By Lasisi Olagunju

There is the legend of a newspaper journalist who had an issue with his uncle, an oba in present-day Osun State, and threatened the king with death. The man needed a favour; the oba closed his eyes to the man’s demand. “Kabiyesi, you will die,” he reportedly informed the oba. “Iku boo?” Everyone who heard him gasped and upbraided this man for the sacrilege of speaking ill to a king in the palace. They thought his beer and booze had again taken hold of him. In response to demands of apology, the man stormed out of the palace, and back to his base in Lagos.

We say a tree does not fall in the forest and kill someone at home. I used to believe that proverb would be true at all times until I heard how this man carried out the regicide he promised. He got to Lagos and submitted a report to his editor that his uncle, the oba, had joined his ancestors. Did the editor pass the story for publication? Well, who else could be the best source and authority on the life and times of a king if not his own kin, the king’s man himself? And so, an abnormal tree that fell in Lagos killed the oba at home. The king read his own obituary, courtesy of his own nephew who worked in faraway Lagos.

The event happened in the 1970s, so we were told in the 1990s. And we were warned as newsmen never to build our truth on a foundation laid by only one source. The man got the fake news of the oba published and stood by it. We couldn’t really get hold of the publication but we were told the man’s name. When the second republic came with its opportunities, the man moved to Ibadan. He had to. His ways had made the waters of Lagos too shallow for his shark to swim.

Our man edited an ephemeral newspaper for some politicians in Ibadan in the early 1980s. Then he spiced it with some other extra journalism stuff. I wished he were alive now for me to ask him why he ‘killed’ the oba. But if we did not see what his Ajantala did in the bush, we saw the man’s face as he joined in shredding icons on the streets of Ibadan on days when the metropolis lived its reputation. What reputation? I have beside me here a copy of Ruth Watsons ‘Civil Disorder is the Disease of Ibadan’. Everyone came to this world with a disease which defines their existence. The end came twenty-something years ago for the man who used his pen to kill his uncle, the king. It was not a nice end.

The world was crazy 50 years ago when a newspaper was deployed to ‘kill’ a monarch. It is crazier now with social media and its unhinged tendencies. I remembered the death story of the undead king when some unknown persons with unknown motives used social media to announce the death of Globacom chairman, Dr. Mike Adenuga, Tuesday last week. I also remembered the Zik-is-dead hoax of 1989. Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe was in his study in November 1989 working on book manuscripts when he read his own obituary complete with a list of a committee to bury him. It was crazy. One thing is clear, the one who wishes one dead is not a friend. A death wish whether oral or written is an enemy action.

The social media can be rumour pro-max. Rumour, most times, comes false and in unfriendly costumes. While its currency is virality, it easily spins out of the spinner’s control. Robert H. Knapp in his ‘A Psychology of Rumour’ (1944) avers that “if leaflets, newspapers or radio broadcasts are likened to bullets, then rumour must be likened to a torpedo, for, once launched, it travels of its own power.” Social media scholars have at various times raised the alarm that false information is a threat to modern society.

Lt Col. Jarred Prier of the United States Airforce in 2017 published a seminal piece that demonstrated how social media had become a tool for all kinds of ‘war’. In his ‘Commanding the Trends: Social Media as Information Warfare’, he mentioned “malicious users” and “malicious actors” creating malicious trends and manipulating internet platforms to spread negative messages, most times fake news. And, fake news he defined as “propaganda composed of false story disguised as news…”

Death rumours rarely have an identifiable source. The one about the Globacom chairman did not appear to have any. What it had were internet rats in desperate grab of trends. Whoever started the fire disappeared soon after lighting the match. I got calls; the first from a colleague in the United Kingdom; another from Benin, yet another from my office in Ibadan. A friend sent the screenshot of a Facebook version of the vile announcement. Everyone who contacted me sounded alarmed and apprehensive. But, why would they be calling me for a confirmation of bad news? Who do we call – or text? My friends suggested names. First a text to a certain number. “Good evening, sir”. No immediate response. Then I placed a call. A laugh; the line went dead. Then a response came in one minute: “Chairman is fine…” That was a text message from the man I called; we call him Bob Dee (Chief Dele Momodu). Two other messages of reassurance soon followed from that channel. Then, the newsroom went calm, and the same social media that created the topic of death scrambled to quench the fire. “Are rumours just rumours?” Rumour theorists, Heng Chen, Yang K. Lu and Wing Suen, once asked themselves. And they answered, yes. They also noted that rumours (that are not rooted in truth) “often disappear quickly without a trace.” I read all that in their ‘The Power of Whispers: A Theory of Rumour’.

I asked one of my callers why he sounded so troubled by the death rumour. He told me what I already knew: You remember that old song by Juju music commander, Ebenezer Obey? Anyone who knows the evil ways of darkness will not wish the moon bad (Èdá tó mò’se òkùnkùn, kó má mà d’Ósùpá l’óró) And, I think I heard a new one from Obey on Friday. He weighed in with a new song, using his music to list the benefits of the moon and why its soft, golden glow must continue to drape the night in ethereal light. It fits this hour. There is so much darkness here, in the public space and in the space we call private. That was why as children, we got sad whenever the full moon was seen reducing in size and getting far gone in distance.

Why were my friends almost hysterical at the virality of Adenuga’s death rumour? I can tell why. You know how many people work in that man’s businesses – telecoms, oil (downstream, upstream, midstream), banking, construction etc? Some trees singularly make a forest. This is one of them – one of the reasons Nigeria is not completely an economic arid zone. Read Martin Williams’s ‘When the Sahara Was Green’ (2021). The Sahara desert was once lush with greenery. It became what it is today because of unconscionable humans, agents of eco destruction. Malicious bush burning joined hands with other vices to tip the land’s moisture balance. Collectively, they degraded the green that made that stretch to breathe. The result is what the Arabs saw and gave the label ‘sahra’ – the meaning of that word is ‘wilderness’. Now, apply that to our economic situation and be alarmed. Foliage is the canopy of the forest. When you remove trees that make forest forest, the forest dies. That is why we say this China shop should not be heady goats’ playground. Mortar, we can roll; pot, we mustn’t. If you roll a pot like you do pounded yam’s mortar, the master potter will roar in angers of lightning and thunder.

When someone of value is pronounced dead and they refuse to die, the Yoruba have a name for such a hard-to-crack nut. They are called Kokumo (This-is-no-longer-dead). Such are moulded into Ìkòkò ribiti (well-rounded pot); they are, in carefulness, protected from wanton eyes of malice. Adenuga’s Conoil struck gold in 1991, the first indigenous oil company to achieve that feat. His Globacom is also the first and has remained the only wholly indigenous telecoms company in Nigeria. The fact of these businesses coming first serves not just the owner; it serves more the country. It has served as a bulwark against the exploitation of foreign waves. That is why we say the man behind it must live and why we say “no time to check time” to his deathwishers. They are a dead horse. Who are they, anyway? And why are they angry?

The invidious, false news of a top entrepreneur’s death should interest the state and its operatives. Howard Wolk, co-author of ‘Launchpad Republic: America’s Entrepreneurial Edge and Why It Matters’ said in a December 2022 interview with Forbes magazine that America is great because it consciously nurtures its businesses and protects their owners even from the state itself. “We limit the ability of incumbents to stifle entrepreneurs,” he declared with an air of pride. Here, the challenge is not a threat of state stifling, it is the menace of bad belle, threats from fake news and the odious bile of idle envy.

His Wikipedia page speaks to where he is coming from: “Adenuga made his first million in 1979, at age 26, selling lace and distributing soft drinks. In 1990, he received an oil drilling licence, and in 1991, his Consolidated Oil struck oil in the shallow waters of Southwestern Ondo State, making it the first indigenous oil company to do so in commercial quantity.” Then, he branched off into telecommunications. He got a conditional GSM licence in 1999. It was revoked. But where he comes from, a man is not allowed to lie supine because a stupid horse flings them off. He must get up and mount the horse again, which is what the man did. He joined the fray again. He won and received a licence when the government held another GSM auction in 2003. Then the story of telephony changed in Nigeria – for the better, forever.

Nigeria should not be a graveyard of businessmen and their businesses. Great businesses make great economies. A Nigeria without four-star businesses cannot have a five-star leadership. The world has no seat for the poor. We have an environment that is toxic enough for entrepreneurs, we should not add for them rumours of ill-timed setting of their radiant sun. We have lately seen, not one, not two, very big entrepreneurs having issues just for giving Nigeria what Nigeria desperately needed. Now, it is Adenuga. How does that encourage economic growth? And a country and its leadership are as great as their frontline businesses. We see this in America’s political and financial systems which empower entrepreneurs to create and invest capital and compete without the fear of knives of envy being driven into their backs.

We enjoy the ‘rebellion’ of Adenuga’s Glo; it serves our individual and national interests. There is something about that model in the Forbes interview I cited earlier: Howard Wolk said “entrepreneurship is a rebellious act” and that the United States is great because its political and judicial systems encourage that rebellion while spurring the rebellious to rise and seize new opportunities. His claim is correct. The more unconventional a business is, the more it fires up a country’s creative energy. Globacom did this when it came in 2003 and ruptured the tendons of predatory competition it met on the turf. Nigerians enjoyed that patriotic recalcitrance from Glo. They still enjoy it. That is why millions of them are wedded to that network as a duty to Nigeria. And they will remain so even though the house may be on fire and robbers may be on the prowl (Bí ilé ńjó, b’olè ńjà).

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu and Chepkorir Sambu
Described by one scholar on its centenary as “perhaps the greatest historical movement of modern times”, the Berlin Conference West Africa Conference began shortly after noon on 15 November 1884. Interrupted only by a short break at the end of the year and the beginning of the next, historian, Adu Boahen records that the conference ended on 31 January 1884.

On 26 February 1885, the powers gathered at the conference ratified the General Act of the Berlin Conference, which embodied their agreements. The week before the ratification of the General Act, according to historian, Godfrey Uzoigwe, the Lagos Observer newspaper lamented that “the world had, perhaps, never witnessed a robbery on so large a scale.”
Among the six goals identified by the General Act, the over-arching provisions set out “rules for future occupation of the coast of the African continent.”

Of the 15 countries that attended the conference, 14 were European: United Kingdom, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Sweden-Norway, and the Ottoman Empire (Turkey). All the European powers signed on to the General Act. The United States of America was the only non-European country at the table and also the only participating country that did not officially ratify the resulting treaty.

From Africa, the Sultan of Zanzibar had equally sought representation at the conference but had his ambition derisorily blocked by the United Kingdom. Otto von Bismark, Chancellor of Germany which attained unification only 13 years earlier in 1871, hosted the Berlin Conference. Six years earlier, he had similarly played host to the Congress of Berlin called to stabilize the Balkan Peninsula at the end of the Russo-Turkish War in 1878. There was an irony to the fact that the same venue was to serve as the site of a conference to Balkanise a distant continent of about 30,302,861 square kilometres. For context, this is a territory big enough to contain all of the U.S.A., India, Europe, Argentina and New Zealand combined with some room to spare.

The Scramble for Africa preceded the Berlin Conference but the conference crystallised rules and doctrines that would govern the colonial occupation of Africa in its wake. In opening the conference, Bismark hoped that it would agree on rules to regulate “the terms for the development of trade and civilization in certain regions of Africa”; assure free navigation of the Rivers Congo and the Niger; anticipate and avoid disputes as to new acts of territorial occupation in Africa and “further the moral and material wellbeing of the native population.”

The aftermath is controversial for predictable reasons. The continent lives with the consequences of decisions in which it did not participate and whose records are also outside its control. While the lingering consequences of Berlin continue to be debated, a few deserve to be highlighted.

First, as is evident from Bismark’s stipulations, the conference objectives and outcomes infantilized Africa and its peoples and habituated the world to the continent as lacking in agency and its territories as lacking in history or civilization prior to the occupation that followed in the wake of Berlin. These ideas were to be subsequently embodied in doctrine, jurisprudence and treaty law. The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council ruled in 1918 that African territories were “so low in the scale of social organization that their usages and conceptions of rights and duties are not to be reconciled with the institutions or the legal ideas of civilized society.”

The court offered no authority or support for this decision; there was none. This jurisprudence made its way into the provisions of Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant which referred to these territories as being “inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.”

Second, the logic of colonial occupation made atrocity inevitable and the traumas from that have assumed inter-generational dimensions. Looking back at the period preceding the conference, however, Adu Boahen recalls that Africa “was far from being primitive, static, and asleep or in a Hobbesian state of nature.” The rules of the conference precluded any items on sovereignty whether of the European states or of the African territories. Yet the outcome created a logic that encouraged adverse assertions of sovereignty over African lands and peoples. John Kasson, the lead US delegate to the conference had argued that the establishment of “productive labour” in African territories “can only be arrived at through the permanent establishment of a peaceful regime.” The idea of permanent establishment of a peaceful regime over other peoples’ lands could only occur through occupation and rapine.

This is exactly what ensued in the aftermath of the doctrine of effective occupation consecrated by the General Act of the Berlin Conference embodied in the obligation assumed by the parties in Article 35 of the General Act “to insure the establishment of authority in the regions occupied by them on the coasts of the African continent sufficient to protect existing rights, and, as the case may be, freedom of trade and of transit.” Seven of the 14 countries present at the Berlin Conference went on to become occupying powers in Africa, namely: France, Britain, Germany, Portugal, Belgium, Italy and Spain. Their campaigns of occupation were accompanied by violence which has been described as “brutal and deadly.”

In the quarter century from the end of the conference to 1910 when the period of active territorial occupation occurred, nearly every affected African country experienced a fall in population. The signal case was King Leopold’s Congo Free State about whom it has been said that the population crashed from “20 million in 1891 to only 8,500,000 in 1911. In other words, the King’s system resulted in the death of between 10 and 11.5 million Congolese as ‘a very conservative estimate.’” Contemporary movements for acknowledgement and reparations barely scratch the surface.

Third, as Ali Mazrui points out, the Berlin Conference ultimately saddled Africa with twin crises of both state legitimacy and governmental legitimacy. Governed as they were by logics of arbitrary and convenient externalities, colonial territorialization made no effort to foster legitimate political communities. The methods of divide and rule and of Indirect Rule which defined colonial administration, instead encouraged adversiarialism instead of coexistence within countries. As colony yielded to post-colony, these left legacies of political unrest, regime instability, and conflict.

Fourth, the boundaries created in Berlin have proved durable but not necessarily stable. To head off this problem, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) at its second Summit in Cairo, Egypt, in 1964, pronounced the continent’s borders at independence as a “tangible reality” to be respected by all member states. The reality has been a lot less sanguine. The continent’s borders are notoriously arbitrary and porous and many are disputed. One scholar has counted over 100 border disputes in the continent as well as “approximately 58 potential secessionist territories in 29” African countries championed by “at least 83 political associations and pressure groups.” A cottage industry in territorial dispute resolution exists, with 13 of 18 contentious cases submitted to the International Court of Justice from Africa being about inter-state boundaries.

The legacies of the Berlin Conference in and on Africa endure. The response of the continent’s leadership has until recently been lacking in coherence and urgency. The deepening of regional integration in the African Union which was supposed to address the colonial atomization of the continent has stalled. In parts of the continent, it is experiencing reversal or now confined only to trade in goods. Similarly, efforts to address atrocity violence through transitional justice around Africa confine themselves to post-colonial violence, without recognizing or addressing the lingering traumas from colonial era violence.

While the movement for reparations for colonial atrocities, including the repatriation of pillaged African arts gathers pace, it faces renewed resistance from the emergence of illiberal governments in the capitals of perpetrator states who were at the Berlin Conference. On the 140th anniversary of the Berlin Conference, these trends underscore the need for renewed attention to an event whose consequences for both Africa and international law were seminal but not always constructive.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu teaches at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, Medford, MA

Chepkorir Sambu is a lawyer is a lawyer and researcher focusing on conflicts and peace processes in Eastern Africa.