Why I Left the Red Pill-Verse

by Paul Chuks

Elti Meshau

Rain pattered the roof. The hall was quiet, a pin drop would have sounded like a riot. Grime faces stared at their question papers, lecturers paced the hall, more bounce added to their step — a devilish grin that seemed like the grime faces validated their mischievousness. On my seat, the wind stalked me like a stubborn ex. It removed my cap and scattered my hair that I had gripped in a rubber band. A lecturer strolled my way and held my hand as I was about to put my cap back on. He first joked about how my beards made me look like a Taliban who had a bomb in his bag. Then said my hair — afro, wild, flaying — as if celebrating freedom, made me look like Nietzsche. My evening was made. Nietzsche? I only knew he was a famous existentialist who said God was dead, and many Christians hated him. I wrote my exams with light in my head, smile on my face. I finished early and ran home to binge on everything Google chrome had on him. I was delighted with what I saw. He was an existentialist like me who acknowledged the world’s imperfection and had stopped bothering himself about it. Instead, he welcomed whatever woe life threw at him. He was an unbeliever like me who believed that God, metaphysics, emanated from human weakness and had gone with the dark ages. I became a Nietzschean. I adopted existentialism full-time and wore his master versus slave morality theory on my arm like a shield — an intellectual accessory even. Everywhere I went, I muttered the problem with existence, is existence itself.

In Nietzsche’s moral theory, there are two personality types. One is the master, also known as “the overman.” He is to be strong-willed, a hodgepodge of spiritual superiority with wellbeing and excess of strength. Say Roman Caesar and Jesus Christ shaken together. He might also be like the Greek god of light, Apollo, with the self-control to match the personality type of Dionysus who had vitality and drive and sought the highest form of pleasure. The slave is the second personality type. He is the complainer, the failure, the lowerman who is virtuous only because he is unable to attain the status of the overman and in jealousy, becomes virtuous and uses morality to taunt the masters. He particularly ascribed this personality type to Christians in saying that the gospel of Christ numbs all passion of Christians and hands them virtue and morality in replacement. I liked the sound of that because God had slipped off my mind and I grew to nurse a special hatred for Christianity. I adopted this theory and went about my days crafting myself to be an overman. I found myself in the red pill verse and was enchanted that his best example of the overman was a creative artist tyrant.

I noticed a shift in my mental psyche; I had become complacent in conversations about colonialism. I found myself saying colonialism has been over decades ago, yet we Africans are still crying about it. The change starts by moving on. I also found myself believing that white men were superior to black men due to their civilization and when anyone told me it exists courtesy of black men, I’d simply say it is because they were superior that they employed us to build for them. I was manifesting Nietzsche’s overman and distancing myself from the lowermen of Pan-African worldview, since they were the complainers who secretly nursed the colonial ambition of the white men and would have enslaved people were they equipped for it. Beforehand, I was a firebrand postcolonial scholar. My cohorts wondered what had gone wrong with me; some thought my excess intake of weed had caught up with me. Others saw me as betrayer and ostracized me from their intellectual community. I wasn’t fazed because the overman should be accustomed to such temperament from people who are not designed to accommodate cloying perspectives that challenges theirs. But he glories in his ability to be cloying because the truth is not romantic.

I wasn’t romantic anymore. Previously, my poetry shone the most in letters I wrote to my lovers. My red pill edifice had taken over and was concretized by my daily intake of red pill content. Love became an illusion, a mental fart that only weak-minded people let fester. I told women the patriarchy was inevitable.

I still loved Africa, still consumed Pan-African intellectual contents and still saw myself as a Pan-African but with very different views and approach to our liberation. I started struggling with the concept of white superiority. Was it a fact, I asked myself, that the white men are more superior because of their civilization? Why don’t we have black men like Abraham Lincoln or Isaac Newton in our history? Then I Read Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Mask. He analyzed the relationship between white men and black men, white women and black men, black men and white women and white women and black women under the empire. I found that I had exhibited the traits of a black man successfully defeated by colonialism and I was not an overman. We had prestigious men like Isaac Newton in Ptolemy. Africans had believed in heliocentrism before it became acceptable in Europe. Africa had more urbanized societies than Western Europe before the slave trade. Niger-Delta men had built boats from their own intellection to navigate the river, and Kano was the trading hub of textiles from the 11th to the 19th century, how much more the conquest of slave trade and colonialism. So why did I feel inferior? I traced it back to my want for overman. I realized that instead of being an overman who wore superiority like an identity card, I had submitted myself to white supremacy and had been defeated. I interrogated Nietzsche. His critics hated him for good reasons. I was particularly interested in what informed his theory of master-slave morality.

Apparently, it came from his critique of Christian love. For him, Christian love was a hoax because it came from fear. I am afraid my neighbour may injure me, and so I assure him that I love him. If I were stronger and bolder, I should openly exhibit scorn for him, which of course I feel. It does not occur to Nietzsche as possible that a man can experience unalloyed universal love, obviously because he himself feels almost universal hatred and fear, which he would fain disguise as arrogant indifference. His “overman” — who is himself in his trance — is a being who, to the hilt, is bankrupt of sympathy, ruthless, cunning, cruel, concerned only with his own power. It never betided Nietzsche that the yen for power, which he bestowed upon his overman, is itself an effect of fear. Those who do not fear their neighbours see no necessity to tyrannize over them. Men who have trounced fear have not the panicky quality of Nietzsche’s “creative-despot” Neros, who try to enjoy music and massacre while their hearts are filled with dread of the ineluctable palace revolution. There are two strains of sainthood: the saint by nature, and the saint from fear. The saint by nature has an unbidden love of mankind; he does good because to do so gives him happiness. The saint from fear, on the other hand, like the man who only avoids pilferage because of the police, would be wicked if he were not restrained by the thought of hell-fire or of his neighbours’ vengeance. Nietzsche can only picture the second sort of saint — so full of fear and hatred that spontaneous love of mankind seems to him impossible. He has never conceived of the man who, with all the fearlessness and stubborn pride of the overman, nevertheless does not inflict pain because he has no wish to do so. Does anyone suppose that Lincoln acted as he did from fear of hell? Yet to Nietzsche Lincoln is abject, Napoleon magnificent. It occured to me that perhaps my lecturer was calling me mad and not complimenting me. I ditched Nietzsche and his overman.