“Those who are about to die salute you”

By Lasisi Olagunju

From William Bascom, American folklorist and anthropologist, I got a Yoruba story. It is here retold, substantially in my own words, in some areas using his words: A certain Chief Lowa was careless with his tongue. Every priest has a priest; Lowa’s own warned him to be careful so that his mouth would not disgrace him. Chief said he had grown taller than disgrace; he was too surefooted to be put to shame. Because he had money and medicine in super abundance, he thought there was nothing he said or did that would have repercussions. His secrets he made subjects of boasts at palm wine joints. He would say anything on impulse and credit it to spasms from unseen spirits.
Then it happened that an unknown tale bearer had gone to inform the king that Lowa had a goat that talked like a human being. The king sent for the chief and the chief appeared before the king. “Is it true that your goat speaks like you and I?” Lowa said it was true. The palace responded with gasps of disbelief. Are you sure? He said he was sure and swore in the name of the town’s ancestors that what he said was the truth and the whole truth. “Well then. Bring your goat before the throne in four days’ time.” The king ordered him and vowed that if, indeed, the goat talked, he would give Lowa half of his possessions, but if it did not, Lowa would be given the goat treatment – barbecued. Chief Lowa smiled and shrugged. He was sure of his goat and its human vocal chords.

Lowa in four days’ time brought his goat before the king. The palace grounds hosted the noble and the not so noble. Every ear wanted to hear the unnatural; every eye was desirous to behold the goat that was human. Lowa rose and spoke to his goat; the goat kept mute. He talked to his goat more frantically, Lowa’s goat ignored Lowa; it refused to answer its owner. It was clear to all that Lowa’s truth was an empty boast; they said he had fooled the king and the ancestors. The people said what he did no one had ever done and gone back home in one piece. Palace guards seized Chief, got him bound, hands and feet, while a huge fire was prepared in fulfillment of the king’s vow.
Chief was stripped naked and his body passed slowly back and forth across the huge fire. On the third pass, the goat opened its mouth and asked, “Why are you trying to kill my owner?” There was a commotion in the palace. “The goat talks!” The people shouted. Lowa was saved and taken off the fire while the king ordered that half of all his possessions be given to him. He was richer but sober. Bascom said as Lowa was taking his goat home, he asked the animal, “Why did you let them pass me over the fire three times?” The goat replied, “Should I have answered the very first time and let you get all this wealth without any suffering? If one becomes rich through trade, do we not see its scars on one’s body?” May our mouth not set us up for trial.

The president spoke to Nigerians before he left China a few days ago. He spoke about his “very bold and unprecedented decisions” at home; he linked his audacious boldness with the unprecedented hike in “fuel prices” and then asked: “can we help it?” No one there could tell him we could – if we searched well and in the right places and using the right persons. Is it not true that the market owes its access not to just one road? While the president was sawing our spine abroad, NNPC was sinking its teeth into our neck at home. It said petrol price in Nigeria would be “determined by global market forces.” And you wanted to ask what that meant. Dangote Refinery is active too, painting ambiguous portraits of oily prices on canvas. Everyone is tugging at the wounded entrails of the helpless.

Writing for ‘The Reading Teacher’ in March 2004, Salli Forbes said “to err is human, to self-correct is to learn.” She was correct. A leader may have the courage to make a mistake but he must not lack the wisdom to know that an error has occurred. And, it is not enough to spot the mistake; the leader must have the competence to correct himself, to repair the damage and stitch up the error. Buying petrol now is like paying for the last supper – dining, then dying. And it is all because someone spoke the wrong words on a wrong day last year. That person has not agreed that his error threw the nation under the bus; he is instead doubling down, praising his priest of pain.
Ben Sira’s wisdom of the ancient counsels whoever must speak to “say much in few words.” Eugene MacNamee, author of ‘The Government of the Tongue’, has a more extreme maxim: “Whatever you say, say nothing.” MacNamee warns that “saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, or even saying the most banal of things in the wrong place with the wrong accent could lead not only to offence but to death…” You would agree with MacNamee if you agree with South African researcher, Khona Dlamini, who thinks “the tongue is fire.” And with Douglas Ewart who insists that “the tongue is mightier than the sword.” Richard Turnbull says “by the tongue, men are led into error through false doctrine.” The wise men who founded Ile Ife had a million gods. But they said one deity worthy of their worship is the mouth. What they offer the mouth till tomorrow is a mouthful of carefulness; they gave it a tongue-twister name, olubobotiribo. Its cognomen is ‘baba ebo’ (father of offerings). May our mouth not disgrace and defeat us.

Darkness has a heart. If you like, call it ‘Heart of Darkness’ with all the pun Joseph Conrad’s novel of that title evokes. Nigerians entered last year and suffered the stroke of escalating petrol prices – one of Buhari’s parting gunshots. Today’s president, as that president’s reluctant candidate, campaigned vigorously against the pains of that era. On his campaign rostra, Bola Tinubu told the distraught to trust him with their votes: “E lo f’okàn ba’lè (be calm), we will bring down the price of petrol.” The candidate on heat got what he wanted and, in his very first speech as president, the conquistador pulled the plug on the livelihood of hope: “subsidy is gone.” He fired that shot into the darkness of our market and nothing has remained the same for all since. He said in China that he could not help it. When he made the be-calm promise before the election, did he know that what he said was a lie? In every context (and contestation) of lies, at least one side is not deceived. And that is the liar. Lies can kill, and they kill. The lie teller may keep his body while victims of his untruth lose theirs. But he loses his essence. “Lying is dying…There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies”. For the source of that line, check Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’.

While the petrol price tragedy drags on forever, people are dropping dead farm and stream. Nothing walks the land at this moment except poverty and pain. But the president said in China that our eyes needed to see what we are seeing for Nigeria to be sturdy and stable. It is in Orwell’s dystopian ‘1984’ that you read that a stable society is “only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.” Listen to Orwell: “For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves…” (page 198). No one, not even regime backers, are free from this pain. For I have seen some very committed Emilokan people writhe in pain, wetting their withering plants with tears. Why are they not excused from what we suffer? “It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges…” (Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four; page 199).

The city burns but Nero has just finished playing tambourine in Chinese cafes. The end of the world is having the street empty. It is having ghostly trekkers casting no shadows everywhere. It is Nigeria becoming Malcolm Cowley’s “empty streets of air.” How many will live to tell the end of these hard times, only God knows. Bill Gates said in Abuja last Tuesday that “the actual tax collection in Nigeria is actually low.” Our president echoed him in China on Friday that the petrol we buy must be this costly for the country to stand. There are ‘rumours’ that VAT may move from 7.5 percent to 10 percent. Wahala! Eleven years ago, a barrage of austerity measures was wracking the people of Greece. Just as Nigeria has its own husbands feeding it doses of poison as elixir, Greece had Germany as its guardian angel, its doctor which prescribed for it poisonous doses of magical wellness. Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schauble, paid a visit to Greece on Thursday, July 18, 2013. To welcome that visitor, a troublesome Greek newspaper exclaimed: “Hail Schaube, those who are about to die salute you.”

The Greek newspaper got the about-to-die salutation from Ancient Rome. In ancient Rome, captive gladiators are routinely driven to death in a horrid game supervised by the emperor. They called it a gladiatorial match. The fights had large, loud crowds watching and applauding as men hacked men to death. It was an event that saw fighters die after fighters until the last man standing dropped dead. In AD 52, Emperor Claudius reviewed an edition of that ‘game’, then he heard those fated to die let out a cry: “Hail, Emperor, those who are about to die salute you (Ave Imperator, morituri te salutant).” And the emperor responded in practical terms demanding that they died.

Malcolm Cowley’s poet persona hears a scratching at his door, “the noise of some one fingering the latch once.” He opens “and found the night empty of sound, empty.” A long time ago, Emeritus Professor Ladipo Akinkugbe’s uncles heard their own “scratch at the door.” They also found “night” but it was not “empty”. He writes: “Asleep in their little mud hut, they were suddenly roused by some knock at the door in the middle of the night. His elder brother bade him open the door as he had assumed that this was a neighbour seeking assistance. He refused and soon the knocking ceased and the caller’s footsteps faded into the darkness. Peeping through a small hole in the mud wall, they discovered to their horror that it was a leopard. Had that door been opened, they both would never have lived to tell the story.”

Culled from the Nigerian Tribune on Monday, 9 September, 2024