I hardly imagined the expression implied that even after the flesh and bones of the perpetrator of the crime or the victim’s had long decayed, the crime/debt lives on. I however remembered Mark Antony’s funeral oration by Julius Caesar’s graveside: “The evil that men do, lives after them; the good is often interred with their bones..” Obviously the (colonial) master and servant shared certain concepts, albeit in their diverse tongues.
There’s poignant irony in Mark Anthony’s oration. The human history norm is studded with statues and monuments of great men; here and there, women, who excelled in their relationships with fellow humans, guaranteeing themselves evergreen memory in the annals of history. Mark Anthony’s oration, the irony spin notwithstanding, conveys subtle element of truth. The evil men, that men do may not be depicted or reproduced in monuments or on their embalmed tombs, but it nevertheless , lives forever in written or oral and carried from generation to generation. Think of Cain the fratricide, Lot’s wife, Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mobutu Se Se Seko, Idi Amin...
