painting to roofing. There is employment at schools, churches, and a few upscale small hotels and guest

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houses. There is administrative/clerical employment at two Local Government agencies—Ughelli Local Government Area (ULGA) North, ULGA South—which employ civil servants for the expected series of assignments—licensing, city planning, accounting. Despite this range of local jobs, there is a severe problem with unemployment, currently pegged at 60 percent, and with other plagues— terrible (but recently improving) roads, irregular (but incrementally improving) electricity supply, serious crimes like kidnapping in the streets (in a state of flux, dreadful one month, controlled the next), and a brutal (and almost equally dangerous) vigilante system to combat the crime. The unemployment figure, as I said, hangs around 60 percent for the residents in general, though it mounts to 80 percent for college graduates, whose aspirations for “suitable employment” are almost certain to be frustrated here in Ughelli—and not only here, for Nigeria as a whole is plagued by the challenge of effectively using its natural or human resources. And as if these frustrations were not enough, Mother Nature herself has been sacrificed to the mercies of this Ughelli community. Not only is the air quality degraded—air filters rare on vehicles, gas flaring byproduct-depositing particles in the air, the quality of petrol frequently diluted and toxified4—but the environmental setting here trembles between devastating heat (February), an equatorial rainy season (April to October), and the dusty dry season (December to March) which includes the harmattan, a dry wind which can lower the temperature into the sixties Fahrenheit over night, while depositing a half-inch of Saharan dust on your writing desk. Yes, Ughelli is rough-looking, though it is bustling and dotted with small industries and abundant self-employed labor; and here and there the city is flavored with up-scale and nouveau riche houses. These Afro-Tudor domiciles conflict with the predominately cement-block, zinc-roofed structures that line the main commercial streets of the place. It is those streets which set the down-at-the-heels visual tone; monotone, colorless buildings, rusted zinc, dusty vacant lots, hardly a blade of grass, let alone a park. Ughelli as a whole remains rough-looking even though it has recently undergone improvements such as extensive new Federal road construction that has opened a heavily used route through the north of town, joining Benin City and ultimately Lagos in the West, to Port Harcourt, Igbo country, and Kaduna in the northeast.5 The very construction of this Federal route has not been easy, having been hampered not only by swampy calcareous soil that resists asphalt, but also by the harassment and kidnapping carried out for months against the road workers; attacks by

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Niger Delta militants who, though backward and poor themselves in their devastated riverine hideaways in the southeast of Delta State, no more than 100 miles to the south as the crow flies, represent marginalized militant groups, who resent the road worker recipients of Federal money which properly (they think) should belong to themselves, oil-victimized tribes.6 Thus the Niger Delta oil-exploitation issue in one way or another expands actively into Ughelli, and is at the time of this writing an adjunct disruption to the anyway unstable social jell of Ughelli.7 Without dispute, however, this road construction has brought with it benefits envisaged by a constructive Federal government project—Nigeria being a Federal Republic administered from the capital Abuja, through the governments of thirty-six states. These benefits (in this Delta area) include relatively easy local transport, the acceleration of long-distance heavy lorry traffic, and on the whole a reduction in (the very numerous) road accidents. So there is a whiff of the Enlightenment, capital letters, in this small city. And there are other whiffs; an incremental improvement in electrical service, a gradual diversification of business enterprises, an enlargement of venues for entertainment or civic night life, largely in the new hotels. Such African cities as Ughelli are every year acquiring a more westernized profile. Yet as I said, Ughelli is rough by any standard, and I don’t have to go far to see that. From where I observe this Federal road, night and day on my guest-house balcony with a small troupe of lizards for buddies, I see an endless blend of okadas (motorbike transport for local passengers), heavy lorries, battered passenger cars, battered and heavily crowded private buses, and frequent emergency or high-priority (politicians or police, that is) vehicles, topped with screaming blue lights and driving hell-bent through the scattering of pedestrians and cars. The negative twist to Ughelli’s Enlightenment is always evident: chaos reigns on the highway. Yet what I see from my guest-house balcony reveals more than such routine chaos as passes here in front of me. From that same balcony, east along the same road, I can see a half-mile almost to Afisiere Junction, one of four nodes formed around the Highway as it passes through Ughelli. At Afisiere Junction the new Federal Express road divides into a dual carriageway, at a point where roads branch off (north) to the village of Afisiere and (south) into the center of Ughelli. At that point, despite the smoothness of certain parts of the surface of the Express, all hell breaks loose. Automobile and pickup drivers; okadas with up to three rotund passengers; pedestrians crossing; brahma bulls crossing: all these agents, moving in a counterpoint of conflicting directions, explode in chaos and mindless me-first-ism which is a living metaphor for the chaos

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of Ughellian society, a society without a truly functioning government on any level, without any we to interhatch with the abundant me. (The confusion of this nation as a whole is implicit at Afisiere Junction: a nation eaten through with graft and tribalism, both of which work at cross purposes to order and discipline.) And yet the road does go on ferrying its loads from early morning to evening. From the guest house balcony you get caught up in the pressure of the flow. You feel the life of this place becoming your life. You know that though there is a breakdown of order at Afisiere Junction there is huge energy right in front of you. Then, as you begin to feel that this highway flow is the flow of life itself, blood stream and toxins blended, the flood begins to slow. Your rumination stops. It stops at 10:00 p.m. and recommences around 5:00 a.m. There is a period of seven hours when you are surprised to be hearing yourself breathe. You are so at ease you ask no questions. But your body knows that the pulse of this road artery is also the artery in your arm, and that it has slowed. Those seven hours of what is to you silence, peace, withdrawal into sleep, belong to what remains of the bush (Urhobo aghwa), out there in the night lining the pitch-black distant Federal road; it belongs equally to the evil forces that roam such a bush. (Evil, eshu in Urhobo, is the name of the key enemy in this culture; banning the diabolic is everyone’s project, and the night, in which spirits travel, owls hoot, and witches plot, is the content of the fear inside every Urhobo I know; a fear of the darkness closing in around your face and eyes and sense of touch; not an existential fear at our problematical condition, for it is dark, but rather a smooshing squushing-in fear, the fear that accompanies the sense that you are being constricted by witchery.) The evil counter-universe, out there and keeping the vehicles off those unpatrolled, dangerously potholed highways, beyond the reach of the Federal project, is not only the evil of the spirits but is also the evil of real armed robbers-cum-killers, highway assassins who take money and lives with almost equal ease, then vanish into the bush of a Delta State impenetrable to police or military investigative powers. What locals think of the wider spiritual evil, out there in the night, I have no idea. (Twenty years of marriage to one of those locals has only made the mystery more impenetrable.) The spirit world of the Ughellian is made out of internalized fears which must be allayed or if possible prevented by any variety of medicines. The pharmacopeia targeting such dangers is rarefied and consequential. Do I find these complexes picturesque? I used to. But that was a patronizing and insular attitude. Could I explain to any Ughellian my culture’s fears of cancer, of a lonely old age, or of the loss of our children to depression and suicide? What

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unspoken fears haunt us! The Ughellian mindset has let Christianity replace the bewitched world only on conditions of extravagant compromise: a theology built on mountains of miracles, a world bathed in the blood of the lamb, overnight absolution the door-price for a Pentecostalism which will try, perhaps even then in vain, to extirpate the unnamable horror underlying the silence. In light of all which, naturally, the traffic knows just when to leave the highway frontier alone. Hence the slowing of the pulse at 10:00 p.m. Hence the relief when the first cars pass the house at six in the morning.

3. The Federal Express Road As a part-time resident of this small city, I have struggled to square its increasingly Enlightenment tastes with a darkness and entropy that banish anything like order or common sense. The Federal road, for sure, springs from the Enlightenment care; mankind taking its collective destiny in hand, settling down to shape its own world. This taking control is not at all a novelty on the African continent—certain contemporary states like Ghana, Malawi, and Botswana far surpass today’s Nigeria in this regard, committing to infrastructure, transparency in supporting it, and citizen benefits; while already pre-colonial Nigeria, for centuries before occupation, had given effective civic form to its values, through both the agencies of the family and the kingship/clan polity; there was an abundance of social organization and welfare. (Whole African nations— like Sierra Leone, turned into a refuge for freed slaves, 1792, and Liberia, established as an independent nation in 1841 for freed slaves from the United States—were founded on the premise of their value to human well being.) Yes, though this Federal Highway seems to have been built from out of the grip of demonic forces, it is nevertheless a contribution to both culture and economy in Delta State. Engineer Abubakr, nursing a few inches of Jack Daniels Black Label, describes the levels of asphalting, the variations in the water table under the road bed, and the budgetary allocations coming out of the capital Abuja, that have put him, a small corps of engineers, and thousands of local construction hands in the midst of an ambitious project. (Abuja, the seat of the Federal Government, has instituted this national road building project with the support of the World Bank, and the stretch of busy road below our guest house balcony is a very small segment of the result.)8 This project is Enlightenment if anything here is, and in some ways it belongs to a larger pattern in the renewing Nigeria of our moment, a Nigeria fondly vilified by any and all, in and out of the country, but not totally stuck in its

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problems, and in some ways looking for openings into a richer communal life. Good roads, greater safety, more jobs, ultimately a more vibrant economy: people of larger vision reach to these hopes throughout this country which does what it can when it can to apply such useful thinking. We all know what this “apply” can mean. Since the time of the Roman Empire good roads have been the key to civic growth, and anyone walking the Roman roads of northern Britain today will inwardly respect the good sense and purposefulness of the first-century Feds in the Capitoline. Road building was a crucial upgrade of the new American government’s effectiveness in the early nineteenth century; roadways were the path of communications, trade, adventure, exploration. Yet it has not been easy to bring contemporary Nigeria—the country has only been “a nation” for fifty years—to the point of undertaking such efforts on its own behalf. In the decade from 1910 to 1920, the British were responsible for substantial developments of transportation infrastructure in Nigeria. (Their interest was self-interest, to strengthen export communications to Britain, but the byproduct of this self-interest was a rare developmental spurt for Nigeria.) Engineer Abubakr, savoring a break from the Islam to which he usually adheres, takes another sip, and has to conclude his assessment of the value of the road he is charged with supervising with an admission that the government is sharply cutting back on its support of the project. (As of the current rewrite, more than a year later, the road construction is underway again, and with good results. Trying to write history once and for all, on the spot, is like trying to stop intense pleasure, which is passing as you savor it.) In fact the continuation of the whole project—the date of this writing is February 2011—is in question; while at the date of this writing, March 2013, the project is advancing. Why has this Setraco road part of the Enlightenment project stumbled, or why is such a commendable Federal project as this not an absolute shoo-in? There are many reasons, and I will isolate one, non-economic, as it happens, for it fits my theme; though of course economic corruption on the Federal budgetary level has also to be at the root of any observations on the present issue. (The money allotted for the road may have been “diverted”, as are many federal subventions allocated either by Abuja or by the thirty-six state governments, and every Nigerian I know would quickly expect an explanation along those lines.) There is a darker-thaneconomic answer to the question of why the project is stumbling, and that answer allies to the mindset that peoples the night hours bush with evil. I just alluded to part of this darker answer in terms of Niger Delta militancy. A tribal anti was at work obstructing the road project. The Federal

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supervisors from the North, who were sent down to the Delta to arrange and manage this road project, are ethnically alien to the residents of the areas through which the road is passing. The locals are Urhobos (or possibly Ijaws or Itsekiris). They are only easy with local road workers. But Engineer Abubakr, to whom we have referred, is from mid-Nigeria’s Ekiti State, and is a Muslim Igbara tribesperson and speaker. There’s the face of the other for you! There’s a basically non-economic reason why the continuation of the highway isn’t a certainty! Furthermore, making the administrative blend richer and more foreign, there are white supervisors in this northern-Nigeria-based contract operation. The locals are alienated by this unfamiliar component. At the same time—in addition to this issue of ethnic and even racial unfamiliarity introduced by the roadwork team—the road has created the inevitable dislocation of private lands and road crossings, for which, though some compensation has been paid, there is resentment. (Enter rapacious local “boys”, a richly operative code word for “area boys”, thugs who represent local regions or interests, and who rise up to scrap dangerously for their territory.) Road workers have been harassed, kidnapped and murdered. Huge ransoms have been demanded. The locals have fought hard against what we are calling Enlightenment. Why exactly? I will leave the answering of this question, to which we will return, for the overall Ughelli picture which will be sketching itself in this book. We will find, in this quasi-city, forces of anomie, darkness, incompleteness, which can and do thwart almost any social project. (There are as well sources of light, which can generate unexpected undertakings of personal kindness and mutual support.) The dark forces are one reason I’m under virtual house arrest these days, in the protection of my compound; I don’t want to become a statistic. Like the road workers I am a sitting duck for locals who resent the intrusion of the other into their urgently needy environment.

4. Prostitution and Law The thought pathway by which this discussion enters Ughelli is clear: in the interests of laying down a perspective, we reach for the new, the Western, the organized, in the citizen drama that is this quasi-country, this blend of more than two hundred ethnic groups, and of at least three supertribes—Yoruba in the Southwest, Ibo in the East, and Hausa in the North—this chaos of the natural diversities we in the industrialized West so pride ourselves on striving for.9 We enter Ughelli by way of a Federal Highway, well laid out and for the moment smooth, which at one end runs out into a Delta State bush which is fear and at the other end into the

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labyrinth of Federal Budgetry and local hostility. We don’t start with the Federal Highway project in the Marxian conviction that material advancement and civic construction will solve the problems of a people. But we don’t have to subscribe to such an ideology in order to look favorably on this road project, which at best simply promises to bring a bit of Nigeria to the point where it can live its communal life more comfortably. Comfort of movement is important, in a society increasingly empowered by the internal combustion engine; even more important is the saving of lives, in a Nigeria where fatal road accidents (the fraction recorded) are almost at the global peak, while unreported road accidents are frequent. Many people drive without training, indifferent to traffic signs, blending drinking and driving with a cool machismo which makes the texting-and-driving epidemic, about which we fret in America, look like kindergarten play. Exactly while I am writing this, I am being forced to cope with what I am analyzing; the conflict of Enlightenment with the retrograde. My wife and I have returned to Ughelli after a two-year absence, and have settled down in a comfortable guest house, in fact have just brought our rooms to spic-and-span order, cleaned and bleached, and have started to feel at home, in what to her is/was home, and what to me is starting to feel that way. We have swept away the dust, and are settling. Just as we are gaining breathing space, a new reality breaks open a half-mile or more down the road toward town; deafening Igbo pop disco music, “palm-wine music” my friends will later call it, somehow still close enough to tear apart the guest-house walls, our ears, and our sanity. (An engineer friend will come by, long after the need has slowed, and explain that we are sitting in an acoustical pocket, into which the lateral boom boxes, far down the road on either side, contrive to pour their deafening products.) Of course the noise had doubtless been there for several days, mounting in gradual crescendo from 6:00 p.m., orgasming out around midnight; but we had been, if not too busy to hear it, at least in the first days after our return, too busy to pay attention to it. (There is a psychological component to hearing, no?, which means that at times we are swamped by noises which at other times we can shut out.) Friends, though, had already been aware of the “drinking parlor”. My friend Margaret had described the place this way. A small tortoise car circulates through the streets of Ughelli, proclaiming the news of the town. One day, as she and her husband Stephen are passing our house, they are themselves passed by the tortoise car, proclaiming the opening of a new “Ashau (whore) quarter”, a “place to rejuvenate your penis”, as the loudspeaker proclaims. It seems the new facility is what we have just found to be our

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down-the-road neighbor, the home of blaring palm-wine music. Now we are really noticing. The music is all over us; we can’t eat, sleep, make love (ha ha), or read. In the following days, up at seven, we find ourselves bleary and headachy. And at that we don’t yet realize the full degradation of the attack. The “nightclub”—I still fumble for the right word—is a metal-roofed shack with wood pilings for support, and twenty narrow bedrooms lined up over the beer parlor; a whore house, bringing in Kwale girls from up country for those brave local souls who are willing to risk what little life they have for a few seconds of sperm. The prostitution industry, and the associated human trafficking, have been thriving in West Africa since the advent of European interests in the fifteenth century; prostitution currently thrives in this part of Delta State, as it does in Benin City, next door in Edo State, which exports prostitutes to Mali and Burkina Faso, not to mention Italy and on beyond into countries like Greece and Spain. We are, no doubt, not far away from a feeder colony.10 God have mercy on these girls whose traditional village cultures will one day reject them with scorn—if they don’t return home in high style; though if they do so return they may rapidly ascend the social ladder, their dubious pasts a matter of indifference to jealous competitors. The decibels seem to rise, night by night, or is it only my blood pressure? The call of my rational self-defense system grows louder by the night. A brother-in-law, studying for a law degree, drops by and drops a hint; it sounds like a page out of Rawls, and rests on the axiom that we all have rights, up to the point where we intrude on others’ rights. Locke, Jefferson. That is the Enlightenment project. The whoremasters down the road, this argument would go, are free to blast away the night, up to the point where they are robbing me of the right to sleep. Thomas drops that truism and leaves. The next morning I lay the nobility of the perspective before my wife and propose consulting a lawyer. What derision I arouse! But I’m not easy to deride, this time. I’m tired. So we agree on a compromise. She takes a cab down the road to the whorehouse and “speaks with the whoremaster in charge.” An ex-soldier turned Bakassi boy, he proves “subtle”, her term, and reassures her that the situation will be kept under control. Just what he said I don’t know. Maybe just a way of getting her out of his face. For a day or two the decibels shrink; then the following Friday they spike, with a vengeance. Til 3:30 a.m. I really get the idea. So there’s no plateau to rest on. I feel an Anglo-Saxon Common Law build-up; I am determined to exert my rights, decide to call Mr. Akboji, a friend of ours and a bailiff with the district court, and I inform my wife. But she is not happy with my decision. She is not sure, I suppose, how to retail my

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darkening situation to me; she wisely urges me to consult Augustine, my most traveled and insightful Urhobo friend, and a regular visitor to later chapters of this book. Augustine, anciently a local mechanic apprentice, was early recruited and trained by Shell, whose human resources insight had brought him up the ladder of corporate success to wealth and a wide purview onto life. My wife’s suggestion of Augustine is persuasive, and soon he and I are sipping some Tennessee Mash and talking Realpolitik. What he lays out is lucid, changes my thinking, and digs deep into the Enlightenment project issue in Ughelli. After this talk, as after the talk with brother-in-law Goodman, to be explored at the beginning of the first essay ahead, I viewed the Enlightenment and my Nigerian life differently. Reader, you knew what I was talking about before I did! I sit there in Ughelli with this next-door problem, and I suppose that I can go to the local police, or to a lawyer. What was I thinking? I was recurring to abstract principles of law, the kind of principles the American citizenry, no matter how benighted, is accustomed to invoking at every moment— Second Amendment gun rights are the rage as I write—relying as it does on the “sacredness” of private property, and on the presumed rights of the individual. (Presumed is of course the word, for sometimes even in the Land of the Free the hovering abstract pulls back to reveal…the raw meat of practical turf wars, the cops or the judges playing their own version of judicial gamesmanship, but without the cunning of the African.)11 What are those abstractions but the working values of the Enlightenment shapers of our own Revolutionary perspective; values highlighted by the dramatic thinking of such as Locke, Voltaire, Jefferson, men forwarded to us in the Constitutions of the great Western democracies, and whose thinking was deposited like a genetic marker in pre-WWII liberal Americans like this author? So, reader, you see what I was up to in my Anglo-Saxon ardor, as well as what would have happened, if I had “brought the whorehouse matter to court.” I was doubtless the only one who “couldn’t see.” The scenario, Augustine explained, would be predictable; the police will already have arranged a deal with the whorehouse owners for monthly payback. (The creation of an Ashau quarter contravenes written Nigerian law, and it has to be kept under wraps.) The police will have “met with” the accused party, arranged to tolerate the status quo for a further fee, and left in the hands of the whoremasters the convenient job of getting rid of the plaintiff. (After all, he was easy to find, his color was “white”, and there would be no way of winning redress for the disappearance of such an unexpected visitor.) The conclusion Augustine left with me was obvious,

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that I had to keep my nose out of the whorehouse noise issue, my earplugs screwed in tight, and my impatience under the care of Lorazepam.

5. Is the Enlightenment Abstract? The eighteenth century in Europe was a time of major social change— the decline of agriculture as the foundation of society, the development of a middle-class economy, the opening of the religious perception to critical analysis, even the beginnings of social science. Those societal changes, which create the cultural climate of the world we in the West now inhabit, cannot have felt abstract from the inside, any more than change in any other age can have felt abstract. Social-cultural movements, like those accompanying the Western Enlightenment, tangibly realigned the intimate conceptual habits of people. (The concrete actualities of the Enlightenment can have been no less compelling in the culture of Black African communities in 1780. There has, however, long been a difference between the West and Africa in the areas of historical self-consciousness, especially in the notion of historical progress. The sub-Saharan African in 1780 will have been less governed by the notion of linear time, and thus of direction in history, than were his Western counterparts of the time; the eighteenth-century sub-Saharan African will have been living in a relatively hierarchical/agricultural/ritual climate, which provided its own social satisfaction, as well as its own satisfaction of the basic needs of survival.)12 The distillate of the new Western social climate, starting to prevail by the mid-eighteenth century, settled into certain high-culture phrases—the rights of man, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, a Shaftesburyan or even a Goethean im ganzen gut und wahr und resolut zu leben—which in their banner content fairly rapidly helped to remove old governments and shape new sensibilities—ours. These banner concepts, in other words, may have been abstract but they had muscle. Whether or not we are better for our “progress”—a notion coined in nineteenth-century England—is still out with the jury,13 and nothing in the above line of reasoning is intended as a taking of sides on the sensitive “third-world issue”. Our modern Western abstractions-working-through-history were empowered by a West with a cultural history available for large-scale opinion formation, a history to which the Greco-Roman had centuries before given impulse. Plato and Aristotle, long before Locke, had parsed the connections between thought and social action, and imagined the state that might be, aerated by the principles latent in thoughtful men interacting. The politeia Plato and Aristotle envisaged, like The City of

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God Augustine created in words, was stapled to the sky, a permanent stellar reminder of what could be. The in-your-face was nowhere in these speculations, and the thinker and citizen shared equally in the right to breathe and imagine. Any place at which Ughelli could presently access this deeply rooted Enlightenment project is still blocked off by insufficient openness. Out in the bush, far in the night of the Federal Highway, is a force majeure “it” which cannot be thought away. That it is a brusque congeries of entrails, it is the body parts of an albino, tucked into a sacrificial pit, it is the lily blossom launching pad for a transatlantic flight inside a peanut shell, or a crossing to the Night Planet; it is, to shift to a “Pentecostal translation” of these archaic folk powers, both a mountain of miracles and a mountain of menstrual pads, discards of fiery abortions. Abstraction is stillborn in the face of this hodge-podge of its that rummage around in the Ughellian sensibility. This is why Ughelli doesn’t easily get to the Enlightenment project, either in road maintenance, civil ordinances, or abstract courts of appeal. This is why Augustine referred me to the Lorazepam for consolation.

6. Elementary School Otowodu Public Primary School is a good sample of the fairly rundown, open-to-the-elements—no doors, no glass in the windows—onestorey, one-room-wide elongated school houses visible throughout Delta State. Corrugated zinc roof, grainy textured blackboards, moldy concrete walls and floors—victims of annual rainy seasons whose effects don’t dissipate—small wooden benches torturing little bodies as do those benches and kneeling rails on which we try to return Jesus’ sufferings Sunday morning, in Ughelli’s Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church. Several decades ago, my friend Marilyn tells me, the children of Otowodu bought plastic chairs for their teachers to sit in, and bought their own userfriendly benches to sit on. Marilyn, several decades ago briefly an instructor in such a schoolroom, assures me the physical conditions were better in the past, but back then, of course, the population was much smaller, and the economic degradation of the country less advanced. We will deal ahead—Essay Three—with a certain Delta State governor during whose tenure money earmarked for use in such schools as Otowodu was squandered on personal luxuries. My friend Margaret has brought us here. She is a seasoned mid-life public school teacher. She introduces her headmistress, a short and downto-earth lady in khaki, to whom I pose routine questions about

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schoolbooks, school fees, school uniforms, school attendance. In primary three, the level I will visit, there are math and English textbooks—oldfashioned but crisp, workbooks attached; some three dollars a copy. (Six hundred naira, in local terms, may equate to two or three days’ income for the poorest of the families in question, a significant but not insuperable challenge; later, in the classroom, I see only a few copies of the text, although I gather there may be a special explanation, that the Delta State Education Department has provided the school with only a fraction of the number of texts they require.) School fees are low; even for families living on “less than a dollar a day”, as we assess the local economy; fees and uniforms are within range. (The kids look cared-for and are trim in their uniforms, an appearance which PS 47 in the Bronx or Jefferson in Cedar Rapids might well want to emulate.) Is this a result of the colonial inheritance, some byproduct of a distantly filtered British school tradition? School attendance is compulsory, and absences are investigated; yet absence within presence, Margaret indicates, is one of her challenges as a teacher. Many of the children exercise a commercial fantasy during class, dreaming awake/planning for a commercial enterprise: the majority fantasizing a small concession selling Pure Water, the commodity of note on the lowest selling level in the Ughelli streets. From the earliest age the Urhobo trader-to-be hustles, and his/her fateful combat with a selfish and value-chaotic society provides an early onset life-motif for many. In the classroom I realize, in my face, the relation of education to infrastructure, and to the possibility of Enlightenment. I enter the classroom to find the students standing beside their seats, roaring a Good Morning, Mr. Will that would make anyone’s day. The two matronly teachers find a plastic chair to seat me in—these chairs cost five bucks each, and not every teacher can afford one—and guide me to the back of the room. As I enter, the class is at its business. English sentences have been written on the blackboard, and the students are repeating them after the teacher. After they finish, the bosomy mistress at the board praises the kids and asks them to clap for themselves; they do. (For a moment, neatly dressed in grey trousers/skirts, with checkerboard design blouses, the kids present the crisp and determined atmosphere I described above.) Then the class proceeds to written exercises, each student huddled into him or herself, behaving like a robot, cramped and intense. Exercises complete, they carry their writing folders forward, present them to the teachers, and retire to their seats. There follows a ten-minute interval, during which the two mistresses lightning-read through the exercises, mark each student’s paper, and at the end unceremoniously toss the pile of graded papers onto the floor in the front of the room, where the class monitors collect them,

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and proceed to the distribution. Ultimately, with much shuffling and crunching back and forth, the kids collect their graded materials, squeal or groan, and squeeze back into their rows. There are one hundred and ten kids in this room, and within thirty minutes they have done their exercises and been graded. Disciplined behavior is here no victim of impoverished infrastructure. You have to wonder at the disorder and lack of organization in this society, whose educational foundation is in certain ways disciplined. Greed higher up on the administrative level is almost certainly the culprit. Math is next. Only a few outbreaks of cut-up mar this second morning exercise; an occasional teacherly noggin blow, a student shin-kick now and then. (Margaret stresses the importance of getting English and math in early, before the later morning heat hits the aluminum roof; the last two hours of the day, noon to two, are useless for learning.) Altogether, thinks Gulliverian whitey seated in the back row, this is a crowded, wellbehaved, underequipped cross-section of youngsters, guided by two ardent but totally overwhelmed mistresses. Physically/psychically there is not much room to move in this classroom. Everywhere you turn you have in front of you a wall, a student’s body, a shrunken space made up of bench and attached desk. You are always smooshed. The limits on Enlightenment in Ughelli may have their roots in archaic cultural inclinations, a certain anti when it comes to reason and experiment, but in brute present fact those limits come down to issues of breath, space and to the aeration of the intelligible, which is so hard to acquire in a learning-setting of this sort. One trend of this book will be to see what the inheritor of Western Enlightenment has to learn and share here. This book is the author’s adventure in learning. However, right here in the classroom, in which surprisingly much discipline and attention are mustered, limiting material conditions—overcrowding, lack of facilities, understaffing—make it hard for the Ughellian to create a new world distinctive to him or her self. Learning requires space and breathing room, and if that space is lacking, whether in the classroom or in the bush at the end of the Federal Highway, the perceiving mind closes in on itself. One can only “think” in a situation.

7. Juju: The Primitive and the Traditional I have written elsewhere of the permeation of juju—witchcraft, magic—in the culture of Ughelli.14 My interest in this topic was for a long time literary/romantic, a byproduct, if ever there was one, of Western narcissism and idle curiosity. This interest goes way back with yours truly, doubtless into a womb filled with magic transformations, and a youth in

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which actuality had mercifully not yet obstructed the imagination. At age thirteen I presented to myself a small volume of reflections on the Zanzibar clove trade, my first book; a text saturated with adolescent exoticism—descriptions of the Grand Bazaar with its luxuriant manycolored robes, strident cries, flashing scimitars. In the following years I studied Swahili avidly in the cavernous University of Illinois Library, memorizing colonialized dialogues, but buffaloed from the start, as I now realize, by a language structure in which names (for instance) are classified and declined by the kinds of objects they represent, rather than by inherited grammatical conventions, as in Latin or Greek.15 Such to me “exotic” impulses lay behind my earliest turn toward West Africa, sitting as I did in my late twenties in Austin, Texas, the steaming heat of which took me to extremities of the mind, and to Scobyan fantasies. There I was, teaching Greek Classics, but referring them constantly over into texts like Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (1948) or Journey without Maps (1936). I was fascinated, still am, by what seemed to me the never-quite-intersecting relations between Africa and Greece. The intersection may have been especially difficult for me to plot, for the mysterious depth of each culture reached far into my own heart of darkness, a masturbatory sadistic heart only advanced age is starting to tame. (In that dark heart brewed the query for the roots of primitive wholeness.) I was at that time ever on the lookout for new psychic powers, magical sacrifice, and malignant-effectual witchcraft. Jane Harrison, Sir James Frazer, E. R. Dodds were my psychopompoi into the Greek darkness, though I was born in an age when fascination with the African darkness was already charged with being colonial-regressive. The Africa I anticipated, in reading the British novelists, brought the adventurous intrusions of colonialism up against every kind of unfamiliar recourse to the pre-scientific. (The British exploration of the Hellenic darkness blurred into the African’s own sense of the shaggy contours of deep reality.) Notwithstanding that background, and though I am still a tourist in this African town, always will be, on this visit I begin to see more clearly the patterns in the local carpet, and to depend less on the primitive in myself, when it comes to grasping the emic16 of this particular other. One thing is now clear. Juju and sympathetic magic are not part of a colorful repertoire of behaviors out of a folklore dictionary, but aspects of something elementally intelligible: an effort to explain the powers of the world without recourse to the abstract, an effort to control and empower personal anxieties, but in the course of it to fill eyes, ears, nose and throat with things til you choke on them and have no room to move, are just in

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them. Juju is a way of controlling the personal universe but without giving yourself room to breathe. That’s what seems to me both intense and ultimately dysfunctional about superstitious magic; the effort to control the rain, to create or ward off the spell of the witch, to move through the night at planetary speeds, to convert purloined body parts into the powders that guarantee fertility or sexual power. That such cultural practices can lead to every kind of “poor way to get things done” I had known from the start, way back in Texas. (Hey dude, curanderas abound there too!) But I was now, on returning to Ughelli, reminded of the impediments Ughellian culture puts in the way of living “rationally”. It will require a brief tale to introduce this point. I came back to Ughelli with my mind full of longing for my first real Ughellian friend, William, and for the grand times he had shown me in the past. William had seemed a kindred spirit, whose assumptions about life, different from mine, were forever giving me a window onto the self I had tried to curtain off. He was a skilled technician, like my friend Augustine; though just a talented local kid, William had, in the old days shortly after Nigerian Independence (1960), been spotted by Shell recruiters, trained to work as a mechanic on heavy drilling rigs, and been incorporated into a Western offshore drilling team on Forcados Island. William enjoyed a successful career, handling and maintaining heavy machinery, and battened on handson Western savvy without sacrificing his Urhobo sensibility. He had entered my life shortly before his retirement, and, as he was a childhood friend of my wife, we had a leg up on bonding. We did just so, visiting Delta State villages together, talking with the elder gentry in remote corners, schmoozing over Johnny Walker with his friend Paul, and arguing over such arcana as whether a small boy can induce or prevent the rain. A comrade in arms, William up and died before I got back to Nigeria this time, and I stumble still in the debris of the trip plans and camaraderie we had before us. This morning I join my friend Augustine on a visit to William’s bereft widow, sit in a lightless upstairs room in commiserative silence, and on departing, because I know Augustine is a realist, I ask him if the widow did not seem excessively beaten by events. It has been six weeks since William’s death, and though the widow is a woman of business acumen and personal maturity, as I know from the past, it seems this afternoon as though there is no person left in her. Augustine clarifies the unusual bind in which William’s widow finds herself. To start with, she has been mourning the passing of William’s mother, which occurred a few weeks before William died. Thus William’s wife had already been curled up inside a passive bereavement role, heavy

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curtains, limited light, low voices, sharing with her husband the weight of his mother’s loss. But that burden was expected to come to an end when William settled the burial ceremony of his mother. (Burial ceremonies, in Urhobo culture, do heavy mending labor, and because the circle joining the ancestors to the living is unbroken, there is a confidence of reunion which makes doing the ritual properly of great importance.) But then William died. The burial of the mother, who was older and had priority in death, had to take place before the ceremonies for William could be performed. An unusual double burden lay on William’s wife, who was already encased, as convention would have it, in total passivity, the pure mourning condition. There was no husband left to shoulder the heavy labor and expense of the mother’s funeral. No wonder William’s widow seemed crushed by the millstone of fate. The loss of first emotional priority, William, could not be alleviated by the freeing of burial rites, and there was no clear timeframe for that now remote relief. An emotional logjam was battering the woman to pieces. The framework of this sad bind is familiar to my ear. For twenty years, married to an Urhobo and regularly incorporated into (some of the) family and tribal news, I have absorbed a headful of mortuary details: this or that corpse being refrigerated until certain family members can get together on funeral arrangements, or until some person can return from abroad to preside at the last rites; this set of corpses from a single devastated family held on ice expensively until the money can be found for the burial; this or that mortuary facility losing its freon supply and suffering a forbidding temperature increase. Every culture has its private tales of the death industry, and I single out a local Nigerian setting because I have observed it and think it fits the present theme. The Enlightenment project, as we might ideally think it in the West, is all about moderating the blunt it-ness of the human situation. We try to deny the ultimates, when possible, or at least to “look the other way”. Ughelli spends its limited resources, but seemingly unlimited time, on wading into the thick web of it. Large swathes of life are devoted to the issue of death. And such devotion can be costly. The Roman Empire fell, Gibbon thought, in part because of its funerary extravagances.17 That there are other ways of dealing with death we note in the occasionally heard Biblical adage, to “let the dead bury their dead”, and in traditional Islam, which enjoins corpseburial within twenty-four hours after death.

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8. Ughelli at Worship When it worships, Ughelli gasps for air and cries out loudly. Just as the whorehouse down the road blasts forth its palm-wine music, many of the thousand local churches praise God in equally brash sound that leaves no place for response in it. Ughelli offers no refuge from the roar of traffic or predication. Because everyone believes, everyone shouts. I exaggerate, pick and choose examples. (I have been choosing this worshipper-trope since 1957, when I introduced it to myself in an essay on Mt. Athos. My own mindset is credent, sometimes credulous, at best exploratory. I find congenial the rhetoric of the worshipper pose.)18 Yesterday my friend Augustine took me to Christ Apostolic Church. The wooden structure, as tin-roofed and reverberant as the whorehouse down the road from us, or as the elementary school in Otowodu, rattled with the pastor’s stentorian tone: an hour-long exhortation to train for the battle against evil, and especially for the battle against the evils of adultery, which can bring a proud puffy man like King David to ashes in the “twinkling of an eye”. The church was small, and an unamplified male voice would have carried perfectly for the entire congregation, which was midlife female and their offspring, all open to be taught. Instead, and to be expected, the pastor roared into a sensitive microphone, which thundered through the space of belief. There was as little room to learn in, ultimately, as there had been in the Otowodu classroom, bodies and wall space right in your face. (The in-your-face theme here became the in-your-ears!) To compound the learning difficulty, the pastor hurried the flock breathlessly from one dense Old Testament passage to another. There was no stopping point for mind. In terms of “light”, the Enlightenment, the space of the service opened out into freedom only with the dancing, a shuffling sassy good-spirited processing to the collection box and around the aisles in snaking writhe. It was then that the color of the culture—guinea brocade bodices, multiplex brilliant wrappers, gaudy head ties—burst open a space of feeling. The senses are pounded differently in Maurine’s new cement block church down a winding path into the bush across the road from our guest house. As with most church structures, in this country where building of any sort is usually “in process”, Maurine’s Celestial Church of Christ is bare and thirsty for tithes, but holding on. Barely holding on would be closer, for this new parish, under the growing diocese of the Celestial Church, is off the main track and hard to reach; furthermore, it is the victim of rival Celestial parishes, which have so far skimmed off much of the available customer base—which means the base for whatever meager

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financial support there is. For some time it appears that the experience of Maurine’s Church will be as hollow as the single room that contains it. Nothing, though, dims the ardor of the three male pastors and Maurine. They pray in and among the twenty of us in the congregation; they bring us to our knees, endlessly praise Jesus on our behalf, rinse us in the familiar prayers of the Celestial Church; lull us into the belief that we are in a generic African church. Or rather, they do so with that tweak that gives each of the many fractional denominations of recent Nigerian church history its cachet. The celebrants and the congregants wear white garments, celestials indeed, no shoes, angels you see, and at liturgical turning points—though this service is as fluid as any Pentecostal praise service, in Africa or the States—resort is had to candles, the mystery of their soft light, and quiet. What to me remains most startling, a link to the loudnesses (and sometimes powers) of Ughelli, from whorehouse to place of worship, is the unique cataclysm of Celestial laying-on of hands. My wife is a godmother to this particular congregation, and has prepared egusi soup for the worshippers to eat after the service. In return for her special support, and out of their hearts, the pastors and Maurine ask us to kneel, hold candles, and receive the Church’s blessing. Our hands around our candles, we wait through a minute of prayerful blessings, then are “attacked” with a PRAYER from the dark thin pastor of power, who seems to speak from a Celestial Vatican. At once the congregation of twenty assaults us with a babble of intersecting prayer threads: “may the Father”, “blessed be the…”, “by the holy name of”, “Jesus the sal...”, “holy bleeding….”, “miracle mountain…” All these patchwork imprecations storm across us, moving at different angles at a galactic rate…my gaping ears…. A storm of Babelian proportions sweeps two minutes from our lives, then slowly subsides, until only two or three voices remain, and finally we are left in the quietude of stiff knees and half smiles. It is only later that night that I remember a similar “attack” from years before, when my wife and I had returned to Ughelli to visit family. My wife, as I knew, was personally familiar with certain “spiritual churches” in Nigeria. One of them was the Celestials; she was sensitive to the prophetic understanding of Maurine. On the night in question the power of that “involvement” had assumed the form of a visit, to our compound, of a cohort of Celestials. It was early dusk, warm and cloudy, and I had gone upstairs to watch television. An unusual calm settled on our house. Something took me toward the balcony, where I looked out on a group of Celestials, hand-inhand in a corner of the compound. They were in shadow but around the perimeter of the front yard were many small white candles, flickering in

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the breathless air. It was a féerie. Then, at some order to pray, the group had begun their Babelian cacophony—or was it a replication of the orderfilled chaos of the beginning of the cosmos? For several moments, which sent eerie shock waves down my spine, the group sustained their cleansing of the world. They set up a band of value around the yard, then slowly let their voices fall away into a silence intended to heal and protect. I had buried this startling spiritual incursion until I knelt under blessing in Maurine’s Celestial Church. In my own Catholic Church, twenty times the size of Christ Apostolic or the Celestial Church, but sardine-jammed like the Otowodu schoolroom, there is expectedly greater opening for hearing, and some light to imagine in. The protocol of the mass guarantees room for discovery, as does the dance, as giving and heartfelt as at Christ Apostolic, and repeated through three collections. Here the dance, giving its light, springs from a richer genetic tapestry than at Christ Apostolic; men and women and children, from dressed in their best to laboring come-as-youare, snake their ways through the church, leave their pence and return with their tithe, let themselves go into the light of rhythm. I think back on the meditative practice I found most infectious at Christ Apostolic. Each worshipper creates a private space around him/herself, gets up and moves quietly back and forth within that space, at intervals that seem appropriate, gestures, shuffles, speaks with self as prompted by the pastor. A place for light will be made, if not offered unbidden; we will see profiles of that classical spirit-shaping in the following essay, when we talk with my brother-in-law Goodman, for whom the space of belief opens clearings for daily life. In both Christ Apostolic and Saints Peter and Paul, spatial movement provides the leavening the Body of Christ requests of us. It is not hard to understand the fervor of Christian practice in today’s Ughelli, where day-to-day life, in a rough-looking city, can weigh heavily on the natural fervor of the body. Nor is it only in the churches that worship bubbles upward in this culture. A few days after visiting with Augustine in Christ Apostolic, we feel we need a break from the uproar of the whorehouse and the traffic flow of the Expressway. We head for the removed mansion of Margaret (Part I, section 6)—the primary-school teacher of note in these pages, to sleep it out in the atmosphere of the countryside. At 6:00 p.m. we enter the marble living room hall, obscure in early dusk, once more abandoned by the fickle Dame Electricity. We’ve eaten, I’ve “had my drink”, and a pretty long evening promises boredom. I hope for some quality talk with Margaret, but it will be hours. So my wife and I and the other two occupants of the room sit watching the domino political

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effect turn North Africa and the Gulf States into world historical significance. The other two occupants, robed pastors, say nothing, have not so much as eyed us, and break through a kind of lifeless languor only a couple of times, to answer cell phone calls. (“In the saving name of Jesus Christ,” mutters the older, slacker man, presumably blessing a caller, “in Jesus Christ’s name be saved, in the name of the Lord…”) The calls end, another government topples, and Margaret gradually settles from her endless bustling through the house. By this time it is dark, a small generator is puffing intermittent streaks of dull light through the lamps, and the two men of God have disappeared into the guest rooms on the ground floor. By 8:30 Margaret leads my wife and me to the upper floor where we will sleep, and then out onto the splendid Afro-Corinthian front balcony, a viewing point for the large front courtyard with its palms, mangos, bush cherry trees. We sit, I pull out my notebook, and much of the finer texture of my report on Primary Three spins forth from Margaret’s subtle and experienced brain. While Margaret talks, my wife watches, and I jot, a clapping of hands and a volley of Hallelujahs sweep across us from the gated mansion to our west. We look over to see the profiles of robed men, shouting, blessing the Lord; but doing so with a militancy that demands attention. In retrospect I think I was confused not only by the men’s fervor but by such worship occurring inside a private house; a practice unfamiliar to me. (I forget historical instances: the Roman family huddled at home around its lares et penates familiares; the royal chapels scattered through early modern Europe, at which Renaissance regents used to worship in the presence of private chaplains; Houphouet-Boigny’s private chapel—and Cathedral— at Yamoussoukro.) How little did I realize what Margaret knew, or the layers of appreciation she had, for my evident surprise. What she purportedly knew about the “guys next door” was that they were Ijaw militants occupying a kind of safe house as they pursued their plans for driving the Federal Government out of the Niger Delta. What she knew about the night ahead of us included the languid pastors from downstairs. Margaret was not quick to disclose what was in her mind. We slept in Margaret’s very narrow bed that night, so that there would be room downstairs for the pastors. At eleven or so I woke, asthma choking me, my face crammed against the drywall. I crawled out of bed to lie on the floor. Not too comfortable there, I struggled back to bed an hour later, but with the dulled sense that the guys next door were at it again, praising their Lord. I woke my wife, who was awake. “It’s in this house”, she croaked drily, not too patient with my endless wide-eyed gaping at this culture which she devoted the first thirty-five years of her life to finding

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normal. A crash of lightning opened my dull brain; the pastors were brought in by Margaret to perform an all-night prayer-and-praise session, roaring their heads off with the name of our Lord, and intermittently leading what I took to be the house members in a scratchy cat’s cry of hymn singing. Amazed that we too were the site of an all-night prayer job, I gave way to fear. The Ijaw event had been crackling and fierce; the “name of the Lord” had rattled out with bold assertiveness, as though thrust back into God’s very face. Peter Ekeh, in his Studies on Urhobo Culture,19 notes that Nigerian Christianity, only a century old, has always had trouble with the notion of a loving God/Savior; eguono, the Urhobo word for “love”, carries a strong sexual tone, though it is the closest Urhobo noun to the Christian agape. There is little room for “love” in this religious project, as, incidentally, in Ancient Greek religion, where honor and piety were the operative concepts. This issue in language and culture reflects out in the “harshness” of the Urhobo or Ijaw prayer-praise. (We will return to this issue in Essay Four with its discussion of Prayer Bullets for Winners: The War against Haman, a living text of prayer-praise.) My fear was fostered by our isolation, by my half-understanding of the situation, and by the stillness of nature outside—a couple of Brahma bulls chewing quietly outside my window, a full moon of a brilliance rarely visible in polluted Ughelli, a slight breeze in the palms. The pounding praise stammered onward, a brother to the hard worship of the militant Ijaws a few hours before. I eventually put this harsh language stream into its bed of sleep, as on many nights I have had to be the living damper for the palm-wine music down the road in Ughelli. Wherever the Lord can be praised, I seem to learn, is right on; as when, in signing his lease for a year’s contract on our two-bedroom apartment, our new tenant rose to lead us all in a jubilant recognition, to the Lord, of the bond we were contracting.

9. Order or Messiness I get back to the house from the darkened home of William’s widow to find my sister-in-law and my dear friend Alice, an elegant figure of a matron. (Now, bitterly, removed from me by death, although I will write of her, in Essay One, as though she were still “with us”, which she is.) Both of these women work for Ughelli Local Government, part of the apparatus of civic management which was left behind by the British, when in 1960 they cordially pulled out of their expensive, tiring, and increasingly dangerous colonial role. We will share a Guinness after a day of work and then they will share with me again, as previously when I

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visited their Local Government Authority office, some of the administrative niceties of their work places: filling out land-titles, vetting and disbursing drivers’ licenses, stamping and recording land and house ownership documents, authorizing exemptions from the taxes which few people (except civil servants) pay anyway, recording births, deaths, population figures, and the number of licensed chicken farmers in the area. It doesn’t take long, in the presence of these wired charmers, to rediscover the issues touched earlier concerning the Enlightenment possibility, which was after all just a passion for bringing order into the messiness of daily life. In talking with these two, I find that the smooshedup it of routine Ughelli existence begins to shrink into the background, as it does whenever we humans manage to classify or codify the thick presence of the daily—even when our means is stats pertaining to auto sales, or to the GNP of Uruguay, or to the number of chicken farmers in Delta State. It’s like suddenly feeling a massive head cold receding from you; it’s like finding statistical information that helps you to make sense of intuitions you have had about curves in alfalfa yield or the changing profile of recorded abortions. You just listen to the ladies. Perhaps you, Mister Author, are a poor man’s Platonist, exercising that categorical control over experiences of which the law, everywhere in the world, is made. Listen to another “Platonist”, Delta State Governor Uduaghan, as he addresses us, upon unveiling the seven annotated volumes of the newly published statutes of Delta State: As a State Government that is founded on the rule of law, it is quite natural for us to connect with Mr. President’s cardinal principle of the rule of law, because we share in his vision of a law-based society and Government; a law-based people—literate and respectful of laws of the country. We have by annotating Delta State Laws become the torch-bearers of this vision. Since I am in the midst of eminent lawyers and jurists, I need not stress the point that the principle of the rule of law is the very glue that holds the society and government together…20

The mere scent of order and legality is intoxicating, limning a human world in which—all else being equal—the bureaucratic niceties of the Local Government Authorities would make sense. Would is the operative word here. For of course the bureaucratic dimension Alice and Marianne inhabit makes them underlings in a system that recurs to the bribe, the anti-law, on any level higher than the most perfunctory clerkly recording, but that maintains its briberies within a Byzantine labyrinth of legal technicalities.21 There needs to be a formal legal system to subvert for corruption to have meaning. (My wife and I—I call up an example—

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request a document proving the legitimacy of our automobile registration, and slip an envelope across the dusty table in the State Capitol’s Office of Documents; but if there were not a written law requiring the possession of such registration the bribery would make no sense, and for that matter might not take place.) Could the solution to today’s rule of systematically perverted law be a return to the customary oral law of pre-colonial Nigeria, where traditional unwritten practice, and not an “arbitrary” written code, was the “founding document”; an oral law which, in a blend with Ango-Saxon law, is still the operative legal system in much of southern Nigeria; while Sharia, Islamic law, is currently re-establishing itself throughout several states in northern Nigeria, and, similarly to pre-colonial law in the south,22 proclaims a return to traditional oral practices? Could it be that the colonial grafting of Anglo-Saxon Common Law, onto the traditional law of the native courts and onto Sharia, is a large source of confusion and even malfeasance in contemporary Nigeria? It is in fact the forest of the colonizer’s law, that colonial inheritance unrelated to the traditions of native law, which were living practice for centuries before Independence, that opens a breathing space out into a world where roads could spring unopposed from administrative mandate, and whorehouses could be challenged on the grounds of illegality. But it is at the same time that very imported written law which creates a culture of indifference and contempt, contempt for what is there simply that it might be scorned—as it often is.

10. The Bakassi Boys When it comes to the legal in Ughelli (and throughout much of the South and Southeast of Nigeria) it of course comes to the enforcement of the laws; that is, in many instances, to the de facto executors of the law, the Bakassi boys. Governor Uduaghan may speak of the dignity of the laws, but of what importance are they if not enforced? Wherever some kind of recourse to the legally effectual is demanded in Nigeria, extra-legal solutions bubble to the surface. The owner of the Ashau Quarter whorehouse down the road from our guest house is one of the enforcers, a Bakassi boy! We pay the Bakassi for protection and know their dial-up cell number by heart, in case of emergency. Who are these enforcers of the law? Are these men representatives of the claritas of the law which they reinforce? Executors of the seven volumes of Delta State Law? No; there is no reason to think that these guys “know the law”! But then on what basis do they act, and how have they acquired their influence? During the

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late eighties, crime, political muscling, and financial corruption coincided to make of three Eastern Nigerian States—Imo, Anambra, and Abia—a nightmare of insecurity. Market traders were regularly robbed, the streets were terrorized by armed robbers. In the absence of any effective security from the Federal Government, and of any responsible police force—most small towns in the country still today lack a police station or police presence—the person on the street embraced any security presence that offered itself. This readiness was especially pronounced in the large Igbo market towns of Owerri and Onitsha, which were (and still are) among the busiest markets in West Africa. “It just so happened” that at this time there was a development in vigilante security service in the East of the country, near the Bakassi Peninsula. In a small market town near the town of Bakassi— close to the border with Cameroon—cobblers were being harassed by mafia-style hit men, and asked some local toughs for support. With these toughs, some of them ex-cons, others just streetwise, the nub of the Bakassi boys was in formation, and from that point on, throughout eastern Nigeria, the growth of the Bakassi was assured. One special basis for their appeal was their indifference to ethnic issues, which freed the Bakassi (in their early stages) to concentrate solely on what they saw as matters of crime and punishment. In this they clearly marked themselves off as an alternative and at first genuine policing force, in a society where the orthodox police are both feared and despised, and where ethnic militias—like the Odua People’s Congress or the Arewa People’s Congress—though providing protection do so only for their own ethnic group. It was of additional weight, in support of the Bakassi in their early days (the late nineties), that they conducted their vigilante activities under a cloak of mystical-spiritual powers, against which there was no appeal. They spoke to the Nigerian susceptibility to the daily supernatural. Useful to market traders and political musclers alike, not to mention the woman on the street with her stall in the local market, the Bakassi rapidly extended their influence and welcome, until by early in the present century they were familiar role players in the security business of South Eastern Nigeria; their reach including Ughelli and surrounding Delta State.23 Thanks to them, and in the absence of effective crime-fighting police in Ughelli, the Bakassi boys have imposed order of a sort on this small city I write from, which in recent years has been ripped apart by armed gangs of the sort referred to above in connection with road building. (The current state of Bakassi influence, as well as of armed gang threats, is as volatile as Wall Street, so that the present remarks are generic rather than pinned to a precise moment.)

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And how have the Bakassi imposed order, and have they thereby advanced the goals of a well-functioning society? The answer is going to depend more than most on where you are coming from. As crime fighters in the Ughelli area the Bakassi appear to have sustained their reputation for “cleaning up the joint”, and they have done so with the blend of mysticism, brutality, and non-accountability which has from the start accompanied their policing activities. In a recent raid in the Ughelli area, the boys—all this is second-hand from my friends, in a culture where one does not talk that much about the “boys”—caught forty-five armed robbers, putting them to the test to determine guilt. The test? If a truthdetermining machete, placed across the chest of the suspect, turned blood red, the individual was guilty; and though only the Bakassi themselves can identify this color change, their evidence prevails. (This is where their spiritual powers penetrate all that is hidden.) Promptly, the account goes, the Bakassi draped old rubber tires around forty-five armed robber necks, and set fire to the lot. What is not second-hand is this: this morning, in front of our guest house, I saw the Bakassi hog-truss a “thief”, toss him into the back of their beat-up van, and drive off with him. My wife, matter-of-factly: “They’re going to kill him.”

11. A Society in the Making The Enlightenment project? Have we seen some of that light in these pictures of life up close in Ughelli? Of course we have. The Setraco Project—which at the writing of the present keystrokes has been once again abandoned thanks to fresh attacks from “daredevil militants”, then put back into action again—springs from the impulse to honor “man on his own”, Ernst Bloch’s banner exhortation.24 Someday, we have to be thinking, the Afisiere Road rats’ nest will be swept free—it has been, as of this moment in 2013—and will once again release pent-up carbon-toting vehicles into their passage to….nowhere? And there are other forms of Enlightenment around! We have seen children at school, local government workers at work, jurists meeting to discuss the laws of Delta State, and though we had to “see through” all these actions into what they might be if more effectively carried through, we were nonetheless seeing the outlines of a genuine society. We were moving into our time—and that without mentioning such upgrades as the (today) ubiquitous cell phones and stateof-the art televisions. All of which is not to say, that the author is without reservations a “friend of the light”. I have confessed my allegiance to kinds of darkness—from narcissism to juju, my long history of attraction to pre-Christian cults, my uncooperative aesthetic turn—but I have been

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glad to see others in their more temperate efforts than mine, making a skill out of life. There was something here to fix in Ughelli, and ultimately not even a partial retrograde like me was going to make any difference to the fixing process. In the following four essays we will open out the implications of living in Ughelli, with special attention to the seamless social whole formed by the actions of living Ughellians. In tracking that seamlessness, we will find the Ughellian community practicing survival skills which are not to be inventoried by incremental moves toward Enlightenment. A whole mode of Enlightenment will be taking amorphous shape in the background, and we will be seeing bits and pieces of it as we go.

Notes 1

Elizabeth Isichei, A History of Nigeria (London: Longman, 1983), p. 438. The hangings of Saro-Wiwa and of eight other Ogoni leaders on charges of inciting murder brought international condemnation onto the government of Sani Abacha. Nigeria was immediately expelled from the Commonwealth of Nations. 3 For a wide spread of essays on Urhobo culture and history, see Peter Ekeh, ed., History of the Urhobo People of Niger Delta (Buffalo: Urhobo Historical Society, 2007.) 4 This seems the place to introduce two complementary poems by the Urhobo poet, Tanure Ojaide. The first poem depicts the ravages of oilfield degradation in Urhoboland, as they are in your face just a few kilometers from Ughelli. The second poem belongs here as a reminder of the still-pure waters of the Ethiope River at Abraka, not more than a hundred kilometers north of Ughelli, still in Delta State but relatively removed from the Niger Delta Oil Exploitation area. 2

XIV At Eruemukowharien† designated Ughelli 1 bold on oilfield charts but never on road maps stealing past police guards beside flow stations with a phone camera wriggling through bush onto a metal platform I took close shots of two gas flares that have been burning for fifty years and for sure will go on for centuries if the earth’s not exhausted.

Ughelli: The Enlightenment Project Beside the twin infernos a wilted cassava farm that cannot feed a child and blackened earth denying plants and creatures life with the heat hell promises those committing mortal sins in a silenced community begging for sentry work from its tenants now lords of the land. †

Eruemukowharien: a small town close to Ughelli in Nigeria’s Delta State. The Ethiope at Abraka (2008) For the good luck of staying north of the Delta, For the fate of no oil wells expected in the area The Ethiope saunters gracefully toward the Atlantic, With the same agility of youth as of timeless age The same clarity the water displays from source Through serene forests to the ocean’s open arms That forty years ago I knew as a student at Obiromba And on midterm break swum the eyes red at Abraka. The mirroring white sand still dazzles, The virginal smell of centuries still persists As the deceptive depth of the river That sheets of white sand still cover. As I stroll along the riverside at the beach That Gordon’s hotel creates for recreation, I collect white stones of diverse shapes Dredged deep from the water’s bosom; I take away in a bottle wet sand pumped Through metal pipes to widen the beach That nobody has touched before And remains pure from inattention.

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Part One Truly, there are exceptions to the poaching Oil lords’ reach and greed in the land. Truly, there are limits to the business Of concession-selling by a state And the exceptions gladden the heart For so long tormented by despoliation. (Both poems published by permission of the author.)

For the corrosive effect of oil extraction and gas flaring on the inhabitants of the Delta, cf. the discussion in David Ogula, Jonathan Rose, and Francesca Abii, “A Phenomenological Study of Corporate Social Responsibility in The Niger Delta, Nigeria,” Journal of Leadership Studies, 6(2), 32–47. The environmental degradation of Delta State as a whole—the obliteration of the mahogany and rubber forests, the elimination of arable agricultural land, the poor maintenance of facilities processing electricity and water—are symptoms of the reckless misuse of the land in the Niger Delta. The corrosive effect on attitudes and lives is made vivid in “Perceptions and Attitudes towards Gas Flaring in the Niger Delta, Nigeria”—see collateral reading—by Edino, Nsofor, and Bombom. They conclude their survey with a citation from a former resident of Ughelli: “I left my town, Ughelli, because oil spills destroyed my farmland. I am now here in Ubeji, and the heat and toxins from gas flares are ‘cooking’ me up.” Cf. also the study by Uyigue and Agho, Coping with Climate Change and Environmental Degradation in the Niger Delta of Southern Nigeria (Benin City: Community Research and Development Center, 2007). That essay opens fresh purviews onto the Niger Delta outreach inland, and its effect on the residents of Ughelli. Flooding, rising water levels, destruction of vegetation, pollution of rivers; all these malign offshoots of Niger Delta oil exploitation are tangible through to the interior of Delta State. 5 Setraco Ltd., a construction company founded by two young Nigerians in 1977, now undertakes numerous road and bridge construction jobs throughout Nigeria. The Warri-Kanama stretch, of which we speak here, is being carried out under contract to the Federal Government. This professional project is the kind of evidence we have to value, that the Nigerian government can carry through on projects without pocketing all the money on the way to the job. 6 Niger Delta Militancy road-building opposition continues in September 2012, when the East-West Federal Highway under discussion has been violently blocked in Rivers State; militants there demand full government compliance with the recent amnesty agreements designed to bring an end to the oil-issue conflict. 7 See a report by the respected Vanguard newspaper (available at http://nm. onlinenigeria.com/templates/?a=4591) on a major Shell oil spill that occurred on August 15, 2005, which decimated the farmlands of fourteen communities in ULGA South. As usual the damage was followed by disputes about who was at fault. Shell maintained that the blame lay with “local youths” who had tampered with the flow pipes in an effort to siphon off oil, while the indigenes insisted that

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poor Shell maintenance—and a broader attitude of indifference to the local communities—was at the root of the problem. 8 A loan from the World Bank (duration: 2008–2016) lies behind many of the ambitious projects of President Goodluck Jonathan, to facilitate travel and transport and to reduce accidents on Nigeria’s highways. 9 We encounter here the paradox of diversity. We make a shibboleth of diversity in the United States, though it is not a simple bonus for the society. Nigeria is torn apart by too much diversity. May a quondam classicist remind himself that the Greeks of the classical period had no use for diversity, yet mounted around their insularity one of the world’s “universal cultures”? 10 Cf. Stephen Ogongo Ongong’a, “500 Nigerian Victims of Forced Prostitution Killed in Italy,” Africa News, January 1, 2011 (available at http://www.africanews.eu/component/content/article/37-africans-in-italy/1560-500-nigerian-victimsof-forced-prostitution-killed-in-italy.html) for a chilling report on the current state of prostitution in Nigeria. 11 Lawless Nigeria is a nation saturated with laws. It has a rich written Federal Constitution, replete with borrowings from Anglo-Saxon legal tradition. Thus each of the thirty-six states which make up the federal nation lives in the framework of its own full set of State Laws, which cover every contingency of legal happenstance from the perspective of that State’s traditions and customs. 12 The French historian Jean Braudel opened the present issue, in his 1958 essay “Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue durée,” Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 13(4), 725–53. In thus announcing the perspective of what was to be called the Annales School, he directed attention to centuries-long enduring themes in human history, like the idea of the crusade, which long outlasted the events called the Crusades. Jean Vansina—see collateral reading—extends the techniques of both archeology and linguistic history to exploring gradual multi-secular developments among ethnic groups in the Eastern Congo. 13 In The Idea of Progress (1920), J. B. Bury synthesized the history of the belief that mankind is on the whole developing and improving his adaptation to life on earth. One thread in this argument is that technical know-how gradually breeds more of itself, so that, without divine governance, the human condition has the capacity for continual improvement. Heirs of the Industrial Revolution, British readers of Bury on the whole welcomed his perceptions. 14 Cf. reference in Introduction, endnote 3. 15 The author called a childhood friend, Prof. Ross Bell of the University of Vermont, on December 10, 2012, to check on a childhood memory. (The two grade-schoolers grew up cheek-by-jowl in Urbana, Illinois, in the “paradise years” of the thirties in the Midwest.) Ross recalls the author’s phone call, at age ten or eleven, suggesting the two of them should take a trip to East Africa, like Stanley and Livingstone. Life-long preoccupations declare themselves early in the game. 16 Emic and etic are sociology/anthropology terms designating two possible mindsets toward descriptions of behavior. The etic account is that of a neutral observer, commenting on cultural behaviors; the emic account is that of a person within a culture, describing behavior meaningful to him/her.

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In Chapter 2 of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon discussed the various luxuries to which upper-class Romans became accustomed as the influx of goods from the Asiatic Provinces increased, in the third and fourth centuries A.D. Luxurious funerals were among the costliest extravagances. This author has abundant anecdotal evidence that such (in nuts-and-bolts terms) excessive expenditure dominates the Ughellian’s budgetary planning. 18 Frederic Will, “Mount Athos,” Yale Review, XLVIII, 1958, 82–97. 19 Cf. Ekeh, note 3 above. 20 Emmanuel Uduaghan, “Rule of Law is Glue That Binds Society, Government Together,” speech given at the Transcorp Hilton Hotel, Abuja, Nigeria, April 2, 2009 (text available at http://www.deltastate.com.ng/Speeches/20101027206/ Delta-State-Speeches/rule-of-law-is-glue-that-binds-society-government-together. html) 21 Cf. Blundo and de Sardan (collateral reading) on the complexity of bribery and corruption in everyday West African practice. 22 English Common Law, which was under formulation already in the twelfth century, and is on display in the Magna Carta, is a compilation of cases decided by Judges on the basis of their own common sense, and with reference to precedent. This kind of incrementally built legal construct provided a ready-to-hand model for the just-colonized African worlds, which were seeking governing principles congenial to their own traditions. 23 For a thorough background and critique of the Bakassi—calling for their abolition—cf. Human Rights Watch, The Bakassi Boys: The Legitimization of Murder and Torture (2002). 24 Ernst Bloch, Man on His Own (1971). This polymath German Marxist thinks his way through Orphic mysteries and Christian millennialism to a powerful view of man as the creator of his secular social destiny.

PART TWO: THE SOCIETAL WEAVE

ESSAY ONE WORKING THROUGH: UGHELLI, 2012

…none of these individuals (in Sierra Leone) lived in despair….it (their contentment) was because these individuals had a place in their local communities, despite their dreams of widening their horizons, and because their utopian fantasies, projected in folk tales and daydreams, were never so abstract as to encourage a cult of inwardness or eclipse practical reason.1

* Part One offered glimpses of Ughelli, with an eye to the Enlightenment project, the regressive in Ughelli which obstructs the Enlightenment, and the prospects for the future of that community. The following four essays interweave with that introduction, refer back to it often while narrowing the book’s focus to certain existential categories of “living in Ughelli”. These four essays try to capture four modalities of existence in this city: “Happiness” in Ughelli; the Ughellian’s sense of where he/she exists in temporality; the moral and ethical threats to which that Ughellian, fallen into the temporal, is prey; and finally the “multiple but edgy resources” available to the Ughellian—police, vigilantes, military; organized religion, witchcraft, juju; education (paideia)—as defenses against the fall, indeed against the general perils of the human condition. The defense issue— searches for ways to protect human reality and control—takes us back to the issue of “happiness”, with which we started, and which is a keystone of the Ughellian’s personal security-system. (“Happiness” is indeed more than that; think of the determined good nature of Enlightenment Englishmen like Shaftesbury or Horace Walpole, with their wellsprings of good humor and good sense.) In other words the intent of these four essays is to disengage, from all the intersecting horizons of the Ughellian experience, a structural understanding of “living in Ughelli”; an emic contribution, so to speak, to the understanding of the Ughellian condition from inside it. In attempting a survey of this seamless whole, we will coast alongside the theme of our introductory essay, with an eye to the whole liveability of the Ughellian’s

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world. If we can share some of the Ughellian’s reality with the wider world, beyond ourselves and Ughelli, the goal of this book will have been achieved. Worth repeating: we opened this book with the author’s introduction, in which he considers some of his Ughellian learning curves: his accumulating sense of the thought and belief worlds of others, of the way others construct a society, and of the way married love can play out when the ground rules for compromise are there. There is a lot at stake here for the author. These three themes bleed into the author’s involvement with his book, his desire to “reach out”, and will leave it understandable that he himself requests a hearing, in and among the scenarios occupying Essays One to Four. Testimony, research, and the author’s own imaginative creation want inclusion here as part of the book’s whole. There is fiction here, there is scholarship, and there is “personal experience”. Which leaves the present volume a text into which the author’s guest personality inflects the details of Ughellian life to be told here. The result is not going to be “scholarship” as an addition to the empire of knowing, the kind of additive learning promoted by academic research in the social sciences, but another kind of scholarship; the paying-it-forward of the given world in society’s working symbols as given body by an individual.

1. Goodman’s Vision My brother-in-law Goodman announced this morning, over a beer on our guest-house balcony, that he is a happy man in a happy culture. Why does Goodman think he is a happy man in a happy culture, especially in this culture usually—by outsiders anyway—considered miserable? Is Goodman a covert advocate of the argument of Charles Murray’s Losing Ground,2 that living with fewer commodities can be a positive source of satisfaction? Not really. Is he a religious absolutist, convinced that happiness lies in rejecting the goods of the world? Not exactly. He is neither a monastic nor a Quaker. He was, and seemingly still is, a lifeasserting citizen of time. But he has a theory of what makes for happiness.3 Goodman is a Registrar at a branch of the Delta State University in Asaba, a man with a B.A. in Anatomy and thus “one of us academics”, a guy with an eye on the Western Enlightenment perspective, let’s say a “Setraco man”, a man of science as well as administration, and yet…and yet…Let’s hear what he says when I ask him why he’s a “happy man in a happy culture”.

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For Goodman happiness is a byproduct of the Christic playbook. He narrates a life cycle. It starts with the consecrated inception of life, baptism and the sacralization of biological birth. Circumcision, naming, blessing are awarded their days and times, until the young presence exists swaddled in the sacred. I, your author, have seen five children spill from my loins, and two direct from a wife’s vulva, and worked the experience without much master imagery. Goodman is the father of two young boys, and ploughs into this bloody vaginal conversation with readiness...and an orienting framework. Confirmation follows—do I envy his narrative?—with rituals designed to promote value growth inside whatever Church, inside whatever spiritual growth home. This Delta South (and Goodman with it) sweats lifetime Christian commitment—Goodman is a Methodist—collective in sentiment and fervent in group prayer, song, and dance; for Goodman you cannot begin too young to fortify the youngster’s repertoire of adages, prayers, and general dispositions assigned to a lifelong adulation of Christ. My own children responded ab und zu to my fitful efforts at faith enforcement, which to this day can scent of the uncertain and feverish quality of my belief. Roman Catholic, yes, but working through anxiously at every bend of the knee. Moral upbringing is for Goodman the next stage in the iter vitae. (I open another beer, Goodman joins me.) Goodman, and every Urhobo friend who will share with me, is firmly devoted to the notion of respect for elders and, though in a frequently dysfunctional society, of respect for self; this quest for respect becomes a model for the parent leading the child through the teen years. No, of course I don’t think that Ughellian moral upbringing is uniformly stressed or successful. After all, I said the society is dysfunctional. That moral perspective is an horizon of interpretation, and I can see that is the thrust of Goodman’s discourse; the moral life is a map, protended, pre-enacted in language. The actual fact, without question, is that poverty, overlarge and uncared-for families, and a consequent related decline in “morals” are fiercely present factors of the sub-Saharan scene, and not far to look for in, for instance, the seven thriving whore-quarters of Ughelli. No, Goodman is not exactly speaking from the power of his environment, but rather from the power of his intentions. Nor do I dump on my own efforts, which have hovered over five children who in their ways do honor to their culture. But I am going for a general portraiture of the happiness map Goodman projects. His narrative might, after all, extend to me some new accounts of the happiness we all seek. I am trying to get inside his narrative. Family-building will be the large central effort of life-making, on Goodman’s map. This action is the individual’s preparation for subsequent generations, whose anticipated

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presence to life’s advancing but never-changing drama will be part of the joy of making those generations possible. The family-making plot of a Goodman story will play itself out today in today’s socio-economic terms—perhaps two or three kids, instead of the seven or eight or, in polygamous families, even twenty, even forty of the past—but those are only plot details, not affecting the normative family plan, to which Goodman attributes supreme importance. Education itself, the key driver in this whole system, will be ever in attention throughout the course of life, as though the acquisition of learning was a way of finding, inside yourself, passages through the life cycle. To be sure, the notion of education can be sadly abused here; commercial priority continues to dominate the enterprise of education, subduing every effort toward humane classical education, but at the heart of all this ambitious fumbling is an ancient African respect for the education that brings you closer to the knowable world, that supports traditional life-loving practices, and that has at its root not just the colonial masters’ inheritance, but traditional sagesse, with its medical/empirical components, which lay at the functioning center of the archaic African family. Goodman performs these arc-shaping ideas before me with a directness and self-awareness I cannot imagine hearing from any of my American academic colleagues, not even from our crew of Burkean wannabees—Bill Buckley, Alisdair MacIntyre, Norman Kristol, the editors of the National Review.4 And let’s give Goodman credit for imagining, as the crown of the cyclical process he describes for the parents, eventual respite from labors, an aging which basks in the support both of one’s children, whose lives you have built to shape, and of the vast network of in-laws, who support you to the end. What have I shored, finally, against the declining of my body? I have no tribe. I bristle when my juniors jump to assist me, but soon I’ll be begging them to do so. I’m rudderless. I’d love to be loved! And Goodman—now he takes another beer, shifts the gleaming Heineken label along the coastline of the sun—is leading us to what? Finally—he goes on—to old age and the inevitable decline into the dignity and respect you have earned, as you go—whether or not you are Christian—to your home in glory or to ancestors who await you, and whose order you have upheld; all just as your ancestors themselves have experienced it, timeless and circular.

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2. Augustine Goodman is a sport, coherent, quietly but daringly in control of the language of living holistically. He knows the tenor of the Western Enlightenment but supplements it forcefully with a transcendent faith. My cohort of Ughellian friends only rarely finds a reason, in their presence to me, to become the site of such self-definition as Augustine’s. I and they are simply swimming side by side up the river of time, only occasionally brushing. But then life is always chary of relationships in which there is major disclosure. It is harmattan season (February) and Augustine (Part I, section 4) arrives at the house about five in the afternoon, shaking off the chilly/dusty wind behind him. He has come from Warri to Ughelli to examine a few of his properties, to work at some of the business deals he has his post-retirement hands in—buying and selling lorries to be used in the hauling of sharp sand; overseeing a few small cassava plots that are being farmed for him, caring for his fish farm—and to pick me up. I have been back in town for little more than a week, and have so far had only a brief view of this increasingly close acquaintance, who over the years of my visits has helped me to feel close to the dynamic of “living in Ughelli”. We are going to visit the widow of our mutual friend William, an excursion characterized earlier (Part I, section 7). Augustine, five-foot-ten and chunky, is in his mid-sixties, walks with a brisk step, a curl of smile tucked into his eyes/cheeks/mouth, and has a way of sitting in a large soft living room chair that fills the room with his comfort. This afternoon, though we are pre-empted by the visit to a widow, we are full of the pleasure of being together. Goodman had given me the same sense of personal sharing, in a younger and less complex way. Different ages, different emphases. As I talk with Augustine in the living room, then on the drive across town, I understand better why I am at ease; like Goodman, Augustine thinks and talks to a purpose, and is even with me. In material ways Augustine is “far ahead” of me; housing, vehicles, disposable income, Augustine has them. If anything it is I who am a parasite on him, edgily looking to know him better and to find out what he can tell me about “living in Ughelli”. And that issue of material possessions, which has solved itself for Augustine and me, is only the outermost hindrance to mature relationships here in Ughelli. A coagulation of cultural myths, the American dream, the third- or developing-world myths, the “colonial master” thing; all these fragments of popular un-thought gather unbidden

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to impede a true black-white relationship here as elsewhere in formerly colonized Africa. Augustine’s transcendence of these myth-traps, in his development as an independent, will in part derive from his career-long engagement with white business culture, industrial practice, and lifestyle in the expat setting of Shell Administration. His qualifications for entry into that Shell world had already announced his unusual cultural self-confidence and flexibility. His path of progress has been steady. Passing from mechanic apprenticeship through technical certificate through exhaustive stages of vetting and competition into the entry-level training of an international business consortium (Shell), he was to become the only member of his original training group to reach management level, with several hundred employees under him. In other words Augustine proved himself, ab ovo, capable of competing at the highest level inside the white man’s world. And from there he was putting into practice the sense of how to do the West in which nestled his special version of “acting and thinking to a purpose.”5 I am writing about Augustine as though I understood him as I do myself, and this is not true. To understand yourself is to work with yourself so carefully, and over a period of so much time, that you know both what you can expect of yourself, in any circumstance, and the implicit ground rules for self-change. Can I understand myself, in this sense? I can maneuver a useable account of myself that will coordinate with my acts—can I do that for another person? Can I understand Augustine from where I am, outside him? No, but I have positional equipment that facilitates my attempt to understand him. I can join him in dialogue and, in testing his responses against my life-world, I can lay out an inner interpretation of this other person. I can slowly let him help me to know myself as knowing him.6 All that said, I believe I understand Augustine as a presence for whom finding value, sequence, and directional prompts equates to a selfrefreshing journey through meaning. I found the same pattern in Goodman, who gave me a theology of meaning tout fait. As I track what seems to me happiness, among my Ughelli acquaintances, I fixate to the issue of meaning in lived life. I suspect Augustine would formulate his meaning world in terms of the penitential sermon he thundered out at Christ Apostolic one day in my presence, while Goodman could translate his transcendent rite world into everyday kitchen-sink value and purpose. But both of these men will give off the “come, travel with me” aura limited to those who find and seek meaning. That aura is Augustine’s version of having confidence in the world, an adroit mastery of joie de

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vivre and fatalism, and a concern with figuring his way through the system. As he did in Iowa! Augustine’s visit to Iowa, which occurred in the summer of 2011, marked the first appearance (except for that of my wife, seventeen years before that) of an Ughellian in the small town in Iowa which is home to the author. The visit was a marker for Augustine, who has traveled a lot for a true-born Ughellian/Warrian, but always in the line of business training, under the aegis of Shell. (From the outset of his career, forty years before, Augustine was the trainee to watch at Shell. He was sent to Holland for classes, branching off for a visit to the United States and Britain, and from that point onward, in the mid-eighties, he was a regular Shell-assigned visitor to Western Europe.) Can anything have been more remarkable to Augustine than Iowa? The vignettes are the drama here: a tour of the Amanas and of the Amish country of Kalona; shopping in an upscale kitchen boutique in Cedar Rapids; a tour of the University of Iowa campus. To all of these to me familiar—but not really familiar, for on this visit I saw everything freshly—places Augustine and I traveled, observing and inspecting and asking questions. I will not forget Augustine walking with me around the Kalona Sales Barn during the monthly horse auction. I will not forget because the kind of presence Augustine brought to the new, there, was for me Ughellian happiness in practice. He watched, parsed, concealed, processed. What I am able to say, of his quality of attention, is what he was enabling me to say about myself; in knowing another person we transcend ourselves and take chances with ourselves as objects of our own knowing. Augustine took on easily what to him, as to me, was out of the ordinary: we are standing in the drizzle outside an arena full of horses, auctioneers, and prospective buyers. (This is a monthly auction, bringing to it Americans of every stripe—yuppie horse buyers, local crackheads eager to assess the market, Amish farmers—twenty-five of their buggies and horses are lined up against the harness rail.) Augustine surveys the auction, as do I, and as we are leaving, dusty and tired, he goes up to an Amish gentleman who is just leaving his parked buggy. “Can I take a picture?” asks Augustine. The bearded skinny guy, overalls, stovepipe hat, hops nimbly out of the buggy, starts walking away, and gently responds, “take all the pictures you want of the horse.” Augustine’s amusement is just the size of mine, surveying the dry line drawn between cultures. (It is often in such moments, when culture A and culture B share a glimpse of culture C, that cultures A and B collude with each other. The wink is enabled.)

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It is the same level noting of the culturally different which made of Augustine—for the midwestern narrator of this experience—a site across which to exchange. At the Amish settlement of Middle Amana we wandered with other visitors through a century-and-a-half-old house, home to a productive tinsmith, and to the living memorabilia (five generations) that lined these rooms. In the basement work room, which was filled with dilapidated kitsch, artifacts, and old drug store paraphernalia, we came on a Mennonite version of an Irish snug, a windowless, airless basement room lined with shelves of “old Muenchen” type beer steins, and tintypes of the major capitals of Europe a century ago. Musty, archaic, but thick with the memory of gemuetlich drinking apart from the ladies, this curiosity carried me back through parts of my own background—as a six-year-old helping my Dad bottle homemade brew during Prohibition—which I told Augustine about, and which he appeared to understand. But did he understand? And did I understand what he understood? Am I stupidly arrogating to myself an understanding of the other, which little justifies? I think not, and in part for the reason implicit in the way I think I take position in being—as do you and you. I start from the premise that I was here before I thought of myself as being here, and that not only does every account I can give of myself find itself foresaid, but the foresaying ground, that I work from, is the same ground that Augustine—or Soraya in Qatar or Ted in Manchester—works from, the ground of human intelligibility.

3. Lucy The third profile in happiness is Lucy, a now unmarried lady in her late fifties, who has been living in Ughelli in recent decades, thus returning to the place of her parents’ birth after an extended period in Port Harcourt. We meet her at a point of settling in and down. Lucy’s subtle thin face and narrow body fill their space to perfection. Hers is a life in the middle, a woman of her own culture’s middle class, a teacher and market woman off and on throughout her life—as indeed are many “middle class” Delta women—and an urbane, in her way, using an unusual knife of sarcasm and even satire to cut her way through some of life’s challenges, like her own divorce—which put her at odds with her culture, and which stemmed in part from Lucy’s loss of a child during her only marriage, now decades in the past. We sit across from each other at a rectangular table in the guest house dining room, heavy sky parting to admit a single finger of sun which plays across the magenta cloth between us.

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Lucy has just participated in the traditional marriage ceremony of my step-daughter, which has meant some days of working with us on preparations—cooking, sweeping, outfit preparing. Lucy has another three-day preparation stint ahead of her later in the week. That stint will take her, as is often the case with mid-life women in this community, back to church—Pentecostal now—around which many of her daily activities— charities, meetings, women’s groups—revolve. The church is the activity and worship center which provides shelter and peace—in a society constantly exposed to exaggerated noise, outbreaks of crime, and to those difficulties of transportation, employment, and physical health which mark off the sub-Saharan woman’s life from that of my middle-class lady neighbors in Mount Vernon. The happiness undergirding Lucy’s life is the conviction that “all will be well”, which doesn’t dry out her frank report of her difficulties. Her father, back in her childhood in Calabar, sold Bertola, the imported gin of choice, and Lucy made her way into teaching, for seven years. There followed an early marriage, which lasted twenty-five years, and the abovementioned divorce. Her current economy is shabby genteel: no vehicle, no discretionary pocket, no travel. The happiness? It’s in the wit with which she details her life, in the secular energy she brings to her trans-secular belief that “all will be well”, and in the community of believers with whom she shares the conviction that Ughelli can be saved as is. No longer active in the market—she makes the minimum necessary naira by sewing at home, or by collecting small rents on a house she owns—she lives simply and frugally, battling, as she does it, the constant inflation which holds her to the fundamentals of life— a flat diet of the cassava product garri (eba), fruits (pineapple and oranges), and soups/stews made of okra, say, or chopped vegetables with native spices, and, if lucky, a sliver of smoked dried carp—sustaining but unvaried. The happiness is also in the growth of perspective, that aging in meaning brings to focus, and in this she joins Augustine and Goodman, also mellowed by time which defines our limits, while at the same time (at best) helping us to manage our skills. For Lucy, Ughelli is by and large still a good place to live, though she is at the same time nostalgic for the days when doors could be left unlocked, neighbors trusted one another, and suspicion and fear were less oppressive. (Of my many Ughelli friends Lucy is the rare laudator temporis acti, for the Ughellian is typically too headlong to indulge in nostalgia.) It is in line, with that trace of nostalgia in Lucy, that she fancies for herself a visio pacis for her last years: she wants to create a fish pond on her property, to fence it in, and off of that now-popular local industry to

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create a kind of Horatian retreat, rus in urbe, from which she can also make the expected profit. (In an update of this conversation on April 22, 2013, Lucy reports stoically that she has had to abandon the fishpond idea, for security is lax in her area of Ughelli, and thieves regularly net up and empty the fishponds of the area, unless those ponds are guarded throughout the night.) For Lucy, as for Goodman and Augustine, “working through” is ordered happiness in action, whether in thinking through (or doing) the stages of the life cycle (like Goodman), in living carefully through the sequential perceptions of human encounter (like Augustine), or in beingthere to the velleities of destiny (as Lucy is). Happiness, as we view it here, is in and is a process, not an epiphany, and carries its own rewards and responsibilities. The basis of such happiness is self-discipline, consistency, and time on the ground. The lack of these virtues, on a civic level, will have undermined the efforts at Enlightenment among some of the figures who flitted through our introductory snapshots. What are religious excess, hostile regionalism, or indifference to environment, if not assaults against self-control and self-discipline?

4. Persons and History I have started with three working-through Ughellians—Goodman, Augustine, Lucy—Ughellians between their early forties (Goodman) and their mid-sixties (Augustine), which is to say, in “historical terms”, psyches wired between 1960 and 1980, a period of serious change in Nigerian culture, of change, let it be said, so tempestuous that for different reasons—poor living conditions, promise of opportunity—it drove out large waves of the Nigerian diaspora now found in Britain and the United States. Augustine was born more than ten years before the by then (1960) bloodless separation of Nigeria from Britain, its colonial master.7 The date is significant for Augustine’s working career, as a little perspective will indicate. Already in 1907 the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company had joined the British Shell Company; by the 1950s the merged company, Royal Dutch Shell, had begun oil exploration in Africa, from the Mediterranean littoral to the coasts of Nigeria, and down to South Africa. By 1958 Royal Dutch Shell had begun oil production in the Niger Delta, and it was in that connection that Augustine found his way into the workforce; born in 1946, he had spent the second decade of his life acquiring a Technical School certificate, thus was at a ripe moment in his work life at the time when Shell first began interviewing indigene recruits. Augustine’s skills recommended him to this parsimonious company, and

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ultimately (after endless trial periods, as we have noted earlier) elevated him to management level, after having discarded all the other competitors in his cohort. Augustine’s birth date was propitious for the career into which he earned his brilliant way. While for Augustine the Shell moment was an expansive life builder, for Lucy, born in 1952, six years after Augustine, the way of the woman market earner—in a society marked by severe patriarchy—was straight and narrow. From early on she was occupied with teaching, and taking the profits home to the family. Then, as we have seen, came marriage and two children stillborn, and divorce, which carries a stigma with it in Urhobo society. (Remarriage, not Lucy’s path, can go some way toward removing that stigma; while by now the general taboo on divorce is yielding to globalizing trends in Nigerian culture.) These cultural scars have left on Lucy a beguiling patina of lived sadness; a commonplace working-through of the happy, the sadness of which the reverse is the desire for a gentle resolution, rus in urbe. Goodman was born in 1970, the youngest of our group. He finds himself at the beginning of a potentially promising academic career, though well past his youth and subject to the always unpredictable breakdowns, strikes and confusions of the Nigerian academic world. He is in-process on every front—as a conscientious householder, a responsible University bureaucrat, and as a human living the processual life he supports. The “temporal parameters” joining Augustine, Lucy and Goodman range from 1946 to 1970, years leading up to and into the new postcolonial Nigeria. These were transitional years, in which a new state was in the creation, in which the control of government was passing to the indigenous of the land, and the shape of the government was being tailored to fit the three major ethnic groups—Igbo, Yoruba, and Hausa—who are the central ingredients of what was projected to be a single nation. (Nationhood was not to be an easy concept in post-colonial Africa, and is in serious question in today’s Nigeria, where the alliance among the three major ethnic groups—and particularly along a North-South axis, which puts the Hausas off in a world of their own—is threatened by competing commercial interests, religious turf wars, and the absence of any sense of a common national good.) Between 1960 and 1970 fairly good and bad governments followed each other in rapid succession, Western exploitation continuing in only slightly covert form; the ills of sectarian and tribal greed, and of endemic corruption, were starting to take their toll on even the hardiest patriot of the new country. Private working-through happinesses make their ways through textbook political crises, but of

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course not without paying their penny of tribute, to the grinding setting in which they have been embedded.

5. Chief We have driven out to Ikrigbetor on a steamy early afternoon in late January. I breathe a little more freely as the dusty stalls with identical retail imports—all lamps here, next door all shoes, next door all rice— recede along the roadside, giving way to trash piles, vacant lots with patches of spindly cassava plants, finally to a kilometer or so of foundations for new construction, the promise Ughelli makes to itself to grow toward the villages of Agbara and Orogun to the north. We come to the small community of Ikrigbetor, Ughelli’s farthest outreach to the north, and there find a narrow turn in to a broad clear space at the end of which sits Chief’s ochre-colored storey house, a grandeur for the neighborhood. Chief’s driver meets us at the door. I step into the long, darkened parlor and embrace one of my senior in-laws, a retired accountant, petrol-station owner, and man of the world. The room is darkish, few windows to the exterior, and the rubycolored plush furniture drinks what light there is. A Star beer, “very cold”, foams before my chair, and Chief, seventy-five, sits stark in profile near me, his thin wrinkled face all nerves and analysis, his clothing work-a-day chief, a diaper-pattern wrapper folded up tight around the belly, a buttondown shirt, a narrow single strand of coral beads—the professional touch. I am thinking we are about to “have an interview”, and in the way I have customarily done, since I was a teenager preparing remarks for a prospective girlfriend, I am mouthing inwardly what I will ask: “The colonial world, how did you experience it…?” or, because that sounds like me trying to imitate me, “how old are you? When did you meet your first oyibo? What was your reaction?” None of these brouillons d’angst matter. Chief blurts: Fred, I love you. I love you too, I reply. What did I say, Fred? (This in a voice of thunder.) He looks at me hypobleden, as Homer had it, a hapax that comes down to “sideways”, “at an angle”. Wry, bemused, artful. You said, “I love you”. Hummph. Harrumph. Fingers on lips, serious silence. Secret. I have eleven children. All of them graduates. Am I blessed?

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You are blessed. (He will demand I repeat this assurance, each time more playfully highlighting himself, adroitly creating a bibulous atmosphere in which I am made a white guest hero.) Several additional changes play over the question of whether he is blessed, always returning to the truism that he is blessed. I could stop my dialogue here. I am no master of this form. Furthermore, from here on, for a couple of hours, the interchange will be exactly like this. He drinks ogogoro, or “roots”, from a glass bottle grimed with the pungent force of native herbs reeking of 30–60 percent ethanol alcohol, steam-distilled from the exudate of the raffia palm, and both a recreational and a ritual commonplace in West Africa, where addresses to the ancestors are regularly accompanied with a ground-ward hurled dash of the liquor. I was toppling into the afternoon heat, as the game dialogue pursued itself, when one of Chief’s tenants was seen passing in the middle distance of the compound, and Chief roared at Solomon, his placid and amusable driver, to get the hell out there, bring Moses in to talk! Moses, who looks like a thirty-year-old Paul Robeson, or a Sudanese Marlon Brando, good-naturedly takes his place on the other side of Chief, drawing the oga’s attention away from me, and setting up a new round of rhetorical questions. Chief demands of Moses to be reminded of what he, Chief, has just pronounced about his blessedness, then, when Moses delays, or loses attention, Chief flays him with a verbal attack, cries that Moses is “trying to challenge him”, rises to his feet—fierier with each additional shot of ogogoro—mock-boxes, then turns on a heel, shows a brilliant row of pearl teeth, and giggles to deflate the drama. Moses “deals with it”, the afternoon shuffles away, and in a sparring interchange, during which Chief and I compete with one another in our capacities to make the other repeat what we have said, I unsheath the cell phone, ring my wife, and finish the last bubbles of my long-nursed beer. It is 4:30, Chief is musty, sharp-witted, and fake confrontational, and the game would seem to be over for the day. And so, I am thinking, has transpired an interview in which two or three living humans literally drank one another’s blood! How wrong I was! As his niece, my wife, enters, Chief leaps to his feet again, sucks us both up into his tempest, and shuffles out the front door with us to his 1990 Toyota; his driver, Solomon, takes the wheel, and we start through Ughelli on our way to Olomu, family heartland for my wife and the clan, the home of my wife’s father, Chief’s cousin. By now I am pretty familiar with the Oviri Olomu road, which leads out of Ughelli past the Police Station, Government College, the General Hospital, and onto the shaded

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country road, studded here and there with coconut palms, villages just offroad, and a few pretenses at mansions, vast structures either half-built and molding to death, or complete—the money child of some regal politician or state governor—and left in desuetude by a life of indiscipline or the harsh twists of political fate. An old friend of mine, Paul (Part I, section 7), lives in a pink storey house, ten miles from Ughelli, and I know we turn left there, and with a wave I salute Paul’s poultry barns, and the memory of florid debate over whether a small child can stop the rain. Then, with Chief blurting out directions, Solomon doing seventy over potholes, and villages whizzing by, we find ourselves pulling up to the gated private palace of the Ohworode of Olomu, whom I had met years before, when my father-inlaw had taken me to “visit his friend the king”. This is a setting of joy, one might say, for the King is a local leader of great charm—formerly a beer wholesaler, now a king, elected by his clan motherland in Olomu, and for several decades regent of this post. Chief coughs, mutters, beams as he leads us into the royal sitting room. What followed, my wife explained later, was the happier for having been part of ritual. I am in fact talking about a kind of traditional-world working-through which we all know, which brother-in-law Goodman outlined clearly, and which is in the Ughelli culture I know frequently masked, because this culture relies far more even than ours on the societal value of cared-for sublimation. “Ughellian happiness” takes place at the service of carefully planned workings-through. The expected unrolls in the royal sitting room. The King enters, we all rise, kola nuts are shared, and we salute the monarch’s long life—adjuve, adjuve, adjuve, wosunto—as a practice of drawing us all together under a single prayer. My wife and I and Solomon then sit back, sip the Palace Special, while Chief, whose high chair is in the front adjacent to the King’s throne, enters into conversation with the monarch. It is not until two days later that my wife tells me what the afternoon talk was about. At that point, I acquire a sense of what the whole day of hedonic play-acting with Chief had been about, and gain a purchase on what this essay is about, the kinds of working-through happiness it stumbles on. Chief’s father had formerly owned the land on which the Ohworode’s palace is built. But Chief’s father had moved from that land because there were too many witches and wizards in the area, and the area of Ikrigbetor, where we met Chief at home, is clean of that kind of pollution. Chief wanted this afternoon to establish that point with the Ohworode, who evidently was neither troubled nor surprised by the point; deeply ensconced in Anglicanism, he was himself immune to the anxiety and

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contagions Chief was characterizing. Why then did Chief want to establish this point? (I proceed as though I knew; my wife has helped me to establish a theory which is plausible.) The King had recently visited Chief in the storey house at which this vignette began, and had had his own point to make. Chief was an Olomu person, of an Olomu dad, and as such should have built his retirement home in the Olomu kingdom, which the Ohworode “controlled”, instead of on the Afisiere side of Ughelli, which was the area of Chief’s mother’s family. In the palace sitting room, that afternoon, Chief was responding to a charge made by the Ohworode. Ughellian happiness derives from working through life. Had this essay been “deeper” in intention than it is, and worked toward a “theory of personality”, it might have given itself time to dramatize happiness issues in the lives of all our portraits—Augustine, Lucy, Goodman—to the degree we are trying to go there with Chief. In the latter “going there”, which like all such “detective work” finds itself prying apart the fine tendrils of human motivation, we have yet another key strand to incorporate. I had heard an intimation of that motif, in the car driving toward Olomu. Chief had squeezed my hand and muttered that it was time for him to replace the majestic clunker we were riding in. The next morning, after our trip to the Ohworode, Chief was up at 5:00 a.m.— Solomon’s report—showered and was waiting for Solomon, and for a trip to the car dealer. Chief had his new old car that next morning. The pieces of the puzzle, of how Chief was seeking his bliss, were coming together. Here’s the overview of my discovery of Chief’s afternoon path to bliss—and the place that discovery occupies, in the happiness-discussion of this essay. When I got to Chief’s on Wednesday afternoon I found him in a dilemma of his own. He was already “working through” and building difficult achievement structures in his mind, at which I fumblingly guessed through his cloaking actions; mumbling, grunting, acting out with whispered “shush” warnings, issuing mock challenges—“are you challenging me, man?”—laying on his entourage brusque and dramatic plan changes, like the tempest of pressure he brought on me and my wife to head down with him to the Ohworode. Chief was heading for a needed “showdown”—or explanatory encounter—with the Ohworode, and somewhere, in the mixtures of that interior program, Chief was promising himself a fresh car for the next day. A psychodrama, which fully explained Chief’s “preoccupation” and difficulty in factoring in his visitor, was at play in one of those struggles between meaning and ease that constitute episodes of working-through happiness. Chief was in the midst of staging some transitory scenes of his own bliss.

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It would contradict whatever theory undergirds this account of Chief’s behavior to leave unmentioned that everything interpretive at stake here is an interpretation of this author as well. There is no room for observer innocence in accounts dependent on their very observer for becoming object portraits. And thus the author readily concedes vulnerability for this essay, which was written by others across his face. The vignette characters before the author, in their roles as working-through happiness, are themselves only byproducts of the author working through them toward his own happiness. This wrinkled face of mine, this throat that has drunk the verbal blood of the seven continents, thirsts for a position of rest in the photography of lives: a chief, a mid-life lady, an ambitious and thoughtful academic. There being no end to the sample called life, we settle for the home-made end.

6. Jacob Jacob represents the talented, unemployed graduate population, which, after completing university in Nigeria, has gone out for a year as a Youth Corper.8 Though he is one of a kind, he does in fact share a general profile with his unemployed age mates, who, like him, have been born into a version of the new global/tech world, and have eaten enough of the fruit of contemporaneity to be left desperately frustrated; they seem to be of little interest to their society. What makes Jacob more than a representative is his unusual quickness, his sensitivity to nuance among people and their generations, and his capacity to cope with his frustrations. It is this “aura”, its origins in the energy of self-awareness, that is his “happiness”. To say this is to anticipate that Jacob knows how to “workthrough”. Who is this tall, skinny, penetrating-glanced young man with coffee skin? Jacob was raised in Sapele, in the west of Urhoboland, a more diverse cultural region than Ughelli, and the seat of Ijaw and Itsekiri tribes as well as of Urhobo. His dad was already, at the time of his son’s birth in 1982, an employee of NEPA, the frequently derided Nigerian Electric Power Authority (Part I, section 1). In 1990 the family moved to Ughelli, where Jacob has since resided, except for four years at the University of Benin, where four years previously he completed his undergraduate work in Engineering; he has just now returned to that University, to work for a Master’s in Engineering. The lost years that test manhood—and in which working-through seems to be life’s very material—were 2007–2011, when

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Jacob was unemployed in Ughelli. He is feeling immensely better about life, if not about his prospects, now that he is “using his brain again”, but he is still looking at the tableau of a greedy tribalistic economy which minimizes him because it hands out favors along family or clan lines, and not on the basis of merit. It is this setting in which he found himself this winter, looking for remedies to despondency; managing, despite having to live with his Dad at age twenty-eight, to keep a serious love interest bubbling, and to spend every evening with his equally on-hold buddies at the cybercafé. Class tells, in this story of happiness. Jacob has retained his respect for the academic world, and for the regulatory power of thought. He is aware both of the support offered by family—a knowing dad who, despite generational disagreements, is willing to discuss anything with him—and the indifference of the State or “civil society” to his personal quest. The byproduct of this double awareness (in his case) is a strong sense of purpose. He maintains it against the example of a deteriorating youth culture around him—he estimates that 80 percent of his age mates, throughout Ughelli culture, are heavy users of cannabis, which is available everywhere, and are biding their time until fate puts a shovel in their hands or offers them a construction bit-part to play. (Ughelli is a self-help economic culture, with limited industry—as we saw in the Introduction [Part I, section 1]; construction, which may lead to contacts and contracts, and may even lead into the lower ranges of politics, is the all-purpose term for almost any ground-upward way into the job market.) That shovel may, in certain circumstances, become a shovelful of gold.9 Above all these temporary recourses, Jacob swallows pride, lives with Dad—though restively—and continues to read. (His voracity for the written word throws him into relief, let it be said, against the palette of individuals the experience of Ughelli provides. The written word takes training, time, and care to create and consume, and while it gains new foothold here every day, in law, business, and government, the oral [cell phone] or especially the written shorthand [texting] reigns even more crushingly here than in the U.S. The cost in thought and clarity is apparent.) Jacob also continues to mature, which is at best not easy in that time-slot between twenty-four and thirty. I indulge a careful curiosity in his mind-work during these years. I ask a question: are you in love? The answer I get is where I want to go, into the affective life. He is of course in love—for how else can an identity-seeker pursue the all-essential self-definition?—but with love come those tell-tale affections in which hitherto unformulable thoughts restore themselves. Life becomes a rinsing working-through. Thus Jacob finds without trouble the answer to another

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query: what think you of the folklore of your elders, the juju, the flights through the night planet, the dread of falling victim to the evil eye, or to that region of animistic darknesses that covers the continent with its thrilling anti-functionality? (Part I, section 1) I am leading the guy carefully, I believe, toward an expression of generational conflict which will buoy my prejudgment that the new Nigeria has fallen into the cheaply modern, like the new America—in which, of course, the expected trendiness is taking more than a few regressive paths toward the old America, of religious severities, of self-protection and of isolationism. But Jacob does me the favor of disappointing me. He does a ninety degree turn into my rectilinear thinking, and recounts a recent episode in which he has been called up short in his new world confidence. His girlfriend asks him if he would like to make the acquaintance of a spirit-person (obanji) woman who has befriended her. Jacob agrees, is introduced to the spirit person, and comes under the power of a belle dame sans merci who comes over him in bed that very night, crushing him until he cries and screams for release—though in the morning his roommate says there has been no commotion at all, business as usual. After that night, Jacob reviews his view of the folkloric tradition, and is still reviewing it. Generational conflict is often not quite what it seems, in Ughelli.10

7. Alice Only Alice, of the Ughellian workers-through I sample, rivals my brother-in-law Goodman in globality of view point. Goodman launched us on a down-to-earth theology of rite and hope; Alice, as a lifelong and ardent Anglican, also clings to the traditional anchors of sanity. Where Goodman (or Lucy) joins Julian of Norwich—“all will be well”—Alice too proclaims ultimate truths. Unlike Julian and Goodman, however, Alice sees only evil around her, sees hope as an extrusion from the scabs of broken life. And in this perception she revels. Alice is a large, commanding, fiery woman just past the lip of sixty, energy brimming from her like a natural force. She is wife number one in a polygamous marriage, and sits securely atop the pile of five—whom she scorns appropriately, from the redoubt of her tiny crowded bed-sitter at one end of the row of apartment flats reserved for the wives of Mr. X. That is, that setting was Alice’s initial marital home, and she still banks it, but like all Urhobo women Alice is steadily building both a life and a house of her own. (Nigerian married women are from the day of marriage intent on repairing the damages done to them by patriarchy.) For her career life Alice worked as a records clerk in ULGA North (Part I, section 1), while

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at the same time she maintained a small Mom-and-Pop store in a downtown Ughelli cubbyhole. To get away from the house, to undertake a personal enterprise, to breathe independent air: these traits are co-natural to Urhobo women, and as market traders or small shop owners, in particular, they find their liberation. The Alice I meet these days, both in her new and enlarged shop, and in our guest-house parlor, is a strong person finding more of herself all the time. By now she has multiple financial tentacles out into the community, is constantly engaged in the prayer and fasting life of her church, and has come into mastery of her personal grasp of life. What could make her happier than retailing with gusto the turns and shocks of her world become narrative? How happy she is to report on the corruption and defilement of her beloved Ughelli! The dark shadow of nature is in Alice simply the other side of ordinary language. Conversation with her? She carries it on with herself, telling you into it, and as she sits for lunch with me, eating and drinking bulkily, she too speaks of ritualists and night planet travels, and of the facility with which all that takes place in the material world has already transpired in the spirit world. The shallow ingenuity that has brought me to this African shore battens on these Alice accounts, and on the ways in which her geography of the eerie bolsters her gusto for life. She speaks to my wife of a policeman ritualist who lives in her neighborhood. My wife goes on eating. I choke inside. Ritualists? The guys who sell body parts? —He has a passion for children, always eyeing them for sales! Seems he has a busy market not far from here. —Children? I mumble. —They make the best sales. Policemen have all kinds of access to unprotected populations. This man is known for his good products. My wife doesn’t help me out because she is both hearing, with the third ear that covers both my culture and her culture, and not hearing but being her culture inside; for long ago she made her peace with the shadow zones that were the color of her very childhood, while I was born square into the privileging of “high science”, the radical interface of American pragmatism with the in my early time—forties, fifties—burgeoning expertise of particle physics, exploratory new logics, and the first glimmers of social engineering, with its address to the “reason” in society. —How do his neighbors feel about him? Are they uneasy? —What can they do? They keep their children out of the way. Anyway the real talk is about his wife. No one has seen her for days. Things haven’t been going well between them.

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My wife, who knows the family in question, asks of the cop’s new wife, and makes a connection; a younger woman, of course, taken on as a second wife, but in fact, my wife suspects, taken on as a cover, so that the first wife, one of the disappeared, will not be missed. Alice confirms. The first wife had been dropping out of the picture, and was clearly on her way to being “replaced”, as Alice puts it. This had happened before, both with an earlier wife of the policeman, and with one of his children, disappeared. I cough politely, trying out some sub-vocalic resource for saying more than I can say. I get no returning sign from the two ladies to reassure me. I am in the dark, reading the dark. Alice does these things to me. And with that spirited gusto that says this is my dark and joyous world, and only God can play a significant role in it, so let it roll baby! In a subsequent conversation, Alice has been recounting, with fond detail, the bus accident into which she has recently been thrown, along one of the disastrously potholed roads between Ughelli and Benin. (Setraco Enlightenment is needed throughout the nation!). She sat calmly in her seat, waiting for the smashed front door of the bus to be pried open; desperate fellow passengers clambered over her shoulders in a panic to break and slither through the shard-smothered glass windows of the bus. (Alice has told this story in my presence once before, but this time, without changing a syllable of text, she heightens the drama with voice inflections that would make Sarah Bernhardt weep. Another friend, Elizabeth, though less supple with her English, exceeds even Alice’s capacity to wring the modulated drama out of a narration—say, a few weeks ago, in the account of a kidnapping attempt that failed, on a downtown Warri thoroughfare, an account so rich in delay tactics that the hearer was wet with intensity by the time the narration rounded up.) Savage the narrated event, yet I anticipate the moment of framing, which will characterize the blessings bestowed on Alice “that day”. The physical world, she insists, is a mirror of what has already been preordained in the spirit world. Nothing is to be feared, for the Primum Mobile has creation in His hand. The exquisite with which she supports this contention wraps up the reassuring of the whole tale. In the spirit world the masters are able to adjust the position of the planets, to make the sun stand still, or move backwards, so that—as in Homer where night and day cross going their separate ways—the day, under a sun moved from late afternoon back to noonday, can be sufficiently lengthened to allow the rescuers time to arrive at the bus’s side, to leave the getaway car visible not far from the scene where it was abandoned, and, finally, to let the bus attackers, who .

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were bent on kidnapping the passengers, get caught—all within the space of one miraculous day. Alice, as I have said, is full of joy. When she narrates you listen, and feel in the firm hand of her mythology. The interface between scripture and the darkness exists as a seamless whole in her.

Notes 1 Michael Jackson, Life within Limits: Well-Being in a World of Want (2011), 184– 185. 2 Charles Murray, Losing Ground (New York, 1984). 3 Happiness Studies! Aristotle’s analysis of eudaimonia is a launching pad for any inquiry into the nature of happiness:

Verbally there is a very general agreement; for both the general run of men and people of superior refinement say that it is eudaimonia, and identify living well and faring well with being happy; but with regard to what eudaimonia is they differ, and the many do not give the same account as the wise. For the former think it is some plain and obvious thing like pleasure, wealth or honour. (Nicomachean Ethics, 1095a 17.) From this base Western culture would tussle with the meaning of happiness which goes beyond “plain and obvious things”. The topic is ever-fresh: cf. Daniel Gilbert’s recent Stumbling on Happiness (2007), which leans to a view of happiness as being in sync with your life purpose, thus as a kind of action. My brother-in-law Goodman maps out a kind of happiness in action, quite different from a hedonistic view of happiness, a martini on the beach at St. Kitts. Goodman coincides, in this project, with Karl Rahner in The Christian Commitment (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963). On pp. 148–154 Rahner encapsulates a view of the spiritual life stages which resembles the traditional African perspective, though by omitting the ancestors he endstops the circular process of life at Heaven’s Gate. It might finally be added, as a caution against any happy-face implications to follow in this essay, that evidence for widespread depression in developing countries is amply supported. Cf., for example, Vikram Patel, Melanie Abas, Jeremy Broadhead, Charles Todd and Anthony Reeler, “Depression in Developing Countries: Lessons from Zimbabwe,” British Medical Journal, 322(7284), 482–484. There is by now an extensive literature on the demography and sociology of happiness. Cf. Carol Graham, Happiness around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires (2009) for surveys of happiness in different parts of the world, and its correlation to variables like health, age, and economic situation. (Note: Ms. Graham writes of “many poor countries, like Nigeria, reporting extremely high happiness levels, and many wealthy ones, like Japan, having relatively low levels…” p. 48, or of countries “with extremely poor health standards, such as Guatemala, Honduras, Nigeria, and Pakistan [which] have relatively high average happiness scores,” p. 123). Cf. by the same author,

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The Pursuit of Happiness: An Economy of Well-Being (2011). This book raises method questions about how happiness can be measured, and what governments can do to include happiness indices in their national planning. (This is the practice in Bhutan, for instance, where the population is regularly canvassed to determine their happiness level. Gross National Happiness quotients are considered guides to managerial practice in Bhutan.) For extensive treatment of the study of happiness issues, cf. The Journal of Happiness Studies. 4 The National Review, whose editors were conscious of the influence of Edmund Burke, and of his powerful writings against the French Revolution—Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)—has taken contemporary inspiration from Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (1953)—and has established itself as the standard bearer of intellectual Conservatism in America today. 5 Yes, sure, the author hears the Western perspective regnant in these passages, in which the “native” and the “colonial master” are still contraposed. How can we bleach a language for which history has readied a vast array of clichés? 6 Cf., within the immense literature on interpersonal understanding—which psychologists, philosophers, and religious thinkers have studied since the dawn of thought—the present author’s “Anticipation,” Dalhousie Review, 6(Summer 2008), 169–78. That analysis amplifies the hints of the present book on the nature of interpersonal “understanding”. 7 It seems relevant to mention that the colonization of Nigeria was violent for decades, before the British finally gave up their role in the Scramble for Africa. On this bitter violence, read Toyin Falola, Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria (Bloomington: Indiana University, 2009). The harshness of the Nigerian experience, during periods of subjugation to the West, plays out in the “stoic” attitudes characterized in the first two essays of this book. 8 In 1973 Nigeria instituted the National Youth Corps program, under which all University Graduates are sent for one year to serve—often in a teaching capacity— in a community and region of the country far from their home base. The intention: to promote interaction and understanding among citizens of different parts of the nation. 9 The role of the contractor, as the author has observed in Ughelli, is multiple—as in the States: in Ughelli he takes on a construction project, gathers a team of workers, sees to the preparation of the building materials, and in the course of arrangement networks, assigning sub-jobs to this and that person in whose influence he has an interest. In the case of jobs of some size, this kind of temporary positional power can be turned to lucrative and sometimes politically effective advantage. 10 One of the author’s relatives, a man of storytelling genius, years ago floored yours truly with an obanji tale. A young woman, in a village on a river not far from Ughelli, was betrothed to a handsome young man who, as it later turned out, was already married, under the water of the river, to a beautiful obanji. After some efforts at maintaining a regular and reliable relationship with her mate, the earthly spouse gave up in despair at the periodic absences of her husband, who was regularly called back into the waters to be with his true bride, the obanji. The earthly marriage collapsed.

ESSAY TWO STANDING INTO TIME: THE CASE OF UGHELLI

With most African societies, it is possible to discern three distinct chronological periods in their oral history. There is first a remote early epoch when the world was “created” and the particular society was “formed”. This is followed by an intervening middle period in which the society coalesced, interacted with other communities, and perhaps experienced migrations, conflicts, or famines. The most recent period extends back two or three generations, into the time just before the living experience of the community’s oldest surviving members.1

1. Moods and History Happiness (working-through) is existing on the level of your time; and there is a lot of such happiness in Ughelli, for all the wretchedness of the place. The paradox underlying such happiness—happiness in poverty—is by now (as we saw in Essay One, footnote three) of widespread social interest, and will remain central in this second essay. For all that, however, happiness or unhappiness, modes of personal being, are far from the essence of being a person. (I cannot know what you are by knowing whether or not you are happy. I can just know how your being is temporarily inflected.) These modes of being morph constantly into contrary moods, which like happiness are themselves transitory; happiness itself does not “last that long”, nor does unhappiness—“even Niobe ate”. Let’s then reflect on a condition which is deeper in us than our happiness (or unhappiness). Presence within history, for instance, while arguably not yet what one is, is a deeper and more stable condition of self-situating than happiness (or unhappiness), and one which bears the same genetic markers as one’s happiness. Take the example of a young child’s first occupations of its historicity. How deepeningly self-reflexive in us is that first step toward presentation of self to self, the inner temporal sequence that joins the infant smile in us, at six months, to our first traces of functional memory,

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at two years! What a condition of being occupied by temporality! What an epic odyssey the young person endures during this period. How much deeper that history is than either our particular mood in the childhood moment or the history of our moods! Our inner history provides a foundation off of which our moods glance lightly, are epiphenomena. And this is to pull an example from private time, the inner time in which we experience ourselves, and are ourselves concretely experienced. What about objective history, the inner temporal process seen “from the outside”, from the textbook timeline? If we thought we were deeply embedded in the infant’s historical odyssey, how does that embeddedness appear when “seen from the outside”? How deeply embedded are we in that time, the time during which we project out as objects to ourselves, and are recorded, as we might be in a registry of births and deaths? The time, say, in which we present ourselves when we write an old-fashioned autobiography? “F went there first, then changed to another school, then established himself in business….then…”? Or in which our parents might speak of us as having failed or succeeded in this or that? What does the Ughellian experience of him/herself in that kind of temporal objectification, which can range from the self-discovery of looking in the mirror at oneself objectified to the moment’s shock of self-awareness when (like the protagonist of The Red Badge of Courage) he discovers he is a “coward”, and locates himself on a previously unfamiliar map made by others? What does the Ughellian experience of himself as personal/ family/clan history? Are the Ughellian’s moods traceable to his external historical condition? Does the Ughellian’s personal happiness relate to his/her self-concept within his/her own history, or within “objective history”? To his/her conception of the objective history of the tribe, as it might be formalized by an historian? Does his “happiness” touch any deep registers of his historical “being here”?

2. History Layered Inside Moods When we think of what we would be doing, when we make statements to others that include grounds for the conclusion we are happy, we have to suppose that we are “coming from somewhere” into those statements. (Are we ever happy “for no reason”?) That somewhere could be a big kiss from the girlfriend, a just-nibbled chocolate éclair, or praise from our Vater professor. The event in question may have been hours or years in the past, but it will inevitably be available for recall, at a moment when we are located at a need or relevance for it. We might say there is a “history” to the statement we make in proclaiming our happiness, though we may not

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be conscious of this history as we enact it. As working usage, to take our conceptual playing field from happiness to its precursor conditions, we may speak of the history of a condition like happiness in general as an historical layering/texturing within that happiness, in terms of which happiness or sadness or any other modal condition “enriches” or “complexifies” itself from within. History is always there when happiness wants to figure out what it is. Though history may be out there, it is always “within”, too. In fact the history that is “out there” is not easy to relate to the history we are within.

3. Our Temporality Inside us, we find history without ground, receding continually at the pressure of the conditions that are its symptoms.2 This is lived history, a deepening that can be caricatured in spatial terms, such as those to which we resort with notions like “layering” or “complexifying”. This is the stratum of the “where we are coming from” in exhibiting this or that behavior, and as lived this history establishes around it the sense of our temporality, which plays an important role in enabling us to characterize our entire presence to the world. Viewed “from the outside”, this temporality quantifies out into the spatial profile of temporal working, by inner complexity, or layering, and has no markers on it.

4. History and Self-Consciousness Where do my Ughellian friends themselves come from, both in their personal histories, themselves as their own memories, and in the largerframe objective history of their world, their world seen from the outside? Where does the large-scale “happiness” of those Ughellians have its roots? We can put this question in terms of what we would have to do to answer it. Would the answer to where my Ughellian friends’ happiness comes from make more sense after we had read a “good” History of Nigeria? After we had really “learned” the “objective history” of Nigeria? Or—to try out another kind of answer—after we had sat down for many hours with my friends Augustine or Lucy, and come to know their family trees, as well as their “needs, hopes, and traumas”? These two different paths, toward the archeology of Ughellian “happiness”, would involve two different and yet interrelated kinds of history. The Ughellian’s large-scale objective history, the history-book history, his history en grand, ultimately defines him and his moods, but itself exists only as the emergent experiences of individuals, who have taken themselves on as objects,

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spurred on at some point by the need to make themselves intelligible, to lay down markers which are at the same time the creation of a group memory.3 In reliving this incremental archaic marking process, by which memory is given a group object, the Ughellian of today would be entering a forward mobility which is part of living the past. Once established by our remote ancestors, universal history, transcending, enlightening, and then pervading the mists of the individual as private memory, will dominate the global human enterprise of self-knowledge straight through from Thucydides to Manetho and from Ssu-ma Ch’ien to Arnold Toynbee. There will be points, in this dual onflow of group with personal memory, this grounding for moods, when collective-objective memory reflects back onto itself, creating from its ashes a new kind of personal memory. Selfknowledge, feeding on itself, will generate the onward flow of cultural and individual history. In the West, with Vico, a new stage of historical awareness was eventually promoted: the study of history began to incorporate a reflexive enquiry into the whole drama of human consciousness. Self-conscious history was still a global history, but it introduced into the study of la grande histoire the grand historien, and that is in itself a dimension of layering. To bring our universal history project closer to where the Ughellian stands today, we may say that the express train toward our moment, ferrying the Ughellian with it, soaring over millennia-like periods of deep sleep, crawls at last into a seeming terminal, nationhood; and with it, in the last sixty years of central Africa—into a “nation” called Nigeria at the journalistic whim of one Lady Lugard4—and with that, in a recent past that includes self-reflective accounts like Crowder, A History of Nigeria (1968), or Isichei, A History of Nigeria (1983), the web of human consciousness parts to allow in a block concept, “The History of Nigeria”, and to enrich therewith educational curricula and scholarly file drawers until the “history of Nigeria” begins to appear as tangible as your mom’s shoulder.5 Every Nigerian now knows that there is a history of Nigeria, though some have much and others nothing to say about what “belongs inside that concept”. A backdrop is in the air which was non-existent one hundred fifty years earlier, pre-Lady Lugard, and that conceptual flag will wave over every conceptual Nigerian Embassy until the end of the awareness of the history of Nigeria. Objective history will wave through that flag. And whatever Nigerian happiness has to do with this express train of time will lay itself out with increasing flair. Private histories, needless to say, will germinate and empower themselves within the “objective frame”.

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5. Moods and the Historical Condition The landmass of conceptual pinpoints which constitutes the “history of Nigeria” may be thought of as the cushion of intelligibility, against which the individual Nigerian consciousness leans as it matures in its private history sense, living linkages unsuspected day by day, learning by chance from Aunty Egbidigbe that her uncle’s father, who had always seemed only a dusty tintype image of a bearded soldier, hardly visible on the picture rail in the sitting room, was by another account one of the mercenaries who had found himself in the north, fighting in the Usman dan Fodio outbreak in the early nineteenth century—which century notion may itself have been given useability by this memory formation. By small steps even in a pre-literate society—for conscious history and writing do not always walk hand-in-hand—the common picture of one’s highest available comprehension of history begins to appear through historical memory. How could behaviors like happiness (or unhappiness) not be simply a byproduct of living the complexifying texture of both private and “objective” history? Or of personal history as it unfolds from infancy on? Happiness will be a loveable and fleeting chance-visitor in the long outfolding of the individual’s historical condition.

6. Individual Mesh with History The meshes of personal history, the webwork of relational formations, in Africa elaborate and culturally powerful kinship relations, all this lifeshaping bolus of self-definitions and motivational harbors opens by vigorous conduits into the larger history of tribe, state, world, so that dependent on the culture, the level of information, and the individual’s mind, the local history of the self interpenetrates the history “above it”, and vice versa: in this interpenetration lie the raw materials of the temporally placed self, initially personal/private, subsequently objective, from which the modal self, happy, bruised, anticipatory, anxiously takes its place on the arena of public consciousness.

7. La Grande Histoire as Panoply If we speak grande histoire we will be thinking a virtual panoply, supported by us actors—am I not a co-actor with the Ughellian, and he/she with me?—in and out of which the sustainers of scholarly history infiltrate, stitching a thread here, a thread there? The cloth being constructed, over the Nigerian mentisphere, glistens with nodes—points of

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high interest to us as we try to construct a history for Nigeria. Is one end of the cloth pinned to the Pharaonic, an Egypt from which the current residents of Urhoboland may have departed as recently as 4,000 years ago? Is another peg fastened into the thought-sky at the point, in the fifteenth century A.D., where Portuguese settlers brought their trading nose, and their writing, to the exposure of West Africa? Is the closest-tohome peg attached to the mind’s ground at the point when the modern state of Nigeria was declared, in 1960? And where is the peg of slavery attached? And where the struggles of the Ughellians with Nana and his Itsekiri flock in the nineteenth century? And where the fine-tuned transition from slave exports to the home-grown palm oil industry in the nineteenth century? Of so many connection points consists the outline of a national history! Not to mention the personal history of every one of the Nigerians who make up this history. Not to mention the inside of the envelope, Augustine and Lucy as they are lived by the mere being-here I share with them. This imagistic talk is an absurdity, of course, and for a reason; the panoply of grande histoire, and ultimately of that universal history which Bossuet6 saw descending from God, is a panoply in the mind, like the empyrean of ideas through which philosophy moves. The structure of la grande histoire is forever supported by us, its intimate constructors, in fact is dependent on that personal odyssey by which you and I were moved from the crawlspaces of the crib to the condition of the two-year-old working to construct a sentence, and by nothing else, yet we are not thereby obliged to discount this structure as a figment. The history of the world, as a construct, is real, operative, and takes effect on the ground, in our daily lives, even though that history is a construct. The history of Nigeria is such an effectual construct in each individual’s living through of Nigeria itself, minute by minute; in that individual’s living outward into happiness/unhappiness.

8. Crossovers and Gerontocracy At some points, of course, every Ughellian today lives directly off of his culture’s grande histoire. The life of the little guy on the street is a tissue of states of affairs, potentials, roadblocks, desperations, which his/her objective history has for centuries been hewing out of the block of cosmic temporality. (As a bynote there are indeed people of virtually Methusalen age, in Ughelli and surroundings, of whom we might speak, in regard to their country’s grande histoire, as like those demi-gods of classical antiquity, who lived in both the world and the overworld. The

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village of Orogun, ten miles from Ughelli, is a gerontocracy, divided into five kingdoms, each of which is ruled by the eldest man [okpako erere] of his village: the supreme King of the village is one hundred and fifty years old while the village is peppered with centenarians, with ages ranging from one hundred to one hundred and thirty. With little reflection we can calculate the timescale on which these figures intersect with their national, and before that their tribal, history.) Such crossover points,7 between personal timescale and la grande histoire, are living relics embedded in the daily texture of Ughellian life. The personal/historical, within the grande overarching histoire, will in these crossover figures have reached such complexifying conditions that seasoned mood will bubble forth from the human specimen. They are proofs, in the fashion Herder would have loved, of the continuity between the mythical and the empirical; that presence of the transcendent, in the working-through of the daily, which Johann Gottfried von Herder highlights in his Journal meiner Reise im Jahre 1768.8

9. Haphazard Modern Nigeria The casual flinging-together of diverse ethnic groups was a British gamble at the inception of the colonial era, and was based on a limited knowledge of African local history and culture. The landmass that the British colonial power thus oversaw was in effect already divided into the more than two hundred ethnic groups then and currently of significance in Nigeria—with different languages, customs, and often different religious values. (Not all the colonial dispensations which followed the Congress of Berlin in 1878,9 and which saw French, Germans, British, Portuguese, Spanish take their shares, were as haphazardly instigated as was the British in Nigeria, but many found the challenge of imposing statehood insuperable; after all, the nation-state itself was still a novelty in late nineteenth-century Europe, where to that date Italy itself was still not a nation, and Germany barely one—stitched together as it was by the exertions of Prussia and Bismarck.) It was hardly to be imagined that the Nigeria of the time would coalesce into organic social/political units. It is not to be wondered that the first half-century of attempted Nigerian nation-building, 1960 forward, though heralded by some good intentions, an outstanding early President, Murtala Muhamed (1976), and underpinned by a maturely written, if derivatively Western, Constitution, was shortly to fracture into rival and greedy political units. Many traits of the Ughellians’ historical heritage were being forged at that time.10 The Ughellian on the streets today, hustling and scamming, or persisting and

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struggling with an eye on some small prize—a later-in-life house, a used car; or perhaps far less, a new thatched roof, a septic tank, eventually a Georges wrapper for Mom’s funeral ceremony—hanging in there, with an onset of malaria a half-dozen times a year and with no recourse except a dubious over-the-counter pharmaceutical from India—such an Ughellian on the street is at every turn working the furrows carved in time for him by an inexperienced polity, caught in the throes of what we can call contemporary tribalism, barely tapping the larger purviews of Nigeria’s grande histoire; and persisting, through it all, to display the kind of gritty happiness we put on stage in Essay One.

10. Urhoboland: Slavery, History, Happiness So much for points where the individual Ughellian’s lived history intersects the recent grande histoire of his/her nation, or let’s say an amalgam version of that grande histoire which is itself simply a speculative overpinning for the brute one-thing-at-a-time evidence of life on the ground. And that is only to chatter as though the individual Ughellian belonged with privileged directness to the recent chronologies of his/her historical world. The Ughellian should not be dismissed as though he/she (or you/me) is incapable of experiencing the cosmic. Since our kind has had nine million years on the planet, and, pressed back toward the Big Bang in the infinite morphs that brought the organic out of fervent chemistry, who knows how many billion more—perhaps thirteen billion?—to account for, it is vanity to choose a cut-off point at which any of us became individual figures enacting a particular history pinned to the sky. The Big Bang, which set in motion the genetic diffusion which in a few hundred thousand years produced atoms,11 and ultimately blends of hydrogen and lithium in organism-productive forms, is the preface to the advent of the homo sapiens for whom Charles Darwin initially, and correctly, postulated an African origin. (In our haste to talk away the thirteen billion years that constitute this preface to the planetary whole, we need poetry to consolidate our cosmic sociology. How can we imagine a conflict between poetry and such sociology, given that the great visions of the whole require the poetic compendiousness of a Lucretius or Dante?) How can we imagine making sense of infinite quantity without the voice of the epic to do the naming? We must think that what a human is was being answered in carbon and galactic winds and firestorms long before platforms for personhood were even a dream carved in the face of mountains.12

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The history of the grand empty spaces of time13 writes itself off against the following millennia in which West Africa reinforced at every point the pre-modern stasis we associate with a cohort of essentially nonwriting peoples, for whom the transmitted oral is the living social contract.14 We speak of a period, the first millennium of our era in West Africa, in which Great Empires are being formed—the Soninke Empire in Ghana (750–1200), the Malian Empire founded by Sundiata (1200–1500), tapping the power of trans-Saharan salt/gold trade—but in which the continuous life of West African culture pulses at a low transformation rate, while in Europe—to pick a benchmark—Roman culture is fragmenting slowly into culture pockets, like Anglo-Saxon Christianity or the Carolingian court, in which the formative of the culture we live today, in the West, is already discernible. It is also a period during which, in the forests of West Africa, immemorial stasis has its way, and survival practices, embedded in animism, in the magical placating of hostile nature through ritual cycles, repeat an endless ballet between mankind and nature, which the shapes of great empires barely inflect.15 The homo sapiens that was to fissure into the innumerable homines of place, and that has been increasingly timed/placed by the science of mitochondrial DNA,16 had first appeared by 200,000 B.C. in southern Africa, and in the next 100,000 years began to spread out through the Horn of Africa into Eurasia. It is in the course of these movements that Black Africans found themselves making one kind of migration south from Egypt, taking their Niger Congo language tools with them, and around 4,000 years ago, it is speculated, making homes for themselves in the western part of their leaf-shaped continent. The thematics destined to bring African humanity “forward”, from the first Portuguese interventions in the fifteenth century A.D., slither roughly toward Benin, one of the first assurable touch-down points of the Urhobo people, as they make their way to present-day Urhobo land—Delta State today—and to the Ughellians, eventually sprawling out among twenty polities in an inland corner between the Niger and the Benue Rivers.17 From the viewpoint of this essay, which concerns not only happiness but the range of historical expressions experience can assume in the individual or tribe, the specific eventum, what gets into the book of the grande histoire, is not uniquely formative for the people: the death of Caesar may be no more foundational for Roman history than a concurrent change in the law of inheritance,18 which though bred in the Roman law courts has vast implications for the balance of power between aristocracy and plebs. Without doubt, to be sure, there are decades facing the Urhobo people in which major events—slavery, inter-tribal palm oil conflicts,

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adjustments to colonialism, inclusion in the corporate body of a new nation, of which the Urhobo was a tiny fraction—would force Urhobos to inspect themselves and be what they saw. The growth of the Atlantic Slave trade dated from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and from its origins among Portuguese adventurers spread to the commercially more powerful slave industries in Britain, France, and Holland, all of which nations were naval powers eager to expand their influence and fill their coffers, and under no guiding principle more elevated than the servicing of that slave/sugarcane/cotton British processing, with an eye on the return to that Africa where an abundance of fresh slaves was available, and cheaply made milltown goods from Britain could be sold to (for a while) credulous chieftains at a royal price.19 Ironic enough that the growth of the Industrial Revolution in England, which was in many ways a boon to the urban proletariat there, should have turned angry teeth against those least protected of creatures, the little guys entering the world chained in the belly of a fetid trader. While my Urhobo friends in Ughelli deny the (to them) living presence of slavery, within their working memories and daily pursuits, it is hard to doubt that the traces of this violent dislocation of peoples, which cut right through the Urhobo tribe, did not leave everywhere a formative scar. Born out of carbon in the vast wind of the galaxy, torn within migrations by enemy hostility and lack of food, the Urhobos were to discover the hard way the iron hand of the West. One doesn’t have to withdraw distantly into the Urhobo imagination to find slave events that could have transpired in the lifetime of Urhobos still living today. Just up the road from Ughelli, to pick one among many kinds of event that no one present to it would have forgotten: Slaves were also sacrificed to religious deities, at funerals and on other occasions; these practices too promoted social control. At Uhuru, for example, a slave was usually killed in deference to the supernatural protector of the salt lake and marked the opening of the salt season; while in the Niger Delta a slave could be offered to such river spirits as Duminea. The taking of titles, especially ozo titles (the highest chieftain titles among the Urhobo), required the death of slaves too. The 400 title-holders at Asaba (50 kilometers from Ughelli) in 1881, for example, had each sacrificed a slave on assuming their titles; two more slaves were to be killed at the funerals of each of these men. At Calabar the number of funeral victims was much larger; hundreds of slaves were killed at several important funerals in the nineteenth century. In most places, however, one or two deaths was usually sufficient.20

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Throughout the eighteenth and up to the early twentieth century, both abduction slavery, which conveyed human animals through the Middle Passage, and domestic slavery were daily elements of life in Urhoboland, not to speak of Nigeria as a whole, where the expansion of slavery into every household and village remade the Nigerian cultural landscape of the time.21 Little consolation though there is in it, the white man investigating the slavery topic with his load of historical backpains soon learns that the African on the ground was to the max complicit with the white slave industry, in victimizing the weak, the poor, or the criminal for economic purposes. The very tribal nature of the slave trade in Urhoboland, plus the inland location of the Urhobos, contributed to the unique quality of slavery among these people: much of their enslaving was done among themselves, one clan misappropriating the residents of another: The fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries probably constituted the period when the various Urhobo clans were settling down in their respective localities. This would also have been the period when most clans began to spread outwards from their headquarters, as groups moved away from settlements where increasing population had begun to give rise to comparative scarcity of land, to more unoccupied areas.22

It was in this outward spreading process that the Urhobo clans took one another into slavery. The slave trade, to be sure, roared much more loudly along the coast, and especially around Bonny, Calabar, and Yorubaland than it did among the Urhobos, and yet, as our above citation makes clear, there was plenty of bloody slave suffering not far from Ughelli—up to a period not more than a century ago. The decisive development, in transforming Urhoboland slave experience, was the introduction of the palm oil trade in the later nineteenth century, and with it the engagement of slavery in the local processes of the palm oil industry. The internecine battles and trade conflicts between Urhobos and their more internationally exposed coastal neighbors, such as the Ijaws and Itsekiri, led to greater commercial sophistication among the Urhobos, and, by the early twentieth century, long after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, the Urhobos had become part of a growing webwork of West African and trans-oceanic commercial transactions; the Urhobo input, as for many years into the twentieth century, resting particularly on products like rubber, mahogany, cotton, cocoa, and cane products. If we were to leave the story here, say at the time of WWI, we would have had a package of backgroundings for whatever constitutes the current “happiness” or “unhappiness” of the Urhobo: wanderings—both cosmic

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and in the vast Niger-Congo migration from Egypt, refuge then flight from Benin, gradual clan spread-out into the current landlocked intra-riverine area, endurance and at the same time manipulation of the slave era, gradual reworking of the economy in the direction of palm oil, which was desperately needed in Britain for maintenance of the new machineries of the Industrial Revolution, and entrance, with the twentieth century, into the system of West African, and to some degree Western, economies. And at that point we would have had to add in colonialism, which gave the British Commonwealth stamp to the Western appetite for African natural wealth. The result of our decision to rest, in this portmanteau analysis of the current Ughellian character, would have been comforting; we might have drawn some parallels among the endurances of the Urhobo people, their acquired patience and devotion to the good of the moment, their commercial savvy, and the broadly equable nature we find on the streets of Ughelli.

11. Oil The story sketched so far, in which we try finding intersections between la grande histoire of “Nigeria” and the figures who live it, is almost at term….almost. Momentous changes were however immediately ahead, the advent of oil exploration and industry, and, embedded in that turn of events, the Biafran War (1967–1970) which meshed with the issues of the oil boom. After these events the Nigerians as a whole, and among them the Ughellians, were never to be the same again. As we have observed, in Essay One, section four, the British and Dutch discovered oil in the Niger Delta—not far by the crow’s flight from Ughelli itself—in the late 1950s. For some time this globally precious product—which was soon to tap into the expanding international market for automobile and industrial machine fuel—was harvested exclusively by Western Companies (Shell, Agip, Chevron) which were at work both in the Delta and offshore in the Bight of Benin. However, the profits accruing from oil production rapidly gained attention from the new Nigerian government, which was in its convulsive just-independent phase; the oil boom of the 1970s coincided with the explosion of official corruption in the first presidency of Olosun Obasanjo (1976–79). The Nigerians began at this point to lay claim to much of the profits from the oil industry, and to enter into contractual agreements with the oil companies, for revenue sharing. As this house drama intensified, and the vast monies brought in from the oilfields trickled into the pockets of 1 percent of the Nigerian

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population, the little guys, Ughellians among them, began to see themselves bypassed by federal and global geopolitics. They began to see clearly that they lived in a nation cut off from its agricultural capacity, deriving over 70 percent of its revenues from oil, hostage to a growingly proficient (foreign) industry diversifying to new oil fields and offshore positions, and dividing the oil pie with the Nigerian government. It was not entirely coincidental that the Biafran War occurred at this point, thriving as it did on oil control jealousies as well as on inter-tribal hostilities; that war spoke to the Igbos, who had vast resources in their own territories, of the possibility of independence. (The war in question coincided very nearly with the American Vietnam War, which was equally divisive, brutal, and greedy.) The long story of oil, in which we all sit globally today, and which seems to cast its shadow across Nigeria, is the story of corruption, devastation of the agricultural self-sufficiency which used to buoy Nigeria before the introduction of imported foods, and of mismanagement so systemic that the Nigerian people gain little profit from their wealth of natural resources, and reap human and environmental degradation in order to fill corrupt pockets. If any shadow darkens the mind of the “happy” Ughellian it will be the pervasive corruption of the nation since oil became its master. No Delta teenager will fail to know the degeneration of the social fabric, in the dog-eat-dog struggle for the oil wealth laid like filthy golden eggs on the Nigerian landscape. The Nigerian beneficiaries of the monies coming in from oil made killings; in 2001, with 159 oil fields and the number growing, with an extraction of 2.2 million barrels per day, 83 percent of the revenue of the Nigerian Federal Government came from oil; while, to cite an up-to-date assessment, Nigeria’s national oil revenues amounted to $90 billion in 2011, and $32 billion in the January–April period of 2012.23 What did not remain in the hands of the leaders of state was parceled out to the State Governors, who have proven to be largely indifferent to their public responsibilities as guardians of such public funds. Many governors have been prosecuted, most recently the notorious former Governor of Delta State, James Ibori, whose name says it all for any sentient Ughellian, and to whom we will return in the following essay.

12. Ur-Happiness We started with happiness, then took a loop through the cosmic history of Ughelli and the Urhobos, touching down here and there at points where what their history had unfolded seemed pertinent to the way they,

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the Ughellians, are today; “happy”, simplistic as the term may be, “hopeful”, as though a better future forever beckoned, “stoic”, when that better future seemed reluctant to show, and “life-loving”, at least in the sense that life-sacrifice for a religious goal seems to them idiocy. The question begged throughout was this: did the history of these people, right back to the Big Bang, correlate either grossly or with fine tuning to the nature of the people coming through our guest house door; to Augustine, Lucy, Jacob, Chief, Alice or Goodman? Behind that begged question lurked the jackpot question: is the happiness of humanity in general reflective of the details of the human experience? Do we live our whole prehistory?24 Can some of us live it more than others?

13. We Are What We Were So far we have settled for a broad equation, that the stubborn happiness of the Ughellian relates to the seasoning, tempering, toughening process of the historic, even into the prehistoric. Is this a useful point as is, or would it need more tuning to be more than a rhetorical exercise? Tuning is needed—and yet the backgrounding in migration, enslavement, commercial conflict, new-nation and oil-extraction blues—arguably all and each of these shapings of event play their role in forming the contemporary Ughellian mood set—and the fact that we cannot correlate x event with y consequence, that we are left with poetic/historical causal thinking in the fashion of a Herder, is not to be held against the broad validity of the argument. An historical genetic works its way through the Ughellian tradition; a genetic whose gene-sequence is the time-flood of Ughellian history.

14. Home, Sweet Home I have turned my lens onto a culture far from my native, and thought thereby to make more accessible to me the relation between “what I am” and “what I have been”. I figured that penetrating my misty selfhood to the time strata that compose it was too clearly destined to private distortion; and so I turned to another culture. Camera, lights…backward roll…ta da…Illinois offspring of WWIIera academic Dad and traveler Mom…roots into Germanic Pietists (Dad’s side) and English/German yeomen (Mom’s side)…two centuries on the North American landmass…before that millennia in Europe…before that the long trek up from Africa while the pigmentation adjusted to a gradually less intrusive solar intensity…then Gondwanaland…then back

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to the convoluted of Hindu kalpa magnitude extent through the carbon…to the point, of course, where what I was and what my brother-in-law Goodman in Ughelli was is identical… License granted me for the above, may I insert the hard rod of a serious question? Given that kalpoid immensities are in our backgrounds, where does a valence with mood-shaping potentiality enter the immense future-establishing course of history? When does the Ughellian acquire even the beginning of specific traits—hey! the happiness in my Ughelli guest house comes from somewhere—and when does the Iowan acquire the slanting-toward seed-cap stoicism, with its mood-balancing against the velleities of the seasons and of the Chicago Board of Trade? At what point in the carbon, or is it infinitely post-carbon, do those innervations first make themselves felt in terms of which I am to find myself today either in a free-market democracy with embedded privacy and property rights, or in a free-market kleptocracy with threatened security and sky’s-the-limit freedom for tax-free private enterprise?25 The reasonable response will be to push the answer as close as possible to the present moment, but reason may in this case, as often, be misleading.

15. Gentlemen Songsters off on a Spree Children of the sandstorm, all of us, the breath of carbon, the whiff of oxygen, a set of dreams planted in the rough soil of time. Can we learn from one another? Can the study of Ughellian happiness, in its historical setting, teach me to be happy? Each of us carries an historical genetic tracker. I personally am from a small American breeding ground, one child of two intellectual parents, “no conflicts”, Midwest, pre-WWII; the old days. Even at the time of my birth, however, I was brought up on a nationalized landmass—the “nation” was then 150 years old—whose human population was heterogeneous in a manner indescribable in Urhobo terms. The vast bulk of the population was white, with blacks, still barely citizens at the time, hardly more than 10 percent of the remainder.26 However, within the whiteness, the diversity of national origins was huge—largely from Europe, but from every corner of that continent, and in many cases deeply embedded still in their regional cultures. It is through this last state of affairs, thus crudely formulated, that my culturescape developed, the historicity from which my modalities of being-here derived. Whereas the Urhobo in my Ughelli living room will inherit a single historical tradition. (Isokko, Ijaw, Itsekiri traditions—to pinpoint neighboring tribes—are significantly different from the Urhobo historical

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setting, are precisely the other to the Urhobo.) Whatever experience the Urhobo inherits, and at a certain point in prehistory it intersects with my historical genetic, reinforces its firmness and integrity by the consistency of the historical populations it is made of. Whereas the American expat, to this day, feels a certain kinship with other Americans in Taiwan (say) and with no regard to where they came from, the Urhobo expat in Iowa, while sensitive to fellow Africans, will bond only with fellow Urhobos. I strive, in saying this, to lay the framework for an account of the different tweaking happiness receives in Iowa from Ughelli. The Ughellian carries an overlay of migratory patience, godfriendliness, a sense of terrain exploitation, recent colonial maneuvering and devastating corruptness in the formulation of a new independent Nigerian polity; an underlay of pained tribal solidarity. My white fellow citizens, in Iowa, carry an overlay of North European persistence, Lutheran submission to God, rural values reeling from the impact of industry, commerce, and now the virtual world in which we can store all our terrors. Living room doors open on every side. Through one of them enter Goodman, Lucy, Augustine, through another Arlen, Diana, and Steve. Everyone knows how to smile, but the Ughellians live it, while the whites learn it. The Ughellians enter the room as though knowing why depression is unknown among them, and why the social tribal network is always there to support. The mid-Americans enter the room as though knowing why depression is increasingly common among them, but knowing very well how to make the most of the gloomy perspectives onto human nature that Calvin and Schopenhauer have helped them characterize. The question of this essay has been whether the historical DNA of a group tweaks its nature. I think we have a crude answer in our hands. The Ughellian lives in-your-face the millennia of tribal closeness, reinvention, and hope born of setback, the hope the farmer never stops boring you with, as the rain holds back once again over Linn County. Our regional tweaks are unique to the fix of events in our historical gene threads! Mankind in his groups has threaded perplexingly interlaced paths, en route to the today which is already yesterday, but there is a fine line of continuity running along deeply inbound endurers, and the profile of a facial gesture can encode a history forking off from the carbon at the point, say, where one team goes north and another east, and the unique fervors of group life are fixed.

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Notes 1

Phyllis Martin and Patrick O’Meara, eds., Africa (1984), p. 75. The author has in several places aired this notion of the always pre-anticipated present, from which its history exists as having just been snatched away. Cf., especially, Time, Accounts, Surplus Meaning: Settings of the Theophanic (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011) and Being Here: Sociology as Poetry, Self-Construction, and Our Time as Language (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2012). Cf., for an angular approach to this issue, Charles Olson, The Special View of History (1970), p. 11: “a man’s life is an act of giving form to the condition or state of reality (concerned obviously as a moving thing himself) at the exact moment of his birth.” 3 Cf. the review of “memory studies” by Olick and Robbins in the collateral reading. Though itself out of date, in the now-burgeoning field of historical construction, this review provides a brilliant survey of the ways individuals, and societies, construct their versions of their pasts. 4 Lady Lugard (Flora Shaw), wife of the colonial governor of Northern Nigeria— Lord Lugard—suggested in an article for the Times in January 1897 that “Nigeria” would be a good name for what was roughly the territory of contemporary Nigeria. 5 The acceleration of scholarship in the West during and since the Renaissance has eventuated in the present moment of info overload, in which university libraries, to pick an instance, order databases rather than texts from their limited budgets. For the broad issue of the transformation of the historical done into information, see Daniel Halévy, Essai sur l’accélération de l’histoire (1948). 6 Bossuet’s Discours sur l’histoire universelle (1681) tracks a Biblical cosmology in which no room is left for error or chance. 7 Classical mythology abounds with stories of immortal-mortal pairings: Achilles with an immortal nymph mother (Thetis) and a mortal (King Peleus) father; Castor (of Castor and Pollux), son of the goddess Leda and the mortal king Tyndareus. The attempt of Calypso (Odyssey, Books 5/6) to seduce Odysseus into endless life, is the most poignant guide to this crossover point between the timeless and the mortal. 8 Herder’s Journal of his journey, which took him from Riga to Nantes, promoted rich lateral awarenesses of the mythical world view, which archaic—and not only—humanity occupied. The misty thought climate of Ossian pervades this journey over the fostering element, river water. 9 The Congress of Berlin (1884–85) was hosted by Otto von Bismarck, and marked the increasingly central role of Germany in Europe. While the ostensible goal of the Congress was to regularize relations between European and African nations, the outcome was to promote active and swift intervention in Africa, the Scramble for Africa. 10 The chaos of forming a government, starting in 1959, is reflected in the endless procedural disputes, often promoted by tribal/regional interests, which paralyzed any reasonable programs for establishing the new state; while the Biafran War, which tore the country apart, was ahead in the near distance, 1967–70. It might be 2

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said that the sense of governmental futility, which the Ughellian reflects today, had deep and easily remembered roots in this initiatory moment. 11 Big Bang theory presumes both an enormous and an ongoing expansion of an initial kernel, and a gradual cooling of the universe. As a context for human existence, the Big Bang gives every reason to support a dynamic, self-transforming definition of the human project. History as the future, though a burden to imagine, may be the most effective perspective in which we can understand our sense of being co-creators with God. 12 Carbon, the dominant binding bridge among that one quarter of organic beings which are not water, is our link “backwards” into the formative geological stages of our planetary growth, and from there back to the mineral formative of cosmos making. 13 Cf. Frederic Will, Time, Accounts, Surplus Meaning: Settings of the Theophanic (2011), Chapters Four and Five. The discussion concerns “empty time”; not the “longue durée” of Fernand Braudel, but time stripped of event. 14 The apparent absence of writing in West Africa has been at the center of debate over whether West Africa “really has a history”. (Many of the personal behaviors of contemporary Ughellians are oral: few read recreationally, many own laptop computers, but there is very little use made of them). Without entering that fray, note that there is some evidence of West African writing systems: the Vai syllabary of Liberia, the Mene syllabary of Sierra Leone, Nsibidi ideographs of Eastern Nigeria, and several others, none of which are clearly datable, and of which some are clearly archaic, others of recent minting. Cf. S. I. A. Kotei, “The West African Autochthonous Alphabets: An Exercise in Comparative Paleography,” Ghana Social Sciences Journal, 2(1), 98–110. 15 The work of Jan Vansina—How Societies Are Born: Governance in West Central Africa Before 1600 (2004)—enters the vast woodland spaces of the Eastern Congo, and recreates, from exiguous linguistic sources and ecoarchaeological investigations, the life of peoples in whom no explicit “history” is discernible. The same kind of many-pronged investigation of the life of the Niger Congo peoples in West Africa during the first millennium would probably turn over the same intricate pattern of small-scale proto-agricultural contracts with nature. Cf., in regard to the temporality of the “vast historical spaces”, this author’s Time, Accounts, Surplus Meaning: Settings of the Theophanic (2012). For a parallel to the seemingly empty temporal spacings of the pre-colonial African experience, cf. the eye-opening work by Trigger, The Children of Aataensic: A History of the Huron People to 1660 (see collateral reading), vol. I, pp. 6–7: The more Romantic argument, and one that is now shared only by those who know little about the American Indian, is that Indian cultures changed so little during the centuries prior to the arrival of the Europeans, that, in effect, the Indian has no history of his own. He goes on to discuss the profound changes brought by archeology to the view of no Indian change; adaptation to new artifacts and techniques is easily traced. The

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bearing of this kind of thought, on multi-secular developments in early African culture, is evident. 16 Mitochondrial DNA was the first part of the human genome to be sequenced and has enabled biologists to track the evolutionary relation among species. It also fosters a study of the relationship among populations—thus proving its usefulness to anthropology. 17 Small historical developments are often drivers of great events—“for want of a nail the shoe was lost”—but empty time is the great unmentioned driver in most historical studies. The works of Fernand Braudel (and his Annales school) stressed longue durée, slow and irresistible environmental change, as the fundamental mover of human history. 18 Roman Law of Inheritance was subject to modification over the centuries: at one point stipulating for the eldest son, at another allowing for wider distribution among all the children of the deceased. Changes in these inheritance patterns, though infrequent, were of great importance to society, for they seriously impacted the distribution of capital in the Empire. 19 Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), is especially insightful into these European duperies, which however could only last so long, as cheap goods tended to wear out rapidly. 20 Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery (1983), p. 180. 21 Cf. Elizabeth Isichei, A History of Nigeria, pp. 96, 104 for comments on the culturally transformative power of the slave industry within Nigeria. 22 Obaro Ikime, Niger Delta Rivalry (1969), p. 51. 23 Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics (http://www.nigeriastat.gov.ng/) is the source for the current oil revenue figures. 24 Cf. Frederic Will, “Can We Get Inside the Sensibility of the Archaic ArtWork?”, Contemporary Aesthetics, 6, 2008. 25 On the market kleptocracy and its brute ramifications in indigenes’ lives, cf. the recent “A Phenomenological Study of Corporate Social Responsibility in the Niger Delta, Nigeria,” by Ogula, Rose and Abii, Journal of Leadership Studies, 6(2), 32– 47. 26 The author has written elsewhere of growing up into a culture which seemed to have no flavor, not to be a culture; an error that only foreign travel corrected. Among the preconceptions he unmasked as he developed was the assumption that his culture is chiefly white. There were reasons for that assumption. There were few blacks in the central Illinois University town where he grew up. The Ku Klux Klan was at that time—the thirties and forties—present in Champaign County, Illinois, a deterrent to Black immigration into the area. In the 1930 Census the White population of Champaign County was 60,349, while the Black population was 2,040. In the 1940 Census the differential was even more marked. And so on. But the author lived in a small agricultural enclave of a vast country.



ESSAY THREE ABJECTION INTO THE FALL

One can only be terrified at the crying need for purity the Universe suffers from….1 Bribery, corruption, white-collar and corporate crimes, which cost Nigeria (economically and socially) more than the thousands of petty crimes for which the country’s prisons are overcrowded, have come to be accepted by almost every Nigerian as part of our “normal” existence.2 The advantage to mankind of being able to trust one another penetrates into every crevice and cranny of human life.3 We are linked to political society by something that somehow escapes our immediate consciousness; by a whole tangled skein of pressures and motives, some rational, many more not so.4

1. Your Author The author of this third essay is as corrupt as any, as you have guessed from the ease with which he adopts the stand-back observational pose of the aesthete. He is an observer of the social, and, as you will easily see from a look at one of his autobiographies, A Portrait of John,5 he works in a tradition; that of horrified fascination with the Fall. Western literate culture—Book of Genesis—opens with such a fascination, and right through to Norman O. Brown, in Life Against Death (1985), has gone fearlessly into the analysis of our condition: inter faeces et urinas nascimur.6 The desire to see to the bottom, at all times, has traveled with us; tell-all has persisted onto the always popular celeb page, confirming what no less a thinker than John Calvin observed about our fallenness.7 Think of it! We can set our iPhones for ET divorce alerts! And this is not yet our author’s main point about the path to corruption. In his case that path was a private one, pre-discussed in intimate conversations—with himself—and had its roots in narcissism, eroticism, the aesthetic. The personality brewed at these roots encountered



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at each misstep a point of fall, a moment at the edge of a cliff. There comes a time in the pursuit of bad behavior when one notes that “begins to fall”, when one commits a fatal act and senses he/she is doing so. Of course that dramatic notion of the Fall is Western, and has its prestatement in Greco-Roman notions like hamartia, fatal misjudgment, or in a Christian Seven Deadly Sins perspective. For that Christian notion there is indeed a sharp cliff of moral fall threatening each of us. That is what we are made of. In what follows I will look into the profile of sin, in several African instances, and will in so doing pursue an alternate narrative of the “nature of the Fall.”8 The alternative view I will meet, in trying out some African expressions of the Fall, will put much less stress than does the Western moralist, on the crisis of the fateful fall, with the Greek background and Hawthornian humiliation that entails. The alternative view of the Fall, which I find in African public/social instances, will involve a more moderate narrative of public failures and loss of face. I am thinking especially of the account the African will give of failure in the arena of politics, where the culture traditionally tests, proves, or destroys itself. The African fall, or rise, regularly defines itself in terms of politics,9 but the judgment on the fallen is characteristically far less decisive or irreversible than it is when the Western figure of power falls. Should we say that the African feels more than the Westerner a human understanding, from the start, of the weakness of the power player?

2. Private Vices, Public Virtues Why do I make my own confession? And why do I thus admit the fatal worm I too have eaten? The impulse is deep. Is it my way of trying to come even with the bumps in my personal road? Or could I simply be exhorting myself to be better? And what about the African fall instances? Where did those fallen Africans either encounter the fall, ward it off, or accede to it—in the public sphere? How can I distinguish between the kind of Fall I and my middle-class sixties buddies fell and the kinds of Fall, actual or potential, observable in these African examples? To so distinguish involves making clearer the distinction between private and public corruption. African corruption is public. So that I can confront the public fall as it actually takes place, let me try to restate this questioning theme. I have been privately corrupt, but not publically, have rarely cheated, lied, or misrepresented in the public sphere, never given the law a headache. May I guess that something like the reverse situation characterizes many of the



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Ughellian lives I now know? The lives of these dear friends act out into the world of corruption constructed from bribes, evasions of law, administrative fraudulence, environmental indifference, tolerance of malpractice, intolerance on many occasions of children and women. And on into the night! The African public sphere is awash with moral reefs. African society is an open invitation to corruption. And the society accepts that public invitation. By contrast, my African friends are in a broad sense models of, well, private good nature, fidelity to the spirits of their culture, familial “reliability”, compassion for others and a sense of order in their social relations. (Broad sense? I don’t want to oversimplify. I am not ignoring the plague of polygamy, which contradicts the spiritual demand of marriage, or the priority of the males’ pleasure zones, but am going for what, in Africa, seems to me an overriding state of affairs, fidelity to the coercive protective in-law culture, the life-sustaining cycle of patronage/reward or elder/dependent, political leader/dependent relationships.) The corruption I am about to characterize, and which has been imputed in high degree to Nigeria,10 is public corruption, and not the private corruption which Western Christianity, since Augustine, has put at the forefront of the human condition.

3. The African Public Career Path Finding himself, since the dawn of Western recorded history, portrayed as either a savage, a primitive, or a tragic historical loser, many an African follows his career longings down the path history expects of him; the corruptive path of what seems most likely to succeed politically, from the low-level power gains of local government participation, to a higher level, say contractor status, and eventually to a more influential role like the offices of the governor—ultimately one’s state governor plays an adjuvant role here—with bonding stops at traditional regional power players like the Ovie of one’s region, powerful chieftains, or king-makers who look for rising stars to invest in as Western venture capitalists scout for up-and-coming companies. It is thus that in today’s Ughelli there are many who train toward politics from early in life, many who hang on in politics, and many who think of their profession as “politics” rather as we might, in the States, think of our profession as “professor”, “electrician”, or “lawyer”; even if in fact that profession led to politics. Politics is where the Nigerian money is, and where the venality of the culture finds the broadest room to express itself. Closet Augustinians, beating their breasts for their human condition, are scarce as hen’s teeth in Ughelli. American



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professor/writers, chattering about their private “sense of the fall”, are a rare species, and come only in the color white.

4. Mobosan The author has a friend who exemplifies the inception of a career of public ambition and temptation, a political career which will sooner or later beg for public attention. The friend approaches the procedures of Delta State politics with the deliberateness of a Republican Roman eyeing the cursus honorum, or a Confucian student of the fifth century B.C., assessing his master’s advice for strategic advancement in public office. In 2010 a friend drives me toward Agbara, beyond Ughelli on the way to Orogun. (Agbara town has seen illustrious undertakings, from Bruce Onobrakbeya’s vibrant artist colony, tucked off on a side road, to Alex Ibru’s ambitious but ultimately failed Gulder Brewery, past a new Ibru University campus, its dorms and classrooms already longing for the students that with God’s help may someday materialize, and the vast, carelessly maintained Ibru Retreat Center, now rarely used except for annual high-level Anglican gatherings—like so much that is grandly planned then set aside or half-executed in this country.11 We take a side road, bounce through the axle-scraping potholes, and pull up at an unexpected gatehouse; down the road beside it is a neat one-storey cement house, freshly painted and artfully structured. A person of taste should, and indeed did, live there hidden away in the shadows, killing chatter and a couple of Stars with two friends in the fan-cooled sitting room. Mobosan, a trim thirty-five-year old, in his informal white houserobes, introduces himself as a politician, and confirms the fact by offering me his card. He is indeed—I read it on his card—by profession a politician. (I am surprised at this professional self-definition; with us “to be a politician” is first of all to be a lawyer, businessman, or…) But I soon get the picture. Politician is what he is. There had been a formative thrust toward the political early in Mobosan’s life, when he had been chosen to attend an International World Youth Day in Phoenix, Arizona, and that experience had buoyed the man’s enthusiasm and self-confidence. During his years at the University of Benin he had networked, and upon graduation, and completion of Youth Corps—which allowed him (like Jacob in Essay One) to network in another part of the country, the north— he began working in ULGA North. (This was his natural launching pad for a budding career in politics; close to home and to the useful familial contacts it offered.) There he met effective-looking politicos,12 and attached himself to one whose star grew lucky for a season—the season



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during which Mobosan constructed the house in which we are sitting—and bought the second-hand Mercedes in the drive. That was this young politico’s high point to date. But that was a few years in the past, and though, as we visit, the house and car still sit in place, there has been a downturn in Mobosan’s electoral investment—his leading light has been defeated in battle, and Mobosan is sitting around, networking and strategizing on a pulsing PC. This morning he is tracking every possibility for a liaison with a rising senior politician in ULGA North. Furthermore—because Mobosan is a smart thirty-year-old—he is reading up, not only on Nigeria today but on the global political scene, it being his belief that politics is the pathway to “doing good for his society” and for the world. One would, from the Western perspective, take him for a smart Washington intern looking for a senator to support, tag along with, and eventually score with. If we have ahead of us, in this essay, the job of noting the crossover point from “politics into corruption”, then occasionally into criminality, that threat will not in Mobosan have manifested in anything more than the promises we all make to one another with our own ends foremost. Mobosan is clean and on the look-out. But the zone of networking, in which he is “investing his career energies”, is one in which the temptations of “African Fall”, public rise and fall, are great. Greater than that temptation that confronts the Western politico? Yes, but only in a special sense important to this essay. African politics has its way of embedding its own viciousness in the culturally approved familial/payback environment that mutes the domains roamed by such as this author in his private adventures through the moral underworld. African politics often arranges some kind of soft landing for its casualties—unlike the contemporary America in which, when they fall, figures like Eliot Spitzer, John Edwards, or General David Petraeus are to some extent tarred for life; although the moral contrast before us here— between the West and Africa—is rapidly eroding, as we see rehab, the rediscovery of God, and a new post-scandal political piety increasingly renewing the image of the American fallen.

5. Joseph: A Student of the Polis The young personal friend to whom I now turn, Joseph, is a university student a few years younger than the Jacob we met at the end of Essay One. From early in life Joseph “had his eye on politics”. That phrase covers a network of growthpoints. Mustn’t the thread of development be like this? Within his/her own home matrix—siblings, parents, and in the Delta region often a very ramified family—the growing person develops a



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leaderly sense of the fine threads of power, the infinitely variegated jointures of intention and compliance among people, from within which he learns about shaping the behaviors of others in action? In such a formative, and given the outlets defined for him by this society in which the political is virtually the only public sphere in which valuable and growing investment is possible, males of ambitious temper are with regularity drawn toward the “political arena”, or toward the arena of “public service”. Few Julien Sorels, in this culture, plunge forward toward a life of academic or even technological excellence. With the young friend to whom I refer, Joseph, the structural problems of carving out a life for the polis are given a special twist by a nurturing background. My friend is the descendant of a distinguished family in the Sapele area, having been raised close to the local royalty, and having enjoyed that distinctive local-ruler sense of power and authority; thus this candidate for politics trails behind him a distinctive tradition of noblesse oblige. How it will color his potential behaviors—whether by helping him to rise above the local and clannish, or by rendering him especially susceptible to the Satans of bribery, so omnipresent and dangerous in Nigerian culture—will remain to be seen; but in any case the impulse driving him forward into the political arena is careful and strong. I look, as on a scarab of potential, at the “wall calendar” Joseph has given me: five rows of photos of members, staff, and assistants of the University. On the top row are three box-shaped photos, featuring, in their center, himself, the kingly patron of the University’s student body, flanked by the oldest de facto king of the State, Otagba Eferobome, his Royal Highness of Sapele Kingdom, and by the mellow mid-life Prof. Olorun Asabin, Provost of the Sapele campus of Delta State University. Joseph, thirty and confident, centers the dramatically colorful page, and demands attention in his purposeful smile and traditional black colonial/gentleman hat. May I say simply that we will follow with interest the political development of this planful gentleman? Guilty of nothing; filled with the desire for power in the interests of service, grounded in noblesse oblige, Joseph stands on the first and noble rung of the political. Like Mobosan, he represents the political vocation, where it is only trying to declare its inner dynamic.

6. The Rough Stuff My distant cousin Ejiro, kin to many local PDP power-player pols, makes a proposal to my kinsman, Goodthought. ULGA South is coasting toward a new Chairman Election—it will be in eight months, but there is much advance preparation to take care of. If Goodthought can put up some



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money to bribe a few key pols who can beat the bushes—i.e. get out the thugs—to support Ejiro’s campaign, Ejiro will share the spoils of war with Goodthought (and others). Goodthought is a mid-twenties youngster of considerable ambition, with a college degree but no prospects of employment. A deal is struck. Goodthought sees the investment, which costs him 500,000 naira, as full of personal promise; one rainy night a few weeks later, as Ejiro leaves our parlor, he is clutching a well-filled envelope. This story plays out toward a level of violence hard (for me) to anticipate. The campaign proceeds, Ejiro establishes his “contacts”—to be exact, he combs such well-known thug dens as Ughelli provides in abundance—and finds guys to do the heavy lifting for him, threatening shop owners and pastors and schoolteachers with dire consequences, unless they cast their votes and others’ for his party, the PDP. As the weeks go by we follow Ejiro’s campaign through the gossip network, and through an occasional late-night visit from Goodthought, who can just feel his investment growing in his wallet. Events move ahead in a PDP direction—there are palaver groups on the move day and night through PDP headquarters on the other side of town. The election approaches, bringing with it some of the inevitable rough stuff—ballot boxes stolen at two precincts, and approaching voters kept away at gunpoint during the transaction—but in the end all is well, Ejiro triumphs, and a victory parade passes the very house where Goodthought himself lives, and where the young man sits counting the war spoils in his mind. The only problem is that Ejiro has won his victory at an unexpected cost. The main opposition party, The All People’s Party, has fielded strong candidates, done its own homework, and in the end, by its own voterigging tactics, obliged PDP to the expensive rough stuff—which includes the purchase of a round of imported silencers and some very expensive hush money on the highest level of the Federal Police. Though apprised of these developments, Goodthought remains confident of his own payback until a major reversal of fortune strikes. Ejiro has indeed won, but thanks to the exaggerated expenses of his campaign he is unable to reward Goodthought immediately—it may in fact, as he confides to my worried cousin over a late-night Star, be just a few more weeks until all “accounts can be settled”. It is during those “few more weeks” that the hammer blow is readied. Ejiro, though in office and protected by heavy security, has been ambushed on his way to work, at the beginning of his second week. Who did it? The thugs he had hired to mow down the opposition. Why? Due to his unexpected expenses he had not been able fully and quickly to pay back these muscle guys, and they want



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their pay. And what did they do with their victim? After receiving a king’s ransom to cover their own expenses, then gunning him down, they dumped him in a patch of bush.

7. The Wormhole of Corruption I opened this essay with a confession of personal weakness—the John Mandeville theme, “private vices, public virtues”—that we might turn also to a tiny selection of biopsies of homo politicus nigerianus. We have begun with three examples: two honorable and impressive instances of public servants still far from the darkness of body politics, and fully engaged in the public roles of ambition; and a dark example, Ejiro, of the rough-and-tumble of physical politics. For interlude, let’s consider the wormhole through which corruption spreads in the Nigerian body politic. Southern Nigeria and corruption have become virtually identical: the blend of tribal pressure from below with greed (long-throatedness in Nigerian pidgin) from above finds a perfect storm in the Delta. I ask Steven, a career Shell technician, for a biopsy of corruption wormholing. He gives me an example drawn from the life world we are currently sitting in, where we are continually and unpredictably deprived of electrical power, helpless victims of NEPA, which has for two decades been underserving the Nigerian people, at a huge expense to Nigeria’s quality of life and potential for foreign investment. (In a recent report,13 it was found that only 10 percent of rural Nigerians enjoy electrical service, while only 40 percent of urban dwellers, and that intermittently, receive the service.) The example before our conversation: the district manager of a specific NEPA power area—it could easily be the Ughelli area—is allotted some 250 transformers for power distribution within the area under his control. He could assign these transformers—which translate into power stations assuring local service, in a so-and-so-many house-wide area—on a simple mathematical ratio; the total number of households divided by 250, with a transformer for each sub-set. He could. But here of course the pressures from below and from within begin. Stephen pauses, sips at his Martell, and makes the obvious point, that the point he is making is not unique to Nigeria, is doubtless global, but that local conditions in Nigeria, shorthanded as tribalism, promote an excess of the case before us. A certain Mr. X—might well be a politician—wants to assure 24/7 service for both his own compound and for that of his girlfriend; thus he approaches the district NEPA manager with a dash, or, better, with an “invitation to a beer”, which concludes with a voluntary suggestion of a



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solution, and a newspaper-covered cash contribution passed under the table. The results of this transaction are that the number of available transformers under the control of the District Manager has been reduced by one to 249. Consequently there is one transformer less to go around over the whole territory served by the Manager. Available power for the entire area is accordingly reduced, and the consequences play out throughout the service area. It is easy to see how the overall consumer allotment will be affected by this particular instance, which of course will typically generate the collateral complications that the individual consumer encounters. (Lack of power will lead that consumer either to an expensive generator purchase, or to a shut down of the family TV.) Stephen reminds me of our own situation, which illustrates the collateral problems that accrue for the consumer. Our guest house is in an area which was formerly residential, but which has over the past decade blended out into commercial; thus we are in effect in a block of four homes which have become isolated from the main transformer area assigned to them. As a consequence we are forever having to negotiate financial outlays to the District Manager’s office to restore service to our small island of consumption, which, due to the disbalance brought by long-throatedness to the system layout, is having to buy its way back into the overall geometry of power distribution. Smaller dashes accompany all of these local transactions, so that what started out with Mr. X’s discreet newspaper exchange in a local beer parlor turns out to be many lesser exchanges in many half-seen venues throughout the power area.14 The author of these lines, who sits here listening to Stephen, does not for a minute suppose he comes off canny or worldly wise by “discovering” this wormhole of corruption into a managerial system. On the contrary, this author is a naïf trying to learn, for the purposes of the present essay’s point about politics and corruption, what the ground level of the corruption problem is, a problem which his own culture’s Enron and Japan’s own Olympus have recently made into household issues.15 Of course what the author wishes to learn is two-pronged: is there any way to ameliorate the Nigerian problem at hand, and is a corruptive dynamic implicit from the start in the tribalistic entry-point of the Urhobo into the public life of his/her culture?

8. Big Time Corruption The former governor (1999–2007) of Delta State, thus the elected power figure most present to the Ughellian, the most elevated voice designated to represent the Ughellian’s wishes in this Federalist



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parliamentary system, has been arrested for the umpteenth time, but this time after a fashion that threatens to stick, and that has already stuck sufficiently to air a great deal of dirty political laundry. Our tale catches here over a single political destiny, that of James Ibori; we need to pay attention to the break point at which this once-reputable public figure took a path that morphed from the corrupt into the deeply criminal. Whatever we want to know about public vice would seem to be implied here, even the unsurprising development that Mr. Ibori, now in prison in Britain, has “found God”.

9. James Ibori James Ibori was born (1958?) in Ethiope Local Government Area of Delta State, Nigeria, 50 kilometers from Ughelli. (He later lied about this date of birth so that he could qualify as a candidate for Governor.) The wormhole we seek will be hidden in these early years, and yet wormholing we go in these pages devoted to the predictably corrupt; a corruption we can refer back to the radical evil Augustine and Calvin posited, but which we will bracket til the end of this essay, in the present review of how the Ughellian makes a world for himself. Ibori was educated at the local Baptist School, and went to the University of Benin, where he graduated in Economics and Statistics— though the buzz maintains that his degree, like many University degrees in Nigeria, was bought. He got his first job working with Mobil Oil, from where he soon advanced to the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC), working with a crack staff of marketers around the Warri Refinery. (There is every reason to suppose that these promotions were as money-fed as most in-company Nigerian promotions; a perception which, if exaggerated in certain cases, still serves as the working conviction of any Ughellian on the streets. The special tweak to Ughellian happiness, which I have looked at in Essay One, derives from the conviction that all will be done in the most dishonest way possible, so that protesting about public behavior, the byproduct of cosmic aeons (Essay Two), is a pleasant if vain sport.) A resume of a sort is thus under formation, which will grow fuller and fatter as the man’s gift for bribery develops.16 Ibori was at one point on his way to prominence as a Federal Government Consultant on Public Policy (1994–1997); a position in which he would be assigned to research the national Drug (pharmaceutical) Policy, which in 1995 led to the creation of the position of Special Advisor to the President on Drug Matters. From that point we will be looking at the dossier of a successful high-echelon political figure, who will eventually



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serve two terms as a State Governor. But what a world of damaging information nestled inside that dossier; of damaging information that at the time of Ibori’s rise to national prominence never reached public attention—but which, in the information revolution that now embraces us, would have gone viral in seconds. The information that would have gone viral was that during the eighties Ibori had moved to the U.K., where, in 1991, he was living in London with his girlfriend, soon to be his wife. At that point Ibori stepped over the line into “crime”. In 1991 he was convicted of stealing and “dishonest actions”. (He was at the time employed as a cashier in Wickes’ Furniture store, and in team with his then-girlfriend he arranged to deceive the store by passing the lady and her goods out through the purchases aisle, though no actual purchase had been made. Was this impulse-crime or part of a simple but well-laid plan?) Not long after this mishap Ibori was again arrested in London and paid once again a fine of several hundred pounds, this time for stealing and lavishly using an American Express Credit Card. We are still (at Wickes’) inside the world of a James Ibori for whom major “political power” was not yet a reality, although, as we have seen, he had already worked with upper-level techies at NNPC.17 Why, though, did he step off this cliff at Wickes? Why did he endanger what was already at least a promising public career? Here lies the essence of short-term thinking, snatching at a limited prize while jeopardizing an entire career. Not long after, as Ibori strove to establish that political career, two citizens of Delta State brought to attention, in Nigeria, the information about Ibori’s London rap sheet; but by that time, with his growing power and “high connections”, Ibori was able to suppress the information with bribes; so that the Nigerian electorate remained ignorant of the man’s criminal past. The Internet, of course, has made such cover-ups much more difficult.18 In the later nineties—a decade after committing his crimes in London —Ibori began his full-steam political career, muscling his way around the curves of power politics—a career which was to include serving as political front man for the brutal regime of General Sani Abacha (1993– 1998). In 1999, with a group of political allies, Ibori founded the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), under whose banner he was elected Governor of Delta State—thanks to abundant bribery and a passport which falsified his age—and he was reelected in 2003, stepping down from office in 2007. Like many other governors, but to a far greater extent than others, Ibori’s long-throatedness may have been the main driver in his governorship. It was no surprise that he carried huge wealth away from Delta State, having fully indulged the privileges of the State Governor to take personal charge



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of the monies provided his office, for public purposes, at the public expense. It was fitting that his plunder should have been carried out publically, and displayed in the face of his citizen victims. But the joys of filthy lucre were not to remain undisturbed. By 2007 Ibori’s frauds and deceptions were widely known, and in the same year Ibori stepped down from office his assets (then set at $35 million USD) were frozen in the U.K. Later that year he was arrested in Nigeria, but bribed his way out from under a mountain of fraud charges. (One hundred and seventy counts against him were rejected at one fell swoop by a venal Nigerian court.) The comedy of arrests and evasions was nearing its end. In 2010, as a noose appeared to be nearing Ibori’s neck, an arrest attempt by the Nigerian government was met by a mob of furious Ibori supporters—that is, paid thugs—and once more, this time by brute force, he was snatched away from the hands of the law. But in May 2010 Ibori was captured in Dubai by the U.K. police on an Interpol arrest warrant. A protracted legal dispute ensued, but in the end Ibori was taken to London by Scotland Yard, and pled guilty to numerous charges of fraud and money laundering. (That sequence of events was transpiring at the time of this writing; street-level reports like this are written in the knowledge that they will be quickly superseded, yet at the same time they try to express more than transitory significance, as Michael Herr did in Dispatches, Vietnam War journalism that speaks to the human condition. I hope that the present journalism about Ibori will find such a resting-place in this book, and that it builds into an instructive larger argument.) Of some interest is the current inventory retrieved from TrendsNigeria, Feb. 28, 2012: A massive police investigation into Ibori’s activities revealed he had bought six properties in London, including a six-bedroom house with indoor pool in Hampstead for £2.2 million and a flat opposite the nearby Abbey Road recording studios. There was also a property in Dorset, a £3.2 million mansion in South Africa and further real estate in Nigeria. He owned a fleet of armoured Range Rovers costing £600,000 and a £120,000 Bentley. On one of his trips to London he bought a Mercedes Maybach for more than £300,000 at a dealer on Park Lane and immediately shipped it to South Africa. He bought a private jet for £12 million, spent £126,000 a month on his credit cards and ran up a £15,000 bill for a two-day stay at the Lanesborough hotel in London.19



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10. Happiness and the Big Bucks My movements in this essay are sterterous: they start by alluding to my own failings, move to acquaintance with the “career” politician in Agbara, briefly profile Joseph, an ardent student politician in the making, follow Joseph with a look at the dirty and disastrous politics of Ejiro, then look at the problem of NEPA corruption, and finally arrive at a big-time politician crook. “Abjection into the Fall” I called this essay, and that’s about right. If this narrative development seems random, it should be remembered that there is a thread here, a concern with two types of downfall, American and Nigerian. The poor man’s Saint Augustine, who writes this essay, and who opened the essay with an unsolicited (if vague) confession, will be intelligible to any Western intellectual who has survived the sixties with his eyes open, while the Nigerian political figures of several sorts who have entered this essay, will at once (I hope) be at least recognizable types to the Ughellian on the street. This essay’s figurae are images intelligible to the Ughellian awareness; the politician, whether a beginner, a skilled 419er,20 or an exemplar of crass greed, is an emblematic figure. I have in the first essay reviewed Ughellian happiness, and taken every opportunity to underline the paradox, that wealth and happiness have only a furtive relation to each other. The come-what-may attitude of the Ughellian on the street is flavored with a sense that he/she has not much power over his/her social/political destiny, and had better “make the best of it”. But there will be another sense in which the street-level Ughellian who comes through my door, even with that stay-out-of-trouble attitude, feels that the political ocean is wide and risky, and that the little guy has a personal stake in the politician dynamic which marks his/her Kulturwelt. For that visitor to our salon, politics is still the one jackpot, the path to ultimate victory. That’s where the big bucks lie.

11. Ughellian Temporality Everyone deplores Ibori. He is the symbol of the scandal of longthroatedness, a man who, while Governor, put up Delta State itself as collateral on an immense bank loan in the U.K., a man whose filthy rap sheet shames every Ughellian, and yet who did acquire power, huge wealth, and what from the outside looks like a bright period in the sun. (A Mercedes? A Bentley? A fleet of Range Rovers? Mansions in England, the U.S., Europe, South Africa? And back home a population living on less than a dollar a day?) In thus deploring what is in one corner of themselves



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desired, Ughellians testify to their historicity; noble, endurant, complicit, opportunistic. What is Ughellian temporality made of if not a long tussle of prehistoric mankind with the environment, then with trans-continental migrations, then with flights from Egypt (the fourth millennium B.C.) and Benin (the fourteenth century A.D. and after), and finally residence in the landlock of Urhoboland, where first slavery, then colonialism, then dysfunctional government have made life on the street as difficult and insecure as possible?21 How can Ughellian happiness, which is threefourths hope, not be vulnerable to the pot of gold occasionally left under the picnic table?

12. Backstreet Politics As we noted, in the above remarks on Ejiro, there are many ways to play the corruption card, and both rewards and perils are connected with the effort. I have a brother-in-law who read Political Science at Nsukka, then hitched his star to a rising local Deltan politician, only to find that the man lost a crucial local government election, leaving my bro a career loser. The monetary stakes in these political investment campaigns are substantial; many a fine house in Ughelli has been built out of the rewards from a successful LGA campaign. (From my guest house in Ughelli, I see one such grand house on a hill in the middle distance, its walls sloping inward, its roof visibly losing its slate, weeds around the compound fence.) The reigning PDP Party has its Ughelli headquarters a few miles from our guest house, and every few weeks holds a gathering of fat cats to “draft policy” and divide the spoils of the most recent distribution of funds passed on to them from the Delta Governorship. Into the empty hall trek the major players, the ULGA North Chairman and acolytes and their boys, to the number of fifty, as well as a brace of venal Ughelli police. The funds get divvied up, the houses constructed, and, of course, the hit jobs assigned; for the PDP is not just about “representing the country”, but about abolishing the opposition. Outside in the street, waiting for pats on the back, for handshakes laced with cash, lounge the thirty-something thugs whose job it will be to enforce the abolition of the opponent. Hired assassination is the best description for what is then done, and the outcome is usually pretty good for the competing PDP pol. *



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13. Corruption: Pros and Cons The foregoing examples—the author, Mobosan, Joseph, Ejiro, Ibori— circled around a variety of points. There is a pre-political condition in which no worm has yet been eaten, and a benevolent desire to serve/reign/ stand out in one’s culture is dominant; there is a point at which the apple is irresistibly tempting—with Ibori the apple of criminal advantage preceded the political fall, though the two falls are twins; there is a professional attitude toward the political—vide Mobosan—in which the strategist, already embedded in the political condition, is looking this way or that, not exactly for illegal entry points but for jockeying regions within the horse race of prospective candidates; there is the rampant venality of an Ibori, whose personality is an exaggerated readiness to fall and destroy. In the public sphere the African has much invested in the political payback world, from which “many good things flow”21 and which is firmly supported by tribal/familiar social assumptions; these assumptions tend to cloak (or is it redefine?) moral imperatives in terms of social obligations. There is an important sense in which the corruption of the Nigerian payback system “works”, for it springs from the living patronage elements of a culture in which familiar setting provides some kind of home for all. Mutual back-scratching, within the extended family, means at least some access, even on the humblest level, to the highest income/prestige strata of the “system”. The adage has it that young Deltans, facing the bleak unemployment figures of their nation, should direct their attentions either toward founding a church or toward “going into politics”.

14. The Author Nailed to the Wall The superscript from Teilhard de Chardin nails it. Public or private, corruption à l’africaine or masturbatory, fantasy-driven Western neurosis, it’s all the same. It? But what is it? Is “it” the drive into evil, or just a way of “being in one’s culture”, a way which, to the doer, seems part of belonging? The anthropological literature on Nigerian venality—cf. collateral reading, Nye, Smith, Sardan, Tignor—flirts with cultural relativism in its efforts to account for the African’s ready indifference to Anglo-Saxon practices of contract law. It is true that these anthropology texts maintain a distinction between socially complicit behaviors, which are a requirement for survival inside the dash-and-bribe culture of everyday Nigeria, and the criminal behaviors of an Ibori; and yet even those criminal behaviors will have closet admirers among those who review the array of cars, planes, and mansions the ex-governor assembled.



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Once the neo-paternalistic system of contemporary Nigerian payback politics is established, there is no clear cut-off point short of serious crime. The author, having placed himself in the company of the Western fallen, may find little solace in this recounting, and must suppose that he, like all who press the limits of “being in their society as it allows them,” is locked into the hell of his own past. In ages when that hell was more than a metaphor, there was also the escape recourse of confession, a religiously sanctioned refuge in which to speak alone with your Creator, and to go away absolved. In a secular age we may have moved in armies of therapists in an effort to displace the internal demons, but we can see, from the number of transgressors who ultimately do make public confession of their crimes, that an internal reworking of one’s “issues” (rehab, the “discovery of God”) will not free the soul. The soul locks tightly to the vera historia it is made of, the moment on the brink—yes I did that, no I cannot undo it, cannot not have done this one morning, and yet I did that, I did this... It is at something like this point, I think, that the religious solution proposes itself—at least to the Augustinian. I can say nothing specific for my Nigerian friends—monstrously evil, mildly corrupt, simply ambitious, travelers at the outset of careers immersed in a culture where going with the flow is coercive, and one can easily suppose that corruption is other people, not oneself. I am talking about my own fall, which was carried out inside the assumptions of individual morality, face-to-face with God— Catholic though I am, and used to mediation—and in which my evil was not cushioned by group networking or the available chance to scratch in return the back of my victim. (Though shock-absorber factors, inside the tribal-based system, can only go so far; African sensitivity to moral slights is keen—for Nigeria is to some degree still a shame culture; Pentecostalism is making forceful inroads not only into traditional religious values but into the sense that corruption is a benign transaction, and crime, as a clear blood-brother to corruption, is forcing its brutal attentions on a society in which law enforcement is struggling to acquire a contemporary face.) Far from that recourse to the circularities of an archaic culture, in which what goes round comes round, I find myself, as always, face-to-face with the wall of my past. My past becomes me, stands inside me, blocking. How do I address it, talk it out of the way? As a still-new Christian, baptized fifty years ago but coming then from deep insentience, and still far from myself, I have yet to feel at home in the techniques offered by cultures in which one does not, ultimately, bite the bullet except by crossing over into crime and setting your feet inside enemy territory, the



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retributive logic of an inner Enlightenment law court. (I am embracing the pleasure of knowing Nigeria; it gives me a sense of another strategy for accessing the moral—the moral of mutual support in action, which though malign enough to exclude the outsider, and rich in suspicion of the outsider, is also able to love its own familial comfort zone.) Thus I survey the harm I have done to others through my bad judgment, my weakness, and my shaky undeveloped sense of purpose, and I turn to the Creator whose expansive imagination makes me ill, the very names of whom I can barely bring myself to pronounce, and I ask to be taken from the wall and talked to. That, I guess, is where the mediation of Joshua the Anointed proves invaluable. One has gone before me to take the message of our boxed-in faultiness straight out into the 180 billion moon-surrounded stars of our galaxy, which is still less even than a portal, and needs converting into quality, from quantity, to be adored and glorified as more than a master mechanism.

Notes 1 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Making of a Mind (New York: Harper & Row, 2002), p. 252. 2 Femi Odekunle, “Crime and Social Defence,” in E. O. Akeredolu-Ade, ed., Social Development in Nigeria: A Survey of Policy and Research (1982), p. 68. 3 J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1909), Book I, Chapter 7. 4 Peter Brown, Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine (1972), p. 27. 5 Frederic Will, A Portrait of John (Detroit: Wayne State, 1991); Song Broken Song: The Work of Frederic Will (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2008)—autobiography written under pseudonym Frank Shynnagh. 6 Latin from Bernard de Clairvaux (twelfth century), perhaps. Often attributed to Saint Augustine, but probably incorrectly, the phrase is commonly listed as “unsourced”. Norman O. Brown, in Life against Death (Middletown: Wesleyan University, 1985) once again woke the Western consciousness to the dark religious fury rustling inside the anal. 7 “Man’s nature is, so to speak, a perpetual factory of idols.” John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, two volumes (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960 [1559]), p. 108. 8 Roman Catholic thought traditionally distinguishes between mortal sins, which have ultimate consequences, and venial sins, everyday living sins. Venial sins are frequently treated in Catholic ethics on a level of severity comparable to that applied to everyday corruption in Nigeria—unsuitable but tolerable. 9 Peter Ekeh, in his History of the Urhobo People of the Niger Delta (2007), discusses the absence, in the language of the God-preoccupied Urhobo people, of references to “spiritual love” as a part of their theology. Power, not love, is the



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Urhobo way to the discovery of the godlike in the human. 10 Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (TICP) is an influential source of public opinion about corruption on the national level. On TICP’s index (in 2011) Nigeria comes in at #143, with a major corruption problem, but one which is less dirty than that of certain African states like Cote d’Ivoire or Chad, and than several non-African states. 11 Alex Ibru, the grand figure in the Ibru dynasty, is a good example of the dynamic African public figure, honorable in his public behavior, creative, and flawed only by the compromise that breathing Nigerian air makes unavoidable. Cf. Abati and Dafinone, eds., Alex Uruemu Ibru: The Daniel from the Lion’s Den (2002), in our collateral reading. 12 As the instance suggests, there is great authority in age and honorable position, and a politician can build on these supports more reliably than on fickle and greedy money-pockets, who are quick to demand a return on their investment. 13 In 2011, Nigeria came in at #68 in total national electricity consumption, just behind North Korea, Croatia, and Azerbaijan (cf. Index Mundi, www.indexmundi.com). 14 Blundo and de Sardan—cf. collateral reading—carefully anatomize daily corruption factors—customs charges, police bribes, civil servant bribes for basic services—in three Francophone African countries: Niger, Senegal, and Benin. Their analysis conforms to daily perception on the Ughelli streets; from my guesthouse balcony I can daily observe s small café where deals, shmooze over lagers, and lucrative bonhomie flow together in a seamless social whole. 15 Both the Enron scandal, which broke in 2001, and the Japanese Olympus scandal (2011) derived from misleading accounting practices designed to prevent stockholders from awareness of huge financial losses. Family-based Nigerian corruption is too personalist, at this stage, to manipulate huge corporate stockholder fraud. 16 Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, former Foreign Minister of Nigeria (2006), twice Finance Minister of Nigeria, and for some time one of the Managing Directors of the World Bank, comes to mind as a thrilling counter example to these exhausting tales of incompetence and self-interest. 17 The Nigerian National Petroleum Company was founded in 1977, in a bid to regularize the practices of the oil extraction industry in Nigeria. As an organization it has left behind it a trail of corrupt malpractices which have cost the Nigerian government, and of course the Nigerian citizen, untold naira. 18 The Nigeria of the nineties, in which Ibori established his crony network with its embedded payback schemes, was virtually Internet-free. The Nigeria that finally put Ibori behind bars is Internet-literate. Social media are transforming the cultural landscape with their information distribution capacity. 19 Stephen Wright and John Stevens, “Nigerian State Governor Funded International Playboy Lifestyle with 50 Million Fraud as He Rose from Humble Roots Working in London DIY Store,” Mail Online, February 28, 2012, reprinted on the TrendsNigeria website, February 28, 2012. 20 419 is the entry number in the Nigerian criminal code that deals with fraud. The 419er is typically associated with smart-ass youth sitting in cybercafés, and the



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image is accurate, though we need to think, in the background of those fraudsters, fat cats directing them from smoky Internet offices in Amsterdam, Brussels, and New York. 21 Onigu Otite, The Urhobo People (1980), penetrates the historical/sociological condition of the Urhobo on the street. This is an outstanding intro to the living historicity of an African tribe.





ESSAY FOUR SELF-RIGHTING IN STORMY WEATHER

While the rule of law founded on constitutionalism is central to the wave of democratization that swept across the globe in the late 20th century, Africa remains trapped in internal frictions and conflicts. Democratization of Africa exhibits rudimentary rule of law comprising mere electoralism and profusion of incivility. Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, seems to be forfeiting an opportunity to be the largest democracy in the region due to growing institutionalization of incivility and violence by state institutions charged with maintaining law and order.1 Rather than insisting on witchcraft’s singular character, we would do well to consider it as on equal footing with more familiar find-them-at-home folk understandings that similarly order and give meaning to our world: say, world religions of all sorts…. All of these notions, and others, impose a neat conceptual order on an empirically messy world. They tell us how the world is and what makes it tick.2

The Challenge of Security Blaise Pascal thought to console us about our condition by writing that “l’homme c’est un roseau, mais c’est un roseau pensant.” A thinking reed is something, conscious of the storms that blow it. But is our consciousness our only recourse in the storm of life? Or have we other recourses for self-protection? This final essay will look at aspects of the security issue as it takes shape in danger-fraught twenty-first-century Ughelli—and of course in Delta State as a whole. The method of analysis will be, as it is throughout this book, a sequence of humanistic case studies, many of them personal vignettes, made to work overtime in order to “stand for” an argument. For instance, the biopsy of religious persuasion will be confined to a single complex example, while the instances of educational development as security will be confined to examples from a couple of primary schools. Can the Ughellian, caught in a dangerous and unstable polity, deprived of



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the civil-society packaging the West has been constructing since the seventeenth century, uninsured and unprotected, acquire security?3 If so, of what kind? Can the Nigerian police be converted into reliable agents of control? Can vigilantism supplement (or supplant) the crumbling order of the police, who are widely scorned and venal to the fingertips—at least in part because of their hapless working conditions? Can, or rather must, the military be called in again—as has happened three times since Independence, essentially from 1960–1999—to impose order, and at the same time to frustrate any democratic maturing in the people? Or—to view the whole security matter differently—is there a level of security deeper, firmer, more reliable than any secular control can provide? That shift in query—and it is a huge shift—launches the issue of religious faith, an influential theme in god-drenched Deltan culture. Can the Ughellian find, in the religious dimension, protection against the velleities of a selfinterested, greedy, and unregulated state? (Can God be the supreme policeman?) We will express some views on those issues. Finally we will look at an unexpected horizon of securitization: education. Our thought has to touch base with the ancient Greeks here. The notion of paideia came first, for the fifth-century Athenians, when they looked for a principle of discipline and control in society. Education (paideia) lies at the heart of a “modern state”, containing the weaponry for fighting back at arbitrary seizure, extra-judicial legal maneuvers, and highway harassment, the kinds of incursion, into the quality of citizen life, which make discourse, deliberation, and long-term planning impossible. The temporal “batteredness” of the “happy” Ughellian, the stormy sea of corruption which confronts him, the perils of a rapacious society—all those obstacles can to some degree yield to the process of understanding, which we expect to be a product of paideia. * Two small narratives.

A Kidnapping Attempt? My wife and I are on the roadside outside the author’s uncle’s—the Chief’s—compound in Ikrigbetor, on the northern outskirts of Ughelli. We leave Chief’s house, walk across the road to our car—windows up, doors locked; we are about to start off when two guys run up to our car, on my wife’s (the driver’s) side, and door-rap to get her attention. She splits the window a crack, to hear their message; they say they need to discuss an



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issue concerning the Chief’s role in a new political alliance in Afisiere, the next town up, Chief’s Mom’s hometown. My wife carries out a lightning assessment, smells danger, thinks she recognizes one guy’s face, “red and chewed up”—there is one on each side of the car now—and without a word zooms away down the road, takes a sharp left into a potholed lane, and winds sinuously back toward the guest house, where the reliable night watchman, Mohamed, is holding the steel gate ready for us to enter. The whole episode barely lasts ten minutes. We talk about it later. My wife was sure it was a kidnap attempt. She had had an instant sense of knowing the shredded face at the passenger window. The pair—she thinks—had been lying in wait outside Chief’s house, while we were inside palavering. What do I know? I wasn’t that concerned until my wife made me concerned. But then it sank in. Wasn’t the setting perfect for a kidnap? Look how exposed we were! Mr. White! And then there was this: no police to turn to, no protective crowd to appeal to, no weapon to fight with. And we in the midst of a kidnapping wave, as everyone knew, which had recently seen children taken for ransom on the streets, an elderly businesswoman taken for ransom from the doorstep of her church, and police chiefs caught red-handed working in collusion with armed robbers and kidnappers. Our only recourse, at the time of the present encounter, would have been a cell phone call to the then (probably) active Bakassi Boys, about whom we have written above and will have more to say, later in this essay. Suffice it to note here that in the ten minutes needed to call in those jungle justice masters, for whose help we pay in this town, we might have been on the other side of that divide that separates ordinary life from the worst of nightmares. * In the next weeks, much talk about kidnapping of whites and prosperous indigenes, especially around the city of Warri, which is only twenty miles from Ughelli. The U.S. State Department confirms all the rumors; no doubt so that its citizens will keep out of trouble. Preface, this, to dumb American gets closer to the heat. *

The Warri Anti-Crime Patrol We’ve spent four days visiting friends in Warri, are on the way back to Ughelli somewhere east of the Effurun Roundabout, when we are pulled



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over at one of the police checkpoints, and my wife, who is driving, is ordered to show her particulars, the car papers, and to pop the hood. Seven members of the Warri Anti-Crime Patrol circulate with their rifles, while a couple of superior officers examine our car papers and the VIN number. Madame, meanwhile, has left the vehicle, and is deep in argument with the officials, where she has been (falsely) accused of car theft on the grounds that no separate chassis number appears on the inside of the bonnet, where “it should be”. She is deep in haggling and explanations—which, but who knew at that point?—should have included the fact that separate chassis numbers are not marked on this year and brand of Toyota. That we were innocent (of whatever) was evident, but just as evident was the in-yourface farce of justice abused, which united especially the two top officers in a (fake) mode of outrage, and which rose to a peak of injured innocence when one of the guardians of the law rejected a thousand-naira bill my wife covertly passed to him. (That he was on the take was obvious, as was the fact that he wanted a much larger bill, but, as we well knew, the official’s game included an initial coy stage during which he had to display wounded dignity at the merest suggestion he was venal.) “What an insult!” responded the lawmen, there in the dust, wind, and pollution of a headlong expressway! What an insult that a Nigerian citizen should thus cast doubt on the professionalism of a guardian of the law! (Were these ritualized, mock-behavior cycles less dangerous in Nigeria, they would be welcome relief for the opéra comique inclinations of a culture on the lookout for the dramatic.) On the highway cars flew by indifferent to us. My wife haggled and was harassed, and I sat like a museum exhibit pasted against the front seat of the Toyota. A certain amount of time had to be allotted to playing out this drama, which deserves attention in a world over-sated with events like police harassment only because of its stakes.4 Finally, sighing, the tall, nervous commandant decided that we must be taken to the District Police Command Post in Warri. A small convoy was created, with ours in the midst of the three vehicles. Two junior officers sat in the rear of our car, their rifles tickling my collar, while my wife slowly drove the car, following the rest of the team in their AntiCrime pick-up. We did a U-turn, started heading back into the city, and then the lead vehicle screeched to a halt; while the Commandant jumped out screaming that Madame could not legally drive the vehicle we were in, as she was suspected of vehicle theft. This charge, and the man’s agitated stride, rifle waving toward us, raised the stakes. What followed was first-time stuff for me, so it just went through me, as the above event outside Chief’s compound “just went through me”. Everything was suddenly “just happening”. My wife later unpackaged



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both events, the first in the fashion indicated above, the latter equally confidently. Of the event before us my wife, while driving in our threatening convoy, gave this explanation: in the rash of kidnappings (especially of whites) in the Warri area, the police have formed close bonds with kidnappers, and in the present case the police intended to take over the driving of our car and to deposit us in some abandoned storehouse on the outskirts of Warri, from where they would send my wife away and take me off for ransom. My wife calculates in the details of this set of events, while driving the car at a snail’s pace, and finally begging the furious commander to provide us with the address to which we were going, so that we could inform those concerned for us. At this point our friend Augustine appeared—I had been phoning him throughout this drama—entering the picture with the savvy of a Nigerian Shell staff veteran who had worked with one hundred employees under his supervision; he talked the agents of the law into leaving us alone, fifty dollars the richer. Once scornful of cell phones, I reformed that day. *

An Evil Collusion A wave of kidnapping madness strikes Ughelli in the winter months of 2012; like a sickness it spreads, victimizing a diverse citizenry, women and children, faculty lecturers, people of property and (now, surprisingly) people of only middling wealth or possessions. The potential victims need not be white or rich. One hears the buzz on all sides and daily reads the news of new kidnappings in the area; most recently—it is March 18, 2012—of a group of fifteen schoolchildren seized in a neighboring state, Akwa Ibom. When I ask my mature and savvy Warri friend, Okemute, whether there is nothing the “forces of order or government” can do to combat this plague, a plague that grows like the spreading bubonic horrors portrayed by Thucydides or Defoe, I get the mystifying response I am now used to. Delta State has formed an elite military patrol, with special powers to ferret out and abolish the kidnapping illness. And have they begun to make headway, have they found some of the perpetrators? No, and rarely do they catch anyone. And why? Because the perpetrators are acting in collusion with higher-ups like the members of the elite military patrol, and when one of the patrol’s bad-boy colluders is caught, as the patrol learn by telephone from the Delta State Police, the higher-ups request that the malefactor be released. (That will be taken care of the next night, out the back door of the police station.) It is hard to image a more



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disastrously vicious circle of greed, complicity, and deception. The ransom collected is shared between police and criminals—between whom the only difference is the uniform. *

Bakassi and Police The reader who joins me on my guest-house balcony, overlooking the Federal Express Highway, will have noticed a steady succession of sirenscreeching law-and-order vehicles, dated pickups with veranda and benches in the back, the driver’s door labeled Police. A few of these are federal vehicles escorting dignitaries, sometimes escorting the occasional white man surrounded by a bristle of protective bayonets, but the majority of the vehicles are the property either of the Bakassi Boys or of the Delta State Police. Why are these local security organizations not able to stem the kidnappings and other threats that just now plague the life of the man and woman on the streets? It is time to go farther into the nature of these law and order professionals, to whom we have frequently referred in earlier pages. First the Bakassi Boys themselves, a jungle justice vigilante group. Then the local police. Then we need to inquire how the two organizations interact. Human Rights Watch (HRW), in The Bakassi Boys: the Legitimization of Murder and Torture,5 describes and then assaults the role of the Bakassi. This informal vigilante group, initially formed in Anambra State to meet the urgent needs of market traders who were being wiped out by armed robbers, is now a hired force providing vigilante services to a wide group of states and communities in southern Nigeria. The HRW text in question enters the history of this group and emerges more than critical of it, detailing brutal Bakassi abuses of civilian rights, not to mention the group’s notorious collusion with state governors, their regular immunity from prosecution, and their contemptuous attitude toward the (often mocked) police forces. The writer of the present text—as I have said elsewhere (Part I, section 11)—is staying some distance down the road from a whore-house run by a leading Ughelli Bakassi Boy. From what I gather, the Bakassi clientele of the joint are hooligans and thugs, for the most part ex-cons. What is the track record of these particular guardians of order? Have they proven their usefulness, as guardians even of jungle justice? All I can deduce, on the grounds of my private investigation, supports the view of HRW.



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HRW fine-tunes their assessment of the group in an account now a decade old and itself undoubtedly needing remodeling today: In addition to targeting real or suspected criminals, the Bakassi Boys are increasingly being used for other purposes. Deviating from their initial “crime fighting” mission, the Bakassi Boys have been called in to settle personal scores between individuals and to intimidate and attempt to eliminate perceived political opponents of state governors. They have murdered and tortured with impunity under the protection of state authorities…There are fears that in the period leading up to elections in Nigeria in 2003, the Bakassi Boys as well as vigilante groups in other parts of the country, may increasingly become a convenient tool for politically motivated violence, and could be used by powerful local politicians to silence voices of opposition…6

I stress this sober assessment from a now outdated, but in many ways still relevant, text because it goes for the heart of the culture in which the Bakassi can flourish. (I could have gone into the painful details of Bakassi abuses, as they are carefully related in other parts of the present HRW document: public beheadings of suspected criminals; short-sleeve [elbow] and long sleeve [at the wrist] amputations of suspects; brutal extra-judicial killings like that of the respected Prophet and church leader Eddie Okeke, or the arrest and torture of Ifeanyi Ibegbu.) That heart of the culture, in which the Bakassi flourishes, is the mutual circuit of favors and obligations which seals together politicians, criminals, high governmental officials, and which includes the police, who would otherwise have been the objective power in the equation—while at the same time excluding the citizen/victims who by general consent are not there to be protected but only to be exploited. As for these latter social victims, the Ughellians themselves, we will have to say that in their victimhood they can be seen wearing several masks. The Ughellian can come on happy, thanks in part to versions of an orthodox theology offered up by my brother-in-law Goodman on a sunny balcony. We have seen—in Essays Two and Three—the same Ughellian emerge deepened but slightly battered by history, have seen the screws of corruption run through his ribs, have made an initial inspection of his recourses (Part I, section 7) to the supernatural, in search of a lasting peace and lasting happiness, and right now, as he seeks to upgrade his career, we observe him thrown to the mercies of his own ruthless society. It is at that point that this person of African history finds himself crouching in the doorway, keeping his head low, going about his business inconspicuously, hoping that the calamities which visit his culture will not strike him, and at the same time knowing that he has in his own society no protection except pleasure or inner calm. There, of course, is where the “happiness” comes in.



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* The Nigerian Police, it seems, would have to be the lynchpin in any introduction of order into Ughellian society. But lynchpin these police are not. Here the Westerner has to reach out to understand. In the West we have arrived at a point where the police frequently appear as “community friends”, caretakers of community; though that conception is naïve—any buddy group is devoted foremost to its own interests—7 there is no doubt that (for example) the United States police forces, from the village level to the FBI and CIA, strive for standards of objectivity and freedom from bias in which our nation can feel some pride.8 There are of course many wrinkles to this pride. (To pick an example: issues of immigration policy, in the state of Arizona, expose points where—thanks to the complexity of the situation—police procedure still demands reinvention of the whole idea of community protection. Harassment and profiling are inevitable byproducts of the effort to protect the southern border of the United States.) American police forces are forever upgrading their skills and awareness, no easy task in a rapidly changing cultural landscape. Nigeria, for its part, is not totally without its own “progressive policing movement”. There have been moves by Nigeria’s new national Commissioner of Police9 to beef up several state police forces with much-needed patrol vehicles and with communication systems indispensable for tracking criminals—especially in a lawless environment like that currently promoted by Boko Haram10 or by the kidnapping milieux of that Delta State from which the author writes. HRW recommends that the Nigerian government devote urgent attention and generous resources to reforming and improving the national police force and enabling it to carry out its duties effectively. While restoring the public’s respect and trust in the police is a longer-term goal, immediate steps can be taken to begin that process. The government should provide adequate and timely payment to police officers and improve their working conditions, welfare and equipment, with a view to raising their morale. Mechanisms should be set up to eradicate corruption in the police force and bring to justice police officers responsible for human rights violations.11

So far so good. But the boilerplate flows on, into recommendations for onthe-street patrolling, for making the public’s life easier…until before long the discrepancy between actuality and dream grows too painful. Suddenly, the writer of this text about a text, this sucker Yankee who has been living real life here in Ughelli, explodes from inside with a huge belly laugh. He



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responds: look, your writer is a sucker, sure, and never the first to know the keep-it-real of tough guys, but this he knows, and he leaves this book as a vast pile of phonemes to prove it, he has learned the difference between policy blathering and what is out there on the street. If anything is clear, it is that the rot in Nigerian civic life is systemic. The police underperform because they are underpaid and abused; the money that could have beefed them up has been diverted by “higher administration” into personal uses. My beloved Ughellians, who are excluded from this cycle of remunerative hideaways, know better than to complain, as does HRW, that the policeman should return to foot patrol where he can help senior citizens cross the road. The dear friends to whom this essay is dedicated are “happy”, as we know, only because they have looked at their situation, said yup, this is how the golf ball lies, and decided to move forward from there. *

Civilian Security HRW, in the same document we are considering, wrote that vigilantes and other self-defense groups currently operating in Nigeria have roots that reach deep into the country’s history. In the pre-colonial era, some—though not all—independent local communities, especially in the south-east, maintained their own standing army…even though these local armies and warrior groups were superseded by the colonial state, which claimed a monopoly on the use of force, they continued 12 operating across large parts of Nigeria.

The Bakassi Boys were one offspring of this vigilante tradition, and while they may have served a useful purpose, say at the times of out-of-control armed robbery in the Onitsha or Owerri Markets, they have, as HRW states, vividly outrun their welcome. (Since we are talking street level, and I write in the winter of 2012, let it be said that during the present period the Bakassi have themselves for a couple of months actually been under arrest by the military.13 The military, normally not policers of civil law and order, have constitutional authority to intervene in riots or mutinies, and in the present case have done so on behalf of one of their own, who was roughed up by the Bakassi “at a party in Warri”.14 The subsequent situation on the streets of Ughelli was said to be none the worse for the Bakassi Boys’ absence.) Another offspring of the vigilante tradition is that of neighborhood watch groups, in which, typically, a neighborhood will



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either organize self-protection from its own ranks—or hire guardians of the neighborhood. (Remember, O middle-class American, the McGruff movement, fierce moms on the ready to guard schoolchildren wending their ways home in mid-afternoon?)15 My brother-in-law Goodman jumps up in the midst of conversation about security to hurry to his local Civil Defense committee, of which he is in charge. I go for the night to Margaret’s house in Echiugbo and wake, early in the quieted morning: the clap clap of wooden paddles stalks eerily down the roads of this little village, closer, then slowly, cla…ck..c….la….ck..cl..a….receding into the misty depths of the town’s long street. The civil patrol has passed. In the morning I ask my host, Stephen, about security in the town. “Faultless and daunting,” he says. “The Civil Defense is the first line of protection. Behind the Civil Defense stand the Bakassi Boys, who would be here like lightning if we called them. They slash and burn, no discussion.” *

Ughelli Renascens? Signs here of a Nigeria willing to take its own destiny in hand? I have combed regions of the Ughellian soul: its stubborn skill at happiness; its long seasoning in a temporality from which that soul derives little conscious awareness, but much instinctual strength; the soul’s vulnerability to the greed that sucks a culture’s vital juices, and the soul’s sickness at that sickness; now we arrive at the efforts of the culture to provide some protection for itself against the dark powers it creates. And we have only started on this hasty profile of policy recourses. We will be going further than that with our theme, with both religion and education, to deeper ploys and protective measures in spirit by which the Ughellian reaches for discipline and its shelters. Have we signs, there too, of an Ughelli renascens? That would be an overstatement. Hardly. “Happiness on the streets,” which abounds in Ughelli, is an evolutionary survival tactic. (Essay One tried listening to that tone, in the fine-tuning of private lives.) The religious security, we will find, is hardly more than such a tactic; an apotropaic process, loudly warding off the demonic. History is experienced passively in Ughelli, with no “idea of progress” to buoy an Enlightenment thrust of man on his own. The religious wards off and proclaims, like a child shouting in the dark for reassurance. Is there then anywhere in Ughelli the germ of group pride, if not in the small nuclei of Civil Defense collaborators, who after all are gathered only around the banner of survival?



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Religion as Security The Ughellian, raised under the close attentions of tribe and family, emerges as historical presence into a polity which is only slowly and reluctantly, if at all, instructive and caring, and which in many cases remains a simple speculum of life in the womb or village. That the polity is punctuated with corruption wormholes can hardly be cause for wonder, since the polity rarely universalizes beyond the stage of family interrelations writ large. (The fine-tuned network of mutual support, gifting, and indebting, which makes of the Nigerian tribe a splendor for the literary artist, a nightmare for the moralist, makes of the polis a playground for mutual support.) In the tumultuous aftermath of this social dynamic it is no wonder that no sense of common good, good beyond the family, remains left to backbone the polity. The Ughellian finding him/herself on the life-living cusp of this situation, and living a life which has much of hustle and desire in it, lives into an existence with few protective controls. Such an Ughellian figure, given sufficient self-reflection, might morph into Rilke’s huge awareness: Ich habe kein Dach ueber mir, und es regnet mir in die Augen. [I have no roof over me; it’s raining in my eyes.]16 Security, naturally enough, follows as a reigning concern, as does trumping the feeble protection of the secular, the quasi-security provided by a housing in the universe, where the presence of tutelary forces might surround the threatened polites. Are we not at the doorstep of the religious instinct itself? We are at the point where the African, who, at the beginning of the cycle we trace here, emerged with an equability tinged with happiness, and who derived benign good nature from a secure nestling in the womb, comes up against the anxiety that smears itself over the background of the African mind, against that night of the demonic hovering over the bush, with which we attempted to describe the Deltan outback in our introductory snapshots (Part I, section 1). Yes, we are crossing over into the religious, where, as we will see in the archetypal case of Peter, below, a mixed Christian/pagan theology emerges, flanked by all the demon-watching and warding that make up the interventionist, ad hoc security system of juju, witchcraft, wizardry. We will accordingly linger with Peter. We will try to get to know what he has put together from his experience. After that we will turn to two snapshots of the tamest and strongest of the security supporting religions, education, and consider what role primary education can play in making Nigeria a safer and better place to live in. *



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Peter Peter is a small wiry man, unpretentious and fierce, but then he is a prophet, and brings into the room with him the kind of discomfort we would have had to expect from his foregoers Isaiah or Jeremiah. He provides the extreme model for the passionate Judeo-Christianity of Ughelli; that is, as prophet he exceeds the evangelist in bringing in the flock, and the pastor in nourishing the flock with the burning words of God. It is true that Peter is also a pastor, at his Prophecy and Healing Chapel, as he is a Lecturer at Salvation Bible College in Ughelli, a graduate in Business Administration from the Delta State University, and a Ph.D. from Arkansas Bible University. But foremost he is the prophet, a regularly established role inside the Nigerian Pentecostal Churches. The prophetic profession is frequently played out for purely lucrative ends, and there are many wealthy “prophets” in Ughelli, and throughout southern Nigeria, but Peter is not one. The true prophet can easily be distinguished from the false prophet, Peter assures me, and I believe he knows himself; on rare occasions, of which Peter assures me he is one, a genuine prophet appears, present, capable of swaying vast numbers, and able to heal. To judge by what he describes as his edgy relation to the prophetic establishment, and by his quirky intuitive brilliance, I incline to think Peter is the genuine article. And what is that genuine prophetic article? Is it a bulwark of security? Someone to turn to, in a world where neither police nor vigilantes can protect you? The prophet (prophetes) is the teller in advance, or seer—to change the image from saying to seeing. (This is the figure of Ezekiel, Isaiah, or Elijah, who led the Israelites forward in excoriating language, or of Cassandra, who knew a whole fated disaster in advance, and fruitlessly warned the Greeks against it.) To see in advance is to have concrete foreknowledge which can be useful to people—whether they will have a child, whether they should stay with a partner or not, whether they should take a certain trip, how they should interpret this or that dream—and Peter, because he can speak to all of these decisions, considers himself both a healer and counselor, as well as a seer. His prophesying itself is carried out from the small church beside his home, where he preaches, works with confessing parishioners, and studies, in an ambience of peace of mind which is replacing the larger field of ministerial administration and conflict on which he used to exercise and exhaust himself. It is not only his professional achievements and combats—conflicts, jealousies, turf battles with his brother over church ownership, struggles to hold onto congregants—from which he is



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withdrawing into peace, but also his former mass-scale prophetic presentations. Peter knows what it is to hold a receptive audience in his hand as he gives proofs of his gift for reading some parts of the future. He knows what it is to call a woman up from his audience, to invite her to confess her sins, and to feel, in oneness with the congregation, the sigh of collective relief as evil behaviors are opened to the light, and demons are released. (And the security of all is disclosed, making itself felt in the room!) He also, I sense, knows what it means no longer to be holding such audiences in his hand, and how fragile his current peace of mind is. He may know too much about people, as he sees it, to sit easily in their presence. Wherever precisely he sits now, he knows himself above all as a healer, and delights in one-on-one achievements, knowing as he does, in the presence of an ailing parishioner, what the source of spiritual pain is, which he must extirpate in order to free the sufferer. Before no resident demonic does he stand back, for he sees illness as an attack by the devil; and sees his own gifts, clearly, as one antidote to the devil’s concentrated assault on Urhobo society. Where did that prophetic gift set in, in Peter’s life? As a youngster, playing in his mother’s own church—private churches are commonplace in this Ughelli of one thousand churches, no permit or credentials are required to establish one17—Peter had felt exalted while drumming. This kind of exaltation is routine in Nigerian religious experience; in Igbe dance cult, where the white-robed worshippers sway and tumble like the Bacchantes in Euripides’ Bacchae; in the song-induced high worked up during all-night prayer sessions of the chapels just going up behind our guest house—and all over town; in the overnight prayer exaltation which virtually levitated my friend Margaret’s mansion, where we found ourselves in the first essay (Part I, section 8).18 As a boy of ten, hungry for sweets but begging them in vain from a caring but careful Mom, Peter discovered his own money-earning prophetic move. He would go up to pregnant women on the street and tell them they were going to have a male child. This was genuine prophecy, as Peter saw it. When it turned out, as it did in some cases, that the prophecy came true, and that in addition the mom in question had hitherto born only girls, the prophet was richly rewarded for the joy he had foreseen and, in a way, “promoted.” (An intersection, there, of secular strategy with a divine outcome.) Many a sweet lay at the end of that road. If you are going to be a successful prophet, why not prophesy what has a constructive chance of coming to be, and of producing a deliriously wished-for outcome? Time grew out around this world, the young man acquiring a good education, graduating from the Delta State University in Business



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Administration, ready for a professional career in the corporate world. Then one day, when Peter was living with his mother—because his hottempered Dad, enraged at the boy’s independence, often beat him unconscious—one day Peter was riding on the highway with his elder brother when the attack occurred. (Remember: this is the kind of founding event which one narrates, gives body to by retelling, calculates into the account of oneself as origin. Joseph Smith or Paul of Tarsus come to mind.) The windshield of their car became clouded over, at least for Peter, by a fog out of which emerged the outlines of a figure in white robes—it was an angel—which, though his brother at the steering wheel could not see it, came ever closer to Peter, took him by the neck, and began to choke him. Through a closing windpipe Peter croaked to his brother that they had to get off the highway immediately; Peter was dying. By chance they were close to a highway exit; near the exit lay a healing center presided over by a noted evangelist. Near death, Peter collapsed into a coma on the evangelist’s floor, where he remained for three days, broken by the angel, and with his helpless face turned toward God. From that time on, it was clear to Peter that his life had changed, and that the voice of God was the most important voice in his world. His subsequent Church-building, professorial study work, and mass-prophesying appearances all stemmed from this encounter with the angel, who was remorselessly demanding a life change. The life change brought into it a Christianity of prophetic proclamation, but left behind none of the worlds of demonic struggle, which Peter inherited from archaic stages of African anxiety.19 The full disclosure of his condition was for Peter the security— we seek that theme—of belonging without mediation to his world. While recounting this angelic attack, Peter sits across from me in the fading afternoon light; tight as a drum he is wired with some of the heat of his brutal father, fervent and uncomfortable, not fit even for the complex happiness endemic to the Ughellian. (To be sure, each of us has his/her unique path to bliss, and who am I to judge what turns and twists Peter’s happiness-path takes? Or what sort of refuge he finds against Ughellian anomie?) As our talk grows lateral, lassoes fragments of the lived world crowding his faith life, we slide into the anxiety-creating zones of evil. (I have elsewhere [Part I, section 1] discussed the dark dread of the night far out onto the forbidden Federal Highway beyond Ughelli; I touched the zone of owls, serpents, half-human forms, transformative poisons. Hints were dropped; the Ughellian is never far away from the breeding grounds of evil.) I think we got into the “evil” topic through the “madman” theme, which is a local issue that confronts me every time I go out, and about which I have been pestering my friends ever since I first arrived in



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Ughelli, fifteen years ago. A familiar sight on the streets of Ughelli—they occasionally dance down the Federal Highway below my balcony—these “madmen” are typically naked, wander or gesticulate down the center of the road, and seemingly pay no attention to the highway around them. (A poop stop in the gutter, just beside the rushing cars, is hardly noticed.) From my first days in Nigeria I have asked for an explanation of this human type, and of the citizens’ indifference to the scenario, and only Peter has opened the matter to the light, and enabled me to understand the local perspective. (Back here in Iowa, Social Services would quickly have wrapped their tentacles around this “victim of society”.) I had wrongly thought that Peter, as a prophet who had entered belief through the physical attack of an angel, would reach down as our Lord recommended and touch those “struggling at the bottom”. (Was I in good faith hypothesizing in Peter a world-sensitivity beyond my own? For that matter, was I right about our Lord: didn’t he suffer the little children to come gently to him, while, when needed, he could whip the money lenders out of the temple?) Peter’s own attitude was simple and not gentle: the madman was evil, concealed some sin that needed to be confessed— allusion is made here to madmen who “have confessed” and been cured— and no great harm would be done if the man was blown away by the traffic. (Weed, or stronger stuff readily available in Delta State, probably played a role here too!) I had “always known” that the Urhobo obsession with “proper behavior” was more than Emily Post, but now I understood that the socially offensive had the germs of the sinful in it; a consistent perspective, if one understands society as the definition of life as value, and successful existence as a constant struggle against evil. And so we are into the realm of evil, and Peter is finding his true theme, and I drop back into that sense of the “African” anxiety complexes, fears of evil eyes/attitudes/implications, of coded or cultish juju solutions to fear, and that just when my conversation was edging toward the sphere of love—suffer the little ones to come unto thee, harm not the least of these; for Christ sake do something for the madman—we are edging into the sphere of the dark. I was looking for the religious as a principle of security, but I was receiving only a very turbulent response to that quest. The conversation takes turns new to me. Peter believes that the Black Man has a black magic which is as powerful as the White Man’s white magic; the White Man invents the chips that will carry voices via satellites across the ocean, while the Black Man can cross the Atlantic during the night, on the Night Planet, and can return home in the morning. (Peter cites the distinctive story of a woman from Ughelli who thus crossed the ocean, and returned the next morning, having meanwhile assumed the form of a rat,



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bitten her London-based son, and killed him overnight. Talk about seamless; Peter recounts these adventures in spirit with the matter-offactness of a high-school chemistry teacher describing a lab experiment.) I trot out language drawn from Western social science, try amateur psychiatry, as in my head I have been testing it out throughout Peter’s accounts of his states of possession. And then for all my desire to intervene, conversation takes us down a dark alleyway into sub-themes which undergird Peter’s prophetic Christianity, and which are built on the rock of custom. The issue of the madman had opened this box, and the extreme recourses of security have been presented to the world. I have had occasion (Part I, section 7) to mention the painful death of William, my dearest Nigerian friend. William was Peter’s brother-in-law, and the loss of beloved human life covers us for a minute, until Peter casts a difficult kind of dark light on the loss, bringing in a demonic topography that goes with the “animist world view”, and that firmly moves the death of William over from biology (bp issues) to its underlying causes, the source of the deathly infection. William’s mother had just predeceased him, while subsequent to the event recorded in our introductory snapshots, and more recent than William’s death, his younger brother had died. (In our introductory snapshots we tracked all but this crowning detail.) Peter and I revert to what I call this “brutal coincidence”, a term at which Peter balks. I know that he is processing the pan-African conviction that no death, indeed no turn of fate for good or evil, is ever accidental, but that destiny rules all events. (Not destiny in the sense of Aeschylus’ ta pepromene, the forever from on high inscribed, but destiny in the sense of the way things had to play out in this particular case. Here in the Delta a death is always the basis for a suspicion of foul play; as when a husband dies, and the wife makes urgent pre-emptive efforts to exonerate herself from guilt in what cannot be a death by “natural causes”.) Sure enough, Peter adds his commentary on the “brutal coincidence”: Orokpo, the village where David and his brother and mother are from, is a fated miserable village, dooming its residents from birth, noxious with death, as one can see on a visit. (I had just visited Orokpo, and found a largely mudhut-lined main drag with no signs of economic life beyond the kitchen parlor apothecary shop, provisioned with cheap imported sweets and a few tubes of toothpaste. A nothing spot on the road.) The “brutal coincidence” is thus not coincidental at all. As I query the point, I see Peter open to the rich topographies of good and principally evil, and my head comes off as it has so often in the past, when in the midst of discourse with African friends I look down at the ground and find it shaking. It should not have been shaking that hard.



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Earlier, as Peter was discussing the responsibilities of the Evangelist, he had stressed the importance of vigilance against cults, and from there we had gone briefly into the issue of witches and wizards. But only briefly. Now Peter has brought us back to the theme of evil persistent in a locale, and the doctrine of witches and wizards is in full sight. Witches and wizards thrive in Orokpo, it seems. (Peter identifies two other hot spots for witches/wizards in our part of Delta State: Okparabe, where these masters of evil abound, and Oteri, on the outskirts of Ughelli, a village known for the brilliant young men who have regularly left there on scholarship to Britain, and been turned mad shortly after arriving there. Peter enriches this talk of witch-land with detailed reports on ritualists, body parts experts, thriving throughout the Delta, and thick as hen’s teeth in Ughelli.) William was originally from a doomed area, and in building a house for himself in Orokpo, as in planning a house for his mother there, he subjected himself to the local powers in the most tangible way. His death, and that of his mother and younger brother, were predictably enough lodged in their home-town environment. No death, Peter would be the first to say, is natural; death, like life, always springs from agency. There is an order—often a malign order—in human affairs; but through the thicket of anxieties, proscriptions, and exaltations the individual can find his way to axes of meaningfulness. This would be a move within the securities of understanding, no small part of the spiritual security we query now.

Notes on the Talks with Peter I found Peter straight and boyish and rather tough, from the start—not knowing that tough in this culture can mean hurt and self-protective. (Here’s where the inner pressure for security manifests itself.) He arrives on time—because he believes that is the white man’s habit—and he sticks to his subject for the same reason. (These colonial preconceptions of the white presence are lodged in habits of thought operative in all Ughellian dealings with the oyibo, and generate blends of unsureness with contentiousness which I find hard to untangle—but provocative.) He has learned in a hard school to be faithful to himself, perhaps in order to correct for the distortions of his historical condition, perhaps in particular because an elder brother has recently pulled seniority on him, and run off with the large pastorate Peter thought he possessed. Peter feels to me like the genuine article, with nothing to sell. While the evangelist and the pastor have roles, within the Pentecostal tradition, of selling the faith and building congregations, the prophet has the role of telling the truth and predicting it. He is not in dialogue, he is not asking for alms, he is telling. I



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have visited Peter’s Sunday morning service often enough to know that while he does not charm, he knows his Scripture in a hard and germane way, and shuffles rather angrily through his small chapel, encouraging harshly and dispensing heartfelt imprecations against the diabolic. Let’s say he’s ready to fight for security. Accordingly, the message he brings in the wake of prophecy is stark. I have come hesitatingly to mention to Peter what seems to me the character of his Christian position, and indeed of the Christianity I find most prominent in Nigeria—loud, assertive, praising by infinite repetition. I have come to say that I find little of the meek Christ I was especially trained on: the good shepherd, the one who calls to him the little children, the genius of the Beatitudes. His response is a sharp mot juste, that Nigerian Christianity is an anointing Christianity, all about laying hands on, blessing by loud praise, laying on hands for healing—in short, for acting, action. He shares with me a small illustrative booklet currently popular for use with twenty-one-day prayer and fasting programs in the Delta: Prayer Bullets for Winners (War against Haman 8).20 The Christ addressed, named, praised in this fierce little exhortation to self-discipline, is the Lord whose voice is Jehovah’s—angry, anxious of the evil, super patriarchal. Last year, 2011, was a year of decoration and the Lord told me that this year 2012 is the year, in which He, “JEHOVAH OVER DO” whom I also call “JEHOVAH SUPER DO” will PROCLAIM (ANNOUNCE) you. It is a year when people will SEE and HEAR of all the goodness of God in your life, family and ministry.

The resultant praise of Jesus (often replaced or over driven by Jehovah, in the Old-Testamental thrust of African missionary Christianity) thunders from Ughelli’s churches night and day, and is the tone of Peter’s own “tough” prophetic Christianity. (Nowhere else, though, do I see that Christianity so firmly interfaced with archaic anxiety-fury as in Peter himself.) It is an aggressive personal gospel of testifying to the power of the Lord, for indeed it is only through power that Peter was throttled into belief—more violently taken than Paul. There is no dearth of violence in Deltan Christianity. Peter’s recent practice, in the wrestling match against the Satanic, has as I write led him to “incarcerate” two twenty-year-old women in his flock; they confessed to dreaming of improper marriages outside the church, thus to unacceptable sin, and through a three-day prayer and fasting program Peter was freeing them of their diabolic obsession. As this incident illustrates, and the foregoing on Peter takes as truism, Christianity is in such a prophet a life-death unremitting struggle against evil.



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* In our introductory snapshots we pulled an all-nighter with Margaret, visited Augustine’s Christ Apostolic Church, went to mass, and bore through the ecstatic blessings of Maurine’s Celestial Church. I bore witness to the variety of Nigerian religious traditions, which reflect the founding drives behind the beliefs brought in from the West, originating with Portuguese Catholic visitors as early as the fifteenth century. These imported Christian forces gradually assumed local forms, and by the time of colonialism blended with indigenous traditions into, say, the patriarchal tones of contemporary Deltan praise religion. The blending of Christianity with native traditions—fascination with and dread of nature spirits, interpenetration of the “perceived world” with the “night world” inside it, susceptibility to labile forms, humans into animals and the reverse—this blending is seamless, as we see in Peter’s unquestioning conviction that his Christian prophetic can heal right through the borders of two women’s minds into their impure dreams. Where Peter took up arms for God and against evil, others prefer a lower register—while still maintaining the same themes—inclined to walk in peace as the greatest security. On every side of these extremes of security-search there flourish the practices of juju, ritualism, herbal healing, and witchcraft/wizardry, which may be viewed, in the present setting, as from the ground up, archaic procedures of warding off, of doing what the “higher religions” do with more evident historical grounding, and what the forces of social security—Bakassi, police, military—seem incapable of doing at all. *

Education Education, to which we attended in Essay One, through the discussion with brother-in-law Goodman, comes last in this survey of security resources, because we needed first of all to see how potent or impotent the alternatives were. As so often—once the police, the military, the vigilantes, and the priests (of whatever stripe), magicians, and wizards have been factored in—it occurs to us that if people simply “thought better”, “wrote better”, even “talked better”, they would rise to a new level of self-understanding and effective behavior. Their security would lie in the accordingly better world they would be building for themselves. As the pre-Raphaelites (Morris, Frye, Pater) thought, the creation of significant



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self-expressions grounded in care for living would inevitably purge and strengthen the language of the tribe. One might compare this nobly minimalist perspective on social reform with the movement in contemporary urban policing which introduced the notion that minor crime—breaking of windows, scribbling graffiti, even leaving trash around, was the kind of infraction of civic virtue the police should concentrate on. The slow building of social responsiveness, from the ground up, would be the foundation of a more respectful and secure society.21 One bright day (Part I, section 5) we visited Margaret’s public elementary school in Ughelli. We found it teeming with life, seriously overcrowded (sixty fourth-graders jammed together at long wooden desks), manifest with poverty, hustling and fatigue. As I learned from the experience, many (certainly not all) of the students were undernourished, came to school tired and irritable, and had their minds on the hawking that lay before them at schoolday’s end. Yet there is no doubt that the educational enterprise on which they were thrust was fulfilling a supreme obligation of the nation,22 and made for the shelter and protection of the citizens, in their adventure through that anxiety-filled social world from which neither the constantly invoked Oghene (God), nor the state government, nor the Bakassi Boys were able to provide protection. We have written of that school in the introductory snapshots, and remind ourselves of it here, as a sample of the grass-roots educational level. Three days ago I went to visit another elementary school, this time a private school founded and directed by a distant relative of the Peter whom we now know as a prophet and pastor. This school, on the north end of town, lies down a pothole-pocked dirt road lined with tiny mom-and-pop shack stores—Food is Ready; Goatmeat Pepper Soup Today; Mineral; Gulder—a few being constructed storey buildings, with regal iron gates and crescent gables—THE LORD BUILT THIS HOUSE—and some empty fields. The environment, in this growing sprawl corner of Ughelli— Maurine’s Celestial Church is just a few blocks further, in fact in this very block there are five new churches—is bursting with new dreams and old realities—impassible road, patches of shack poverty, voluble and lively residents passing back and forth to get water, to buy snacks, to gossip. We see Ese ahead, waving; she ushers us a couple hundred meters to the East, where we find her school. Raw and fervent, this seedbed of intellectual control is housed in a roofless, partially completed, rented building, which Ese invests in with a view to eventual purchase. The eight-foot cement walls separate off eight little dirt-floor cubicles of classroom; the path among the classrooms is a



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rough-and-ready trample over hillocks of mud. (Dry season this; think of the floors in rainy season!) In and among those cubicle classrooms sit one hundred and thirty youngsters in yellow school uniforms, ranged by age level from KG to Primary 4, fourth grade. For a couple of hours Ese, my wife and I tramp, climb, bend and wriggle from one classroom to another, greeting the kids to the tune of a heart-warming Good Morning, Sah. We distribute tuppenny candy bars, cheerful glances at the learning work underway; then we take our leave. The difference between this school and Margaret’s, visited a year earlier and described in Part One, lies in the much more favorable student-teacher ratio here—perhaps one to eight, as contrasted to one to thirty—the reduction of the terrible classroom crowding that jammed Margaret’s children into one another’s elbows, and the easy presence of Ese herself, a self-willed sexy commander-in-chief whose chief weapon is her smile. Saying that, you say it almost all: Ese is ambitious for her school, which she hopes to have registered as soon as she can muster the required 700,000 naira, and willingly submits to regular inspections by the Delta State Ministry of Education. (Bribes there doubtless are, but also supervision, for the Nigerian educational system—like its legal system—is full of [often unfulfilled] promises of administrative organization.) In Ese we are looking at what seems a story of ambitions and progress; a crossover point between American and Nigerian styles of hustle. And indeed around her Ese can look out on a city sprouting private education from every corner. In Ughelli, start-up private schools are as prolific as start-up churches;23 it has been observed that these two are the only growth enterprises in town, protected, as they are, by a culture in which anything can be built, undertaken, tried out untaxed—but that the law of the market in the end trumps all. And so this essay comes to a kind of formal end, with two vestpocket-sized examples of the role of education in initiating security. I am ready to stretch the research brain, to add, to this initial account, a positivist account of the other levels of public and private education in Ughelli. (Were I so to extend the ambitions of this final chapter, I would turn first to the upbeat but realistic text, Repositioning Higher Education in Nigeria (2006), by Borishade and Okebukola—see collateral reading— which combines academic idealism, for University education in Nigeria, with tough realism, as it discusses the national universities’ lamentable shortcomings, corruption of every sort and neglected infrastructure; and from there I would focus on the Delta State University system—with its flagship campus at Abraka, and campuses at Ole and Asaba, where brother-in-law Goodman works.24 I would simply enrich the theme limned



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in discussion of Ese’s grade school: a wealth of vigor and talent soldiers on in conditions of makeshift or underfunded infrastructure, and the environing specter of social greed.) I am ready to write a Wikipedia entry on public education in Nigeria, at least to the best of my ability, and in line with the empty Faustian curiosities I have myself addicted in a lifetime of miming the Enlightenment project. And then, whoops…I’m thrown off track. Ese comes by the next day to have supper with us and Enlightenment man asks how she thinks the school visit went. (All I can think of is the beaming faces and the Good Morning, Sah.) Not so well as you might think, Ese slowly replies. Many parents called her, after the children got home from school, to ask about the oyibo who had appeared in their school and given them sweets. These parents were suspicious of the foreign person and of his intentions. Was this the usual Nigerian anxiety reaction toward the foreign? I thought it exaggerated. Indeed it was an exaggerated fear, explained Ese, bringing up the topic current on every street in town. Exaggerated but for a reason. The day before, she said, a “stranger” had picked up a girl and taken her to a room in the posh Excel Hotel in nearby Warri. Over the course of the night he had made love to her, then used a magic on her which transformed her into a blend; half-woman, half-python. After this transformation, of which YouTube video records were circulating throughout Urhoboland, and on which the expiring girl-part of the creature, the upper half, could be heard crying Mama, Mama, the “stranger” wizard carved up the hybrid creature, removed many body parts, and made his escape through a hotel window into the night. He had not been seen since. This story had exacerbated the already active fear of Ughellian parents, that their children might be abducted by wizards, magicians, or other demonic forces.25 It was only the next day that the Vanguard Newspaper published the “clarification”. The video was an old one, which had been used on YouTube a year earlier, and was introduced along with the current story, in an effort to destroy the popularity and success of the Excel Hotel. *

Antecedents This last essay is vignettes, but it would love to say much in little about the issue of security as it confronts the Ughellian. It may provide at least a research agendum for the future, the minimum of upbeat fervor, if we conclude the essay by reviewing how we arrived where we are today.



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From the collateral readings below, from a text like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which portrays one kind of model for life prior to colonialism in Africa, and from a stalwart book like Elizabeth Isichei’s History of Nigeria—again see collateral readings—which devotes close attention to the lifeways of pre-colonial Nigeria—one can start to formulate an historical grasp of the Ughelli of today in terms of its antecedents. (Essay Two was wholly devoted to the issue of temporal “antecedents”.) Those antecedents are explanatory, just as are the Iowan’s antecedents, on land settled by North Europeans—our colonial move against the settled life of Sioux and Kiowa tribes—are explanatory of much of where “we” are today. Pre-colonial Nigerian antecedents explain the cultural curve of Nigerian history from the Stone Age to the present. An historical profile establishes itself there, against which we can start to diagram the growth of the cultural environment of the area currently called Nigeria. Our diagram, like a diagram of the major periods of historical geology, will feature vast empty spaces, interspersed with small diversionary pockets—the vast historical spaces of Essay Two—in this case spaces of migration, settlement, intervention, warfare. For several centuries prior to colonization, for example, the early modern Nigerian historical line was perforated by the intrusion of the cultural other, starting with the Portuguese in the fifteenth century. For four centuries, until the British colonial administration had formally established itself (1914), the intersections of the West with the West African coast and the Saharan ports in the north of Nigeria grew denser and more porous, until with colonialism the British consolidated what were becoming their increasingly profuse commercial enterprises in both the south and north of Nigeria, thus assuming control of the territory in Her Majesty’s name. If we are here to formulate a grasp of Ughelli in terms of its historical antecedents, we will want, at this point, to introduce the sharpness of the break imposed by the colonial intrusion: the intervention of an exploitative cultural system, which imported perspectives totally alien to the local culturescape. To unpackage the character of the intrusion would involve a review of the governmental/bureaucratic machinery of administration in Early Modern Britain, with its roots in seventeenth-century empiricism, and its development in the fiscal punctiliousness of Prime Minster Gladstone (1809–1898). British exigencies and cultural practices would at that point seem essential alternate readings onto what so far we have taken to be the Nigerian culture world.26 Those are the new perspectives, which eventuated in a formal Nigerian Constitution—a derivative and deductively grounded set of principles for administration—a document which had its roots in the



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Western Classical tradition, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution—stages foreign to the equally world-adaptive, but far less experimental/dynamic, cultures of sub-Saharan Africa. One footprint of this Western intervention was administrative rigor, and, when it comes to the colonies of the British, who were still astraddle a lucrative bureaucracy of Empire—in India and Africa—rigor which was just in the process of being honed by Imperial necessities. The primary texts appropriate to research, in the security issues highlighted in this essay, are administrative or classificatory documents like the reports of Federal Ministries of Education, National Security, or various Nigerian Federal documents regulating the establishment of religious institutions. Without exception those documents have been presented, formulated, and thought through with an eye to Comtian exposition, data analysis and rigorous argument from theses to conclusions. The present author has at least perused the compendious legal statutes of the Federal Republic of Nigeria; one would have to conclude, from such documents, that Nigeria is a nation functioning under the unwavering banner of Law. Is this, we ask, the Constitution of a nation whose citizens mock its impotent efforts to care for its children? What has happened to create the gap, in the Nigerian polity, between noble concept statements of purpose and mission, and the daily conduct of a society in which principles of law, educational policy, police responsibility…are flouted? To answer we need to deal with a few questions: what was the mindset of the British colonial administrators who formulated their administrative documents in Nigeria? Who were, and of what kind were the Nigerian players who drafted the Constitutional documents for their own new country, now barely more than fifty years old?27 Into what kind of cultural milieu were the new laws of the land introduced? Finally, what was the result of introducing the abstract principles and laws in question into a cultural milieu like that of Nigeria in 1960?28 Research indicates at least the direction we would follow in answering these questions. We would be reviewing the ways in which total cultural mismatch leads to imposed securitization/legality which has little relevance to the culture on which it is imposed.

Notes 1

Richard Ingwe, S. P. I. Agi, J. Adams, and Judith Otu, “Incivility and (Un)Constitutional Destruction of Lives and Property by Security Agencies and Political Gladiators in Nigeria: An Analysis,” The Icfai University Journal of Public Administration, 5(2), p. 32. 2 Todd Sanders, Beyond Bodies (2008), p. 185.



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From the seventeenth century on, Western European and British society had been maturing into a kind of homogeneous social collectivity, in which, strident as were the differences among the social and economic classes, there was some mutual sense of belonging together as a single polity. 4 Postnote to the Anti-Crime patrol incident. Some time after the incident in question, the car occupants are startled to discover that in fact there is a discrepancy between their car registration number as it appears on their papers and the chassis number recorded on their car engine. That does not justify the threatening and volatile behavior of the police, but then, and here the nature of seat-of-the-pants history—like this one—begins to declare its limitations, the author later learns that the police had claimed that they themselves were being put in terrible danger by their conspicuous co-presence with a white foreigner in the middle of the highway. In fact, a few days before in the area several kidnappers, spotting an oyibo under police escort, had killed several of the accompanying police and kidnapped the white man. In other words, the world “seen by the Nigerian police” will be as shaded, as bad-and-good, as that seen from any other group perspective. The author expatiates, in this footnote, as a way of reflecting on the valence which has of course governed the writing of the present book, and on, if you like, one more example of the “difficulty of doing history.” 5 HRW, The Bakassi Boys: The Legitimization of Murder and Torture (2002). 6 Ibid., pp. 2–3. The text proceeds to highlight the nefarious inter-relationship between the Bakassi and political forces eager to manipulate them. 7 Intra-department police (or military or mafia) bonding is a well-authenticated social phenomenon. Mutual protection is assured by mutual silence, and whistleblowing is brutally tabooed in such cultures. 8 The United States is not unique in its law enforcement development. Cf. from within the abundant literature on Anglo-American policing, Les Johnston, The Rebirth of Private Policing (1992), especially Chapter 9, “The Sociology of Policing.” 9 Actions (2012) of the new Nigerian Police Commissioner (npf.gov.ng), InspectorGeneral Mohammed Abubakar, include the deployment of hundreds of new patrol vehicles, the raising of constables’ salaries, and the provision of housing and supplemental assistance for police officers. 10 Boko Haram (Western Education is not acceptable) is a radical Islamist group influential, widely spread, and given to violence throughout Northern Nigeria. 11 HRW, The Bakassi Boys, note five above, p. 6; one of many international calls on Nigeria to improve the image and working conditions of its law enforcement agencies. 12 Ibid., p. 7. 13 Details of this arrest created a significant buzz in Ughelli, though typically they circulated under the radar of “official news”, and, in the author’s judgment, acquired wings in the telling. The story started inscribing itself at the point where veracity and urban legend meet, as they have done since the time of Herodotus— and long before.



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Arrest of Bakassi at party. Anecdotal buzz brought this info to the author. His ongoing efforts—online, newspapers, gossip—to verify the report having failed, he resorts to this lame confession; vulnerability to the fascinating. 15 The familiar logo of Detective McGruff, the Crime Dog, was created in 1980 and pasted on middle-class American picture windows. The decal summoned the image of the housewife behind the curtains, ready to protect lost or threatened kids on their ways home from school. The interest in community policing generated many such local movements in the eighties; the first of more than 700 McGruff communities was established in Utah. 16 From Chapter One of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1910). 17 Church establishment is without protocol in Ughelli. No papers or certificates are required, though in order to achieve corporate status for your place of worship, you must pay the Federal Government a fee of some $2,000 USD. 18 Conditions of levitation, exaltation, inspiration, and miracle production are everyday dramas in Nigerian cult and spiritual life. The churches rock with fervor. The roots of such ecstatic demonstration are tangled with archaic, long precolonial, African tradition, and create new waves of vision every generation. Cf. texts of Devereux and Eliade listed in the collateral reading section for an enriched understanding of these phenomena. 19 The works of E. R. Dodds and Peter Brown—among many others—help me to see the ecstatic and regularly devil-dreading religiosity which provided early Christianity’s cultural environment, in the second and third centuries after Christ. 20 Chris Kwakpovwe, Prayer Bullets for Winners (War against Haman 8) (2012). 21 Policing from the ground up was the policy promoted by the New York, Boston, and Los Angeles Police Departments under the stimulus of Commissioner William Bratton. Bratton’s “broken windows” policy involved thorough dealing with petty and street-level crime, and with the maintenance of close communication between police and law-abiding citizens. 22 The proclamation of universal education in Nigeria is formalized in UBE: Universal Basic Education for Nigeria, Proceedings of Mini-Summit at Abuja (2000), published by the Federal Ministry of Education. There has been free public education in Nigeria since the mid-twentieth century. 23 Private schools proliferate now in Ughelli. Our case study from Ese’s school, in the present essay, indicates that though the school infrastructure may (temporarily) remain impromptu, that lenience is dependent on the decisions of the inspectors, whose visits are regular and scrutinous. 24 One wants to include, in this list of educational institutions in Ughelli, Government College, which was founded in 1945, shaped after the British Public School system, and for long a seedbed of Nigerian leaders and intellectuals. In recent decades the school has fallen into disrepair, but is currently being rejuvenated thanks to the efforts of Governor Uduaghan. 25 “A girl turns to snake…Bukola Solaja 104072051,” YouTube, February 25, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beMuxWQnt6s 26 William Gladstone, a meticulous budget balancer, and his chief and conservative rival, Benjamin Disraeli, argued through issues like instituting income tax, and the



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pros and cons of the Corn Laws, and in the course of these interactions fostered a new bureaucratic and data-based administrative culture in Britain. 27 Cf. John M. Carland, The Colonial Office and Nigeria, 1898–1914, for a study of the class and education backgrounds of selected British colonial administrators posted to Nigeria.



EPILOGUE

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.1

*

Childhood Innocence In my childhood I wandered often through the bosky corners of the University of Illinois campus—in that other world of the American thirties, during what in retrospect seems like a corner of peace. The “outer world”—of which I knew almost nothing—was soon to boil up into a second World War, then into the protracted Cold War world of the second half of our past century. That pre-WWII moment of childhood was a time in my life when I felt the charm, kinship, and peace of nature; I was as easy with the natural world as a Navajo shaman or Tanzanian rainmaker, facing the whole he was there to harmonize and auscult. I was that in sync with “nature”, the nature created for me by, in odd combination, the Romantic Movement (Wordsworth, Schelling, Fromentin) and the Industrial Revolution (Hargreaves, Arkwright, Darby). Wordsworth painted the backdrop of my sensibility, but the world slowly forming around me was the handiwork not only of Descartes and Newton, but of such practical geniuses as I have just mentioned, who over a period of more than a century had been limbering up culture for a new pragmatic. Both of my historical natures spoke of the fruitful readiness of the new world lying around me. Reading was my path to a sense of all this. Three books stood out in my mind from those innocent years, 1935–45. The books were Marius the Epicurean (1885) by Walter Pater, The Ancient City (1864) by Fustel de Coulanges, and Louis Ménard’s Du Polythéisme Hellénique (1863). I see now, for the first time, how strikingly these books sprang from their own second half of the nineteenth century Europe, with its aestheticism, its questioning of the Christian argument, its taste for the sensuous pre-Christian world, and its growing density of anthropological/ religious/aesthetic insights into the workings of society. The reading of those books set back my discovery of Christianity, but reinforced the invisible aesthetic messages of the world, in that sense instituting for me a boundless future in “spirituality”.

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“Revelation” in Ughelli I was wired to fire one morning fifty years later, in 1995, on the outskirts of Ughelli. I was taking a walk by myself in a fairly isolated bush corner, palm and cassava lining each side of the dirt road, birds singing with farmland innocence, when I came on a simple sacrifice of fresh fruits, green branches, and a hare; a small bundle of devotion left at the crossroad. I all but went down on my knees before this testimony to what I took to be the sacrifice of the earth to its own beauty and persistence. I was transported back to Urbana, Illinois. I regressed into everything that had made me innocent. I surely exaggerate today. The moment in Ughelli was just that moment. But it was a moment ready to inscribe itself; it gave reality to a realm of offering to which I had previously had only books for access. I hope that the remarks on “religion” as a kind of security, which I have aired in the fourth essay, enunciate some of the inexpressed material of the present “revelation of sacrifice”. We never know, I guess, when an unexpected event will invigorate and reconfigure the past inside us.

The Seamless Whole I had no idea, despite a reading background which included African issues as well as European, and despite a constant querying of other voices from other lands, that there was a culture in which the higher religious formed a seamless whole with the “animist”, or with the sense of labile, impactful, devil-filled, generally dangerous/sacrificial, regionally rich, narratively dramatic forces that were part and parcel of the reality of our world. (To an instinctive poet, with much faith in the imagination, this kind of discovery seemed too good to be true—and perhaps it was, in the sense that nothing I was discovering was generated by what its creators would have cared to call imagination. Peter, if nothing else, was there to confirm the human reality behind the mindset I was discovering.) I opened the previous essay with a discussion of Peter because I knew no one in Ughelli who so seamlessly drew together the tenets of Pentecostal Christianity with the instincts of animism, at which a couple of sentences ago I threw a paste of (I hope) descriptive adjectives. Peter was onto everything, prophesying like Jeremiah, crushing the devil under his heel, weeping with the Beatitudes, traveling with peanut shells through the bewitchery of the night planet, shuddering at the diabolical submarine witchery that constitutes a world in itself, dreading witches themselves as part of the malign machinery that drives a human world gasping for any trace of salvation. Nor, having surrounded Peter

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with such an account, would I even have touched the modality in which he occupies this mass of conceptual instincts. Can I penetrate to the mode of his retailing? I have already said the mindset he comes from is not, or has no pretention to be, imaginative. (Ughellians are unimaginative, for they inhabit a universe to which imaginative access would be irrelevant; that access would arrive long pre-anticipated.) That modality is matter-of-fact, living the daily world and the spirit world together, amused or startled by neither, requiring no special explanation of either, and maximally opaque to the Western academic inquiry into what conceptual language could translate all this.

Iter Vitae Goodman, my brother-in-law and the father of the happiness theory in Essay One, brought forward a sanitized version of the Christian diabolism Peter inhabited. For both thinkers, however, the salvational operation of Christianity operated against a backdrop of loss, harm, and above all fear—may I say fear of those dark places in the bush to which we referred at the beginning of our introductory essay? When I say that Ughelli gave me room for new spiritual awareness, I mean that nothing could have been more unimaginable, to the mind-environment of my upbringing, than the over-rich, densely populated and high-stakes spiritual world in which both Peter and Goodman were embedded. (I have said this in my Introduction, trying to characterize a midwestern pre-WWII upbringing with what it connoted in the way of reading and feeling. Now I return to the “intellectual content” of that upbringing.) Academic life, in a 1930s and -40s American state university—my Dad’s initial teaching world—meant the rationalism of the New Industrial Welfare State, living with hope its transition out of the agricultural heartland into a world being recklessly thrown by economics and unemployment toward horizons even we who went there are still trying to characterize. (What was that new world we were bounding toward in the forties?) My Dad—sons collect these rare twigs—was a Professor of French, a Rabelais/Montaigne skeptic, dubious of doctors or religious nostrums—he himself was a preacher’s and farmer’s son from rural Shenandoah Valley apple-country, and without being “scientific” seemed moulded by the confident scientism gripping the West in the first half of the twentieth century. Renan’s version of poetic skepticism, I am guessing, was in my Dad’s veins. There was no mention of the church, let alone other cults, inside the humane walls of 710 Delaware Street, Urbana, Illinois. (Did I see him cry? Once, at the Comédie Francaise in Paris, I

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turned to him—he was sitting beside me at a showing of Claudel’s L’Annonce faite à Marie. His face was wet with tears.) With this kind of background I gladly complied, for it allowed ample opportunity to construct the church of the book, and to write what I hoped would someday be an adequate response to my life. The path that led from such a childhood through versions of Catholicism, Vedanta, and Buddhism was not uncommon for an upscale Western kid of the era, but on the whole did nothing to prepare me for the world inside Peter’s mind—and, less sharply formulated, inside the minds of all the individuals who have appeared in the present book. My spiritual enlargement would be an understatement of the power of these encounters, which to this moment leave me stertorous with incomplete questions and painful appetites. Am I the better for this adventure into the African fumious? Or was I better off in the nursery-school gentility of Pater’s woodland sprites, Fustel de Coulange’s dignified ancestor worship, and Louis Ménard’s polytheism as substitute physics? I am better off. For this better off, too, I’ve a memento/touchstone. Thirty-five years ago I wandered into a conference being held at the University of Iowa on the anthropology of medicine. The speaker was addressing aspects of traditional spiritual healing in Nigeria. I asked a post-talk question: was the local healing practice, in this or that matter, successful? The question was meant to seem bluntly countermainstream, and the majority of the social scientist/anthropologists seated there took it that way. Some laughed, the nervous laugh of the academic— I’m one—whose value-free inquiries are suddenly projected into the real world. I have remembered that nervous laugh, among the many, as a marker of a patronizing perspective which, in the last half-century, we Westerners have grown less prodigal of. The curve of global awareness, at its tip, is reading the other as pragmatic and effectual in its way, and not simply to be measured by Cartesian Enlightenment standards.

The Construction of Society The new sense of how society is put together? And how evident societal failure can be? Back to the author in Urbana, Illinois, U.S.A., a decade before WWII, in what, for this youngster of middle-class stability, was a period of peace and gentle self-discovery—for all the ambience of the Depression and Kristallnacht, of which he was only remotely aware. My little America was still a young country, as we were taught to think it, with launching points at a period of decision nailed into time a century and a half before, with foundational thinkers, and with natural plenty there for the taking. (We too, like the Nigerian portrayed in Essay Two, encased

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ourselves in a more or less self-conscious historical framework, its launching pads unique to it. Can only God co-ordinate the plurality of launching pads that constitute global history?) Dizzying as was the future awaiting us, “we” in Urbana felt part of the worlds of learning, of adequate material enjoyment, and of our version of teenage competitiveness. For me the idyll lasted through the war, to which I was the last to turn my attention. Suffice it to say that the socio-political eye, with which as a young person I was drawn to see my world, was observational, complacent, and aesthetic to the degree that I supposed social issues just ran nicely on their tracks as they do in the TV Thomas the Train idyll of my grandchildren today. That this was far from the reality, even of my pre-war American world—think of the Depression—I was only slowly to learn, when childhood insulation got ripped away. The dysfunction that mars social achievement in Nigeria stems from distorted value-bonds among people, as those bonds play out in money transactions. The local way of describing this distortion is in terms of greed, long-throatedness, but I track that greed to the kind of violent disruption of the understanding of money, which in people like Ibori, but actually among the super-wealthy everywhere, leads to a self-destructive disregard for agreed-on values. Corruption, on this account, would be above all a cognitive mistake, a systematic misjudgment of the relations among things and people. Again, the local account of this misjudgment is to blame it on tribalism, or clannishness, which has the effect of clouding money transactions, and lucre itself, into a haze of familial connotations. I scratch your back, you scratch mine. The symbolic act for this calculating lavishness is spraying. And what is that? The bride-to-be, the just-widowed, the anniversary-celebrating couple: all these stars for a moment are likely to be ceremonially pasted with naira bills, which are thrown at them, headlong, until the blessed individual is literally pasted with filthy lucre. Family members on such occasions expend on one another a lavish flood of monetary praise names, in which the bank note ceremonially, and in the family setting, abdicates all claim to objective value. This ceremonial excess is calculated enough, targeting family members whose reciprocal involvement in the intra-clan transaction guarantees all-in-the-family status to localize excessive expenditure. The closure of this familiar circle, smearing it with the paste of brightly colored papers, guarantees that cash stays in the family, and that no matter how great Johnny boy may become on the national scene his roots (and his assets) will remain right back there in the village, where Aunty Susie and Uncle Bill first smeared him with naira bills.

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Marriage? Déjà Vu All Over Again My new insights into married love? Their relation to the insights of the foregoing book? My wife has been a major figure in the foregoing book, as a beloved profile crossing the pages, and, functionally, as the real figure with whom I came to discover the people and place that make the topic of this book; finally, even more important, she is the place I came from to find her in the first place. It had been our intention, early on in marriage, to share one another’s worlds. It seemed fair, it satisfied my natural desire to discover, and it seemed easy to accomplish. It was not easy to accomplish. There were our children to work with, in the United States; there were cash flow problems; there were major detours of schedule, like two years of residence in Ivory Coast, while the author was a Fulbright Prof, or many months out of three years spent teaching at Deep Springs College in the Sierra Nevada desert of California; in any case, 2010 found us ready to return to our original culture-sharing project. For the present author, that decisive change meant serious commitment to the present book, which was a kind of pledge of commitment to the squalid/vibrant city to which this book is devoted—as well as to the gorgeous woman to whom it is devoted. One consequence of this sharing is that I now know something about what makes my wife tick. That “makes her tick” business takes us back to the theoretical issue which dominates this entire book, and indeed shadows the very idea of “the book”. To marry a person, to invest in the understanding of the community, to read history with understanding, to raise children—all these key interpersonal negotiations demand of their initiator a capacity for selfperception. That self-perception is different from the kind of bilan de soi self-inspection that Howard Gardner distinguishes from the interpersonal, and which makes the subject of “psychological” investigation. I refer now to “existential self-perception”, a being conscious of yourself as you perceive. I mean more than that complex act of being at stake in your own awareness, for the site of the being at stake, in the four life-central actions with which we open this paragraph, is the other—the person you marry, the community you engage with, the history you interpellate, the children you shelter into the world. In other words the you that reviews and lives you is the you already instantiated in the other from whom you take your inquiring stance. That state of affairs underlies the intimacy with which the human community pre-exists what efforts it can make to untangle the thing called individuality.

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Notes

1 Marcel Proust, The Sweet Cheat Gone, vol. 6 of Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Random House, 1932), p. 758.



COLLATERAL READING

Abati, Reuben, and Jewell Dafinone, eds., Alex Uruemu Ibru: The Daniel from the Lion’s Den (Lagos: The Guardian Ltd., 2002). Abraham, Willie, The Mind of Africa (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1962). Abrahams, Ray, Vigilant Citizens (Cambridge, England: Polity, 1998). Adkins, W. D. H., Merit and Responsibility (Oxford: Clarendon, 1960). Akani, Christian, ed., Corruption in Nigeria—The Niger Delta Experience (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 2002). Akeredolu-Ale, E. O., ed., Social Development in Nigeria: A Survey of Policy and Research (Ibadan: Ibadan University, 1982). Bastian, Misty, “Married in the Water: Spirit Kin and Other Afflictions of Modernity in Southeastern Nigeria,” Journal of Religion in Africa, 27(2), 116–134. Bayart, Jean-Francois, L’Etat en Afrique: La Politique du Ventre (Paris: Fayard, 1989). Bloch, Ernst, Man on His Own (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971). Blundo, Giorgio, and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, Everyday Corruption and the State: Citizens and Public Officials in Africa (Cape Town: David Philip, 2006). Bodunrin, P. O., Philosophy in Africa: Trends and Perspectives (Ile-Ife: University of Ife, 1985). Bond, George, and Diane Ciekawy, Witchcraft Dialogues: Anthropological and Philosophical Exchanges (Athens: Ohio University, 2002). Borishade, Babalola, and Peter Okebukola, Repositioning Higher Education in Nigeria. Proceedings of the Summit on Higher Education (Ibadan: Heinmann Educational Books, 2006). Braudel, Fernand, On History (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1982). Brown, Peter, Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine (New York: Faber and Faber, 1972). Carland, John, The Colonial Office and Nigeria (1898–1914) (Stanford: Macmillan, 1985). Crowder, Michael, West Africa under Colonial Rule (Evanston: Northwestern University, 1968). Davies, Oliver, West Africa before the Europeans (London: Methuen, 1967).



142

Collateral Reading

de Sardan, Jean-Pierre Olivier, “A Moral Economy of Corruption in Africa,” Journal of Modern African Studies, 37(1), 417–27. Devereux, Georges, Reality and Dream: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian (New York: New York University, 1969). Dike, Kenneth, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta. Reprint. (Oxford: Greenwood, 1982). Dodds, E. R., Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University, 1965). Durkheim, Emile, Les Formes Elémentaires de la vie religieuse (Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France, 1912). Edino, Marcus, Godwin Nsofor, and Leonard Bombom, “Perceptions and Attitudes towards Gas Flaring in the Niger Delta, Nigeria,” Environmentalist, 30(1), 67–75. Ekeh, Peter, ed., History of the Urhobo People of the Niger Delta (Buffalo: Urhobo Historical Society, 2007.) Eliade, Mircea, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Princeton: Princeton University, 1964). Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963). Federal Ministry of Education, Nigeria, Main Report: Vol. 1 of the Report on National Conference on Discipline and Motivation in Schools, (Lagos: Federal Ministry of Education, 1990). —. The National Conference on Discipline and Motivation in Schools (Lagos: Federal Ministry of Education, 1990). —. Nigeria Education Sector Analysis: An Analytical Synthesis of Performance and Main Issues (Abuja: Federal Ministry of Education, 2000). —. UBE: Universal Basic Education for Nigeria, Proceedings of MiniSummit at Abuja (Zaria: Federal Ministry of Education, 2000). Geschiere, Peter, Sorcellerie et Politique en Afrique—La Viande des Autres (Charlottesville: Karthala, 1995). Ghazvinian, J., “The Curse of Oil: Niger Delta, Nigeria,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 83(1), 4–27. Gifford, Paul, African Christianity: Its Public Role (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1998). Gilbert, Daniel, Stumbling on Happiness (New York: Vintage, 2007). Goody, Jack, Technology, Tradition, and the State in Africa (Cambridge, England: Oxford University, 1971). Graham, Carol, Happiness around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires (Oxford: Oxford University, 2009).



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—. The Pursuit of Happiness: An Economy of Well-Being (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2011). Gyekye, Kwame, Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience (New York: Oxford University, 1997). Hackett, Rosalind, ed., New Religious Movements in Nigeria (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1987). Halévy, Daniel, Essai sur l’accélération de l’histoire (Paris: Les Iles d’or, 1948). Herr, Michael, Dispatches (New York: Knopf, 1977). Human Rights Watch, The Bakassi Boys: The Legitimization of Murder and Torture (New York: Author, 2002). Humphrey, Nicholas, A History of the Mind: Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992). Ikejiani, Okechukwu, Education in Nigeria (New York: Praeger, 1964). Ikime, Obaro, Merchant Prince of the Niger Delta: The Rise and Fall of Nana Olomu, Last Governor of the Benin River (New York: Africana, 1969). —. Niger Delta Rivalry (Oxford: Longman, Green and Co., 1969). Ikuomola, A. “Intelligence Information and Policing in Nigeria,” Journal of International Social Research, 4(17), 474–484. Isichei, Elizabeth, A History of Nigeria (London: Longman, 1983). Jackson, Michael, Life within Limits: Well-Being in a World of Want (Durham: Duke University, 2011). Johnston, Les, The Rebirth of Private Policing (London: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1992). Kirsch, Thomas, and Tilo Graetz, Domesticating Vigilantism in Africa (Rochester: James Currey, 2010). Kotei, S. I. A., “The West African Autochthonous Alphabets: An Exercise in Comparative Paleography,” Ghana Social Sciences Journal, 2(1), 98–110. Kriel, Abraham, Roots of African Thought (Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1984). Kwakpovwe, Chris, Prayer Bullets for Winners (War against Haman 8) (Lagos: Our Daily Manna, 2012). Law, Robin, “Human Sacrifice in Pre-Colonial West Africa,” African Affairs, 84(334), 53–87. Lovejoy, Paul, Transformations in Slavery (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University, 1983). MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1981).



144

Collateral Reading

Martin, Phyllis, and Patrick O’Meara, eds., Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1984). Malinowski, Bronislaw, Magic, Science, and Religion (New York: Anchor, 1954). Mbiti, John, African Religions and Philosophy (London: Heinemann, 1969). Murray, Charles, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1988 (New York: Basic Books, 1984). Mwalimu, Charles, The Nigerian Legal System, Volume 1: Public Law (New York: Peter Lang, 2005). Nwankwo, Lawrence, “The Birth and Death of a Local Initiative: Challenges of and Lessons from the ‘Bakassi’ Vigilante Group in Southeastern Nigeria,” Local Environment, 11(1), 95–108. Nwoke, Matthew, Philosophy of Technology and Nigeria (Owerri: Claretian Institute of Philosophy, 1992). Nye, Joseph, “Corruption and Political Development,” American Political Science Review, 56(1), 417–27. Nzegwu, Nkiru, Feminist Concepts in African Philosophy of Culture (Albany: SUNY, 2006). Ogula, David, Jonathan Rose, and Francesca Abii, “A Phenomenological Study of Corporate Social Responsibility in the Niger Delta, Nigeria,” Journal of Leadership Studies, 6(2), 32–47. Ojaide, Tanure, The Beauty I Have Seen (Lagos: Malthouse, 2010). Okonjo-Iweala, Ngozi, Reforming the Unreformable: Lessons from Nigeria (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). Olick, Jeffrey, and Joyce Robbins, “Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices,” Annual Reviews of Sociology, 24(1998), 105–40. Olson, Charles, The Special View of History (Berkeley: Oyez, 1970). Otite, Onigu, The Urhobo People (Buffalo: Urhobo Historical Society, 2007). Pakenham, Thomas, The Scramble for Africa (New York: Random House, 1991). Perham, Margery, Native Administration in Nigeria (London: Oxford University Press, 1937). Philips, John, ed., Writing African History (Rochester: University of Rochester, 2005). Putnam, Robert, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). Rodney, Walter, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: BogleL’Ouverture, 1972).



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Sanders, Todd, Beyond Bodies (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2008). Seraqueberhan, Tsenay, African Philosophy: The Essential Readings (New York: Paragon Press, 1991). Smith, David Jordan, A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria (Princeton: Princeton University, 2007). Temple, Charles, Native Races and their Rulers (London: Cass, 1968). Tignor, Robert, “Political Corruption in Nigeria before Independence,” Journal of Modern African Studies, 31(2), 175–202. Trigger, Bruce, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University, 1976). Uyigue, Etiosa, and Matthew Agho, Coping with Climate Change and Environmental Degradation in the Niger Delta of Southern Nigeria (Benin City: Community Research and Development Center, 2007). Vansina, Jan, How Societies are Born: Governance in West Central Africa Before 1600 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2004). Vaughan, Olufemi, Nigerian Chiefs; Traditional Power in Modern Politics, 1890s—1990s (Rochester: University of Rochester, 2000). Waite, Gary, Heresy, Magic, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Will, Frederic, “Amulets,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 49/50(Spring/Autumn 2006), 249–60. —. “Anticipation,” Dalhousie Review, 6(Summer 2008), 169–78. —. “Can We Get Inside the Sensibility of the Prehistoric Artist?” Contemporary Aesthetics, 6 (2008), http://www.contempaesthetics. org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=512 —. Flesh and the Color of Love: An African American Marriage (Abidjan: Publications universitaires de la Cote d’Ivoire, 2002).