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Chapter 0:
Why Social Healing?


The Transcript







Hello. My name is Immaculata, and you're welcome to the Sweet medicine project, produced by Studio styles, an offshoot of my research and art practice, where I ask, “How can we form deeper connections with ourselves, our communities, our histories and environments”, and where I contribute towards following such connections.


[Medley of voices from around the country.]


What you've just heard is a rough temperature check of how Nigerians are feeling about the country and their lives right now. At the beginning of this project, I gathered a team across the country to go out into the streets and into classrooms, into offices, into the markets, and ask people what their pressing social challenges are right now in Nigeria. These responses come from Yola, Kano, Ibadan and Enugu, and together, they highlight economic challenges, problems with gender roles and perceptions, identity and conflict, exclusion and questions of agency and so much more, which I have made this Sweet Medicine project to address.


Sweet Medicine is an argument for the indispensable role that the humanities and social sciences play in our quest for social healing in Nigeria and anywhere. Later on in this episode, I'm going to explain what I mean by social healing. But for now, I will say that this podcast is an exploration of the roles that oppression, identity and conflict play in the formation of our ideas. To do this argument and exploration, I made this project in various parts.


First, there's the podcast, which you're listening to right now, and on Tuesdays for the next eight Tuesdays, I will be presenting insights for my research over the years, and on the weekend, for the next eight weekends, I'll be sharing 14 conversations I had with Nigerian researchers who are thinking about social healing and working, either researching or practicing in the fields of the humanities and social sciences. The conversations began with the question, “How have we as Nigerians been taught to think about how to be in the world?” There is a website (sweetmedicine.me) which contains transcripts, research notes and other resources used in this project. The website also contains a link to a research directory of over 2000 humanities and social sciences research projects on Nigeria's histories and cultures. Finally, there's an ongoing series of public programs, which began with the Studio Styles text club earlier this year.


At the Club, we meet online on Saturdays to discuss anything that can be read for meaning, from objects to novels, podcasts to playlists. In working on all these parts of the project, I asked myself a lot what my ideal practice of education or of engaging with the world would look like, and I found a good example in Paolo Freire’s articulation of what he calls a ‘problem-posing model of education’ in his 1968 book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He defined a problem-posing model of education as a model where people develop their power to perceive critically, the way they exist in the world. Such is a model where “people come to see the world, not as. A static reality, but as a reality in process, a reality in transformation”. And it is in that spirit that I have designed this project for you and I to gather and face the world around us and within us, to share what we see, define our problems for ourselves, and imagine potential solutions with an orientation towards action.


So what do I mean by social healing? I guess I'll start by saying actually that healing is the one thing I am most interested in, and the one thing I feel most useful for at this time in my life. It’s the one place that I saw I could confidently pitch my tent on if I were going to ask a research question. It feels like my whole life has been a practice of —
  1. feeling overwhelmed by the suffering I'm observing within and outside me.
  2. always thinking, why this suffering? And three finding ways to mend myself, to mend the things around me, to take responsibility, to stay alive for all the delicious things that life has to offer.

And so for me, when I think about healing, I'm not thinking about a destination, but rather an orientation and an orientation that is riddled with failures and errors and reasons for healing in the first place.


The other thing here is that there is some deep, serious problem in Nigeria, and nobody's coming to save us but ourselves. If you're a Nigerian, like whether you're living in this country or you're abroad, you don't need anybody to tell you about the harsh realities of our economy, our insecurity and just the general dire quality of life right now. Most of us, maybe all of us, are in some kind of survival mode. Stress is killing us.


The way I see it, our actions are either seeking fullness and connection or our actions are lashing out from the pain of lacking either either the fullness or the connection. I think death, destruction and decay are inevitable, but far too often called up prematurely, and so my focus with social healing is on how we can repair that which carelessness and lack of care breaks, and on how we can make good ruins out of inevitable transformations.


By social healing, I mean an orientation towards life affirming relations with ourselves and all beings around us. I mean life affirming relations with the world that we are all co creating, whether we like it or not. By social healing, I mean an exercise in integrity and integration, an exercise in the kind of connection we can achieve only by accepting ourselves as new as we will be every single day.



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Decades and decades of colonial and military brutality and subjugation have numbed our collective Nigerian psyche, and left us resigned and afraid to ask anything of our country, of our government, of the public us. By and large, I see us as a nation of people who are afraid of our desires because we are rational beings who have seen the bar for what Nigeria can do go so low. And so we repress our desires and punish others for having what we cannot have. We are afraid of the child who wants more than its parents, because really and truly, how would the family afford it? How can the family risk experiments? After all, we have seen and witnessed, we would be foolish to imagine otherwise, and this is precisely the problem.


I've spent the past three+ years working as an independent journalist, artist and researcher, asking three questions about Nigerian life. One, how are we making a living? Two, how do we find belonging? Three, how are we making meaning and therefore healing? Out of all of this, I've spent the last year focusing on this third question, and particularly the word healing. I know it's the woo-woo-est of all woo-woo subjects out there especially according to the suit-wearing briefcase-carrying members of society who also happen to be the people whose offices control the largest flows of capital into and around this country. And on the other extreme of the socio-economic spectrum, healing is also the farthest objective in the minds of the country's overwhelming majority, the pedestrian peddlers for urgent 2k. All this to say, I know all too well that the project of healing in Nigeria today demands convincing. For those who find it in themselves to be able to pause and ask, “Wait, where are we running to what have we been taught about ourselves? How have we been taught to think? And how can we disrupt programming that alienates us from ourselves as individuals and in limits groups from one another in our collective. And how else can we be?” If you're one of those who find it in themselves to be able to ask these questions, sweet medicine is for you.


In the 1979 novel The Healers, by the Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah, the main character is a young man named Densu who intends to join the healers. During one of the conversations he has with an established healer named Damfo, he asks Damfo, “What really is the healers work?” Damfo replied, “You may say it is seeing and hearing, knowing.” And later in novel, he expands that “the work is for includes a whole people throughout time, not just our single, separate lives here and now.” When I speak of the humanities, I'm referring to those disciplines that are about seeing and hearing and knowing a whole people. I'm referring to disciplines that study the expressions of human beings as a means of exploring and revealing what it means to be human. These disciplines include literature, philosophy, religion, history, the arts, architecture and the like. And by social sciences, I mean those endeavors through which we study how people interact with one another, how we develop as a culture and how we influence the world, the social sciences and humanities are how society builds its collective imaginary and how it reflects on its collective consciousness.


One may think of the humanities and social sciences as one may think of psychotherapy, a thing that happens only in offices of licensed practitioners, or as a luxury that is dispensed and only useful in certain places. But that's not how I think of it. My argument is for something that happens (or doesn't happen) inside each and every one of us, all the time, whether we're in the office or in the kitchen or on the bus, whether we're in boardrooms or in markets. It's an argument for holistic healing that begins with what you consume, a healing that is sustained by the relationships we cultivate with our individual selves and with other people and other things around us, a healing that entails daily practices of compassion and responsibility, A healing whose journey is shaped by your inheritance, where you come from, what has been given to you. No other industry is occupied with the question, is this what it means to be human, or am I a monster to the level and at the capacity that humanities and social sciences.




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This podcast will run for eight weeks, including this one. You’ll get an episode of 30 to 60 minutes like this every Tuesday where I explore the following questions in consecutive order:
  1. Why the humanities in Nigeria when people are starving?
  2. What do we do with history and what do we do with our past?
  3. How might we describe the nervous condition of today's Nigeria?
  4. What kind of family is this our country, Nigeria, and how do we relate with it?
  5. Why dem born Nigeria in the first place sef?
  6. Why take ownership?
  7. What are our bodies good for?

In each episode, I will share with you what knowledge my humanities education has given me, what skills in seeing and hearing it has cultivated in me, what immeasurable difference I have seen those skills making my life for the better, and what critical toolbox it has equipped me with that I believe can be useful for everyone living in Nigeria today. I share my story and my findings to inspire people to see real, practical value in an education that values social reflection.


Alongside these Tuesday episodes, I'll be releasing two of 14 conversations over the weekends. These conversations are conversations I had with researchers who are also oriented towards social healing in some form. The conversations are relaxed, don't worry, and they're intended not as lectures, but rather as conversations, as gist really. And we explored, in these conversations, what mending social rifts in contemporary Nigeria looks like both in research and in practice.


My guests include Nigerian Twitter’s favourite gentle parenting therapist, the monk who founded Pax Herbals, a pioneering alternative medicine research and manufacturing company in 1997, an architect currently doing her PhD in the history of how architecture was used to develop and represent a national identity for the newly independent Nigeria, a documentary photographer and filmmaker whose work as a National Geographic explorer has taken him to the depths of Nigeria’s ugliness in oil polluted Niger Delta and to peaks of Nigeria’s beauty in the serene mountains of Taraba, nature’s gift to the nation. These are just four of them and I can not wait to share all fourteen conversations with you. he website and directory will be launched soon as well. So stay tuned for that.


It's likely that this project may not appeal to you if you are somewhat committed to thinking of Nigeria and life as a thing that only happens to you and not with you. I believe in agency, and at the same time, I know that there are certain situations that limit our awareness of or our expressions of our agency, or that even limit that agency in and of itself. At the edge of my reasoning, I can see contradictions which I have not yet been able to resolve. I know that next year me will have ‘hmmm’s to make when she listens to this. And for all these reasons, I invite you to disagree and to reason with me. Not only do I believe that meeting contradictions is part of the thinking process, but it's also part of the reason I embarked on this project to meet these contradictions and face them with other people, so I can better understand them, and I can better understand the many ways we can work towards solving our social problems in Nigeria. My intention is to inspire you to imagine that difference is possible and that you have something worth contributing to make that difference possible. And to encourage more people to take up explorations of the arts, humanities and social sciences, whether formally or informally, because it is through such endeavors that our capacities to dream and to make change are built.




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Once again, my name is Immaculata, and you've been listening to ‘Why social healing?’, the introductory episode for the Sweet Medicine podcast. Sweet medicine is produced by Studio Styles, my project space for research and creative projects on well being, social justice and healing connections with ourselves. Sweet medicine is funded by the Open Society Foundations through its Ideas Workshop, whose ambition it is to fund heterodox ideas and speculative concepts across the globe and to seek out new forms of cultural production where open society and expression intersect. Our theme music is by Joyce Olong. It is an original composition for this podcast. For the long list of collaborators that helped bring this to life, visit sweet medicine.me.


Thanks for being here and see you next week.