Irish poet and playwright, Oscar Wilde, in his lowest moment in prison, drew a comparison of how he sank from being one of the greatest writers of the late 20th century, into a bisexual pedophile. Son of Anglo-Irish intellectuals, Wilde was a writer with lacerating wit. He equally dressed flamboyantly and garnished his writings in flamboyant imagery. He was however bisexual, a precursor to the creed Trump detests today. Wilde’s ordeal began when he issued a civil writ against 9th Marques of Queensberry, John Sholto Douglas, for criminal libel. John was the father of Wilde’s homo liaison, Sir Alfred Douglas. Though he won the suit, evidence from the trial made Wilde eligible for trial for gross indecency in homosexual acts. It became one of the first celebrity trials of the century. Overwhelming evidence confirmed that the writer of the famous The Picture of Dorian Gray indeed seduced teens into homosexual activities. At age 39, the court held that Wilde seduced Alphonse Conway, a boy of 16. Another teenager of same age, Walter Grainger, claimed Wilde threatened him with “very serious trouble” if he revealed their homo dalliance.
Convicted and sentenced to two years maximum penalty, Wilde was in jail from May 25, 1895 to May 18, 1897. He spent the term in Newgate Prison in London, Pentonville and Wandsworth Prisons and then to Londonto Reading Gaol. While, as prisoner, he was being moved from Wandsworth to Reading, he faced the lowest point of his life when a crowd which spotted him on the train’s platform jeered at and spat at him. In his De Profundis, also known as Letter to Sir Alfred Douglas, which he wrote in his last year in prison and published posthumously, Wilde had written: “She (his mom) and father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honored, not merely in literature, art, archeology and science, but in the public history of my own country, in its evolution as a nation. I had disgraced that name eternally. I had made it a low byword among low people. I had dragged it through the very mire. I had given it to brutes that they might make it brutal, and to fools that they might turn it into synonym for folly.”
I told the tale of Wilde’s unraveling above to illustrate how human beings and nations unravel. In the last two weeks, the world saw America unravel, its dirty entrails revealed to the world. Before now, the narrative was that, it was African and Third World despots and leaders who shared animal features with our ape ancestors. They reacted according to the stimuli of their whims and intrinsic human wickedness. They were emotive and made no effort to shroud their human passions and desires. Many African leaders have, over the century, been profiled as despots because they couldn’t tame their passions and emotions. They came across as wicked and self-centered, sometimes acting out as narcissists. No doubt a product of close to a century of colonialism, it was believed that some of these beastly leaderships the Third World produced could not be found in America. On the contrary, “God’s Own Country” was the manifestation of human purity and America epitomized the height of the purest of human character.
When a situation makes everyone equal in action, the Yoruba have allegories with which they justify it. One way they do this is to invoke the imagery of an African chickens’ pen. As a way of reducing costs of daily sustenance, most African homes maintained pens. They are enclosures within compounds where livestock or pets are kept. They serve as immediate relief from the rigour of dashing to the market for protein. At dusk, these animals, especially the local livestock, are lured from roaming round compounds into the various pens/cages, lest they become preys to reptiles. Because this practice is replicated in virtually every home, when it is time to equalize human action, it is invoked as an allegory. It illustrates a sense of similarity; that, what is done beyond the shores of individual localities is the same, irrespective of any allusion to sophistication. This is found in the aphorism, “everywhere, without exception, at dusk, hens are packed inside the pen” (ibi gbogbo l’a tií ńk’ádìye alé).
This aphorism has served as excuse for failure. It has also served as justification for horrendous human actions. It is a weak line explored to say that corruption or evil is innate in every man, no matter the clime or skin colour. Despots have invoked it to claim that their actions were normal human reactions. More importantly, the aphorism has served to legitimize and sustain that theory which says that, there is a beast in every man, apologies to Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s musical line, “…this uprising will bring out the beast in us”.
Many analysts who got sucked into the theory of American leaders’ ‘righteousness’ and Third World leaders’ beastliness, find another aphorism as justification. With it, they explain racial leadership character differences. So, they ask if it wasn’t the same rain that fell on and nurtured the bitter-leaf tree into its repulsive bitterness that also fell on the sugarcane which in turn comforts man with its sweetness (Òjò tó rọ̀ sí ewúro náà ló rọ̀ sí ìrèké). The bitter-leaf, in this case, was African leaders who were demonised for almost a century as wicked and selfish. The sugarcane is American leaders whose perceived purity lifted their countries to the zenith of positive global reckoning. This subsisted until about two weeks ago when America’s self-imposed righteousness unraveled.
Mobutu Sese Seko illustrates this bitter-leaf leadership thesis. Born Joseph-Dèsirè, he was President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1965 to 1997. Then came Robert Mugabe, who served as the president of the Republic of Zimbabwe from 1987. And Francisco Macìas Nguema, first president of Equatorial Guinea from October 12, 1968, till 1979 when he was overthrown. So also was Ahmed Sèkou Tourè, the first President of Guinea. From 1958 when he came into this position, he was there till 1984. The continent also had the likes of Abacha, Charles Taylor, Siad Barre of Somalia, Omar Al-Bashir of Sudan, Hissene Habre of Chad, Idi Amin Dada of Uganda and many more. America and the west constructed a cemetery for all of them and cast them in boulders of infamy. It must be said that virtually all these African despots claimed they did all they did to make their countries great. Like Donald Trump.
But, how were we to know that America itself was the proverbial ‘physician, heal thyself’? The last two American presidents, especially Trump, deconstructed America so badly in the eyes of the world, making them not different from Third World countries.
