• Home
• Columnist
• Videos
• Artist
  • Musicians
  • Actors
  • Comedians
• Notable Nigerians
• Legend Dies
• Articles
  • Nigeria Articles
• Photos
• Submit Article

Author: Patrick Naagbanton
Posted to the web: 6/18/2005 4:23:18 AM

Writing is a delicate craft, a writer be a woman or a man only expresses he or her experiences or ordeals in a verbal or written form. That is why writers are different breed of creatures. Last week, I got an anonymous e-mail from somebody who said has been a regular reader of my column, The Town-Crier.
According the mail, it reads, 'Mr. Town-Crier, thank you for your intellectual effort, but in your column, continue to cry while the system goes on, when you are tired like others who were before you, you shall stop writing'. Rather undauntedly, I replied the faceless folk, 'I don't write for writing sake, I write about realities and work towards a major transformation in our society, which makes me different from other writers who write for writing sake. I tell you I am a harbinger in the coming season'. Writing is life-lived; it mirrors society as well as intervenes in crisis in society when the need arises.
Do you know the late Alan Paton? Paton was not a Nigerian. He was a native son of South Africa, born in Pietermaritzburg, in the province of Natal, in 1903. While his mother was a third-generation South African, his father was a Scot Presbyterian who arrived South Africa just before the Boer War. The Boer Wars, which is also, called the South Africa Wars of 1880 1 and 1899 - 1902, were waged between the British and the descendents of the Dutch Settlers (Boers) in Africa. It took the British Empire nearly 3 years (1899 - 1902), to conquer the Boers, in their attempt to build an independent nation for themselves in South Africa.
Paton was a great writer, journalist and poet, he died in 1988 in South Africa, but I will never forget that his famous book, Cry The Beloved Country. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, USA, first published the novel in 1948. The work is a great classic tale written with profound empathy in a troubled and changing South Africa of the Apartheid epoch. The novel is timeless and universally applicable; I read it several years ago, as a college student. I still trust my memory about the central theme of the book. If you have not read it, you need to do so quickly or you wait when another book, Bleed, My Battered Country, shall be written, but certainly not by this columnist.
I am afraid that such book might not come out in this Professor Wole Soyinka's wasted generation or Dr. Ike Okonta's betrayed generation. Sad! The few gifted writers around have abandoned their crafts and taken to the rat race of pursuing materialism and individualism. Well, we do not need to blame them because hard times are here and man and woman must wack. Paton's Cry, The Beloved Country, is applicable to our country, especially now that Mr. President and his soul-mates are celebrating their brand of homegrown Democracy or Obasanjocracy or what the late Afro-beat legend, Fela Ransome-Kuti in his barb-laden lyrical song called Crazy demo or demonstration of craze.
I am glad that I was in far away Dakar, capital of Senegal when the absurd drama of Democracy Celebration peaked in Obasanjo's Stinking farm called Nigeria. That Silly Stuff is now an annual ritual enacted on May 29. May 29, 1999 was that day when the baton was taken from the area boys and girls in Khaki wielding the swagger stick to their counterparts in Agbada brandishing the fractured ballot boxes. My hope is dashed, because almost two decades of uninterrupted brutal tyranny and misrule, expectations were naturally high that the dawn of democracy in 1999, would bring us such dividends like safe and secured existence, improved infrastructure, improved economic conditions, a crack down on crimes like drug trafficking, 419 scams and official corruption.
Above all, respect for fundamental rights and a freer democratic space where Nigerian can pursue their democratic aspiration. From 1999, until date it is now very clear that the bane of our problem is the absence of democratizing leadership and structure. I am sad that in spite of the looming perdition, Obasanjo still suffers from a terrible ailment called messianic complex. When you are afflicted with this sickness, you do not see anything wrong in what you are doing, even when you know that you are wrong. I am sad, I am afraid because the end is near.
On the other hand, my pilgrimage to Senegal provided both a comic relief and increases my pains; I was awakening as saw the natural environment and threat that inspired Leopold Senghor (1906 - 2001). Senghor, the highly respected Negritude prophet and poet, whose ideological reaction against French colonialism and imperialism and his avid defense of Africa contributed toward the pan- African consciousness. David Diop, born in 1927 and died in 1960, was the most promising young Africa poet from Senegal who is famous for that his poem, Africa. The late Mariama Ba, feminist, novelist and essayist, who is celebrated for that her small but great book, So Long A Letter, is a Senegalese too, and our still living Ousmame Sembene, the talented novelist and filmmaker of God's Bits of Wood fame, among others, have kept the rich literary tradition of that great country.
We were at the outskirt of the southern part of Dakar, to attend a conference organized by the West African Human Rights Defenders Network, a coalition of organizations working in the field of human rights promotion and defense. The conference brought together very fearless and courageous journalists, lawyers and other professionals from Guinea, Ghana, Mali, Togo, Cote d'Ivoire, Liberia, Benin, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Mauritania, Niger, Sierra Leone and Senegal, to unite in the human rights struggle. The conference is the outcome of a research study program at the center for Refugee Studies, at the York University in Toronto, Canada conducted by James Torh. Torh is a lion-hearted human rights veteran who escaped from prison and fled his country in 2000 due to attempts to eliminate him by the regime of the exiled Liberian President Charles Taylor. Today, James Torh can tell his story, but many others could not tell theirs. They perished in Taylor's convulsion.
Tyranny, dictatorship and misrule whether in Khaki or Agbada is an ill-wind that does no one any good. Indeed, critical and investigative journalism is not a good genre of our profession, especially in a backward and under developing sub-region (West Africa) like ours. I could not hold my tears when two of my colleagues mounted the rostrum at the conference hall at the Hotel Ngor Diarama, in Dakar, to tell the tales of their bitter encounters with the stonehearted states of West Africa. The case of Throble Suah, a 38-year-old unflinching and investigative journalist, is too empathic. Suah, a father of one child, is a descendent of the Sarpo tribe of the Sinoe count, southeast of Liberia. A news report written by him in The Inquirer, a daily independent newspaper based in Monrovia, capital of Liberia entitled, '300 Liberia languish in The Forest' cost my friend and colleague the loss of his sight, his sexual organ and injuries for life.
On July 19, 2002, the above news item appeared in the newspaper, few days after, Charles Taylor, 'the Liberian mafia' cooling off in Calabar, Nigeria, please ask Idris Abdulkareem, our latest musician in town of Nigeria Jaga Jaga fame. Taylor reportedly addressed a press conference in Monrovia, and repeatedly called the name of the reporter. Sooner than later, Charles Taylor's bunch of mercenary fighters made of blood-thirty and trigger-happy girls, boys, men and women drawn from Burkina Faso, Senegal, Sierra-Leone, Liberia, Ghana and others, who go by the name, The Commando kidnapped the colleague to their torture chambers in Monrovia and taught him several lessons. The mother of the poor journalist and his family suffered gunshots from Taylor's Coterie of official thugs for being close to Throble. A media pressure group based in Accra, Ghana, called Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) led by the famous communications scholar, Prof. Kwame Karikari, provided medical and post-trauma attention to Suah, while, he awaits death by installment. In a coming book, which Suah and I are putting together, we shall tell the story in details.
The story of Jean Baptiste Dzilam, the popular Togolease journalist and former editor-in-chief of a Togo based newspaper called The Event and now publisher of The Forum, another newspaper based in Togo too saw hell in prison in the hands of the expired tyrant, the late Eyadema Gnassingbe. 40 days of uninterrupted torture in 2003, is not a joke. The journalist like Throble Suah now developed serious complications in his abdomen and around spinal cord. His only sin is that he wrote critical reports and articles of the Gnassingbe dictatorial empire. The twosome journalists in spite of their ordeals vowed to die at the battlefield (of investigation and critical journalism) instead of dying in their kitchens. The price of liberty is huge. Certainly, history shall remember the folks who sacrifice personal comfort and greed to create a better society in their respective countries and the African continent.