Then the Lord awoke as from sleep – Psalm 78:65.
Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the Pan-Africanist, activist, musician, recent inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the scourge of the Nigerian state, was the grand master of woke. He was a wide-eyed wokerist cultural genius before most of us. His hit albums like Suffering and Smiling, Zombie, Sorrow, Tears & Blood, Expensive Shit, and many other musical pieces were nothing but Woke anthems. Bob Marley, the Jamaican reggae superstar, was also a wokerist leading light. He popularised woke movement by accident and called it Real Situation, a song from his hit album called Uprising. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Dear Ijeawele” is a short woke anthology for women.
“Woke” is derived from African American Vernacular English to describe the first waking to social consciousness. In Nigeria, it is vernacularised as Soro Soke – speak up! Leftist academics, journalists, mass media talking heads, activists and other potential resistors against oppression are all wokerist combatants.
In October last year, there was a popular resistant mass protests called #EndSARS that nearly upturned the status quo and created huge potential for change and rebalancing of the polity. EndSARS protest has become Nigeria’s version of China’s Cultural Revolution — a radical, youth-led purge of police brutality, traditional subservient culture, and authoritarian impunity. The youths interrogated and deconstructed police brutality and its profiling of their tribes as Yahoo boys. The youths were out in full force to affirm their power and ability to delegitimise leaders they perceive as the problems rather than the solution to their existential struggles – that was woke in action.
We all witnessed the euphoria, energy, creativity, confidence, wit, humour, and joy that the movement inspired after decades of social and political suppression. The EndSARS movement was like a breath of fresh air. The Nigerian youths affirmed their role as agents of their own destiny. Following Franz Fanon, the protests demonstrated how, during the worst police clamp down, the masses could find the means of reorganising themselves under one common and cohesive objective of getting rid of their oppressors and emancipating themselves.
Therefore, the EndSARS protest was a welcoming baptism for the birth of a more robust and sustained protest culture in Nigeria. When a country slips into dictatorship, it must attract protests as a fight back. In its operational conduct, we witnessed how EndSARS brought together a committed band of woke-driven protesters: young, dynamic, reclaimers, mobile, affluent, communicative, and enlightened professionals who were absolute in their demand for a safe space for good governance.
EndSARS, in hindsight, had emerged as a determined struggle, an ongoing determination to rewrite our national history that had ebbed and flowed over generations as we watched the political elites grew ever more parasitical, bloated, arrogant and unconcerned for the unremitting suffering of Nigerians.
EndSARS was able to shine a healing light on our pain, it articulated the experiences of young millennial in the hand of our top heavy and high-handed police, trained to brutalise the people they were meant to protect. Protests are at the heart of every democratic governance. It allows for conversation, debates, and reexamination of the tenets of democratic practices, especially if government falls into the hand of an autocrat. Protests may then force or encourage a true democratic alternative against any exploitative, brutish, and authoritarian status quo. As a tool of democratic umpire, Nigeria youths have now embraced woke. Buhari woke them and he must pay! It is no longer business as usual. Soro Soke is now entrenched both online and offline and gaining more converts within the teeming circle of rebuking and angry pundits on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook.
Internal dissent against bad governance is here to stay. It is awakening! Soro Soke (speak up) has fused into woke culture and what we have now is the weaponisation of the powerless to retake, with all the contrarian manoeuvres available to them, all the ground stolen from them when they were asleep. They are now awake!! The wokerists are everywhere from Yoruba nation agitators, self-determination warriors, environmentalists, BLM, BBOG, feminists, good governance warriors, anti-corruption crusaders to anti-racist activists. They remind us every second of the day that someone somewhere is wrong, is stealing our money, raping our women, is committing fraud, is championing injustice, is repressing others, and must be exposed, stopped, fired, kicked out and brought to justice.
Globally, woke ambassador is our own Ayishat Akanbi. She has taken her wokerist manifestoes across Western Oceans as its apostle and driver. In Nigeria, a shining light for wokism in Nigeria is Aisha Yesufu. In action, in expression, she represents a one-woman band on a rescuing mission calling out all enemies of good governance. Realising that intolerance is resurging under President Muhammadu Buhari’s government, Aisha deploys all the tactics of woke global movement using multiple platforms to embed militant activism and drop woke narratives into the public space.
Her self-sacrificing sense of duty, like Omoyele Sowore’s protests, is seen as fictional danger and the Police, like a programmed robot, always look for ways to stop them, attack them, prosecute them, or abolish their aims and objectives altogether. They are out there on the streets to encourage our solidarity and represent the voice in the wilderness for those who have suffered oppression through generational suppression, injustice, brutality, and the denial of right. ‘All I have is a voice,’ said Auden, ‘to undo the folded lie.’
The pervasive signs of our injustice are seen in all the evils being perpetuated across Nigeria: collapse of law and order, robbery, rape, cultism, assassination, extreme Fulani nepotism, banditry, insecurity, unemployment, police gangsterism, looting, marital infidelity, absence of trust among friends, colleagues and family, infrastructural decay, pandemic corruption, moral brokenness, and deaths.
Progressive politics is “woke”. Former President Barack Obama of the US pushed this frontier and tried to add his voice to wokerist orthodoxy or piety if you like. However, in Nigeria, All Progressives Congress, the ruling party, has desecrated progressivism through its ongoing agenda of internal contradiction to hunt opposition, protesters, and agitators whom they considered enemies into extinction. The party’s fake progressive credential is obvious. The party is currently caught in an eternal dilemma: where is their point of departure from People Democratic Party they were elected to replace?
The present administration is full of denialists even when it is obvious that the Abuja matador, President Muhammadu Buhari, is out to crush oppositions at all cost. The collapse of faith in his competency is deepening and woke soldiers like Prof. Wole Soyinka, Sunday Igboho Oosha, Aisha Buhari, Olayomi Koiki, Seun Kuti, Omoyele Sowore, Nnamdi Kanu, Aisha Yesufu, the Nigerian youths, YouTube radicals, and Bishop Matthew Kukah have refused to renege on their wokerist covenant to speak truth to power and call out evil by its name.
In the face of our collective cowardice and fawning silence, these souls are ready to face down tyranny despite its risk, damage, and death. The emerging generation of Soro Soke and Woke soldiers along with Omoyele Sowore, Aisha Yesufu and Olayomi Koiki have been active in high-risk and high-octane politics of mass mobilization through uncomfortable narration of what Nigeria really is when the gloss is removed and we are faced with a broken nation of high corruption, Fulani privileges, deceit, and hypocrisy.
We have seen the hypocrisy of President Muhammadu Buhari, a converted democrat, and how he morphed into a democratic street fighter!!! Critics, deviants, opposition groups, good governance agitators are visited with arbitrary brutality in a determined reflex into dictatorship. Today, we all must stay woke. We must continue to Soro Soke and call out evil its real name. For 61 years, our silence has turned into generational complicity in what Nigeria has become. The Soro Soke and Woke soldiers in our midst need our support, compassion, and empathy.
Yes, we live a nation where Nigerians live in fear and many of them may not have open sympathy for their determined martyrs. However, we must conquer our fear as we navigate self-determination agenda for our unborn children. Activism is a self-sacrificing vocation and those who enter its dangerous trenches have my eternal respect.
We do not need to wait for Bishop Matthew Kukah to write a hit-piece, Olusegun Obasanjo to write a letter, Soyinka to drop a clanger, Pastor Enoch Adeboye to make dire prophetic pronouncement, Sowore to seize the streets, Aisha Yesufu to send volley of insults to President Buhari from multiple social media platforms, to know that we should embrace Soro Soke and Wokism and question the generic paralysis of bad governance, poverty, corruption, and insecurity?
The time for silence and turning the other cheek is over. Now is the time to reset protest and embrace the dynamic narrative of power-to-the-people radicalism in the age of woke and Soro Soke. President Buhari woke the Yoruba. He woke the Indigenous People of Biafra radicals. He woke the Nigerian youths. He woke us all. And he must pay
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