In 1848, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, the bible of Communism was published by Marx and Engels. The theories postulated are perhaps the most coordinated on the verbiage of social welfarism. Das Kapital followed two decades later by the same author. Most of the ideas put forward in these epic volumes became relics and were subsequently deposited in the dustbin of history.

Marxism has since become an idealist pillar on which intellectualism and activism are berthed. In the scheme of Marx and his followers, Nigeria was somewhere in the portmanteau of nonexistent, one can comfortably postulate that Marx never thought about Nigeria.

In 1848, West Africa [Nigeria], was a fragmented society, a conglomeration of city-states at each other’s jugular struggling to control the trade routes along the desert. The word ‘salt’ featured prominently in the chronicles of West African history and one wonders if it is the same salt that is of little economic value today. But alas, the salt is the same. The Mais of Bornu, the Alafins of Oyo and the Obas of Benin considered clinging to mountains and hills essential than the preachings of an eccentric Marx in 1848.

A mental image can be painted of a grumpy and funny looking European who had the misfortune of visiting the West African coast in 1848 and presented a copy of Marx’s The Communist Manifesto to Oba Ovonramwen or Alaafin Aoole. In his presentation, the wiry foreigner admonishes Igbakeji Orisa, while Bashorun Gaa nods and approves of the contextual relevance of the ideas espoused by a German as relevant to the dominance of Ife Town and as a precursor to the liberation of Modakeke. Peradventure, Ajayi Crowther had functioned in the era, he would have done the honours of translating the manuscripts to Yoruba language.

While the African kings and peoples of the South of the Sahara were slaughtering each other to control trade routes and disposing off their youths as slaves, Marx was busy distributing a contraband pamphlet that championed one of the greatest intellectual revolution in the history of mankind.

The pivot of poverty dialectics seek no glorification in the castigation or dereliction of our history, but establishes a convergence between historical antecedents and contemporary poverty. It aims at highlighting the cleavages and contours of moral decadence sustained by paucity of scholarship and our bid to revisit history ad verbum. To be rid of history is to venture into a bleak future, however to learn nothing from history is to sentence your present to oblivion.

My first encounter with Marxism was my first year as a student of History and International Studies. Intoxicated with the ‘isms’, I bandied my intellectualism with other neophytes. We jaw-jawed on the podium, brandishing our new repertoire of isms to the point of wooing ladies with lovisms. Marxism was intellectually comely to behold, like the swaying rotund behind of a sweet-sixteen, we courted her, and we became idealistic.

As a part time hustler at the time, I simply loved Marx for intellectual armament not for practical living. By the third year, our romance with Marx had gotten to a decrescendo. The cookies crumbled when the Soviet Union (the Mecca of Marxism) became Soviet Disunion in the books we read. Lenin and Stalin became Bolo Yeung while Regan became Jackie Chan. I had convinced myself that my capitalist orientation was well established.

Mixing Marxism with African history presents its challenges. Our ancestors were capitalists, the greediest kinds of capitalists. Our brand was not of the Smiths school, it was a capitalism built on the school of hard-knocks and entrenched in religion. African capitalism was the do-or-die slave-master kind. Thus, while Marx was penning down his dialectical materialism, Africans were practicing dialectic capitalism. The African capitalist structure of 1848 was similar to the European fiefdoms of the Medieval era. The Lord of the Manor owned it all, the Yoruba version was ‘eni to l’eru lo l’eru’ – he who owned the slave owned everything the slave owned.

While it can be argued that Marxism ignited an intellectual and socio-economic revolution as far back as 1848, no book, theory or genius is capable of igniting any such revolution in Nigeria even in an advanced era like 2015.

In 1848, Marxism was ‘contraband’ knowledge, it challenged the status quo ante, it negated the very foundation of European mercantilism. It was therefore not surprising that it was distributed in a clandestine manner initially. But Europe in 1848 prided itself as Enlightened, it grudgingly permitted Marxism and his dialectics to permeate the mainstream of European society.

Marx in his ‘ignorance’ failed to realize that he had exposed the Ancestors of Nigerians when he posited that ‘religion is the opium of the masses’. The classic Capitalist code is like a sleight of hand in a card game – say something, do something else. The European missioners who sold European style capitalism to Nigeria’s ancestors were pleased with their craft. The Africans were already adept in the craft. It was a union of like-minded crooks. While one white man sold the Bible and Quran, the other white man sold ogogoro. As our forebears read the Bible from the Old Testament with the alcohol in their throats, they read of several verses that promoted the intake of alcohol, by the time they got to the Book of Proverbs, they read that too much ogogoro dulled the senses. It is important to coy-ishly posit that our forebears were too drunk and hooked on oyinbo alcohol to notice that they had already been scammed.

In retrospect, they should have started reading the Bible from the book of Proverbs.

Poverty is structural. In Nigeria, it is a function of the sleight of hand. Intellectual juggernauts (I like the word juggernauts, it makes me sound prim and proper) like Awolowo, Ake, Nyerere and Rodney revisited Marxism in the 1960s and 70s, they espoused the tenets as a way to solve Africa’s myriad of backwardness. The underlying lessons (if any) in this dialectics is a coy reminder of the direct link between education, the promotion of intellectualism and poverty.

The leaders of contemporary Nigeria studied Marx, they know what intellectual revolutions can do, they are aware of the enlightenment occasioned by intellectual illumination. The reality is a sleight of the hand. Feed the people with religion and ethnicity, hide the book from them and see how easy it is to lead them.

We haven’t gotten to the Book of Proverbs yet, when we do, perhaps, there may be a verse that instructs on how to be de-addicted from our intoxication with poverty.

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