Man’s dalliance with mindless conformity or his brusque denial of nature’s limitless flourish in scope, content and variety is in itself a disavowal of nature’s encompassing brilliance and of her rippling sense of humour. The free exercise of our faculties is positioned to lead to our understanding of the emblematic message of nature. It is to awaken in us the very essence of our humanity. We however fail to respond appropriately to our situation each time we object to our ability for critical consciousness as a process of the revaluation of affairs and events around us.
In spite of the variegated message of nature writ large everywhere we turn, we insist on crass uniformity and thereby abjure distinctiveness. Interestingly, we are apt to advocate and promote the values of plurality in our geo-social essences. In our politics too we clamour for pluralism and mount the rostrum for the proclamation of fangled expression of the protection of minority rights and values.
And yet, we find it difficult to understand the Apollonian principle and the Nietzschean works which deftly contrast the sensual and the irrational on the one hand and the critical and rational on the other. We seem incapable of unravelling the aetiological myth in the requirement to explain or understand some obvious phenomena.
Our understanding can only stem from our appreciation of attitudes of the past as being inexorably liable to change in the process of history. Whether we welcome them or not, the common places of current metaphor derive from our pristine past. We speak glibly, for instance, of the period 1951 – 1964 in the Western Region of Nigeria as a Golden Age; and someone else compared Dr Vorster and his apartheid policy to Sisyphus and his stone.
It will appear that too much unlearned criticism will silence or put out some magic we cannot hope to recapture. Science and an expanding globe including an increasing sense of social responsibility have their proper claims on the young and their handlers. And so we must brace up to new standards of appreciation such that we begin to see ourselves as part of a continuously developing process.
Today, we see in new trends frivolity, perversion and an abuse of process or a travesty of symbolism. We loudly denounce them even as we fail to recognise that frequently-shifting values are the hallmark of our civilisation. Every generation brings a new attitude to life – often one as a reaction to a preceding one and with the coherence of time the subject matter becomes increasingly complex.
Due to certain moral attitudes, certain personalities have been discussed throughout the ages with several interpretations ostensibly due to attitudes prevalent at the particular time or to an individual presentation powerful enough to leave its stamp on future impressions. For example, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti to many music lovers is the apogee of all that is surreal in music – they believe that the essence of music is restored in him forever by the grace of the gods. Truly, Fela’s mammoth epic performances can only be true of historical persons even in popular imagination.
It is commonplace to talk of the treasures of our historical experience in Fela even as it is difficult to know how else to describe how he has culturally enriched this and many generations.
And we ought to be proud inheritors of a legacy which has come to us in the form of persons as writers or artists who have lived unconventional or nonconformist lifestyles in habit or dress. They have come to us as Bohemian or as Gypsies flouting age-long social conventions. They are largely misunderstood for being uncommon.
Fela, for instance, took a rather horrific episode in Nigeria’s socio-political life and made a magnificent outing of it in rhapsodic, rapturous music. Many of the problems tackled in Fela’s music range far too much for our own age to assimilate. They are part of an enduring metaphor which forms a stream of unconscious assumption on which Nigerian social lexicon rests and will continue to rest.
“Shakara”, “Yellow Fever”, “Zombie”, “Vagabonds in Power”, “Government Magic”, etc together form an internal unity of structure and today are a veritable part of our cherished general linguistic tradition.
Fela was captured in pictures always wearing only his underpants even as he considered himself “fully dressed” and as the climatic conditions of his environment upheld the appropriateness of his ‘frock’.
Under many guises, the Nigerian legal system found Fela often on the wrong side of its prescriptions even as no mention of his lifestyle or dress sense was ever identified as the reason of his alleged infractions. But the deep portents of the Fela experience even though may be expressed in mythical, epiphanic or practical terms, truly find their underlying cause in Fela’s unconventional, eccentric or distinctive lifestyle.
Bobrisky, a self-styled cross dresser, a professed transgender dilettante, and a taunter of the Law had by his hocus-pocus dress sense irritated the settled consciousness of traditional dress code genre. The self-appointed purveyors of this craft had tolerated Bobrisky too long. They could however not find an appropriate charge under which he could be caged. They lazily found a much-abused provision of the Central Bank of Nigeria Act which forbids the “abuse of the national currency” – the Naira. This is one law that has been unconscionably abused even by officials of state at the rarefied level of governance, by politicians at their campaign rallies, at social gatherings like wedding ceremonies, child-naming fiestas, etc. Not one conduct before now had been found impeachable regarding this law.
The Nigerian court system in an epic discovery of self, tried, found guilty and sentenced Bobrisky to six months imprisonment without an option of fine all within an olympiad speed record of about three weeks.
No mention was made throughout his trial about his “unacceptable” lifestyle. But it is facile to reconcile the humanised legal treatment of Bobrisky with the nonconformist ritual of one that dares to be different.
There is loud-enough articulate criticism of the “a-morality” of the law that looks the other way when certain sacred cows commit infractions against it but is impetuously alert to the fullest degree just to mete out a rehearsed punishment to a gadfly that has been mischievously pencilled down for roasting and who has unconsciously chosen to be drenched in oil and is sitting, as if unconcerned, by the fire place.
The intellectual ferment of this age throws up questions of every kind. The court is projected to stand as a true dispenser of power and authority in a rather cold and terrifying way. One wishes that the gods and goddesses of the law are in a better state for comparison. The frieze in the court is a superbly-woven sacrificial procession for a great civic performance but today its omens are unclear. The average man is confused as to its provenance or where it is headed.
The court and its operations have become paradoxes in themselves. The rationalist and the sceptic whose irreverence seems to spring from a deep emotional belief in the old ways sit atop a matter that oozes from the sensual and “irrational”. How can she cope?
For most part, the gods and goddesses of the court are supposed to be human. To compound the court’s rigid reflexes, there is today greater sophistication among those who seek the court’s intervention. The kind of erudition that is found among lawyers as purveyors of the law is no longer commonplace. There ought therefore to be today a feeling among adjudicators of a need for a younger stimulus or attitude which, without asking for permission, has imperceptibly crept in or has come with today’s blockbuster conquest of yesterday’s impregnable barriers.
Much of the humanity’s epic achievements have been made possible through eccentricity or nonconformism.
Rotimi-John, a lawyer and commentator on public affairs, is the Deputy Secretary General of Afenifere.
lawgravitas@gmail.com
