First, his personal achievement. I am not concerned here about marches and boycotts, great and important though they were, but rather about a man who struggled to conquer in himself both fear and hate, two of humanity’s most destructive and limiting emotions. I want to stress struggled and conquered. The struggling is as important as the conquering, perhaps more, because it is that—the fact that the outcome was never a foregone conclusion, that our hero did not enter the stage fully formed and destined to win; that he began where most of us stand today, vulnerable to fear and prejudice and all the other frailties of our human condition; and yet he struggled and won victories—it is that which makes us kin to the hero and enables us to become beneficiaries of his heroic journey and able to derive from it the energy and hope to dare the obstacles on our own little side roads. That is what Martin Luther King should say to each of us, individually.
Second, he is important as a staging post in a long history of black struggle going back to the first revolts, and as a signpost for future battles. It is important to have this historical perspective, because it is the correct one and because it saves us from the heresy that there was once a golden age of tyranny when its victims were quite happy with their oppression.
A white American missionary, J. Lowrie Anderson, working in Nairobi, reported an incident which took place between him, another American, and a Kenyan soon after King’s assassination:
As a colleague and I sat down to tea with an African friend he said bitterly: “We hate you Americans. You killed our Martin Luther King.” My colleague replied: “Yes, I was ashamed of being an American—until I remembered that Martin Luther King was an American also. Then I was proud.”
It is appropriate that we celebrate Martin Luther King, a man who struggled so valiantly to restore humanity to the oppressed and the oppressor.
1992
This essay originated as a talk given at the King Holiday Celebration, January 20, 1992, at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
The University and the Leadership Factor in Nigerian Politics
There is a story about Bernard Shaw arriving at the New York harbor in the days of sea travel, stepping off the ship, and being immediately mobbed by journalists. But before even the quickest of them could open his mouth, Bernard Shaw had fired off his response and stopped them cold: Don’t ask me what you should do to be saved; the last time I was here I told you and you haven’t done it!
I feel very much like that about this whole national debate business which our military has imposed on us. We know what we should do and we refuse to do it. Instead, we are going about “blowing grammar” all over the place, as if our problem stemmed from insufficient shouting. So I turned down or simply
ignored all invitations to join the charade. But then the University of Nigeria asked me to participate in a debate “organized solely for a university as an integral community in the Nigerian family, expected to be in the mainstream and not in the periphery of Nigerian affairs.” I couldn’t quite say no to this particular call, having coming as it does from my very backyard.
And I was asked specifically to reflect on the problem of leadership, on which my stand is probably well known in Nigeria; so the forum’s organizers seemed to be inviting me to answer some well canvassed criticisms of that stand. It was altogether too enticing!
My little book The Trouble with Nigeria, published on the eve of President Shehn Shagari’s second term, opens with the following words:
The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which is the hallmark of true leadership.
So the question of leadership was and is preeminent, in my mind, among Nigeria’s numerous problems. The little book does go on to identify others, such as tribalism, corruption, indiscipline, social injustice, indulgence for mediocrity, et cetera. But my thesis is that without good leadership none of the other problems stands a chance of being tackled, let alone solved.
Now, the twin criticisms of my stand which I find sufficiently interesting to want to answer are: (1) that my view of the Nigerian predicament is elitist, because it emphasizes the role of a crop of leaders rather than of the broad masses; and (2) that my diagnosis wrongly identifies people rather than economic and political systems as the source of the Nigerian problem.
I do recognize, of course, that there are broadly three components to the equation for national development: system, leader, and followers. In an ideal world, each would mesh nicely and efficiently with the others. But quite clearly Nigeria is not in such a world, not even on the road to it. She seems in fact to be going in the opposite direction, towards a world of bad systems, bad leadership, and bad followership. The question then is, How do we redirect our steps in a hurry? In other words, where do we begin and have the best chance of success? To change the Nigerian system; to change the Nigerian leadership style; or to change the hearts of one hundred and twenty million Nigerians?
Proponents of the supremacy of system would argue that unless you have the right political-economic arrangement no good leader can emerge or survive and certainly no good followership can develop. I am no stranger to the allure of this argument, and I admit it can be engaging, especially when it is presented by first-class minds. I remember hearing C.L.R. James (author of The Black Jacobins) at a memorable lecture he gave at the University of Massachusetts making a case for systems. James was a bold and erudite Marxist thinker and was putting forward the rather startling argument that during the Great Depression America had a choice of following one of two eminent citizens—Franklin D. Roosevelt or Paul Robeson. Roosevelt, he said, had proposed to tinker with the traumatized American capitalist system, while Paul Robeson, a more brilliant person by far, stood for scrapping the system altogether. Of course America followed Roosevelt and cast Robeson on the rubbish heap. And the result, said C.L.R. James, was Watergate, a scandal that was deeply exercising America at the time of his lecture. And then with typical hyperbole James told his spellbound audience that even if Jesus Christ and his disciples were to descend and take over the running of the American White House there still would have been Watergate!
What he was saying, in effect, was not only that the American capitalist system was unviable but that systems were all that mattered. And that was plainly doctrinaire. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs of social reconstruction and his restructuring of American financial institutions, especially the creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), may not today be called the revolutions some people thought they were at the time, but anybody who would dismiss them as mere tinkering would have to be a very committed adversary indeed! And he would have to demonstrate, not merely through intellectual abstractions but by pointing to an actual system in practice somewhere which can show better results and no scandals of one form or another.
In my view the basic problem with efforts to bestow preeminence on systems is, however, their inability to explain how an abstract system can bring itself into being autonomously. Would it drop from the sky and operate itself? Would Tanzania have chosen the socialist path to development if Nyerere had not been around? And, next door, would Kenya have gone capitalist if Oginga Odinga rather than Kenyatta had been leader? When fellows speak glibly about the right system, they forget that they are talking about political arrangements brought into being either evolutionally or revolutionally in other places and times by leaders of those times and places or their forerunners. It would not have occurred to Lenin or Castro (to use just two examples) to dismiss the leadership factor in thinking systems out and converting abstract social models into actual institutions. These are inescapable roles of intellectual and political leadership.
Of course, one could argue that all the thinking that needs to be done in this matter has already been done elsewhere by other people and that we, the latecomers, do not need to reinvent the wheel, as it were. But that is a proposition we could not live with.
We need not spend too long on the argument for the preeminence of followers. It is enough to say that no known human enterprise has flourished on the basis of followers leading their leaders. The cliché that people get the leader they deserve is a useful exaggeration—useful because it reminds the general populace of the need for vigilance in selecting their leaders (where they have a chance to do so) and for keeping them under constant surveillance.
But to go beyond that and suggest, as one has often heard people do in this country, that when a leader misleads or fails to offer any leadership at all it is because Nigerians are unpatriotic and impossible to govern, or that when a leader accepts a bribe he is no more to blame than the man who offered the bribe, is completely to misunderstand the meaning of leadership.
Leadership is a sacred trust, like the priesthood in civilized, humane religions. No one gets into it lightly or unadvisedly, because it demands qualities of mind and discipline of body and will far beyond the need of the ordinary citizen. Anybody who offers himself or herself or is offered to society for leadership must be aware of the unusually high demands of the role and should, if in any doubt whatsoever, firmly refuse the prompting.
Sometimes one hears apologists of poor leadership ask critics whether they would do better if they were in the shoes of the leader. It is a particularly silly question, the answer to which is that the critic is not in or running for the leader’s shoes, and therefore how he might walk in them does not arise. An editorial writer can surely condemn a pilot who crashes an airplane through carelessness or incompetence, or a doctor who kills his patient by negligent administration of drugs, without having to show that he can pilot a plane or write prescriptions himself.
The elite factor is an indispensable element of leadership. And leadership itself is indispensable to any association of human beings desirous of achieving whatever goals it sets for itself.
When such an association is engaged in a difficult undertaking or is in pursuit of a risky objective such as nation building, the need for competent leadership becomes particularly urgent. It is like having the captain who takes control over those “who go down to the sea in ships” or up into the clouds in airplanes. Even a nation already firmly established will in times of emergency allow unprecedented powers to its leader, no matter how deeply its democratic instincts may run in normal times. During the Great Depression, the fiercely independent-minded industrial/business complex in America virtually handed its affairs over to President Roosevelt.
When we speak of leadership, we generally are thinking of political leadership. This is to be expected, because under normal circumstances political institutions provide the overarching structure of human society. But there are other kinds of leadership operating under the political superstructure: military/industrial, intellectual, artistic, religious, et cetera. Each of these subgroups evolves its own peculiar rules and chain of command, from the top through a more or less restricted core of middle managers down to the mass of followers. This model can of course be described as elitist.
Unfortunately “elitist” has become a dirty word in contemporary usage. It was inevitable and indeed desirable that with the spread of democratic principles in the world, elite systems inherited from mankind’s immemorial past should be subjected, like any other received values and practices, to critical scrutiny and reappraisal. But in a world in which easy sloganeering so quickly puts the critical faculty to flight, what has happened to the word “elite” is a good example of how a once useful word can become manipulated to a point where it no longer facilitates thought but even inhibits it. But perhaps the cloud under which the word has come is not entirely undeserved. A word is more likely to become abused when the concept it represents has been corrupted.
I should like to examine briefly the uses and abuses of the elite system, using the example of a national army. An army is, of course, one of those branches of human organization where the need for clear, unambiguous leadership exists. The line of command is both necessary and rigid. E