END OF AN ERA?

In April 2003, a ‘political tremor’ was witnessed in the west of Nigeria, home to more than thirty million Yoruba. The political party and the socio-cultural and political group, Alliance for Democracy, and Afénifére, both associated with the late leader of the Yoruba and nationalist politician, Chief Obafemi Awolowo (popularly called Awo) – whose name and ideas have more or less dominated Yoruba politics for about fifty years – were routed in the general elections. Five of the six incumbent Alliance for Democracy (AD) governors were defeated by the People's Democratic Party (PDP), a party which, even though its presidential candidate, Olusegun Obasanjo, was Yoruba, was associated more with the conservative (Hausa-Fulani) power elite of the north of Nigeria. Members of the dominant, ‘mainstream’, Yoruba power elite have always contested power with the conservative power elite of the north of Nigeria. A newspaper columnist averred that the victory of the PDP represented the dethroning of the

On 27 May 2003, two days before the swearing-in of the new PDP governor in the Yoruba state of Oyo, the defeated, out-going AD–Afénifére governor, Lam Adesina, unveiled the statue of Awolowo – with his two fingers raised and parted in the famous ‘victory’ sign – which was erected in the gardens outside Government House in Ibadan, the political capital of the Yoruba nation. However, during the night of the swearing-in of the new PDP governor, Rashidi Ladoja, on 29 May, the twelve-foot statue, weighing 13,000 kilograms (13 tons), which was estimated to cost £150,000 (Nigerian Tribune 2.7.2003: 12), was destroyed.

An interesting political controversy was raised in the aftermath of this attempt to dramatise the end of the hegemony of ‘Awoism’ in Yoruba politics. The destruction of the statue of Awolowo, who had died sixteen years earlier, was described as ‘heinous’ and ‘a sacrilege’. It can be argued that between those who erected the statue and those who destroyed it there was no disagreement about the importance of the man and the power of the representation that was mounted and destroyed. As Jeffrey (Reference Jeffrey1980: 484) suggests, social scientists can wring a good deal of significance from political statues and the circumstances in which they are raised and destroyed.

What do the dynamics of the death and burial, the controversy over the erection and destruction of the statue, and their interpretations, suggest for our understanding of Yoruba politics in particular and elite politics in general? How can the meaning, or meanings, of these social acts illuminate our understanding of the political, the sociology and cosmology of elite power in contemporary Africa?

In this essay, I argue that – and point to ways in which – death, burial and statue are useful in the analysis of the social history of, and elite politics in, Africa. I attempt to explain why students of African politics should focus more on such simultaneously political, cultural and social phenomena as death, burial and statue, given that they provoke new thoughts and interpretations and fresh perspectives in understanding the ebb and flow of contemporary African politics, as it feeds off ‘tradition’, ‘culture’, and the cosmology of African peoples. This is so given that the politics, and the politicisation, of death and the dead involve the ‘struggles to endow authority and politics with sacrality or a “sacred” dimension … competing politicizations of space and time; and reassessments of identities … and social relations’ (Verdery Reference Verdery1999: 36), and the struggle over meanings in societies as these relates to elite competition. I argue that all these are particularly interesting in the Yoruba case, because they happen(ed) in transitional moments in Nigeria's national politics, and also because they constitute often ignored, but enchanting and illuminating, dimensions of elite politics.

Following Verdery, I suggest that what makes Awo's death, burial, statue, or what Samuel Brunk (Reference Brunk1998) would call his ‘posthumous career’, so unusually effective in the politics of Yorubaland and Nigeria, is due to the fact that death, burial and statue are ‘resources for creating meanings and legitimacy in moments of contention’ all over the world. In the specific case of Awo, the Yoruba and Nigeria, the local dynamics that determine and condition the continued political life of a late hero can be explained by examining the form and meaning of the Awo aura, Awo's place in Yoruba – and by extension, Nigeria's – history and politics, and the ways in which these reflect new forms of ancestor worship that are manifested in ethno-nationalism in Africa.

AWOLOWO: THE MAN AND HIS SIGNIFICANCE

At the lying-in-state of Awo's body at the old Parliamentary Building in Ibadan on 1 June 1987, the military governor of Oyo State, Col. Adetunji Olurin, in his funeral oration said: ‘Here lies the legendary Awo, here lies a great compatriot, here lies the prophetic Jeremiah of Africa, here lies the end of an era’ (Nigerian Tribune 2.6.1987: 2).

Obafemi Awolowo (1909–87) was a political colossus in Yorubaland in particular, and Nigeria in general, one of the great nationalists in Africa's colonial and post-colonial history, and one of the leading figures in the decolonisation process in Nigeria. He later became the Premier of the Western Region (1955–9). During his time as Premier, his government instituted the first free and compulsory education programme and free primary health services, among other firsts and achievements. In 1962, as leader of the opposition in the Federal Parliament, he was accused of planning to unlawfully overthrow the Federal Government, and was convicted and sentenced in 1963 to ten years imprisonment. He was later pardoned and released by the new military government headed by General Yakubu Gowon, which seized power in July 1966 from another military regime which had taken over from politicians in January 1966. In the middle of a national crisis that followed this hijack of power and the assassination of the Head of State, Major General Aguiyi Ironsi and the Military Governor of the Western Region, Lt Col. Adekunle Fajuyi, Awolowo was appointed as the Federal Finance Minister and Deputy Chairman of the Federal Executive Council. He is celebrated for having managed the war economy so well that Nigeria did not have to borrow money to prosecute the Civil War (1967–70). He resigned from the government at the end of the Civil War, and ran unsuccessfully for the presidency in 1979 and 1983.

Many words and phrases have been used to capture what is assumed to be his essential greatness: ‘Titan’, ‘Legend’, ‘Sage’, ‘Colossus’, ‘Awo, the Great’, ‘Mystic’, ‘Patriarch’, ‘Papa’, ‘Immortal Awo’, ‘Nigeria's Man of the Twenty-Ninth Century’, and ‘Eternal Spirit’. Indeed, he was such an unusually capable administrator in Africa's unenviable political history that former British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, said during Awo's lifetime that he (Awo), ‘could lead the United States or Britain; he came too soon for Nigeria’ (African Concord 26.5.1987: 22). Awo has been described by admirers as ‘Jesus Christ of our Time’, who ‘during his lifetime … was treated by friends and foe alike with the kind of fear reserved for deities’. General Ibrahim Babangida, Nigeria's military president (1985–93), in his message to Awolowo on his seventy-seventh birthday, attested to Awo's centrality in Nigerian politics and history. Babangida stated: ‘It can be truly said that Chief Obafemi Awolowo has been the main issue in Nigerian politics during the last 35 years: The main political question has been whether you are with Chief Awolowo or against him’.

However, Awolowo's general acceptance as the leader of the Yoruba took no less than two decades. This has already been captured by many authors, academic and lay, including Awolowo himself (Arifalo Reference Arifalo2001; Awolowo Reference Awolowo1960, Reference Awolowo1985; Babarinsa Reference Babarinsa2003; Babatope Reference Babatope1989; Coleman Reference Coleman1960; Ofeimun Reference Ofeimun1995, Reference Ofeimun2000; Otegbeye Reference Otegbeye1991; Sklar Reference Sklar1963). At the start of his political career, Awolowo reviewed Yoruba history and political culture, and concluded by investing himself with a cultural and political mission to try to eliminate the negative effects of the legacies of wars fought by the Yoruba sub-ethnic groups against one another in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries, and harness the positive values in the political culture. Awolowo (Reference Awolowo1960: 166) stated that the Yoruba were a ‘highly progressive but badly disunited group. They paid lip-service to a spiritual union and affinity in a common ancestor – Oduduwa. But in their long history they waged wars against one another.’ By the late 1940s and 1950s

He therefore resolved, in his own words (ibid.),

His vision and mission were not shared by most Yoruba; or, to put it differently, he was not initially widely accepted as the man who was capable of delivering a vision of a modern Yoruba polity. Despite chequered electoral success and his brilliant performance in office as Premier, it was not until his release from jail in 1966 by the military that he became widely accepted in Yorubaland. This was when at a gathering of the Yoruba elite from different political persuasions he was formally declared the ‘Asiwaju (Leader) of the Yoruba’. Consequently, and often prospectively, Awolowo became the ultimate signifier of Yorubaness, one who was cast in the image of the progenitor of the Yoruba, Oduduwa. If Oduduwa, the primal Yoruba ancestor, founded the ‘Yoruba race’, Awolowo, the recent ancestor, remade the Yoruba in modern times. As his lieutenant Alhaji Lateef Jakande stated, ‘Oduduwa is our progenitor and Awolowo welded the race he created. It is the nature of the Yoruba culture to deify their leaders. Obatala, Oranmiyan, Sango and Ogun were all great leaders who were deified’ (The Guardian 13.5.1987: 1).

Despite this, however, Awolowo never ceased to be a controversial figure in Yoruba and national politics until 1987, when he died. Two decades after his death, he has not stopped being the main issue in Nigerian politics, as the controversies over his death, burial, statue and continued political life indicate. The man, described as a ‘constellation of emeriti’, one ‘who had a telepathic understanding of the historical forces at play and an elective affinity with their great unstable dynamics’ (Williams Reference Williams2004) and ‘something of the Old Testament prophet about [him]’, and who was met everywhere he went – even his dead body – with thunderous roars of ‘Awoooooo’, has survived himself. Politics in Yorubaland and, by extension, Nigeria, remains bound to the real and symbolic divide between those members of the elite who were with, and/or are for, Awo, and those who stood, and/or are standing, against him. As Edwin Arlington Robinson says in his poem, Awo seems to have more to say after his death!

THE CULT OF A RECENT ANCESTOR

The cult of the dead in Africa is one of the key traditional institutions in society. In Yorubaland, great personages are believed to pass into the ethereal realm as gods, therefore becoming òrìsà (god, oracle or deity). Indeed, virtually every Yoruba god, from Sàngó, the god of thunder, through Ògún, the god of iron and war, to Òsun, the water goddess, was once a great man or woman whose life was exemplary. In Yoruba traditional religion, the way of life is determined by a ‘covenant-relationship’, as Idowu (Reference Idowu1962: 244) describes it, with the divinities first, and then ultimately with the Supreme Deity (God). However, in Yoruba traditional thought, the òrìsà is kept in existence by the attention of humans (Barber Reference Barber1981: 724). As Karin Barber correctly argues, ‘Without the collaboration of the devotees, the òrìsà will be betrayed, exposed and reduced to nothing’ (ibid.). This is so because the Yoruba live in a society in which human individual power is conditional on the collective acknowledgement and appreciation by fellow human beings. The Yoruba god is therefore far more in need of regular devotees than other gods, and faces a greater need for constant proof of its benevolence. This fact in the god–man, or god–devotee, relationship at the cosmological and spiritual levels is replicated in the political attitude of the Yoruba.Footnote ²

The Yoruba attitude to the òrìsà can be related to their worship of ancestors. Generally, ancestor worship rests on the belief that the dead can influence, and be influenced by, the living (Wadley Reference Wadley1999: 595). One major way in which the living follow or practice ‘tradition’ is by worshipping (or literally ‘demonstrating the worth of’) ancestors, communicating to one another, through this, the importance of ancestors, and, functionally, the value of the ‘traditions’ and social (kin) relationships created by the ancestors. Sawyer (Reference Sawyer1970) argues that, in many of the religions in West Africa, God is the Great Ancestor (Goody Reference Goody1974: 449). Indeed, anthropology has had much to say about ancestors (e.g. Calhoun Reference Calhoun1980; Fortes Reference Fortes1961, Reference Fortes, Fortes and Dieterlen1965; Glazier Reference Glazier1984; Gluckman Reference Gluckman1937; Kopytoff Reference Kopytoff1971).

Leading scholars in the discipline of anthropology, including Spencer, Tylor and Frazer, all concluded that ‘primitive religion’ is marked by ‘ancestor worship’ (Cole & Middleton Reference Cole and Middleton.2001; McCall Reference McCall1995: 256). The evolutionary thesis of these ancestors later gave way to functionalist models, in which ancestors retained a centrality in the total organisation of ‘primitive societies’.Footnote ³ The structural–functional theory of ancestors reached what some would see as a cul-de-sac in Igor Kopytoff's Reference Kopytoff1971 article, ‘Ancestors as elders in Africa’. Kopytoff argued controversially that in Africa there is no significant distinction between ancestors and living elders, thus emphasising continuity and similarity. He insisted that in Africa, ‘living elders’ and ‘dead ancestors’ are often ‘cognates’ and ‘belong to the same semantic field’ (Kopytoff Reference Kopytoff1981: 136), in ways that are different from Western conceptions of separation between the living and the dead.

Some scholars, including Brain (Reference Brain1973) and Mendonsa (Reference Mendonsa1976), challenged Kopytoff's thesis by rejecting the linguistic criteria on which his conclusions were based and the validity of his interpretation (McCall Reference McCall1995: 256). Consequently, there was a very interesting debate in anthropological literature on who are the ancestors in African religious practices. After this, there was a long spell of stagnation in scholarly interest in ancestors,Footnote ⁴ so much so that Keesing (Reference Keesing1983: 185) argued that (Tale) ancestors were best left to rest (or exercise their authority) in peace.

In his attempt to recover anthropological interest in ancestors, through a ‘practice-based’ approach, rather than a focus on cosmological concern, McCall (Reference McCall1995: 258, emphasis added) attempts to ‘demonstrate the extent to which ancestor-related practices are techniques for experientially engaging with the socially constituted past, thus providing cultural mechanisms with which people can make and remake their social world’. The Ohafia ancestors studied by McCall, like most of those studied by anthropologists, lived in pre-colonial times. I suggest that, in the attempt to recover interest in ancestor worship in Africa, the literature should also focus on what I like to describe as contemporary modes of ancestor worship, in which ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ discourses and institutions mesh in the construction of ethno-national heroes. In this context, I argue that the ‘cosmology concern’, rejected by McCall, is relevant; however, its relevance is not in contradiction to practices, as assumed by McCall in his attempt to dichotomise cosmologies and practices. Practices can, and do, feed off cosmological beliefs and concerns and vice versa. In my conception, an ancestor is not merely a superior elder, as argued by Kopytoff, but something qualitatively different. Even though there is continuity and similarity between the (living) elder and the (dead) ancestor in the Yoruba case (for instance, Awolowo is assumed to be ‘ruling Yorubaland from the grave’), the fact that the dead (ancestor) no longer exists materially gives him (rarely her) properties qualitatively different from those which living elders are assumed to possess. Thus, the superior elder when transformed into a dead ancestor is endowed with spiritual properties which he did not possess before his death.

John D. Y. Peel (Reference Peel2000: 94), in his magisterial work, Religious Encounter and The Making of the Yoruba, has argued that in the Yoruba case, ‘Ancestors start out as something quite different from orisa, as known individuals with whom the worshipper has had a personal relationship, perhaps an intimate and affectionate one’. Before their death, such elders were already credited with power beyond the average; therefore, the crediting of superhuman power to ancestors can be taken as only a simple extension of the powers they possessed as living elders. Yet this ‘extension’ is critical, and indicates a transformation in the capacity of the now-dead-elder, which is why the transition to ancestorhood for great men in Yorubaland is always grand and phased.Footnote ⁵ In relating the òrìsà with ancestors, Peel (Reference Peel2000: 96–7) argues that

While Peel's point is valid, however, it overemphasises the distinction between òrìsà and ancestors, given first that, in some cases, particular ancestors – such as Sàngó, Oya, Obàtálá and Ogun – are also in the Yoruba pantheon of òrìsàs, and second that, in some accounts, the Ur-ancestor, Oduduwa, is also regarded as the paramount òrìsà, creator of the world (Apter Reference Apter1992: 154). However, while not all ancestors are òrìsàs, all òrìsàs are also ancestors. Ancestors who are not regarded as òrìsàs are often not worshipped as elaborately as òrìsàs. Also, while òrìsàs are worshipped more purposively – to request their benevolence or prevent their anger – ancestor worship is predicated more specifically on demonstrating their worth and their continuous veneration by their progeny or successors.

I suggest that, given its ties to religion (Sheils Reference Sheils1975), studies of ancestor worship in Africa overlook contemporary contexts in which ‘modern’ or recent ancestorsFootnote ⁶ are worshipped in terms of their continued veneration and the constant demonstration of their worth in the present social process, as exhibited in African forms of nationalism. This recognition and veneration of a recent ancestor who is also regarded as òrìsà, however, draws on the ‘traditional’ practice in which òrìsà is a ‘cluster concept’, part ancestor, part Big Man (cultural-hero), and part nature-spiritFootnote ⁷ (Apter Reference Apter1992: 152–4). The recent ancestor is a collective hero, whose recognition and worship constitute an exercise in national self-identification and validation; the hero is made to personify the nation (cf. Mazrui Reference Mazrui1963: 24). In this context, Ali Mazrui argues, on the basis of the case of Jomo Kenyatta among the Kikuyu of Kenya, that contemporary ancestor worship is ‘only a special form of the wider phenomenon of hero-worship’ among ‘tribes’ and nations.Footnote ⁸ Since the 1950s in Africa, semi-occult and outright occult forms of monumentalisation of leaders have keyed into or fed off the ‘traditional’ need and passion for gods and great personages in society, though in ways that give them a new (‘modern’) lease of life in tune with contemporary political interests. (See Geschiere 1997 for some examples from Cameroon.) Such need and passion are central to the construction of politics, and the ways and manners in which these leaders are encountered while alive and in history. To take another example from Ghana, where the genre reaches its apex (Kirk-Greene Reference Kirk-Greene1991: 178), the immediate post-independent president, Kwame Nkrumah, was assumed to have possessed the influence of pre-colonial Ashanti kings, in addition to the rational bureaucratic powers which the modern office of the president invested in him. Nkrumah encouraged this kind of belief by adopting one of the titles of an Ashanti chief, Osagyefo (‘Redeemer’) and became officially known as President Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah, or simply Osagyefo.Footnote ⁹ More than that, he encouraged a personality cult, like many such leaders in Africa, in which he was regarded as Christ,Footnote ¹⁰ so much so that, when he was toppled in a military coup in February 1966, the soldiers accused him of ‘having pressed religion into his service and come to believe he was a god’ (Ellis & ter Haar Reference Ellis and ter Haar2004: 91; Kirk-Greene Reference Kirk-Greene1991: 177–81). In this essay, I relate the way in which the death, burial and memory of a recent ancestor, who is also regarded as possessing the qualities of an òrìsà, are used to emphasise or contest his over-representation of the Yoruba ethnic nationality.

Generally in Africa, and specifically in the Yoruba case, the endowment of people with supernatural qualities usually happens only after death – when they become ancestors. They may be exceptionally powerful before they die, as chiefs, superior elders, and such like, but such power is often due to their juju (fetish power), or the help they have been able to enlist (e.g. through sacrifices) from òrìsà (or their own ancestors), and not to their own intrinsic powers. In this sense, Awolowo is remarkable as an exception to this rule, in that he was invested with some of the properties of an ancestor or/and òrìsà while he was still a superior elder. He started being credited with more-than-mortal powers while he was in prison, between 1962 and 1966. While he ‘died’ politically, that is, by being jailed by his opponents, he was ‘compensated’ with mystical powers, which to some extent stayed with him afterwards, even in his years of later political failure.

Awo himself fuelled speculation about his occult powers, even if vicariously, through such encounters as when he reportedly turned down a request to join a secret cult by stating that his own personal cult was stronger. I suggest then that, given his pre-occupation with spiritual matters as a member of the Rosicrucian Order, Awo also sought assiduously to sacralise himself. He ate only one full meal a day in the evening, he was an ascetic who absented himself from even conjugal sex from the age of fifty (up to the point of his death at 78, in 1987), and meditated regularly.

His famed ‘supernatural’ powers even verged on what, within the dichotomised understanding of rational–irrational, was regarded as ridiculous. Obviously writing within this dichotomy, Odia Ofeimun (Reference Ofeimun1987), his former private secretary and poet, describes the stories of the ‘supernatural accomplishments’ of Awo as ‘myth and mysticism [that could] drown the secular import of his life’. During his presidential campaign in 1979, many cities, towns and villages in the Yoruba West were gripped differently with panic or delight as thousands reportedly ‘saw’ Awo in the moon in the dead of night with his famous victory sign. As a child, I too was woken up by my parents and siblings to ‘see Papa (Awo)’ in the moon; I must confess that I did see him, because there was no way I couldn't have! I risked been pronounced an ‘infant’ or been confirmed blind.

‘Appearing’ in the moon was, for admirers, the proof of Awo's omni-competence, potency and cosmic influence. For his opponents, it was proof of his evil genius and perfidy. One of the latter, obviously taking Awo as a ‘Big Man’ who was also an ‘absolute transgressor’ (Copet-Rougier in Gescheire Reference Gescheire1997:132), took a half-page advert in a northern newspaper to castigate Awo for desecrating the moon! (Dare Reference Dare1987: 9; Ofeimun Reference Ofeimun1987). Another example was the accusation by some stalwarts of the ruling National Party of Nigeria (NPN), in the Second Republic, that Awolowo was spiritually responsible for the drought in the northern parts of the country, because he hated the Hausa and the Fulani (Dare Reference Dare1987: 9). Thus, while Awo's admirers affirm his ‘holy’ powers which were expected to manifest in political fortunes for him and his people, his adversaries deconstruct this by inventing examples and manifestations not of his ‘holy spirit’, but of his ‘evil spirit’. Both interpretations manifest a combination of fascination and distrust (Gescheire Reference Gescheire1997: 131); either way, Awo is constructed as a powerful political leader with an ‘arsenal of occult tools’ (ibid.: 9), and one who could use these tools in the service of his politics. Achille Mbembe already called for an elaboration of ‘other languages of power’ related to African realities (Gescheire Reference Gescheire1997: 7) that take into account notions of the occult, given that ‘in Africa, discourses on power continue to be marked by these notions’ (ibid.). As Ellis and ter Haar (Reference Cole and Middleton.2004: 91–2) surmise from similar accounts in Ghana, the popular belief in Awolowo's spiritual efficacy suggests that Nigerians ‘readily assume that their politicians are in communication with the spirit world, and that the connection may be sinister. Political power, like spiritual power, is regarded as ambivalent since it can be used to do good or to inflict harm. Hence, successful politicians are both admired and feared.’

To add to Awo's assumed cosmic power even in death, when Awo's remains, which had earlier been embalmed, were interred in 1996, nine years after his death, in a small ceremony involving family members and close associates, one of his associates told my informant that the grounds of the whole house were shaking ‘like in the beginning an earth tremor’ (Ibadan 11.10.2005). This associate found it also significant that Awo's former political rival and Nigeria's first president, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe (Zik), ‘refused to die’ until the day Awo's body was interred,Footnote ¹¹ confirming, for him, long-held suspicion that ‘the reason why Zik stayed so long in politics was to make sure Awo did not emerge as president’ (Babarinsa Reference Babarinsa2003: 179–80). Geschiere (Reference Gescheire1997: 6) has noted that ‘recent democratization process [in Africa] is accompanied by a blossoming of rumours on the role of the occult’, while Ellis and ter Haar (Reference Cole and Middleton.2004: 85) posit that ‘stories like these indicate the astonishing power, often of a mystical or superhuman nature, that people frequently ascribe to their political leaders’. From such a perspective as that of Awo's admirers, ‘a wide range of seemingly disparate, even macabre events coalesce and make sense’ (Kearl & Rinaldi Reference Kearl and Rinaldi1983: 703). While life in Africa is generally mired in the supernatural, the lives of specific political leaders are suffused in spirit idioms, because, in part, they are assumed to be politically strong because they are also spiritually potent.

Even Awolowo had to wonder towards the close of his life why he attracted such great following and love among his people, despite the fact that he last headed a government in 1959 (ThisWeek 23.3.1987: 17). Such was his hold on the real and symbolic politics of Yorubaland and Nigeria that when he died, politics, power and the accompanying dynamics of culture, cultural authority and leadership were again up for grabs, as evident in the (elite) politics of his burial, and the erection and destruction of his statue. Long after his death, Awo, who believed fervently in reincarnation, still exercises authority over Yoruba politics, as his name, precepts and statements are invoked by politicians even for different and differing claims and purposes. In a sense, Awo also becomes an ancestor because, in Yoruba belief, ‘he died a good death’, after possessing all the valued qualities in the community, including good destiny (ìpín/orí/àyànmó), good character (ìwà), good head (orí rere), and possessing (temporal) power and (occult) authority (agbára àti àse) (Dixon Reference Dixon1991: 67–8; cf. Harris Reference Harris2006: 57–60). In another sense, Awo's ancestorhood/òrìsà status is predicated on his refounding or remaking of the Yoruba. As Odia Ofeimun (Reference Ofeimun1995: 14), argues,

The late popular Yoruba dramatist, Hubert Ogunde, had long before the Ooni, that is in the 1960s and early 1970s, affirmed Awolowo's status as an òrìsà in two of his many songs in praise of Awolowo. In one remarkable record in the 1960s, he couched Awo's life in cosmic imagery, including Awo mímó (‘Holy Cult’ or ‘Saintly Figure’), Olúwo àwa (‘Our High Priest’), Òrìsà (deity/oracle/god) and Ìmólè, Baba Òkùnkùn (‘Light, Father over Darkness’). Ogunde sings that Orisa bi Ogun k'osi l'a gbede/Orisa bi eja k'osi l'omi/Orisa b'ire o, Awolowo, K'osi n'ile Yoruba/Awa ti mon o (‘There is no god like Ogun at the smithery/There is no god like the fish in the river/A god like you, Awolowo/Does not exist in Yorubaland/We always knew’).

Awo's immortality and status as avatar consequently provided great opportunities for people seeking power, and generally for the political elite involved in a fierce competition. ‘Immortality’, Frank Rooney says, ‘is to keep others moving when you have stopped moving’ (African Concord 26.5.1987: 22).

TRANSITION OF A LEADER AND TRANSITION POLITICS

THE STATUE OF THE AVATAR: THE YORUBA ANTIGONE

Long after his death, Awo's associates and admirers continue to celebrate his memory through concrete and symbolic actions. One such was the erection, in 2003, of his statue in the gardens of the Government House in Agodi, Ibadan, the political capital of the Yoruba nation. This was where he once reigned as Premier of the Western Region. Awo's statue, like statues in general, can be encountered as material memory, given that memory is concretised in such representations. As Yeal Navaro-Yashin (Reference Navaro-Yashin2002: 198), for instance, shows in the case of Ataturk in Turkey, the statue of such a leader can be ‘paramount as a marker’ of statehood – or nationhood. A version of history is memorialised in statues. Conversely, a statue is also about what is forgotten. A people therefore remember as well as forget through every representation – such as a statue.

With the return of democratic rule in Nigeria in May 1999, the new governor of Oyo State, Lam Adesina, an Awo disciple, announced that he would remove the statue of the Unknown Soldier in the gardens of the Government House to symbolise the end of military rule. Consequently, the government asked for interested persons to bid for the construction of Awo's statue which would replace the statue of the Unknown Soldier. Prohibitive bids made the government abandon the project. But two years after this, the government directed the state's Arts Council to construct the statue. As explained by the Chairman of the Arts Council, Adebayo Faleti, a poet and retired broadcaster, the three-stage tortuous process of producing the bronze statue itself involved its own share of controversies and strange happenings, indicating that the attempt to symbolically affirm Awo's leadership of the Yoruba was being contested even in the material processes that would produce it (Nigerian Tribune 1.7.2003: 12).

The job was eventually completed in March 2003. The statue, which some say was about the largest of its type in Africa (Nigerian Tribune 2.7.2003: 12), was eventually unveiled by the outgoing governor of Oyo state two days before he left office, on 27 May 2003. Two days after the statue was raised, it was pulled down by people believed to be members of the incoming People's Democratic Party (Saturday Tribune 31.5.2003: 6). A monument and a memorial which were meant to signify the political unification of the Yoruba under the leadership of Awo and ‘cloak the legacy of dissension’ (Zolberg Reference Zolberg1998: 569) had, inadvertently, ‘invoked the unappeased spirits of the past, who refuse to rest until their claims have been recognized (Saler Reference Saler1998: 591). The destruction of the statue, therefore, also signifies the changing political cleavages in Yorubaland.

The dead can be harmed (Levenbook Reference Levenbook1984; Pitcher Reference Pitcher1984).Footnote ¹⁸ But the harm is done more to the prevailing interests of the living as they are, strategically or tactically, invested in the dead and then appropriated by the living. ‘Desecrating a statue’, as Verdery (Reference Verdery1999: 5) observes, ‘partakes of the larger history of iconoclasm’. The reactions to the demolition were strong and bitter. The national vice-president of the PDP, Olabode George, said, given that ‘Whatever we (Yoruba) are today, Awolowo was the foundation … for any Yoruba man to have pulled down his statue is not only an abomination, but a crime Oduduwa [the mythical Yoruba progenitor] will look into’ (Tribune 2.7.2003: 1). President Obasanjo was reported to have ‘expressed anger and bitterness about the incident’ (Tribune 8.6.2003: 1). But some of my informants in Ibadan who are close to Adedibu said ‘the strong man of Ibadan politics’, as he is called, ordered the destruction and that he had the clandestine support of President Obasanjo who called Adedibu later ‘to congratulate him for a job well done’ (field notes, October 2005). Adedibu himself publicly denied involvement, but further confirmed the suspicion of some when he added that ‘the timing of the statue's erection was wrong, as it was done in bad faith by the (outgoing) administration’ (Tribune 7.6.2003: 7). Whether it was true or not that Obasanjo congratulated Adedibu, it fed into the long-held suspicion of Awo's admirers that the president would side with anyone who did Awo, Awo's name or anything related to the man some harm. In a press statement, the new governor, Ladoja, declared war on the destroyers of the statue, adding that ‘he himself is a product of Chief Awolowo and would never encourage any action whatsoever towards destroying history’ (Sunday Tribune 1.7.2003: 5). Members of the PDP denied having anything to do with the destruction because ‘all Yoruba, irrespective of their different parties, are all children of Awolowo and would not carry out such dastardly act’ (Sunday Tribune 1.6.2003: 5).

The dead can also cause harm. After reporting that the alleged leader of the demolition team was down with a ‘terminal mysterious illness’, shortly after the destruction of the statue, Tribune later reported that the man, 61-year-old Lai Ajakaye, publicity director of the PDP in Oyo State, died as a result of the ‘heinous act’ (Saturday Tribune 25.8.2003: 6).

But the secretary of the PDP in Oyo State, Eniola Babarinde, said that at a meeting of party leaders in Abuja ‘Governor Ladoja submitted in his report that it was Alhaji Adedibu that masterminded the destruction of Awolowo statue and [Adedibu] did not deny the accusation’ (Tribune 27.7.2004: 4). When Ladoja broke with his political godfather, Adedibu, one year later, one of Adedibu's thugs who ‘decamped’ to Ladoja's faction revealed to Tribune that he was a major actor in the demolition, which was allegedly ordered by Adedibu (Tribune 27.7.2004: 1). Another, the ‘real ring leader’ of the demolition team, Alhaji Abass Oloko, alleged that Adedibu had asked them to destroy the statue because the man was not from Ibadan and Ibadan had its own great sons. Adedibu reportedly added that the ‘Ibadan people and Awolowo are never friends’ (Tribune 30.7.2004).

However, beyond individual peril, some even argued that the destruction of the statue had placed the entire state under a ‘spell’. Even a former governor of the state, Dr Omololu Olunloyo, a mathematician, who was not an associate of Awo, articulated this position: ‘Yes! There are all sorts of curses attached. It may be easier to kill a living Awolowo than to go and demolish his statue. That is what I think the state is being punished for now. This may not be a straight-forward or rational explanation, but it is a spiritual and psychic one’ (Sunday Tribune 25.6.2006).

Governor Ladoja later promised that the government would erect a new statue for Awo, but would also ‘honour other heroes’ such as Ladoke Akintola and Adegoke Adelabu, two late political adversaries of Awo. This promise, for Awoists, recalled Creon's poser in the Greek Antigone: ‘But the good desires not a like portion with the evil.’ It was obvious to many that the governor had no intention of replacing the statue. Even if he wanted to pander to popular sentiments, as I gathered during fieldwork from sources close to him, the fear of courting President Obasanjo's wrath if he attempted to replace the statue would have dissuaded him. However, Ladoja's announced plan to build also the statues of Akintola and Adelabu points to the fact that Awo's statue was recognised as the remembrance of a leader as well as a way of a forgetting ‘anti-Awo’ political leaders, such as Akintola and Adelabu, who were not so honoured. There have been calls to re-erect the statue which are yet to be heeded (Nigerian Tribune 9.6.2006). Despite this, many Awoists whom I spoke to during my fieldwork emphasised ‘the fact that’ the immortality of their leader could not be subverted by any regime in power.

Adedibu's alleged order, beyond the immediate reasons, plugs into the long-drawn antagonism and rivalry between two Yoruba sub-ethnic groups, the Ibadan and the Ijebu (Remo).Footnote ¹⁹ The destruction can thus be linked to the return of the submerged intra-ethnic rivalries that plagued the Yoruba nation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which Awo sought, with much success, to transcend in his political career, as he welded the Yoruba into ‘a nation’. The statue and its destruction re-enacted this battle. Adedibu, in a way, was buying into the long-drawn struggle to counteract Ijebu ‘hegemony’ and ascendancy over the Ibadans in modern times. Here, therefore, sub-ethnic pride (of the Ibadan) collided with pan-ethnic symbolism (which Awo represented). Adedibu, on behalf of the Ibadan, was visiting on Awo's statue, which was taken to over-represent Ijebu ‘supremacy’ in contemporary Yoruba politics, the Ibadans' displeasure with such supremacy, given that the Ibadans were the military champions in Yorubaland after the collapse of the Oyo Empire in the nineteenth century. But not many Ibadan shared Adedibu's position, which was regarded as self-serving.

However, because the statue was a symbolic and spatial confirmation of the primacy of Awo and Awoism in Yorubaland, the destruction was also an attempt to affirm that such primacy had ended with the defeat of ‘Awo's party’, Alliance for Democracy, in the 2003 elections in five of the six Yoruba states. Ostensibly, on both sides, there was sufficient belief in what Ricoeur calls ‘the quasi presence of the represented things’ (Valdes Reference Valdes1991: 118), or what Bourdieu would call illusio – that is, ‘a belief or acceptance of the worth of the game of a field’ (Swartz Reference Swartz1997: 125). Despite the destruction of the statue, however, Awolowo thus continues to be the over-representation of ‘proper Yorubaness’.

While the birthdays of comparable figures in Nigeria's history, such as Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, the most celebrated figure in the struggle against colonialism and Nigeria's first president, who died in 1996, are hardly ever commemorated (Sunday Vanguard 21.11.1999: 8), Awo's birthday and death are remembered every year with great ceremony, which even living persons do not attract. And while the destruction of Awo's statue sparked a crisis, the beheading of Zik's statue in front of his house in Onitsha, eastern Nigeria, hardly attracted media attention (This Day 21.5.2006: 21). Zik's tomb, ten years after his death, remained ‘uncompleted, unkept, uninspiring, and definitely abandoned’ (This Day 21.5.2006: 21).Footnote ²⁰

The only surviving governor of ‘Awo's party’ in the second term of the Fourth Republic (2003–7), Lagos State Governor Bola Tinubu, says, ‘the spirit of Awo is still there; the spirit of Awo is not defeated. The spirit of Awo lives and his ideas live on. That is why the PDP candidates’ campaign on free education and free health is tuned to the same rhythm with the AD … We will continue to promote those ideals. Nobody can wipe (them) out' (The Guardian 27.4.2003: A3, A5). A leading columnist, Reuben Abati, agrees with Tinubu, adding that, even though Awo died in 1987, ‘he has been ruling Yorubaland since then from his grave’ (The Guardian 25.3.2005).

CONCLUSION: THE DEAD AND CULTURAL POLITICS

Secularist and modernist assumptions are often trapped in their derivative self-referential terms of ‘modernity’, ‘rationality’ and ‘democracy’ (Navaro-Yashin Reference Navaro-Yashin2002: 189), in which manifestations in society that do not conform to the trappings of these terms, or what they are supposed to embody or include, are consequently termed ‘irrational’, ‘superstitious’ and/or ‘traditional’. Indeed, modernisation assumes the ‘emancipation of the living from the control of the dead’, so much so that practices such as ancestral worship are presumed to belong to the Weltanschauung of traditional, past-oriented, and not progressive, future-oriented, societies (Kearl & Rinaldi Reference Kearl and Rinaldi1983: 694). However, tradition and modernity, rationality and irrationality, are binaries that are hardly ever useful in understanding contemporary social dynamics, particularly in the African post-colony.

The intertwining and interfacing of the ‘rational’ and the ‘irrational’, the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern’, especially the ways in which they mobilise or immobilise power and interests in society, are critical in the analysis of the social history of Africa. Indeed, as Kearl and Rinaldi (Reference Kearl and Rinaldi1983: 698) have argued, ‘the dead are so remote from everyday life that their potency as political symbols actually increases with modernization’.

Given that death and statues yoke the past, present and future, they are useful and effective symbols for affirming and celebrating the past, as well as revising and contesting that past (cf. Verdery Reference Verdery1999: 52). I have attempted to explain particular instances not so much of ‘how an idea survives a man’ (Erikson Reference Erikson1975: 166), but of how man survives as an idea/spirit, thus making it possible for a man (Awolowo) to survive himself through his community's absorption of him as an idea, while ‘the sense of wider identity created by his presence survives the limitations of his person and of the historical moment’ (ibid.). These are revealed in very interesting ways in the dynamics of death, burial, and the erection and destruction of Awo's statue. Awo's statue and his continued political life serve as reminders of the accomplishments of a putative ancestor, as well as reminders of his collective achievements with which the Yoruba are encouraged to identify (cf. Zolberg Reference Zolberg1998: 573). The abstract ideas of Yorubaness and Yoruba unity become tangible in Awo's statue and the rituals of his veneration as an ancestor. Yet the statue, as well as the continued veneration of the man, also serves as site and/or issue of dissension and ‘unresolved disunities’ (ibid.). What I have attempted to do is, as Brecht would put it, to throw burial and statue into crisis by showing their involvement in major power struggles in society (Cohen Reference Cohen1989: 16).

It is often assumed that what Awolowo was when he was alive is sufficient to explain the power of the idea/spirit of him after his death. However, I suggest that this is insufficient. Indeed, whatever power the idea or spirit of Awo currently has is what is accorded him by his surviving ‘children’ (i.e. living Yoruba, particularly the elite); it is based on their interpretation of the man as well as what he achieved. It is they who have chosen to demonstrate his worth and regard him as the ‘modern Oduduwa’. Put another way, what Awo is today – when he is no longer a living agent – is the product of a complex negotiation between the past achievements of Awo, as they have shaped the present, and the interests and outlooks of various contemporary agents who invoke his name. Those who currently invoke his name even include Yoruba governors in the rival PDP in Ekiti, Ogun, Ondo, and Osun states.

In the literature on ancestors, it is suggested that, as time recedes after death, ancestors lose much of the specificity that they had in life, their idealisation thus becomes independent of their lifetime careers, even if only in principle (Calhoun Reference Calhoun1980: 311). This is evident in the formal Yoruba cults of ancestors – Egúngún and Orò – in which ancestors are de-individualised or merged into the collectivity whose values they represent. This is partly because their personal qualities as remembered by those who knew them gradually and inevitably fade over time, because, as the interests of their descendants diverge, they have to become more of ‘all things to all men’. Yet, there may well be a period when there is tension or strain between the generalised conception of an ancestor, whom everyone wants to invoke for legitimacy, and specific conceptions remembered from what the ancestor had actually stood for in his life. This is so for what I regard as a recent ancestor. This can be seen in the way Awo came to be a general symbol of Yorubaness, raised above sectional intra-Yoruba differences, whom everybody wants to invoke. Despite this, what Awo specifically stood for, such as the interests of ‘native settlers’ in 1940s Ibadan – many of them Ijebu and Christian – could not be entirely forgotten, as the Adedibu position shows. In the context of this, the destruction of the statue was a protest against Awo's establishment as a pan-Yoruba ancestor; it also points to the still unresolved character of Yoruba collective identity.

One major way in which elites ‘perpetuate their grasp of the present and future’, argues Michael Herzfeld (Reference Herzfeld, de Pina-Cabral and Pedroso de Lima2000: 234), ‘is by monumentalizing the past … the submersion of individual mortalities in a collective, permanent, and ageless resurrection of the body politic’. By monumentalising the past through the dead, the authority and status of particular elites are announced, confirmed or even contested. While burial and the celebration of the memory of the dead affirm the place and status of the dead among the living, a statue arrests the process of a person's bodily decay, thereby ‘bringing him into the realm of the timeless or the sacred, like an icon’ (Verdery Reference Verdery1999: 5). Statues signal an attempt to establish hegemony for the ideas represented in them (Cohen Reference Cohen1989: 495). Given their utility in the processes of memory and remembrance, symbolism and imagination, identity and politics, culture and power, the dead, their statues and remains, have lives, both social and political.

My account of the processes and practices of the veneration of Awolowo presents contemporary Yoruba ethno-nationalism as ‘a kind of ancestor worship and a system of patrilineal kinship’, in which a particular leader is regarded as one who defines the noble lineage of his nation (Verdery Reference Verdery1999: 41) – the Yoruba nation. The continued veneration of Awolowo is thus a way through which the Yoruba, particularly members of their power elite, make and remake their social world in the light of current challenges. The name and image of, and actions and reactions to, Awo are expressed in the language and materiality of ‘excess’. Whether in terms of his rumoured appearance in the moon, his capacity to cause drought in the homestead of his political adversaries, the capacity of his ghost to kill the destroyers of his statue, the capacity of his spirit to guide his people and country, the fact that he alone was a ‘constellation of emeriti’, the monumentality of his portraiture, the exceptional process of his burial and the attempt at everlasting embalmment, or the assumed impossibility of reproducing a leader of his stature, Awo is the vintage excess that is represented in excessive emotions.