Refugees’ Rebellion

By Issah H. Tikumah

A fictionalized account of a real experience of a veteran refugee, Refugees Rebellion says it all about the harrowing twists and turns of life in exile. It was written to highlight the growing plight of the huge refugee population around the world. Rich in passion and literary expression, provocative and amusing at the same time, Refugees Rebellion is not just a classic piece of informative entertainment for general readership, but also an arousing message of solace for any grieving heart.

Professor Malinger falls out with the military junta of his country and goes into exile in Gushegu with his wife and little son. The fugitives are taken to a refugee camp somewhere in the bush. Conditions of life on the refugee camp are deplorable: hunger, crime, disease and death are everyday realities. After several months of hopeless endurance on the refugee camp, the fugitives are transferred to Funcity. It is not really clear which condition is the better one is it their former life on the camp or is it their new life in the city where they now languish in joblessness and societal contempt? The general belief of refugees is that officials of CARC are misappropriating resources meant for the wellbeing of refugees. At the end of their thither, the refugees stage a revolt to oust the corrupt CARC officials and take over management of their own affairs. The rebellion fails. Professor Malinger leaves Gushegu for another country after giving a passionate farewell speech to his fellow refugees.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Dec 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504345408

Issah H. Tikumah

Born in Tamale, in northern Ghana, Issah Hassan Tikumah read philosophy and political science to obtain a B.A. degree from Australian National University in 1996. He received both his PGDE (2007) and M.Ed. (2009) from Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria, where he has taught. He now teaches at the University of Cape Verde. As a writer, Tikumah has published more than a dozen books, including novels and essays. Refugees’ Rebellion (2015) and Baptism of Orphanhood (2013) are among his latest novels.

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Copyright © 2015 Issah Hassan Tikumah.

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First published in Nigeria in 2004

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ISBN: 978-1-5043-4536-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-4540-8 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date: 12/03/2015

Table Of Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgement

The Battle for Asylum

The Camp Refugee

The Urban Refugee

The Green Rebellion

The Sermon of Hope

Glossary

Notes

In some cases, definitions of words as used in this context are copied from Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture. (2005). Harlow Essex: Pearson Education Ltd.

Dedication

For the filial fondness of Isma’eel,

my morning sun of a son,

that the unconscious heroism of his toddlerhood

may become conscious in his manhood.

Acknowledgement

The kindness of Mr Jemal Hagos and his lovely family was beyond human evaluation. Indeed, generosity lies not in giving much but in giving at the right time.

The Battle for Asylum

T he military junta of Nantoŋ Republic was exceedingly incensed. The air in the National Conference Hall at the centre of the capital city had thundered and shivered with Professor Malinger’s subversive voice the previous night. But the commandoes missed their target in their early-dawn raid on Prof Malinger’s house the next day. Prof Malinger had already drawn up a contingency plan for his personal safety, for he had neither been unmindful of the flurry of anxiety his subversive lecture would provoke within the junta nor forgotten the terrible fate of other scholars who had ventured similar subversive speeches in the past. Upon getting the wind of the commandoes’ raid on his house, Prof Malinger lost no time in penetrating the borders into the neighbouring Tampiŋ Republic. While in Tampiŋ, he telephoned Mrs Malinger back in Nantoŋ to inform her of his itinerary. And the painful pleasure of love trumped all other passions: The loyal wife refused to back away from her emotional insistence that she must accompany him to paradise or hell! There was a real possibility that Mrs Malinger would be trapped at the Nantonŋ-Tampiŋ border, and so she had to take dangerous detours. Indeed, All is fair in love and war. Prof Malinger spent two days in Tampiŋ waiting for her and her one-year-old son to arrive.

The sweltering journey through the starless midnight of exile had begun. Everywhere was wafting with gloomy smell of foreboding. Woes mounted and mounted upon the fugitives by the day, by the hour, by the minute, by the second, and by the blink. The farther the fugitives advanced into the starless midnight of exile, the darker the darkness became. The darkness soon became so intense that everything in the atmosphere became too clear to be seen. Everything! The only thing that was actually vague enough to be seen in the impenetrable darkness was a ghost-like shade skulking menacingly behind the fugitives. At a point, the blinding darkness became so still that, in fact, not even voices could be heard anymore. But for the fact that the couple - with their toddler firmly tied onto the back of Mrs. Malinger – had clasped arms before plunging into the murky journey, they would have lost touch with themselves in the ever-intensifying darkness. The only sound that was loud enough to defy the deafening darkness and be heard by the fugitives was the menacing footsteps of the ghoulish trailing-shade.

What a dreadful double-whammy! The deathly darkness was further bedeviled with savage windstorms that vowed to tear the couple apart. Oftentimes, the blustery winds blew the couple many miles asunder. But the clasped-arms became so mysteriously-elastic that they would remain clasped regardless of the distance between the bodies of the couple. At times the clasped-arms would be so desperately stretched as to become thinner than the thinnest thread, but even then not even the sharpest razor-blade could snap the thin thread.

As they groped and fumbled about in the increasingly windy darkness, the couple suddenly spotted a streak of dark-light up in the sky far in front of them. With dreaming now being equivalent to thinking in their own world, the fugitives would spend the coming years chasing after the streak of dark-light while fleeing from the monstrous trailing-shade.

While the couple waded in the mire of the turbid waters of exile, chasing the dark-light while fleeing from the monstrous trailing-shade, their blithesome toddler was brimming with the blissful power of puerile ignorance. Apparently, he missed some familiar faces whose names he frequently murmured for a few days but whom he soon forgot after familiarizing with new faces – other than that, for him nothing had changed and nothing had gone wrong. He knew of neither the trailing-shade nor the dark-light. Prof Malinger had often whined bitterly about what he termed diurnal insomnia of his son. In a culture whereby age was adored and yet there was no rational criterion (for determining age) other than physical appearance, the shortness of Prof Malinger meant that his age was often under-estimated - with all the humiliating belittlement that entailed. Against this background, Prof Malinger had purposively - and rather ambitiously - married a very tall woman in the hope that he would have tall children whose height would compensate for his own shortness. Now he often groaned in disappointment: This obnoxious boy is not going to grow tall. What kind of child is this that will only sleep the sleep of adults? He will never sleep in the afternoon like all other children of his age! … Over the years I’ve had to be waiting for my elder brothers to be born all the time! … There were times when, at mid-day, Prof Malinger would employ the tactic of overfeeding in the hope of inducing the boy into dizziness and siesta; there was an instance when Prof Malinger over-fed the boy to such a dangerous level that both an emetic and an