By Lasisi Olagunju
“There were many famous warriors in the village during the pillaging by the Fulani and yet the village was swept off almost completely by the invading warriors. This was not because they (the enemies) were stronger but due to their trickery, the people of Eruku became susceptible (vulnerable). When the invaders came, they would besiege only one quarter at a time and they would send a message to the other quarters not to worry as they were not their intended target. Unfortunately, other quarters would stand by while one quarter was invaded. This same trickery continued and many of the inhabitants were captured and sold to the white slave traders until the whole village was reduced to only ten people and one dog at the end of the last war.”
That is an excerpt from a short history of the Kwara town, Eruku, that was ravaged in broad daylight by Fulani bandits last week. The account is credited to a 1956 publication by the late educationist and a leader of the community, Dr Alexander Omotosho Obateru. I got it on the Internet.
What is described in that history happened about 200 years ago (circa 1820-1825). In January last year (2024), there was uproar online over the installation of a Fulani ‘king’ in that town (see Facebook post by Trust Bethnews/ Eruku Descendants Union on 26 January, 2024). In 1905, Spanish-born American philosopher, George Santayana, published ‘The Life of Reason, or The Phases of Human Progress’. In the twelfth chapter entitled ‘Flux and Constancy in Human Nature’, he writes that “when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
I took time to read most of the eighty-eight comments which the Eruku chieftaincy post and the attached four photos attracted. A particular comment there foretells today: “We came home for the new year and our observation was what you posted. I noticed they have actually infiltrated our village. You see them everywhere with no manner at all, behaving like omo onile.” ‘Omo onile’ means child of the owner of the land.
The city of Nineveh was promised that “affliction shall not arise the second time.” For that Kwara ‘city’ and many more across northern Nigeria, affliction coming in repeated times has become destiny. The attackers of two centuries ago have reincarnated. They are back; deadlier than they were during their earlier incarnation.
Last Friday, overwhelmed by bandits and banditry, the Federal Government closed down 47 federal secondary schools across the North, and some in the South, particularly in Ekiti. Same day, Plateau and Katsina states did the same; Yobe at the weekend. Niger State did its own before Friday; Kwara did in some local government areas; Taraba closed dormitories. The picture is scary. From the derived savannah of Kwara and Kogi, through the montane forest of the Jos Plateau, to the Sahel of the far North, a canopy of tragedy has enveloped the country.
The terrorists are winning – or they have won.
Where I come from, proverbs are connecting rods; they bind generations and experiences; they carry the weight of morality and memory; they code meaning. Because big misfortunes assault Nigeria, miserable ones squat to shit into its mouth. As we grappled with this crisis, President Donald Trump of the United States doubled down on his verbal intervention in our affairs; he told Fox News at the weekend that Nigeria remained a disgrace:
“I think Nigeria’s a disgrace, the whole thing is a disgrace. They’re killing people by the thousands. It’s a genocide, and I’m really angry about it. And we pay, you know, we give a lot of subsidy to Nigeria. We’re going to end up stopping. The government’s done nothing. They are very ineffective. They’re killing Christians at will. And you know until I got involved in it two weeks ago, nobody even talked about it!” Trump said all this at a time Nigerian top shots were hopping from one elevator to another in US high-rise buildings, begging to be heard. They are still there scrambling to extinguish the fire of global outrage at what we do to ourselves. Indeed, when bad luck chooses a man as a companion, even a ripe banana will knock out his teeth. Our ancestors were right.
What does it mean to be a disgrace? David Lurie, the protagonist in J. M. Coetzee’s 1999 novel, ‘Disgrace’, loves Lucifer. He describes him as “a being who chooses his own path, who lives dangerously, even creating danger for himself.” Nigeria is that fallen angel; every word in the ‘Disgrace’ quote speaks to the ways of Nigeria. Choices have consequences; some of them eternal. The consequence of the path we chose is a nation cast into the furnace of disgracefully unremitting insecurity.
We closed schools and closed life. American philosopher, John Dewey (1859-1952) said, “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” He was right. Closure of schools pauses the life and future of learners. Whether students are locked out of school or schools are locked out of learning and teaching, it is a catastrophe to all of humanity. Tragically, both experiences are happening right now in northern Nigeria. The enemy is winning, wining and happy. I pray this flu of banditry and terrorism does not become COVID-2025/26 locking down the whole country. The cloud is heavy.
In ‘Getting Ready for the Dark Ages?’ Kajsa Friedman and Jonathan Friedman say, “When things get bad, we get worse.” They speak about the “polarisation that increases to near hysteria when elites lose control”, and the “interminable decline” and “internal self-destruction” that follow. Internal self-destruction is the poor stealing children of the poor like fish eating fish to get fat. The Nigerian elite have lost control of the steering wheel; the polarisation is galling, the decline is real and unstoppable; it looks like an irreversible teeter towards the apocalypse.
To the victims of the rounds of havoc, there is no government, there is no state. Their state is helplessness. The people wreaking havoc all over the country are extremists of the worst order. They operate without masks and damn the state to cough, catch or caution them. They think the truth of their criminal existence is the truth we must all abide with. Ghanaian writer, Ayi Kwei Armah, writes in ‘Two Thousand Seasons’ that destroyers come always chanting one extreme truth. They always come to “turn earth to desert.” They are a people “whose spirit is itself the seed of death.” The destroyers came for Nigerians, and Nigeria looked away in complicit criminality. That is why they keep coming. And that exactly is why our government is panting and the reason Nigeria is “a disgrace.”
Government said the mass closure of schools was a temporary safety measure. But how brief is that temporary? When ‘temporary’ ends, will the destroyers not renew their coming and we close again? This fall is a free-fall.
There is a country called Afghanistan; its own madness was thought temporary, it is now permanent. And the world has abandoned the madman with his mother’s corpse. It is having a good meal of the cadaver. Northern Nigeria has Afghanistan as a model of what its future could be.
“They are in a very bad situation… the only thing they had was education, but right now they do not have it.” This quote is about the female children of Afghanistan where secondary education for girls was outlawed four years ago by the ruling Taliban. The reign of the Taliban was thought a joke; it is now permanent. Some people in this country covet what Afghanistan does. And they are working very hard to have it.
Two months ago, the United Nations published an interview with activist Fatima Amiri, a victim of Afghanistan’s peculiar regime of repression. The voice in the quote above is hers; and she says more. She says: “It has been four years that people in Afghanistan are having these problems…There are no changes in Afghanistan; still schools are closed, still universities are closed, still a woman cannot go outside alone.”
The lady speaks about Afghan girls who continue to learn “in secret, in the dark, online, through whispers, through books that are like precious treasures.” Some people here earnestly yearn for this experience. And they are winning.
Sixty-two-year-old Dauda Chekula told The Associated Press news agency at the weekend that four of his grandchildren, aged seven to 10, were taken at the Catholic school in Niger State where over 300 school children were abducted on Friday. “We don’t know what is happening now, because we have not heard anything since this morning,” he said. That was on Saturday. Today is Monday, the question is still: What is happening?
Now, you watched the horror of that Kwara church attack: Old women who wanted to run from danger but could not run because old age refused to let them; children wailing and wondering why it must be some people’s job to hunt them like rabbits; pastors asking God why it was that moment of triumph that defeat walked in. The worshippers’ voices were shrill, high-pitched, in victory over calamities when they were shut up by gunshots followed quickly by the boots of the unwanted visitors.
Do criminals reincarnate? I read somewhere a New York prison physician who wrote in 1903 that “few indeed are the criminals who come to our prison at Sing Sing with minds that were at birth tabula rasa, whose mental powers at birth were not already thickly sown with seeds of crime.” What is the difference between what we saw in the Christ Apostolic Church video, the agony of the aged and the cries of children, and the scene described by Samuel Ajayi Crowther on his own capture by bandits in March 1821?
I reproduce Crowther’s banditry and abduction story:
“I suppose sometime about the commencement of the year 1821, I was in my native country, enjoying the comforts of father and mother, and affectionate love of brothers and sisters. From this period I must date the unhappy…day, which I shall never forget in my life.
“I call it an unhappy day, because it was the day in which I was violently turned out of my father’s house, and separated from relations; … and which I was made to experience what is called slavery…
“For some years, war had been carried on in my Eyo (Oyo) country, which was always attended with much devastation and bloodshed; The enemies were principally the Oyo Mahomedans, with the Foulahs (Fulbe), and such foreign slaves as had escaped from their owners. Joined together, making a formidable force of about 20,000, they had no other employment but selling slaves to the Spaniards and Portuguese on the coast.
“The morning in which my town, Ocho-gu (Osogun), shared the same fate was fair and delightful; when, about 9 o’clock a.m. a rumour was spread in the town that the enemies had approached. It was not long after when they had almost surrounded the town; the men being surprised, the enemies entered the town after about three or four hours’ resistance.
“Women, some with three, four, six children clinging to their arms, running through prickly shrubs, which, hooking their loads, drew them down. While they found it impossible to go along with their loads, they endeavoured only to save themselves and their children, they were overtaken and caught, with a noose of rope thrown over the neck of every individual, to be led in the manner of goats. In many cases, a family was violently divided, each led his away, to see one another no more.
“Your humble servant was thus caught — with his mother, two sisters (one an infant about ten months old), and a cousin — while endeavouring to escape. My load consisted of nothing else than my bow, and five arrows in the quiver, the bow I had lost in the shrub while I was extricating myself, before I could think of making any use of it. The last view I had of my father was when he came to give us the signal to flee. He entered into our house which was burnt. Hence, I never saw him more. Here I must take thy leave, unhappy, comfortless father! I learned, some time afterward, that he was killed in another battle.”
If this 204-year-old story is told in some villages in today’s northern Nigeria, it will easily pass as their current experience. Nigeria’s terrorists come in our history as Shakespeare’s “twice-told tale.” G. R. S. Mead in 1912 thoroughly examined life beyond “the cribbed, cabined, and confined area of one short earth-life.” If the dead are gone forever, why do we have descendants of bandits of 200 years ago re-enacting the crimes of their forebears today with gripping exactitude? Why are the crimes committed today done with the same cold-blooded barbarity as they were done two, three centuries ago? And if we know terrorists will always come back, even after now, why are we negotiating peace with them? Why are we not thinking of permanently shredding and flushing them into the Atlantic, soul and all? A dubious Masai proverb says, “If your enemies poison the well, you don’t purify the well, you invent a sharper poison.” Nigeria’s terrorists need that “sharper poison” not accommodation.
Besides, politicians love it when their enemy is served poisoned dinner. Is that why today’s power is getting the George Floyd treatment from northern Nigeria? Some people are happy that the blistering insecurity wracking the country will sink their enemies who are in power. They think terror will help them defeat this government in 2027. They are mistaken. Unless we all rise up and find a quick way out of this hole, these contrived, horrendous landslides will bury all of us before 2027. That is if we are not defeated already. May all the captured across the country not die in captivity.
The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.
