HAJJ SHUAIB, THE WHITE-BEARDED COLOSSUS IS NO MORE

Yesterday, we prayed behind the great Ghanaian Islamic scholar, Sheikh Abubakar Shuaib popularly known as Hajj Shuaib. There is nothing special about our praying behind him. As a matter of fact, this is an imam who has always led prayers for more than two decades of his precious life. And most of us always prayed behind him if not at his mosque in Nima, Japan Motors on the Graphic road where he led the Friday special prayers or Nii Boi Town mosque near his residence or wherever he found himself.

Yesterday’s prayer was special in a very special style and fashion. As usual, he was in front of us but not standing. He lay lifelessly as we stood behind him full of life. He was not the one leading the prayers but the one whom the prayers were said for. We did not hear his throat been cleared as we always did when he led the prayers. Rather, we kept hearing a roaring of Takbirs because of the overwhelming number of people who came to pay their last respects to the fallen giant.  In simple English, Hajj Shuaib had crossed over to the shores of the afterlife and we were there to safely escort him on his journey to the land of no return.

The ocean of people that came to wish him well and pay their last respects indeed was a loud statement. It was a loud statement of his great life which impacted people near and far. And their testimonies of his good works, his impact in their lives, how he lived and breathed knowledge and his  immense contribution to the development of the next Ghanaian generation further gives impetus to the statement that “ how one lives his or her life today stands as a testament to one’s forever after.”

The gathering of well-wishers saw people from all walks of life.  I saw great scholars lowered head just short of shedding tears. I saw former great government functionaries and a number of our parliamentarians. I saw chiefs and I saw the teeming youth that thronged the cemetery.  I saw people that hitherto you would see cruising in their big cars walk from the Imam’s residence to the cemetery; damming the heat of scorching heat of the sun and the dusty distance. The sadness on their faces gave away the fact that it was least expected that Hajj Shuaib would leave very soon. He was full of life and had even led the Isha prayers at his Nima mosque the night before.

There was a tacit agreement in the atmosphere that regardless of your status in life, you will one day be bathed, wrapped and left in the belly of the earth to rot. After all, a great man had once driven the point home well when he stated that “there is an amazing democracy about death. It is not aristocracy for some people, but a democracy for all of the people. Kings die and beggars die, rich men die and poor men die; old people die and young people die; death comes to the innocent and it comes to the guilty. Death is the irreducible common denominator of all men.”

So a great man died. A giant, a colossus, and a walking- institution all rolled into one. Unfortunately, he did not capture his life in a single document for posterity to glean from. He never codified his life experience for the upcoming ones to aspire to. He never gave life to the statement he made when he was given a lifetime achievement award last year. He stated that he learnt at the feet of the Deputy National Chief Imam of Ghana, Sheikh Kamaludeen Abubakar.                  He recounted how profound the studies were such that when they went to Saudi Arabia, the Arabs wondered how impeccable the Arabic they spoke was and how fervid and immaculate their appreciation of Islamic teachings stood.

Two years ago when we lost one great entrepreneur, I wrote about a social malady we have as a people. And until we begin to step up the plate and remediate it, we will wake up one day with all our stalwarts gone and by tether, a wealth of experience denied the subsequent generations. I wrote “however, we need more of the lives of our successful ones to be written. It will resonate well with our circumstances here in Ghana. In that way, we can easily identify with the choices they made. The situation elsewhere can never be the same as in Ghana. We should be given the honor of knowing how they were able to make it in a land Mensah Otabil described as “poisoned”. That will definitely inspire us and imbue in us the “confidence that through pluck and sweat and smarts, each of us can rise above the circumstances of our birth” as Barrack Obama stated.”

Few or absolutely nothing has been penned down on the life of this great intellectual. We only have scanty information on the highlights of his wonderful life.  He lived for knowledge, its acquisition and its impartation.

For more than a decade, Hajj Shuaib taught and explained the verses of the Quran every Saturday and Sunday at his mosque in Nima. A lot of people move from far and near to learn at his feet to imbibe the lessons contained in the Quran and to also lead their lives. To teach the Quran is a no mean task. It is to free people from the limitations of life. Riffat Hassan, the Pakistani Islamic Rights Specialist opined that “to many Muslims the Qur’an is the Magna Carta of human rights and a large part of its concern is to free human beings from the bondage of traditionalism, authoritarianism (religious, political, economic, or any other), tribalism, racism, sexism, slavery or anything else that prohibits or inhibits human beings from actualizing the Qur’anic vision of human destiny embodied in the classic proclamation: “Towards Allah is the limit.” Sheikh therefore has made many people realize themselves and lead wonderful lives.

His name became synonymous with Quran exegesis because of the numerous years he spent doing that at different times of the day. Sometimes after Asr prayers, other times after maghrib. He was also a constant feature on Metro TV every Friday teaching and explaining the Quran. Few years ago, he celebrated a full completion of the Quran on the show. It took him a decade and more to do that. Impressive feat.

He was a master story-teller. You need to see him dramatizing how Allah called Prophet Musah in the wilderness. The baritone voice, the giant figure and the power of knowing what you are saying comes into play. It makes you capture the essence of the story; the reason Allah relays them to the Prophet.  Hajj Shuaib was the best per the description of the Prophet that “the best of us is the one who learns the Quran and teaches it.

Much more significantly, Hajj Shuaib gave a platform for a once upon a time young generation to learn, grow and become responsible adults in the society when he established the famous Kubbatul-Khadra Islamic school in Nima a year after Gold Coast attained its independence.   Interestingly, when he established the school, he left to Saudi Arabia to further his studies (after missing the chance to do it in Egypt). His elder brother, the deputy National Chief Imam, Sheikh Abubakar Kamaludeen took charge. The school became known as “Kamaaliya School”.  Hajj Shuaib stated that had it not been for the fact that all the documents of the school bore the name Kubbatul Khadra, he would have maintained the name Kamaaliya when he returned, out of the profound respect and love he has for his elder brother. The school produced great scholars in Ghana. Notable among these are Sheikh Muhammad Sualih (popularly known as Mijin Yawaa), the late Sheikh Muhammad Juma, Sheikh Saeed Dahman, the great Jinn Exorcist cum Imam of the Zabarma mosque in Nima (he taught me once upon a time), Sheikh Abubakar Kamaludeen, the leader of the Shia Community in Ghana and Mallam Abubakar Muhammad Safo Yanki (one great teacher of mine who seriously broadened my horizon). Interestingly, a product of that school who became its headmaster from 1989 (the year of my birth) taught me Akhadari’s Compendium of Islamic Jurisprudence. He is the late Mallam Mohammed Haadi. At a point in time, the student population of the school stood at five hundred plus. The school has now blossomed into a full secular school run from Monday to Friday without losing touch of the reason for its establishment; the weekend Islamic studies. Once upon a time he established the first ever College for Teachers at the now Nima Cluster of schools where great Muslim clerics were nurtured and developed.

Very little is known about his authorship.  He was the first to translate Imam An-Nawawi’s Forty Hadith into the Hausa language. And this was not an obscure publication done from any corner of his room. It was published with pomp and occasion at Saudi Arabia. He also compiled an Arabic-Hausa dictionary; the publishers, Sublu Salam for Publication and Distribution have stated that its publication never saw the light of day. Sheikh Shuaib also gave language a certain aesthetic feel by releasing an elegy that is absolutely mind-blowing and humbling to the soul.  He also has another one about an interaction he had with his mum.

Hajj Shuaib Abubakar was knowledgeable, giver of knowledge, a striver in the cause of the development of Islamic culture in the world. His eighty-one years on earth was a chronicle of distinction and dynamism. It saw a honorable work with the Saudi Ministry in charge of Islamic Affairs, lectureship at the University of Ghana and a Vice- Chairmanship with the Supreme Muslim Council for Research and Da’awah. He never wavered on his principles. There have been many occasions he walked out of programmes because the programme started lately than as scheduled. He symbolized the fact that our attitude towards time determines progression or regression. He was a clock on feet.

Sheikh Shuaib Abubakar was a human being. He may have had his faults. However, as Muslims, we are exhorted by the Prophet to increase in recounting the good deeds of our dead ones.

May Allah rest his soul in absolute serenity.

DISCOVER YOUR DESTINY

So i went to deliver a book to a customer and he ended up giving me loads of books to go and read. The first from the collection i received from him is a very powerful book by Robin Sharma. The book is Discover Your Destiny. These are some of the statements i gained from the book.

Enjoy!

 

1. No one takes you seriously when you take yourself too seriously you know.”
2. “Every human being needs to carve out the time to articulate a philosophy for his or her life.
3. “Every person must define how he wants to live and what his biggest life will look like.”
4. “Most people spend more time planning their summer vacations than they do planning their lives.”
5. “Without a philosophy, you will live your life according to other people’s wishes. You’ll be like those lemmings following the crowd as they walk off the cliff to their deaths.”
6. “Most people don’t discover how to live until it’s time to die and that’s a shame. Most people spend the best years of the lives watching television in a subdivision. Most people die at twenty and are buried at eighty. Please don’t let that happen to you.”
7. “Only you can discover your destiny.”
8. “Success is important but significance is even better.”
9. “I’ve never seen a U-Haul following a hearse on the way to the cemetery.”
10. “How we show up when we meet the turning points of our lives has a big influence on how our lives ultimately unfold.”
11. “I measure my life not by decades but by deeds.”
12. “I’ve learnt that lasting happiness comes by giving, not getting.”
13. “A little fragrance always clings to the hand that gives roses.”
14. “Be like the sun: the sun gives all it can give. But in return, all of the flowers, the trees, and all the plants grow towards it.”
15. “Life does not listen to your logic; it goes on its way, undisturbed. You have to listen to life; life will not listen to your logic; it does not bother about your logic.”
16. “Your life is a treasure and you are so much more than you know.”
17. “Trust the winter of your sorrow will yield to the summer of your joy, just as the brilliant rays of the morning always follow the darkest part of the night.”
18. “Fear not the unknown for it is where your greatness resides.”
19. “Death is only one of the many ways to lose your life.”
20. “It is a truth that in our darkest times, we are willing to go the deepest.”
21. “The mind is limited while the heart is limitless.”
22. “Give up the drop, become the ocean.”
23. “Your wounds must be turned into your wisdom.”
24. “You are far greater than you have ever dreamed of being.”
25. “Learn from life and allow it to take you where you are meant to go.”
26. “To be enlightened is to be all light: one who is all light has no shadows, no dark side, no fears, no anger, no resentments and no limitations.”
27. “The whole reason we are alive I believe is to grow into our greatest selves and remember the truth about who we fundamentally are.”
28. “Where you stumble, there your treasure lies.”
29. “But we grow most from our greatest challenges.”
30. “You are the hero or heroine of your life.”
31. “The best way to learn is to teach”
32. “Without a philosophy, you just might find yourself on your deathbed and wonder “what if my whole life was a lie”?
33. “What fun is life without a hint of mystery? What joy is life without a little adventure?
34. “Whoever enters The Way without a guide will take a hundred years to travel a two-day journey.”
35. “It’s hard to believe that we live in a world where most people are more concerned with following the crowd and doing what everyone else is doing than living the dreams.”
36. “Do not live your life as a timid soul, my friend. Get into the arena, forget about the critics, and play big with the gifts of your days.”
37. “There is but one failure in life and that is the failure to try.”
38. “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one tries to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw.
39. “To take risk to provoke fear, anger. But to take risks is to be most alive.”
40. “Big risks, big life. Small risks, small life.”
41. “To get to the wells, the driver needs to be willing to go deeper and visit the places that the timid souls would never visit.”
42. “Spending time alone in silence everyday is a tool that will help you awaken and reclaim your authentic power.”
43. “We never get more than we can handle.”
44. “Reading the book of another person is a reflection of their truth.”
45. “The purpose of life is to return to wholeness.”
46. “And people who do not have any self-respect have no idea how to give respect to others.”
47. “Mind, body, emotions, your spirit.” Four awakenings.
48. “If you don’t act on life, life will act on you.”
49. “Wise people remind themselves that everyday could be their last.”
50. “Each day is an opportunity to make a difference in how our obituary will read.”
51. “Life is a gentle balance between making things happen and letting things happen.”
52. “The heroic life is living the individual adventure. To refuse the call means stagnation.”
53. “Know thyself and you’ll know the universe and the gods.”
54. “What the caterpillar sees at the end of the world, the master sees as the butterfly.”
55. “To have a better life, we must keep choosing how we are living.”
56. “Adversity calls forth the soul’s courage to bear unflinchingly whatever heaven sends.”
57. “Forgiveness is the fruit of understanding.”
58. “Living an excellent life is a manifestation of self love.”
59. “Synchronicity is God’s way of remaining anonymous. There’s a higher intelligence at play whose logic we often cannot understand.”
60. “Extremism in any form is unhealthy.”
61. “To be unconscious as to what life is about and why we are here is to be caught up in a misrepresentation.”
62. “When you shift from compulsion to survive into a heartfelt commitment to save, your life cannot help but explode into success.”
63. “It takes great strength to leave the crowd and be true to your original nature. But that’s what leadership is all about – leaving the crowd and being true to who you really are. You don’t fin diamonds in store rooms, sandal trees in rows, lions in flocks, and holy men in herds.”
64. “Self-examination is the first step to personal greatness.”
65. “We are divorced from our original nature. We have grown into false figments of our once magnificent selves.”
66. “The soul would rather fail at its own life than succeed at someone else’s.”
67. “Nothing is more important than having the bravery to live your own life.”
68. “Confusion always gives rise to clarity.”
69. “You can have anything you want if you want it desperately enough. You must want it with an exuberance that erupts through the skin and joins the energy that created the world.”
70. “It’s time to come to your senses. You are to live and to learn to laugh. You are to learn to listen to the cursed radio music of your life and to reverence the spirit behind it and to laugh at its distortions. So there you are. Nothing more will be asked of you.”
71. “Nothing so destroys the heart as the knowledge that you had the chance to manifest the gorgeous potential that you were meant to be and you refused to accept the call.”
72. “To refuse to accept the call of your best life is to insult the force that created you.”
73. “There’s nothing wrong with a man crying. Never forget that a person closed off from his feelings lacks sensitivity, compassion and empathy. Such people are of the kind who start wars, commit crimes and spread hate. Do not avoid your feelings. They are essential part of the authentic person you are.”
74. “It’s been said that laughter is the shortest distance between human hearts. When we laugh together, all the social constructs that keep us apart fall to the wayside and we connect as real people.”
75. “We are all bonded together at an invisible level and a voice of knowing within me told me to disregard this truth was to buy into the illusion fostered by the crowd. We are not separate. I appreciated. We are connected with unseen ties.”
76. “I have since discovered that we can connect with each other through the common sharing of our pain. If everyone in the world came together for half an hour and shared all of the personal suffering they have endured over the course of their lives, we would all be friends. There would be no enemies, there would be no wars.”
77. “Dreams are the language of the soul.”
78. “Life is lived in the now.”
79. “Fix your course to a star and you can navigate any storm.”
80. “The only people without problems and adversity are six feet under the ground.”
81. “No hardships ever last.”
82. “No setbacks are forever.”
83. “No mystery lasts eternity.”
84. “The universe is not ignorant of your heart longings.”
85. “I am not on this earth by chance. I am here for a purpose and that purpose is to grow into a mountain, not to shrink into a grain of sand.”
86. “Life is on the wire. The rest is just waiting.”
87. “The best move you can make is to work on your self-relationship.”
88. “Most people have lost connection with themselves. They have forgotten who they truly are.”
89. “Know yourself and I promise you your destiny will find you.”
90. “There is a giant asleep within every person. When that giant awakes, miracles happen.”
91. “Self-service is the rent I pay for living on this wonderful planet.”
92. “Yes, daily choices would have a big impact on the way my life turned out.”
93. “You do your best and then let nature do the rest.”
94. “I have a duty in respect to life, to let my light shine and take action around my dreams.”
95. “Life is a growth school, ideally created to give us opportunities to learn on the planet. We live on ‘schoolhouse earth.’
96. “Within your heart all answers lie. Walk towards your fears and then you’ll learn to fly.”
97. “We are born fearless and with wide-open hearts. We are born knowing the natural laws that rule the world and why we are here. But-and I know you know this. We want to please those around us and fit into the crowd.”
98. “You see, life is all about education. Each day will teach you the lessons you need to learn if you pay attention to it.”
99. “Life is such a fragile thing. I never truly knew that until now. It is a priceless treasure that we are given to guard and make use of to the best of our ability. That it will not come again is what makes it sacred.”
100. “I’ve since learnt that reflection is the mother of wisdom.”
101. “We must pay attention to life. We must frequently be in connection with our dreams.”
102. “The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.”
103. “Become a person of action, one of those indomitable souls who go out and hunt down the greatest life. Do the best that you know how to do. And then let go and accept whatever comes to you with a happy heart and perfect certainty that this is what nature intended for you.”
104. “Nothing good comes without some sort of sacrifice.”
105. “Go for long walks in the wood.”
106. “Listen to your favorite music.”
107. “In every winter’s heart lies a quivering spring. Behind the veil of each night waits a smiling dawn.”
108. “Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment that the miracle is in the here and now.”
109. “It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”
110. “The longest life is incredibly short when measured against the benchmark of eternity.”
111. “In order to awaken your life, it’s important that you die while you are alive.”

 

Thank you.

 

Mugabe’s POWERFUL AND VOCIFEROUS Speech to the UN General Assembly.

Mugabe with Blakk Rasta

On 26th September, 2007, the walls of New York came tumbling down when President Mugabe delivered a very powerful speech at 62nd Session of the UN General Assembly. It is one of the powerful speeches i have ever read. I capture it here for you.

Enjoy!

 

 

Your Excellency, President of the 62nd Session of the United Nations General Assembly, Mr. Srgjan Kerim,
Your Majesties,
Your Excellencies, Heads of State and Government,
Your Excellency the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Mr. Ban Ki-Moon,
Distinguished Delegates,
Ladies and Gentlemen.
Mr. President,

Allow me to congratulate you on your election to preside over this august assembly. We are confident that through your stewardship, issues on this 62nd Session agenda be dealt with in a balanced manner and to the satisfaction of all.

Let me also pay tribute to your predecessor, Madame Sheikha Haya Rashed Al Khalifa, who steered the work of the 61st Session in a very competent and impartial manner.

Her ability to identify the crucial issues facing the world today will be remembered as the hallmark of her presidency.

Mr. President,

We extend our hearty welcome to the new Secretary-General, Mr. Ban Ki-Moon, who has taken up this challenging job requiting dynamism in confronting the global challenges of the 21st Century. Balancing global interests and steering the United Nations in a direction that gives hope to the multitudes of the poor, the sick, the hungry and the marginalized, is indeed a mammoth task. We would like to assure him that Zimbabwe will continue to support an open, transparent and all-inclusive multilateral approach in dealing with these global challenges.

Mr. President,

Climate change is one of the most pressing global issues of our time. Its negative impact is greatest in developing countries, particularly those on the African continent. We believe that if the international community is going to seriously address the challenges of climate change, then we need to get our priorities right. In Zimbabwe, the effects of climate change have become more evident in the past decade as we have witnessed increased and recurrent droughts as well as occasional floods, leading to enormous humanitarian challenges.

Mr. President,

We are for a United Nations that recognizes the equality of sovereign nations and peoples whether big or small. We are averse to a body in which the economically and militarily powerful behave like bullies, trampling on the rights of weak and smaller states as sadly happened in Iraq. In the light of these inauspicious developments, this Organization must surely examine the essence of its authority and the extent of its power when challenged in this manner.

Such challenges to the authority of the UN and its Charter underpin our repeated call for the revitalization of the United Nations General Assembly, itself the most representative organ of the UN. The General Assembly should be more active in all areas including those of peace and security. The encroachment of some U.N. organs upon the work of the General Assembly is of great concern to us. Thus any process of revitalizing or strengthening of the General Assembly should necessarily avoid eroding the principle of the accountability of all principal and subsidiary organs to the General Assembly.

Mr. President,

Once again we reiterate our position that the Security Council as presently constituted is not democratic. In its present configuration, the Council has shown that it is not in a position to protect the weaker states who find themselves at loggerheads with a marauding super-power. Most importantly, justice demands that any Security Council reform redresses the fact that Africa is the only continent without a permanent seat and veto power in the Security Council. Africa’s demands are known and enunciated in the Ezulwini consensus.

Mr. President,

We further call for the U.N. system to refrain from interfering in matters that are clearly the domain of member states and are not a threat to international peace and security. Development at country level should continue to be country-led, and not subject to the whims of powerful donor states.

Mr President,

Zimbabwe won its independence on 18th April, 1980, after a protracted war against British colonial imperialism which denied us human rights and democracy. That colonial system which suppressed and oppressed us enjoyed the support of many countries of the West who were signatories to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Even after 1945, it would appear that the Berlin Conference of 1884, through which Africa was parceled to colonial European powers, remained stronger than the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is therefore clear that for the West, vested economic interests, racial and ethnocentric considerations proved stronger than their adherence to principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The West still negates our sovereignties by way of control of our resources, in the process making us mere chattels in out own lands, mere minders of its trans-national interests. In my own country and other sister states in Southern Africa, the most visible form of this control has been over land despoiled from us at the onset of British colonialism.

That control largely persists, although it stands firmly challenged in Zimbabwe, thereby triggering the current stand-off between us and Britain, supported by her cousin states, most notably the United States and Australia. Mr Bush, Mr. Blair and now Mr Brown’s sense of human rights precludes our people’s right to their God-given resources, which in their view must be controlled by their kith and kin. I am termed dictator because I have rejected this supremacist view and frustrated the neo-colonialists.

Mr President,

Clearly the history of the struggle for our own national and people’s rights is unknown to the president of the United States of America. He thinks the Declaration of Human Rights starts with his last term in office! He thinks he can introduce to us, who bore the brunt of fighting for the freedoms of our peoples, the virtues of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. What rank hypocrisy!

Mr President,

I lost eleven precious years of my life in the jail of a white man whose freedom and well- being I have assured from the first day of Zimbabwe’s Independence. I lost a further fifteen years fighting white injustice in my country.

Ian Smith is responsible for the death of well over 50 000 of my people. I bear scars of his tyranny which Britain and America condoned. I meet his victims everyday. Yet he walks free. He farms free. He talks freely, associates freely under a black Government. We taught him democracy. We gave him back his humanity.

He would have faced a different fate here and in Europe if the 50 000 he killed were Europeans. Africa has not called for a Nuremberg trial against the white world which committed heinous crimes against its own humanity. It has not hunted perpetrators of this genocide, many of whom live to this day, nor has it got reparations from those who offended against it. Instead it is Africa which is in the dock, facing trial from the same world that persecuted it for centuries.

Let Mr. Bush read history correctly. Let him realize that both personally and in his representative capacity as the current President of the United States, he stands for this “civilization” which occupied, which colonized, which incarcerated, which killed. He has much to atone for and very little to lecture us on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. His hands drip with innocent blood of many nationalities.

He still kills.

He kills in Iraq. He kills in Afghanistan. And this is supposed to be out master on human rights?

He imprisons.

He imprisons and tortures at Guantanamo. He imprisoned and tortured at Abu Ghraib. He has secret torture chambers in Europe. Yes, he imprisons even here in the United States, with his jails carrying more blacks than his universities can ever enroll. He even suspends the provisions of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. Take Guantanamo for example; at that concentration camp international law does not apply. The national laws of the people there do not apply. Laws of the United States of America do not apply. Only Bush’s law applies. Can the international community accept being lectured by this man on the provisions of the universal declaration of human rights? Definitely not!

Mr President, We are alarmed that under his leadership, basic rights of his own people and those of the rest of the world have summarily been rolled back. America is primarily responsible for rewriting core tenets of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We seem all guilty for 9/11. Mr. Bush thinks he stands above all structures of governance, whether national or international.

At home, he apparently does not need the Congress. Abroad, he does not need the UN, international law and opinion. This forum did not sanction Blair and Bush’s misadventures in Iraq. The two rode roughshod over the UN and international opinion. Almighty Bush is now corning back to the UN for a rescue package because his nose is bloodied! Yet he dares lecture us on tyranny. Indeed, he wants us to pray him! We say No to him and encourage him to get out of Iraq. Indeed he should mend his ways before he clambers up the pulpit to deliver pities of democracy.

Mr President,

The British and the Americans have gone on a relentless campaign of destabilizing and vilifying my country. They have sponsored surrogate forces to challenge lawful authority in my country. They seek regime change, placing themselves in the role of the Zimbabwean people in whose collective will democracy places the right to define and change regimes.

Let these sinister governments be told here and now that Zimbabwe will not allow a regime change authored by outsiders. We do not interfere with their own systems in America and Britain. Mr Bush and Mr Brown have no role to play in our national affairs. They are outsiders and mischievous outsiders and should therefore keep out! The colonial sun set a long time ago; in 1980in the case of Zimbabwe, and hence Zimbabwe will never be a colony again. Never!

We do not deserve sanctions. We are Zimbabweans and we know how to deal with our problems. We have done so in the past, well before Bush and Brown were known politically. We have our own regional and continental organizations and communities.

In that vein, I wish to express my country’s gratitude to President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa who, on behalf of SADC, successfully facilitated the dialogue between the Ruling Party and the Opposition Parties, which yielded the agreement that has now resulted in the constitutional provisions being finally adopted. Consequently, we will be holding multiple democratic elections in March 2008. Indeed we have always had timeous general and presidential elections since our independence.

Mr. President,

In conclusion, let me stress once more that the strength of the United Nations lies in its universality and impartiality as it implements its mandate to promote peace and security, economic and social development, human rights and international law as outlined in the Charter. Zimbabwe stands ready to play its part in all efforts and programmes aimed at achieving these noble goals.

I thank you.

RULES FOR WINNING TRIALS

 

 

Rule #1: Remember that life is a series of seasons. Every human being will have to endure the harshness of a few winters in order to get to the glory of the best summers. Never forget that winters do not last.
Rule #2: Join the Hope Club. Big, beautiful, and seemingly impossible goals are superb vehicles to keep you inspired as you walk through adversity. Remember Da Vinci’s words: “Fix your course to a star and you can navigate any storm.” When you are reaching for great and noble goals that speak to the best within you, your desire to reach them will pull you through the tough times that you will encounter along the seeker’s path.”
Rule #3: Keep in mind, at all times, that we grow the most from our greatest suffering. As we go through it, it hurts. But as we move through it, it also heals. When a jug of water falls to the floor and cracks, what was hidden within begins to pour out. When life sends you one of its curves, remember that it has come to help crack you open so that all the love, power, and potential that had been slumbering within you can be poured into the world outside you. And, like a fractured bone, we do become stronger in the broken places.
Rule #4: Failure is a choice. Nothing can stop a man or a woman who simply refuses to be kept down. The book Go Getter will be very helpful on this point. Read it often. Just make a decision from the center of your heart that, no matter what happens to you, you will keep walking the authentic path. Doing so will ensure you a life of real success.
Rule #5: During rough times, there is a tendency to let go of yourself. As you encounter adversity, have the discipline to maintain your routine. Get up early. Do your holy hour. Eat very well. Exercise. Spend time with nature and make sure that you do all you can to keep all four of your central dimensions- the mind, the body, the emotions, and the spirit- in fine operating order.”
Rule #6: Feel your feelings. When you are facing hard times, some people will tell you to “just think positive thoughts.” Such advice is not helpful. While I agree that you cannot move the car forward if you are staring in the rearview mirror and that living in the past is unhealthy, one must not rush to reframe a so-called negative event as a positive one. Doing so will throw you into denial. Feel through the feelings of hurt, anger, or sadness that will naturally surface. It’s okay to be with them. It’s actually healthy to do so. Processing through them allows you to release them. Just don’t get stuck in them. The key is really to strike a balance. Experience the feelings that arise so you do not end up swallowing them and allowing them to fester. At the same time, use your intellectual powers to see the silver lining that every dark cloud brings. This is not a scientific process and ultimately you need to do what feels right for you.
Rule #7: Remember too, no matter how hard things get, you are never alone.

 

Culled from the book Discover Your Destiny by Robin Sharma. 

Thank you.

 

PABULUM FROM THE CLOTHES OF NAKEDNESS

In the 2012/2013 Academic year, i got admitted in the University of Professional Studies to pursue a Tertiary Diploma in Marketing. One of the courses i had to study was Communication Skills. One of the requirements of the course is a book written by one Benjamin Kwakye titled The Clothes of Nakedness.

I fell in love with the book because the setting is Nima, where i come from. And the book contains statements that are worth keeping in the pocket. I have organized some for you. Enjoy.

 

1. “If nakedness promises you clothes, hear his name.” Akan Proverb
2. “It is only a fool whose own tomatoes are sold to him.” Akan Proverb
3. “Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us father than today.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (A Psalm of Life)
4. “He was a man renowned for being deficient in expression and proficient in contemplation.”
5. “What use is a man’s thoughts if he does not express them?”
6. “I must compliment you on your eloquence, even if I disagree with you.”
7. “… but these things added up: the subconscious fed the active mind its morsels, one by one, until they became fully grown unfavorable opinions.”
8. “Not only words mattered; actions mattered too. Leadership did not have to have a moral basis. One could gain control of men and a woman by other means-by enticing them and making them dependent.”
9. “Nature has its demands.”
10. “But sadly, some people can’t even appreciate the night’s beauty because they do not have the ease of mind to do so. Many are swallowed by sadness, by concerns that deprive them even of the simple joys of life, the joys that come as free of charge, for everything else comes at a price.”
11. “A man can’t enjoy the pleasures that are free unless he has access to those that come at a price. Nature’s gifts uplift the mind, but how can a man appreciate this when he has heavy problems on his mind? Problems that threaten his very survival as human being.”
12. “The family might sometimes seem to imprison them, but without it many of them would probably be homeless.”
13. “.. not only do you have the face of a clown, but you also have the mind of a Turkey.”
14. “But be careful, there are certain things not to be said in jest.”
15. “I have no common sense; I have superior sense.”
16. “Bad dancing does not kill the earth.”
17. “Even the strongest must yield to nature’s call.”
18. “Nobody does good just for the sake of doing good. We always do good as a means to an end, never as an end in itself.”
19. “You can’t blame a man for seeking assurances.”
20. “You have done things to my heart that no one has ever done before. I find it hard to believe that after meeting you only once this has happened to me. I’ve been thinking about you all the time. When I go to sleep, you are the last thought on my mind. You are my first thought when I wake in the morning. And even in my sleep it is as if you are with me. I dreamt about you last night and the night before.”
21. “Although the casual observer might not notice, the Mallatta Market is an institution, an instance, a spectacle, a mosaic and a soul all rolled up into one. It is an institution of buying and selling, an instance of human endeavor, a spectacle of bustling bodies and mosaic of food, and it is a place with a soul of its own. It has a character, and it has a set of customs and unspoken laws. There is the law of haggling over prices, for example. If a seller were to tell you, ‘these three tomatoes are worth this much,’ you could agree and take tomatoes at that price. But you could say instead, ‘No, I will give you a little less for them.’ Then the seller might say, ‘Why don’t you buy six and I will further reduce the price for you,’ and you could either agree or bargain further until you reach a mutually acceptable price for a certain quantity of tomatoes. Without this system, there would be no trade.”
22. “There are two types of handshakes. One is limp and causal, the other is strong and full of heart.”
23. “The relationship between mother and son may be a loving and trusting one, but there are certain things often left unspoken, for some of them might disturb the delicate balance of interaction between parent and child.”
24. “When I see her I feel blissful and joyous and the feeling builds until it is as if I am going to choke on it.”
25. “Even at his age, he understood the loss of independence that love for one another could entail, the sacrifices, the compromises. He was fighting love by denying it, struggling with the immemorial conflict between heart and mind.”
26. “He is a man of wealth. But he never allows business to interfere with his quest for spiritual purity.”
27. “But sometimes your emotions can lead you to things you never would have thought possible.”
28. “Not everything that happens to us can be understood.”
29. “Son, nobody goes through life without some doubts.”
30. “But it is possible to experience love that is so deep it can never be exhausted and so strong it cannot be broken.”
31. “Their love had them steady all these years. It was an anchor that refused to break, warmth that devoured all fears, a lullaby that drowned all sorrow.”
32. “Poverty, unaware of its collective power, fears death.”
33. “Is your beauty not beauty that makes every man shudder? Are you not fit only for gods like myself? When the rain falls, I am the fish swimming in the puddles towards your door. When the sun shines I am the bird bearing the leaf of love in my beak only for you.”
34. “Do not put yourself down.”
35. “You don’t go to the river and wash your face with spittle.”
36. “Be patient so you can listen and listen so you can hear.”
37. “My love is better than wine. Will you not taste its sweetness and allow it to intoxicate you?”
38. “O my dove, thou art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stars. Let me see thy countenance let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice and thy countenance is comely.”
39. “You are in my eyes, like the dove that graces the skies and the fields, innocent and sublime. I desire to see your countenance every minute, every second and every passing moment. Why? Your face is beauty personified. Men and women may travel to the corners of the earth, they may go to outer space and back, yet nowhere can they find beauty to equal your beauty.”
40. “As for your voice, what can I say about it? When you speak, it is as if the doves have come from heaven to sing in your vocal cords. The soothing harmony, the melody your voice carries sweeps like the evening breeze over my face and caresses my ears with bliss. Bliss, perfect bliss. That is your voice. When you put your voice and face together, what you have is perfect beauty.”
41. “Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing; whereof every one bear twins and none is barren among them…. Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse; thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thy neck.”
42. “Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy tongue; and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon. I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying, Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.”
43. “But little steps are better than no steps.”
44. “When love and desire die, tolerance is the new target to aim for, and tolerance by itself stands on uncertain ground.”
45. “For love is attractive: those who witness it desire for themselves.”
46. “He looked into her eyes and was transfixed by a potent carnal force. In her body he saw the allure of ultimate sensual possibilities. Her voice sang pleasurably into his ears.”
47. Mystique Mysterious: You look and listen. You don’t talk too much. Why do you choose to be so quiet?
Kojo Ansah: Talk is boring.
Mystique Mysterious: That is the funniest thing I have heard.
Kojo Ansah: Talk is such a waste of time and energy. If people would spend thinking half the time they spend talking, the world would be a better place. If people filtered their thoughts before they spoke, they would not come out with the rubbish we hear these days. I keep my thoughts to myself unless I have something of import to say.”
Mystique Mysterious: I understand your point of view, but I don’t agree with it. What kind of world would we live in if everyone were so guarded in their speech? What would happen if we did not speak spontaneously, when thoughts came into our minds.
Kojo Ansah: We would have more peace in the world.
Mystique Mysterious: I beg to differ. On the contrary, I believe the world would be dangerous. People would bottle up all their inner feelings and frustrations. But they would express themselves through their actions. That could be dangerous indeed.
Kojo Ansah: Loose talk can cause trouble too. I believe it is prudent to hold your thought.
Mystique Mysterious: We have a fundamental difference of opinion, my friend, one that we may not be able to resolve tonight. I suppose we must agree to disagree.
Kojo Ansah: That suits me fine.
48. “And remember that blaming others may blind a man’s eyes to his own faults.”
49. “A man is sometimes blind to the thorns on the path he walks. His friends must provide the light to illuminate the path.”
50. “Everyone is a hypocrite to some extent in this world of mass make-believe.”
51. “Rumors must have wings. Once a rumor starts, never mind how absurd it sounds, it has the ability to cover much ground in no time at all so long as it appeals to the imagination. And often you cannot tell who originates it. Everyone heard it from another person, who heard it from another. Maybe, since rumors are often so ridiculous, it is not surprising that no one is willing to claim authorship.”
52. “She possessed natural charm. Her body, her smile, her laugh, her voice, the way she stretched her hand-were all natural, without effort, without guile. There was nothing artificial about her, nothing strained.”
53. “She had a beautiful complexion, completely without blemish; narrow eyes that suggested intrigue; and voluptuous red-painted lips. Her hair was artfully cut and shaped, and, her figure was the epitome of desirable womanhood: full breasts, thin waist, slimly curving hips.”
54. “They say the pillow is a source of knowledge.”
55. “… and love betrayed may prefer the pain of alienation to the salve of forgiveness.”
56. Kojo Ansah; What do you mean?
Kofi Ntim: We are the most pathetic of creatures. We are insulted, but we can’t insult, taken advantage of, but we can’t take advantage of others. It started slowly and then it grew until where we once had the urge to yell, now we can only sit and talk in whispers, whimpering like kicked dogs, moaning, enslaved by a good nature transformed over time into a foolish weakness. We are fools, my brother, because we are nice to everybody.
It was an old story, and a sad on: the gentle do not go far. Those who fail to live by the iron principle of an eye for an eye are ever susceptible to snares of those who do, those who welcome with open hearts are ever prone to the guile and machinations of those who are out to devour.
Let me illustrate what I’m saying. Take a guest who has gone to visit another. The host says to his family, ‘let’s live together as brothers and sisters. Let’s give our guest a home.’ But the host forgets that a step into the room is insufficient for the one looking to possess the mansion. A morsel of food does not suffice for one aiming to acquire the entire harvest. A parcel of the trade does not sate the heart of one seeking to control the whole economy. Now, the guest steps into the room, gazes at its contents, admires its décor and then asks to seen the rest of the mansion. The unsuspecting host obliges; meanwhile the guest is scheming. To possess, he must learn. Little by little if need be. So he is patient, studying every gesture, every attitude. At the dining table the guest drinks and laughs heartily. The host is charmed, not knowing that he must beware of the one who laughs the hardest. So now the guest knows all he needs to know and he makes his move. He wants to see the source of the harvest. ‘I have this,’ he says, ‘I will trade you for that.’ And the host and his family are trapped by their desire to enjoy the alluring wares brought by the guest. They fall under the spell of his beautiful goods. They want more and more. Eventually, life without the guest becomes unimaginable. He has captured them, they cannot escape.
57. “We live in the same neighborhood, shop at the same markets, breathe the same air. If a disease weeps Nima, it will affect us all. When a neighbor’s house is on fire, all of us are at risk, for who knows how far the fire will spread? It is in that sense that we as neighbors are also friends.

 

MLK JNR: TRANSFORMED NONCONFORMIST

As i stated in the first post, I grabbed a book at Vidya Bookshop titled ” Gift of Love”. It is a collection of some of the powerful sermons of Martin Luther King Jnr. Considering how powerful those sermons are, i have decided to share them one after the other.

Enjoy the second one. ” Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.”  (Romans 12:2)

Thank you!

“Do not conform” is difficult advice in a generation when crowd pressures have unconsciously conditioned our minds and feet to move to the rhythmic drumbeat of the status quo.  Many voices and forces urge us to choose the path of least resistance, and bid us never to fight for an unpopular cause and never to be found in a pathetic minority of two or three.

Even certain of our intellectual disciplines persuade us of the need to conform.  Some philosophical sociologists suggest that morality is merely group consensus and that the folkways are the right ways.  Some psychologists say that mental and emotional adjustment is the reward of thinking and acting like other people.

Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority.

I

In spite of this prevailing tendency to conform, we as Christians have a mandate to be nonconformists.  The Apostle Paul, who knew the inner realities of the Christian faith, counseled, “Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.”  We are called to be people of conviction, not conformity; of moral nobility, not social respectability.  We are commanded to live differently and according to a higher loyalty.

Every true Christian is a citizen of two worlds, the world of time and the world of eternity.  We are, paradoxically, in the world and yet not of the world.  To the Philippian Christians, Paul wrote, “We are a colony of Heaven.”  They understood what he meant, for their city of Philippi was a Roman colony.  When Rome wished to Romanize a province, she established a small colony of people who lived by Roman law and Roman customs and who, though in another country, held fast to their Roman allegiance.  This powerful, creative minority spread the gospel of Roman culture.  Although the analogy is imperfect – the Roman settlers lived within a framework of injustice and exploitation, that is, colonialism – the Apostle does point to the responsibility of Christians to imbue an unchristian world with the ideals of a higher and more noble order.  Living in the colony of time, we are ultimately responsible to the empire of eternity.  As Christians we must never surrender our supreme loyalty to any time-bound custom or Earth-bound idea, for at the heart of our universe is a higher reality – God and his kingdom of love – to which we must be conformed.

This command not to conform comes not only from Paul but also from our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, the world’s most dedicated nonconformist, whose ethical nonconformity still challenges the conscience of mankind.

When an affluent society would coax us to believe that happiness consists in the size of our automobiles, the impressiveness of our houses, and the expensiveness of our clothes, Jesus reminds us, “A man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.”

When we would yield to the temptation of a world rife with sexual promiscuity and gone wild with a philosophy of self-expression, Jesus tells us that “whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”

When we refuse to suffer for righteousness and choose to follow the path of comfort rather than conviction, we hear Jesus say, “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.”

When in our spiritual pride we boast of having reached the peak of moral excellence, Jesus warns, “The publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.”

When we, through compassionless detachment and arrogant individualism, fail to respond to the needs of the underprivileged, the Master says, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

When we allow the spark of revenge in our souls to flame up in hate toward our enemies, Jesus teaches, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.”

Everywhere and at all times, the love ethic of Jesus is a radiant light revealing the ugliness of our stale conformity.

In spite of this imperative demand to live differently, we have cultivated a mass mind and have moved from the extreme of rugged individualism to the even greater extreme of rugged collectivism.  We are not makers of history; we are made by history.  Longfellow said, “In this world a man must either be anvil or hammer,” meaning that he is either a molder of society or is molded by society.  Who doubts that today most men are anvils and are shaped by the patterns of the majority?  Or to change the figure, most people, and Christians in particular, are thermometers that record or register the temperature of majority opinion, not thermostats that transform and regulate the temperature of society.

Many people fear nothing more terribly than to take a position that stands out sharply and clearly from the prevailing opinion.  The tendency of most is to adopt a view that is so ambiguous that it will include everything and so popular that it will include everybody.  Along with this has grown an inordinate worship of bigness.  We live in an age of “jumboism” where men find security in that which is large and extensive – big cities, big buildings, big corporations.  This worship of size has caused many to fear being identified with a minority idea.  Not a few men, who cherish lofty and noble ideals, hide them under a bushel for fear of being called different.  Many sincere white people in the South privately oppose segregation and discrimination, but they are apprehensive lest they be publicly condemned.  Millions of citizens are deeply disturbed that the military-industrial complex too often shapes national policy, but they do not want to be considered unpatriotic.  Countless loyal Americans honestly feel that a world body such as the United Nations should include even Red China, but they fear being called Communist sympathizers.  A legion of thoughtful persons recognizes that traditional capitalism must continually undergo change if our great national wealth is to be more equitably distributed, but they are afraid their criticisms will make them seem un-American.  Numerous decent, wholesome young persons permit themselves to become involved in unwholesome pursuits that they do not personally condone or even enjoy, because they are ashamed to say no when the gang says yes.  How few people have the audacity to express publicly their convictions, and how many have allowed themselves to be “astronomically intimidated”!

Blind conformity makes us so suspicious of an individual who insists on saying what he really believes that we recklessly threaten his civil liberties.  If a man, who believes vigorously in peace, is foolish enough to carry a sign in a public demonstration, or if a Southern white person, believing in the American dream of the dignity and worth of human personality, dares to invite a Negro into his home and join with him in his struggle for freedom, he is liable to be summoned before some legislative investigation body.  He most certainly is a Communist if he espouses the cause of human brotherhood!

Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”  To the conformist and the shapers of the conformist mentality, this must surely sound like a most dangerous and radical doctrine.  Have we permitted the lamp of independent thought and individualism to become so dim that were Jefferson to write and live by these words today we would find cause to harass and investigate him?  If Americans permit thought-control, business-control, and freedom-control to continue, we shall surely move within the shadows of fascism.

II

Nowhere is the tragic tendency to conform more evident than in the church, an institution that has often served to crystallize, conserve, and even bless the patterns of majority opinion.  The erstwhile sanction by the church of slavery, racial segregation, war, and economic exploitation is testimony to the fact that the church has hearkened more to the authority of the world than to the authority of God.  Called to be the moral guardian of the community, the church at times has preserved that which is immoral and unethical.  Called to combat social evils, it has remained silent behind stained-glass windows.  Called to lead men on the highway of brotherhood and to summon them to rise above the narrow confines of race and class, it has enunciated and practiced racial exclusiveness.

We preachers have also been tempted by the enticing cult of conformity.  Seduced by the success symbols of the world, we have measured our achievements by the size of our parsonage.  We have become showmen to please the whims and caprices of the people.  We preach comforting sermons and avoid saying anything from our pulpit that might disturb the respectable views of the comfortable members of our congregations.  Have we ministers of Jesus Christ sacrificed truth on the altar of self-interest and, like Pilate, yielded our convictions to the demands of the crowd?

We need to recapture the gospel glow of the early Christians, who were nonconformists in the truest sense of the word and refused to shape their witness according to the mundane patterns of the world.  Willingly they sacrificed fame, fortune, and life itself in behalf of a cause they knew to be right.  Quantitatively small, they were qualitatively giants.  Their powerful gospel put an end to such barbaric evils as infanticide and bloody gladiatorial contests.  Finally, they captured the Roman Empire for Jesus Christ.

Gradually, however, the church became so entrenched in wealth and prestige that it began to dilute the strong demands of the gospel and to conform to the ways of the world.  And ever since the church has been a weak and ineffectual trumpet making uncertain sounds.  If the church of Jesus Christ is to regain once more its power, message, and authentic ring, it must conform only to the demands of the gospel.

The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists, who are dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood.  The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific, and religious freedom have always been nonconformists.  In any cause that concerns the progress of mankind, put your faith in the nonconformist!

In his essay, “Self-Reliance,” Emerson wrote, “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.”  The Apostle Paul reminds us that whoso would be a Christian must also be a nonconformist.  Any Christian who blindly accepts the opinions of the majority and in fear and timidity follows a path of expediency and social approval is a mental and spiritual slave.  Mark well these words from the pen of James Russell Lowell:

They are slaves who fear to speak
For the fallen and the weak;
They are slaves who will not choose
Hatred, scoffing, and abuse,
Rather than in silence shrink
From the truth they needs must think;
They are slaves who dare not be
In the right with two or three.

III

Nonconformity in itself, however, may not necessarily be good and may at times possess neither transforming nor redemptive power.  Nonconformity per se contains no saving value and may represent in some circumstances little more than a form of exhibitionism.  Paul in the latter half of the text offers a formula for constructive nonconformity: “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.”  Nonconformity is creative when it is controlled and directed by a transformed life and is constructive when it embraces a new mental outlook.  By opening our lives to God in Christ we become new creatures.  This experience, which Jesus spoke of as the new birth, is essential if we are to be transformed nonconformists and freed from the cold hardheartedness and self-righteousness so often characteristic of nonconformity.  Someone has said, “I love reforms but I hate reformers.”  A reformer may be an untransformed nonconformist whose rebellion against the evils of society has left him annoyingly rigid and unreasonably impatient.

Only through an inner spiritual transformation do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in a humble and loving spirit.  The transformed nonconformist, moreover, never yields to the passive sort of patience that is an excuse to do nothing.  And this very transformation saves him from speaking irresponsible words that estrange without reconciling and from making hasty judgments that are blind to the necessity of social progress.  He recognizes that social change will not come overnight, yet he works as though it is an imminent possibility.

This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists.  Our planet teeters on the brink of atomic annihilation; dangerous passions of pride, hatred, and selfishness are enthroned in our lives; truth lies prostrate on the rugged hills of nameless calvaries; and men do reverence before false gods of nationalism and materialism.  The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.

Some years ago Professor Bixler reminded us of the danger of overstressing the well-adjusted life.  Everybody passionately seeks to be well-adjusted.  We must, of course, be well-adjusted if we are to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities, but there are some things in our world to which men of goodwill must be maladjusted.  I confess that I never intend to become adjusted to the evils of segregation and the crippling effects of discrimination, to the moral degeneracy of religious bigotry and the corroding effects of narrow sectarianism, to economic conditions that deprive men of work and food, and to the insanities of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical violence.

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.  We need today maladjusted men like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who, when ordered by King Nebuchadnezzar to bow before a golden image, said in unequivocal terms, “If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us.  But if no, we will not serve thy gods”; like Thomas Jefferson, who in an age adjusted to slavery wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”; like Abraham Lincoln, who had the wisdom to discern that this nation could not survive half slave and half free; and supremely like our Lord, who, in the midst of the intricate and fascinating military machinery of the Roman Empire, reminded his disciples that “they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.”  Through such maladjustment an already decadent generation may be called to those things that make for peace.

Honesty impels me to admit that transformed nonconformity, which is always costly and never altogether comfortable, may mean walking through the valley of the shadow of suffering, losing a job, or having a six-year-old daughter ask, “Daddy, why do you have to go to jail so much?”  But we are gravely mistaken to think that Christianity protects us from the pain and agony of mortal existence.  Christianity has always insisted that the cross we bear precedes the crown we wear.  To be a Christian, one must take up his cross, with all of its difficulties and agonizing and tragedy-packed content, and carry it until that very cross leaves its marks upon us and redeems us to that more excellent way that comes only through suffering.

In these days of worldwide confusion, there is a dire need for men and women who will courageously do battle for truth.  We need Christians who will echo the words John Bunyan said to his jailer when, having spent twelve years in jail, he was promised freedom if he would agree to stop preaching:

But if nothing will do, unless I make of my conscience a continual butchery and slaughter-shop, unless, putting out my own eyes, I commit me to the blind to lead me, as I doubt is desired by some, I have determined, the Almighty God, being my help and shield, yet to suffer, if frail life might continue so long, even till the moss shall grow on mine eyebrows, rather than thus to violate my faith and principles.

We must make a choice.  Will we continue to march to the drumbeat of conformity and respectability, or will we, listening to the beat of a more distant drum, move to its echoing sounds?  Will we march only to the music of time, or will we, risking criticism and abuse, march to the soulsaving music of eternity?  More than ever before, we are today challenged by the words of yesterday, “Be not conformed to this world: but be yet transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

 

Thank you for your time.

#okorosite

MLK JNR: A TOUGH MIND AND A TENDER HEART

I grabbed a book at Vidya Bookshop titled ” Gift of Love”. It is a collection of some of the powerful sermons of Martin Luther King Jnr. Considering how powerful those sermons are, i have decided to share them one after the other.

Enjoy the first one. In life, we must have  a tough mind but a tender heart.

Thank you!

 

 

With Cyril Awadey

 

A French philosopher said, “No man is strong unless he bears within his character antitheses strongly marked.”  The strong man holds in a living blend strongly marked opposites.   Not ordinarily do men achieve this balance of opposites.  The idealists are not usually realistic, and the realists are not usually idealistic.  The militant are not generally known to be passive, nor the passive to be militant.  Seldom are the humble self-assertive, or the self-assertive humble.  But life at its best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony.  The philosopher Hegel said that truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis that reconciles the two.

Jesus recognized the need for blending opposites.  He knew that his disciples would face a difficult and hostile world, where they would confront the recalcitrance of political officials and the intransigence of the protectors of the old order.  He knew that they would meet cold and arrogant men whose hearts had been hardened by the long winter of traditionalism.  So he said to them, “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the mist of wolves.”  And he gave them a formula for action, “Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.”  It is pretty difficult to imagine a single person having, simultaneously, the characteristics of the serpent and the dove, but this is what Jesus expects.  We must combine the toughness of the serpent and the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart.

I

Let us consider, first, the need for a tough mind, characterized by incisive thinking, realistic appraisal, and decisive judgment.  The tough mind is sharp and penetrating, breaking through the crust of legends and myths and sifting the true from the false.  The tough-minded individual is astute and discerning.  He has a strong, austere quality that makes for firmness of purpose and solidness of commitment.

Who doubts that this toughness of mind is one of man’s greatest needs?  Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking.  There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions.  Nothing pains some people more than having to think.

This prevalent tendency toward soft mindedness is found in man’s unbelievable gullibility.  Take our attitude toward advertisement.  We are so easily led to purchase a product because a television or radio advertisement pronounces it better than any other.  Advertisers have long since learned that most people are soft minded, and they capitalize on this susceptibility with skillful and effective slogans.

This undue gullibility is also seen in the tendency of many readers to accept the printed word of the press as final truth.  Few people realize that even our authentic channels of information – the press, the platform, and in many instances the pulpit – do not give us objective and unbiased truth.  Few people have the toughness of mind to judge critically and to discern the true from the false, the fact from the fiction.  Our minds are constantly being invaded by legions of half-truths, prejudices, and false facts.  One of the great needs of mankind is to be lifted above the morass of false propaganda.

Soft-minded individuals are prone to embrace all kinds of superstitions.  Their minds are constantly invaded by irrational fears, which range from fear of Friday the thirteenth to fear of a black cat crossing one’s path.  As the elevator made its upward climb in one of the large hotels of New York City, I noticed for the first time that there was no thirteenth floor – floor fourteen followed floor twelve.  On inquiring from the elevator operator the reason for this omission, he said, “This practice is followed by most large hotels because of the fear of numerous people to stay on a thirteenth floor.”  Then he added, “The real foolishness of the fear is to be found in the fact that the fourteenth floor is actually the thirteenth.”  Such fears leave the soft mind haggard by day and haunted by night.

The soft-minded man always fears change.  He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new.  For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea.  An elderly segregationist in the South is reported to have said, “I have come to see now that desegregation is inevitable.  But I pray God that it will not take place until after I die.”  The soft-minded person always wants to freeze the moment and hold life in the gripping yoke of sameness.

Soft mindedness often invades religion.  This is why religion has sometimes rejected new truth with a dogmatic passion.  Through edicts and bulls, inquisitions and excommunications, the church has attempted to prorogue truth and place an impenetrable stone wall in the path of the truth-seeker.  The historical-philological criticism of the Bible is considered by the soft minded as blasphemous, and reason is often looked upon as the exercise of a corrupt faculty.  Soft-minded persons have revised the Beatitudes to read, “Blessed are the pure in ignorance: for they shall see God.”

This has also led to a widespread belief that there is a conflict between science and religion.  But this is not true.  There may be a conflict between soft-minded religionists and tough-minded scientists, but not between science and religion.  Their respective worlds are different and their methods are dissimilar.  Science investigates; religion interprets.  Science gives man knowledge that is power; religion gives man wisdom that is control.  Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values.  The two are not rivals.  They are complementary.  Science keeps religion from sinking into the valley of crippling irrationalism and paralyzing obscurantism.  Religion prevents science from falling into the marsh of obsolete materialism and moral nihilism.

We do not need to look far to detect the dangers of soft mindedness.  Dictators, capitalizing on soft mindedness, have led men to acts of barbarity and terror that are unthinkable in civilized society.  Adolf Hitler realized that soft mindedness was so prevalent among his followers that he said, “I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few.”  In Mein Kampf he asserted:

By means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make people believe that Heaven is hell – and hell, Heaven.  The greater the lie, the more readily will it be believed.

Soft mindedness is one of the basic causes of race prejudice.  The tough-minded person always examines the facts before he reaches conclusions; in short, he postjudges.  The tender-minded person reaches a conclusion before he has examined the first fact; in short, he prejudges and is prejudiced.  Race prejudice is based on groundless fears, suspicions, and misunderstandings.  There are those who are sufficiently soft minded to believe in the superiority of the white race and the inferiority of the Negro race in spite of the tough-minded research of anthropologists who reveal the falsity of such a notion.  There are soft-minded persons who argue that racial segregation should be perpetuated because Negroes lag behind in academic, health, and moral standards.  They are not tough minded enough to realize that lagging standards are the result of segregation and discrimination.  They do not recognize that it is rationally unsound and sociologically untenable to use the traffic effects of segregation as an argument for its continuation.  Too many politicians in the South recognize this disease of soft mindedness that engulfs their constituency.  With insidious zeal, they make inflammatory statements and disseminate distortions and half-truths that arouse abnormal fears and morbid antipathies within the minds of uneducated and underprivileged whites, leaving them so confused that they are led to acts of meanness and violence that no normal person commits.

There is little hope for us until we become tough minded enough to break loose from the shackles of prejudice, half-truths, and downright ignorance.  The shape of the world today does not permit us the luxury of soft mindedness.  A nation or a civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan.

II

But we must not stop with the cultivation of a tough mind.  The gospel also demands a tender heart.  Tough mindedness without tenderheartedness is cold and detached, leaving one’s life in a perpetual winter devoid of the warmth of spring and the gentle heat of summer.  What is more tragic than to see a person who has risen to the disciplined heights of tough mindedness but has at the same time sunk to the passionless depths of hardheartedness?

The hardhearted person never truly loves.  He engages in a crass utilitarianism that values other people mainly according to their usefulness to him.  He never experiences the beauty of friendship, because he is too cold to feel affection for another and is too self-centered to share another’s joy and sorrow.  He is an isolated island.  No outpouring of love links him with the mainland of humanity.

The hardhearted person lacks the capacity for genuine compassion.  He is unmoved by the pains and afflictions of his brothers.  He passes unfortunate men every day, but he never really sees them.  He gives dollars to a worthwhile charity, but he gives not of his spirit.

The hardhearted individual never sees people as people, but rather as mere objects or as impersonal cogs in an ever-turning wheel.  In the vast wheel of industry, he sees men as hands.  In the massive wheel of big city life, he sees men as digits in a multitude.  In the deadly wheel of army life, he sees men as numbers in a regiment.  He depersonalizes life.

Jesus frequently illustrated the characteristics of the hardhearted.  The rich fool was condemned not because he was not tough minded, but rather because he was not tenderhearted.  Life for him was a mirror in which he saw only himself, and not a window through which he saw other selves.  Dives went to hell not because he was wealthy, but because he was not tenderhearted enough to see Lazarus and because he made no attempt to bridge the gulf between himself and his brother.

Jesus reminds us that the good life combines the toughness of the serpent and the tenderness of the dove.  To have serpentlike qualities devoid of dovelike qualities is to be passionless, mean, and selfish.  To have dovelike without serpentlike qualities is to be sentimental, anemic, and aimless.  We must combine strongly marked antitheses.

We as Negroes must bring together tough mindedness and tenderheartedness, if we are to move creatively toward the goal of freedom and justice.  Soft-minded individual among us feel that the only way to deal with oppression is by adjusting to it.  They acquiesce and resign themselves to segregation.  They prefer to remain oppressed.  When Moses led the children of Israel from the slavery of Egypt to the freedom of the Promised Land, he discovered that slaves do not always welcome their deliverers.  They would rather bear those ills they have, as Shakespeare pointed out, than flee to others that they know not of.  They prefer the “fleshpots of Egypt” to the ordeals of emancipation.  But this is not the way out.  Soft-minded acquiescence is cowardly.  My friends, we cannot win the respect of the white people of the South or elsewhere if we are willing to trade the future of our children for our personal safety and comfort.  Moreover, we must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to cooperate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil.

And there are hardhearted and bitter individuals among us who would combat the opponent with physical violence and corroding hatred.  Violence brings only temporary victories; violence, by creating many more social problems than it solves, never brings permanent peace.  I am convinced that if we succumb to the temptation to use violence in our struggle for freedom, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and our chief legacy to them will be a never-ending reign of chaos.  A Voice, echoing through the corridors of time, says to every intemperate Peter, “Put up thy sword.”  History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations that failed to follow Christ’s command.

III

A third way is open to our quest for freedom, namely nonviolent resistance, which combines tough mindedness and tenderheartedness and avoids the complacency and do-nothingness of the soft minded and the violence and bitterness of the hardhearted.  My belief is that this method must guide our action in the present crisis in race relations.  Through nonviolent resistance we shall be able to oppose the unjust system and at the same time love the perpetrators of the system.  We must work passionately and unrelentingly for full stature as citizens, but may it never be said, my friends, that to gain it we used the inferior methods of falsehood, malice, hate, and violence.

I would not conclude without applying the meaning of the text to the nature of God.  The greatness of our God lies in the fact that he is both tough minded and tenderhearted.  He has qualities both of austerity and of gentleness.  The Bible, always clear in stressing both attributes of God, expresses his tough mindedness in his justice and wrath and his tenderheartedness in his love and grace.  God has two outstretched arms.  One is strong enough to surround us with justice, and one is gentle enough to embrace us with grace.  On the one hand, God is a God of justice who punished Israel for her wayward deeds, and on the other hand, he is a forgiving father whose heart was filled with unutterable joy when the prodigal son returned home.

I am thankful that we worship a God who is both tough minded and tenderhearted.  If God were only tough minded, he would be a cold, passionless despot sitting in some far-off Heaven “contemplating all,” as Tennyson puts it in “The Palace of Art.”  He would be Aristotle’s “unmoved mover,” self-knowing but not other-loving.  But if God were only tenderhearted, he would be too soft and sentimental to function when things go wrong and incapable of controlling what he has made.  He would be like H. G. Well’s loveable God in God, the Invisible King, who is strongly desirous of making a good world but finds himself helpless before the surging powers of evil.  God is neither hardhearted nor soft minded.  He is tough minded enough to transcend the world; he is tenderhearted enough to live in it.  He does not leave us alone in our agonies and struggles.  He seeks us in dark places and suffers with us and for us in our tragic prodigality.

At times we need to know that the Lord is a God of justice.  When slumbering giants of injustice emerge in the Earth, we need to know that there is a God of power who can cut them down like the grass and leave them withering like the Greek herb.  When our most tireless efforts fail to stop the surging sweep of oppression, we need to know that in this universe is a God whose matchless strength is a fit contrast to the sordid weakness of man.  But there are also times when we need to know that God possesses love and mercy.  When we are staggered by the chilly winds of adversity and battered by the raging storms of disappointment and when through our folly and sin we stray into some destructive far country and are frustrated because of a strange feeling of homesickness, we need to know that there is Someone who loves us, cares for us, understands us, and will give us another chance.  When days grow dark and nights grow dreary, we can be thankful that our God combines in his nature a creative synthesis of love and justice that will lead us through life’s dark valleys and into sunlit pathways of hope and fulfillment.

 

Thank you for your time.

I AM AN AFRICAN

 Thabo Mbeki as he observed my work.

Today is 25th May, 2017. And it is African Union day. On this score, i will like to share with you one of the greatest speeches delivered about our great continent. It is a speech delivered by Thabo Mbeki, then Vice-President of South Africa on 8th May, 1996 on the occasion of the passing of the new Constitution of South Africa.

Enjoy!

I am an African.

I owe my being to the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas and the ever-changing seasons that define the face of our native land.

My body has frozen in our frosts and in our latter-day snows. It has thawed in the warmth of our sunshine and melted in the heat of the midday sun. The crack and the rumble of the summer thunders, lashed by startling lightning, have been a cause both of trembling and of hope.

The fragrances of nature have been as pleasant to us as the sight of the wild blooms of the citizens of the veld.

The dramatic shapes of the Drakensberg, the soil-coloured waters of the Lekoa, iGqili noThukela, and the sands of the Kgalagadi, have all been panels of the set on the natural stage on which we act out the foolish deeds of the theatre of the day.

At times, and in fear, I have wondered whether I should concede equal citizenship of our country to the leopard and the lion, the elephant and the springbok, the hyena, the black mamba and the pestilential mosquito.

A human presence among all of these, a feature on the face of our native land thus defined, I know that none dare challenge me when I say – I am an African!

I owe my being to the Khoi and the San whose desolate souls haunt the great expanses of the beautiful Cape – they who fell victim to the most merciless genocide our native land has ever seen, they who were the first to lose their lives in the struggle to defend our freedom and independence and they who, as a people, perished in the result.

Today, as a country, we keep an inaudible and audible silence about these ancestors of the generations that live, fearful to admit the horror of a former deed, seeking to obliterate from our memories a cruel occurrence which, in its remembering, should teach us not and never to be inhuman again.

I am formed of the migrants who left Europe to find a new home on our native land. Whatever their own actions, they remain still part of me.

In my veins courses the blood of the Malay slaves who came from the East. Their proud dignity informs my bearing, their culture a part of my essence. The stripes they bore on their bodies from the lash of the slave master are a reminder embossed on my consciousness of what should not be done.

I am the grandchild of the warrior men and women that Hintsa and Sekhukhune led, the patriots that Cetshwayo and Mphephu took to battle, the soldiers Moshoeshoe and Ngungunyane taught never to dishonour the cause of freedom.

My mind and my knowledge of myself is formed by the victories that are the jewels in our African crown, the victories we earned from Isandhlwana to Khartoum, as Ethiopians and as Ashanti of Ghana, as Berbers of the desert.

I am the grandchild who lays fresh flowers on the Boer graves at St Helena, [unclear], and the Vrouemonument, who sees in the mind’s eye and suffers the suffering of a simple peasant folk, death, concentration camps, destroyed homesteads, a dream in ruins.

I am the child of Nongqawuse. I am he who made it possible to trade in the world markets in diamonds, in gold, in the same food for which our stomachs yearn.

I come of those who were transported from India and China, whose being resided in the fact, solely, that they were able to provide physical labour, who taught me that we could both be at home and be foreign, who taught me that human existence itself demanded that freedom was a necessary condition for that human existence.

Being part of all of these people, and in the knowledge that none dares contest that assertion, I shall claim that – I am an African.

I have seen our country torn asunder as these, all of whom are my people, engaged one another in a titanic battle, the one to redress a wrong that had been caused by one to another and the other, to defend the indefensible.

I have seen what happens when one person has superiority of force over another, when the stronger appropriate to themselves the prerogative even to annul the injunction that God created all men and women in His image.

I know what it signifies when race and colour are used to determine who is human and who, sub-human.

I have seen the destruction of all sense of self-esteem, the consequent striving to be what one is not, simply to acquire some of the benefits which those who had imposed themselves as masters had ensured that they enjoy.

I have experience of the situation in which race and colour is used to enrich some and impoverish the rest.

I have seen the corruption of minds and souls as a result of the pursuit of an ignoble effort to perpetrate a veritable crime against humanity.

I have seen concrete expression of the denial of the dignity of a human being emanating from the conscious, systemic and systematic oppressive and repressive activities of other human beings.

I told him i had read this speech and he said “that’s great.”

There the victims parade with no mask to hide the brutish reality – the beggars, the prostitutes, the street children, those who seek solace in substance abuse, those who have to steal to assuage hunger, those who have to lose their sanity because to be sane is to invite pain.

Perhaps the worst among these, who are my people, are those who have learnt to kill for a wage. To these the extent of death is directly proportional to their personal welfare.

And so, like pawns in the service of demented souls, they kill in furtherance of the political violence in KwaZulu-Natal. They murder the innocent in the taxi wars.

They kill slowly or quickly in order to make profits from the illegal trade in narcotics. They are available for hire when husband wants to murder wife and wife, husband.

Among us prowl the products of our immoral and amoral past – killers who have no sense of the worth of human life, rapists who have absolute disdain for the women of our country, animals who would seek to benefit from the vulnerability of the children, the disabled, and the old, the rapacious who brook no obstacle in their quest for self-enrichment.

All this I know and know to be true because I am an African!

Because of that, I am also able to state this fundamental truth that I am born of a people who are heroes and heroines.

I am born of a people who would not tolerate oppression.

I am of a nation that would not allow that fear of death, of torture, of imprisonment, of exile or persecution should result in the perpetuation of injustice.

The great masses who are our mother and father will not permit that the behaviour of the few results in the description of our country and people as barbaric.

Patient because history is on their side, these masses do not despair because today the weather is bad. Nor do they turn triumphalist when, tomorrow, the sun shines.

Whatever the circumstances they have lived through and because of that experience, they are determined to define for themselves who they are and who they should be.

We are assembled here today to mark their victory in acquiring and exercising their right to formulate their own definition of what it means to be African.

The Constitution whose adoption we celebrate constitutes an unequivocal statement that we refuse to accept that our African-ness shall be defined by our race, our colour, our gender or our historical origins.

It is a firm assertion made by ourselves that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, Black and White.

 

It gives concrete expression to the sentiment we share as Africans, and will defend to the death, that the people shall govern.

It recognises the fact that the dignity of the individual is both an objective which society must pursue, and is a goal which cannot be separated from the material well-being of that individual.

It seeks to create the situation in which all our people shall be free from fear, including the fear of the oppression of one national group by another, the fear of the disempowerment of one social echelon by another, the fear of the use of state power to deny anybody their fundamental human rights and the fear of tyranny.

It aims to open the doors so that those who were disadvantaged can assume their place in society as equals with their fellow human beings without regards to colour, to race, to gender, to age or to geographic dispersal.

It provides the opportunity to enable each one and all to state their views, to promote them, to strive for their implementation in the process of governance without fear that a contrary view will be met with repression.

It creates a law-governed society which shall be inimical to arbitrary rule.

It enables the resolution of conflicts by peaceful means rather than resort to force.

It rejoices in the diversity of our people and creates the space for all of us voluntarily to define ourselves as one people.

As an African, this is an achievement of which I am proud, proud without reservation and proud without any feeling of conceit.

Our sense of elevation at this moment also derives from the fact that this magnificent product is the unique creation of African hands and African minds.

But it also constitutes a tribute to our loss of vanity that we could, despite the temptation to treat ourselves as an exceptional fragment of humanity, draw on the accumulated experience and wisdom of all humankind, to define for ourselves what we want to be.

Together with the best in the world, we too are prone to pettiness, to petulance, selfishness and short-sightedness.

But it seems to have happened that we looked at ourselves and said the time had come that we make a super-human effort to be other than human, to respond to the call to create for ourselves a glorious future, to remind ourselves of the Latin saying: Gloria est consequenda – Glory must be sought after.

Today it feels good to be an African.

It feels good that I can stand here as a South African and as a foot soldier of a titanic African army, the African National Congress, to say to all the parties represented here, to the millions who made an input into the processes we are concluding, to our outstanding compatriots who have presided over the birth of our founding document, to the negotiators who pitted their wits one against the other, to the unseen stars who shone unseen as the management and administration of the Constitutional Assembly, the advisers, the experts and the publicists, to the mass communication media, to our friends across the globe – congratulations and well done!

I am an African.

I am born of the peoples of the continent of Africa.

The pain of the violent conflict that the peoples of Liberia, and of Somalia, of the Sudan, of Burundi and Algeria is a pain I also bear.

The dismal shame of poverty, suffering and human degradation of my continent is a blight that we share.

The blight on our happiness that derives from this and from our drift to the periphery of the ordering of human affairs leaves us in a persistent shadow of despair.

This is a savage road to which nobody should be condemned. The evolution of humanity says that Africa reaffirms that she is continuing her rise from the ashes.

Whatever the setbacks of the moment, nothing can stop us now! Whatever the difficulties, Africa shall be at peace!

Thank you very much.

KHADIJATU’S TEARS OF A RAIN GODDESS

One of the Social-Activists we have in town, Khadijatu Iddrisu read the book Tears of a Rain Goddess and was really enthralled by it. She therefore wants everyone to get the bite of the cherry ( effect of a good book; you wish everyone reads it).  Enjoy!

The setting is  an African one. It is a fictional  book but people and places are described so vividly that it seemed so real. Young Tamara is  introduced as a naive little girl who witnessed the defilement and gruesome murder of her mother before her very own eyes. She silently vowed to take revenge for the death of her mother and brother.

The writer further elaborated the qualities of Tamara as an attractive, disrespectful, proud and arrogant princess who grew up to be fearless and ambitious. In order to seek revenge, she was aided by her father Naaba and the village herbalist, Baba Moru. She used what she had (body and mind) to hypnotize her opponent, to get what she wanted. This is to say that  “no matter how strong and powerful a man is he is never above nature.”

Tamara found her way into the household of her enemies and destroyed them. As part of her plans for revenge, she became the sixth  wife of the man who raped her mother- Yiri Naa, an enemy to her fatherland. Tamara carried the seed of the man whom she hated but troubled him during the nights they were newly wedded. The story unfolds by informing readers of the relationship between fathers and how they regarded their daughters.

In the case of Samad, an elder of Kumbungu land, his daughter Zenator was gloomy and came with the sunshine. When he was lost in the dark, she came with the moon. Zenator was a medal he would wear to the grave. Samad also regarded the strength of his daughter; Zenator as one made of stone and given the heart of a lion- very tough. Zenator on the other hand doubted who she would choose if it ever came to choosing between her father and God. Tamara on the other hand ascended the throne when she  had her vengeance after the death of her father. This is to say that, he had confidence in her ability to lead the people. As the writer further narrates and centers the story around Tamara who became her own enemy when she made her hatred towards her own daughter outshines her love for humanity, things went haywire.

The writer, Khadijatu Iddrisu

Mbozi, the rain goddess was blessed with the gift of making it rain whenever her tear dropped was the seed between Tamara and Yiri Naa. As kind hearted as she was, she was tricked into bringing the downfall of her very own mother. Tamara made her hatred from her childhood transform her belief, way of life and love for people. It eventually led to her downfall. Her secretiveness and bitterness also contributed to her fall.

Wise saying was pelted about and literacy device flourished to give the book  more flavor. This beautiful book was full of suspense, allusion, analogy and pun. It was simply refreshing, grasping knowledge and enticing the mind to a drama of pleasure.
Diana Bamford McBagonluri from trying to get her story out there, shows how much important the culture of our forefathers was. She is hoping that people will read, learn and listen to the advice of the elderly ones, and she hopes that it causes her readers to become more patient, loving and more forgiving.

Moral Lessons
– Be more forgiving and letting go of  hatred/revenge.
– Loving thy neighbor as thy self
– Be patient for tomorrow comes with a new aromatic air than the whirlwind of yesterday. – One destroys oneself with an overwhelming energy when dwelling of pains of yester-years so it is better to let that energy drain off.
– When planning to outwit an opponent, it is not only through coercion but making those above you comfortably superior in your desire to please or impress them. Another tools can be through negotiating and compromise.

Some wise sayings in the book

1. I have my own drum I will beat and dance to its tune. Society will only have to watch.
2. The peacock never tells people how gorgeous it looks but don’t you think anytime it opens its wings it is indirectly telling the whole world that it is beautiful?
3. If you are born a man your first responsibility is fighting your own battles.
4. No matter how strong and powerful a man is he is never above nature.
5. Never throw stones at the puppies when the bitch is home.
6. The birds that destroyed their neighbors nest had nowhere to sleep when their own was destroyed by the rain.
7.When you see a cat before a bowl of fish do you ask it what it intends to do with it?
8.  When salt loses its taste, its next home is the bin.
9. The termite that is determined to eat into a piece of wood ends up in a bon-fire.
10. It is also said that when one is preparing for war and hears his enemy singing songs of victory before the beginning of the battle, he should retreat for they might have seen his weakness.

A great book it is.

 

Iddrisu Khadijatu
The writer is a Zongo girl and a Youth Activist and a lover of the universe.

WE SHOULD ALL BE FEMINISTS

 

Today, i bring to you the full speech the Nigerian Author, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie delivered in December 2012 at TEDxEuston, a yearly conference focused on Africa. She touched on the topic of feminism. A very insightful one…

Enjoy!

 

Okoloma was one of my greatest childhood friends. He lived on my street and looked after me like a big brother: If I liked a boy, I would ask Okoloma’s opinion. Okoloma was funny and intelligent and wore cowboy boots that were pointy at the tips. In December of 2005, in a plane crash in Southern Nigeria, Okoloma died. It is still hard for me to put into words how I felt. Okoloma was a person I could argue with, laugh with, and truly talk to. He was also the first person to call me a feminist. I was about fourteen. We were in his house, arguing, both of us bristling with halfbaked knowledge from the books we had read. I don’t remember what this particular argument was about. But I remember that as I argued and argued, Okoloma looked at me and said, “You know, you’re a feminist.” It was not a compliment. I could tell from his tone—the same tone with which a person would say, “You’re a supporter of terrorism.” I did not know exactly what this word feminist meant. And I did not want Okoloma to know that I didn’t know. So I brushed it aside and continued to argue. The first thing I planned to do when I got home was look up the word in the dictionary. Now fast-forward to some years later. In 2003, I wrote a novel called Purple Hibiscus, about a man who, among other things, beats his wife, and whose story doesn’t end too well. While I was promoting the novel in Nigeria, a journalist, a nice, well-meaning man, told me he wanted to advise me. (Nigerians, as you might know, are very quick to give unsolicited advice.) He told me that people were saying my novel was feminist, and his advice to me—he was shaking his head sadly as he spoke—was that I should never call myself a feminist since feminists are women who are unhappy because they cannot find husbands. So I decided to call myself a Happy Feminist. Then an academic, a Nigerian woman, told me that feminism was not our culture, that feminism was un-African, and I was only calling myself a feminist because I had been influenced by Western books. (Which amused me, because much of my early reading was decidedly unfeminist: I must have read every single Mills & Boon romance published before I was sixteen. And each time I try to read those books called “classic feminist texts,” I get bored, and I struggle to finish them.) Anyway, since feminism was un-African, I decided I would now call myself a Happy African Feminist. Then a dear friend told me that calling myself a feminist meant that I hated men. So I decided I would now be a Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men. At some point I was a Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men and Who Likes to Wear Lip Gloss and High Heels for Herself and Not For Men. Of course much of this was tongue-in-cheek, but what it shows is how that word feminist is so heavy with baggage, negative baggage: You hate men, you hate bras, you hate African culture, you think women should always be in charge, you don’t wear makeup, you don’t shave, you’re always angry, you don’t have a sense of humor, you don’t use deodorant. Now here’s a story from my childhood: When I was in primary school in Nsukka, a university town in southeastern Nigeria, my teacher said at the beginning of term that she would give the class a test and whoever got the highest score would be the class monitor. Class monitor was a big deal. If you were class monitor, you would write down the names of noisemakers each day, which was heady enough power on its own, but my teacher would also give you a cane to hold in your hand while you walked around and patrolled the class for noisemakers. Of course you were not allowed to actually use the cane. But it was an exciting prospect for the nine-year-old me. I very much wanted to be class monitor. And I got the highest score on the test. Then, to my surprise, my teacher said the monitor had to be a boy. She had forgotten to make that clear earlier; she assumed it was obvious. A boy had the second-highest score on the test. And he would be monitor. What was even more interesting is that this boy was a sweet, gentle soul who had no interest in patrolling the class with a stick. While I was full of ambition to do so. But I was female and he was male and he became class monitor. I have never forgotten that incident. If we do something over and over, it becomes normal. If we see the same thing over and over, it becomes normal. If only boys are made class monitor, then at some point we will all think, even if unconsciously, that the class monitor has to be a boy. If we keep seeing only men as heads of corporations, it starts to seem “natural” that only men should be heads of corporations.

Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie

I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is just as obvious to everyone else. Take my dear friend Louis, who is a brilliant, progressive man. We would have conversations and he would tell me: “I don’t see what you mean by things being different and harder for women. Maybe it was so in the past but not now. Everything is fine now for women.” I didn’t understand how Louis could not see what seemed so evident. I love being back home in Nigeria, and spend much of my time there in Lagos, the largest city and commercial hub of the country. Sometimes, in the evenings when the heat goes down and the city has a slower pace, I go out with friends and family to restaurants or cafés. On one of those evenings, Louis and I were out with friends. There is a wonderful fixture in Lagos: a sprinkling of energetic young men who hang around outside certain establishments and very dramatically “help” you park your car. Lagos is a metropolis of almost twenty million people, with more energy than London, more entrepreneurial spirit than New York, and so people come up with all sorts of ways to make a living. As in most big cities, finding parking in the evenings can be difficult, so these young men make a business out of finding spots, and—even when there are spots available—of guiding you into yours with much gesticulating, and promising to “look after” your car until you get back. I was impressed with the particular theatrics of the man who found us a parking spot that evening. And so as we were leaving, I decided to give him a tip. I opened my bag, put my hand inside my bag to get my money, and I gave it to the man. And he, this man who was happy and grateful, took the money from me, and then looked across at Louis and said, “Thank you, sah!” Louis looked at me, surprised and asked: “Why is he thanking me? I didn’t give him the money.” Then I saw realization dawn on Louis’s face. The man believed that whatever money I had ultimately came from Louis. Because Louis is a man. Men and women are diʃerent. We have diʃerent hormones and diʃerent sexual organs and diʃerent biological abilities—women can have babies, men cannot. Men have more testosterone and are, in general, physically stronger than women. There are slightly more women than men in the world—52 percent of the world’s population is female— but most of the positions of power and prestige are occupied by men. The late Kenyan Nobel peace laureate Wangari Maathai put it simply and well when she said, the higher you go, the fewer women there are.

Wangari Maathai

In the recent US elections, we kept hearing of the Lilly Ledbetter law, and if we go beyond that nicely alliterative name, it was really about this: in the US, a man and a woman are doing the same job, with the same qualiɹcations, and the man is paid more because he is a man. So in a literal way, men rule the world. This made sense—a thousand years ago. Because human beings lived then in a world in which physical strength was the most important attribute for survival; the physically stronger person was more likely to lead. And men in general are physically stronger. (There are of course many exceptions.) Today, we live in a vastly diʃerent world. The person more qualiɹed to lead is not the physically stronger person. It is the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more creative, more innovative. And there are no hormones for those attributes. A man is as likely as a woman to be intelligent, innovative, creative. We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very much. Not long ago, I walked into the lobby of one of the best Nigerian hotels, and a guard at the entrance stopped me and asked me annoying questions—What was the name and room number of the person I was visiting? Did I know this person? Could I prove that I was a hotel guest by showing him my key card?—because the automatic assumption is that a Nigerian female walking into a hotel alone is a sex worker. Because a Nigerian female alone cannot possibly be a guest paying for her own room. A man who walks into the same hotel is not harassed. The assumption is that he is there for something legitimate. (Why, by the way, do those hotels not focus on the demand for sex workers instead of on the ostensible supply?) In Lagos, I cannot go alone into many reputable clubs and bars. They just don’t let you in if you are a woman alone. You must be accompanied by a man. And so I have male friends who arrive at clubs and end up going in with their arms linked with those of a complete stranger, because that complete stranger, a woman out on her own, had no choice but to ask for “help” to get into the club. Each time I walk into a Nigerian restaurant with a man, the waiter greets the man and ignores me. The waiters are products of a society that has taught them that men are more important than women, and I know that they don’t intend harm, but it is one thing to know something intellectually, and quite another to feel it emotionally. Each time they ignore me, I feel invisible. I feel upset. I want to tell them that I am just as human as the man, just as worthy of acknowledgment. These are little things, but sometimes it is the little things that sting the most. Not long ago, I wrote an article about being young and female in Lagos. And an acquaintance told me that it was an angry article, and I should not have made it so angry. But I was unapologetic. Of course it was angry. Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice. I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change. In addition to anger, I am also hopeful, because I believe deeply in the ability of human beings to remake themselves for the better. But back to anger. I heard the caution in the acquaintance’s tone, and I knew that the comment was as much about the article as it was about my character. Anger, the tone said, is particularly not good for a woman. If you are a woman, you are not supposed to express anger, because it is threatening. I have a friend, an American woman, who took over a managerial position from a man. Her predecessor had been considered a “tough go-getter”; he was blunt and hard-charging and was particularly strict about the signing of time sheets. She took on her new job, and imagined herself equally tough, but perhaps a little kinder than him—he didn’t always realize that people had families, she said, and she did. Only weeks into her new job, she disciplined an employee about a forgery on a time sheet, the same thing her predecessor would have done. The employee then complained to top management about her style. She was aggressive and diɽcult to work with, the employee said. Other employees agreed. One said they had expected she would bring a “woman’s touch” to her job but that she hadn’t. It didn’t occur to any of them that she was doing the same thing for which a man had been praised. I have another friend, also an American woman, who has a high-paying job in advertising. She is one of two women in her team. Once, at a meeting, she said she had felt slighted by her boss, who had ignored her comments and then praised something similar when it came from a man. She wanted to speak up, to challenge her boss. But she didn’t. Instead, after the meeting, she went to the bathroom and cried, then called me to vent about it. She didn’t want to speak up because she didn’t want to seem aggressive. She let her resentments simmer. What struck me—with her and with many other female American friends I have—is how invested they are in being “liked.” How they have been raised to believe that their being likable is very important and that this “likable” trait is a speciɹc thing. And that speciɹc thing does not include showing anger or being aggressive or disagreeing too loudly. We spend too much time teaching girls to worry about what boys think of them. But the reverse is not the case. We don’t teach boys to care about being likable. We spend too much time telling girls that they cannot be angry or aggressive or tough, which is bad enough, but then we turn around and either praise or excuse men for the same reasons. All over the world, there are so many magazine articles and books telling women what to do, how to be and not to be, in order to attract or please men. There are far fewer guides for men about pleasing women. I teach a writing workshop in Lagos and one of the participants, a young woman, told me that a friend had told her not to listen to my “feminist talk”; otherwise she would absorb ideas that would destroy her marriage. This is a threat—the destruction of a marriage, the possibility of not having a marriage at all—that in our society is much more likely to be used against a woman than against a man. Gender matters everywhere in the world. And I would like today to ask that we begin to dream about and plan for a diʃerent world. A fairer world. A world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves. And this is how to start: We must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently. We do a great disservice to boys in how we raise them. We stiɻe the humanity of boys. We deɹne masculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear, of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves, because they have to be, in Nigerian-speak—a hard man. In secondary school, a boy and a girl go out, both of them teenagers with meager pocket money. Yet the boy is expected to pay the bills, always, to prove his masculinity. (And we wonder why boys are more likely to steal money from their parents.) What if both boys and girls were raised not to link masculinity and money? What if their attitude was not “the boy has to pay,” but rather, “whoever has more should pay.” Of course, because of their historical advantage, it is mostly men who will have more today. But if we start raising children diʃerently, then in ɹfty years, in a hundred years, boys will no longer have the pressure of proving their masculinity by material means. But by far the worst thing we do to males—by making them feel they have to be hard —is that we leave them with very fragile egos. The harder a man feels compelled to be, the weaker his ego is. And then we do a much greater disservice to girls, because we raise them to cater to the fragile egos of males. We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls: You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful but not too successful, otherwise you will threaten the man. If you are the breadwinner in your relationship with a man, pretend that you are not, especially in public, otherwise you will emasculate him. But what if we question the premise itself: Why should a woman’s success be a threat to a man? What if we decide to simply dispose of that word—and I don’t know if there is an English word I dislike more than this—emasculation. A Nigerian acquaintance once asked me if I was worried that men would be intimidated by me. I was not worried at all—it had not even occurred to me to be worried, because a man who will be intimidated by me is exactly the kind of man I would have no interest in. Still, I was struck by this. Because I am female, I’m expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Marriage can be a good thing, a source of joy, love, and mutual support. But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage, but we don’t teach boys to do the same? I know a Nigerian woman who decided to sell her house because she didn’t want to intimidate a man who might want to marry her. I know an unmarried woman in Nigeria who, when she goes to conferences, wears a wedding ring because she wants her colleagues to—according to her—“give her respect.” The sadness in this is that a wedding ring will indeed automatically make her seem worthy of respect, while not wearing a wedding ring would make her easily dismissible —and this is in a modern workplace. I know young women who are under so much pressure—from family, from friends, even from work—to get married that they are pushed to make terrible choices. Our society teaches a woman at a certain age who is unmarried to see it as a deep personal failure. While a man at a certain age who is unmarried has not quite come around to making his pick. It is easy to say—but women can just say no to all this. But the reality is more diɽcult, more complex. We are all social beings. We internalize ideas from our socialization. Even the language we use illustrates this. The language of marriage is often a language of ownership, not a language of partnership. We use the word respect for something a woman shows a man but often not for something a man shows a woman. Both men and women will say: “I did it for peace in my marriage.” When men say it, it is usually about something they should not be doing anyway. Something they say to their friends in a fondly exasperated way, something that ultimately proves to them their masculinity—“Oh, my wife said I can’t go to clubs every night, so now, for peace in my marriage, I go only on weekends.” When women say “I did it for peace in my marriage,” it is usually because they have given up a job, a career goal, a dream. We teach females that in relationships, compromise is what a woman is more likely to do. We raise girls to see each other as competitors—not for jobs or accomplishments, which in my opinion can be a good thing—but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way boys are. If we have sons, we don’t mind knowing about their girlfriends. But our daughters’ boyfriends? God forbid. (But we of course expect them to bring home the perfect man for marriage when the time is right.) We police girls. We praise girls for virginity but we don’t praise boys for virginity (and it makes me wonder how exactly this is supposed to work out, since the loss of virginity is a process that usually involves two people of opposite genders). Recently a young woman was gang raped in a university in Nigeria, and the response of many young Nigerians, both male and female, was something like this: yes, rape is wrong, but what is a girl doing in a room with four boys? Let us, if we can, forget the horrible inhumanity of that response. These Nigerians have been raised to think of women as inherently guilty. And they have been raised to expect so little of men that the idea of men as savage beings with no self-control is somehow acceptable. We teach girls shame. Close your legs. Cover yourself. We make them feel as though by being born female, they are already guilty of something. And so girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have desire. Who silence themselves. Who cannot say what they truly think. Who have turned pretence into an art form. I know a woman who hates domestic work, but she pretends that she likes it, because she has been taught that to be “good wife material,” she has to be—to use that Nigerian word—homely. And then she got married. And her husband’s family began to complain that she had changed. Actually, she had not changed. She just got tired of pretending to be what she was not. The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations. Boys and girls are undeniably diʃerent biologically, but socialization exaggerates the diʃerences. And then starts a self-fulɹlling process. Take cooking, for example. Today, women in general are more likely to do housework than men—cooking and cleaning. But why is that? Is it because women are born with a cooking gene or because over years they have been socialized to see cooking as their role? I was going to say that perhaps women are born with a cooking gene until I remembered that the majority of famous cooks in the world—who are given the fancy title of “chef”—are men. I used to look at my grandmother, a brilliant woman, and wonder what she would have been if she’d had the same opportunities as men during her youth. Today, there are more opportunities for women than there were during my grandmother’s time. Because of changes in policy and law, which are very important. But what matters even more is our attitude, our mind-set. What if, in raising children, we focus on ability instead of gender? What if we focus on interest instead of gender? I know a family who has a son and a daughter, a year apart in age, both brilliant at school. When the boy is hungry, the parents say to the girl, Go and cook Indomie noodles for your brother. The girl doesn’t like to cook Indomie, but she is a girl and she has to. What if the parents, from the beginning, taught both children to cook Indomie? Cooking, by the way, is a useful and practical life skill for a boy to have—I’ve never thought it made much sense to leave such a crucial thing—the ability to nourish oneself —in the hands of others. I know a woman who has the same degree and same job as her husband. When they get back from work, she does most of the housework, which is true for many marriages, but what struck me was that whenever he changed the baby’s diaper, she said thank you to him. What if she saw it as something normal and natural, that he should help care for his child? I am trying to unlearn many lessons of gender I internalized while growing up. But I sometimes still feel vulnerable in the face of gender expectations. The ɹrst time I taught a writing class in graduate school, I was worried. Not about the teaching material, because I was well prepared and I was teaching what I enjoyed. Instead I was worried about what to wear. I wanted to be taken seriously. I knew that because I was female, I would automatically have to prove my worth. And I was worried that if I looked too feminine, I would not be taken seriously. I really wanted to wear my shiny lip gloss and my girly skirt, but I decided not to. I wore a very serious, very manly, and very ugly suit. The sad truth of the matter is that when it comes to appearance, we start off with men as the standard, as the norm. Many of us think that the less feminine a woman appears, the more likely she is to be taken seriously. A man going to a business meeting doesn’t wonder about being taken seriously based on what he is wearing—but a woman does. I wish I had not worn that ugly suit that day. Had I then the conɹdence I have now to be myself, my students would have beneɹted even more from my teaching. Because I would have been more comfortable and more fully and truly myself. I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femininity. And I want to be respected in all my femaleness. Because I deserve to be. I like politics and history and am happiest when having a good argument about ideas. I am girly. I am happily girly. I like high heels and trying on lipsticks. It’s nice to be complimented by both men and women (although I have to be honest and say that I prefer the compliments of stylish women), but I often wear clothes that men don’t like or don’t “understand.” I wear them because I like them and because I feel good in them. The “male gaze,” as a shaper of my life’s choices, is largely incidental. Gender is not an easy conversation to have. It makes people uncomfortable, sometimes even irritable. Both men and women are resistant to talk about gender, or are quick to dismiss the problems of gender. Because thinking of changing the status quo is always uncomfortable. Some people ask: “Why the word feminist? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?” Because that would be dishonest. Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general—but to choose to use the vague expression human rights is to deny the speciɹc and particular problem of gender. It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women. That the problem was not about being human, but speciɹcally about being a female human. For centuries, the world divided human beings into two groups and then proceeded to exclude and oppress one group. It is only fair that the solution to the problem acknowledge that. Some men feel threatened by the idea of feminism. This comes, I think, from the insecurity triggered by how boys are brought up, how their sense of self-worth is diminished if they are not “naturally” in charge as men. Other men might respond by saying: Okay, this is interesting, but I don’t think like that. I don’t even think about gender. Maybe not. And that is part of the problem. That many men do not actively think about gender or notice gender. That many men say, like my friend Louis did, that things might have been bad in the past but everything is ɹne now. And that many men do nothing to change it. If you are a man and you walk into a restaurant and the waiter greets just you, does it occur to you to ask the waiter, “Why have you not greeted her?” Men need to speak out in all of these ostensibly small situations. Because gender can be uncomfortable, there are easy ways to close this conversation. Some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how female apes bow to male apes—that sort of thing. But the point is this: We are not apes. Apes also live in trees and eat earthworms. We do not. Some people will say, Well, poor men also have a hard time. And they do. But that is not what this conversation is about. Gender and class are diʃerent. Poor men still have the privileges of being men, even if they do not have the privileges of being wealthy. I learned a lot about systems of oppression and how they can be blind to one another by talking to black men. I was once talking about gender and a man said to me, “Why does it have to be you as a woman? Why not you as a human being?” This type of question is a way of silencing a person’s speciɹc experiences. Of course I am a human being, but there are particular things that happen to me in the world because I am a woman. This same man, by the way, would often talk about his experience as a black man. (To which I should probably have responded: Why not your experiences as a man or as a human being? Why a black man?) So, no, this conversation is about gender. Some people will say, Oh, but women have the real power: bottom power. (This is a Nigerian expression for a woman who uses her sexuality to get things from men.) But bottom power is not power at all, because the woman with bottom power is actually not powerful; she just has a good route to tap another person’s power. And then what happens if the man is in a bad mood or sick or temporarily impotent? Some people will say a woman is subordinate to men because it’s our culture. But culture is constantly changing. I have beautiful twin nieces who are ɹfteen. If they had been born a hundred years ago, they would have been taken away and killed. Because a hundred years ago, Igbo culture considered the birth of twins to be an evil omen. Today that practice is unimaginable to all Igbo people. What is the point of culture? Culture functions ultimately to ensure the preservation and continuity of a people. In my family, I am the child who is most interested in the story of who we are, in ancestral lands, in our tradition. My brothers are not as interested as I am. But I cannot participate, because Igbo culture privileges men and only the male members of the extended family can attend the meetings where major family decisions are taken. So although I am the one who is most interested in these things, I cannot attend the meeting. I cannot have a formal say. Because I am female. Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture. I think very often of my friend Okoloma. May he and others who passed away in that Sosoliso crash continue to rest in peace. He will always be remembered by those of us who loved him. And he was right, that day, many years ago, when he called me a feminist. I am a feminist. And when, all those years ago, I looked the word up in the dictionary, it said: Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes. My great-grandmother, from stories I’ve heard, was a feminist. She ran away from the house of the man she did not want to marry and married the man of her choice. She refused, protested, spoke up when she felt she was being deprived of land and access because she was female. She did not know that word feminist. But it doesn’t mean she wasn’t one. More of us should reclaim that word. The best feminist I know is my brother Kene, who is also a kind, good-looking, and very masculine young man. My own definition is a feminist is a man or a woman who says, yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix  it, we must do better. All of us, women and men, must do better.