Thursday, March 31, 2016

USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Nigerian Insult Literature : Adeyinka Olarinmoye Crafting a Journey from Cocoa House to Lassa Fever








                                                                                                                                                                                              



                                                                                                                                                                                          Nigerian Insult Literature


                                                                                                                                                      Adeyinka Olarinmoye Crafting a Journey from Cocoa House to Lassa Fever


                                                                                                                                                                               Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                                                                                                                                         Compcros
                                                                                                                                                                                  Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
                                                                                                                                                                   "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"





Insult literature consists of denigrative expressions which demonstrate  literary value.

Insult literature is a part of classical Nigerian performance art, as represented for example, by a festival in my village, Imoga, in Edo state, in which social satire is conducted through insults, from which context comes one such example in the language, Okpameri, here rendered in my inadequate spelling:

Ekwabwale yanezameva, eyanezama sa, oleooogala! delivered in a beautiful, sing song voice, declaring  "your peers have three wives, have two wives, consummate lazy bones that you are!", most likely ridiculing a man with no wife or with one wife, in a time when polygamy was a demonstration of status.

 Insult literature is also demonstrated in the interactions of Nigerians on the Internet, particularly in the context of political debates, which may be described as the central online activity of Nigerians on social media, an activity that inspires fierce passions and a broad range of colorful expressions.

I collect insult literature on Nigerian centred social media and have made an initial presentation of my efforts in "The Beauty of Insults". I also create  insult literature myself, having been involved in extensive forms of this practice, such as an insult poetry contest arising from the differing political views of a group of others and myself, as well as one in which the other person directed ridicule at my family in vile terms relating to ancestry, some of the exchanges visible in the lower posts on this thread, an experience I transformed into a scholarly  essay comparing his insults to  the magnificent imaginative permutations  of Howard Philip's Lovecraft's fiction, centred in the exploration of human fears of cross-species genesis and non-terrestrial life forms, and also built a website, The Demented Nnabuaghas, taking the insult contest further by creating horrible fictional personas for the other person's family.

The essay " 'Aquatic Ancestry' by Kingsley Nnabuagha and the Fiction of Howard Phillips Lovecraft : A Study in Imaginative Convergence" was later anthologized by David Haden in the TENTACLII : H.P. Lovecraft blog which guides readers to scholarly literature on Lovecraft's work.

I am struck today  by the concise force and historical sweep of the insult  delivered by Nigerian politician and academic  Adeyinka Olarinmoye on her Facebook wall on the 31st of March 2016, responding to a contribution to a discussion  in the context of a harsh exchange of words:

"take a high jump from Cocoa House, visit Sambisa with cutlass and demand to see Shekau or look for lassa fever giving rats to make stew with."

This is classically beautiful in crafting a verbal punch consisting of  allusions to various positive and negative aspects in a sweep of Nigerian history.

The person addressed is being invited to commit suicide by jumping off the height represented by Cocoa House, a structure perceived as  iconic of the development programs of Obafemi Awolowo, premier of Nigeria's Western Region from 1 October 1954  to  1 October 1960, Cocoa House, completed in 1965,  being then the tallest building in West Africa, penetrate the near mythic Sambisa forest, its near mythicisation emerging from  its being understood as a central base of the Boko Haram Islamist terrorist group, having been pushed to the outskirts of Borno state in 2013, after making their name through years of spectacular bombings and shootings in population centres and massacres of schoolchildren after their 2011 escalation, from which purported forest base their leader Abubakar Shekau  consistently made  videos sent out to the world to project the group's maniacal vision, leaving Nigerians wondering why the forest seemed impregnable, to the 2015 Lassa Fever outbreak that claimed lives in Nigeria.

The references to these historical contexts are presented in a delightfully ridiculous manner  represented by the incongruous suggestion of challenging heavily armed terrorists with a cutlass inside their forest base, making soup out of rats known to carry a fatal disease and jumping off an iconic skyscraper.

The convergence of imagination and language that shapes literature, reworking the conventional into the unusual or improbable, is a primal demonstration of the ability of the human being to free themselves from the configurations defined by society, nature and history, creating worlds that open a window into parallel or intersecting possibilities, at various scales of the realizable and the unrealizable.



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USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Bandits in uniform, or a country of anything goes by Chido Onumah

Mazi Cornelius,
Would you advocate the military optio:n if the "lootocracy" occure in Sweden or in any other part of Europe or is that brand of justice reserved for Nigeria and other African countries?

CAO.

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USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Boko Haram Abducted 300 Children…A Year of Silence Followed

human rights watch report on boko haram:


 
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A Year On, No Word on 300 Abducted Children in Nigeria


Photo © 2015 Reuters

Three hundred children have been missing for a year, and there has not been a word from the Nigerian government. The elementary school students were abducted by Islamic militant group Boko Haram when it was forced to flee the town of Damasak in March 2015.


Damasak is the largest documented school abduction by Boko Haram militants. Yet it has drawn far less public attention than the group's widely condemned abduction of 276 school girls from a school in Chibok in April 2014, which inspired the international #BringBackOurGirls campaign. 219 girls are still missing from that abduction.

It is not clear to what extent the Nigerian government has acted to secure the students' release, but it has anobligation under domestic and international law to take measures to protect its citizens from Boko Haram's serious human rights abuses.

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Thailand's Absurd Sedition Charge for Red Bowl Photo

This week, authorities arrested a57-year-old woman for posting her photo holding a red plastic bowl inscribed with Thai New Year greetings from former Prime Ministers. Sedition charges for a Facebook photo expressing symbolic support for Thailand's political opposition shows the military junta's utter disregard for peaceful dissent...
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The US is Quietly Helping Saudi Arabia Wage a Devastating Aerial Campaign in Yemen

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In Louisiana Jails, with HIV and No Help

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USA Africa Dialogue Series - Video: The Honourable Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN tackles some perennial questions on the country's Power Sector

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSidRBYNr58#t=146

The Honourable Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN tackles some perennial questions on the country's Power Sector

Image result for hon babatunde fashola


Funmi Tofowomo Okelola

-In the absence of greatness, mediocrity thrives. 

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USA Africa Dialogue Series - Son of Africa: David Adjaye (Architect)

Itwas a delight to watch  David Adjaye  on BBC Hardtalk just a few days ago

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03n39t5

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USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Bandits in uniform, or a country of anything goes by Chido Onumah

In other words what you're saying is that the devil should be put on trial (by the courts) and if not found guilty, should be set free. You can call it "jungle justice " if you like and this is where I support Donald Trump:  when all else fails, we should start with a little waterboarding to begin to recover the loot.



On Thursday, 31 March 2016 13:36:43 UTC+2, Chidi Anthony Opara wrote:
Mazi Cornelius,
Thank God that you did not eventually become a military officer/ruler. The age long practice of an accused being presumed innocent untill proved guilty(by the courts) would have been abolished and the consequences would have been grave. Like my brother Chido Onumah, who is a good writer by the way, you would have been the accuser, the prosecutor and the judge.

One of the problems I have with the Chido Onumah well written narrative is that
 Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi, who should be in trial with others for allegedly plundering the resources of his state as governor is now being subtly presented as a role model

I have no problems with anti-corruption campaigns, I have advocated them in my poems long before the current hysteria, but I have serious problems with President Buhari's one sided anti-corruption.

Finally, I am happy that I  joined this forum, otherwise, how would I have known that jungle justice is not peculiar to the motor parks.

CAO.

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USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Bandits in uniform, or a country of anything goes by Chido Onumah

Justice Opara,

I'm glad that  at least you take me seriously 

and by extension so should some of your political allies

of the class known as the lootocracy

the crooks most directly responsible for bleeding the Nigerian people's economy.

Ecclesiastes 7:1

A holy sonnet by John Donne

Dear Chidi almost every day I study about this and I am aware of  God's mercy in our lives.

How do you think I feel when I read this? I should presume them innocent? No, I'm not bloodthirsty.

With me as commander-in-chief of the military, they should then have every right to fear Justice – and that includes Goliath.  Just as you too have the right to presume  lootocrats their innocence in spite of the mountains of evidence against them and the fact that in their hearts,  they themselves know that they are guilty.  In fact I should like Ogbeni Kadiri to be my Tunde Idiagbon! Babatunde O ye, to help institute some of the structural reforms that His Highness John Mbaku Esq has been insisting is the sine qua non to rooting out corruption that is otherwise so endemic and so deeply ingrained in some bureaucracies that it's popularly known as " the system"

You are absolutely right! If by the grace of the Almighty, I had been blessed  as  the next military man in charge of a certain African country, then,  "The age -long practice of an accused being presumed innocent until proved guilty(by the courts) would have been abolished and the consequences would have been grave". That  was a good poetic word that you used there: "grave".  Better still, less abstract and even more directly to the point, you could have ended that sentence with the word , "deadly". "The age -long practice of an accused being presumed innocent until proved guilty(by the courts) would have been abolished and the consequences would have been deadly"

 Here's the Devil's dictionary definition:

DEAD, adj.

"Done with the work of breathing; done

With all the world; the mad race run

Though to the end; the golden goal

 Attained and found to be a hole!"

 Only six months…

You would be doing me, you yourself , your good friend Goodluck Jonathan  and  my Ikwerre  Brother Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi injustice if you think that as supreme military commander, I would send  innocent men  to the gallows  or line them all up to face the fire squads, just for nothing. As I pointed out : five minutes  to start vomiting  di money  or else yu go quench here right now and the vultures  nah dem go eat your dead body tomorrow morning !

We don't want to take anyone's life.  All we want is that the loot be returned and that includes that Bank Manager at number 10 Aba Road in Port Harcourt who stole  my gratuity,  15% of my gross salary for two tours  plus some other emoluments stashed in his bank in £ Sterling. I could have used connections but thought it better to let justice run its course. Personally, money is not that important to me but I hate corruption.

Some of these guys get held up with the alternative "your money or your wife" and without hesitation some could say, "Please leave my money alone, but you can take my wife" – but ask the same man wearing pants " Your money or your life" and they will start bargaining, "How much do you want?" and will invariably choose life….

This should not take long, as I said, just give me six months to clean up  and then I would hand over to civilian power , after  recovering much of the loot and good riddance to the most criminal elements in the corrupt elite.  Does that sound too idealistic to your poetic ears?

And how do you like this part of Hamlet's to be or not to be soliloquy:

"For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,

The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurns

That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin?"

Six months!

"The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer" was the motto of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during World War II. Other variations of this include "The impossible we do immediately, miracles take a little longer." Now dear Chidi, as commander-in-chief, if some of the religious Naija people were to then demand  a miracle from me, just as they asked of Jesus,

"Then some scribes and Pharisees said, "Teacher, we want you to show us a miraculous sign",  the first part of Jesus' reply ( King James Version) should come in handy: An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign

And there you have it.

Yours sincerely,

Cornelius

It's time to update this:

We Sweden



On Thursday, 31 March 2016 13:36:43 UTC+2, Chidi Anthony Opara wrote:
Mazi Cornelius,
Thank God that you did not eventually become a military officer/ruler. The age long practice of an accused being presumed innocent untill proved guilty(by the courts) would have been abolished and the consequences would have been grave. Like my brother Chido Onumah, who is a good writer by the way, you would have been the accuser, the prosecutor and the judge.

One of the problems I have with the Chido Onumah well written narrative is that
 Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi, who should be in trial with others for allegedly plundering the resources of his state as governor is now being subtly presented as a role model

I have no problems with anti-corruption campaigns, I have advocated them in my poems long before the current hysteria, but I have serious problems with President Buhari's one sided anti-corruption.

Finally, I am happy that I  joined this forum, otherwise, how would I have known that jungle justice is not peculiar to the motor parks.

CAO.

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USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fayose's one man oppositional role.docx

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld from Glo Mobile.

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