USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fw: THE NEW FACE OF RELIGIOUS TERROR: SOYINKA AT AWO MEMORIAL

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From: maggie anaeto <maganaeto@yahoo.co.uk>

Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2013 14:21:42 +0000 (GMT)

To: <ayo_olukotun@yahoo.com>

Subject: THE NEW FACE OF RELIGIOUS TERROR: SOYINKA AT AWO MEMORIAL

THE NEW FACE OF RELIGIOUS TERROR: SOYINKA AT AWO MEMORIAL   Ayo Olukotun          For most people, listening to a lecture by or reading Wole Soyinka, Nigeria's preeminent literary personage and iconic writer is often not a pleasure.  You may find that even with a massive dictionary on hand, some words like 'assignation' or 'origination' are peculiarly his inventions and are not listed in any modern dictionary.  But once you have peeled off the not so inviting exterior however, the succulent nutrients and edifying sap of insight and arresting thoughts open up to you more than compensating for the labour you exerted to reach them. Unsurprisingly, therefore, not much commentary has attended the characteristically incisive lecture entitled: 'Winding Down History: Religion and Nation; Power and Freedom' delivered last week by the Nobel Laureate and the inaugural winner of the Obafemi Awolowo Prize for Leadership.        Let me set on record that the event, attended by a distinguished cross section of Nigerians including the Vice President who stood in for President Jonathan, party chieftains and leaders such as Chief Bola Tinubu and all but one of the ACN governors; Dr Rahman Mimiko, governor of Ondo state, Niger State governor, Dr. Babanginda Aliyu, royal fathers, business moguls among others had all the features of a national fiesta. The Obafemi Awolowo Foundation under its vibrant executive director, Dr Olatokunbo Awolowo-Dosunmu deserves appreciation for organising a cultural and Pan-Nigerian event on such an extensive scale.  Soyinka's lecture which also constitutes his acceptance speech of the coveted Leadership Prize, addressed the horrors and sensational atrocities committed in the name of religion, situating these within the concepts of power or rather its abuse counter posed to the liberating anthems of freedom.    Carrying forward the thesis he propounded in his recent, influential publication: "Harmattan Haze in an African Spring" Soyinka lays bare for the audience, the insidious and subversive outworking of religious intolerance illustrating with several examples that it is a short walk from abridging people's freedom in the name of religious observances to snuffing life out of them in pursuit of a so called higher calling.       Autocracies enforce their fiat not just by violence but by appropriating the mechanisms of mental production and intellectual colonization. In the same manner, the new 'imperialism' of religious intolerance has its ideological fortresses that must be stormed before humanity; in particular the Nigerian national space can be rid of its terrors.  There is in Soyinka's construction a kind of religion that ministers to man's spiritual essence and invites us to embrace causes that connote, edifyingly the divine essence, there is also the religion that as Soyinka expresses it "has proved again and again a spur, a motivator and a justification for the commission of some of the most horrifying crimes against humanity." The eminent writer's alarm bells are precisely sounded to warn Nigerians and humanity against the scorched earth implications of this later kind of religion and its potential to dismantle nations in formation such as ours.      Power dementia, every lover of Soyinka's artistic works knows, is one of the recurrent themes in his drama, novels and essays.  He invokes this concept once again by alluding to the 'dictatorship of clerics' and goes on to berate 'this power that saps the holistic apprehension of our human potential and reduces it all to the private interpretations of textual theologians.'  This according to him is the sort of mindset that would in the name of religion obstruct remedial and medicinal initiatives to roll back the advancing surge of polio among the youths, sentencing a generation of Nigerians to enforced disabilities. That is not all. Quoting a recent statement by a disciple of al-shahbah, which glorifies death through martyrdom the Obafemi Awolowo leadership Laureate narrates that this is a frightening form of the exercise of power over the mind and choice of action of others, in the name of religion. How then about the view canvassed in some quarters that religious terrorism is a response to poverty and marginalization? Soyinka rather impatiently dismisses these perspectives when he admonishes: "Let us stop foisting our own analysis over a freely conceded and boastful declaration. That individual does not say, I am hungry I am marginalized therefore, I 'kill'. He tells you to your face, you have only one choice, submit". My own submission on this score is that we are dealing here with what social scientists like to call a level of analysis problem which is another way of saying that analysts are filming or are taking photographs from different angles. Those who stress the link between religious terror and endemic poverty as former United States President Bill Clinton did recently, are looking at structural, long-term drivers while Soyinka here draws on the acute powers of imagination to paint for us the contours of the religious monster in its death dealing assignment and the terrifying self validating ideology which it invokes to dispatch others to the great beyond. The two perspectives are in fact complimentary as Soyinka's urgent summons to spirited action does not preclude substantial anti poverty strategies within the context of a revitalized, developmental state. After all sectarian religious leaders do not just preach at their disciples; they minister to their day to day material needs to secure their compliance. Let it be said, however that Soyinka did not merely show us the deadly sneer on the face of the religious beast; he proposes several interesting remedies for tackling and neutralizing it.  He draws our attention to bridge building and evocative gestures such as the former governor of Kano state, Alhaji Shekarau going up to a church in Kano to worship after a devastating upheaval in the city in which several churches had just been razed down. Were more leaders to speak out against murderous outrages in the name of religion, Soyinka argues, we would be nearer to finding our way out of the woods of criminalised religious bigotry.  He endorses reprisals and the use of force against sectarian crusaders who have no qualms about taking the lives of others but sounds a note of caution: We must not succumb to their dehumanising and denaturing methodologies.  In other words, the war on terror must also wear a human face; as best as practicable; in the language of criminology, the project must be reformatory rather than exterminatory.     Blameworthy, the writer submits are leaders from the Northern part of the country who sit on the fence watching what began as a neighbourhood fire engulf virtually every state in the North with catastrophic consequences for economy, social life and even orderly worship in that severely blighted region.  In Soyinka's frank words 'the delinquent silence of religious and community leaders where the religious rights of others were trampled upon, often terminally' is a factor in the prolongation of the crisis.    And there you have it, a distinguished writer and elder statesman, holding up a mirror to a dysfunctional society and showing us ways to loosen the tormenting grip of religious fanaticism by affirming freedom and the right to life.       Prof Olukotun is Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Entrepreneurial Studies at Lead City University, Ibadan. ayo_olukotun@yahoo.com 07055841236