Nimi Wariboko
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Abstract
An effort at summing up the dynamism of writer and scholar Nimi Wariboko 's life at the intersection of various personal and larger histories with his work as thinker and writer, using his Nigerian Civil War poetry as an inspirational matrix.
The rose and cross of the title comes from a Rosicrucian AMORC description of human life as best explored as a movement between the cross of challenge and the rose of fulfillment.
"The trauma of the Nigerian Civil War made me a stammerer', states scholar and writer Nimi Wariboko, a person who intrigues me on account of his unusually powerful transmutation of his own circumstances and his development of a philosophy exemplifying the potential of human life as a creatively transformative process.
Sitting in his garden in Boston, one of the academic capitals of the world on account of its concentration of some of the world 's most impactful and most prestigious universities, he reflected on the journey that had brought him to a professorship in this place, as surrounded by his wife and children, the inhumanities of war loomed in his imagination, juxtaposed with the soothing brilliance of the garden in which he was seated.
"The war lives on at the centre of my being" he states of the searing incidents of more than fifty years ago, in which, as a child of six, he ran from soldiers and dodged bombs, facing aggressions from both Biafran and Nigeria combatants.
Why, then, is the war never referred to or elaborated upon in his many books and essays before the 2025 publication of his Songs of Childhood: Biafran War Memories?
Silence might be a means of self protection as an experience is absorbed by the self.
Having arrived at a peak of one's life journey one could look back at the landscape one passed through, mapping its contours and marvelling at how the minefields were navigated as well as the beauty and inspiration of the gardens one encountered.
Yaffa Eliach, on the anti -Jewish Holocaust of the Second World War, memorably depicts how hunger may shape how victims of war see themselves and the world.
The images of mobile skeletons represented by the victims of the Nazi death camps are the background to Eliach 's story of a woman who, riven with hunger in one such camp, vows to marry a baker if she survives the ordeal, a marriage that will ensure she always has food.
The government of the nation founded by the descendants of that woman who shared her story with Eliach in Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust have used starvation, during and after a totalistic bombing of territory, to try to break the will of Palestinians with whom they are struggling for control of the lands constituting Palestine and Israel.
What is Wariboko's own account of his six year old self's experience of the imperatives of biology in the face of inhuman horror?
The people of his native Abonnema were being marched by the Biafran army to a location different from their homeland in an ethnic cleansing exercise, leading his family to slog through a forest to the destination, on which journey they emerged from the forest, passing by a a house where a woman was eating yam soaked in palm oil, an ordinarily austere meal, but the sight of which roots the starving child to the ground, unable to move in spite of the urgings of his mother and grandmother, " their words were impotent, mere noise" he recalls, " I was going to stay there till...heaven rumbled or fell and lightning struck, tearing the earth apart".
How did the journey continue?
The woman simply ignored him and her casual indifference broke through his mesmerized gaze, forcing him to move on.
Decades later, the man whom the child became has left far behind such contexts of personal suffering, had returned from an MBA at Columbia, one of the world's most prestigious schools and was working in Nigeria's financial sector.
He happened, however, to be worshipping with a Christian community formed by the staff of the Maroko, Lagos residents who had moved in after the place had been cleansed by the government of its poor inhabitants in order to make way for elite housing developments.
Among this low income community of Christian worshippers, Wariboko was Born Again, undergoing the experience of accepting Jesus Christ as his Lord and Saviour and asking the Holy Spirit, the dynamic and formless expression of God, the ultimate creator, to live in him, as this process is understood in Pentecostalism.
Wariboko was never the same again.
In that conversion is to be found the matrix of everything he has become since then.
The child who survived the inhumanities of war, narrowly escaping death, the brilliant primary school pupil who so impressed the principal with his impeccable English that he helped him pay for the entrance examination to secondary school when the pupil could not, the university graduate, who even though finishing with a First Class could not get a job for one year, the pastor to an African congregation in New York , some of whose members possibly struggled with immigration challenges, was fused with the the Columbia MBA graduate and the writer of economics books, a person who has lived the depths of deprivation and the person who has experienced the heights of opportunity, the Columbia budget being larger than that of his native Nigeria as he observed in shock, the man who went on to get a PhD in theology from Princeton, another of the world's greatest universities, going on to craft philosophies of human flourishing, as he calls it, exploring issues of how to maximize human potential through ideas, through environmental management, through economic systems, through the intersection of possibility and actuality, of the infinite and the temporal.
In the midst of this convergence of ambition and exposure to lack, how did Wariboko become a person without bitterness, without ethnic acidities, a psychologically balanced individual?
How did a Pentecostal pastor, which he was for a time, emerge one of the foremost scholars in the spiritualities and philosophies of his native Kalabari, Pentecostalism, particularly in Nigeria, where Wariboko lived up to mature adulthood before emigrating to the US being a place where classical African spiritualities are anathema to Pentecostalism, being seen as the work of the Devil, feeding the ignorance that reigned before the coming of the Christian message?
The human being lives within the palace of his mind, owned by him alone. but this mind is shaped by various factors, over which the owner of the mind has greater or lesser control.
That mind also functions within an environment defined by relationships with other people and by natural and human made material conditions.
The intersection of these realities shape the history of a person and that of groups of people.
What if one wishes to break from this network of configuring factors, if a person wants something radical that is not part of his or her circumstances, what some would call a miracle, how may one go about it?
How does one break free of the imperatives of one's life, of those factors that seem to be moving one in a particular direction and striking free, move in a direction that fully actualizes one's creativity?
I understand this to be a central question of Wariboko's work and strategic for understanding how the Abonnema youth became the multi-disciplinary scholar and writer, a stellar figure in Pentecostal and Kalabari philosophies and theologies and an insightful explorer at the intersection of theology and economics, theology and urban planning, constructing environments with a sensitivity to the sacred, so it's inspiration may galvanize human creative potential.
This question is summed up through his investigation of the Kalabari version of an idea that, presented in diverse ways, unifies various bodies of thought around the world - the belief that the human being embodies an infinity of creative possibilities but does not know how to access them.
"So" is how this infinity is named in Kalabari thought. The finite possibilities to which the human being has access are known as "so".
How can a bridge be constructed between these two realities, consistently expanding the scope of human creativity?
This question integrates Wariboko's work in various disciplines and may guide efforts to understand this creative figure operating at the intersection of prayer and action, study and contemplation, inspiration and intellect, the synergies through which he structures his life.
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