When he eventually soared into silence, we were
shocked even though we expected it. His health became a drama not of an
impending tragedy, but a spectacular ending. The sort of ending Shakespeare
described as “sweet sorrow.”
Many craved the chance for a last peep at the
dying man, even if he was in a futile rage against his dying light. Throughout
his life, we saw the fighter who was a man of peace. He wanted to avenge the
white man but he became a reconciler of races. He had a bad temper, but he
lightened the world with his supernova smiles and his torso dances with
children, if ungainly. Unlike his contemporaries, he did not die in office so he
could live in the hearts of his people. He was the one who first invited his
foes to dinner and then to share power. Later they shared the Nobel Prize. A
statesman who felt cold comfort in a politician’s robe. A revolutionary with
royal bona fides. He had every reason to be bitter, but he became a proselytiser
of one world. A Samson in battle, a Solomon in council. Heroic and stoic.
He forgave everyone who in 27 years stole his
vital years, a law career, the pride of family, gregarious bliss of friendship.
He became an inmate, menial labourer, active vegetable, loner, wearer of shorts,
mine worker, hewer of water and wood, an innocent in jail, at the beck and call
of his white accusers.
He returned bigger than his superiors, became
president, a statesman, citizen of the world, an activist for the world’s
ravaging disease, a concert organiser, a host of presidents and students, and by
the time he turned 95, he had morphed from human to a saint, from villain to
champion. The pugilist who never relished an uppercut except against injustice,
who never wept because they damaged his tear-duct at a salt mine, who hid his
quiet solitude at not really having a traditional, stable family, who adopted
the world as family. The man after turning 95 had become, in his odyssey from
apotheosis to apotheosis, the most towering figure of the past 50 years. In
company with such colossi as Churchill, Roosevelt, Lincoln, he belonged to the
ages. So when Nelson Mandela died last week, we were relieved of the angst of
expecting. We were taken out of our misery.
“Anticipation is more potent than surprise,”
wrote poet Samuel Coleridge. It was a great and delicious misery. Never was a
death so expected, and never was its arrival so celebrated. A celebration so
solemn as the man.
Yet it is his death that strikes me in this
column, and I use it to tell the story of Nigeria. I wondered, if we had a
Mandela here, if we would have called for a national conference. He emerged from
jail to face a South Africa on the verge of what many called a civil war. He
faced ethnic suspicions, racial tension, intraparty fission, elite disarray,
ideological warfare. His freedom had caged his country in chaos. He needed to
bring them together.
Many say that was his greatest legacy, he who
grew up a man of feuds became the symbol of one South Africa. In his death, that
is the envy of every testimony. He acted “with malice towards none and charity
to all” according to another reconciler, Abraham Lincoln, who wove heroism out
of the throes of division.
It is the tragedy of us as a nation that we have
never had a personage like him in all our history. Not even Herbert Macaulay,
with all his nationalist grandeur, left this world with enough heft to hold very
ethnic group in awe. All our heroes have been ethnic heroes, and all of them
died ethnic champions. We have never had a truly Nigerian hero, one who fired
our imagination unsullied by tribe or faith.
The closest would have been Nnamdi Azikiwe, who,
after taking over the mantle from Macaulay, rose in stature, and fired our zeal
as a polyglot liberal with easy charm and warm diction and bonhomie. But he
lacked the moral stamina, first when he had to deny the partisans of his
movement and ran away into hiding when he thought the colonial lords hunted him.
He also could not rise above Chief Awolowo’s Action Group’s corralling of his
NCNC footprint in Western Nigeria. It denuded him of the chance to be premier.
Rather he paid Awo back in his ethnic coins by ousting Eyo Ita. So the Zik of
Africa had shrunken into the Zik of Igboland. In the Second Republic, he
presided over the NPP that was essentially an eastern advocate. When he died,
after his nine lives, he was seen principally as an Igbo icon. Although we
pretended it was a National burial, just as Ojukwu’s, the Igbo saw his funeral
and the approbation of his life as principally theirs.
Of course the passing of Ahmadu Bello, the
Sardauna of Sokoto, enmeshed Nigeria into its sanguinary chapter we call the
civil war. He was unabashedly a northern imperialist with regal hauteur and a
sense of entitlement to Nigeria for the North. His death was mourned mainly in
the North. Nzeogwu might have thought he was doing an anti-feudal good, but he
ended up with a profile of slayer of a people’s beloved. It made Nzeogwu a
tribal champion.
For Awo, he had an austere pose, an almost
ascetic grandeur. He was the most profound, methodical, and visionary of any
leader we ever had. The greatest Nigerian ever, he crafted templates that all
the other regions followed for governance. Few can doubt his role in turning the
Western Region into a place of wealth and envy. Paradoxically when Awo died, it
was not essentially a Nigerian death. It was a Yoruba death. Awo’s role in
stealing Zik’s thunder in the West has irritated the Igbo up till today, so also
were his assertion about starvation as a legitimate weapon of war. We cannot
forget the oporoko and second hand clothes speech, or when he sent a Yoruba man
to Sokoto to represent UPN at the polls even though the party had Hausa.
Achebe, no icon in that regard, described Awo a
tribalist. A nation lives the way it mourns. In each of the deaths, the Yoruba,
Hausa and Igbo saw them as the heroes, as their special tragedy. Each tribe was
an exclusive club of mourners, jealous of their funeral woes and tears, their
magnificent misfortune. The deaths of our icons have followed the big three
patterns noted above. All the whites and black tribes, and Indians and other
Asian indigenes of South Africa saw Mandela above the parochial traps of tribes
and race. None of our leaders has been seen to have flown of their primordial
cages. Perception is the problem. We don’t trust or even forgive.
It calls for extraordinary statecraft, an ability
to persuade by words and deeds, by character and symbolism. We are not Nigerians
yet. In many states, politics of ethnicity has ruptured prospects of
harmony.
Mandela did not organise a national conference.
He did it by example. This is the way our political elite should grow. United
States President Barack Obama cannot build a coalition like Mandela partly
because of his race and partly because of his inability to connect with people
on an emotional level. This Mandela had aplenty. He combined a mystique of moral
grandeur, a playful humanity, deep empathy to bring people to his side.
We want leaders who have mastered the “other,” a
Yoruba or Hausa leader who can feel the Igbo deep in his bones the way President
Clinton warmed to blacks in the US. Or an Igbo leader not ensconced in his
tribal cocoon.
When they die, and all Nigerians mourn, then we
have that sense. Gani Fawehinmi inspired close to that pathos, but he was an
activist, not a political leader. Such a leader would not fall to narrow cant or
tantrums, but will contain the Nigerian multitude, like Madiba did his people.
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