Open Letter to the German Ambassador: How Germany underdevelops Nigerian academia(2).

Vanguard. Lagos, Nigeria. 30.5.12

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YOUR Excellency: I have on two occasions applied for a German visa in as many years and both applications have been conference-related. If I have, as a Nigerian academic, come this far without yet visiting Germany, it is nothing short of gratuitous insult for your embassy to imagine that a visit to Germany is de rigueur for my academic career or even worse, that such a visit is for economic migrancy.
Otherwise, I must be well-heeled to think of Germany as a tourist destination. In the event that I do and I’m denied a visa, I could very well turn in less hostile directions. After all, it’s my hard-earned money I would be spending. But as it is, my proposed trip is for purely academic purposes and, as I have mentioned, I have never had cause to apply for a German visa except in the line of my profession.
Germany then couldn’t have been and is certainly not as important to some of us as officials of the German Embassy might have led themselves to believe. The conference I’m billed for, although holding in Germany, would bring together scholars from across continents, not just Germans.
It’s sheer recklessness, borne of vile but arrogant ignorance, on the part of your embassy officials who probably don’t have any education beyond the most basic to stand in judgement over their betters in matters very much beyond their competence.
While these embassy officials routinely turn down visa applications or treat genuine applicants with criminal disregard without the slightest scruples, German scholars continue to find their way into Nigeria in line of their own profession. I have as a culture journalist facilitated an important interview with one such German researcher, Markus Coaster, working on Fela/Highlife Music just a few years back. In situations like this, one cannot help but conclude that the attempt is to prevent Africans having a voice in matters central to their identity as Africans and as members of the human race.
Some foreign embassies like the Germans’ seem bent on keeping Africans in a position where they are defined but only by outsiders who propound grand theories that only serve to perpetuate ancient but unproven myths about the ‘Third’ or ‘Developing World’ orders.
But even as they seek such contrived exclusion or silencing of the African voice, their own scholars with appropriate economic and technological support routinely make their way into different parts of Nigeria and Africa. Many foreign scholars, including Germans, have made lifelong careers from researching Africa. There are many across the Americas and Europe, so-called Africanist scholars, whose entire academic career is focused on Africa and Africans. An example that easily comes to mind is Professor Ulli Beier, the German scholar who passed on last year in quite advanced years.
Professor Beier first came to Nigeria in the 1940s, right from the beginning of the University of Ibadan, and his scholarship went a long way in discovering and promoting the careers of some of Nigeria’s most iconic cultural players and producers, from Duro Ladipo, Kola Ogunmola to artists of the Mbari Club- Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, J.P Clark-Bekederemo, Demas Nwoko, etc, which he co-founded. His Iwalewa (Yoruba for character is beauty) House in Germany today stands as testimony to his lifelong commitment to the study of Yoruba culture and arts.
Ibadan, Ede and Osogbo, among other towns, in the Yoruba heartland where Professor Beier became a household name, even with first class royalties; was feted and celebrated- these towns are today the cultural destinations they have become and Yoruba culture is justly and deservedly famous around the world owing to some of the works of such foreign scholars as Beier, Susan Wenger, Georgina Beier and that Amazon of British academy, Professor Karin Barber of Birmingham University.
It is through such cross-ventilation of ideas and scholarship and exposure to other scholars and cultures that the academic culture is nurtured. This is precisely what foreign embassies, such as the German Embassy and its discourteous staff, that erect roadblocks by way of denial of visas to academics destroy when they behave as they do. It is again déjà vu and we are thrown back to some 130 years when European powers met in the German city of Berlin to carve up Africa without the input of Africans. This scenario is constantly played out today across conference venues in Europe and other parts of the West where debates and conferences about Africa, its people, culture and future prospects are held with little or no African presence.
There are many conferences like that held across the West in which there would be but only marginal or zero African presence.
Well beyond the issue of undermining Nigerian, even, African scholarship (for the same practice obtains across the Continent- a colleague attending the VAD.e Conference in question had to obtain a letter from the Foreign Affairs Minister of his country in addition to his visa application!), there are yet other ways by which the German Embassy dehumanises Nigerian visa applicants.
First, the German Embassy must be the singular one of the busier embassies that still requires visa applicants to report physically to stand on interminable queues in order to submit visa applications after an appointment. Other embassies have outsourced this aspect of their work to private companies. But the German Embassy, like the proverbial glutton that eats alone and must one day die alone, insists on keeping every miserable kobo made off Nigerians from going elsewhere.
So it makes it mandatory for Nigerians to report at the embassy. And at what time? Applicants must be on that queue where a foul-mouthed hireling hurls insults at parents in front of their children like a rabid dog at 7 in the morning or an appointment obtained after months of trying is cancelled. Now to be able to report at the Embassy at the rush hour of 7 in the morning, you must have been on the road at 4 or thereabout or you can’t make it through the infamous Lagos Island traffic snarl. Yet an applicant making such journey through the dangerous streets/ roads of Lagos in such small hours of the day must do so carrying vital documents (both originals and copies) such as educational, marriage and birth certificates of entire families; certificates of incorporation of companies, without leaving out important bank statements and raw cash.
These and more are the types of documents that the German Embassy requires Nigerians to log around in the dark hours between midnight and dawn. A peculiar German treatment indeed! I’m pressed for space Your Excellency, Mr. Ambassador, but I hope this gives you a picture of the rot that goes on at your Lagos Consulate?