A Requiem For Maiduguru By Patrick Oguejiofor December 4, 2013 - 20:37 — siteadmin By Patrick Oguejiofor This is a special tribute to the victims of numerous religious-motivated killings in the city of Maiduguri in recent times. I know an ancient city of Kings that stood on a tripod heritage of peace, faith and history. It does not matter if this peace is the perpetual presence of fear of what has become well-known and most dreaded. It does not really matter if the faith represents the barbarous termination of innocent lives in the vilest manner by demons from hell executing their Masters’ bidding with fanatical zeal. It does not also matter if the history is the bitter story of intolerance of fellow countrymen and women who are equally offering sacrifices of appeasements to foreign deities with obscure origins, wrapped in myths. I know a lovely city in the heart of the Sahel, a city that can take you to three countries: Chad, Niger and Cameroun within an hour’s drive. I love a beautiful home of peace surrounded by desert damsels with outstretched hands ready to bath a tired stranger with warmth and love. This is my private tribute to thousands of fellow sojourners in this family of humanity bludgeoned to death for no cause of their own. This is a dirge for nameless citizens of a world of horror that a once city of love and peace has become. This is a lamentation for the rape of a pregnant sister before the audience of the gods. This lamentation is for the corpse of a brother abandoned and bloated in the desert sun, begging for the funeral rites to commence. This is a requiem for a beloved that is no more; a sad song for a once great monument now bereft of glory, a city once sprawling with wealth and splendour but now flowing in blood of innocents, putrid corpses on the street, overflowing mortuaries. I cry for a city with ghosts of unburied corpses floating the air. But I see fanatics swallow my howling in the star-stripped night. I see slaves of cultural colonization mocking me. I see time swallow my cry. I also see time bathing in the blood-flooded city. Today, I see daylight. I see the sun and even though another day is here and tomorrow will come, I see no light. Maiduguri, Potiskum, Baga and Bama. I love these names. They sing lullabies. The musical tunes of Kanuri, Fulani, Babur and the rest drives me to sleep. They reminds of those great attributes of the Creator: Love, Peace and Mercy. The diversity of Nature. I am madly in love with these beautiful people and their beautiful languages, their beautiful heritage, their culture, their civilization. They made a bed of fur for me and in it I laid down my weary back for eight years. Today, Maiduguri stands like a great king conquered in war. Maiduguri, Oh Maiduguri, the homely city that paid host to thousands of my kinsmen in search of refuge after a genocidal civil war, turning them to Kings from paupers. Maiduguri, how I love you! You are the beautiful desert damsel by the roadside, waiting to be wooed. Maiduguri, I love your history of power and valour. Oh ancient city of the famous city of Kanem-Bornu empire, I am mesmerized by you. Yet I dread the gunfire that has taken over your streets. I dread the all-terrain-vehicles furiously roaming your suburbs, hunting down demons. Today, I dread the pronouncement of your name. I dread the shiver that runs down the spines of believers and unbelievers in your midst when your name is mentioned even in dreams. I dread recalling that night of eclipse of the moon and the dozens of lives it eclipsed away. What tragedy! Just that simple, natural phenomenon. And behold, innocents are offered as burnt offering to foreign gods. I dread recalling the carton riots that took away my sweet kinsmen and their hard earned wealth. I recall the hypocrisy in the faces of the authorities when pleadings for compensation and for justice to the demons behind the horror. Rev. Father Gajare! Remember him? Remember how he was mowed down in front of his shrine? I wished they had harkened to my prayers and sent the demons to a bottomless pit! I remember the trepidation that heralded the introduction of CRK in schools. How can I forget those faces of my kinsmen it blew away from this atrocious planet! I do not want to talk about the dreaded Maitatsine of three decades gone. And now, and now, and now. Hell’s bowel is opened and the devil is unchained and Maiduguri is his new abode. Maiduguri, how can I forget your beautiful citadel at Mairi village that reminds me of Umass, Boston? Oh, those NYSC years! Those sweet maidens that caressed my soul! Those youthful sweet, lustful years and the excesses! Oh Maiduguri, I love to caress your maidens once again! But listen to me, Maiduguri, my once beloved city: Go, weep! Weep in repentance. Centuries of western learning will make no difference to you if time is dragged back by a thousand years. Maiduguri, beautiful damsel in the desert morning sun, polluted by putrid smell of bloated corpses of innocents, lying in the sun, unburied, without funeral rites, I dread your memory. Cursed be the man who placed this curse on you! Cursed be the path that placed you on this inglorious path. Maiduguri, I dread your name because your inhabitants loathe humanity. Maiduguri, I dread your name because humanity has left you! Patrick Tagbo Oguejiofor is the author of Drums of Curfew, a collection of poems. He is the Vice Chairman of the Abuja Branch of the Association of Nigerian Authors (AN).
Posted on: Wed, 04 Dec 2013 22:42:27 +0000
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