A few days ago, I came across an interesting new word while falling through a YouTube rabbit hole involving people being seriously assaulted by dangerous wild animals they kept as pets after being supposedly domesticated.
“Anthropomorphism,” a commenter remarked, was the reason why so many of the unfortunate people in these videos made the tragic error of thinking that a dangerous wild carnivore with millions of years of evolutionary history behind them would not attack a human because it fed them and treated them nicely.
I checked the dictionary for the meaning of this cool new word, and the definition went as follows: “Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human characteristics or behaviours to an animal, object, or a god.” In other words, it is the act of projecting human thoughts, behaviours and characteristics onto entities that are not human – often to disastrous effect. In reality, there are many entities whose behaviours are set in stone, having been fixed in place by unfathomable processes and the passage of vast amounts of time.
Trying to project concepts like gratitude and honour onto entities that have not evolved to understand such things can only end in a spectrum that ranges from mild embarrassment to tragic and avoidable death.
This week, we are witnessing the results of a form of Anthropomorphism in Nigeria’s political space. The would-be President who believes that it is “his turn” for entry into Aso Rock is discovering like so many before him, that projecting the social norms and behaviours of one political culture onto a completely different one, does not end well. While it is a somewhat obvious lesson to understand for the historically aware, those less versed in history could use a little primer, so let us retreat 200 years to the year 1817 in the city of Ilorin.
Afonja in the 19th Century
Shortly after the death of Aole Arogangan the Alaafin of Oyo, an ambitious upstart in charge of Ilorin called Afonja decided that he should become the new king. When the Oyo Mesi declined to choose him for this role, he decided to effectively destroy the Oyo Empire by seceding and decimating the power of Oyo. To achieve this, he took a fateful decision in 1817. Looking to bolster his military manpower, he offered protection to Hausa slaves and muslims undergoing any persecution in the Oyo Empire’s domain if they would flee to Ilorin and join him. Shortly after ward, he invited his priest Alimi to Ilorin. A Fulani Muslim with a large number of Hausa slaves under his command, Alimi’s migration to Ilorin greatly bolstered Afonja as he successfully waged war on the Oyo Empire’s sphere of influence.
Or so he thought anyway. In reality, as he was winning battles in the field with his new-found, numerically superior fighting force, Alimi was quietly studying Ilorin and figuring out how to conquer the city and make it an Islamic Emirate despite being outnumbered by Yoruba and non-Muslims. The popular version of the story that often appears on Nigerian social media spaces is that Alimi then turned against Afonja and defeated him, subsequently proclaiming Ilorin an Islamic Emirate after executing his erstwhile benefactor. The real story is a bit less visually spectacular, but arguably even more chilling.
Afonja’s erstwhile mercenary army of freed Muslim slaves became a new class of overlords across Ilorin and the newly conquered territories. Alimi of course, knew how the story would end, but despite his closeness to Afonja, he deliberately watched it play out, studying him in depth until the inevitable self-implosion. When Alimi finally made his move, it was actually in the context of a popular revolt against Afonja in Ilorin. Afonja was slaughtered and burnt to ashes by the man he himself invited into Ilorin because of his eagerness to defeat the Oyo kingdom.
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One imagines that at the point of death, he might have wondered how Alimi could betray someone who did so much for him. How could he do this to someone he owed such a debt of gratitude to? How could Alimi sleep at night after such a heinous act of betrayal? And presumably, Alimi would have simply shrugged off such questions with a faintly confused smile, because such concepts were completely alien and foreign to him. To Alimi who came from a culture that understood only warfare, conquest and power, Afonja’s projection of Yoruba cultural concepts like “honour” and “gratitude” would have been anthropomorphism on the scale of that which I saw on YouTube that night. Completely wasted and pointless.
Afonja in the 20th and 21st centuries
In 1993, Moshood Kolawole Olawale Abiola won what is widely considered to be the freest and fairest presidential election in Nigeria’s history. In an alternate universe somewhere, he became president and Nigeria emerged from the dark shadow of two decades of military dictatorship into a bright new decade of multi-party democracy and economic expansion. In that alternate universe, his erstwhile good friends Sani Abacha and Ibrahim Babangida agreed to vacate their cushy offices in the new federal capital and hand over the metaphorical keys to the kingdom to a wealthy civilian politician.
Of course, we all know what universe we live in, because none of that happened. What happened instead, was that after two decades of wining and dining with the Abachas and Babangidas of the world, doing business with them and financing their multiple military coups, MKO Abiola never saw the light of day as a free man again. His wife was assassinated in broad daylight and he died in a prison cell. Like Afonja, MKO of course had a “deal” with the very people who ended up truncating his mandate and taking his life. It was a sweet, cushy quid-pro-quo where in exchange for his years of funding and support, they would grant him access to the keys of the real power he craved.
MKO’s political anthropomorphism informed his belief that those he was dealing with were capable of understanding the moral concept of honouring their word and the need to respect a deal. In reality, as Afonja found out nearly 200 years before him, there exists a certain political constituency in Nigeria whose culture simply does not recognise concepts like “Gratitude,” “Honour” and “Reciprocity.” This constituency understands only power, incentive, force, coercion and compulsion. To this constituency, “Because I promised” is not close to being a good enough reason to do anything it does not want or absolutely have to do. This constituency can only ever be dealt with using the twin forces of carrot and stick, like a tiger in a zoo. Regardless of its surroundings, the tiger remains very much a dangerous predator that will eat the zoo keeper it has known for years, if the second proper precautions are not taken.
When as I fully expect, the 21st Century’s Ikoyi-resident reincarnation of Afonja sees the latest iteration of the doomed quest to strike a “deal” with Alimi’s constituency fall flat on its face, the topic of discussion should not be the mere fact of Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s failure to go one better than Obafemi Awolowo and MKO Abiola before him. It should not be even about the hypothetical scenario needed to achieve the Nigerian Holy Grail of political power in Abuja. It should be about the dictionary definition of the word “anthropomorphism” and its significance in the run up to the 2023 election.
Expecting certain things to be different this time because of hope and ambition is the same mix of optimism and delusion that led many of the unfortunate people in my YouTube rabbit hole to end up in the ER, after wrongly assuming that their wild pets could ever be domesticated.
“Anthropomorphism.” Don’t forget that word.
