A letter from the Rambler

A Letter from the Rambler.

Dear Pip old chap. Man, have you heard the latest in America? That a bold twenty year old shot and killed twenty six people including his mother with four bullets lodged in her brain and even twenty children, six year olds in cold blood. I cannot describe that kind of act. Not even Shakespeare, Charles Dickens nor Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie can find the right words to describe that kind of thing. But the truth is, it is not the first time such a thing is happening in America and certainly won’t be the last. Every year you always hear such stories about a psychotic or psychopathic kid who gets up one morning and snaps and starts spraying bullets on everybody like a drunk spraying pee from his uncontrollable penis of showers straight from a bladder which contains a lake of alcoholic urine. And the Americans are always quick to give us the explanation, “This kid is known to have a long history of depression, delusions, isolation, trauma, paranoia, claustrophobia, insomnia, amnesia, non compos mentis, delirium tremens…” Arrrgh, my ear, my ear, Pip old chap! Those names give me chronic migraine headaches. And they feed us with all those jaw breaking scientific names of all those their jaw breaking mental conditions that can make us Africans develop deafness. Word Pip, all those their explanations of mental ineptitude why madness has crisscrossed two wires in their kids’ brains are all a bunch of fallacies intended to cover up the real reason why their kids have gone gaga with AK 47s and AR15s just like Lady Gaga has gone gaga with monstrous clothing.

Has the American media ever pondered why Sub Saharan children like us never suffer from those their non compos mentises or Delirium tremenses and why we never do such things? One word –cane. In my country Cameroon, we call it “mulongor.” From the moment we are born, whenever we do something wrong we are immediately sent to it first with a knuckle knock on our foreheads, “kock”. Next …twash, the first stroke falls on our backs with a swishing noise penetrating the flesh and sends us straight to the ground with a “doop” sound. We fall onto bare earth and we are rolling in the dust like maniacs and scratching our backs from all angles. Twash, Ouch! Aye! Aye! The second one unearths a scream; a tortured scream from our vocal cords that passes through our larynxes to our pharynxes to our boucal cavities and even our nasal cavities into the atmosphere in a vociferous reverberation that almost deafens anybody around us. Twash, the third one is whistling piercingly on our palms like flails of fire falling on our flesh and our fathers are cursing and insulting and whipping and we are weeping and they are whipping and we are weeping and wailing like it’s the end of the world. Yes. Then when we do something wrong again, we go through that dreaded whipping lifecycle again. That’s why we grow up to be sane adults with a sound moral fibre who do not spray bullets on people. I’m not saying we grow up to be perfect though. But even the stubborn African child knows he does not have to plunge bullets into his mother’s forehead! And into the cranium of a six year old! or six year olds for God’s sake!

But the Americans, what do they do? They do not only spare the rod but also spoil the rod. When their children do something wrong, they only scold them or sometimes don’t even scold them. Worst of all, when the American kids are whipped, they pick up the phone in fury and call 911 (using their parents’ phones in the process. Do those calls also add to the bills?) The police officer will come and say, “Sir, we will incarcerate you for spanking this kid.” And the parent is locked up and the children are happy. And when it happens again, the parent is locked up again and they are even happier. When the locking up keeps recurring the happiness keeps increasing and increasing and there may be a time when the police will delay the arrival and the kid will get very very angry and think he is the police. Since America is a place where anybody can own guns, the kid will pick up his AK47 or AR15 and think he is doing good police work and shoot the father dead for spanking him and laugh happily like a hyena hehehehe. He will move out of the house and since his brain is gun possessed due to the excessive shooting of aliens in Playstation (like this one in Connecticut), the obsessive listening to gunshots in 50 cent’s gangsta rap music or watching movies like “The Matrix” one thousand times, he will go around shooting six year old chaps and 100 year old chaps believing he’s Keanu Reeves or 50 cent or even a US soldier shooting in Konengal valley; Pakistan before shooting himself dead. And the American media will start feeding us blatant lies of mental names like Delirium tremens and non compos mentis so we should believe them. Pip, not me, I cannot believe them because all that is infamous rubbish. Those illnesses don’t exist. It’s all fictitious like a John Grisham novel.

The Americans were part of the early evangelists who spread Christianity in Africa in the 1880’s. In the Holy Bible which they brought to us it is clearly stated, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” Our parents took the advice of the Holy book and we are not shooting our mothers along with six year olds. Ironically, the Americans did not take the rich advice of God’s wisdom and look at what is happening to them. They have not only spared the rod but they have also spoilt the rod and by their own doing doubly and even triply spoilt the child. Pip old chap, I don’t want to keep running my mouth else those Americans will send a military drone to bomb my head off planet earth. Rather, they may send one of those their remote controlled, delirium tremens “never-miss-the-target” sniper kids to Cameroon with a bazooka. No, God forbid, Papa God. Those kids are more ruthless than fighter jets like B2 bombers. They are even deadlier than atomic bombs. The hole one of them will excavate on my small tummy with that bazooka will be as deep as that valley in America called the Grand Canyon. It may even split me into two halves. And split twenty six of my relatives into fifty two halves. Americans, I’m sorry, I didn’t say anything. Look, Pip, don’t quote me anywhere, I was only rambling.

Yours truly,

The rambler.