Enemy Number One

By Baba Galleh Jallow

The people of No Talk Republic were saddled with a curious dilemma that was amply expressed by the fact that nowadays, their country was called No Talk Republic. Clinging furiously to his conviction that he had the best and brightest answers to all the questions in the world, Gyant DaMidget resolutely trampled on, crushing the weak, smacking the defenseless, slapping the innocent and banging the heads of vulnerable families on the wall. He liked to show people that he was more powerful than they were. As he grew fatter, the people grew thinner. Things got so bad that thousands of families woke up in the morning with no hope of breakfast and went to bed on an empty stomach. Family heads now walked the streets begging for bread crumbs, food leftovers, and coins to feed their starving families. Young people now gathered together and boldly sang about the hard life, hard life that was eating them up, eating their beloved families up, eating their beloved nation up.

But Gyant DaMidget did not care a hoot if the people were starving. He did not care if babies cried through the night because they were hungry and desperate parents shouting them down in pained anger because they had no food for the babies. All Gyant DaMidget cared for was his power and his supposed superiority above everyone else in No-Talk Republic. To demonstrate that he particularly enjoyed a game of political swordsmanship, he habitually carried a sword with him everywhere. The people knew of course that the only purpose for DaMidget’s sword was just in case someone attacked him. DaMidget himself would have them believe that the sword had some mystical purpose that was too dreadful to discover, just like the giant boubous he wore under the extreme heat of summer. But of course the people now knew otherwise; and this really troubled our greedy Gyant.

You see, part of the people’s curious dilemma was really Gyant DaMidget himself. If he could trample on the poor and the weak and knock the heads of vulnerable families on the wall, then he could surely also say ‘I was born after colonial rule because I did not want to be born under colonial rule.’ Gyant DaMidget emerged from that statement as a particularly curious specimen of the Amin type and really drew a wow! Amin too boasted that the crocodiles understood what he was saying. That was a very big claim, but nowhere near DaMidget’s history-breaking claim that he chose when exactly to be born. Well he was born, he was not really bright, he was mad, he joined the army, staged a coup and installed himself as the one and only Law in No Talk Republic. DaMidget’s story was so interesting it dazzled the imagination of the people. And so they grew more interested in seeing who exactly this Gyant DaMidget was. They started looking closer and that made Gyant DaMidget really uncomfortable. You see, Gyant DaMidget dreaded exposure. He was actually not Gyant DaMidget; he was somebody else and that was his best kept secret. DaMidget’s sword was one of the objects carried around to deflect attention from the real thing – the legendary wolf in sheepskin, the one that fell into big trouble one fine day, just when he least expected it. The people loved to watch Gyant DaMidget trying to run so fast away from tomorrow, trying to block the flow of natural time, try to force the world to behave as he wished, trying to ask the moon to stand still so he could prove he was a powerful man. It was sad spectacle. The way Gyant DaMidget often drew his invisible sword and charged into battle against human nature, then emerging and claiming a victory that never was.

Sometimes perched insecurely in his giant hummer, the one with the attached security post manned by heavily armed men that follows him around like a killer tail swinging furiously around for any possible targets. When he raises his hand to salute the people, DaMidget would make sure that it was the hand holding the sword so that the people would remember his mystical powers, the ones that serve as a transparent smokescreen to hide the real thing. Gyant DaMidget suffered from a severe inferiority complex that he would rather hide and that persisted not because it was incurable, but because the patient would just not be cured. By a sheer will to live the lie because that’s where he felt at home, Gyant DaMidget had rendered his system immune to the virus of humility, which was the true mark of all great leaders. And Gyant DaMidget was not one to pretend to be humble anyway. What do you mean humble? He would often ask, his teeth almost clenched, a questioning grin on his lips, his head to one side, facing slightly up in the manner of one that’s higher heavens. DaMidget’s dilemma hurt because DaMidget felt small in his skin. He was like a sprite crouched against the bitter cold, refusing to take cover under the roof of the national mind, refusing to partake of the milk of the nation school, shunning anything he did not know and clinging only to what he knew. He was a specialist at starving the nation mind and was therefore himself a victim of mental starvation. The mind that starves other minds is necessarily starved; that was simply one law of Nature over which DaMidget had no say.

Second Genamin Gyant DaMidget could have bloomed like a flower in the spring if only he kept an open mind when he seized power. Sadly, the Amin type is utterly incapable of seeing beyond its own version of the world, which it holds to be supreme and utterly infallible. People like DaMidget feared and shrank from nature at first sight; and so they spend their lives crouching from imaginary blows, striking out at imaginary enemies, refusing to hear not a word that differed from their word. They represent a classic case of the closed book, perhaps the worst character flaw a person could suffer. This particular character flaw is suffered only by people who, like DaMidget, chose not to embrace the great gift of humility that would have opened him up to the sea of wisdom in the nation school. Instead, he declared that no one could tell him what to do and always repeated that he feared no one. If anyone thought he was a man, let them come face him. He was not afraid of the so-called West and fears only the All Mighty Allah. And of course, as far as he was concerned the All Mighty Allah was fully on his side and would defend him from any potential bully. He would not allow anyone to come and recolonize the country in the twenty-first century. Four hundred years of foreign rule!

Naturally, all that boasting told the people that something was not particularly right with Gyant DaMidget. And the more they looked, the more DaMidget cowed and shielded himself with his sword as part of the national salute. One day he was told that if he carried a monkey skull on his back, he would actually be invisible; and so he took to carrying a long dry monkey skull on his back, nicely tucked away under the giant boubou. ‘They will see you but they will not see you that’s what he told me,’ Gyant DaMidget often told his cronies as they gathered in his house for a drink. ‘So when I tell you that people are different you should not question my wisdom.’ The cronies would all coo and do the never laugh and shout ah boss, no never sir! Gyant DaMidget would brim with fake confidence and shift his sword on the wall. ‘In this world you cannot say you don’t understand the world. If you say you don’t understand the world then you are telling us you do not listen to what people say and that’s a bad attitude you know? I don’t stand it.’ DaMidget would wax quaintly philosophical as he proceeded to expound some of his fake theories to be gladly consumed by his audience in order to convince him that his version of the world was the one and only correct one. ‘My grandfather used to say DaMidget, you don’t know who you are,’ he would brim, raising the excitement among the gleeful cronies several notches higher.

Now because he would not listen to good advice, Gyant DaMidget grew into a very funny guy who always made the people laugh and hold their mouths and stare around and ask eh, is it really true? Gyant DaMidget refused to accept that it was against human nature to shun good advice. He refused to accept that it was against human nature to willingly shun the truth and shun justice. And because Gyant DaMidget was guilty of all these crimes against human nature, he could only suffer from a bad case of severely arrested development. For him, good advice, the truth and justice are located on enemy ground and so must be routed totally out of hand! They must be shown that Gyant DaMidget was a great revolutionary with a dynamic vision of where he wants to go. Part of his dilemma was that where he wanted to go was not where the country wanted to go. So he spends his days tugging madly away at the country, heaving and shoving, pushing the nation in a direction it did not and would not want to go. And he would entertain no questions on the subject. He was particularly glad to snuff out the lives of any vital institutions in the nation school that pretended to know what was right or wrong. In his version of the world, a revolutionary was one who was powerful enough to make everyone do their bid as much as was humanly possible. When it proved humanly impossible, Gyant DaMidget would either make a lot of public noise and tender a private apology or seize a couple of families and knock their heads hard on the wall, just for the heck of it! ‘If you do not think I am a true revolutionary, come and try me,’ he would often boast. ‘In fact what do you mean by revolutionary?’

Of course, the people of No Talk Republic knew that Gyant DaMidget was indeed a particular type of  revolutionary; the one that never heard of the word itself, being too preoccupied listening for any funny or dangerous noises in the background. In fact, Gyant DaMidget preferred dangerous noises to funny noises because the latter sounded too familiar and close to home. Gyant DaMidget’s fear of exposure stemmed from that the fact that the real him could only evoke laughter by the monstrous magnitude of the fear that perpetually gripped his heart and made him cold under 100 degree weather. Fear created and nurtured by his own stubborn refusal to learn, to listen to reason, to respect human nature, to accept the fact that like all the rest of us, he is merely an incomplete being in perpetual need of soul food. Gyant DaMidget was starved of soul food and so from starved soul syndrome, an excruciatingly painful condition that turns its victims into living bundles of crippling fear that must never be allowed to surface. And so in order to control his trembling in the perpetual cold, Gyant DaMidget proudly carried his sword around, sweated profusely under the giant boubous in 100 degree weather, but nevertheless grinned and trampled on to prove just how hot and powerful he was. He was a revolutionary who got it all wrong. That was his other sword, the one that must never be seen but that was always heard rattling famously around. Ironically, that was his favorite sword. It was also His Enemy Number One. Hence the curious dilemma he represented to the amazed people of No Talk Republic.

Things so bad that the people now called him Toady, Haali, Barrbi, Mbota and Nakbi among other funny names, when they talked about him in public. Some people said the bells of time were tolling for Gyant DaMidget; that in the not too distant future, he will become the history that he had made and No-talk Republic shall be free of his heartless oppression of the poor, the needy, the helpless; and the hungry babies shall cease to cry through the long dark nights of tyranny he imposed on their beloved nation.