© Numero Unoma
Look, I know the question I’m about to ask might make me sound stupid, but I find embracing one’s vulnerability to be very attractive. Besides, asking stupid questions usually rewards one with wisdom, so I’m just going to lay it out there for all to see:
This human race thing, what is it all about really? What are we racing against each other for?
Oh that’s right a gold medal. Right? No? What then?
It’s world Humanitarian Day on 19 August and the 2022 theme is #TheHumanRace. I’m still trying to work that one out in my head. I guess it must be some kind of oblique reference to the rise in racism across the globe. A perfunctory Eurocentric platitude that reeks of embarrassment and reluctance at having to make even the remotest admission of racism, because we all know that Eurocentric jingoism is the fly in the ointment of the human race, just as tribalism is the fly in the Nigerian ointment.
“You got the horse race, you got the dog race, you got the human race, but this is a rat race” said Bob Marley in his 1976 song, Rat Race.
The image of a rat race always has my overactive imagination causing me shudders of revulsion as I picture hundreds, maybe thousands of writhing rat bodies trampling over each other to get somewhere. They are mostly attributed with blind greed, yet it somehow seems lame to put all blame on the poor nasty rodents, after all rats will be rats, and if the German folk story is to be believed, the rats are mesmerised by the tune of the pied piper.
The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines a pied piper thus: 1 : one that offers strong but delusive enticement. 2 : a leader who makes irresponsible promises. 3 : a charismatic person who attracts followers. (keep scrolling) >>>>
According to Wikipedia, “The legend dates back to the Middle Ages, the earliest references describing a piper, dressed in multicoloured (“pied”) clothing, who was a rat catcher hired by the town of Hamelin to lure rats away with his magic pipe. When the citizens refuse to pay for this service as promised, he retaliates by using his instrument’s magical power on their children, leading them away as he had the rats.” The children were never seen again, but three children were not lost. A lame child who could not follow quickly enough, a deaf child who could not hear the music, and a blind who could not see where he was going. This version of the story spread as folklore, and has appeared in the writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Brothers Grimm, and Robert Browning, among others. The Hamelin street named Bungelosenstrasse (“street without drums”) is believed to be the last place that the children were seen. To the present day, music or dancing is not allowed on this street.
In a travel report on the city of Hamellin, the BBC cites evidence that the story really did happen, though nobody really knows why the children disappeared, or whether there was any real connection with any rats other than the human rat who abducted the youngsters.
Did you know that a group of rats is called a mischief? So, we agree that in order for there to be a rat race, there has to be a pied piper leading the rats to some destination. Caveat: this is not a scientific fact! Who then are the pied pipers, and are they without mischief? Could they be the politicians who have led Nigeria so far off course that the ‘miss-road’ had become endemic?
In recent times the Pied Piper sector has become highly competitive. Apart from politicians bearing bags of rice and spraying confetti made of Naira banknotes, there are the Japa pied pipers, some of whom legitimately lead Nigeria’s young professionals to Canada the new Promised Land, and others who lure gullible young people into prostitution and human trafficking. Then there are the pied piper pastors who give new meaning to the word conviction, because faith and conviction are what cause their victims to ‘plant seeds’ with the fruits of their labour, namely everything that they own, when in fact said pastors somehow manage to escape conviction after ruining peoples lives through such poetic fraud in the name of the Lord. How about plastic surgery, who are the pied pipers there, is it celebrities or plastic surgeons who are leading so many young women to their death? And the Ponzi-scheme pied pipers, are ordinary people like your uncle’s second cousin.
But rats are not the only human or non-human vermin that plague the human rat race. Mosquitoes are another. These blood sucking, disease-spreading parasites have been given a day, August 20, as World Mosquito Day (would you believe it!) to share with honey bees, as World Honey Bee Day. Yes, same day! Quite frankly I am deeply offended by such paradoxical celebrations of these two antitheses on the same day. Whose bright idea was that? In stark contrast to the pestilent mosquito, the honey bee stays busy making the world a better place by pollinating flowers and fruit trees, and also by producing honey.
Both of these insects have the means to pierce human skin and inject an irritant. It is hard to begrudge the bee its sting, since any creature adding value to the world should be entitled to self-defence from attack. The mosquito on the other hand, uses each puncture for self-serving purposes only. The irony is that all the attempts humans make to rid the world of mosquitoes through chemical extermination continue to fail, while in fact they are simultaneously succeeding in killing off the honey bee, without whom life on earth as we know it would cease to be. There’d be no more flowers or fruits, and after a while no more trees either. Meanwhile, every year half a million Africans die of Malaria, mostly children. Yes, UNICEF data tells us that every 75 seconds a child under five dies of malaria on the African continent.
But what do the pied pipers of Big Pharma and their aiders and abetters in the multilateral organisations of the world (such as WHO) do? Instead of allowing a natural remedy like Artemesia to be used, they ban it outright because it threatens their profit margins, and instead, they play their pipe and subject the entire human race to their billion-dollar profit-generating vaccines, such as the Covid19 and malaria vaccines, despite the fact that Artemesia, a simple plant remedy, is useful in the treatment of both. Even rats are kinder to each other than that. Because they are of the same race. Somehow, Black people are not of the human race, they are the Black race, so nobody bats an eyelid when we die like rats. In fact, somebody even deems the insect that causes those deaths worthy of being given its own celebratory day of the calendar. August 20 is World Mosquito Day, I kid you not.
The problem with race and races is that their raison d’être is for there to ultimately be a winner. Make no mistake, second place is the first loser, so if you are going to participate in a race, then you might as well be sure to win by any means necessary, because only the gold medal is of any value. This has to do with the Golden Rule, which states that (s)he who has the gold makes the rules. Oh, and by the way, (s)he gets to break them too. No comeback.
I am still puzzling about the human race, and its purpose on earth, because if we continue like this, we are going to be the ultimate losers when we exterminate ourselves through rat race mentality. Nature can live without us, it is we who cannot live without nature. Who knows, maybe the world would be a better place if rats took over. Then they can avenge the slander they have suffered through our coining of the term ‘rat race’, and finally tell the truth when they talk about the low down dirty and now extinct human race.
A great captivating read…