FALSE categories, in part because of the ontological link between humanity and falsehood, are an inevitable, and perhaps inerasable, feature of life as presently constituted. They are, as I show with just one example beginning from the next sentence, essentially a tool of power rather than the product of ignorance. As a Nigerian familiar with the genocidal “herder’ system with which Nigerians grapple on a daily basis, you are no doubt conversant with the category, “farmers/herders clashes.” Like the category, “women and children” often touted by the apostles of gender studies, this term encodes a linguistically sophisticated suppression of truth. It is a transparently false category. But while it does not exist in reality, it has gained currency and traction through wholesale embrace by those the ace columnist, Tony Afejuku, calls Nigeria’s decisioners; the powers that be, those who rule us to our permanent discomfort.
In an address he presented as a special guest of honour at the Peace, Unity and Security Lecture Series held at the ECOWAS Auditorium in Abuja in February this year, Nigeria’s current Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Mr. Abubakar Malami, SAN, postulated that the setting-up of a commission for pastoralism, regulated by law, could provide a recipe for resolving the protracted “farmer-herder conflicts in the country.” According to him, simply addressing the farmer-herder crisis “from purely theoretical perspectives often devoid of reality and without synchronization with the needs and aspirations of the involved stakeholders”, is not only counter-productive, “but inimical to the emergence and sustenance of a peaceful and prosperous Nigeria”.
ALSO READ: APC To Sanction Masterminds Of Parallel Congresses, Says Chieftains Involved Are Saboteurs
Shorn of its rhetorical pretensions, Malami’s averment is nothing but sheer gobbledygook, but it was crafted in the language of demagoguery by design. The dictionary before me as I write defines a clash as “a short fight between two groups of people.” By referring to the genocidal onslaughts on Nigerian farmers by a band of bloodthirsty psychopaths as mere “clashes,” Malami, like the rest of Nigeria’s officialdom intent on ethnic supremacy, carefully diminishes the plight of the victims and avoids responsibility for the herders’ horrendous activities. Come to think of it: if in Nigeria farmers and herders are merely “clashing,” then the proper thing to do would be to sit both sides on a table and iron out their differences. Through a commission, that is.
As a trained stylistician, I am at least vaguely familiar with the literature on im/politeness. In conversational talk in English, it is usual to try and mitigate face-threatening acts (FTAs) because, ultimately, we want to be members of a civil community. Through linguistic mitigation, for instance, we try to repair the damage done to someone’s face by what we say or do. Consider the following said to a football player by his gaffer: “That’s some chance you lost! I did that during my first match for Juve!” Here, the coach tries to mitigate the damage that may be potentially done to the face (public image) of his player who has just had a scandalous miss in front of goal. But of course we may choose to perform FTAs in situationally appropriate contexts. As I said in my doctoral dissertation, “politeness is not called for during a fire outbreak.” In such situations we scream, we gesticulate wildly not necessarily because we wish to be rude but because we must perform utterances that are dictated by the situation.
But in the case that I am addressing here, what we have is so much more than impoliteness (an utterance that threatens the face of an addressee): it is a linguistic manipulation made to reinforce hegemony. The theorist, Louis Althusser, would group such deft uses of language as part of the Ideological State Apparatus, that is, instruments used by the state to legitimize oppression in such a way that the oppressed might even come to see their oppression as being quite natural.
As I write, Nigeria’s farmers remain at the mercy of Fulani ethnic warlords masquerading as herdsmen. They rape women before their husbands and daughters before their parents. They kill at will, drink and bathe in the blood of their victims, and conduct the most horrendous robberies on the highways. They displace farmers from their ancestral heritage: lands that their forebears farmed hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago; lands that are an inerasable feature of their identity. The lands are not just a spot of ground: they are the site of history, of culture and identity, in short, a site of life.
In Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the character Okonkwo was confronted with the kind of situation faced by Nigerian farmers today. Hear him: “Let us not reason like cowards…If a man comes into my hut and defecates on the floor, what do I do? Do I shut my eyes? No! I take a stick and break his head. That is what a man does. These people are daily pouring filth over us, and Okeke says we should pretend not to see.”
The political okekes are still here speaking of “farmers/herders clashes” instead of “murderous/genocidal attacks on farmers.” The intent is clear: to cripple the ability of the victims to fight back. It’s all about hegemony, folks.
and then