IF WE MUST DIE (Claude McKay 1889-1948)

If we must die let it not be like hogs
Haunted and penned in an inglorious spot
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs
Making their mock at our accursed lot
If we must die, o let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Let men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Amazing Facts You Don't Know About the Noble Prize in Literature

 

Here are some facts about the Noble Prize in Literature award:

1) In 1909, Selma Legerlof became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature. One of her best known works is Jerusalem, which in 1996 was adapted into a movie by the same name.

2) Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European or non-white recipient of the Nobel Prize (in any category). Tagore was awarded the 1913 Nobel Prize in literature. 

3) Have people declined the Nobel Prize in literature? Yes. Boris Pasternak, the Russian poet and writer was originally awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize in literature. Famously known for Doctor Zhivago, a novel set in a timeline between the Russian Revolution and the Second World War, Pasternak’s work was not allowed to be published in the USSR for these were the Cold Wars. He was forced to decline the award by the USSR. 
In 1964, leading French philosopher and writer, Jean-Paul Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, but refused to accept the award as he always declined all official honours. In a public announcement about his refusal of the Nobel Prize, Sartre wrote that “a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution.” 

4) Politics: Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2010, contested the 1990 presidential elections in his country. Although he won the first round of voting, he lost the race to Alberto Fujimori. Llosa’s famous works include The Time of the Hero, The Green House and Conversation in the Cathedral.

5) In 1907, Bombay (now Mumbai)-born British author Rudyard Kipling was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. Kipling, then aged forty-two, remains the youngest winner of the award till date. He is also the first English-language recipient of the honour. 

6) Ivo Andric of former Yugoslavia, the 1961 Nobel Prize in literature winner, is the first recipient of the award for works in the Serbo-Croatian language. He was born in Bosnia to Croat parents and lived most of his life in Belgrade (Serbia).

7) Wole Soyinka in 1986 became the first African to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Soyinka is known to be a central figure in Nigerian history, and for his role in the nation’s independence from British rule. He has been known to oppose military dictatorships, both in his own country and elsewhere.

8) In 2000, the Nobel Committee decide to award China’s Gao Xingjian with the Nobel Prize in literature. Gao became the first Chinese recipient of the prize (though he had adopted French citizenship in 1998). However, his works were banned in China after his 1989 book The Fugitives, which had references to the Tiananmen Square massacre. In 2012, when Mo Yan became the second Chinese to win the Prize, the People’s Daily refused to acknowledge Gao’s feat, hailing Mo as the “first time for a writer of Chinese nationality to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Today is the day that Chinese writers have awaited for too long...”

9)  2016 saw Bob Dylan becoming the first Musician to be awarded the noble prize in literature since the inception of the Prize

LOVE SURVIVED

The streets are filled with naked homes

Mutilated cars and bikes share the road

With decaying corpses of men and animals

The vultures and crows are nowhere in sight

Empty shells of bullets and bombs litter everywhere
Like a ghost town in an apocalyptic Hollywood thriller

The city is barren of life

From the market now barren of buyers and sellers

To schools and public parks now devoid

Of the innocent laughter of children

The churches and mosques empty

Deserted by both saints and sinners

The campus empty of adventurous youths

Government offices lay abandoned and looted

With no civil servants in sight

The sick have escaped from the hospitals

The prison is empty of both warders and criminals

The city is as noisy as a cemetery at night

But despite all these signs of death

I still walk with hope 

For I am sure somewhere amidst this wreckage

Love has survived and waiting for someone to find her

For she had survived worst

My First Holy Communion

One of my childhood biggest dreams was to join the long immaculate queue that walked to the altar like the Roman infantry to receive the communion every Mass. I have always being amazed with the way people comport themselves with righteousness after receiving the communion. I longed to know how it tasted; I dreamt of it, I imagined what the body of Christ would taste like in my sinful tongue.

It was this burning desire that made me join the catholic catechism at a very young age. A class I took more seriously than my Formal academic work. I never missed a catechism class not even when I was ill; I studied and practice everything Brother Friday taught me.

I remembered my first confession, which was a day to my first communion, I recall how we were cajoled to confess all our wrongs, we were cajoled with tragic tales of the fate of sinners who went to receive the communion without going for confession. 

You can only imagine the sincerity in my young heart as I walked like the worst sinner to the confession booth, knelt down and said “bless me Father for I have sinned” and went on to vomit all the sins of I had committed even those that I think now, don’t even count as sin.

I could remember how I memorized the penance given to me, as I walked straight to the altar to recite the ten Lord’s prayers and ten Hail Mary prescribed to me, making sure I pronounce every words that made up the prayers correctly and sincerely.

On the D-day, I couldn’t sleep the night before, my heart filled with trepidation, “What if I didn’t confess all my sin? What if I didn’t carry out my penance well? What if I have sinned unknowingly? Will something bad happen to me after receiving the communion?, Was I really worthy to receive it?” I tumbled in bed as my heart played pranks with my little head.

That morning I skipped my favorite breakfast because Brother Friday told us to receive the communion with an empty stomach and an open heart. Oh! my stomach was as empty as the Sahara desert and my heart as open as the gates of hell. Nothing will stop me from receiving the body of Christ.

In church, I and my fellow first communicants were dressed in white, the only black thing was our complexion, the congregation gazed that us with pride as we walk towards the altar in line to receive our first holy communion. The pride on my mother’s face was visible from a mile away, her son was about to receive his third sacrament, and three more to go.

My immaculate face was tainted with disappointment when the priest gave me the communion and let me sip from the cup that contained the blood of Christ.  

Now i can't remember why i was sad. was it the taste? or what?

I guess it was the taste. I expected the body of Christ to taste like the body of Christ,  not like wafer, i hate wafers, and I expected the blood to taste like Christ's blood not like alcohol.

Not that I knew what the real body and blood of Christ was suppose to taste like, but there are somethings you only know when you see them; like the love of your life.

When I got home and my friends asked me with glee what it tasted like, I told them it wasn’t worth the one year in catechism class. When I think of it now I just smile.

She have her mother's eyes

She have a mother's eyes
Eyes red and swollen with bruises
Filled with sorrowful tears
That will make a good ink
to scribble the saddest tragedy

She has her mother's tattoos
Skin tattooed with fresh lesions
By the love of her life
Her hope like her mother's
Insecurely locked in the trembling arms
Of her powerless child

Her dreams charred like her mother's
On the sacrificial altar of love
She is like her mother
An angel with a broken wings

An angel who went through hell
In the name of love
Searching for a soul
to mend her broken life

Tiger stripes

She was born under the clutches of pain

Destined to be an untamed wild

And in surviving countless battles

Her tiger stripes she earned

Should Religion Be Taught In Schools?

Religion has always been part of our educational curriculum, right from the onset of formal education in Nigeria. In the northern part, Islamic education has been there even before the introduction of western education. 

The Western education introduced to Nigeria was brought not just by the Europeans but by the church (missionaries), little surprise most educated Nigerians before the 70s were product of Western education provided by Christian missionary. And so if the missionary is your teacher the Bible automatically becomes a compulsory subject. 

Thus Western education became the most effective medium used to brainwash and turn most Nigerians away from their ancestral religion to the religion of the white man.

In Nigeria today, most private schools and most State run schools, run their school based on a moral dictates of a particular religion. If it is Christian school, don’t expect to see Islamic knowledge in the curriculum, and if it is Muslim school, it is a Haram to teach the Bible to students.

So the million dollar question is this if we must teach religion in schools; which religion should be taught?

The Christian parent is skeptical and uncomfortable with a Muslim teacher; teaching her child about Islam and the same goes for the Muslim parent; so what we end up having are teachers preaching about a particular God/religion and consciously or unconsciously condemning the other religion (which is virtually what all religions do), so at the end of the day students only end up with one side of the story and will grow up with a biased mindset and a negative outlook towards other religion.

Some will argue that religious education breeds good morals in students. But so does Civic Education and in Nigeria, students even carry out examination malpractice when it comes to Religious Education examination. 

If Religion Education does breed good morals, then Nigeria shouldn’t be experiencing this level of moral decadence we are seeing today, so it is either the teacher or the church and mosque has failed woefully.

Everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, it is in fact a fundamental Human Right but religion should be something that a child needs to learn at the mature age. If indeed the person chooses to learn it. 

Teaching religion may provoke an exchange of hateful comments between children who have prejudice against people of a certain religion. Religion isn't like math or English, you don't need a WASSCE in it for nearly any job, unless you want to become a nun, an Imam or something.

While in secondary school, I saw Religious Education (CRK) as a waste of 45 minutes of my precious time each week when I was taught stuff that goes in one ear and out the other because I had gotten tired of hearing it in church or during family devotion. In that wasted time at school, and all the other subjects which are nonsensical, I could have learned lots of other things that are more applicable in real life.

Been a student of a Missionary School, I found teachers to be  incredibly biased, and I find most of my teachers teach Christian beliefs and see Christian belief as the only medium of teaching good morals, sometimes forgetting the fact that there are students of other religious background.  Not even religions associated with my roots or other countries of the world were taught to me, if they were ever mentioned it was either to condemn the belief or ridicule them.

Religion is something that children don't know how to analyze or really understand. You can't teach something like religion to children as they don't really know all the stories and can't know how to critically analyze and ask their own questions. Teaching a child about the story of Jesus or Mohamed is non-essential to their education and it gets in the way of their curriculum. Religion should be something they find on their own and should not be forced by parents or their teachers.

Many religions are corrupt and if we must teach children about religion in schools, we should not cherry pick them. You can't give someone a false perspective on something. Just read Leviticus and kids will never want to read the Bible again.
  

Every person in the society is free and has right to choose which religion he/she want to choose. And if this person believes in Christianity, he can be tolerance about the other religions, but somehow he/she will be biased about other religions. Brad S. Gregory mentions in his article of “The Other Confessional History: On Secular Bias in the Study of Religion” that during the history people always had bias toward the other religions and even they had wars because of the different beliefs (pg.132-149). Nowadays, this situation changed but it is still remaining as a cold war or a war of thought. For example, in the western world, people have bias toward Islam because of the terror acts. In these conditions, you can't expect a Christian teacher to give an unbiased education about Islam.

 It is time government should stop paying to upkeep subjects that are not essential to our students’ education. I won't condemn Sunday schools and Koranic schools and any other education used to help educate people in religion. But I feel that it shouldn’t be part of students’ grades. If anything, they should learn religion when they can truly understand it, instead of a sort of brainwashing technique.

I throw down the gauntlet to the government. Ban religion being taught to children under eleven in any manner, at home or school, then let them make an informed choice thereafter. Let's see how long it takes for the numbers of ' believers' to tumble rapidly because the children haven't been brainwashed.