“The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that it wasn’t suicide…” Barry is saying. We are walking across the little park next to the deans office. This park opens out on to Engels street and is a few minutes walk away from the Intourist hotel. Ugo, Eddy and one Ghanaian fellow are walking in front of us and arguing about something. ”…I am beginning to think that he was killed…”he continues.
“Why would somebody want to kill Philip?” I ask.”…he hardly spoke to anybody and even when he’s drunk he was always more interested in women.”
“I’m suspecting that he was involved with the KGB and that when he started to know too much and they felt that they didn’t need him anymore, they had decided to get rid of him…”
“That’s ridiculous Barry!”
“You think so? Then Kasi you have not yet understood how subtle these people can be. And I think that‘s the problem with you docile black people; its either that you guys have sold out or you‘re too damned ignorant to care about the important issues. Look at Ugo, Eddy and Sampson over there-I bet they‘re arguing over something as silly as fighters!”
“Or the problem maybe that you see problems where there are none, Barry. “I say a bit irritated.
He is laughing. “Look around you Kasi, whether you want to accept it or not the white man is on a mission to indoctrinate us with the ideology that we are an inferior people…”
Barry is going off point again. He has become so obsessed with this whole thing of the white man wanting to dominate the black man that his whole life is becoming pigeon-holed into one way of thinking. And I am beginning to worry about some of the things I have heard him saying of late.
The other day he was telling us how there is a global conspiracy by the white man to destroy every remnant of Africa’s ancient history so that they can replace it with the lie that Africans are savages and an inferior species. “They want to make us feel inferior so that they can continue to dominate us“ He said and had then started to speak passionately about Ancient Egypt and about how the white people who discovered the Sphinx in the desert had tried to hide its Negro nose by defacing it.
But “ I now hear the spirit of the ancestors calling me” He said, because the “time to liberate Kememu from mental slavery has come…” He says that “Kememu” is the name the ancient Egyptians used to describe themselves and that it means “black people”.
A lot of the things Barry says sound interesting and show how much he has read on the things that interest him, but others are now becoming a bit troubling; now and then he springs new words on us and say that they are ancient Egyptian words that have come to him. The other day he had used the word “mmiri” for water and said that that it is also Ancient Egyptian but I had decided not to burst his bubble, because that’s the word for water in Igbo.
“…I am sensing that they will soon want to get rid of me Kasi…” Barry is saying as we approach the Intourist hotel. And he was sounding a bit scared.
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