2A, Lateef Jakande Road, Agidingbi, Lagos, is an address that holds great childhood significance for me. Between 1995 and 1999, my after-school routine consisted of reading Enid Blyton books and playing with imaginary friends, surrounded by hundreds of cooking gas cylinders at my mom’s gas business, which occupied the entire premises. Every afternoon, Dad would pick me up from school in Gbagada and drop me off at mom’s office after a quick stop at Mr Biggs, which was our little secret.
He was not supposed to eat the meat pies and Coke we both enjoyed so much on account of his diabetes, and mom was the ultimate “there-is-rice-at-home” African parent, so our daily trips to Mr Biggs at Gbagada Phase II were our long-running father-son conspiracy. The only thing I enjoyed as much as our daily Mr Biggs ‘dates,’ was getting to mom’s office and running to the back office window so I could see her.
I never knew her name, and we never even exchanged words. All we used to do was stare at each other through the window, smile and wave for hours. She was one of four children born to a couple who lived in the tiny security house inside the compound. Every time I asked my mom where Mr Idris and his wife came from, what “Hausa” people are, and why I never saw their children go to school, I got a curt answer and an irritated expression that told me in no uncertain terms to drop the topic. I only knew that they had a really strong perfume and that she – whatever her name was – was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen in my life.
Muritala Mohammed – by all accounts, an actual, real-life war criminal – has his face immortalised on our money and has Nigeria’s busiest airport named after him
One day, mom caught me waving at Unnamed Childhood Sweetheart through the window, and I received a beating that I still remember clearly, 21 years later. She stormed out to have a word with Mr Idris and soon, the shrieks and wails coming from the small house told me that my little “girlfriend” was also getting a seeing-to from her mom. For a while, she stopped showing up at the window, but soon we resumed our little distance love affair after taking a few precautions.
Then one day I came back from school and she was nowhere to be found. I found a way to slide in a question about her innocently, and I was informed that following a series of Yoruba-Hausa riots in the area, it was no longer safe for Mr Idris and his family to be there. They had gone back to “the North,” wherever that was. I was full of questions, “Why are they not safe here? But they didn’t do anything to anyone! Where is the North? What is going to happen to them?” Each question met increasingly frenzied eye rolling until I was instructed to drop it. I cried for days when I realised that I would never see her again.
These days, 2A, Lateef Jakande Road houses Top Radio 90.9 FM and a boutique, and I used to drive past it on my way to work every morning when I lived in Lagos. Waiting at the traffic light outside the building, I would sometimes wonder what happened to the little Hausa girl I once shared a painfully innocent puppy love affair with. What became of her life up north? Did she go to school and become somebody? Did she get married off at 13 and develop VVF due to underage childbirth? Did she become a displaced person in a camp somewhere? Is she even still alive?
“Anonymous Hausa Childhood Flame” is just one of millions of Nigerians whose stories are completely ignored or actively suppressed in Nigeria’s cruel hierarchy of human life. The world gets to hear my story because I won the birth lottery and I have the ability to articulate myself well, but my story is not more or less important than hers. Africa’s most populous country has a major problem with acknowledging the stories of its inhabitants, especially the plethora of unpleasant stories that many of us do not want to hear.
Nothing illustrates this more than our attitude toward the Nigerian Civil War. It wasn’t until I met people who shared their stories that my wall of ignorance began to break, starting as recently as 2011. Among the many people I met was an accountant who survived the Asaba massacre as a 10 year-old boy by pretending to be dead, while his father and three uncles were not so lucky. In 2014, my mum casually mentioned to my shock, that during the war, she witnessed an anti-Igbo pogrom in Itire, Surulere where she grew up. This incident has been, for all intents and purposes, thoroughly scrubbed from every mainstream historical account of the war I have seen.
The following year, I then met someone who showed me a photo of his sister who died during the war after eating baby food from a batch of aid rations that was deliberately laced with rat poison allegedly by the Nigerian Army. The following is a quote from Major Benjamin Adekunle in ‘The Economist’ on August 14, 1968: “I do not want to see any Red Cross, and Caritas, any World Council of Churches, any Poe, any Mission, or any United Nations Delegation. I want to prevent even one Ibo [from] having even one piece to eat before their capitulation.”
Apart from the emotional potency of these stories, it must be noted that they took place within living memory – 1970 is not that long ago. Despite how successfully they have been silenced and removed from mainstream political discourse, the fact is that the existence of millions of survivors has real implications for the corporate existence of Nigeria. To my mind, the existential threat to Nigeria’s continued existence is not the fact that Nnamdi Kanu exists. The real threat is that the conspiracy of silence surrounding the Nigerian situation and the millions of important stories that have been silenced end up giving power and legitimacy to the likes of Kanu – because nobody else is willing to break the wicked, suffocating silence.
What is more, the lack of regard for people’s stories, and state use of silence as an official policy have led to a situation where Muritala Mohammed – by all accounts, an actual, real-life war criminal – has his face immortalised on our money and has Nigeria’s busiest airport named after him. To understand how a person that lost relatives to Mohammed’s genocide in Asaba must feel about this, perhaps we should imagine a parallel universe where Tel Aviv airport is called “Josef Mengele International,” or the Congolese 20 Franc banknote has a picture of King Leopold on it.
Your silence will not help you
While historical grievances and passive-aggressive ethnic warfare may breed a somewhat understandable type of silence, a different kind of silence is becoming commonplace in Nigeria – silence in the face of open state oppression and government tyranny. This type of silence is particularly harmful because unlike other types of silence that offer convenience and the comfort of the status quo, it does not help anyone even in the short term.
As General Buhari busily reverses the gains of the longest unbroken of democracy in our history, the very worst thing we can do is keep a stiff upper lip and go about our everyday business silently, hoping and praying that the increasingly tyrannical dictatorship will time out or simply stop and go away of its own volition. That is not how power works. Those in power count on our habitual silence and our cultural conservatism which reflexively seeks to protect the status quo – even when it does not favour us at all.
If we insist on silence, the disease will spread and worsen because that is the nature of power – it takes whatever it can, and does not bother itself with questions of whether it should. If our strategy is to wait in silence until a change of government in 2023 – assuming that a third term is not pushed through – the new government will simply carry on where the old one left off. When you give your power away, nobody ever hands it back.
Democracy does not merely mean queuing up every four years to vote. It also means keeping power diffused and in the hands of ordinary citizens in the open, instead of concentrated in tiny, opaque circles. One of the most important ways to reverse the tide of power hungry individuals stealing our democracy is to constantly and intentionally speak out. If we want a Nigeria that is in any way better than the trash fire we are currently engulfed in, silence is our worst enemy. In the long run, it does not save anybody.
For our own sake, we have to kill silence before silence kills us.
Source: Business Day
