The Examples of Goodness

Until she won the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing, Namwali Serpell enjoyed relative obscurity at her Associate Professorship position at Berkeley, California.

If the Caine Prize didn’t thrust her into the African and global limelights, beyond the inhabited borders of the literati and the bitter spaces of critics, her hand of giving and her golden heart of love certainly brought her fame and great renown.

Today, Serpell, Zambian, is not only famous for the prowess of her art, the brilliance of her fiction, and for the genius of her prose but also now well renowned for reconnecting the vessels of humanity to the blood that binds us, for sharing joys with others-a labour of love, for humanizing compassion and kindness, for denying the self the pleasure of enjoying the fruit at the hands of labour, and for providing a stellar example to a world that has long grown greedy and selfish, a world complicated by the problem of ME, MYSELF and I.

The world shouldn’t be greedy and selfish.

The world shouldn’t be problematized by ME, MYSELF and I, by the spirit of the self, by the ubiquitous wraith-that which conquers the human habitation, which inhabits our communal space, and foists upon it greed, lust and that constant question of what’s in it for me- by the phantom culture that inhibits fellowship and bond, love and affection, WE and US, and makes blood lighter and water thicker.

The world shouldn’t be so! Sadly, it is the world we live in.

There are those who reject the self-seeking ways of the world, who reject the notion of exalting the will of the self above the collective will, the individual will above the communal will, and who seek the moral aspect of the self- the selfless aspect that promotes the true ideal of “give, and it shall be given unto you…for with the same measure it shall be measured unto you”.

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Still, there are those who object to Ayn Rand’s description of selfishness as a moral virtue and of the selfish person as a “self-respecting, self-supporting human being who neither sacrifices others to himself nor sacrifices himself to others”.

Serpell is one of those objectors, a conscientious one at that, I must stress.

That sense of objection didn’t escape her one moment last year when she decided to share her $15,000 Caine Prize money with other writers ( Masande Ntshanga, FT Kola, Elnathan John and Segun Afolabi) who made the shortlist of the Caine Prize.

This is what she told the British Broadcasting Corporation in July, 2015:

“I wanted to change the structure of the prize. It is very awkward to be placed in this position of competition with other writers you respect immensely and you feel yourself put in a sort of American idol or race-horse situation when actually, you all want yo support each other”. Bless her.

No naked person offers his nakedness as a gift to the world.

Sharing the prize money is an “act of mutiny”, she rebelliously stated at the time.

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Serpell is wrong. Sharing, an intricate aspect of giving, is an act of kindness, of love and of compassion. This is more so when one considers the fact that no writer, including Segun Afolabi, the 2005 winner, ever found it expedient to share their prize money with other writers, so that other winners could share their prize money with others at another time, at least going by the information available in the public space.

All of this would have happened: Serpell would have walked away with her prize money, like other prize-winners before her. In her moment of glory, she would have remembered those nights she toiled alone with her short story. She would have remembered her grandparents who eke out their livelihood in Zambia’s Copperbelt Province. She would have remembered friends in downtown Lusaka who stood in front of their television sets and cheered her to victory. She certainly wouldn’t have forgotten those who cupped their faces because they were too frightened to watch the television. She would have remembered friends at the Free House in Berkeley she owed a pint of lager or two. She chose to forget them. She remembered the kindred of the writing fraternity.

This is the Serpell example: to share our possessions with humanity is to gift love to all men and women!

Enter Josephine Ugwu, who many folks don’t know was only a week and a half ago named by the highly regarded online youth platform, Ynaija, as its ‘Person of the Year.

Ugwu, a cleaner at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos, was performing her routine duties on the 23rd day of January, 2015 at the arrival lounge of the airport when she found a bag lying unattended to on the concourse.

She narrates her story: “That particular day I was doing morning shift. As I was cleaning, I saw the bag on the floor where passengers were waiting. Around 7:20pm when I closed and was about to leave I saw the bag again still in the same position. I told passengers there to take note of the bag so they will not forget. The passengers said it did not belong to them. So, I had to take the bag to the security point. The security men then opened it and counted the money”.

The recovered bag contained foreign currencies of different denominations, when converted topped a little over twelve million naira.

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The example of Ugwu sheds light on the goodness of humanity. While it fulfills the moral ideal that out of the goodness of the heart comes good, goodness, comes righteousness, comes love and kindness, so that the good heart can go on living forever, it also extols the best in us and restores faith in our much maligned humanity.

The other example of Ugwu is that which makes the aspiration of the second stanza of the national anthem real and profound. That she, like many others, sought the God of Creation to direct her noble cause, in love and honesty to grow, could forever live just and true with her conscience isn’t lost here. Ugwu could have shunned the piety of the writer of the anthem. She would have betrayed her conscience by bolting far away with the bag into the anonymity of the Lagos suburbia without a trace. She didn’t. She did the noble thing by returning the bag to its grateful owner.

Can anything good come out of our country?

Come and see countless Good Samaritans-poor folks, unsung and unnoticed, who, tempted by their conditions to hide lost and found items away to improve their lives, don’t yield to temptation, so that mercy will continually follow them. They are thankful for their good and unblemished lives-at least.

Can anything good come out of our country?

Meet Josephine Ugwu, “in whom there is no deceit”!