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A dream perverted
More articles on this topic: Campus Cults, NigeriaFifty years ago, Nobel prize-winning writer Wole Soyinka formed a university society with his friends. This month, in a report for Channel 4 News, he returned to Nigeria to find his alma mater being exorcised - part of a national clampdown on the copycat ‘cults’ blamed for a series of campus atrocities. How has this come to pass?
Imagine a solemn procession of academics treading its way between the manicured lawns of a university campus. They are in mufti, so it is not really an academic procession. One figure, however - he appears to be their leader - is dressed in white robes and equipped with the local equivalent of bell, book and candle. They pause for some moments, perhaps to fully take in their environment or simply to summon their resolve, then move purposefully down a slight incline and vanish beneath their destination - a hanging balcony near the foot of the slope.
There follows a period of silence. A bottle emerges from the folds of the white-robed leader, its contents are sprinkled on the ground, on walls, splashed against the ceiling and poured down every corner of the alcove to the muttering of indecipherable words. The words take the character of an invocation of spiritual powers. They evolve into energised words of prayer, backed by the chorus of increasingly ecstatic worshippers, perhaps of a Pentecostal flavour, punctuating the leader’s prayers. This group is embarked on the rites of exorcism.
Over 50 years ago, a group of seven students gathered at that same spot on an equally uncommon mission - to found the nation’s first campus fraternity, whose motto, as inscribed in its scroll, is summed up as: anti-tribalism, anti-elitism, non-conformism, chivalry, etc. Fast-forward 20 years, and the fraternity has acquired many imitators, mostly rejects from the original fraternity. Their ethos - if one can call it that - is of such a nature that to describe them as fraternities is as appropriate as calling a serial rapist a sex therapist. They establish competitive reigns of terror on campuses, engage in activities that occasionally spill over into the towns. They extort, rape, employ acid to disfigure women who have spurned them, and serve as enforcers and thugs to politicians.
After several years pretending that the problem did not exist, the present government in Nigeria has finally acknowledged that universities had become hostages to this evil. It ordered vice-chancellors to embark on counter-cult programmes, disbursed funds, and even gave them a deadline for the eradication of the scourge. Each college was to find its own formula. The most spectacular of these approaches was the revivalist services of public renunciation - both Christian and Muslim. Most unique was the rite of exorcism at my alma mater, the University of Ibadan, whose imaginary reconstruction I have deployed to introduce this subject. The event was real, however; a ritual of exorcism was performed by a prophet or shaman, well known and well respected. One of the participants to whom we spoke insisted, rather coyly, that it was not an exorcism but a simple prayer meeting.
The theology behind the event was this: whatever took place 50 years ago in that birthplace of the pioneer Pyrates Confraternity must have been infiltrated by Satan, who, it was proposed, inhabited the gardener’s shed at the time, and demonised the purpose of those students. The mimic groups imbibed the Satanic spores and, unconsciously, became transmitting vectors. The solution was to go back to that spot and exorcise the devil. No attempt has yet been made to explain if there is any correlation between the unleashing of the hibernating spores and certain societal distortions that have taken place in the nation since - such as the effects of the civil war, brutal military dictatorships, the oil boom, etc.
It is easy to scoff at such arcane proceedings, yet it is necessary to recognise in the desperation of the exorcists the portrait of a community at its wits’ end. It is also symptomatic of a society in denial, since the real causes of college decadence are to be found in society itself, the outer society of which the university is only a reflection. This is an obvious thesis, one that I have propounded - pounded would be a more accurate expression - into the heads of the adult society, that violence and cultism are exactly what society has made of itself. The imitators mimic the fraternity culture, intrigued by, and envious of, its outer shell - the structure - but what they stuff inside that shell comes entirely from the observed and evidently successful norms in a predatory society, from the obscenities of power, the corrupt lifestyle of their parents and mentors, the culture of impunity that has dominated Nigerian nation space for over 30 years of military rule, poisoning the nation’s humanity with exhibitionist affluence and a culture of decadence and alienation.
Perceptions of the campus fraternity culture in Nigeria occupy three main categories: the eccentric, the criminal and the diabolical. The first is dismissed outright - eccentricity can only be a questioning mark on the status quo, a nonconformist attitude that constitutes a minor irritant. “Criminality” is too dangerous, because to recognise an act as criminal requires that you bring down the full rigour of the law on the perpetrator, and such offenders are often the children of the powerful.
That leaves only the third - the diabolical - which becomes a free-for-all, and for some, extremely lucrative. It does not require a lot of mental exertion to take on the devil, especially when he was last “sighted” a full 50 years ago, hibernating in a gardener’s shed where seven young students chose to challenge a colonial heritage, throw away their three-piece suits and ties, don outlandish gear and roam in imaginary seas. Fortunately, there are still creatures left in the world who insist that one protocol set down in invisible - but indelible - ink in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is, very definitely, the Right to be Eccentric.
I did not exactly jump at the invitation to join in making a documentary about this phenomenon, for the simple reason that I had my hands full. However, I recognised that this was an opportunity that needed to be seized. My greatest scenic disappointment, however, was that we could not even use the footage we had shot of the “sayling” of the original pyrates who are still alive and well, focused and integrated within adult society, having withdrawn from campuses over 20 years ago out of despair.
It is sad that many students have never known anything of the absurd junkets of campus culture. They would be astonished to discover how their counterparts deploy their spare time, warding off the dreaded day of reckoning when the examination doors close on them, and the authentic rites - the rites of passage - begin.
· Wole Soyinka’s film on Nigerian cults goes out tonight on Channel 4 News at 7pm.
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