By Richard DABLAH_
(richard.dablah@gmail.com)
I have been living with that headline, “Dead River Gods: Speak Now or Keep Quiet Forever.” It haunts because it names what we have refused to name: the sacrament of water turned commodity, the old reverence of rivers replaced by the ledger of profit. Rivers that once carried our stories and fed our children now yield poisoned fish and the metallic taste of mercury. This is no ghost story; it is a ledger of greed.
Once, our customs treated rivers as living law. Taboos, offerings, and seasonal rests were not pieties alone but practical protocols: groves left standing to hold the rain, festivals that allowed spring to recover, river-keepers who enforced access like stewards of a common inheritance. What outsiders call superstition was, in many places, ecological governance given ritual form. Where those practices were held, waters stayed pure; when they broke, sickness followed. These were survival algorithms encoded as ritual.
When Fred Amugi asked, on World Rivers Day, “Where are the deities?” he did more than lament. He performed an act of truth-telling by naming the moral vacuum where spirits once stood in the public imagination. If the gods are deaf to poisons, who bought their silence? If they are asleep, who turned off the alarm? The question is dangerous because it forces the visible and invisible authorities to answer for what they have allowed.
Call it progress, call it development, but the language has shifted: rivers that fed children now feed cancer. Illegal mining poisons water with mercury and cyanide; chiefs and politicians barter access to commons for campaign cash; entire communities are reduced to daily negotiations with contamination. What once was constrained by ritual and necessity is now driven by a simple calculus: how much can be extracted before the alarm becomes inconvenient? Journalists call it ecocide; that name is only a start. Naming the crime is not the same as stopping it.
We must not romanticize deities into supernatural police. The old spirits were mirrors, reflections of the covenant between people and place. When communities honored their obligations, rivers returned blessings; when greed prevailed, waters reflected the violence. The mythic vocabulary was a ledger, a way to name debts science and law have not yet reconciled. If the mirror lies shattered, the blame belongs to those who held the hammer.
Technocrats speak in parts per million and ministers count votes per margin. Engineers can dredge sediments and scrub heavy metals; lawyers can draft treaties and impose fines. But none of these measures alone repairs a broken covenant. Restoration demands humility, the willingness to return lands, to criminalize ecocide, to make chiefs refuse bribes, to hold corporations and financiers accountable, and to let elders who still hear the river testify in courtrooms and parliaments. For decades, galamsey was treated as a misdemeanor; such categorization is a moral abdication. Our legal vocabulary must widen to catch up with the moral language already written into the land.
If you ask me where the spirits are today, I answer plainly: they are where the harm is. They live in the children with unexplained illnesses, in women forced to walk farther for water, in wells we no longer trust, and in groves felled for a day’s pay and a lifetime of debt. Spirit is not a ghost; it is a ledger of relations. Their silence is not absence but a record of choices made and compromises bought.
This is a provocation, not a prayer: stop praying only for miracles and start demanding justice. Let chiefs choose between true tradition and contracts that sell the rivers. Let churches preach restitution, not resignation. Let journalists name names and follow the money. Let our courts and parliaments answer the whispers of elders. Speak louder than the men with shovels. The gods do not need our noise; our children do.
Flumina tacita testantur.
The silent rivers bear witness.
