Poet and scholar, Professor Niyi Osundare, declaims jingoism, hypocrisy and Trumpism, hurtling the world towards another war at the Lagos Book and Art Festival.
Some are masters of double speak but poet, essayist and scholar, Professor Niyi Osundare is not one. Always, he calls a spade by its name; not a digging instrument.
On Friday, November 10 , the guest of honour at the 19th Lagos Book and Art Festival (LABAF) themed ‘Eruptions: Global Fractures and Our Common Humanity’, and dedicated to him to mark his 70th birthday, was at his candid, ebullient best, declaiming hypocrisy , jingoism, Trumpism and other social ills threatening humanity
Delivering the keynote entitled ‘Another Season of Hate and Severance: World War III, Here We Come!’ at Freedom Park, Lagos Island, Osundare expressed worry that rather than learn from the costly errors of the past including the slave trade and world wars, the world is embracing hatred and hanging on the precipice.
The author of ‘Eye of the Earth’ noted how the Al Qaeda funded and controlled 9/11 attacks on the US led to retaliations, including an unprovoked war against Iraq. The war, the poet explained, not only disrupted the profoundly delicate ethnic and religious balance of Iraq, but led to the rise of ISIS, one of the most brutal terrorist groups in the world, and “the escalation and dispersion of terror in the Middle East and far beyond its reaches.”
The terrorist plague, the Professor of English at University of New Orleans, US, continued, has infected many parts of Africa including Nigeria “where for many months Boko Haram literally delegitimized the national government by corralling a big chunk of the northeastern parts of the country under its terrorist control” and that consequently, “for the first time since the civil war, Nigeria is saddled with a throng of Internally Displaced Persons (IDP), with refugee camps brimming with desperate adults and malnourished children.”
The poet also condemned US President Donald Trump, disclosing that he “knew how close the Barbarians were to the gate of the Empire” with some of his campaign rhetoric and eventual ascension into office.
He said: “The day Mr. Trump boasted on the campaign trail that he could stroll down the street, shoot someone out there, and just walk away unasked, unchallenged, and his screaming supporters cheered while the rest of the world was thrown into shock and consternation, I smelt from a very close distance the germs of egotistical fascism. I knew how close the Barbarians were to the gate of the Empire.
“Well, since the Trumpite eruption in the closing months of 2016, the United States, nay the entire world has never been the same again. We are witnessing an unfolding drama of abominations and grotesqueries, horrible nightmares in the height of noon. …Those satanic ghosts of the past we thought we had laid to rest under the forgotten heaps of history are back with a vengeance.”
Osundare also warned against jingoism which he differentiated from nationalism. The world, he said, “is full of jingoists today; rabid nationalists who are incapable of seeing the other side. Shallow, petty, and scared of reasoning, they turn their stupidity into a virtue; schoolyard bullies with more muscle than mind, they make ignorance and arrogance such a logical rhyme.”
Continuing, the Ikere-Ekiti born poet said that from the effects of Trumpism and separatist agitations across the globe including Nigeria in the last one year, another world war is possible. “With the sabre rattling going on between the young King in Pyongyang and the old Emperor in Washington, it is only a matter of time before the crude verbal missiles between these two hot up into nuclear conflagration.
“The plot is ready for a gigantic human tragedy: on one side a rash, unstable, ruler with a severe empathy deficit and dreadful bout of malignant narcissism, on the other a young, inexperienced maximum ruler with one of the world’s largest armies under his firm control; the former needing a nuclear assault to appease his bloated ego and justify the ‘red line’ he has drawn with his intemperate rhetoric, the latter needing a nuclear offensive to secure his hold on power and demonstrate his dominance over the Korea Peninsula. Two perfect antagonists in a tragedy of possible apocalyptic proportions.”
The time for people of conscience to come together to halt the world’s slide into war, he warned, is now. “There is too much hate, too much fundamentalism and its concomitant bigotry and blindness. Our present world is too unequal to be just, too unjust to be peaceful. We live in a world that needs to demolish existing walls of severance, not erect new ones and then have the cruel, insulting audacity to ask the victims of those walls to pay for them. For, as I have always believed and often said, truly educated minds build bridges, not walls. They perceive the vital connection in the ostensibly disconnected. They celebrate global friendship, not nativistic, flag-enshrouded fragmentations. Our Common Humanity needs more of those bridges built of justice/equity, compassion, generosity, and spirit of true internationalism. For it is either we survive together or we perish apart. Let all nations rise now and cast a vote for Life, for the Future. It is our inescapable responsibility to save and preserve this world, OUR world.”
The keynote, expectedly, attracted comments from some of the guests including senior lawyer, Femi Falana, publisher of Premium Times, Dapo Olorunyomi and Executive Editor, TheNews/PM News, Kunle Ajibade. Others were poet and one time governorship aspirant in Edo State, Odia Ofeimun, Chair, Editorial Board, The Nation Newspapers, Sam Omatseye and artist Tunde Olanipekun.
On Trumpism and its manifestation in Nigeria, Falana said: “All over the country, we are talking about restructuring, but there is only one part of the country that does not want restructuring and most people are not even ready to say it that the Fulani, with the Hausa, are the only ethnic group, which does not want restructuring. Why? Because it favours them! So, we are living in a world in which it is better to be in the tribe than to be in the main, and I can only come to the main, when you give me everything I want in my tribe. We are in a stage where democracy has to be seen for what it is – democracy! I was happy with what happened in Virginia and New Jersey in the U.S., when, in spite of the appeal to Trumpism, level-headedness prevailed.”
Ofeimun, on his part, disagreed with Osundare’s focus on happenings abroad than on events within the country. “Our focus as Nigerians should be about the state of our country and not America. We must situate what we are talking about locally,” he said, adding that Africans have more pressing concerns than Trump.
Responding to Ofeimun, Osundare explained that he did not forget Nigeria while preparing the keynote. “We have bad politicians in Nigeria, but they cannot declare a World War. Their fingers are not close to the nuclear button. The ‘global is local and the local is also global.’ This is extremely important. When I warn all of us about the possibility of a nuclear war, this is what I mean.
We all share one sky like one big umbrella above our heads. The same oceans wash our shores. This, actually, is the over-riding theme of my new book of poems, ‘If Only the Road Could Talk’ about my travels round the world; how very closely connected we all are. It is my firm belief that Global Humanity is bound by one umbilical cord!”