Original, complete post can be found at https:///post/weaklyanonymous./180

Africa is not worth saving (on second thought, CHANGE)

I was going to re-title this as a question, to indicate my slight uncertainty at the finality of the topic, to inspire less judgment but I realized am receptive, responsible man of substance and I need to right what I feel is honest without thinking of the backlash. Part of the world’s problem is that men do not self validate as women do, ‘woman of substance’ and all.
I’ve been subconsciously trained by novels and TV to pick up offenses- racist, sexist, homophobic- regardless of how I feel about them. I do not know still why you’re supposed to be offended by watermelon. Something about boobs, maybe? It’s easy to know what to be offended by, and pick them out of what people say, or do not say, and how they act, but never what we say, on the blandness of things we already consider normal that offensive seem jarring. That the naira is weak alone should be offensive. But what’s offensive? That Nigerians say Buhari gets another infection.
There’s a lot of anger, brewing and simmering. There’s that Biafran talk that just wouldn’t die down (and I suspect would continue to grow as part of the problem is that we always feel all alternate universes are present than current, inhabited), and Boko Haram, and increasing poverty, and it seems even more infuriating to the average Nigerian to tell him change begins with him. By him, I mean him/her. There’s the response that reeks of self denial: I wouldn’t have to be important in change making if we had a working president.
It’s easy to blame, to try to be safe. There’s a disgusting side to Nigeria’s resilience: a selfishness, a sinister sanctimony. You steal pepper worth fifty naira and you are punished in the most flagrant and painful of ways. There are sins lounging deep in the recesses of our minds: mutual hate towards that boss, pernicious envy towards that unserious secondary school who now has a house in Lekki you’re sure he got through drugs or prostitution or that lazy nairabet, bitterness from the Igbos to everyone else, and then we go on forums and in private discussions and delude ourselves that the magnanimous anger and bad will created and enforced by over a hundred million people would tremble at the feet of one man simply because he bore the title ‘President’.
Buhari isn’t a self-professed, or otherwise, messiah, just a man- I believe- with goals which are frustratingly not coming to limelight. Yet (hopefully), and he’s getting punished by a lot of Nigerians because the bad seed planted years and years ago just happened to have it’s harvest season why he was overlooking the farm. The sad truth is that half of Nigeria’s population would read this, because they’re incapable of it, because they don’t want to not feel comfort at their own limited, narrow, feelings of inadequacy. A lot of old men and women, young men and women, teenage men and women would go about their quotidian lives unaware of the existence of a need to change, always wanting more, feeling entitled to more, trying to get more, because more is a thing that has been seen. We’re all spoilt children who are angry with daddy and mummy for not being able to get that toy every other child seems to have.
Africa, as a whole, is one giant group of people better at complacency than anyone else. Few days back, I was discussing with a friend of mine at an article that said Lorde was going to the wilderness to write her album, and how Americans had a history of camping, and he agreed with me that it was needed, when one had too much comfort, but that when Einstein was thinking he should be knowing more, finding more, making more, thinking more, we were thinking of getting more. More tubers of yams. More titles. More wives. Our innate complacency might or might not be an extension of laziness, but it surely comes hand in hand with envy covetousness.
Let’s imagine Nigeria as the world. We are 1st world and 3rd world. We would be grateful for our electricity, and our good roads, and our technology, and he happy, because there’s no more in sight. Scrap that. This imagination is on par with the science fiction of time travel (to the past, I mean, which has been certified impossible). Nigerians can’t crave more if more cannot be seen. This is not contentment. In a Social science course I had to take in University, I came across a quote from some guy that’s important enough to be quoted and he said something along the lines of Africa not being able to do anything except that handed to them by the whites.
Let’s get defensive: we’re not that bad. I mean, we’re the giant of Africa. We have Philip Emeagwali and Wole Soyinka and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Mikel Obi and these guys are not just local champions.
Of course, that is precisely why we know them. Everyone of these people got their success and recognition outside Nigeria. I had found that quote racist and annoying, but quite truthful, just like the notion that we may still be living in trees if they had not come. If Adichie didn’t win the Commonwealth prize and the Orange prize and the MacArthur genius grant, or get sampled by Beyonce, she would just be ‘a fierce writer’ a ‘writer who came fully made’ but not a writer to be taken seriously, whose highly opinionated ideas are very influential (I love the way she says baby bump, and if she had just the Nigeria Prize for Literature, people would say, “who is this one that is forming?”)
This isn’t just to individuals, it’s to items, it’sto brands. We don’t like Made in Nigeria unless it’s Ankara or Art or a leather shoe from Enugu because then we get to show off how patriotic we are, and how much ‘progess we’re making’. And then, getting an original Chanel shoe in New York is a primal need because it makes you feel exquisite strutting Shoprite, Surulere wearing them. All those fashionistas with blogs would be reeling, you’re sure. Because Lagos is a place for the rich to show the semi-rich just how rich they are. Wearing Dior in Onitsha is useless, so places like Lagos and Abuja get more crowded, then more expensive, then less crowded, and we create these class systems to feel even more complacent, because then we won’t be asking for more because of we’re very aware we’re a lot of people’s more.
Continue reading: https:///post/weaklyanonymous./180