Solitude

Solitude motivates my brains to work—

It brooks no intrusion whatsoever,

For my creative juices to flow.

Solitude goads on a reminiscence;

Jerks my memory out of slumber land.

And in the morning mist I think of her—

The hostage to my fortune.

Solitude incites my recollection of a fear:

That in some tempting day;

In the solitude of my persona I’ll boil over,

And defile the sanctity of this life.

Solitudes prods the raging fire of an ambition;

And in the event this odyssey comes to a desired end,

I aspire to touch and inspire;

Not with my hands but oeuvre.

Runaway Tilent: When the Good Die Young

The late Tupac Shakur was often a misunderstood artiste consumed by his own chilling prophecies.

His name is synonymous with the tragedy that befell Gangsta rap and its subsequent demise in the late 90s. Tupac Shakur has come to epitomize hope and resilience, while at the same time being associated with the curse of a young black man in America. His rise was meteoric and his fall an anticlimax to a troubled life blotted with crime and incarceration.

Arguably the crowning achievement of Gangsta rap, Tupac is best remembered as a young man who became disillusioned by his own success that ultimately became his waterloo. An extremely gifted wordsmith, his prowess at a recording booth remains legendary. In fact, hate it or love it, we are yet to see anything like it.  The songs he recorded two decades ago remain evergreen and relevant to date.

It has been said that success killed Tupac—it made him develop a false sense of invincibility that led to a fatal disregard for personal safety. Whether that is true or not is not for me to decide. But what I do know is that this was a young disturbed man whose life mirrored millions of other black youths’ in America. His single mother battled a terrible crack addiction and missed out on many of his formative years. This was a man who left home to live on his own in an abandoned building.

To borrow the words of Jada Pinkett (now actor Will Smith’s wife) who briefly dated Tupac, “nobody knew the demons Tupac carried . . . .’’ Deeply hurt beyond point of recovery, he opted to channel out his pain through his poetry and a familiar baritone that defined his music. Having pulled himself up by his own bootstraps from the poverty infested neighborhoods of California, here is a man who couldn’t break free from the senseless black on black violence whose allure proved completely irresistible.

The circumstances surrounding his unsolved murder in Las Vegas remain a chilling reminder of the fact that the good die young. There is so much to learn from this fallen star. . . .

Unconditional Love

Maria brought a tin lamp and placed it on the table. It was the only source of light in the house. She affectionately bade her first born child goodnight and disappeared behind an old ruched curtain where her daughter Viviane was fast asleep. She peeped from behind the curtain and saw that he was completely lost in books, unperturbed by the tin lamp’s flickering flame and surly obscene shouts of night merry-makers outside. 

Her husband had been an officer in the ministry of works but died ten years ago.  Since then, she was yet to receive a coin of his death benefits or even the monthly widow’s pension, and her visits to the pensions department were always met with indifference, hostilities and sugar-coated promises. Two months ago, she eventually accepted the fact that her husband’s money was gone with the wind, when an official at the Pensions office told her that her husband’s file could not be traced—in short, it was lost and without it, no coin could be paid. It was time to look elsewhere if her two children were to eat.

If there was any hope left in her life, then it was in her two children. She was jobless and sick, and should anything happen, she trusted her son would be good to his sister. Staring secretly at him as he studied on the small table, her eyes lit up with admiration in their yellowness and sure as eggs is eggs, she knew he won’t fail her. She had always seen that bright future whenever she looked into his eyes.

No sooner had she turned on the mattress cover stuffed with gunny bags to face the mud wall and force some sleep, than disturbing sounds began filtering in from the other side through the gaps on the carton-covered wall. She could tell that her neighbor Pamela was entertaining a guest in her room. From the loud snoring, she believed that her daughter was deeply asleep. But the son was still at the table, the irritating moans notwithstanding; he had become accustomed to the neighbor’s kind of profession. Personally, he wanted to become a medical doctor, specializing in neurosurgery. After winning a scholarship, he had reached a resolution not to let his immediate environment smother his dream. He would just assume everything and wait for time to fly.

Living in the ghetto required that one doesn’t take to heart everything the eyes and ears perceive. Another undisputed rule was that those fond of suffering culture shock could never make good residents of a ghetto, because once within its confines, etiquette becomes a reserve of the souls found in those leafy suburbs with manicured lawns, perimeter walls, running tap water, sewerage services, security and electricity.

Maria burned with guilt when her son eventually opened the door and left, apparently too embarrassed to be experiencing such an act in his mother’s presence. It was a familiar occurrence and she knew he was seated outside under the only security light in the expansive slum, reading his books and risking his life all in the name of getting an education and dodging poverty. A sympathetic community developer had erected the tall lighting tower to discourage gun totting criminals who ruled the slum day and night, raping women old enough to be their mothers and snuffing life and property out of innocent victims, in total disregard of the fact that they were all soldiers of the same struggle.

A deep groan from Pamela’s room reminded Maria that she had no moral ground on which to stand and judge her neighbor. She too, besides washing people’s clothes for a little pay, traded her body for material gain. But what was one to do, alone and with children to take care of? Life had proved itself harder than ever before and like they say, man must live or perhaps, survive. Putting a simple meal of ugali and sukumawiki on the table was a herculean task in itself for one person, what about two extra mouths to feed? It was all about circumstances. If anything, which sane person could wish for such a life?

The tin lamp finally went out after running out of the five shillings worth of adulterated paraffin bought at a local shop. Unknown to many, what they thought to be paraffin was actually a mixture of the highly flammable petrol siphoned from car parks and a little paraffin. Consequently, exploding stoves was a common phenomenon resulting in loss of homes, deaths and life-long scars.

Her gaze darted in the room’s darkness. She hated to doubt if her children would overcome the ghoul of poverty that had the audacity to majestically walk over the generation fence and eat them up. Albeit everybody was screaming themselves hoarse, preaching how education was necessary to win the war against poverty, it was slowly but surely becoming common knowledge among the masses that education was no longer the principal elevator to a good life. In the country, it was obvious that what mattered in one securing employment was whom you knew and not what you knew. She thought it was outrageous that somebody could struggle through school, draining his family’s resources along the way only to end up with nothing to show for it all. And their crime? Not knowing someone who could connect them to the high voltage power lines.

She knew of scores of young men and women who did odd manual jobs in the slum and yet they were university graduates. Could you accuse them of not having tried enough? And what would you have to say of some evil secretaries who are known to shred irreplaceable academic certificates of desperate job seekers? Apparently, illicit cheap liquor appeared the only agreeable way to go for those graduates who couldn’t stomach the unfair sight of their dreams and sweat going up in a plume of smoke not because they are lazy, but because the system had failed and cannot accommodate them.

Maria had an acquaintance who her sparkling resume notwithstanding, in order to supplement her little income that could barely pay rent and keep the family of four in shape till the next payday, had resorted to discreetly engaging in the oldest profession. This she did not because she enjoyed the company of men she barely knew, but because she was concerned about her children walking around with protruding stomachs and saving her ever-sloshed husband the embarrassment of walking around without undergarments, even if already enjoyed by a European.

She wondered if children raised up in slums ever stood a chance in life. As others believed, around was an environment only fit for raising gangsters and twilight girls. How could someone expect monks and nuns to sprout out of households where the rudiments of proper parenting ranked with dinosaurs on the timeline? Since parents had shown their competence in blazing the trail of immorality, then their children literally had no future to look forward to because no society is alive without a sense of morality that is dearly treasured and held onto the hearts of its members in a jealous guard.

By the time he came back, she was feeling dopey. She could hear him grope in the darkness, shoving the few items in the room to create a sleeping space on a mat. Though her eyes felt heavy with sleep, she didn’t forget to pray. Religion was the only consolation for those souls wallowing in poverty because where there was religion, there was still hope; where there was religion, there was still possibility; where there was religion, there was life. Sitting up, she prayed that someday in the foreseeable future, her kids and their likes all over the world will break the ground and rise against the myriad challenges of their upbringing, blotted with innocent plays in grungy playgrounds littered with used French letters and syringes. She clenched her feeble palms into small tight fists hoping in her prayer that a day to come, those children will break loose from their ugly pasts; that somehow in the future, these children will look beyond the open secret that their mothers had to sell their bodies for them to feed and clothe.

Finally, she fell into the irresistible arms of Morpheus, full of hopes that her own children will defy all odds and grow up into a respectable successful man and woman, although dusted and disgusted in the elementary stages of life.

The Joy of Giving

Some years back, I was fortunate enough to meet an Italian missionary and his wife. They led an extremely simple life in a small rented brick house that they shared with another missionary couple from Jamaica. One day, over a cup of coffee in their house, I gathered enough courage to ask the Italian couple why they chose such a life in Africa over the comforts of Europe, and their answer was plain simple: “the joy of giving.”

Apparently, Roberto had been a computer programmer and his wife a school teacher. They had given up their noble professions and sold all their material possessions before flying to Africa, with Kenya as their first destination. Their mission was to spread the gospel of Christ and alleviate human suffering by starting small income generating projects for poor families. I was young then, and my preoccupation was scheming how to get rich day and night, and so you can imagine my disappointment that somebody was so happy being poor by choice, because Roberto and his wife barely owned anything! Years later, I have come to fully appreciate and comprehend the joy of giving.

It goes that when you give and assure a fellow human being of a dignified existence, the peace you feel in your heart is insurmountable. It’s nothing like you’ve ever felt before, seeing the reassuring smile of a helpless child who knows that her next meal is guaranteed for. It’s a good feeling that I suggest every human being ought to experience before they die.

When you’re a witness to a situation in obvious need of help that you can afford but decide to ignore, then you become a prisoner of conscience and I tell you there is no jail like a guilty conscience. You don’t need to have much for you to give— if all of us, with the little that we have, could stretch a hand of charity, you would be amazed at the millions of broken hearts of sorrow and the rivers of tears we could stop. And there is a misconception that giving is all about money. I put it to you that some people, for instance the elderly and terminally ill, can do without your money—a little bit of your time and company is all they mostly need to feel valued and human.

It’s common knowledge that into the world you brought nothing, and out of the world you can take nothing. And this is why it makes a lot of sense to give away that which we don’t need, because it’s plain to see that we shall lose everything anyway when our respective lives have run their full courses. Too much of anything becomes good for nothing, ultimately.

If you’ve never given, then you’re yet to experience the real joy. Why not go out this weekend and give a helping hand to someone in need and see how it feels?

Above Death

“Blimey, we’re doomed!” I recall uttering to my colleagues that early morning, moments before we were viciously attacked. I had sighted the MSF helicopter up in the sky, its huge blades chopping furiously through the cold morning air of a thankless state. I followed it keenly with my eyes from our small office till it disappeared into the far away horizon.

 

I put my pen away and left my mind to wander. A week ago, president Francisco Nguema had banned the use of the word ‘intellectual’ and launched a purge against all the educated people in Equatorial Guinea. Thousands fled the country fearing for the horrendous night visitations by armed presidential thugs, hired to eliminate any person he imagined to be a threat to his ambition to rule for life. The MSF had finally had enough, when their clinic in Malabo was invaded and patients and staff sprayed with bullets by armed youths, who quickly forgot how they had previously been treated in the same clinic with total love and devotion.

Even though I had gone into hiding, I had reached an immutable decision not to leave the boarders of my motherland.  If I was to die, then, it would be a heroic death on the soil of my beloved country and nowhere else. After all, I had reasoned, there is no good or bad death—regardless of how you find yourself in that dreaded state of lifelessness, death remains just death. And even killers will someday die. Contrary to the opinion that journalists exploit human tragedies for profit, as a dedicated scribe, mine was a mandate that sat above death and profit; above volleys of bullets, intimidating gun muzzles and the hangman’s noose; above paranoid totalitarian politicians and their evil systems of oppression, suppression and manipulation. I chose to remain true and equal to my calling by continuing to release a periodic newsletter from behind the scenes, with a small team of other journalists who believed they had ultimately found something worth to die for.

Memories of chants of war songs and blaring artillery fire still triggers off a spike of adrenaline all over me. To date, I don’t view dead bodies—I have seen more than enough to last me a lifetime. I have seen badly mutilated and decomposed bodies in the course of my journalistic duties and therefore, the sight of one nowadays, does me the disservice of replaying aching memories of a past that I’m struggling to leave behind. I believe some things in life are not worth remembering.

Still lost in thoughts and wondering when, why and how it became a crime punishable by execution to be educated, a hand grenade catapulted into the tiny office sent debris and life-threatening shrapnel flying in all directions possible to imagine. We all crawled into the badly shaken editor’s office and bolted the door before pushing an antique oak desk against it. Bellicose soldiers did a door to door search for anything breathing in a shanty town where our office was located. From the editor’s grilled window, we watched them flash out a man with a broken arm, nursed in a sling, from his tin-walled house that could easily pass for a kennel. He was viciously hit on the temple with an assault rifle whose make I couldn’t immediately identify. From another room, a grey-haired man was unceremoniously kicked out. Being physically challenged, he wasn’t lucky. I saw him resign to fate, lying on the path before his soggy doorstep, crying and pleading with the heartless men in jungle green uniforms to spare his life. He was within our earshot.

“I’m just but a cripple with nothing my sons,” pleaded the old man as a tall youth in military fatigue towered over him, beaming with pride and arrogance of being in the government service—a government that supplied its people with hoes bought on taxpayer’s sweat, and encouraged them to plough into each other’s skulls while the land was left to fallow and grow hunger. I squeezed a tear from my eye and felt acrimony and pity shoot up and clog my throat, seeing young men working hard to turn the land of their fore fathers into a replica of Chechnya. The poor old man tried to crawl on the ground in a desperate bid to escape the soldier’s kicks on his ribs. He spat a mouthful of blood and further resigned to fate.

I hate to recall the sound of the old man’s cry, when the devil incarnate pressed his ugly boot against his groin. It was as if he was pressing on the gas pedal of one those funny sub-standard military trucks the government had heavily invested in.

“There!” the soldier threw a pair of broken crutches at the man’s feet. “Take your crutches and hop to sweet freedom!” 

 It was like being given a new lease of life. The poor old man put up a quick struggle and soon, he was up. With baited breath, we watched him move frantically towards our office against a background of black acrid smoke, which soared up into the sky. Looking up, I saw the clouds scud, as if paving way for the innocent lives and property reduced to ashes and smoke, to reach before the mighty throne of the Lord of creation and lodge a complaint against the wickedness of man—his greatest creation. Just imagine the kind of drama that meets the eyes of God whenever he takes a peep at a world he created so pure. . . .

The next thing I heard was a scary gunshot. I quickly threw my gaze before me just in time to catch a glimpse of the old man letting go his crutches and falling to the ground with a gruesome bloody wound on his ripped-out chest.

Everyone in the office held their breath. He had been fell not so far away from our office and the proximity and reality of death got everyone into a meditating mood. I could see our cleaner was having a hard time fighting back tears. She was the only woman in the room and the sobs she was trying to suppress shook her corpulent frame vigorously, as a double stream of tears flowed freely from her eyes. The rest of us just stared hard. In times of war, I had learnt, sobbing one’s heart out was forbidden. In fact, even infants knew they weren’t supposed to cry carelessly, lest they gave their hiding mothers away to the enemy.

Watching in hollow-eyed silence, it never occurred to us that the soldier’s shouting for people who had hidden in a nearby disused building that once served as a banking hall to surrender was the herald of a massacre.

“Come out you cowards!” shouted a child soldier, strapped with an ammunition belt and holding a gun almost his size. To his chagrin, there was no response. I reckon nobody in there dared move even a finger. It was a really tense moment, the one that only comes once in a lifetime. I sighed heavily and looked around the room. Just moments ago, the editor I had found ogling over some nude literature was now holding a rosary in his hands! Indeed, the moment of death is the only moment of truth in the life of man; before it happens, this life is always but some very big joke. Suddenly, the cleaner pointed at something incoherently. Before I could grasp it, the window shattered and pieces flew dangerously.

“They’re entering the building!” shouted the cleaner, prompting pandemonium to break loose in the tiny office. Knowing the nadir of my life had finally caught up with me after practicing journalism for only three years, I began saying my last prayers. I couldn’t deny that I had been warned severally, that journalism was a thankless career that would only reward me with a painful early death. So this is it? I thought.

The building was quickly surrounded by trigger-happy souls and I knew it would take inconceivable skills to cheat death. No doubt, I believed the soldiers were going to live up to the numerous death threats we had been receiving.  A week earlier, somebody anonymous had sent us a poison pen letter, promising to deliver us to Lucifer in a hand basket. We had responded in our editorial that we refuse to be cowed by a mortal coven of man-eaters, because we trust in a God who sits above every thought and effort of man. The Express Bulletin—the newsletter we produced, had persistently been vocal in advocating for the government to arrest rampant looting of public coffers, by coming up with a development plan for the country and an accounting system for public funds. We had vehemently opposed and openly criticized the presidential decree that made military service compulsory for all boys aged between seven and fourteen years. Furthermore, we did not agree with the senseless killings of imagined dissidents, whose heads were stuck on poles and paraded in the streets of the capital, to send a chilling message to anybody with ideas detrimental to the incumbent presidency.

The screaming inside the editor’s office wasn’t a deterrent enough to make the soldiers leave us in peace. The cleaner’s praying and begging wasn’t a reason enough for them not to repeatedly use on her a weapon synonymous with African conflicts—rape. They told us that they had been clearly instructed ‘from above’ to baptize us with fire for being too nosy and for prying beyond our borders.

What followed was traumatizing. The cleaner was strangled with bare hands and the editor, for his ‘editing improperly printed words that defiled the purity of the patriotic citizen’s mind’, was crassly ordered to remove his trousers and bend over. I saw a soldier remove a tube of petroleum jelly from his pocket. . . .

“Bastard!” I felt a gun’s muzzle prod my sides repeatedly as I walked through the debris of broken office furniture and typewriters. I was escorted to my desk and ordered to shred everything from my chest of drawers before it was smashed viciously. A hard copy of what I considered the biggest scoop of my career about an attack on the Nigerian diplomatic mission in Malabo by the president’s thugs, and set to run in the next issue of The Express Bulletin with the biggest headline possible was set ablaze.

We were all paraded outside the office and instructed to step back from dozens of Kalashnikov muzzles pointed directly at us. I remembered that lonely starry night when I made the decision to sell my struggling bakery and become a writer, because it eventually got to me that talent was God’s original idea of how man shall live. As we waited to get shot, it was my hope that we shall not die in vain; that our killing will emboss a sense of pride in those we shall leave behind by knowing that we fell for a worthy cause. And even though the dead are done with their struggles and healed by death, leaving their pain with the living, I trusted that we shall rest in eternal peace knowing that those whom we inspired will turn the pain of their loss into a victory for the betterment of humanity. From the air above they shall attack, and deep from within the vast oceans; on land their boots shall know the way, till liberation comes.