Of course it’s an important anniversary. “Where were you when they killed JKF?” they used to ask. “Where were you on 9/11?” is the new buzz.
Me, myself, personally, on 9/11, I was on a bumpy flight between Douala, in Cameroon, and Dakar, in Senegal. It was a small jet aeroplane that was distancing me once again from my family, with unspoken regrets; from one part of Africa to another.
I got the news more or less as I landed, and proceeded to watch the unfolding events, bizarrely, from Gorée, the legendary slave island, where I was working at the time. And of course, like the rest of the world, I was awed, appalled and amazed at what was unfolding before my very eyes on the television screen, out there in the tropics, so far from the scene of the crime. And yet so close across the Atlantic Ocean, and so close to the history that binds us together.
Why?
The events of September 11 2001, when all those passenger planes thumped into civilian and military targets, taking thousands of civilians with them to their doom, turned out to be a long-awaited wake-up call about the state of the world. What has happened since — the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq — has brought it all into sharper focus.
At the same time, they have not brought the world any closer to a solution to its ills or to the very contradictions that brought about that initial catastrophe — the spectacular attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, the Pentagon in Washington, and a supposed attempt to take out the White House itself.
It’s hard not to get sucked into all the conspiracy theories. The most overt of these are those pumped out from Washington and London, claiming that there is a worldwide conspiracy, emanating from the Middle East, to cut at the heart of democracy itself, and bring down the civilised world.
That has been the justification for increasingly bogged down military engagements against the much-reviled Taliban in Afghanistan (which no one did much about before) and Saddam Hussein in Iraq (who no one did much but business with before), which have produced nothing more than heightened fury against the West down on the ground. As the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott once wrote: “Quo fucking vadis?” Where the hell does it all lead?
There are other conspiracy theories that have intruded themselves into the debate since 9/11. When I was last in New York, a radical black radio station was giving serious airtime over several days about how the attack on the World Trade Centre was an elaborate plot hatched by the CIA and the Pentagon itself. They had done serious research, and brought in several eyewitnesses.
Why, the radio station asked, were there all these guys in black suits running around the base of the WTC talking into radios in the middle of the night before disaster struck the next morning? Why were they so busy clearing the area? Why were certain people warned not to show up for work on the fatal morning?
Why were there so many thousands of gallons of diesel fuel stored in the basement, ready to explode, in a perfect demonstration of a controlled demolition, bringing those two erect, elegant edifices down in such perfect fashion?
Why was mayor Rudi Giuliani so evasive in the following days? How come George Bush was out of Washington when the Pentagon was going down? (As Dr Seuss would have put it: “Mr Brown was out of town.”) Why, in fact, was no aircraft wreckage found in the vicinity of the Pentagon? It looked much more like a missile attack. And so on, and so on.
In the meantime, Osama bin Laden, prime suspect in this series of unlikely events, is still on the loose, supposedly somewhere in Pakistan. The world’s most powerful country, backed by the most powerful military and an unparalleled espionage network, is unable to locate and eliminate him. He must be quite a guy.
My own suspicion is that he has shaved off or trimmed down his ridiculous beard and is strolling around in Florida, USA, or on the beaches of California, smiling at the bikinied residents with his disarmingly gentle eyes.
There was a horrific loss of life on 9/11. Five years down the line, the aftershocks have yet to subside. There has still not been an explanation of how all this could have happened — how a bunch of amateurs could actually have accurately flown civilian aircraft into the twin towers in New York with such ease.
And was the fourth aircraft, the one that was apparently headed for the White House, brought down in a Pennsylvania cornfield by heroic passengers who would rather die than see their country’s premier tourist attraction get hit — or was it shot down?
None of these questions has been answered on this critical anniversary of 9/11. But one thing is certain: the world has never been the same ever since, whoever set off all the fireworks in the first place.