By Birbal Boniface Musoba
8th
February, 2016
Once
upon a time, in a land enchanted by a Napoleon-complexed and charismatic trade
unionist, a land swept up by the romance, promise and seduction of a newly and
hard won democracy and a liberalised, pluralistic and free press, there lived an
average boy of average height and average intellect from an average family named
Aaron.
Now,
even though Aaron went to a government school on a military barrack in the
heart of the landlocked country’s third largest city, he most frequently found
himself in the gay companionship of children who went to the so-called, but now
defunct, fancy school of the day, a school whose name conjured sighs of
schizophrenic adulation from other children’s parents, eliciting in the
children, in turn, a deafening and envious demur that they their gullible, ingenuous
essences could not action.
Living
in the industrial and commercial centre of the once the economic backbone of
the British’s south central African protectorate, back in the days before M-net
and K-TV, back when the only available television channel would begin its
broadcast transmission at 17hrs with an hour of the much craved and beguiled
cartoons, the main palate of speech, even in the lower middle class home in
which he was raised, was one of the major Bantu languages spoken primarily in
north-eastern of the former British protectorate. But, from time to time, when Aaron
was in the company of his more affluently educationally predispositioned
friends, he would try as much as he could to master the Queen's speech, to the
bemused delight of his friends.
As
the days passed, with each week bleeding seamlessly into the next, echoing
louder the mediocrity of the former than a prepubescent boy should notice, Aaron’s
dreams - the metal and fabric that cushion childhood with a nostalgia-laced
indignation of sweet-days-gone-by – were robbed by the crushing and ever
reverberant realisation that, in his homeland, in this place in which his pride
and fever were supposed to be peaked, in this place, surrounded by his
contemporaries, which was supposed to be home, when one did not command the
language that enslaved us, the language that brought our forefathers to their
knees, stripped them of their decency and made them subserviently fellate their
pride away, the language that perversed our sisters and mothers’ chastity for
the parade of the affluently predispositioned, he becomes lesser - not lesser
in the regard of those who thought us lesser, no less, but lesser to his own
kin, his own tribe, his own people; akin to a medieval fag.
Today,
Aaron is no longer boy that average boy of average height and average intellect
from an average family, but he has grown into a man, an average man of average
intellect and ambition, but still a man. Today, Aaron, still fluently eloquent in
that language that is a lingua franca for 18 related ethnic groups, but having
have had his education make him travel beyond the borders that were so
dispassionately drawn to forever keep people united by the red soil of our continent
strangers, is still plagued by that old but familiar nagging anxiety: has the zeitgeist
changed or did those bemused and delighted children simply grow into the elitist
class that masks its abhorrent decency with gullible, ingenuous essences to the
outraged melancholy of society?
The
End
