The Unveiled Ten Tentacles of Tompolo, By Enewaridideke Ekanpou

There are people in Africa who are culturally rooted, proud and independent but they are thin on the ground. Majorly scattered everywhere like JP Clark’s ‘broken china’ in his poem, ‘Ibadan’, are hundreds of thousands of people who inhabit a cultural desert, devoid of oasis. They are the marooned. In fact, marooned like Robinson Crusoe on the uninhabited island is the man who is culturally rootless. For the culturally benighted, culture rooted in traditional mysticism is the road to perdition, the road to ungodliness punitively decorated with seven ‘HELLS’. That is the threatening danger, the peak of ‘CHRONIC benightedness’.

Sometimes culture speaks mystically without words.
Sometimes culture ululates and echoes in meditative silence. Thoughts of purification and reconnection occasionally channelled without malice harboured for anyone tell a great story of cultural rootedness, a great story of depth in mysticism that dwells only in the world of the pure-hearted.

Every object has its own orbit however the plane it finds itself. Ill-timed and poisoned objects down the path of Tompolo have habituated themselves to journeying from every conceivable corner of the world as their mastered orbit, laden with verbally improvised explosive devices. Powered by thoughts of dismantlement from visibility as a calculated agenda, the verbally improvised devices journey daily around Tompolo with different seemingly believable stories of wrong doings anchored narratively to wrong-foot him towards the Bermuda-like abyss. In vain the verbally improvised explosive devices journey around the universally acclaimed development activist because Tompolo is tentacled, with the power of retraction of his tentacles when the circumstances demand it. Over his head the furious waters always pass as they often do whenever they come upon the extended branches of the Epain tree in the river.

Every ten years Tompolo’s tentacles tell a reverberating story of foiled dismantlement attempts at his fortified wall that daily houses his tentacles. Tompolo’s life is often marked by major events in every ten years, as dictated by the numerological weight of the tenth tentacle. In every ten years Tompolo experiences a proliferation of verbal virulence masterminded by detractors from the lunatic asylum. The current surge of verbal virulence strategically directed at Tompolo is rooted in the numerological mystery traced astrologically to Tompolo’s tenth tentacle. This is a numerological reality likely to dwindle away like soap without being noised when the cacophony of verbal virulence retreats naturally to its calm roost.

Tompolo is an implacable hater of human trafficking, injustice, exploitation, underdevelopment, impoverishment, ritual killing, pipeline vandalism and crude oil theft. However the anti-Tompolo propaganda, he can never become the antithesis of his core beliefs and directional principles. For people battered by afflictions of ‘political pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis’, they are always pathologically superfragilisticexpialidocious in their observations, comments and analyses whenever volcanoes of mysticism are spotted anywhere on earth, particularly the ‘traditional mysticism’ championed by Tompolo. They are the perpetually afflicted who are domiciled in the Republic of Politics as deadwood content creators – dead to the supremacy of mystical brotherhood pilgrims could find in the Gbaraun Egbesu Temple in Oporoza.

Precisely, like substances methodically poured into a mould, a pattern has emerged. This is a pattern that could be deployed to extrapolate all the motivations behind the anti-Tompolo moves launched off from the homes of Niger Delta to the homes in Abuja. The methodology is either kinetic or non-kinetic. To dwarf and dim the performance visibility of Tompolo in his avowed national tasks is what the preternaturally charcoal-hearted people set sights on in their privileged existence on earth. Their struggle against Tompolo’s functional visibility paradoxically intensifies and foregrounds the vulnerabilities of these charcoal-hearted apes and chimpanzees.

Between the effortfully dwarfed Tompolo’s visibility and their gaping vulnerabilities there is a parallel; this parallel resides in Robert Browning’s poem, ‘My Last Duchess’. In this poem cast in dramatic monologue, the Duke of Ferrara tries to demarket his late wife before his own emissary in a bid to marry another woman but he ends up revealing his vices as a man who abuses, objectifies and murders women. It is quite predictable the Duke of Ferrara would be denied the opportunity to marry the woman whom he seeks because his shortcomings have been revealed in the dramatic monologue. Similarly, the authorities before whom the genuine Niger Delta development activist is verbally pounded like pounded yam, always see the virtue and wisdom in choosing Tompolo over their phantom name-killing creations.

Deliberate moves to dim the performance visibility of Tompolo is the licence for Tompolo’s visibility because such feeble and infantile attempts only throw up the vulnerabilities of the plotters who are seen by the authorities as people without their heads. For Gabriel Okara in his great novel, THE VOICE, they are narratively characterised as people whose heads are not correct.

The ten tentacles of Tompolo are not mere creations to be deployed geometrically and algebraically within the mathematical space. Embedded in Tompolo’s ten tentacles are numerological secrets and significances yoked mystically with astrology for projection into the future, though not without accurate alliance with his retraction mechanism. In the life of Tompolo the ten tentacles share numerological and astrological bond with his mechanism of retraction.

Tompolo’s ten tentacles are his pair of moral and mystical compass that reveal a given pattern in every ten years. For Tompolo his egregore is deeply buried in the ten tentacles.

Revival of African traditional mysticism and cultural significance occupies a special space in the symmetrically aligned hierarchisation of Tompolo’s ten tentacles. As hierarchically programmed, it is the assigned domain of one of the ten tentacles to activate, stimulate, procedurally the functional operationalisation of African traditional mysticism and the indigenous cultural practices of Africa without incorporating elements of self-adulatory mumbo-jumbo and self-exhibitionism. Without markers of puritanism, carrying only pure thoughts inhaled and exhaled as a regular mystical regimen, the assigned tentacle devotedly ploughs the path to facilitate and guarantee meaningful communication with the Divine Intelligence through the established structures built hierarchically around Egbesuism which has its own codes that promote religious ecumenism across all denominations and centres of worship.

Tompolo is always a tentacled man. A tentacled man is immune to the deficiencies of verbal irrationality, the delusions of power, of materialism, of infallibility, of megalomania, of narcissism, of spiritual purity, of spiritual hegemony, of spatial monopoly, of traditional situatedness and traditional impeccability within the secular space. Such a unique being enjoys in arrears spiritual, traditional, cultural, psychological, philosophical and ecumenical equilibrium. A tentacled man also enjoys mystical and moral fortification.

When a man is filled to the brim with mystical and moral fortification, the dismantlement exertions of dark-hearted mortals become mere puny exertions that lose their poisonous penetration and potency before the pachydermatous shell of the tentacled Tompolo.

Tentacled as Tompolo is, with his time-tested mechanism of retraction whenever his tentacles psychically detect an approaching lethal encroachment on his SHELLED WORLD, the dismantlement processions and madrigals hymnally invoked are a mere distraction because Tompolo ontologically stands beyond their killer arrows often released higgledy-piggledy into the secular space.

The story of Tompolo’s ten tentacles is a long but mystically and philosophically compelling and compulsive one to be told in phases in every century for societal edification and cohesion. Tompolo is not tentacled for exhibition as a zoological artifact. Societal edification, growth, cohesion, integration, cohabitation, cultural harmony, cosmic harmony and governmental recognition are the propellers of Tompolo’s tentacled existence, harmoniously dictated to from time to time by the superior commanding voice of the constituents of the ten tentacles. These ten tentacles are mystically weighted and disposed to tackle any societal challenge however the subterranean envy and acrimony malevolently infused into the compositions of the given societal challenge…

The society in which we live becomes an oasis of harmony, growth and development when we are sufficiently awakened to the mystical potentials buried in the tentacled existence of Tompolo because that would mark the end to the proliferation and flight of verbally improvised explosive devices from the verbal armoury in the lethally skillful hands of the charcoal-hearted people who are the ‘aborignes’ of the lunatic asylum in the Republic of Kimimienseimo.

Dr. Ekanpou writes from Akparemogbene, Delta State.