The Insensitivity of Privilege

I have a ritual I perform every Saturday. As opposed to waking up at 5:00 am, I only get to leave my bed at 8:00 or 9:00. No morning prayers even. No anxieties about getting on my computer as early as possible to get started with unfinished work. My alarm chimes at 9:00 am with a reminder like this "#Sanitystop: you've earned it," a weekly reminder that tells me I need to take in life a little more slowly and have my moments. So, I took my phone and went online to my little sister's message informing me of a planned protest in Sokoto because a Christian girl named Deborah some days back had made a blasphemous statement about the Holy Prophet Mohammed. Some Muslim students of her school had gotten enraged by this and had dragged her out the next day right on campus, stoned her to death and burned her body right there.

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Again, there was nothing too surprising about that event if you have lived all your life in the north. I have witnessed one of such events myself -even though, in this case, the boy in question had escaped by sheer luck and serious intervention -he had to leave the campus and Sokoto forever. The mob action this time was a lot braver because for like the first time, the perpetrators had the killing filmed and, in fact, showed their faces like in a heroic deed, not only chanting Allahu Akbar but showing the matches with which they burnt her and posted the video online. That was the difference—the harrowing detail of the death. The Muslim protesters had gone out to protest the arrest of two persons involved in the crime by the government, and they wanted them released immediately.

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As my day progressed, I was in a total state of confusion. Who do I call first, and how do I repeat the calls to make rounds every 30 minutes to find out how everyone is doing? ?The protest was getting extreme -they had burned two churches and destroyed businesses by afternoon near my house, and my mum had left home with nothing to get somewhere safer. Again, that was not anything new. My mum has seen many crises and is not unused to leaving everything behind and never looking back. Aside from making calls all the way from Europe, what else can I do?

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I could be angry and curse. I could go on my social media and rage. I could actually go on my social media and drop a sensible take adding my voice to the 'No more' group. That is a sensible thing to do. All my professional experiences have been in Human Rights. I am used to developing messages and placards, and fliers for protest. I am used to making press releases. Hell, I am accustomed to following and numbering the name of people that have died in violent crises across states in Nigeria in detail every month and sending out reports and newsletters. I have been the manager of the communications team of the National Day of Mourning for the Victims of Violent Crises in Nigeria NDOM 21 as a communication officer at Global Rights.

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What I had been doing was helping those who had to outsource their voices during crises because to speak too loudly is to have yourself 6 ft below the ground. Even though, to say the truth, there is an extent to which you would experience crises that the idea of death for what you stand for would seem even appealing -the human spirit is good at adapting fast. But that is beside the point. The point was that I could not speak as loudly as I wanted to. Everyone I call family stays in Sokoto state. Knowing the characteristics of this mob, to what extent do I speak, or do I not speak? How much should I say or not say that would not constitute another blaspheme? What would be the state of my loved ones that I had left behind to pursue another dream in Europe? I needed more than anything else to outsource my voice yesterday.

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So, instead of going to post publicly online to express my sadness at the event, I moved to a friend’s private message to express my anger. I told my friend that ‘they’ were attacking my home. It’s getting messier. I’ve been on calls all day. I have been online on a Saturday I would usually not be online. Been following up with reports and videos that I would not typically open. However, my good friend, a learned South-westerner, told me my family should not be living there in Sokoto in the first place.

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As much as I would like everything else to bother me more, that statement stood tall in my mind -right at the front of it. My friend is not the only one with that opinion. I went through many WhatsApp and Twitter posts, and I saw similar opinions. People questioned what other tribes and religions find appealing about living in a place like Sokoto. Some would usually confront me indirectly with this question. I have always found it hard to explain this truth to them: People who stay in a place they find indigenous all their lives do not understand the other hundreds of definitions of what a home is and might likely never know. People who have families they feel related to by blood do not understand what it means for total strangers to not only become family but home. They are prisoners of their privilege, if we can call it that. You can actually tell the insensitivity of privilege and what it can make its holders, whether educated, intelligent or illiterate. Yet people do not really understand how much privilege they have and how much their opinion relies on their privilege.

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If anything, be afraid of privilege. We all should be afraid of privilege. Of trivialising another's experience through lenses, we have not worn ourselves.

Privilege sometimes puts the burden of insensitivity on its bearers, making an unsympathetic, unintelligent and blind human out of us. For every one of us, we should be confronted with how to manage our privileges and what they make of us -good humans or ordinary unfeeling human who thinks everything they have no personal understanding of can be explained with logic and everything they have experienced could be explained from emotion. Against common belief, it takes a lot of work to be a good person.