Don Robotham[1]
In a context of the global financial meltdown and the very deep crisis facing Nigerian society, the life and work of Bade Onimode has enduring importance. For what characterized Bade’s work was his insistence that any analysis of Nigerian and African society had to be conducted within the context of a grasp of the global political economy—Nigeria and Greece together, so to speak. A stout champion of Nigerian national integrity and of African liberation, Bade was always an internationalist committed to the social, economic, and political emancipation of the downtrodden everywhere in the world. But Bade’s work speaks for itself and there are others far better qualified than I to write about his intellectual-political legacy—more relevant than ever before, in this era of permanent crisis.
Instead, I wish to reflect on the more personal side—Bade’s human qualities if you will—which were inseparable from his illustrious intellectual and political achievements. Without any doubt, these qualities were the force which drove him on and sustained him through all the many difficulties he was forced to endure. These personal characteristics arose out of and were nurtured by Nigerian society—his native Lokoja and elsewhere. It is a wonderful thing to observe that these qualities are alive and strong in many Nigerian intellectual and political personalities today, despite all the social and political degeneration which has occurred. In other words, just as this same, imperfect and blemished Nigerian society produced its great son Bade Onimode in the past, recent events make it clear that it is also doing so now and will do so again and again in the future. Ex Africa semper aliquid novi.
Chicago
I first met Bade Onimode in the winter of 1967 when we were both graduate students at the University of Chicago—he in Economics, I in Anthropology. We were part of the small group of Black students at the University and he—coming from Nigeria—and I—coming from Jamaica discovered soon enough that we had much in common in our colonial, and anti-colonial, experiences, with perfidious Albion in particular. By 1968 we became roommates, living in a fairly large University-owned apartment on South Greenwood in Hyde Park on the south side of the city of Chicago. In 1970 we parted—he to Ohio State and I to do my doctoral research in Ghana.
We barely kept in touch over the years, although I tried to follow his career and his political work from a distance in the Caribbean and he did likewise for mine. We reconnected again in 1986 when I made a brief visit to Ibadan, and then again in 1994 when he spent an entire day and a half with my wife and myself at Cambridge University. On that occasion he autographed a number of his books for us and we had exhaustive discussions on politics and economics in Nigeria, the Caribbean and the overall global system, late into the night. One highlight for both of us was my wife preparing an excellent Jamaican meal for him and all three of us—as we would say in Jamaica—‘waxed it off’ in no time at all.
Jokingly, Bade contrasted this treat with the pathetic efforts he and I used to serve up to each other as ‘dinner’ in those freezing Chicago winters. Bade used to concentrate on the preparation of farinha while I worked on some insipid broiled chicken, plastered with ketchup—desperate efforts to find Caribbean or African seasoning proving fruitless. We would sit by the TV and discuss politics and economics over this tasteless food into the wee hours of the morning. One particularly funny moment which my wife and I fondly recall to this day, occurred on that last visit in Cambridge. On arrival, Bade greeted my wife, whom he had never met before, in proper Nigerian style as ‘Madam.’ This immediately elicited a stern rebuke from Melrose who loudly demanded to know what sort of comrade was this who resorted to a ‘feudal’ mode of address to a friend’s wife. No amount of explanation from him or me that this was simply a sign of respect would placate her. To loud laughter on all sides, she insisted that it must be “Melrose and Bade” or no food! Faced with this ultimatum, we hastily relented. Melrose and Bade it became—an instant bond restored across the centuries and generations—slavery and the slave trade notwithstanding—between a Black woman from rural Jamaica and a Nigerian revolutionary from Lokoja, on the banks of the Niger.
Bade did not have a happy time in the Economics department at the University of Chicago. Although Keynesian economics was still by far the dominant paradigm in the US at that time, the Chicago department was dominated by what subsequently has become known as neoliberalism. Some of the so-called “Chicago Boys”—a group of Chilean graduate students who subsequently became dominant under Pinochet after the coup in 1973, were present in the department at that time and very much the teachers’ pets. Disdainful attitudes to Africa were commonplace and Bade had to put up with many casual, insulting and hurtful asides. It was an extremely hostile intellectual, ideological and personal environment—totally unwelcoming. On various occasions Bade reported experiences which were clearly racist and which shocked him to the core. He had no difficulty understanding ideological differences, but that these should be personalized in racist anti-African innuendo was simply too much to bear.
In other words, Bade witnessed personally and directly the birth and incubation of neoliberalism. He thus had a very deep grasp of the fact that behind structural adjustment policies in Africa and elsewhere, lay not only an ideological and political apparatus but also an entire set of patronizing and supercilious cultural and personal attitudes. From his days in Chicago Bade realized that defeating neoliberalism involved not only oppositional politics but also the ability to structurally transform economics, politics and culture in progressive directions.
Given these experiences, it was no surprise then that he left for Ohio State. Yet outside the stifling confines of the Chicago Economics department it was an entirely different story. The US was in turmoil—the antiwar and civil rights movements were at a peak and Chicago was very much a center of it all. The assassination of Martin Luther King in April, 1968, followed by the assassination of Robert Kennedy in June and then the tumultuous Democratic Party Convention in Chicago that August brought the University to a standstill. In April, the University had been shut down following the King assassination when the entire south Chicago area was transformed into a military camp, with the sounds of gunfire frequently ripping through the night. Sections of the Black Student Movement occupied the University administration building. Heated debates broke out on this previously starchy campus, with sharp divides emerging between reactionary and progressive faculty and students. All of us, including Bade, were in the thick of this and it affected us deeply. At that time, Jesse Jackson was a student at the Chicago Theological Seminary—an affiliate of the University. On his visits to Chicago, it was not uncommon for Martin Luther King to visit the campus and to have lunch in the rather luxurious Divinity School canteen. Many of us young graduate students, including Bade, would join the large table and be present at these lunch discussions at these epochal moments. Often, at another table not far from ours, other conservative faculty would sit having their lunch, apparently oblivious to our presence. We returned the compliment.
Bade had a front seat, witnessing this unprecedented upheaval in American society—so difficult to describe to people today—who simply cannot imagine the scope and the depth of the progressive movements of that time—Black as well as White. They were profound and had a lasting impact on both Bade and myself. All of us—African American, Caribbean, African—were one social-political circle—Jamaicans, Ghanaians, Nigerians, Cameroonians, Zambians, Americans, economists, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, physicists, chemistry majors, zoologists—it did not matter. All the more valuable this diversity, because we then could share and compare our experiences and grasp deeply the underlying unity of our condition and our common intellectual and political goals.
When Bade returned to Nigeria with his doctorate from Ohio State in 1972, he brought with him this inspiration. From the experiences of this varied grouping, he had come to realize that there were broad similarities shared by oppressed peoples everywhere and that these derived from specific global structures in which this oppression was embedded. He had seen for himself the political and social changes which were possible, once the people had been aroused and organized. The deep political and intellectual experiences in the United States—especially the Marxist tendencies in the civil rights movement—far more widespread than is popularly appreciated and close to Martin Luther King himself—left an indelible mark on all who lived through them.
Political Discussions
Yet one should not exaggerate. It was not the case, for either Bade or myself, that our political orientations originated in the United States. On the contrary, both of us brought to America an already formed radicalism—springing out of our immediate colonial and neocolonial experiences. We both represented the Independence generation—Jamaica becoming politically independent two years after Nigeria in 1962. What characterized that generation was the deeply felt conviction that political and constitutional independence was not enough. From the very beginning, we felt deeply that without a material transformation of the everyday lives of people, political independence lost its rationale, becoming a tinkling cymbal. While strongly supporting the liberal freedoms—speech, assembly, press, movement, political organization and representation—we did not stop there: Bade sought to get to the root of the causes of popular poverty and to develop feasible solutions of a lasting structural nature which would end these hardships once and for all.
Hours, days and weeks were spent discussing contemporary politics and economics and the history which had shaped them. Three issues in particular dominated our discussions: the connection between Africa and the first African Diaspora in the Americas; secondly, the Cuban revolution; third, the African Revolution, especially but not exclusively in southern Africa.
As a result of us being roommates, it became clear to Bade and our other many African friends that Caribbean culture was much closer to African culture than its African American counterpart. At the same time there were clear differences: although we regarded Caribbean family ties as far more extensive and powerful than anything encountered in America—Black or White, it was a puny thing compared to the situation in African culture. I explained to Bade that, in the Caribbean, a vast network of aunts, uncles and cousins with ‘family land’ was common, and that respect for seniority and even age mates was strong—when I was growing up in Jamaica you couldn’t call your elder brother or sister by their first name but had to say “Brother” Tony or “Sister” Mary or you would surely get a slap! Yet there was no formal structure to this family network—no lineage, no formally designated family head or elders, no formal polygamy, no formal authority of men over juniors and women, no formal authority of mothers-in-law in the homes of their sons and daughters-in-law and no formal rules of family inheritance, with the very limited exception of ‘family land.’ Even in the case of ‘family land’ which customarily was held on collective tenure and could (or, at least, should) not be bought and sold, this represented by far the smaller parcels of land which families or individuals owned and was a source of great contentiousness—to be avoided at all cost.
Likewise, in the religious sphere, it was easy to see that Caribbean people had strong beliefs in ancestral spirits and their regular intervention in everyday life in this world. The appearance of favored ancestors in dreams and, indeed, the occasional pouring of libation before meals, was an experience that anyone brought up in rural Jamaica would have been thoroughly familiar with. Yet strong notions of Destiny or of Nemesis, often found in Africa, were by and large only vaguely present and did not take on the salience which they sometimes did in Africa. These similarities but not identities led us to often discuss why sometimes marriages between women from the Caribbean and men from Africa did not last: few Caribbean (especially Jamaican!) women would be comfortable with the rights of elders and mothers-in-law to active involvement in family affairs and indeed, would be likely to aggressively assert their own counter-rights. The conclusion was unavoidable: Caribbean society, formed during the mercantile period as European plantations, was far more deeply penetrated by capitalist relations than was the case for most of Africa, with the exception of South Africa.
These discussions very quickly led to the issue of the European (and later, trans-Saharan) Slave Trade. Here it is important to state this fact: Bade Onimode was the first African intellectual I ever encountered who was able to discuss the responsibilities of sections of African society for the slave trade, openly and without apologetics—something which may be common on the Nigerian Left today but was rare among Pan Africanist intellectuals then. Following on the work of the late Walter Rodney, it was clear to Bade that the simplistic account of the slave trade by the liberal school of post independence African historians was deeply flawed. Indeed, if their approach prevailed (only the white man was involved, only the white man was to be held accountable) then the contemporary exploitative structure of neocolonial African society would necessarily remain incomprehensible. This was not Bade’s approach. He knew who in Africa did what to whom and when, in alliance with what external forces. He knew who continued to do what to whom in Africa and when, in alliance with which contemporary forces.
Bade was intrigued by the connection between Jamaican and Nigerian culture—overwhelmingly sourced from the east and south—Akwa Ibom, Abia, Ebonyi, Enugu and Cross River states—and coming to Jamaica principally via Calabar throughout much of the 18th and into the early years of the 19th centuries. He was amazed to hear of the annual Christmas masquerades in Jamaica—Jonkunnu—with various figures in almost identical masks and costumes and similar music and musical instruments to those found in Enugu such as in omabe and odo. Bade was also fascinated to learn of the many similarities between rural Jamaican and Ghanaian culture and also the many influences which came from the Congo/Angola area. He developed an enduring interest in Caribbean culture and society, with a deep appreciation for the social and historical context out of which popular Jamaican musicians such as Bob Marley came.
But when it came to the Caribbean it was the Cuban Revolution which held his attention. He peppered me with questions: what did I think of the 26th of July movement? What about Fidel? Did I think that he was on the right track? Was racism really being eliminated in Cuba? What about the efforts to move the economy away from sugar monoculture? Were these effective and could they succeed? Above all, what about the dependence on the Soviet Union—was this not exchanging one form of neocolonialism for the other? I explained that the Cuban Revolution had been THE formative event for my generation in the Caribbean and Latin America. That, on a clear day, we could see Cuba from the hills and the north coast of Jamaica and that the 1959 overthrow of Batista had burst like a thunderclap in the region. If a small group of revolutionaries could eliminate illiteracy from Cuban society in two short years, what were we waiting for? How could we justify the promise of privilege in the midst of poverty held out by neocolonialism when, less than 90 miles away, the real aspirations of the mass of people were being realized?
But Bade’s favorites subject for discussion was the conditions for revolution in Africa. Bade was thoroughly familiar with the writings and politics of Kwame Nkrumah, the stance of Nyerere and the revolutionary struggles against apartheid in South Africa and the Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique. He also knew Fanon and Cabral’s work inside out. He was no narrow economistic ideologue, although he was very much a mathematically-oriented economist, as his text book makes clear. Bade’s political outlook was not arrived at superficially but arose out of struggle as well as a close reading of both the African and European radical traditions. I remember in particular that, contrary to the fashion at the time, he was not unduly impressed by Fanon, although he understood where he was coming from in terms of the psychological distortions wrought by colonialism. But to Bade, any analysis which confined itself to the purely psychological level (Fanon), or primarily to the cultural-philosophical sphere (Senghor and Abraham), or to the political realm (Nkrumah), left the foundations of the problems untouched. Without a class analysis based in political economy one would never get to the root source of the problem of popular poverty and would never be able to propose anything but transient ‘solutions.’
Hence this extraordinarily gentle and mild-mannered human being took the turn to radical political economy and found himself sucked into the unforgiving vortex of Nigerian politics. Yet Bade was the very opposite of the rabid demagogic ideologue, sadly familiar on both the Left as well as the Right. In a certain sense he was not a political person at all—the exact opposite of the ruthless, amoral type who, according to Machiavelli, Weber and Carl Schmitt, is the archetype of both rationalistic and charismatic politics in all eras and cultures. Bade was polite, earnest, modest and self-effacing to a fault—with a forgiving, kind-hearted nature. The rough and tumble of Nigerian politics necessarily hardened him and gave him a certain inner steel but it was not his natural milieu. He never lost that quiet, soft-spoken, reflective, genial quality—with a slight, but unmistakable, spiritual aura. Very Lokoja. Very Nigerian. Very African. Very human.
How close we three became after that reunion in Cambridge. It was as if we had never parted. Little did we know that this would be the last we would see of him. Ten years later, Melrose and I miss our Bade dearly—lux perpetua luceat ei.
New York, NY
March 1, 2012
No comments:
Post a Comment