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“Stream-of-Consciousness?”

“Stream-of-Consciousness?”

Musing over the weekend on my next article, I recalled a lecture at Cape Coast University years ago when Professor Wole Soyinka set the audience roaring with laughter after an interesting confession.

Years later, when he reads interpretations/attributions made to him by university students in “Poetry Appreciation” examinations about what he was thinking of when he wrote the poem, he laughs his head off.  This is because he never thought of those brilliant ideas students credit him with.

Like Wole Soyinka, I did not think of that at the time of writing!

Thoughts of the Immigration Officer murdered at Hamile welled up.My mind then jumped to TV news that, villages around Asankragwa have virtually been taken over by Chinese “galamseyers.” The locals have literally been bought-off by Chinese with their money-power.

He seemed to believe in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar saying that, “Of all the wonders I have heard, it seems to me most strange, that men should fear; Knowing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come!”  Fela courted death!In his song “Trouble sleep, yanga wake am,”, the lyrics in Pidgin-English state, “if cat sleep, rat go bite him tail, wetin idey want?” Simply, if a rat bites the tail of a sleeping cat, what does it want?

Fela answers his question himself saying that “palaver, idey want, palaver igo get!

He also created a township for his musicians and his forty wives, called the KATAKULA-REPUBLIC!ZhombieHaving sang what the rat should expect biting the tail of a sleeping cat, Fela curiously, probably like Julius Caesar who rejected a warning not to go out on the Ides(15TH) of March in 44 BC, went ahead to record a song against the military titled “Zhombie!” He described zhombies (military) as brainless people who just did what they were told to do including killing, without thinking!Could Fela’s behaviour feed into the French philosopher Voltaire’s quote that, “man is rational in that he can think, not in that he thinks?” Fela did not need a soothsayer to tell him the consequences of his actions!Eventually, his Katakula-Republic was burnt-down with grievous bodily harm to himself, and his old mother who was thrown down from a storey-building!ObservationsFor Ghanaians who advocate violence as a conflict-resolution option, take a look at the current carnage in Ukraine.

Original Story on: PeaceFMOnline
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