National Issues
If That Would Cost Me The Freedom Of Biafra -By J. Ezike
On the 20th of April 1987 I was born. It was on a midnight –a time when Darkness and Light had merged. It was neither Night nor Day. It was on a time when two opposite Universal Forces had crossed path. My Mother and the Midwife who were mortal witnesses to my birth had said that I was born at an unusual hour. It was Full Moon. And I had left the world in my Mother’s womb and greeted the Universe at exactly 00:00. And so the Stars on the midnight sky of Kano Emirate registered my birth within that Sphere. In Divine Language the time of my birth signifies a Celestial Force – a union with the Infinite One. And if you wish to put it in one word – Eternity. Based on that Mystery System, my existence as a Soul in the World of Flesh at an unusual hour connoted both positive and negative meaning…
From that time I began my Journey of Life through the wilderness of thrashed roads and laborious ordeals. Over the next few years, precisely on my Fourth Age in the Emirate of Kano, the door of my mind was ajar to the hatred that lived amongst us and haunted the aliens whose tribal identity made them the “Marked men” and who by the virtue of their belonging to a religious group other than Islam won them the spoils of jihad. I was one of the aliens. And with my young carnal eyes, I witnessed the bloodiest religious war that would certainly pass for genocide.
It was in 1991. Even as a grown man, I had always declined to believe that my survival in that religious war was gifted by a fluke. It wasn’t luck that saved me. It was The Divine. I was inclined to accept that amidst the violence that engulfed the towns, I died from within –in a world that was beyond the physical. That death had risen upon me and walked me through the Rivers of Human Blood that I may witness with my young innocent eyes the sheer brutality of that royal graveyard, the mean-spirited and pitiless ideals that revealed the central purpose of One Nigeria. It marked the first stirrings of destiny. It was the Universe guiding my nascent visions and showing me the Great Evil to conquer.
I had not known myself very well while growing up as an immigrant. Every day of my existence in Flesh, Evil seemed to be the typical of life in One Nigeria. When life had ended in Kano, a precarious new one followed closely in wake. I became part of the generation of Igbo-Christians who fled the bazaar of mass slaughter and flocked in the barns of Lagos and Biafra land. My father’s strong-willed spirit was braced with stoic endurance that made him to rebound his financially beaten back to his feet and took the reins of the mad tragedies, healed the wounds of his misfortune in Kano and dared to face the hard conditions of life in One Nigeria. He was barely 27 years of age, married with four fledgling responsibilities on his young shoulders.
As I grew older, my Father became to me a survivor of many misfortunes, and throughout all those brutal years, he did not falter to stay resolute, to face the crushing realities with tremendous fortitude. As a young boy, observant, in tune with my realities, I gathered those visions and took mental notes of those events that were the preconditions to my imminent evolution. In the course of time, I flew into an awakening and the pliant self yielded to the energies that afflicted my vanity of desires. The effect caused my mind to expand its opening and my innermost ambitions paralyzed, so that my heart, deserted of material longing, was filled up with the passion for selflessness.
I do not remember in my growing years in Lagos, Jos, Gusau, Onitsha, Orlu and Abuja that my vision of One Nigeria would coalesce into an austere one, with a rigidly philosophical outlook. Amongst my peers I was certainly the one obscured by growing metaphysical oddities. The eclipsing of my Ordinary Self brought a cosmic surprise to me and to those with whom I found trust to share in the experience of my bizarre side, to be bored by the bleak scenes in my mind and the ever-flowing dreams that spoke the message of The Divine.
As a young boy, I had suspected that there was something in me that had always haunted my chosen paths. It was something silent but chilling, something that spoke in whispers and consistently harassed my mental world with visions, something that was there but Unseen. Something that consistently stirred itself in my spirit without my control.
I knew I was strange and I tried with unabating efforts to escape from the intolerable apparitions that became a part of my daily life. In the many deaths I had known, none proved to have established a deep spiritual contact than the death that succeeded the Kano religious war. It was a death that left me pale for over seven months. A death through ritual and the rather withering esoteric utterances consummated by blood, hair and sacrifice. I became the sacrificial to the world of darkness – a victim of satanic occult target. Drenched by the tears from my young Mother’s eyes and her prayers echoing and clamoring to my distant spirit straying away in the Great Beyond, cradled in her bosom, and under the triangular roof of a Holy Temple and prophets of the White Brotherhood, my scraggly young bones vacillated between life and death, fighting to beat the grave out of my dwindling flesh. My soul, the contention of Light and Darkness…
From what I was able to gather from my Mother, in the history of such evil, no victim had ever resurrected from or survived that kind of death. And for many years, I kept that peculiar page of my life a burning secret but somehow my long struggle in the world of the spirits, my indescribably transcendental encounter at the age of four, left a divine mark on my third eye and endowed my speech with the power of prophecy.
My strangeness was beyond all hope of cure. And like a hermit, I lived a life of solitude in my mind, keeping tabs of the countless imaginations that flashed in meteoric lightning. My long silences punctuated by shattering visions and a revolting spirit that protested to take the reins of my destiny. And I realized with the astonishment of a child observing the colorful silence of fire that I had an innate ability to bring into existence that which my speech had uttered and my mind had crystallized. By being committed to the dictates of the celestial force within, I reached towards the world of the Infinite Possibilities and by default became the Original Expression of the Uncreated Being.
Through my third eye, I saw the future and spoke its coming into life. They were times in the past when I spent great energy in the pursuit of superficial things and wrestled with the formidable opposition from within that unleashed scores of life crippling adversities. And I realized that in order to discover one’s greatest calling, one must be prepared to lose himself, to be forgotten in the eyes of the world and become non-existent from their memories and tune in to the frequency on the inside – the celestial force moored to the Soul.
In the scourge of poverty which I had known and the unbearable hardships that were a recurring motif I spoke into life, words that reverberated on the silent visions of my mind. As a teenager, it was shocking to me at first when my words guided by The Divine proved to be prophetic in the long run. The fulfillment wasn’t always immediate but it was a promise of credence. It was amusing to my friends at the University of Abuja when in 2008, I spoke casually of kick-starting my musical career in the United Kingdom. Of course my words were greeted with great ridicule. I was at once dismissed and tagged a dreamer. Here was a young man who drank almost on a daily basis, Garri with Kulikuli and could barely pay his cheap rent at the dregs of Gwagwalada. I remember in 2015, somewhere in Georgetown Guyana, I had told my landlord that one day my feet will meet the dust of India and then from there it shall walk on the streets of the two most viable countries in “North America.” My landlord in mild chuckles that betrayed the echoes of his mind must have thought of my words as one borne out of illusion. I spoke of a day when I would rejoice the birth of my younger brother. I spoke of a day when the restoration of our tragic loss in Kano will be made flesh. I spoke of many things that seemed impossible at first to the listener or the reader but they all came to past with passage of time. In the same vein, I spoke of a day when the freedom of Biafra will be realized.
I am a spiritual man contaminated by the imperfection of flesh. Like King David, King Solomon and Samson, I too have my demons. However, my spirituality made me radical and more mysterious in thoughts and actions. I cannot be deciphered by modern technology and organized schemes that I find totally laughable, somewhat childish for my Old Soul. I am a Great Mystery – a product of the ancient; even the “most intelligent” cannot comprehend. When I look into the eyes of any mortal born of a woman, I can pierce through their minds and capture their souls and know who they are and what they are – even when those eyes are shaded with the darkest goggles and those lips stitched into studious silence. Before you think of playing any mind game with me, be assured you’re dealing with a young man who communicates with spirits and who has died many times and isn’t terrified by death. But I guarantee you that the next time I shall die, immortality shall follow!
Permit me to share some of my dreams with you, my friend. Like Joseph, the Most High visited me in my dreams in 2016 and 2017, precisely. In one of my dreams, I saw the strangest mortal assembly gathered on a greener pasture. They were great numbers of people swarming in caravans. They were all alike, crammed-up and amassing towards an exalted image flying on air without wings on his back. The great crowd who walked on that greener pasture looked up towards the exalted image flying on the carpet sky. I am that exalted image. And I was gifted that revelation more than three times. In 2016, I had a dream where an ordained image was leading a great caravan of people with Biafran flag. Nnamdi Kanu was the ordained image. And I was gifted that revelation more than three times…
There are certain things and/or divine revelations I do not want to write. Thus I want these words to flutter in parables. I am not Nostradamus. And I certainly did not choose to engrave my image in the struggle for Biafran Independence. I was born for a reason. And I am fulfilling the Divine Will of the Most High.
I shall abruptly end this inspirited article on a strong note:
Since I was born and now that I am 32 years of age, I have been an immigrant, settled outside my ancestral land. And I am tired. I want to go home. And Biafra is my home. In all honesty, I dare say that I do not desire permanent residence or citizenship of any foreign country, including the country where I am currently
