Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Fada Ameh, and the Single Story.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Fada Ameh, and the Single Story.

Fr. Omokugbo Ojeifo

“One of the reasons that I want to talk about this issue publicly is because I don’t want what happened to us to happen to any other person.” – CNA

Two weeks ago, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (CNA) posted a video on her Instagram page, where she read out testimonies from some Catholics in Igboland, who had had horrible experiences with some church leaders in the process of burying their deceased loved ones. Reactions to CNA’s post were polarized. While many commended her for taking this issue head-on, some others thought that this was taking matters too far. “When will she stop attacking the church?” “Has she not already made her point?” “Didn’t the Catholic bishops give her audience?” “What else does she want?” These were some of the reservations that greeted CNA’s post. I believe that these reactions come from Catholics – both clerical and lay – who feel a sense of duty to protect and promote the “good image” of the church.

Following CNA’s post, my friend and classmate Fr. Sylvanus Ameh made an 8-thread twitter post (which he also shared on his personal blog on Facebook). The thrust of his post was a call on CNA to heed her own counsel on the danger of a single story. After acknowledging the reasonableness of her campaign against the ills of priests at funerals, he then made an appeal in the fourth part of his post: “But I wish to make a request of you: after these campaigns on the shortcomings of priests, I’d personally like to see you do a similar campaign with equal zest, showing the world the many good things priests have been doing to make the lives of people better and meaningful.” In the sixth part, Fr. Ameh talked about “a grave danger in presenting and promoting only one narrative about a situation. I am saying therefore that you should also create a balance in the image of the Church you’ve painted recently.”

Some friends drew my attention to Fr. Ameh’s post by tagging me in the comment section or by forwarding the post to me. CNA was at Notre Dame at the time, and having seen that I had posted some of the photos I took with her on my Facebook and Instagram pages, they asked me to bring Fr. Ameh’s post to her attention. I didn’t feel obliged to do so for a number of reasons, which I will explain shortly. Moreover, Fr. Ameh had tagged her handle to his twitter post. I therefore imagined that she’d see it. However, my reasons for not feeling obliged were connected with my own reading of the issue. I didn’t think I agreed with Fr. Ameh.

Here are my reasons. First, CNA’s protest is not a madness without a method. After the horrible experience which she was subjected to during the funeral of her mother, others have had similar experiences, which is evident in the testimonies that she collected and read in the video she posted. This tells us something. To change an ill-wired system, it is not enough to speak once and be silent. Those asking what she intends to gain by her continuous public utterances and activism on the issue imagine that entrenched systems of injustice simply change by the fiat of a single engagement. Those who know how constructive social change takes place will agree that you have to hold the feet of a flawed system to the fire through multiple forms of social engagement in order to generate sufficient heat to change its temperature. CNA is determined to bring down the Berlin Wall of odious funerary practice in Igboland and wherever this practice rears its ugly head and whichever guise it assumes.

Secondly, I felt that Fr. Ameh missed the moral logic of ‘the danger of a single story’ which is arguably CNA’s most popular public talk. Avoiding the danger of a single story does not mean that if I mention half the ills of someone or something, I’m equally obliged to mention half their good deeds, as if I were engaged in a 50/50 balancing act. If that were the case, would it be right, my dear friend, if after publicly thanking a philanthropist for his generosity in paying my younger sister’s tuition (which is obviously a good act), I also balance the story by mentioning that he’s not such a really good man because last Saturday he slept with his neighbour’s wife? Would that be avoiding the danger of a single story? Or would I be right in telling a friend who announces that he’s just lost his mother and is mourning that he shouldn’t cry too much and that he should balance his grief by telling the world that his father is still alive?

The point I am making is that context matters, and I think CNA broached this issue at the start of her address to the bishops. No one speaks from nowhere. CNA is addressing an issue that touches upon her deepest human and religious sensibilities, and it doesn’t square up to tell her to also remember to read out a report card of the goodness of priests in order to balance the ills, as Fr. Ameh has suggested. Why? Because there is a need to stay focused with the issue of the moment; and the issue of the moment is a dark spot, a blight that needs to be gotten rid of.

In September 2016, I published an op-ed in Thisday titled, ‘The Media and Extrajudicial Killings,’ three months after the news of the beheading of an Igbo trader, Mrs Bridget Agbaheme, by irate Muslim youth at Kofar Wambai market in Kano. Within that same period there was also the story of the 42-year-old RCCG female pastor, Mrs Eunice Elisha, who was stabbed to death by some suspected persons in Kubwa, Abuja, when she went out to preach at dawn. Following the sour turn of the two cases, I started my article with this question: “How do we get the mass media to pursue investigative journalism and to stay with a particular issue until justice is served?”

My concern was that the media had somehow forgotten about pursuing justice in these two cases and, like Nigerians tend to do, moved on. I thus concluded my article with this observation: “I believe that one of the shortcomings of the media in Nigeria is the lack of preparedness to develop a reflex for persistence, the ability to patiently hold on to a particular issue, stay on it and pursue it to a logical conclusion. I understand that as a result of breaking news constantly competing for attention, today’s media is in a flux, speedily moving from one story to another and capturing new items of journalistic sensationalism. But this attitude does not help to get political leaders to be accountable to the people. We are not just suffering from a broken criminal justice system; we are also suffering from a broken system of political accountability. The media can help to bridge this gap in its reportorial mission by compelling both political leaders and the judiciary to pursue the cause of justice while serving the cause of the common good.”

In making this observation, I was merely invoking what Bishop Kukah referred to as corporate national amnesia in his book, Witness to Justice, namely that Nigerians are a forgetful people. In another op-ed which I published in Daily Trust about the same time, titled, ‘How amnesia can hurt a nation,’ I quoted Soyinka’s pungent lyrics: “We are a nation of short memories. The season changes. Rain falls and blood is replaced by mud on our walls, our streets and – alas – even on our minds. Mud settles on the eyelids of memory. Nothing lasts in this nation, nothing.”

My thrust in these two articles was to remind Nigerians of the importance of persevering in the fight for justice, which can only be won by the eternal vigilance of the sentry. This felt need for justice, for the church’s public accountability, is what is driving CNA’s activism. People talk about issues from a place of cognition and affectivity, whether these issues are of a personal or social nature, individual or communitarian. This is the logic built into social change movements, whether we are looking at the campaign against racial segregation in America, apartheid in South Africa, or against the Taliban’s degradation of women in Afghanistan. Psychologists call it ‘cognitive appraisal.’

Moreover, I don’t think that CNA hasn’t shown that she has good things to say about priests. Read her works from Purple Hibiscus to Half of a Yellow Sun and you’d see how she infuses her literary imagination with some of the deepest convictions of her Catholic faith. When she showed up at the 52nd priestly anniversary of Cardinal Onaiyekan in Abuja last August, she made it known that she’s drawn inspiration for her activism from the store of the Cardinal’s own commitment to speaking the truth. (Interestingly the title of the book we were launching on that day was Let the Truth Prevail). This a good deed she admires in one of the church’s finest prelates. She has spoken glowingly about the Holy Ghost Fathers who ran the university Catholic chaplaincy at Nsukka during her younger days. There is no doubt that she has fond memories of the good deeds of those fine clergymen, which is why she continues to talk about them.

CNA loves the church. She doesn’t hate the church This is probably stale because she herself had made the point during her address to the Catholic bishops last August when she said: “I do love the church. It is a complicated love shadowed by disappointment, strained by distance, but no less genuine for having these qualities.” She also noted that when she wrote her critical article in L’Osservatore Romano, it was “not to discredit the church but to make the case that we can do better, we should do better.” If she hated the church, she probably would have said to hell with Catholicism long ago. But she has not said that. She is still in the Church and still a Catholic, even though some sons of the mother she loves have hurt her and her family so badly during their low moment. And as her last Instagram post shows, these sons seem to also be hurting other children of the family. When at the beginning of his pontificate Pope Francis ingrained in the public imagination his admirable image of the church as a “field hospital” that is out there in the battlefield tending the wounded and bringing them succour, he had in mind a church that is a healer, not a church whose ‘healers’ inflict wounds on her children. The point is: there is a problem to be fixed, and we all need to roll up our sleeves and get to work.

It is people who love and care about the health of an institution that would take the pain to talk about her ills. Why? Because they want the institution to reflect the best of its values and to live up to its historic mission. This is even more significant for an ancient faith that prides itself with only one aim: to save souls. CNA seeks to purify this institution of “the dust and soot that obscures and begrimes the transparency of its image” so that it may “become truly human by exclusively pointing to God” – to borrow the words of Pope Benedict XVI. To avoid talking about the ills out of a desire to protect an institution’s “public image” or the fallibility of her gatekeepers would be a false form of love. It will eventually explode.

This week I was talking with another classmate of mine who said that CNA should stop attacking the church. I allowed him to finish and then I said to him: There is no single group of people more vocal in talking about the ills of the Nigerian government than Catholic priests in Nigeria. Surely, this is for good reasons. And yet the Nigerian government, as far as I know, has not told Catholic priests to shut up. (Mind you when we talk about the failures of the government, like the total breakdown of law and order, insecurity, massive corruption, and the wanton loss of human lives, we do not balance our speech by mentioning even the few things that it tries to do well). But when it comes to our own church, as soon as someone criticizes us for the things we don’t do rightly, we somehow enter into defensive mode. Why, I asked my classmate, do we think that we have a right to criticize the government, but turn around to silence critical voices within our own church?

To borrow Jesus’ affectionate expression, here is “a daughter of Abraham” who is deeply hurting, and it seems that the much some of us can say to her is: “Shut up. We’ve heard you. Stop crying. You’re embarrassing us.” Why are we not attentive to “the weightier matters of the Law” that Jesus talks about: mercy, justice, love, compassion?

There is no doubt that the church needs money, and that her faithful have a responsibility to support her mission, which is their own mission as well. CNA knows this too well. In her oft-mentioned address to the bishops, she stated clearly: “I do not want a poor church. I believe in supporting the church.” However, we need to come to an agreement on how to go about this, especially in a context such as Nigeria where many people, including those who populate our churches, are poor and are looking up to the mountain from where shall come their help (cf. Psalm 121:1).

On the other side of the dinner table where she sat as an interesting conversation raged on on the eve of her departure from Notre Dame, CNA fired this reply to a remark made by one of us, smilingly: “I don’t care about peace; I care about justice.” I didn’t take that remark to mean that she is indifferent or apathetic to peace but that if we ensure justice, then we can secure peace. In light of this, her remark reminded me of one of Martin Luther King’s memorable lines, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Friends, isn’t that the direction we should all bend towards?