My father will celebrate in London, where he had gone to bring our Christmas clothes, is how his disappearance from our lives, was explained to his three children. As we grew up as the burden of a single mother, “obinrin bi okunrin” ‘a woman like a man’, an insult to feminism alright but a figure of speech, we got to know that his was a journey of no return.
Beasts of England! Beasts of Ireland! Beasts of land and sea and skies! Hear the hoof beats of tomorrow! See the golden future rise! How does the life of an animal pass? In endless drudgery. What’s the first lesson an animal learns? To endure its slavery. How does the life of an animal end? In cruel butchery.
Our pen workers said the same thing but in tedious prose and monotonous fables of Tortoise and Hare. Their titles were more profound: The beautiful ones are not yet born, Not Yet Uhuru, Houseboy, My Mercedes is Bigger than Yours and so on and so forth. But their own anthems also became ordinary bar raillery and marketplace jokes. With the soldiers governance became a competition between classmates and course mates. Coups and more bloody coups followed another until the people cried foul again.The game cannot go on. But somehow the game will, the game must, life must go on any how. But the game can only go on well-well if the foul ‘thing’ was found and flushed out of the system.