The abolition of posters will greatly affect the posteriors of poster-sticking imposters.

My dear Billy,

The history of mankind has been marked by several major and minor wars. There’s been the great epic war of the Ramayana in which two enemies were pitched against each other, as in most succeeding wars up to our times. Then there was the Mahabharata, another epic war, which opposed two close relatives, the sons of two brothers. This too has become an eternal conflict which is growing more and more intense. To this day, brother is fighting brother ferociously over inherited property – the parents and grandparents have toiled hard to acquire property which their sons and daughters are fighting each other to squander.

There’s also been the Trojan War, the War of the Roses, the Opium War, the two World Wars of the last century, the war in Vietnam, the Star Wars and many others. Most of these wars have been lost and won, my dear Billy. But the war against ignorance has almost been a lose-lose affair, unlike the conflicts in the local education sector which have always known win-win solutions. So far, nobody has been able to win a war against ignorance except my good friend Rafic Soormally who lives in England, or rather, because he lives in England. But then, there are many other Mauritians who live in England, and yet…

And today, in Mauritius, they are embarking upon a new kind of war – the poster war. The authorities have just had a dream, and in their dream they suddenly found that posters constituted a hideous, harrowing eyesore that called for immediate obliteration. This in a desperate bid to maintain the semblance of the paradise island concept.

And so, they have decreed that henceforth, and with immediate effect, posters should be banned from all our buildings, walls, trees, electric poles and all other places, virtual and real. Even before the law was enacted, they started attacking, and suddenly all the posters were destroyed in one fell swoop under the focused cameras of the MBC. The war against posters is on, my dear Billy. In a highly concerted élan, ministers, mayors, students, boxing champions, politicians in garbs of chameleons or vice versa, the forces vives, sugar industry workers and others who didn’t quite know what it was all about, went through towns and villages, armed with a few implements and a lot of determination, and waged a ferocious war against posters, some of which must have been put up by none other than the very warriors themselves.

“Dékolé pa kolé” – unstick don’t stick – went the fierce war cry, and our brave soldiers of the occasion charged fearlessly as the passive enemy, hanging stupidly inert on the walls, could offer absolutely no resistance in the face of such a relentless armada. One by one the poor posters fell, as their defeat was incontestably established. Fortunately, it was not the same jury that had defeated our Bruno Julie at Beijing. That was the end of a glorious sojourn on the wall, the tree, the lamp-post, which the posters had been protecting from the cold, the breeze, the rain, the dust, and the smoke from fuming vehicles.

What was their crime, my dear Billy? Simply that they had been mounted on the wall and forgotten there, or covered by other posters often put up by the same people. Before embarking upon such a serious poster-bashing mission, have they for one instant thought of the vital role that posters play in the life of the population? They are the life-blood of communication. They are the ones that tell you that the MMM will make a crucial announcement at a meeting at Bar Chacha on a certain day and time, and that their cherished leader will read a chapter and verse from the Book of Revelations on Valayden; or that at the inauguration of a bus stop at Pont Bon Dié some time next week, Labour is going to disclose its plan for making black Obama rule over white America, and how to reach self-sufficiency in food by cultivating crops in the atmosphere.

However, I must tell you there are also other types of posters too, my dear Billy. There are those that seem to tell you that if you are a lousy, smelly, idle, underprivileged and over-sexed status-seeking neurotic moron, vote for Mr. X or Madam Z. There are also posters that will tell you there’s a trade fair going on somewhere. These are like people who tell you that you are a stupid bum who doesn’t know what to do with your time and money, and that you had better go to the fair and waste both.

My greatest worry is about the poster stickers, my dear Billy. This tribe of seekers vies with each other at election time to put up the posters of their candidates, thus facilitating their leaders, in case of victory, to constitute their pool of advisers, board members and other nominees from among the brotherhood. The abolition of posters will greatly affect the posteriors of these poster sticking imposters.

Posterity will tell us whether the anti-poster campaign was worth engaging in. But their disappearance will certainly erode a good chunk of our folk landscape.

The walls will now lay bare and look naked as they will be disrobed of their papery covering.