THIS week, I reflect on the many simple poor folk,
royal highness's I have met as I traversed the country of my birth from East to
South, and Barotseland. Having lost our fifth republican President Michael
Chilufya Sata (a person that most that call the likes of me bitter, knew
personally and in a dialectic way, I will miss him), one expected that there is
silence in the moments of silence in his honour. Hate him or like him, we have to
respect and honour him for ascending to the highest office in the land. It is no mean feat. It
takes guts.
Unfortunately, to H.E’s memory, there is no
silence somewhere. This is because, there are just too many ghosts abounding. This
is not to say there are those that are not observing a moment of silence. There
are.
These are soaked in heavy downpours of delusions
of memories of angels in white dropping “development” like manna from heaven. We observe the moment of silence with them, as
we have learned to respect the ghosts of the fiction of their happier memories. This is not the time for us to
convince them, of what ghosts really are. We bow our heads in respect with
them, as we feel with them their pain and loss. After all, we too are human,
even if they never really treated us as such.
But there are those who know no silence in the
moment of silence. These see ghosts. For ghosts are realities of our sadder
memories. The ghosts they see are varied, scary, meanspirited.
Some have sadder memories of an individual that
many years ago, a foreign diplomat once warned us about. This eminent person
from one of our nearby
countries that went through a protracted struggle for respect of freedom, human
dignity and equality, noted that one emerging media mogul will one day hypnotize the masses to meet his and his friends’
self-interests. We laughed. We even used the mongrel dog-eared adage of “not in
Zambia”. Yet, we know and pretend not to know that in this memory, Mwanawasa used
to be called by some common vegetable name. But, when this individual became
the garden owner and not the gardener, Mwanawasa was cross-bred to a “prize
winning vegetable”. And so the story was, for the deceased fifth president. He
too was a devil in the mind of this individual, but later this canny individual
sang the Psalms.
Well, today those that are not silent have come
to the reality that this sadder memory is indeed a ghost that existed. But, it
is no longer a ghost. Today, they call it the “cartel”. (Please, don’t ask me
who or what this cartel is, as I am still in Mexico searching for it). Any way,
it evokes pain, and perhaps we should not have laughed. I hear, it is a State
within a State - a travesty of our democratic governance. Its opinion does not
represent your interests and mine. It represents itself. Period. Oops! Seems, I
found it.
Then, there are those that have sadder memories
of a government that disrespected the very people that euphorically (and
perhaps duped by the “cartel”) choose a particular party to rule over them. Forty
two point two four, was it? Not an overwhelming majority. But, so says the
Constitution. And it was!
In H.E’s most trying times, our sadder memories
of the Patriotic Front government represent ghosts where this and that
spokesperson, Jim and Mary, told us H.E is very fine. And anyone who publicly said
he was not well, was insane, criminal, immoral, power hungry, and could be
caged (well, some youths in Woodlands were indeed caged). Huh! So disrespectful,
they were. Somehow, these fellows believed they voted for themselves. I wonder
how they could think that.
In hindsight, clearly these fellows suffered
from dementia praecox. Dementia praecox is one of several
psychotic disorders characterized by distortions of reality and disturbances of
thought and language, and withdrawal from social contact. In the moment of
silence for H.E., clearly, one does not need to be a psychiatrist to diagnose
them as such. We have ghosts, thereof, because we were fed a demented reality,
and it is sad.
The unfortunate circumstance arising from these
ghosts is that the many simple poor folk, I have met in my travels have
inerasable sadder memories. They don’t want to live a demented reality ever
again. The trust they had in independent media, the people they vote for seems
to now have waned like when the Stone Age ended because they ran out of stones
(just a fable). They have been pained, disrespected (and are still disrespected
given the confusion being witnessed during H.E’s mourning period). But,
fortunately the simple folks will pay their respects to H.E., though seeing
ghosts in the moment of silence.
Inarguably, perhaps they should not only observe
a moment of silence, for him (H.E), but for ourselves, too. We have been duped
for far too long.
This, should be, a moment of silence where we
should say, “never again”. Sic. We should also be careful of those that are pointing;
giving directives to the exorcists to conquer the ghosts. Simply because, the
ghosts we see today are their memories. They are the ghosts.
Ora
pro nobis.
