I DREAMT OF MANY CHILDREN...
What treasures are you bringing to me? I asked of them,
For that is the meaning of children in a dream.
They are never still, busy, running, climbing, jumping, skipping, pushing, touching, breathing, hugging, crying, laughing, and through it all, wide eyed with expectations.
Expectations and Anticipations.
For they believe. That I have it in me,
They want me to bring them to life,
Bring them to life? What a huge responsibility?
“But you can do it,” their anticipating gaze pulled at me.
“But you are so many,” I cringed away from my destiny,
“Yes, we are,” they chorused in giggles, “and there are many more of us,
There are zillions of us where we came from, and if you bring us to life,
Many more will come, and they will keep coming and coming and coming and coming…”
I am the wide eyed one now, not in expectation but in terror.
I had wondered before in my waking mind, ‘what would it be like to have 365 children,
One for each day of the year?’
Terror! Abdication!
But they could read my thoughts,
“No silly,” they giggled again, as they jumped, skipped, hugged and kissed,
And yet some were in the tree that I didn’t see before.
“You will stay and embrace us, and we, we will take care of you.
All you have to do is hug us and listen to us.”
“That is all?” Skepticism!
“Yes, silly,” they chorused again, and they were touching me, breathing on me, shoving me, pulling me, jumping on my knees….
“Don’t you remember me, I was there with you when you were one year old, and we were going to love the world with all of our hearts, we were going to eat it up, that was how much we loved the world,” she kissed me on my lips,
“But then, you stopped really tasting things and kissing me, and I missed you dreadfully.”
And my middle aged heart felt an ‘ouch.’
“And me, silly, we stared at everything, the world was so glorious and we put pictures of the world in our heart, our eyes were the cameras then, look inside you, the pictures are still there, in their infinite beauty, I look at them everyday.” She tapped on my eyes.
“But then you stopped taking pictures, and you really stopped seeing, and I missed you dreadfully.”
And my middle aged heart felt a second ouch.
“And me silly, we used to hug the world, we were all hands and arms, we touched everything and hugged everything. I can still feel everything in my hands and arms; have you forgotten?” She pulled violently at my hands.
A third ouch in my middle aged heart.
“And, oh how we cried!! It was the best music in the world, we cried and cried and beckoned to the world to come to us, that was our language then, and what a beautiful language.
And sometimes the world came and sometimes the world ignored us, but that wasn’t the point. Do you remember how we felt after a good cry?
Yes you do.
We felt like the morning after a heavy rainfall, and everything is calm, cool and gentle.
How we loved a good cry.
We still cry, you didn’t desert me girl,” she draped her adorable arms around my shoulders,
“That is our one talent, and you hung on to it.”
And on and on……………………….
“When we were five, we were going to make a big loving family,
And the ‘nth’ ouch to my poor heart.
“When we were six, we said we would love our husband to pieces…
Another ouch to my heart.
“When we were nine, we promised not to be mean back when people were mean to us…
Another ouch to my heart.
“And we still loved to cry and we still felt like the morning after a heavy rain fall, and we love the feeling…
“Yes, we do,” I smiled and she smiled back as she tugged on my cheeks.
“It is our one true talent,” we said in unison and giggled and said “Jinx,” and giggled again.
“When we were twelve, we promised to be beautiful, inside and outside…
“When we were fifteen, we used to cry a lot, we got our heart broken every day, every goddamn day and we wept, and we felt like the morning after a heavy rain fall….” And we both smiled at one another.
And the children from the tree came down and pulling and shoving started in zillions of voices, and we were going to work very hard, we were going to keep hope alive, we were going to thank all that came our way, we were going to smile all the time, we were going to be ………….
Finally, I asked, “have we done any of that?”
“We did some of them,” they chorused, “But you grew up and forgot about us and that hurt us a lot and we cried,”
“I am so sorry.”
“Its okay, we never go away, we hang around, trying to catch your attention, and to remind you of your promises to us. It’s great that you are talking to us now.
And see, it doesn’t take much, just embrace us, that is all there is to it.”
And the ouches to my middle age heart started to slowly ease off.
Happy New Year. Every day is a new beginning for us not to forget the promises we once made to ourselves.

Feasts of Phantoms a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni-- ISBN 978-0981393926Available your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from Genoa House.

Crossroads

Crossroads.
I grew up with this proverb, “Iko rita meta, idamu alejo,” i.e. A crossroad is the predicament of a visitor/stranger. And each time I heard it, I had this image of a stranger arriving in the metropolis that was Ibadan of my childhood from my grandmother’s small village in Ekiti, and he would be in the traditional four piece suit of Fila, Agbada, Buba and Sokoto all of which were made of Aso Oke and he would have a horse tail in his hand. He would be standing at an intersection with three, four or more roads meeting and he would be reeling around and around and around in confusion while waving the horse tail, perhaps to ward off the ever present flies, or, to maybe clear the fog that he thinks its in his mind for he knew he was in a quandary.
Why this image? I grew up in a household ruled by my maternal grandmother who missed her small village very much and so most of her discourses were about this nostalgia. And her relatives did come down often to visit bringing with them lots of yams, some vegetables, chickens and a goat once in a while along with lots of stories about the happenings in the village and these, my grandmother would savor with relish. The relatives in turn would be overwhelmed with the city teeming with zillions of people and so many roads and vehicles, and my grandmother in turn would reassure them.
There were other references to crossroads as well, I remember walking to my elementary school with my twin brother early in the mornings, and on arriving at certain crossroads in our neighborhood we would find pieces of broken clay pots, and in some of the larger pieces would be a peculiar combination of stuff—palm oil, a coin, dead rat, chicken skull, some large feather belonging to some bigger bird like a hawk, and once we saw the head of a dog, at another time, the eye of a big animal, and usually some precious beads like corals and other weird and bizarre combinations of things. Each time we see this, I would freak out as I felt my head expand and contract, and as we had been warned several times by my superstitious grandmother and other housemaids, we would give the offering, for that was what they were a wide berth as we hurried along on our way.
Another thing about the crossroads of my childhood was that they were notorious for motor vehicle accidents. There was also the famous University College Hospital that my grandmother would refer to as simply ‘Orita-Mefa’ (Intersection where six roads met), and the accompanying image for me is one of pain as in painful intramuscular injection of immunization or medication as we received all our medical care from this hospital.
Then there was a popular song by Ebenezer Obey about his enemies in an attempt to harm him dabbling in juju and placing ebo—offering at crossroads. And finally there was the drama on Television and a character in this drama series was Eshu, and his province was the crossroads, where he would stand and confuse the heck out of people, not just travelers or visitors but anyone passing by was his potential victim.
I remember one drama in specific where two BFF—best friends forever, who loved each other very much, had been friends since their childhood, and had never had an argument or fought in their lives and as such were like one soul in the manner in which they could read each other’s thoughts and anticipate each others joys and sorrows and were always at each others beck and call. They were a match made in heaven and the envy of everyone. On this particular day, they fell victim to Eshu’s pranks and to the shock of the whole community started to fight and were determined to beat each other to death.
What happened? They were walking by and chatting to one another amicably when Eshu walking towards them from the opposite direction passed them by walking purposefully and right in between the two of them. He greeted them politely and they returned his greetings in turn and Eshu went on his way.
The following ensued:
Friend #1: ‘Can you believe that odd guy, is he color blind? He’s wearing an orange Agbada with a red cap.”
Friend #2: “No, he’s not, its okay to wear black cap with orange Agbada, black goes with everything.”
Friend #1: “I see that you are the color blind one.”
Friend #2: No, I’m not, you are the one calling black, red.”
They argued and were both getting angrier by the minute and before we knew it, they were calling each other names and accusations were flying back and forth as Friend #2 started to question the sanity of Friend #1 if he was calling black, red. And then there were accusations about a business judgment of five years before that had caused both of them lots of money. And another accusation of how one friend had inadvertently flirted with the other’s wife, thinking that it was her sister, and on and on it went and then the blows started to fly.
The ever present concerned citizens milling around ran to the fighting men and separated them as they admonished them, two grown men fighting in public, had they no self respect? So they narrated the story to the concerned citizens and Eshu was in the midst of the crowd and he listened to their narration. In the narration too, the two bosom friends started to get heated up again and the citizens had to stand between the two of them. At some point, Eshu came to the forefront and asked them if it was him that they saw, and the two men eagerly said “Yes.” He showed them his cap, and on one side the cap was red and on the other side it was black.
Eshu is Yoruba’s trickster and god of the crossroads and there are tricksters in mythologies of other cultures. In the Congos, his name is Papa Legba, he is associated with red, emblematic with the heat and intensity of the crossroads. He is a cruciform figure with the extended arms suggesting either prohibition or guidance or the more sinister possibility of the crossroads drawing the wayfarer into a state of confusion and panic.
In Greek mythology, the goddess of the crossroads is Hecate since the crossroad is considered the opening of the underworld in which Hecate was the mistress. Hecate is believed to arrive at the doorways of those laboring toward birth, a midwife, mediating that crossroads of becoming or obstruction.
Crossroads are symbolic of choice, union of opposites, the meeting place of time and space.
It is the place of burials of suicides, vampires and felons to ensure their confusion of ways and prevent their return to haunt the living.
Crossroads are associated to Ganesha of the Hindu pantheon, a god with an elephant head and he is the lord of beginnings and of obstacles, and Janus in Roman pantheon, the god of beginnings and transitions and of gates, doors, doorways, endings and time. He is a two faced god since he looks to the future and the past, and the concept of January is based on him. Crossroads are locus of extreme potency and ambivalent gods able to contain and synthesize opposites flowing into one another. At crossroads one confronts the necessity of choice and the immensity of fate. It is a matrix of union and also of separating, parting, splitting, of meeting and farewell.
Crossroads, considered to be the opening to the underworld represent the possibility of many ways and also commitment to the individual path. Legendary, the crossroads suggest a junction where consciousness must regard the unconscious, and be accountable to the whole self in its ambivalence (An Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols by J.C. Cooper and The Book of Symbols).
What do all these mean? Crossroads as symbols and metaphors make us question ourselves and prevent us from becoming rigid and dogmatic in our self-belief. It is as if they are the fault that lets in the contents of the unconscious into our conscious psyche, fructifying them with things that have been suppressed, repressed or things that have never before been brought to consciousness.
Oedipus, the famous crossroader of literature made a choice at the meeting point of his historical inheritance, fate and destiny, though this could have been attributed to road rage, but the history he had fled caught up with him and the choice he made at the crossroad was actually to actualize it. He lamented: “Oh three roads, dark ravine, woodland and way/Where three roads met: you, drinking my father’s blood/My own blood spilled by my own hand: can you remember/ The unspeakable things I did there, and the things I went on from there to do?” (Sophocles, 72).
As I was writing this piece, ‘Scent of a Woman’ was playing. I left it on but muted the television because it’s a movie I have seen many times before, but I have my favorite scenes at which I turned on the volume. One was when Colonel Slade (played by Al Pacino) went to Charlie Simms’ (played by Chris O’Donnell) school in lieu of his parents for the trial, and in his eloquent speech said he did come to many crossroads in his life but he had never made the right choice, even though he knew which road to choose, but he did not choose them because they were too damn hard, but that Simms came to his own crossroads and he chose not to snitch on his peers, even though he faced possible expulsion from the prestigious preparatory school which would mean returning home to his not wealthy parents in Oregon, defeated, and with his tails between his hind legs.
Simms actually had been at a bigger crossroad that weekend he spent in New York City when the alcoholic Slade, who was living out his planned last few days. He had frustrated Simms to no end and had broken every rule possible including him, a blind man driving an expensive rented car, such that if Simms had abandoned him (as Slade invited him to do on many occasion that weekend), we, the audience wouldn’t have faulted him.
Simms was at a crossroad; to let an annoying, miserable, bitter, blind, hateful, and suicidal SOB who had nothing to lose in life and who had made his life hell, but was in his custody, and was wielding a deadly weapon that he knew how to use very well, kill himself, or stand between him and his gun and as such put his own life at risk. Simms chose the harder and scarier path and prevented Slade’s suicide.
What I took from the movie is Simm’s integrity and his ability each time at the crossroad of his life to choose the path that led to his growth and development. Al Pacino won a well deserved Oscar for his performance but the fictional Simms won the Oscar of life.
I am someone who is impressed by the genius of our dreams and the stuff that they crank up night after night and for me and based on my own psychology, I dream of crossroads a lot. And after a while I came to appreciate that it really is a place of making choices as new possibilities are offered to us. And the choices are either to stay with the old and outdated story or to begin a new story, because the crossroads of real life or of our inner life are actually roads where new life and opportunities are presented to us. Paul Valery said: “The bottom of the mind is paved with crossroads.”
And as they are the fault lines where the unconscious is opened to meet consciousness, something new, usually a treasure, or a potential that is in us all along, is presented to us at this point of our lives and we are left to choose and follow the unknown, unfamiliar, narrow and probably dark and scary path or to return as we have come, to return to a well known, well traveled, worn out, broad, and well lit path, but it is of the old story. And just as in that image from my childhood of that well suited man from my grandmother’s village, will he choose a road, any road, and follow it to its logical conclusion and that road might actually lead him to his relative’s house in Ibadan or will he cower in defeat, get onto the next lorry and return to his tiny village, defeated by life?
And if he were to take the path that he didn’t know, what will become of him and who would he meet on the way? What adventures would he get himself into; and if at the end of it all, would he still remain the same or would he have gained the confidence to tackle the wilder Lagos next?
When at the crossroads of our lives—whether our inner life or our outer life (before the era of GPS), we are not aware of the feelings of changes in the air, what we feel is dreadful anxiety, and all we can think of is where to get some Xanax, or a drink.
Anxiety, a feeling that is difficult to sit with, is a sign of inner conflict and is one affect that has driven many people to seek counseling from which ever place they do, from their psychotherapists, psychiatrists, pastors, Imam, priests, hairdressers or bartenders. “What should I do? I don’t know what to do, please tell me.”
But can anyone really tell us what to do? It is our crossroad and not theirs and to tell us what to do would be transmitting their own values which are very unique and individual things.
And conflict is a great midwife; it is that which assists the delivery of new possibilities in us if we don’t flee from it.
Conflict is symbolized in mythology and dreams by the number two, a thing that was once one is not enough anymore and it becomes two—that one thing and its opposite, to do or not to do, to stay or to go, to stand or to sit and so on and so forth. And out of these two, a third must be born and this third is the new possibility and this is the making of a crossroad. And this third can only be born by sitting with the conflict, that thing and it’s opposite.
A good example is that drama of my childhood, of the two best friends. They were of one mind and were at peace. This is a good place to be, and most of us crave it but it is not a place of growth, but rather of stagnation because there is a whole lot to us as human beings and maturity is the ability to live most of what and who we are even when they are in contradiction, in harmony.
What Eshu did is to help them see the possibility of discord and that they had resentments and some degree of rage and hatred towards one another but which they would not allow themselves to be aware of. And this is what came out in the fist fight they engaged in. Before the fight, they were just one sided human being, all they knew was the love that they had for one another and that was it, but after the fight, they have become more human, more rounded, fleshed out and three dimensional human beings capable of hate and of love and all other emotions that are in between those two, and it is the balancing of this in harmony that makes a human being. So Eshu in this context has brought something that existed in these friends all along, he didn’t introduce it to them, they had had it in them long before Eshu came along.
This is how crossroads, internally introduce the new thing into our lives, the thing that we have always had in us but which we were not aware of and when we become aware of its presence gives us more consciousness and enriches our lives.



Feasts of Phantoms a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni-- ISBN 978-0981393926Available your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from Genoa House.

Blogsite of Kehinde Adeola Ayeni: ORIKI

Blogsite of Kehinde Adeola Ayeni: ORIKI

Feasts of Phantoms a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni-- ISBN 978-0981393926Available your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from Genoa House.

ORIKI

Oriki is ‘The Call of the Head.’

It is poetry loved by the Yoruba of Western Nigeria and perhaps other parts of Africa and had been taken by the black race into the Diaspora because a vestige of it was featured in the movie “Ali,” in which the character of Drew Bundini Brown played by Jamie Foxx, repeatedly sang poetry to Mohammed Ali before, during and after his fights, calling on Ali’s ‘head.’ There is a poignant scene in which Ali had kicked Brown off his entourage after he admitted to selling Ali’s championship belt on the street for $500 to feed his heroin addiction, Brown shows up to beg for his job back and he was clean of drugs; Ali relents when he starts the call of the head poetry—“Floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee,” and the two of them finished the poem in unison.

At the lips of talented orators, it is something to behold. An example was the Premier of Western Nigeria in the early 1960s Chief S.L. Akintola all of whose political speeches be it state of the union address, canvassing for votes, cursing out his enemies, or lauding his supporters were poetic orations powerful enough to hypnotize a person.

Oriki includes family history, praise, warnings, admonishments and admirations. It is not flattery, but based on real accomplishments and failures of the family. It goes back many generations, thus each family has the Oriki unique to them. It is sang for a person usually by his parents and loved ones in times when he/she is depressed, challenged, going through trials or tribulations, or after the person has accomplished something remarkable like moving from one threshold to another, or as an appeal to the person. If the individual is in despair, it reminds the person whom he is, where he came from, and where he is hoping to go. It is one of the rituals to accompany the person through the challenging tasks of life and for him/her to know that others have faced the challenges before and have succeeded.

It is oration that is in the province of the gods and it is sung as an obeisance and in humility before a power that is unconscious and as such unbelievably powerful. The Yorubas sing them in the worshipping of gods like Ogun—god of Iron, and Sango—god of lightening and thunder. It’s a parallel to Greek mythology as recorded by say Sophocles complete with the verses and the choruses.

Winnicott asks “Is it not from being gods that we become man?” and actually Oriki tells us what is possible in the human realm and as such humanizes us. This is because when we are unconscious we are identifying with the gods and Oriki takes this into consideration and gradually shrinks the psyche of the individual down to its appropriate human size without ignoring the potentials that are inherent in him/her.

It is so embedded in Yoruba culture and language that almost everyone has amongst their six or seven names an Oriki, usually given to them by their grandmothers as her way of saying to the child, “this is how I see you, a child to adore, cherish and spoil,” which is what grandmothers do. Examples of such names for girls are Ajike—this is a child that I will cherish each morning that I awake, Asunke is the child that I will cherish even as I sleep, Aduke, this is a child that I will compete with others to cherish, Abeke –for this child, I will plead for the opportunity to cherish her and Ashabi—this is a child that was highly selected to be born and she continues to select the best for me. And for boys are names like Akanni—I especially selected him to be mine, Isola—He creates wealth for me all the time, and so on and so forth.

‘Head’ in this context is the depository of all that makes the person the human being that he or she is. It is our fate, destiny, and in psychology, we ‘ll say, the unconscious contents of the persons psyche which though not consciously known by the individual, nevertheless directs the person hither and thither as if he/she were under the control of a puppet master.

That it is ‘the call of the head,’ shows that the contents of the person’s unconscious are being called upon for them to become conscious and thus dynamic for the ego; the contents in terms of deposited family history/legends.

Freud said “There probably exists in the mental life of the individual, not only what he has experienced himself, but an archaic heritage. The archaic heritage includes not only dispositions, but also ideational contents, memory traces of the experience of former generations.”

I was excited to find scientific and confirmatory explanation in a psychoanalytic paper on the function of Oriki (though it wasn’t called that, and not that I needed the confirmation, I have benefited from its function all of my life), but according to Lynch(1991), “it is a kind of idealized merger in which the self-object provides a certain level of calmness and reintegration of the self structure of the [child], especially at times when the child’s self structure may have been somewhat fragmented as a result of some trying experience, failure or upset in his or her world. The idealized self-object restores the enfeebled self of the child to a new level of cohesion or maturity. Over the long term, this kind of idealization can gradually help the child internalize the idealized self-object image and assist the child in later years in the formation of internalized goals and ideal for itself.”

What this is saying is that growing up is hard and painful and we need all the help that we can get. As a child is growing up, or as the child in each of us regardless of how old we are is being hopeful and reaching out for whatever it is that we all reach out for all the time, be it ambition, love, friendship, happiness and etc. we are putting ourselves in a very vulnerable position for rejection or loss or even the uncertainty that we will get what it is that we are hungering after, or that we even deserved it. The ego is that part of our psyche that does the desiring and it may in the process despair or be terrified.

But there are a lot to us, there is that part of us that do deserve these great things that we want, and these great things are in us already, but as unconscious potentials. And they are in that part of us that had been in this world forever and for generations and these parts of us are the inheritance from our ancestors who have gone before us, and tried these things and had their results one way or the other, and this is because everything has been tried before.

So when our mother or grandmother or aunt ‘calls our head’ because they can see that we are anxious, afraid, holding back or that we are facing something major, that ‘call’ tells us that it is possible and that it has been done before, or warns us how it is that the people who tried it before didn’t succeed, and when we hear this, it brings together, the part that is fragmented off and terrified with the part of us that can do it, and the parts of us that wants it and where these wonderful things really are in us but as potentials, and the coming together of all these parts lifts us up to a new height and our heads actually do swell, and it is a huge reassurance.

It is also a good way to apprehend our family history, both from our fathers side and our mothers side of the family, because in these histories are the treasures that we have inherited and are thus deposited in our unconscious, because regardless of how history might have been re-written by living ancestors for their own individual and personal reasons, the Oriki which at the core doesn’t change from generation to generation contains the concrete truths.

Ann Ulanov (Female Ancestors of Christ) said, “If we know who our ancestors are, we can live in unbroken continuity with the past. That in turn grounds us in the present, protecting us against being blown this way and that by every new wind of religious fashion or political movement. Continuity roots in something beyond our own time and nourishes our sense of dignity and duty in living creatively with what tradition has bequeathed us. Just as we can entertain our different complexes imaginatively and thus protect ourselves against psychic splits and dissociations, so our culture in honoring our ancestors may connect what we were with what we are and may suggest what our children may become…”

She continues, “Looked at causally, a genealogy gives a vision of the originating source from which we can trace a line of development to our present life, to this day. Looked at prospectively, a genealogy enables us to ask what will be breaking in upon our present life from the future.”

For me, I have had my ‘head’ called by relatives, neighbors and friends for a lot of reasons, from my fathers side of the family, my mothers side, for being a twin, and for being a breech birth, yes there is a ‘call of the head’ for that too.

This is a verse from the ‘call of the head’ of my father’s side of the family, and like I said, it is poetry with many levels of interpretations and associations that if I were to begin to break it down, would take up about twenty pages:

“It is a house of wild horses,

A house where every herb is healing medicine,

In that house, they are so gentle that they are able to bring you a goat,

a meek sheep or a cockerel if you asked for it,

But if their household lion goes berserk, they are able to rein it in as well.

I only plucked one herb for my medicine but when I processed it,

I was able to get 200 healing medicine out of it.”

Feasts of Phantoms a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni-- ISBN 978-0981393926Available your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from Genoa House.

Forgiveness: According to Nelson Mandela

I put Nelson Mandela up there amongst the gods, as a contemporary of Prometheus. “Civilization begins with a rebellion. Prometheus, one of the Titans, steals fire from the gods on mount Olympus and brings it as a gift to man, marking the birth of human culture. For this rebellion Zeus sentences him to be chained to Mount Caucasus where vultures consume his liver during the day and at night it grows back only to be again eaten away the next day. This is a tale of the agony of the creative individual, whose nightly rests only resuscitates him so that he can endure his agonies the next day. But note also that Prometheus is released from his sufferings only when an immortal renounces his immortality in Prometheus favor. This Chiron does. What a vivid affirmation of human life, one of the essential characteristics of which is that each one of us will some day die! It is saying: I willingly give up immortality to affirm humanity; I am willing to die in order to affirm human civilization.” Rollo May, Power and Innocence.

Mandela did steal ‘fire’ from the gods and gave it to the humans of the 20th century and as such he increased our level of consciousness in our dealings with one another regardless of the color of our skins and I know that race relations in the world since then has improved.

The history of South Africa has fascinated me since I was in secondary school and in the late 1970s there was a massive influx of black South African students into our schools, this was Nigeria’s way of helping the disenfranchised South African blacks. The five students that ended up in my school had left home, family and friends behind. At the time, I was still struggling with the feelings of abandonment from my parents who I felt had banished me to boarding school at the age of 12, but I still saw them about once a month, on vacations and holidays, I wondered how these students fared without seeing their parents for years and some of them swore never to return to apartheid South Africa.

But what baffled me the most about the whole situation and still continues to baffle me till today is the fact that these black South Africans were not citizens of their own country under the apartheid laws! So what’s their citizenship? They were in limbo, belonging to no land.

But they must belong somewhere, they are in this world on some land and yet they have no citizenship! What is citizenship? Does that mean they couldn’t get passports? No, they couldn’t and the girls who ended up in my school at the time came as citizens of the free and landlocked Lesotho and, Swaziland.

It reminds me of a stupid law that existed in Nigeria (and as since been scrapped) and which gave the police the power to arrest you if they didn’t like the looks of you, and that law was about ‘Wandering.’ So if you were taking a walk on Broad Street in Lagos, a policeman could just come up to you and arrest you and lock you up, “and what is my offense?” you ask. Answer: “You were arrested for wandering.”

This law will better be understood if taken in historical context, and that is back in the colonial days, the colonials and expatriates commandeered and lived in the choicest parts of the country, like on lakeshores, by the oceans, on the hills and other scenic parts, and if you a native was found walking around any of these places, it means that you were going there for one thing and one thing only, to upset these white people with the sight of your black skin, even though this is black Africa we are talking about.

This takes my mind to the famous saying attributed to Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya in the 1950: “When the missionaries arrived, Africans had the land and the missionaries the Bible. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened our eyes, they had the land and we had the Bible. Africans were told the Bible would deliver them into heaven. But they were not ‘saved’ from slavery. Since the bible spoke of slavery without condemning it, Christian missionaries argued sternly that Africans would in fact be better off as slaves than as African savages.”

And to this day, I cannot bring myself to watch movies like ‘Out of Africa,’ or ‘A Good Man in Africa,’ where the ‘white’ man is like the Holy Ghost descending to save Africans from themselves, and not to speak of Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness.’

So, since my teens, I have followed the events in South Africa closely and like most people in the world rejoiced when Nelson Mandela was freed from prison and what a celebration we had in Nigeria at the time! Over ten of our most popular musicians released albums to mark the occasion and there were celebrations on our streets and individuals threw parties in their homes. We even had our famous ‘Aso Ebi,’ wax cotton fabrics with the faces of both Nelson and Winnie on them and I bought 2 yards of the fabric to make a dress for my toddler daughter at the time. Every African grew a foot taller in that year.

If Nelson Mandela never did anything more in his life after his prison term and securing freedom from apartheid for South Africans, if he had said, ‘I have been away from my family for over thirty years, I just want to spend the rest of my life in retirement and reacquaint myself with them, he would have done exceedingly well, but he didn’t rest on his oars and like he said in the concluding part of his prison memoirs Long Walk to Freedom: “When I walked out of prison that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both. Some say that has now been achieved. But I know that that is not the case. The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning.

I have walked that long road to freedom. I have tried not to falter; I have made many missteps along the way. But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can rest only for a moment, for with freedom comes responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not yet ended.”

And so he worked harder with other political groups and parties and was elected the first black president of South Africa.

But like he said, it was only a moment taken to rest, and then he shocked the whole world by setting up The Truth and Reconciliation Committee as a step in the healing of the country. And what this was about is that anyone who had abused, or oppressed or brutalized another person under the apartheid law could come up, confess to this and be given absolution. Why did he do this? He didn’t want his country to dissolve into a civil war as was speculated by the whole world where the now free and majority blacks after years of oppression and suppression and being herded as cattle in the shanty towns, beaten, imprisoned and killed under the apartheid laws not to speak of other daily injustices and humiliation would rise up and avenge all of these wrong doings on the minority Afrikaners.

I read reactions to this from a lot of writers and I struggled with them as they tried to come to terms with this. Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Laureate, in The Burden of Memory, The Muse of Forgiveness: “The logic of “Truth and Reconciliation,” however, demands that the mind prepares itself for the spectacle of a “penitent” Pol Pot, freed, morally cleansed, at liberty to go about his business in a humanely restored milieu!”

“This risk free parade of villains, calmly—and occasionally with ill-concealed relish—recounting their roles in kidnappings, tortures, murders, and mutilation, at the end of which absolution is granted without penalty or forfeit, is either a lesson in human ennoblement, or a glorification of impunity.”

And, “Memory obviously rejects amnesia, but it remains amenable to closure that is, apparently, the ultimate goal of social strategies such as Truth and Reconciliation, and the Reparation Movement (for the enslavement of a continent). It is there that they find common ground even though the latter does entail, by contrast, a demand for restitution. Both seek the cathartic bliss, the healing that comes with closure.”

And one of his conclusions was, “The crimes that the African continent commits against her kind are of a dimension and, unfortunately, of a nature that appears to constantly provoke memories of the historic wrongs inflicted on that continent by others. There are moments when it almost appears as if there is a diabolic continuity (and inevitability?) to it all—that the conduct of latter-day (internal) slave runners is merely the stubborn precipitate of a yet unexpiated (my emphasis) past. The ancient slave stockades do not seem ever to have vanished; they appear more to have expanded, occupying indiscriminate spaces that often appear contingent with the national boundaries.” I wonder if this is what Nelson Mandela was trying to prevent in his country.

A lot of trauma was and still continues to be visited on the African continent and even kind-hearted and well-meaning people of the world still use Africa as their spitting pot, and I wonder if had every country in Africa on attaining their independence had set up a Truth and Reconciliation Committee, we would not we have continue to visit even worse atrocities on ourselves.

Has the Truth and Reconciliation committee in South Africa given both the blacks and the Afrikaans a means of catharsis and has prevented to a large extent internalization and identification with the oppressor? Has it helped in preventing South Africans blacks from identifying at the pole of victims and the Afrikaans identifying at the pole of the perpetrators?

Mandela did not underplay the effect of apartheid on his people; he gave it its due place in South African history: “The policy of apartheid created a deep and lasting wound in my country and my people. All of us will spend many years, if not generations, recovering from that profound hurt. But the decades of oppression and brutality had another, unintended effect, and that was that it produced the Oliver Thambos, the Walter Sisulus, the Chief Luthulis, the Yusuf Dadoos, the Bram Fischers, the Robert Sobukwes, of our time—men of such extraordinary courage, wisdom, and generosity that their like may never be known again. Perhaps it requires such depth of oppression to create such heights of character. My country is rich in the minerals and gems that lie beneath the soil, but I have always known that its greatest wealth is its people, finer and truer than the purest diamond.

It is from these comrades in the struggle that I learned the meaning of courage. Time and again, I have seen men and women risk and give their lives for an idea. I have seen men stand up to attacks and torture without breaking, showing a strength and resiliency that defies imagination. I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. I felt fear myself more times than I can remember, but hid it behind a mask of boldness. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” As someone of African origin reading this, I want to be like the Thambos and the Sisulus, and I just don’t want to be an ordinary African woman anymore, I want to expand and widen my frame of identification.

Mandela began to show us his thought process leading up to the Reconciliation committee even while in prison: “I never lost hope that this great transformation would occur. Not only because of the great heroes that I have already cited but because of the courage of the ordinary men and women of my country. I always knew that deep down in every human heart, there is mercy and generosity. No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or of his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than it’s opposite. Even in the grimmest times in prison, when my comrade and I were pushed to our limits, I would see a glimmer of humanity in one of the guards, perhaps just for a second, but it was enough to reassure me and keep me going. Man’s goodness is a flame that can be hidden but never extinguished.”

And he goes to say: “It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred; he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.”

On my part, I have come to realize that Forgiveness is a very active process indeed and one that you have to work really, really hard to get to, it is not for the faint at heart and it does not include Forgetting, and as a matter of fact, we must not forget at all.

But it was while watching the movie ‘Invictus’ produced by Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman that I came to fully understand and appreciate Mandela’s thought process. And in different parts of the movie as he gradually preached his message of forgiveness and not only did he defuse a potentially violent situation, he joined the whole country together and had them sublimate their intent not to forgive (and black aspiration), and whites fear of retaliation into Rugby, projecting their anger onto the opposing teams that they played.

Rollo May said “The joy of the discovery of one’s own thoughts is a truth that we rarely hear from anyone who hasn’t hammered it out on the anvil of years of solitude.” And Mandela had almost thirty years to hammer this out and the whole world is richer for it.

Feasts of Phantoms a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni-- ISBN 978-0981393926Available your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from Genoa House


http://africaworksgpz.com/2011/03/19/hidden-history-of-nigerian-brain-drain/

We Have All That We Need

I have been thinking of this quotation by Erich Fromm from his book, The Art of Loving, “The truly religious person if he follows the essence of the monotheistic idea does not pray for anything, does not expect anything from God; he does not love God as a child loves his father or mother.

He has acquired the humility of sensing his limitations to the degree of knowing that he knows nothing about God.

God becomes to him a symbol in which man, at an earlier stage of his evolution, has expressed the totality of that which man is striving for, the realm of the spiritual world of love, truth and justice.

He has faith in the “principles” which God represents; he thinks truth, lives love and justice, and considers all of his life only valuable in as much as it gives him the chance to arrive at an ever fuller unfolding of human powers—as the only reality that matters, as the only object of ‘ultimate concern’ and, eventually, he does not speak about God—nor ever mention his name.

To love God, if he were going to use this word, would mean, then, to long for the attainment of the full capacity to love, for the realization of that which ‘God’ stands for in oneself.”

But as people we pray for this or that, concrete and material things, whereas what we should be praying for is the ability to be fully all of whom we were meant to be because we have all that we need. And in the faces of challenges, we should be praying for the strength to bear the challenges. We shouldn’t be praying for things to change to suit our purposes. This is hard, I know, but I think this is the way it’s supposed to be.

It’s in the same way that different rituals help us get to the next developmental stage or cross the thresholds of life into the next level where we are meant to be, but they are not rituals that take away what is coming, because then they would be making us regress but they encourage and support us as we move forward.

For example, with seasonal changes, there are rituals to help us get through the harsh winter months as in the holiday celebrations; they don’t make winter go away. We welcome the birth of the sun (from the Southern Hemisphere) in December with the winter solstice and it gives us hope that it is coming back though it doesn’t arrive fully till March or April but we have something to look forward to and this gets us through the cold Winter months. And different cultures have different holidays at this time of the year with the common theme that they are all Festival of Lights.

Challenges and disappointments will come with living a life and most of the time, things will not be to our liking, but we have in us things to compensate us for what we lack if only we are able to appreciate them.

What is really important is the ability to welcome and embrace and deal with whatever it is that comes our way. When we are challenged, of course we are frustrated and angry but it’s the part of us that feels special that this should not happen to us, its like we are above that, and people do say things like, “I am a good person and I have paid my dues but then bad things still happen to me.”

First of all who is a good person and who is a bad person, and who is making the judgment? The Judge in us makes this judgment and it is partial to us and wants only bliss and no pain. In my profession we call it the Ego, and it’s very short sighted with a very narrow range of vision and as such not very smart.

When people say “I am a good person and this should not happen to me,” it is an infantile way of thinking and it is full of entitlement and what we really mean is that “I am better than other people and I should have special favors all the time, and those bad things should happen to other mortals lesser than me.” and also it is a way for people to control other people, as in “I want you to be this way so that I wouldn’t have to feel the anxiety that I feel when I am around you.’

People disappoint us all the time and they betray us and this is because “Betrayal is loss of projected values (E.F. Edinger).” And what we have projected out there was ours to begin with, and the betrayal forces us to take them back into us and they enrich us on the long run.

Our children most of the time will not fulfill our ambitions or dreams for them. Some of us have been challenged by giving birth to children with deformities or other forms of chronic illnesses. What should we pray for in such a situation? For a Miracle so that they are changed back to what we would have wanted? This is what most of us do pray for.

Every person on the face of this earth has brought something unique to the world, something that has never before been seen in this world, but the tragedy is that most of us don’t realize what it is, and they remain in us as potentials, it is like we are forever pregnant without ever giving birth to the baby. R.L. Sharpe said “Isn’t it strange that princes and kings, and clowns that caper in sawdust rings, and common people like you and me are builders of eternity?

Each is given a bag of tools, a shapeless mass, a book of rules; and each must make –ere life is flown—a stumbling block or a steppingstone.”

And different aspects of life are expressed in each and every one of us. And when we come in contact with someone that we don’t feel comfortable with or we don’t like, that is an expression of life and of God in that person, we are uncomfortable because it is something that we (our ego) do not want to acknowledge as part of being in this world.

But the thing of it is that people who are different in the big ways that we label handicapped, or mentally ill or on the ‘edge’ of society are the ones who have brought the really significantly new things to the world. And History is full of these people and we have all benefited from their contributions. And if (as I am sure their parents had prayed and hoped for miracles to cure them back to what the society calls ‘Normal’), and had the miracle been granted, we would not have had the benefit of their contributions in our lives. “Civilization got his first flower from the rebel (Rollo May in Power and Innocence).”

There will always be outliers on the Bell curve of the world, that is the human condition.

So perhaps what we should be praying for are in the words of Etty Hillesum (1943) an inmate at Auschwitz during the Second World War, “Reality is something that one shoulders together with all the suffering that goes with it, and with all the difficulties. And as one shoulders them so one’s resilience grows stronger. But the idea of suffering (which is not the reality, for real suffering is always fruitful and can turn life into a precious thing) must be destroyed. And if you destroyed the idea behind which life lies imprisoned as behind bars, then you liberate your true life, its real mainspring and then you will also have the strength to bear real suffering, your own and the world’s.

Oh God, to bear the suffering you have imposed on me and not just the suffering I have chosen.”

Feasts of Phantoms a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni-- ISBN 978-0981393926Available your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from Genoa House.