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On the wall of the family living room hangs a blue striped short-sleeved shirt. By it stands an ironing board on which there is a pressing iron, the very iron that the househelp had used in blotting out the rumples of wrinkles from the shirt. The shirt, now enveloped by dust and cobwebs, is still hanging there, where it has been hanging since October 19, waiting for the man who was to hang it on his back. The shirt hangs there, doing a gentle dance whenever the breeze blows its little flute. The shirt hangs there, mute and isolated like an orphan. It is a sad, silent reminder that the man who own it, the man for whom it was pressed, the man who was to wear it is not around and will never be around again.

He had planned on that holy day that he would be at work at noon. Little did he know that somewhere under the ground someone was planning something else, something that would abort his appointment, something that would turn his noon into his doom and make him see noon no more. He didn’t keep his appointment, not because he didn’t want to but because he wasn’t allowed to. He rather kept an unscheduled appointment, an appointment he did not plan to keep, an appointment with death. This holy day became his last day, the last day he would keep any appointment, or would do anything else because someone had come on a bombing mission. And it was a mission possible.

Little did he expect that the messenger who came was a messenger of death. He had thought that the bearer was likely to be a messenger of peace. That was why he smiled on receiving the parcel since he thought that what he had in his hands was a message of good tidings until a few moments later when he and his world were wiped away, leaving him no time to reflect on why someone would perform such an unholy act on a holy day, or, in fact, on any day at all.

As the bomber scampered away, mission accomplished, he left disaster behind. The man who was hale and hearty some minutes before had now been pounded into pulp, his blood had created a river of its own, his bones had parted company with his flesh. Three weeks later, the whole place is damp and desolate and deserted, reminding one of a theatre of war with lumps of flesh and cake of crimson. This is a novel kind of war, a war that is novel in its impact and its method, a war that this country can safely do without.

This is one war that has expanded the threshold of violence and brought in its wake fresh fears of our collective sanity. It has squeezed us, one and all, into a tragic cul de sac and made us, one and all collective victims of a new form of debauchery. It is a rough road to travel, a road that is strewn with thorns and spikes.

As we embark on this journey, we have sorrow and fear and uncertainty for company, and neither sorrow nor fear nor uncertainty makes good company.

Death is, of course, every man’s destination and will come when it will come. But there is something to be said about a nation in which the jewels on its crown are sadistically plucked and thrown away. The nation then becomes one that has a crown without jewels and what is a crown without the dazzling glitter of jewels? Its distinctive mark is its emptiness and its barrenness. It is like a green, luxuriant vegetation that has been eaten away by the harshness of the weather and drained of its water and its moisture; its green leaves becomes discoloured, they fade, droop and die. That is what the messenger of death has tried to do, to kill the vibrancy of our nation by removing the jewels from our crowns and giving the impression that crowns without jewels are crowns when, in fact, they are mere carcasses of crowns.

The sudden arrival of the killer-mail-man has introduced a new element into living and dying in Nigeria, an element that hitherto seemed like film shot in Lebanon or Northern Ireland. But by the events of October 19, Lebanon or Northern Ireland is not so far away after all. The risk of living has been upgraded and life has, in turn, enjoyed a hefty discount. It is no surprise, therefore, that nation has shown so much grief in the past three weeks because, for most people, the death is not death of one man but that of our collective dreams, the dream of nation where all men can enjoy the freedom to make their contributions to the development of the fatherland. We have the responsibility of keeping the coal of that fire burning in the hearts of all Nigerians so that the death that has occurred does not take the life of that dream and does not take away the hopes and aspirations of our future generations. A nation easily becomes decrepit when it allows itself to be overwhelmed by its infirmities, when its present generation can neither dream dreams nor see visions.

Now is the time to make the choice, the choice between good and evil, truth and falsehood. The way we make these choice will determine in which direction we mean to go, whether in the direction of damnation or in the direction of salvation. Our decision will determine whether we intend to free our nation from the spectre of fear and the spectre of guilt. For the blue striped shirt hanging there represents the exhibit of our guilt, an eternal reminder that there’s something which, in one moment of madness, we did wrong.

The question remains whether we intend to persist in this path of wrong. For the dead man represented a voice that was willing to pronounce sentence on wrong, on whoever or whatever was wrong. It is for this reason that that voice represented hope for the New Nigeria of our dreams, a Nigeria in which all of us could make higher aspirations, in which the lion and the lamb could co-exist without the latter fearing that the former would devour it, in which all men could share in a feast of friendship and love.

We make all these declarations because of our belief that our nation possesses the resilience to pull through great moments of trauma and carve out a place for itself under the bright sunshine. It is what we are able to do so that the blue striped shirt will vanish from our consciousness and become, once more, merely a blue striped shirt and not the symbol of our insanity.    

First  published on November 17, 1986