Summer of Silence
“It occurred to me that if all of us who feel trapped by the loss of our voice through DN4 can gather in one big square and yell, “Why?” God may hear and answer.”
Oh! Summer. Summer has always been kind to me. Summer is my seminal season, my period of creative germination, when my thoughts run faster than my fingers on the typewriter. Unlike most other who procreate creatively in spring, the seasons of rebirth, and luxuriate in summer, I luxuriate in spring and procreate creatively in summer. Muse is kind to me in summer. But this is a different summer. This is my summer of discontent, when my fingers run faster than my thought. This summer does not permit me to look forward, for it is a summer of remembering things older, things which happened before I was born. It is the summer of thinking 40-year-old thoughts, thinking of a time that my mother had not even met my father. Only God knew then that I would be. Nobody else did 40 years ago. This summer encourages looking back. This summer forbids me to look ahead and think of tomorrow. Of what use is it to a seminal mind to worry so much about 40-year-old thoughts, thoughts of death, for those are the thoughts that this summer encourages. Forty years ago this summer, mankind stopped the mass killing called the Second World War. But the war was not only a European war. It was a world war in which Nigerians also fought and died, and it could not, therefore, be said that the war ended when the world pretended it ended. The war actually ended, in the real sense, at between 8.15 and 8.16 on the morning of August 6, 1945, when the Americans flew atop Hiroshima in Japan and dropped the bomb that changed permanently the march of man.
The bomb leads me to think of silence. And the bomb makes me think of South Africa, and then of silence. Silence makes me think of a new order in my country that says I can’t think to tomorrow and how I shall like to be governed. That is why this is my summer of discontent, when I am pulled three different ways: South Africa, The Bomb, death of free speech, each pulling me. No, I am pulled four different ways, for the three initial worries add a fourth: Silence. This is how they link up. The mad nuclear race between the US and the USSR means that mankind, of which I and mine are a part, will be obliterated if Reagan or Gorbachev decides for any reason to blow the world to smithereens by exploding their stockpile of nuclear arsenals. One of the reasons for which either of the two men man decide to put an end to the march of mankind can be South Africa. The racist regime in the underbelly of Africa may decide to use its nuclear weapons that is widely believed to exist in South Africa in a desperate effort to halt the march of reedom that has caught fire in that part of Africa. I always thought that the more than 20 million blacks who inhabit South Africa could not become free if they were not willing to play down their lives. OAU is irrelevant to their aspirations. In any case, they cannot expect their kith and kin up north to deliver them when they, too, are in need of deliverance. Verily, verily, no African can claim to enjoy God’s own free air.
That is why I concluded that the blacks in South Africa would have to deliver themselves by showing the readiness to lay down their lives in the battle against racism. I thought that they should be willing to die in their millions before Pieter Botha and his criminal government would believe that the end was indeed well nigh. That they are now doing. And coupled with international awareness that a fire is burning in South Africa, Botha and his clique now realize that one way or another a denouement is around the corner in the battle for supremacy in South Africa. Most people now believe that the apartheid system would collapse within the next five years. But nobody should expect the racists to fold their arms and stick their tails between their legs and run away. They will fight, they have always fought. And when the end is at hand, they will use their nuclear weapons. They have not acquired them for cosmetic purposes. And what do you think the Soviet Union will do when South Africa decides to explode nuclear weapons to battle blacks and Africa? And if the Soviet Union comes into the arena, what do you think the United States will do? Ronald Reagan has already made it clear in words and deeds that the whites of South Africa are his to protect by whatever means should the need arise. And he will be prepared to match the Soviet Union weapons for weapon in that imminent conflagration.
When that happens, Nigeria, which may appear far away from the hypocenter of the conflagration, will catch the heat in which millions of people of this country will surely fry to death. That is easy to imagine. Read the story of Hiroshima and the devastation that followed the bombing of the city 40 years ago. The big bang of nuclear explosion leaves one certain effect in its wake: Big silence. Thus by the time that the Buhari regime issued its order decreeing silence on the discussion of the future of Nigeria, I was already thinking about the evil of silence. The order sent me into a strange frame of mind: I went into a dialectical soliloguy on the meaning of tomorrow. It went thus: If I can’t discuss tomorrow today, can I discuss tomorrow that has become yesterday? Is it okay for me to discuss the subject of what someone discussed yesterday about the future of Nigeria, so long as I limit my language to the past tense? The philosophy failed even before it started. No chance for tomorrow. And the gloom set in. Why has this summer thruned life into one long booby trap forbidding thought and speech? It has since occurred to me that it is unlikely that I am the only one feeling trapped by hope unrealized, and that millions of us must be feeling so trapped. If all of us who feel this way about the loss of our voice can gather in one big square and yell, “Why?” God may hear and answer. But the chances are remote. God has done all He can for Nigeria and Africa. Our destiny is in our hands. He has given us spring and summer and free air. If we have squandered all, it is for us to ask: How?
©Newswatch, August 12, 1985
(Pp.270-272)
