Onwuchekwa Jemie
It might be useful to indicate the basics of a Samurai education as a model of what we should functionally reproduce. A Samurai upbringing: “But sons of samurai were severely disciplined in those days: and the one of whom I write had little time for dreaming. The period of caresses was made painfully brief for him. Even before he was invested with his first hakama, or trousers – a great ceremony in that epoch – he was weaned as far as possible from tender influence, and taught to check the natural impulses of childish affection.
“Little comrades would ask him mockingly, ‘Do you still need milk?’ if they saw him walking out with his mother, although he might love her in the house as demonstratively as he pleased, during the hours he could pass by her side. These were not many. All inactive pleasures were severely restricted by his discipline; and even comforts, except during illness, were not allowed him. Almost from the time he could speak he was enjoined to consider duty the guiding motive of life, self-control the first requisite of conduct, pain and death matters of no consequence in the selfish sense.
“There was a grimmer side to this Spartan discipline, designed to cultivate a cold sternness never to be relaxed during youth, except in the screened intimacy of the home. The boys were inured to sights of blood. They were taken to witness executions; they were expected to display no emotions and they were obliged, on their return home, to quell any secret feeling of horror by eating plentifully of rice tinted blood-color by an admixture of salted plum juice.
“Even more difficult things might be demanded of a very young boy – to go alone at midnight to the execution-ground, for example, and bring back a head in proof of courage. For the fear of the dead was held not less contemptible in a samurai than the fear of man. The samurai child was pledged to fear nothing. In all such tests, the demeanor exacted was perfect impassiveness; any swaggering would have been judged quite as harshly as any sign of cowardice.
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“As a boy grew up, he was obliged to find his pleasures chiefly in those bodily exercises which were the samurai’s early and constant preparations for war – archery and riding, wrestling and fencing. Playmates were found for him; but these were older youths, sons of retainers, chosen for ability to assist him in the practice of martial exercises. It was their duty also to teach him how to swim, to handle a boat, to develop his young muscles. Between such physical training and the study of the Chinese classics the greater part of each day was divided for him.
“His diet, though ample, was never dainty; his clothing, except in time of great ceremony, was light and coarse; and he was not allowed the use of fire merely to warm himself. While studying of winter mornings, if his hands became too cold to use the writing brush, he would be ordered to plunge them into icy water to restore the circulation; and if his feet were numbed by frost, he would be told to run about in the snow to make them warm.
“Still more rigid was his training in the special etiquette of the military class; and he was early made to know that the little sword in his girdle was neither an ornament nor a plaything. He was shown how to use it, how to take his own life at a moment’s notice, without shrinking, whenever the code of his class might so order.
“Is that really the head of your father?’ a prince once asked of a samurai boy only seven years old. The child at once realized the situation. The freshly severed head set before him was not his father’s: the daimyo had been deceived, but further deception was necessary. So the lad, after having saluted the head with every sign of reverential grief, suddenly cut out his own bowels. All the prince’s doubts vanished before that bloody proof of filial piety; the outlawed father was able to make good his escape; and the memory of the child is still honored in Japanese drama and poetry.
“Also in the matter of religion, the training of a samurai boy was peculiar. He was educated to revere the ancient gods and the spirits of his ancestors; he was well schooled in the Chinese ethics; and he was taught something of Buddhist philosophy and faith. But he was likewise taught that hope of heaven and fear of hell were for the ignorant only; and that the superior man should be influenced in his conduct by nothing more selfish than the love of right for its own sake, and the recognition of duty as a universal law.
“Gradually, as the period of boyhood ripened into youth, his conduct was less subjected to supervision. He was left more and more free to act upon his own judgment, but with full knowledge that a mistake would not be forgotten; that a serious offense would never be fully condoned; and that a well-merited reprimand was more to be dreaded than death.
“On the other hand, there were few moral dangers against which to guard him. Professional vice was then strictly banished from many of the provincial castle-towns; and even so much of the non-moral side of life as might have been reflected in popular romance and drama, a young samurai could know little about. He was taught to despise that common literature appealing either to the softer emotions or the passions, as essentially unmanly reading; and the public theater was forbidden to his class. Thus, in that innocent provincial life of Old Japan, a young samurai might grow up exceptionally pure-minded and simple-hearted.
“So grew up the young samurai concerning whom these things are written – fearless, courteous, self-denying, despising pleasure, and ready at an instant’s notice to give his life for love, loyalty, or honor.” (Extract from “A Conservative,” in Lafcadio Hearn, Writings from Japan, pp.291-293).
If we learn from the Samurai upbringing, we cannot allow our children to be brought up on Channel O, and the like.
A change in our concept of security:
Besides inculcating a warrior mentality in all Black Africans, we need to change our still-colonial concept of security.
The colonial notion of security was the security of the colonial state and enterprise from the people it came to exploit and oppress. This was the doctrine of security which conceived the colonial army as a back-up for the police, i.e. as an army to be used for riot control and punitive expeditions. This doctrine has been inherited by the neo-colonial states and has not been changed. [In Nigeria it was applied by the British to suppress the Aba women’s uprising, and recently by Obasanjo to wipe out the restive peoples of Odi and Zaki Biam].
In neo-colonial Africa, it has been noted that a small army, incapable of serving as an effective instrument of foreign policy, tends to ‘look inward’-to intervene in domestic politics; and that by and large, African forces are deployed only against their own people in their own countries. Furthermore, as Nyerere noted in 1961, “If an African state is armed, then realistically it can only be armed against another African state”[See Opoku Agyeman, Africa’s Persistent Vulnerable Link to Global Politics, pp. 18, 19, 20, 23]
Can such internal security armies defend Black Africa against the Arab League, or Belgium or France or the UK, let alone against NATO?
Here is Azikiwe’s suggestion for an African Convention on Collective Security.
“This should make provisions for the following: a multilateral pact of mutual defence . . . ; an African High Command . . .; a doctrine of non-intervention in Africa, on the same lines as the Monroe Doctrine in the Western Hemisphere. This doctrine should make it clear that the establishment or the continued existence of any colonial territory in the continent of Africa, by any European or American or Asian or Australian power shall be regarded not only as an unfriendly act, but as an act of aggression against the concert of African States; a Pan-African Declaration of Neutralism [i.e. non-alignment] . . . ” [Azikiwe (1962), “Future of Pan-Africanism” in Langley, ed., Ideologies, pp.321-322]
We need to adopt and develop this line of thinking. Security has to be against our external enemies: Arabs, Europeans and whoever else; and against enemy capabilities, existing and potential. Hence we will need to monitor enemy capacity as it changes, lest we find ourselves equipping ourselves to defend against obsolete weapons, and preparing for the last war, as it were.
Furthermore, our concept of security must be broadened well beyond military security to include economic, food, health and ideological security, since we have been under attack by the Arabs or the Europeans in all these areas. In fact, we need collective security of a total sort-security against all possible means of attack, presently known and potential, and from all possible enemies.
