Pastor Adeboye, Grigori Perelman And Poincare: the Mathematical Degrees of Separation. (First published in 2010)

When I read the report of how the Russian mathematician, Grigori Perelman, turned down the 1 million dollar Millennium Mathematical Prize for solving one of the most redoubtable mathematics problems, I was again reminded of the knotty linear continuum, otherwise called Africa. What has Perelman got to do with Africa? A lot more than you would guess. All right, he is not a descendant of the poet Pushkin, who had an African great-grandfather. But then, who says Perelman does not have his own African ancestor, lost in the reverse offing of time? Anyway, soon after he resolved the mathematical problem (Poincaré Conjecture), Perelman resigned from his teaching job at Steklov Institute and has since eschewed what he sees as the seamless materialism of modern life, he has escaped into a kind of temporal semi-monastic existence in a verminous flat in St Petersburg, a neo-Tolstoyan figure time-travelling into an unwritten Dostoevsky's epic.

After Nigeria's Pastor Adeboye was named one of the People of the Year in 2009, I wrote an article in which I mentioned the Millennium Mathematical Problems. I submitted that it would have been a more worthwhile achievement if Adeboye had solved one of the problems instead of winning plaudits for pronouncing the profound obscurantist drivel of hoping to plant churches in every corner of Africa. I took full cognisance that Mr Adeboye has the freedom to act according to his lights or what he considers the lights of his god – if his great God had told him to supplant mathematics with religion, then one should better leave well enough alone. After all, if there is such a saying that the road to hell is full of good intentions, I don't think it would be entirely facetious to suggest that the road to heaven may indeed be full of daft intentions.

I found it ever so slightly bemusing that it was not only Mr Adeboye who had given up a career in mathematics for a calling as a scriptural shepherd corralling flocks of Nigerian Pentecostal sheep. I understand that Mr Kumuyi, head of Deeper Life Church, was also a mathematics teacher (probably a colleague of Adeboye's) before he became yet another shepherd overseeing a huge flock. I remember someone parlaying his Christianised commonsense into my rueful observation of this coincidence: Isn't it a good thing, he argued, that mathematics loss is God's gain? Being a born-again bonehead, this person failed to reason it out that mathematics' loss is not just God's gain but yet another instance of Africa's reversion to the state of ante- or anti-enlightenment. Would it have mattered whether or not Pastors Adeboye and Kumuyi had remained run-of-the-mill mathematicians and were not even capable of solving the merest mathematical problem? Probably not. I just don't see any point in celebrating the sacrifice of mathematics to religion.

And this would not have meant anything if these two had not set a lamentable precedent that it is something to be rapturous about when someone brilliant enough to be a scholar gives academe up for preacherly calling. Today Nigeria is full of doctors, engineers, architects, lecturers and ‘professors,' who are either honorary or part-time pastors, or deacons, to use a happy-clappers' parlance, or who have given up their old professions to become full-time bible-cramming gospellers. Again, there would not have been anything wrong in a handful of well-educated lay Christians taking preferment, but for this to have become a fashion, a badge of respectability and wisdom, is pitiful. For one thing, it would seriously undercut the chances of anyone from such a society ever winning anything as rare and crucial as the Millennium Prize.

And what is this Millennium Prize, and why am I going on about it? This is a very important Prize, and considering that it is not won every year or even every four years like the Fields Medal, it may even be said that it is more important than the five intellectual Nobel prizes, more important than the latterly instituted Abel Prize. I am not the most mathematical in the village; my handhold on the finer points of maths has always been slippery and very weak indeed. While I would not presume to compare myself with such literary colossi as Updike and Soyinka, I have read both men express how the love of maths was lost on them. Possibly, the DNA sequence of the denizens of the literary republic carries an elision in numeracy, so there is no point in fussing over an expatiation on any of the Millennium Mathematical problems.

Nevertheless, I appreciate and even have an apprehension of the power of mathematics, its omnivalence, its overarching immanence in the exploration of the morphology and meaning not just of the earth, but of the whole universe, maths is the ethereal (as well as real) equivalent of carbon. From Pythagoras to Ptolemy to Newton to Einstein and even to Hawking - maths has been the instrument of choice in these men's effort to untie the few they can among the billions of knots and skeins and the mysteries of the union of space and mass. To render it further down, there could not have been such an invention as the computer I am writing now without mathematics – plus millions of other things. And although applied maths could bring forth such a beautiful – or at least useful thing - like the computer, in its pure form, it is notoriously difficult; it is dense, deep, and to a lot, metaphysically runic.

The Millennium Problems are the apogean problems of mathematics, the eminently bull-headed cruces, the bitch septet. One of them is the cognately complex Poincaré Conjecture. This conjecture is no more or less complex than the Riemann Hypothesis, P versus NP Problem, or Yang-Mills Existence and Mass Gap. In 2003, Grigori Perelman cracked, or shall we say, second-conjectured the Poincare conjecture. In his time, the Frenchman Henri Poincaré was a mathematical luminary; his contributions to mathematics were (still are) massive; among dozens of formulations, he conjured up what is now known as the Poincaré Conjecture. Like all Millennium problems, this is all but humanly unsolvable and extremely prickly. This is why the Clay Mathematics Institute offered a million-dollar prize for the solution of any of the seven.

Perelman was the first person to solve any of the long-unsolved problems - the Poincaré conjecture was proposed in 1904. In 1996, it had been proved and verified that Perelman had marrowed out the conjecture; he was awarded the Fields Medal. However, Perelman declined the award and refused to appear at the International Congress of Mathematics to accept the medal. Several years before he was awarded the Clay Millennium Prize, he had given up mathematics, describing the subject as too painful to discuss. And again, like the Fields Medal, he rejected the Millennium Prize with its million-dollar premium, saying, 'I'm not interested in money or fame. I don't want to be on display like an animal in a zoo.' He believes cracking the theorem is enough reward.

What piques my fascination is how Perelman has reacted rather than his gargantuan algorithmic achievements. Well, crackpot and idiosyncratic, you might say. But we should not forget what had come from that crackpot mind in the first place. And despite the odds, Nigeria, or maybe Africa as a whole, needs a mathematical crackpot like Perelman rather than ex-mathematicians who have chosen a no less crackpot religious persuasion in which they see nothing wrong in praying for miracles or to the ‘unmoved mover,' to move cars. As I wrote earlier, someone like Mr Adeboye has all the right in the world to give up maths for the pulpit, but the effect of such personal abdications is part of the problems of Africa today, and we are yet to thoroughly examine where this sort of teleological drift would land us. Ours is a continent slumbering in the belly of the whale of time. I fear that it might be too late by the time Africa is disgorged; the continent might find itself islanded, arid and sterile, a metaphorical Jonah.

And there is a paradox to the connections I am trying to make. Perelman, the mathematician, worked his backside off, solved a thumping mathematical problem, and won a prize, but chose to live a hermitic life, spurning the million dollar gift, an attitude which mirrors the scriptural Jesus Christ than that of a man who gave up mathematics for charismatic Christianity and thought nothing of buying a billion naira aircraft. At the same time, several thousand members of his congregation might be unable to send their children to school for want of money or feed themselves squarely. This sort of parable is one of Nigeria's subtle tragedies. And when the final tally of the most influential people of this century or even millennium is made, I don't think it will be too hard to separate the grains from the chaff. No Nigerian ‘pastor' – not even Adeboye – has done anything worth celebrating in a high-minded, even humane, way. The likelihood is that these men and women would feature in lengthy footnotes when the story of the failed state once called Nigeria is written.

M

My fascination with the pun mummy
the mother and mummy the embalmed
Egyptian soul endures.
Time and sophistication have not erased it,
much more so when mummy
the mother abides in time, well-preserved,
cherished, honoured and full of soul.
We never grew out of calling her mummy.
Even now after she's gone...
Gone.

Sometimes you wonder:
Is that it? Is that all there is to it?
Yes, it is.
This is something grave philosophies
and pollyanna religions
do not prepare you for.
For we all measure our time
against the span of our parents' lives,
still more so against the parent
who lives longer, long.

She left in her 90th year,
yet everything looks foreshortened
and brief.

At last, sooner or later,
time's arrow pierces every heart:
in one fell swoop Thanatos
eases out Eros;
the wrecking ball of Earth
smashes us against the bosom
of nothingness and nonexistence.

My fascination with Allan Ginsberg's
Kaddish endures, the poet's song
for his late-lamented mother.
But where Naomi Ginsberg was the very
sea itself, stormy and calm by turns,
Sade Oriku was at once
an oasis and a dune, harbour
and haven for us all.
You would think the words,
'Oh you look like your mother'
feel less bemusing now.
They do not, not when mirror
and reflex tell you otherwise.
Well, aren't we all flickering shadows
of the dead?
Aren't we guttering candles
planted on shrines to the dead?
Aren't we merely one of
the multifarious mutations of evolution?
But here we shall stay with things
sub-specie humanitatis...

Her anima enriches me, stuff
from which my marrow was made.
Her humane gene endures
but the meme of Christianity
that was foisted on her foreparents
has gone awol in me.
I recall her heartfelt Abrahamic prayers...
My forced, knowing, bad-faith 'amen'
now ring hollow.
But that was duty, filial duty,
and she knew - the soul of kindness
and care, Mother.

We still call her mummy
even though she's gone,
even though in her last
testament and autobiography,
she mutes mummy, calls herself Mama.
Isn't Mama better, sturdier, realer,
solemner and mother-earthy?

Mama, you're forever
mummified in our hearts.

Antinatalism

"How could an omnipotent deity have created in its own image - an exceedingly obscure, almost taunting notion - a being too feeble to escape affliction, misery, temptation? What sadistic experiment is being played? May the Almighty be cursed for his pains, in all senses of that word... We did not ask to be born." (George Steiner: Poetry of Thought).

George Steiner is on target here. Inherent in this passage is Steiner's not being a fan of God, even if the polymath somewhat nods in 'his' general direction in many of his books. However, Steiner's problem-of-evil gibe is not my concern here. I am as bored of that grammatical expletive called 'God' as I am of the debates about 'his' omni-ness or lack of it. The gist of this quote is not so much the anti-God rehash, not so much the old-testamental execration, as the antinatalist final sentence. Steiner's 'We Did Not Ask to Be Born' clincher piques my ideological fancy.
Antinatalism: It is better never to have been born—or anti-procreation. Antinatalism is another way of putting the better-never-to-have-been-born postulate—or position. Antinatalists believe that it is not only perverse for humans to subsist in an imperfectible world of suffering and loss, but it is also thoughtless, unnecessary and utterly self-indulgent to procreate when you find yourself in this 'vale of tears.' Antinatalists are convinced that this only world we know is nothing if not the repository of harm, hazards and hurt.
Bar a few desultory interludes of joy, existence is nothing but a cacotopia of pain, suffering and decay - a cacatopia, or to vulgarise that neology, a massive ball of turd, a cosmic shithole, an existential cesspool. Antinatalism stands in opposition to the contents of many conditioned assumptions and settled reflexes which include religion and its often shallow unphilosophical dictates, particularly those of the family of Semitic religions. Go ye and multiply, they all command. But one does not need religion or the say-so of any god to be natalist, to desire the flesh, to have sex, have children, although these same religions repeat doctrinal downers like 'original sin' and 'generational curse.' Biblical books of Jeremiah and Job resonate with antinatalist laments and regrets, with these two luckless eponyms 'cursing' the day they were born. Even the 'vale of tears' I wrote above is from the Bible.
Anyway, antinatalists have no time for religion. The crux of their argument is simple, if ramifying. In as far as we did not 'ask to be born' and were born just the same, we should not make the mistake our procreaters made and spawn other suffering-prone littluns...
Antinatalism is neither prescriptive nor life-affirming, nor is it anti-life - it is only a philosophy, a tough-minded, even fair-minded, philosophy. Ask any parent who has seen their child suffer, I mean unspeakably acute, bone-deep torture, you would begin to understand antinatalists... Then just ask parents: the sheer burden of parenthood, the conscious and semiconscious everlasting worry, the nagging, niggling apprehensions...  What hand would the Fates deal this colic-wracked tot? a thoughtful parent might wonder. She might also ponder, if she was not unrealistically Pollyannaish, how much would her child's bed of roses be interspersed with spiny brambles and stinging nettles? conveniently forgetting that for many the only bed there is is a bed of nails and spikes?
And speaking of colic, I would ask, along the lines of Steiner's thinking: How would a so-called benevolent and perfect god create such a torturous affliction as colic, why would 'he' subject a few-days-old child to such sleepless torment?
Of course, I am an antinatalist might-have-been, which nullifies the question of whether I am an antinatalist or not, or even whether I ever possessed that cast of mind. Only the consciously—even joyously—childless is the authentic antinatalist. The thoughtful parent of a child can only mull these things over, impersonally, if sensibly, which is what I am trying to do here.
I'll conclude with Steiner (from Grammars of Creation).
"Crippled by congenital disease, made blind or limbless by hereditary infirmity, begot in drunken rage or uncaring tedium, children have been known to ask their parents: 'Why did you force existence on me?' In times of massacre, of wilful torture and deprivation, such as the Shoah (Holocaust), the questions pressed on children's lips. And there were indeed those who asked out loud... By what legitimacy do we procreate, do we sentence to a lifetime of pain and victimisation, beings who have not asked to be?" Needless to say, Steiner, like me, is an antinatalist manqué.

Donald Trump and the Right Nation

To put Donald Trump's president-electhood into perspective, I have been rereading my overthumbed John Micklethwait's and Adrian Woodridge's 'The Right Nation: Why America is Different.' Published in 2005, The Right Nation is a remarkably perspicuous book about how America, despite lapses of liberal-seeming regimes (both Democrat and Republican), is essentially a conservative country, politics-wise. I have found some of the passages of the book eerily relevant to recent events. Below is one: 'As for elitism, rather than dreaming about creating an educated 'clerisy' (class, if you will), the Republicans ever since the 1960s have played the populist card. Richard Nixon saw himself as the champion of the "silent majority." In 1988, the aristocratic George HW Bush presented himself as a defender of all-American values against the Harvard Yard liberalism of Michael Dukakis. In 2000, George W Bush, a president's son who was educated at Andover, Yale and Harvard Business School, played up the role of a down-to-earth Texan taking on the might of Washington.' Reading the book before Trump's tricky victory, I realised that this passage had melted into the larger analysis of American politics, but now it leaps out at me. Donald J Trump is the last in the gallery of Republican presidents who rode to power through the agency of crass populism. I say crass, but in one form or another, populism seems to have worked for these men, as evidenced by how they were able to harvest a number of American 'Belts'. There is the ever-dependable Bible Belt. The marginally moveable Rust Belt. The Gun-nutters' Belt. Amorphous White America Belt. And, particularly in the case of Trump, a sizable girth of Racist Belt, held up by sturdy and close-woven Braces of 'Deplorables.' Trump has been able to harness the hackneyed jingles of Republicanism, bellowing them from rooftops, haranguing from the tribune of tart politicking, he has been able to cram Nixon's 'silent majority,' Bush the Elder's 'all-American values,' and Bush the Younger's hail-fellow-well-met dudeishness into his 'make America great again' warcry. A few people have compared Trump with the slave-owning, Indian-hounding, frontiersmanlike Andrew Jackson, America's 7th president, a flighty and muddled comparison, but that is not my concern here. Anyway, the mugwumpish demiurge of the Democratic party had long been dead before the incubation and hatching of the ' Right Nation' in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Although loopier and kookier than his 'conservative' forebear, Trump took more than a few leaves out of the tract of Barry Goldwater, a Republican presidential candidate, in 1964. Goldwater opposed equal rights for blacks; he haughtily countervoted the Civil Rights Act. He was seen as a 'bigoted nut', and to a large extent, he was. Micklethwait and Woodridge sum him up: 'It wasn't just a question of extremism. Goldwater cheerfully broke all the basic rules of politics. He sometimes started speeches by listing all the people he didn't want to vote for him. He told an audience in Texas that an aeroplane contract should have gone to Boeing in Seattle rather than to a local company. He denounced Johnson's antipoverty program in poverty-stricken West Virginia... One fan created a soft drink called "Gold Water - The Right Drink for the Conservative Taste." With characteristic political sensitivity, the candidate (Goldwater) promptly spat it out. "This tastes like piss!" he spluttered. "I wouldn't drink it with gin." Needless to say, Goldwater was beaten by Lyndon B Johnson in the 1964 election. But then, it was a different America - or, shall we say, Uncle Sam. It was the Uncle Sam who could still see the difference between 'right-minded' and 'Right-minded,' uncynical Uncle Sam who hadn't developed a thick skin to nuance; conscientious Uncle Sam who was still mulling over ways to atone for past sins, who was still somewhat avuncular, trying as best as he could to commune with the ghost of Uncle Remus. At least in looks, Donald Trump is as different from Remus as possible. Even in temperament. For one thing, Trump is neither cuddly nor biddable. And for an heir to Goldwater, he is indeed a mutant, a Midas-pawed alchemist who has turned Barry Goldwater's baser ambitions into a frightfully garish reality. If anything, Trump is as loose-tongued as Goldwater, if not recklessly so. Because where Goldwater had only been antipoverty in impoverished West Virginia, Trump had told Iowans that they were stupid. But he had defeated Mrs Clinton in Iowa because Iowans had lapped up everything he said, including the slur. As it turned out, Trump's boast that he could shoot someone on New York's Fifth Avenue and get away with it is no hot air. He didn't shoot - or hasn't shot - anyone, but the way he was apotheosised during the campaigns, he would indeed have got away with murder. He disrespected women and boasted about abusing them, yet he got 53% of white women's votes. He called Mexicans rapists and ne'er-do-wells, yet 29% of Latinos voted for him. He lied, he bragged, he bullied. He taunted a disabled man. He faked piety, yet the majority of American Christians voted for him. He refused to release his tax records, yet almost half of the American electorate voted for him, with the fusty Electoral College system tipping the balance in his favour. This unlikely and considerably unlikeable monstre sacre is America's president-elect; he is now cakewalking towards the White House. One wonders what happened to Uncle Sam and the United States of America. Probably nothing. Or nothing. It is not as if Trump is a Satan-spurned golem let loose from far-flung badlands unconnected with America; he was birthed from the mouldering womb of the American body politic. Thomas Frank, that fantastic and prolific chronicler of the rise and rise of the American Right, is still pitching around for unambiguous answers in his books. Something stands out, though, as it does in the Right Nation: a discrete American character, a logic-shy New World ethos. Americans always yodel their exceptionalism - perhaps Trump is the exception that merely proves a slightly undifferentiated rule. The authors of The Right Nation got a few things right in the book - the pharisee politics of the Right, the Republican party's macropolitics, America's intrinsic conservatism, the lingering sainted odour of Ayn Rand, the ever-lurking hegemony of the Right - but even for them, a post-Platonic and cartoon-conservative figure like Donald Trump was difficult to adumbrate.

Is Rastafarianism A Proper Religion?

My daughter asked: Is Rastafarianism a proper religion? Although I could guess what she meant, I told her to clarify: What do you mean by 'proper religion'? Something like Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, she said. Oh, I see. Briefly, I set it into perspective for her. There's no such thing as a 'proper' religion. A religion is a religion, whether it is Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Sangoism, Mormonism or Rastafarianism. No hierarchy whatsoever. All religions are spawns of the imagination, figments of fear, delusion, ignorance, or straight-out battiness - or the throwup of phantasmagoria as in the case of Peyote Religion.
I don't think worshipping an Emperor of Ethiopia who was clearly bemused by it all is more ridiculous than the worship of a wraithlike ahistorical figure called Jesus who, in the stories written about him, was somewhat confused whether he was the 'son of man' or the 'son of God.' Nor will I use the attributive 'proper' to describe a religion whose followers take as holy writ a pieced-together chapbook of ancient tales, injunctions and diktats, all said to be spoken by an unbodied voice to a man under a rock or dune in Arabia. Although some Buddhists take themselves too seriously, the religion itself stresses maya - illusion -and it does not rejoice in blowing the sweet-sour raspberry of heaven and hell or bloviating about a draconian singular god.
If you grew up in Africa in the 1970s and 80s, you would - or might - go through a phase of Rasta consciousness. There was Bob Marley, of course, helming the 'Zion train' of dreadlocked Reggae-making Jamaicans who popularised and proselytised Rastafarianism. There was cannabis, the main constituent of Rasta eucharist, oodles of it. Impressionably enough, under the influence of this 'herb', I tried to listen and stomp to Peter Tosh's 'Legalise It' and 'Bush Doctor' while sporting scrubby unconvincing dreadlocks. Something I never quite understood was the deification of Haile Selassie, the late Emperor of Ethiopia. While recognising the Jamaicans' connection with Africa, I thought there was something off-beam about them making a god out of an Ethiopian monarch. Considered the scion of Solomon, he was also believed to be their King of kings, Lion of Judah. I remember asking myself: even if Selassie was all of these things, how are my Jamaican brothers and sisters connected to Judah or King Solomon? You see, there is an overlap between my deconstruction of Rastafarianism and rejection of Christianity. I could see some parallels between Selassie and Jesus - or between those who made both out as gods of some sort. There is the same mass delusion. Same hero-worship. Same idolatry. Same aggrandisement and over-identification with a father figure. Same embrace of absurdity and unreason.
In a recent post by a Facebook friend about the absurdity of God-belief, I commented that 'I can't get my head around the idea of God and religion.' Someone replied, 'Bro, smoke some weed.' I couldn't help but chuckle to myself. Sadly, I am now teetotal when it comes to pot-smoking. But then, having grown older and mellower, I think it might indeed work. If I dosed myself up with Fela Kuti-size rolls of skunk, I might, like Amerindians stoned out on peyote, begin to hear the call from God, see Moses and his burning bush, David, Solomon, Elijah. I might even glimpse Haile Selassie.

How I Became a Christian... Not.

Yesterday, I made an absolute burnt offering of a slice of bread which stayed in the toaster a few moments too long. I was about to toss it into the bin when I glimpsed the Face - that familiar, popular, bearded, iconic face. It leapt out at me so keenly that I nearly convinced myself that the stippled tracings I saw on the piece of burnt bread cohered into that stock face of Jesus. It was Sunday morning, and I could very well have gone on to zap a secular, carefully and thoughtfully constructed edifice of Reason and Irreligion, christianise myself there and then, make a 'spiritual' sea change, embrace God and his dearly beloved son and doppelganger, Jesus.
Let's pursue the counterfactual. It was indeed Sunday morning, and, alas, I saw the face of Jesus of Nazareth charcoaled across one side of the slice of carbonised bread. A voice descended from heaven and told me to stop being a bullheaded Saul and become Paul, Jesus of Nazareth's chief bullshitter, to stop being a scapegrace and enter into God's grace-scape, to stop being an unbelieving asshole and become part of the flock of Christian sheep. Amazingly, the voice had an effect - affect, more like - and I began to speak in tongues, sing and dance, glorifying and jitterbugging for Jehovah. Drunk with rapture, I sauntered off to a church, the nearest evangelical ark, to confess my sins and profess faith and born-again belief. Everyone was happy for me, and I became an effigy of the lapsed atheist, a lost rogue ant who found his way back to the teeming anthill. After all, it was only last week that someone I had not seen for years, aghast at how irreligiously unregenerate I still was, again forecast how I would truly become not just a Christian but a pastor. Tandem with this prediction, I made a beeline for pastorate after becoming a Christian. And miracle of miracles, within 24 hours, I became a 'Man of God,' ordained and all that. Praise be!
But it didn't exactly happen that way. The burnt toast with the cloudy outline of something that I couldn't very well persuade myself was a face that did not have that effect. And it could not. But let's proceed with the assumption that I discerned a face, and apparently the face of Jesus. Which Jesus? That of the Nazarene, who may or may not have lived in a place called Judea 2000 years ago? As we all know now, the received Jesus physiognomy could very well have been that of Cesare Borgia or that of Max Von Sydow or Robert Powell, whose lean, handsome, if hippieish, face still graces the walls and altars of evangelical churches. I knew that even if any image was singed on the incinerated slice of bread, it would be anything but that of a man from 2000 years ago or anyone from any time. It might well be a small, charred, nondescript surface whose random ridges and lines vaguely described a hairy face.
Which brings to mind a particular Jesus' optical illusion. You stare at some Rorschach-esque images for a minute or so, and when you lift up your head and focus on any wall around you, you see Jesus. I knew a Christian person who took this optical mindfuck so seriously that she thought Jesus had indeed popped up on her wall, who weaved the sign of the cross and breathed a momentary Jesus-themed prayer, who thought the illusion shouldn't be repeated often as it might offend Jesus and God, that it might amount to blasphemy, like calling the name of the Lord in vain. And thereby hangs the whole sorry tale of religion.
However, just as there isn't any Jesus on the wall and it's all fancy, there can't have been any Jesus face etched on burnt toast. When you say you see Jesus on the sea-lapped sands of a beach, or in a frothy cup of cappuccino, or in the areolae of your girlfriend's tits, you have only seen what your mind trickily tells your eyes to see. It's pareidolia, a relatively recent subcategory of apophenia - the tendency in humans to see patterns and meanings in random objects, in smoke and clouds.

Culture and Its Christian Enemies

The notion that the Second World and Black Festival of Black Arts and Culture (FESTAC), which took place in Nigeria in 1977, called down a curse on the country has been in the air for some time. This muddleheaded underthinking was broached in the late 1980s as Nigeria began to trundle towards the morass of economic depression, sociomoral decay and the corresponding weedlike flowering of a species of Christianity - pentecostalism - and its dopey consolations. When this hypothesis was first hazarded, it erred on the side of causation: the economic troubles Nigeria was experiencing could be blamed on the overspend on FESTAC. Crude calculus, of course, but it was relatively semilogical, marginally more sensible than the daft supernaturalism of blaming the shitty wicket in which Nigeria finds itself on the Festival of Arts and Culture. I heard the latter argument 20 years ago, and someone, an evangelical pastor, tried to impress me again last week. Here's the routine: Nigeria is in this state because we turned the country into a vast Baalist basilica dedicated to the worship of 'traditional' idols, images and false gods in 1977. To say I nearly lost it is to understate it - overstate, in fact. Because all I did was shrug and say to myself: why waste my time, breath and vocal chord on trying to educate anyone so superstition-bound as to sacrifice arts and culture on the altar of a foreign religion foisted on and fed to us with the opiate kernel of cultural supremacism?
In 1966, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Senegalese president, poet, homme de culture and honorary Gaul, hosted the first Festival of Arts and Culture in Dakar. In those post-independence years, Africa was awash with hope and cultural pride; the continent felt it was ready to show and tell the world that it was not the cultureless Conradian Black Chaos whose occupiers were only capable of unlanguaged gibbering while wallowing in the barest jungle existence. The budding African culturati repaired to Dakar to celebrate Africa. The black diaspora also made an appearance, and a few dashikistas and cultural pilgrims made their way to Dakar, reconnecting with Mother Continent. It was a high-tone spectacular and cosmopolitan, too. Even the hard-to-please Wole Soyinka, who attended the event, testified to it as a succès fou. In one of his books, he gives Senghor a grudging pass for curating a cultural do which went beyond the ambit of the poet-president's ideological preoccupation: negritude. Contrariwise, Soyinka often trashes the Festival of Arts and Culture that the Olusegun Obasanjo military government staged in 1977. Although the Nobel Laureate had participated in the month-long festival, his later postmortems and revisits of the event are damning. The degree to which this has to do with his animosity towards Obasanjo can only be surmised. Soyinka thinks the Black Arts Festival 1977 was not 'cultural' enough, too low-brow, too derivative. But I was around in 1977, although a preteen, a curious, intellectually ambitious youngster (what you'd call a nerd today). However, no quotient of curiosity or precocity could have pushed my interest in FESTAC 77 as far as it went if my dad had not been there. The old man had made sure I was distracted from mere play to watch and sit in on what was happening on TV. The opening ceremony. The songs. Miriam Makeba. Odyssey. Osibisa. Dramatic performances like Langbodo. With his early-type tape recorder, Dad recorded many of the musical performances, particularly Miriam Makeba, and in the next few years, the distinctive Makeba lilt suffused my world. For all its blemishes, FESTAC 77 was a leaven for my cultural sensibility. It helped to shape my appreciation of the arts. So one wonders: How could a festival celebrating African traditions and cultures be bad? Where did that come from? To blame the foreign religions of Christianity and Islam is to absolve most of their Nigerian adherents, slavish, forbiddingly hollow adherents. Why would any self-respecting human pay so much obeisance to the cultures and religions of others at the expense of his own, regretting the celebration of the ways and world in which he was born and raised?
The FESTAC mascot was the ivory pendant mask stolen from the palace of the Edo (Bini) King by the British. Only the representation of the mask was used: the British Museum, which has been its home for almost a hundred years, would not allow Nigeria to have it, not even on loan. Some cultural imperialists have argued that artefacts stolen by the British are better kept and safer in the British Museum. At first, you want to yell and swear at the superlative carefreeness with which this lofty paternalism is expressed, but when you hear Nigerians describe such an artefact as an 'idol,' you baulk. The mind boggles when it contemplates Isis barbarians smashing up and destroying museums and ancient sites, but it boggles no less when it ponders the cultural illiteracy and ignorance-driven iconoclasm of Nigerian Christians. The phrase 'when I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver' has been attributed to a few sources (mainly German), but not to muddy the waters even more, I will rest content with the transposition: 'when I hear the word culture, I reach for my Bible' - apropos of the Merry Christians of Nigeria. The problem with this kind of attitude is how the apparently educated, those who have been through university classrooms, still choose to get blissed out on a cocktail of ignorance and religion-concocted pigswill. In 1977, the barbarians were at the gates, raring to overrun the country; now, they have fully occupied the whole of Nigeria, all of 170 million, give or take a few. In this light, I think Soyinka's stingy appraisal of FESTAC 77 as less than perfect is superfluous - after all, a diamond is a diamond, even if it is rough. For all it might be worth, a jamboree-like arts and culture festival, even one as grandiloquent as 77, would today be wasted on Nigeria. In his Freedom and its Enemies, Isaiah Berlin analyses six thinkers who stood athwart freedom in Enlightenment Europe: one of the men is Hegel, a dismisser of Africa as a place devoid of history and, consequently, culture. Isn't it shameful that we have turned Hegel's 300-year-old postulate into a self-fulfilling prophecy? No, I am not about to argue that cultural and artistic refinement and Christianity are mutually exclusive. The high priest of high culture, TS Eliot, indeed made cultural and poetic capital of his almost ideological devotion to Christian Neoplatonism and the High Church. But while new-wave Pentecostalism in Nigeria does not (and cannot) even pretend to be Low Church, it is obscurantist and anti-knowledge; it is a movement in which the common denominator is marked so low as to be merely imaginary.