There is a proverb among my people that says: when the moon is shining, the cripple becomes hungry for a walk. And so it is with the nations of the earth today, who have looked upon the brightness of another man's oil fields and found themselves suddenly seized with an appetite for strolling in with their armies.
The news from the Gulf reaches Ogidi like the distant rumble of thunder that precedes the great rains, except that these are not rains of blessing but of fire. A Kuwaiti tanker, its belly swollen with crude oil, has been struck off the coast of Dubai, and now sits bleeding black blood into the waters of the Persian Gulf. The American president has threatened to obliterate Iran's Kharg Island: that small spit of land from which the lifeblood of a nation flows, if his terms are not accepted. One cannot help but think of the white man who arrived at the banks of the Niger with his Bible in one hand and his Maxim gun in the other, and said: let us reason together.
In Isfahan, a city whose beauty once silenced poets, columns of fire now rise where American and Israeli bombs have found their marks. The Iranian foreign ministry calls the ceasefire demands excessive and unreasonable. And what demands they are: the kind a leopard makes of a goat when they sit down to negotiate the terms of dinner. Spain, at least, has had the good sense to close its airspace to American war planes, a small act of refusal that my grandmother would have understood. She knew that when the great ones fight, it is the grass that suffers, and she also knew that the one who refuses to carry the load of injustice on his head has not thereby become a weakling.
Meanwhile, across the waters, the oil price has climbed past one hundred and five dollars a barrel, and here in Nigeria, ah Nigeria, the price of petrol at the pump has risen by sixty-five percent, the highest in all of Africa. There is a bitter joke in this. That a country sitting atop oceans of crude oil should have its people unable to afford the fuel to drive their motorcycles to market: it is the kind of irony that would have made the elders of Umuofia shake their heads in that slow, deliberate way that means the world has lost its reason. The Philippines has declared a national energy emergency and is scrambling for diesel from Japan. The great machine of the modern world, it turns out, runs not on progress or democracy but on a dark liquid pumped from beneath the earth, and when that liquid is threatened, all the fine speeches about civilisation amount to nothing more than the chattering of weaverbirds.
Here in Ogidi this morning, the harmattan should have been long finished, yet the air sits at a mere two degrees, a chill that makes the old women wrap themselves in extra cloth and mutter about the strangeness of the seasons. Even the weather, it seems, has forgotten its manners.
But let us turn from fire and oil to matters of power and the men who wield it. In the Congo, Joseph Kabila, who led that vast and plundered nation for eighteen years, is now a hunted man. The government has convicted him of treason and sentenced him to death. He says the charges are bogus. Perhaps they are. Perhaps they are not. I have written before about the man of the people who becomes the enemy of the people, about the politician who starts with the suffering of his countrymen on his lips and ends with their wealth in his pocket. Whether Kabila is such a man, I leave to the Congolese to decide. But I note that this is a story as old as the continent itself – the liberator who becomes the tyrant, and then the new liberator who arrives to begin the cycle again, like a snake eating its own tail.
In Israel, a new law has passed permitting the death penalty for Palestinians convicted of deadly attacks. The law, observers note, has been carefully written so that it would be unlikely to apply to Jewish extremists who commit similar crimes. When I read such things, I think of the District Commissioner in my first novel, who planned to write a book called The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. The powerful have always had a talent for writing laws that apply only to others. It is one of their most consistent gifts.
And yet there are those who resist, who insist that the human being is not merely a creature to be governed and exploited but a person with dignity and a voice. In Colombia, a man named Luis Carlos Rua spent years documenting corruption while dressed in an elephant costume: anonymously, stubbornly, with the kind of patient absurdity that is sometimes the only rational response to an irrational world. He has now been elected senator. I confess this story pleases me. The elephant, after all, does not forget, and neither should the people forget what has been done to their roads, their schools, their hospitals, their futures.
In Bolivia, the clowns are marching. Dozens of them have taken to the streets of the capital to protest a government decree that threatens their livelihoods. It is tempting to see this as a small thing, a comic footnote in a day of grave headlines. But I have never believed that the struggles of ordinary people are small things. A clown who cannot feed his children because the government has written a foolish decree knows a suffering that is entirely serious, and his protest deserves the same respect we give to any other.
And in Haiti, that island nation which has suffered more than most, which has been exploited by the French, occupied by the Americans, and abandoned by everyone, at least seventy people have been killed in a gang attack in the Artibonite farming region. Nearly six thousand have been forced to flee. A human rights group speaks of abandonment by authorities, and the word sits there like a stone in the stomach, because it is the right word. Abandonment. It is what happens when a people become invisible to those who hold power, when their suffering becomes merely statistical, when the world turns its great and noisy attention elsewhere – to oil prices, to threats of island occupations, to the theatre of summits and ceasefire demands.
There is one more story I wish to mention before I return to the quiet of my compound. NASA has begun the countdown for the first crewed mission to the moon in over fifty years. Mankind will walk again on that white disc that my ancestors looked upon and told stories about – the moon that called the tortoise to its feast in the sky, the moon by whose light the masquerades danced. Perhaps when the astronauts look down upon the earth from that great distance, they will see what we on the ground cannot – that we are one village, burning.
The proverb says: a man who makes trouble for others makes trouble for himself. It is a simple wisdom. The elders knew it. The children know it. But the great nations of the earth, with all their bombs and their tankers and their carefully written laws, have yet to learn it.
