The Country Of Laughter And Forgetting By Okey Ndibe

Many lovers of contemporary fiction
would quickly recognize that my title
is a nod to Milan Kundera’s intriguing
novel, The Book of Laughter and
Forgetting. In Kundera’s title I have
found something of a perfect handle
for what I suggest is a particular
Nigerian fact: the tendency to laugh
harder as life proves direr, and the
haste to forget what most deserves
to be remembered. We laugh so easily
– and so spiritedly – because we have
found the strange magic of
forgetting how twisted out of shape
our country is. For Nigerians, amnesia
(or even willed forgetfulness) is a
hope, a shield, a panacea and a
disease all rolled into one.
Some years ago, Abdulkareem Adisa, a
retired Nigerian general, provided an
anecdote that was as fitting an
illustration of the matter as any. By
way of background: in the days of the
Ibrahim Babangida dictatorship, Mr.
Adisa presided as a military governor
of Oyo State. Then, under the regime
of the bespectacled General Sani
Abacha, Mr. Adisa’s profile rose, not
so much in affect as in notoriety. He
became Nigeria’s Minister of Works
and a self-aggrandizing member of
the powerful inner circle of the
Abacha despotism. His ministerial
tenure was marked by what some
critics regarded as an era of inflated
contracts, mediocre work, and
abandoned projects. Nobody could
fairly accuse him, for example, of
rising to the challenge of maintaining
the country’s highways much less
overseeing the building of new,
durable ones.
If Mr. Adisa exhibited mastery in any
sector at all, it was in the sheer
accumulation of wealth. By the time
he left office, swept away by the gale
of a disesteeming melodrama, he’d
become a preening, self-satisfied man
of means. Yet, all that wealth did not
spare him the humiliation of a
ridiculous fall from grace, if men like
him could ever be said to be possessed
of grace. He was named in an
apparently phantom plot to overthrow
Mr. Abacha, his erstwhile pal and
benefactor. The regime, which
seemingly orchestrated the plot in
order to test the loyalty of some
insiders, let it be known that Mr.
Adisa – once summoned by Mr. Abacha
and confronted with evidence of his
disloyalty – had buckled, hastened to
his knees, and let out a torrent of
tears and wails in a ludicrous gesture
of contrition.
Had Mr. Abacha not died quite
suddenly, as the absurd drama of the
so-called coup had yet to reach its
finale, many believed that Mr. Adisa
and his cast of “disloyal” cohorts,
would have been killed. Thanks to the
dictator’s death, Mr. Adisa emerged
from detention and soon after slipped
into the role of kingmaker. In the
prelude to the 2003 presidential
election, he became one of the most
visible ex-generals and government
functionaries championing Mr.
Babangida’s presidential ambitions.
Parlaying his financial fortune into
political “muscle,” he was not shy to
let it be known that he was a
veritable, Nigerian-made stakeholder.
He was cross with reporters and
Nigerians who brought up the
questions of Mr. Babangida’s
overwhelming unpopularity. At every
turn, he underscored that it was the
place of his ilk – and not really up to
voters – to decide who was to rule us.
In the rare moments when he
remembered that there were millions
of other Nigerians, it was to remind
us that these millions were his – and
other stakeholders’ – “people.”
Then, in an interview he gave to a
Nigerian publication, Mr. Adisa
offered a telling anecdote. Asked if it
was true that he, a general, had
reduced himself to tears before Mr.
Abacha, Mr. Adisa offered no
apologies. Who would feed and take
care of “my people,” he asked the
reporter, if he had allowed himself to
get executed. When the interviewer
stated that posterity would record
that he became a wheedling, spineless
caricature at a critical moment, Mr.
Adisa reached for an easily
translatable metaphor. He reminded
the interview that the oyibo – white
people – invented both the pencil and
the eraser. The implication was clear:
that the inscriptions of history were
easily erasable.
Mr. Adisa was in an automobile
accident in 2005, on a stretch of road
he might have maintained in his
ministerial days. Gravely injured, he
was flown to the UK, one of the
locations where Nigerian
“stakeholders” go for medical care.
His eraser was unable to hold off
death.
In the particular context of Nigeria,
that Adisaian argument about the
eraser often appears irrefutable. It
often seems that memory – an abiding
awareness of events and experiences –
is untenable in Nigeria. A friend of
mine even once suggested that
Nigerians are, on the whole, allergic to
memory, hostile to the human
enterprise of remembering. The price
of this allergy is, of course, that
(Chinua Achebe memorably reminded
us), we no longer know when the rain
began to beat us. That gap, I suggest,
accounts for a great deal of national
inertia, our incapacity to do anything
to shield ourselves from the buffeting
storms.
Still, I have the sneaking feeling that
Nigerians are not altogether as
bereft of memory as it is fashionable
to suggest. Instead, it is more the
case that our lives have become such a
relentless cascade of absurd events
that the psyche would simply come
apart if it did not find a mechanism
for deflecting the incessant, stormy
shock. Think about the parade of
horrors that’s become part and parcel
of Nigerians’ everyday experience:
gruesome road accidents; police
shootings of innocent people,
sometimes on account of disputes over
N20 bribes; death by Boko Haram
explosives; lecturers who demand sex
or cash in exchange for good grades;
students who offer sex or cash in lieu
of hard work; civil servants who
pocket billions in public funds
entrusted in their care; National
Assembly members who won’t give a
straight answer about their
entitlements (for the reason that
these payments are both excessive
and bear no relationship to output);
local government officials, governors
and the president who stow away
hundreds of millions each month in
“security votes” – and then pocket
huge contract sums as well; highways
daubed with a thin film of tar and
declared “constructed”; neighborhoods
swallowed by flood water; civil
servants and private sector employees
who go for months without pay; civil
servants and private sector employers
who go for months without putting in
a decent day’s job; daily traffic jams
that seem choreographed from hell;
hospitals stripped of equipment;
hospitals where high bills and death
are the only guarantees; school
buildings in such dismal shape that
class conscious rodents abandon them
for classless cockroaches; urban
shanties surrounded by clogged,
brackish gutters; visitations by armed
robbers and kidnappers – and so on.
The mind is capacious, sure. Yet, the
sheer challenge of processing and
holding in the traumas of daily life in
Nigeria is a recipe for disaster. It
may well be the case, then, that
Nigerians remember and remember
sharply those who misshape their lives.
Even so, they must feign
forgetfulness and laughter in order to
go from one day to the next. The
question that should trouble the
Adisas of Nigeria – with their pencil
and eraser metaphor – is this: what
happens when the people realize that
laughter and (seeming) forgetting
have not served them? What happens
when, inevitably, there’s fire on the
mountain?

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okeyndibe
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