Letter from Buea to Yaounde

Dear Ngwa,

And so, something happened!

The “House that Jack Built” is haunted. Better still, it is euphemistically crumbling and crushing its thieving occupant in the process. The Gubernatorial occupant is denying his own property in exactly the same manner by which the biblical Pontius Pilate denied the God Man. How the thieving mighty are scramming from the very lap of luxury!

I hear the poor villagers are planning to storm the Fako version of the Bastille if they are not placated with immediate effect. But then, unlike the Bastille of the now famous single Frog Revolution of 1789, they may have to storm many such Bastilles in the land of their birth that has been raped for no other reason than that they are so welcoming of “Mojilis”.

Ngwa, did you by any chance meet with Lord Lundy when he travelled over there to make a case for the grabbing king pins and to some extent, ensure that justice eludes the true owners of the land? He had every reason to, because the racket fixed it in such a way as not to turn Wonjoku into a “New South Wales” and have the little peevish brat govern it.

You see the point! Put two and two together and the answer, of course, would be, who “sold” the said hectare; for how much and for what reason. I told you in one of my mails and I hereby reiterate that the clouds shall soon clear for us to know the colour of the sky.

By the way, Ngwa, I got these calls from some dunderheads who would rather we kept quiet because, as they put it, people have a right to their privacy. What crippled reasoning! Do not say I told you that a policewoman who was assigned to investigate the land mess was victimised as soon as it was noticed that she was on the right track. Poor girl; the mafia not only threw her out of the beat but went ahead to suspend her salary for three months. Scandalous!

Know what! In your last mail, you recalled how the mighty Nixon of Uncle Sam was smoked out of that White House that by some divine design is today occupied by this black tenant from the East of the raped Continent, by the prying duo of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward.

And may I very humbly tell them that there is hardly ever any privacy for those who have sought fame and political glory. The moment you are elevated to public office, you are no longer private. The tendency for the media would be to bring the cameras into your bedrooms.

Did I hear you say that is unfair? Not all the way, my man. Naturally, if you have too many bedrooms away from those you vowed to share with your room-mate, the media would focus their cameras on you. Surely, you can’t have your cake and eat it; or can you, Ngwa?

This brings me to this Western yo-yo train. Today, they talk of strong institutions as opposed to strongmen. And tomorrow, they summon the strongmen and render them stronger.

I am looking forward to the day when the ambivalent West shall be picnicking with Good Old Bob on the banks of the Zambezi or the shores of Lake Victoria. It may not take long, given that Bob’s case, like the one of the Etoudi tenant is one of “till death do us part…”

I just took the cue from your last mail in which you decry the ambivalence of the black Uncle Sam chief priest. See how he summoned all the head boys, but for the stubborn Bob of Zimbabwe and the lunatic of Sudan. They all turned up like a pack of sheep. Even your own headache of state who hardly attends African Union meetings scampered across, posing for pictures with the American boy and smiling like a big girl for the cameras.

In the end, Ngwa, they were all given lollipops, promised baby dolls and warned not to look in the direction of China, lest they turn into a pillar of salt like Lot’s wife of the Sodom and Gomorrah fame. Again, I agree with you on this permanent interest phenomenon.

See how they cajoled this sit-tight chap from the East of the Continent. Just see how he suddenly returned to his own vomit, fed on it, as humbly as a dog would, and beat a hasty retreat from his intransigence! Otherwise, how come the stigma of this primitive thing called homosexuality was suddenly and conveniently deleted from the statute books of Amin’s country?

At the eleventh hour of his being summoned to Uncle Sam’s world? A world in which it is perfectly in order for a full blooded man to copulate with his own sex, but illegal for there to be polygamy? Gee me a break!

How bestial can these fellows get? I fear, Ngwa that our dear headache of state might just have been given the marching orders to have the constitution panel-beaten to have this “man-upon-man” weird law surreptitiously slipped into place.

Let us wait and see if truly, someone is about to knock me down with a feather. Greet your body for me. And say me well to your better half that, I presume, has not yet grown a “Kumbo Striker” in between her. God forbid!