BLACK COCKTALE

“Leadership is not a popularity contest; it’s about leaving your ego at the door. The name of the game is to lead without a title”-Robin S. Sharma
If you know a man, who forgot he was nothing but a ‘puny toddler’ until he staggered accidentally into the circus of power. If you know any man, who got carried away that he was once ‘the little end of nothing whittled to a point’, until he mistakenly stumbled on the wings of authority. In his hollow of forgetfulness, he decided to fuel his ignorance and pseudo power with the deadly sin of superiority that reeks of conceit and arrogance-ego. I once met such a man; he needed a reminder that he is diseased and I said to him: ‘I can help you…I will treat you’, but he wasn’t willing to be treated; of course, I am no doctor but I didn’t have to be one to know that he is afflicted with one of the world’s deadliest syndromes!

“If your ego starts out, “I’m important, I’m big, I ‘m special,” you're in for some disappointments, when you look around at what we’ve discovered about the universe. No, you are not big. No, you’re not. You’re small in time and space. And you have this frail vessel called the human body that’s limited on earth”.-Neil deGrasse Tyson.
It is sad that, time and time again does the pride of man in power influence his very own fall. While denying it, such a man gradually starts to believe that he is the authority or that he possesses great moral dominion over others. He deceives himself, thinking he can disrespect and treat anyone according to his convenience in the name of power. He knows not when to speak and when not to. By that point, he loses steam; in result, he falsely begins trying to prove that unwarranted dominion by seizing the role of a condemner.

His status is similar to a naive pauper who has never known wealth and on stubbing his toe upon it; he squandered it all, carelessly forgetting that he will become a naïve pauper once again. Worse still, he feigns
knowledge when he knows nothing. Ignorance may not need immediate attention but when you don’t know and you don’t know that you don’t know, that, requires immediate attention with a red light signaling ‘emergency’. Bear grylls once said “A man’s pride can be his downfall and he needs to learn when to turn to others for support and guidance”.

You see, a man in this state keeps fooling himself thinking that he has power, but he will find out that the power he has is limited to times when things are going well. Once things start going poorly, they will see how powerless they truly are- their pride has kept them from seeing aspects of their lives that they need to work on, it has kept them from seeing gaps in their knowledge and ability. How sad!
Humility is the opposite of pride, and the humble man in a position of power will have a good vision of just where he stands in the world. Even when he doesn’t know, he will be willing to learn with humility. He will never be carried away and as such he will lead neither muddled with power nor blinded by pride or ego. That, my audience, is a man of pure power, real leadership, distinct honor and undefiled dignity. My kind of man!*winks*

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The leaders of tomorrow -an abridged version of a long essay.
The 'abovementioned' phrase has been used several times by individuals from various walks of life,the youth not exempted, but i think we dont understand its meaning. I guess it's one of the thousands words we use on a daily basis without trying to figure out the meaning embedded in it.
Permit me at this juncture to recount a têtê-a-têtê i had with my late dad. I was on my way to say 'hello' to a friend who just returned home for the end of the session break,on my way to his 'domus', i came across two men sorting things out in a duel,from all the blabbing associated with such a higgledy-piggledy atmosphere, i heard one of them saying at the top of his voice 'omo oba lola' ni mi,while the other refute the claim,his premises being that his father told him the name of the royal families without the other party's family on the list,that couldn't have been an over-sight, so he thought.
I asked my dad what it means to be 'Oba lola' and wondered if the throne deserves fighting for,at least not at a point when there is no 'vacancy'. He replied calmly,'oba lola' never became king and 'may' no 'can' not become one. He concluded by saying that 'today is the tommorrow of yesterday and there can never be 'finis' to tommorrow,there will always be a tommorrow. I realised that the 'poor' man is not to blame,he has been decieved to believe that the throne will belong to his family very soon.
If you've really followed this far. I have few questions to round off this post. Dont you think the person that coined the phrase 'aforementioned' intentionally used it to decieve us? If not,why do we have old men at the helm of affairs of the state while the youth are reduced to a spectator engaging one another in frivolous debates? Why do we fail to produce a leader amidst the millions of youths roaming the streets? Don't you think it's time for youths to challenge the status quo? -'Ademola non contenti ad status quo'. Is it high time the youth became the leaders of today?
Thus,though we cannot make our sun
stand still,yet we will make him run
-Andrew Marvell's TO HIS COY MISTRESS line 45-46.....
Beht are we ready to make our sun run?
THINK....

AMANDLA AWETHU

written by Habeeb Professorr X Kolade

The silence that pervaded the entire room, you knew, was not what even a mad man would expect from the provocation of the news; its melancholic message and its misery melange. If a stranger had walked in that evening, he would have seen you holding tight to the chiffon cotton that separates your room from the large sitting room. He would have seen your sorry eyes too and how they shuttled between the ground and the empty space that bonded you with your parents that sat on opposite caramel colour cushioned chairs at the centre of the room which was also the only rug covered floor space in your house with an old centre table as its hat. The sofa and the other seat were empty. The silence, your mother's sanguine eyes, your Father’s building rage and the whistling winds, would have suggested to the stranger that his sojourn had brought him to an eerie cold house and the only lively thing the red petals at the centre of the table and the golden splendent breath of the sun on the room’s ember. It was like you were behind a screen and the movie viewer had paused the movie to pick on some popcorn or look closely at the poster hanging on a rusty nail on the wall that read TRAIN A GIRL AND YOU HAVE TRAINED A NATION attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, or look closely at the point where all our eyes had been directed to at that moment, a national daily that lied innocently on the table, like it was oblivious of the news that it carried and instead wondered why it provoked such silence and its imminent ire.

The only reason you were safe was because you had been jailed by your Uba (father).

Freedom is not always a good thing, you thought. It was that liberty to walk down the street and be maimed by an angry assailant or be hit by a stray bullet. It was what made it possible for men to be split by bombs in marketplaces and motor parks. It was what now separated you from Nafisatu, your ambidextrous twin sister. You had wandered off from school in your imaginations and the school teachers sent for your father to complain to them that your mind was never in class and that sometimes you walked off, alone, imagining things and speaking to yourself. So your father took you home after questions had been asked about your sanity.

And if the stranger was your father’s younger brother, Yakubu who lived with you but was several decades younger than your father, he would be standing near the door, a few stubbles around his thin shin, his white jalamia stopping just before his ankles, and his eyes sitting in a tearful socket. His thick eyelashes exaggerated the misery his face expressed, but could it be less? He was the harbinger of the news, the institutor of the horrifying silence.

That silence was only common when Nafisatu was in the room reading. Your father would frown at anyone that made any noise. She was unlike you, even though you strikingly resembled each other that one of you had to sacrifice her face to get mark beneath her chin to reduce the confusion you both normally caused.

Nafisatu was unlike you in every way. While she was crazy about everything science, you were one who only saw art in anything good. While you both loved to observe the surroundings, you both saw and picked out different meanings. And while she loved to read, you were one who only believed in your imaginations and wanted to dictate from your thoughts the eventualities of life. But then, you both had resolved the in your own ways, to be bent on creating a dent on the earth, to make your impact felt. She called it creating your own earthquake; you called it rewriting the earth’s script.

The memories of your moments together flashed before you and you could see her gentle smile sit well on her fair skin, fair as the evening’s hue with an extra tint. She was as bright as summer’s day but calm as winter’s moonshine. You could paint her face over and over again, but now with the tears that now rolled down your cheeks relentlessly, it blurred out severally. The effect of the news was not sudden, it took its time to gradually overwhelm you like shadows shading in and fading out as the sun enacts its daily monotonous dance.

It was not the first time that such tragic events had taken place but it was the first time it blew your own roof open, tore off your clothes and exposed your helplessness, your terrible uncertainties and the humongous fear that was banked in your hearts and your heads. One person or two always had those heartrending stories to tell; stories of broken bones, of splattered blood, of scattered splinters, mangled limbs or twisted necks, and vanishing bodies. And you have always carefully listened, shrunk your face in a duet of annoyance and disgust, cursed in fury but then walked away with only bits of those stories reappearing when you want to retell those stories too, not as a thing to act on, but as a topic to chew away with time at coffee breaks or between sales at marketplaces, receiving nothing more but a few extra head-shakes, your only form of solidarity.

The only other time it happened so close to you was when Yakubu narrowly escaped a bomb blast after he walked away from a gathering of friends when he saw Karima, the girl that he had become obsessed with and spoken of in his dreams, singing love serenades that were mostly marred by his rather dreary baritone voice. Karima sold Fura de Nunu in large calabashes with motifed edges and Yakubu would run after her whenever she passed through his vicinity and even though he had nothing except stipends gathered from his apprenticeship at Mallam Sokoto’s leather workshop, he would promise her everything in the world. You sometimes watched the way she smiled sheepishly when Yakubu taunted her or made one of his lofty promises with artfully swaying arms like the conductor of an orchestra. It was her Yakubu had chased that day when a bomb went off behind him. You watched from your house and he fell on his face into the soil from the shock that jolted him. He had risen and turned to see the rising cloud of smoke and the raging fire that bottomed it. His face shook in horror as he stood there speechless watching people scramble around him, waiting for someone to nudge him back to life, to tell him it was a fragment of his imagination, a self-conjured vignette, something that faded away in time, something like the rising smoke, a vampire of history, that left no scar nor told stories of its birth as it vanished into space.

It took Yakubu several months to escape from the emotional and psychological trauma that repressed his thoughts and held him in confinement. Those times, shattering sounds of a fallen glass mug or heavy thuds of books on the ground could fan the flames of his depression and send him into another bout of grief, of brokenness and detachment from life’s gestures. Nafisatu and you would peep several times from the window to watch him cower from unseen gestures and shake your heads in pity. You saw him falling, losing his mind over your shoulders. And when he finally broke out free from the entanglement of the mind-bending ordeal, though not fully, he visited the mosque more frequently. It was one of the many vicissitudes of life.

It seemed your father’s sigh gave your mother the licence to cry out loud. She erupted and threw her arms in the air. And you saw a tear fall from your father’s eyes for the first time ever and through that empty space, the emotions reached you and you broke down in tears too. It was as if it just dawned on you all that Nafisatu was gone, like you had just checked her room and did not find her there and someone had to you said she might never return again. Yakubu gaze was planted into the ground and his tears watered it.

“Where were they taken?” Your father finally said without lifting his head.

“People said the forest in Sambisa, some men are gathering to go there to search for them but they have nothing but some bows and arrows” Yakubu replied in a rather calm way. You feared that he might be struck again by his lurching and lurking ordeal.

“We will go too… with whatever we have… machete, knives or even rakes. We would not sit and moan all day… we must do something… now”.

It was already dusk when your father stood from where he sat and walked inside the room. He returned, expunged of the jalamia he formerly had on, and was now wearing a pair of jean and a white shirt, with a brown furred-collar wool jacket. He went near the study table that sat at the corner of sitting room and paused a little before bending to pick the green plastic kettle. It was on that table Nafisatu sat daily to read her notes after school, slouching at the nights’ end on the giant wooden chair after hours of reading and you usually would see your father carry her in his arms after Tahajjud and pacing quietly to her room where he placed her on her bed amidst smiles. You always wanted that affection, but you barely got it because you never really came back from school to read your notes at the study table or anywhere or anytime far from the examinations, instead you would wander down the street to listen to the gusty winds and watch the dancing leaves, painting a new paradise for yourself and feeding yourself that gusto that no one else gave but at the end offered strong objurgatory remarks more borne out of your unwillingness to study like Nafisatu than your obdurate affection for art and life, though you knew of your father’s extant affection for you too because you served him better than Nafisatu ever could. Nafisatu was a quintessence of a good child, you were her defiant alter ego.

Your father and Yakubu prayed at the corner of the room while you watched. Mama sobbed quietly at the other end where she had now rolled to. And when they were done, you saw your father cry out at last with outstretched and shouted “Allah, bring back our child, bring back Nafisatu”

He rose and went into his room and came out with two machetes. His face was now stern and his tears wiped away.

“Hafisatu, take care of your mother” He said and you nodded from behind the curtain.

“I am going to bring her back… we won’t sit here and do nothing” He said for the last time, walked over to Mother and bent over her to kiss her forehead. He rose and walked out of the room without looking back. Yakubu followed.

We were his only two children and we had come at once after eight years of a barren marriage. The doctor then warned your mother that another childbirth should not be attempted as she could lose her life, after she had to go through caesarian session to conceive you.

Suddenly, your mother rose from where she sat. You wondered where the sudden rush of strength came from. She slipped into the kitchen and came back with two big knives. The rage in her eyes was like that of a mother hen whose chick had been attacked. She stormed out of the house and you raced after her.

“We will not be left behind” she shouted between rage and tears. “She is my daughter too”. You felt she was almost crazy.

But then as you paced after her, looking left and right for a weapon to carry, you knew that one day when your story is told, it would not be of those who folded their arms and waited when they could have risen and done something!

The wind slammed the door behind you.

HABEEB KOLADE PROFESSOR X

#BringBackOurGirls

BLACK COCKTALE

written by Habeeb Professorr X Kolade

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