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.