By Bate Besong (Published in The Post, No 0781, Friday, July 14, 2006)
The words of scholars are wise
and they are always fair.
Their toga of narration
is made of gold thread
& topaz.
They keep the cadences of
Archimedes in rhetoric of finest gold.
they never depart from invocations of eureka
We are not worried
on account of the bureaucratic
obfuscators; sorcerers of
Staff Development Grants; necromancers
of a thousand Mission Warrants
who gloat over the erasure of memory.
We are not worried
on account of those who
use false scales and
weights; who plot against
the playwright & glare against him with hate;
put them on the scales, and
they weigh nothing.
they are lighter than the ostrich's feather.
(ii)
We do not regret the death
of those who-- in their boundless opprobrium - make
plans to ruin others.
Falsehood may triumph a hundred
years; in a campus, whose
academic history
has been written, in blood; but
it surely fails!
We are not jealous of those who
will soon be killed by their
own swords
See where Rectors and Registrars
have fallen, they lie, unable to rise
(iii)
Tests and trials come to us all in life.
Playwrights are those who suffer
persecution for their bold testimony
A pearl receives its luster from
the grating bits of sand.
I do not reprimand you, then, because
you eat the flesh of bulls
you exalt your raucous greed, you anoint your intellectual
flabbiness; through a montage of petrol bonds.
I do reprimand you because you
are as heavy-footed
as the Bakingili hippopo, you thought
you would always float
through life on Prime Ministerial
& Presidential decrees of ease.
You now send forth a stinking savour.
You have sold you own compeers
for a medal as though they had little value
You have become as stupid
as a mule, which must be controlled with a bit
& bridle to make it submit.
You will soon disappear like
Harmattan grass that dries up;
you will die like plants that vanish in the Kalahari.
You are no more than a puff of wind.
Hierarchy and robot-
Administrators will disappear
you may look for them, but you
won't find them writers and scholars will possess
this Campus and enjoy intellectual prosperity & peace
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