THE MIND OF BLACK MAN IS DIFFERENT: I WAIL ON MY BIRTHDAY FOR THE DESPONDENCY OUR CHILDREN FACE

By Nkem Ossai

Permit me to start this birthday jargon by remembering the great Oracle of the written word. I crave your indulgence to quote his famous advice to writers. This is what has influenced the greater part of my thoughts on any social issue. I confess, this philosophy has held me captive that whenever I bend down to put something black or white on paper, it floods my subconscious.

Achebe notes: “Clearly there is no moral obligation to write in any particular way. *But there is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless. Whether we look at one human family or we look at human society in general, growth can come only incrementally.”

I want to profoundly thank my first family for the great job they are doing on me. They have so amazingly taken care of me that ageing has taken the back seat in my appearance and in my psyche. The Igbos believe in the transcendental transformation of their ascended beings. Lord, in my next world, may I come back to the same children, the same family, and with the same social connectedness around me in Igbo land.. Let me add that it must have been because of their care and God’s providence that I am still around and still holding my pen with great determination. I am running out of my way to say, thank you great children and great friends.

It has become a habit for me to talk about what I consider strange or rather unusual about my environment during my birthdays which of course, I have never celebrated as the world celebrates except randoming and musing like this since as a writer, I consider it my place, my natural responsibility and a call to duty to contribute to the common good of our society through what I write.

Achebe notes again that the truest tests of integrity, is its blunt refusal to be compromised. He further adds that when a tradition gathers enough strength, to go on for centuries, you don’t just turn it off one day. And he addresses my country thus; “the only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.”

From the above, does it require a soothsayer to understand that my country has learnt nothing from experience and forgotten nothing. One would have expected that after several decades of violent take over of governments, by the military, we would have become like Ghana or Rwanda or better than them in our thoughts and behaviours. But this is not to be as every new regime in Nigeria works acidulously harder to be worse than the previous. Indeed, the competition is now on who can drive the six inches nail into the medulla of the downtrodden in order to fasten their early descent to the abyss. A young woman recently suggested that pensioners die as, according to her, they are useless to the country. The morass is already too deep that I fear it will take a million years to reverse and that also must be by an angel.

We have so brazenly abandoned all the norms for civilized behaviour in a constitutional democracy and now by choice, have installed spirits and demons to make decisions for us. The level of corruption in high places and the reckless abandon with which it is committed, gives credence to Achebe’s predictions. It is now a norm and a tradition to be evil and to not care about the future generations. When I was in my twenties, I learn that governments are socially responsible. Now, all I can see is a government that can not pay their workers ₦30,000 living wage (whatever that means), per month but can afford to buy a Jeep at a criminal cost of ₦150 million Naira for an individual law maker. Where are we headed?

We have also, willingly chosen the path of slavery and destruction with our so called education eventhough people like Azikiwe and others contrived our part to freedom and development with their intellectual sagacity, from the whiteman’s land. We have employed our own intellectual prowess in the art of election rigging, and the use of legal technicalities to defraud genuine winners and in other words, steal the people’s mandate. I wail for cash and carry judges and justices. Since we are powerless in their decisions, we will resort to prayers so that at the end of this debacle, their children will have a share from the outcome of their court decisions, good or bad.

Let us always remember that whatever a man plants he reaps. As we are busy planting in corruption, election rigging and deliberate injustices, so shall we reap. I have never seen a man who planted a corn-field and when he goes to his farm he harvests a barn of yarm.

Talking about a black man, I ask: Why has slavery continued to dwarf the mind of black man and keep recolonizing his spirit over and over again that he is becoming perpetually incapable of fighting the social ills and malaise around his God given environment as the people who colonized us did?

I wail because the opportunity to have a free and fair election was presented to us on a platter of gold with several beautiful adornments. But, it was not to be. I wail and ask: Is black man’s love for ill-gotten wealth a genetic and generic mutation? They now sell their mothers and fathers for a pot of porridge. Why then would I not congratulate Essua who on selling his birthright to Jacob, remarked; to hail with inheritance. Is life all about Belle like Essua?

Worse still, our state institutions; the police, the electoral body and even the courts no longer cared about what happens to us and the nation so long their pockets are stuffed with Naira notes. No wonder that generational great man, Peter Obi noted and saddly so that our courts have become procurement areas not places of Justice.

Drenched in this generational evil the black man (truly I mean Nigerian man), is weak and unable to understand the difference between evil and good and between freedom and slavery, and even between life and death having so carelessly cheapened our lives with intentional degradation that we have ended up losing all our sense of self esteem craftily deposited in us by God. I wail because I can no longer differentiate between when we were under colonial rule and now that we are free assuming we are. Like his white masters he now devotes so much energy in oppression than in developing himself. He has so comfortably and willingly chosen to inflict his fellow black man with worse instrument of slavery than the whitemen have used against us.

Right now they have began the process of deconstructing our minds to revel in evil and corruption and to not understand or be able to separate evil from good. The few courageous ones are either settled or hounded so they will never interrogate their evil ways.

Today, our mantra or rather ‘new normal’ is that ‘power is taken not given.’ This is in the sense of grab it, take it or destroy it. It is a pure argument from gehena, and nonsensical as it sounds.. But, who will blame them. Our courts failed to query the advocates of grab it, take it or destroy it. In fact, they commended them. Even a Nobel Laureate came out before the entire world to defend it. What do you call that – a rotten society. That must have been the reason the Bavarian philosopher, Levy Strauss said, “The world began without man, and it will complete itself without him.”

A professional colleague recently rebuked me when I complained of the conspiracy carefully hatched by the Fulani and the Yoruba to steal the mandate freely given to Peter Obi by Nigerians because of his tribe even though they are innately aware that in Peter Obi, a lot of problems bedeviling the nation will be solved. I now ask: “How does the mind of Blackman work? I think sometimes it works in reverse mode.

I wail because when I made a journey to the archives, I discovered that at the time of slavery, we were deconstructed, body, soul and spirit by the whiteman to be subservient forever. This is what I saw:

“The first slaves arrived here in 1619. Between 1619 and 1865, Virginia passed more than 130 slave statutes to regulate the ownership of Black people. A 1662 law made all children of enslaved mothers slaves, regardless of the father’s race or status, so that rape by white slave-masters couldn’t create a free child. A 1667 law codified that slaves who converted to Christianity were still slaves. A 1669 law allowed slaves to be killed for resisting authority. The wording of the law regarding Christianity is revealing. The slave-masters would claim Christian piety in their acts of enslavement”

When I read the above laws enacted over three hundred and fifty one yeas ago, I exclaimed, “indeed the blood of the black man is smeared in the coven of slavery forever.” By this I mean, “he will never be free from himself.” His Gene has already been corrupted. This is why he revels in hurting himself without any sense of guilt. Then I concluded that we are indeed slaves forever.

Appalled by the events in Nigeria in recent times which stupified even the best of our people, one of my friends remarked thus: “while we are busy perfecting all the known arts of election rigging, and engaging in the politics of self-mutilation, self-immolation and fratricidal violence, the world left us behind.” And I couldn’t help adding, “and India went to the moon.”

After the general elections in Nigeria adjudged as the worst in Africa if not the world, we have just finished another round of spaced elections in three states of Nigeria but the story is not different from the previous. Allas! We are already sold to the Lord of the Manor.

We learn that election is supposed to be the democratic ways to overcome political crises. We also learn that democracy brings about strategic-level-relationships. I ask again, are all these mere cosmetics dressing that we now waste billions to conduct election only to ask unsuspecting citizens who honestly came out enmass to choose their choice candidates to go to court? Whose courts?

Back to my birthday, here, we are in another glorious moments and period of the year when we celebrate our thanksgiving. It is important we remember how lucky we have been, even in the midst of this evil wrought on us and on our children, and even as our hearts keep breathing air and bleeding self-inflicted blood, injustice and wounds so difficult to obliterate, let us thank God. He remains the reason we still have the strength to bear this.

As you read this peace, keep praying for our children so that God will strengthen them to face this endless meditated denials and sufferings (which my generation did not face) in a country streaming with milk and honey.

The party has just begun!

Life, they say, is all about discovering!

Cheers to an awesome year of adventure!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO NKEM OSSAI