The Partition of Africa by the Imperialists

They held her eagle-spread on the slab

They were three hooded creatures

They had pale faces

But with blood shot eyes.

They stood over her like hyenas over their prey.

The first wore a cassock of stars and stripes with an emblem of a bald eagle

The second wore a yellow cassock with an emblem of a swastika

The third wore a cassock of red cross with an emblem of a crown.

She was like a helpless sheep in the hands of her shearers

They now held her in chains as they stripped her of her precious golden robes

They removed the precious stones in her golden robes.

Then they parted her thighs and took turns to dissect her womanhood

As she bled and shed copious fluid from her birth canal

They put their white chalice at the opening into her womb

They drained her precious fluid and filled their chalice.

They left her as she writhed in the agony of her vaginal mutilation

The first one drank some of her fluid from the chalice

He passed the chalice to the second one to drink his own portion

And the second passed the chalice to the third one to drink the last portion.

Then, the first one mounted her and pierced through her womanhood

The echo of her screams rent the air and the ill winds carried her screams in their wings.

The ill winds carried her screams to the four corners of the earth

And even the winged children of the skies heard her cries in the clouds

And they flew away to the ends of the universe with the echoes of her cries

And the Lord of the universe could not bear to hear her cries in the skies.

The three hooded figures rose from her and loosed her.

“Even the devil prefers virgins,” the first one said.

“And we have offered him the most beautiful one on earth,” said the second one.

“And now she would become our slave,” said the third.

I turned to the Lord of the universe and I asked:

Magumo acho chii?

How will it all end?

He did not answer me. 

 He was enveloped in the cloudsI knew he has been watching all along.

The one with uncountable eyes sees all things in the whole universe.

He sees all the visible and invisible things that mortal eyes cannot see.

The only one whose uncountable eyes twinkle all over the dark skies every night.

I asked again:

Magumo acho chii?

How will it all end?

He did not utter a word.

I took my Assegai in my left hand and raised up my right hand in a clenched fist.

I must save our beloved Nubia from devils.

Then I heard his echoing voice like cracks of thunder.

You have the will to set her free!

Congreve (1670-1729) was an accomplished practitioner of the wit and cynicism made famous by his contemporaries Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. His last play, “The Way of the World,” (1700) is considered a classic of Restoration comedy.

The late 17th and early 18th century is often considered the golden age of satire. Writers took advantage of classical forms to cleverly castigate the royal and aristocratic classes. This was the era when the poet Alexander Pope could sum up his literary competition in a book entitled “The Dunciad,” and Jonathan Swift modestly proposed solving the Irish famine by encouraging them to eat their own children.

He scribbled the title with the nib dipped in the vial of blood.
He took the snapshots of the title written on the A4 size piece of white paper. Then, he dropped his Canon digital camera and sat on the wooden chair made from Mahogany. He looked at the oil on canvas portrait on his easel and smirked. Steve Wonder’s classic song Isn’t She Lovely echoed in his head. What a waste. And she was his fiancé. The agonies of the ironies of life always left him dumb and numb.

Whom the demoniacs want to destroy, they first make deaf to every word of reason.

He turned on his personal computer. A Toshiba desktop that was a gift left in the studio by Rafaela his roommate before he relocated to Port Novo in the Republic of Benin. Rafaela said Nigeria was becoming too crowded for his peace of mind. The traffic jams in Lagos city were nerve wrecking for a quiet artist to work in a peaceful atmosphere that would be conducive to his spirit. But he was the opposite of Rafaela, be loved everything about the hustle and bustle of the congested mega city. He loved the drama of life.
Life is a story to be told. Finis.

He read the story silently. Steve thought it was all fiction. But if only the agent knew that there was only a thin red line between his virtual world and their reality.
That is why I love quantum physics.
He sneezed and made the sign of the cross.

He remembered that he had not gone for confession. And without confession, he would not partake in the Holy Communion tomorrow. A Sunday mass without Holy Communion always left him in a state of emptiness.

He swore that imagination traveled at the speed of light. He wondered what a clone of Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein would look like. Awesome.

He remembered the artwork he did and called it, The Network of Entropy. But his tutor the great Bruce Onobrapkeya could not understand it. It was all physics to him. His other paintings based on equations also puzzled the printmaker.
“Sir, one cannot be a good artist if you do not understand the physics of light. How would you accurately show light and shade in drawings and paintings without the knowledge of light? And without the knowledge of chromatics, you cannot understand colors and how to use them in painting your subjects,” he emphasized during one of their sessions on nature study in class.
“Pablo!”
His classmates hailed him and he nodded to acknowledge their appreciation of his genius. His psychophysical hypothesis of Art awed his classmates.

He was one of Onobrakpeya’s magnificent 12. The twelve most outstanding students on his honors list in Art class. But he believed he was light years away from the others. The flashback soon became blurred and he sighed. He turned to the radio cassette player on the wooden reading desk and pressed play.

The transcendental sound of Mozart’s Haffner symphony from the player soon filled the studio and as he listened, he fell asleep with his head resting on the reading desk. Symphony No. 35 always possessed him anytime he listened to it.