The Rhapsody of Freedom

The melodious cock-a-doodle-doo woke everyone up, as the sun rose over the vast pratum meadow to the east, the rustic foothills and plains of the plateaux in the North, tendering like the labyrinthine corridors glowed with golden light as if touched by an Angel or Midas from prairie.
The radiant sunrise reminded us that it was the dawn of freedom and hope – the Independence Day.
As I turned around to greet my father who had prepared to step out of the house.
He said enthusiastically with an infectious grin,
“We all dreamt of this gleeful day long ago.”
The first warm winds of spring gusted along streets and broad boulevards, calling out winter-weary residents who had pains of slavery locked up in their loins, into the daylight and allayed them. They thronged the sidewalks, strolling, linking mouths and hands together, everywhere smiling and chatting.
People hanged around in groups like village gossips, discussing on the wonderment.
The well-wishers visiting from overseas stopped at intervals, marveled,
“This is the enchanting Canaan promised in our travel guides.”
I came out to the street to observe the euphoria.
For the first time, I freely with so much confidence and pride walked through the alleys of my city.
Then, I sighed,
“Now this is a home, not a dungeon.”
I paused for a while and approached a group of onlookers who were deeply engaged in recalling the memories of the painful past.
One of them turned to me and laughed aloud.
“Thank God”, he muttered, and smiled. “There’s hope.”
The whole universe converged and stood on the soil of a neo-nation. They came to witness the ceremonious exodus of the John Bulls, and the birth and christening of a Negro-Giant, born to rise and become the Pride of Africa.
The neo-nation was called “Niger-ia”.
As we seceded from Great Britain in 1960, October 1, our first Emperor acceded to office.
I noticed unity et peace out of our outstanding diversity, such are residuum of our colonization.
It was a day of high joie de vivre; we were like men that dreamed, perhaps hallucinated. Several people never stopped asking themselves the question,
“Is this true?”
“Is it really real?”
Right there at the level of Tafawa Balewa Square, on the platform of unity, in the spirit of truth and patriotic brotherhood, and wearing an appearance or a countenance of faith; everyone chanted the anthemic songs of freedom and change.
(With sync voices) “See a change that will accentuate progress and development; a change that radiates an abiding illumination to our future.”
The atmosphere was filled with so much love; love for one another, love for our sovereign country…after the declaration…
I pondered,
“If love really means forgiveness, only God will tell if we can truly love by forgiving our Taskmasters...if we can really forgive our failed and failing fathers.”

(…Love is not which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove. O, no! It is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken…Sonnet 1156, William Shakespeare).