At times like this my tears are like a river to wash up all the sorrows I had. Sometimes my tears would not subsidize my sorrows. Instead my sorrow will run through my veins and began to bleed my internal organ giving me a terrible pain. I do have no strength to fight but I know that “a voiceless man is as good as dead.”
I don’t know when things began to change, but at first it all looks firm as a marriage bound with the will of GOD.
I remember how I could forget those pictures, vividly. Besides, every year at our “libration day”, that is how they tell us to remember it, the liberators. The liberation from tyranny of an evil regime but as far as I know we never been colonized. Shall I hold a rifle and join some “liberators” at war front? To kill my own brothers and sisters so I could save my country. What makes my country a place to live? We, who inhabits it, who have a different opinion, culture, religion, and so on.
We have gone fighting among ourselves from what I remember and what I read in history class. Back then and now like curse blood shading is a reality.
I was telling you about the “pictures” from the “liberation day”. Yes, each year this similar scene will be aired on television, which was captured almost seventeen years ago.
A parade of military men and vehicles; a first footstep in to the capital-a tank covered with green leaves, a camouflage. Ironically the children running along both sides of the tank with a raptures joy, some holding small part of a leaf branch, symbolizing peace and elder men and women at a distant were welcoming them.
“we had gone on marches of victory and I do not think there was anyone mean enough in spirit to ask whether we knew the thing we were celebrating. Whose victory? Ours? It didn’t matter. We marched, and only a dishonest fool will look back on his boyhood and say he knew even then that there was no meaning in any of it is so funny now, to remember that we all thought we were welcoming victory. Or perhaps there is nothing funny here at all, and it is only that victory itself happens to be the identical twin of defeat” (Armah, The beautiful ones are not yetborn).
It is no surprise that our so called “librators” turned out to be worse. This trend has gone for a more than half a century. African writer Okey Ndibe in his book “Arrow of rain: “ I shudder at the behavior of our so called leaders. It’s hard to believe these were the same leaders who asked us to drop the dirt and fight the whiteman. Peasants and workers alike answered the call. Then, when the white man left, what did these leaders do? They took the owner’s corner in the pleasure cars abandoned by Whiteman. They ran in to the mansions the British left behind and barricade themselves there. Then they began to remind us that we were not one people, afterall; that we are Husa or Yoruba or Igbo or Kanuri or Nupe or Edo or Efik or Fulfulde or Tiv, lik the British they discovered they could rule if they divided the ruled…….”
Is this how we think? Is this how to lead a country? When each year people are dying from famine, disease, malnutrition…you keep feeding us with words that are distractive to say the least.
I go outside going to school, along my way on a mini bus or going on foot in a short distance, I found our big family and my big house roof blown away.
The sullen heat of the day seems not only talking the morning fog also most of its inhabitant. For the unlucky ones who took the roofless, big house, as their home. You will find them on the streets begging. With drugs and alcohol I see their youth fading away.
Okey Ndibe on the same book, he said “you hear all these stories about ministers using public funds to buy cars for their mistresses or acquiring European Castles for themselves. How can you think it? You go to any village and you are shocked by the squalid life there. The dust roads. Hospitals that have neither drugs nor doctors. The polluted stream water the people drinks the lack of electricity. Then, as you were trying to come to grips with a reality that seems to belong in the Middle Ages, up comes a Rolls Royce carrying some minister to remind you that you are not in the sixteenth century after all but in the twentieth. Then you are faced with pathetic irony of the villagers lining up to hail the nabob in the Royce-the very man who has plundered their country…”
Aren't these the reality in almost all African countries, today? When are we going to see our prophet of change?
N.B the whole idea comes from the two books mentioned
2. Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
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