A Defining Moment

Edward Femi Adeti, Author

So, you want to ask yourself if the world is fair to have eminent and innocent persons either decapitated or gunned down by slaughter-happy terrorists whose only certificates are the thick rag masks they are wearing.

Literature is my religion and in writing (not in journalism) I really want to be recognised as an Elisha of deities like Soyinka, Faulkner and Ron Hubbard. 

This year alone, this ‘religion’ has lost Awoonor, the Homer of African Poetry, just months after the ground-entering of another god who came and walked the earth in human flesh― Achebe. Idols of the pen they are, and more exalted than saints of the ink they will remain. To hurt any of these immortals is to touch God’s anointed and doing His prophets a great deal of impairment.

Awoonor took a sudden exit in Nairobi through a terrorist raid in what has become, for many, a defining moment. The globe can no longer afford to live in increasingly thickening fear, like a loner toddling and groping in the dark, heading nowhere safer and fairer than a bottomless ditch.

Terrorists are in their own slaughter paradise and they have shown that they have no bounds. Even in early childhood schools where infants do not know yet how to spell TERRORISM, cold-faced terrorists pop up and heartlessly show kids depths of terror that sadly will remain in the memories of their parents and countries for ever. 

Those who know how it feels to lose a loved one, and how difficult it is to cope and live on without them, should understand my anger here. And anyone whose fingertip has ever been burnt by the little red flame on a matchstick and still remembers how they kissed that finger should also imagine how much more it would feel to have a deadly dose of gunfire cruise through a full body. That is rage! 

In what is worse than a sheer mockery of humanity, you find what men of global reputation have toiled to achieve for decades sublime at the hands of some beast-hearted, familiar aliens whose job now is to keep a fatigued world awake at midnight. 

We now walk through the streets where a band of rag-wearing rats who are of no use to anybody but to only those who sell their weapons can just get up and bring the world to tears at will just to laugh and pop champagne in secluded, unknown caves. 

There is probably no other way to describe it than to say they are now addicted to killing, guzzling fresh blood and seeing a heavy downpour of tears! And as to who falls victim, where the tragedy must take place and when they will strike, it is found on their blind-hate timetable, known to them only. 

My mourning robe is dipped in deep indigo for my beloved Awoonor, a man I met only once when he was Chairman of Ghana’s Council of State. It is a defining moment. And I am more than convinced that what we are in is no longer the world I knew some days ago. No longer the world I knew.