Salvation Colony

Chapter Thirty-One

183 Salvation Colony: Sequel to No Way to Die Chapter Thirty-One Dennis Nunqam Ndendemajem I returned to The Colony in a smouldering irritation, my temperature, pulse and tongue, all speaking of a dreadful crisis. This was going to be the most difficult decision to make, and so I tried to impart form on my tormenting thoughts. How was I, a mere mortal, going to confront the Man of God, the defender of the weak, my own personal saviour, the man in the absence of whom I would have long perished in a gutter for want of a place to stay and food to eat? Yet, it was necessary. Whatever I was going to say (and that weighed on me like a bag of cement!) was for the good of The Colony, not because I believed the rumours. Reverend Pastor Sixtus Shrapnell must take it in the light in which I myself viewed it - as the only means of dispelling all the unfounded accusations made against ALCA. With the important exception of our Father himself, we the members of the colony scarcely travelled out of its confines, unless on a crusade. We usually had no reason to travel out. We had everything inside. It therefore did not take me a long time to summon the eleven others to whom I revealed what I had just learnt. My brethren were unanimous in decrying the allegations as false information calculated to tarnish the good name of an organization which has achieved for the citizens of this country what the government could never achieve. I drew their attention to the newspaper reports with which they 184 Linus T. Asong were all very familiar. I then formulated some five or so questions, the answers to which might make us rethink our attitude towards Our Father. “It cannot be,” they all shouted when I listed the questions to them. Unbending devotion to Our Father had long robbed us of the powers to think for ourselves. Whatever he condemned was what we condemned. We praised only what he praised. Since he had passed his judgment on the newspaper articles and the rumours as wickedly false accusations, this judgment had long become ours too. Many of us, in fact all of us, were so convinced of Our Father’s innocence that we thought it would be the height of folly, blatant blasphemy, for us to even approach Our Father with the problem. We asked ourselves several times: “if it turns out that He is in fact not as guilty as the public and the press was saying, will he not call on God to burn us alive as He had once threatened?” The counterfeiting part of the accusation bothered me very much. If He was a counterfeiter as it was claimed from the Cosmas’ report, why would the government not arrest him right away? We could not understand. The whole world was behind Our Father, or at least used to be behind Him, we all recalled, until the press turned against Him. Because we were not all agreed on what to do, somebody suggested that we put the matter to vote. We agreed and did so by a show of hands. Six brethren voted in favour of going to confront Our Father. Six voted against. There was a second round of voting. This time, I who had voted against the showdown changed sides and voted in favour. With this narrow margin, the twelve of us took what we knew deep in our hearts of hearts to be the greatest risk of our lives to challenge Our God. I was nominated the spokesman on the issue. I accepted. I did not like accusations one bit, and so was very anxious to have the matter resolved once and for all. 185 Salvation Colony: Sequel to No Way to Die *** The continuous appearance of articles in the papers as well as the spreading of rumours by word of mouth against our church turned Our Father into something different. I had even begun to sense that he was looking at some of us with intense suspicion. One day, from the way he suddenly started behaving towards me, I asked myself whether he thought I shared Cosmas’ feelings towards our church, since he was my brother-in-law. The stories about the place hurt us all, but it seemed to eat Our Father up like a canker worm. I could...