“my name is Khan. . . and I am not a terrorist.”
How many times do we need to carry placards, run jingles on radio, use the public address system and pay for ads on TV just to reclaim our innocence? These could be moments when we want the world to know our identity and innocence so that we won’t fall into the unguarded hands of prejudice. These were times when we have to tell the world we are not all 419ners, we are not corrupt, and we are not internet scammers and we don’t do drugs. Think of the bad PR.
Tune your TV to CNN, BBC and Aljazera, what do you see? A pitiable portrayal of Nigeria as a cesspit of hell. A place where young people with energy and talents bathe in refuse dumb for survival. A place where children of school age do not attend school but rather beg for alms. On education, they say we are not there yet: our degrees are not respected so that when you leave the shore of the country to pursue studies, you need to start all over again. You are black, not tanned. Apart from racial prejudice, you are Nigerian, you are bad!
Now add Mutallab, add Boko Haram, and you get the answer- pure hatred. They might have said it to your face several times: “leave our country!” You are a prime suspect at the embassy. You undergo the most humiliating of human treatments at their airports just for them to ensure that you are clean, that you are not there to stain their country with your filthiness.
Why is it that it is only when you do wrong you get their attention? When your students get to do great things, they are not there to cover it. When your lecturers get to propound great theories, they seldom see the great prospects in it. When your women stretch themselves to get their results, they turn their black eye and label it Africa’s shallowness.
But that was not their thought years ago when gold gushed, and they rushed to tap it. Nigeria has lost its innocence and it is a loss that dares not speak its name. Talking about the past glory and strength of this great nation often salts the shore that have refused to yield to doctor’s prescription and healing.
Ever since the dawn of September 11 in America, the world has lost its sleep. It has been a war of identities. A needless war fuelled by some blinded elements against the world peaceful co-existence. How can men want to avenge for God? If we call Him the Almighty, can’t we believe him to save himself?
This misguided zeal has cost me my innocence. I left the north, the abode where I was born due to religious/ethnic crisis. I left the confines of a place I had known as home; I left my friends, some of whom who denied me when they raised the guns and machetes against me. Even at the brink of death that day, though I shivered, I was not afraid. I thought it was all a play. Thank God it played itself out because I would not have been alive to tell my story. My 12-year old reality could not take in the confoundedness and since then I haven’t stepped back to that land. I have heard of gruesome murders but then could not really interpret them. I knew what it is to slaughter a chicken but my imagination does not extend to how a human being is annihilated. It was truly an escape from savagery and peace; let’s observe a minute silence for those who were not given a chance to tell their story 1, 2, 3. . . and then till 60, may their souls rest in peace.
Now ask yourself, how would those three corps members murdered in Jos have felt when the blade sliced through their throats? What would the numerous souls lost to Boko Haram say if they were given to chance to live and decide if western education is a sin or not? Gruesome murder, needless death, you may say.
The path of Allah is that of love and not hatred. Peace is the language that eludes the world. Blood is the word that is replacing it. It flows freely these days that the world is now devising new euphemisms to cover our loss of innocence. What differences does it make if we refer to genocide as “ethnic cleansing”? What is the essence in calling prostitutes “working women” and their patrons “clients”? Do we cover our shame when we term abortion “menstrual regulation” just tone down the severity of the act?
Does a government which calls its homeless people “rough-sleepers,” or coins the phrase “educational disadvantaged areas” for its uneducated have any claim to responsibility? Perhaps we should see the film, My Name is Khan, to understand the plight of Rizan Khan, an Indian who travelled the length and breadth of America just to say one thing to the president of the United States: “Mr President, my name is Khan and I am not a terrorist.”
He is a Muslim, a man who has fought hatred with love, and who has replaced the pain of losing a child to religious bias with offering to help the black Americans caught up in the hurricane at Wilhelmina, Georgia. He overcame not with the power of a gun but with a heart full of love. Though he is affected with Asperger syndrome with affects his senses, he remains undeterred.
The world has many problems. We can solve them if we start to take a step. The world has had enough of violence, racism, crime and war; please look elsewhere and seek other options.
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** Hannah Ojo, a versatile creative writer and intrepid journalist provides answers to questions left unsolved by others. As an undergraduate at prestigious Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Hannah won the Coca-Cola Award for the Best Campus Reporter of the Year, and she is presently working at The Nation Newspaper. This view was first expressed in Fount Magazine, 2011.
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