An essay that insists on precision.
 | By Jyoti Thottam Deputy Op-Ed Editor |
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I have been reading and rereading the news from Nigeria about a wave of protests against police violence. One of the main demands of the protesters, who have filled the streets in Lagos for the past two weeks, is the disbanding of the Special Anti-Robbery Force, or SARS, a notorious government security force. Read and reread these stories, and the images and text begin to feel familiar — the riot squads, the tear gas, the determined young people unarmed except for their handmade signs and Nigerian flags. |
But in the hands of the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the specific fury of these protests becomes clear. “For years, the name SARS hung in the air here in Nigeria like a putrid fog,” she writes in a powerful new essay for Times Opinion. She describes a scene of chilling violence at Lekki Toll Gate, recorded in a blurry video and circulated on social media: “Soldiers walk toward the protesters with a terrifyingly casual calm, the kind of calm you cannot have if you are under attack, and they shoot, not up in the air, which anyway would still be an atrocity when dealing with peaceful protesters, but with their guns at arm level, shooting into a crowd of people, shooting to kill.” |
Chimamanda, who has spent the last several weeks in Lagos, argues that these protests are different from ones in years past. They “signaled the overturning of convention — the protesters insisted on not having a central leadership, it was social rather than traditional media that documented the protests, and, in a country with firm class divisions, the protests cut across class.” It would be easy to describe the situation as anarchy or chaos, but this essay insists on precision. She writes that “anarchy” and “chaos” are “different ways of using language to obscure what is fundamentally to blame — a failure of leadership” and puts the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of Nigeria’s president, Muhammad Buhari. |
I encourage you to spend some time with this essay; Chimamanda writes that she had just recently buried her father and soon afterward, his only sister. She emerged from her own grief to mirror the collective grief around her. “I think of their families brutally plunged into the terrible abyss of grief, made more terrible by the knowledge that their loved ones were killed by their country.” |
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