The power of un-information

‘’Share de gari; Share de gari’’. It was a hostile play with President Shehu Shagari’s name; and the widely held view at the time that his regime was drenched with corruption and brazen looting of public funds.  Newspapers carried front-page stories with various scams, including contractors importing saw dust with monies released by the Central […]

‘’Share de gari; Share de gari’’. It was a hostile play with President Shehu Shagari’s name; and the widely held view at the time that his regime was drenched with corruption and brazen looting of public funds.  Newspapers carried front-page stories with various scams, including contractors importing saw dust with monies released by the Central Bank for ‘’industrial equipments’’.
The other rap hit at Lagos State Government. It claimed that Russian astronauts had reported a surprise discovery of mountains on the Nigerian coastline not shown of world maps. Officials in Moscow quickly checked the incoming pictures, and radioed back that they were seeing ‘’Rubbish Mountains’’ on the streets of Lagos. The astronauts were, probably, deflated by the realisation that their names would not be given to newly discovered mountains here on earth; but that was hardly Soyinka’s concern. He had made his point about space information as a tool for lampooning bad governance.
His album popped out of my memory library after viewing a documentary by AIT television – Sunday 16th February, 2014. The subject matter was the ‘’transformation’’ of airports by Stella Oduah, a former Minister of Aviation whose departure from Jonathan’s Cabinet had been celebrated in newspaper headlines on February 13th, 2014. Television cameras did a fantastic job of bringing out architectural splashes in airport terminals in Lagos, Enugu, Kano and Abuja. Persons interviewed across ethnic and class divides testified with lavish praises for Ms Oduah’s leadership in two years of grandly visioning the aviation sector.
The Governor of the Central Bank, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, reported that he pumped much money into the sector because important work was being done there. It was irrelevant, he added, if people did not like her person so long as she/he had achieved what would endure as a worthy legacy.  Channels TV had claimed that Ms Stella Oduah had, in chalking down her historic achievements, ‘’stepped on toes of very powerful people’’. Opposition politicians were cursing failed government performance; and PDP was tossing out an excellent ‘’transformation’’ minister. I felt information malnourished.
I also recalled watching a report by a Columbia Broadcasting Corporation (CBS) correspondent in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s capital. The scene was a football stadium where people had jammed in to hear Mwalimu Nyerere, a ruler of the country from 1961 to 1985, tell them that they must get used to being led by someone else. The picture showed vast rows of what looked like upturned bottoms of pots. The editor did not want faces and bodies of school children shown as evidence of Nyerere’s record in promoting primary and secondary school education. American viewers – particularly Black Americans – were to be protected from positive achievements by post-independence African governments. Television pictures of Africans building their future were scandalous and harmful to American national stability. But CBS also showed rows of Tanzanians weeping as Nyerere drove north to his little modest home.
Professor Ali Mazrui’s television series ‘’The Africans: A Triple Heritage’’ would be pulled off from further telecast by PBS – America’s non-commercial public interest network – because powerful interests in the country found it offensive. Some critics claimed that he had labelled the United States as an ‘’imperialist’’ even though American money also went into funding the series. Mazrui himself thinks that the culprits were images of dignified Senegalese women dressed in flowing buboes as they gracefully sauntered down streets of Dakar; and of Yoruba women dressed in ankara or atamfa while at owambe parties along a street in Lagos. Africans should only be shown in mud huts; barefoot women loaded with baskets of yam on their heads, a child on her back while a baby dangled acrobatically from a breast being robbed of its milk.
Professor Cheik Anta Diop demonstrated omissions by European scholars from writings by Plato, Pythagoras, and Archimedes that reported on what they had learnt from the Egypt of the Black African Pharaohs. French, British and German writers wished to justify the barbarism of Europe’s slave trade across the Atlantic Ocean. The thought of Africans being their intellectual ancestors was too harsh for them to carry. The European audience had to be protected from positive truths about Africans. Information eats fire.
Our Geography teacher, Mr Thornton, led us on a field trip to Kenya’s Rift Valley.  We spent the first night shivering around a big fire. Our school uniform would not fight Eldoret’s cold; and climatology was being taught by the ‘’Hand of God’’.  That social geography known as ‘’Europeans grabbing land from African peoples’’ was taught by huge tracts of land planted with blankets of maize, tea or coffee or pyrethrum. At a bottom corner of one farm would be a cluster of huts for ‘’squatters’’ or those allowed to plant food crops on a small section in exchange for being labourers for the European farmer who owned the vast plantations. Mr Thornton, being a wise Englishman, kept us uninformed about the ‘’MAU MAU’ revolution raging for that land.