Against The Evil State: My Response to Rabo Abdulkarim

Richard Ali {c}

AGAINST THE EVIL STATE: MY RESPONSE TO RABO

Last week, during the ANA National Convention held at Gusau, Zamfara State, I had the opportunity of interacting with the Kano State Censorship Board’s DG, Alhaji Rabo Abdulkarim. We met at a forum within the convention where he set out to justify his widely publicised agenda to censor all authors in Kano. Five persons spoke before I did, including the poet-intellectual Odia Ofeimun and the academic, al-Bishak from the Nassarawa State University. I believe that forum has given me the necessary knowledge, hence the conviction, to publicly stand by my views expressed then and now in this article.

The entire thrust of Rabo’s justification of censorship in Kano is religious precedent – that somehow, in the works of Kano writers, immorality has been promoted and that this is contrary to Islam which is the dominant religion in the State, hence the need for his censorship. The actual, surely negligible, percentage of such anti-moral, religion-insensitive work does not interest me. The issue is that Rabo and the Kano State Government evidently see themselves in the office of the ulama, priests and imams to whom are entrusted the preservation of religious precept and its moral component. Among other things, Director General Rabo Abdulkarim sought to point out that “even in religion”, censorship existed with aspects of religious text being suppressed on the instructions of God Himself. So he, Rabo, was merely the latest in a long line of “censors” who trace their lineage to God Himself! THIS IS VERY VERY DANGEROUS - the sociologic mindset underlying it is the same kernel that sprouts the Evil State. The second half of the 19^th Century saw such a kernel, that errant strain of social philosophy called Fascism, and its kinfolk; Socialism and Communism. The tragic of the 20^th Century, including two world wars, is its rightful bloom. Now, in 21^st Century Nigeria, such a sinister preamble faces us.

When the State arrogates to itself the moral suasion of Religion, seeking to enforce this arrogation by instruments of legal suasion such as the Kano State Censorship Law, the State has simply affirmed Mussolini’s text - “the keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative.” This would no doubt be well and good if such a State were foundationally a fascist State. The Kano State government and its minions, however, were all elected under the 1999 Nigerian Constitution which declares that the country can only be governed “democratically”, meaning by the Rule of Law in government/power relations and respecting Fundamental Human Rights in practice. The State’s arrogation of Religion is clearly the first step in the creation of the Evil State in which “individual and groups” will be relative – contrary to rudimentary democracy. In a democracy, thus in Nigeria, “individuals and groups” must be FREE – freedom of thought, action, even the freedom to life contra-defines Fascism, they are the gene characteristic of Democracy.

In our long, trying history, the Nigerian artist and writer, from Uthman dan Fodio right down to Ken Saro-Wiwa have embodied that irreducible freedom, paying the price, social regeneration or death, over the centuries – this is the TRUTH. In attacking the writers of Kano and Nigeria, the State, in Kano through its minions and in Abuja through its acquiescence have launched an attack AGAINST FREEDOM – that also, is TRUTH.

Now that we know definitively the State’s underlying agenda, how have we as artists and writers responded; - to the threat that the same Democracy we and ours have spent blood to enthrone is now being imperilled; that the representative institutions which we have created to protect our freedom are morphing now into appurtenances of the Evil State? How have we responded?

Before I go on, I would like to say in any society, the quantum of stupidity is often the kinetic force that determines the dice face of its people’s destiny.

The Nigerian intelligentsia, when they have not been smirking partisans of the fictitious and alternately chauvinist “North-South” divide have responded to this attack in the manner the northern academic, al-Bishak, did at Gusau. After a circuitous proem, he finally decided to say that if there is a “law” setting up the Kano State Censors Board, Rabo would “never stop” what he is doing. What he said really was that, in the extant case, Rabo should continue threatening freedom while writers should continue complaining of it. What he said involves the admittance of Rabo and the Evil State into the social equation of Nigeria and I assure you there is nothing “intellectual” about a “head-in-the-sand intellect”, the prefix outrages its twin! Al-Bishak’s comments are merely those typifying the response of a considerable percentage of our thinkers and writers here in the North, and it is not any more his fault for exemplifying that mindset than it is mine for attacking it.

What I say is – bar the gates and secure the fastness, do not let Grendel in! Do not, my dear writers and Intellectuals, pretend you do not know what Rabo is about; do not pretend not to know that in this incursion at Kano, the very future of Nigeria, our Nigeria, is at stake. Do not pretend that Rabo can possibly be allowed to “do what he is doing” when what he is doing is scorching the fields where our grains grow, burning the granaries! Do not pretend you do not know that an illegal law MUST not be obeyed, must be fought in the courts and if the courts become corrupt, they still MUST not be obeyed. Do not pretend to not know this and much more!

But, if you choose to so pretend, take off the garb of Intellectual, don that of Quisling and in doing so lose all my respect and friendship - even if that means I stand alone amidst my true few friends.

That is that about the Evil State and my response to Rabo Abdulkarim and his bent masters, the Kano State Government and the Nigerian State. I have also spoken to the Intellectuals who helm Nigerian literature. I wish now to speak to my true friends, the writers of Kano and Nigeria; to the future of Nigeria I say, listen to me please.

The mistake we make too often is to circumscribe ourselves to the walls of the Nigerian middleclass to which by birth or education most of us belong, forgetting we have a duty to through our work interact with Society as a whole. This must stop. We must begin to see ourselves as a part of an organic whole. If the State has turned evil and if the Intelligentsia have turned quislings, we must return to our selves, to the People to whom we belong. If we have remained away from them, we must now rediscover our bonds with them because attacking our freedom and dominating us is just the first step towards the complete subjugation of the People. In attacking our freedom to write, they undermine our right to our thoughts. And when these are successfully stymied, from then onwards, the Evil State will at birth give each child a life’s parcel of ignorance.

Now, especially as we are under attack, we must break down these exclusive glass walls and fraternise our ideas with the lower-classes, lifting them up to where we are, thus increasing our number and guaranteeing that the They who wish to automate the Evil State will know in advance that we are superior in number and resolve. We must shatter the walls and start speaking to the talakawa of Northern Nigeria in their own language. It is for our own good and in our best interest that we realise this, for when Ignorance becomes public policy, we, stamped into the lower-classes, will become nameless faces in a neo-commune. And it will be much harder for us who have gained so much. That is all I have to say to you.

I will end this article by imploring that we must stand against this Evil State in the making and not seek to compromise with it as the our leaders seem self destructively bent on doing, pretending to forget that one negotiates only with equal. And to my courageous comrades in Kano who will go by the names, “Abdul”, “Sa’adatu”, “Yusuf”, “Ibrahim” and “Talatu”, I say – WE WILL WRITE, WE WILL KEEP WRITING AND WE WILL TRIUMHP!

Ali, former Editor, Sardauna Magazine, poet, holds an LL.B {Civil Law} from the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.

A Review of Landscapes of Realities

Poet Alert: Dr Yusuf Adamu

Not being a cricket, this piece should not be considered a work of cricketism; it is rather a sanarwa, news, a review, and an acclamation of a newly published poet. Once every few years a collection of poems comes along that so definitive it can only be reviewed on its own terms. Dr Yusuf Adamu has provided us with just such a collection with the publication of his 2008 Poems, Landscapes of Realities. This review is meant to offer lovers of verse everywhere a studied opinion of this latest offering from the generally considered literary-arid northern Nigeria.

The poet is a football aficionado and geographer, he lectures at the Department of Geography, Bayero University, Kano. This background proves important in considering his poems. His literary grounding is in the Hausa language where he has published three novels; Idan So Cuta Ne {If Love Is a Crime}, Ummul Khairi and Maza Gumabr Dutse. He is also a blogger of note; {http://www.africanpublicpoet.blogspot.com/}, {http://www.tagarduniniya.blogspot.com/}.

Landscapes of Realities is a very slim volume of fifty six pages comprising forty three poems written entirely in free verse. The poet has conveniently divided them into three thematic hubs; “Innocence”, “Places” and “Realities”, comprising five, seven and thirty-one poems respectively. The poems included in Landscapes were written during the years 1997 and 2000 and perhaps their being published in 2008 is an acknowledgement by the writer that the content and context of his poems have remained relevant over the last decade.

The arresting individual characteristic of each poem in Landscapes is leanness – an almost anorexic control of diction such that each poem renders a chosen reality starkly, without the confusion of ambiguous words or an obscurantist style. The collection, taken as a whole, betrays an acute social conscience that is prescient but not overly sentimental in its comment, exhortation and, more often, denunciation. The bareness of geography, where a hill is a hill and a plain is a plain, have been transposed successfully into the poems of Dr. Yusuf Adamu, where Nigerian realities – the motorcyclist, eclipsed dreams, the corruptions of power and time – are rendered in severe relief.

The five poems comprising “Innocence” – “The Child”, “Truth”, “Childhood Dreams”, “Almajiri” and “Happiness” adequately reflect the bare template of each Nigerian, before experience ups and happens to them. The innocence of childhood and truth, the beauty of a child’s dreams are captured in their fragile ephemeralty. This nostalgia is punctured by the poem “Almajiri”, about the agonizingly human fodder, child-scholar-beggars, that have become an embarrassing fixture in the cities of Northern Nigeria. The blight of Innocence, occurring in “Childhood Dreams” –
. . .they wake up growing
into a world full of malice
falsehood
diminishing glory and shame
. . .guilt replaces innocence
ancient dreams
barely materialized
-is given a context in the lines from “Almajiri” below –
he is very young an frail
the economy is biting hard
the Mallam cannot sustain him
. . .he must hunt for himself.

The second part of the collection, “Places”, comprising seven poems, are poetic descriptions of Kano City, Jos City, the Plateau, Kura falls, Wembley Stadium and the town of Sussex. They are simple poems. However, a poignant question is sneaked in which forms the prelude to the next part of Dr. Adamu’s poems, the poet asks –
Where shall we be
If there is no geography?

“Realities”, comprising thirty-one poems, provides a rich mine for critical exploration. The poet-persona in these poems is above the fray of the realities being described yet we can feel the organic, umbilical relationship between the two. “Realities” probes maternal mortality and poverty, germane issues in the North, with the poems “Child Birth” and “Malnourished Child”. “Fuel Scarcity” and “Motor Cyclist” critique the nature of government insensitivity vis a vis the devious and oftentimes, dangerous, “survival” activities of the Nigerian citizen. Beggary, another social problem in Northern Nigeria is given the treatment of clinical satire in “Professional Beggars”; “Career Beggars” on the other hand denounces the beggars for their ignorance, however, it doesn’t stop there, the poem ends –
their minds are enslaved
by false beliefs and ignorance
chained by laziness
their minds may never be free
until the society decides to set them free.

On the late General Mamman Vatsa, he says –
His sprit shall forever be
Nourishment for his memory never ceases
As the living drink from his lines
In the same spirit of the Ecclesiasticus, of paying respect to “great men and their fathers who begat them”, he honors the “Ancient Revolutionary”, Akhenaten {1338-1358 BC} and a “Brave Captian”, Sultan Attahiru of Sokoto who defeated by the British, was subsequently killed at Burmi, on his way to join forces with El-Kanemi or Rabih in the Sudan –
Maxim gun he hasn’t got
Can he remain on the throne?
. . .our glory has fallen and broken.

Perhaps in correcting the conservative and reactionary stereotype of Northern Nigeria, Dr Adamu has in a series of poems affirmed that the radical, revolutionary streak has been in the north long before the south knew of cause and anti-cause, I speak of men like Muhammad Rumfa, Shehu dan Fodio, Sa’ad Zungur, Aminu kano, Hamza Abubakar. In the poems “Strike”, “Rebellion”, “Smash Them” and “Speak Out”, he idolizes revolt in the face of malevolent power. Says he –
But if they are unjust
If they oppress you
Day and night
If they mismanage your funds
If they deny your rights

Then rebel
Fight in the open
And in the close
Do not fear their might
For God is not on their side.

However, even judging this collection by its standard, there are shortcomings. On the ground of “leanness”, there are poems laden with prosaic fat so much so that the poetry of the poem is lost. Examples of this are the poems “Problem” and “Kindness” which read too much like penny motivational tracts. Secondly, the poet’s style involves the breaking of sentence syntax and while this stylistic preference has in the main worked superbly, it has not so worked all though. An example of the jarring and unaesthetic effect of this is the line “His colleagues he betrayed” from “Driver’s View”, “For, truth they represent” from “Kayan Sarki” and the first stanza of the poem “Frankenstein”.

Another critical charge, this time of complacency may be laid against the poet. Instances abound where the non-printing of a single letter, “s” or “’s”, have discontextualised poems and hurt the flow of their line. One inevitably pauses at such a point. An example is the first stanza of the otherwise correct “The Sun”. On another limb, “The Poet Died” is rendered unwieldy for its sheer and abrupt vacillation between past and present, sample –
The power of the gun
He knew quite well
Yet it is the power
Of the written word
He believes in
I have no doubt that General Vatsa for whom this poem is in memoriam “believed”; but he cannot “believe” {L4 excerpt above} because that would imply living contemporaneity and Vatsa, we know, has been dead for decades.

These shortcomings can easily be overcome during the expected reprint of this Poems. They do not much hurt the beauty of the collection or derogate the sincerity of the poet behind the lines. Among the emerging voices in Nigerian poetry, Dr. Yusuf Adamu’s Landscapes of Realities would definitely find a niche for itself.

Kano Memoirs: Creative Writer’s Forum

Among The Brothers

During my recent literary sojourn to Kano City in Northern Nigeria, I had the unanticipated pleasure of meeting the crème of that city’s young writers and thinkers. The accusation variously laid against the northern part of the country has been that, vis a vis the south, it has largely been unable to tell its story. Not on one occasion, in salons across the length of this country, the question, axiomatic, has been – the south has produced Wole Soyinka, Eastern Nigeria has produced Chinua Achebe, who, of that stature, has the north produced? I was well aware of that typecast even as I attended the Forum, as the meeting is called. I merely reminded myself that stereotypes must be held in abeyance until real evidence can prove its truth or falsity.

The writers of Kano meet monthly under the auspices of the ANA/EEL British Council Creative Writers Forum. It is a partnership between the local chapter of the Association of Nigerian Authors {ANA} and the English and European {French} Languages Department of the Bayero University, Kano with support from the British Council, Kano. The meetings are held on the last Wednesday of the month at the Council’s premises along Emir’s Palace Road, which is an exemplum of traditional arewa architecture with its thick mud walls and old style motifs printed on the exterior walls. Together with my friend, Abdulaziz Ahmad Abdulaziz, I entered the meeting hall at exactly 4:30 p.m. Were not for Abdulaziz’s foresightedness, we would have joined the others standing at the corners or on tables – the hall was full.

A young man was reading from a poem, his very words were –
Like a river cut away from its source
A day without sunshine, shrouded by envious clouds . .
- “a love poet”, I thought, “a poet in love” and wondered the fatal connexion betwixt the two. Muhammad Balarabe Sango who is the PRO of ANA/Kano State was chairing the meeting. He showed his courtesy by recognizing my work with ANA/Plateau State and inviting me to the dais where I declared myself delighted to be there. There were over sixty persons in the hall; six times more that Lenin said would have stopped the Bolsheviks coming to power in Russia. Indeed, the Muse of writing dwelled amongst the Kannawa.


About twenty writers read that day, the 26th of March 2008, mostly prose and poetry; Bakano 80, Muktar Ali Hikima, Terungwa Isaiah Itiav, Abdulaziz Ahmad Abdulaziz, Abdullahi Sufi, Muttaqa Yusha’u Abdulrauf and M.B. Sango amongst others. I read my short story “The Ravages of Dust.”

The health of a country’s letters can be ascertained by the themes its writers tackle, the literary is the thermometer of the social. The themes of the Kano writers are astonishingly varied, ranging from the everyday such as love within the society, love and lust between the sexes, the road as a vehicle to social harmony to the clearly metaphysical such as Ali Muktar Hikima’s “An Odd World” and Abdulaziz Fagge’s “The Untold”. Bakano 80, a writer, in answering a critical salvo from the floor viz the crime obsessed theme of his work replied that he felt crime had been marginalized in contemporary Nigerian prose, hence his desire to affect this discrimination in his work. Needless to say, I found Bakano’s reply highly perceptive and true.

However, while protean themes indicate literary virility, the general style of the Kano writers leaves much to be desired. Liberal construction, and inevitable the misconstruction, of grammar has taken its heavy toll on the work read during that meeting, perhaps indicative of the corpus itself. Without paying attention to the “personal” nature of a writers style and the miring myriad arguments on that, I venture to say grammar, as synthesized in that unit of sense, the sentence, is and must remain the building block of style. Grammar is organic and an at least rudimentary mastery of it is necessary in order to avail a writer the defense of “style” when accused of linguistic or grammatical miscarriage. The writers of Kano have either largely failed or been careless in their use of grammar and I do not think the defense of “style” avails them. The grammatical liberties taken in some of the work read, prose and poetry - the appropriateness of syntax, imagery, and diction – too many times, those liberties were over-taken.

The real workshop proved educative and insightful critiques were made. Among the gathered that day were Drs. Yusuf Adamu and Bala Garba of the Bayero University, Kano. The former lectures geography while the latter is from the English Department. I left the meeting with the appropriate words of Dr. Bala on my mind, he said, concerning creative writing – “it is not the creative we lack, it is the writing!” Dr Adamu stressed that one should not call oneself a writer before one becomes one and the fitting toga of a true writer can only be worn at the end of a long process of writing and rewriting, refining and editing, and critique.

I agree entirely with the dons. The trouble with up and coming Nigerian writing is the impatience to get the cattle to the market. But you only get a good price when the cow is fattened. And fattening a cow is not a day’s job. Yet, the abundant energy that brings about impatience is very important because it pointed out the reality, that those twenty writers that day were confident enough and willing to put their work on a pedestal, to be critiqued and to accept criticism. That is, of course, the beginning of improvement.

On leaving the meeting that day, I felt that the future was promising since even as far up north as Kano, there are writers passionate about writing. It would only be a matter of time before critical appraisal would nudge these fine young persons to even greater refinement of their language and ultimately, the good of Nigerian writing.