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Subject:
From:
Samba Goddard <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Date:
Sat, 20 Nov 1999 00:13:19 +0100
Content-Type:
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Asalaamu alaykum Madiba,
Alhamdullila, Thank you very much for this incredible fact.

May Allah(SWT) give you longlife,goodhealth and progress in all
what you are doing.

May Allah! increase your knowledge and give you the best of
knowledge....Ameen!!!!!

(Masalam)
Samba Goddard

Madiba wrote:

> GUARDIAN
>
> Friday, 19 November 1999
>
> A woman called Tomorrow
>
> By Reuben Abati
>
> THERE is this woman called Tomorrow. Born in a timeless moment, by a father
> whose name was Time, and a mother called Hope, Tomorrow has grown to become
> the most famous, most beloved woman in history. She is a polyandrist: every
> man is her husband. There is also something of a lesbian about her: every
> woman loves Tomorrow. They think about her. They want her. They admire her
> beauty, and everything she promises. Ms. Tomorrow - she uses Ms. to
> underscore her neutrality and availability, is human to the extent that she
> conditions human imagination and efforts, but still, she is not exactly like
> us. She is more of a ghost standing between the past and the future, so
> translucent you can see through, yet so intangible and evanescent, so
> changeable, she confounds, mystifies, intrigues. At group and individual
> levels, man has been locked in a permanent embrace with Tomorrow. She is so
> generous, so available, if she were really physical, she would have been a
> prostitute, servicing the hunger of a rampaging phallocentric,
> pillow-centric humanity. Her feminity is indeed irresistible. To embrace
> Tomorrow is to live. Mere thoughts of her keep the heart pumping, and the
> blood flows in our veins. I am not exactly what you think but I confess from
> the bottom of my heart that I love tomorrow. I should like to see tomorrow:
> everything that surrounds me: should see tomorrow too.
>
> Religious institutions tend to love tomorrow more than the rest of us. The
> entire epistemology of religion is based on the conviction that without
> tomorrow, humanity is lost, trapped in time. People go to church, the mosque
> and the temple either because they want to know tomorrow, control tomorrow,
> or influence tomorrow. Tomorrow is ambivalent though, it is the vortex of
> good and evil and the logical home and end of all contradictions. Immediate.
> Totalitarian. Tomorrow arrives and surrounds us, not in 24-hour terms, but
> in moments of pain or pleasure, fleeting moments in which life acquires new
> meaning from an ordinary touch, or a spoken word. Tomorrow is a witch. She
> can summon the wind, a bullet, a letter, a car, an illness, or just about
> anything to deliver her love or hate, message and impact. In loving tomorrow
> then, our devotion is total, like votaries at the altar of a goddess, and we
> have no option, because tomorrow is the vessel for all the energies in
> nature, the very energies that supply the electricity of life, and mediate
> the law of thermodynamics for positive ends. To hate tomorrow is to die.
> Those who despise tomorrow instantly lose part of the spark of life: they
> become like NEPA, our society's epileptic institution (which is why even the
> inimitable Chief Bola Ige appears helpless) and in the end, they commit
> suicide. In every human society that kind of suicide resulting from a wilful
> failure to embrace tomorrow, is considered a crime. Such men are taken to
> the evil forest, they are treated by forensic experts like a piece of
> evidence of how not to be human in a humanising world in love with tomorrow.
> Tomorrow, then, is what we live for. The hangman looks forward to tomorrow.
> The man on the death row, like Ken Saro-Wiwa, still speaks of tomorrow with
> certainty. On the way to prison, Chief Obafemi Awolowo spoke of tomorrow
> like a man who knew tomorrow, and her secrets.
>
> But tomorrow is the home of secrets. Who knows tomorrow? men are wont to
> ask. "Nobody knows tomorrow," the same question is answered on the tail
> board of Lagos mammy-wagons, the Molue, where philosophy is delivered and
> distributed in the streets in innocent but poignant doses. If men were to
> know tomorrow, they would never make mistakes. The Elizabethans (16th and
> 17th century England) invested much effort in knowing tomorrow, but their
> most accomplished poet, William Shakespeare eventually wrote that "It is
> human to err". Man errs because he is destined to die. He dies because he is
> fallible, imperfect. Tomorrow is a wonder of creation - every woman is - and
> those who doubt this should consider the mystery of pregnancy, the bigger
> mystery of birth, and the larger mystery of growth. Medical scientists and
> fortune tellers these days pretend to have answers to all problems: they can
> foretell the sex of a child, or the coming of a hurricane, but science has
> not answered all the questions about the future of a hurricane, or the tango
> between a child and tomorrow. Fortune tellers have not fared better. Every
> year, Olabayo, and Okunzua pretend to know tomorrow, very soon they will
> mount the crystal ball again, but by mid-year, they have to remind you of
> what they said about tomorrow, and they are free to say anything, because
> really we are so trapped in personal battles with tomorrow, we hardly bother
> about men who live off the uncontrollable destiny of man. Even Nostradamus,
> the prince of all futurologists, did not know everything , because nobody
> does.
>
> Take Gen. Sani Abacha. He used state resources to employ marabouts who told
> him he was the greatest thing since the invention of toothpaste. Abacha
> wanted to know tomorrow. He loved tomorrow. The marabouts told him he had
> found favour with tomorrow. But he died, neither knowing nor meeting
> tomorrow. If he had known that when and if tomorrow comes, his family and
> friends will be subjected to humiliation, disgrace and contempt, maybe he
> would have struggled to be a better man. If Abiola had known tomorrow too,
> he probably would have stayed away from politics, and maybe he would have
> gone into politics, and then not insist on the mandate he won on June 12.
> Who would have thought that Obasanjo will return from prison to become
> President? And Bamaiyi who was once said to be a man of power and means in
> the Nigerian Army - today, the courts and lawyers are helping him to enjoy
> some respite before the sins of his past catch up with him, and his tomorrow
> receives a judgment from the past. If Bamaiyi had known, maybe he would have
> behaved differently. Who could have predicted two weeks ago that Enwerem
> will lose his seat as Senate President? And that Chuba Okadibgo and his band
> of Igbo coupists will remove their own kinsman, something Tell magazine
> could not really do?
>
> I am afraid of tomorrow. Tomorrow, being a prostitute, is unreliable. Good
> men do not always see tomorrow. Nature is ambiguous in its judgments. Until
> we are able to know why good follows bad, and evil is rewarded with good, we
> will never know tomorrow. So, what will tomorrow bring? Candidly, I repeat:
> I do not know. The country today is precisely at such a moment that evokes
> anxieties about tomorrow. The country is laden with contradictions. We have
> a president who means well, but he is surrounded by cripples who are slowing
> down the process with their omissions and shortcomings. We have a president
> who left alone says the right things but whose speech and letter writers are
> often absent-minded as evident in that thoroughly absent-minded letter to
> the governor of Bayelsa State, that governor with a sentence of a name -
> knowing that I require two tongues to pronounce that Governor's name, I
> don't even bother to write it. (Sorry.) We have a democratic government in
> power, but it looks like the politicians are distracted, while the area boys
> are in charge. The Amphibious Brigade of the Egbesu Army and the Spiritually
> Fortified Brigade of the Oduduwa People's Congress are far more influential
> than either the Nigerian Army or police. When Lagos residents need help
> these days for example, they don't bother to consult the police, they invite
> the neighbourhood branch of the OPC. And yet, democracy is supposed to
> guarantee our happiness, and not place us at the mercy of semi-illiterates.
> Tomorrow is strange: she produces all sorts. Ganiyu Adams is today the
> spokesman of the Yoruba. At least, he is the only one who can make every
> other ethnic group in Nigeria listen to the Yoruba, and yet Yoruba advertise
> themselves as the most civilised group in the country.
>
> We are at such a moment in our lives as a nation when everything is
> happening, and anything is possible. No nation, where the rule of law, is
> entrenched, can afford such calamity. Our primary problem is in the area of
> law and order. Some bearded mullahs in Zamfara State are misbehaving, and we
> are all busy saying that is democracy. That is not democracy, it is
> stupidity, because it is foolish to allow fifth-columnists exploit democracy
> to cause havoc and not do something about them. We have impregnated tomorrow
> in this land. We have abandoned the women of the land, and impregnated the
> alternative from the coven of witchcraft. If tomorrow gives birth to a
> hermaphrodite, that will be sorry indeed, considering the efforts we have
> made, the bridges we crossed, the trees we planted. If and when tomorrow
> comes, we shall see.
>
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