Ayi Kwei Armah
“The person who strays from the source is unroofed and is like dust blown by the wind” (Molefi Kete Asante).
“There are no fruitful speculations outside of reality” (Cheikh Anta Diop).
The chichidodo bird is a volcano of internal contradictions
The chichidodo bird is in many interesting aspects more like the profound lyrical content of freeballing Wanlov da Kubolor’s acoustic guitar-driven song “FOKN (fucking) Country” which, though very unlike Bob Marley’s acoustic guitar-driven ballad “Redemption Song,” somehow exposes the internecine contradictions of the chichidodo bird.
To wit, the “FOKN Song” is a polemical music sheet that exposes Ghana as a gargantuan distortion, as a stupendous fraud.
The Chichidodo bird’s post-Nkrumah Ghana, a dreamlike canard hanging precipitously on a mournful grave of internecine contradictions, is far from ethno-geopolitical consolidation given the preponderant weight of the Chichidodo bird’s divisive politics and lackluster leadership upon the sagging national conscience.
Without mincing words, let just say that the chichidodo bird’s diarrheic shit-bombing barfing-politicking also tends to desecrate the national flag, its rainbow magnanimity of gold and yellow and green and the black star:
…she goes about ransacking the dog-weary national coffers with reckless abandon, cold impunity that is, and secreting the booty away in the Da Vinci Codes of the Panama Papers and the formidable vaults of Western banks…Gold!
…she goes about destroying and polluting the environment, forest, water resources, lands and generations unborn without any proactive sense of environmental consciousness, and signing away, call it a Faustian devil’s bargain, our vast natural wealth (on the cheap)…Green!
…she goes about dehumanizing and abusing and cheating citizens out of the national pie through neocolonial internal colonialism…The Black Star!
…she goes about making the black star shed needless oceans of red tears, of old-fashioned sadness for all the huge if meritorious sacrifices it [the black star] made toward wringing the political freedom of Africa from the firm purchase of colonialism…Red!
This desecrated national flag which has been crying forever, is kept on open display in a stool-like coffin, a devil’s island called Flagstaff House, the Garden-of-Eden of unimaginable political corruption in terms of sheer volume and endemic universality in that diseased body politic.
What, we should dare ask ourselves, have the chichidodo bird and her maggot-infested chickens of wicked, reprobate politicians finally managed to turn Steele Pulse’s “Rally Round” into?:
“Rally round the flag…Rally round the red…Gold black and green
“Marcus say: Red for the blood…that flowed like the river
“Marcus say: Green for the land Africa
“Marcus say: “Yellow for the gold…That they stole
“Marcus say: “Black for the people…It was looted from
The chichidodo bird, it turns out, has succeeded somewhat in turning any progressive idea of political hopefulness for Africa into a political dirge for Africa, a painfully shambolic betrayal.
Compounding her betrayal is the fact that she is also anti-people…anti-masses…a creative critical mass which she has never bothered to carry along as she executes her mandate, a mandate popular sovereignty invested with her, yet here Frantz Fanon stares her in her face with a daring conscience:
“To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them too, that there is no such thing as a demiurge, that there is no famous man who will take the responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people!”
The chichidodo bird is that dirgeful empty political speech that has become an in-your-face staple in her country of birth, a maggot-infested lavatory of a cabal of insensitive chicken-head politicians.
Her Olympian sense of self-importance and superior intelligence is merely a lost sprint after an approaching mirage of dystopian buffoonery, a cracked mirror, if you will, her dystopian and doctrinaire territory of thinking being off-limits to pragmatists.
The chichidodo bird’s unnerving calm demeanor…composure…equanimity…in addition to her destructive aggressive calmness are an Orwellian veneer of intellectual and moral insecurity.
A well-known political nymphomaniac, the chichidodo bird is no doubt a creation of her own de-centeredness.
The chichidodo bird, a tabula rasa on which is engraved ineligible tattoos of historical consciousness and cultural de-centeredness, thinks highly of herself, and for what nobody really knows.
True, that perceptual construction of narcissism lacks any useful instruments of immanent self-criticism.
Indeed the chichidodo bird is a laughing hyena, a Frankenstein hybrid between a ratite butterfly and an aeronautic ostrich, and, granted the painful irony that she sees no use questioning the Farsi (Persian) saying, that the yellow dog and the jackal are biological brothers, she succeeds in putting some of her critics at ease on account of this concession.
Still, she looks in the cracked mirror of dystopian make-believe and sees Edward Said’s penetrating eye staring at her:
“I do not know,” says Said, “whether the photograph can, or does, say things as they really are. Something has been lost. But the representation is all we have. Something has been lost. But the representation is all we have.”
The truth really hurts, this proverbial statement she no doubts knows to be indisputably true.
She also agrees with Bob Marley (“Jah Live”) that “the truth is an offence but not a sin”; this after her having also agreed with him that “is a foolish dog back at a flying bird.”
The chichidodo bird, to put it mildly, if we may, sees her constructive critics as no less than “foolish dogs.”
Foolish dogs bark at flying birds because it may well be the case that they have no deep understanding of the complex mechanics of avian aeronautics, namely the political theory of kleptomania.
Yet she also uncompromisingly loves Donald Trump’s anti-feminist rhetoric, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “We Should All Be Feminists,” and no less our own President Barack Obama’s “This is What A Feminist Looks Like” (August 4, edition of Glamour Magazine). Yet the chichidodo bird wants to be known as chichimamanda, a Machiavellian if Frankenstein hybrid between the chichidodo bird and Chimamanda…a sphinx…something the latter rejected on principle. Hear President Obama:
“That’s what twenty-first century feminism is about: the idea that when everybody is equal, we are all more free.”
Donald in contrast:
“Beauty and elegance, whether in a woman, a building, or a work of art, is not just superficial or something pretty to see.”
No further remarks.
The chichidodo bird smiles at a Donald Trump portrait…then expectedly alternately explodes and implodes into jittery dusts of emotional smithereens, giving off her signature wry, wicked laughter of moral contradictions.
And a “laughing hyena” she is also called, the chichidodo bird has no qualms saying a big yes to:
…Bob Marley’s “War” and Tupac’s “Hit ‘Em Up”; U2’s “Beautiful Day” and Bob Marley’s “One Love” and Dionne Warwick’s “That’s What Friends Are For” and Scorpions’ “Wind of Change”!
…Village People’s “Macho Men”; Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” and Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” and Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful” and India.Irie’s “Video”!
Perhaps the greatest irony also…the chichidodo bird unabashedly admires the constitutional dictatorship of the Supreme Court and the militant journalistic terrorism of the Montie 3…
Judicial bastadization; journalistic terrorism…the chichidodo bird’s moral pollution all the way!
Oh what a wonderful world, the chichidodo bird says Idi Amin is Nelson Mandela’s identical twin sister.
This comes straight from her viral and bacterial droppings, from her bleached skin-feathers, like Bukom Banku’s, she thinks and sees herself as white. The pied chichidodo bird, also suffers from vitiligo. Yet she hates and admires with equal measure the black-and-white ivory keys of the organ and the piano.
But Frantz Fanon, a world-famous apostle of colonial deconstruction, knocks down the walled fence of exaggerated self-confidence she has erected around her avian-person. Listen to Fanon:
“I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos…and the white man, however intelligent he may be, is incapable of understanding Louis Armstrong or songs from the Congo. I am black, not because of a curse, but because my skin has been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a drop of sun under the earth.
“And there we are in a hand-to-hand struggle with our blackness or our whiteness, a drama of narcissistic proportions, locked in our own particularity, admittedly with a few glimmers of hope from time to time that are constantly at risk from the source.
“So, unable to blacken or negrify the world, she endeavors to whiten it in her body and mind…The contact with her unconscious would have helped matters. Instead of acknowledging that she is black, she turns the fact into an accident…”
Clash of the titans
The crisis of identity is a big issue in the national character. And since the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah all our political leaders, it seems, have behaved just like Bukom Banku because, just like his sycophantically agreeing to one of his wives’demands to bleach without considering the demands’ consequences, these post-Nkrumah leaders have taken to the neocolonial demands of their foreign patrons to bleach the country dry.
Fela Kuti labeled the coconut-heads of these maggot-infested avian political animals “colo-mentality”! In one sense therefore, the chichidodo bird’s politics of resentment, her vigorous pursuit of schadenfreude politicking and electioneering strategies, her subtle promotion of internalized racism (ethnic stereotypes/colorism), and her outright rejection of respectability politics are an epic failure in her projection of stateswomanship. Such Sambo, house-slave politicians!
Yet she has the nerve to promote this as postmodern feminism, sometimes as traditional feminism!
Alas, not even James Brown’s “I’m Black/I’m Proud” and Burnings Spear’s “Identity” have succeeded in providing the sort of effective resolution of the crisis one had hoped to see in the sclerotic body politic of these maggot-infested avian political animals.
Also not even Albert Memmi’s “The Colonized and the Colonizer” has much say in the political discourse, since the main characters of his book, afore-mentioned, have arguably been replaced by and now eat the fermented pie of internal colonialism themselves. Wole Soyinka meant this in part when he said:
“The oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it.”
Thus, resolution of the crisis of identity is far from complete given the prevailing dichotomies in the sclerotic body politic of our maggot-infested avian political animals, as the following works eloquently represent:
Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and Frantz Fanon’s “Black Skin, White Masks” on the one hand versus Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “We Should All Be Feminists” and Veronique Tadjo’s “Mame Wata and the Monsters” on the other hand. “For we no want no devil philosophy,” said Bob Marley.
The masses must, therefore, reject this “devil philosophy” which their clueless, wicked leadership of political animals represents in the sclerotic body politic, for this is the only way they can hope to realize Louis Armstrong’s…Satchmo’s…Kenny G’s…What a Wonderful World!
Conclusion
The chichidodo bird is a time-bomb of contradictions. Not only that, it is also a Pandora’s box…A Trojan Horse. She is what Molefi Kete Asante has called “Rooming in the Master’s House” and Malcolm X a “house slave.”
Yet, she is also almost impossible to unravel because those—the people or the masses—who should be qualified to perform the unveiling have—themselves—been turned into ideological alchemies of alliterate-unlettered Zombies by these humanoid-avian politicians, materialistic clerics and the colonial-neocolonial educational system.
This issue, it appears, has resolved itself into a gargantuan recrudescent furuncle under the humanoid-feathery wings of the chichidodo bird. It is gradually growing into a malignant cancer.
Fortunately for us, three great philosophers among our foremost thinkers provide some painful truths about squashing this furuncle:
“Africa is a paradox which illustrates and highlights neo-colonialism. Her earth is rich, yet the products that come from above and below the soil continue to enrich, not Africans predominantly, but groups and individuals who operate to Africa’s impoverishment” (Kwame Nkrumah).
“Only a loyal, determined struggle to destroy cultural aggression and bring out the truth, whatever it may be, is revolutionary and consonant with real progress; it is the only approach which opens on to the universal. Humanitarian declarations are not called for and add nothing to real progress” (Cheikh Anta Diop).
“A wise person speaks carefully and with truth, for every word that passes between one's teeth is meant for something” (Molefi Kete Asante).
All in all, the chichidodo bird is a tantalizing if impenetrable puzzle, mystery…in that her impressive acoustic ballad of beauty embodies the myriad contradictions of her sensuous body politic…as well as their corresponding myriad solutions.
Therein lies intractable simmering possibilities of dualistic…antagonistic…internecine implosions. These have expressed themselves as civil wars, coup d’états, and other social-political upheavals in the sensuous body politic of the chichidodo bird in some African nations!
“A word to the wise is certainly in the north…the head,” it is said. That was why Nkrumah proclaimed to the world, “We face neither east nor west; we face forward.” The chichidodo bird, on the other hand, vehemently rejects both statements and argues that we should rather move in circles!
In circles:
…underdevelopment…no progress…no development…arrested development…kleptomania…public corruption…are the core tenets of the chichidodo bird’s political philosophy…political ideology.
The chichidodo bird sarcastically refers to this political system where public corruption and arrested development are the oxygen citizens exclusively rely on for survival, a Eurocentric democracy, primarily a political philosophy based on the concept of humanoid-avian halitosis.
Moving in circles…the chichidodo bird now heads the kleptomaniacal empire of Bob Marley’s “Pimper’s Paradise,” her:
…having pimped the country’s vast resources to philandering foreign interests on the cheap;
…having built sprawling white-elephant skyscrapers of generational debts from needless acquisition of foreign-loans when she could have at least used the country’s vast resources to underwrite and to maintain an improved set of sprawling skyscrapers in the empire of mass poverty and illiteracy, to wit, of improving the standard of living and the quality of life of her citizens;
…having undermined the country’s efforts to go cold turkey, to wean itself from an asphyxiating addiction to the patronizing and paternalistic largesse of foreign-aid, of foreign-based cocaine-loans, of foreign-based heroine-loans.
The chichidodo bird has succeeded in making her maggot-infested lavatory of a Eurocentric country a terminal in-patient, a terminal out-patient, a hospice…rather than the healthy doctor, physician…or the healthy hospital or clinic itself…
Oh, her maggot-infested lavatory of a Eurocentric country is addicted to the nymphomaniac Shylock, a Shakespearean Merchant of Venice…of the World Bank…of the International Monetary Fund…
This is just one of the many reasons she and her likeminded neocolonial, hyenas, skunks, raccoons, cockroaches, ants, and shit-carrying beetles hate to rally around Marcus Garvey’s national flag.
The chichidodo bird even steals from his own subjects and hides the booty in Eurocentric banks in the West. The Eurocentric West then uses the booty to develop its country, develop its human capital…while the chichidodo bird’s maggot-infested country decays beyond recovery…
We shall return with Part 3, the concluding section.
References
For the Molefi Kete Asante quote, see http://blog.gaiam.com/quotes/authors/molefi-kete-asante/26019
For the Edward Said quote (see Rosi Braidotti/Paul Gilroy’s edited volume “Conflicting Humanities.”Bloomsbury Academic).
Nina Bahadur. “18 Real Things Donald Trump Has Actually Said About Women.” Huffington Post. August 19, 2015.
Frantz Fanon. (1952). “Black Skin, White Masks.” Grove Press.
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