I’d like to think,” mused Prince Tonye Princewill, in a telephone interview, ”that, after our electoral experience, Nigerians can confidently face UNESCO’s ‘Year of Light’—or any other collective challenge”.

I rang Princewill (a politician in Port Harcourt), because the Kalabari Kigdom, where his father is King, has a Sun Shrine, to which the famous Awu-Aru Sun Festival is devoted. Accordingly, I’d hoped, he would have more than a mundane interest in light.

We are now well into month-four of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s “International Year of Light” (IYL, 2015)—declared, to enhance our appreciation of light and light-based technologies.

But so far, IYL has generated little excitement. One reason, of course, has been the 2015 elections and a pervasive unease about the possible aftermath.

That though, is not the whole story. The truth is, Nigerians are anaesthetized intellectually. The intelligentsia, in particular, is mired in a psychic state, which I call “cinematic insouciance”. We react to global events, with the detached interest of a man in a cinema house.
Mentally, a person watching a movie exhibits all the passions and moods that the incidents written into the script would call forth, were they occurring in real life: Laughter, fear, dread, happiness, hatred, disgust, etc.

But in contrast to real-world situations, the movie-watcher is not goaded to act by what he sees or hears. Despite the panoply of induced emotional states, the cinema-goer departs care free—with the satisfaction and insouciance of having been entertained.

So it is with the black ruling elites, both in Nigeria and elsewhere. The International Hydrogen Economy, the first one-year crew on the International Space Station, space colonization, the Chinese invasion of Africa under cover of “MOUs”: None of these momentous challenges move the intelligentsia.

Yet the world is hardly a cinema. We cannot continue with our indifference to epochal international events, as if history is unfurling on a big silver screen and we have the option of exiting—entertained but otherwise unaffected.

When there is no market for Nigeria’s petroleum, because former buyers have turned to hydrogen (and nuclear fusion) for energy, policy makers won’t be able to reach for the remote control and flick off the television or stride out of the cinema—because the threat is real and not contrived.

Likewise, when the Chinese have removed the mask of civility, and seized eastern Africa, there’ll be no cinematic psychology to bring emotional relief. The sheer idiocy of importing thousands of Chinese into Africa is a tragi-comic drama that does not require the “suspension of disbelief”.

Black survival demands that our intellectuals, artistes, writers and policy makers engage the global system and meet these and other challenges. Retreating into religious piety is an act of self-delusion. Preaching and praying all over the place won’t make Nigeria a spacefaring nation or a nuclear power.

IYL beckons. Elucidating light may seem remote and abstract—as do stars, planets and the Moon. Yet we are all part of the same universe. Our planet is a functional units in a cosmic system that is governed by common laws and principles.

Even “nearby” stars are untold trillions of kilometres distant. Still, starlight regulates the mating of countless specie here on Earth. Stars controls bird migration and, on moonless nights, guide mosquitoes. They cue farmers in Cross River State, on when to start preparing the land.

Cosmic rays, arriving from outside our solar system— some from as far away as other galaxies—have helped humans to evolve into what they are. They may influence our weather and are ultimately responsible for the carbon 14 that archaeologists use in radiometric dating.
To be continued.