Oka Obono
Whether as a specific period in time or part of a comprehensive cultural ethos and intellectual renaissance, modernity was forged in the contexts of Western history and aspirations. It developed alongside the trajectories of European industrial capitalism and the emergence of the modern nation state in the course of the past 500 years.
Notions of modernity are instructive to discourse because, on the political front, the most important attributes of the modern state include its sovereignty and the obligation of other states to recognise its autonomy within the comity of nations. The concept is thus useful for making cross-national comparisons of political performance as a means of mobilising consciousness and engineering change.
Moving forward, it should be observed that not every society existing at the present time is a modern society. There are pre-modern villages in modern Australia, Britain, Nigeria, and the United States. This suggests that modernity is not synonymous with contemporaneity. In other words, “the contemporaneous reigns of two monarchs” merely signifies that the monarchs in question reigned at the same time and not that their reigns were in any way modern. Accordingly, while all extant countries are contemporaneous, not all (including Nigeria) are actually modern.
Splitting hairs today, eh? I know. My therapist tells me it is better than splitting heads the way we saw at the elections. So, indulge me.
Historians refer to the period 1492 to 1789 as “early modern” but clearly, Nigeria did not pass through this phase together with Europe because even its name was not conferred on it until 1898. Hence, that phase was postponed. The question is: What are the current referents of its modernity? What attributes make Nigeria modern?
Development? Not necessarily. The conflation of development with modernization through the division of the world into developed and developing countries might have been expedient, but it was epistemologically problematic and morally arrogant. In earlier biological writings, development was perennial; everything was in flux and a state of developing. Nothing could ever fully be “developed”. The bifurcation of countries into “developed” and “developing” was erroneous for treating relative conditions as permanent. It lost sight of the perennial character of development and, along with it, the idea that development has diverse trajectories and outcomes. As such, it is important to bear in mind the possibility that development could occur in pre-modern conditions or pre-industrial states and, conversely, a modern situation may not be accompanied by dignity or development.
Nigeria is a nebulous modern state defined by attributes of the state of nature. It is an expansive pre-modern landscape liminally bobbing between the post-primitive and early modernity.
Ghana is more consistently modern and South Africa has been in late modernity for some time now. From the moment Ghana changed its name from “Gold Coast”, it affirmed an indigenous consciousness upon which it could base its sovereignty and cultural renaissance. The seriousness with which Ghana is taken was underscored on July 24, 2009, when it reclaimed the head of King Badu Bonsu II from the Netherlands, after 170 years. Bonsu was chief of the Ahanta ethnic group and was hanged in 1838 for ordering the murder of two Dutch emissaries. His head was preserved in a jar of formaldehyde in a Leiden University medical laboratory until the Ghana government quietly and successfully negotiated its release last year. Similarly, South Africa repossessed the body cast of Saartjie Baartman (a.k.a. the Hottentot Venus), from France in 2002.
By contrast, Nigeria has not been able to retrieve one of its most prized cultural artefacts – the bronze Mask of Queen Idia of Benin, which remains in the protective (and lucrative) custody of the London Metropolitan Museum of Arts. A replica of the mask was used for the Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in 1977and this should have warned us because, thirty-three years later, Nigerians seem to have settled for a poor pre-modern replica of democracy.
The referents of Nigeria’s modernity are its endless and unmitigated darkness; the resurgence of killer diseases and high infant and child death rates; maternal mortality; incomprehensible helplessness of its citizens in the face of a siege on their lives and property by armed bandits, on the one hand, and internal plundering of state resources by public officials, on the other. The country is ruled and ruined by officials not acquainted with Johann Peter Süssmilch, who wrote in the 18th century that the modern state must create conditions which dissuade its citizens from travelling abroad in order to retain their productive inputs within the system.
Nigerian modernity is represented by unstoppable outflows to other countries for services as ordinary as childbirth and education. The migrations bespeak failures in the political economy and contractions of opportunity among minority groups who now know that their salvation cannot be assured within the predatory directions and pre-modern tendencies of the Nigerian state.
