The good news from the Ganawuri community in Jos, Plateau State of Nigeria is that the mother of Titus Mann has been successfully buried. The event which took place Saturday, May 4th, 2024 matters a lot because she is the mother of a (legal) philosopher.
It is even more so that Barrister Titus Mann is not of the Jurisprudence of the crippled Oracles stuff. He is of the Shakespearean cast, capable of floating from the essential Shakespeare to conventional Jurisprudence and back. He is a chip off the old block that the Nigerian university system produced up to the mid-1980s before midnight came at noon.
‘Mourning’ the departed
Therefore, his mother and her burial has the significance of his reaches, particularly that, at her age – 95 – her burial was a celebration, not a mourning. Many comrades spoke to this in their solidarity with T’Mann on the occasion.
Now that T’mann is a confirmed motherless philosopher, can he return to philosophy? Philosophising is all that ‘we’ have at a time of social cholera as this, especially if we follow the example of Ngugi Wa Thiongo.
Look at all the commotion going on in the world today just because Ngugi dropped one word called Decoloniality in town. Intervention can authoritatively assert that Ngugi is recognised as the originary source of the whole idea before Mignolo, Quijano and co-popularised it further.
As difficult as tracking concepts and practices to the originary can be, it is important to do so in so far as no concept has a fixed or permanent meaning. Meaning changes because the social space itself is overflowed with infinitude of truth claims, none of which is inherently true or false as true or false is a function of power.
It is time for T’mann to sit down with another Jos-based philosopher, Darius Dauda Angwa, to give Nigeria a concept capable of breaking the aridity we see in Nigeria. Or, as Jos has been the site of all manner of violent conflicts, that can attract attention. What those clashes may appear to be could be different from what they actually are. What they become or could become will not come from any extra-discursive grounds beyond signification. Come on, there is no time!
By the way, what appears to have gone wrong with the Ganawuri contingent of the Left in Nigeria. Cde John Odah reported recently that Cde Chom Bagu aka The General has so fused into the folks that it is difficult to pick him out. That could be a form of solidarity but in what ways might it help a community for one of its most experienced and multi-task capable sons to carry all of that to a space that have no uses for those attributes at the moment? He should be where his ideas can be part of the pool.
Might a national seminar on the Ganawuri dimension help!
