Manchester Terror Attack Is Another Case Of Senseless Adversity Against Literature Poem by alexander opicho

On Tuesday 23rd of May 2017, Salman Abedi executed suicide bombing of the innocent people and children at drama in session in Manchester, this savage act left 22 people dead, one of them being only a child of eight years. It was cruel. This comes after two years of terrorist bombing of Charlie Hebdo, a Paris based News Paper that uses cartons and other graphics to make literary comment about contemporary and topical issues without any bias in terms of gender, race, religion or political ideology. Intellectual and ideological neutrality of the Charlie Hebdo is readily evident in the time-tested media objectivity inherent in the content of its stories that have been always available online till today. Thus, there was no fact that could justify the Charlie Hebdo bombing. Comparatively, some few years ago in Kenya, terrorist attack at the West Gate Mall in Nairobi claimed life of Kofi Awoonor, the west African poet and novelist, the author of This World my Brother, who had visited Nairobi to participate in Story Moja Literary Festival. Awoonor's literary focus was on oracy, African poetry and songs, and use of novel to use post-colonial agendas in Africa like political exclusions. He was not an intellectual involved in the debates of religious fundamentalism. It is thus regrettable that the terrorists attack on literary practitioners like the case of Awoonor is mere cowardice perpetrating senseless adversity against literature.
Such acts are worth nothing else but to be condemned strongly, regardless of any political or religious justification giving them a backup. Any social ideology that avoids intellectual engagement and discourse only to resort to violence against un-armed people does not deserve any recognition. Modern world has a lot of avenues for negotiation towards whatever targets one intents to achieve. This is why is it is logical for any lover of literature to join others in condemning the terrorist attack on the theatre group at Manchester. The attacker cowardly used violence against drama and art, social virtues that only intent to serve mankind through aesthetics and intellectual nourishment but not through brutality of terrorist violence.
In such moments it is agreeable for one to share an intellectual disposition with Wole Soyinka in the speech he delivered three years ago in Dakar, Senegal, to society of western Africa griots, the speech which was under the title a Slap in The Face of Public Taste, it was here that Soyinka reacted to terrorism by blaming religion as man's greatest undoing, Soyinka ascribed terrorism to religious sentimentality which can only be managed through firm counter-terrorism. Terrorism makes Soyinka to look at religion as an alibi or a cloak behind which humanity hides to perpetrate its mad love for worship of the materially powerful. Fortunately, Soyinka looked beyond the flimsy side of those using religion to do bad things by appreciating that the Bible and the Quran are so far the most perfect works of literature ever achieved through human civilization. Though in the same speech Soyinka wondered about what man could have created had he not created religion.
Soyinka was only affirming dialogue but not violence as a better way through which human civilizations can be advanced. And of course it is a fact that, science, religion, politics, commerce, ideology and philosophy can only be carried or be transferred by one across the world through dialogue but not violence. Use of violent crusades and terrorism as evinced in the recent attacks at Manchester and Mogadishu is purely self-defeating actions.