She was looking very beautiful and radiant, although she had her veil drawled over her head and across her shoulders. She smiled at me, her smile was comforting.
“What troubles your mind?” she asked softly. Then, she came and sat beside me before I could answer.
Today, it still seemed a sort of irony to me that the first contact I made with Miriam was a discussion on political matters. That day, I shared my feelings with her. To my surprise, I realized that Miriam was not only very intelligent; she was also versed in the political matters of our Nation. However, her views were in conflict with mine. Miriam believed the problem lies in the false unification of non similar entities. To her, Nigeria is like a combination of strange bedfellows that have been brought up to look at issues of life from different perspectives. They can never agree on issues. She believed the only answer lies in the complete dissolution of the country and breakup into its component parts or else, very soon, there would be cataclysmic consequences. At a time, she looked at me straight in the eye and said: “The elites and the upper middle class of this country are so far above the rest of the citizens that they have been disconnected from the reality of the futility of uniting this country.”
Eventhough, my discussion with Miriam that day ended up posing more questions to me about the future of my country; I had met someone who would become a soul mate to me. From that day, we became friends. Later, we became very close friends and soon, we became inseparable. Despite being a Muslim, Miriam was cool minded and liberal in thought and expression. This was against my perception of Muslims as conservative, violent, vengeful creatures who were enemies of change. Sometimes, when I confronted her with questions concerning Islamic violence, she would shake her pretty head and tell me it is not about the religion, it is about the people. She told me stories about her native town, in Northern Nigeria, about the extremities of using religion as a weapon. Of course, she always had her own version of the story every time we heard news of violence in the Muslim dominated Northern Nigeria. In her view, those acts of violence were just evil and selfish acts, perpetrated under the guise of religious fundamentalism. Unfortunately, the direct perpetrators are also victims of people who take advantage of their poverty and unemployment, to use them for political purpose. No matter how much drama we attached to it, these acts are political, rather than religious.
One day, I went to Miriam’s home. I had meant it to be a surprise, so I did not tell her I was coming. I reached the house and saw Miriam crying. Immediately she saw me, she wiped her tears and asked me to give her some money. That was the first time she had ever asked me for money. I gave her some money and did not ask any question. Later, she told me what had happened.
“My siblings had not eaten for two days. I needed to find something for them to eat and it seemed all hope was lost. Thank you very much Akin.”
I was surprised. Miriam could not be more than nineteen. Was she supposed to be responsible for taking care of the family?
“What about your parents?” I asked.
“My father died three years ago, fighting for ECOMOG in Liberia.”
“What about his entitlements?”
She smiled sarcastically and shook her head. “You ask as if there is justice in this country. The government told everybody that billions had been spent in promoting peace in Liberia, yet my father and thousand others perished without their families receiving any compensation. Where do you think the money went to?”
“At least your mother should be able to take up responsibility.”
She shook her head sadly. “My mother separated from my father a long time ago.”
At that time, I really felt sorry for her. At a tender age, she had been left alone to battle the storms of life.
“I had just come back from a futile attempt at getting a part time job when I found my siblings crying. They told me there was no food in house and they had tried in vain to get something to eat. Fortunately, I had bought some rice at the market on my way back. I decided to cook. Unsurprisingly, there was no kerosene in the stove.
There had been a total blackout for the past three days so I knew using electric stove was out of it. There was no money to buy kerosene, so I rushed to the sawmill to get some sawdust to use as fuel in cooking. However, to my surprise, there was no single grain of sawdust. One of the security men told me the sawmill had been dormant for four days.
‘N.E.P.A has refused to give us electricity.’ he told me.
‘What of your power generator?’
The man shook his head and smiled. ‘Haven’t you heard about the new fuel price hike? Deisel is so expensive now that our company will go bankrupt if we run on generator.’
Frustrated, I had returned home, trying to think of how to get something to eat. That was when the thought of the predicament of this country overcame me and I started crying. Akin! I was weeping for this country, not myself.”
The day the ultimate tragedy occurred, I was in my room, having an afternoon nap. Two days earlier, Miriam had told me she was traveling to her mother’s village in Eastern Nigeria. I was half-asleep when I my phone rang. Reluctantly, I picked it, angry at the fellow who had disturbed my peace. However, the first voice I heard was Miriam’s.
“Hello, Akin.” she said in a frail voice, and instantly, I had an inkling of danger.
“Miriam, what is happening? Tell me!” I asked desperately.
“Akin, there has been an accident. On the road, near Awka.”
Her voice was so weak that I was instantly overcome by a bout of terror. Inwardly; I prayed it wasn’t as terrible as it seemed.
“Miriam, where are you now?”
“I—am in the hospital, I am on the floor. They brought us here three hours ago.”
“Oh God!” I exclaimed softly. And they haven’t attended to her!
“Akin.” Miriam called; her voice was getting weaker now. “There isn’t enough bed space and the doctors are on strike. The nurses are only attending to the Ibo people amongst us. I---” she gave a loud gasp.
“Miriam!” I called. Inwardly, I was fuming at the hopelessness of the situation.
“Akin, I am losing blood. Tell my siblings about what has happened.”
At that point, the situation was becoming clearer to me. Miriam was dying and I could not do anything to save her. I bowed my head and cried, sobbing loudly as I heard the dying gasps of Miriam. Ten minutes later, she died.
When Miriam died, something also died in me. My belief in the problems of the Nation as mere challenges in Nation building vanished. I realized that there is something fundamentally wrong with my motherland. Yet, something new was born in me. The tragedy of Miriam’s death had aroused in me, a new quest for the institutionalization of justice in my country. I realized that if the fundamental identity of my Nation is not redefined, then we are merely postponing the evil day. I remember the parable of an old man, who gave three coins to his four sons before he died, telling them to share it equally. After his death, instead of trading with the coins, the children fought over the coins and destroyed one of them. Each of them gave birth to a son and the remaining two coins also passed to the second generation. Like their fathers, they also quarreled over the sharing of the coins and destroyed one. Now, the third generation has only one coin to spend. My generation is the third generation. We are in a critical point in history. If we fight over this coin and destroy it, there will be nothing left to give our children and history will not forgive us. But if we wisely trade with it and get more coins, then we will earn our place in history. The ultimate destiny of man on earth is making his world a better place.
Thursday, January 23, 2014
The Critical Point(Part 3)
She was looking very beautiful and radiant, although she had her veil drawled over her head and across her shoulders. She smiled at me, her smile was comforting.
“What troubles your mind?” she asked softly. Then, she came and sat beside me before I could answer.
Today, it still seemed a sort of irony to me that the first contact I made with Miriam was a discussion on political matters. That day, I shared my feelings with her. To my surprise, I realized that Miriam was not only very intelligent; she was also versed in the political matters of our Nation. However, her views were in conflict with mine. Miriam believed the problem lies in the false unification of non similar entities. To her, Nigeria is like a combination of strange bedfellows that have been brought up to look at issues of life from different perspectives. They can never agree on issues. She believed the only answer lies in the complete dissolution of the country and breakup into its component parts or else, very soon, there would be cataclysmic consequences. At a time, she looked at me straight in the eye and said: “The elites and the upper middle class of this country are so far above the rest of the citizens that they have been disconnected from the reality of the futility of uniting this country.”
Eventhough, my discussion with Miriam that day ended up posing more questions to me about the future of my country; I had met someone who would become a soul mate to me. From that day, we became friends. Later, we became very close friends and soon, we became inseparable. Despite being a Muslim, Miriam was cool minded and liberal in thought and expression. This was against my perception of Muslims as conservative, violent, vengeful creatures who were enemies of change. Sometimes, when I confronted her with questions concerning Islamic violence, she would shake her pretty head and tell me it is not about the religion, it is about the people. She told me stories about her native town, in Northern Nigeria, about the extremities of using religion as a weapon. Of course, she always had her own version of the story every time we heard news of violence in the Muslim dominated Northern Nigeria. In her view, those acts of violence were just evil and selfish acts, perpetrated under the guise of religious fundamentalism. Unfortunately, the direct perpetrators are also victims of people who take advantage of their poverty and unemployment, to use them for political purpose. No matter how much drama we attached to it, these acts are political, rather than religious.
One day, I went to Miriam’s home. I had meant it to be a surprise, so I did not tell her I was coming. I reached the house and saw Miriam crying. Immediately she saw me, she wiped her tears and asked me to give her some money. That was the first time she had ever asked me for money. I gave her some money and did not ask any question. Later, she told me what had happened.
“My siblings had not eaten for two days. I needed to find something for them to eat and it seemed all hope was lost. Thank you very much Akin.”
I was surprised. Miriam could not be more than nineteen. Was she supposed to be responsible for taking care of the family?
“What about your parents?” I asked.
“My father died three years ago, fighting for ECOMOG in Liberia.”
“What about his entitlements?”
She smiled sarcastically and shook her head. “You ask as if there is justice in this country. The government told everybody that billions had been spent in promoting peace in Liberia, yet my father and thousand others perished without their families receiving any compensation. Where do you think the money went to?”
“At least your mother should be able to take up responsibility.”
She shook her head sadly. “My mother separated from my father a long time ago.”
At that time, I really felt sorry for her. At a tender age, she had been left alone to battle the storms of life.
“I had just come back from a futile attempt at getting a part time job when I found my siblings crying. They told me there was no food in house and they had tried in vain to get something to eat. Fortunately, I had bought some rice at the market on my way back. I decided to cook. Unsurprisingly, there was no kerosene in the stove.
There had been a total blackout for the past three days so I knew using electric stove was out of it. There was no money to buy kerosene, so I rushed to the sawmill to get some sawdust to use as fuel in cooking. However, to my surprise, there was no single grain of sawdust. One of the security men told me the sawmill had been dormant for four days.
‘N.E.P.A has refused to give us electricity.’ he told me.
‘What of your power generator?’
The man shook his head and smiled. ‘Haven’t you heard about the new fuel price hike? Deisel is so expensive now that our company will go bankrupt if we run on generator.’
Frustrated, I had returned home, trying to think of how to get something to eat. That was when the thought of the predicament of this country overcame me and I started crying. Akin! I was weeping for this country, not myself.”
The day the ultimate tragedy occurred, I was in my room, having an afternoon nap. Two days earlier, Miriam had told me she was traveling to her mother’s village in Eastern Nigeria. I was half-asleep when I my phone rang. Reluctantly, I picked it, angry at the fellow who had disturbed my peace. However, the first voice I heard was Miriam’s.
“Hello, Akin.” she said in a frail voice, and instantly, I had an inkling of danger.
“Miriam, what is happening? Tell me!” I asked desperately.
“Akin, there has been an accident. On the road, near Awka.”
Her voice was so weak that I was instantly overcome by a bout of terror. Inwardly; I prayed it wasn’t as terrible as it seemed.
“Miriam, where are you now?”
“I—am in the hospital, I am on the floor. They brought us here three hours ago.”
“Oh God!” I exclaimed softly. And they haven’t attended to her!
“Akin.” Miriam called; her voice was getting weaker now. “There isn’t enough bed space and the doctors are on strike. The nurses are only attending to the Ibo people amongst us. I---” she gave a loud gasp.
“Miriam!” I called. Inwardly, I was fuming at the hopelessness of the situation.
“Akin, I am losing blood. Tell my siblings about what has happened.”
At that point, the situation was becoming clearer to me. Miriam was dying and I could not do anything to save her. I bowed my head and cried, sobbing loudly as I heard the dying gasps of Miriam. Ten minutes later, she died.
When Miriam died, something also died in me. My belief in the problems of the Nation as mere challenges in Nation building vanished. I realized that there is something fundamentally wrong with my motherland. Yet, something new was born in me. The tragedy of Miriam’s death had aroused in me, a new quest for the institutionalization of justice in my country. I realized that if the fundamental identity of my Nation is not redefined, then we are merely postponing the evil day. I remember the parable of an old man, who gave three coins to his four sons before he died, telling them to share it equally. After his death, instead of trading with the coins, the children fought over the coins and destroyed one of them. Each of them gave birth to a son and the remaining two coins also passed to the second generation. Like their fathers, they also quarreled over the sharing of the coins and destroyed one. Now, the third generation has only one coin to spend. My generation is the third generation. We are in a critical point in history. If we fight over this coin and destroy it, there will be nothing left to give our children and history will not forgive us. But if we wisely trade with it and get more coins, then we will earn our place in history. The ultimate destiny of man on earth is making his world a better place.
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Critical point(Part two)
hen I got to the University, my ideological basis was shaken. I saw students who were more miserable than I had ever imagined. I saw some of my friends like Chidi, struggling to pay our meager school fees. I couldn’t understand it anytime Government increased the fees and students cried out. Throughout my childhood I had never felt special or privileged. I thought my life was the life of the average Nigerian kid. I never considered my parents rich because everybody around me was like me or even living better than me. Perhaps my parents had deliberately sent me to a federal government university so that I could see the true face of Nigeria. For the first time, I had to drive through some of the densest parts of the Lagos mainland from my home on the island to get to school at the beginning of the semester. On those rare times, I had a glimpse of the degradation and hopelessness that pervaded the land. Often I got stuck in a traffic jam before getting to school. I drove through shanties and ghettoes; landscapes so horrible in their ugly state that you wanted to cry for the people who live there. Yet you remember that they are people; men and women like you who have dreams, hopes and aspirations. They are not animals. I drove past kids hawking water in sachets while they were supposed to be in school. I witnessed police brutality and corruption; a man slapped repeatedly for about twenty times just because he did not have money to bribe one officer with ugly tribal marks on his face. Yet it was always the poor that were being victimized. I felt ashamed when they allowed my car go, seeing that I looked like someone whose parents would be connected to some powerful people and then stopped the driver of the ragged car behind me just because he looked like someone that could not muster the connection or resources to fight back. The police extort and brutalize the weakest people in the society. These were glaring realities in a city where some people live in mansions behind high walls, separating themselves from the misery outside. The elite rich have insulated themselves from the hardships imposed by their own irresponsible leadership. Many poor, like Chidi’s father are suffering because the government is making them pay for the greediness of the elite.
That day, after Chidi’s outburst, I went to the classroom and sat down staring at my book, but my mind was in tumult. I was pondering over the issues troubling my mind when I heard a voice behind me.
“So the rich also feel sad.”
Sunday, August 18, 2013
Critical point
The bore in my heart is too deep, is there anything that can fill it up and make my life whole again? I doubt it. Yet, beyond the emptiness her death has left behind, lies a new passion. Beneath my deep misery is a new sense, a new awakening that has opened up my eyes to another misfortune which, though, is the root of my calamity, supersedes my own grief in its catastrophic proportions. The debacle of my country is a great tragedy that has spurned in me, a determination to work passionately for the liberation of my Nation. Sadly, the true paradox is that my motherland is not yet a Nation; it is still struggling to be one. I have realized that, if the root problem is not solved, then more kinds of my tragedy will occur. In my deepest torment, I tried to gather the pieces of the story together. I remember with nostalgia, the good times I had with her and how it all ended in tragedy. Yet, no matter how much I could figure out, everything still remains a puzzle. Even the inception of our affair was a mystery because I never thought I could find love with someone so far from me in background and ideology.
I met Miriam in the second semester of my first year in the university. She used to sit at the front in the class, behind the window, just opposite my left, back seat. I used to be a womanizer and my eyes usually wandered around the class from time to time to scan the faces of pretty girls in the class. I had gone out with many of the girls and earned a reputation as a Casanova. Of course, the girls fell at my feet like ninepins; I was the Don Juan of the class. By the second semester, they were beginning to bore me, and I was going to other departments to have a taste of something new. However, this beautiful, veil-wearing, mysterious Muslim girl had always elicited a strange curiosity in me. One day in a psychology class, my eyes darted towards her in the extreme front right. Suddenly, we made eye contact. She flushed briefly, then looked forward to concentrate on the lecture. I thought I saw her blush but I wasn’t sure. That was when I realized that she was very beautiful. After the lecture, I tried to speak to her but she avoided me. After several other attempts, I decided to forget about her. But she continued to linger on in my mind though I occupied myself with other things. She was a challenge I needed to overcome; a problem I needed to solve.
One day, Chidi, my best friend and roommate received a bad news, his father had just been retrenched in the civil service, and he sent to him that he had no means of paying the school fees of his five siblings. I met Chidi under the oak tree in front of the college; he was full of hatred for the Government.
“Akin, look what these bastards have done to my father. After twenty years of selfless service and three months without pay, they threw him away like a dirty rag!”
He waved the paper in the air, his eyes glowing with anger. I tried in my best way to console him to no avail. I am lucky enough to have come from a family that was comfortable enough to provide for all my needs, so I never knew what it meant to be living from hand to mouth. Of course, I couldn’t understand Chidi’s predicament, I couldn’t comfort him though I tried.
“Let’s just hope they will call him back. Or, they will pay up his entitlements.”
Chidi looked at me in the eye, his eyes were red. Slowly, he shook his head.
“No Akin. This country is doomed, nothing works anymore. There is no more truth, and the day truth dies in a nation, the people’s trust also dies and eventually, the nation dies for want of truth.” he said softly, but firmly. Then, he stood up and walked away.
Throughout the day, Chidi’s words continued to haunt me. Although I knew there were problems in my country, I looked at them as minor challenges in the process of National development. My father is an engineer in a multinational oil company that pays well, my mother is a senior accountant in an auditing firm. My parents built a house in Victoria Island where we lived. I went to expensive private nursery and primary schools run by rich companies. My secondary education was the same. I went to a boarding school, fully owned and managed by foreigners. I had escaped the horrors of the terrible Nigerian educational system. I met children from very wealthy families and other ones from families that were just as rich as mine. Due to my upbringing and non-exposure to the horrible side of my country, I had come to think of my family as the normal Nigerian family. Never did I know that my family was just one of the 30% that could be said to be living above poverty level.
W
Saturday, May 4, 2013
Call for Submissions: ANA - NICO Short Story Collection (Nigeria)
The Association of Nigerian Authors is pleased to announce a call for entries for a short story collection sponsored by the Nigerian Institute for Cultural Orientation [NICO]. The anthology will comprise of the best submissions and will be released by August 2013.
• Theme: All stories should deal with aspects of Nigerian culture, interpreted widely.
• Length: Under 3,000 words.
• Submission: All entries are to be sent via email to bmdzukogi@gmail.com with the subject “ANA/NICO [title of submission]”
• Format: Entries should be sent as a single MS Word-readable document in 12 pt, Times New Roman Font, double spaced with pagination. All entries must be accompanied by a separate attachment providing a 200-word bio and full contact details.
PLEASE NOTE:
• For entries to be eligible, they must not have been published in print in Nigeria prior to submission. The Association reserves the right to remove a story from the collection on discovery of prior print publication.
• Online publication in magazines, blogs, and journals etc are not affected by 1. above.
CONTACT INFORMATION:
For queries/ submissions: bmdzukogi@gmail.com
Website: http://ana-nigeria.com/
Chimamanda reads 'Americanah' at the Terraculture, Lagos
"Saturday, April. 27, 2013, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, speaks to Associated press during an interview in Lagos, Nigeria. Modern life in Lagos, Nigeria's largest city, has become almost a character itself in novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's new book, "Americanah." Within its pages, one catches self-acknowledged glimpses of the writer herself, who shot to fame with her previous novel, a love story set during Nigeria's civil war entitled "Half of a Yellow Sun." - (AP)
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