NIGHT OF HORROR*

By Niyi Osundare

    (When a cache of mine-size dynamite lives in a neighbourhood bedroom)

         I            

The year was young

     Our woes were old

The day plodded to a dusty twilight

     Unfazed by the harmattan hassle

Then came the wails of a lampless night

               When supper lost its way to penniless homes

And the night masticated the moon   

     Like a hapless morsel

The minaret was mum

     The bell tower loomed forlorn

In its tongueless height 

     The wind wound a whisper

Round the restless lips of absent horns

     Pigeons coed ceaselessly in their busy holes…...

And suddenly, so suddenly, 

     A blast, a big, battering blast

And the evening’s blissful quiet 

     Was shattered into a thousand bewildering shreds

The ground shook beneath our feet

     Solid mansions crumbled like cardboard boxes 

Flipped luxury cars littered the streets

     Like piles of scrap yard junk

The road now is a running tale 

     Of broken glass and mangled metal

                II

It all happened in the famous part

     Of a famous city; proud, gentle zone

Of the top cream, tempered by law and learning;

     Mapped out and built once upon a very long time

When place-builders doubled as people-builders

     And Statesmen were wise and just and clean

Architects of multiple mandates who knew

     How to turn a house into a home 

            

That was once upon an epoch 

     When leaders THOUGHT before they acted

And “life more abundant” was in every way 

     More than an empty slogan

Now, the Grand Old Dream

     Has withered into a deadly nightmare

Where the Law is dead, the wrong is right. . . . 

     A mountain of military-type dynamite

Has become a furniture item

     In a top-class residential haven

A corrupt “carry-go” security conspiracy imperils 

     Our being even in our safest enclaves

A big battering blast has shaken us to our very roots

     Behold venerable old men and women crawling 

Out of their rubbled homes, their heads double-grey

     From the ashes of their blighted bowers

Here they are in wreck and ruin:

     Glorious legacies of Master-Builders of old

Now houses of horror

     In this era of prodigal inheritors

* In the evening hours of January 16, 2024, there was a massive explosion caused by loads of dynamite piled up in a house in a top-class Ibadan neighborhood, resulting in human casualty and the destruction of many respectable houses. The vibration from the blast was felt 20 miles away. The most devastating peacetime blast in this part of Nigeria. Are you still wondering how deadly dynamite became a welcome domestic furniture item in a country of multiple laws and zero compliance? Ask the demon called Corruption and watch it come up with a thousand answers… 

*Niyi Osundare, one of Africa’s foremost poets and academics, is Emeritus Distinguished Professor of English, University of New Orleans.