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Culture, Democracy and Renewal
by
Professor Wole Soyinka
Nobel Laureate, Professor Emory University, USA
Washington, D.C., September 27, 1999

I have been conducting some involuntary research into what may yet prove to be the evolution of a new culture - well, not so much research as a frustrated monologue - one that I am much tempted to describe as a burgeoning culture of techno-authoritarianism. if you have had the misfortune of being thrown into a situation – as I was during the past five to six years - where you had to execute the major part of your projects in perpetual motion, which means being obliged to work on any available computer from time to time, you would immediately recognise what new affliction this is. Surely it is the height of impertinence when a mere computer not only talks back at you, but actually presumes to correct your choice of expression, your spelling - all from what must be a data bank of elementary linguistic choices - and even goes so far as to offer its own substitutes from a limited geographical knowledge, or awareness of the vast humanity that exists in other cultures.

One immediate consequence of this is that sending an email on some of these imperious machines takes about ten times what should be the normal time and effort, since it presumes to edit your message for accuracy - here are just a few examples from very recent experience. Attempt to type out the name of the ancient city of Ibadan in my own Nigeria, and that infernal machine presumes to suggest that what you have in mind is either 'Aberdeen' or 'Iberian'. Attempt to type a perfectly a simple name like 'Aboyade' and it tells you that the word you should use is 'abode', 'obeyed' etc. For 'Yemi', it offers you 'yeti', 'semi', or EMI! Even the commonest expressions of a language like French are not spared. I typed out 'A Bientot' and the machine suggested that I was - bent. But the moments of triumphant recognition only make matters worse. For daring to gather up some tidbits of Nigerian life in a basket which I quite legitimately called 'Nigeriana', the computer ordered me to substitute 'Nigeria' or 'Nigerians'. Mind you, that didn't stop it rejecting Sapele altogether and proposing 'spell', 'sapped', 'staple' and so on. But the most egregious act of all was when it presumed to know my ancestry better than I. Each time I routinely acknowledged my father's name, it rejected it but, this time, it left - a blank. This I intend to take up in the law courts as some kind of subtle aspersion on my paternity. As for 'Wole', that never stood a chance. The machine turned up its nose and rolled out 'Wool', 'Wolf', 'Whole', and most depressingly of all - 'Woe'!

Well, in the hope that the World Bank cum IMF will devote some future conference to this aggressive face of techno-culture, I take my leave of the cultural dictatorship of computers and turn to the more manageable province of humanity, which in any case is responsible for arming these machines with, at the very least, the power of acceptance and rejection. Who knows, we may yet live to see the day when this new entity moves to exercise the absolute power of the veto over individual creative choices.

It was actually a re-encounter with a city, with a people, and a revolution that persuaded me that a continuing exploration of the province of Culture occasionally offers us unique models of cooption in the democratic and progressive vein, even in the least expected places. The people themselves, in this particular instance, call in a miracle but, I prefer the description - cultural renewal. I had visited this city - in Europe - about fifteen years before, on invitation. In company with one or two others, I was to be honoured with an award in the creative field. I had been very sceptical when I received that invitation. A Literary prize? What were they trying to prove? Most patently an image laundering exercise, I reasoned. But the matter was much worse. There was to be a Festival, an Arts Festival. The Beijing Opera had been imported from China, there was a concert pianist and a stunning soloist. And of course there was an Art exhibition, not to mention a fireworks display and I do not recall what else.

Well, I attended this event, and my direst expectations were completely fulfilled, only it was much worse. I arrived in a city whose notoriety had been earned from everything else but the Arts - and this was starkly manifested. There was not much to complain about the artistic fare - pianists, opera, theatre all performed to world standards - the Peking Opera had even made the effort to trim its tendency of 'longer is better' to accommodate those of us with a tolerance level that was way below that of the Chinese. However, and this was a big however, something very anti-cultural and anti-art surrounded us. We were moved between hotel and performance venues but, once or twice, we did venture into the city, risked a stroll among the natives and - this feeling was uniformly shared - we sensed, not culture but - its very antithesis. The city looked distressed. There was a tightness about the streets and the walls, within the markets. The people - old, young and children - were withdrawn - there was absolutely nothing festive about them, about their demeanour.

It would be an exaggeration of course to state that we encountered no laughter anywhere - of course we did. But it was not general laughter, it was the laughter of unease, of nervousness, or else of obsequiousness, the laughter of the slave eager to please a master. Complementing this was also the laughter of superciliousness, of arrogant, sated power, the laughter of a swaggering minority. There is laughter that we all recognise from public spaces - the markets, parks, sidewalks and shops, but there is also laughter that you can sometimes hear from cracks in the wall, laughter even from open sewers, from garbage and even from poverty. The kind of smile that we saw and the laughter that we heard were self-conscious in some way or the other - they did not appear to be part of normal human interactions. Now, knowing the reputation of this city, knowing its history, one could say that I was already prejudiced, that my responses were already under the control of pre-knowledge. So, before I reveal the name of this mysterious community, let me fast-forward to April this year when I returned to that city in expectation of worse, far much worse. There had been incidents, murderous incidents of arrogant challenges to the democratic order of the overall state. Indeed, when I received the letter of invitation early in the year from what sounded like a new civic organisation, I said to myself, is that city being taken on as an international project, as some kind of clinical case study of a malignant virus? Or maybe, I thought, it was an attempt to boost the morale of the resistant minority of that criminalised enclave. Well, why not, I thought, after all, I could consider myself tied to the place in some symbolic cultural way so, I accepted.

And this is what I encountered! Right from the airport, the ambience was nothing remotely near my recollection or projection. It was as if a new breed had been imported from some neighbouring settlement specifically for this international gathering - from facial expression to the overall physical language of the body - men and women, young and old alike, officials, passengers, vendors at the kiosks and, as we stepped out of the airport building, the waiting taxi and bus drivers and workers. I could not escape the difference, and I wondered to myself: could it be that I had become so conditioned by the surliness and predatory aggression of officials at Lagos Airport over the years - there appears to have been notable improvement in recent times, by the way - but at the time, that purgatory of visitors and citizens alike exuded a steamy hostility that was further compounded by the menace transmitted all the way down from the pinnacle of brute power in the Abacha years - and so I was left wandering if it was that experience of the home front that made anything approaching human warmth, or even basic civility suddenly appear as angelic emanation.

Worse - or, more accurately, better still - was to come, as we drove into the city. The apprehension that had appeared to stiffen the shoulder blades of the pedestrians in that earlier time - as if dreading the stealthy blade - was missing. The furtiveness, the sullenness of many that was complemented with the arrogant complacency of a few - all this was gone. The heavy protection iron grills that covered even the narrowest slits that occasionally passed for windows, at all building levels - including the narrow fanlights - fortifications on domestic existence that led me to admit, at the time, that this was Lagos transported overseas, but without the vitality and ebullience of Nigerians - these, admittedly had not been removed - but they did not crowd you with such a depressing uniformity as had been the case on that earlier visit. Indeed, I suspect that I had to look for them, to ensure that they were still there. They were mostly still in place, but they now seemed an inconsequential part of the overall architectural tradition. The narrow streets were still narrow, but the narrowness had been magically broadened by unaccustomed vitality. There were new open spaces, pedestrian walks and squares that were reminiscent of those open malls of other capitals where young men and women sipped coffee, watched the latest matches on television, shopped and flirted. I had seen nothing, absolutely nothing of these during my earlier visit. Perhaps I should have prefaced those last observations by confessing that, in my view, it is the architecture of any place that primarily determines its culture and reveals its soul. I have declared as much in so many words addressed to a prior edition of this Congress, so I shall quote just a little from that earlier observation just as a reminder, and of course for the benefit of those who were not here at the time:

"Architecture is the implacable comment on a people's cultural being, it is one tributary to the fount of culture which cannot be circumvented. It is there. You must cross it, you must wade through it, swim in it, fish in it, cleanse yourself in it, live in it or live with it as best as you can. Of all the various expressions of a people's culture, none manifests its cultural quotient with such immutable authority..... Within the meadows of that fountain spring that we have named Culture therefore, Architecture stands apart as the synthesis of ideal and function, a replete embodiment of aesthetic sensibility and natural physics. Architecture is a cultural responsibility unmatched by any other project of culture; it represents the ultimate measure, in my view, by which the environment can be judged - culturally secure, or else culturally alienated."

Alienation - that, summatively, was the condition that defined the citizens of this ancient city during my earlier visit. A bewildering contrast was to be my experience this April. I did my usual thing - first thing in the morning, set out on foot to stroll through just awakening streets and the vibrancy, even at that hour, was startling. Flowers were trellissed from the overhanging balconies - perhaps one of the factors that contributed to the vanishing trick of the protection grills. The squares sprouted monuments - I did not recollect seeing any before - and yet these were not new, but ancient monuments. Somehow, they had been rendered invisible during that earlier visit. There were architectural landmarks that were clearly undergoing restorations, open markets, gleaming stained-glass windows from churches reflecting the dawn......one could go on and on but, the major impression was the transformed humanity that had begun to trickle out of doors to swell the throng of jostling traffic of motor-bikes, waiting passengers at bus stops etc., no longer the dour, sullen, stressed and defeated half-humanity that I had encountered on my prior incursion. And they were flinging greetings across streets at one another with just the kind of natural effusiveness to which one was accustomed from their cousins on the mainland itself

What on earth had happened to Palermo? - For you must have guessed by now that I have been speaking of Palermo, capital of Sicily, the island of the Mafia and organised crime, powerful enough to have been regarded as a parallel government - indeed often described as a state within a state - making nonsense of whatever democratic pretences were being projected by Rome, a criminal government with an arm long enough to corrupt or violently terminate, at the very highest levels, any threat from the central government to its own existence. Sicily was a reminder that democracy does not commence and end with the electoral ritual but that, on the contrary, the greatest threats to the democratic culture need not come from the formal state, but from the resolute conspiracies of a few, as long as they are organised and sufficiently ruthless. The parallels between a Mafia state and the kind of military dictatorships undergone in many African or Latin American nations are self-evident. The only difference is one of territorial authority. A military dictatorship is nothing other than a Mafia structure that has taken over the entirety of the state, instead of being content only with being a 'state within a state'.

How was the miracle of Palermo achieved? Fascinating though that struggle was, a story of formidable personal courage, martyrdom and stubborn mobilisation it must remain in the main outside the purlieu of our subject. More immediate to our democratic and cultural concerns is the question: what is the propulsive agent, and afterwards, the palpable precipitate of this act of liberation? The summative word is - Renewal, and renewal most especially in the cultural domain. And it helps us to differentiate between culture as understood or as projected, on the one hand - as a kind of glamourised occasion that merely seeks to deodorise a reality of civic alienation, lend spurious prestige to the violent overlords of a captive domain, and, on the other, the culture of participation, of social mobilisation that was initiated - for example - both during the struggle against the Mafia and as the latter process of consolidation of the victory over the Mafia, the complete transformation of the mentality of defeatism in the older generation, side by side with the nurturing of a new generation in the principles of the very human ordinariness and entitlement of creativity and democracy.

Now, a human transmission of the physical change of environment - an often underrated factor in the self-regarding and psychological well-being of a people - this was what I had read and felt in their physical bearing the moment I arrived in Palermo, the new confidence that infused an unaccustomed elasticity to their limbs as they set off in the mornings, imbuing them with a new resolve of civic contribution, clearly a sense that they were now existing and producing - not for some alienated, coercive masters - but for their own self-realisation. Now, the quantity surveyors of sociology and economics are free to go out and measure how this translates into economic growth and a nation's development, and make comparisons with the time of the Mafioso. After all, during the struggle against the Mafia, there were demonstrations by hundreds of workers who marched through the streets, carried placards reading VIVA MAFIA, LONG LIVE THE MEN OF HONOUR, MAFIA MEANS EMPLOYMENT, HANDS OFF THE MAFIA etc. etc. These were the typical hard-hat vanguards of reaction, and their orchestrated complaint was that Mafia provided jobs, ran an efficient productive machinery etc. but for whom? And I even had the experience, on my second visit, of running into a bartender who grumbled on and on about how life was better under the Mafia, how the Mafia was wrongly accused of many things, but now see what a mess the Municipal Council was making of the economy etc. etc. It was wonderful however to see that he spoke in a low voice in that cafe, concentrating on what he hoped would be the sympathetic ear of an obvious stranger. It gave one a pleasant tingling to see how thorough was the change of status, the boot had shifted to the other foot and fear, if any, was now in the eyes of an unrepentant Mafioso.

We dare not forget however that there were also some writers and artists who had actually contributed to the romanticised legitimisation of the Mafia, among them, as I recently discovered to my distress, the playwright Luigi Pirandello, and the lesser known Leonardo Sciascia who declared:

Mafia is a way of life for Sicilians which revealed their particular soul, their relationship with the outside world and with life and death.

For Sciascia, his attraction to Mafia culture ran so deep that he actually describes it as a "metaphor for a wider universe". Obviously the Mafia did not lack even the approbation of the cultural sophisticates, so how could I fault the bartender whose grouse was even more grounded in basic needs.

More to the point however is this, that what we should understand as Development must move away from emphasis on Gross National Product and revert to the human scale - to be measured in the exploration and nurturing of skills within a social condition that fully liberates such skills. Even if my interlocutor at the bar had been right - and undoubtedly the faithful had indeed enjoyed a greater measure of job security and social privileges under the Mafia - I am certain that any objective sociologist would discover a vast release of the reservoir of productive potential as a result of the atmosphere of increased freedom and the elimination of arbitrary bondage - for this is what the Mafia represented - a structure of bondage on which an entire society was run, and that can only mean social stagnation, leading to the elemental decay that had struck me with such force at the earlier visit.

The alternative model spells very simply - Renewal which, in this instance was actually being literally demonstrated in the many projects undertaken by the new leadership, projects that involved the populace, restored their civic confidence, their pride in their environment and their pride of belonging. Of these several projects, the ones that struck me as being both imaginative and transformational on multiple levels that amounted to a direct cultural offensive. Consider the "Adopt a Monument" campaign for instance. Now, before I explain what this entailed, it is important to recall the cultural decay that had been deliberately cultivated by the Mafioso.

Take the theatres. A number of theatres were now in the process of restoration, having been converted into warehouses for every conceivable merchandise, mostly, I suspect, contraband. Or deliberate hoarding, to create artificial scarcity and thus inflate prices in the commercial outlets that the Mafia owned and/or tightly supervised. The opening ceremony of the huge congress that had brought us to Palermo took place in what was claimed to be the oldest theatre in all of Italy - legitimate claim or not, I could testify to the sumptuousness of its interior and its fabulous acoustics. That theatre had been deliberately boarded up for decades by the Mafia, and one wonders if Luigi Pirandello was even aware of its existence Churches, ancient churches, architectural gems had suffered the same fate. When the process of restoration began, a process that was preceded by what amounted to a virtual programme of exploration and discovery, many of the immediate neighbours to these monuments expressed astonishment that they had lived next to, or daily walked past architectural treasures - including churches - of whose existence they had known nothing. Incredible but true, among a staunchly Roman Catholic people!

The "Adopt a Monument" project was beamed largely to the schools. It became a project that integrated every child into the process of cultural renewal, as the schools spent their weekends and holidays, and even some of their school time scraping off the accumulated grime of ten, twenty, even fifty years to a hundred, a process that one could claim paralleled cleansing society of the spiritual decay that the stranglehold of the Mafia represented. They painted walls, learnt new skills in the art of restoration, uncovered hidden murals and, for the first time, developed a sense of ownership in their surroundings. It was astonishing, the number of publications whose contents are simply the sketches, paintings, poetry and musings of these school children. I left with several examples of these, many of them woven around the theme of the changes that their communities were then undergoing. Their understanding of Democracy was constantly underscored by their comparison of life as experienced today with what they had learnt of the fate of some of their parents and relations during the reign of the Mafia.

Remember that some of these children had also been children of the Mafia bosses who had behaved in school exactly with the same arrogance and even privileged violence, and so, those outside the penumbra of power knew, at first hand, what it meant to be under the control of the Bosses. Now, they were able to express the changes in cartoons, in short stories and play enactments. These are fundamentals of human development that can never be measured by the calculations of any Gross National Product or the number of oil barrels exported by any nation. The programme of creative liberation is the profoundest of any form of investment in Humanity, and humanity is the sole end and purpose of the project of material development within any society.

Just in case anyone questions the parallelism of Mafia socio-controls, extending down to even children, with their military counterpart, I can only invite you to the recent history of Nigeria, much of it now in the public domain, where the children of the late dictator took part in the torture of Nigerian citizens, competed with one another in sadistic authority and in executive looting. If anything of course, the Nigerian instance was so openly structured that instructions flowed from the seat of power to commercial institutions and police commands under the letterheads of 'Office of the First Daughter', 'Office of the First Son' etc. And we may also wish to take ourselves even further back to the reign of Idi Amin whose children would appear in class at Makerere University armed with an Uzi and sidearms, personally take out a student or two whose faces they did not like, or order them arrested and subjected to arbitrary imprisonment, torture or elimination. Often, the crimes of these victims were no more than rivalry for the favours of a woman, or a refusal to literally 'kiss the hand', Mafia style, of the scions of the Boss.

To return to the Palermo project for reversing the mentality of submission and alienation, let it be understood we are speaking of culture as a continuing process of creative participation, not as culture of the capital "C" where a few square feet of canvas, dubbed a masterpiece is sold at increasingly obscene astronomical prizes or theatrical performances are prized out of reach of the real lovers of theatre. What kind of culture is it anyway when an individual sits by his telephone and rachets up the prize for a picture as he bids in millions of dollars for a canvas he has never laid eyes upon! He has heard the name, or the painting has been recommended to him by his "Art Adviser". And so, in between one business deal and another, he splurges some twenty to forty million to cover a bare patch on the wall of his dining-room. This is mere Acquisition, not Culture. And when one projects what a mere fraction of the cost of that so-called "Old Master" or market designated masterpiece can achieve in the authentic cultural enrichment and transformation of the lives of a community, in a manner that touches all, including environment, one begins to understand those violent scenes that take place in galleries where some innocuous, inoffensive looking, and normally pacific natured individual attacks canvases in a gallery with the business end of an umbrella or defaces a sculpture before he can be overpowered.

THE CULTURE OF OPPORTUNISM

As already hinted at therefore, Culture has many faces, and even in the evidently primary constituency that I have assigned to culture - that is, culture as an attribution of the creative intelligence of the people, not as its manifestation of privilege and caste - we have to be very cautious and determined in combating the many distortions of which its invocation is capable - in other words, what we might call the Sciascia principle, one that reconstructs, or reinterprets the cultural "soul" of a people to justify conduct that others, including the victims of such "soul" find reprehensible and oppressive. So, let me reluctantly take leave of Palermo and turn my attention - this time - to my own immediate constituency, or sufficiently close by as to make no difference.

I owe this example to Christian Amanpour, that remarkable field investigator who has a habit of turning up in the most unlikely places. What she succeeded in bringing to the screen in a programme two or three years ago was the ongoing practice of female enslavement in an obscure little village in the Republic of Ghana. These slaves are known as "brides of the gods", and the explication of their plight can be summed up in the simple fact of their being victims of some unremarkable, indeed quite trivial history - some form of debt owed in some ancient time past by a family lineage in one village to another. Those details are, believe me, quite inconsequential.

What matters is that thereafter, from generation to generation, a young girl must be offered to the priest of a certain fetish in that village to become a 'bride of the gods', meaning, in reality, domestic slaves of the priest - right from childhood. From the moment that the victim enters the priest's household, he is free to exercise his 'conjugal rights'. Amanpour elicited from these girls, and from the villagers, horrifying stories of rape by the priest, including underage rape. She did not lack for corroboration by the priest himself. The priest owed his slaves nothing, not even domestic upkeep. On the contrary, they are obliged to fetch and carry for him, tend his farms and minister to every whim of his existence. As they grow old and become sexually unattractive, they are discarded and the invisible deity, through his randy representative on earth, sends for fresh substitutes. It is a lifelong, generation to generation indebtedness. Some of these slaves had attempted to run away, but this only led to their being shackled when caught, and such was the superstitious terror in which the villagers were trapped that the family of the unwilling bride sometimes took the lead in tracking her down and returning her to the insatiable priest.

Ms. Amanpour ensured that the priests fully utilised their right of reply. I was particularly fascinated - in that repellent way with which we are all familiar - by a singularly unappetising specimen with appalling teeth and rheumy eyes - a noxious satyr who was, incidentally, a government official in Accra. Asked what he thought of this practice of slavery in modern times, he defended it as an age-long culture, and truculently demanded what business Amanpour had, coming all the way from across the seas, to interfere with a culture about which she knew nothing

Now, I doubt very much if the Ghanaian government itself knew anything about this culture of slavery in the backyard of its capital. What is instructive for us is that, from within the same culture, from within that same national space, resistance to this culture did take place, had begun long before Ms. Amanpour's entry - indeed it was the voluntary programme that was in progress for the eradication of this custom that first came to her knowledge. Rituals of cleansing, from that same culture, had been unearthed to neutralise the presumed supernatural powers that the priest routinely threatened to invoke, in order to exact retribution from the victims - and their families - and to dislodge the tenacious fear that had been inculcated in them, one that held them in bondage even without the physical chains. Once out of the clutches of their sexual masters, a process of rehabilitation was commenced, ensuring that those slaves were gently eased into a world from which - in a mood of despair and resignation - they had withdrawn.

We may like to note another example of this resort to cultural armoury in order to counter the distortions in the psyche of society which have been created by a breach of social norms or a rupture in ethical relationships. Today's Sierra Leone is a nation that is haunted by a near-destroyed generation, the boy-soldiers who were forcibly conscripted into various rebel forces, and inducted into a career of atrocities that remain beyond the imagination of most of us here today. With the cessation of hostilities, these youths have posed a truly gargantuan problem of rehabilitation, especially as a good deal of their crimes were committed within their own communities, where they were raised, and against people with whom they had grown up. One choice would be to treat them as war criminals, as permanent pariahs, outlaws, to cast out from any human society. The other option was to find a way of reorientating their minds, purging them of past crimes and restoring them to the bosom of the community. Fortunately the ancient traditions of these bruised societies had - as always - remained intact, and it was this process that has been deployed for reintegrating tens of thousands of these derailed minds - with considerable success.

The basic, quite elementary lesson to be extracted from these - not uncommon - narrated scenarios is what we began with: culture as a matrix of infinite possibilities and choices. From within the same cultural matrix, we can extract arguments and strategies for the degradation or ennoblement of our species, for its enslavement or liberation, for the suppression of its productive potential or its enhancement, for the stagnation of social existence or its renewal. We are reminded that the claims of cultural usage can be quite specious, that they may be geared to selective interests in opposition to the well-being of other sectors (and not always the minority) from within the same community, exploiting and abusing in the process what are no more than incidents of a history-in-the-making.

No one could claim, for instance, that the late terror of Nigeria, Sani Abacha, was a creature of absolute hostility to culture. In fact, he should go down in history as a patron of the Arts. This cynical sadist not only set up a Commission for the protection of Intellectual Property - dedicated to the protection of artists' copyright etc. - but was rewarded with a Medal of Achievement, personally given to him by the then Head of the Intellectual Property Organisation in Geneva, a United Nations agency. That gentleman of Culture has however since resigned. Presumably Abacha also believed that a fertile field should be periodically cropped. In short, observing, we presume, that Nigeria was over-artistically endowed, he also ensured that he made his place into Nigerian history books by becoming the first Head of State in the nation to order the hanging a producer of culture, the playwright Ken Saro-wiwa, herded others into prison and drove the rest underground or into exile. The career of Sani Abacha, however also serves us however to remind us of the crucial role that culture does play in the liberation of a people and their search for democracy.

With the efficacy of the word brutally reduced by the jackboots of Sani Abacha and his ubiquitous goons, the people resorted to other media of expression, music most notably. The musicians took up the gauntlet of resistance, first openly signing their own names to the recordings, then switching to tactics of anonymity when they found themselves in turn on the receiving end of the brutal attention of security agencies. Disks and cassettes flooded the markets, were copied and passed from household to household. They varied from the familiar generalised, ready prayers to God, Allah or Anabi to intervene in the unhappiness of his people and rescue them, as he once rescued the children of Israel, to super-subtle allusions, veiled, unflattering portraitures of the tyrant, and pointed morality tales. On a more combative level were the handful that delved into traditional metaphysics and invaded the abode of the gods, were filled with arcane imprecations and incantations, right from deepest antiquity, some of them exuding such seeming potency of visceral malediction that it was a wonder that Sani Abacha did not simply fall down dead or fall to howling like a dog, maybe drag on his stomach, reptilian, into one of his extremely rare cabinet meetings. Perhaps the mixture of such ancient traditional liturgy with the most modern synthesized acoustics distorted the message in the conservative hearing of the deities and ancestors, because Sani Abacha simply continued to unleash his own hounds of terror on the contested terrestrial field.

These things however, do take time. The ancestors have a very different time schema from the reckoning of mortals and eventually, as the world now knows, something did happen. While the nation awaited that festive event however, Sani Abacha continued to demonstrate that he was himself, if anything, a man of culture and a patron of the arts. He imported trainers from North Korea to drill school children in those precision displays that are so beloved of totalitarian regimes. After years of paranoid reclusiveness, the dictator was persuaded that, as the sole candidate for an election that would decide the next civilian president, he had a duty to present himself to his subjects in a spectacular way. And so, on October 1st, 1997, the parade grounds of our capital city, Abuja, became a mammoth field of impeccably dressed school children engaged in cultural displays, ably supported by traditional groups of artists from all corners of the nation. This was followed up, early the following year, by a musical extravaganza aimed obviously at demonstrating to the world that there was no discordance, only harmony among the Nigerian people.

Securing the services of the nation's most popular bands and soloists did not present much of a problem. First of all, the liquorice of an abnormal performance fee, just for the one appearance was, to put it mildly, sufficient to make any vocal artiste overcome even a sudden attack of laryngitis. Next, a very cunning impression was conveyed to them that the event was to be staged as a benefit concert for the one acknowledged cultural export of the nation - the national soccer team, the Green Eagles - to aid their foray into France for the World Cup. Nigerians, I don't have to remind you, will sell their souls for a football match. Well, from all reports, it was a fabulous musical fiesta, where even the most rheumatic favour-seekers and geriatric sycophants ensured that they were seen dancing vigorously to the most demanding rhythms.

It all turned out to be only a dance of death however, as Sani Abacha was soon after admitted to some other principality over which, in all probability, he is already contemplating plans to make himself President for Life. From all that we know of that nation space however, he is likely to meet with a fiery opposition from a far more experienced and tested incumbent. After years of distortions in the cultural - and of course other developmental priorities of a people - Nigerians, like the citizens of Palermo, are beginning to reconstitute themselves in their own authentic image. The monuments that were raised to the vaingloriousness of the Mafia lords in military are being recovered and restored to the people. Some will argue that we had no monuments to begin with anyway, but that is to fall victim to what I have already decried in that earlier lecture as the blindness of gigantism. There is no community without its monuments, even if such are monuments that have been converted from the uniqueness of nature and nurtured into symbolic signposts of a people's identity. And in any case, we have the example of the improvisational ingenuity of the usurpers of the democratic will - parks, housing estates, institutions renamed after the imperators of the hour in order to indoctrinate the mind with the idea of permanence of the rule of force and the triumph of mediocrity. Such was the degree of hubris that, always under the banner of environmental beautification, horticultural experts were engaged to recreate roundabouts with new gardens - but with one single motivation - to spell out the names of the military masters in giant lettering of flowers. Well, what is planted can also be uprooted, and the grime of dissolute power over the landscape of a nation will be scraped off, inch by inch, even as the children of Palermo have done to the dark reign of the Mafia, restoring to the people the obscured realities of their once vibrant culture and opening up new vistas for a people's destiny of self-renewal.

After Liberia, after Rwanda, after Somalia, after Congo-Zaire, after Sierra Leone....after this numbing cycle of the negation of humanity and decay of community that seem resolved to pursue us into a new millennium, a continent in search of models for renewal could do worse than look towards the miracle of an ancient island community that has leapt out of the Dark Ages, regained its obscured identity and lit up the beacon of hope in the eyes and hearts of a new generation.