Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first African-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
Suyi Ayodele, a columnist for the Nigerian Tribune, is a contributor to USAfricaonline.com
This is a folktale satire for the fallen Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and its conqueror, the All Progressives Congress (APC).
Where I come from, we give the Omoluabi half words as dinner; when he swallows them, they become whole in his belly. Please follow me on this voyage to the belly of the wisdom of our elders.
There is a saying among the elders of my place: when an okro tree grows taller than the farmer, it loses its stalk. Power in proud hands is never innocent. A man who will be given a title, those wise men of old say, must be of good character. Bad character, they further reason, spoils good destiny. Only a very few men have ori (destiny) and iwa character. The best of prayers is for one to have both ori and iwa.
Long ago, in a town whose name has been eaten by time, there lived a stranger who arrived as a guest and soon became the fear of the household. He was loud, fiery, and perpetually angry. Though he was not the owner of the house, not even a tenant, the compound trembled when he coughed. Before long, people began to whisper a name for him, Àlejòkúròkíoniléjeun: the guest who must leave before the owner can eat. Only powerful men earn such names.
This stranger was not merely powerful; he was dangerous. Worse still, he lacked character. He had no patience for finesse, no respect for boundaries. He was the kind of man invited to dinner who would grip the wrist of his host and demand the biggest portion. A man of brawl. A man of war. Pray such a man does not pay you a visit!
To him, all snakes were edible (gbogbo ejò ni jíje). Such men do not know which battles to avoid; they fight everything that moves. There was an Aare Ona Kakanfo, a Yoruba Generalissimo, like that. Because he lacked a war to fight, he stoked a rebellion against himself and rose to crush it. That is the way of those who are pathologically belligerent. When they have no one else to fight, they turn the battle inward
In the house the troublesome stranger occupied, he soon learned the secrets of the shrine. And when a guest knows the inner recesses of your deity, defecation on the deity in there becomes sport.
Wisdom demands caution in such circumstances. If you would part ways with a lunatic, you must never let him hear your footfall. The owner of the house, no fool himself, endured, knowing that chasing away a dangerous guest who knows your rituals requires patience, allies, and timing. But the compound suffered. Neighbours whispered that one household had already collapsed because of this same guest, and another was next in line.
Yet power does not last forever. Something in the air suggested that the guest had already begun singing his nunc dimittis. Like old Simeon, who after he had seen the baby, Jesus (Luke 2:29-52), there was no more sight for him to behold, once a man has seen the inner chamber, there is little left to behold. Such a man grows reckless. He shouts at shadows. He quarrels with walls. He spares no one in his anger, real enemies and imagined ones alike. This is what our Àlejòkúròkíoniléjeun is doing in the house of his host
Anger, the elders say, does not know that the carrier is not sure-footed (ìbínú ò mò pé ẹni tí ó gbé e kò dá l’ésè). A man in rage believes himself immortal.
The philosophers of old understood this. In the study of Stoicism, the philosophy in the field of the endurance of pain or hardship without the display of feelings and without complaint, Plato and Aristotle say anger is a painful reaction to significant, wrongful harm. While Plato suggests that anger should “be transformed from external retaliation to internal self-betterment and moral reform”, Aristotle sees it as a response to perceived injustice. Àlejòkúròkíoniléjeun, in his fight against members of his household and those in his host’s compound, comes across as a good student of Aristotle. The fight is the one the elders of my place call àjàkú akátá (fight-to-the-finish). There is no holding back; there is no retreat, there is no surrender.
But the original Stoicism philosophers, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, otherwise known as Seneca the Younger (4 BC-AD 65), and Epictetus (Gained or Acquired), consider anger as a destructive passion that should be controlled or eliminated if the carrier must live to tell the story. The two philosophers suggest that one should be calm and rational in the face of anger, seeing those responsible as not opponents but members of the family.
They hinge their argument on ‘The Paradox of Anger’, where they submit that “Anger is a double-edged sword: it highlights moral wrongs and can fuel powerful change, yet it often distorts reality and harms the angry person or others if uncontrolled. The philosophical challenge lies in discerning when anger serves justice and when it becomes destructive, a fire within, that is both poison and medicine, demanding wisdom to manage.” (See Citti Francesco’s Seneca and the Moderns, in Bartsch, Shadi; Schiesaro, Alessandro (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Seneca, Cambridge University Press, 2015).
The last part of Seneca and Epictetus’ admonition is what Àlejòkúròkíoniléjeun lacks. The most dangerous man is one who is powerful but lacks character. It is worse if the same man has a bad temper alongside his bad character. The end of such a man is an unmitigated disaster. Plato warned that anger should be turned inward, into moral reform. Aristotle excused it as a response to injustice. But the Stoics, Seneca and Epictetus, knew better: anger is a fire that burns its bearer first. It is both poison and medicine, demanding wisdom to manage. Without wisdom, it destroys. These are not mere conjectures. There is an old story the elders tell to explain this.
Once, there lived a great hunter and his beautiful wife. They were generous people, loved by neighbours, feared by beasts. But they had one flaw: terrible anger. When rage seized them, they fought like sworn enemies, destroying their own household.
They were also childless. After many years, they consulted the Oracle. The divination was clear and frightening: “The gods have a child for you, but your anger will kill him before his destiny ripens.” Terrified, they begged the gods, promising restraint. The gods relented, and a son was born. Joy filled the house.
One day, while the mother worked on the farm, she laid the child beneath a baobab tree. Unknown to her, a gorilla lived there. Each day, the gorilla descended, lifted the child, and sang: ìrunú fùfùfù baba e/kò ní jé kí o d’àgbà/ìrunú fùfùfù ìyà e, kò ní jé kí o t’ójó (Your father’s anger will not allow you to grow old; your mother’s anger will not allow you to fulfil your days). The child laughed.
When the mother discovered this, anger seized her. She threw stones. The gorilla used the child as a shield and fled. This continued until fury overwhelmed her reason. She reported to her husband. That night, their home became a battlefield. They nearly trampled the child to death.
The hunter resolved to act. He prepared poisoned arrows, máfenukèjè, poison without antidote. He lay in ambush. The gorilla descended again, singing the same song. The hunter, blinded by rage, released the arrow. The gorilla lifted the child, and the arrow pierced the baby’s heart.
The child died without a cry. The gorilla changed its song: ìrunú fùfùfù baba e/kò jé kí o d’àgbà/ìrunú fùfùfù ìyà e, kò jé kí o t’ójó (Your father’s anger did not allow you to grow old; your mother’s anger did not allow you to fulfil your days). Then it vanished forever. The parents wailed until death claimed them too. No child remained to perform their final rites. That, the elders say, is what anger does.
A powerful man without character is already a disaster waiting to happen. A powerful man with anger and secrets is worse. Such men play dangerous games, mistaking fear for loyalty, noise for strength, rage for courage. They forget that institutions, like shrines, rot when desecrated from within. History is full of such guests, the Àlejòkúròkíoniléjeun of this era. They eat before the owner. They scatter households. They collapse compounds. And when they finally fall, the house they claimed to defend lies in ruins.
The PDP is in a coma today, because its Àlejòkúròkíoniléjeun of a child happened to it. The Bad child is a powerful guest in the household of the APC. It will take the entire strength of the equally dangerous and powerful men in the ruining APC to ship out Àlejòkúròkíoniléjeun’s bull in the APC’s China shop. One can only hope that too much damage would not have been done before that is achieved.
I wonder what APC was thinking when it accommodated the terrible stranger in its house. A man who made a waste of his household just to be your guest will not spare the brick and mortar in his host’s house.
This is why the advice from Àlejòkúròkíoniléjeun to his host’s children not to ‘run their mouths’ is very instructive.
A man who, “today”, is “enjoying” his state, without ‘knowing’ “those who did the work”, should not challenge the benevolent spirit that cracked the palm kernel. Àlejòkúròkíoniléjeun has more secrets. Those of the landlord of the hosting family are part of them. If the children of the host are wise, they should know how not to prove a man of anger like Àlejòkúròkíoniléjeun.
The troublesome stranger knows too much about how the chief host was ‘made’ and I take a bet: he will not hesitate to spill the beans if provoked! A man of anger and the man on the local Ayo game slate have one thing in common; they don’t know how to keep secrets (Òrò ò bò l’énu aláyò). Incidentally, Àlejòkúròkíoniléjeun is playing a dangerous Ayo game with the politics of his home state. His host and his children should wise up!
Only Àlejòkúròkíoniléjeun knows what members of his immediate family bought in his shop and did not pay for. He alone has the franchise to the root of the crisis bedevilling the home since May 29, 2023.
What is clear to the public is that Àlejòkúròkíoniléjeun is rabidly angry. And in the fit of his anger, he spares nobody; not even the host, who provides him the present platform to move about in a convoy, where his security guards drawn from all the nation’s security architecture outflank that of the Okaegbe (the head of his family. The next victim of our angry Àlejòkúròkíoniléjeun, one can easily predict, will be his chief host.
And in all sincerity, I pray Àlejòkúròkíoniléjeun not to stop at how the most important institution in the land was compromised to give his troubled host undue advantage.
He should answer his father’s name by telling the entire world how his chief host became the number one man in his troubled community. Honestly, this community stinks with men like Àlejòkúròkíoniléjeun and his docile chief host! Tufiakwa!
