Epilogue for tomorrow
For those of you who live tomorrow, one or two or three centuries
hence: our present was a dangerous place to live. Believe
what you read of us - those horrendous things we did. We mutilated
conscience, murdered truth, enthroned mediocrity, slept with
pythons called hypocrisy, sycophancy and ethnocentrism. We
were the frontiersmen that made your future/present available.
We were close to the earth, rustic in our crudities, academic
but uneducated, loud without finesse and the sophistication
of thinking. So gullible were we that we made heroes of termites
that ate the fences of our economic sustenance. Some leaders
stashed away millions in foreign banks, lived high on the
sweet juices of corruption, loved and built empires for their
mistresses while ordinary people lay dead of economic strangulation.
Even for the sheer thievery, some of our people still hailed
them. The oppressed are sometimes their own enemies. Could
you believe it? These were realties of ancient/modern Africa,
when we signed documents with toes and counted flies as human
beings. We practiced permissive political prostitution at
the expense of the nation. We will never be well until we
truly treat our ills with honesty in all facets of our national
lives. If not, we will continue to cut each other's throats
for the next century. We practiced orthodox religion which,
in turn, negated progressive awareness. It deadened our sensitivity
to modernity. Your time might be modern - modern Africa when
science means awareness. For our time, we could not invent
a needle in our own names. Soldiers ruled us at many intervals
because, by nature, we were imperious, imperial and impossible.
Self-discipline did not agree with us, neither did cleanliness.
Every last Saturday of the month, soldiers forced us to clean
ourselves and our environment. That was how bad we were. Finally,
we had great writers. I mean our own Tolstoy, Dostoevski,
Shakespeare, and so on. They lived and faced the harshness
of crudity for your sake. They wrote what the saw. How could
I make you see what they went through when conscience was
dead? I knew some of them: they taught me. A special treat
you would admit, to know the makers of history in your time.
This perhaps is the summary of our state of national ill health
on the eve of the 21st Century. Well, I must go now, to prepare
for my departure. Tell your children that I did my best so
that they could be proud of me. The chameleon has done its
dance; it's left to the offsprings to use their feet. Hope
your time is better than mine. Say me well to all.
Your loving great, great, grandfather,
Tayo
