By
Obododimma Oha
Suddenly, armed robbers knock loudly on your door for you to open or forcefully enter your apartment and ask everyone to lie face-down. The order: where he kept the money. And warning: if they find any amount elsewhere, someone would die, most painfully. So, you cooperate in your interest. But, no looking up! They take the money and ransack the apartment for other valuables before leaving. They spend a lot of time in the apartment, as if they own it. They could have dished out food and could have eaten it leisurely, even asking Bobby to recite "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” one hundred times. But, what after the robbers have gone and neighbours and other sympathizers have come in to say “Sorry” with folded arms? Are you still lying face-down there as if to justify the order that you should not look up? Are you still keeping the experience, wishing the robbers were still around? Oh, you are murmuring: "Not my portion." Whose? Are you still lying face-down while condemning the robbery? Are you still lying face-down, going to the robber to confirm making citizens and their indigenous institutions lie face-down? Are you still lying face-down in your education, judicial or justice system, philosophy, language, etc? Are you still lying face-down in everything, even in the naming of your streets and spellings of names of places?
Is it only the names of streets and misspellings of names of places? No! The robbers' geography is sacrosanct, made-in-Heaven and cannot be redrawn. You cannot redraw unless you are a bloody sinner. You cannot redraw it quietly and peacefully. Somebody that dares look up and into the face of a robber will bleed and die. What is good for the goose is not good for the gander.
For me, “postcolonial condition” means living the falsehood that you are still under colonial rule, pretending you are on your own, but miserably helpless in the hands of system of the past robber. And you cannot look up!
So, now some postcolonial countries are unable to get up from the floor to receive sympathisers. Their rulers try to legitimise or perpetuate their rule, using the colonialist’s strategies. Should we say that this inability to get up is the problem of fear, that someone would bleed and die miserably? Or is it just because of weak and inadequate resources? Economic dependence!
The logic is simple: you are indicating that the robbers were justified or were sent by God to make everyone in the apartment lie face-down, for the money to go, for Mummy to be raped terribly, for the apartment to be ransacked and valuables carted away! Maybe you even arranged the robbery and would have your cut-out. Maybe you are waiting to put on your face-mask and bark orders in the other apartment. Maybe.
Robbers work for robbers, justify robbery. A thief that takes over from a thief is not in any way different. That new thief is continuing the tradition of thievery and may even disgrace it in the process of performing thievery.
Are you still wondering why you are neither here nor there? It is simply because you are still lying face-down on the floor shivering with fear, instead of getting up to receive visitors and try to call the police. Is being neither here nor there not even embarrassing? Until you get up, your apartment, turned upside-down by robbers, is not your apartment. It is not one you can recognize.
To respect the colonial enterprise is a task that must be done. So, you have to hurry to the colonial robber to approve fellows who are solidly in the colonial enterprise. It is a matter of re-pacifying your own people and being rewarded for it. It is not corruption; it is adventurism.
And when will they stop helping you to help themselves? When would you stop being a beggar carrying a dirty plate and asking for miserable coins? When would your appetite for foreign assistance wane?
The colonialists are coming back, they have to and are trying to. They want to rule you in other ways. They have to exploit you in other ways. The robbers do not have to spend all night ransacking the miserable apartment. You should do that for them. May ways to kill a rat, especially a stupid one.
When the robbers came, they covered their faces; they wore masks and also ordered you to lie face-down. That was obviously a little business with identity. They wanted you to rethink recognition. The enterprise involves some falsehood.
But, the model has changed. A robber now does not have to worry about identity and recognition. After all, it is all a game of blood and that of eat and be eaten. Eat and be ready to be eaten. In that case, the only identity is dead body: outcome of eat and be eaten. So, continue to lie face-down on the floor till next century.
Come, let us reason together and redraw the maps as we want; every mapping or remapping is tentative. Nobody needs to bleed or die as the robbers wanted while working with their own map. Let us use reason as our weapon. Come, let reason together and not indirectly thank the robbers for coming. Come, let us reason together as humans.
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