Let me introduce the topic by declaring that the matter, discourse I intend to place before this celebratory audience is the matter of history, which, indeed, is a subject matter of vital importance. Our friend, Ogie Eboigbe, who today becomes a septuagenarian, has chosen to unveil a Biography and History Project whose objective is to encourage us to reclaim our history by writing our biographies and autobiographies. A biography is a narrative that traces the history of a personality. But appreciation of the worth of history, and, by extension, the worth of a biography, is contingent on understanding the nature of history. What is history? We need to inquire. And the fruits of our inquiry on the nature of history can be applied to our land, the land around the Niger—Nigeria.
When it comes to history, there is a conversation I habitually memorialize. It was a conversation I once had with a student of computer science who had come from another university to use the library of the Dominican Institute in Ibadan, the tertiary institution that served as embryo out of which the Dominican University grew.
“What are you studying in the university?” I asked her.
And she, in legitimate pride, answered: “Computer Science.”
With intent to provoke a conversation, I proceeded to ask a further question. “What of history?” I asked.
“History,” she said, “is about dead people. I prefer to study the computer.”
Her response met with another question from me. I asked, “Can a computer function without a memory?”
“No, it cannot,” she said.
I shall come back to this conversation later, to the lesson or lessons to be learnt as it applies to Nigeria. For now, permit me to say some words on what is meant by history by recalling what some philosophers have said about history.
What is history?
For Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), history is nothing but a tragedy in which the powerful repeatedly and recurrently overcome and trample upon the weak without any regard for morality. Or, if at all the powerful have any regard for morality, morality for them is the legislation of the powerful. Whatever the powerful in society decide to be moral, to that the weak must conform. In other words, whatever the powerful decree as sacrifice to be offered, the poor must offer, even if the powerful were to raise no finger in making such sacrifice. Perhaps it sounds familiar.
Karl Marx (1818-1883), for his part, had put forward a philosophy of history according to which events in history are directed by and are reflexive of material and economic conditions of people living in history. In the arena that history is, Marx would say, the contradiction of poverty of the proletariat and affluence of the bourgeoisie plays out, and the inevitable outcome of this game of contradiction is a classless society. However, the inevitable emergence of a classless society would be quickened and facilitated by a class struggle in which the poor will rise against the rich who alienate the poor from the fruits of their labor. History for Marx is therefore a class struggle, and the end of history is the classless society. Think of the statement of Jesus in the Gospel according to John, “The poor you will always have with you” (John 12:8). Without any interpretive effort to know the meaning of those words, Marx would disagree with Jesus.
Before Nietzsche and Marx was their German compatriot, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), for whom history is the expression of ideas. It was his philosophy of history that ideas drive history. It was in disagreeing with him that Marx would proffer the explanation that the events of history are determined, not by ideas, but by material conditions of human beings in history.
Hegel and Marx sought to explain what history is by using reason alone. But history for us who are Christians, can and must be explained through faith and reason, not through faith without reason, not through reason without faith, but with faith and reason. Exemplary in proffering an explanation of history through faith and reason are two great philosophers and theologians, St Augustine of Hippo (354-430), and St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274).
According to St Augustine, the events we witness in history point to the fact that history is a cohabitation of two cities—the city of God regulated by love, and the city of man regulated by egoism. All that we witness in history is the confrontation between love and selfishness, between love of God and love of the self to the point of treating God and other human beings with contempt. But at the end of history, says St Augustine, the city of love will triumph over the city of selfishness. Now we long for justice and for peace. But the justice and peace for which we long cannot be fully manifest until the eschaton, the end of time, in the eternal Sabbath when we shall rest in God because we have allowed God to work in us in our history.
For St Thomas Aquinas, history is the arena of divine providence. Divine providence is God’s direction of the affairs of the universe towards goodness. In history we see tragedies and treachery, we encounter heroes and villains. In all these, God reigns. And the Gospel of Christ is the good news that God reigns in the midst of all human distress. In this regard, Christianity does not preach a message of denial, an opium, as Marx would say. The Gospel is not a denial of pain. It is, at the same time, recognition of pain and proclamation that the power to overcome pain has been offered by God to humanity through the death and resurrection of his Son, Jesus Christ. You do not become well by denying that you are unwell. You do not tell the physician that you are strong when in fact you are weakened by illness. When you go for a job interview, and you are asked by a member of the board: why are you here? You do not get hired for the job by responding that you are at the interview because you have a job in the company.
Christianity would have been a message of denial if it had denied all the pains and tragedies in history. The Gospel is a narrative of all that human beings go through in good times and in bad. Yet, it is a proclamation that good triumphs over evil. At the heart of the Christian Gospel is proclamation of the good news that in the death of the Son of God life is given to the world. His death is acknowledged and not denied. But his resurrection is proclaimed as victory over death, the ultimate triumph of good over evil, of love over hatred
To the metaphorical conversation of the computer and its memory chip I shall now return. My earlier assertion that history is the memory chip of a people compels me to say more about history, about what it is, and about who and who act in history. I shall do so by postulating another metaphor, and that is, the metaphor of an arena.
History is an arena. It is an earthly arena in which God is at work and human beings are at work, an arena in which human beings sometimes act in ways that conform to the will of God, oftentimes in ways that do not conform to the will of God. Nonetheless, history is where God, in his benevolence, omnipotence and omniscience, directs the affairs of the universe to goodness. In other words, in history, human malevolence is overcome by divine benevolence. The malevolence of human conduct does not and can neither impede nor obliterate the benevolence of God. For God’s goodness is the very being of God which cannot be impeded by the malevolence of contingent beings that we are. That is the way in which history is an arena in which divine providence is at work.
Indeed, a computer cannot function without a memory chip. That is becoming increasingly clear in the light of what today is called, by way of a misnomer, “artificial intelligence”. Why I consider it a misnomer is a matter for another lecture. Suffice it to say at this point that, since history is the memory of a people, just as a computer cannot function without its memory, human beings cannot function without history serving as their memory. When, therefore, a country remembers to forget, when a country forgets to remember its past, it becomes a land whose people are unable to accomplish what they ought to accomplish, a land whose citizens accomplish what they ought not to accomplish. It is my submission that Nigeria eminently exemplifies such a country, and that exemplification is an irony. That it is an irony is what we learn when we reflect carefully on two lines of our national anthem: “The labors of our heroes past shall never be in vain.”
When a country remembers to forget
When a country remembers to forget her history, the consequence is failure to remember her past heroes. Heroes forgotten are heroes uncelebrated. When heroes are uncelebrated villains are eulogized. A country where heroes are uncelebrated and villains are eulogized is a land where good behavior is punished and bad behavior is rewarded. Those who fail to acknowledge their heroes will not accomplish anything heroic. The exploits of the Super Eagles in the African Cup of Nations concluded about twelve hours ago would have been impossible without memory of past footballers, especially those who won the trophy in 1980, in 1994, and in 2013.
Nigerians have an uncanny disposition and capacity to remember to forget the antecedents of those who present themselves as candidates for public office. We remember to forget to ask pertinent questions before we cast our vote: what has this candidate accomplished? What have been his achievements and failures? What does his past point to when it comes to his capacity and competence for public service? What is his track record?
And there is at least one reason why we remember to forget. It is this: in every electioneering season, we prefer to ignore pertinent and vital questions about our collective past, and about the past of those who present themselves for elective offices, for reasons of ethnic, regional and religious sentiments. We would rather remember to forget, and forget to remember the past. By so doing, we conduct ourselves like an employer of labor who advertises a job, and hires a person for the job after having willfully chosen to ignore the curriculum vitae of each applicant.
Our disposition to remember to forget is facilitated by the marginalization of humanities in the curriculum of our institutions of learning. In an attempt to catch up with technologically advanced countries, Nigeria adopted an education policy that prioritized the sciences over the arts. Nigeria remembered to forget in the 1970s, when I was in secondary school, when science students were considered to be more intelligent than arts students. The study of history was marginalized in the marginalization of the humanities. And the consequence of our disposition to remember to forget and to forget to remember is that, in a way that validates the philosophy of history in Plato’s dialogue on the Republic, every regime in Nigeria tends to be worse than its predecessor regime. We have seen and we continue to see darkness in history. We have seen and we continue to see the darkness of hatred, of violence, of injustice, of ethno-racial, regional and religious bigotry. But we also see love in history, imperfect as it is. We have seen justice, and we have seen integrity. We have seen, quite often against expectations, honesty. History is where light shines in darkness and darkness cannot comprehend it.
For those who believe in the good news of Christ, the reign of God has begun, as Jesus proclaimed at the beginning of his preaching ministry. But God reigns in the midst of distress, and light shines in darkness. In a religious climate such as ours, a climate of miracles and prophecies for sale, contemporary Nigerian religiosity overlooks the distress and darkness and simply proclaims miracles and prophecies. In Nigeria, we have witnessed the darkness of colonialism, the darkness of colonialist creation of a state held together at gunpoint, a multilingual and multiethnic state without a constitution capable of managing its diversity. We have seen how it led us from unprincipled civilian rule, mistakenly taken for democracy, to the first bout of military misadventure that began on January 15, 1966 and appeared to have ended on October 1, 1979. I call it an appearance because, as Fela Anikulapo Kuti sang in Overtake Don Overtake Overtake, “Dem put civilian friends for there, them call am federal gofment. Me I know dem by their name, me I call them soja go soja come.”
Military misadventure led this country into a totally avoidable civil war during which defenceless civilians were massacred in the north of Nigeria because of their ethnic affiliation, in Biafra, in Asaba, in Ikot Ekpene and in many other places. Again, to show that history is light shining in darkness, in the darkness of the Asaba massacre by the Nigerian Army, a soldier of the same army showed kindness by smuggling a letter out of Asaba at a time when letters were not allowed out so as to conceal the massacre. The smuggled letter, written by a young woman whose brothers were killed during the massacre, and addressed to another of her brothers who was studying in the United Kingdom, alerted the world about the massacre. We have seen the darkness of people killing in the name of religion. But we have also seen the light of Muslims protecting Christians and their places of worship, and of Christians protecting Muslims and their places of worship.
From the first bout of military misadventure into politics, and after the 1979 return to civilian rule, we found ourselves infected a second time by another bout of pestilential military rule from December 31, 1983 to May 29, 1999. Coming with prolonged military rule and its attendant socio-economic dislocation is oil wealth to which only those in power and their friends have access, wealth of which the teeming population is deprived access. So we find ourselves bearing the dubious distinction of impoverished citizens of an oil-rich country, inhabitants of the poverty capital of the world. Our poverty has led to increased religiosity. But the authenticity of this religiosity has remained doubtful. We are suffocating in the toxic fumes of a deadly mixture of corrupt politics and corrupt religion. In fact, corruption has become religion.
Conclusion
History is data. History is also interpretation of data. History is chronology, a story, a narrative within an interpretive framework. If we ignore or forget the data, there will be no interpretation, no lesson to learn. To ignore the data of history is to inflict on ourselves deprivation of invaluable lessons. That is what happens when a nation remembers to forget.
Nigeria has had a sordid past of ambiguity of power, of inter-ethnic mistrust, of ethnic cleansing during and after the first, second and subsequent military coups, during the NigeriaBiafra war in which both side committed and concealed crimes with propaganda, a sordid past of badly conducted elections, manipulation of ethnic, regional and regional diversity. And the present is not less sordid.
Now we must retrieve our past, not to reopen wounds, not for vengeance but for justice, for justice understood as rectification of relationships. Our sordid past of ethnic mistrust has fermented into xenophobia, into ethnic, regional and religious intolerance instigated so as to win elections. The beautiful game of football offers us reprieve from our ethnic bigotry, as we have just witnessed.
The Biography and History Project which is being unveiled by this lecture is the initiative of the newest septuagenarian in town. He is also launching a book which is a compilation of articles from his blog. The Biography and History Project invites and encourages us to grasp how and why the personal history of each of us is ineluctably interwoven with collective history. In order not to erase our memory, which would erode our capacity to function in history, let us respond to the promptings of our friend, Ogie Eboigbe, and tell our story, not as victims but as artisans of peace and justice. With that, our children and children’s children will enjoy the justice, peace and development of which we are deprived. That is why we owe Ogie a debt of gratitude for his project. And a way to offset that debt of gratitude is to tell our story.
Father Anthony A. Akinwale, OP, Professor and Deputy Vice Chancellor
Augustine University
Ilara-Epe, Lagos State
[1] Lecture delivered on the occasion of the 70th birthday of Ogie Eboigbe, at the McGovern Hall, St Agnes’ Catholic Church, Maryland, Lagos, on February 12, 2024
