the blueshift journal

WHAT IT MEANS TO BE US

 

“I categorically say that all white institutions were built through the agency of superior weaponry and not superior intelligence as many erroneously believe" P.O.M. Njemanze

1.

It was mid-day, the last week-day of the first week of March 2003. Heaven covered our hall with a blanket of heat. In the shadow of the school kitchen where fifteen of us hid, two boys -- both thirteen like me -- argued over the forthcoming Nigerian presidential election, both supporting their respective tribesmen. The day wore on like a determined long-distance athlete. The two boys argued and argued. And then, they fought: the Hausa boy brought out a scalpel from the school kitchen, the Yoruba boy broke a Limca bottle he brought from Mama Ngilari's kiosk. In the end, we were asked to draft eyewitness accounts at the principal's office. Later, we stared at night's scary face at the front of the school clinic, waiting impatiently like an expectant father, to see how deep the cuts of the two boys were. Our eyes hitched us, and when we eventually had the chance to satisfy them, we slept like injected dogs.

Our dreams were short. It was a Saturday, yet, Aunty Osagie, the matron sent us to the bathroom with her thundering voice. Afterwards, we sat in the dining hall where she came to serve us a real-life story as breakfast: her great-grandmother was a teenager in 1897 when the "almighty" British stormed Benin City under the leadership of the "great" Rear-Admiral Harry Rawson. Within days, Benin crumbled. So did the lives of over 15 million Africans.

"15 million of my people killed because of gold and bronze?" Aunty Osagie asked the warm air strolling about the dining hall, while we stared and stared on at her as someone would their favourite TV show. 

"The moral of my story is: if you all want to survive in this world, I want you to love yourselves irrespective of your tribes, because out there, the world hates you and me and all members of our families because of the flesh wrapped around our feelings. So you see how scarce love is for us black people?" She added.

  ****                *****            *****

" When the Whites came, they held the bible, while we had our land. They told us to close our eyes so we can pray, and when we opened our eyes, we had with us the bible, while they had with them our land." Frank Leuma a character in the movie, Somewhere in Africa.
 

2.

Just a month after the place in which I was born became a city of imagination, existing only in my head, my grandmother dropped me off at the gate of my new life. For the first time, I read under a night sky, sitting among the stars. I read a book, pilfered from a senior's wardrobe. It was a book of poems. The poems in the book, all many years above my understanding except one. 

Even as a 12-year old, I could divide the poem and explicate the poem in stanzas:

In that time
When civilization struck with insults
When holy water struck domesticated brows
The vultures built in the shadow of their claws
The bloody monument of the tutelary era

Here the speaker took on the advent of slavery. Indeed, when the Europeans came to Africa, two of the major reasons which they used as pretexts for invading Africa were civilisation and Christianity, all of which Diop dealt with above.

In that time
Laughter gasped its last in the metallic hell of roads
And the monotonous rhythm of Paternoster
Covered the groans on plantations run for profit

The speaker described the events which took place after the actual arrival of the slave-traders: the quotidian happy African life based on the principle of communalism and family life was replaced with agony, despondence and sorrow as many families lost their members who were taken through the Middle Passage to the New World to pick flowers on plantation fields which will be shipped to Europe for manufacturing.

O sour memory of extorted kisses
Promises mutilated by machine-gun blasts
Strange men who were not men
You knew all the books you did not know love
Or the hands that fertilize the womb of the earth

Here, the speaker lampooned the Europeans directly. According to him, though these White men were educated, but they had no iota of love in them, neither did they know that the world came into being through the existence of Africa and Africans. To him, the prospects and future of the continent were cut short with the Europeans' technologically-advanced weaponry.

The roots of our hands deep as revolt
Despite your hymns of pride among boneyards
Villages laid waste and Africa dismembered
Hope lived in us like a citadel
And from the mines of Swaziland to the heavy sweat of  Europe's factories
Spring will put on flesh under our steps of light.

At this point, the poem transmuted from the Pre-colonial period to the Colonial era. This period witnessed a wave of revolts against White domination across Africa such as the Mau-Mau Revolt in German East Africa, the Aba Women Riot in Nigeria, leading to the death of many Africans. Yet, the nationalistic Africans wouldn’t give up on their dream of regaining their freedom from the Europeans. After this wave of revolts, what followed was total subjugation of the now, weakened Africans, resulting in the total transportation of their resources from Africa to Europe.

Even as a 12-year old, I could feel the experience of my forebears with my palms like it were a wall. Even as a 12-year old, I had questions my history teacher couldn't respond to the next day with her mouth, but her watery eyelash told me all the answers I needed. Even as a 12-year old, I had an unsettled issue with every white face I saw on the TV. Even as a 12-year old, I mustered so much courage to convince my uncle of the need to despise everybody whose hair was straight. .

Back to that night: by the time I closed the book of poems, the stars had become a conglomeration of watery shingles.

****                *****                    *****

"Lionel Quaid: Prudence, our mission was not to intervene while the system functioned perfectly. A few years down the road, the President will ask for forgiveness and make the promise of "never again", but in terms of national interest we did everything right.

Prudence Bushnell: We were loyal to a policy that allowed hundreds of thousands of people to be killed! As far as moral imperative, we did not do the right thing.

Lionel Quaid: We're bureaucrats, not the political leadership.

Prudence Bushnell: Is it because they're Africans?

Lionel Quaid: Don't do that, Pru. It was Rwandans killing Rwandans."

A conversation between United States diplomats Prudence Bushnell and Lionel Quaid over the Rwanda Genocide of April 1994 in which over 800,000 Rwandans died, from Sometimes in April, a historical movie on the genocide. 
 

3.

It was bright and cold, light had just made its debut. My sister, her husband and their two kids all rushed out of the house before the longer hand of the clock marched the face of another number. After their departure, there was silence. To kill silence, I switched on the TV, CNN: Emmett Till, young, black and handsome. Killed brutally because of love, that was 1955. 60 years later, on the other side of the Atlantic, over 2000 people were killed in Baga. Few days before, just on the roof of Africa, death picked 11 people like weeds in Paris. Europe and America mourned. They mourned Paris, because 11 humans died. What of Baga and its 2000? Why did those white eyes look away? Why? Why? Why? Why? Between those 60 years, Ebola was born somewhere in the Motherland. Well, many years after the purported discovery of Ebola, the virus became seriously carnivorous, guzzling Africans like they were noodles. And the Africans died and died like mosquitoes or something less worthy.  I'm still asking how? How? How? How?

I would engage my brother-in-law in a cold war of words much later about what it meant to be black outside Africa or to put differently, how blacks were viewed by non-blacks. He walked up to me, as a bride to her groom, he put his palms around my flat cheeks and said "just how an average human looks at a pig or a chicken." 

I shook my head in disagreement, wanting a more trenchant answer.

"Remember I lived in Germany for 5 years and in Spain for 1 year and France for another 1 year. Remember, the black PSG football fan that was kicked out of a bus by a group of White Chelsea fans in last week's UEFA Champions League?" He asked.

I shook my head in agreement.

"I experienced that almost every day while I was away from home" he concluded.

I didn't shake my head anymore; I couldn't shake my head anymore.