The University/6

I notice a police car parked just in front of our hostel as I walk down the street, which leads from the bus stop on Engels street to 212 Pushkinskaya. As I approach, two very tall police men come out from the hostel and are entering their car. They are now driving in my direction towards Engels street and as they speed past me I am wondering what on earth has been going on in our hostel since I left for the University yesterday evening.

In the lobby area one of the porters is mopping the floor but I can still see some stains of blood near the porters desk. A few students are standing nearby and talking, probably about the incident that must have just happened and I notice one of the Nigerian students standing near the steps conversing with a guy from Ghana.
“ What happened?” I am asking as I walk up to them.
“ Barry head butted Omar and he’s had a noise bleed!”
“Who’s had a nose bleed?“
“Omar…”
“ Na wao for this Barry” I say “…the guy should take things easy. We‘re not at war…”
“What lead to the head butting?” I ask.
“Guys, I’ll see you later I need to go” The Nigerian student says and leaves.
“ Charlie…” the Ghanaian said refering to me with the generic name Ghanaian’s call people “…you know say Barry is always complaining about Omar. I heard that he called Omar an Arab slave. And then one thing lead to another…”
“What did the police do?”
“Took their statements and then left without saying anything; you know, the usual thing they do when it’s a problem between two Africans…”

I am not surprised that Barry attacked Omar; he’s been promising to do that for some time and had even warned Omar to run from him anytime he’s on his own! Omar is from the Sudan and is Moslem. Him and Barry have been having a lot of arguments about Omar’s racial origins since Barry first noticed that Omar prefers to hang around Arabs than with black Africans.

The other day one of the guys from Morocco had mentioned in passing how he finds Omar’s rejection of everything black African to be disgusting and since then Barry has been waiting for an opportunity to have a show down with him.

“How can some body be so self-loathing as to deny his own race?” Barry would ask “…the moron doesn’t know that Arabs don’t really like Africans and that for them, every black African is supposed to be a slave. Even the word for black people in Arabic translates as slave…”
“But why is that your problem?” I asked“…If that’s what the man wants to call himself, who gives you the authority to confront him about it?”
“It is my problem and I’m going to fuck Omar up. I‘m going to take him on man to man and then beat sense into him until he begs for mercy and accepts that he is a black African!”
“Fighting him will not make him change his opinion”
“It will make me feel better!“ Barry said.

I caught up with Barry in his room. There was a group of other guys there trying to calm him down, but he seemed to be winding himself up even more.

“You guys should have let me hit Omar a few more times!" I heard him saying as i entered his room "...I feel a lot of rage at his nonsense; stupid Arab slave! When will we Africans wake up and stop allowing every other race to humiliate us? “
“Ol’ boy calm down” one of the guys was saying“…you cannot change what has been in history. And you certainly can’t change the thinking of millions of people by just fighting one man.”
“I can’t change him, but I can at least make him feel the physical pain of being humiliated as a man, in addition to the shame he feels about who he is. I‘m not yet finished with him though. I want Omar to start having nightmares about me. I want him to wake up in the middle of the night sweating with images of my big black African fist terrorizing his enslaved mind. Because the next time I meet him on his own, my fist is going to smash into his broad Negro nose…”

The look in Barry’s eyes as he is talking tells me that he is not making idle threats; he means everything he is saying and at this very moment I do not envy Omar.