This is the  fourth and concluding part of the paper delivered  by Ifowodo at Oleh, Delta State, under the auspices of the Solomon Ogba Peace Group in Collaboration with Flomat Books. The third was published last Friday

By OGAGA IFOWODO
I HAVE taken up much of the time and yet there is more to say, so I must move on to ask whether the militarization of the campuses from without aside, the confraternities are in any way complicit in the rise of this deadly culture of violence.

I raise this question because, clearly, it is time to move beyond the lazy and mendacious blaming of the Pyrates for the degeneration into gangsterismand cultism, or indeed any mutual finger-pointing by the spokesmen of the confraternities.

The “foam” in their eye: hierarchical structure, machismo and chauvinism of confraternities: As seen at the beginning, the manifestoes of the five oldest confraternities, taken as the model of most if not all of the others that followed the Pyrates, are highly idealistic.

There is hardly anything to fault in them, other than, perhaps, in mere matters of style. So how then did they become so easily prone to co-optation for ends diametrically opposed to the ideals of freedom, justice, egalitarianism, racial pride and authenticity, fair play, non-discrimination, solidarity and service to humanity in general that they so stirringly espouse? I will not waste time here. I have two speculations; I will hazard them and move on to the concluding part of this lecture.

Firstly, it seems to me that the hierarchical organizational structure of the confraternities, borrowed wholesale from the Pyrates despite any accusations of undemocratic leadership or betrayal of the original ideals levelled by the Buccaneers, rendered them easy targets for infiltration, being in that way akin to the command structure of the military. “Odas is odas,” say the Pyrates, who explain that it is merely a by-word for “discipline,” but you might say the same thing of the military too! “Blud for blud,” the Buccaneers say, claiming divine retribution or karma for all evil deeds, but in the reality of daily existence, this might more easily connote a unilateral sense of right and wrong to justify unreflective acts of vigilante justice, echoing as it does the Mosaic injunction of an eye for an eye which the latter teacher, Jesus Christ, felt compelled to rewrite as “turn the other cheek” for an ethic of forgiveness.

This hierarchical structure betrays the tenets of freedom and democracy that their respective creeds trumpet. And the names and nicknames of their leaders as well as of the groups themselves are revealing: Cap’n Blood, Grand Eye, Seadogs, Sea Lords, Air Lords, Axe-men, Supreme this-and-that Confraternity. Indeed, one confraternity, the Eiye, an Afrocentric philosophy notwithstanding, observes a Rambo Day! And then there is the ethnological marvel of Norsemen, a branch of the Germanic race to be found in the Nordic countries of Europe, who, unknown to the world, turned all black at some point in history, relocated to Nigeria and formed a club (kclub, that is) that also goes by the name of Vikings! Secondly, there is the tendency I can only describe as unbridled machismo, a vaunted masculinity that undergirds the exclusion of female students from membership, a practice at variance with the non-discriminatory, radical egalitarian humanism proclaimed by their manifestoes.

It is not enough to disavow male chauvinism; the very exclusion of females from the social activities that promote fellow-feeling and group solidarity, from the internal deliberations on issues during which questions of power within and without the organization are resolved, has to have some bearing on the structure of thinking of the male members regarding daily collective existence in the larger society. In particular, the impact of that mode of navigating the civic space, which is necessarily a shared one, on the weaker minds among them, the sort allegedly expelled from the Pyrates, leading to the chain of factionalisation and mimic groups. But let me be clear: I am not levelling a specific charge of chauvinism against individual confraternity brothers but only making a general observation as to the way our mode of existence, of social interaction, can affect, mostly unconsciously, our attitudes.

Is this contradiction, perhaps, what the metaphorical inaptness or rhetorical excess of confraternity self-naming points to? I am speaking here of the outlandish notionof pirates, buccaneers, sea-lords and air-lords who only “sail” and “fly” on land! No more than puffery, probably, and a pointer to the “boys’/men’s club” spirit of the whole thing for a start, the idea of a male-only society devoted to bonding and camaraderie and so well-served by tall tales. Indeed, one might wonder if all members are at least required to be swimmers or “astral travellers.”As the faithful majority of confraternity members ponder the metamorphosis from the charitable organisations envisaged at their inception to the diabolical gangs and cults that they have become, I hope that such members will at minimum consider these speculations as an invitation to further self-scrutiny.

Cults and the idea of the university: on learning and character: Indulge me for one more minute as I turn to a key idea of the topic. Since what we know today of the confraternities-turned-cults is antithetical to learning and character, we need to remind ourselves, as well as present and future undergraduates, of the idea of a university, its ultimate purpose. I hold that this is true, by and large, even if the one and only purpose of entering a university – as is so often the case – is to obtain a meal ticket, a certificate that guarantees a better job and higher salary. And I can think of no better authority to turn to here than Cardinal John Newman, an Anglican turned Catholic who became a towering figure in the history of the modern university.  With the blessing of the Pope, he founded and was rector for five years of the Catholic University of Ireland (the present University College of Dublin). Though a “man of God,” he insisted on the separation of the church from the university: the latter, he insisted, was not the place for making moral beings; that office, he rightly asserted, belonged to the church and priests and not to the non-seminary classroom and the professor. Knowledge, which he saw as its own end, was the ultimate justification of a university. According to Newman, education “makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman.” How many of our prosperity pastors, owners of a good number of the new universities that are the rage today, one of which insists on virginity tests for its female students (mercifully, it appears all right for boys not to be virgins!), would accept this proposition?

As Newman argued, “To open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to know, and to digest, master, rule, and use its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, resource, address, eloquent expression, is an object as intelligible (for here we are inquiring, not what the object of a liberal education is worth, nor what use the Church makes of it, but what it is in itself)… as the cultivation of virtue, while, at the same time, it is absolutelydistinct from it.”

Given our subject, I would underline the opening phrase about opening and refining the mind to enable it master and have power over its faculties. In plain words, the age-old goal of knowledge for self-mastery (though one cannot wholly master one’s self it is nonetheless a worthy goal) or personal discipline, which in turn prepares the individual for a life of dignity and service to the common good.

University education, in particular, of the liberal kind, Newman insisted, “brings the mind into form.” For him, the function of a university properly called, or, in his words, “taken in its bare idea,” is “intellectual culture.” Not, it bears reiterating, a “culture of violence,” for a university “educates the intellect to reason well in all matters, to reach out towards truth, and to grasp it,” the knowledge that it imparts being an “indispensable condition of expanding the mind.”

Newman offered these and many other profound insights into the nature and purpose of the university in a series of lectures he gave as founding rector of the Catholic University of Ireland; they were subsequently published in a book entitled The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated in Nine Discourses Delivered better known by the shorter title, The Idea of a University. I commend it to our heads of state and governors (elected and unelected), and our private proprietors (especially the daddy overseers, bishops, archbishops, men-of-God) – honourary intellectuals, all, as visitors or the final authority of our universities.

Enabling environment

Newman’s ideas will help clear some of the thick cobwebs that clog their thinking and prevent a healthy understanding of university education.

Perhaps then we would return to the urgent business of expanding the minds of our young men and women; of creating an enabling environment that would promote learning and character. Given this, and all the foregoing, I shall not bother with the tedious and perfunctory exercise of proposing a “way forward.” That way, at any rate clear directions to it, are implicit, I believe, in all that I have said. And if not, definitely in the reams of paper full of such proposals that abound in our archives. Let us then look to any sense I may have made this afternoon, and to the solutions that brighter minds than mine have proffered and will surely proffer again, voluntarily or on demand, with the sworn determination of eradicating the culture of violence that has wrecked our universities and restoring them to their old glory as places of learning and character.