Who Remembers Bisa?

Sizenjani, my friend

Yesterday, I fortuitously tuned to some radio station and listened to a program focusing on the latest developments in Africa. I heard with envious wonder about trendy and innovative African writers, artists, musicians, agriculturalists and businesspeople. I was left deflated by how much has been going on in Africa without my knowledge. People are doing things out there, man. Achieving, accomplishing, attaining, and succeeding!

And I was despondent about by my own inadequacy, Sizenjani. How does one make themselves seen and heard? And if you do make yourself seen and heard, how long can you make the World watch and listen to you? Will the World ever appreciate what you do and say? Then I started imagining the effort required to hold the World’s attention and I couldn’t help but wonder at how wearying that must be and finally I got to see the ultimate uselessness and meaninglessness of it all. So I got lost in the dream of it all and kept going back and forth between visions of the World looking up at me on a podium and getting discouraged by how vain it all was.

See, we do things and they get lost into the past. The void of time swallows them up and the 15 seconds of fame is over. Who doesn’t want to be the respected talk of the World? Who doesn’t want the World’s adoration and its attention? Yet look at how fickle and flighty it is. Here now it is looking at you; one beat, two beats, then a new thing comes along and now it has its back to you. It is said if it is true, it is not new and if it is new, it is not true. Sometimes, the fated few manage to hold the World’s attention but it turns out that that is very dangerous. You can get killed for it. Ask Jesus. (But maybe we shouldn’t ask Him because He was a special case. He had planned to die at our hands, no matter what.) We can ask the other martyrs, though. They called attention to themselves and today we call them martyrs! Not a thought to be relished, that one.

Sizenjani, do you realise that each of us is a minuscule grain of sand on a beach that stretches from the Book of Genesis to the Book of Revelation? Try calculating the souls that have been before us, the souls that are here now and the souls that will come after us. Then, proportion me or yourself against the resultant sum; that is how much the World can ever care for me or you! Sigh! Don’t you see how meaningless and useless it all is? Who remembers all those souls? More importantly, who cares?

Once upon a time, one thousand two hundred and forty one years ago, in 777AD, let us imagine there was born into this world on this very spot I am, a baby girl. Straight from the womb, she was light toned and her skin was wrinkled like the butt of an old woman. But over the next few months her skin took on the chocolate brown of the continent and, fresh and glowing with Life, stretched over her fat chubby body. Bubbling with Life and health and delightful little cries, her parents named her Bisa; greatly loved. She grew up in that age amid the customs and traditions and struggles of that time. She dreamt, she survived, she settled for what Life handed her. She had her husband. She had her children. She grew to be a sage old woman who had seen it all. And then she died; maybe through a war that swept through her village or maybe peacefully through heart failure. She probably got buried or she rotted above ground. She was a flower that bloomed in the morning, gloried and got burnt by the sun during the day and wilted at sunset.

Sizenjani, I ask you. Who remembers her? What was her Life for? Did it have meaning? Who cares for her now? Who cares what her Life was worth? Who cares whether her Life had meaning? Does science care? Does evolution care? Does atheism care? Does humanity itself care?

Think about it, Sizenjani. Is it not obvious then, that you and I are useless to each other in the grander scheme of things? Okay, okay, my friend, let us say, we had the ability to remember those gone before us. What could we do for them with our memories? They are gone and they wouldn’t know that we remember them. Soon you and I will go the way of our fathers. We will sink into the ground and turn to dust. Those that come, will they remember us? Would you like to be remembered? Huh! A lot of good that will do for you!

Suppose, Sizenjani, those that come after us were granted the power of resurrection. Do you think they would want to resurrect us? Maybe me they would but you! Ah man. Who wants a useless man with missing teeth and rheumy eyes and knock knees like you in their world? You are important only to me, Sizenjani, because you are my only listener and the only one I can beat at Chess. Ha ha ha! No, my friend. They wouldn’t want to resurrect you. And let’s say, if that power were granted to you today, would you resurrect Bisa? No! You would resurrect that old hag Mai Mafupa, instead, who used to drive you crazy with her poisonous brew. What would you care about Bisa, who has been dust long enough for the ricochets of her songs to become non-existent to human history? Even the echoes of her genetic code ceased to reverberate in us eons ago.

No. This is all so unsatisfactory, Sizenjani. You and I are not meant to be born, live and die and get lost in the selfish, finite, impotent memories of man. There has to be someone who remembers us all. There has to be someone who remembers Bisa. Most importantly, there has to be someone who cares! That is the only way her Life can have real meaning. Does it make sense that Bisa lived for only a heartbeat in time and then died, never to exist again? That someone, after remembering and caring, must have the ability to recall Bisa from the dust of her body, scattered to the four corners of the world where the winds blow. He must be able to recall Bisa’s dust so as to reconstruct Bisa. Thus Bisa lived, Bisa died and then Bisa lives forever.

Who remembers Bisa? Not you, Sizenjani. Nor I. Only...He.

Come, man. Hurry up. The football match is about to start...