Monday
March 15, 2010 |
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Nigeria chalked up another dubious
record in infamy with the recent pre-dawn massacre of innocent men,
women and children near Jos. Reports of the bloodbath became a staple on
radio and cable news broadcasts around the world, complete with macabre
pictures of bloodied corpses, gaping mass graves, and disconsolate
wailing women. These reports were also splashed on the front page of
major international newspapers, including the New York Times.
Haiti and Chile are still reeling from the aftermath of devastating
earthquakes, a natural disaster. Nigeria continues to be beset by
man-manufactured crises and disasters.
In the age of the Internet, accounts and photos of the savage attack –
which, in its use of machetes to dismember targets and bonfires to
immolate many, came across as a mini version of the Rwandan genocide –
seemed to be everywhere one turned. Scores of photos were forwarded to
my e-mail addresses and posted to my Facebook account.
Where I could, I deleted the photos. For there is, after all, something
that’s deeply wounding to the psyche in peering at the monstrous work of
the depraved and – one inescapably concluded – the deranged. To glimpse
the pictures – and glimpse was all one managed, it being impossible to
look – was to confront barbarity on a scale that caused one to shudder
at the human capacity for evil.
I was not only appalled and horrified by the wantonness of the nocturnal
attackers; my sensibility also recoiled from what, in my suspicion, is a
growing appetite for gore and horror. This appetite is daily facilitated
and fed by the Internet. Thanks to the communicative ease offered by the
Internet, anybody can sit before a computer anywhere in the world and
widely disseminate any information, complete with (often gory)
photographs.
It’s true that, in many cases, these photographs serve to corroborate or
lend dimensionality to written accounts of events. Yet, the raw, stark
manner in which some grotesque photos are distributed leaves me worrying
that we are in danger of losing our ability to flinch. I worry, besides,
that our seeming fascination with gazing at extremely sickening
photographs of callous acts – in this case, the Jos massacres – is bound
to accelerate the erosion of our sense of the sacredness of human life.
That fear is real enough for me – which was why, once I heard and read
about the latest episode of sectarian bloodbath in Jos, I tried my best
not to linger over the pictures of victims. I’m not one to seek
photographic authentication of dastardly acts. Yet, as I already hinted,
it’s often impossible to avoid all the images thrown at you from
multiple sources, known and unknown. In the case of the carnage in Jos,
several well-meaning “facebook” friends must have thought they were
doing me a favor by bombarding me with the horrific images. In order to
delete them, one had, perforce, to glance at them.
In the process, two images from that photographic gallery of evil
branded themselves on my mind. One photograph is of a mother and a baby
– in all likelihood her child – lying side by side, both bodies burnt.
It was as if their assailants wished to make them into human barbecues.
The other picture was just as haunting. It’s of a child, at most three
years old, its skull gashed open to expose a reddened brain. Perhaps the
deadly blow was struck with a machete or some other sharp instrument.
The dead child has a thumb in its mouth; he or she must have been in
deep sleep when the terrible blow was struck. That child’s posture –
with a thumb frozen in the mouth – tells its own disturbing story. It
spoke to me of the murder of innocence.
The immediate murderer is, of course, the man (or woman, perhaps?) who
was so crazed as to take an axe to the skull of a sleeping, absolutely
harmless and defenseless child. The perpetrator, whatever his or her
grievance, cannot possibly produce any justification for snatching that
child’s life.
But there’s also a sense – a deep sense at that – in which the
thumb-sucking child as well as the charred mother and child indict the
Nigerian state – a state run by vampires who “eat” the citizens’ flesh
and “drink” their blood.
Truth be told, the recurrent spate of so-called religious violence in
Nigeria is but a symptom of a nation that’s sabotaged every opportunity
to achieve itself. Nigeria remains a discounted dream, a space run (and
ruined) by (in)human parasites who suck the life out of their quarry,
leaving the nation-space feeble and wobbly.
Those who sneaked upon the sleeping victims in a town near Jos and
executed their murderous designs were – to some degree – proxies for a
Nigeria that devalues its citizens’ lives. For despite the religious
coating that served as ostensible motive, the attack was, at bottom,
evidence of colossal dehumanization wrought by pervasive economic
misery.
Nigeria might have nurtured that thumb-sucking child to grow up into a
productive citizen. Perhaps the burnt woman was a suckling mother, a
small trader who rose up daily and did what it took to provide food for
her family, or a farmer whose produce gave her a means of sustenance and
a way of meeting the world. But a Nigeria whose resources are looted by
a few, whose police are too busy collecting bribes at roadside blocks to
pay attention to the real task of law enforcement, whose bureaucrats
spend their waking hours inventing novel ways to make the lives of their
fellows harsher – that Nigeria betrayed the victims of our latest
man-made disaster.
It is up to citizens to reclaim their lives by taking back their nation.
The first step is to insist that their so-called nascent democracy learn
to respect the wishes of the people in next year’s general elections. It
should surprise no one that Nigerian “leaders” who usurp office and get
away with it treat Nigerians as cattle or worse. It is only when the
people establish their sovereign power that they can compel the state to
respond to them as citizens – not fodder for senseless death.
