Nigeria: Let us include the rite of the autopsy in the burying of the dead

Speculation was rife

The apparently sudden death of Prince Abubakar Audu who was more or less on the cusp of a gubernatorial victory has elicited much commentary on social media.

When the news of his death as we were awaiting the announcement of the electoral results first emerged, I was persuaded to overlook the breaking news and curb my curiosity for the frenzy to dissipate enough for the facts and the truth to emerge.

The only truth that has emerged from this tragic tale is that he is deceased and has been interred according to Islamic rites, everything else with regards to manner of death, cause of death and other extenuating factors has been a matter of accusation, supposition, speculation, conjecture, suggestion, rumour, innuendo and fable. This list is hardly exhaustive.

Nothing really was known

I cannot attribute anything, but in all the reports I have read, there has been mention of cardiac arrest, stroke, poisoning, paranormal activity, voodoo and all sorts of silliness. None of this helps the matter at all.

For all the enlightenment we have acquired, we tend to heighten our superstitious predilections at times of birth, at marriages and at death, even if our general lives are hardly lived in any recognised adherence to faith or religion and the tenets the books require us to espouse to be model examples of our belief systems to our common humanity.

Now, I have no medical training, but the most recent pictures of the man depicted an unhealthy pallor, very much like that of the late President Umaru Yar’Adua when he ailed with nephrological complications that led to his demise.

Besides looking overweight and other deleterious conditions that might evolve from that, it is very likely that there is a clear-cut medical condition that resulted in the man’s death.

Bound to ages gone

Yet, as we live in the 21^st Century, our lives and livelihoods are majorly trumped by belief systems, traditions and cultures that have not evolved for many quincentenaries, that we fail to benefit from the knowledge, logic, reason and developments that have brought humanity to the amazing modernity and comforts of the present times.

One such area we fail to deploy at death is medical examination and autopsies, the advances in modern medicine can in most cases determine the cause of death, not only to put beyond doubt the rife speculations that surround a sudden death, but such knowledge in either a minor or major way can also help the living.

Knowledge from deaths

In cases of cancer, it might cause survivors to check if they might be susceptible to the same  type of cancer especially if there is a genetic predisposition to it. It might aid medical science in know what to look for if anyone presents symptoms that might lead to complications. This is a valuable knowledge that goes beyond the individual and the present tragedy to the greater good of humanity.

Part of what has given medicine the tools to treat many ailments has come from the study of the dead and much as it has from observation of the living. It is sad that one only has to leaf through the pages of a Nigerian newspaper to read obituaries of many of died of a brief illness. The brief illness is a catch-all term that covers everything from a fatal asthma attack, through epileptic fits to cancer discovered so late that nothing could be done beyond providing palliative hospice care.

Bringing reason to belief

Whilst there is nothing wrong with being religious, we allow religiosity to becloud both judgement and reason. In the absence of a modicum of reasonableness compounded by grief and loss, we accentuate a fanatical tendency to fatalism, providence and destiny allowing the burning questions to remain unanswered in submission to the primordial where ignorance becomes the cradle of bliss and succour.

Whether, there is a soul or not, once the force that animates and enlivens the body is gone, we have just a body in the process of decay and disintegration. We must respect the memory of the person departed and treat the body of the said departed with dignity, but there is no rule created in anticipation of the modern times that prevents gaining knowledge from an autopsy.

The rite of the autopsy

In times past, there were probably no means of preserving the dead, the Egyptians of old used mummification and embalmment for their pharaohs, other cultures found burial, cremation or some other means of disposing of their dead. Yet, we attach ourselves to age-old customs at our convenience when at other times we desperately avail ourselves of the benefits of medical science.

We need to rethink this clash of options and the time has come to include the autopsy in the burial rites and have civil law demand that where cause of death is inconclusive or death is sudden, internment will not proceed before medical examination, else the body will be exhumed for final determination.

Batter yourself not your wife

Seeking kindred spirits

Having left Nigeria just over 15 years ago and now effectively spent more than half my life in total in Europe. I find that quite a few elements of my Nigerian heritage are coming to the fore.

Generally, I am not a person given to ethnic community gatherings or associations of common identity, but I find that I have been drawn to the Internet equivalents of these groupings.

Whilst I try to catch up on Nigerian events in the news, blogging is quite an interesting phenomenon because it takes primary opinion out of the hands of paid professionals and puts in arena of general public debate.

Debate however can be interesting as intelligence, common sense, knowledge, wisdom and commendable discourse sometimes contends violently with prejudice, ignorance, intolerance, bigotry and plain stupidity.

The Nigerian Blogs Aggregator does this job beautifully as Nigerians and lovers of Nigeria – home and abroad – congregate to dispense with their perspectives of ideas, events and people.

Vagina Monologues in Nigeria

One topic that got me surfing through links to other blogs and varied comments to an authoritative source was pertaining to the arrival of the Vagina Monologues in Nigeria.

This is a post-feminist analysis of issues developed on the experiences of over 200 women globally related to their sexuality and status in society as they deal with violence, rape, genital mutilation and other customs that border on savagery.

Some countries like Uganda, Malaysia and China have banned the performance of Vagina Monologues because it addresses difficult topics most especially that recurrent masculine pastime of wife battering.

Observation has given me opportunity to write about this for the first time, however, I give credence to those who have tackled this issue in the interview granted by the organizer of the event Hafsat Abiola-Costello and theNaijablog entry that develops the context further.

Personally, it is a raw subject since at one stage, one had to be involved in trying to placate a difficult and complex situation.

Where is the love?

Marriage continues to be a mystery to me, you really never can understand the machinations and intricacies of love and affection between two people who meet and decide to spend their lives together.

It is usually just between those two and what we observe as family and friends is the bond of love, concern and devotion which results in the celebration of marriage.

The world we live in today indicates that this power and quality of love is no more the exclusive preserve of heterosexual relationships, it is chemistry between the hearts of two human beings regardless of sex and pairing permutations.

For the many, the pairing beyond man and woman is a mountain to climb, but the facts are each person to their own chooses what represents the joy in their lives.

What baffles me is how that engine of love falters in the privacy of the environment of that couple leading to domestic violence and probably more.

Marriage should not be an end; it has to be nurtured through expressions of love and affection, sometimes frank talk and disagreement but with mutual respect for what incidentally was supposed to be “till death do us part”.

Total submission

So, an uncle wrote to me to address an issue with a protégé who had to be brought back on to the path of honour, dignity and total submission to her husband.

No, I was not angry, maybe, I was not incensed, but indeed, I was livid with rage, however, I had to temper my eventual response with reason and purpose in the context of the patriarchal setting of Nigerian society.

The matter could not have been more disturbing when it became apparent that the wife battering scoundrel was also a medical doctor. The things we condone in Nigeria.

My father had said years ago that I have always thought like a Westerner, indicating that I sometimes presented a range of views that normally never gets expressed for purposes of deference.

For instance, in Yoruba culture, you cannot accuse an elder of lying directly, rather, one has to be smart about the way the facts are presented for others to deduce and deal with it in closed company.

Basically, the structure of society is built on completely preventing the older generation from losing face or admitting their mistakes to anyone but their peers or an older generation.

The language is pervaded with proverbs which masquerade as frank talk to devastating effect.

I could afford myself the luxury of that political double-speak or basically not mince my words using the privilege of my Western heritage to good advantage.

The path to honour

In general, it appears that many husbands think that their only role in a marriage is provision; that could have been true in times past, there is now a lot more to the role of a husband than that.

I cannot count the number of times my parents quoted the Bible on the issue of my honouring my parents having left out their own responsibilities in achieving that symbiotic relationship. [1]

When the scripture talks of this, it offers the promise of long life to the child – first responsibility, the parent who does not want to bury their child would probably get involved in the process of ensuring the conditions conducive to having the child honour them.

I know, not all issues of the death of child are encompassed in this situation, but it is a sound warning to both child and parent. Further study indicates that the parent school the child in the ways of God and also not provoke the child unto wrath.

There is a fundamental and initial part of care and duty on the part of the parents that sows the seeds for the honouring they would eventually receive off their children.

The path to submission

The previous illustration shows how we select the choice cuts from Scripture to plant our views in domination of other parties.

It is interesting that Ephesians 5 in the Bible helps illustrate the subject of submission all too clearly by comparing the relationship between Jesus Christ and the Church with the relationship between the husband and his wife. [2]

Beyond the fact of the headship of Christ and the husband the issue of the service and servant-hood of Christ looms large.

Whilst, this looks like a religious exercise, it is the context of the relationship that I want to extract for inference.

Christ gave his life in sacrifice for His Church, He teaches, nurtures, encourages, listens, admonishes, enthuses and builds His Church as His body, the full expression of Himself to the world.

Now, if a battered wife is a husband’s idea of sacrifice and the full expression of himself to this wife, the family, and his friends and to the world, we are the poorer for it.

Seen in that context, it appears that the selfless sacrifice and devotion of a man to his woman is the conducive environment for “required” submission.

Submission is then borne out of the respect, admiration and the husband’s humility in relating to his wife rather than the husband’s disrespect and humiliation of his wife. [3] It is a tall order.

Institutions and traditions

The framework of our society allows for marital conflict to be resolved within the extended family network of people we trust and respect. In the West, one might even seek professional advice through marriage counselling.

In some cases, these networks have failed such that the issue is best addressed by temporary or permanent separation; this gets complicated by the presence of offspring – I would not delve into that here.

The concern here is with the traditions which believe that the woman should pay the ultimate price for dishonouring the family.

Thankfully, governments are taking a more strident view of these activities; there is no justification whatsoever for murder, regardless of the event that so infuriates the family and their status in society. [4]

Whilst, I had no easy solution to help resolve my protégé’s circumstances, I had this much to say.

If nobody had a way of resolving this precipitous disagreement, the woman would best to separate from her husband, but I would not sacrifice my protégé on the institution of marriage.

Marriage was made for us, not humans for marriage. If I had to choose between tradition and the people, I would choose the people.

Vagina Monologues would have a good few people shifting in their seats; hopefully, it would get aired before the Nigerian Moral Police stymie issues that really need to be thrashed with the utmost ferocity.

A welcome development indeed.

References

[1] Honour your father and your mother

[2] What are the roles of a husband and wife in a family?

[3] A husband is to love his wife

[4] Honor killing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia