Stark Reality of Raw Power

01, Mar 1999
'One loose cannon had brought to the agenda not a new freedom, but a freeness of framework in the context of which nothing could work...'

Long ago children played "stick-em-up" without any major problems. Everyone understood the rules of the game. Those rules comprised our pact, our covenant of unwritten social convention. Everyone knew how to behave as the game unfolded.

Basically, it was a game of hide-and-seek played with toy guns.

As the team of seekers sought the hidden, it was customary for all those who first fell in the line of imaginary fire to be deemed "dead" and be corralled back at the base until the end of the game. The team that made the most "kills" won the contest.

Then suddenly one day a new kid, named Gura, appeared on the block. Gura proved not to be an upholder of respected rules and inherited convention. Gura crept up from behind and hit other children real "gun-butt" to head and he seemed to relish the flow of warm blood. No one had ever committed such a brutal, violent act before the appearance of Gura. And that was not all.

Gura captured people and tied them with vines to trees out in the bush rather than bring them back to base as was customary. He felt that such a tedious task, though justifiable, robbed him of much needed time to score additional "kills."

One day Gura tied a victim to the trunk of a tree in which there was a black-ants nest. Yuh talk about weeping and gnashing of teeth!

On another occasion he tied a player to a tree and forgot to go back to release his prisoner at the end of the game. Parental questioning about the victim's whereabouts brought about a mad rush by all and sundry back into the bush just as dusk was about to engulf everything.

Yet still Gura was not be deterred, so overwhelmed was he by the need to win at all cost.

He made up his own rules as he went along, undaunted by the cries of "foul" and protests that even reached the ears of parents who traditionally remained aloof and allowed the children to sort out their own parameters. Six of the parents sought to talk to the new kid on the block, but yuh think Gura listen? No way!

What took the cake, however, was when Gura began to refuse to be "killed", even when caught hands down. He would be trapped clearly in a line of imaginary fire and his fortunate captors would aim their toy guns and shoot him loudly, "bang! bang!", yet Gura would not concede.

He came up with this pet line in response: "And as ah falling..." He totally rejected "dying," claiming always to be merely flesh-wounded, diving into the bush as he fell, and still capable of "shooting back" and defeating his bewildered subjugators.

The last time he said "and as ah falling..." and dived into the bush he fell on a huge stone and broke open his head. With the blood gushing down his face and mixing with the phlegm from his nostrils and the tears from his eyes, Gura kept bawling, much to the consternation of the others: "Ah still ent dead!"

That brought a complete cessation to the children's most favoured pastime. Without convention the game could no longer be played. One loose cannon had brought to the agenda not a new freedom, but a freeness of framework in the context of which nothing could work. The game had to be reconstituted. It could not embody Gura's frontier type consciousness of anything goes and still be everyone's beloved game.

New social convention and a new morality had to be found to promote the game further. "But we never had this kinda problem before," one child advanced. "And we used to play good just as dem bigger children show we and de thing pass on, and all o' we did know how to behave when we playing until this no-where-rian, Gura, start he stupidness."

It was the stark reality of self-seeking, unscrupulous, raw power. The kind of power that only an accident of fate or genuine politics could bring to heel. This story is true for there is always a "Gura" on the horizon. Believe that!