The 31st of May and Me
May 31st is a day of utmost significance to me, in my personal and political life. And the two days of May 31st that defined me in fundamental ways were in the consecutive years of 1988 and 1989: when I welcomed a brother into my life, and when the events that would shape my political and ideological trajectory for life occurred.
Ibukun means Blessing
I had grown up for almost seventeen years as the only son. I
have four lovely sisters who are dear to me. However, I always longed for a brother
for many years. I was doing my A levels at Anwar Ul Islam College Agege in 1987
when my mom became pregnant. By then, it didn’t seem to matter, though somewhere
in my heart, I prayed the baby would be a boy like me at last.
Momsie's water broke just as I was getting ready for school.
Dad dropped me at the Iyana Ipaja bus stop as he took my mom to the same
hospital I was born years back. On arriving back home in the evening, I got the
news that mo ti r’énikéjì. To say I was elated would be an understatement. The
affection for the warmhearted, brilliant, towering young man that is my àbúró,
has never waned.
Happy birthday, 6ft6GP. Here’s my poem for you once more,
from Drafts of Becoming:
6ft6 MD
There was
something about that Tuesday morning.
It seemed
pregnant with promise, yet ordinary.
The chaos
at the bus stop
was no
different from the day before,
and every other day.
….as I
dropped from my father's car.
He was
taking my pregnant mother to deliver a baby.
Once,
twice, thrice and a fourth time when I was younger,
I
cheekily badgered my smiling mother for not having a brother.
Growing older with my
sisters, it no longer seemed to matter.
I was
more bothered that my mother would deliver a baby,
as I was going to the university.
The Tuesday was not as
ordinary as it seemed in the morning.
Its
promise took shape in a manner I had stopped imagining.
…. a brother, whom I could have fathered!
Promises filled my head
I would
always be there, I told myself
…as brother
and a small father.
Promises
I could not fulfil….
I could
not have known that I was setting off on a path to serve
in ways
that severe
even when filial bonds are intact.
The greatest promise of that
Tuesday in May
revealed itself in time.
It has taken the shape of a man;
deep in thought,
caring of heart
and handsome to behold.
...a gentle colossus, a man
of his own.
And the pleasure and honour
to
call him brother…is mine alone.
The Anti-SAP Revolt and Becoming Mayist
The 1989
Anti-SAP revolt was a landmark event in Nigeria, at a historic global
conjuncture. It was ignited by students, starting on 24 of May in Benin. Within
days, it had swept across the country. Whilst students were its torch bearers,
it became a “festival of the oppressed” against the hated structural adjustment
programme and the terrible hardship it had brought on the poor masses.
The peak of this popular uprising was on Wednesday, May 31st.
That same day, massive repression by the repressive apparatus of the state started.
It lasted for five days. Dozens of people were killed in several cities across
the country. Over a thousand people were arrested and detained.
I threw myself,, body and soul, into the protests at Ilorin,
as a young revolutionary activist at the University. By 2nd June, the protests in that town
had petered out, and I headed to Lagos. Unfortunately, the repression had
already taken the winds out of the sail of the movement there as well. Sometime
in the future, I will have much more to share about how the next few days
unfolded for me, including my escape with Prince Isaac Black from death at the
hands of anti-riot police as we left the Africa Shrine.
The Revolt and its aftermath had a profound impact on me,
helping my self-clarification process and reinforcing my commitment to
revolution from the bottom. To put things in context, we must recall not only
what was happening in Nigeria. The year marked the fall of the Berlin Wall, and
two years later, the USSR would collapse alongside it. The Anti-SAP Revolt
itself was also unfolding with the Tiananmen Square protests in China, which
began in April, but the Chinese state suppressed it around the same time as the
uprising in Nigeria.
For me, the events showed the need, more than ever, for an
ironclad organisation with roots in the working masses and youth, as well as a
pressing necessity for an approach to theory that could not just take
"actually existing socialism" as the point of departure of what a new
society could be.
To cut through the chase, a year and a half after, drawing
from the lessons and inspiration of that pivotal moment, five of us formed the May
31st Movement at the Negroid Temple in Agbooba, Ilorin, on 19th
January 1991. This would be the precursor of the Socialist Workers League which
came into being at the NATA headquarters in Lagos, on 29th January
2011.
I sign off this day, with this poem, for the seed and its
flower. The soil of resistance is our earth of revolutionary struggle until
victory or death.
Flower of May 31st
The heat
and zeal of resistance
was
crushed in that hour.
Angered
passion and the heroic confrontations
it
conjured, were snuffed out for a while
with bullets
and bayonets.
Rampaging
marauders in black uniforms
swept
through the streets.
The
defeated were not to be left in peace.
Death or
imprisonment was meted out
to
protesters they found.
There is
no alternative to SAP,
the junta
declared. Debates in conference halls
and on
the pages of newspapers, counted for naught.
An ouster
clause had shut the mouths of the courts.
Massquakes
of youths on the streets?!
No, this
could not be tolerated!
It had to
be drowned in blood.
The sky
and the land bore witness to slaughter.
In Benin,
Ibadan, Lagos, and Ilorin,
the
bodies of felled youth littered the streets.
The seed
of resistance was crushed
into the
soil of history
by vile jackboots.
It sprouted - with
vengeance,
flowering ideas and resolve
to change the world.
…May 31st made
us.
© Baba Aye, Drafts of
Becoming (2021)
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