It is only through the ideology of alcoholism that one can triumph over the absurd theatre happening in Nigeria today.
The brazen stealers of Nigerian elections will almost always tell you: Go to court! I will rather go to the bar!
And so I happen upon this party after INEC makes a coup of manufacturing the first elected, sorry, selected, female governor in our good old Nigeria.
It’s at the party that I hear that INEC has annulled its own result, but who cares when the beers going inside me in keeping with the ideology of alcoholism can never be annulled.
In the present tense of liquor, it’s a rollicking night of highs and higher highs in which, under the inspiration of booze, the face of every girl looks like that of an angel from the heavens.
A party in a bar is the very next thing to paradise which justifies Ernest Hemingway’s words: “If you want to know about a culture, spend a night in its bars.”
And what is more, Paracelsus, the Greek physician, says, “A little bit of beer is divine medicine.”
Little wonder the wise one, Plato, chipped in: “He was a wise man who invented beer.”
Forget all the sad men of the Morality Brigade, alcohol remains the ultimate muse for the creative masters on Planet Earth.
It is no secret at all that at least four American Nobel Laureates in Literature were unrepentant alcoholics.
Let’s name names: William Faulkner, Eugene O’Neill, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck. What a great company to keep, for in my little way I have earned an MBA (Beer) of the Media Beer Academy of Nigeria Breweries Plc! I have my certificate to show off unlike the selected one!
According to F Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.”
While the drink takes me in the party, I remember the words of the late drunkard in my hometown, Ikerionwu, who famously said: “Drinking does not kill you; it only makes you sleep where you went to.”
This reminds me of the Onitsha landlord who managed to stagger to the frontage of his house after a night of heavy boozing only to ask his astonished neighbours: “Please which house is Number 5 on this street? I’ve been told that’s my house!”
The party and the booze get into higher gear when the DJ plays the music we call “Ghana Pieces”, and my flight of thought veers to the role played by booze in the development of Ghana as narrated by Ayi Kwei Armah in his inimitable The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.
There was a certain white specialist who was brought to Ghana to teach Kwame Nkrumah’s people “The Stages of Growth” but ended up boring all Ghanaians into deep slumber until the Attorney-General of Ghana took over and roused everybody up by teaching the white man Ghana’s specialty known as “The Stages of Booze” thusly:
“Stage One – The Mood Jocose.
Stage Two – The Mood Morose.
Stage Three – The Mood Bellicose.
Stage Four – The Mood Lachrymose.
Stage Five – The Mood Comatose.”
After having gone through the five stages of booze, notably, Jocose (humorous), Morose (mournful), Bellicose (hostile), Lachrymose (tearful) and Comatose (deathlike), it is little wonder that Ghana has overtaken Nigeria in all indices after having obviously seen it all.
Nigeria must perforce undergo her own stages of booze culminating in the fifth stage called “Comatose” – or death will supervene to ensure the fulfillment of the Nigerian epitaph written by Chinua Achebe as per There Was A Country.
I think it’s the makers of Heineken beer who made the experiment that scientifically proves that if the music gets heavier the drinking goes slower.
In these slower moments of the party, I can recall that the earliest beers came out of Iraq and Iran when the places were known as Sumeria or Mesopotamia.
And the beginning of beer was feminine, very female, because brewing was then a part of the household chores.
Incidentally, it is the female hop flowers that are tops in the making of beer because they are high in alpha and beta acids that are needed for brewing.
The world as we know it was saved by beer because the greatest invention of all happens to be beer, the lynchpin of the agricultural revolution.
Yes, from 9000 BC beer has been making history, remarkably leading to the invention of writing and mathematics.
In Ancient Egypt, writing and maths were invented to record and calculate the amount beers needed even in the afterlife!
Now the party is coming to an end, and as I wrote in the beginning, the beer is making every lady available look so beautiful, like a cross between an angel and the fictional first selected female governor of Nigeria from Adamawa.
“Babe, you are more beautiful than all the poetry ever written,” I tell a bespectacled lady poet near me.
“How many bottles have you taken?” she retorts sharply.
“I don’t drink bottles; I drink beer!” I reply with a mighty hiccup.
The lady poet runs away, quoting for me Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah:
All de beer
Dem drink for here
De make me fear
– Uzor Maxim Uzoatu is a renowned poet, journalist and author
