Not too long ago, a report in the social
section of one of our national dailies caught my eye. One of the celebrants was identified as
“Princess, Olori, Deaconess X”. Of
course, I have been around long enough to know that such collocations are
standard fare in my homeland. Yet, it
caught my eye. More recently, I
discovered via another public announcement that Town Planners, too, have joined
architects, and sundry other professionals—pharmacists, engineers, etc.—in
self-identifying as such in their designation in all spheres of life way beyond
the confines of their professional memberships.
No doubt, we are too familiar, those of us
who travel to other African countries and interact with other Africans in
various situations across the globe, with the many jokes about our love of
titles in this neck of the global human woods.
Beyond the jokes lies the ugly fact that surreptitiously, and quite
firmly, we have transitioned into a country drowning under the baggage of
honorifics while the phenomenon of honour, the very idea that the honorific is
designed to tag, to symbolize, to mark, has become less and less a presence in
our personal, professional or, most importantly, collective lives. This is the theme I wish to expound upon in
the rest of this discussion.
Time was, at least, in Yorùbá culture with
which I am exceedingly familiar, when death was preferable to living in
ignominy. There are multiple variations
on this theme in the culture’s usages.
It was said that when a military general was cornered, rather than
capitulate, he would eat a leopard’s liver.
The belief was that the liver was lethal. In both cases, what is under reference is an
insistence that there was no substitute for honour—living your life above
reproach, keeping your word, refraining from behaviour that would tarnish your
reputation for clean, honest living, characterized by consideration for others,
scruples and staying within the bounds of decency—even if you are the
privileged owner of untold riches, high office, multiple titles, widespread
popularity, and such like. The idea is
that honorifics—the fact that you are a chief many times over, you are of the
professional class, etc.—are no more than empty shells once they become bereft
of the honour that is supposed to be their content, the real root of which the
honorific flower is merely an adornment.
I argue that the proliferation of
honorifics—chief, alhaji, Jerusalem pilgrim, town planner, architect,
pharmacist, engineer, pastor, general overseer, supreme evangelist, bishop,
archbishop, alfa, and so on, and so forth—in our life, public and private, is
in inverse proportion to the increasing dearth of honour in our lives. Ordinarily, when you are styled a professor,
for example, you are supposed to “profess” and be known for what you profess—a
discovery, a method, a point of view, a specific theory, and the like. The honorific, “professor”, is only as good
as the honour that is holder embodies.
Otherwise, there is no difference between Professor Peller or Professor
Y.K. Ajao and the professors who have earned their plaudits through the
distinction that attends their strivings in their chosen fields. “Architect”, the honorific, is a hollow shell
if its holder is a lousy professional, exhibits no professional ethics, and has
no distinction whatsoever attaching to her commissions. The celebrated architects in the world are not
so celebrated because they go by the moniker, “architect”; rather, the
solidity, originality, beauty and utility of their works are the stuff of which
their honour is made. When you are an
officer in the armed services, you are supposed to be “an officer and a
gentleman” whose bearing and acting are meant to be characterized by a
recognition of bounds beneath which you don’t fall.
When you are a chief, honour demands that
you be the head and not the sole of the feet dedicated to waddling in puddles
or walking on the ground. When your
interactions do not evince the superior etiquette and ethics identified with
such a title, what we are left with is the monk-less hood.
Think of yet another honorific that the
country is awash in: pastor. With a
surfeit of pastors, the country is not comforted. All manners of hustlers, tricksters, beggars
are not only “men and women of God”, called by whom we can’t be too sure but
are all too ready to exploit the faith people have that pastors are imbued with
honour that grounds their titles, of that we can be certain.
If any more evidence be needed, and this
takes us back to the news that triggered off these reflections, that we no
longer value honour but instead are fully vested in the vacuity of honorifics,
here it is. Why is being a princess not
enough? Apparently, the honour of being
and living as a princess does not suffice; you must add to it “Olori” and
“Deaconess”. “Professor” is no longer an
embodiment of self-justifying attainment and attractor of requisite respect and
honour in our society. All and sundry
must know that you are also an “engineer”, a “chief”, and, as is increasingly
the case in our society, “reverend” or “pastor”. The pride of a professor, when it is not a
chieftaincy, is to have newly introduced acquaintances affirm: “You are the
author of …” as they reel out those works\work of yours that make them feel
honoured to be in your presence.
This unfortunate penchant has not left our
“traditional rulers” unaffected. To take
the Yorùbá example alone, it is no longer just enough for our oba to be
designated “Aláyélúwà”. Such is their
own addiction to honorifics that they do not realize how ridiculous to be
tagged “His Imperial Majesty” when you or your predecessors never built much
less ran an empire. Why do you need any
more meaningless titles when, according to the legitimating principles of your
autochthonous traditions, you are the owner of the world and being itself? But such is the lure of honorifics that every
“ori adé” in Yorùbá is busy trying to outdo the other in terms of whose title
is bigger than the others'.
There is no better metaphor for the
decreasing role of honour in our lives than the proliferation of hoods at all
levels and in all crannies of our society.
The more people adorn themselves in ridiculous-looking academic gowns,
the less educated we have become. What
is more, as academic gowns multiply, so have academic dishonesty, sexual
harassment, embezzlement of funds by all manner of functionaries at our
institutions, examination fraud and motley other malpractices. Most of all, our knowledge repository keeps
getting depleted.
What continues to befuddle me is how,
instead of pausing and asking what is going\gone badly wrong, we continue to
multiply our addiction to honorifics as the younger generation, too, begins to
mistake the hood for the monk. The
country is now home to a plethora of nondescript awards, prizes and dubious
recognitions. Our illiterate
functionaries revel in being dubbed “man of the year”, “governor of the year”,
and so on. No one bothers to check much
less establish the bona fides of the awarding outfits. Our bankers behave like primary school kids
giddy with awards that a moment’s thought would have shown that the so-called
recognition is an infantilization of their kind. When was the last time a South Korean Central
Bank governor or his Belgian counterpart put on a dunce cap to accept some
dubious “Central Banker of the Year” honours?
No, they are busy adding content to their stations and having their
honour thereby deepened without the distraction of meaningless honorifics. The only honour that should matter is that
their policies work and they deliver on the promise of their office to make
life meaningful for their people. It is
also why some decline those prizes and recognitions because having people
celebrate their work is more than sufficient for them. Think of all our multiple award-winning
honorees who have been shown to be no more than common crooks, be they bankers,
police and military officers, vice chancellors of universities and so on. Think of all the pastors who have betrayed
the trust of their flock either in playing fast and loose with institutional
funds or the bodies and minds of their followers that they have repeatedly abused. Sexual harassers in our academic institutions
or at workplaces often have lofty titles that, heaven help you if you fail to
address them properly, they think are emblematic of and deserving of
respect. All too often, in our mistaking
honorifics for honour, we mistake the hood for the monk.
Finally, eléèébú ni mí, mo mọ èébúù mi, as the Yorùbá would say. For those who know me as ‘Malam” and might
think that I, too, am invested in an honorific, I have a caveat. To the extent that it is an honorific either
for a teacher or a gentleman, I plead guilty as charged. I hope that those with whom I interact in
either or both respects come away thinking that I strive to be a good instance
of that general kind. For the rest,
‘Malam’ is, for me, a nickname, no more.
Absolutely nothing rides on it.
Is it too much to
look forward to a time when, as a people, we might begin again to reacquaint
ourselves with honour and dare to truncate our investment in honorifics? I can only hope not.
