By Busuyi mekusi
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Nudity is a unique identity to every human being at birth. Reasons adducible to this are commonality and equality in vulnerability. However, man has mastered the tricks of inequality; pranks of injustice and frivolity of over-decoration that mummies prepared for burial are either scantily or heavily clothed. While Islamic religion allows for the wrapping of the mummy with a sheet of cloth, Christianity permits that a corpse be clad in a manner reminiscent of after-life engagements. The latter is also found in some traditional practices like that of the Old Oyo Empire, and by extension Yoruba cultural worldview, where the dead is fully attired and perfumed for the world of the dead. This is not to forget that Yoruba believe in transcendental tripod worlds of the unborn, the living and the dead. Other opinions exist, though, that the mummy is not worth than a lump of wood that should be incinerated.
Whereas nakedness is not desired for the dead, postmodern civilisation approves bareness for the living, as body parts become socio-political and economic instruments to gain mileage and surpass opponents in competitiveness. The female body has particularly been subjugated, to bear the burdens of imposed values and meanings that are used for personal ends and aggrandisements. Feminine body is treasured in advertisements, not only to attract desired attention but to force acceptability, symbolically. This explains why the female picture would get dragged to the advert for vehicle tyres. As against the old repressive order that blames female vulnerability to sexual harassment on nudity, proponents of matriarchal independence have vigorously supported the staging of female nudity as an ascription of the value the opposite side would like to subjugate.
Tying a rope around the neck of the hen might not be ordinarily fashionable in Yoruba parlance, but the didacticism is more of the loss the owner could incur from the thoughtless venture. Therefore, nudity might not have been approved by God, who chose to clothe Adam and Eve after their transgression, but a wilful playful generation could also add it to some of the lows that place their socialisation over the reasonable past that is now best known for primitivism.
Beyond the simple meaning of nudity, it can also metaphorically refer to being stripped of certain values, worth or respect. It is to this end that nakedness in a public space is seen as the height of shame, opprobrium or ignominy. Curiously, reasons for which people buried their heads in shame in the past, like being caught with someone else’s wife, corruption, or thieving, are now sources of popularity to barefaced roguish misfits that would rationalise morality, mask with religion, or rigmarole with the court. We would soon hear the gospels according to Emefiele as soon as he gets a bell to complement his paraded Bible.
Vladimir Putin may not have equalled Hitler in the latter’s notoriety of Jewish Holocaust but his invasion of Ukraine has precipitated substantial destructions. Apart from the ruins traceable to the warfronts, there have been vicarious negative reverberations in remote places, particularly where diminishing wheat supplies from Ukraine and gas supply from Russia have exacerbated poverty in Africa. With Putin calling the bluff of Western countries and their allies by invading and sustaining the bombardments of Ukraine, his rapprochements with developing nations, mostly on the African continent have not left anyone in doubt that he is seeking the support of the populous majority of vulnerable nations to contend with the super powers on the other side of the hemisphere. The denomination of most developing countries’ economies in the America dollar is also being challenged to diminish the self-conferring supervisory roles America has enjoyed for some years.
Putin’s sustenance of the Russian economy amidst his belligerence towards Ukraine got boosted by the popularisation of the Rouble in Russia trading with other nations. One most significant deal Putin has with Africa was the recent announcement at the Russia-Africa forum held at St. Petersburg, South Africa, to the effect that Russian government had pardoned or written off debts owed it by African nations, amounting to $23 billion dollars. He had also hinted that another $90 million would be allocated for the same purpose, stressing that the link between Moscow and Africa would see hard-pressed African countries like Burkina Faso, Mali, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Eretria, etc., receiving thousands of tons of grains from Russia. Predictably, the incursions Russia and China are making into the African continent are targeted at usurping colonialists like Britain and France from sustaining their traditional holds on the continent.
It is for the foregoing that the recent military coup in Niger has reopened the unfinished balkanisation of Africa by foreign marauders, who would create dissidents to undermine constitutional democracy, and support military rascals that would sharpen their greed and decorate their buffoonery with the collaborative looting of the mineral resources in their countries by the foreign exploiters. At another side of the dangerous divide, terrorist organisations like Al Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, etc., have effectively seized the Sahel as a launch-pad to destabilise adjourning countries. The resurgence of military coups in West Africa sub-region is not a storm in the tea cup for a country like Nigeria that has been reduced to a ‘big-for-nothing’ nation by recalcitrant dissidents who have made the past records of ECOMOG exceptional performances in moonlight tales.
The setting up of military formations on African shores by ‘super powers’ has apparently shown that it is not mainly for the purposes of security on the continent but the protection of the interests of the oppressive nations. Reminiscent of great paradox, the same countries that are clamouring for peace and security across the globe are the ones manufacturing arms and smuggling them into developing countries to empower saboteurs who steal national natural endowments and sell them cheaply to foreign merchandise. From Nigeria to Angola, Niger to Ghana, Zimbabwe to Madagascar, crude thefts, gold butchery, uranium thieving, etc., underscore the continuous ravaging of the African continent by monstrous North with subjugated deceived collaborators on the South of the equator.
The Atlantic Slave Trade and subsequent pilfering of the African continent by colonialists, no doubt, simply stripped the continent naked, even as attempts to end the nudity through good democratic governments were violently overthrown and supplanted by western stooges who always looked up to their imperial masters for survival and direction. Notwithstanding the disaggregation in the economies of African countries and those of western nations, the World Bank and IMF have continued to set economic directions for the former, as the loots of greedy African leaders, partly made up of loans got from the global agencies, are ferried to service banks in Europe and America. African nations are naked in the cold, desirous of clothing from China and Russia who are newly-found ‘lovers’, promising care and romance that Europe and America have been economical with. One only hopes the China attire, made in Russia, is not infested with either thorns or devil’s bean.
As Africa continues to revel in Russia’s ‘love-letter’ of debt pardon and grain release, it is important for the leaders to learn from the dubious act of Amarah Kennedy to prevent Russia from trading with the nakedness of Africa. Kennedy was recently arrested in Lagos State, and alleged of leaking and commercialising the nude pictures of women he was romantically involved with. Most of Kennedy’s victims were said to be widows, whose naked pictures he would post on the social media of people that know them, after which he would extort money from his victims for him to stop further popularisation of their nudity.
Africa countries’ ‘widowhood’ is as pathetic as those of Kennedy’s puppets. However, while the victimhood of the former was principally driven by politico-economic reasons, that of the latter must have been fuelled by social-biological considerations that constrain them to remarry, on the one hand, and the quest for sexual gratification that reminds them of their emotional configuration, on the other. Widows, irrespective of their ages, are imprisoned in most Nigerian societies, in a manner that suggests culpability in the death of their husbands. They are, therefore, left to secretly lick their wounds, soak their pillows unheard, and hurt within emotionally. The practice of mass marriages for widows in states in northern Nigeria is a realistically systematic way of unmaking the ‘witchcraft’ label redundantly imposed on these helpless vulnerable women.
Most unfortunately, a new widowhood has been constructed through single mothers who have been ostracised because of hoarded patriarchy, or denied filial treatments by estranged husbands. For them, they believe the stories of their ‘irresponsible’ husbands are analogous to the oxymoronic depiction of the ‘living dead’.
Africa has not yet danced through the market nude, and clothing her nakedness is a task that must be undertaken by all, as the dispositions of Russia and her likes may end up only as candies coated in poison, even as they would end up trading in our nakedness. Tinubu’s ‘elite of the elite’ should allow Nigerians breathe!
