Where is The Source of The Nile?
The angry cloud of bees looms large over them. They look at each other as the canopy of bees shuts down the faucet of trans-contextual thinking. Not even a drop of thinking-water makes its clang of rhetorical or gestural presence felt. ?Do you know what this means?? The Scarab Beetle asks, finally breaking the iceberg of silence into emotional smithereens of talkativeness. Yet again, admittedly, the answer is not as clear as it seems. This is because philosophical mathematicization of Life Experiences is not an intimate or pedestrian preserve of any of the other six animals. In that case, what is an appropriate response to the question then? An apt response may be part of Ancient Egyptian thinking!
A bold statement posted on The Scarab Beetle?s door lintel replies from a vanishing distance: ?Man, Know Thyself!? And where is this ?Man, Know Thyself?? to be located?
The answer: Where is The Source of The Nile?
Someone, it turned out, may have had an answer somewhat close to ?Where is The Source of The Nile?? The question is, Who is this Someone? The Atlantic Ocean remembers seeing ?Man, Know Thyself? on The Scarab Beetle?s door lintel and blunders out: ?Life is what you make it!? The angry cloud of bees finally disappears into emotional bubbles of self-recovery. This answer, in fact, that response, so to speak, may have been arguably the most appropriate riposte. It earns The Scarab Beetle?s laughing approbation. Nonetheless. ?Certainly a good answer,? he injects into their venous conversation, adding: ?And finding that path to Life?s blissfulness, whether circular or linear, is an individual?s choice, though, yet again, that choice, that unique individual choice, if we may add, occasionally, derives from a community of shared responsibility, belief, transparency, probity, and accountability values. Meant as an aside, this is not the sole responsibility of trained mathematicians. Every ethno-creature is a mathematician by nature.?
In the main, it also turns out The Atlantic Ocean and The Forest are two of the most assertively intelligent ethno-creatures in the universe, a scientific conclusion based on the vast body of brainy-water and verdant canopy of brainy-foliage atop The Atlantic Ocean and The Forest, respectively. Except Human Beings, every other ethno-creature strives to be like The Atlantic Ocean or The Forest, at least if not in intelligence then in spatial behavior. Understandably, Komodo Dragon and Tasmanian Devil are far removed from this large reservoir of intelligence, of creativity!
Where is The Source of The Nile?
Once again, The Scarab Beetle, it turns out, is more interested, even enamored of the intricacies of Life than of social issues of extreme extraneity, so he launches into the philosophical depths of Life. As a result, he subjects the word Life to orthographic individuation: L-I-F-E. ?L? he tells them is ?love,? ?listening,? ?learn or learning,? ?I? ?insight? or ?intelligence,? ?F? ?friendship,? ?fruitfulness,? ?foresight,? and, lastly, ?E? ?eye,? ?ear,? or ?eat.? Insight and foresight are spiritually or intellectually related to the piercing range of psychological sight. In other words, to an investigational depth of understanding, a priceless gift which an individual uniquely possesses and consequently exercises over nature. Activities involving insight and foresight as well as ?eye? entail the psychological mechanics of critical thinking. Simply put, Life may appear to lose its instrumentalist value of analytic ontology outside the immediate social circumference of critical thinking. The political economy of critical thinking is exclusively typical of The Scarab Beetle.
Yet critical thinking is exactly what The Seven Animal Friends think Human Beings woefully lack. However, this contrarian view is highly controvertible because The Seven Animal Friends are yet to constitute themselves into a convincing assemblage of evidence to make their case?if at all. Still, the perennial question, ?Where is the source of the Nile??, obtains in the body politic, a question that has not been answered passably, if at all, since the dawn of conscious time. The point is that whoever, ethno-Animal or ethno-Human Being, discovers the answer gets the gene of longevity or of ?eternity,? which the letter ?E? in L-I-F-E also symbolizes. It should also be acknowledged that ?eat? and ?fruitfulness? are part of the intellectual scaffolding of critical thinking. ?Eat? is theory or ideation and ?fruitfulness? is praxis or productivity in the Animal World, the world of politics.
Unfortunately, Human Beings have not reached that emotional threshold of intellectual sophistication. Again, this explains why The Seven Animal Friends have no iota of respect for Human Beings. But, quite apart from these reservations, The Scarab Beetle knows Life is not as rosy as Human Beings say it is. He is about to explain this to his friends when a worm-like seismic electricity coursed through their bodies, their psycho-emotional anatomies, sending waves of oceanographic opprobrium to their intuitive hearts. It is a shrieking outburst, the politics of the Big Bang Theory, concentrically radiating away from the inner vaginal-sancta of The Earth. The Earthquake!
The Earthquake romantically sings Salman Rushdie?s novelistic concerto??The Ground Beneath Her Feet.? Yo-Yo Ma plays the cello; Koo Nimo and Prince Nico Mbarga add the crying-voice of their palm-wine guitars; Guy Warren of Ghana supplements the orchestra with his syncopated drumming-ness; the rocky voices of Peter Tosh, Fela Kuti, and Bob Marley make a militantly powerful showing; Thelonious Monk displays tactile dexterity on the piano; the vocal saxophonics of John Coltrane steams in; the elephantine trumpeting of Louis Armstrong and of Miles Davis take over the dirge of social and political confusion. The raspy, croaky voice of Louis Armstrong joins the vocal symphony of Fela Kuti?s, Bob Marley?s and Peter Tosh?s.
Refrain: ?Where is The Source of The Nile?? screamed the froggy voice of Louis Armstrong?s. ?Life?s and Death?s dirge of philosophical incomprehensibility!?
Meanwhile, the uncontrollable rage of The Earth tosses and tumbles The Seven Animal Friends in a careless exercise of dice-tossing stochastics, a happenstance process of which The Celestial expanse is eloquently ignorant. And while they toss and tumble in the naked openness of The Atmosphere, the psycho-emotional stratosphere, mammoth balls of wailing fire, smoke, vapor, and lava throw up the past, the present, and the future from the gaping-crater of ethno-human consciousness. The Earth! The Earthquake! The Ground Beneath Her Feet. John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, Yo-Yo Ma, Bob Marley, Fela Kuti, Miles Davis, Koo Nimo, Prince Nico Mbarga, Thelonious Monk, Guy Warren, Salman Rushdie?s ?The Ground Beneath Her Feet,? the trumpet, the piano, the drum, the saxophone, the guitars?become a vocal dirge of cemeterial ghostiliness. Seemingly. So? Oh! Merely seemingly. Ostensibly. Apparently. On the face of it?
What is this seismic cacophony all about? Human Beings sometimes forget The Earth itself is Life, another ethno-human, and is the ?E? in N-i-l-e as well as in L-i-f-e, with both words placing The Earth in a position of cosmological extraneity! Do ethno-human politicians listen to The Earth when they go to sleep? Granted, since the letter ?E? stands in for ?ear? and ?eye,? do ethno-humans respectively make it a point to listen to or try to see what those buried in The Earth, hardworking and conscientious brothers and sisters six feet under, men, women, and children who have passed on as a result of ethno-politicians? callousness, political ethnocentrism, ethnic conflicts, political wars, and political kleptomania? Where is Salman Rushdie?s ?The Ground Beneath Her Feet??
And where is The Source of The Nile? Where are Bob Marley?s ?Africa Unite? and ?Crazy Baldhead?? Where is Peter Tosh?s ?Mama Africa?? Where is Louis Armstrong?s ?What A Wonderful World?? Where is Fela Kuti?s ?Teacher Don?t Teach Me Nonsense,? ?Mister Follow Follow,? and ?Lady?? Where is Prince Nico Mbarga?s ?Sweet Mother?? Where is where? Where is You? Where is I? Where is They? Where is Us? Where is Life? Where is Death? Where is Chinua Achebe?s ?Things Fall Apart?? Where is Tsitsi Dangarembga?s ?Nervous Condition?? Where is Frantz Fanon?s ?The Wretched of The Earth? and ?Black Skin, White Masks?? Where is Cheikh Anta Diop?s ?African Origin of Civilization? and ?The Cultural Unity of Black Africa?? Where is The Scarab Beetle? Where? Where? Where?
There is a sudden materialization of a tornado of public disapproval hurtled through the dust-devil of events, of seismic cacophony. Naturally, The Earth cracks open and a mountainous Hong Kong of continental insecurity, of elephantine proportions in terms of geographic marvel, juts out of a spit of acid-heat into a standing-doppelganger of national instability, a psycho-political trademark of the seismic terrorism of the Nation of Lazy Monsters (NLM). A sickly bombast of seismic pretense. Of sorts. It is no wonder these thundery globes of the Nation of Lazy Monsters (NLM) is cocooned in the internecine placenta of The Earth, particularly, as it were, in the compartmentalized Forest and Cave of Feudal Civilization.
Where is The Source of The Nile?
In a matter of seconds, the eldritch members of the NLM, otherwise referred to as The Feudal Dictators, have perfectly meshed with the psycho-emotional forest of plantation mentality, a serious disease born of mental backwardness and of ethno-racial inferiority complex. Among other things, they do not share The Dolphin?s noble idea of self-respect, democratic populism, and self-autonomy and, therefore, decide to substitute national circle-ness and straight-lineness for a countermine, a strategic alchemy of seismic terrorism. What is more, they also want to have political sex on the moon with him, The Scarab Beetle, in which the pundic philosophy of ?irrational self-interest? of Adam Smith replaces the phallic philosophy of ?rational self-interest? of The Dolphin.
All in all, The Scarab Beetle rejects their political transvestitism thinking having political sex on the moon, the Sodom-and-Gomorrah abode of the great epicene Kweku Ananse, that is, the plain mirror, The Esu-Elegbara, The Signifying Monkey, with him will be a sacrilege of the highest order. Politically incorrect. In the end, the sickly bombast of seismic pretense swallows up 300 innocent children, men, and women. Like Jonah in the whale?s mammoth belly. Like Jesus Christ in a grave for three days! Like the de-legging of Elizabeth Asantewaa! Like the death of Krobo Edusei?s Sister. Like the victimhood of Krobo Edusei?s wife. Like the Kulungugu Bombing! Like Tasmanian Devil (JB Danquah) and Komodo Dragon (KA Busia) working with the CIA. Like the dirge of Salman Rushdie?s ?The Ground Beneath Her Feet?! Like! Like! Like!?Always like!
Death! Death! Death! Life! Life! Life! What a wonderful world! Life! Life! Life! Death! Death! Death!
Fortunately for them, The Seven Animal Friends escape the terroristic seismic fury of The Earth?unscathed. The Scarab Beetle blames the elements, human insensitivity, human technological and industrial inconsideration, and lack of environmental consciousness as reasons for The Earth?s blind fury. However, The Rat, Mobuto Sese Seko?s totem, is about to add gravity to the emotional crises suffered by The Earth, but, this, in no time, incurs a measured rebuttal from The Scarab Beetle. ?The Earth is held in position by a system of neutralizing forces: Centripetal and Centrifugal!? says he. ?Centrifugal force, namely, tears each other apart, jealousy, greed, and backbiting, are the dominant forces in ethno-human relations. Human wars are the result of centrifugal force.?
The Scarab Beetle simply means the crushing terrorism of the National Liberation Movement (NLM), Boko Haram, Ansaru, and Al-Shabab, plus those chronic problems in Northern Ghana.
Was the NLM George Orwell??s ?Animal Farm?? Where is The Source of The Nile?
We shall return…
