Let me start by thanking the officials of the Harvard Nigerian Students Association for inviting me to give the keynote address. I am greatly honored by your invitation and am delighted to be here.
It is noteworthy that you are celebrating Nigeria’s fifty-fourth independence anniversary by showcasing her culture, history, and achievements. You have also included in your presentations the cultures and talents of other African nations. This shows your spirit of inclusiveness and your capacity to tap into the spirit of the Pan-African movement. The Pan-African movement played a crucial role in igniting the struggles for freedom in Africa during the colonial era. After independence, especially in the 1960s, differences over ideologies and machinations of the capitalist and socialist superpowers worked to kill the emerging spirit of Pan-African unity. I salute you for showing a commitment to Pan-African unity. Nigerians, as citizens of the largest black nation on earth and the biggest economy in Africa, have the unique responsibility to work for the unity and progress of Africa. Our destiny is tied to that of Africa.
From what I have seen, heard, and experienced of your generation all over Nigeria, Africa, and here in the United States, I hasten to say that yours is well placed to make Africa the pride of the whole world. My prayer and hope is that you will have more success than previous generations in restoring the dignity and respect of the black race. Where your parents and grandparents have failed, you will succeed. With apologies to Walter Benjamin, I state that your coming was expected and today your African ancestors lay a claim on you to redeem Africa’s past, and to do so even as you move forward into the future. This is a claim you cannot settle cheaply. There is a giant struggle ahead of you. Africa, especially Nigeria, is harboring two dueling ideals. You will have to give battle to both the past and the future in order to forge a glorious path for Africa.
The Pan-African scholar Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, in his book, The Souls of Black Folk stated that there are “two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” Today, I do not want to focus your attention on our dark bodies, but on the two unreconciled strivings in the body politic called Nigeria. Pardon me for this, but I am going to describe Nigeria as a pregnant woman with twins. “Two nations are in [her] womb, and two peoples from within [her] will be separated; one people will be stronger than the other, and the older will serve the younger” (Gen 25:23).
One child represents the ideal of connection to a place, ethnicity, and shared land. There is a tendency to reverence the ethnic group, the past, origins, and blood. These forces of origins, soil, and blood are very powerful and claim the loyalties of Nigerian citizens. They give us a sense of being and belonging. This is not necessarily evil or bad, because all people need a sense of belonging, a sense of romanticized past. Every attempt to build Nigeria must speak to this need. The task is how to creatively harness it to promote civic nationalism, a positive sense of patriotism.
The other child is the child of expectation, the hope of Nigeria’s future, greatness, and destiny. This second child does not reject the nation’s past, but does not desire to reinstitute the past as it was. It wants to realize the not-yet of the country, bring to pass the unrealized potentials of the largest black nation on earth. This child, unlike the older one, wants to identify Nigeria’s mission to humanity and her role in the world.
The generations of your grandparents and parents represent the older child and your generation is the younger one. Are you willing to fight, to pull away and separate yourselves from their commitments to ethnic loyalty so that all of our public institutions can be reconfigured to serve Nigeria’s greatness and distinctive gift to humanity? Will you sell the future of Nigeria for a mere pot of stew in your moment of distress? Your parents and mine sold the country short and opened its treasury doors wide to foreign and local economic predators. They were also not well prepared to serve their country. Listen closely: Will you adequately prepare yourselves so that when Nigeria calls, you will be ready; you will not be running far and wide to fetch what you need to serve her? Is your generation ready to lift up the national flag and pitch it at the highest pinnacle of technological and cultural achievements? Are you ready for your own October 1?
October 1 represents freedom, independence, a new beginning. The most laudable way to celebrate the memory of our heroes past is to declare your own independence from the national ruins of your parents and grandparents. If you continue to do what your parents and grandparents did, then you are condemning to death the future and hope of Nigerians. You must make a decision. I set before you good and evil, life and death, backwardness and progress. Now choose life, the future, the new, so that you and Nigeria may live and realize her distinctive greatness. As Franz Fanon once advised, you must out of the relative obscurity of the present national predicament, you must out of the ruins and debris of dashed hopes and expectations, discover your mission, and either fulfill it, or betray it. Harvard Nigerian students, are you feeling me? Are you with me? Are you for your ethnic group or for the commonwealth of Nigeria?
The two children struggling in the womb of Nigeria are also represented by what Peter Ekeh calls two publics: communal and civic. He argues that the communal or ethnic public is considered moral and beloved. The other is amoral, hostile, and largely hated. In the communal one, because it recognizes the worth of her personhood and citizenship, the individual feels a sense of citizenship and membership in the community. The individual is morally linked to the society and she sees her duties as moral obligations to benefit and sustain a community of which she is a member. On the other hand, the civic public, primarily imposed by colonialism and its apparatus of coercion, which refused to recognize the worth or citizenship of the individual, has no moral link with the individual. The individual steadily being attacked by the colonial and postcolonial state is alienated from the state and her attention is focused more on the primordial public, such as kin and ethnic groups, which are independent of the state. Unlike the attitude of cooperation in the communal realm, the attitude toward the civic realm is purely materialistic and exploitative, and the individual experiences no moral urge to give back to the civic realm in return for its benefits. In fact the individual is obliged to draw resources from the civic public for the benefit of the primordial community.
The younger child here is the civic public. Yes, the civic public is not perfect. Yes, the colonial masters created it. Yes, the politicians have converted the postcolonial state into a means of production. Yet we cannot abandon it. This is what we have now and we have to make it work. We must commit to reclaim it from the hands of thieves. We must commit to public service as an ideal of citizenship.
Your generation is the younger child. Once again, the older child must be made to serve the younger. I enjoin you to turn the ideals and inclinations of your parents’ generation to serve yours, that of civic revival and national progress. You have to reconstruct and build on what they are leaving behind for you. They have left something for you, a foundation of sorts from which you can rebuild.
I might have spoken as if my generation and the ones before completely failed yours. We did not fail in all areas and millions of us are still alive to make amends. We also share your pains and frustrations, especially those of us who were born after October 1,1960, in a free and hopeful Nigeria. Your parents and I are not perfect, but we can say that the economic future of Nigeria is bright. We can say that the country is better than what the colonialists and imperialists left us in October 1960. Nigeria is better in many respects; best of all we produced your generation in freedom and have equipped you with pride in Africa, we have given you great education (at least, those of you here today) and good family values, and we have passed on our rich African cultures to you. Your generation is better than ours. It means your parents and grandparents fulfilled one of the most important obligations and prayers of Africans: “May our children be better than us.” Are you not better than your parents?
Your parents are now saying to you: Go in this might of yours and you shall save Nigeria from the clutches of poverty, corruption, and incompetence. Have they not sent you? Your coming was expected and now they have put a claim on you. Do not say you are too young. Before you were formed in your mothers’ wombs, Africa was waiting for you. Arise and go forth! Let no one trouble or stop you. For you bear on your body the marks of Africa’s greatness, in your soul the determination to excel, and in your mind the wisdom of all continents.
God bless you all. God bless Nigeria. God bless Africa!
By Professor Nimi Wariboko
Katherine B. Stuart Professor of Christian Ethics
Andover Newton Theological School
Newton Centre, MA 02459
nwariboko@ants.edu
