September 2009. We
waved good night to the warrior Gani Fawehinmi. When the news came, no
cannons boomed loud sorrow for a fallen giant, no women raced through
the market places shredding grief into angry tatters. Here cannons boom
only for thieves tossing loot-crumbs to the masses. May his spirit
haunt us until we seriously locate our role in rebuilding the land of
his dreams.
My people live in
this tired place that time forgot. Ugly dirty buildings wave their
owners’ pride at you. The earth is red-brown, dust valiantly fighting
off any attempts at progress. Their way of life is governed by a mix of
the past and what passes for today. Progress is measured by the
material nearness to an otherness which makes for the farcical. Graham
Greene would love my village and VS Naipaul would fill sick volumes
with reams of this self-loathing. Here turmoil is constant. We merely
describe the turmoil and we despair. Everything stays constant. Why? Do
not be afraid of the answer; be afraid of today’s darkness. Why are
things the way they are with us?
This land of my
birth is a giant boil that needs to be lanced and drained of excess.
This is a filthy nation, an eco-disaster in the making. Cloying waves
of dust and filth rise up to escort you everywhere and environmental
abuse wraps around you squeaky tight like discarded cellophane. Our
land is allergic to respect and it proclaims itself a sick warehouse
where bad products and ideas go to die, a crude nation pawning crude
oil to the crude. Elegance fled long ago. And tending the growth and
the decay is a mean army of agbada-clad rodents taking turns to gnaw at
the innocent. Why are these things so?
Pompous signs
filched from America are proudly hung on filthy structures and
institutions: “Welcome to River Road Estates!” The right words anoint
the wrong things; palaces for hovels, good fortune for corruption, and
God’s wish for the misfortune of beautiful children swimming, sad, in a
war they did not ask for. Women and children carry this nation and her
men on their frail backs. Every day.
This land is
infested by bible-toting vermin, pastor-thieves mining the rich
anxieties of our people. They are picking peasants clean of everything
they do not have. What kind of God allows this insanity? A horrific
crime is being committed here. The new temples steal from the triply
traumatised in the name of their Jesus. Churches! Churches! Churches
everywhere, not enough destitutes to minister to the jheri-curled
demands of thieving clone-pastors. The living dead die finally and
greedy elders gleefully exert their revenge at funerals, slapping tolls
on exhausted pall-bearers.
The police sit
under barren mango trees staring balefully at the papers of the hunted
willing the money that they did not earn to appear. The oppressor is
not spared the rank indignities of what passes for life in this
country. A perverse individualism has disfigured all of the land, this
place of a billion bore holes and power generators. Every house is a
municipality unto itself indifferent to indifferent government
services. Nothing else seems to work.
Steam shrouds
ancestral clans and red clouds of dirt sway to the taunts of new
masquerades with sporting alien names. This land is pregnant with water
maidens bearing offspring and issues. Produce and game spill out of
dilapidated trucks, everything ripe for the stealing. We wave to
beautiful umbrella people selling phone cards – mystical pathways to
the dreams of the dispossessed. My blackberry flits from anemic network
to anemic network, flirting with the gods of broken cyber bridges, just
to keep me connected to the world.
We wave to
18-wheelers traversing the land on roads that used to be here. Trucks
killed by the crush of produce and neglect lie in wait seeking blood
for fuel. We close our eyes waiting to be crushed by speeding
dilapidated vessels coming straight at speeding dilapidated vessels but
they disappear like raging comets at the last merciful minute. The
roads, oh the roads, what have we done? Iku, death-god, Ogun of the
rusted metal, save your son.
Generators.
Everyone has a generator. Imagine living in a three-bedroom apartment;
imagine a lawnmower in your balcony, mowing nothing, roaring, belching,
farting noxious noises and fumes all day long. The place should be
child proofed, toddlers and children are everywhere amidst the
generators, the electrical wires and the gas fumes, All day I beg the
generator to stop its effete roar. The generator is proud of his
muscle, why his phallus is bigger than his neighbour’s.
Every day my people race from pockets of danger to isles of lesser
danger. Walls are a forbidding metaphor for the annihilation of our way
of life. Everywhere free spaces have been arrested behind ugly walls.
Outside the walls, we walk fearfully among ancestral masks wearing
designer handbags, crocodiles burying themselves in shoes. Opportunists
leap out of the darkness brandishing opportunities at bottom feeders.
Our leaders should be shot. Why are things the way they are?
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