Thursday, October 11, 2012

Hideous Humanoids, Barbaric Beings

Four boys are lacerated, eviscerated, excoriated and incinerated by a mob of maybe ten. Thousands, literally, feast on the cruel skill of their local ‘gladiators’. A few officers of the law cower among the rabble in this arena of the gory and the gruesome. They do nothing to stop the baying wolves. If they try to stop the lunacy, their reward would be a flaming pneumatic garland.

This happened in Nigeria recently. It could have been Ghana or Kenya or South Africa or anywhere in Africa. (WARNING!!! IT'S REALLY, REALLY GORY!!!)

In my knowledge of African history, criminals and suspects may have been punished by flogging, burial-while-alive, banishment, capital punishment. BUT it happened after a trial; a trial by the elders or, indeed, a trial by ordeal before the gods and their priests. The punishment was cruel sometimes and the trials not credible in today’s conventional wisdom.

BUT THERE WERE TRIALS BEFORE PUNISHMENT!

We were cheated into colonialism, yes. We inherited some great legal norms, though, to add to valid virtues of our own. Joy!

So when (and why) did we learn to seize suspects, untried, to bludgeon-n-burn to death? Why are we more barbaric today than 500 years ago?

© The Author

4 comments:

  1. Devlin11 October, 2012

    This is shocking. You're right. The attackers are not human though they look human.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Think-About-It11 October, 2012

    Well said.
    How did we get here? The daily hustle makes us forget to teach our kids the right and simple way to live in harmony.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous11 October, 2012

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    ReplyDelete
  4. Kwame Mensa-Bonsu12 October, 2012

    It's because the named states....along with their neighbours....are largely failed states. They can't provide justice, so their citizens dish them out, messily!

    ReplyDelete

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