The phrase ‘Boku Haram’ is Pidgin English that is being used in the Northern part of Nigeria to self-describe a guerrilla movement organized to stop the modernization of the area. Boku is ‘book’ and Haram is ‘unkosher,’ really ‘not Halal.’ The area involved in Northern Nigeria was the Bornu Empire between Mali and Cameroon. I’ve been to both sides of the area, but never in it.
Don’t bother reading the Internet about the subject. Wrong as usual. The Bornu area had for centuries been influenced by the Muslim Berber traders along the Sahel border, but being illiterate, the locals considered a one inch square torn out of a Quran as an Islamic talisman. They have little idea what Islam is. The Boku Haram only claimed to be Muslim after getting money and arms from ISIS.
The main tribe in the area is Kanuri, but there are dozens of languages and many trading tribes that pass through the area constantly.
In 1962 I was hired to read all the books and manuscripts on Africa pre-1850 and record the economic activity. My research is the core data for the subsequent economic histories of Africa. Based on that, I can say the Fulani tribe passes through the Bornu area regularly and has for centuries.
Interestingly, the Boku Haram are notorious for kidnapping entire schools of young girls. This is discussed below about the innocence of girls.
The widespread African objection to modernization is stigmatized with the word ‘corruption.’ The same word is used globally by tribal people referring to modernization. Which is the subject of this blog.
Unless you’ve spent years travelling in tribal areas of the world, you would be surprised to learn that most of the tribal world, about one billion people, use the term ‘corruption’ to describe the modernization they hold in contempt. The modern world is disfavored when compared to their tribal world. Just look at the way Arab Palestinians live or native American tribal people live and you will understand that they don’t want modernization. They usually reject it with the term ‘corruption.’ It corrupts their tribal way of life.
I tried to form a global organization, in the 1990s, to educate the world that most tribal peoples don’t want modernization and want to be left alone. Tribal people like trucks, buses and some of our artifacts that they can buy in local open markets like pens, jewelry, t-shirts, music playing devices and some medicines. But the rest of our way of life is alien. While so many people are tribal and anti-modernization, I couldn’t find enough fellow modern people to create any organization at all. I just wanted the modernizers of the world to know that tribal people don’t want to be modernized.
We moderns do something very strange that we don’t see ourselves. We protect our young girls from knowing the actual way bribery and illegal political payments function in our world. I know that I never explained it to my two daughters, but I let my son learn it on his own. The police hassled him because he was an early skateboarder. The Boku Haram try to save young school girls from the education system. In both cases we want girls to remain innocent.
Of course there are many things women know about our society that men don’t.
The shielding of women from the reality of bribery and illegal political payments explains the near 100% of single women who vote for the Democrats. The Democrats pretend to be self- righteous and innocent. Of course modern bribery is not a single party issue. All elected officials get rich on modest salaries. But single women seem to be much more blind to the Lefty nonsense than their counterparts who are married and don’t vote Democrat.
What is the modern issue of bribery and illegal payments in politics? It is not a single thing, nor is it the same everywhere. When I returned to San Francisco, coming home from the University of Chicago, my car was stopped by a traffic policeman. I did what I learned to do in Chicago., I put a $20 bill in my wallet as I handed it to him. He handed it back and said, ‘We don’t do that here.’
In San Francisco your property taxes are related to the amount of bribery you pay to the tax authorities, your business permit is totally dependent on who you hire to get your permits and permits for repairs or construction are tied to what group does the work. Chinese-Americans do the electrical work; I even saw a permit delivered to the door for a Chinese electrical contractor I was using. Irish do carpentry and construction, Mexicans do roofing and ‘other’ Asians do plumbing. Pick the wrong group and a permit can take months or years.
I know Joe Donahoe who virtually lives at City Hall and represents the building trades. Joe is the ‘bagman’ who makes permitting quick for his clients.
I was in politics in the 1960s when Nixon was defeated for President by Kennedy. We people in Republican politics all knew that Kennedy’s team wouldn’t have won except for ballot fraud in Chicago that intentionally overrode downstate voting and the same was true in Texas for upstate voting. That was why Johnson, the Senator from Texas, was selected as Kennedy’s VP that election.
Nixon knew that the voting fraud could not be publicly exposed and reverse the election so he let the issue pass. Trump in 2020 was naive about the issue.
During Reconstruction the North ignored all the Southern state presidential votes because anti-black corruption was endemic.
Our language has examples of voting fraud by big city machines and political autocrats. That was the job of New York’s Tammany Hall, of Chicago’s Daley Machine, Lousiana’s Earl Long, California’s Jesse Unruh and dozens of others before them.
Keeping women ignorant of how our society works is really a reflection of the patrilineal political world. (Except for Nancy Pelosi who learned about bribery from her father.) What is surprising is that it is never truly understood nor discussed by ordinary men or women.
Why is this particular innocence of value to society?
I am reminded of a story told to me by my close friend Margo St. James, founder of the hookers union Coyote. When Margo first arrived in San Francisco, a true naif, a country girl from the most northwestern city in America, Bellingham, Washington, she started a house cleaning business. One or more of her cleaning girls must have turned a trick and Margo was arrested as a ‘prostitute.’ In her trial before a judge she exclaimed she had never had sex for money and she didn’t know any ‘johns.’ The judge ruled she was a prostitute because no ordinary woman would know the term ‘john.’
Is that the kind of innocence we are trying to provide to girls?