Who was Ethnocentrism? No one knew for sure, though Prof. Rumors had it that he, she, or it was probably The Porcupine. The Porcupine? Yes, The Porcupine. Since you were not so sure of The Porcupine’s true identity, did it not cross your mind that, oh, possibly, just possibly, the indefinite article, “a” and “an,” rather than the definite article, “the,” would have been descriptively apposite, at least in that peculiar situation of yesteryear? Not too sure. Not too sure? Supposedly. How was that the problem of Sister Sure then? Well, we sure did not know that either! In that case, how about “some” as either definite or indefinite article in that atypical situation of yesteryear? Indeed, was yesteryear not a true mirror reflection of tomorrow, of The Present, even of The Past?

If you said so. So, again? Just so! In fact, we asked so, did not say so! Well, if you said so. Again. Fine. So be it. Fine. So-and-so said so. Fine. No problemo! Fine. Anyway, were you lost? You, how? Not you! Us, then? Nope! That was all there was to it, Sister Sure, at least for now! So? Yes. Was? No. Were? Maybe. Probably. Possibly. Peradventure. Per adventure? What? What was that? That? Oh yes. That! What do I say? Who was I? Stated differently, who am I? You should have better asked that! That? You mean? No. You meant I then? No. That! That had never been much of a problem, a major problem, either, in that un-ordinary situation of yesterday! Then, I, methinks Today must have been the problem in that un-ordinary situation of yesteryear?

Per adventure. Also, methinks Today, not I, must have all the answers of yesteryear. That yesteryear could be Today, should be Today, or must be Today. Of the Future. Of The Present. Of The Past…That was poetic bedlam!

Emphatically, that problem was eminently of The Future, of The Past, not of The Present. If you said so. Who was you, then, if of The Past should ask? I did not know. Yet, others had also said, speculated, that The Porcupine was a certain Empire, now a fallen Goliath, a feminized Samson and pre-mortem husband of the masculinized Delilah, a ghostly shadow of its former self, its lost former self. A self? Yes. A self. A nebulous self. Indeed. The Porcupine was all that, including I, Some, A, An, of The Future, of The Past, and of The Present, So-and-So, Per Adventure, You, That, Methinks, and the like. And the like too? All of that. Yes.

Still, The Porcupine, all of that, lived in frigid isolation inside the blistering sun of self-conceit, of self-delusion. Moreover, like the slothful turtle, snail, or tortoise, he lived in relative isolation inside the spongy cocoon of self, of selfness, of the fallen Empire, falsely nursing a thought, a millennia-old debunked hypothesis, that, The Shell, that shell of unimaginable foresight, was all he needed to establish or confirm his self-imposed contrived superiority, an unfortunate turn of event carried out against The Shell’s well-informed evaluative, albeit certifiable, objection that he was merely, simply, cotton, not even its boll. Understandably, the white pigmentation of the cotton added to his inventoried disguise of forced superiority. Sadly, their she-men and he-women, educated and uneducated, bleached their beautiful dark skins in spite of their cottony whiteness, snow whiteness.

Pointedly, The Shell had meant to say to him that he was merely “a,” “an,” or “some,” not “the,” not even “it,” in the social universe of ethnic, religious, cultural, and racial equality, although his frigid isolation had imbued him with a horrifyingly false sense of ethnic, cultural, or racial superiority, granted that the word “superiority” was itself a relative concept—a social or cultural construct—in the political world of cottons. It sometimes meant “inferiority” in Cottonian argot! Further, The Porcupine’s confused little bipolar or schizophrenic mind always told him, in fact, deceived him, that he was, without a doubt, “the,” that he exclusively was of yesteryear, of The Past, of The Future, and that other animals who looked exactly like him did not belong to those chronological frames of animality.

However, it never occurred to him that his Gangnam-style psycho-dance moves were misrepresentations of echolocation, a correct diagnosis of auditory hallucination. Paradoxically, he, The Porcupine, was not even as proverbially intelligent as The Scarab Beetle, who, it may be recalled, possessed an ant-sized brain, although still capable of using his unimaginable foresight to navigate the intellectual complexity of the known universe of nature, of life, including The Porcupine’s, with the aid of the Milky Way. Jealousy. The problem of jealousy. How? The Porcupine’s misopediac attitude toward The Scarab Beetle partly stemmed from The Scarab Beetle’s international award-winning inventions: Afrocentric Nationalism and African Personality.

Technically, both innovative theories, the first of their kinds, paved the way for radical reorganization of the distortive thinking of post-colonial mindsets and for restoring de-personalized characterology of human beings, humanized by-products of Darwinian imperialism, racism, and colonialism, to the pinnacle of existential sanity and human decency. Unfortunately, the misguided members of The Nation of Lousy Monsters (NLM) distanced themselves from them, the two concepts, while, rather believing in the Ivory-tower invention of elitist rejection of the people and in returning the people to the psycho-emotional brutality of Darwinian racism. Re-colonization! What more?

Understandably, as always, The Porcupine became maddeningly jealous of The Scarab Beetle’s range of visual, ontological, and intellectual mechanics, so he renamed The Scarab Beetle, quite provocatively and disrespectfully, The Dung Beetle. Of course, like his well-respected parents and the larger community to which he belonged as a valued elder and sage, The Scarab Beetle loved dung and made no private or public pretence of disliking it. Instead, he used it to quench the fire of his gustatory yearnings when the need arose, which they sporadically did. That was simply that! But, what about The Porcupine, if You may ask?

The Porcupine ate the dung of The Grasscutter, dawn, morning, afternoon, evening, year-round, too, but mistakenly, probably inadvertently, thought of it as being outside the immediate sphere of public knowledge. The truth, the in-your-face truth, as it were, was that the emotional simplicity of his mind had converted the limitlessly-expanding universe to “an ant,” a situation that compelled him to perceive complexities exclusively in reductionist configurations, somehow making him believe public knowledge meant “knowledge in the public” and “the public” meant “openness” or “privacy.” To him, to his dead particle of dusty mind, there existed no difference between “silence” and “pandemonium.” They essentially meant the same as in “same”!

In other others, his overblown atom of all-knowing mind saw no qualitative difference between “privacy” on the one hand and “publicity” or “openness” on the other hand, which also adequately explained why he could scream at the top of his lungs, in much the same way when he openly evacuated on the beach in full glare of visiting Cottonians or when he held “private” audience with members of his family. Also, rather repulsively, The Grasscutter dung eventually underwent cultural fermentation in The Porcupine’s self-deceiving sawdust-head and maggot-infected mouth, thus rendering his vocal and mental stench psycho-nasally intolerable. His fake superiority stemmed from public rejection and isolation of him owing to his repulsive psychosocial stench.

“Another obvious emotional sequent was that of his earsplitting ignorance, his failure to acknowledge his social-pariah status as a natural outgrowth of his intellectual and rhetorical dungy fermentation,” recalled Methinks, The Porcupine. That. Oh that! Of The Past. Of The Future. Of the un-ordinary situation of yesteryear. Today. You. I. A. An. Some. It. Of The Present. So-and-So. And the like. That? He was all that, The Porcupine. He thought his Empire of You, I, Some, Methinks, of The Past, of The Present, An, of The Future, So-and-So, A, Today, and the like, oh, was all of that. All of that. An Empire of Boastful Emptiness, of grudging nothingness. Still, The Porcupine, of The Past, of The Present, of The Present, I, Today, Methinks, and the like, hey, was merely a supreme virago calabash of boastful emptiness, of psycho-spiritual animalness!

The Porcupine—a man-woman, a she-goat man of hollow emptiness, a plastic bag of psycho-emotional feebleness that could not erect an Empire of grudging emptiness all by himself, a cheap undertaking whose culmination had been ascribed to his pregnant and infirm he-women, blind nieces, and earthly Yaa Asaasewaa. An empty taxidermy of vanities at that, The Porcupine! That Porcupine of The. Of I. Of A. Of Some. Of An. Of unordinary situation of yesteryear. Of Ethnocentrism. Of Kleptomania…That!

That? The Porcupine drank stale palm-wine and ate roasted Grasscutter dung while their he-women went to war on his behalf! All of that, he boastfully said of himself. An. Of The Past. Some. Of The Present. I. Of The Future. Methinks. And the like. All of that. And yet whenever his brave he-women complained about his manly she-ness of cowardice, The Porcupine, a she-goat man of hollow emptiness, travelled to his forehead, The Salaga Market, and stole real he-men, he-women, and children of Elephants, Dinosaurs, Horses, Tigers, Jaguars, Lions, Mammoths, Hippopotami, and Bears, great fighters whom he forcibly employed as mercenaries during The Battle of Giants.

All of that. Of The Past. Of The Future. Of The Present. The rest of the stolen he-women, children, and he-men from The Salaga Market, “the leftovers,” he called them, he sold to The Cottonians in exchange for rickety arms, tools he used for slave-raiding and Grasscutter-dung-plundering exercises on his neighbors’ fields. That was the wicked nature of The Porcupine, that she-ness of cowardly sheepishness! His fiery greed knew no bounds, traveling past the limits of the Milky Way, not his vaunted ant-like intelligence. Oh! The Porcupine, a-spiritual hominid of hollow emptiness, was known, that is, proverbially, to have sold his mother, his father, his brothers and sisters, his grandparents, and his children for trinkets of broken mirrors and bootlegs of poisoned schnapps. That Kleptomania.

The entire gargoyled visage of The Porcupine, it turned out, came into The World of Confucianism masterfully shrouded in the psychological genomics of The Kleptomania. The Kleptomania himself. That is. That. His was an Empire raised upon a solid foundation of Ethnocentrism and Kleptomania, of slave raiding and plundering of other living creatures and selling them to The Cottonians. That? Oh she-ness man of The Future, of The Present, of The Past. The Porcupine. I and Methinks. Of himself, The Porcupine had a very low opinion of himself. He laughably called that contrived inferiority complex of his superiority complex.

What? That. I and Methinks once asked of The Porcupine, of himself: “Why were you so wicked and so greedy, to the extent of selling your children, your parents, your grandparents, your nieces and nephews, your entire family to The Cottonians for emptiness, for hollowness?” No response. That Ethnocentrism. That Kleptomania. That Ethnocentrism was Kleptomania. That Kleptomania was Ethnocentrism. Mirror likeness. Sort of. Yes, The Porcupine cleverly managed to skip the question then majestically stepped out of the staid cocoon of his pocket-sized mind, his brain, into the warm embrace of cold nothingness, singing the national anthem of The Empire of Hollow Nothingness:

That Ethnocentrism was Kleptomania, what do you say? Our friendly enemies say we are hardworking stealing and thieving scallywags Our enemy-friends say we are Grasscutter dung eaters That Kleptomania was Ethnocentrism, what do you say? The world says we feed on a fermented sense of ethnic superiority, of self-delusion Our King has become a thieving presidential rapping-gangster of emotional monstrosity That Ethnocentrism was Kleptomania, what do you say? Methinks and I say we are a forest people of animals Of The Past. Of The Present. Of The Future. That Kleptomania was Ethnocentrism, what do you say? Of That. Of I. Of Some. Of You. Of A. Of Today. Of An. Of It. Of The. Of un-ordinary situation of yesteryear…That!

Quite grippingly, the Amerigo Vespucci rapper KRS-1 (Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everyone) had an alternative name for The Empire of Hollow Emptiness. He fittingly branded it The Grasscutter Dung-Eating Empire. He also concomitantly referred to its national anthem as “The Ghetto Anthem” or “Self-Destruction,” after all, as the people had known, KRS-1, a conscious rhapsodic mouthpiece of the downtrodden, had Komodo Dragon (KA Busia) and JB Danquah (Tasmanian Devil) in mind when he composed the anti-nationalist, anti-patriotic lyrics and set them to the decayed rhythm of Danquah- and Busia-esque mis-consciousness, believing that the stinking auras of the two ethnocentric leaders of The Nation of Lousy Monsters (NLM) bathed in the emotional mud-puddle of plantation, crab, or ghetto mentality.

But then again, KRS-1 sneaked another powerful line, the “Mate Meho Bastards,” into “The Ghetto Anthem,” about that of the bastard son of Father KA Busia and Mistress JB Danquah, General Akwasi Afrifa, of the progressive organization, Afrifa Faces Reason & Commonsense (AFRC), which did justice to a reprobate inconsequential like Afrifa according to the social demands of public consensus and of popular sovereignty. Put differently, the AFRC exactly did to Akwasi Afrifa what Linguist Baffour Akoto, KA Busia, and JB Danquah would have readily done to him on the subversive cross of national betrayal—“mate meho” from the harmonious community of critical-thinking human beings. That is, when he had faced the comeuppance judgment of The People’s Firing Squad at the Teshie Military Range, the womanly coward, Akwasi Afrifa, screamed like a wounded chick: “All Die Be Die.”

On the other hand, putting that historical aside aside, as it were, let the rainfall-story of the extinct Empire continue. That? Posterity is asking. Yes that! The ancestors had already responded. What was that? Meaning the centuries-old rigor-mortis body, the ghost of a dead empire, they had been mourning had not been an extant empire entire, but rather an extinct empire of yesteryear, not a living empire of backward-looking tomorrow. That is? Why did they, the she-men, shamefully betray the earthly Yaa Asaasewaa, while, simultaneously, shamelessly beating their fluffy chests and calling themselves he-men in the same stinking breath of emotional pettiness?

Did The Porcupine always have to play The Signifying Monkey, The Kweku Ananse, and The Esu-Elegbara in the theatrical battlefield located on the Lake Bosomtwe of moral and historical truth? Not necessarily. The reason. The earthly Yaa Asaasewaa reportedly had said to the he-men: “I must say this, if you, the she-men of Anti-Ash, will not go forward, then we will. We, the he-women, will. I shall call upon my fellow he-women. We will fight The Cottonian he-men. We will fight the last till the last of us falls in the battlefield.” All hell broke loose. The cowardly he-men of Anti-ash soon began calling, even perceiving her, thence as rhetorical witchhood of boastfulness, of foolhardiness, essentially. “Like women, like men,” they say.

“The grinding teeth of history,” they say, “Is like pregnancy. Pregnancies do not hide like coward lizards and snails and sloths and ghosts of he-men. They lead he-men and he-women as boldly and confidently as nose leads the face, not as timidly and servilely and obediently as shadow follows she-men and she-women when facing the light of truth and of openness.” That? Yes. The grinding teeth of history are here to stay. And stay they will. Should. Must. It turned out earthly Yaa Asaasewaa had made that declaration of war, that clarion call for social, political, and ethno-animal justice, even as her sisterly, motherly, and grandmotherly she-men, the masculine weaklings of the dead Empire of Anti-Ash, munched their way through a social gridlock of roasted Grasscutter dung and musty palm-wine blood of virgin girls whose innocent heads accompanied The King of Anti-Ash to the underworld of ethno-animal inferiority complex.

Eventually, they lost The War of Self-Esteem, of The Battle of Ethno-Animal Supremacy with The Cottonians, a war which Prof. Jared Diamond, a Cottonian historian, described so vividly in his Bible of Books—“Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.” And the secret reason behind their epochally crushing defeat, their enduring loss of contrived superiority complex? The men of Anti-Ash betrayed their martial he-women. In fact, even The Porcupine the First, their War King, was clandestinely in on it, the betrayal, namely, Ghana’s and Africa’s Day of Shame, as well. So-and-So and Today knew all the facts but chose not to breathe a word to anyone for reasons of collective self-preservation, their contrived superiorized inferiority complex.

The crushing defeat culminated in The Cottonians’ capture of The Porcupine the First whom they shipped off to Sea-Shell Island, an archipelago of intellectual baldness located in the Indian Ocean—on the pate of The Porcupine the First. What is more, the earthly Yaa Asaasewaa and those other female chiefs who had seconded her clarion call for war and had ended up fighting with her to neutralize the political encroachment of The Cottonians also landed on Sea-Shell Island. Certainly, while in exile on Sea-Shell Island, as had reportedly been acknowledged and consequently recorded by historians, The Porcupine the First secretly negotiated for his release from the prison of sizzling islandness with the leader of The Cottonians, the mustachioed Hitler of colonialism, in exchange for the female chiefs’ and Yaa Asaasewaa’s existential durance on Sea-Shell Island.

Sadly, the female chiefs and the earthly Yaa Asaasewaa would remain in permanent captivity, ultimately dying on Sea-Shell Island. Since then, The Anti-Ash Empire had become a moribund forested zoo where the royal stool—The Silver Stool of Lies—crown jewels, royal oath, and The Porcupine had been put on open display for public viewing. Notably, the mustachioed Hitler of colonialism was kind enough to build The Man-She Palace, later the official seat of the cowardly Porcupine, in Kum-Ase, the phallic capital of Yaa Asaasewaa’s pundic he-manliness. That was part of the great story of Today. Of The Past. Of The Present. Of The Future. I. Methinks. You. So-and-So. The Porcupine. A. Some. An…

We shall return…