A SMALL WORLD
This world is a very large place albeit a small world. I
agree that that is naïve. We all live in different worlds in this same world of
ours. We all have the same time but have different time zones. We have our
distinctive races but are of the same race: the human race. Our languages are
varied but all of them studied together have the same features and possess
incredible similarities.
Granted, some of us have longer noses, others are as flat as
it can get, but when you see a dry and skinned skull, there’s just a hole where
the nose should be. Inside of us we are not any different from each other. The
Chinese wouldn’t look the same to you if they didn’t marry their not-too-distant
cousins. The midgets of Africa wouldn’t be so short if they bended that age-old
custom of not marrying beyond the sacred river that is their protection against
the evil spirit-clans on the other side. And when you live in a 40 degrees
temperature like all your ancestors you don’t need any clothes for warmth. You
would invent one if you lived in a place where there’s no temperature at all
because no one wants a cold heart.
That piece of anthropology and sociology makes one thing
clear: that human beings are interesting. And for those of us who have settled
for the only reasonable explanation of an intelligent creator, there is no
fitting word to describe the creator of such a fascinating race. It is pretty
crucial for nations of people to acknowledge they didn’t get here on purpose,
that they had no hand in the matter. It is crucial that they ask pertinent
questions and weigh up the ready answers without presumption.
I happen to be one of those few people who understand that
blindness has little to do with the ability to see temporal things. And because
of that whenever I listen to the news or watch it telecast, I try to see the
part most people aren’t seeing – the nonphysical cause. It happened again this
yesterday. The Queen of England threw a national party to celebrate her 60
years on the throne. And it was a pretty big deal, so big it was broadcast live
to the whole world. I relished the rare opportunity of watching a nation in a
barrel of laughs. I watched the colours and the sounds and the history, the lessons
handed down by time and the experiences of the royal family. There was nothing
better than the fact that at this time the whole world is happy with and for
the royal family – today, at least they are in the news for the right reasons.
And for the first time in a couple of years the world got to see something on
the news that didn’t drive their appetite away because of its lack of goriness.
And I wished the four-day party wouldn’t end to give way to the usual nightmare
that is news and the figures that mean the matter in body bags. And talk of the devil and he is bound to appear.
We were still watching the event when my little cousin, Sop, came back
from church to announce that something big is also happening in our own country
right then. There was a world cup qualifying match between Nigeria and Namibia and
he was cross that we didn’t give a fig. He wouldn’t understand that those of us
who are not as young as he is do care. We care for our hearts. Football and all
the tensions that go along with watching it isn’t good for the heart so I gave
it to him straight that I wasn’t going to trade any football match viewing for
this party.
But it wasn’t long before a number of us grown-ups went out
to the country-side to visit with a relative of ours who got his left leg
broken for him by a night-blind and drunk motor bike rider. And we came back
feeling the way you feel when you have visited a hospital or a correctional
facility or a hospice or a refugee camp or any other such place that brings out
the humanity out of this body of mud. Those kids of course watched the match
while we were out and so gladly welcomed us with the news of victory for our
country. That was good but did a bad job of soothing us. But during that time
something else had happened – the nightmare that we call news.
We forget that something similar had happened in the morning
in the north of the country where some suicide bombers had gone to some churches
and blown themselves away with explosives killing over a dozen people and
injuring scores of others. You figure that because that happens every other
Sunday it becomes a back page news and not so hard to forget. What happened was
that in this vast but small world, during the time the British were celebrating
and Nigerians were winning the football match in the south, and those in the
north were trying to recognize and number fragmented and charred bodies, a
passenger plane from our capital crash landed on a heavily populated area of
Lagos near the airport. The impact and the explosion set three buildings on the
site on fire.
The authorities who didn’t have a sweet clue announced that
the over one hundred and fifty passengers and crew aboard the plane were
certainly DOA. The authorities who didn’t have a sweet clue did nothing in the
form of a rescue operation to rescue those who might still be alive in the
rubble. The world watched hour after hour and wondered why nothing was being
done about the fact that nothing was being done. We didn’t want to accept the dreary
fact that the death toll could end up being in the region of a couple of
hundreds. Oh God, let it be less!
And usually when something this tragic happens all in one
day, I would ask my family, albeit jestingly, if we had sinned as a nation to
deserve all this. The truth is that we have sinned just as our fathers had. Of
course the British didn’t deserve to be celebrating because they have not only
sinned but had made it lawful to sin. Only that unlike ours, their fathers
didn’t sin so. They weren’t so wise and presumptuous as to believe in no-God as
most of their children do today. And if these children carry on the way they
do, in the nearest future they won’t have anything to celebrate. And as we
change and leave the ways of our fathers, soon we will have more reasons to
celebrate and less to lament about. Then the pictures in the news will have
colours but they won’t be gory.
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