Nigerian University Confraternities Versus Herdsmen And Bandits -By Chibuike Obi

One indication of the level of mass psychosis that the contraption Nigeria induces in its citizens is the phenomenon of members of only-male confraternities composing songs about how rugged and strong they are while being so cognitively dissociated that they can’t question themselves or their university, zonal, regional, and national leaders- their Capoons, Ibakas, Grand Eyes, Kpois, Skull Executioners, Supreme Pontiffs, Dons, Jurist Fathers- why they can’t employ their ruggedness and strength in fighting killer herdsmen and marauding bandits wantonly killing and maiming their brothers and sisters in Southern Nigeria where confraternities originated from and still dominate. Nor do the mass of their members question why their many socially and politically prominent regional and national leaders cannot leverage their supposed martial prowess and numerical strength in militant activism and rebellion against corruption and oppression by Nigerian politicians and rulers

Oh, wait. The members of the Pyrates and Bucaneer confraternities sometimes compose songs against government corruption and bad leadership, which is risible, if they think it in any way discomfits Nigerian politicians. They certainly know that it doesn’t discomfit Nigerian politicians. So their minstrelsy is on a par with the non-existent effect their hosting of lectures, conferences, seminars, and symposia has on corruption and bad leadership in Nigeria.

On the devastations of the herdsmen and bandits and the bad leadership of our rulers, ALL confraternity members are reduced like the rest of us Lubbers and Jewmen to impotent lamentations.

From the very first Nigerian confraternity (Pyrates in 1952) to the latest street corner gang that calls itself a confraternity, none have shown themselves capable of living up to their official mottos of social activism against injustice, oppression, and corruption.

It shouldn’t be surprising though, because performativism and virtue signalling are the essence of liberalism which a pioneer Nigerian confraternity founder like Wole Soyinka embodied. That’s why the Pyrates that Soyinka co-founded with six other men who espouse the same liberal ideology, virtue-signal bold and principled militancy by composing and mocking bad leaders in catchy songs that the bad leaders probably enjoy. Even though Soyinka’s nauseating lovefest with alleged drug lord Tinubu and confirmed war criminal Barack Obama should now tell any reasonable person that the reputation for militant radicalism that he acquired from his writing and the days he held up a radio station at gunpoint was a cover for virtue-signalling milquetoast liberalism.

Formal Western education, which underpinned the British colonial education system in Nigeria, which is still more or less the post-independence Nigerian education system to date, has had a curiously schizophrenic character, since at least Greek and Roman times. It has always championed reason, freedom, and autonomy but its practical and pervasive effects have usually been unreason, slavery, and dependence in the everyday life of the masses in the societies it has influenced. Western education influenced by its Enlightenment legacy birthed the ideology of liberalism that was supposed to be the keystone for governing and ruling all societies across time and space.

Liberalism is ideal in politics and social culture. But in political economy, it gives rise to the kind of schizophrenia where Western liberals like the founders of the US democracy were wealthy slave owners. This schizophrenia was manifest in the UK as its leaders were enslaving and colonising Africa and Asia to enrich the economy of their country while perfecting the institutions of political liberal democracy in their country. The British claimed they were shouldering the white man’s burden in tutoring the barbaric natives they found in the crazy patchwork countries, which they created in their competition with the French in West Africa, in response to accusations that they were merely enslaving and colonising the natives for their benefit.

One of the craziest of the patchwork countries that the British created in their colonizing mission was Nigeria. The British created Nigeria as a vehicle for looting and exploiting raw materials and opening up captive overseas markets. After conquering and pacifying the innumerable ethnic nationalities they found in the region they named Nigeria, they set about looting the country. They needed to loot at minimum expense to themselves so they had to educate some of the natives to aid them in their exploitation of the colonies. It is the educational aspect of their colonialism that concerns us here because the education offered to Nigerians further culturally degraded, mentally shackled and colonized them.

The literary and humanities aspect of Nigerian colonial education centred on the glories and triumphs of British and Occidental culture. African culture was usually demonised, if and when taught at all; and it was taken for granted that there was virtually nothing worthy of emulation and respect in African culture, history, and society.

That explains why when seven university undergraduates,( later-in-life Professors Wole Soyinka, Muyiwa Awe, and Messers Ralph Okpara, Aig-Imuokhuede, Sylvanus Egbuche, Pius Oleghe, and Natheniel Oyelola), at the then University College Ibadan decided to form a socially activist confraternity dedicated to fighting “tribalism”, class privilege, elitism, moribund convention, cant, institutional decay and corruption, they drew inspiration, themes, and motifs mainly from British and European culture and history.

It might be seen as a perhaps curious quirk of the mentality of these young men that the themes and motifs they chose were from the violent and murderous 16th and 17th-century history of British sea robbers and pirates. Maybe they hadn’t fully outgrown that boyhood Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn stage of fantasizing and revelling as swashbuckling heroes in imaginary battles. One would have thought that as the pioneer Nigerian beneficiaries of the great liberal humanistic British education, they could have chosen crusading figures of reason and freedom in British history such as Tom Paine and John Wilkes, instead of fictionalised high-sea robbers. But they were still boys and boys will be boys. Though, of course, for these young men, the violence and murder of the pirates were to be figuratively used by them in their social activism against the evils of society. That’s why they spelt pirates as pyrates and claimed that they wanted to co-opt the chivalrous code of the pirates in their dealings with the supposedly weaker sex and the fight against injustice.

However, the fact that these young men chose motifs and themes almost exclusively from British and European rather than African history reveals the alienating and culturally degrading character of British colonial education.

A remarkable example of how British colonialism had so alienated and traumatized these young undergraduates is given on the website of the Pyrates confraternity aka National Association of Seadogs. In a stunning display of these young mens’ complete lack of dignity and self-consciousness as black African conquered and humiliated by a racist, exploitative foreign power, they gave this as their reasons for choosing the names of foreign pirates, (for example, Captain Blood- Wole Soyinka and Long John Silver- Muyiwa Awe)– “…Explained simply, tribalism and nepotism in Nigeria, at the time and now, facilitated by easy identification associated with names from various tribes. To ensure the disappearance of tribal identity as a source of identification, everyone who joins the organization is given a name from which it is impossible to discern either tribal or even national identity. This practice also applied to places where the organization developed a presence…”

It is impossible to describe the staggering lack of self-awareness in this statement. Young men whose parents had witnessed the ravaging, conquest, and degradation of their culture by the British enthusiastically admit to taking up names from the cultures of their parents’ conquerors to ensure the disappearance of their “tribal” and national identities! And Soyinka is called a pan-Africanist! These young men were from the Yoruba, Edo, Igbo, and other Nigerian ethnic nationalities that had as much right as the English, French, and other Western European nations to be nation-states. But these young men and the so-called anti-colonial pre- and post-Independence Nigerian leaders had implicitly accepted the British colonizing logic of denigrating Nigeria’s ethnic nationalities as mere tribes that were too politically and culturally unsophisticated to be nation-states.

Ironically, Franz Fanon’s book Black Skin, White Masks came out in 1952, the same year the Pyrates confraternity was founded.

Fanon’s famous book which psychoanalyses how European colonialism and racism alienate and traumatize black Africans into identifying with European culture at the expense of their black identity would have been invaluable in showing these young men how deeply mentally colonized they were despite their abhorence and resistance to the surface ills that colonialism had wrought in the Nigerian colony. Certainly, though, the mostly white lecturers who taught Soyinka and his group wouldn’t have recommended a truly revolutionary black writer in their syllabus!

Practically the only aspect of African culture the founding Pyrates incorporated into their confraternity was music (singing, drumming, and dancing). Confraternities like Eiye and Black Axe (Neo-Black Movement) which broke away from the Pyrates or were formed in reaction to the early excesses and high-handedness of the Pyrates, incorporated more African elements. But the overall ethos of all of them was European.

In retrospect, it should not have been surprising that these fraternities would eventually become violent towards themselves, non-member students, the staff of university campuses, and the general public. An exclusively male university fraternity culture founded on hierarchical, quasi-martial and paramilitary principles- which even if the martiality was supposed to benefit humanity- will find it almost impossible not to derail into toxic and bellicose masculinity. (Examples of these kinds of trajectories abound in American college fraternities and the Mensur culture in German universities).

And that’s exactly what happened. Inter and intra-confraternity fights eventually became so violent that the Pyrates were forced, at least publicly, to close their university branches; and the dictator IBB and subsequent Nigerian rulers found university confraternity members a handy army in brutally suppressing both militant and peaceful activism by students and university teachers on university campuses. By the middle and late 1990s, most of the confraternities had evolved into criminal gangs (generally called secret cults by Nigerians) involved in organised crime in Nigeria and abroad.

An intriguing fact that seems to have been little thought about or researched is that other British, French, and Portuguese colonies in Africa did not have this phenomenon of university confraternities that evolved into criminal gangs. The AI tool, Grok, gave this reason for this interesting fact-“Other African universities lacked the same combination of historical catalysts, intellectual leadership, and permissive environments to foster similar groups. Additionally, stricter institutional controls, differing cultural contexts, and alternative forms of student activism in countries like Ghana, Kenya, or South Africa prevented the development of confraternity-like organisations.”

Whatever may be the reason for other African universities not developing confraternites like Nigeria, what is not in doubt is that Nigeria is the numerically largest and most unwieldly of all the European creations in black Africa and that must surely have had something to do with how Nigerians as a social group compared to other African countries.

The process of creating the contraption, Nigeria, may have economically, morally, psychologically, and intellectually impoverished Nigerians more than other colonies in Africa; with one of the key agents of intellectual impoverishment being of course the Nigerian education system, especially at the higher level. One significant fact that may support this line of reasoning is that Nigerians, whether educated in Nigeria or abroad, almost invariably turn out to be performative and virtue-signalling liberal artists like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and J.P. Clark; intellectually light-weight political leaders like Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo, Tafawa Balewa, and Ahmadu Bello; and class-reductionist, doctrinaire leftists and liberals like Okwudiba Nnoli, Edwin Madunagu, and Stanley Macebuh. Edwin Madunagu, a full professor of Mathematics, is the perfect illustration of how shallow and removed from international standards, Nigerian intellectual culture is, even in the hard sciences. Professor Madunagu wrote a mathematically illiterate article defending Professor Chike Obi’s (no relation to the present author) proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Obi’s proof was wrong. The theorem was proved by Professor Andrew Wiles, formerly of Princeton University in the US.

Nigeria never seems to produce thinkers, leaders, and artists like Amilcar Cabral, Samir Amin, Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, Ngugi wa’Thiongo, Franz Fanon, Fred Hampton and Huey Newton of the Black Panthers, and the Latin American leaders of the Tupamaro movement.

This lack of solid intellectual and political leadership has turned Nigeria into a country where grown men and women think like three-year-old children.

A prime example of infantile thinking in full-grown highly educated adults is the pathetic case of Nigerian Catholic bishops adopting Pray For Nigeria In Distress, in addition to press statements and pastoral letters, as the exclusive means of resistance and rebellion against the tyranny of IBB and Abacha. While their counterparts in Latin America, inspired by socialist and far left-influenced Liberation Theology, were engaged in armed insurrection that eventually toppled the Western-backed dictators in their countries.

Nigerian university confraternities pride themselves on their hierarchical structure (another telling example of the cryptofascism of liberalism wherever it is practised). But the major problem with hierarchy in organizations is that it fosters the herd instinct in members even when they may be physically courageous. That’s why members of Nigerian university confraternities can be physically courageous enough to torture intending members horrendously when initiating them and savagely fight themselves like jungle animals but are meek and quiescent in Nigerian politics. Nigerian university intellectual culture, which is mostly derivative, and hence an appendage of Western intellectual culture, is the reason why these confraternities cannot transform their organizations into intellectually rigorous, revolutionary organizations, like the Black Panthers and the Tupamaros.

The hierarchical structure of confraternities, along with the long-prevailing conditions of intellectual aridity, philistinism, and crass materialism of Nigerian universities and the general Nigerian society is what ensures that these confraternities remain laser-focused on their core competencies- which are organized crime, murdering and maiming themselves and innocent bystanders, philandering, and heavy drinking. These confraternities also engage in image laundering peripheral activities such as hosting symposia, conferences, and lectures on Nigeria’s problems, public philanthropy, issuing press statements, opinion articles and essays in the media that lambast corrupt Nigerian rulers, and composing songs that mock and lampoon the same leaders.

One would have thought that all-male confraternities who claim their ethos is against cant, convention, conformism, oppression, and social injustice and who never tire of singing about their ruggedness (“Ahoy! Rugged Sailor, Alora! Awumen, Aye! Axeman, Aro! Mate…”) would surely do more than twiddle their thumbs and lament impotently, like mere Lubbers and Jewmen, in the face of herdsmen and bandits murdering, maiming, and raping across the land.

The inability of Nigerian university confraternities to meaningfully tackle the existential menace of herdsmen and bandits while being physically courageous in butchering themselves in meaningless inter-confraternity blood feuds quite simply proclaims to the world that they have the courage of animals but lack the moral courage that makes one truly human.

In simple words, they are just animals without having the animals’ excuse for engaging in violence for basic survival.

Chibuike Obi, a freelance journalist based in Niger State, can be reached at ojionu@hotmail.com or on Twitter @chibuikeobi19 or Facebook as @chibuike.obi.5059