Strictly Personal

Soyinka prize in illiteracy

Published

5 years ago

July 17, 2018

On 13 July 2018, the 84th birthday of Olumo Wole Soyinka, the 1986 Nobel Laureate for Literature, I honour him by revisiting a debate that is raging on the Internet over what many call my misreading of his work, especially with reference to my interpretation of his play, Death and King’s Horseman. Literary experts have been marvelling about the “Author’s Note” that accompanies Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka.

Most playwrights leave it to the directors and producers of the play to interpret it as they wish but Soyinka was worried that most experts were misreading the play. He took the unusual authoritarian step of stipulating how the play should be interpreted but the critics appear not to notice and have continued to misread the play, in my own humble opinion. Soyinka left clues that would guide readers to decode his original intention in writing the play but most literary critics miss the point and some accuse me of being the mis-reader.

The very first sentence in the author’s note may have led many critics astray by stating that the play is based on real historical “events which took place in Oyo”, which the author defined as “an ancient Yoruba city of Nigeria”. This is misleading in a number of ways that literary critics should have been able to understand. To say that the events took place in 1946 would be to localise the time and space of the dramatic events whereas in the world of theatre, events do not take place exclusively in the setting but also on every stage where the play is produced.

Soyinka expected that literary theorists would understand that the playscript is not simply an archival document or ethnographic report but the work of original creation even when based on real events.

The play was not expected to be read, as the verbatim report of a tragic case that took place once upon a time. This is true of all works of creative writing that are supposed to be inventive no matter how much resemblance there may be between fiction and reality. In fact, many writers include a disclaimer that that any resemblance to real events was unintentional. As a matter of fact, the same can be said about reality genres that are full of inventions too. Soyinka clearly stated in the first paragraph of his author’s note that he made “changes” in the narrative “in matters of detail, sequence and of course characterisation”.

He also informed the illiterate critics that he deliberately set the play back a few years “while the war was still on, for minor reasons of dramaturgy.” Here, Soyinka is guiding the would-be producer away from a simplistic historical interpretation of the play as being only relevant to the case of 1946 given that dramaturgy grants artistic license that defies the laws of historical specificity. In addition, Soyinka may have misled the interpreters of the play by saying that Oyo was an “ancient Yoruba city of Nigeria”. Here he could be challenged by historians who may point out that Oyo was an ancient Yoruba Empire and not simply a city and that by 1946, it was no longer simply a Yoruba city but a multicultural one.

Moreover, nothing “of Nigeria” can be said to be ancient because Nigeria itself is a modernist invention by colonisers. The hint about the Nigerian setting of the play should have encouraged the critics to understand that the play is not only about a Yoruba tragedy but about a Nigerian tragedy. The reference to “while the war was still on” should have massaged the memory of the critics to remind them that the play was published only five years after a tragic genocidal war in Nigeria in which Yoruba elites played a leading aggressive role along with other ethnic elites in Nigeria. This play, in my lay opinion, is better understood, as part of the soul-searching by Soyinka after he was released from solitary confinement for opposing the genocidal war against the Igbo. Why were highly educated Yoruba leaders the ones who cheered on the genocide against the Igbo in Biafra?

Also, Soyinka indicated that those who were interested only in the factual account of the case of 1946 should go and read it in the British National Archives in Kew. He also pointed out that those who wanted to read a more exact historical re-enactment of the case should consult the “fine play in Yoruba (Oba Waja) by Duro Ladipo”. In other words, Death and the King’s Horseman is not that kind of historical re-enactment nor is it the kind of “misbegotten’ German television film about the case. The play was a more urgent intervention while Soyinka was in exile following the end of the war and his release from solitary confinement for having the audacity to oppose tyranny. Unlike his other plays, he did not wait for the play to be produced before he published it. I believe that Soyinka was directly and indirectly challenging his fellow Nigerian intellectuals to account for their opportunism in supporting a genocidal war that took 3.1 million lives in 30 months.

In the third paragraph of the author’s note, Soyinka declared that the “bane of themes of this genre” is that once the text appears, “they acquire the facile tag of ‘clash of cultures’”. He rejected such a label as “prejudicial” in the sense that it is prone to “frequent misapplication” and also because the label “presupposes” a potential equality in every given situation between the cultures of the coloniser and the colonised “on the actual soil of the latter”. Soyinka went on to award “the overseas prize in illiteracy and mental conditioning” to the writer of the blurb of the American edition of his novel, Season of Anomy, for “unblushingly” stating that the novel is about the “clash between old values and new ways, between western methods and African traditions”.

Soyinka explained that it is due to “this kind of perverse mentality” that he was forced to warn future producers (and critics) of the play to avoid “a sadly familiar reductionist tendency” and instead attempt to capture the “the far more difficult and risky task of eliciting the play’s threnodic essence.” Experts on the work of Soyinka are baffled by this injunction and wonder openly what he was banging on about? What is Soyinka trying to hide? He was trying to reveal something.

I offer the original interpretation that Soyinka was referring to the genocide against the Igbo which was the theme of the novel that he referred to, Season of Anomy, in which he recounted the eye-witness account of how fellow Nigerians hunted down tens of thousands of innocent Igbo men, women and children and massacred them in a pogrom that led to the secession of the Eastern region and the intensification of the genocide. In that novel, he mocked the archaeologists for poking around in search of fossilised bones while fresh blood flowed like river in the country and they did not seem to be bothered.

He also challenged the sociologists who came with “erudite irrelevances” about marriage and divorce but refused to join him in opposing a genocidal war. The novel depicted the Marxists who were locked up in a mental asylum as phrase-mongers who failed to recognise the revolutionary situation in the country and instead rallied in support of the genocidal military dictatorship rather than turn the civil war into a liberation war. To suggest that the novel was about the clash of cultures was a strategy to condition the mentality of Nigerian intellectuals towards the acceptance of the propaganda that the Igbo who led the struggle for decolonisation were primitive tribalists perhaps because they had no chiefs while the ethnic groups that ganged up against them were more civilised because they were monarchical, according to the ideologues of colonial domination.

Walter Rodney also observed that to call the genocide against the Igbo a tribal war would be to call Shell BP a tribe (along with the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union) and Ikenna Nzimiro argued that the Marxists in Biafra were engaged in class struggles. The “threnodic essence” of the play refers to funeral songs in Greek tragedies and I believe that Soyinka was inviting the producers of the play to imagine a national mourning for the 3.1 million killed in Biafra that the country has refused to mourn. Agwuncha Arthur Nwankwo has been calling for a National Day of Igbo Mourning to be recognised by the Nigerian government as part of the atonement.

In the final paragraph of the author’s note, Soyinka observed that an alternative structuralist interpretation of the play is to see it as a cruel joke on the British colonial District Officer. He quickly dismissed such a reading as distasteful and added that he deliberately avoided writing dialogue or scenes that would support such a misinterpretation. He dictated that, “No attempt should be made in production to suggest it”. This sounds like an angry response to critics who choose to misread his works for ideological reasons while ignoring the concrete conditions that his works address.

A prominent Marxist literary theorist that I admire, Biodun Jeyifo, who is an expert on the work of Soyinka, was invited by the British Broadcasting Corporation to write about any work of literature that he saw as being representative of the global culture. He chose to write beautifully about Death and the King’s Horseman, as an anti-colonial play that tried to subvert the use of the Queen’s English by creating a “future” tradition of the Anglophone that was more figurative than the English language.

He invoked the work of Marxist cultural studies by Raymond Williams and by Stuart Hall to suggest that the other Englishes around the world serve to subvert the domination of the world by Standard English. I pointed out that his interpretation is too superficial for a Marxist because the “thredonic essence” of the play was not to show that Africans could speak English better than the English. I suggested that a cultural studies reading of the play would not have focused exclusively on the beautiful writing or language of the play but would have tried to see the challenge to monarchism and oppressive traditions in the play.

Jeyifo told me privately that I should go and read the play again because it is not against the monarchy or against ritual suicide but simply against the colonial domination of African cultures. I admitted that I could be accused of misreading the play but I called it a strategic misreading and wondered if it is possible for an expert on the work of Soyinka to misread it. Soyinka seems to think so and that is the whole point of his detailed telling off of the experts in his author’s note.

Contrary to the claim that Death and the King’s Horseman is only an anti-colonial play, Soyinka concluded his author’s note by stating that, “The Colonial Factor is an incident, a catalytic incident merely.” To him, the central “confrontation” or conflict that he tried to resolve in the play was “metaphysical” in the sense that it played out in the world of “the Yoruba mind – the world of the living, the dead and the unborn, and the numinous passages which links all: transition”.

Soyinka was puzzling about the metaphysics of the Yoruba worldview that made it possible for the best educated characters in the play to be the ones who cheered most vociferously for Elesin to abide by the tradition that expected him to kill himself in honour of a dead king. Similarly, Soyinka was wondering why the best educated Yoruba were the cheer-leaders of the genocide against the Igbo. Soyinka advised producers to try and capture this tragedy by using music to represent the macabre dance to the “music from the abyss” by the intellectuals who danced while millions were being slaughtered in Biafra.

I am not an expert in dramaturgy but I love the work of Soyinka. I cited his essay on Neo-Tarzanism in my criticism of the film, Black Panther, which I called an example of neo-Tarzanism. Following the serialisation of the criticism, I was invited by the KPFK public radio in Los Angeles to discuss the film with an Ethiopian publisher and an African American director of the Pan African Film Festival. During the discussion, the Ethiopian said that we should not condemn the presence of monarchies in Africa because there were popular emperors such as Mansa Musa and Haile Selessie who were admired by Africans and by the African diaspora.

The director of the Pan African Film Festival questioned my reference to Soyinka because he saw Death and the King’s Horseman as an indication that Soyinka was a monarchist who supported even the tradition that the horseman should commit suicide to honour the dead king. As Killmonger asked derisively in the film, I asked, this is your king? I stated that Soyinka used that play and almost every play of his to undermine the institution of the monarchy and call for democracy, which he is on record as admiring in Igbo culture. He spared the life of the Horseman in the play and his other tragedies – Kongi’s Harvest, Madmen and Specialists, King Babu; his novels, his poetry and his memoirs all support my interpretation of his anti-monarchical orientation.

Since the experts who have studied his work have focused almost exclusively on the structuralism, I propose to offer a post-structuralist or deconstruction radicalisation of his body of work to show that the tragedy of the state violence especially against the Igbo is at the centre of the conflicts that he has been trying to resolve. Just as the genocidal war was waged without a cease fire for humanitarian interventions, the author coincidentally instructs on page 8 of Death and the King’s Horseman that “The play should run without an interval.”

I agree with critics who will charge that I am misreading Soyinka here. If so, I will admit to a strategic misreading that is necessitated by placing the text within the context of a recent history of trauma that the author did not simply witness as a bystander but one in which he actively tried to stop the genocide and earned himself solitary confinement without trial. Sociologists approach the work of writers by taking into consideration, the context of the private and the public lives of the authors whereas literary theorists may concentrate exclusively on the technical, language, or structural aspects of the script as instructed by T.S. Eliot in his foundational essay, Tradition and Individual Talent.

What I am offering is a sociology of literature interpretation of Soyinka and I am certain that the rebel in him may force him to disagree with my interpretation and award me a national illiteracy prize. I am not contending that all existing interpretations of Soyinka are wrong. I am only saying that there is something missing in the community of Soyinka interpretations and I contend that what is neglected by critics is not minor but a central aspect of his work – his self-sacrificial opposition to the Igbo genocide in particular as a foundational part of his oppositional aesthetics in the face of tyranny.

Commentator: Biko Agozino.
He is Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, United States of America.

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Strictly Personal

Reviewing the world economic model, By Lekan Sote

Published

12 hours ago

November 29, 2023

Ifeoluwa Dada

The newly elected President of Argentina, Javier Milei, promises to smash orthodox economic models in Argentina. He vowed to cancel a slew of government ministries, departments and agencies, including the Central Bank of Argentina.

Kenyan President William Ruto, who wonders why Africans must use the dollar for intra-African trade, says, “From Djibouti, selling to Kenya, or traders from Kenya selling to Djibouti, we have to look for US dollars. How is US dollars part of the trade between Djibouti and Kenya?”

He adds, “That is why Kenya champions the Pan African Payment and Settlement System that is done by our own institution — the Afreximbank… Why is it necessary for us to buy things from Djibouti and pay in dollars?”

Proof that the world is taking note and acting on this argument is in the fact that China, the world’s second-biggest economy, initiated a Yuan-Naira payment arrangement for trade with Nigeria.

This international payment option will bypass the Belgium-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications system, operated by G-10 Nations to power global money and security transfers.

Russia, warring with Ukraine, its former client state, now insists on receiving its currency, the ruble, for the gas it sells to (especially) the Western European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation military alliance.

The blurb of Thomas Pakenham’s “The Scramble for Africa,” a historical account of how the West took over the fortunes of Africa, observes that, “Europe was experiencing a period of economic stagnation (in the closing years of the 19th Century) and (thought that) Black Africa might be… an El Dorado, a new market and tropical treasure.”

Pakenham stated that the missionary, explorer and medical doctor, David Livingstone, had suggested ‘the 3 Cs,’ of commerce, Christianity and civilisation, which he cynically interpreted as “a triple alliance of Mammon, God and social progress,” as a remedy for the blight of slavery and slave trade in Africa.

Livingstone’s conclusion that “trade, not the gun, would liberate Africa,” is just a pacifist route for Western nations to rule the economy of Africa.

GlaxoSmithKline Beecham is vacating Nigeria which no longer serves its commercial purpose.

Dr Patrick Lumumba, lawyer, social activist and former Director of Kenya School of Law and the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission, probably a motivational speaker to African politicians, has urged Africans to define their terms of economic and political engagement with the world.

Maybe Milei, who vows to dollarise Argentina’s economy, is cynically pointing out that the metropolitan economies have become so dominant that peripheral economies may have no need for their own currencies. By the way, the Argentine peso bears the American dollar sign.

Dollarisation will mean either the substitution or simultaneous use of the dollar with the currency of Argentina, the largest debtor of the International Monetary Fund, with a killing 143 per cent inflation rate.

It looks like the people of Argentina, their Western economic policy advisers and the rest of the world will see even more iconoclastic policies from the oxymoron in the radical, yet far-right, Milei.

Anyone who knows the workings of capitalist economics and can read economic trends knows that beyond becoming “flat,” the world and its increasingly interdependent economy will sooner or later be ruled by a single leviathan that operates from wherever the international monopoly capital chooses between New York, Beijing, London, Berlin or Tokyo, or even Pretoria.

Japanese business consultant, Kenichi Ohmae, has shown how cross-border businesses almost no longer have national addresses but take up an amorphous identity as it becomes more difficult to classify the legal residency of their ubiquitous international monopoly capital owners.

Ohmae says: “National borders are now irrelevant to most companies and consumers, regardless of whether they are in Japan, North America, or Europe. Current frictions and clashes at the national level may seem serious, but they are insignificant at the microeconomic level where customers buy and companies sell.”

The first place to look into for the tendency that the world’s economies may eventually merge into one is the consumerist outlook of the “glocal” citizens, the ultimate cosmopolitans, who dress, look, speak and exhibit the Western materialistic attitude wherever they are resident in the world.

Ohmae adds: “Americans are eager to buy (Japanese) Sony Walkmans and wear (Italian) Benetton sweaters. Like other cosmopolitan consumers in advanced industrial countries, they acknowledge the value of good products and buy them, regardless of their country of origin.”

If you took this “one-world” idea to the ridiculous, even bizarre, extent, you would have observed that striptease dancing, cross-dressing, even the LGBTQ syndrome and the biologically ridiculous idea of a transgender are trending throughout the metropolitan and peripheral nations!

Another evidence of the “one-world” trend is the global brands and the multinational corporations that manufacture, market, distribute and advertise them. Nearly everyone in the world today knows and craves one global brand or the other.

Again Ohmae points to an irony that hits the West: “The (now materialistic) Japanese (consumers) are not aware of contributing to imports when they drink the products made by Coca-Cola, nor do they feel any duty to drink a Japanese brand instead….

“They pay no attention to the fact… that Coca-Cola is an American company, or that Kleenex tissues are made in Japan by a joint venture that is 50 per cent American-owned. Schick has the largest share of the Japanese market for razor blades, but Japanese men don’t feel they have jilted the leading domestic (razor blade) brand!”

These global brands include European football teams and fast-moving consumer goods, like dresses, accessories, shoes, personal hygiene products, wines, beers, and quick-service restaurants, like Kentucky Fried Chicken, Domino’s Pizza and Nando’s.

But how all these work, almost like one big orchestra, to impose one culture and one economic model on the whole world, is the more intriguing part: Finance, technology and marketing communications are the nodal nexus in this intricate loop.

Yet the workings of the mechanism of Western capitalism have an inherent problem. By continuously adding layers of costs on a product, as it travels throughout the labyrinth of the market, a product acquires added costs that are almost irreversible.

It may be difficult to replace this cost-loading template that has permeated even into the communist systems (run by Communist China under Chairman Mao), and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (spearheaded by Lenin)!

Today, China and Russia are leading capitalist economies, even if communism and socialism are tucked in somewhere in the formal posturing of their Marxist political literature and economic theories.

The hypocritical USSR, under Stalin, appointed Dr Amanda Hammer, whose father emigrated from Russia to America, to establish Occidental Oil company, to handle Soviet Union trade in petroleum, gold and mink, with capitalist economies of the West.

The Minister of Finance, Wale Edun, who is also the Coordinating Minister of the Economy, needs to assemble economic theorists, corporate players, and entrepreneurs to review Nigeria’s current economic template and design a new one.

Just as Western democracy is not quite working out for Africa, as former President Olusegun Obasanjo and former Ekiti State Governor, Kayode Fayemi, have observed, the spiralling cost-loading template of the West is also not working for Africa.

Nigeria must evolve an economic template that works for it, and halt the hand-me-down template that holds its economy down for the West to exploit.

X (formerly Twitter):@lekansote1

Strictly Personal

Malawi’s path to an ‘Award-Winning Judiciary’ By Chidi Odinkalu

Published

2 days ago

November 27, 2023

Ifeoluwa Dada

Joyce Banda, Malawi’s fourth (and first female) president, was in Nigeria earlier this month as guest of the Nnamdi Azikiwe University in Awka, Anambra State in South-East Nigeria, where she spoke at the 12th annual lecture in memory of the man after whom the university is named. It was also the 119th birthday of Nnamdi Benjamin Azikiwe, Nigeria’s founding president, and the month of the 26th anniversary of the death in 1997 of Malawi’s founding president.

At the lecture, Joyce Banda described Malawi’s judiciary as “award-winning” and many Nigerians in the audience, embarrassed by the contrast with theirs which wallows in infamy, broke out in spontaneous acclamation. The story of how Malawi’s judges became “award-winning” should be of interest to Nigerians.

On the ruins of the banned Nyasaland African Congress, NAC, Orton Chirwa, Aleke Banda and their confederates, founded the Malawi Congress Party, MCP, in 1959. The previous year, Dr. Akim Kamnkhwala Mtunthama Banda, who would later lead the country to Independence as Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda (no relation of Joyce Banda), returned to the brutal embrace of a colonial jail in the country he left on foot in 1915. In the 42 years of his foreign sojourn, Dr. Banda had travelled through many countries and continents, acquiring qualifications in anthropology and qualifying as a medical doctor in both the USA and in the United Kingdom. On his release from jail in June 1960, Orton handed over to Banda the leadership of the MCP.

In 1964, on the sixth anniversary of Banda’s return to the territory, Malawi attained Independence with him as its first prime minister. Orton Chirwa, a graduate, like Nelson Mandela, of Fort Hare University in South Africa, became Attorney-General and Minister of Justice. Two months after the cabinet was sworn in, it was in disarray in a power tussle triggered by allegations of autocracy against Prime Minister Banda.

In many ways, Nigeria’s and Malawi’s trajectories managed to converge and diverge. Six months after the military took over power in Nigeria, Malawi became a Republic in July 1966, with Hastings Banda as its first president. It was also the month of Nigeria’s second military coup.

Orton Chirwa had little regard for the niceties of fair hearing. Prior to Independence, he took issue with the presumption of innocence and burden of proof in criminal trials, arguing for their replacement with traditional African ethos. As Attorney-General he sought these reforms but could not enact them before he was turfed out of cabinet in September 1964.

Following the collapse of the Chilombwe Murder Trials in 1969, Banda scrapped criminal trials by regular courts, transferring jurisdiction over them to so-called Traditional Courts, comprising a traditional chief as chair, with three citizen assessors and one lawyer. As both president and Justice minister, he appointed the traditional courts and they also reported to him. Orton’s ideas had become law.

The Traditional Courts eventually usurped the regular courts, affording to Hastings Banda a perverse veneer of process as they handed to him the heads of a succession of his political opponents in a periodic re-enactment of Biblical blood theatre designed for his macabre amusement.

The three decades of President Banda’s reign accounted for the murder and killing of over 6,000 in a rule described by the Los Angeles Times as characterised by “brutality, nepotism and whim”. The rule of law in the country was reduced to reading the mood swings of the man who would come to be known simply as the “Ngwazi”. As he memorably put it: “Everything. Anything I say is law . . . literally law.”

On Christmas Eve in 1981, Banda arranged to abduct an exiled Orton Chirwa and his wife, Vera, from Zambia and, in a tragic irony, had them arraigned for treason in 1983 before the kind of traditional courts that Orton had advocated for as Attorney-General. Their trial was a charade. The court denied them legal defence and the right to call witnesses. Initially sentenced to death on conviction, Banda commuted this to life imprisonment. Orton spent the remainder of his life in solitary confinement at the Zomba Prison in Malawi where, in December 1992, he died at 73.

In death, Orton exacted revenge on his nemesis. Reputedly born around 1898, Banda’s cognitive capabilities were in terminal decline. On June 12, 1993, Nigeria voted in elections to return the country to democratic rule after a decade of military rule. Two days later, Malawians similarly voted overwhelmingly at the end of tortured advocacy to end single party rule. In Nigeria, the military nullified the vote, extending its rule by another six years. In Malawi, the outcome stood and in elections the following year, citizens toppled Banda’s MCP, replacing him with Bakili Muluzi of the United Democratic Front, UDF.

Under President Muluzi, the country took steps to reinstate the rule of law, reform the Traditional Courts, integrate them into infrastructure of the lower magistracy and update the skills of former traditional court judges through suitable training. In the judiciary, the task of spear-heading this reform then fell upon two young judges: Andrew Nyirenda and Rizine Mzikamanda.

As his tenure wound to an end at the beginning of the millennium, President Muluzi thought himself indispensable and sought to extend his tenure, pitting him in a battle of wits with the judiciary who eventually ruled that being term-limited made him ineligible to run again. In this battle, the judiciary were strengthened by the popular support of citizens wizened by years under the Ngwazi.

In 2004, Professor Bingu wa Mutharika succeeded Muluzi. When Bingu died suddenly of a suspected infarction in April 2012, his younger brother, Peter, an American law professor for over three decades, who was also Foreign Minister, sought to engineer a departure from the constitution in order to by-pass the vice-president, Joyce-Banda, and install himself president.

Despite failing in this machination, Peter inherited his late brother’s political infrastructure and, in 2014, got himself elected president in succession to President Joyce Banda, whose effort to nullify this outcome was foiled by the courts. In 2019, Mutharika sought re-election and, knowing that he lost, got the electoral commission to erase enough results to announce him winner. In February 2020, the Constitutional Court invalidated that declaration.

The year after taking power, in 2015, President Peter Mutharika appointed Justice Andrew Nyirenda as Chief Justice of Malawi. It fell to Nyirenda’s Supreme Court to affirm in May 2020 that the election organised by the president that appointed him as Chief Justice was too flawed to be lawful. On May 8, 2020, they ordered a re-run.

Ahead of national elections in 2019, Nigeria’s President, Muhammadu Buhari compulsorily retired then Chief Justice, Walter Onnoghen, whose fate was buried by the selfish ambitions of his own judicial colleagues.

In Malawi, by contrast, believing that he needed a more pliable court, President Mutharika sought on June 12, 2020 to oust Chief Justice Nyirenda and his next in line, Justice Edward Twea. In response, Malawi’s citizens blockaded the streets and the courts restrained a desperate president. Two weeks later, the citizens delivered the coup de grace, ousting President Mutharika in the re-run. When he retired in 2021 as Chief Justice, Andrew Nyirenda became a judge of the IMF Administrative Tribunal. His successor as the Chief was Rizine Mzikamanda.

In Malawi, citizens learned the hard way that the judiciary is ordinarily a weapon in the hands of the powerful; that judges are not born independent; and that judicial independence is fought for not donated.

Courts and the judges who sit in them are liable to suffer elite weaponisation in any country in which citizens are unwilling to provide judges with the political support to enable them to strategically defect from the status quo.

Malawi’s politicians, having learnt that this kind of judiciary endangers them all, have become reluctant converts to judicial independence. Trading in short-term control for long-term security of expectation, they seek and appoint the best to be judges.

In Nigeria, by contrast, subsistence remains the cause of politics; so politicians weaponise the judiciary in advancing a jurisprudence of subsistence. Citizens interested in changing this could profit from a study of how Malawi changed it.