May the good Lord spare one from the offensive of one’s offspring. While some people enjoy the fruits of their misbegotten labour, others must endure the labours of their misbegotten fruits. While there are orphans who know their father, there are also fathers who know their orphans. It was said that when Karl Marx was brought back to the world a hundred years after to witness the revolutionary convulsions triggered by some of his intellectual descendants, the great bearded one cleared his throat and then intoned: “I thank God that I am not a Marxist”.
It was said that on his deathbed, wracked by pains and miseries arising from huge swellings on his body, the greatest philosopher of the nineteenth century swore to make the much reviled bourgeois class pay for every one of the carbuncles that have turned life into an impossible torment. And how well did they pay for it!
While joyous fans and soccer-mad aficionados were soaking up the wonders of the modern Russian city of Ekaterinburg, they might have forgotten a minor historical detail. It was here that the last Russian Tsar, Nicholas, and his entire family were horrifically done to death by furious revolutionary soldiers some months after the revolution.
In the course of a long, event-suffused teaching career spanning the whole gamut of education from primary school, modern school, teacher training, polytechnic to the university, yours sincerely has collected quite a number of former students. One of these, a former two-term governor in a core northern state, was so miffed by snooper’s claim of being his former teacher that he stormed out to make an urgent phone call. Upon return, he was smiling sheepishly and apologetically.
But of all these miserable descendants, none has been as unsparing, as unstinting and as hell-bent as a fellow columnist on this paper. Thirty five years after first encountering him as an impossibly bright but recalcitrant undergraduate, Olufemi Macaulay, a scion of the iconic Macaulay family, often barges into snooper’s office, just as he did then, to hone his literary skills and to engage in Socratic dialogue that pushes the English language to the edge of semantic impossibilities.
It is quite a time-warp; as if time had stood still for this chap and his bemused former teacher. Nothing daunts the fellow, not even snooper’s occasional disobliging frown and stony glare. Macaulay saunters in like an infamous goblin, his face glowering with intellectual mischief and profane merry-making. Occasionally, this Okon-like creature would ask for a sip of his favourite beverage which he gulps down only to ask for an immediate refill, hinting that his spirit was low. The boy takes frightening liberty with a snooper well past his pugilistic prime.
Last week, Macaulay was on top of his irreverent form as he barged into the office with intent, his face glowering with impish irreverence. He immediately fastened a discomfiting gaze on snooper’s cranium.
“Sir, have you by any chance noticed a striking similarity between yourself and…..” the chap opened.
“Between myself and whom?” snooper charged, cutting him dead in his track.
“Ha, between yourself and Kylian Mbappe”, the fellow retorted with a mocking grimace.
“And who is Mbappe?”snooper screamed pretending to be oblivious of the French teenage prodigy and new global soccer sensation. But Macaulay pressed on, ignoring his teacher.
“I have studied the shape of your head, your complexion and your peculiar laugh and the evidence is overwhelming”, the chap insisted.
“Which evidence? And which complexion?” snooper shouted, asking Macaulay to take his leave or face physical expulsion from the office. Macaulay loitered around, muttering some insensate nonsense about French leave and Dutch courage. Later that night, yours sincerely began arduous research into Mbappe’s background. Anybody would be proud to have such a gifted boy in the family. But it turned out that Mbappe is actually a product of Cameroonian and Algerian parentage.
When this incontrovertible evidence was presented at an editorial gathering a few days later with the selfsame Macaulay maintaining a stony impassive silence, another impish fellow retorted that Mbappe actually has Yoruba names in addition to his baptismal name. Snooper quickly took his leave. To our relief, the CNN later showed a picture of Mbappe’s hometown with a cameo of his parents. Man pikin no be man pikin. May the good Lord save us from our abami and abamo children (monster and misbegotten) whose feet drag on the floor as you try piggy-backing them.
