By Teju Cole
On Friday October 5, 2012, four students at the University of Port Harcourt, in
southern Nigeria, went to the nearby village of Aluu. They had gone to collect
a debt from a man named Coxson Lucky. The students were young men, all in their
teens or early twenties. At Aluu, they tried to shake down Lucky (how
aggressively, no one really knows); it seems they also seized some items
belonging to him. Lucky raised an alarm, a crowd gathered, and the students
found themselves accused of stealing laptops and phones. They were immediately
set upon by the mob, stripped, paraded through town, and beaten with sticks.
They began to plead for their lives and, even as they did so, were weighed down
with tires and set alight. All four of them -- Chiadika Biringa, Ugonna Obuzor,
Lloyd Toku, and Tekena Elkanah -- died there, in the mud of Aluu village.
Lynching is common in Nigeria. Extrajudicial killing is often the fate of those
accused of kidnapping and armed robbery, but also of those suspected of minor
crimes like pickpocketing. These incidents, if reported at all, get one or two
paragraphs in the newspapers and are forgotten. Nevertheless, the killings of
the Aluu 4, as they have come to be known, touched a nerve in Nigeria. This was
in large part because the murders were filmed and uploaded to YouTube and, soon
after, seen by many among Nigeria's huge population of internet-savvy youths.
In the days that followed, there was a pained and horrified discussion across
Nigerian social media. How could this happen? What sort of society had we
become? Would the guilty be caught and punished?
I could not watch the video. I was still haunted by a clip I saw years ago of
another lynching. Two men had been set on fire, and were being whipped. The
skin came off their bodies in oily red strips, and their tormentors urged each
other to slow down and let them suffer. I could bear only to look at the stills
from this new video. But I found the response to the incident among the
Nigerian public interesting. The outrage was loud and long. It was as though
this were the first time such a thing had ever happened, as though Nigerian
society were not already mired in frequent and almost orgiastic spates of
violence. Somehow, this incident had differentiated itself from the terrorist attacks
by Boko Haram, the endless killings by "unknown gunmen," the carnage
on the roads, the armed robberies, the dispiriting catalogue of crimes in
places high and low.
What was the cause of this soul searching? What made the Aluu 4 different from
dozens of others killed by mobs in the past few years? What innocence had been
destroyed by this particular spontaneous instance of murder?
* * *
One evening in September 2010, the lawyer and poet Tade Ipadeola was
driving home in Dugbe, Ibadan, in southwestern Nigeria. It was a drizzly night.
Visibility was poor. From his car, a white sedan, he saw a speeding
motorcyclist ahead of him collide with another motorcyclist. The motorcycle
that was hit wobbled slightly and went on its way. The one that caused the
collision was slewed across the road. The male motorcyclist and his female
passenger lay prone on the asphalt. The man wore no helmet and blood from his
cracked skull pooled on the road. The woman writhed in pain. Ipadeola parked
some 15 meters from the scene of the crime, left his engine idling, his beams
on, and hurried to help the accident victims. He was the first on the scene,
but very soon after, other cars had parked, and so had other motorcycles.
Someone from the gathering crowd suddenly said, "The white car hit
them." At this announcement, a sudden fear coursed through Ipadeola. That
was his car that had been mentioned. His guilt was established by his mere
presence at the scene.
"It takes 10 seconds, more or less, for the mob to decide whether to
administer their brand of justice," Ipadeola said, in recounting the
incident to me. "The diabolical compression of time was the most frightening
part." Everyone looked at him menacingly. Especially dangerous was the
assembled brotherhood of motorcyclists, who are always to be found defending
their own in such situations. There were only two possible outcomes once guilt
was established: They either burned the car, or they burned the car and its
driver. But on this night, another voice spoke out of the crowd claiming that,
no, it was the man bleeding on the road who had hit another motorcycle. Some
section of the crowd seemed to believe this, and Ipadeola walked back to his
car, shaking, hoping that the tide which had suddenly turned in his favor
wouldn't suddenly turn again. He made it home alive that night. He lived to
tell the tale.
* * *
One of the chief characteristics of a mob is its quickness. It is sudden. It
pounces. In Ikeja, Lagos, in 2011, two men, Alaba and Samuel were severely
beaten and very nearly killed for eating human flesh. Closer investigation
showed that what they'd been chewing on was, in fact, beef. By this time, their
punishers had long dispersed into the city. In Nigeria, we sometimes call these
mob actions "jungle justice." Most people are not opposed to them on
principle. As a sweet-natured aunt of mine said a few years ago, referring to
my question about thieves who had been killed by vigilantes, "Why do we
need such people in the society anyway? It's better to just get rid of
them." She was expressing the pain that many feel about the violent
crimes, and their desire for instant restitution.
"Jungle justice": The term is uncomfortable in the way it seems to
confirm the worst prejudices that outsiders might have about daily life in
Nigeria. Won't the expression make people think that Nigeria is a savage place?
Certainly, from the experience of the people I know who barely escaped being
lynched by an irate mob, who experienced that sudden, startling, and almost
fatal diminishment of self that occurs when hostile strangers close in on you,
no term is too strong or too angry to characterize what mobs do. Jungle justice
is not the half of it. But we should be fair enough to set Nigerian street
justice in its various contexts.
Mob rule -- or to give it its technical name, "ochlocracy" -- was not
invented in Nigeria. Theories of the mob predate ancient Rome. Extrajudicial
murders litter the post-Civil War history of the American South, all the way
to, and beyond, the story of James Byrd, Jr., in 1998. Punitive murder by the
police and by vigilantes has existed in all societies at some point, and
probably still exists in most. In cosmopolitan centers like New York and Paris,
until at least the early years of the 20th century, lynchings were reported in
the newspapers. Félix Fénéon, writing faits divers -- brief news items,
usually of a peculiar or violent nature -- in Le Matin in 1906, recorded
several instances of people being set upon by mobs. For instance one reads (in
a translaton by Luc Sante): "Near Brioude, a bear was smothering a child.
Some peasants shot the beast and nearly lynched its exhibitor."
While working on a project I call "small fates," modeled closely on
Fénéon's faits divers, I found several similar instances in the New York
of a hundred years ago. Lynching in the U.S. is so closely tied to racial
violence that we forget that it often featured in incidents where race was not
at issue. In one story, a man on East Houston Street, who had attacked his
lover with a razor, nearly lost his life to a mob. There were other incidents
of lynchings or near-lynchings: After a jailbreak, when people attacked a
driver who hit a child, and so on. More recently, there has been a rise in such
spontaneous acts of violence in places such as Jamaica, Pakistan, and Kenya.
What many of these societies have in common is a crisis of modernity. People,
finding themselves surrounded by newly complex circumstances, and finding
themselves sharing space with neighbors whom they do not know and with whom
they don't necessarily share traditions, defend themselves in terrible new
ways. The old customs have passed away, and the new, less reassuring, less
traditional modes of life are struggling to be born. Mobs arise out of this
crisis. They are a form of impatience.
The investiture of legal power in the hands of the state evolved as a way to
stem endless vendettas, blood feuds and unauthorized violence. In countries
with a properly functioning legal system, the mob continues to exist, but it is
rarely called upon to mete out capital punishment. The right to take human life
belongs to the state. Not so in societies where weak courts and poor law
enforcement are combined with intractable structural injustices. The mob flows
into that vacuum, and looks for whom to kill. A mob is not, as is so often
said, mindless. A mob is single-minded.
* * *
In 2011, in Gusau, a town in the northern state of Zamfara, Saminu Ibrahim, a
journalist, went to a local branch of Skye Bank to withdraw some money. While
he was there, one of the bank staff, Idowu Olatunji, suddenly experienced a
hysterical episode in which he felt his penis had vanished. This peculiar form
of anxiety, which happens with some regularity in public places in Nigeria, is
usually followed by the accusation that someone nearby "stole" the
penis. A crowd gathers and rarely is there any kind of examination of the
accuser's body. His word is simply taken for it, and a beating of the accused,
sometimes fatal, follows.
Within its highly particularized context, this bizarre
sequence of events makes a perverse sort of sense. It might even be interpreted
as no more perverse than some things that pass for the normal abnormality in
other societies, such as those in American culture, "alcohol and drug
abuse, major depression, dysthymia, mania, hypomania, panic disorder, social
and specific phobia, and generalized anxiety disorder," a list presented
by Frank Bures in his extraordinarily nuanced Harper's essay on penis
theft in Nigeria, "A Mind Dismembered" (subscription required).
Bures, struggling to understand the psychological context for this kind of
anxiety, notes that "every culture has its own logic, its own beliefs, its
own stresses."
That day in Gusau, the banker Olatunji accused the journalist Ibrahim of penis
theft. All of a sudden, Ibrahim found himself in mortal danger from a crowd.
They closed in on him with murderous intent, and only the presence of
quick-thinking policemen saved him from a grisly death. But what made this case
truly unusual, and makes it a textbook case of Nigeria's neuroses and its
perplexed modernity, was that Ibrahim later sued Olatunji in a court of law for
defamation and false accusation. His response to this intolerable threat to his
life was the formalized idea of the law guaranteed by the state. He answered
jungle justice with civil justice. And it was at this point that the story
dropped out of the public view.
* * *
Crowds are attractive because of their egalitarian promise. The mob is a form
of utopia. Justice arrives now, to right what has for too long been wrong with
the world. As Elias Canetti wrote in his masterful psychological study, Crowds
and Power, "All who belong to the crowd get rid of their differences and
feel equal." In this sudden equality is part of the appeal of a lynching.
But, it is a spurious appeal. As Canetti says of the equality that mobs feel,
"it is based on an illusion; the people who suddenly feel equal have not
really become equal; nor will they feel equal forever."
When I asked my Nigerian friends to tell me about their own close calls with
mob violence, I was surprised, and a little dismayed, by how many of them
actually had stories to tell. Eghosa Imasuen, a sharp-minded and witty
novelist, told me about his experience at Alaba, the main electronics market in
Lagos. This was in 2003, and the salesboy, who had opened the cardboard box of
a television, wishing to force a sale, began to loudly allege theft. It was a
hustle. He had done it before. As Imasuen put it, "An expletive-filled
denial saved me. It was scary. I had received a few slaps before the crowd
noticed that my friend and I were too angry to be thieves." The crowd
turned on the accuser instead, and gave him a severe beating before taking him
to the chairman of the market, who in turn handed him to police.
In the case of Akin Ajayi, who writes on arts and culture for Nigerian and
international publications, it happened one day when he was fifteen, playing
truant from the elite boys boarding school, King's College. He had snuck off
campus, in Obalende, on Lagos Island, to buy some suya, the spicy grilled meat
popular all over the country. A misunderstanding over change, or perhaps,
again, a deliberate hustle, from the suya seller, led to Ajayi being suddenly
surrounded by violent merchants. He felt the danger, and broke into a run. For
a hundred yards, he was pursued by them. It frightens him still, to think of
that day.
Elnathan John, who is also a journalist and satirist for Nigerian newspapers,
had been taking photos of a government raid on an illegal market in Abuja. The
government officers, though armed, were beaten back; the situation became
dangerous all of a sudden, even for onlookers. One man, a black-marketer of
petroleum products, objected to John's camera, and tried to chase him down and
hand him over to the angry crowd of traders. John was just barely able to run
around a corner, jump into his car, and speed off. The memories are fresh in
his mind: It happened just this year.
* * *
Those of us who have lived a long time in Nigeria have heard, in the market
places, the cries of, "Thief, thief!" We have seen chases that won't
end well for the person being chased. We have all seen, at the very least, in
some market square or busy intersection, the charred remains of what used to be
a human being, what used to be some mother's son, some child's hapless father.
Many of us remember hearing of how a boy of 11, accused of kidnapping a baby,
was burned alive near the National Stadium in Lagos in 2005. In that case, as
in the case of the Aluu 4, a video recording was made of the incident and circulated;
part of it was broadcast on television. There can be little doubt that before
the current year is through, several more people will be lynched in Nigeria,
for petty crimes or on the basis of false accusations.
When I'm in Nigeria, I find myself looking at the passive,
placid faces of the people standing at the bus stops. They are tired after a
day's work, and thinking perhaps of the long commute back home, or of what to
make for dinner. I wonder to myself how these people, who surely love life, who
surely love their own families, their own children, could be ready in an
instant to exact a fatal violence on strangers. And even though I know that
lynchings would largely disappear in a Nigeria with rule of law and strong
institutions -- just as they have largely disappeared in other places where
they were once common -- I still wonder what extreme traumas have brought us to
this peculiar pass. I suppose it must be a blood knot, one that involves all
the restless ghosts of our history-maddened country: the gap between rich and
poor, the current corruption of the ruling class, the recent military
dictatorships, the butchery of the Civil War in the late '60s, the humiliations
of British colonialism, the internecine battles of the 19th century, and the
horrors of the slaving past. We have, by means of a long steeping, been dyed
all the way through with callousness.
* * *
I was frightened out of my skin one Sunday morning last November. In Surulere,
near the National Stadium in Lagos -- in other words, close to where the
11-year-old boy was lynched in 2005 -- I saw a van accidentally hit a
motorcycle. Neither the motorcyclist nor his passenger appeared to be seriously
injured, but the driver of the van, possessed by a sudden panic, didn't stop.
He drove off in an attempt to escape. A cadre of motorcycles gave immediate
chase, and there was no doubt that they would bring him to a rough form of
justice. "They'll catch him," a man said loudly. "They'll
certainly catch him." Already, I could see that the driver would soon run
into traffic and have to face his tormentors. I was appalled, but not
especially surprised. I understood well that this was part of what passed for
normal in the troubled street life of present-day Nigeria.
The Inspector General of Police made a statement vowing to capture the culprits
in the murder of the University of Port Harcourt students. A heavy police
presence descended on Aluu, and a large number of people have now been
arrested, including the traditional ruler of Aluu and a police sergeant who
apparently helped the crowd. A manhunt is underway for Lucky, the debtor who is
believed to have incited the violence and is now being called, in a bit of
wishful thinking, the "mastermind" of the murders.
It's hard to escape the conclusion that, in addition to the shock of actually
seeing the murders on video, the concern being expressed here by the government
-- in response to a public outcry that began online -- has other, unspoken,
elements. These young men are "us" in a way that is not comfortable
to confront, in ways that might seem trivial. The contrast between the photos
released by their friends -- polo shirts, sunshades, jeans, clear skin, jaunty
caps worn just so -- and the awful sight of their bloodied and naked bodies in
the mud is sickening. They are, or were, close to the world of many other cool
young Nigerians. Their presence on social media brings them even closer: Ugonna
was active on Twitter, and was nicknamed "Tipsy." With Lloyd, AKA
"Big L," he was a hip-hop enthusiast. They had recorded a track
together, and this song was widely shared on Nigerian networks. In this sense,
they were in the same class as many of the young Nigerian people on Twitter,
somewhere along the imprecise continuum that constitutes the Nigerian middle
class. They had some access to material resources; they had educated and
somewhat well-to-do parents; one or more of them had been overseas; they were
technologically savvy; and they had a sense of the world beyond Nigeria. The
Aluu 4 are in all these ways just like the young Nigerians who lamented them on
Twitter and other social networks, the ones who helped push the police response
to the killings, and began a petition to have a bill passed criminalizing mob
violence. The Aluu 4 were also, in this material and cultural sense, more like
us than they were like the poor villagers who killed them; the violence was
probably not disconnected from the terrible income gaps that are a fact of
Nigerian life, and the explosive resentments those gaps can create.
It is startling to consider that
another atrocity had occurred in north-eastern Nigeria four days earlier, at
the Federal Polytechnic Mubi, when gunmen had lined up and shot no fewer than
26 college students. Some reports put the number of dead as high as 40. The
response to the Mubi killings was stunned, but much quieter. That incident has
essentially dropped out of the public discussion now. We do not know the names
of the dead students, nor do we know if they recorded hip-hop music in their
spare time, or had Twitter accounts, or traveled overseas. They seem to have
been from more modest backgrounds than the Port Harcourt students. The Mubi
killings also seem to have some element of the incessant religious conflict
that is ripping the north of the country apart. Boko Haram might have been
involved. The conflict in the north frightens many privileged southern
Nigerians, but rarely touches them directly. Places like Borno, Bauchi, and
Adamawa are far way from the world inhabited by most educated, cosmopolitan
Nigerians. The Boko Haram conflict and the various incidences of religious
violence in the north are exceedingly complex, and have come with a shockingly
high death toll. Nevertheless, many who heard the news of the Mubi massacre
would simply have surmised that, although the dead were our fellow citizens,
they were not really "us," not in the discomfiting way the Aluu 4
were.
But even if it is true that there is an element of class loyalty and regional
identity in the attention being paid to the murders in Aluu, Nigerians now have
a chance to think about a subject too long considered just a part of life. The
outrage could lead to legislation. The very slow process of making Nigerians
understand that ochlocracy is murder might gain some traction.
Tade Ipadeola, the lawyer who described mobs as a "diabolical compression
of time," had also added: "And to think that we all complain that
normal court proceedings are inordinately long in Nigeria." In a country
where the rich commit crimes with impunity, and where the majority of the people
in prison are awaiting trial, it is sad, but no great wonder, that citizens so
often opt for the false utopia of the mob. But no Nigerian can now shake the
feeling that it could be any of us falling afoul of the hive mind. No one
really believes that there's just one mastermind in the case of a mob killing.
It was always our problem, but in a destabilizing new way, it really is our
problem now.
I took a look at eighteen-year-old Ugonna Obuzor's Twitter account
(@tipsy_tipsy), which he last updated on October 3, two days before he was
lynched alongside his three friends. His timeline isn't wordy, but it's fairly
opaque, written mostly in the terse, quasi-American argot familiar to anyone
who reads young Nigerians. There are a few messages in which he seems
distressed about some unexplained event. Perhaps he was going through a
romantic breakup (some of his retweets support this reading) or some other
personal disappointment, but in light of his sudden death, the messages have
taken on a decidedly different cast. On September 14, he wrote, "Its a
shame buh it is wat it is...its real as this.." and, six days later, on
the 20th of September, "It breaks my heart evrytym I tink abt it...still
can't beliv it.." I scrolled down further down. On August 21, Ugonna had
written, simply: "Perplexed." And on the day following, on August 21,
2012, the same single, haunting word again: "Perplexed."
English
club Chelsea have dropped their Nigeria international Victor Moses from
the squad to face Sparta Prague in their Europa League tie on Thursday.
The Nigeria international had been quickly recalled for the trip to the
Czech Republic which forced him to travel back to England from South
Africa instead of heading to Abuja with his teammates.
Daily Post - We reported this morning, that Stephen Keshi had withdrawn his resignation
as coach of the Super Eagles, after a meeting with Sports Minister, Boloaji
Abdullahi. The 51-year-old has now released a statement which confirms his
decision to continue in his role.
“Winning this tournament is an honour. I came on board a year and a
half ago, and my dream was to make all Nigerians happy,” said Keshi in a
post-match press conference
His real name is Olumide Adegbulu but he
is popularly referred to as Olu Maintain. An accomplished artiste, the
Yahooze crooner, is one of the most extravagant artistes in Nigeria. In
this interview, he opens up on his lavish lifestyle and the
entertainment industry
