Thirty years ago or more, they were red-eyed. Not from insomnia, but from an ideological dislike for oppressive institutions. Marx and Engels were quoted with the confidence of Scripture. Lenin was invoked more frequently than grandparents. Capitalism was the enemy. Oppression was a crime, and feudalism was the culprit. Religion was, at best, an opiate; at worst, a fraud. The future, they believed, belonged to the masses, with history firmly on their side. Kings and chiefs were mere relics, patiently awaiting extinction.

Fast-forward to three decades later. History remembers now, not only what they said then, but also what they have eventually become. 

Your Highness. Your Royal Majesty. High Chief this, High Chief that. Wakilin Yan Socialist. Madawakin. Eze Gburugburu.

Kabiyesi o!

Sarki!!

The greetings are deep. The bow is deliberate. The voices are reverential. Those we now greet and bow before, in tones of studied deference, were once Marxist firebrands. Yesterday’s anti-feudal pamphleteers have become today’s custodians of customs and tradition. They are kings and chiefs, sometimes turbaned, sometimes robed, often pastoral, occasionally apostolic, and always honoured.

What happened?

This is not an isolated case. It is a pattern. The once-fierce socialists have discovered ancestry, customs, and tradition. The materialists have found metaphysics. The class warriors now preside over palace disputes involving land, lineage, and goats. The revolutionaries who once demanded the abolition of inherited privileges now sign documents with seals passed down through bloodlines. And we must ask, gently but mischievously: is this postmodernism at work, or were we all deceived by men in socialist togas who were only waiting for their crowns?

Postmodernism, we are told, distrusts grand narratives. It laughs at universal truths. It questions certainty. Under its watch, ideology becomes costume, identity becomes fluid, and contradiction becomes chic. In a postmodern world, one can be a socialist in the morning, a traditional ruler by afternoon, and a turbaned titleholder in the evening, and a pastor by evening, without the inconvenience of explanation.

But Nigeria’s reality is rarely that innocent. This is not merely irony, nor a playful dance of shifting identities. It feels like a play reaching its denouement or, more like, a long game reaching its inevitable conclusion. One begins to suspect that some of our fiercest anti-feudal warriors were never truly at war with feudalism at all. They were merely waiting their turn. They were queuing. I am reminded of an incident at the Samaru campus of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, in March 1991. I had barely settled into my role as President of the National Association of Nigerian Students when I sought an audience with the radical historian, the late Dr Bala Usman. I was promptly dissuaded. “Forget him”, I was told. “He is now a defender of northern feudalism”.

Add this to the foregoing. A few years ago, I attended the birthday celebration of a dyed-in-the-wool socialist, an event chaired by a first-class emir. Beyond the emir’s extended homilies on freedom, what struck me most was the quiet irony of it all: a symbol of a historically oppressive institution presiding over a gathering of people who, in principle, were dismissive of the emirate system itself. The contradiction was impossible to miss. I could only shake my head.

The charge at Bala was striking, not least because he was himself a prince of the Katsina ruling house, a fact that made him an object of suspicion among sections of the Zaria left. To his critics, lineage was destiny. Radical scholarship, no matter how rigorous, could not fully absolve aristocratic birth. He was thus cast, somewhat lazily, as a closet apologist for feudal power. Time, however, has a way of rearranging moral furniture. Many of those who once paraded as uncompromising critics of feudalism, who spoke with theatrical contempt for inherited authority, have since emerged as its most visible defenders. 

Some now sit comfortably within the very structures they once denounced, turbaned, titled, or sanctified by religious offices. The irony is neither subtle nor accidental. What theymistook for ideological struggle may, in retrospect, have been strategic positioning. Bala, accused of feudal sympathy despite a lifetime of critical inquiry, now appears honest by comparison. His supposed sin was birth; theirs, it turns out, was mendacity. The mask of untruthfulness has fallen away, and we witness today the remarkable ability to wait for the moment when strategic positioning pays off.

This is what all of the foregoing means: they fought hierarchy loudly until hierarchy called their names. And they answered, “Yes, Your Royal Highness”.

Let’s be clear: tradition in itself is not the villain. Religion is not the enemy. Chieftaincy is not a crime. Our societies have always evolved through layered authority. What unsettles is not the transformation but the absence of confession. No apologies. No footnotes. No revised theses. Just a smooth transition from “down with feudal lords” to “my forefathers ruled this land”. “We can’t do away with our tradition”. 

One wonders what happened to historical materialism. Did it lose its material base? Or did the base finally acquire land titles? In the days of yore, religion was criticised as a tool of domination. Today, the same critics have become pastors who preach obedience, patience, and divine tidings. Yesterday, tradition was accused of oppressing women and youth. Today, it is rebranded as “cultural authenticity”. Yesterday’s radicals demanded horizontal power. Today’s chiefs demand vertical reverence.

We are not expected to notice. Even if we do, we are expected to bow and scream: Sarki. Kabiyesi o!  Perhaps, this is the Nigerian version of ideological recycling. Nothing is wasted. Radical rhetoric becomes legitimacy at once, while socialist credibility becomes moral capital. Years spent condemning power are now credentials for wielding it “responsibly”. After all, who better to rule than one who once opposed rulers?

Or so the story goes.

Memory is stubborn. It recalls the slogans once shouted with conviction, the conferences where certainty reigned, and the essays that confidently announced the passing of tradition before modernity and the subjection of religion to reason. Today, many of those same voices defend throne rooms and pulpits with equal fervour. The contradiction is not quiet. History remembers not only what they saidbut also what they eventually became. Thirty years ago, who could have imagined this? Thirty years ago, who could have imagined that an emir, long a symbol of oppressive feudalism, would one day preside over the birthday celebration of a dyed-in-the-wool socialist? Perhaps everyone except those who took the rhetoric too seriously.

Abdul Mahmud, a human rights attorney in Abuja, writes weekly for The Gazette