“……. [Not long before the end of 15th century] the British Isles and western Europe in general were but distant backwaters of the Mediterranean world. Little of importance ever happened there. Even the Roman Empire – the only important premodern European empire – derived most of its wealth from its North African, Balkan and Middle Eastern provinces. Rome’s western European provinces were a poor Wild West, which contributed little aside from minerals and slaves. Northern Europe was so desolate and barbarous that it wasn’t even worth conquering …….” (Yuval Noah Harari).
This is the first day of first month in 2022CE – on the Gregorian calendar! The year 2021CE is history! History can be interestingly enlightening. It can even be very illuminating especially when it is not rendered – only – from the perspective of the ‘conqueror’. All sides of a historical rendition (which are, unfortunately, almost always, not complete on the table) may offer us the opportunity to make informed and ‘objective’ judgement of past happenings. Regrettably, as implied earlier, the annihilated parties, in wars, for instance, do not always have the opportunity to relay their side of the story! That is the reality, in most cases, concerning what is/are presented/accepted as history! Thus, ‘history’ may be perverted, deliberately made disjointed, biased, warped, muddled up, revised and sometimes outrightly contrived.
Consequently, ‘conquerors’ make efforts at transmitting ‘history’ – theirs and others’ – orally and/or in written form, from one epoch to the other, fearlessly justifying its content, for themselves and against the annihilated side(s)! ‘Conquerors’ may be ‘benevolent’ at transmitting ‘history’ of and for the vanquished! It therefore suffices to say that ‘history’ is never ‘complete’ without the (unavailable) account from the vanquished! This account, if not lost in history, is difficult to come by and propagate! Nevertheless, efforts toward this is important, without losing sight of the fact that it is unfair to judge history using today’s standard. We do not intend to analyse history, here, using today’s standard. This, of course, will be unfair! Yet, we all still need to go into history and relate it to the present in order to help the future.
When the news of the death of a 12-year-old boy named Sylvester Oromoni Jnr. went viral, it was as if the ‘unusual’ happened. True to type of a pretentious, deceptive, reality-denying and lying society such as the current Nigeria, there was an insincere hullabaloo that appears to have died down, today! We want to believe this is so because of legal implication(s) of discussing it in the public domain! Newspapers and other news outlets, then, vociferously reported that the late Sylvester Oromoni Jnr. was allegedly beaten by fellow students in such a way that it resulted in his death. The phenomenon was swiftly described as bullying! We send our heartfelt condolence to family/friends of the Oromonis and others that have suffered from such a catastrophe! This kind of traumatic experience is better imagined than experienced!