A few weeks ago, I saw a video of kidnap victims from Kaduna’s Greenfield University after their release. I offered a typically withering assessment of the behaviour I observed in that video, but the point quickly got lost in the noise of Twitter as is so often the case. MY grouse was not that the relatives of the people in question were offering thanks to their deities for the release of these kids – I don’t think anyone could have a problem with that.
My beef was that rather than being quietly thankful for their loved ones’ lives, they turned the scene into a loud praise and worship event filled with “speaking in tongues,” bible waving and confident smiles. All that mattered was that “the enemy had not succeeded.” Never mind the dozens of other Greenfield University kidnap victims who weren’t so lucky – apparently “God” and “the enemy” only had an interest in these lucky few. Everybody else including the dead students could go to hell.
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What my eyes saw was a vulgar demonstration of the levels of failed statehood that Nigeria falls further into every day – the industrial kidnapping of students. The bible wavers in the video could not see past the temporary reprieve from what is increasingly an unignorable nationwide problem that will shortly meet us in Lagos and Abuja. There was only one term I could think of to describe this type of short-sighted cultural self-centeredness.
Diagnosing meritorious manumission
The term “Meritorious Manumission” comes from the Meritorious Manumission Act of 1710 in the United States, which authorized the legal emancipation of slaves or improvement in their status in return for certain “good deeds.” Such deeds could include saving a white person’s life, saving a white person’s property, or snitching on other slaves planning to run away or start a revolution. Meritorious Manumission was held up as the sum and total of a slave’s dreams in 1700’s America – to achieve the personal achievement of escaping individually from the nasty shared experience of blackness.
That unproven belief, which lies at the junction of optimism and malignant narcissism, underpins some of the most destructive and dangerous aspects of the cultural disease afflicting Nigeria
Say you were a slave in 1715 who saved the life of a master’s beloved lastborn, and for this, you were granted your freedom under the Act. You would have achieved what every slave dreamt of – Meritorious Manumission. The problem is that even if you got a bit of money as a thank-you from your former master, you were now in a world that was not designed to accommodate a free black person. Nobody would house or do business with you. The South also had some very strict anti-vagrancy laws so you could not be without gainful employment on the pain of being sentenced to indentured servitude (i.e slavery) on a plantation.
So you either drifted and ended up enslaved/lynched, or you found a master – often your old one – to hire yourself out to, perhaps on more favourable terms than a regular slave. Instead of being a slave, you were now…an employee – which in the context of that time, was basically the same thing. Thus even if you avoided the horrors of life as a field slave, you were never truly “free” in the real sense of it, because your status was permanently and inextricably tied to that of the majority of your kind. The day you spoke a word out of turn, society would very quickly remind you that it could take away whatever favour it had bestowed on you.
In other words, the dream of Meritorious Manumission was ultimately a doomed one in the 1700s, and the same holds true today.
You are not Special
Whatever type of manumission we chase in this part of the world, we all agree on one central tenet: “My case is different.” That unproven belief, which lies at the junction of optimism and malignant narcissism, underpins some of the most destructive and dangerous aspects of the cultural disease afflicting Nigeria. Belief in personal exceptionalism is what motivates kidnappers, organ traffickers, drug counterfeiters, armed robbers, internet fraudsters, religious extremists and other people whose existence makes our lives that bit more difficult.
To a man, they all believe that what they do is justified because they are trying to achieve one type of freedom or the other. Whether it is a naira amount or a visa or a miracle that is the desired manumission, a large part of Nigerian culture is the strong belief that a particular individual achievement will make our dreams come true – no matter what it takes to make it happen. We have been culturally instructed to believe strongly that our interests as individuals come before collective interests. This belief manifests itself in everything from how we run damaging and needlessly divisive election campaigns to how we use power for reckless self-enrichment and ethnic nepotism without thinking about the bigger picture.
It is all about the immediate result we are seeking – the Meritorious Manumission. If we just get the keys to government coffers, we will be made for life. If we just get into this position, we can enrich our 3rd generation. If we just get into that country, we can remain there permanently and better our lives even if we are overstaying on 2-week tourist visa and making it harder for Nigerians to get visas in future.
Apparently, as long as we get ours, we’re fine.
