Black and (not always) Proud

Sometimes I wonder. Whether there is something fundamentally wrong with being black. Sometimes, when I get really depressed by the things black people conceive in their hearts, I imagine that when the Creator was colouring us our beautiful black, some of the paint leaked into our hearts and some parts of our hearts became black.
Last week, I was in Wuse II where I went to pick up something. As I headed back to my base, I ran into heavy traffic. The traffic warders were there – in the scorching sun that was stealing fluids from unknown crevices in my body – directing traffic. Perhaps, with a little patience, we wouldn’t have spent a lot of time there. But people refused to obey, insisted on riving at crazy speeds and squeezing their cars through impossible openings even after their section of the road had been stopped. I guess in anticipation of such behaviour, the traffic people had sticks in their hands that they use in pounding such vehicles when they came close enough. And I asked myself; Why? Are the few minutes which you stole and are likely going to spend caught in traffic at another spot worth getting your windscreen smashed?
The very next day, I watched an online video of a man and a woman accused of theft face jungle justice on a street somewhere in the east. I watched her beaten and dragged on the coal tar surface, clothes ripped and men forcing her to open her legs while they kicked her repeatedly in her vagina. This, barely a year after four young men were murdered to the glee of the madding crowd on spurious allegations of theft. I watched and wondered; what brand of madness afflicts my people? At what point did the gene coding for humaneness and common sense get leached out of us?
And while I was still irritated by all of this, the Nigerian Senate decided to rile me up by trying to pass a law that can be translated as a ban on online criticism of the government. Pray tell, is there a part in the rules guiding the Senate that says they must only introduce bills that are controversial and serve only to get the populace worked up. I mean, the noise about #Child Not Bride only just died down. I am yet to see the Senate propose a bill that makes illiteracy a crime, yet to see them take a stand on punishment for corrupt politicians and here they are chasing after people who are exercising their fundamental human rights. Maybe they are labouring under the misconception that we will no longer ask about the millions of Naira a certain dishonourable minister used in purchasing bulletproof cars. How sadly mistaken. perhaps, we should also introduce a bill which jails Senators that proposes incendinary bills.
I used to say, tongue-in-cheek, that perhaps we should return to military dictatorship and all my friends will be up in arms, saying how much better our failed democracy is. How freedom of expression is the best thing that has happened to us since sliced bread. I should now ask, are we still free to express ourselves in whatever way and by whatever media we may choose? By how many degrees are we currently separated from a dictatorship?

The last line of Animal farm keeps running through my mind: the creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but it was already impossible to say which was which.
And while I bitterly considered this sad state of affairs, while the tired hours of 5th December crept towards the 6th, a great man passed on. A man whom the vastness of English language fails to adjectively satisfy made a transition. The first website on which I read it described him as ‘an African leader by which all African leaders continue to be measured and against whom they always come up short’ (are the leaders of my country listening???). Perhaps, his death came as a consolation to me. That there may still be good in the black race. And as a timely warning to this government that there will always be people who have ‘an ideal which they hope to live for and to achieve, an ideal which they are prepared to die for’
Perhaps, I am being too harsh on us. I have seen that all human beings regardless of colour have great capacity for evil and an even more immense capacity for good.
Choose Ye today…….
Rest in Peace Tata, the whole world mourns you.