By Alagie Saidy-Barrow
If you are my friend on Facebook, chances are you have heard me berating my mentor, Sawagibi, about always quoting some dead person. Well, allow me to be a hypocrite for once (my hypocrisy count never goes beyond one) and anchor my position on some dead smart guy they call Joseph Shieber. This Shieber guy came up with the term the “Nietzsche Thesis,” which he named after another smart dead guy called Nietzsche.
The Shieber fellow maintains that when you hear Gambian people converting, debating, or arguing about issues, the objective is not about getting to the truth or acquiring accurate information, rather, Shieber argues, we debate/converse/argue to simply preserve ourselves. All right, the Shieber fellow never mentioned Gambia but what he said is that essentially, people debate/argue to maintain our “social standing” and for “self-preservation.” If the truth is not pleasant, like the truth that there is no genocide against Whites in South Africa, then Trump and his fellow crazies have no use for it. As in, the truth does not matter when it does not serve us. You know, like when our own president insisted that Essa Faal was getting paid 500k at the TRRC, or that by now, the lack of reliable electricity would have been a thing of the past, the truth never mattered to those who fed him this information because it didn’t serve their interest. The truth certainly didn’t matter to our president because he could have “trusted his “info-givers” but verified” the info they fed him.
The Nietzsche thesis argues that “Our acceptance or rejection of statements is often based on a calculation of their potential life-preserving or life-enhancing consequences, rather than on their accuracy.” Now, observe our conversations/debates in this colonial space. Do you think facts or seeking the truth are what underpin our positions? With each major topic that we are preoccupied with, I’m beginning to believe more and more that the truth does not matter. It’s about self-preservation! That includes standing by who you want to believe at all costs, no matter what the facts are.
There is an African proverb that advises us to “love truth even if it hurts us and to hate lies even if it helps us.” In our colonial space, we hate truth that hurts us and we love to embrace lies if they help us. Now observe our debates and tell me that the truth or facts matter to us. Look around you and see if accuracy matters to us in debates. I have had the privilege of interviewing/interrogating people of different nationalities and you know which witnesses challenged me the most? If you guessed Gambians, you’re on the money.
I know you don’t want to hear that truth only matters when it favours you but oh well, you can seek comfort in the big balmy hands of my friend, Denial. A proverb goes that the “truth passes through fire but it does not burn it.” That was until truth entered this colonial space and emerged in an unrecognisable form. With us, the truth/facts are fluid. With us, the truth depends on which side you speak to and who you speak about. And we love to take sides, form teams, adopt a siege mentality, and often become very viscerally comfortable in our echo chambers.
