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Let Them Eat Cake (While We Drink Gari)! By Ogaga Ifowodo

October 12, 2011

As legend has it, when told that the peasants had no bread, Queen Marie-Antoinette, wife of the beleaguered king of France, Louis XVI, responded, “Let them eat cake!” Actually, those words, which have come to symbolise the insensitivity of the ruling class to the plight of the ordinary people, were in all likelihood never spoken by the much-maligned lady. We may have Jean Jacques Rousseau’s acerbic wit to thank for the words believed to have appeared for the first time in his autobiography, Confessions — precisely in the sentence, “I recalled the stopgap solution of a great princess who was told that the peasants had no bread, and who responded: "Let them eat brioche." This richer class of food is what has come down to the present day as cake. Which is not to say that Marie-Antoinette could not have uttered the same or similar words; only that there is scant evidence that she did. On the contrary, it is another queen, Marie-Thérèse, wife of Louis XIV, some sources claim, who expressed this unpardonable disregard for the people. Some even name the daughters of Louis XV.

As legend has it, when told that the peasants had no bread, Queen Marie-Antoinette, wife of the beleaguered king of France, Louis XVI, responded, “Let them eat cake!” Actually, those words, which have come to symbolise the insensitivity of the ruling class to the plight of the ordinary people, were in all likelihood never spoken by the much-maligned lady. We may have Jean Jacques Rousseau’s acerbic wit to thank for the words believed to have appeared for the first time in his autobiography, Confessions — precisely in the sentence, “I recalled the stopgap solution of a great princess who was told that the peasants had no bread, and who responded: "Let them eat brioche." This richer class of food is what has come down to the present day as cake. Which is not to say that Marie-Antoinette could not have uttered the same or similar words; only that there is scant evidence that she did. On the contrary, it is another queen, Marie-Thérèse, wife of Louis XIV, some sources claim, who expressed this unpardonable disregard for the people. Some even name the daughters of Louis XV.

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But the accuracy of attribution is beside the point. It is not for nothing that popular lore ascribes the words to Marie-Antoinette. In the bleak years before the outbreak of the 1789 French Revolution, her alleged extravagance and haughtiness had come to symbolise all that was wrong with the French monarchy and all that explained the unrelieved misery of the ordinary people. What is significant and enduring in the legend is the undeniable class character of its moral: ensconced in their opulent palaces, the ruling class lives in an alternate reality wherein there is never lack, the only problem being what and how to choose. This is what the variant of it said to exist in Chinese lore, and which substitutes emperor for king, rice and meat for bread and brioche, also underscores: so alienated, the ruling class becomes so self-indulgent it cannot understand that those unable to afford bread (rice) can’t be expected to come by brioche (meat) more easily. The Nigerian variant would be something like this: “When told that the ordinary people were starving because gari had become too expensive, the president (governor, minister, senator, representative, commissioner) responded, ‘Let them eat Semovita!’” Senate president, General David Mark, said as much when, as a former minister of communications, he admonished us that telephones are not for the poor.

As I read the reports of the celebration of our country’s fifty-first independence anniversary, one story caught my attention and seized it for a while. Not due to the errors of grammar that marred the otherwise informative story, “Nigeria Celebrates First of its Kind Independence Day Celebration” (sic) in the NEXT online edition of 2 October 2011, but because of the picture of President Jonathan cutting the anniversary cake. He was accompanied in this solemn task by his wife, Vice President Namadi Sambo and his wife, the aforementioned telephones-are-not-for-the-poor Senate President Mark, Deputy House Speaker Emeka Ihedioha, Chief Justice Dahiru Musdapher, former Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon, and former President Shehu Shagari. No ordinary cake, obviously, it required nine hands to cut it, though truth be told, only three — of the president, his wife and of the vice president — appear to hold the knife, while the six other hands are caught in a gesture of “blessing” the cake. (I should mention that one hand, if you look at the picture carefully, appears to be indicating the exact spot its owner would prefer for his or her slice!) Yes, blessing the cake. Not surprising for a country neatly partitioned for foreign gods, nor that this solemn celebration, the highlight of which was the grand cake cutting ceremony, was assured divine benevolence by a man of God and a servant of Allah. As for the autochthonous and legitimate gods of the land, well they are peasant gods, pining for gari and being told rather rudely to eat cake!

A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words and this one merits more. It is a vivid illustration of the pernicious idea of sharing the national cake which is the governing ethos of our rulers since independence. It is an idea now so ingrained in the national consciousness that ruler and ruled alike can claim, unabashed, only one justification for public office: “to come chop,” in the words of General Obasanjo, two-time head-of-state. While this is the age-old idea that informs the greed and primitive accumulation instinct of ruling classes everywhere, no matter how much enlightened self-interest may seek to curb it, it is the mark of cynical resignation on the part of the ruled. For the latter, adopting this self-defeating ethos is often compelled by the brutal reality of trying to survive in a polity where the commonwealth is monopolised by the few in or around government. It necessitates do-or-die battles for access to the cake, for the right to participate in the cake-cutting ceremonies that take place year round in the name of governance.

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And I couldn’t turn away from the picture because of the story it told. Information minister, Labaran Maku, sought to credit the government for a low-key celebration, though we all know that the threat of bombs had something to do with the new-found sobriety. Even then, Jonathan showed us just why independence has meant endless doom for the ordinary people and ceaseless boom for the tiny minority that battles its way to the corridors of power. But I ask, why a cake as the token of our independence celebration? What can it symbolise for us? Certainly, it is not that it constitutes the staple food of the people. Nor that its ingredients are all locally grown and processed, and so it bespeaks our self-sufficiency. On the contrary, and as we saw at the beginning of this essay, the cake is more properly seen as a staple of the haves, and as the symbol of the destitution and resentment of the have-nots. For, look, there wasn’t a single ordinary citizen’s hand anywhere near the cake. Yet it was baked, no doubt at a scandalous cost, for and on behalf of us all! I demand, with all the right that citizenship confers on me, to be told how much it cost to bake, decorate and transport to venue this national cake. I bet it is more than a citizen’s minimum wage for a full year.
But if eating the anniversary cake was conceived as some rite of communion, of ingesting a symbolic morsel of the country so that we may all have the land in us the better to cherish our independence, then Jonathan has clearly shown us which Nigerians are truly “independent.”  In action more than words, the president confirms the truth that the overwhelming majority has lived with since that first day of October 1960. Nigeria, the picture tells us, belongs to the ruling class in every epoch as represented by Gowon, Shagari and Jonathan. And that the rest of the people are not invited to her independence feast, to the pride and glory of self-governance.

It follows then that while having his cake and eating it, Jonathan could once again ignore the severity of the problems threatening the continued existence of the “nation” by making blithe assurances: “We overcame before. We will overcome yet again.”  (Who the hell writes his speeches?) Thus, the seething angst and desperation of the Niger Delta that has seen to the martyrdom of Isaac Boro, Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni 8, the catastrophe of a ruined ecosystem and its immeasurable human misery all amount to mere “restlessness.” Sounding this way, you would be forgiven if you imagined Lord Lugard reporting to London before the day Jonathan celebrated with a cake — “Secretary of State for the Colonies: And the natives? / Lugard: Just a little bit restless, sir.” I suppose that the mayhem of Boko Haram in city after city up north and the unceasing carnage in Jos are just two more instances of restlessness across the land. Nothing, of course, to prevent the national cake-cutting, sharing and eating by the president and his fellow rulers of the land while the people drink gari to bed.

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