By Toyin Falola

 

When We Remembered Our Names

We had been bending so long that our children thought that the human body was meant to have a curved back.

We had whispered so long that silence became our inheritance, passed from grandmother to mother, from father to frightened son.

They took our ancestral names and gave us numbers.

They took our histories and called them darkness.

They took our gods, our languages,

our memories and returned them to us inside museums

with labels written by strangers.

And when we protested,

they asked us why we were angry.

When we remembered,

they called us bitter.

When we asked for justice

they recommended patience.

Ah!

There is a patience that

becomes another name for burial.

There is forgiveness

that opens the door for the whip.

There is humility

that pulls a grave

tight around the legs of dignity

and buries it alive.

But one morning—perhaps no different

from any other morning—the bent back decided

that it possessed a spine.

The mouth remembered that before

silence there had been song.

The feet remembered that before

chains there had been dancing.

And the people remembered

their names.

My mother said:

Ọmọ tí ó bá mọ ibi tí ó ti ń bọ,
kì í ṣe àjèjì sí ara rẹ̀.

The child who remembers where the journey began
does not become a stranger to the self.

So, we returned.

Not backward.

Never backward.

We returned inward.

We descended into the abandoned rooms.
of memory
and found our ancestors
still sitting beside the fire.

They had not disappeared.

They were waiting.

Waiting beneath our tongues.

Waiting inside the drum.

Waiting in proverbs
we had become too educated to understand.

Waiting in the names
we shortened
so strangers could pronounce us comfortably.

Waiting in the scarification
we once called primitive.

Waiting in the stories
our grandmothers carried
without footnotes.

And the ancestors asked:

Who taught you to be ashamed of us?

No one answered.

Even the wind became quiet.

Then dignity began its return.

Not like thunder.

Not like an army.

Not like revenge.

Dignity returned
like blood entering a numb limb.

Painfully.

Slowly.

Necessarily.

A woman looked into the mirror.
and refused to hate her face.

A farmer stood upon exhausted earth.
and called himself knowledgeable.

A child spoke her mother tongue.
without apology.

A scholar opened an ancient proverb.
and discovered a library.

A worker wiped sweat from his forehead.
and understood that labor
was not shame.

A nation examined its wounds.
and stopped calling its scars
inferiority.

Something enormous had begun.

The recovery of the self.

Listen:

Dignity is not arrogance.

It does not require another person.
to kneel so that we may stand.

We have known kneeling.

We will not manufacture knees.

We have known chains.

We will not become blacksmiths.
of another people’s bondage.

We have tasted humiliation.

We will not serve humiliation.
at another person’s table.

For the wounded must be careful:

sometimes the oppressed
dream not of ending the throne
but of sitting upon it.

Sometimes yesterday’s victim
sharpens tomorrow’s whip.

Sometimes the slave
escapes the plantation
carrying the plantation
inside his heart.

No.

Our freedom must be greater than that.

Our dignity must contain
the dignity of others.

Otherwise
we have merely changed
the name of the master.

So, rise.

But rise differently.

Rise without crushing.

Rise without becoming
what wounded you.

Rise because your grandmother.
did not survive everything
for you to inherit shame.

Rise because your ancestors.
did not cross centuries of fire
for their descendants
to apologize for existing.

Rise because somewhere
a child is watching you
and learning the posture
of being human.

Straighten your back.

Slowly.

It will hurt.

Centuries are heavy.

Straighten it anyway.

Lift your face.

Your eyes were not created.
only for studying the ground.

Speak your name.

Speak all of it.

Do not shorten it
for the convenience of those
who never bothered
to lengthen their understanding.

Speak your language.

Recover your memory.

Reclaim your history.

Enter the house of the world.
not as a beggar
waiting beside the door,

but as one whose ancestors
helped build civilization’s roof.

And when they ask:

Who permitted you to stand?

Tell them:

The earth did.

The ancestors did.

The unborn did.

The graves behind us did.

The possibilities before us did.

But above all—

we permitted ourselves.

Because dignity delayed
is not dignity destroyed.

Because a people can be conquered
without being completed.

Because humiliation may occupy the body
but must never become
the permanent government of the soul.

And because there comes a morning
in the history of every wounded people

when fear becomes tired,

when silence loses its authority,

when the knee remembers
it was made for walking,

when the spine remembers
its ancient architecture,

and the human being rises—

not asking,

not begging,

not apologizing—

and says to history:

Enough.

We have carried your shame.
long enough.

Today
we return it.

Today
we recover our names.

Today
we gather the broken pieces
of ourselves

and discover

that even broken calabashes
remember
the shape of wholeness.

Today we stand.

And tomorrow,

our children will not believe

that we were ever taught

to crawl.

Welcome to the age of humiliation!  Today marks the launch of a new phrase from me: “The Age of Humiliation.” As you might have guessed, I will be using it to describe those times when people (you and me), communities (where we live), and nations (Nigeria, Iran, Ukraine, etc.) experience adversity and face ongoing and systematic attacks on their dignity, agency, recognition, and hope.

I see it as a technology of power. Power embraces humiliation as a means of control. The poor are shamed for their poverty; unemployed people are made to feel like failures; migrants are stripped of names and made into categories; citizens must plead with governments for rights that should be inherent; academics pine for recognition from systems that may disregard their scholarship; nations rich in resources bargain from positions of weakness. Humiliation is worse than embarrassment.  It’s the weaponization of power—invisible bullets penetrating the minds of those who suffer it.

We have suffered excessive humiliation in Africa. Slavery reduced humans to commodities.  Colonialism made conquest into an ideology that justified our inferiority as a race and civilization. Colonial education often taught us Africans to measure Europe as the standard of intelligence, progress, beauty, religion, and history. Independence offered the restoration of our dignity.  But postcolonial conditions have repeatedly reinvented new versions of humiliation: dictatorships, corruption, financial dependence, unemployment, insecurity, visa policies, unequal international institutions, marginalization of African epistemology.

Today humiliation is not unique to Africans.  We live in an unequal world.  Extreme wealth lives side by side with desperate poverty on our computer screens. Social media makes comparison a daily practice. We flaunt our achievements and hide our debt, loneliness, anxiety, and failures. When everyone is watching everyone else’s highlight reels, ordinary life begins to feel like a crime: Why aren’t you richer? Why aren’t you famous?  Why haven’t you succeeded?

We should not overlook humiliation.  Citizens watch public institutions crumble, and political leaders ask for loyalty. Individuals know that something is wrong but feel powerless to make it right when kidnapping becomes routine, when violence pays off.  When hunger stalks the land.  When corruption goes unpunished, when generations can’t find work, the most serious harm is not merely that your life does not economically prosper. It’s that your suffering may fail to elicit indignation from others or anyone in authority. To suffer is bad enough.  But to learn that your suffering is of no consequence to those who wield power is a humiliation.

The world order has its hierarchies of humiliation too. Some passports allow you to enter any country you wish. Others will get you pulled aside for extra screening. Some currencies buy trust.  Others depreciate year after year.  Some countries produce knowledge; others have their knowledge scrutinized and judged valid or not by someone else. Some countries can break the rules with impunity; when smaller countries do the same, they’re penalized. Though all states supposedly enjoy sovereignty, they exercise it to very different degrees.

Humiliation has a viscous cycle.  Humiliated people can look for others to humiliate in turn. The powerless father may bully his family.  The disillusioned citizen may scapegoat the immigrant.  The embattled ethnic group may need an enemy and make one. The oppressed become oppressors of those less powerful than themselves. Humiliation cascades down through the social hierarchy.  To be denied your dignity, you sometimes attempt to strip others of theirs.

Humiliation can be politically catastrophic. Humans can live in poverty for decades.  But we cannot stand being scorned while we’re poor. Revolutions.  Populism.  Religious radicalism.  Ethnic nationalism.  Xenophobia.  Political violence.  Many of these things draw their visceral force from people feeling that: “We are no longer willing to be disrespected.” The politics of humiliation convert injured memories into collective rage. But humiliation does not have to end in vengeance.

Anyone who has ever been humiliated knows that humiliation’s opposite is not pride. It is dignity.  Dignity is the restoration of agency.  To speak without having to plead to be heard. To know without having to be certified that you are human by someone else’s knowledge. To be a citizen without being the client of a politician. To work with dignity.  To meet another civilization without feeling inferior or superior.

             For Africa, decolonization at its deepest level must therefore be a project of restoring dignity. It cannot mean swapping European street names for African ones or colonial officials for home-grown elites. It must restructure institutions so that people experience citizenship as a dignified thing. It must rehabilitate confidence in African ways of knowing without undermining a hardheaded assessment of the past. It must generate economies where young people can see a future at home instead of experiencing migration as their only option for dignity.

It may well be that the defining struggle of the twenty-first century is not democracy versus authoritarianism, capitalism versus socialism, North versus South, or even tradition versus modernity. It may be between systems that produce humiliation and human beings who insist on dignity.  History is full of Ages of Humiliation when people are routinely told (by borders and governments, by economies and technologies, by institutions and sometimes even by other humans) that they are less than they know themselves to be.

            But history changes when the humiliated decide enough is enough. We refuse to live on our knees.