It has been one long night of horror for me. I have been awake watching again two movies which I had watched many years ago. These two movies, SOMETIME IN APRIL and HOTEL RWANDA, are scripted from the historical realities of the horrors of war between the Tutsi and Hutu in Rwanda. To my fellow youths, before you disseminate false rumors of how Biafrans are being mauled down in their sleep, as people in America and Europe nudge you on this seemingly heroic path of self-destruction, I strongly recommend you watch these movies. You can get them in movie stores or download/watch them on youtube.
Now that this blood thirsty python is dancing carnivorously on our doorsteps, it is timely pertinent we talk to ourselves, especially my fellow Umuokoro Igbo – enough of this mental and emotional manipulation. Refuse to be used as experimental guinea pigs of war and cannon folders. Let us be mindful of the fact that women, children and youths are usually the worst hit in any war situation, and should the present senseless crisis degenerate to a full blown war, we the youths are bound to be the major casualties. The collateral effect of war on the youths and our future is what these European and American-based war makers are working hard to keep hidden from us. I was privileged not to witness the last civil war but my father is lucky to be a survivor. He, my father, is already shouting that there is no one who really witnessed the human tragedies of the Nigeria’s civil war – the mangled bodies of infants, the kwashiorkor-protruded stomachs, the rape of loved ones right before your presence, the mass heap of human bodies, the hunger, and the desecration of the altar of our God – that would embrace the present madness. And my father has never lied to me.
My young family and I neither live in America nor work in Europe. We live and work in Aba, the heart of the present theater of absurdity where human-eating pythons are dancing. As the pythons keep dancing here, all the inhabitants of this town have tasted a semblance of war’s exhilaration, but we pray that we remain protected from seeing what war actually does. The brainwashed amongst us may ask me who is talking about war here but you have got to know this – no war ever starts as a war. Hate speeches, false rumors, accusations and recriminations in the guise of propaganda, the myth of glory and honor, hyper-nationalism and patriotism are all precursors of war but in real war situations these are empty platitude.
Umuokoro Igbo ibe m, as our fathers told us, it is not just the mark on our faces that differentiates us from our neighbors but our history and experience. This may be a season of anomie when common sense appears to have fled to brutish beast and men have lost their reason but we must be mindful of who we are, our history, our experiences, our plight, our hope, our all. That we are being tolerated as mere serfs in the Nigerian project is as true as this is the year 2017. That we are grossly misunderstood, feared and even hated by many is not disputable. You know it just as I do that our path is encumbered by state-sponsored hinderances. We have always known about the existence of deliberate state polices to break our spirit, to deal with us, to contain us and to remind us that we are a conquered people. Do we need to be reminded that the masters and lords of this age are so paranoid of Ndi Igbo that they will stop at nothing short of burning down this beautiful edifice that houses our father’s obi, and that these same characters were also the leaders of the rampaging federal forces who overran Nsukka in 1968 and used the encyclopedias in the university library to roast suya just to rubbish Igbo pride? When we self-destruct as we are presently doing, we would have saved them the time and labor as the house they are strategizing on how to destroy would have caught fire on it’s own. And this would be the worst caricature of the famed Igbo cot of reason.
As they paint pictures of classless Biafran el dorado where roadside mechanics will become ministers, indolent dreamers will transmute overnight to senators and lazy never-do-wells will be promoted to governors, certain things are not adding up in my calculation. I may not be dead sure but it does appear we are only being given war’s perverse and dark thrill while the harsh consequences of war are being veiled from us. When war comes, we pray it does not, we will have to stand over the mangled corpses of loved ones, our wives, girlfriends, mothers, sisters and even daughters would be raped before our very eyes, our civilization would be bombed out of existence, our education would be halted, starvation would become the order of the day, we would but smile when we behold our loved ones smashed to a mass of bodies, we would make thick forests our safe places of abode with pythons and such other human-eating reptiles as our unfriendly neighbors, we would be killed like rats, our worship places would be desecrated, the few survivors would be conquered as slaves once again. The mythic visions of war may appear heroic and entertaining as the internet tigers are presenting it but the worst disservice we can commit against ourself and generations unborn at this stage of our experience would be to succumb to an ill-conceived and ill-prepared war. Call me a coward or even a saboteur if you like but I insist the American based and European based war makers who give us the visceral thrill of force should not hide the effects of bullets, tank rounds, iron fragmentation, bombs and artillery rounds from us.
There is something Nnamdi Kanu is not telling us. He is not telling us that he, unlike you and I, holds a British passport. He is not telling us that once this house catches fire, off he zooms to safety in London but you and I will be left here to stew in our juice. Before you argue this remember that Ojukwu fled to Ivory Coast and Charles Taylor fled to Nigeria when the going became rather rough. Majority of the internet warlords are only cajoling us into courting premature martyrdom but they are not telling us that they are only threatening from their safe heavens in Europe and America unlike you and I who risk being feasted upon by this dancing python. They are only prodding us to burn Ariaria Market but they hide their intentions of causing civil unrest in Aba for a state of emergency to be declared in Abia. In the face of all these we do not have any option than to remind them of the words of Alexander the Great who insisted that he would only agree to shake the world if given somewhere else to stand. As they churn out hate speeches, bombing and blasting only on internet, let us politely remind them that it is only a man whose loved ones did not go to market that relishes hauling stones into the crowded market. They should be made to know that the wounded, the crippled and the dead in this great charade were swiftly carted off the stage. They are Nnamdi Kanu’s war refuse. They will not be seen again. They will not be heard from again. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. Let them know that some of the survivors are already under the firm grip of despair and death wish. Many are most unlikely to readjust while some have retreated into isolationist hell of self-destructive regret and rage.
This message may be too painful to deliver but it must heard. To de-escalate the present tension, to defeat the plans of the enemy and to help see that this python dances back to the barrack, kindly share this post.
