What is your Sovereignty? (1)
Recently, I have returned to Black internationalism, fully aware that our struggles are universal, despite the differences in our histories, trajectories, locations, and nuances. Black people in different Black geographies, from the Caribbean to Cairo, deal with the afterlife of what Sharpe called “asterisked histories” (the Middle Passage, slavery, plantations, colonialism, imperialism, empire, and more) in one form or another, but they also have to deal with local differences and mutations of the legacies of these events.
The young Black man killed by a white police officer is dealing with the same reality as the boy who was murdered by Nigerian police during ENDSARS, whose body we are told is yet to be delivered to the parent for appropriate burial. The similarity is that they are both victims of state institutional violence and agencies, but the differences are numerous. Whatever some white police officers do is as horrendous and unpardonable as when a Black person does the same.
Death in the hand of a stranger may hurt, but it hurts even deeper when it comes from your own blood, someone who is kin and skin to you. There are people in my dad's family who hurt me that I may forgive but will never forget because family should never do that.
Since the talk about the US threat of invasion, people have been talking about sovereignty, international law, and other vocabulary of an idealist understanding of international relations, forgetting that the "oyinbo that made the pencil made the eraser." While others are talking about responsibility to protect and other gibberish ideas.
However, in the excellent manner that the abolitionist Frederick Douglass asks about the relevance of the 4th of July for our Black cousins, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” I am asking the African elite, and particularly the Nigerian political class, what is your sovereignty?
What is your sovereignty to the Nigerians who have died needless and avoidable deaths when the institution that should protect them unleashes suffering and tragedy on them?
What is your sovereignty to the Nigerians who have become their own police, their own electricity company, and their own security against armed robbery in many ungoverned spaces where "every household has become a government of its own"
What is your sovereignty to the northern Nigerian Christians who saw you sleep and wine and dine with their enemies, the murderers of their families, while you claim to be their friend
Again, I ask, what is your sovereignty to the pastor who is conducting burial everyday for his parishioners when you are on work visit and medical leave every market day
What is your sovereignty to the young out-of-school children scattered across northern Nigeria who are susceptible to being enticed or brainwashed into blowing up your country in exchange for food or the security of being a member of a gang?
