HE believed in miracles. He was certain a solicitous spirit preserved him during the Nigerian civil war. Soldiers died around him but he was never hit. He saw soldiers whose stomachs were distended by decomposition, but his own stomach was flat because it was often empty. He fought on until a halt was called to the war.

The end of the civil war gave him no sense of closure as he had many cares. Even the well educated had trouble picking up the finely shattered pieces of their lives after the war and his own education had ended in primary school. He became a newspaper vendor in Ibadan.

He was a small man of darting quickness and appeared to crouch, like a tiger about to spring, even when he was stationary. But he was a harmless, humorous man who had no place in his heart for bitterness.

One morning on a day that it did not rain, his eyes lost their brightness and his grin, a fixture of friendliness, as permanent as a mask’s expression but without its artificiality, became a grimace. He woke up to a strange world after a normal night. His right leg did not look different from what it was the night before but it now had a lead-like heaviness that destabilised his balance. He felt a stabbing pain when he gingerly stood on the leg.

He was a newspaper vendor and he needed his legs. His friends contributed money and he sought help in a government hospital. He did not get better and went to other hospitals. His situation remained painfully the same.

The vendor was told about a man who performed miracles with the routine regularity of a conveyor belt. The preacher was unknown until several newspapers published a story in which he claimed to have cured a man who suffered painful priapism after sleeping with a prostitute. The preacher has a talent for graceless self-promotion, like many of those who claim to perform miracles in Nigeria.

Does the preacher’s story of priapism have Freudian significance? A return to the boyish fears of castration? Peter Abeland, a French theologian who lived in the 12th century, relates in My Story of Misfortunes that he was castrated by the uncle of the woman he loved. The young lady was his student. There are those who say that some Nigerian preachers deserve to be castrated for sleeping with some young female members of their church and sometimes also with the young ladies’ mothers.

The vendor had faith and believed the preacher when he told him that he was cured. He actually felt better and returned home a very happy man. He has been dead for many years now. Death came a few months after he visited the preacher. His leg felt heavier and the pain made him cry. And he was a civil war veteran. He had been cruelly deceived by the preacher.

He was taken to his hometown when he became¡ desperately ill and his thoughts may have turned to some of the battlefields where bodies lay in profusion, the soldiers’ blood like the crushed red petals of blooming flowers. He had survived, but deceived by the preacher it was now his turn to die.

Those who seek miracles, a majority of them women, are victims and should be protected. The preachers falsely advertise their spiritual skills and dishonesty is a crime. Some of the preachers are wisely vague, claiming to heal a person in a crowd of cloistered anonymity and not an individual isolated by harsh spotlight.

One TV station recently showed a man who said he was possessed by a demon. The preacher questioned the demon to soften it up. It was a strange demon: what it said was defiant but it said it in a voice of whimpering retreat. Are demons not supposed to thunder?

The demon was still resisting the attempt to expel it from its victim’s body when it said, ‘oh, my God.’ It was a 10-year-old boy who pointed out the incongruity of a demon appealing to God.

A pat for Patience in Perth
President Goodluck Jonathan held his wife tenderly in Perth, Australia, and fed a piece of her birthday cake to her. The cake was not the sacrament, but a testament to their uncommon communion.

Patience was pleased and was the glowing picture of pulchritude. It is obvious that the president and his wife are very much in love. The photograph showing a union of bliss was published in some newspapers.

Being in love has never stopped some men from straying, but President Jonathan appears to be a man of conjugal constancy. There are no stories about trysts with busty bimbos in presidential guest houses. One gets the impression that the decorum that appears to exist in the president’s marriage is not forced, is not a facade. It is decorum without dank solemnity. The president and his wife are certainly having fun.

Viscount Melbourne whose name Melbourne in Australia bears, had a miserable six months in 1812. His wife, Lady Caroline Lamb, did not try to conceal her affair with Lord Byron. The story of Byron making Melbourne a cuckold was all over Britain, whose prime minister Melbourne later became.

President Jonathan was probably not told about Alice Springs while in Australia and did not visit the town. Alice Springs, it has been said, used to be a place of surplus and serenity, almost a real-life Shangri-La. Shangri-La in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon is a valley of heavenly hush and agelessness; the people are forever young.

Nevil Shute published a novel entitled A Town like Alice. The plan is to make the town another Alice Springs. The heroine of the novel was imprisoned by the Japanese in Malaya (now Malaysia) during the Second World War. W. Somerset Maugham set many of his short stories in Malaya

In one Maugham short story, an Englishwoman murders her husband because he does not want to return to England. She returns home and lies that her husband died of natural causes, but her rough treatment of his photographs arouses her sister’s suspicion that matrimonial malevolence and not a microbe may have been the cause of death. 
Patience’s arms are loving and President Jonathan will never suffer even the mildest unpleasantness at her hands.

Britons stole Australia, which was not its name at the time, from the Aboriginals. But President Jonathan has promised to give Nigeria back to the ordinary people and end their privations in the midst of plenty.

The heroine of A Town like Alice comes into money and starts a small shoe factory. President Jonathan grew up without shoes but he is now the owner of several pairs of good shoes. He says he has started off on the right foot and no Nigerian child may now have to go barefoot.

With the woman he held affectionately in Perth by his side, President Jonathan is certain to succeed in making Nigeria a place like Alice.

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Your view
Thanks for the history lesson today, but for the date 1453. I am sure it is printer’s error, it is most likely 453 AD
Lad Babalola

*** 1453 is the correct date. There were no Muslims in 453 AD. Prophet Muhammed, the founder of Islam, was born in 570 AD. Emperor Diocletian divided the Roman Empire in 286 AD. The Western Roman Empire with capital in Rome ceased to exist in 480 AD, but the Eastern Roman Empire survived, indeed flourished, until Constantinople, its capital, was occupied by the Turks in 1453.

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