Playing Violins On The Titanic

Sometimes all you can do is play a violin on the titanic

Life for a Nigerian is really hard. As an example, here are my general circumstances. I was born to parents without a University education, and for a lot of my childhood I lacked many things. Thanks to charity of my wealthier relatives, I was able to attend a good school for a while, but even the source of that charity ran dry and I was transferred to a terrible public school. I have never known any real luxury, and there are many times I was bailed out of hungry nights by other wealthy relatives. I could only attend University because my parents experienced a minor change in fortune by the time I was writing my first Jamb examination. Fortunately, my father has his own house, so we never had to worry about rent.

Even today, I am struggling a fair bit. There is every chance that I may experience a change in fortune that renders me unbelievably poor. I live in my own rented apartment, true, but I have to scrap every penny I earn to ensure that I save for rent and am not evicted from my flat. It is quite possible that I will never earn enough to buy a car. It is also possible that I will never earn enough to be able to purchase a flight ticket to go across the street.

But I am far from the average Nigerian. The average Nigerian lives in as close an approximation of hell as you can imagine. When I was in University, I remember seeing tens of kids — many less than ten years old — sleeping beside the road and begging passer-bys for food to eat. True to form, these kids never cried or looked morose. Begging was a sort of game to them, and every rejection was shrugged off so easily. Though my family was poor, and at some point we lived in an uncompleted building (my father’s), we have never been close to begging on the street. It was a really horrendous existence, but consider this; the child begging on the street had a closer experience to the Nigerian median childhood than I ever did, despite how bad my own childhood was.

Consider the average Nigerian man. He is born in some nondescript town in Lokoja. He has never experienced more than 12 hours of electricity in his life. His father is dead from easily treatable sickness, and his mother sells Garri in the market. There are many nights he goes to bed hungry, and he lives in a shack that does not protect him from the elements. Everyone knows he would have died if not for cheap drugs provided by the baby-eating Bill Gates (who relaxer-haired Chris now tells us is probably the Anti-Christ). He has to hawk in the morning before he goes to school, and he has to hawk when he gets back. What of school? That is a grand story alright. His teachers are, more often than not, dumber than half the population and are only teaching because they could get no better employment. His class is also a shack, and sometimes herdsmen, some with pump action rifles, bring their cattle to graze in the school compound. He has no access to the internet because he cannot afford a phone, and the highest position he can reasonably aspire to is to become a well paid picker/middle-man/ whatever-the-name-of-an-amateur-internet-fraudster-is-these-days, or a politician’s boy, or the boy of some rich trader in the area.

It is hell. It is the life of the average Nigerian. The fact is that the vast majority of us cannot, due to circumstances beyond individual control¹, seriously aspire to anything of great significance. That is why very few Nigerians want to live and die where they were born. Suggesting it to them seems like a curse. Try telling a Nigerian who lives in Ayobo that they would live and die in Ayobo, and you may earn a dirty slap. And you would have probably deserved it. Would anyone of sane mind want to live and die in Ayobo? No.

Not only are things terrible from every perspective, they are getting even worse. Nigeria today is worse than Nigeria ten years ago, if you can believe it. And it will probably be much worse in ten years. Everyone who has any sense knows that the political class is out of its depth. That is why political leaders of means have found ways to gift their kids lovely apartments in New York and London accompanied with a sweet passport of another country. Everyone knows that the Titanic is going down and the lifeboats are filled. So what is left for the rest of us to do? What can we do?

Last week a friend of mine who had the good fortune of moving abroad spoke to me about his new life. I was quite happy for him, and of all the things he said, I think the most fascinating was when he said that an hour’s wages could feed him for almost a week. Imagine being completely freed from the threat of hunger as long as you can work. He works twenty hours as a student per week, and less than 10% of his earnings is spent on what to eat. That is a level of luxury that most Nigerians will never experience.

There are loads of different estimates on how much Nigerians spend on what they will eat, but the consensus is that it isn’t less than 65% of their income. Can you imagine how a rat lives? Always looking here and there and bobbing his neck for a crumb here and a crumb there? Always looking forward for a new meal, and understanding that his life can be cut short by a thousand different forces at any point in time? That is the life of the average Nigerian. Not only is The titanic sinking, we aren’t even humans on the ship. We are the rats.

You may think this state of things should occupy every waking moment of our existence. If you are on the Titanic, wouldn’t it? Even if you were just a lowly rat? Every Nigerian should be locked in and tuned in into stopping the rot of the country, you’d argue. And there are many people who say as much. Anytime there is excessive focus — or really any focus at all — on entertainment such as Davido’s wedding, or some stupidity of a Big Brother Naija housemate, there is always someone there to wag a finger at you and tell you to focus on the big issues. Can’t you see the country is sinking? Why do you care more about Wizkid’s track-list than 30% inflation? Can’t you see that the country is going to hell (it isn’t; we are already in hell), why do you care more about some strange forced beef Nigerians have with Ghanians?

These questions are asked in good faith, but I would like to make the case for playing violins instead of fretting about the pace at which the Titanic is going down. I know this may sound defeatist, but it is true. Most Nigerians will be defeated by Nigeria. They will never reach their goals, whatever it may be, and will also live a mediocre life dominated by penury, suffering and sickness. There are optimistic Nigerians who think this isn’t set in stone, and I suppose it technically isn’t. But the sun rising tomorrow isn’t set in stone either, yet we live life like it is. Nigeria’s continued mediocrity, for at least our lifetime, has an almost equal level of certainty. If this is true, and the evidence near guarantees it, why shouldn’t we play violins?

Let’s consider our existence in some context. If I’d been born in this same area five hundred years ago, there is a decent chance I would have killed my mother at birth because of my gigantic head. If I had not, and had escaped the hundred other treatable illnesses that affects children, I would have grown up to do what? At best be a lowly farmer who spends long days toiling under the heat of the sun only to return to a nagging wife and a bland meal of some tasteless grub and bush meat. And that is on good days. On bad days I can expect to return home to nothing but bitter fruits and seeds. Or to the sack of my village and the colorful screams of my relatives being raped by bushy-haired brutes. I can also expect to die in war when my small village is attacked by a much larger force. And if that does not happen, I may die of illness in my prime, or be murdered on the way to my farm by an envious fellow. My circumstances today are certainly awful by global standards, but surely not by historical standards.

Despite having such a hard life right now, I have a better existence and much better prospects than probably 99% of my ancestors. The same is true for even the average Nigerian who suffers the many horrible indignities of Nigeria. As a smart man I met once said; this is the land our kith and kin has built, and what choice do we have but to rejoice and be glad in it? Life is pretty short. If you blink 17282619179 times, it’s totally gone. It would be awful to spend all that time agonizing over matters that we have limited control over. Many of us are powerless to change the country, and the next best thing we can do is jump ship. But even that has gotten more difficult. Canada announced that it would limit immigration over the next three years, and Donald Trump’s election signals a rightward shift in American perception to immigration. Crucially, even if that shift didn’t happen, most Nigerians will never be able to realistically jump ships. We are stuck on the Titanic, and we can’t all get on lifeboats.

So, what do we do? We play violins. Next time someone tells you to focus on the more important things instead of your pet nonsensical entertainment — such as the woes of Manchester United, or some new anime, or some brain-rot Tik-Yok cancerous slop — tell them that you are acutely aware of the Titanic sinking. But what are you going to do? Your fretting and crying will not fix the huge hole in the hull of the ship. Your agitations will turn make the icy cold water breathable. Your anxiety will not manufacture a thousand new lifeboats. Yes, Nigeria is going to shit, and the pace at which it is going to shit will probably get worse; but what can we do about it? Are you willing to die on the streets like a dog in a Holy War to end the status quo? Are you willing to murder hundreds — no, thousands — for your pet political ideas? Are you willing to steal the property of a stranger and covert it to your inheritance? If you aren’t, then what is left but to play violins?

Someone once told me that the period between when you come back from work and go to bed makes up to 30% of all the actual living time you have on earth. This means that the quality of those periods, and their adding up, is more reflective of the quality of your life than the grand vacation you take, or the explosive one-off sex you have, or the one great book you read, or the one fantastic conversation you had. If you spend that time being morose and depressed, you will end up having a sad and pathetic life. If you don’t, and find some happiness in the little things, you will end up having a much better quality of life, even if you don’t achieve your grand plan of village-people-domination. Picking a horrible partner, for instance, near guarantees a miserable life, whether in hell like Nigeria or in heaven elsewhere. That is within your grasp, and doesn’t completely depend on the direction the country is trending towards. My point, I suppose, is that we ought to take our happiness where we can find it, instead of lamenting all day about things we cannot change. Yes, hell is hot and horrible; but if you are born in it, what are you going to do?

This doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t try to improve their situation. The musicians on the Titanic dressed up for the occasion. They had their suit and ties on, had polished shoes, and played the violin properly. No matter how badly the Titanic is sinking, there is much to do before you hit the icy cold water. And if there is much to do, shouldn’t we take some time to play some violins? And bask in the beauty of the music that we can make?

More importantly, I believe that playing the violin doesn’t just help you deal with the mystery of the ship going down. It also helps with getting off the ship — or fixing it, if possible! The best ideas don’t arrive during periods of intense stress, at least in my experience. They arrive during times of calm, relaxation and ease. Newton didn’t realize the truth of gravity from falling bullets on the battlefield, but instead from deep contemplation around an apple tree. We don’t only play the violin because it helps us make meaning of our madness and our lives. We should also play the violin because in it we may find the solution to actually solving our madness, whatever it is. So when next someone screams at you, and tells you to forget your hobbies and focus on the grand destruction happening all around you, tell them to kick back, get a cold drink, and listen to you play your violin. What else is there to do?

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1. Fixing Nigeria is certainly within the control of Nigerians. The only question is ability, not authority.