I know a girl
She loves to pray
And everytime we kiss
She runs away in shame
Because I don’t fit into her world
And she can’t look her leader
In the eye
When I’m on her mind.
Is your river flowing?
Should I… check again?
So she runs far away
And in the distance we can
Pretend
That she’s stronger than Shame –
She’s ashamed of herself
For not being herself.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
On Bar Beach
On the shores of Lagos
Before the sea reclaimed the land
In those times
When all we had was soft white sand
On a moonlit night hard
Pressed I rode you on my Atlantic stallion
And the hooves that galloped across the sand
Cried of mermaids and whispers and sunless depths
And during the day I was at work
Renting my horse out to tourists
And middle-class upper-class noisemakers
And snobs and their children enjoying
A day at the sea, they pay to trot
Horseback upon the sea’s sand licking fingers –
And there you were, underneath
The thatch roof, selling fried buns, cold softdrinks
And ice cream and catching my eye
And we dreamed impatiently of the approaching night
Of long after midnight
And the lonely beach, the hoarse waves
The salty breeze, that soft pale sound
And the ride hard pressed upon
Our Atlantic steed, nostrils flaring into the wind
Stallion and mare
And the world is pounding the sand
And Lagos is fast asleep.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
(Lessons from the first (mis)steps following modern Africa’s independence)
Nigeria’s case, considering her human and natural resource potential, is especially pathetic. One of the most mineral rich countries in the whole world and probably the most educated nation-space in Africa, high hopes were pinned on her future. Before he died in 1946, Herbert Macaulay had already for more than two decades championed, stoked the fires and laid the political foundations of Nigerian nationalism. But Nigeria’s greatest strength was also her most paralysing weakness: Diversity in number. A mind-blowing total of over three hundred tribes speaking as many or more languages, additionally split between Christians, Muslims and Animists, with a long pre-colonial history of competition, are indigenous to the most populous black country on earth. As victory in the push for 1960 independence from British rule approached, politics blatantly and shamelessly degenerated into ethno-regional-religious do-or-die contests. Macaulay’s successor, Zik of Africa, eventually abandoned the national canvas and, following the examples of the other regional leaders, retreated into ethno-regional partisanship. From all sides of the federation the message was clear and unambiguous: Pan-nationalism and one-nigerianness were henceforth dead and buried. Political leaders, including the Prime Minister, were seen each by the other regions as simply representing the interests of their regions, tribes or religions. From then on, the Nigeria project became purely a treacherous, mistrustful, coalition poker, a serpentine dance on shifting sands, a volatile cake to be unevenly divided or stolen whole, a mad dash for power. Corruption and selfishness flourished. Nigeria’s stupendous mineral wealth turned into a curse. In the contest for political, economic, resource and military advantage, there was no loud, strong, unifying, pacifying, blending voice. Instead there was a deafening dearth of Will to see themselves as one great people, to detribalise and de-religionise the nation-space, to inculcate national values, to forfeit any right-to-rule mentality, to foster trust amongst one another. There was no leadership effort to awaken in the peoples a sense of being one people, a purpose to being one people, a will to become one people in an equity-based democratic independent African nation. Like an unstable atom, Nigeria wobbled and broke down. Rigged elections, violence, coups, pogroms, civil war, military dictatorships, failed democracies, tribalism, religious violence, calls for cessation from all sides, annulled elections, distrust, disunity, accusations and counter-accusations, all underlined by corruption and financed by Nigeria’s oil reserves – this would consequently be Nigeria’s fate for the next forty years after independence. Wounds and positions from the past still plague the national dialogue, unreconciled, even to this day. Great problems need great minds. Great opportunities require great courage. On independence morning, Nigeria’s leaders proved themselves unable to dream big and visionary, to grasp the spear of destiny inadvertently handed to this unique black nation and to overcome the temptations of regionalism. Nobody was willing to be the one to forfeit regionalism in the interest of nation-building. No-one was brave enough to bell the cat. Nigeria was not plagued by one lifelong dictator; she was and is plagued by one lifelong streak of power-lust and plunder.
Congo, another stupendously mineral-wealthy country, did not even make it past the first few months of independence before intense internal disunities thrust it into the path of civil war, coups and dictatorship. Lumumba, quite simply, never had a chance. Belgian interests and American intelligence were bent on his demise. In the face of outside opposition, the only chance of survival anybody ever has is the unity, support and backing of his people. But, of all the independence era African leaders, probably none was a greater victim of the internal disunity of his country’s tribes and peoples than was Patrice Lumumba. But he was not victim alone. His fiery, fearless and forthright nature – his greatest asset as a freedom fighter and anti-imperialist champion of independence – became his tragic, if heroic, Achilles’ heel once the Congo attained independence and was left to itself, with him as its executive head. Not reconciliation and de-escalation were his modus operandi – such were not in his revolutionary nature. His message was resistance, retaliation, elimination and conquest. His fazit: Congo was full of local and foreign enemies, and they all had to be eliminated or booted out. Fullstop. When the U.N. – whose peace-keeping troops had, at his behest, come into his country with lightning speed – seemed unwilling to help him squash his enemies in the manner he desired, he loudly turned to communist Russia for help, inadvertently touching a raw nerve in global Cold War politics. He was punching way above his weight. Thus, his fate – and that of the Congo – was sealed right from the start. His fellow Congolese, aided by Belgian troops, captured him, held him without trial, tortured and executed him, and hacked his body to pieces; but that too brought no peace. The rest is history. The Congo, alias Zaire, has since then been the plaything of coups, interventions and dictatorships, the most infamous – but not last – of which was under Mobutu Sese Seko. After once suffering and surviving the dark horrors of Belgian oppression and exploitation, the mineral-rich Congo today still remains a tricky multi-ethnic hotbed of internecine guerrilla activity, civil war and internal disunity.
Independence, again and again, is followed by national disorientation and national soul-searching, by disagreements, civil strife and civil war. Even after the fight for political liberation has been won, the acteurs march on in the same spirit of war – hunting saboteurs, persecuting opponents, sidelining adversaries, undermining competition, underdeveloping out-of-favour regions, and taking revenge on defeated former oppressors. In Africa, rather than triggering a united, popular, constructive march towards self-dependent development, political independence exposed and fed a glaring unwillingness or incapacity to unite, to make use of the various strengths of the various components of the nation, to apply the pragmatic common sense and make the tough sacrifices and compromises required to achieve a functional political unity. What became visible was a frightening failure to grasp the concept of the one, big, strong, united Whole, shared by everybody and not just dominated one-sidedly by a few. An integrated Whole to which, and for which, each individual is responsible and free. Instead, under the conditions as they were, all that could flourish were OPPRESSION and CORRUPTION, DISTRUST, CONFLICT and, eventually, DISINTEGRATION. Independence, in the cruel irony of the ways of fate, brought with it more challenges than colonialism ever faced us with, and we were not prepared for them at all. Just as today also, despite the benefit of historical hindsight, South Sudan too was not prepared for the internally disruptive forces that are always set free by independence.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
… continued in 7 of 11:
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES: 7 – (Ugandan Up-n-down)
Preceding Chapters:
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES: 1 (Preamble)
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES: 2 (Egypt’s Modern Pharaohs)
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES: 3 (Tunisian Troubles, Libyan Losses, Ethiopian Woes)
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES: 4 (Sudan and South Sudan)
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES: 5 – (Ghanaian Black Holes & Ivorian Time Bombs)
Time could be a river
If I were standing still
Or a dream, if I
Had taken a sleeping pill –
But awake I meander
Through dreams which I fulfil
So I must be the river
And time is standing still.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
A thought of mine
Well-saddled, gallops on
Its hasty steed
Like a need seeking another need
For the ache has become
A part of my memory of you
And my needing to be needed by you
Has become too, too heavy to share
With anybody else but you.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Loneliness, heart
Time breathes, in out
Endless time
One foot ahead of the other
The foot you left behind,
Drags
You lift it
Place it ahead of the other
With life, breathe, in out
Pain, unbearable, becomes bearable
Loneliness?
The earth, not our home
We make it homely
But sooner or later
We feel again
Loneliness?
Homesickness?
Loneliness, heart
And the loneliness won’t leave your heart.
As Ngozi watched Ada reading some papers in front of her, she felt again the old loneliness creep back into her heart as thoughts of Tony came floating back, whisp by whisp, into her.
Oh, Tony.
Since they broke up, life had seemed quietly dismal to her. Empty, barren, not so much like night – which, when clear and lit up, is beautiful – as like a sunless, hueless, dreary day. A touch, a smile, a face, a voice… oh, how these could so make a difference in one’s existence! Everything had changed after him. She needed a way out or in, she didn’t know which. Going or coming? She felt trapped in an irresolute destiny. That was when she had started reading Sylvia Plath. Only there had she found a temporary home. And temporary had been long enough. Who needs forever when temporary can do the same job in a fraction of the time?
Why waste forever on the temporary? We will live on.
But, inspite of that, without Tony, the unfriendly world had become and remained even unfriendlier. She could take it, but it was still like a slap in the face. Harsh, stunning, demoralising. But sometimes it could be a clarion-call to action.
Like now!
She touched Ada resolutely a third time on the shoulder. Everybody around her secretly held their breath and guardedly watched this odd spectacle between these two young women.
Ada did not appear, for a second, to have felt the touch on her shoulder. Then she, with deliberation, turned her beautiful head to the man sitting to the right of Ngozi and spoke directly to him.
“Please, could we exchange seats.”
Clearly the man was taken by surprise. His big eyes opened wider on his lean, black, bony face and he sputtered:
“Eh… er… okay.”
Ada stood up, squeezed past the woman on her right and, as she stood in the aisle, waiting for the man to slide past her, became – or rather, her legs became – the objects of general, if mixed, attraction.
Finally, though, the switch was concluded. The woman that had been to her right and thus on the edge of her former bench, had slipped into the position she had just vacated, in the middle, leaving the man to again be on the edge, like he had been in his former bench.
Ada, meanwhile, on this bench, indicated to Ngozi that she would like to sit in the middle, and Ngozi acquiesced. Side by side, they looked at each other.
Then, with a smile, they shook hands.
This indeed seemed, to the spectators around them, like an unexpected but pleasing dramatic finale to the live-show; an unconscious tension that had lain over each person broke and lifted and suddenly everybody burst into smiles as if a bubble had burst, a cue been given, a story found a worthy, happy ending. And everybody likes to know how the story ended. When it ends well, people smile.
Even the man who had taken the seat in front to make space for Ada beside Ngozi, turning just at the right moment with a bemused look on his face, also had to smile, although (which had prompted his turning around) the two fat-bosomed, big-bottomed women to his left were now forcing him to all but perch precariously with barely half of his buttocks on the tiny space they grudgingly allowed him on the very edge of the bench. Too late he had realised that his former seat was much more comfortable, but the damage had already been all but done. He thought immediately of asking for his former seat back, but you know women; the young lady would begin to talk upside-down jargon and by the time he managed to get his seat back, if at all, they would already be at their final destination.
Such were the thoughts going through his vexed mind when he turned round with that bemused look on his face of which I earlier spoke. When, however, he saw the two young women smiling handsomely and shaking hands, looking as though they would soon be hugging each other at any moment, although he had no idea why, the altruistic part of him was suddenly touched and, magnanimously contented, he turned round again with a transformed countenance and bore his fate on his new bench with a noble silence.
to be continued…
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Enjoy the full Story here
(Lessons from the first (mis)steps following modern Africa’s independence)
Those who have a knowledge of post-independent Africa will, sadly, not be surprised by the turn of events in South Sudan today. Macabre, but true. Indeed, they would have expected it and, like Mandela and his team, and they would have prepared for it, to try and avert it. South Sudan’s road to independence has been long and winding. She began her life in the modern African world as a region of an arab-dominated Sudan which was herself the joint colonial property of Egypt and Britain. Even before their first modern independence – that of Sudan from Egypt and Britain – Sudan was divided into an arab-speaking islamic north on the one hand, and on the other hand a south full of a myriad black tribes speaking different tongues, mainly Christianised, partly adherent still to ancient African religions, and basically lacking a sense of united nationhood amongst themselves. What united them was their wariness of the north in the face of a long history of slavery and jihadic wars; whereas the north itself was focused on achieving independence from its external colonisers. And independence indeed eventually came, but it did not bring peace with it. Acrimony between military and politics, disputes between Marxists and non-Marxists, moslem-christian religious animosities, and the distrust between north and south, ensured that years of coups, civil wars, genocide and violent disunity would follow. Decades after independence, seemingly unable or unwilling to find a lasting workable peace between north and south, in 2011 they parted ways acrimoniously. Soon after, in the newly independent and sovereign South Sudan, the very same quarrels, accusations and maneuverings that had plagued newly independent African countries five decades earlier, reared their stubborn heads here too and South Sudan degenerated into a hydra-headed civil war. Finally, the tribes of the South, lacking any other external adversary, seemed all too willing to turn their guns on each other and destroy what it now seems that they never had nor ever really tried to cultivate during the decades of tribulation: internal Oneness, inter-tribal political unity. And, unfortunately for them, it seems that they, too, have no Madibas amongst them.
Take any African region, north, west, east and south, and study its collective post-independent or post-liberation history. Examples abound, enough of them. The wound cries out like a disjointed pack of scattered wild voices screaming from a burning house: the lack of reconciliation; the lack of representative, inclusive democracy, of socio-political unity. Some will call it the lack of national common sense. In Africa, for some reason, political office is not voluntarily terminal, whether or not the constitutions stipulate such, and power is not shared. Leaders seem to love only the concept of their country, the fact of having a country, but do not also love all the peoples of the country, their welfare, their liberties and their peacefully united future – not if it requires that the rulers and their support groups themselves equalise themselves with the rest of the country and subject themselves to a rule of law that stands above everyone. Instead, everybody wants to grab the crown, and sit on the throne, and then ostracize, under-develop and punish his enemies. No matter what effects this has on the country in the long and short run.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
… continued in Part 5 of 11:
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES: 5 -(Ghanaian Black Holes & Ivorian Time Bombs)
Preceding Chapters:
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES : 1 – (Preamble)
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES : 2 – (Egypt’s Modern Pharaohs)
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES : 3 – (Tunisian Troubles, Libyan Losses, Ethiopian Woes)
The light that comes
Comes from within –
Sun, moon and stars
Are stars in your own inner film
Morning comes with distant murmurings
Trains and cars and birdsongs gurgling
Silence broken by the rain
And swallowed up in silence again.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
(Lessons from the first (mis)steps following modern Africa’s independence)
In Tunisia, in the so-called French Maghreb region of North Africa, Habib Bourguiba endured imprisonment and persecution, bravely kept up the struggle for liberation, and eventually led the country to independence in 1956, pushing the French out of the political helm of affairs in Tunisia. He applied himself to the economic betterment of his country, experimented with socialist models and, when they did not yield the desired results, switched to more liberal economic strategies. Internationally he was very concerned about securing an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. In the mean time, however, politically he set about instituting himself as the sole authority and system in Tunisia. He pushed through a constitution that gave him near dictatorial powers, and was eventually elected “president for life”. He maintained an authoritarian regime until, after more than three decades as president, a doctor declared him medically unfit to rule any longer. Ben Ali, his minister, succeeded him and he too applied himself to Tunisia’s economy, more than tripling its GDP within a twenty-year period. Politically, however, he too went down the road well trampled. He spent the next twenty-four years refining and perfecting his control over state and government, stage-managing elections, persecuting opposition, blocking free speech and incessantly perpetuating himself in power. But the long arm of the people’s fury, come to fruition in the Jasmine revolution, eventually caught up with him and his cohorts, at long last, in 2011.
Apart from in Egypt, the Tunisian revolution also triggered a similar revolution in neighbouring Libya, which historically has also not fared better, plunging that country too into riots, bloodshed and conflict, leading to the overthrow and death of their own once-liberator turned lifetime-dictator, Gadddafi. Today, more than five decades after modern independence, the present generations of these countries have to struggle desperately and painfully in a volatile, polarised, changing world, to attain what their Independence-generation failed to do: to motivate all sections of their populace into finding, anchoring and practicing a sustainable self-rotating form of representational constitutional democracy, one in which tolerance and reciprocal respect of differing wishes, inclusion, reconciliation and rule of law, within the context of a global modern world, hold sway.
In Ethiopia, Emperor Haile Selasie enjoyed the reputation of being the head of the only nation in Africa that was never successfully colonised. In the 1930s he courageously resisted Mussolini and the Italian invasion and then continued to rule Ethiopia, as Emperor, for many more decades to follow – until in a 1974 coup he was overthrown and dethroned, and then imprisoned in his own Grand Palace by his own people, where he died a few months later, a lonely old man. In his many long decades as leader of the Ethiopian Empire, he had fired the imaginations of Africans and Blacks all over the world, and hosted and reigned as founding chairman of the Organisation of African Unity. He inspired religions and movements, stood as a bastion of global racial equality and dignity, abolished slavery, and pumped much time, effort and the scarce financial means available to Ethiopia into a forward-thinking infrastructural modernisation and industrialization effort. Only one thing he did not do: show any interest in a political game-changer that would replace the monarchy with a true representational democracy in which all the different peoples, classes and sections of the nation would have, and unitedly administer, a joint stake. Civil wars with Eritrean, Oromo and Somali liberationists destabilised the state; a state in which Selasie ruled over and decided everything – administrative, adjudicative, financial, military and ministerial – an autocratic monarch. After the Wollo droughts and the famine came in the late sixties and early seventies, the disconnect between the leaders and the peoples tore the old establishment down. The army mutinied, popular revolts tore through the streets, and strikes and demonstrations paralysed the land. Emperor Haile Selasie was eventually deposed – after almost six decades as Ethiopia’s leader – and a new dictatorship under Major Mengistu took his place. Post-Selasie Ethiopia was then plunged into years of coups, dictatorship, Red Terror, uprisings, dispute, war and violence – all compounded by drought and famine. The Emperor had never built or championed a political system that could harness the patriotic, broad, representative efforts of the whole country’s peoples towards peacefully and constitutionally finding and executing a joint self-sustaining, rotational solution to their problems. He left a divided, politically adrift nation behind. Ethiopia was thus cruelly and ironically sent back to square one, despite its great history and iconic leader.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
… continued in Part 4 of 11:
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES: 4 – (Sudan and South Sudan)
Preceding Chapters:
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES: Part 1 (Preamble)
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES: PART 2 (Egypt’s modern pharaohs)
It’s called the hardworking middle-class
Let’s call it the narrow mountain-pass
For it keeps nervously thinning out
The underworld is getting crowdy
And impatient and restless and rowdy
Getting ready for a bout
The top one percent noiselessly feeds
Off the profits, the interests, the proceeds
No sound, no word, no whisper, no shout.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 