Ethics and Time: Ethos of Temporal Orientation in Politics and Religion of the Niger Delta by Wariboko Nimi

Author:Wariboko, Nimi [Wariboko, Nimi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2010-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

4

Apocalypticism:

The Struggle for a Relevant Future

This chapter investigates the being and event of Kalabari temporal orientation. The term being refers to the state of affairs, to self-perpetuating condition, to what is already named, counted, and managed. The term event refers to the appearance of something new in the situation—whatever breaks into the order of things. How does a society’s need to collectively reckon with its past, to once again work in the imagined ways of its ancestors, affect the extant order of things? In what ways does the future possibility of settling accounts before God shift the society’s temporal orientation and its meaning of subjectivation? How does the imagination that presents the apocalypse as “a present and continuing fact of life” cause a break in time and in being? When the “present becomes the time to settle old differences, give voice to untold agony, and to put the past where it belongs, so that the future can at last begin,”1 how does that affect the intensity and expectation of time?

In this chapter I examine how the Kalabari understand apocalypticism. First, they hold the notion that it is a present and continuing fact of life: Each unique moment makes a radical claim to immediacy in terms of responding to the needs and care of community. As we shall see the Kalabari notion of social immortality makes the present the right time to rise to the occasion and do the right thing for the community. People must live as though the future has begun. Traditionally, the Kalabari do not have a definitely and obviously grand moment in the future to settle accounts, to separate the sheep from the goats. The apocalyptic moment has always been imminent and immanent. With the coming of Christianity the notion of continuing and ongoing apocalypse was joined with that of apocalypse as a momentous Day of Judgment. This mixture produced a Christian convert, a millennial-type figure with a reputation for thaumaturgy who could rupture the “being” of missionary Christianity and set off a moral panic in the sense that time was running out for the society.

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