Dear God, Why?

I joined the U.S. Navy and was stationed all over the world. I also met a young lady who later became my wife. We were blessed with two wonderful sons, Reme and Jason. They were my pride and joy and reason for living. I was on top of the world, and I wanted the best for them, so I took all I had and started a successful business around my talents as a martial artist. I had status, a career, and family. The little religion I had was just a show. God was just a word.

Arrest, and Jail. Then one day, as I was taking a family member to the hospital, I was surrounded by police. I had no idea what was happening. Here I was, an American serviceman, a patriot, and I was being arrested. Dear God, why? I had never been in any trouble and my record was as clean as my uniform.

I found out I was being set up by former associates of mine. They wanted to frame me so that some scheme of theirs could go undetected. My attorney persuaded me that everything was fine. “You’re innocent,” he said. “Don’t worry. This will never stick.”

Then the trial came. There was no evidence, just my word against my accusers’. Somehow, the jury found me guilty, and I was sentenced to life in jail. Dear God, why? What did I do to deserve this? Why are you letting this happen?

I was angry and bitter. I had traded the crisp white uniform of the U.S. Navy for that of the state prison. My faith was shattered. I couldn’t believe that God existed. If he did, why would he let something like this happen to me?

As time passed, I became colder and angrier. Because of my martial arts background, I was accepted and respected within the prison community.

But then the ultimate happened. My oldest son, Reme, was involved in a fatal car accident. I was lost, I hated everyone and everything. Even God was my enemy.

Stirrings of Peace, and a Crisis. Around this time, I met an inmate named Todd. He walked around the prison with a peace that simply glowed. I don’t know why, but we became the best of friends. We even became cell mates. I grew to trust him and found myself sharing my feelings with him. I found out that he was a Catholic, and he kept telling me that he was so peaceful because he knew God. “Fat chance,” was my response.

Then Todd convinced me to go to chapel with him one day. I sat in the back pew and didn’t want anyone to see me. I wasn’t willing to accept God, but I found the quiet, non-threatening atmosphere to be peaceful. I began going to chapel more frequently and following Todd around like a puppy. I wanted the peace that he had, but I just couldn’t pinpoint where it was coming from.

Once again, tragedy struck. My youngest son, Jason, was riding with a friend and was struck by a drunk driver and was in a coma. Every day for about a month, I was allowed to call the hospital and speak to him, even though he couldn’t talk back. Then I was asked to make the hardest decision of my life. The doctors wanted me to take Jason off life support. I struggled with the decision, but Todd was there to support me. Finally, I consented, and at 10:00 a.m., just two days after my own birthday, Jason’s life support was discontinued. At noon, he was gone. I felt completely empty.

Meeting Jesus in Prison. As time passed, Todd invited me on a retreat. This was a one-time deal called a Cursillo. My immediate response was, “No way, not me.” I didn’t want to have anything to do with God. But Todd kept hinting, and I felt like I was letting him down. He had done so much for me. I finally gave in. I didn’t expect anything. I thought I’d just go and listen.

Wow! I was floored. I met Jesus on that retreat—a laughing, smiling, crying, joking, caring, loving Jesus. I felt like the prodigal son. I found answers to many of my questions. I forgave my accusers. I forgave the people who caused my sons’ deaths. I forgave everyone who had ever harmed me or my family.

I found the peace that was in knowing Jesus, and I wanted more. I became the prison chaplain’s choirmaster and the chaplain’s clerk. I worked to bring more Cursillos into the prison. Most of all, I began to study the word of God.

Confined,but Set Free. But then my life took another unexpected turn. About a year after my conversion, I was diagnosed with incurable multiple sclerosis. Prison was hard enough for a healthy man, and here I was losing control of my bladder and bowel functions. And the pain kept getting worse. I was eventually confined to a wheelchair.

Then one day, as I was in the chapel in my wheelchair, a young man named Eric approached and offered to help. He seemed to come out of the blue, but I believe the Holy Spirit was at work. I was getting depressed, and the good Lord sent an angel in my time of need. Eric attended to all my needs. He cleaned me when I soiled myself. He cooked my meals. He spent hours playing board games and studying Scripture with me. He was a reflection of Christ to me.

My illness finally landed me in the prison infirmary, where I remain to this day. I now have all the time and quiet I want to study Scripture, and countless opportunities to help others who are infirm.

Recently, I received a scholarship to a Catholic distance university, and my studies have become more intense. This opportunity has allowed me to bring my heart together with my head. I am knowing Jesus as well as feeling him.

Someday, if it’s God’s will for my innocence to be proven, I will be thankful. But in the meantime I know that he has plans for me right here. I’m no longer angry or bitter. It took my coming to prison to see Jesus in the eyes of those who believe in him and to experience his love.

I know my life has changed for the better and I am now being sought out and respected for my faith rather than my ability to fight. I have been blessed with the opportunity to learn about Jesus, and I hope to pass it on. I now hope that the Holy Spirit will make me an instrument of the same peace I once sought and found.

Dear God, thank you!

Dissonant Biafras and the Burden of Memory

In a very profound sense, it is us who still live – especially all here on the internet – that bear the brunt of the Nigerian Civil War. Thomas Carlyle said, “The crash of the whole solar and stellar systems could only kill you once”. The many dead of Biafra, be they stabbed, or shot, their skulls smashed, or their bodies mangled, have died once, and now enjoy the impregnable convalescence of the afterlife. But for us who live, it might be a more gradual death as, every now and then, a grotesque black and white picture of a kwashikored child surfaces online (it could be from any Black nation on earth but Nigeria), it deals us fresh Biafra blows and breaks our hearts all over again. As we recover from it, we know not when another is coming. In this bafflingly insensitive world, another is always coming.

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This sentiment is expressed more vividly in Raoul Peck’s Sometimes in April when Idris Elba’s character tried to soothe an old man’s despair after the war in Rwanda. The man seemed to imply, ‘Oh c’mon! Don’t feel sorry for me. You have longer to live with it.’ That’s damn right. Thomas Mann observed and I agree, that “a man’s dying is more the survivor’s affair than his own”. On this score, grief is ours, and until we decide otherwise, it always will be. Kurt Vonnegut’s densely sorrowful account (Biafra: A People Betrayed) of the last months of the war might help us decide sooner. After the tears the piece might evoke, some quietude could follow, then some musings, and then some genuine sense of pride. Then maybe a smile… at the marvelous thought of the quality of human beings that lived and fought and died in and for Biafra. With the crudest of arms against the bombardment of a Nigerian government spuriously backed by the weaponry of Britain and Russia, the Biafrans, in Martin Luther King Jr.’s terms, were never pulled down enough by the enemy to hate them.

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When thus you smile, know it that you would have switched fortunes with some aged man somewhere who has lived seventy or eighty years with the stench of his wickedness. Whenever the old actually start making excuses, then they really have none. They look back on their lives and say it was worth it, that they kept the country together, and that it is still together. Together doing what?! And at what cost? Together crawling; a 57 year old baby with Down’s syndrome, still pandering to vested western interests.

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To a very great extent, it was war, so both sides were justified in their quest for victory; never mind genocide. In one of Vonnegut’s exchanges on Biafra he writes, "It's hard to prove genocide," said Hall. "If some Biafrans survive, then genocide hasn't been committed. If no Biafrans survive, who will complain?" Elechi Amadi, in his Sunset in Biafra, acknowledged it was but a war. When he quit the Nigerian Army and showed his concern for the sufferings of non-combatant Biafrans, a lot of them found their voices. A gaggle of women besieged him, complaining about serial molestations, starvation, and rape. He was sympathetic, but urged them none the less to remember that a war was afoot. People who are killing your men and starving your children would almost certainly also rape you. Tragic as it may be, it won’t be the most significant dark spots of the struggle. But it was only as far as killing and getting killed went that the war was honorable. The Nigerian government eventually lost the inborn dignity of men, and thought it an allowable part of the strategies of warfare to starve women and children to death. It was a shameful affront on humanity. That was Nigeria’s second goof. The first was resisting the secession in the first place trying to protect a political territory they neither created nor ran well; trying to hold together a marriage in which the parties’ interests are so perennially divergent. A marriage they didn’t preside over, from a courtship they were never in.

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But of all goofs, the most pervasive has been the silence thence. Nigeria’s Gettysburg, for forty-seven years, has had no one show up on it to read an address. Save for a National Anthem that many have never sung nor know how to sing, this country called Nigeria has no rallying cry, no beacon to mark where our journey began, no compass to point where it leads. What we call constitution has been serially abused by military incursions and ethnic and religious precedence. These realities point to a purposeless war on the part of the Nigerian government who seem content with blaming the deaths of over 2 million supposed Nigerian citizens on one man’s (Ojukwu) ill decision. In place of one address, one acknowledgment, one motion for redress, what we have are mischievous pick-aways at our history by many who are intent on distorting the narrative for heinous reasons.

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Like an amoeba, circumstances between then and now have continued to assume many shapes. These circumstances have given vent to many differing emotions and sentiments. Nowhere is it more evident than in the multiple Biafra movements we’ve been seeing, some even calling out and damning others. MASSOB, IPOB, BLC, BIM, BZM, ADM, etc… somewhere in this crowd, the golden idea may be lost. It paints an all too familiar picture, of when the heaven was said to touch earth, and from the radius where that contact was made distinct religions that are eternally at loggerheads with each other were born. In our case, opportunistic tendencies have been threatening to alter the genes of people whose forebears stood and fell for something noble, activated by the Ahiara Declaration. Somewhere between Ojukwu and Kanu, the plot may have been twisted, but it cannot disappear. Water may lure blood to a doomed race, but the latter being thicker would be saved by its tardiness.

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The ideal Biafran is not vulgar, insolent, or of trivial character. He will not cajole, coerce, or blackmail anyone into sharing his 30^th May sentiments – especially not from the Nigerian divide – just as Arsenal fans cannot now subject Chelsea fans to an English FA Cup celebration. That the FA Cup trophy is one proves that whoever wants it is ready to undo his neighbor to clinch it. Hence, nothing Chelsea does to Arsenal can amount to a desecration, instead, only Arsenal can ridicule themselves. Desecration is the abuse of something revered; people who do not revere a thing therefore do not have the capacity to desecrate it. If anybody needs to carefully gauge their Biafra rhetoric it is the Biafrans themselves.

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Anyone who receives a new insight on a path the Biafra struggle should take could do well to find another nomenclature for it. Biafra is exclusively a product of the Ahiara Declaration, a sublime 48 page document that mentions the word Igbo only once – and in a demurrable context: “…From this derives our deep conviction that the Biafran Revolution is NOT just a movement of Igbo, Ibibio, Ijaw and Ogoja. It is a movement of true and PATRIOTIC AFRICANS. It is African nationalism conscious of itself and fully aware of the powers with which it is contending. From this derives our belief that history and humanity are on our side, and that the Biafran Revolution is INDESTRUCTIBLE and ETERNAL.”

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Are the Igbos having an unfair deal in Nigeria? Yes. Should they do something about it? Absolutely! But whatever the Igbos do for themselves to gain politico-economic relevance is no more a Biafran cause than Lionel Messi is Spanish. The right to self-determination is also theirs; they can ask to secede. But if it ain’t Biafra, it ain’t. The real Biafra is 50 today; in another 50 years, nothing would have distorted and discolored history more than if we put layers and layers of embarrassing epochs between the innocence of our children to come and the nobility of our fathers gone.

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All the foregoing depend on known circumstances, chiefly, that the struggle for the actualization of a sovereign state of Biafra is the Biafrans’ to win or lose. But there is the remote possibility that, the Nigerian state, out of mischief or rare humaneness, would either grant Biafra leave or wholesomely restructure Nigeria to comfortably accommodate all. If the former results, well, when the Wembley showpiece was done and dusted and Arsenal won the trophy, they cared less about the brash tackles from Chelsea while the game was on; those were written in as part of the costs of a sweet victory as everyone departed for their various destinations. In the case of the latter, a question of forgiveness would be thrown up. It will then bring us face to face with Wole Soyinka’s dilemma in The Burden of Memory, The Muse of Forgiveness as dissected by Kirkus Reviews. One question begs for a non-existent answer:

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How do we tuck away the bitter memories of our bloodied past? Forgiveness, a salve on the wounds to promote healing, would seem to be the morally superior option. But is excusing morally outrageous behavior moral or simply foolish? Perhaps healing requires revenge, an excising of the cancer. Are we to imagine, for example, a repentant Pol Pot walking the streets like any other man, freed by the forgiveness of those whom he did not manage to kill? Soyinka identifies forgiveness as “a value far more humanly exacting than vengeance” yet cannot swallow the proposition that it will, by itself, suffice. Something is missing from a process which absolves the perpetrators of tyranny so completely that they assume the same moral or civil status as those whose conduct is crime-free. Soyinka’s answer is reparations, a paying back from victimizer to victim, but even this sits somewhat uneasily. Alas, it is part of the cost of despicable acts: once committed, there are no longer answers with which we can be completely comfortable.

#WifeNotCook

More and more, feminism is becoming a popular theme; but some ones are taking it too far me thinks. You don’t preach feminism by constantly berating men. As a matter of fact, the reverse ought to be the case. Feminism has to be an education… of the men folk.

But if you insist the current world order is skewed, and you want to single-handedly reposition the planet, then, here is a ring, go ahead and propose. Then prepare to go and see his people… and let them determine what his groom price will be.

What can be more constructive is education… a gradual, gentle reorientation, not harassment and verbosity. For we do, all of us, need each other. So start by disabusing his mind from seeking to acquire a woman by paying dowry for her… Then proceed by extricating too much kith and kin influence from nuclear families.

Is woman today coy? The feminist has to be coyer, for certain hunting circumstances make the lioness lie down for the deer… She stoops to conquer. If someone can disagree with simple reasoning, how much more verbose, arrogant arguments?

The teacher comes to school with new knowledge, and painstakingly transfers it to his students. School is an approach to learning that has been found to be effective. There are other methods, and each is gradual, gentle, and methodical. From what we know, therefore, we can conclude that the #WifeNotCook campaign will not help this cause.

Every now and then there are conferences, workshops, seminars. The convener sometimes has new knowledge to share, at other times is aware of the existence of new knowledge and wants to acquire it. Then ensue the gentle, structured, methodical approach of seminars et al.

#NoBeShout