Born to Rule

1. Early Childhood

1 Born to Rule: Autobiography of a Life President 1 Early Childhood M any authors have written various things about my early childhood. While some of the things border on truths, half-truths, hearsay, gossip, innuendoes, and so on and so forth, some are deliberate lies intended to seek my downfall from power and to discredit the popular people’s movement that I am leading. I am happy to say that none of these destabilizing acts has succeeded. This is, of course, because I have the people on my side. More important, my power comes from God and no connivance by any wayward group of individuals will deter me from seeking the welfare of my people and my own survival as the shrewd politician and wise leader that people all over the world say I am. That historians, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, the church, the press and others should be so interested in writing about me and my country is evidence that my country is indeed in the limelight of the world. We are flattered. It is true that I am a bastard as some people have written. I was born around the time of World War I by a wonderful mother whom I never got to know. In fact, I was raised by my aunt, Mrs. Afor Njimtah, and did not know that she was not my real mother until I was about 15 years old. It happened by chance. A classmate of mine with whom I fought and whom I beat to pulp for making fun of my unkempt hair and jigger toes, abused me that I was a bastard. When I returned home later that evening and confronted my aunt and her husband, they confirmed that my mother and my father had met in a bar and that I had been conceived that same night. My father never showed up again, and when my mother delivered me, she could not stand the shame, and so she committed suicide. 2 Tah Asongwed I wish to say here that I am not ashamed of my status. Our society should rather be ashamed of the way it treats it unwed mothers for it was our society that drove my poor, innocent mother, then a young and tender school girl, to kill herself. Had my mother done the abominable thing by causing abortion, I leave it to the reader’s imagination to fathom what opportunity this country would have missed to have me as their God-given president. However, it is definitely not true that my security agents arrested, tortured, and later on hanged the editor of the Mandzah Drum for publishing a derogatory article about my status. We in this country have a free press and if I had thought that the article in question injured my reputation, I would have sued the newspaper for libel. As to the actual cause of the death of Chicha Chachi whose pen flowed with venom and invective for the government, my country, and me, all I can say is that investigations have been going on for the last 5 years or so to identify the killers or hired assassins. It is true that we have many journalists in jail, but it is not because they publish false rumors about my status. If we routinely jail our journalists, it is because they recklessly publish inflammatory literature which could incite our people to civil disobedience and rioting. Let me make it perfectly clear that we in this government are just as surprised as the public about the manner in which Chicha Chachi died. We understand that an autopsy report states that he died of a heart attack. We believe that to be highly probable because the poor chap’s heart could not keep on lying as he had been doing. In any case, we are impatiently waiting for the results of the investigation we ordered years ago. It is also true that when I learned that I was a bastard, I became, understandably, at that young age, very miserable. I could not understand why my father would shirk his responsibilities, but then I have grown to understand that not all men are men. One only has to look at some of my ministers and government officials. They run away from taking decisions and assuming their responsibilities and when the press accuses them of irresponsibility, they say they haven’t received instructions from the president’s office to do so and so. But then...