UNDERSTANDING MAN AND SOLUTION TO THE BIAFRA CONUNDRUM - Episode 2

The aphorism that ‘no man lives is isolation’ summarizes the social dimension of man. Aristotle once taught that he who has no need of his fellow men is either a beast or a god. In clear terms, we are certain that man cannot be likened to any of the two, at lets in their ontologico-metaphysical status. It is shuddery that we talk of carving out the republic of Biafra territory on an Africa soil where we profess our spirit of communalism. The reason is not far-fetched.



In the worldview of the Africans, Mbiti points out the traits of communalism in his ever trenchant assertion of ‘I am because you are, and you are, I am’. Chukwudum Okolo calls it Being-with. Being-with places much emphasis on the ‘us’ than the ‘I’. This is in contrast to the Western’s principle of individuation, deeply rooted in the Cartesian reductionism the enthronement of the ‘I’ over the and above the ‘us’. In our African parlance, solidarity is the principle of our sociality. The African idea of values depends on personal identification with and within the community.

Communalism in Africa is a system that is both suprasensible and material in its terms of reference, both are found in a society that is believed by the Africans to be originally ‘God-made’ because it transcends the people who live in it now, and it is ‘Man-made’ because it cannot be culturally understood independent of those who live in it now. The authentic African is known and identified in, by and through his community. More so, Nature has predisposed that all the tendencies of man are destined in the end to develop themselves perfectly to their final political purpose – the Universal Civil Society.

However, in man, as the sole rational creature on earth, we are destined to use the object of our reason to develop the human species and not an individual man. This is where the call for the secession of Biafra acts as a cog to the development of humanity. This is because, the society should be a continuum, where a particular generation draws strength and improve on what the previous generation has achieved in such a way that earlier generations will now exist for the sake of the latter.

Nigeria has reached a certain level, the creation of Biafra simply, from the sociological perspective, draws us backwards. The ontological prism establishes that man is a being composed of a body and a spirit. The questions surrounding the relationship between the soul and the human body have been the preoccupation of many philosophers since the time of the ancient Greek thinkers. The complementary relationship existing between the human soul and the human body will be postulated as a guide toward the peaceful co-existence of the agitators for Biafra and the rest of Nigerians.

It is evident that the soul is essentially immaterial and the body essentially material; hence by the virtue of the make-up the duo are incompatible. But the soul, though immaterial, is the activating part of inorganic physical body that has the power to live. By implication therefore, the human soul is a substance on its own that has the capacity to bring forth life in the body and live independent of the body. However, the soul on the other hand, cannot perform any of its natural activities without the body, this is because, according to Aquinas,

“the soul has its own act of existence which it communicate to the body, without the body, it is not a complete substance since it has essential relationship to the body. Consequently without the body, it cannot exercise any of its natural activities. Thus the rational soul can exist without the body, but it cannot do anything in, what is for it, an unnatural state”
(cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica part 1, art. 1 ques. 76).

Hence, the human soul necessarily keeps to its ontological status and abilities in union with the body. From the other point of view also, the human body, though activated by the soul, can still exist without the soul. The body and soul are complete substances, but in the formation of the entity call man, they are incomplete substances and cannot exist independent of each other. Their relationship is therefore complementary, whereby their distinct natures are preserved. In like manner, even though Nigeria is a conglomerate of many ethnic groups with diverging ideologies, we can still emulate the human complexity, and adopting the right mental attitude, strive towards living together.