The Contraption of Interest -By J. Ezike

It turns out, now, that the ethical barriers that I believe to exist between me and the hazards of a mutinous vocation are so thin as to be virtually imaginary. I certainly haven’t discovered yet, any principled reason for not retaining my status as a “rebel” within the subject of self-determination – which may not appeal to modern sensibilities – and it is not my complicated tale of misadventures or the past memorial scenes of the unsettled, African immigrant in London who are to be indicted or blamed for the rebellion I exude but this vassal institution.

Also, I do not intend to give civil consent or show a tiny spark of regard to this Lugard’s establishment or allow the “King of England” and his successors advise me on why this Pandora Box of Great Evils and Miseries should be preserved, and reduce me to these dehumanizing shows of objectification, and polish me with the triad, helot colors that ridicules my capacity to reason, and condition my mind to accept this abyss as God’s Plan, and instruct the bare-bones of my guts to display the true grit of a “suffering and smiling slave” by espousing a creative escape from the engineered hardship and by some fairy hope forge a survival instinct in making a “toxic pepper-soup” with the same “poisonous pepper” they have bequeathed and willed onto the helpless, disadvantaged, battered and dehumanized “HUMAN BEINGS” entrapped in this contraption of interest that mirrors the Devil’s Feces.

J. Ezike

And I am forced to ink the language of rage at the British Government and tell the King and his equerries in Buckingham Palace that it is a barbaric, an ungodly, an uncivilized and a Philistine-like manner of being to decree a system of arrangement upon a “free people” without their collective consent. And I am resolute – more resolute, really, than I ever was – never to make peace with the oppressor but to die and go to Hell before I would let any British Monarch place a chain of subjugation on my mind, or define and describe my identity as a Nigerian, or paint me as one of the conquered brains with that potentate brush or bewitch me into buying the crooked gospel of Nigeria’s indivisibility, or make me accept my sacrificial place in this republic of death.

I grew up in this contraption of interest becoming part of the eerie images in the sordid portrait of wickedness and greed. I was conditioned by the artist to poise in reckless silence at the injustices that frightened me terribly and made me an effigy to my own woes as citizen of this slave-making-machine. The only other possibility seemed to involve my becoming of the passive people who couldn’t find the rage in their spirit or the rhythm of the indignation they feel for their ill-fated existence co-lettered, co-authored and co-designed by a distant white man and his resident black boys.

I take this mutinous vocation seriously and I dare write about this eyesore that keeps staring at me, unkindly, with a dead-man’s gaze. Though my flesh is smitten and charred from this heat of mortal affliction and degradation, my mind – the greatest asset of my existence is full of life and alert to the gimmicks.  The fear of death is frightening enough, but the silence of cowardice is more frightening still.  The latter is another fear, a fear that the mind in responding with a rebellious streak to the injustice the flesh suffers, was putting the entire body on the path of mortification and sudden expiration. A child cannot praise a wicked lactating mother who deprives his infant thirst for milk, and knows the vast natural supply of it. He is apt to seize her of earthly peace with a rioting cry that speaks much of rebellion than plea.

To remain silent against injustice is simply to insure that one’s predicaments, afflictions, woes and miseries of oppression remains un-exiled, and one day, be devoured by it. The only way out is to challenge the tyranny with death-disdain. In order words, silence is not an option.

“Nigerians” must evolve from their lukewarm temperament and realize that they are the true enemies of their own salvation. The Nigeria which they ignorantly hold in esteem and with a misconceived patriotic zeal is not merely an Igbo, a Fulani, a Yoruba or an Hausa affair but a contraption of interest for the British Empire. And the gospel of a “Better Nigeria” is simply a musical gimmick that predates the conception and nativity of the founding fathers; it is a wrinkled lie as old as Adam. There is no way, no way whatsoever in steering this rickety, death-wheeled conveyance out of its deep-seated muddles.

I have said it before and I will say it again; Nigeria is finished. Now is the time to be rebellious for once in our miserable lives as citizens of this contraption of interest and demand an Independence Referendum as the democratic means to restore our dignity as free men and as HUMAN BEINGS.