Edeoughts In Power

Hello Edeought , I saw you sit in a boat and row. The boat wasn’t in the water, it was on a sandy beach and you were dressed like the Edeought you are. You sat in it and you rowed and the swarm of minions that follow you around just like flies follow a bunch of shit clapped and snapped pictures of you. They thought that was cool. I bet you did too-that sheepish smile on your leathery face told the story with crystal clarity. But to us who have lived through the real life experiences of fishing all night long and ending up with only a handful of fish in our nets in the morning, what you did wasn’t funny. For those of us who have fished 200 fish to have 180 of them confiscated by your law enforcers-what you did wasn’t amusing. For those of us that have lived off the boat and have lost parents and family to the insatiable appetite of the sea’s raging waves-you looked ridiculous in that boat.

What is fun to you is to us a matter of life or death to us. What you laugh about is to us a situation of either food on our table or no food on our table at all. That boat you sat in and made a fool out of yourself in is in our world what determines whether or not we stay alive. We use that dug-out boat as an ambulance. We brave the waves and the untold carnage in the dead of the night at sea, we row with our own hands and our muscles burn underneath our skins to save a life. To us that boat is a legacy passed down from generations to us. It’s the only thing we can wholly lay claim to as one that’s truly ours. To us that boat is the special insignia we hold on to. Our parents died in the sea and we never got to give them a decent funeral. We never found their bodies either, we found the boat. So we hold on to it as if it were that our parents left us that boat as a sign that even if they are gone today, we live on and carry on with the family tradition tomorrow. We were born and raised in this dirty, smelly landing site that you only visit once every five years to seek our vote. Sir, that boat to us is the reason I can today speak two international languages and 12 local languages. That boat is the reason I went to school. That boat paid my school fees, bought my scholastic requirements and put these torn clothes on my Uncle’s back. That boat bought our chicken, rice and soda on Xmas day and we rode in that boat from our impoverished island to mainland to attend a service at the big exotic church where the walls and people were out of our best fairy imaginations. That boat sir is what pays the taxes you have levied on us. We don’t need much, we only hope that when you step down from your 2 Billion bullion truck that chauffeurs you around on the campaign trail, have some respect for us, for our customs and those things that we uphold as sacred and so close to our hearts.

Hi , Edeought we are weak but that doesn’t make us dumb. No we are smart. We are wise. We are silent. In our silence, we have found immense strength. In our oppression, we have developed unimaginable resilience and versatility. In our poverty-the song that you sing every day, we have learnt to accept our predicament and live with what we have. We don’t steal nor do we plunder public funds. We live within our means. In our sickness, we have learnt to work for and take our medicine as prescribed. We will live until the lord decides our time is up-then we will leave in peace and rest in peace while the rest of our kind live on. In our captivity, we have taught our children to know the lord and respect your rules. Our children have been brought up with humility and they have the wisdom of the land that our fore fathers passed on to us. They are strong and smart though they wear rugs and eat out of the soil. They don’t have strange accents and all those titles your sons and daughters have. They don’t fly jumbo jets to go give birth in foreign lands. No, they dont own half of the city like your people do. No, our children have nothing but each other and that to us is worth more than you will ever plunder, buy or own. To you, it’s all folly and you insult us every day and we are offended but we dont fight you back. We don’t fight you back because fighting you back is weakness to us. To us, strength is restraint. In our alienation, we have built dependable, social cohesive bonds with each other. We won’t kill each other-no. We will die for each other. We have decided that power is nothing if its uncontrolled. Corruption is evil, its everything bad we have been taught to avoid and so is cronyism, sectarianism and tribalism-to you, this is your life line. In our insignificant tribal communities, we have learnt to practice humanity and remain as humane as our fathers before us commissioned us. In us, we have found fulfillment and as such we shall coexist. We have adapted to the world you created. Because we faced pain and suffering with brevity and astuteness, we have in it found relief. Because we accepted defeat , in it we have found victory-a way of winning through losing. Because we took you in and you betrayed us and turned your guns against us, we have found a away to forgive you and live with you as though you were never there. We are what we are because you are. We are poor, diseased, marginalized, overtaxed and oppressed but we are alive and we are happy. We are a life force. We will survive. We will survive long after you are gone. We will still be here! We will survive!