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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