APPARENTLY to indicate his deep-seated hatred against the unimaginable filthiness of Texas, a south-central state in the United States of America, that equally served as the operational base of the Confederate Army during the American civil war, Phillip Henry Sheridan, an army general and a military governor of Texas and Louisiana afterwards, dropped a bombshell. It was rather a scathing sarcasm that portrayed Texas as the dreariest place to live on earth. Sheridan had said at the close of the 19th century that, “If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell.”
The last Sunday’s piece entitled, “Ibadan: Child of two worlds...From perspective of corps members” written by a corps member in Sunday Tribune leaves a sour taste in the mouth and could best be deconstructed as the latest exhumation of Sheridan’s I-hate-Texas-and-prefer-hell ideology. The corps member ‘brilliantly’ offered a perspective of Ibadan as a town in search of exposure and harmony of aesthetics.
Her pen dripped with anger as she wrote, “I advise you to get exposure because you lack it...when I consider the decorum of the majority of her inhabitants amid a decorous few, I dare ask: Ibadan, are you a city or a village? You are neither here nor there. Along what lines do I begin to argue your existence as a city? Is it Bodija, the refined environment of University of Ibadan...? They are not without streaks of that disposition that rabidly distinguishes you from contemporary civilisations.”
A Jungian psychoanalytic reading of the piece will better leave it as a release of an artist’s repressed feelings that equally shape the artist’s perspective. Feeling is a thing of the mind; it is an emotional construction that clearly underpinned the writer’s perspective. The corps member felt and let loose a tirade of pent-up thoughts, but feelings are not always correct.
Her perspective of the ancient city of Ibadan is steeped in what Carl Jung called collective unconscious and what Frank Mowah interpreted as the “inherited potentialities of human imagination.” The perspective is largely shaped by a tribal strain.
To start with, Ibadan is inanimate without a people or its inhabitants. The inhabitants, mostly Yorubas, in the writer’s psychic disposition, lack exposure, hence her billion dollars advice, “...get exposure because you lack it.” Her archetype of Ibadan (Yoruba) people is clothed in the linguistic apparel of “indecorum”; little wonder their “pristine conception of civilization” and their inability to afford decent accommodation.
If one may ask, what is the writer’s conception of civilisation and modernisation? How did the writer arrive at the description of Ibadan and its people as being indecorum? Is Ibadan the only dirty place in the country? What about places like Aba and Onitsha that have nearly become putrid sores on the feet of the East? Is there anything like exclusivity of good or evil to a race? What is the writer’s knowledge of racial stereotyping? Does the writer know that Ibadan is the political capital of the Yoruba people, and an affront to the town could be interpreted as an attack on its people?
One is not defending filthiness and uncouth behaviour, but to transmute a town’s insanitary condition into a ploy for kvetching and attack on the civilisation of a people is rather condemnable. T.S. Eliot, in one of his critical works, The Metaphysical Poets, posits that “civilisation comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility must produce various and complex results”. Ibadan is a result of historical complexity. You need to study the history of the town in order to know better.
Ibadan is as old as Timbuktu in Mali and other ancient towns in the old Mali and Songhai empires. The splendour of Ibadan is in its grey hairs. “O ni ohun ti oju agba ri ko to jin” (The hollow in an elder’s eyes results from what he has seen so far). The beauty of the ancient is that it combines the old and the recent to evolve a hybrid, and this takes a long process. The town is in its present position because of governmental failure. It has suffered decades of neglects, yet it will overcome its problems.
Civilisation is sacrosanct and should not be gnawed at. It is a cultural vehicle that conveys what defines the essence of a people. This is why it would be termed ignoble by taking on a people from their socio-cultural defining essence.
What is Ibadan? A city set on the hills of inter-racial harmony and peace that cannot be rubbished, a trail blazer in many respects, a town of nobles and warriors and the largest in West Africa. Forget Ibadan’s arrays of rusted roofing sheets; they too are a historical result of complexity. To the “corper” who wrote “Ibadan: Child of two worlds...,” Ibadan proposes a toast of love to you.
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