The
article started like so many, of recent times.
It was yet another sad, sordid and grisly tale of domestic
terrorism. It was Christmas day
2011. It happened in Nigeria. Furthermore, because it took place in
Africa—committed by Africans against other Africans—it likely would not get
much mention in the western mainstream media.
That doesn’t mean that there weren’t international dimensions, with potentially
global implications, however. Americans
should take heed. Sometimes we can learn
important and relevant lessons from far and distant places.
Nigeria
is a very big and extremely diverse country, situated on the coast of West
Africa. With a population of roughly 160
million people, it is the 10th largest country in the world. Much like the US, it is also a democracy,
consisting of many different ethnic groups and languages (many more than the
US, in fact!). It has a federal
government consisting of 36 states. The coordinated
Christmas day attacks—perpetrated by a group called “Boko Haram”—took place
spread over many hundreds of kilometers, in three different locations in the
country: Madalla, in Niger State; Jos, in
Plateau State; and Damaturu, in Yobe State.
Nigeria in Context of
Africa and the World
Figure:
Nigeria in global geographic context.
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Location_Nigeria_AU_Africa.svg
The
article went on to describe the deep hurt, the pain, and the outrage caused by
this terrible incident. It provided a
very short list of those prominent persons who went on record to publicly
condemn it. The excerpt here, culled
from a larger article, from the Associated Press, starts with a quote from the
African Union director, Jean Ping. I will
make use of an extended section of this AP article, in order to highlight a
certain point about how people think about things like terrorism. Please note the framing of the article (look
for any recurring themes), and how they are presented here. Please consider how certain issues may be
brought to light, even as others may be masked.
The African Union also condemned the attacks and pledged to
support Nigeria in its fight against terrorism.
"Boko Haram's continued acts of terror and cruelty and
absolute disregard for human life cannot be justified by any religion or
faith," said a statement attributed to AU commission chairman Jean Ping.
On Sunday, a bomb also exploded amid gunfire in the central
Nigeria city of Jos and a suicide car bomber attacked the military in the
nation's northeast. Three people died in those assaults.
After the bombings, a Boko Haram spokesman using the nom de guerre
Abul-Qaqa claimed responsibility for the attacks in an interview with The Daily
Trust, the newspaper of record across Nigeria's Muslim north. The sect has used
the newspaper in the past to communicate with public.
"There will never be peace until our demands are met,"
the newspaper quoted the spokesman as saying. "We want all our brothers
who have been incarcerated to be released; we want full implementation of the
Sharia system and we want democracy and the constitution to be suspended."
Boko Haram has carried out increasingly sophisticated and bloody
attacks in its campaign to implement strict Shariah law across Nigeria. The
group, whose name means "Western education is sacrilege" in the local
Hausa language, is responsible for at least 504 killings this year alone,
according to an Associated Press count.
Last year, a series of Christmas Eve bombings in Jos claimed by
the militants left at least 32 dead and 74 wounded. The group also claimed
responsibility for the Aug. 26 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in
Nigeria's capital Abuja that killed 24 people and wounded 116 others.
While initially targeting enemies via hit-and-run assassinations
from the back of motorbikes after the 2009 riot, violence by Boko Haram now has
a new sophistication and apparent planning that includes high-profile attacks
with greater casualties.
That has fueled speculation about the group's ties as it has
splintered into at least three different factions, diplomats and security
sources say. They say the more extreme wing of the sect maintains contact with
terror groups in North Africa and Somalia.
Targeting Boko Haram has remained difficult, as sect members
are scattered throughout northern Nigeria and the nearby countries of Cameroon,
Chad and Niger.
Source: (AP) http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AF_NIGERIA_VIOLENCE?SITE=CAANG&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
The last paragraph from this excerpt, shown
immediately above, is crucial to what I will discuss next. It states that Boko Haram “sect members” are
scattered throughout northern Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, and Niger.
Those four countries converge at a place commonly
referred to as the “Lake Chad Basin.” A quick search on the Internet, via Wikipedia displayed the following map.
Lake Chad comes with a long and interesting (and more
recently “tragic”) history. Like most of
Africa, the vast majority of people who live and work in this region have
traditionally worked in agriculture—farming and fishing, in this case. Furthermore, over many, many centuries they
had come to rely on the hydrological features of Lake Chad for their routine agricultural
practices. An important—and I would
argue “missing”—piece of the social history of the Lake Chad Basin is worth
noting here. You see, the “farmers” and
“fishermen” of Lake Chad can no longer conduct farming in quantities sufficient
to sustain the local population.
This begs an important question, with potentially
disturbing implications: What happens to
otherwise strong and healthy young men in a given place, when they can no
longer work to support themselves, their families, and their way of life? What can history teach us about such
things?
For many decades now, the human population in
this region has been steadily increasing, while the water supply from the Lake
Chad has been steadily decreasing. What
follows, below, is a simple time-series graphic, from the United Nations, that
will demonstrate some of the current crisis in the Basin.
Lake Chad is drying up.
The size of Lake Chad has increased and shrunk
at regular intervals. Increasing aridity in the Sahel area and more demand for
freshwater for irrigation may however entail that Lake Chad will continue shrinking.
Lake Chad varies in extent between the rainy and dry seasons, from 50,000 to
20,000 km2. Precise boundaries have been established between Chad,
Nigeria, Cameroon, and Niger. Sectors of the boundaries that are located in the
rivers that drain into Lake Chad have never been determined, and several
complications are caused by flooding and the appearance or submergence of
islands. A similar process on the Kovango River between Botswana and Namibia
led to a military confrontation between the two states.
Climate change exacerbates the drying up of
already arid zones in Africa. Vorosmarty and Moore (1991) have documented the
potential impacts of impoundment, land-use change, and climatic change on the
Zambezi and found that they can be substantial. Cambula (1999) has shown a
decrease in surface and subsurface runoff of five streams in Mozambique,
including the Zambezi, under various climate change scenarios. For the Zambezi
basin, simulated runoff under climate change is projected to decrease by about
40% or more. Growing water scarcity, increasing population, degradation of
shared freshwater ecosystems, and competing demands for shrinking natural
resources distributed over such a huge area involving so many countries have
the potential for creating bilateral and multilateral conflicts (Gleick, 1992).
The above quote is from the United Nations
Environment Programme, which has been tracking the creeping environmental
crisis in the Lake Chad Basin for many years now. Again, the last sentence in the excerpt above
is key: “. . . shrinking natural
resources distributed over such a huge area involving so many countries have
the potential for creating bilateral and multilateral conflicts.”
What the last sentence didn’t mention, above, is
the capacity to create “unilateral” or “internal” or “fratricidal”
conflict. Sadly, it is not uncommon for
human beings to turn on each other, in order to seek a solution for their declining
resource predicaments, irrespective of national boundaries. Sometimes the boundaries are not national at
all. Sometimes they are ethnic.
Sometimes they are religious. Rwanda in
the early 1990s was an example of a deep ethnic cleavage. Nigeria today is an example of an emergent,
and potentially deep, religious cleavage.
There is another factor to consider, however. Each country—Rwanda for the 1990s and Nigeria
now in the second decade of 2000s—has suffered from a creeping ecological and demographic crisis. That crisis, in the minds of far too many
political and social leaders, has often gone misdiagnosed and misunderstood for
far too long.
This is not to say, of course, that human beings
are not capable of causing problems for other human beings—far from it. There’s an old Nigerian saying: “To ask people to live together is to ask
them to quarrel.” Instead, what I am
saying here is that not all human problems can be strictly isolated to the
world of human social relations. Instead
of constantly looking toward “other people” as the immediate locus of one’s own
problem, in many instances it is better to cast ones’ gaze toward the rivers,
the skies, the mountains, and the forests.
I believe that my own African ancestors once knew a little something
about all of this. It is often in these natural
places (often referred to by the ancient ones as “sacred places”) where the
root of many social conflicts can be found.
However, it seems modern humans have been socialized to “ignore” or
“discount” Nature, in her powerful capacity to drive human social events. Alas, we modern humans engage in such
ignorance now only at our peril.
I personally witnessed a small piece of the
Rwandan Holocaust, in northern Rwanda, back in 1994. I saw what can happen when
Nature’s liberal-but-but-ultimately-unforgiving laws are finally transgressed
too often. Nature will work to reduce
the human population so that the supply of Her bounty is once again brought into
balance with human demand. How that
process gets played out among human beings can vary, according to local culture
and history; but, the end result is nearly always the same. In the final analysis, Nature’s laws will be
enforced—by any means necessary. Human
beings, as a matter of self-interest, should work hard to see that Nature does
not have to intervene directly too often, in order to enforce her laws. This is the current challenge before us. It would be better if humans could be a bit
more attenuated to more of Nature’s simple laws, I think.
While the locus of the most recent round of
international terror may have been in Nigeria, this week, the lesson is a
global in scope. There is a “timeless” lesson
to be learned here—for all of humanity to consider. Sometimes, at a deep and sublime level, what
appears to be the issue starring in the face of human beings is not really the issue—not really.
Sometimes it is a mask. Behind
that mask lies a deeper issue, the real driver of current events. And sometimes, like the many layers of an
onion, there are even many masks covering it.
There was terrible tragedy that took place in
Nigeria on Christmas day in 2011. And my
heart goes out to all those who were affected, in one way or another, by this
tragic set of events. As people mourn
and bury their dead, as politicians posture and make political statements, as
onlookers gawk with shock and amazement, and as perpetrators congratulate
themselves and prepare for the next round, it is my sincere hope that people—all
people regardless of their station in life—would consider the various masks
being worn today. Sometimes the masks
hide situations. Sometimes the masks
hide people. The process of masking still remains the same, however.
We should think long and hard on these
things. It won’t be easy for many, I
realize. There has been so much pain of
late. But, ponder this. Underneath that hard, cruel mask of terror in
northern Nigeria may well be the crying face of a fisherman—the face of one who
is hurting because he can no longer feed his wife and children. Underneath the
biggest mask of all may well be the face of humanity’s increasing suffering, crying
out under a yoke of ever-tightening global resource constraints. Might now be the time to consider looking
past some of the masks?
Blaine D. Pope
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