The National Committee for the Protection of the Homeland, CNSP for short, has existed in Niger since July 26, the day President Mohamed Bazoum was taken prisoner. Months pass and the theme of the Homeland shows no sign of diminishing, on the contrary, patriotism and patriots are now model citizens to imitate. The new Nigerian citizen will be patriotic or not at all! How can we not think of the years spent in primary school and remember the movements for independence, the patriots ready to sacrifice themselves, the carbonari who dreamed of a unified country. Then the combinations orchestrated by left-wing political regimes that combined, manipulating them, the Family, God and the Homeland are mixed together. The trenches of history and Western colonizations have, not rarely, been the geopolitical translation of such juxtapositions. Then the language, mirror and echo of the spirit of the time, used derivatives of patria, from the Latin pater. The ‘pater familias’, father of the family of ancient Rome, with unfathomable right of life and death over his children, patriotism and finally patriarchy. The latter interpreted as the cause of everything oppressive in Western civilization.
Our father Pietro, our father and our mother’s husband, went through life with humility because he himself suffered from the absence of his parents at an early age. A young partisan in the Ligurian-Parma Apennines to fight against the prevailing Nazi-fascism, he then transformed into a husband, father, construction worker and grassroots union delegate. His life was not as long as it could have been. His heart held up until the age of 56 until, one night, he stopped beating with that paternity that had kept him alive, despite his misfortunes. With his wife, our mother, he lived, shared, awaited and hoped for that future that he had glimpsed in the mountains, touched several times by death. He let himself be surprised by life as if it were the first time that what the family, in its sober poverty, went through had happened. A marital delicacy, his, that our mother, a widow for twenty years, never ceased to remember with sadness first and serene joy later. They are buried together in the country cemetery not far from the thousand-year-old church where they were married, on a Sunday morning in September of that year.
There is not that continuity between homeland, father and patriarchy that we would like to believe in the West, where fatherhood seems to have gone out of fashion and status. The crisis in the identity of fathers, as conceived and systematized in the past, seems irreversible also because it is linked to changes in the identity of women in the growing autonomy over their own bodies. A society without fathers worthy of the name, with a role to reinvent, would be a tragedy and would create the same disaster as a society without mothers. There are fathers who disappear and others who are on the run when they are needed most. Others feel that the power of the past has gone like sand through their fingers and they have lost the certainties of the past. Giving a face to fatherhood should be one of the most urgent and decisive projects of our time. Without this attempt it appears illusory or misleading to teach and recite the prayer of the Father God with your children.
