The Inmates of My Room

Should I blow or should I not blow my own trumpet? That is the question. It is very unfortunate, but it still remains a fact that the person who blows my trumpet has very unceremoniously left me. Not because he was not sufficiently paid but rather because he could not develop sufficiently strong and projecting cheers to make my trumpet heard amidst the din and bustle of Accra City life. And now, in his absence, I must willy-nilly sound this trumpet however faintly.

By way of introducing the first note, I am a man who always faces facts squarely and is frank even to the extent of being imprudent. I am very short when it pays to be short and I am very tall when it is useful to be tall. ‘All weather’ is my nickname. I am an intricately complex mixture of all that it pays to be. I am a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), first class honours in ancient and modern Palmwinology; a master of all drinkables except coal-tar, cascara, sagrada and turpentine; a fellow of the Royal Institute of Alcohol; Head of the Faculty of Immunity against Intoxication in International University of Sparkling Bubbles. I am a man with green blood in my veins and with a more fertile brain than Erasmus’. In a word therefore, I am a very important person who is now soliloquising, with a mind in a cloudy puzzlement, to find out why the Government did not make it possible for me to drive in any of the luxuriously modelled and fashioned cars provided for the VIPs during the celebration of our independence.

I stay at Accra New Town, in a house where lizards and bats and mice enjoy such first class but highly unharnessed democratic freedom that they freely and easily and impudently spit at and excrete on me, and even go to the sad extent of at times sharing my bed with me. I go out and come to meet them, carelessly relaxing in my bed, in a bossing attitude. Poor me, how dare I question them. It is just inviting them to multiply their trespasses. What is worse, our desires never harmonise, they are always at loggerheads, always conflicting and always quarrelling.