Sometimes men play snake as our soldiers are set to do everywhere from tomorrow. When they do, they always have tales to tell — pleasant, unpleasant.
There was a traditional Yoruba Alarinjo/Apidan theatre troupe called Ayelabola. Apidan theatre, incorporating the efe (jokes/comedy) and Idan (magical miracle) genres, predates modern Yoruba history. Kacke Gotrick notes that Apidan musical drama was watched live by explorers Clapperton and Lander in Old Oyo palace in 1826. The Ayelabola troupe was ancestral, passing its skills and powers from one generation of performers to another. The name, Ayelabola roughly means “we met wealth on Earth.”
An Apidan’s attraction is the power to enact anything he desires. He moves from town to town, village to village transforming self to all kinds of beings, stunning his audience, making money and building a reputation. He could turn himself to a monkey and jump from roof to roof – with even greater dexterity than the real thing. His choice may be python. He enters his costume, gets screened off behind a circular wall of rafia mats — then he comes out as one large gliding snake, moving to constrict all on its way. But an Apidan must juba (pay due respect to) the owners of the land before doing anything. If he would do it and live, he must pay obeisance to the elders before him and the ones around him. There are taboos too which he must not break. Doing that almost always proves fatal.
This Egungun Ayelabola came into town uninvited, danced round to arrogant drumbeats of his troupe and forgot (or refused) to bow before the lords of the land. He wanted to dine with elders with unwashed hands. He had it smooth at the beginning. He did efe, the audience laughed and clapped. He then turned to the more enthralling idan. His powers turned him to everything he desired. He did more. He turned wet mounds of loamy soil to smooth yummy pounded yam. Then he turned to python and the ground shifted under his weight.
It must not rain on this contrived python but it rained without warnings. His wives panicked and chanted his oriki. They mixed desperate remedial songs with antidotes of incantation. Then they called out his ancestor – the one who turned to Oyinbo at Jalumi War and scared the enemy into their Red Sea. His women invoked the spirit of the old one at Ekitiparapo who collected enemy bullets with the folds of his dress and fired them back at the foe. They sang and danced as initiates; they chanted heard and unheard lines and cursed the enemy. Nothing worked. Ayelabola could not go back to man. Helpless and defeated, he crawled away forever into the thickets of the unknown. His songs of pride and power became a litany of elegies — Ayelabola d’ere, o b’ere lo – (Ayelabola turned python and crawled away as python).
Whether it is an invented tale or a true life story, the fate of that python performer recommends humility to the powerful. No one marches on the eyes of the earth and gets earth’s blessings. Let all pythons beware of misadventures. Power fails power sometimes.
Tomorrow is January 1, 2019. It should ordinarily be a day of celebrations. But, for us in Nigeria, it will be more than a New Year day. Our Chief of Army Staff, Three Star General Tukur Yusuf Buratai, has announced that his tanks and troops will roll out in all the streets of Nigeria beginning from tomorrow. He called it Operation Python Dance. “Python will dance all over the country” from January 1 to February 28, 2019, Buratai vowed. The army chief said his python would fight criminals and criminality and protect our elections and our democracy. That was his explanation. How does this reptile dance? I know python constricts. If it dances, it must be a dance of death.
We are in a dangerous world and in an age of adders and pythons. My computer science friend said even in his field, Python now dances and is, in fact, the programming language of the moment. And he said when they discuss python, they also talk of IDLE — Integrated Development Environment. This is not suggesting that our army is idle. No. The army is not idle and listless. The army is only misapplying itself getting involved in a pig fight. It won’t come out clean after this dance. Nigeria is not that landlocked enclave where the last dance held. There is a potent enemy in the North-East which daily kills officers and men, young and old. Our army is leaving that devious enemy for our ill-equipped police to confront. The army will from tomorrow roam the streets of Nigeria showing its muscles to helpless road users and innocent bystanders. The Yoruba would look at any bully doing this and say eni a le mu l’aa l’edi mo (You harass only the one you can beat).
There must be something about this Buhari government and snakes. What could possibly be the reason why it sees nothing wrong in unleashing serpents on a traumatized people? Could it be because our president is from Daura where an ancestor killed a mysterious snake that laid a siege to the ancestral well? Or could it be because the army chief is a snake farmer? Buratai’s multi-million naira snake farm is somewhere called Gora, some 40 kilometers from Abuja. The big man’s unusual farm has a variety of snakes. It houses cobra with black mamba; it exhibits pythons and rears other animals to feed them. Our army chief’s type is not common. Who else can you recollect tendering and attending to snakes the way Buratai gingerly keeps his reptiles? Is that why he is enamoured by the constricting properties of python making it the only imagery in his operational poetry?
The Afenifere said Yorubaland would resist the coming army of pythons. “We advise the army to go and face the Boko Haram in the North-East which is daily showing its capacity to degrade the Nigerian government…Let us specifically say that the Yoruba people will resist any army of occupation in our space. We will not surrender to acts of intimidation,” Afenifere vowed. How it plans to resist the coming army of pythons and snake charmers I don’t know. But I know that in Yorubaland, the people don’t accommodate snakes. That fact is in their proverb: You don’t leave a snake on your ceiling and go to sleep. Snakes have trust deficit. They are store-houses of poison and lethal pouches of treachery. They don’t trust and are never trusted. They are death. So, Yoruba don’t welcome snakes. In fact, they kill and eat snakes — almost all types: cobra, adder, mamba – even python, their king. The traditional Yoruba kill and eat them all.
Politics is a game of serpents. Mahatma Ghandi said his politics was rooted in the resolve to “wrestle with the snakes” of the society he lived. Buhari’s number one critic, Junaid Mohammed, believes the Operation Python Dance is an audacious, slimy scheme aimed at delivering electoral victory to Buhari without a contest: “The Nigerian Army has never carried out such an exercise since the attainment of independence in 1960. They have never held such a martial operation before an election,” he said while warning that “the army did not create Nigeria. They should be careful and Nigerians should be watchful of them.”
Junaid was in the House of Representatives when Shehu Shagari was president. He should, therefore, know how dangerous pythons could be – especially when they dance out of their natural habitat to play politics.
The Nigerian Army is an enviable institution. It pays and pays to keep Nigeria going as a country. It is one public entity that has managed to keep its sanity in the midst of the madness everywhere. That is why it should stay off the pig-fight politics of the coming elections and the ones after. What is the army’s business with elections and political showmanship? Should its khaki become leather and still hope to keep its starchy reputation? When pythons invade communities unwelcome, they get same treatment with that goat and that sheep that enters homes without salutations — they are tied down as specimens for rudeness and arrogant intrusion. Stories abound for tomorrow’s pythons to learn from.
Even if you have the powers to make and unmake, create and recreate destinies, must you be reckless about it? Most people who endure pains of existence would fight to the death to shake off impunity served raw as this Python Dance in an election period.
If the pythons of our army must dance from tomorrow, the place to go should be the killing field around the Lake Chad basin where Boko Haram fights to reign. Their theatre is there in the tragedy called the North-East and Zamfara. Not in my quiet street of hungry strugglers; not the peaceful corridors of Nigeria where folks silently sweat away, eking out a living.
I wish all of us a happy, prosperous and peaceful 2019.
and then