The Worst of Times

Small personal happinesses pale in comparison to this dark cloud looming over Nigeria and its neighbours.Tuesday, after an early morning of prayer for the girls kidnapped in Borno, I began to grade my students’ final papers, when I received a phone call that bombs had gone off in Jos, only days after the bomb in […]

Small personal happinesses pale in comparison to this dark cloud looming over Nigeria and its neighbours.
Tuesday, after an early morning of prayer for the girls kidnapped in Borno, I began to grade my students’ final papers, when I received a phone call that bombs had gone off in Jos, only days after the bomb in Kano. I spent the rest of the day online, not grading but tracking the news, calling friends to make sure they were ok. The bomb had gone off near Terminus, the news said, near the heart of the city, near the old Yellow Market which has lain in ruin for nearly thirteen years after a night explosion destroyed it.
Wednesday, as the university grading deadline approached, I decided to stay offline. I went to the large terrace on Lake Monona, where sailboats are docked, one of the university’s most picturesque locations. We are emerging out of a long cold winter, still recovering from the brutally cold “Polar Vortex,” and we seize any chance to feel the sun on our skin. I sat there all day under a tree where the green leaves had only just emerged, at a table overlooking the lake, grading and watching people. It was a beautiful day: white-sailed boats skimmed the water and hundreds of people gathered around yellow and green and orange tables, eating and laughing. I looked up from my grading every now and then and watched the people around me, a couple and their six-year-old daughter, who danced around their table; the ringlet-haired mother sitting beside me who had just defended her PhD hours before. She nursed her baby and every once in a while answered her phone in Spanish. A group of people in office clothes clapped and sang for a co-worker’s birthday. University students newly released from classes waited in line for hamburgers or emerged from the water where the sailboats swayed. The smoky scent of grilling burgers, a scent that made me long for the scent of suya, wafted over the Terrace. I watched faces, the nuance of expression, the beauty of the young, the handsome character in the faces of the aging, the variety of features from every continent. People smiled against a blue sky with a golden sun beaming down. And I thought of God’s words in Genesis, “It is good.” It is good, this earth and this sky and these human beings laughing on the shores of the waters.
And then I thought of Jos, always so beautiful in May with streams filled with water and green grass creeping over the rocks and the white clouds wisping along the horizon, and of how a friend had written in despair on Facebook, asking how the sun could shine so bright and the frangipanis and the orange trees could put out their waxy white blooms to perfume the air, when bombs were going off and limbs were being torn apart, and human blood was leaking into the earth. I thought of the shops near the Yellow Market, the many-coloured cloths, perfumes competing with generator fumes in covered aisles, a central open space to which all aisles lead, which gets a little muddy in rainy season, where women sit with greenleaf and onions and stockfish, where there are shoe shops, dress shops, shops with sparkling jewels, traders calling out to come try this, come buy that, mingled voices speaking in Igbo and Berom and Hausa and English. The market is the central heartbeat of a multi-nationed Jos. It is good too, this place, recovering as it has from the crises that have punctuated Jos history over the past 13 years. I can’t quite imagine the mangled metal and flesh, screams, and blood in this place that all of those of us who have lived in Jos know so well, though every day I hear, in construction noises, echoes of bombs that do not discriminate between Christian and Muslim, Berom, Igbo, Hausa, or Fulani. Bombs that tear apart human beings and destroy their families in Maiduguri, Kano, Abuja, Jos. Bombs that seek to tear apart Nigeria as a whole. Blogger Muntasir Adamu, a student at University of Jos , writes of how he was in the university library when he heard the bombs. Rushing to a hospital to check for friends, he writes “I saw cooperation from both Muslims and Christians in evacuating the dead bodies, helping those that were seriously injured and most importantly donating blood to the injured. […] I saw families who were still looking for their loved ones. My neighbor and friend Peejay lost his cousin James. This morning, I met Tanimu in the hospital who is still searching for his wife Sadiya and their seven months old baby. She was in the market when the attack took place yesterday. He has visited all the major hospitals in Jos but to no avail.”
Why does this happen? I wondered sitting at this table in America, as the white sails bobbed and the people laughed and the sun beamed down. How can it happen? How is it possible that people can be so evil? How is it possible that a person can live with the sole goal of destroying life. And my mind turned, as it often does, to one of my favourite authors, literary scholar C.S. Lewis, who himself was in the trenches of World War I. In C.S. Lewis’s second science fiction novel Perelandra, he imagines a new untouched world in the process of creation, where the beauty and innocence of new life is threatened by a scientist named Weston, who has developed the technology to colonize the universe. He begins this process in Lewis’s first science fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet. In the second novel, Weston’s human plans of imperialism have disintegrated into something even darker.
One morning Ransom, the linguist Weston kidnapped in the first novel and who has now been supernaturally transported to Perelandra, wakes to find “a trail of mutilated frogs lay along the edge of the island.” As Ransom follows the trail, he finds Weston crouched, ripping open another frog. Ransom slowly begins to realize that Weston has become evil incarnate, a human vehicle for the devil. His evil becomes apparent by his pleasure in destruction of life, from plants to animals to finally his attempts to warp and destroy the human life on the planet. Evil cannot create, it can only destroy. It hijacks people to participate in this destruction. Ransom’s only weapon is his knowledge of the good.
I seek in books the answers I can find nowhere else. As I hunt the library for C.S. Lewis’s book The Great Divorce, which imagines hell, I find it on a shelf full of philosophy books on the question of evil. I scoop up almost a shelf full of them, books with dark covers, the word Evil emblazoned on them. These days it is no longer an intellectual inquiry but a burning question that takes over everything. How do we combat evil without falling into evil ourselves? Books help us theorize, but what are the practical solutions? Jos blogger Muntasir asks the same questions, “’What does it take to be human’ and ‘What do we owe each other as human beings?’” He writes “I believe that our humanity goes beyond our religion, region race or ethnicity. Regardless of it all, we are humans and we must respect this humanity that we all have in common […] We must not allow them to win.”
As I read, in despair, the hate spewing across the internet, I appeal: let us not fall into the trap Boko Haram sets by seeking to turn Nigerians against each other. Let us not allow their hatred and inhumanity to overtake us, turning victims into perpetrators. We can choose to build up and create or we can choose to tear down. If we choose the latter we are on the path to becoming just like them.