Читать книгу The Extinction of Menai - Chuma Nwokolo - Страница 8

Extracts from the 1990 Interim Psychiatric Evaluation of the Menai People

Executive Summary:

The Brief:

As the notorious Topless Procession case demonstrated, the Menai ethnic nation manifests an insular clannishness and resistance to modernity. Is this a symptom of an underlying psychiatric condition afflicting the entire ethnic nation? Are those traits likely to spread to Nigeria’s three-hundred-odd ethnic nations? Do they threaten Nigerian nationalism? Is this condition treatable, and if so, by what means?

The Subject:

The Menai is a minor ethnic nation whose global population at the date of this interim report is about one thousand. Ninety-five percent of all Menai live in Kreektown, an impoverished village on Agui Creek in Sontik State. Although there is only one known instance of public nudity among them, they are pathologically incapable of adapting to city life. They are victims of a group indoctrination that prevents them from emigrating from Kreektown. This made them particularly vulnerable to the defective Trevi inoculations during the 1980 Lassa fever outbreak. They address themselves as Menai, call their language Menai, and (although apparently of average intelligence) stubbornly speak Menai to the exclusion of the official Nigerian language in their village square.

Extract from the Glossary:

It is a feeble language, as I have mentioned elsewhere. There is actually no word for ‘suicide,’ which is understandable, I suppose: before this trauma of their imminent extinction, they had no cultural memory of Menai taking their own lives. Their word for ‘death’ is a portmanteau word that opens up into the English equivalent, sleepcatastrophe. Quaint, that. Sums up their entire world view.

Chief (Dr.) Ehi A. Fowaka

M.B.B.S.–F.R.C.Psych.–W.A.C.S.–F.M.C. (Psych)–F.W.A.C.P.–J.P.

* * *