Love and Politics

BY WOLE OGUNTOKUN
THE Whisperer is not a politician, that most reviled of professions, but recognises the importance it plays in all matters.
Love conquers all, truly, but what happens when your relationship becomes the subject of politicking as it will someday?
Many years ago, The Whisperer, who likes to think of himself as of indeterminate race or tribe met a girl from the Eastern part of Nigeria.
It started off like many relationships start, thunder rumbling overhead in clear blue skies, flutters in the stomach, sweet love songs having meaning wherever one came across them, wanting to be with this person all the time, and then the politics came into play.
One day, an older woman from her parts asked her, “What are you doing with this boy?”
It was a question posed entirely on tribal divides and I was flabbergasted. Now, I have since learnt that the politicking is not limited to the East. My “tribe” is as guilty of it as any other and sometimes the politics comes from religious and financial angles
Richard Nixon, the former United States’ president was caught on tape saying abortion might be allowed if the prospective parents were white and black.
Politics with a mix of something more malevolent. Let’s be grateful that the days of the Nixons are gone, at least in America.
Is love entirely free of politics, ever? The girl you find just a bit more attractive because her father is a Director General and lives in a house that makes the MTV “cribs” of the superstars’ pall in comparison?
The guy you think might be a good catch because he holds a European Community passport? A pretty girl once asked me outright where I was born.
When she found it was in Nigeria, a country she apparently considered landlocked and unable to produce any good thing, she lost interest in me. I’m glad she did, it showed a remarkable lack of intellect on her part and years after, she’s still ‘landlocked’ and that young man has become... well, The Whisperer.

WHAT to do when the young man you’re crazy about has a dragon for a mother and you can see from the first time you say hello that she’ll only let you marry her son over her dead body?
She doesn’t think you’re good enough because you’re not a doctor or an engineer or she thinks you just lack pedigree.
You let the young man be if he can’t sort it. It’s his fight, not yours and if he can’t settle that, there’ll be many things he’ll leave unresolved in your life.
As an aside, it amazes me to see some families claim pedigree. What is that indeterminate thing called pedigree? How does it develop? How does a family recognise if it has one?
I come from a middle-class background (at least I hope it was middle-class) and have some self-acclaimed pedigreed relatives who amuse me no end with their posturing. In the proper sense of the word, they do not qualify in any way. So, is pedigree about money, or education or royal lineage?
If it is about money, is it about new money or old money? Can the new rich stake a claim to pedigree?
Can those whose grandparents were rich but who have now frittered away their own inheritance stake a claim because they come from good stock?
A person who considers pedigree and not the worth of the man or woman standing in front of him or her needs therapy.
Let every person be judged on whom he or she is and not how many bags of ammunition a parent managed to sell as a gun-runner during the Congo war.
Then of course, there is the intellectual class which will accept you as long as you have some modicum of intelligence. Let all those who have been discriminated against run to its ranks.
The politics in religion must never be under-rated. The religious leader who tries to match-make members of his or her flock for the sake of not wanting them to disperse to other flocks or seeking to maintain some kind of control over specific members by fixing them up with ‘loyal subjects’.
No, it’s not always all about love with religion, I’m afraid. For non-Africans, the power of African religious leaders is incomprehensible but the power is alive here, nonetheless.

THE Whisperer went to see a young woman he was enamoured of while still at university, and met her father for the first time that day. He was a high-ranking member of the government and he asked, ‘What’s your name?’ so The Whisperer told him. Then he repeated the surname and asked, “What does your father do?” That day, I wished my father had some exotic job like an astronaut (Nigeria still has none of that) or a space engineer. Politics walks hand in hand with love in many places.
I remember the story my friend, Soji, told me a few days before we were called to the Nigerian Bar. We had gone to different universities even though we grew up one street away from each other, then had met up again at the Nigerian Law School.
That day, Soji told me a tale I will always remember as long as there is life in me. He had finished secondary school but hadn’t been admitted to university and he had taken up a job. He had however met this young girl who was in first year at a university studying medicine and they had begun a relationship, one that he appreciated greatly.
One day, he decided to go visit her and took another friend along. He hadn’t been there five minutes when the girl’s father returned and met them all seated. The girl introduced them and then went on an errand for her father. Soji said the father looked at he and his friend for a while and then asked, “what do you do?” Soji and his friend were in the same boat at that time, a state that might have made them appear like low-lives and lacking any kind of ambition. The girl’s father asked Soji, “look around this living room. Is your father’s house like this?” The man continued, “You see that girl, you will never be like her”
When they were “released”, Soji and his friend stumbled out of the apartment, his friend so confused, climbing over the balcony guard.
That tirade by the girl’s father inspired Soji to study law and that day as we sat and laughed about the story, he spoke of returning to the man’s home in his wig and gown and telling him how far he had come.
We understand that with almost everything, humanity is selective, and we sometimes sub-consciously choose partners for the size of their hips so they can find child-bearing easy and for what they can bring to the dinner table.
However it may be, let it never be said that we have forgotten that most fundamental of things, the reason the very world goes round and why the earth is filled with beauty. Love will always be the message of this Whisperer.

laspapi@yahoo.com