kænoaworld
...to love to live to learn
Monday 22 August 2022
Thursday 3 March 2022
Monday 21 February 2022
Monday 14 February 2022
SOMETHING HAPPENED TOMORROW
Sleight of hand, the good old trick revenant on every return. I sat across the bar observing as he lied his adulations, his words rolling with the fluidity of well-oiled wheels. She giggled, fingers across her mouth, a fancy attempt at covering her blush.
The wine had flowed red, crimson-red but not all the way to raspberry. Her ears had heard their fill, and her heart well-drawn out. He had tipped the waiter in clean bills, his 'goodness' advertised for good measure. Now Cupid wouldn't miss, even at old age, failing eyes, and unsure aim, this maiden's heart was so nowhere to not be found.
The petals were purposefully scattered from door to bed, like ants on the trail of industrial sugar. Two scented candles burned generously at both sides of the bed. She jolted to a halt upon the sight of 'Will You Marry Me?' neatly created with neon light on the wall across the hotel room.
He was on one knee, ring stretched out, waiting for her approving finger. The tension was thick, almost tangible. "Yes" seemed customary. "No" seemed a crime, or at least a tort. She was seconds away from sealing her matrimonial fate.
Just then the sound of an incoming phone call interrupted proceedings. The worst possible timing. He struggled with his side pocket, brought out the telephone. An open ring box on one hand, phone on the other hand, he declined the call quickly and went back to the moment.
She said 'Yes', and with two tear drops dribbling down the sides of her face, she hugged and kissed him. One good kiss deserved another, and from there they went down that famous path legally reserved for a married couple.
At the middle of the night, when they were clasped within each other's cuddle, and he was fast asleep, the phone call kept coming. She suddenly took interest in the call when she saw the name. "Mrs XYZ", the name of the caller was a curious one, and when finally a voicemail came in, she decided to have a listen, of course, her future husband wouldn't mind. The recorded voice was of a woman asking why he had delayed coming back home, complaining that their second child had fallen ill, and that he should call her back as soon as he got the voicemail.
The man was snoring away while his secret was being made known.He was a married man for whom no price was too high to pay to satisfy his appetite for more. He had retained a strong desire to get our mystery maiden to the bed, but she would never agree to his advances unless he put a ring on her finger. Quite the time, Valentine's, ring on finger, sex on a platter, and that went off the bucket list.
She dropped the phone with new tears, but this time not of joy. Good ring, fake stud, fake love, bad market. This happened tomorrow.
Okwuchukwu Augustine Ndulue.
Saturday 10 July 2021
THE HONEY THAT POURED AWAY
Dear Ewatomi,
I must confess that along the way, I paused once or twice to wonder why I was telling this tragic story. What lesson could I possibly pontificate on from this story? Neither of us is a model, and I do not suppose that either of us intend to follow that path in the future, so why would I bring up the tragic end of a once promising young lady?
If you observed, over the next one month after the day you told me about your numerous suitors, the one thousand and one of them including Ali Baba and his forty thieves, Sinbad and the crew on his seven voyages, everyone of the soldiers packed in the Trojan horse, and the three hundred Spartans, I maintained a conspicuous silence with you made possible by a more conspicuous distance from you. The infrequent calls and chats were intentional. My mind and heart needed a new ecosystem in which my affection for you would not interrupt sound judgement. I thought about my place in the long term race for your love, and quickly convinced myself to seek out a new challenge which held less odds. This quick decision yielded the rest of the time for me to ponder on the quality of the men over whom you have mounted your love and marital future as a golden trophy. Now, out of the race myself, my bias did not accompany me on this reflection, if it did my recommendations obviously would be compromised, but I make bold to say that whatever I am saying here is purely based on the indifference of logic in which all emotions add up to zero, and of which one plus one would equal two.
Mr. Harry of whom you have so well spoken is a fantastic lad, fantastic in the actual sense of fantasy; something that is too good to be true. I would wonder if you are sure whether his 'Harry' is short for 'Henry' or short for 'Harold', but that would be to challenge your overall awareness which is a topic for another day, a day I intend to bypass. I would wonder if his oil company job is in an oil company or in an oil company, if the oil in question is crude oil or vegetable oil. Not that it would matter if love is truly unconditional. I would wonder if truly he lives in Malaysia, but was born in England and thus an Englishman of Nigerian descent. I would wonder how real his estates are and how true his huge pay is. Am I saying that he is not who he says he is? Not at all, ‘too good to be true’ is not necessarily ‘too good and therefore false'. Having considered the details of his story and put things in context, I dare say that some things if true make others quite unlikely. I may have met a Nigerian sailor in landlocked Mali or a Nigerian chef in Italy, I might have also met a Nigerian firefighter in Antarctica, but a Nigerian oil worker in Malaysia? Well, you never can tell these days. And of course he is in Nigeria on leave, and has been on leave for the past three months. Do even maternity leaves last that long nowadays? I wonder if I intend to make any point with my skepticism here, maybe the point is that whether Harry is 'Harold’ or 'Henry’ he appears to be too enthusiastic to prove himself competent, and in my experience when people are too enthusiastic to prove unnecessary points quite often some things are either exaggerated or an outright falsehood.
If my sentiments here are right then what I see here with his many claims about himself could be that he is desperate to come across as a man of legitimate means, and if that is the case the probability is high that his means are illegitimate. And if one detail is false, do we assume that some others cannot also be false? If a man would win you over with falsehood, how much falsehood would he employ to keep you?
Doctor Ben, as you fondly call him, appears to have a less suspicious profile. Faking one’s way to medical practice in a university teaching hospital is as rare as a rave in a monastery. As a medical doctor, I assume that his life would be as orderly as surgical procedure. Maybe he is not a heavy drinker, does not stay out late, watches his diet, and possesses all the details that make for a proper boring gentleman. I believe he is someone you can live with, but I doubt he is someone you cannot live without. He may have the things that can offer you a peaceful home but I am not convinced that he has what it takes to give you an exciting matrimony. It is good to know that a man does not shout at his wife, but it is not good enough that he has no sense of humour to make her shout in laughter. It is good to know that a man has a bright mind, but it is not good enough if his best idea of fun is the game of Monopoly. It is good enough that a man keeps to time but it is not good enough if he thinks that a romantic date is a waste of time. Again as with Harry’s ‘Henry’ and ‘Harold’, I would wonder if you know whether Ben is 'Benjamin' or 'Benedict'.
Age is just number, but I would be dishonest to pretend that the numbers between you and Kelvin are not too many. I admire his honesty in telling you his real age, it would appear rather more likely that in a matter as this a man of his age would rather lie about his age to come off as a younger man than say the truth and hurt his chances. He even has the looks to make a lie believable, and I have seen some men in their late twenties and early thirties who look older than he is. We must acknowledge his honesty. Honesty and good intentions aside, forty two and twenty two are even numbers but it would seem odd that a lady so young would settle for a man at the gates of midlife. If the love is there then I would admit that the next consideration is always about what people would say. You expect that typically younger girls do not get married to much older men without certain assurances. People believe that it is always motivated by money, and Ogá Kelvin is not deficient in that regard. If everything else is in order and public opinion does not fluster you, then I would say without holding back that yours is a match I would recommend. He is mature, urbane, a complete dose of humour, and not to mention that his importation business is as prosperous as stink to a warthog and as legitimate as the Obama administration.
While it is important to know how much you are loved by any of them, I want you to give as much attention to the profile or background of these suitors. I believe that I would be belabouring the point if I go ahead to write about Calistus the ex seminarian who claims to have found in you his new calling, or Mike the banker, or Odogwu the first of the two suitors in Dubai, or Martin his city rival. Look out for the silent and salient points beyond their fascinating stories. Check them out on their social media profiles, check their old pictures and posts. Get to know their philosophy of life and get to know who they are when they are not in love. Are they humble because they are humble or are they humble because they have nothing for which they can be proud? How do they speak to those they consider lower than themselves? Are they polite to you but rude to the waiter? These details slip out no matter how much one might want to hide them, and if you pay attention you would see them if they are there.
The world can be a dark and scary place. Sometimes grace is the illumination we need to go through dark alleys, and sometimes it is our wide open eyes. And It doesn’t get much darker than the choice of a life partner. Love, they say is blind, perhaps it is blinded by the darkness of these paths. But I like to think that love is not blind, it is drunk, it staggers, it trips, it falls, it belches, it gets up and it keeps moving. The blindness of love, to me, is but the blurriness of vision, a drunk driver seeing two steering wheels and four hands. It is at this point that you may be blind to obvious things, you may underrate his faults and overrate his strengths. When you are overpowered by emotion, your logic would be compromised. But as with drunkenness, you would eventually sober up and then see the things you could not see before. Maybe I am a timely voice of reason in these alcoholic times, and maybe mine are the sober eyes with which you should see clearly in this period.
I would call you ‘honey’, but you are meant for another man’s cup. Things are such that I can make recommendations on whose cup you pour into, so that in time I will be at ease knowing full well that you are not the honey that poured away.
Okwuchukwu Augustine Ndulue.
Tuesday 6 July 2021
THE NIGHT THAT HANNAH DIED (3)
The romance which began between Hannah and Osvaldo was more Eastern than it was Latin, the fondness and clingy attachment was as steamy as an Ottoman bath and no less sophisticated. Every fashion show in a different city was as much about business as it was about fun, they were like the honeymoon before the wedding. Paris, Milan, Rio, Tokyo, or London, Hannah toured the world but more than that Osvaldo toured her heart. More than winning her love, he won her trust. Hannah saw in him an infallible being with whom she could entrust her life. However, while we may say that a dog is man's best friend, it would be important to be sure that the man is the dog’s best friend. For Hannah love was so blind that she couldn’t see a lot of things, didn’t ask questions, and didn’t check if this man was actually a man or a dog, or rather how much of him was a dog.
Saturday 21 March 2020
SINNERS OF WITTENBERG (Act 1 Scene 1)
Sunday 15 March 2020
TO THE ANGEL OF THE CHURCH IN WUHAN
Thursday 12 March 2020
OUR COMMON BLINDNESS
Friday 6 March 2020
WEEP ON CHILD
Monday 2 March 2020
THE LAST OBOTEMAN (1)
Friday 4 January 2019
THE NIGHT THAT HANNAH DIED (2)
Tuesday 1 January 2019
THE NIGHT THAT HANNAH DIED
Tuesday 25 December 2018
WHO IS A SAINT NOW? (2)
Friday 21 December 2018
WHO IS A SAINT NOW?
Friday 14 December 2018
Saturday 8 December 2018
A SOLDIER'S GIRL
Wednesday 9 May 2018
ANATOMY OF THE FEMINIST MIND
Women have held the world in place, birthed the home, the house and its builder, the porter and his clay, the artist and his brush. For every human who has walked this Earth, a woman pushed, yes, the pangs of childbirth, a painful experience some compare to immolation: women burn themselves to bear others. They are the first teachers of the child, the first guide of every human in this blind world. But soon this baby, a girl named Nnedi, is introduced into the harsh realities of feminine existence in our world... She is the first child, she sees her mother put to bed five more children in the next eight years, all daughters. she notices her father's increasing disappointment with the continued birth of daughters. On a very bad day, she comes home to her crying mother, the woman had been beaten for not having a male child. It is still not coming to this girl, she has encountered boys at school and there doesn't seem to be much fuss about them, or such hype that her mother should be crying for not having a son. It hasn't come to her how much of no value her father held his six daughters that he is now considering getting another wife just to give him a son.
Finally, her mother gets pregnant and over the next few months would go from one prayer house to another asking God for a son. Nnedi is growing bigger and is gaining the basic understanding that comes with age, so amidst the celebration when her mother put to bed a baby boy at the end of nine months, Nnedi is in much reflection and wonder. She is wondering why her father killed a big ram to celebrate, she is wondering why visitors wouldn't stop coming and she is wondering why none of these happened at the birth of any of her five sisters. Nnedi sees that the boy is treated with special care and honour, such that any of the girls isn't getting. Nnanna, the boy, wouldn't have to do house chores because they were meant for girls and he would just have to be groomed to inherit their father's legacies and wealth. However, Nnedi and her sisters wouldn't need much investment, as, in the words of their father, they would still be married off to other men, to breed and nurture children. He believed that his daughters should learn how to keep a home so that they wouldn't be problems to their husbands' homes.
Nnedi is soon getting uncomfortable, she can't understand why she should one day leave her father's house to another man's house, drop her surname and pick up the man's, and live the rest of her life at his pleasure, subject to all his desires, demands, whims and caprices. She can't understand why even the reverend at Church would spend his sermon teaching women to be subject to their husbands and call them Lord like Sarah. She can't understand the profiling, why female sexuality is often the subject of ridicule: 'Beware of strange women, the daughters of Jezebel'. She can't understand why a woman's worth is sometimes screened through the lens of what value she adds to a man's life, yes, if she cannot cook she is not a wife material, if she can't do this or that she is not this or that, and if she is not married she is not complete.
Nnedi remembers Linda, the senior business executive, a frontline entrepreneur who before her engagement had been judged for years in the jury of public opinion and her only blemish was not having a man in her life. Nnedi looks North, and sees Aishattu living with the other women in her father's harem. They are mostly covered up, and often denied education which is haram. And their entire existence is for the purpose of satisfying a man. Nnedi gapes as Aishattu is being married off at thirteen years to Mallam Nuhu, she whimpers as Aishattu puts to bed at fourteen and is soon down with VVF. Nnedi can't understand why this should be, why the men in Al Jannah would get seventy two virgins as reward: seventy two women whose eternal purpose would be to serve one man. Who would serve the women? Nnedi asks.
In several cultures, liberal and conservative alike, we would always find women who are dissatisfied with the status quo, women who believe that the stereotypes and profiles under which women have been made to live should be dismantled and a new framework established. Often times we find them engaging in different aspects of activism to demand for a better deal. However, method, is as important as purpose, and when undefined purpose cannot tell a spear from javelin, in method, sports becomes war. Here we find perhaps the biggest problem with feminism, no not the men, who are often erroneously considered the enemy, but rather feminism itself, what it means to one and to all. It doesn't need an extensive research to discover that many feminists do not even know what they fight for. Some are because their friends or heroines are, and when it is not mob mentality it is plain misandry.
The problem continues, that even for those who believe they know and can properly define their own feminism, what feminism is to one is different from what it is to another to the end that there is hardly a consensus anywhere in the world on what feminism is just as 1+1=2. That is as far as theories go, but beyond theories, by their fruits we shall know them and we can see the invisible winds in the dance and sway of palms and branches. A person's actions speak volumes and so has militant feminism. There are some whose mindset empties entirely into actions that show more loathe for men than love for women, like in the words of Golda Meir, Arabs who would know no peace until their love for their children is more than their hate for Jews. This breed of feminists cannot differentiate between sameness and equality, and would oftentimes infer that women are same as men, consequently rolling over several fallacies as they try to argue out their points.
The difference between men and women spread from emotional to physiological details and understanding and appreciating these differences have created high cultures where women are treated as ladies and men as lords. Yes, it is by understanding these differences that men open the car door for their ladies and walk them down the stairs. It is in that same understanding that we say 'ladies first' almost as an article of faith.
Yes, chivalry isn't dead, and it was born by this understanding. Yes, ideally, men should treat women with such honour and respect that this understanding demands, and more importantly respect is reciprocal. But, somehow, a certain feminist orientation would rather have men and women struggle on the same queue for train tickets, or bread ration during a famine, bearing in mind the physical strength advantages that the man possesses over women and undermining them. Anything outside of this would suggest to her the obvious relative physical weakness of women, which is as clear as the sky on a bright day. At the same time, this breed of feminists would criticize the man for having no shame for raising his hands to hit a woman.
I once came across a feminist who questioned why women should give birth, saying that child birth is rape, in her words 'the baby rapes the mother from inside out'. Such are the thoughts of these ones, 'We are victims, everyone despises us, everyone uses us, even babies rape us.' Just negodu. Of the legitimate concerns, it should also not be forgotten that men could ask 'Why should men work at the mines? Why should men pay the dowry? Why should, especially in the Nigerian context, a man be considered not fit to marry if he has no job but no one raises an eyebrow when a jobless girl walks into a wealthy man's house by the certificate of marriage?' For almost every legitimate feminist concern, men have got there struggles too. It is the system, it is the table bending here and there.
However, truth must be said that this table seems to be tilted to masculine advantage. While chivalry isn't dead yet, male chauvinism is alive and well, and it stares us in our faces almost everyday. We are at a fancy Night club in Benin City, a group of boys walk in, rich and spoilt, they park their fancy cars outside the establishment and walk in with swag. Then they order for costly alcoholic beverages, and then one roars with a hoarse voice 'Where are the ladies at?!' Yes, there is that smack of entitlement in his voice, that arrogant exclamation at nobody. Soon a group of girls catwalk in, their skimpy clothes would go off one after the other till almost nothing is left to the imagination, each boy takes two or three of them for himself, he spends the night between gulping his wine, sucking his shisha and groping the girls' generous bodies. To him they are almost not human, they are almost the playthings of his hormones, almost as useful as a bottle of André or a shisha pipe, basically they are things to him.
But who do we blame? The boys that need the girls to make their nightout complete or the girls that would so generously throw their bodies around the boys? Who should complain? Is it Iti Mpataka, who is typically minding his business or the feminist who is angry at the boys for having no respect for the girls and their bodies but would say nothing to the girls for having no self respect?
Yes, we should talk of how Europe underdeveloped Africa but we should also talk of how Africa underdeveloped Africa. We should talk of male chauvinism but we should also talk of how women have helped it survive. How often in the university campus does a boy invite a girl over to cook for him and how often she doesn't say no? How often would he overtime make such demands? How often would he thus believe that he can always make such demands of any other girl? How often do girls get invited to hotels and they would gladly go, often times taking their friends with them? How often does this make the man believe that women are cheap and willing? Truth is ideas are fed by realities, and most women have not helped these realities. Most men believe in the superiority of men because most women have acted out inferiority.
Here I should say that discussing feminism is very difficult when what it is is different from what it should be. Again I suggest that mission is as important as vision, and that the mission of feminism for the most part is deceptively detached from what the vision should be. The vision should be to balance the table and not to turn it. It should not be for women to have the table tilted to their advantage and to the disadvantage of men, that would be inheriting the load side on the lever of a skewed system, it would be a turned table but still a table. Yes under that system women would become kings and men would become palace maids, it would be revenge but like feminism now, it would be a matter of time before men start 'masculinism'.
History has shown that oppressed puppies become the vengeful hounds of a turned table, imagine the early days of Nazism in Germany, or the Bolsheviks in Russia and the Fascists in Italy, the picture at the beginning often contrasts with the picture at the end. In all a turned table is bad news, a balanced table is not. Feminism should be able to design a vision and mindset that is realizable without man-hating. It should pursue a balanced table, a system that recognizes and respects our gender differences, it should pursue a system where men are lords and knights and women are no less ladies and amazons, not whores.