currently, it is not certain whether they are prepared “to want to do more”.
The worrisome signals are evident in the first part of the poem, showing what happens
when leadership is driven less by the ethos of responsibility than by personal ambition:
The demented set his hut on fire
And stood aside to watch the ashes of his life
The child is set again on a path of death
And my fear returns to me (31)The reign has become that of an apocalypse, the annihilation it is likely to breed is
enormous in the estimation of the people. This is why it is comparable to the memory of
the Civil War. The implication of this is that the same brinkmanship of the civilian and
military class that devolved into the war is at play again under the despotism of
Babangida. The long standing battle that has always existed between the artist and the
state here appears to be awarding victory to the state because the wish of the state appears
to be on the ascendance. When this happens especially in the form it takes in the socio-
political background to this work, Oguibe himself says: “we (artists) have even greater
reason to be doubtful... we are simply saying what we see, for it is seeing and not saying,
our people say, that kills the elder. It is hearing and not heeding that will kill the child”
(Stewart Brown 1995: 59-60). Saying therefore becomes a burden of responsibility in “A
Gathering Fear”. It is an attempt to expose all there is to the machination of the state
against the people on the one hand, and on the other, an attempt to interpret the
implications. So by proverbially telling on “the child [that] is set again on the path of
death”, the generally pervasive metaphor of the “abiku” child which many Nigerian
writers, the most famous among whom is Ben Okri have explored comes into the
picture again. For the mischievous spirit-child who is destined to be born as severally as
it is prepared to die before attaining consciousness, the trauma and instability it brings on
its parents can be rightly linked to a dangerously treacherous and vertiginous point to
which Nigeria is pushed in the march once again towards the carnage of the Civil War.
This is what the poet means when he says “These clouds now hurrying back/ Heralding
the clap of thunder / We’ve walked this path before / Memory lies ahead wriggling in her
pain” (31). The “path of thunder” has also come to appropriate every other form of crisis