messy tale of land grabs in Tanzania, where local communities are sometimes evicted to make room for national attractions.”
“There is the
nationalities were employed in the World Trade Centre that almost every nation on earth was affected by the slaughter that took place.”
everywhere at unusual hours – they are security men going home in the early hours of the morning after guarding the homes of the rich all night; “unbeez” (unemployed) people going to case joints where they might pick up a job or two; or maidserv- ants and cooks going to the market early to see whether they might get good prices for the foodstuffs they have been sent to buy for their employers – cheaper prices meaning they can award themselves a small “commission” to secretly pocket. Such people follow a multitude of reli-
gions, so for all they knew, “Osaman” and his Al Qaeda followers had succeeded in killing many people who might be Muslims
“It transpired after 9/11 that so many different
indeed so full of contradictions. It tran- spired that so many different nationalities were employed by the establishments in the World Trade Centre that almost every na- tion on earth was affected by the slaughter that occurred in the wake of its destruction. Cleaners, security guards, clerks, cooks,
like themselves. Wasn’t that utterly stupid? If you asked the killers why they had
thrown the bombs at places where they knew they might kill their own brother Muslims, they might tell you that it was “unfortunate” that innocent lives had been lost, but “jihad” (holy war) was acceptable in the eyes of Allah. Every man’s fate is decided by Allah and if the deaths of those killed in the bombings were not acceptable to “Allah’s will”, they wouldn’t have died. Which, of course, absolves man of every
responsibility for his own actions, and plac- es everything fatalistically in the lap of Te Almighty (whose mind no-one is supposed to presume to know, anyway!). Jihadism is
waiters, telephonists, receptionists – again, people belonging to the lower classes of society, whose welfare, if Al Qaeda was truly anti-capitalist, would be of concern to the group. Even before stories floated on the internet that some Ghanaians had been burnt beyond recognition in the inferno of the Twin Towers, Ghanaians instinctively understood that Al Qaeda was no friend of the ordinary people, and that is probably why they reaped their vengeance immedi- ately by doing the only thing they could do: making fun of Osama bin Laden’s name. Because the new name, “Osaman”,
was easier to rhyme with Ghanaian names than the original, it was that which they used in their word-games. But then after a while, the fun about
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