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Ear to the Ground
By Charles Onyango Obbo |
Big Men - you can’t live between life and death
Dec 1, 2004
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This column had been written on a very different subject. To be precise, about exiled opposition leader Dr. Kizza Besigye’s recent call in to the “Straight Talk” programme on the Voice of America hosted by the “Kabale Kid” Shaka Ssali. There were references to George Orwell’s great book, “Animal Farm” and the leaders of the animal’s revolution, the pigs Napoleon (that would be President Yoweri Museveni) Snowball (Eriya Kategaya), the sycophant and Squealer (many contenders for that honour). Together with other animals, they formed what we would recognise in Uganda today as the Movement Historicals. And what happened to their constitution, after it went through several amendments and turned Napoleon into a tyrant. But to that, if the times permit it, we shall return next week. My attention was instead taken by the 3rd Quarter issue of Global Journalist, published by the International Press Institute, which features the Pictures of the Year from the previous 12 months. The photos mine the deep recesses of the range of human emotions – love, hope, desperation, innocence: An adrenalin packed moment during a Sierra Leonean amputees football match; a dramatic shot of a prostitute with a client in a Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) brothel; and then a Liberian combatant. As the year ends, the African rebel or government soldier is making it into every “photo of the year” report. They never miss. After many years, I put a finger on an irony that I had always “looked” at in these “photos” yet I could not see. These rebels, militia, and rogue militaries all take the trouble to have a clean haircut. It means they stand in the mirror in the morning, make sure they look good, then go out to kill, rape, or loot. Why would you want to look good, if you were going out to kill or rape? I suspect it’s because the most complicated relationship we have is not with each other, or our rulers, or our environment, or with our gods, but with death. The scenes in Ramallah, during Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s burial, were a display of public grief that I no longer thought human beings were still capable of – this in a place where death is a constant in the bitter Isreali-Palestinian conflict. It seems of all things that die, the Palestinians never imagined Arafat was one of them. Mortality is such an inescapable daily reality, our civilisation in reaction seems to be driven almost solely by affirming life on a constant basis. When we go out to war to kill, we take trouble to look good as a statement that we hope to make it back alive. We love games like soccer, because they offer possibilities that we don’t have in life. Death is certain. There is other likely end. But in a soccer game, your team has three options; it can win, it can draw, or it can lose. There are no draws or victories in our lives. We all pass on in the end. Our politics is shaped by the same contradiction. A leader steals an election, jails his opponents, and torments his rivals, making many enemies in the process. He takes away their lives (both in reality and figuratively), so he can extend his. But then he misses out on the joys of the same life, because he cannot go out and bask freely in the sun as he has to beef up his bodyguard into thousands of men, and retreat to live behind a fortress of State House because it’s the only place he can be safe. The people, battered, resort to the most easily available means to them to get back at the leader – their mouths. So they get on their phones and call the radio talk shows and complain. The government decides they are “abusing” the president, and draws up a list of FM stations to ban. In our lucid moments, we make constitutions that recognise that our bodies age, our minds degenerate, and our joints become rheumatic, so we say thou shall rule for only 10 years. But the next day, we hanker for the logic of the soccer match; we look for a victory or a draw. So we remove the limits on how long one can be in office. Then the day comes, and the ruler is 75 years old. At that point we remember the provision in the constitution that one cannot be president if he/she is more than 75 years old. So we get rid of that too. But there are things that no one, however powerful, can take away from the people. They might not be heard on radio, or be read in the newspapers, but they will still talk. And they will say the Big Man is too old, and so on. The rulers will still try, as they did in the Kenya of Jomo Kenyatta and “the Ngwanzi” Kamuzu Banda’s Malawi, to ban even private speculation about the Big Man’s age. As time closes in, like the rebel or soldier who gets a haircut and looks good before going to battle, the denial factor goes into high gear. Buildings and streets, and schools are named after the Big Man. His bust makes it onto the national currency notes. His autobiography becomes compulsory reading in schools. The presidential “palace” in the village where he was born becomes a place of pilgrimage for the ruling party faithful. However, the Arafat moment always – always - comes. I look at the photos, and one shows street children in a sewer in Ulan Bator, Mongolia. Despite the squalid conditions, two little girls are shown doing their make-up: The power of the message came to me: If they are lucky, the immortality politicians seek might be captured in the fraction of a second it takes to shoot the “photo that is worth a thousand words”, but never in life. It never gives anyone the three possible end results that a soccer match does. *Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] |
© 2004 The Monitor Publications
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