AFRICAN LEADERS MUST REPENT
By Joseph Haba
Today, May 16 2001 at 4:200 in the morning I had a trance in Staten Island, New York City. I was lying in bed. My body was serenely resting, but my mind was profoundly occupied and engaged. It was about the poignant-heartbreaking problems in Africa, poverty, civil war, corruption and AIDS. Suddenly, in a floating trance, I saw Africa taking a weird and astonishing shape of an indescribable giant ready to justly chastise.
Though I was not sleeping, I was in Africa and in my native village - Teyehoun - among my people. I was with them. The people that raised me; and the people I owe. As I stood among them, I saw Africa smoothly separating itself from the world and stood up. I was standing up. Standing and curious while my eyes were moving, moving across Africa.
Meanwhile an unheard of movement slowly and steadily began to take shape. The first thing I saw – at the spot where Algeria and Tunisia meet –was a steady moving layer that uncovered an astronomical eye which extensively propagated a river of light around its body, the land of Africa. The light from the huge eye was so gleaming, dazzling and powerful that a needle among pebbles could be seen half a mile away. Then, an enormous abyss in Egypt, where Africa sneezed, followed this incidence. A chilly electrical power engulfed my body and created an astounding panic in my brain. While I was contemplating this incident, an endless blue mouth opened between Djibouti and Eritrea. There, Africa deeply and vociferously yawned.
As I wondered over these happenings, I saw, like a city under a severe earthquake, the whole part of Africa in motion: Some parts were being immerged leaving huge blocks of earth-like stumps. These stumps made upward shrinking across the land like cobras steadily raising their swallowed heads. From the top of those structures, whose summits looked like mushrooms, there were homogenous fivefold cracklings. And a metamorphosis occurred which transformed those structures into thousands of bushy-hairy hands armed with clubs.
There was a wild tumult followed by a quiet moment. From nowhere, I heard a voice saying in a loud and demanding sound: I AM TIRED OF YOUR MISCHIEF! I’M SICK OF YOUR TYRANNY AND THE SWINDLING PRACTICES YOU HAVE CHRONICALLY ESTABLISHED ON ME, IN ORDER TO ENSLAVE MY HELPLESS BELOVED CHILDREN. I’M FED UP WITH YOUR SELFISH REGIONALISTIC ANARCHICAL USE OF MY BODY, WHICH CONTINUES TO DEVASTATE ME. YOU HAVE MALICIOUSLY KILLED MY SINLESS LOYAL CHILDREN, AND YOU CONTINUE TO DO SO. I'M FED UP WITH WHAT YOUR ANCESTERS DID TO MOST OF MY BEST, ROYAL AND VALIANT HANDS WHEN YOU CAUGHT MY CHILDREN AGAINST THEIR WILL FOR SLAVERY.
There was a pause in cemetery-like quietness. Then it resumed in a moderate tone: Again, the brothers and sisters, who could have healed the wound, which you never stop aggravating on me, you have misused their naivety and have used it to destroy people and their way of life. And you use children to kill their own brothers and sisters, to kill or traumatize their own parents. As those children kill, or as they are killed, you say: “You’re soldiers trained to die, at all cost, to defend your country from its enemies." Then, you create division among the people that look up to you for guidance; then, you create enmity among the people within your jurisdiction and your neighbors; then, you make friends with the enemy of your subject, corruption.
As soon as the word corruption was pronounced, without warning, there were a number of flashes of all the clubs that hit the heads and bodies of most of the African leaders. Those leaders who believe the countries they lead belong to them. It was like a heavy rain pouring on light zinc roofs. Eerie cries followed.
-STOP! The voice from nowhere said. “It’s just the beginning.”
Suddenly everything vanished like a flake of snow under a blazing sun.
But my mind continued to question me. I started thinking about my people again and again. I started thinking about myself and about what I have gone through. And I concluded: “Good deeds are seldom, let’s look for them; Bad deeds are numerous, let’s avoid them.”
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| Last updated 2011/12/12 11:14:44 PST | Hits 784 |
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