Thought Picnic: It was a Black Valentine

A Black Valentine

In one week, I have written nothing and a lot has happened since I penned the piece about My Funny Valentine in the earnest desire for love, company and companionship.

However, as we woke into the morning of St. Valentine’s Day of the year 2013, 4 shots reverberated round the world as it became an echo chamber of a tragedy that still leaves many in shock but worse still, the irreparable losses, the loss of freedoms to love, to live and to roam – it is all too sad.

She started the night before in the arms of her love and by daybreak she was in the arms of her Lord, the whole episode unfolding like a horrific thriller with both entombed in the ground and in a cell, the former we must never forget for the enduring glory of the latter.

Guns with irrational backbone

One cannot comment on the specifics of the case but one thing is evident, regardless of the status of whoever was caught enclosed and defenceless in that place, that person would have ended up dead, be the person an intruder or a lover and that for me is unacceptable aggression in the face of somewhat irrational fear predicated on the assumed extreme vulnerability of the perpetrator.

Guns appear to give people an unusual sense of bravado and daring where other defence mechanisms to seek help or flee, and I mean flee will kick in.

Four gunshots was four gun shots too many, too determined, too irrational, too demonstrative, too controlling and too self-assured of dealing with a situation. We may never know the mind of the how and why but result is devastating enough that the absence of a sense of great remorse of what was essentially avoidable will never be acceptable.

My sympathies are with the victim, totally

One must not stand to judge, but between the extremes of the benign of the fear of an assumed intruder and it must be clear that this was not fighting off an intruder and the unfortunate pall of spousal abuse resulting in a fatality all too common in many places around the world, my sympathies are squarely with the victim regardless of provocation; no non-aggressive provocation where the other party does not present an existential threat to life should have anyone ending up in the morgue.

The circus of love ended on Valentine’s Day and what we have now for entertainment is the circus of the macabre, it is almost as unwatchable as it is reprehensible as the media feeding frenzy has settled down south on a basic gavel hearing that has now stretched into the fourth day.

For all the accolades, glory and heroic feats of determination and achievement that dogs the principal and masks his attendant foibles, weaknesses and shortcomings, none of which must be discounted with the flippant wave of the hand, my thoughts, my pains and my heartache are with Reeva Steenkamp, her bereaved family, the death of the life force of an amazing dream and the many partners who have by pre-meditation or inadvertently fallen at the hands of the person they chose to love.

Rest well – Reeva Steenkamp.

Nigeria: The need to arrest the spate of religious vampires

The gospel meeting needs

The airing on Channel 4 in the UK of Seyi Rhodes' Unreported World - The Making Of … Nigeria’s Millionaire Preachers [1] did not include other footage that would have been more representative of the gospel because it did not appear as spectacular and outlandish as the subjects in that show.

In an accompanying article [2] that should have had a modicum of proofreading [This is a blog, Channel 4 is a professional news channel, such must be better catered for.] the ministry of Rev. Mrs. Chika Oluchi is spoken of.

She is the overseer of The Mountain of the Lord Ministries International: Centre for Liberation which runs a widow’s fellowship catering to the needs of these women who apparently have no means of material or spiritual support.

Almost inexcusable gullibility

Most touching is the story of Therese who is mistakenly identified as a widower rather than a widow, just as the confusion of numbers is used to describe Rev. Oluchi as a remarkable women [sic].

Therese lost her husband some years ago and apparently fell into the hands of rotten preachers who convinced her that her husband was a member of a devil worshipping cult persuading her to dispose of all her late husband’s property and give the proceeds to the church leaving her and her children destitute.

To crown this wickedness they said God will kill her and her children if anyone found out. Those preachers have now been apprehended and Therese appears to be rebuilding her life untouched by the supposedly wrathful God ready to murder her and her children for being inadvertently married to a devil worshipping husband.

Held hostage to their ignorance

Herein is the deeper problem with religion in Nigeria, the ability for the unscrupulous, dishonest and Machiavellian to prey on the gullibility and apparently vague dread of the supernatural of people to exact them money, property, blind allegiance and followership.

People get held hostage to their fears perishing in their ignorance and inability to independently seek out the truth of their beliefs many of which have been foisted upon them by merchants of deception masquerading as religious leaders.

Sadly, there is no indication that many can emancipate themselves from this enslavement as these religious confidence tricksters trot out every kind of corporate or personal message along with false prophecies purporting to be of God to feed on the anxieties, fears, uncertainties and doubts of the sometimes vulnerable, sometimes stupid and usually both.

Taking advantage

Religious vampires with fangs long enough to sink deep into the heart to feast on the blood of those beholden to their whims, drawn away from the truth by the spectacular and paralysed by the fear of the retribution of blood thirsty animist gods in the misrepresentation of the Christian God.

It takes one back to those unsightly but horribly truthful paragraphs reproduced below from Lord Lugard’s book, The Dual Mandate that I covered in my Apes Obey Series [3].

Revisiting Apes Obey

In character and temperament, the typical African of this race-type is a happy, thriftless, excitable person; lacking in self-control, discipline, and foresight; naturally courageous, and naturally courteous and polite, full of personal vanity, with little sense of veracity, fond of music and loving weapons as an oriental loves jewellery.

His thoughts are concentrated on the events and feelings of the moment, and he suffers little from the apprehension for the future or grief for the past; his mind is far nearer to the animal world than that of the European or Asiatic, and exhibits something of the animals’ placidity and want of desire to rise beyond the State he has reached.

Through the ages the African appears to have evolved no organized religious creed, and though some tribes appear to believe in a deity, the religious sense seldom rises above pantheistic animalism and seems more often to take the form of a vague dread of the supernatural.

He lacks the power of organization, and is conspicuously deficient in the management and control alike of men or business; he loves the display of power, but fails to realize its responsibility; he will work hard with a less incentive than most races.

He has the courage of the fighting animal, an instinct rather than a moral virtue; in brief, the virtues and defects of this race-type are those of attractive children, whose confidence when it is won is given ungrudgingly as to an older and wiser superior and without envy.

Perhaps the two traits which have impressed me as those most characteristic of the African native are his lack of apprehension and his lack of ability to visualize the future.

Without doubt there is a need to review each of these traits as identified by Lord Lugard and see how certain who have acquired power by all sorts of means have been able to subjugate others so easily because therein lies the root of many of the problems Africans face today, a fifth of those Africans are apparently Nigerian.

[1] 4oD – Channel 4 – Unreported World - The Making Of … Nigeria’s Millionaire Preachers

[2] The Making Of … Nigeria’s Millionaire Preachers – The Widows’ Fellowship and Therese’s story.

[3] Introducing the Apes Obey! Series

Childhood: Ghosts and ghouls of my past

Seed thoughts of evil

I had an impressionable young mind, ripe and fertile for imagination and the imagining of things that take fear to another level.

I alluded to this in Childhood: Shocked into adolescence the two paragraphs appear below and I’ll continue from there.

I had a very terrifying experience when I returned home after 4 months down South when my aunt and our houseboy were chatting about appearances of evil and to the mind of an impressionable 10-year old there was fertile land for imaginations that could produce untold realities.

That night as my parents entertained guests, our kitchen was detached from the main building and as I went to place the dishes out at the washing area, I saw what I believed to be the devil and my life changed completely from then on, I knew fear, I knew terror, I found out that having my parents present did not save me from what my imagination could conjure for my seeing.

Ghouls and ghosts

In my first term at secondary school as a boarder, I arrived late enough to take the top bed of a bunk bed, the chap below lived to regret it, that, I wrote about in Childhood: Atòólé.

However, there was a bigger problem, we slept in pitch-darkness and the experience I had at home after a while followed me to school, my sleep interrupted one night and as I opened my eyes, I thought I saw something white fall from the high ceiling to the floor and that set me off.

I recited Psalm 23 out loud incessantly until I fell asleep out of exhaustion; it was a nuisance to others because it meant no one else could have sound sleep.

There were times I woke up and I thought I could hear things being dragged across the floor, all sorts of remedies were tried to no avail though bunking with others did seem to help, the nocturnal enuresis was intolerable.

Dark jungles of the unspeakable

I ended up with all sorts of nicknames from holy ghost to pastor, it was the latter that stuck. When the term break came, I was sent home and my parents were told I could not return to the boarding house until they had sorted the problem out.

This time between my aunt and grand-parents every kind of animist remedy was tried, baths in the strangest places, potions of suspect concoctions, an amulet belt and chewing razor blades – a story for another blog.

It was a deep dark world of all sorts of trials by anyone and everyone not to talk of the different incisions with things rubbed in on the chest, on the scalp, on my cheeks – all because a seed thought was planted in the mind of a child with a very vivid imagination.

The power of the mind

Now, one can reflect and wonder if the best thing to do was to tell better stories of triumphalism to wipe out those thoughts rather than what we all went through – the problem was my mind, my imagination and the grip it had on my reality.

There is very little you can do externally to arrest that and for all they everyone tried, the answer could have been a lot easier if we had a religion that was not steeped in superstition and fear but one that espoused a bold all-conquering Jesus.

I returned to the boarding house for the second-half of the second term, not as fearful but the mattress needing sunrays every few days.

Editorial: Eleventh of May 2011

No jumping to conclusions with closed doors

One may never understand what informs irrational behaviour by some that their actions endanger themselves and the lives of others.

It goes without saying that the complexity of the mind whilst allowing for moderation of behaviour by societal mores still has some just appearing to go off tangentially and it is only providence that prevents a catastrophic mishap.

We can be irked and piqued by circumstances beyond our control that make us lose patience and or even cause lateness that the people responsible do not do enough to placate the situation.

Air travel is generally safe but it has lost most of its allure of pleasure, there are others that do not fly well, they take to the bottle and other agents to help them through the journey.

The case of a man caught between different episodic issues trying to open the door to an airplane which was halfway between Orlando and Boston implies the airplane did not have steps set to the door for disembarkation.

Whilst the man would see a face of the law scowling and breathing fire, it is incumbent on us to keep an open mind and since the door was still closed there should be no danger of us jumping to conclusions either.

No invective enough to lambast this cretin

The sad death of 11 National Youth Service Corps members during the recently concluded Nigerian elections tugs at the heartstrings with sorrow and anger. This situation was in every way avoidable if all those responsible for their safety had not shirked their responsibilities.

Passing the buck is bad enough but the governor of the host state whose remit it was to ensure security and peace plumbed the depths of calumny and issued utterances that made many think he lacked both a heart and a mind.

Having first averred that the deaths of the people were a course of destiny they could not avoid, he contemned their memory by comparing their loss of life to the loss of replaceable property.

The backlash that followed his insensitive, intemperate, irresponsible and atrociously stupid comments had him trying to redeem himself by saying he would, given the opportunity personally shoot the killers of those people.

It leaves reasonable people completely lost for words as it belies a cretinous crop of nonentities that Nigeria has been cursed to have elected for public office.

There will be life insurance pay-outs, compensation for loss of life, help for their families, the memorialisation of martyrdom and much more, none of which can attempt to make amends for these tragedies.

The greater worry is what the smell of money might do to others who scenting a largess would be more preoccupied with how they can deprive those families of that blood-money for their selfish ends.

It goes without saying, the deaths were avoidable, the mobs should have been corralled and no government official should have been caught unawares by the eruption of violence and how it developed into carnage.

Statues come alive in my mind

Young and impressionable

That young minds can be impressionable is not something I would debate about, it is as self-evident as I can recall from my own experiences.

Only a few days ago, I caught the tail-end of a story by someone who was returning to a suburb in East-Africa and recalling that his father was one of the writers if not founder of the Drum Magazine [Source - Drum (magazine) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia].

Now, I remember, Dear Dolly, the agony aunt who handled letters of inquiry from people caught up in romantic dilemmas, however, there is one story that leaves the most indelible mark on my memory.

I read a story about a boy of about 10 years of age who had been murdered, that was bad enough, I was only 8 then – but the pictures of the scene of the murder and the body were so graphic beyond distress - the thoracic cavity was ripped open exposing the innards through the ribs, he might have been shot, but it looked like the boy was hacked to the death - and still, I returned to read the story and view the pictures to exacerbate my added discomfort.

Fiendishly Fried Friends

The one that brings on this blog is about another story that I read out of a comic-book, probably a Beano [Source - The Beano - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]. One of the characters was longing to see a friend, so he took a picture of the friend, put it in a frying pan and gave it a deep-fry – in the next strip the friend appeared.

I cannot say how I arrived at the concept of fried appearances, but there have been times when that idea and thought has gained more than the occasional meditation about the madness that my imagination can evoke.

The statue awakens in my mind

So, now in Berlin, I am staying on Budapester Strasse and this is just past a technical institute where a towering statue of Alexander von Humboldt [Source - Alexander von Humboldt - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia] stands touching a globe.

In the day time, I would walk by the front of the statue without a thought, at night, I would cross the street to avoid walking by the statue.

In fact, I am no enthusiast of statues that have the human form in any place other than museums where they are locked up and have no hope of escaping.

Yes, escape – I did say that – a whole mix of experiences have ingrained in me the idea that statues of bronze, marble, carbon fibre or any kind of molding material can animate and take a swing at me.

Between reason and fear

I find it interesting that when I have no other alternative than to walk amongst statues at night, the debate and conflict goes on in my mind as sound reason battles to the death with irrational fear about what is likely to happen.

The statues keeping still or become a rampaging mob, running after me just to have the fun of scaring me stiff.

Now, I do wonder what you would make of the statue in Oosterpark in Amsterdam of a boy sitting on a horned goat – even the without the drums beats in the middle of night, I break down in cold sweat and I am close to the paralysis caused by irrational fear.

Enjoy the slide-show of some of the statues that give me the creeps and I would update the collection which includes comments and descriptions with others as I approach them in the day time. (+_+)