Letter from Buea to Yaounde

Dear Ngwa

I got you. I feel you. And I appreciate you! It’s been ages ever since anyone recognised any good in me, which I suspect is in short supply and said so, let alone publicly. I say this strictly for the reason that if one fails to blow one’s trumpet every now and again, the trumpet is most likely to get rusted. I giggled like a big girl when I read all the accolades... in your last mail. Now, we get down to the brass tacks. I agree with you that that the Gainako that Lapu Yabi rented to drive the CAMLELE “iyo cows” is, unfortunately herding the stock in the wrong direction.

Why won’t he, if not in fulfilment of the late sage, Chinua Achebe’s assertion that as long as a goat lives, it belongs to the child who tethers it daily, but that as soon as it is slaughtered, the real owner is then known.

And how about the other fellow in the fray; the smug self conceited and complacent Don Quixote, with whom he has been doing the power tango? Don’t you see the perpetual fight in this bookman, even when trifles are all he must challenge in a court of law?

If truly, the Gainako is not his “anointed nemesis”, why has he not, in his characteristic fashion, taken the road to the law courts or try to have the khaki boys arrest and keep his nemesis behind bars, so he can drink political cold water garri in peace? Gee me a break, Ngwa! Let them “fight to quench”, for all I care.

One of the protagonists is a jurist and so should have long imbibed the legal maxim of volenti non fit injuria and shut up, instead of running to the very media that he loves to hate, to cry on its shoulders like a lazy school boy that has failed his exams.

See what they did to the toxic gin of Upper Volta; or is it Campari? Don’t tell me you have forgotten that by slaying the ebullient and progressive Thomas, for power, it was but a matter of time for the people’s gin to overpower the Campari of the Burkina State office and hand him back to his French minders. Ngwa, if by any means, you are the connoisseur or the faithful apostle of Bacchus, the god of wine, like me, then you’d easily understand that “gin strong pass campari”, full stop!

Lucky disposable puppet; he now has been taken to the Ivory Coast, to be spoon-fed by one other French lackey. One only hopes, Ngwa, that this toxic political drink doesn’t veritably turn up on the dining table of those the French installed in Drogba’s country a few years back.

On the other issue of khaki boys, insisting on converting pen-pushers to errand boys, I think it is tantamount to courting insurrection by any other name. In Pidgin, the lingua-franca of this land of “njanga” and “mololo”, the common saying is that “nyanga di sleep, trouble di wake-up-am”. The Ngola chieftain had better hurry up and stop them before these jack-boots introduce irritating grains of sand into his much cherished garri.

If you doubt what I am saying, then just rush up there and ask our “grand frère du nord”, Bello, what happened to him after sand was poured into his garri, or better still, “Mygarri” in April 1984.

If you still can’t make it to him, then, let me remind you of the fact that he took “mapang” to that part in which the Haramic idiots are today, causing untold havoc, where he cooled his feet for years, before the Ntarinkon chieftain broke the jinx and reinstated political talkativeness.

A word to the wise, it is said, is enough. Let the khaki boys leave the pen soldiers alone. They have got better wars to fight. Let them not say that they were not warned.