It’s the floating city, in water but not in it. They built it, with an enduring determination. Some might even say, they spiced their determination with perseverance. Failure, to them, was not an option. For them to fail would be to become subject to the barbarians, they would rather die than for this to happen. Don’t we the Yorubas say “Dying with dignity is better than living in mockery?”
So they started with one timber, drove it down into the marsh and it became a pile. To be a tree here was a death sentence akin to being a turkey during Christmas. In no time they ran out of trees and to the thick forests of Slovenia, Croatia and Montenegro they called.
It was gruesome work, laborious and tasking. Trees had to be felled with axes (brute strenght) and pulled over land to the nearest river. They bound them together as rafts and floated them across the Adriatic sea moving from East to West until finally reaching their own shores.
The labors of their heroes past didnt stop there, actually that was where it ramped up. Timber upon timber got driven down the marsh land, 4 metres and maybe more. They overlaid these piles horizontally until they became a platform. Only then was it good enough to build their houses with mortar. If you say their city is a buried forest, you are not wrong for that is what it is actually.
The buildings started going up, one after another. On 118 small islands they built and connected them with numerous canals and bridges. Nature, of course yielded to them, though now it threatens their offsprings as a warning not to be ignored. Okonkwo, you know him. Yes, the same one Chinua Achebe wrote about. He must have been of their stock because their founding fathers lived exactly according to his wisdom that “when a man says Yes, his Chi says Yes also.”
Hundreds of years have passed and the buildings continue to stand. This land, once a barren waste land, has become the cynosure of every eyes. A tiny city that punches globally above its weight. It has only 271,000 residents but hosts 20 million tourists annually. There was no way the founding fathers could have foreseen this. They were fishermen, merchants, moneylenders and bankers, they didn’t look to tourism for sustenance. But what they did, they did with zeal. Such was their zealousness that even William Shakespeare was not spared of the happenings in this city and had to write about it. It was here that Shylock, being over zealous (with a lot of wickedness as well) asked for Antonio’s pound of flesh.
As Libya collapsed, the boats started arriving too. Carrying hundreds of migrants on perilous journey across the sea to Lampedusa. From here they spread, up north finding their ways to mainland Europe. Some end here, in this city.
Unfortunately unlike Okonkwo their fellow kinsman, plate in hand they begged on the streets. The tragedy of their plight is that there are no dole outs here. This people, whose forefathers laboriously worked hard, believes in dignity of labour and not beggar thy neighbour!
If you take a minute to listen to their stories, they will tell you that they are political refugees being persecuted for their believe in having their own independent state of #BIAFRA. They have enough money to print stickers about Biafra and deface walls but not enough to start a trade and keep off the streets.
Meanwhile their siblings at home, in Nnewi, Onitsha, Abakaliki and across the nation are following Okonkwo’ s wisdom. Yesterday was a breath of fresh air because of what Yekini did, today was anguish and pains because of what our Biafrans are doing.
