(Not for ourselves alone are we born.)”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
Cicero was a politician, a lawyer and a humanist. His name was later attributed to eloquence. For it was written of him, “not the name of a man, but of eloquence itself.” However, today is not the day to tell his story. Like a ruminant, lounging under the coolness of the mangrove and dedicatedly, chewing its curd, so have I mulled over Cicero’s poignancy.
Harrowingly, as the ripples of my epiphany expanded, one sad fact, like a blood sucking leech attaches itself to a benighted host, clung to my medulla. In my soliloquy, I asked myself this question for the umpteenth time, “Are Africans simply inept of demystifying Cicero’s truth or do we just choose to ignore it while the white man makes a commitment to live it?”
For only a man that has come to a total unraveling of Cicero’s gold would reach down and lift other people up. This is exactly what Dr Ian Squire and his three missionary counterparts did. Squire, heart-wrenchingly, lost his life while trying to make life better for others but he would not be the first to die so. Perhaps, if we, Africans, continue in the savage ways we so vehemently denounce, he may not be the last. Squire would be just another magnanimous ‘Oyinboh’ who died trying to salvage the despicable living conditions of some black men. That was his only crime!
How can one begin to comprehend the barbarity and callousness of a disadvantaged people who lack the competence to live like Cicero admonished but lashes out at to grab the smallest opportunity to make life miserable for others? Isn’t that savagery at its zenith?
I try not to imagine how Squire’s widow must be dealing with the reality of his horrendous death. According to reports, 57-year-old Squire, until his death, ran his own opticians in Shepperton, Surrey, and had been founder and chairman of the Christian charity Mission for Vision since 2003.
He founded the charity to provide training and eye equipment for clinics in countries, including Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya and Mozambique. Monica Chard, a friend of the deceased, spoke of Squire this: “He was a lovely, quiet man who everyone knew and loved as the village optician. “He went out to Africa every year with the charity and his wife was also involved. He just wanted to help people see who otherwise would not have had any help.”
That was a good man. That was a man who lived his life according to the precincts of Cicero’s wisdom. Did he deserve to be killed by the greed of some people within the bunch he came to emancipate? Yet, we claim we are not savages! Squire died in captivity and little details are known of his demise but how is this event different from the stories of the Operation Auca in 1956? Three scores and one year later, the same kind of barbarity is re-enacted in different customs.
Though in 1956, Huaorani warriors of the rain forest of Ecuador used spears to end the lives of five white missionaries in the most barbaric manner, suspected militants, probably adorned with bullets, charms and machines guns, stormed the rural community of Enekorogha on 13 October, 2017 and kidnapped 4 Britons who were there to give sight to members of that community at no cost. Isn’t that savagery?
Three others were release three weeks later but Squire, unfortunately, did not make it out of captivity alive. Today, darkness looms for members of the community an elder in the community lamented: “We are in big distress now. We have been given free treatment (by the missionaries) since 2007 to date. Now that they have closed this clinic, I think we are in big distress.”
It is quite unfortunate that though the best we can do for ourselves is nothing, some of us go out of the way to make life miserable for people that have in their own benevolence chosen to alleviate our sufferings. The people of Enekorogha in Delta State have a government system in place, don’t they? But where has the government been before 2007 and even after 2007? Nobody, not even those the people voted for came to their rescue save for an Oyinboh man and his crew. What did he get in return? Those Oyinboh people left their comfort zones, came down to the belly of Niger Delta, abandoned by even its own government but they appeared to some people as the gateway to quick wealth. They saw their messiahs as cash cows and decided to milk them dry.
Their government will pay, they probably thought but were they even sent here by their government? No! They came here simply to make life better for my fellow countrymen, my brothers from the Niger Delta. Over and over again, they have been kidnapped, killed, ravaged and treated poorly by a few who do not understand their mission but have they stopped coming? These people are propelled and motivated by the understanding of Cicero’s words and we must come to this realisation: killing them will not kill the good in them.
I beseech us, Africans, Nigerians, my people from the Niger Delta region, hurting the emissaries of good tidings is doing a monumental evil to ourselves. An end must come to these kidnaps and killings but it would only happen when we mine the gold in Cicero’s phrase.
and then