Free Climate of Fear by Wole Soyinka Page B

disbelief. It is a phenomenon that reveals itself in its abandonment of skepticism. A new community is born, imbued with its own moral code—again, not one that is subjected to rigorous tests—that places itself outside existing social arrangements. A complacent society views it at first with a condescending amusement, later with trepidation.
    How I came to observe this process firsthand was just as relevant to my observations. I was in self-imposed exile, a therapy I had embarked upon for another situation of lethal rhetorics that had sacrificed a million or two of Nigerian humanity under the rhythmic mantra:
To
keep the nation one is a task that must be done.
Our civil war was being concluded in a mood of euphoria and, as I emerged from prison detention, I was not sure which form of hysteria grated more—the tone of nationalist jingoism that had surrounded me before I was locked up, one that made that war inevitable in the first place, or the barely suppressed triumphalist smugness into which I was thrust as I regained my freedom. Military success was equated with a divine vindication of the war.
    On the other side, in the breakaway Biafran state, the same syndrome had more tragic results. Youths went into battle with nothing but wooden guns in their hands, captives of the same rhetoric that was drummed daily into their heads—
No
power on the African continent can subdue
us.
That belief had somehow translated into the mimic guns with which they charged the federal foe, as reported by a colleague who pronounced himself numbed by the experience. Was it any different, I wondered, from the self-submission of normally hardheaded men to the rhetorical powers of a Ugandan, Alice Lakwena, and her Holy Spirit Mobile Forces? Alice’s volunteers charged into hails of bullets, convinced that they were immune to their penetration, that the force of bullets was neutralized as a result of the inoculation that Alice had administered to them. After the capture of Alice in Tanzania, a university professor who had been part of her army was asked, in an interview, how it was possible for him, a man of presumed intellect, to have been persuaded of the supernatural powers of this woman, and for so long. He could proffer no answer, only that he supposed that they had all been under some spell. Fatalities, he said, had been rationalized away—such victims were only the weak in faith. This scenario has been sadly encountered in many more civil-war zones all over the continent, most especially among the child soldiers.
    And now we come to the nurturing environment of the mantra. As I began my lecture tour of some European universities during that exile, it did not take long for me to realize that the mood of the historic Paris uprising was still in the ascendant, never mind the failure of that movement—and perhaps the zeal, being all that was left, was even more willfully embraced on that account. I came into daily contact with students and all manner of disenchanted youths seeking a revolutionary answer to the inequalities, the oppressive contradictions of their societies. Maoists, or Maoist-Leninists, or Trotskyites,
    Proudhonists, or Maoist-Leninist-Trotskyites, Stalinist-Leninists . . . no matter what hyphenated revolutionary tendencies they professed, all had one fundamental trait in common. They were bearers of a new illumination on the condition and future of human society. They were the subversive agents who would topple the bourgeois order and liberate the “new man” with all his potential, unfettered by the norms of a failed society, its hypocrisies and dubious ethical values. They formed a compact of solidarity with the marginalized no matter how remotely placed—from the bauxite mines of Jamaica to the coal mines of South Africa. Ideologically schooled in Marxism, even at its most rudimentary, most did not directly espouse anarchism as a social philosophy, but gave a practical, anarchic