I Do Not Write For You _Written By Dele Farotimi
If you are acquainted with me, you would know of my legendary impatience. Patience is not one of my stronger Agbada. I have only learnt to rein in my rather short fuse, as I became older. Do not be fooled by the use of the phrase; short fuse, I was always the tiniest kid in my school days. At least I was until LASU alale. I had simply perfected the science of making clear to fools, that I had no intention of wasting my time and energy on them.
My short fuse rarely had me willingly throw a punch at anyone, and my weapons of choice have always been the tongue in my head, and the brain housed in the head itself. The ones in authority considered me a brat to be subjugated, and my bigger classmates and seniors, either tolerated me, or gleefully took whatever opportunity they found, to wash my caustic tongue with soda. I have never been accused of the sin of diplomatese.
A dear friend and brother spoke to me yesterday. He spoke with a lot of pain, and his counsel was that I should be drawing your attention to the fact that all that is happening today, were foretold in my book, Do Not Die In Their War. He is of the opinion that I have failed to take every opportunity to show you how wrong you are, not to have even bothered to read the book, but to presume to argue with me, when I speak from the position of watching something about which I had warned, happening in real time. He could not understand how I would go into TV interviews, and fail to hold my book as an evangelist would clutch the Bible. He spoke to me in anguish.
The second book threatens to kill the first was his conclusion. He has read the manuscript, and would prefer that I allowed the first a chance to circulate better. It better explains the second is his deduction. I have pondered his words to me, for I know his love is pure. You are the beneficiaries of the thoughts he has triggered.
I do not write for you. I am convinced that you are incapable of understanding my words. That as Pharaoh’s heart was hardened, the heart of this generation is hardened, and you were not purposed to hear my words, even as you were forced to listen to my wailings. I have stopped writing for you. I write now for posterity. I write so that my children and future generations might hold me innocent and free of the several charges that they shall surely bring against the perverse generations that have led us into the mess to which we have become acculturated.
Or perhaps there’s a more artistic and creative explanation for my complete and total lack of interest in pontificating about the book. To me, it’s done. I have written it, and it is up to those who care, to find the time to read it. I write from my stream of consciousness, and Do Not Die In Their War, has been written, and I am simply done with it. I see new vistas explained by the book, and those are the things with which I am currently preoccupied, and from where my creativity is flowing. I am still mining from the same vein, but I am simply in a hurry to deal with the other issues raised by the need to birth a nation.
Fela had the annoying habit of never playing any song he had recorded at a concert, be that at the Shrine or anywhere else. I am not an authority on Fela, and I am happy to be corrected, but I cannot recall Fela playing on stage, a song that he had already released as a studio album. I believe that I now understand why he wouldn’t. It is not unlike asking that the creative should reinvent his work. That the mother of a child, having gone through the trauma of pregnancy and the pains of birthing, shall rewind, and replay. I have not found a single chapter in Do Not Die In Their War, that I wouldn’t want to rewrite, if I had the opportunity to do so.
I am working to make the book: Do Not Die In Their War, available for free download in the coming days. I am not under any illusion that giving you the book for free would suddenly turn you into readers, some of you have the attention span of my brother Femi’s dog. Pesky little okere, forever darting around excitedly, not unlike the squirrel it resembles.
I wrote Do Not Die In Their War, for you. I have endured several idiotic arguments from so many of you, inanities that might have been cured or mitigated, by the wisdom you would have gained from reading. After a season, I gave up on you. I console myself by writing with the future in mind. I write in witness against this generation. I speak to record that you were warned, that you had sufficient knowledge of what the future holds, and that you are the ones that have refused to be persuaded by the truth told to you by your own senses. If I was writing for you, I’d have wasted my life on a generation incapable of change.
I do not write for you again. I write against you.
DF