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| Adelakun |
If by now, faux historian
and professional agitator, Femi Fani-Kayode, has not responded to the rejoinders
of Professors Banji Akintoye and Farooq Kperogi on his Yoruba identity
flippancy, we can conclude he has nothing further to say and move on to drawing
some lessons from the brouhaha of “Yoruba” and its etymology. In some ways,
Fani-Kayode’s attention-seeking ways represent the flawed ethics of the present
milieu. We live in a post-truth world; the traditional structures that
regulated popular inanities have broken down and given way to the reign of
alternative facts.
There are two
lessons that I took away from the Yoruba/Yariba episode. First is the role that
the media played in helping Fani-Kayode brew his pot of mischief. There was no
other apparent motive about his claim that the Fulani bequeathed the Yoruba
their name other than troublemaking, and it fits into a larger pattern of his
anti-Fulani sentiments. He did not cite any source for his discovery, and the
way the more astute scholars dislodged his argument shows that there was no
rigour invested in his ideas before he hit the streets. He just wanted to
arouse the ethnic chauvinists permanently resident on social media as he is
wont to do. Judging by how tribal irredentists crawled out of the woodwork to
feast on his historical dabble, he pretty much succeeded.
In these present times,
it would have been mere wishful thinking to expect the media to have ignored
him. Before, the maxim used to summarise media reporting was, “If it bleeds, it
leads.” These days, what leads is what trends. Once some “gist” ignites on
social media, it becomes newsy and gets reported in even serious newspapers.
With digital technology, traditional media lost much of the primacy of its
function as agenda-setters and instead plays reactionary roles to the agenda
set from the social media networks. Coupled with the spectre of fake news,
troll farms that skewer the realities of unsuspecting targeted populations, and
the bewildering absurdity of deepfakes, the traditional press seems to have
settled to the role of agenda-moderators instead. What they still cannot afford
is to yield their advantage of a core of trained professionals who can source
well-researched and edited news items to the mercenaries of social media.
By way of an example, we
can borrow from the USA and their reporting of their President, Donald Trump.
If there is something Trump is renowned for by now, it is his incredible
capacity to tell needless lies barefaced. Each time he comes on TV, you can
expect he will leave you open-mouthed with his falsehoods. The American media,
finally worn out from helping him broadcast his mendacities, reconsidered their
ethical ideals of objectivity and neutrality. Journalists were traditionally
trained to strive towards dispassionate reporting and not make themselves the
news. But they found it was naïve to be passive while the president used them
to broadcast blatant lies that are hurtful to other people. So, they rethought
their tactics of reporting the president’s live events – “lawn chats,” press
conferences, and rallies – and withdrew the courtesy of remaining objective with
him. Now, they fact-check Trump right away. As he is making another false claim
on live TV, they are also pulling up a sidebar on the screen to dispute his
lies for their viewers. Yes, calling out the president that way may shift the
notion of “objectivity” for reporters, but they cannot afford to be uncritical
of their roles in sustaining what remains of their country’s democratic ethos.
There is a lesson in that
drift for reporters who source their news from social media fora. It is
important they be circumspect, so they not become the handmaidens of “social
media influencers” whose desperate need to trend and accumulate more followers
lead them to say outrageous things. There should be more reflexivity in their
process, so they are not complicit in helping mischief-makers broadcast
garbage.
For instance, the
reporters who went to town with Fani-Kayode’s story did not bother to run his
claim with serious history scholars before publishing it as “news.” Even the
ones who did a follow-up report consulted some “Yoruba elders,” and asked them
to comment as if the issue had any merit in the first place. The other problem
with that approach is that they put some of the respondents on the spot with a
question that is outside their area of primary competence. If the media had to
report Fani-Kayode’s story because they thought it was newsy, they could have
consulted actual historians who have devoted their lives to studying these
issues and used the historians’ informed opinions to bracket the account. That
way, we will not risk combusting our society with wild tales concocted to sow
the seeds of disaffection in an already fragile polity.
The second lesson I took
away from the episode was triggered by how much pleasure I derived from the
beauty of erudition that both Akintoye and Kperogi displayed. After the moment
passed, I was struck by the realisation that their adept scholarship might also
be a shrinking enterprise. Between the two of them, they made a valid case for
why society needs to invest in the knowledge of history with the same passion
we advocate the sciences and the social sciences. They also remind us what our
society is about to lose if we do not favour studies such as history and the
rest of the humanities.
These days, it is not
uncommon to hear someone advocate striking off humanities courses from the
university curriculum because they have no more relevance to our society. They,
of course, base their observation on the fewer opportunities available to those
trained with the set skills that the humanities imbue. The universities (public
ones, mostly) keep producing them, but when they fail to find employment
opportunities that match their areas of strength, they end up in the bank as
tellers. Things are so bad that many of the leading private universities –
which will be graduating the bulk of our children in the future – do not even
offer courses like history, philosophy, languages and linguistics, fine arts,
classics, and religious studies.
The few private
universities that offer history as a course shore it up with studies of “international
affairs.” That likely means the history their students learn is oriented
towards foreign affairs (not much considering Nigeria contributes zero to
global diplomacy!) These days, some university vice chancellors want to build
airports, while some others advocate the development of courses on
entrepreneurship. Underlying the persistence of the call for raising
entrepreneurial students is the presumption that the complex problems of
economic growth and development that confront Nigeria can be tackled if the
university curriculum privileges a managerial manifesto.
While the present reality
is that the knowledge enterprise itself is subject to the push and pull of
neoliberalist forces, we should also be mindful that our failure to train
historians means that we are undoing ourselves. We are building a future where
we will always be at the mercy of fly by night historians who scour limited
archives in search of knowledge with which they can cause a ruckus. It can
never augur well for a culture that fails to build the life of the mind, the
thinkers whose thoughts uphold the ethical pillars of society.
Just imagine for a minute
that there was neither Akintoye nor Kperogi who has devoted their lives to
studying history and have cultivated their scholarship long ahead of
Fani-Kayode to intervene as ebulliently as they did. Who knows the kind of
sentiment-mongering and antagonisms that would have accompanied Fani-Kayode’s
faux history by now?
Adelakun, a respected columnist, writes for Punch
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