The Phoenix

By Sheriff Bojang

This is a true story. About me. Some rains ago. It was in February, I was sore, gored by a man I call The Bull. He was magnificent, as magnificent as Mr Pecksniff in Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit. He came a stranger from the cold and we the simpletons of our Little Town opened our doors and hearts and lit our hearths for him. But as the night grew old, we yawned and yielded to the wings of Hypnos, that god of sleep. But not so, The Bull. He sat wide awake like the sultan in The Thousand And One Nights and while we slept, he burnt our toes with the dying embers from our hearth. Unable to do anything about the pain, I blew the last reveille on my trumpet and quit.

I wanted to leave town and go to the Academy in Britain but I couldn’t, so I stayed in our Little Town. I had all the time on my hands and nothing to do. So I raced in my little red chariot on the highways of our Little Town till all the horses dropped dead. I then played Scrabble till all my playing mates died. A young man, used to working eighteen hours a day suddenly found himself an idle upstate Kombo town wallah.

If you really wanted to know, some days I wished I were rather not born. Or that there was some time warp machine I could have used to eat up the months as fast as I could. But there was no such thing and the age of the great sleepers when one could just duck into a cave and dose off the next seven years was long gone. So, I began writing. I had always thought that my first book would be an introspective autobiog I might title Portrait Of A Journalist As A Young Man. Instead, I ended up writing a handbook for reporters. You see, journalists use every opportunity to harp on the people’s right to know, yet the majority of us write so badly as if reporting was an exercise in language cryptology. So, I thought, it was time for someone to tell them about the people’s right to understand, and so, I wrote my handbook, a protest against clutter and journalese. After two weeks, I hung up my pen but I was determined my mind would not be the idle workshop where the devil will hammer on the anvil. And I started a magazine called Xpress.

If you ask me a word to describe myself, I will ask for two: goofy, sinner. Sinner? Yes, we all are since the Adamic days, so said the scriptures. Goofday? Yes, I try to be as good as Robert Bellarmine who would not ever disturb the fleas in his clothes. Or Paps Touray. We all know that like happy Lothario, the flamboyant frontman somewhere in every hamlet in Kombo wherever his band spent a night on tour. And yes, we all know this child of Gunjur was the greatest singer ever to be born on our shores. But perhaps you do not know that a golden heart beat in that man’s breast. Paps was so goody that once while retiring on his bed in the night, a thief broke into his house. Realising he knew the man, he turned his head the other way, too shy to even look his thief in the eye! For those who say goodness in the world today is as dead as the ancient elephants called mastodons, think again.

So, I have tried to forgive The Bull. But the man has not sought redemption. The evil in him grew like the gorgon’s head. He never ceased to amaze me. And what amazed me most about him was not how he tilts his massive forehead and locks you in his gaze, or on some days make a point of saluting the gardener with both hands or make an elegant show of going down on his knees before even a Buba of Buiba lunatic. What amazed me the most about The Bull is how he would blow fire from one corner of his mouth and snowflakes from the other end at the same time and yet remain unfazed. When he takes his ease among his flatterers, he would say he is a Trinitarian and his godheads: God, Jammeh, Rice. But even as he says this, he would be lying for God is the original goodness, Jammeh is good and Rice certainly is good. But The Bull is bad, rotten and he revels in his badness. His favourite saying was: ‘I am black, blacker than black’ just like those errant folk in the Book of whom when they are told: ‘Do not make mischief in the land’, reply, ‘We are not mischief-makers’ when indeed they dabble in nothing else.

Lest you doubt God’s goodliness, why does the sun still shine? And excuse the incidental vulgarities of his nature, Jammeh is a good man. Has he not circumambulated the Black Stone of Mecca a score times and sent thousand other grateful souls from our Little Town to the hajj? Little Beards and his people would say Jammeh steals people’s money to do so. But is that not an exact mathematical equation: P + P = P. And even there, Jammeh says he gets his money from Allah’s World Bank. Do you deny the favours with which Allah favoured him? You there clashing your teeth in smug jest, do you mean Allah can’t have a world bank where ordinary men have? You Sons of My Mother, Jammeh is the king the likes of whom have erred. Is it that anytime he errs a little you should cry, ‘Crucify him!’ like the Jews to Jesus?

Can you say The Bull is a believer when his godheads are good and he is intrinsically bad? Lenrie Peters, if he were alive, would say of The Bull, ‘He is a major league unbeliever’, and Nana Grey would chorus, ‘Big time, big time!’

But even as we were wondering in our puzzlement, Jammeh that great of great Kings of Gambia, espied the heathen in his court and he cut his tongue with the nylon strings of his rosary like the Chinese monk in Lethal Weapon. And we all cried hallelujah! God is great! God indeed is good! The Bull is dead but he’s reincarnated in a young bullock who is going round giving everybody tinnitus. Sometimes I used to wonder whether his only purpose of existence in life is to see how far his skin can stretch without exploding or just… I hope this young bullock does not become like one of them. Those empty-headed idiots in town whose hubris always presage their fall after getting some little position of power. I do not want to cry hallelujah again.

Editor’s Note: This essay was originally published in *The Standard* on 4 November 2011. The text presented here has been transcribed from an archival newspaper clipping whose age and poor print quality have rendered some passages difficult to decipher. While every effort has been made to reproduce the original faithfully, any inadvertent errors, omissions or discrepancies are solely the responsibility of the editorial team and should not be attributed to the author.

The post The Phoenix appeared first on Daily Observer Gambia .