A Son Remembers – By Billy Giwa
“I pray for his killers, that death may be more kind to them than they were to him and spare them, ever, the experience of dying.”
On October 19, 1986, my father was striped off a physical frame which encased a most noble spirit. All who saw what was left of him will agree that the flesh that coated him bore little resemblance to the Dele Giwa one knew in life. It has been a period of learning to evaluate life and its essence, or rather, a period dedicated to appreciating death for the meaning it gives to life and the way in which it promises to laugh brutish ambition to scorn. Such is bound to happen when the politics of death involves two: a villain and his victim. And it is here that I must contend with John Donne: death does not simply hide behind kings and desperate men out of timidity. Actually, it is they that death must flatter with the prospect of life uninhibited in its bid to achieve a design, while it remains the ultimate inhibition to their lives. But the prospect of endless pomb blursmurderous ambition’s vision and implicates a villan in death’s design to reduce man to beast. The short-sighted logic of perverted minds makes such people fail to realize that one day they too will lose the very they forced another to lose.
All this makes one wonder what it is all worth and what, in fact, a killer’s design is. Is it to kill a spirit or is it merely to deribe the spirit of its physical frame? If it is to achieve the latter, death may be temporarily proud. For, indeed, somewhere in Ekperi lies a form that disguised a spirit that spat celestial fire. There lies the gloty of death but what a glory: a shell dismembered, denuded and betrayed by the brokers of death is forced on us for interment but the spirit of the man continues to parade the land. We are finally left with a tragic indictment of a system done cannibal and a piteous spectacle of the baseness callous timid minds. With the benefit of hindsight, I now have the presence of mind to evaluate the tribute paid to my father – that which the method employed by his killers is suggestive of. What they said really is: ‘We cannot contend with your intellect. We can only hide behind a mask and employ sophisticated means of elimination to handle a most sophisticated man whose incisive prose sent ripples of the apocalypse down the spine of corrupt.’ Defined in this way, his killers present to us a sorry spectacle of cowards who murdered just to be rid of a critic. But has criticism ended in the land? There is nothing but a pyrrhic victory for them and such initial victory is wont to culminate in frightening episode. For someone once said that retribution means ultimately doing to one’s self what one thought he was doing to another. The same goes for their sympathizers and indelicate opportunists. A group of self-deceiving men who barter integrity for hypocrisy, those who must dine with desperate men and lend their dignities to the service of damnable ambition. And sadly enough, those who must remain afloat even if it costs them their conscience.
If their ambition, however, is to kill the spirit, then death may well bow its head in shame. What boldness would aim to stfle a disembodied yet active soul such as Dele Giwa’s? And what does such mind imagine would become of traits imprinted on hitherto blank spaces? What barrenness of thought would underestimate the enternal force of the written word? What sort of mind is ignorant of the external character of ideas, the undying and intellectual part of man? These draw me back to what baffles me, What is it all worth and why should men deal in death? Every death that occurs tells us something, albeit obvious, but which we lack the patience to appreciate. That is probably why we dress our dead so much that our consciousness gets glued to the celebration of life than to the contemplation of the essence of death. A decomposing body by the raod side compels a hurried turn away from the sordid spectacle because mocks our drunkenness with life. So drunk with life are we that some prefer to sell others to deah in a bid to secure for themselves life abundant. But the wise know that death only relieves life of the burden of flesh and a great many years of being afraid of death. For “death (as my father suffered) hath this also, that it openeth the gate to good fame and extinguisheth envy,” “(Envied when alive) The same man, dead, will be loved.” If great minds as Shakespeare’s, Donnie’s, Francis Bacon’s and Horace’s were so disposed, who says then that my father lost?
Perhaps if these had an analytical mind they would have thought twice of their action. Such minds would have informed them that it was both counter-productive and nonsensical to make a heroof one considered a social nuisance. But they do have minds, to be sure. It is the sort nurtured on the mundane legacy of social suppression and violent elimination, the sort that reaps the spoils of destruction, that fires gun on reason and bombs on truth, and almost always for all the wrong reasons. And this is sad enough. It is worse to think that the mode of assassination of one unarmed person questions a preparedness for the more tasking role society expects. Ordinarily, an aim such as they executed demands a carefully weighed analysis of the objective condition and the subjective factors that affect it; and an appreciation of the relationship between these. Such is necessary so as to avoid complications. But what does one expect of a disposition that sets action before thought, a betrayal of a lack of tact in a conspiracy that thrived only because it has the wherewithal to set justice on a step forward and two backwards. As they say, might is right. But for the rest of us (the mightless), it is all sad, very sad.
In this event, what is left for me (for I must speak for myself), however, is an unwavering relationship with the only one to be trusted these days – God. It is to him that I must turn, pray and communicate my fears and despair; and thses are legion. I feel and fear and pray for his motherland for she is the worst for it. In a number of ways. I find our fate (the motherland and mine) somewhat identical. We have been made charity cases of some sort – she at the mercy of the big capitalist countries and I (and four others) of the goodwill of kind people. I feal and pray for the motherland whosechildren (that ought to know) are failing over themselves in the worship and, by implication, perpetuation of a reality that all the gods that our forefathers worshipped must damn. I pray that the drift (ominous as it is) that dollaercentrism has set in her course does not waste her potentials. Also I pray for my father’s spirit, his love and dedication for a purposeful national direction: for Newswatch his baby, that death does not take what life gave. Mama Ayiyi Giwa, bereaved mother and widow both; for Dele Junior, Tunde , little Funmi and Aishat, orphans of truth, I pray, confident that God cares.i pray for well-wishers and sincere friends; for Alhaji Abdulaziz Ude, a kind gentleman. For an unshaken commitment to a friend one had and a cause both shared, I must say the words of Alexannder Pope: to your coffin Gani Fawehinmi, which shall be lined in embroidered silk, have a satin pillow, your name and titles on a gold plate set in the finest cedar – 100 years from a tree I shall plant. And for his killers, that death may be more kind to them than they were to him and spare them, ever, the experience of dying.
©The Guardian, October 19, 1989
(Pp.301-304)
