by Pappy Maj
We had been hungry for years. The hard fact of continuously dwindling resources was finally making Mother worry. She had hoped and prayed that the factory where daddy worked would be re-opened as promised in the letter she received from The Big Ones when they were wooing her and the rest of the village for the much coveted ‘X’ next to their names. Although the promises in the letter were somewhat too good to be true, she decided to go with the pretence that everything would be alright, lest she be bestowed with a short sleeve or long sleeve gift she had heard others had received when they dared question the promise. We had been hungry before, and have been hungry ever since. The promise is yet to be kept.
The Big Ones whose name you dare not say out loud, lest you disappear, or get arrested had written a love note, yet all that I could see and feel was the continuous abuse and rape of my talent, wasted youthful opportunities and depraved dreams. Mother had been laid off work and told that there was no money to pay workers at her job, and father would go to the closed factory and sit with the other men in silence and bemoan their dead ambitions and failure to provide for the family. But we always tried something out for ourselves and never wanted to question The Big Ones on why the promises they had written in the love letter had still not materialised. The rumbling of our hungry stomachs became a chorus that we were slowly becoming accustomed to; with the deep bass rumblings from father, the high pitched sopranos of our mother’s tummy, and the short staccatos from us the children. It was a chorus of hungry tummies that gained in crescendo and reached fever pitch.
Sometimes mother and father would go to our next door villages’ tuckshops to try and procure the little food that they could to feed us, and also buy some things to come and re-sell, they called it eeking out a living. I really do not know what happened, but I guess The Big Ones heard that we were eating from next door and became angry with us because we were not being patriotic, and being proud of our hunger. So they said we could not go and eat next door.
Mother and father were furious.
They burnt down the house.
As the house caught flames and begun spreading its licks to other households, I saw other mothers and fathers and their children too ask the The Big Ones to explain why we had to live with this hunger in our own village which we knew was rich enough to feed us all and also give to our neighbours too? Mothers and fathers asked why they had to suffer in our own village where they had asked The Big Ones to protect us and shelter us from the storm. The song had changed, and we all wanted to know why we had to suffer so, when they could live in skyscrapers and build multi-million households and just write to us love letters they were failing to fulfil. But they never replied us. They were silent.
Instead, they set the dogs on us. The dogs barked and bit us and showed their ferocious teeth. They were enraged like dogs that had a thirst for blood, not sparing anyone; mother, father and child alike, we all got to taste the fury. We bled, but we did not die. Mother and father had decided that enough was enough.
Mother and father shut down the village. And the chorus from their stomachs transformed into the chorus of our united power. We used the weapon called solidarity and used the tool called hashtag to cultivate this new terrain of a promising new village that we could so easy see in the near horizon, and we could smell its beautiful scent of equal opportunity, respect for human rights and criminalisation of the poison called corruption that they consumed on a daily basis, with the money that came from our own dwindling resources.
All we had to do was stop this crippling plague that would sometimes engulf our village; FEAR.