Savages Among Us Who Give Thumbs-up To Joseph Conrad -By Festus Adedayo

Two separate occurrences that are gaining currency in the media space are issues which should arrest the attention of Nigerian authorities. The first is the alleged clubbing to death of an officer of the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW) in Akwa-Ibom State by a policeman and the other, a trending video of the merciless beating of a young man by soldiers for wearing an army camouflage. The two incidents point to the animalistic tendencies of uniform-wearing forces in Nigeria, a throwback from the days of military regimes.

In the second incident, a young man was so inhumanly subjected to beatings with a horse whip that he couldn’t stand on his feet. Soldiers who inflicted on him this macabre beating had among them a female. In the second episode which occurred in Uyo, policemen allegedly clubbed the man to death because his boys resisted a soldier who converted his personal car into commercial activity and thus loading passengers, a turf seen as exclusive to themselves by road transport workers.

Why the authorities have to be interested in the two episodes is that humiliation of Nigerians and this resort to barbaric practices should by now have evaporated in the mentality of Nigerian uniform-wearing forces. Nigeria cannot claim to be aping democratic practice yet flagrantly disobeying the dictates of human rights. The Chief of Army Staff and the Inspector General of Police, or whoever is in charge of purging soldiers and uniform wearers in general of their tendency to run backwards to embrace and exhibit our consanguinity with our pre-historic ancestors – the ape – should not rest on their oars in this onerous task. The rate at which our Egypt – the place of bestiality, of human desecration of humanity – still excites our brothers in uniform is legendary.

These characters remind me of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. By the way, Conrad, Polish-British novelist’s 1899 novella is a narrative voyage told by the narrator, Charles Marlow, who voyaged up the Congo River into the Congo Free State aboard a boat which was anchored on the River Thames.Conrad’s thus provided an opportunity to legitimize British imperialism and racism and create a parallel between London, his archetypal “greatest town on earth” and Africa, “places of darkness.”

As a prelude to the sanitizing of these men with hearts of darkness that I crave, can the army authorities fish out these inglorious exhibits of Conrad’s reductionist mind, make public examples of them and fumigate their darkened hearts until they conform with the heart of a typical human being living in a democratic society? It is high time we flushed out these artworks of Conrad from Nigeria.