In Response to Sheriff Bojang's 'Killjoys'
By Foday Samateh
Lehman College, New York



The Spirits of Santangba that inspire beyond measure proved inadequate few
short years back when Brikama Sirifo meditated on the disquiet of our
continent. Never given to relenting, the evermore inquiring sheriff of
scribes, who once appropriated for himself the sobriquet Domori Foday
essayed a platonic assignment to the real Foday operating under the
pseudonym Cassandra. This most learned mind could not fathom the
common-sense defying mannerisms of the Big Men of Africa he rightly called
“Killjoys.” So he tasked me to obligation with this concluding challenge:
“This is the riddle our resident philosopher Cassandra must help resolve.”

I apologise profusely for the delay lasting the intervening years between
the question and the reply. Notwithstanding the passage of time, the
constancy of monotonous pandemonium in Africa absolves me of all charges of
violating the law of urgency. But being the resident philosopher whose
insight is solemnly prayed for, I will discharge my sacred responsibility
that proscribes all liberties for self-indulgence in the business of
leisurely procrastination. Gladly, with haste and speed, I avail myself to
the call of duty.

Between complete despondence and outright cynicism we all must ask the
Hamlet question why the world must suffer the nefarious ways of sinning men.
Shakespeare’s most famous prince-hero lamented the usurpation of power that
denied him his future throne as “something is rotten in Denmark.” The
ubiquitous replication of power grab, the original political
misappropriation, in our continent can then only be mourned as everything is
rotten in Africa. But that is the paradigm of the riddle; not the decoding
of it. In fact, there is a plurality of interpretations given the
multiplicity of the scandalous misdemeanors of these men. Whether we start
from the east, west, south, north, or at the very centre of our continent,
the permutation of decadence is the same: the Big Men are inscrutably
harebrained against the backdrop of their appalling delight in the abnormal.


So Bojang-ba, I invite you on an odyssey of discovery to show the meaning of
the riddle! Take a deep breath and let’s dip headlong into Pope’s Pierian
Spring. Here, the ocean floor of wisdom, where the translucent is made
transparent, is my residence. Like Virgil was to Dante, I will be your
poet-guide from this vantage point, where we gaze upon the Inferno on the
bank and shore. Look up through the liquid silver and see ephemeral men
tightening their clutches on borrowed sceptres, imbecilely dramatising their
malversation. Drunk with the impression of invincible and unmindful of the
havoc they wreak, they ramble and trample to make a preposterous show of
their machismo born of the erroneous belief that power is immortal. Sadly,
Nature does not mandate a functioning memory the heart-beat of breathing
souls! Otherwise they would reflect on the unmarked graves of those who went
before like the Poor Player not to be heard no more!

Down in the South an octogenarian, who still was my hero long after you
abandoned him with your admiration, clings to power. His name is Mugabe who
had fought for everything, won everything, but never knew when to quit, and
so lost everything for Harare. He is reliving the glorious days of a
worthwhile revolution in lonely fantasy, and so fails to see that he is the
problem of now caught up in the inescapable web of a brutal transnational
politico-economic order. His irascible defiance in a world of pragmatic
national interests zaps zeal and zest out of Zimbabwe, and renders it a
failed state. Just below him is Zuma, jockeying to succeed the pan-African
Mbeki in the Rainbow nation. Scandalised by high-leveled corruption and
stigmatised by a steamy rape charge, his character is a flawed liability,
and his ascension to the reigns of Africa’s only strong democracy will be a
sacrilege against the sanctity of Mandela’s magnanimous struggle.

Up in the North mundane Mubarak casts his iron fist for decades over the
land of the ancient pharaohs. Watch him hand over the keys of Cairo to Jamal
to perpetuate paternalism. He neglects the fertile Nile to idle beauty and
terrible waste, so Egypt is a hope unfulfilled for the Egyptians. While
mummies-visiting tourists and jihad-waging terrorists compete over the
resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh for destination, the strongman of the
so-called Greater Middle East is busy clamping down on democratic
reformists. His neighbour, Al-Bashir, the cantankerous maniac of Khartoum is
busy deploying the Janjaweed in Darfur on Operation Genocide. Washing in oil
energy-thirsty China craves, he gives the world the middle finger, as he
remakes Sudan a monolithic Arab nation by violently cleansing it of ethnic
Africans.

In the East, follow the folly unfolding. Three men with head of Serengeti,
guffaw the Great Lakes leaving in their wake a valley of dearth. Museveni
unlearns the lessons of Obote and Amin. The former Darling of the West, he
is now a disgraced whiner of Kampala. He said stupid people, meaning
Africans, deserve to be enslaved, so he must toil on the first plantation.
Next door is Kigame, who brought tribal war to Kigali. The gain of his power
is the immutable pain of the price: Rwanda got genocide; Africa lost its
humanity. In sub-continental Congo, Petit Kabila stands in for Grand Kabila,
who fooled the world with his Lumumba façade. But truly, he was a provincial
opportunist naïve in urbane nuances. Like his foxy criminal predecessor
Mobutu, he lost Kinshasa to the Ghost of King Leopard, the notorious butcher
of universal proportions. In the Horn it is business as usual. The hotspot
Mogadishu violently spirals out what little is left of it, and endangers the
fragile region with renewed escalation of instability to rival the painful
days of the Cold War.

In the Center, oil gushes out in every gorge of blessed ground. Voluptuous,
voracious dictators, and their promiscuous, pampered, prodigal heir-apparent
sons, incarnate themselves into crude oligarchies. They live the fantasy of
fairy kings, indifferent to the earthlings starved and dying ailing,
emaciated deaths. Why, why, why? Impunity is the greatest instigator of
abuse of power. As in most of Africa, there are no institutions to hold
these miscreants accountable, so they do as they like.

Set your sight on the West wilting wildly. Yes, it is optimising to see that
Kufour’s Accra is a democracy by all standards of experimentation after the
rancorous, roaring years of Rawlings; Kabba’s Freetown is free of the
sanguinary Sankoh; and Lady Johnson-Sirleaf’s Monrovia is moving away with
momentum from the rapacious tentacles of Taylor. But the pain in the
strained muscle has not disappeared, only relocated. In Lomé, the Eyademas
consolidate a kingdom Louis of France and his aristocrats would marvel at.
Abidjan, once the oasis of peace, is a playa vapourising feuding Gbagbo’s
south and rebel-soldiers’ north. In Bissau Vieira, who outlived his nemesis
Mané, has made a secondcoming. The taste of power is too insatiable, too
addictive to let go the chalice from the greedy lips. Gladly for once
democracy answered for itself in the home of the Super Eagles, when the
Senate gave Obassanjo the rebuking snub to extend his presidency beyond the
constitutional two-term limit. Still, in the premier Nobel laureate’s home,
things still fall apart, because the centre cannot hold. Babangida, the
Maradona of Abuja, is coming out of a hasty retirement to dribble past
Abacha’s blood-dimmed legacy. In Banjul, Abacha’s son spews bile and venom
from the density of his emptiness. The swift hand of persecution desecrates
human dignity, so the sheriff and his legion of soothsaying scribes flee to
England! All brawn no brain, Jilangka swore murder. And soon murder was what
the nation got. The quintessential peace-journalist Hydara was felled by a
midnight assassin’s bullet. I must pause to let flow my salty mourning
tears. For the reading world knows fully well that this doyen of saints was
my friend and mentor!
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