I love Africa. Living in Africa; you see life as a long story line. Inexhaustible experiences. Eons ago, they said it was about hunting and gathering, or laboring butts in the fields all day and gathering around a large cooking pot in the evening to listen to a story as narrated by an elder or a peer to others regarding his conquests. As you collectively sipped from the common pot and later worked your fingers on the mound of plantain. Sounds fun, No? Must have been after we had civilized beyond the caves or did the story telling happen at the cave entrance? I have seen a snake slither into a hole on the ground and I hate to imagine the African man used to slither, no, retreat into a cave after some bumming in the sun on a lazy day. But that story of a 21st century cave man the other day makes me rethink my denial position. Anyhow. I particularly love stories with a good story line, punctuated by creamy innuendos, the likes that make my eyes pop in amazement, wonder and anticipation. I have been struggling to finish up Ben Okri’s songs of enchantment and I must confess this is the longest I have taken to read a book. As I mentioned in a previous post, the heavy metaphorizing using supernatural imagery seems to crowd the story. Nevertheless, I have been determined to follow through Azaro’s adventures and possibly have a re-read before I can give my two cent worth of criticism. I must however point out the rich use of language. Beautiful in a marvelous way.
Here’s an excerpt: fragments of the original way
…Behind the second procession came the representatives of our spirit world, illustrious ancestors with caravans of wisdom, old souls who had been reborn many times in the magical depths of the continent, and who had lived the undiscovered secrets and mysteries of The African Way—The way of compassion and fire and serenity: The Way of freedom and power and imaginative life; The way that keeps the mind open to the existences beyond our earthly sphere, that keeps the spirit pure and primed to all the rich possibilities of the living, that makes of their minds gateways through which all the thought-forms of primal creation can wonder and take root and flower; The way through which forgotten experiments in living can re-surface with fuller results even in insulated and innocent communities; The way that makes it possible to understand the language of angels and gods, birds and trees, animals and spirits; The Way that makes them greet phenomena forever as a brother and a sister in mysterious reality; The Way that develops and keeps its secrets of transformations-hate into love, beast into man, man into illustrious ancestor, ancestor into god; The Way whose center grows from divine love, whose roads are always open for messages from all the spheres to keep coming through; The Way that preaches attunement with all the higher worlds, that believes in forgiveness and generosity of spirit, always receptive, always kindling the understanding of signs, like the potencies hidden in snail tracks along forbidden paths; The Way that always, like a river, flows into and flows out of the myriad Ways of the world…” Pg. 160 Songs of Enchantment ~Ben Okri
Every quarter I get a chance to passively participate in a Board meeting and much as it’s strenuous it’s hell lot of fun too. And my silver lining is the chance to interact with fine minds. “In Africa there is no democracy!” Actually Africa doesn’t need democracy, it needs dictatorship. We can only handle fine-tuned democracy. Pin drop silence, a pause then,…No! Hell no,…what about all the fights, the liberation struggles, recently the Arab uprising in the North of Africa, ballot revolutions and all? They have fought for democracy….Yes, they have but question is do they ever get it and if they do…who can recognize democracy in Africa when they see it? But look at case Ghana…they are a good model. Nope. There is no democracy even in Ghana,..it all depends on your standpoint. I am uncomfortable and my mind is busy organizing anything that would work to defend democracy should the argument seek my opinion. But deep inside I know it’s mostly true. See, last time we met ,you said Mubarak is bad. Now you can’t stand Morsi. Surely! I listen on.
Discussion keeps spiraling and am almost disappointed that the argument is from a top scholar and should his views be correct, then I don’t know what hope holds for the village idiot who can’t even define what he fights for. Oh, my Africa. It’s Kenyan elections in few days so I keep hoping we are growing and I am sure the system this time will prove that our growth as a democracy is on a positive curve. I hope.
So what’s your weight? Lol! I never thought men ask each other questions of the “weighty kind”~heh heh. I stopped caring immediately the scale tipped over 100kgs. I got this naughtily curved smile at the edge of my lips and hopes that no one notices. Oh, but why, I am 122kgs. Tsk Tsk. And another, I am 84kgs. You know I am the first born and we had this huge sibling gap after I was born so I had a liberty to suckle until I was 3 years old. I would go play, run back to suckle and then leave to expend the energy in playing games again. Okay, UNICEF should hear that. That’s how it was intended to be. That is heaven for kids. I know of my friends who suckled until their mothers had to apply some pilipili on the nipples to keep the tots off. Now, I didn’t mean Kipipiri.
As Sir X returns from checking his room windows, he laments that the mosquitoes in Alexandria go all the way to 10th Floor while the Nairobi ones manage to get to 4th Floor. I kid you not. But why, Alx is on sea level and the quitoes there are genetically modified. This is the same one who opines that Eve was genetically modified for Adam at the Garden of Eden. As in women were ‘GMOed” at the ancient fruity garden for the man. Yikes! And then a joke goes round about some guys from non-tropical countries who are so hairly that they don’t have trouble with quito menace. The damn little buzzy things just hang around the hairs but never really touch the skin. Adaptation strategies like you learnt in your Bio class. The musings!
And the discussion takes no definite life but keeps charting a new course. To how God created a beautiful Africa, then decided to forget all about it while He focused on the rest of the world. Like created this beautiful resourceful continent and turned his back on her. He forgot it exists. Oh No! But how to understand the pain, troubles and poverty in Africa. My work has taken me to thedeepest and poorest parts of Africa, he continues. We suffer too much in this continent.
From Guinea Conakry, where the people are totally forgotten. It’s a country that you have to search in a map, Google does not recognize it exists. Poverty beyond. A two days meeting takes 10days, 4days to fly to and another 4days to fly back. You fly B-class but you may end up sitting next to a woman carrying her chicken( excuse the pun!) you miss the flight, it will take 4 days to catch the next flight. The countryis capital exactly looks like the aerial view of our Kibera. Maybe they need then to stop calling it the biggest slum in Africa to “ the comparative of Guinea Conakry’s capital”. To Burundi..Oh, yes. That country is poor. There are no roads. The nearest port is Dar or Msa some 3000kms away. You follow foot paths. It’s a hilly country and the foot paths keep meandering through the mountains and from nowhere in the mountainous bushes, people in droves just appear when they hear the sound of an approaching vehicle. Scary! I am yet to see…so am skeptical at this one. Seeing is believing. The food there is organic, for there is no fertilizer or even money to buy some. Plants grow courtesy of Ammonia, only the natural kind. Dear Lawd!
Poverty is relative. In Asia for example, kerosene is subsidized for the poor but in Kenya and largely Africa, it retails at the same price for the rich and the poorest poor and even if you subsidize the corrupt rich will still cut corners to buy at the lower price. I think when you are rich you don’t have a conscience but to be poor is also very painful. And this poverty and inequitable distribution of resources is to blame for our hatred for each other to the extent we kill. But why, you have to understand that it’s your wife first who won’t let you live. You show up with empty hands in the evening and the words spewing from her mouth will make you carry your sword to go and hunt. You mean women are the same everywhere? Yes, they went to the same school everywhere. No one knows where that campus is but everywoman passes through it. Nope, it’s an accountability system, a woman in the group protests. Like clipping the horns. Why they are always complaining? You go ask, honey, what do you want? Ok, sweetie, Me myself I don’t know what I want. I let you figure out what I want…Really, we aren’t that damn confused womenfolk?! Someone was asked for a wish: to choose between building a bridge from here to Australia or to figure how the woman thinks. To know how a woman thinks is so difficult that I would rather the bridge. Heh heh. This is a dangerous ground.
To Burkina Faso.Oh, damn! I have this colleague from Burkina who was awarded his undergraduate scholarship to study in Canada. Specifically British Columbia. And you know temps there can be as low as –ve 30. You know our African socialism. In that spirit, the villagers gathered. Their son was going to the west. To the cold land. They fundraised to buy him a sweater. And they bought a yellow one for that matter. So the boy goes off to the BC. And when he arrived it was so cold and he put on his yellow sweater.
Then a woman sees him and kindly asks him to come along with him. Oh, I didn’t think they are so kind here. And she offered to live with him. So hospitable, thanks goodness! One month, one year, six years! And he didn’t pay a penny in return to the kindness. Then one day, she asks him to leave. Why now? No, she wasn’t rude, just politely asked him to leave. Dude didn’t know that the kind host was a doctorate student in Anthropology with a special bias in African studies and how lucky she was to just land an unadulterated specimen on the street, straight from the dusty Africa. Nice, eh? So he was a specimen under study for 6 straight years. I know how you are feeling now. Anger? The holy kind of anger? I felt so too. Like dude should have sought legal redress for being “used unwillingly as study specimen”. But he didn’t. He went ahead to be a brilliant scholar and am sure very useful to his own country now to have wanted to stop and mull over the unfortunate incident. At least someone took him off the cold street and welcomed him.sighs!
And then one recounts their Dutch experience a couple of weeks ago. It’s snowing there right about now and probably never was a worse time for someone from warm…”hot” tropical Africa to indulge in a drinking spree. So , yea, a bunch of Indians lure him…They swing some whisky and I understand, those fellows drink neat and quickly and he gets “inspired”. He gets a glass of pure BL and he gallops it and heads off for dinner. Then his colleague starts noting that the guy is seeing things. Wait folks, what did you give to him across your wing? No, nothing..he met us taking some BL and wanted some. The thing works unholy magic and stars starts dancing. Senior can’t eat. I am going to sleep, chest thumping. By all means do. He trots the snowy street. Legs dancing unwillingly to some unprecedented tune. He is grateful he never found himself in the farthest corner of Europe. No one followed him up to check whether he took the right train. And he braved the snow in a mere shirt. In his room, the bed was floating. So he figures out a cold shower would do wonders to lift his muggy head. How do you do that, in 3 degrees cold weather? The shock sends him out and sobers a little while. He is lucky to have survived a thermo shock.
One senior, a tomologist turned strategist is the lead story teller. In fact am sure you are trying to figure out who’s the persona in this story nowJ Says how about snakes. That he abandoned his career with sweet potato because every time he would go to work with the vines, he would always meet snakes. But they are not as poisonous as Egyptian ones that famed Cleopatra queen of Egypt committed suicide using a snake bite.
Anyhow, I believe in Africa. We aren’t doing so bad. I know there are areas we are doing extremely well but areas we rank unbelievably low in the eyes of the world. We produce so much food in some areas but again our distribution mechanism fails us. We have a year of milk glut resulting into a river of milk and a following season of hardly enough. I also believe we are actually a food secure planet only that some folks eat more than enough. I haven’t keenly looked at obese stats versus malnutrion/hunger stats but I got a nagging feeling that they can balance off. Wait, we all believe in Dida Food science now, don’t we all? Supposing we all just ate enough, would anyone sleep hungry? But for as long as the sun is shining bright, I believe in Africa. I know and I have heard of areas that will take thunderstorm effort to catch up with our little civilization but I will keep a hopeful spirit that they will catch up. You know they say in Africa, even when you close your eyes, you can feel the poverty, almost touch it, but I still believe in the changing story of our tropical slopes, only for the better.
I also dream and imagine endless possibilities, even in the backdrop of The Way that has since been corrupted by succeeding generations, by greed and decadence, blindness and stupidity, by vulgar and dim witted leaders. I believe in the possibility of restoring our stolen heritage, our dispersed legacy, our myths coded with wonderful secrets of living, our splendid feats of memory and science and mystic, art and learning, poetry and thriving in a universe of enigmas and accomplishments….I echo Azaro’s wild imagination of the undiscovered African Way….And this is just the beginning of unimaginable possibilities. We are about to take off!!
WRITEthinking 