Fwd: Herbert Wigwe : Night of Tributes
cornelius...@gmail.com
Salimonu Kadiri
Sent: 08 March 2024 21:31
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Herbert Wigwe : Night of Tributes
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Oluwatoyin Adepoju
I admired the little I knew about how he amassed his fortune as a technocrat and the fact that he had recently opened a university, Wigwe University.
Probing the source of a person's wealth is valid, in my view, but coupling such probing with denigrating the value of wealth in relation to death ignores fundamental realities of human life.
What achievements follow anyone into the grave? Accomplishments in scholarship, in kindness, in building people, in creating or sustaining institutions?
Yet, unlike the thesis of David Bennatar's Better Never to Have Been Born, people struggle to make the most of this equivalent of a bird flying swiftly in and out of a lighted room in the dark of night, as Bede describes human life in his history of Christianity in England.
Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning describes the effort to make life meaningful within the perplexity of the unknown as the core of human life.
I know, however, that there are various legitimate routes to wealth in Nigeria because I have seen them in action.
Wealth accumulation, however, is a skill, not one that everyone is able to cultivate.
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cornelius...@gmail.com
Re - ”…fundamental realities of human life.”
“When beggars die, there are no comets seen; The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”
We could adapt the import of the metaphors here, to suit the occasion; it was no mean feat or ordinary occurrence to witness the former Emir of Kano crying while paying tribute, celebrating Herbert Wigwe’s life.
Laudable: The late Herbert Wigwe was rich and a philanthropist; those who paid tribute remember the good that he did while in this world.
In another sensitive soul, it produced In Memoriam A.H.H.
As Baba Kadiri can confirm, I told him that I was not feeling happy with the way he concluded his response to Herbert Wigwe’s tragic departure, his pious but painful reminder that “we came to this world with nothing and will not take anything with us when we die” - words, which, mind you, are not radically different from Genesis 3: 17 - 19 culminating in The Almighty’s harsh rebuke of Adam and all his descendants, forever and ever :
“For dust you are,
And to dust you shall return.”
Isn’t it with those words that some of our dearly departed are dispatched to the Hereafter, with a solemn, ”ashes to ashes, dust to dust” to await the resurrection?
I might be going out on a limb here, that pre-colonial and pre-Christian missionary Western Nigeria (Church of England) and Eastern Nigeria (Holy Roman Catholic) must have been entities that are very different from what we have today, so that Baba Kadiri can still say with a straight face that there were no ashawos in Nigeria before the White Man came, that prior to the arrival of Robinson Crusoe and Tarzan and the Missionaries and their ilk, there was no prostitute, no prostitution and no word designating the aforementioned, in the Yoruba language - and yet Christian Missionary and Bible ethics must have impacted our societies to an inordinate degree for Baba Kadiri to be saying, like Chinua Achebe's good old Winterbottom, “we came to this world with nothing and will not take anything with us when we die”
Isn’t it the same Protestant Ethic that animates resentment towards the nouveau riche and
some of the country’s most eminent Pentecostal Pastors who you must admit are very philanthropic in dispensing the “Word of God” and lubricating the machinery by which to spread the word through tithes and other donations?
If the story of Jesus and the rich man were to be genuinely taken to heart and all of Nigeria's billionaires, millionaires and other rich men and women were to obey Jesus' injunction ”Go and sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me”, then the poverty statistics would be evened out overnight.
I asked ProfesorGoogle, “Does God Say it's not OK to be rich?”
Sadly, talk is cheap and even a mustard seed of faith is great, but I doubt that Baba Kadiri or Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju or any of the big-time Pentecostal pastors, bishops, archbishops, cardinals or popes would be willing to do just in order to, after the burial, “have treasure in heaven”
cornelius...@gmail.com
Corrections. Pendant crossing some tees and dotting some ies.
With all the talk about “ Knowledge Production”, isn’t it about time that the postcolonial big wigs, big grammar people produce their own Oxford version of a reliable Nigerian English Dictionary? It should be a profitable affair - even Afrobeat is a big market with a whole lotta oyibo specialists and madmen thinking it’s no disgrace wanting to grab their Ph.D. in Nigerian English, in the same way (colonial complex) that a servile Farooq Montesquieu (I can’t think of a better surname) would like to be appointed King of the Castle by excelling in Chaucer at Oxford University, but not in Francophone’s Afro-Caribbean, like Abiola Irele. Surely, there's no harm in that comrades?
The corrections in question
# Ashawo which translates into Prostitute in the King’s English. What’s the plural in Yoruba and how is that noun pluralised in Nigerian English? Maybe I should ask Baba Kadiri? I’m asking those who know because he has already told me that it’s something that cannot be bought, that Street Lady can only be “ rented”
# Should read: ” Sadly, talk is cheap and even a mustard seed of faith is great, but I doubt that Baba Kadiri or Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju or any of the big-time Pentecostal pastors, bishops, archbishops, cardinals or popes would be willing to do just that ( “Go and sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me ( Jesus)“ in order to, after the burial, “have treasure in heaven”
It’s also doubtful that any of these people or e.g. Joe Biden would be prepared to do just that in exchange for peace or “treasure in heaven”
On a lighter note in response to Adepoju’s existential concerns, there's always Monty Python's The Meaning of Life or better still, their Life of Brian ( almost wrote “Brain”)
But for anyone who is really serious, there’s ASHTAVAKRA GITA ( translated by Hari Prasad Shastri)
cornelius...@gmail.com
Very last correction :
Pedant not “pendant” or pen-dant crossing some tees and dotting some ies.
When it comes to lexicography, the problems are many. There’s always The Devil’s Dictionary composed by Ambrose Bierce, the same Luciferian that issued The New Decalogue.
When it comes to lexicography, indeed the problems are many: Here’s a star essay on
The Problem with Defining Antisemitism (the New Yorker Version of The Problem with Defining Antisemitism according to one Eyal Press.
BTW, when it comes to the definition of antiSemitism I’d like to hear the full monty, the definitive Michigan version according to Emeritus Professor of the Mother Tongue, Kenneth W. Harrow: he could do that please, or forever hold his peace or piece…
Very last last correction: There are many transitions of ASHTAVAKRA GITA apart from the one in my possession, translated by Hari Prasad Shastri)
Salimonu Kadiri
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>