My Moral Challenge

On November 19, 2008, a friend of mine alerted me to the presence of a video on the internet titled "Saving Africa's Witch Children" A number of concerned Nigerian writers have responded to it on the popular Nigerian village square. I share their shock and deep concern. Above all, though, I could hardly suppress the enormous sense of guilt that began to haunt me after watching the documentary. Contrary to some of my colleagues who promptly condemned some of the perpetrators of that evil as indeed they deserved to be, I have chosen to blame myself.

Why should I blame myself for the evils that were perpetrated thousands of miles from where I live, one might wonder. Why be haunted by the specters of a certain kind of depravity?

I’m in my mid forties, well educated. I have an extensive knowledge of how Europe combated the debilitating effects of ignorance and superstition and finally emerged as what could be termed as a product of clash of ideas; I also know that the US is built on ideas (not exclusively though, you might say). I often ask how my knowledge or wealth of ideas has benefited the part of the world I come from.

I ask this question not only because the appearance in that documentary of Gary Foxcroft, an English man, quickly reminded me of Mary Slessor (1848 – 1915), a Scottish missionary who spent her life in Nigeria among the Efik, fighting the people’s superstitious beliefs. I ask because I possess the kind of knowledge that equipped them to challenge that darkroom of ignorance; I ask because I too could make a difference.

Mary Slessor taught the Africans of her time that twins weren’t evil and that witches did not exist. Gary Foxcroft taught the young Efik man, who reminded him that the accused children confessed to being witches, that the children merely voiced out what was suggested to them by their world: if you suggested to somebody that he is bad for a long time, this person would easily confess that he is indeed bad.

One of the great achievements of Things Fall Apart is that it painted a picture of the African moral and epistemological world, a world much controlled by superstition. One is nearly forced to think that the African mind hasn’t moved further away from where it was when Mary Slessor died in 1915. If anything, it appears to have cocooned itself with readymade counteraccusations of the other of imperious meddling. And so Helen Ukpabio, Prophetess and Founder of the Liberty Foundation and Gospel Ministries, accused the white woman interviewing her of imposing her white, colonial mentality on her, the good African woman doing God’s will.

Doesn’t this sound familiar? Isn’t this the kind of mindset that has literally brought about Zimbabwe falling apart? Just the other day, the New York Times carried the disheartening news of cholera ravaging Zimbabwe. Mugabe’s answer: The West is responsible.

What could I have done to prevent a six inch nail from being sunk into the head of that young girl in the documentary who was scooping food from some plate on the floor and piteously glancing up to people in whose hands her life depended?

The documentary raises a lot of questions about our humanity, how far we have gone or are yet to go towards humanizing our world. More disturbing, however, is the degree of certainty and audacity with which the preachers and perpetrators of the said evil professed their grasp of truth. In their voices, I heard those who have so warmly embraced ignorance that not even God is strong enough to rid them of that. Equally disturbing for me is the realization that I have people in my family (immediate or extended) who not only think like those in the documentary, but are willing to harm others in order to demonstrate their moral purity and their grasp of the eternal truth.

Where do all the literary and cultural theories I have crammed in the course of my studies overseas fit into all this? Most of these theories were aimed at resisting the arrogant West!

It is perhaps not out place at this time of our intellectual and social history, to rethink the value of the individual voice in interrogating the modes of production and consumption of knowledge in the African world. Equally important, indeed, more so is the challenge of interrogating our moral worldview, our attitude to life and to one another.