Isese’ Traditional Worship Must Not Rest Until Perpetrators Of Crime Are Brought To Justice – Soyinka

‘Isese’ Traditional Worship Must Not Rest Until Perpetrators Of Crime Are Brought To Justice – Soyinka

Soyinka added that these perpetrators included the “purveyors of sectional hate and discord who applauded the deed, including those who have obstructed the cause of justice.”

Nobel Laureate, Prof Wole Soyinka, has said that adherents of Isese traditional worship must not be intimidated nor relent until all perpetrators of crime against humanity are brought to justice.

Soyinka added that these perpetrators included the “purveyors of sectional hate and discord who applauded the deed, including those who have obstructed the cause of justice.”

The Nobel laureate also called for religious tolerance in the country.

Soyinka made this call on Friday in Lagos State, at a Public Exchange on the topic “Isese, Samarkand, And Other Markets Of The Mind”.

He commended all those – human rights activists, community leaders, affronted citizens, advocates of equity and all – who had taken the course of defending the traditional adherents who had recently been vicitimised in Ilorin, Kwara State, by state actors including the Nigerian Police.

In the statement titled “Thus Counsels Isese”, Soyinka, however, warned that the battle was not over, noting that “there are those who feel compelled to indulge their obsessions through the cooption of public symbols and educational institutions. We must never weary of instructing them, of offering them gleanings from the threshing floor of millennia-old and new transformative ideas, rescue them from centuries of false historicism, baseless fears, and will to dominate and/or flaunt an inglorious past of enslavement.”

He said, “(Isese) enacts an impartial order, inserts a critical building block in the architecture of universal enlightenment… The celebration of ‘Isese’ is not defined by an annual observance only, but as a presiding awareness, a daily companion that offers its essence for humanity’s harmonised co-existence.

“It transcends religion since it calls to what is innate to all sentient beings, those strange advocates of Freedom who, paradoxically, nonetheless persist in fashioning chains for themselves and for their fellow beings. Isese liberates.

“It is an expression of the collective human spirit, its enveloping, compassionate accommodation of human experience, yet one that strives towards the seemingly inaccessible, intuitively felt as an elevating dimension of one’s material estate. ‘Isese’ is a Path, not a destination, a seizure yet a pursuit of what we experience as the inner quest for ultimate illumination.

“ISESE does not conclude. neither does it exclude. It does not diminish, rather, it enlarges. It teaches the community to embrace, explore, and adjust. It defends the right to believe or not believe, and acknowledges the limitless variety of phenomena, both what is provable and non-provable. ‘Isese’ promotes, foundational consciousness, gratitude for, and sanctity of human life. It repudiates the supremacist claim of any structure of spirituality over another. Content with the pursuit of inner serenity, which is the climax of, and extraction from celebration, ‘Isese’ does not seek to exercise power. All true religions know that celebration is a prelude to community equilibrium.”

“Preoccupied with the larger, imponderable questions of existence, ‘Isese’ does not thereby neglect the particularized. Thus, it concerns itself with the fate of every unit that makes up the community, and is innately bound to engage in questions such as: What is a youth, by the name of Mubarak Bala doing in prison?

“Recall, ISESE upholds the right to believe or not believe, thus the question is not trite, it is not academic, but is instantly catapulted from the particularized to the universal podium of Justice.

“How does a nation define itself, when a youth can be sentenced to waste his years of mental prowess in prison, for no crime beyond the right to believe or not believe? ‘Isese’ speaks to individual and collective conscience. ‘Isese’ calls on those misguided forgers of human chains to respond to a plain question: Why is that youth, and undoubtedly numerous others, wasting away in hidden dungeons, for crimes that the very protocols of nation definition, known as the Constitution do not recognize. ‘Isese’ asks, When is Justice? And what is that ensign worth, if it fails to fulfil the primary condition of social accreditation which is – Justice?

“Justice, for which another name is Equity, walks hand in hand with Tolerance. Tolerance is simply according to others the right that we exercise on our own behalf. Do we need to seek far and wide to embrace the position of ISESE on the elementary virtue of Tolerance?

“Not in the least. In any neighbouring household to nearly every other dwelling in this nation, we shall encounter those whose Scriptures extol this very virtue.”

He further stated that ‘Isese’ insists that godhead is not so inadequate that it requires the inflicted suffering of humans, their abuse, torture, and degradation, their recurrent tribute of tithes and offerings in blood transfusion in order to make the essence of godhead manifest, neither does it decree, as a condition for admission into its manifold, the absolute, uncritical veneration of avatars and prophets on its way to ultimate enlightenment.

“‘Isese’ declares that any such pronouncement or proceeding serves only to inseminate terror, not piety, and thus, remains an abomination in the very sight of the godhead. ‘Isese’ preaches mutual respect, but insists on the primal sanctity of human life. ‘Isese’ turns its face against murder, such as the brutal ending of the girl student Deborah Samuel.

“‘Isese’ demands justice for that martyred girl, for her family, for her community and – indisputably, the nation itself. ‘Isese’ must not rest until all the perpetrators of that hideous crime are brought to justice, including those purveyors of sectional hate and discord who applauded the deed, including those who have obstructed the cause of justice.

“All are guilty of instigating others to emulation. Any society that thinks or acts otherwise, even by omission, has chosen the path of disintegration,” he said, adding that Isese would never be diminished.

Credit: Sahara Reporters