By Tanimu Dan Rabeh
It was the day docility and inertia ended. It was like a thief in the night. And like a thief in the night – with the stealth screech at the main gate, the ominous muted but still audible footsteps, the rattling of the front door and the shattering of the burglary proof – it had signs. But the signs are not the ones to allow you do all necessary preparations. And unlike a thief in the night, it happened in the day time. That day – the Mannequin Animation Day – was MAD. It wasn’t like a universe-size Ragnarok or even an earth-size Armageddon. It was just a country-sized, or should we say country-wide, madness. Just madness, as no continent split, no star fell nor did any intercontinental ballistic missile explode.
It wasn’t as if anybody thought it could happen. Indeed, it was unthinkable. Or was it? It was as impossible as imagining that a woman who has cooked on her Katine or Mitad (three-stone stove on which cooking pots are placed with firewood between them; Fulfulde and Amharic) for 50 years will conceive that heat can melt stones, except if her husband were a smith. So the day molten magma comes up, it is too late to conceive the reality. For, how could lifeless things begin to move, have emotions, thought and personalities? And, just as our culinarian aunt will think, those stones, which never moved with heat, scum, rain, dust and all, can never begin to think and certainly never have felt pain, not to talk of reacting.
The possibility was remote, at best. There is a recent fear of the possibility of AI (Artificial Intelligence) having a mind of their own and “revolting’’ from men who built them. But not robots, talk less of mannequins. For the most part, apart from their external resemblance to humans, they are hollow inside and have no internal engines or technological fittings, or so their misusers think. Proof of lifelessness: the owners have used them as they like and to every degree. They kept them naked, left them in the sun and rain, broke and welded back their limbs, burnt them in the fire and called them ‘things’. After all, they are dolls, lay figures, pointers, dummies, dress forms or whatever user-fit names you give them.
The owners of the mannequins, and they are many, bought or acquired them. From noble causes like using them for training in the medical field to the ignoble causes of using them as sex toys, the owners have paid for them. Their uses at boutiques, at road construction sites as pointers, in farms to scare birds, etc, can be said to be innocuous. They bought some flexed, and they have ever remained so. The erect never changed either. Those used for training have had their skin and bodies mutilated so many times but never shuddered even once.
Their ‘creators’, or those who brought them to this level, made them black, white or colours inbetween. They gave them long hair or short ones as they wished. Made them tall or short, fat or slim, beautiful or ugly and smiling; most times they have a flat affect so that you would have labeled them autistic, schizoid or catatonic if they were not inanimate or labeled so.
But on that day, all seemed to have changed. They suddenly had emotions. Their visage revealed welled-up anger; all bad types – judgmental, chronic, assertive, punitive and aggressive anger. No one told you to run away from them. They seemed to have personalities as they seemed to know who they were, what cause they were fighting and who the villains were. Their actions that day appeared to be thought out, well thought out. The spontaneity, targets, different but coordinated moves looked like they had different identities but were instructed from one source to individually carry out what that source wanted. And they did them well; well, not well but with perfection as ‘well’ may sound unfair to the victims.
It appeared that vengeance was meted to the appropriate offenders simultaneously at each place, coeval with happenings elsewhere. No human activity could continue, so much so that even the media houses could not report anything until after it all happened and ended. Here at the media houses, the least horrible seemed to have happened. As the gates were locked, cables were unplugged; servers and screens were smashed and escape routes blocked before the tyrants and abusers were attacked. It appeared that these mannequins have had their muscles trained and toughened so that the annihilation of their targets was indescribable. After all deed were done, a quick fixing of media equipment were done so one mannequin could announce that they had taken control. This happened at all media houses at the same time as already noted, so that whoever was watching or listening to anything anywhere heard or saw the same thing at the same time. At the time s/he was probably also trying to run for his/her dear life.
You would think they would have rolled out the security men, but wait, it needs to be repeated, the actions were synchronous. At the military barracks, the other ranks, sorry, the mannequins there, had locked the armory, demobilized the tanks and shot their O/Cs. The mannequin spokesperson answered the request from the ministry of defense, saying ‘sir, nobody is getting out of any barracks’. The boys attached to each GOC, General or anybody ‘took care’ of them. Ditto the police, the Civil Defense, the DSS, the NIA, Customs, Immigration, etc.
Some big men were just trying to get out of their houses when their drivers, orderlies, cooks, etc, took care of them. If any had already gotten to the gates, they were ordered out, beaten and their shoes collected before they were ordered to sit down on a lawn to await orders.
Some surprises did spring up. At one point, some mannequins were seen destroying other mannequins. It turned out this was not a mistake. The mannequins in the police stationed on the roads, had allowed themselves to be used by officers to harass, dehumanise and extort other mannequins so they were also destroyed. This happened to mannequins at payrolls and accounts departments, revenue establishments, etc, who, though being mannequins themselves, joined others to deal with mannequins.
At another point, some mannequins were protecting their bosses instead of decimating them. It turned out these were kind bosses who did not turn these humans to mannequins. They did not send them on degrading errands like buying Kilishi or groundnut or going for school runs for them. They did not ‘chop’ their emoluments or refuse them their leave. They never insulted them or withhold their trainings. They did not terrorise them.
At other places, interesting things happened. The mannequins, now animated, got even hilarious. They caught one chain-smoking Oga, locked him up just to deny him tobacco for a day as his punishment. He begged them all day for smoke but they gave him water. Some group forced their minister to trek to the bus-stop and get into kabu-kabu bus to go home while some forced their DG to ride on a bike home.
At the universities, the mannequins were in droves – guards, cleaners, students and some NASU members. One of their first targets in one university in the middle belt region was a notorious lecturer in Electrical/ Electronics who would not allow students to graduate. His house was burnt down and he was dragged on the campus streets till his breath ceased.
At the religious houses, unholy things happened. But spare me the divine wrath that may come from narrating the stories which would have included the collection of January salaries as seed, the mandatory hundred days fasting even when God did not say so, the instruction to go and die to get to heaven even when the clergy themselves would not do so as if they do not want to go to heaven themselves. In addition to dehumanising and hypnotising them, they also kept them spell-bound. They were so sure their eyes will never clear. So you can imagine the shock.
What happened at the construction site was interesting. The Chinese foreman could not understand why the gate was being locked. Now, if you are looking for where labourers are dehumanised in our country, check the foreign-run manufacturing or construction companies. The mannequins, having locked the gate, got the operators of the ugly construction equipment and began to bring down the makeshift offices. Reflexly, the Chinese foreman ran to physically stop them. He was struck down. The ones in the office pulled out guns only to discover that they were not loaded. Don’t ask me what happened to them.
The unanimity of the oppressed humans reduced to mannequins included bandits, kidnappers and insurgents. The guards turned their guns on their commanders. Their captives, also mannequins, united with the guards to bury the tyrannical commanders. Ransom money and money from sponsors never got down to the lower ranked bandits and insurgents and they were killed at the slightest mistakes.
The political, religious and other elite have systematically dehumanised others to the point they thought that any up-rising was impossible since they have become more or less like mannequins. They have used religion, ethnic differences and regions to hypnotise people. Over decades, these tactics have gradually become ineffective. The animation day, nay, revolution day, was successful because every tyrant and oppressor was handled by the oppressed within his sphere of oppression, this happening at the same time everywhere. It was the best formula for revolution. No need of fund-raising or organisation. They were not occupying or moving from place to place blocking traffic or destroying things. Even the French Revolution could not beat that.
Dan Mallam told me that he was running and meeting different groups but nobody cared to harm him or seemed to notice him. This was also part of the plan, so he can tell the story as he just narrated, sweating and horrified as he woke up from the reverie.
But it was the near future he saw.
● Dan Rabeh lives in Abuja and sent this via WhatsApp
