By Olu Obafemi
The essence of humanism is its stress on the significance of human values and dignity; that people possess the capacity to provide solutions to their problems and life challenges through rational and scientific means and can thus attain fulfilment of individual, communal ideals, transforming the world into a more clement, conducive and livable place for all people. The tragic emotions and irrationality that dominate religious dogmas and fanaticism for many centuries, leading to extreme violent movements on intra and intra-religious bases have had lethal and mortal outcomes on the entire humanity.
Writers –literature and the media—have dwelt, expectedly into the mortal damage and ruination of humanity erected by excessive religiousity and ethnic/racial chauvinism. I should draw two examples here. I will explore, without engaging arcane purism, the art of music, literature and the media to interrogate the basic philosophic and concept/ual assumptions here with the aim of exposing the historical and contemporary trajectory of these cultural practices in Nigeria to argue my case; stage to stage, song to record and the media traditional and social) as therapeutic aesthetics for social transformation. What songs in instruments, sonic waves and membranes, percussions, agidigbo, castanets, flutes, accordion, xylophones, saxophones, guitars, and so on, have our musical artist sung to us generations before and now, to tell us how far away we have sauntered from our basic humanistic instincts, values, ethos, mythos, to get this inhuman, inhumane, irrational, deluded, depraved, at moments when we should be climbing the ladder of progress which was envisioned for society.. The prose, the poetry, the performances of generations before; what message have they rammed down our social nerves, on how much drift we have made, off course knowledge, reason, and values/virtues? We have continued, like the rest of the world, may be painfully and frighteningly more feverishly, to tumble down the precipice of anarchy, violence, self and mutual destruction, deploying various mortal agencies which we have created and invented, to destroy ourselves, our humanity, in physical, cultural and economic terms / spheres of our existence. We do have a continued tradition of public intellectuals as columnists all through our history.
The social media— communication through the internet platforms–has nearly swamped the traditional media in this digital age. The various online fora of the social media—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, Linkedin, and so on, have become dominant tools of engagement—social, political economic– all over the world and our country has embraced it irreversibly. Whereas it has increased the democratic space and has been deployed by both government and the citizens, it is radically redefining the nature of engagement (especially political) between the citizens and the State all over the world. It has also generated a lot of conflict and tension because of its massive usage; it has brought the two into more direct interaction and government can no longer monopolize free speech. Its power (the power of technology that it uses) lies in its immediacy, speed and political reach and its uncontrollability.
It is projected that in the next few years, in Nigeria, the deployment of the social media will increase ‘by more than 80% with more than 44 million people accessing online forms in a demography of about 200 million. The worry of the state about social media abuse to undermine the state—threaten the ‘corporate existence’ of the nation (with specific concern for its potential to aid insurrection as it is put out– is enhanced and manifested recently in the ban of Twitter. Yet, apart from its capacity to widen dialogue space, its economic development/utility reality which has been put at about 10% of the nation’s gross domestic product and nearly 25 million people make it unstoppable in Nigeria. There is the debate of the mutual advantage of communication technology (in which Twitter is critical) to both government and the citizens and thus the increasing local, national and international criticism of the censor of twitter as impeding the nation’s humanity and freedom of expression. There is no question that government has a point in wanting Twitter to register in Nigeria for it to qualify to fully operate in Nigeria. It is intending to do this through the imminent Social Medial Bill which has been widely criticized as inhering the potential to criminalize criticism of government and the demand for greater accountability of the state through the social media. A balance has to be sought between abusive use (fake news, hate speech and all) which exists in one form or the other and the human rights violation that the ban and the media bill portends.
I find the danger of the descent of humanism pointedly depicted in the music of I.K. Dairo, as far back as the early sixties and still rings screamingly prophetic today. His album Ise Ori Ran mi ni mo se (loosely translated as I do the job assigns to me by Destiny) ramifies this message of the need to restore humanism in society. Every line of this album warns against all the dehumamizing power of greed, avarice, corner-cutting, corruption, roguery, lack of contentment, self-debasement In the search for sudden and filthy wealth and so on. It is a therapy and nostalgic cure to listen to the music in its Yoruba language form which translation inadequately captures, alas! Literature, as we all know, is a reflection of society, in the manner of a mirror. Beyond mere reflection, it refracts society in the way that the soul breathes life into the body. Literature, therefore, as an arm of the creative industry, endows, ennobles and enriches a nation’s humanity. It advertises and tells the its story. Politics and matters of an imperatively political nature, have for instance, in the African experience, have preoccupied the literature establishment. Our writers, since the colonial aegis have put their songs and stories in the service of humanizing our society, in accordance with the expectations of George Thompson (1946), over seven decades ago that ‘the poets speaks not for himself only, but for his fellowmen. His cry is their cry, which only he can utter. All this is in the project of reconstructing society in the moment of reclining, degenerating humanity and the pursuit of viable nationhood and the world order. Before examining the commitment of Nigerian literature to social reconstruction and rehumanization, we look at a broader experience of the impact of the obsession of power and politics to a disorientation of the proletarian revolutionary process which sought to dislodge capitalist dictatorship in the Soviet Union.
Excerpts of the Nigerian Academy of Letters Convocation Lecture for the 22nd and 23rd Annual Lecture, delivered on August 12, 2021 at the J.F. Ade Ajayi Auditorium, University of Lagos, by Professor Olu Obafemi, FNAL, NNOM