Ajibola Ige - An Ecumenical Spirit Being the funeral oration of Nobel Laureate Professor Wole Soyinka on January 11, 2002 at the Liberty Stadium, Ibadan, for Chief Bola Ige.
THE murderers are among us. Let no one be in any doubt -
they sit among us, right within this sombre gathering that
honours the passage of a hero. There are the unwitting
collaborators whose blind politics brought this moment to
be, whose primitive notions of contestation offered up this
land of sacrificial platter. Perhaps they are contrite.
Perhaps now, they realise that they have been mere tools
in the hands of their diabolically far-sighted, deeply
calculating partners. These latter are the gloating
presences in this assemblage, mocking, ever cynical,
triumphalist. Cold bloodedly, they have begun to debate
who shall be next on the list of those whose social resolve
will always plague their waking hours, those who stand
between them and their nefarious ideologies, their internal
obsession to expropriate and waste people's material
heritage, and their immaterial but palpable will. These
murderers have been to the home of their victim - and I do
mean the real perpetrators of this crime, not their agents,
not the mindless mercenaries who pulled the trigger. These
paymasters have polluted the register of condolences with
the abomination of their names, and hypocritical
sentiments. Their doleful countenances belie the cesspit of
infamy that has invested and now passes for their minds.
The murderers are present among us in this space of
honour, albeit one of a nation's bereavement and
leave-taking. They renew themselves in the abundance of
our grief, but they fail to understand that here, at the core
of our grief-stricken hearts is a vitality that cannot be
extinguished. The stillness that they have imposed on this
form only hastens the burgeoning of a seed that he has
planted in the hearts of millions, in the hearts and will of
succeeding generations. Our tears will water that seed, and
its efflorescence will overwhelm the blight that they sought
to impose on our horizon.
I do not eulogise a saint - I know of none. I speak only of a
town-crier, a strident, sometimes intemperate witness, a
gadly even to his close associates. But no one could steal
his voice, living, and none shall steal his voice, though now
seemingly muffled by the shrouds of death. In hamlets and
villages, in private company and public institutions, in
caucuses of politicians and the assemblage of thinkers and
builders, in the pulsating nests of righteous dissidence,
conscientiously in the corridors of power, and contentiously
in the media, both on the home front and at international
gatherings, this was a voice that rang out clearly, decrying
injustice and mobilizing others, moving millions towards an
infinitive vision of the possible, the vision of human
cohabitation in mutual respect, the harmonising of diverse
communities, but only in conditions of absolute parity, only
under conditions of absolute justice. Our friend, brother
and colleague turned the accident of birth into an insurgent
force for the creation of one entity, north, west, east and
south.
Born of adventurous Yoruba parentage, raised in the far
Hausa north, he was, like many, a symbol of the potential
oneness of a rich diversity, but unlike most, he chose not to
remain a passive symbol. His maturity imbibed the vision of
a nation-builder whose concept of a family of nations had,
at its foundation, an egalitarian relationship of people. His
temperament rejected the agenda of domination - there,
this erstwhile lamb of peace roared with the rage of a
provoked lion. Ajibola Ige interracted with diverse origins,
beliefs and allegiances with a conviction that sometimes
made his own immediate associates ask themselves where
his loyalty lay in a non-dogmatic ideology that embraced
the possibility of transcending lines of division, of striving
for a goal whose end is the upliftment of society - from the
geriatric down to youths and infants. It embraced others
who shared the same direction, even when camped across
the dividing line of party allegiances. This was a
responsibility that he accepted as a fundamental mandate
of a nation's humanity, one that transcended rhetoric and
petty partisanship. Ajibola Ige was a builder of bridges.
And still, they killed him. Why? Why did they kill this man
whose battlefield lay solely in the realms of ideas, of
debate, in the skills of organisation and the ability to lead
and inspire men and women? Even children. One whose
tools of contestation would be found only in the arena of
conviction and the tenacity to pursue noble causes? Why
should they kill a man who could not kill, who could never
giver orders to kill or maim, nor would ever respond in kind
to the violators of his own humanity. Not even the most
implacable of his enemies would attribute to him this spirit
of crude retaliation. And those of us who knew him closely,
who had battled alongside him in the many convulsions that
threatened to engulf this nation, can testify to this. We can
testify to his impassioned belief in the processes of law, his
conviction that human concourse must constantly
differentiate itself from that of the beasts of the jungle by
operating through an agreed set of rules, and principles.
His induction into the International Law Commission of the
United Nations, just weeks before his death, was a
recognition so summative of his life that a short sighted,
impatience Death could only misread his opening of a new
chapter as the terminal page to an illustrious career.
Why do you imagine that he constantly sought among the
artists, was at home at their gatherings and manifestations,
why did he seek the fount of creativity to renew himself? It
was only partially as an antidote to the dehumanising
tendencies of politics - he was himself a communicant at
the altar of the Arts. Both laws and philosophy, we
sometimes forget, are suckled at the same breast of the
Muses of which the Arts are equal partakers. As Governor
of Oyo State where he was confronted with a level of
barbarism beyond imagining in the manipulation of the
1983 election, Bole Ige stuck to his belief that the rule of
law would eventually prevail, establish truth, and vindicate
the cause of the just. His allies, his associates, were
exasperated at such an immovable defence of a rampart
that was being eroded by day, minute by minute, by
cynicism and violence of the other side. This then was a
man whose reservoir of generosity insisted, against all
evidence, that his opponent should be credited with a
capacity to reflect to act justly, a capacity that would surely
elevate them above the propensities of beast and would
exercise a civilising control on their conduct. Again and
again, he conceded them grounds, gave them the benefit
of the doubt - but remained adamant in the contest of
principles. Robbed in open daylight of the mandate of the
people, he did not respond in kind or advocate violence.
This is the rare breed of the cultured politician that has
been taken from us. We must ask ourselves - why?
But we have just named the reasons, and we need look no
further. Only the specificity of the origin of this cowardly
blow is left to determine. We are a nation that kills our best.
Generosity is a tainted word. Largesse of heart is regarded
as a medical condition, like an enlarged heart, requiring
drastic intervention. Tolerance is ridiculed as the mark of
weakness. And so we kill the generous, the large of heart,
the tolerant. Even the symbol that should heal and bind the
nation together are turned into agencies of death -
including faith, piety, religion. A man of unswerving
Christian conviction who has served on the World Council
of Churches, a position that he used to battle the iniquities
of Apartheid South Africa, joining hands with a minority to
transform that body into a combative tool of liberation. Bola
Ige was, in turn, the incarnation of that liberation of the
spirit that embraced the followers of other faiths as equals
before a Supreme Deity. In this, he was twin to his
predecessor on this road to calvary, the late President of
this nation who never assumed office, Bashorun Moshood
Kashimawo Abiola MKO as we all knew him - a devout
Moslem, the Deputy leader of the Islamic Council, also
evolved into a great exemplar of like virtues, the humanistic
embodiment not merely of tolerance, but of full acceptance
of the other. Let the convergence of their convictions and
of the nature of their deaths serve as a lesson to the living.
One a Christian, the other a Moslem, both unequivocal in
their embrace of the human entirety, whatever their faiths.
If either could be faulted for the sin of intolerance, it was
indeed that of an uncompromising intolerance of the
intolerant. Neither viewed a friend, or a colleague or a
stranger through the distorting veils of religion. Yet when
they quit our midst, the nation assuages its conscience with
one non-denominational service after the other. To what
purpose?
The non-denominational service remains a ritualistic sham,
a mockery of such lives, unless it is pervaded by the true
ecumenical spirit that animated their existence. We need to
cultivate their transforming spirit of oneness, a virtue that
also defined the poet and statesman, Leopold Sedar
Senghor, who has preceded our own Bola Ige to the land of
the ancestor. It is the highest attainment to which any
profession of faith can aspire, since it transcends mere
catechism, canticles and scriptures which, whatever claims
are made, are no more than products, interpretations and
emendations of imperfect, deeply flawed humanity,
however deeply inspired. Let us bear this in mind, as we
mourn, yet again, another paraclete of the ecumenical
vision that seeks to unite all beings within the immensity of
the universal cloak of the spirit.
Let the killers among us pause and reflect. The route to the
mind is not the path of the bullets nor the path of the blade,
but the invisible, yet palpable paths of discourse that may
be arduous but ultimately guarantee the enlargement of
our private and social beings. Let the killings stop and the
intercourse of minds begin. Let these killers understand
that we do not simply lament this death, we are resolved to
extinguish the impulse that lies behind it. We are bound in
a common cause to terminate the impulse that takes our
best, our brightest. Everyday, we move closer to a
polarisation of the word into two communities - the
community of life and other - the community of death. That
death is inevitable is such a banal comment on existence
that it deserves no further avowal. When we speak of the
Party of Death therefore, we refer to those whose life
mission - often blasphemously transposed into a mandate
of religion - is not towards the enhancement of life as an
inextinguishable continuum in the consciousness of
generation after generation - but a quick, and easy
resolution in death. We speak of the Party of Death as a
mindless surrender before the challenge that confronts and
excites other with the complexities of intuition, discovery,
creativity and the social articulations that define the human
phenomenon. The feeble twitches of the killer, however
lethal, is a confession of that intense frustration, a
confession of creative impotence, an inability to extinguish
the infinite phenomenon that is life. We reject the
blasphemous who seek to play God by appropriating the
right to the measure of existence.
This is not a death in isolation. It thrusts itself outwards as
an encapsulation of the killings that have dominated our
landscape these many lamentable years. The question that
this Absence places before us is a simple one: shall we
come together and engage in a sincere dialogue, or shall
we continue to splutter through these terminal monologues
of serial violence? Those who continue to refuse this
dialogue of peoples no matter by what name it is called -
who continue to concoct untenable reasons for its
avoidance, and attribute impure motive to its advocates,
have merely chosen to concede the last word to the Party
of Death. Today it is the Ijaw, the Itshekiri or Urhobo,
tomorrow is the turn of Sagamu, Agege. Umuleri, Aguleri
have been there before, Modakeke now, Osun to follow
soon after, not forgetting the Ijaws and the Ilaje. Kano will
not be outdone when Kaduna has laid claim to hierachical
preferment in the Party of Death. And then Jos, the ancient
ecumenical city of Jos goes up in flames, is awash in
torrents of blood, while Tivs and Jukuns meet at the
abbatoir of mutual repudiation. If only this death could be
the last, this death that we own so intimately, if only the
death of Bola Ige, one that we may call a true 'peoples
death' could be a culmination of this ascent of the bestial
pedigree in us but - I fear not. I gravely fear that this will not
be the last.
How can it be, when a human outrage that takes place
thousands of miles away is read and preached as a divine
mandate to pour out into the street, desecrate the places
of worship of others and augment the distant tally of death
with the local slaughter of innocents. No, I fear it cannot be.
Not when those who have had the unearned privilege to
rule this land before, those who treasonably seized the
reins of leadership of this nation, continue to ignite the
dormant flames of zealotry, compound their career of
infamy by fanning those flames with divisive declamations,
affirming what we have always asserted - that they are
closet fanatics, wedded to a hegemonic agenda, that theirs
has ever been an opportunism that masqueraded as a
social reformist zeal.. Now, disrobed of the mantle of power,
they reveal the parlousness of their self-vaunting
leadership integrity, the emptiness of their commitment to
the concept of this nation, indeed the hollowness of their
very pretensions to a common humanity. In the midst of the
killing orgies of the besotted, we sought to hear
statesmanlike words that rebuked, that stoutly denounced
these acts of insanity. What we heard, instead - and by
which we are still assailed till today - was the manifesto of
the Party of Death, the language of human alienation and
even, of treasonable incitement. The very air waves are
demeaned by the indelicacy of their public interventions. In
our silence, in the feebleness of our response, we set the
stage, we nerve the hand towards this definitive moment,
the extinction of a voice of tolerance, of equity and the
re-harmonisation of a much violated community. Behold the
resonance box of one among the foremost, in life an
anathema to the purveyors of hate and intolerance, now
entombed in the mortal frame of Ajibola Ige, our friend and
comrade.
Someone has publicly described the assassination of our
brother as this nation's equivalent of the calamity that was
inflicted by human hands in distant America, whose
symbolic towers of a complex human concourse were
crushed, entombing thousand of lives of different
nationalities, races, sexes, ages, political persuasions and
religious faiths. The comparison may sound hyperbolic but,
when considered closely, as an exercise in degrees of
traumatisation, it is not really far-fetched. Ajibola Ige can
indeed be seen as a twin promontory of Political
Intelligence and Creative Spirit that has dominated the
national landscape of our times, and animated its search
for a cohesive identity. His political estate is vast and
demanding, a network that reaches into virtually every
corner of this nation space, and in every field. It is an
estate that cannot be inherited by any one individual, yet
must be embraced as a bequest of duty and nurtured with
care and commitment. We must all prepare to secure
portions of that estate as dictated by our varied political
temperaments and measure of commitment, tend it
carefully, yet within one collective and cohesive context that
answers the vision of Bola's fecund mind and
organisational skills. His constituency was vast, and even
so much our will expand to embrace and nurture that
constituency.
To the unrepentant hegemonists, the claimants of a divine
mandate of governance who sought to drag a nation down
to their normal habitation in the pit of perdition, you, Ajibola
Ige, reached down and said - Take my hand. They obeyed.
You hauled them up to a plateau of equity, saying, walk
beside me. But they replied, we shall walk with you, but we
shall dictate the destination. At which you smiled and
replied: I said: take my hand, not my voice. And that is why
they killed you. That was why they conspired and killed a
man of peace, a believer in the powers of the mind, a living
exhortation of faith in the triumph of the human Spirit. That
is why they killed a man of politics who identified with the
Arts and creativity as an integrated process of life and
community, as an expression of the cultured self, of which
he was himself a living paradigm. This is why they killed a
builder, a pathfinder through the labyrinths of man-made
divisiveness. But they cannot kill hope, nor can they
extinguish the conviction and a faith in the future that burns
within our hearts.
Ajibola Ige, suun re o. You have earned a place of rest
among those giants who, mysteriously, emerge from a land
of midgets to astound and challenge the world. Farewell.
Walk tall among the ancestors.
Guides
