An Orchestra of Minorities

by Chigozie Obioma

  Elders of Alandiichie, old fathers of Alaigbo, of the black peoples of the rain forest, custodians of the Black Man’s wisdom, hear me: these products of the White Man’s sorcery are the reasons you now complain and cry and wail about your children like fowls after a hawk attack. It is the White Man who has trampled on your traditions. It is he who has seduced and slept with your ancestral spirits. It is to him that the gods of your land have submitted their heads, and he has shaved them clean, down to the skin of their scalps. He has flogged the high priests and hanged your rulers. He has tamed the animals of your totems and imprisoned the souls of your tribes. He has spit in the face of your wisdoms, and your valiant mythologies are silent before him.

  Ijango-ijango, why have I spoken with such a wet tongue about the ancestors? It is because this object that bore my host and others in the sky was magnificent beyond words. All through the flight, even my host—a lover of birds—wondered how it flew. It seemed to him that the propulsion of the plane was by its wings. It soared through the clouds, and over the interminable expanse of water, which had the color of the sky at the end of rainy season. This was Osimiri, the great water body that spread around the circumference of the world. It was the water that contained salt, the osimiri-nnu. Your sacred tears, Chukwu.

  Out of curiosity, I exited the body of my host and soared out of the plane. I was instantly submerged in this wasteland of noises and spirit bodies. All across the horizon, I saw incorporeal creatures—onyeuwas and guardian spirits and others—traveling somewhere, either descending or ascending with magnificent speed. In the distance, a gray mass of creatures crawled over the illuminate orb that was the sun. I tried not to focus on them but to look instead on the plane, whose wings did not flutter as a bird’s. I hovered over it, flying at a strange, unearthly speed as the plane raced on. I had never stopped to watch such a thing before, and it terrified me. I returned immediately into the body of my host. He was still examining the plane in fascination, for it had people, televisions, toilets, food, chairs, and all that may be found in the houses of people on land. But much of his thoughts rested on Ndali.

  He soon fell asleep, and when he woke, too many things were happening all at once. The people were clapping and cheering even as a voice returned to the sound boxes. The plane itself had thudded and was now speeding down somewhere he could tell was no longer the air, for he could feel the vibrations against the ground. The plane was also now full of light, both daylight and man-made light from the interior. He slid up the window covering and understood the reason for the commotion. Joy erupted in him, too. He thought that if his father and mother had been alive now, how proud they would have been. He thought of Nkiru in Lagos. He asked himself what she was doing now. He wondered, with mild sadness, whether she now had a child from that much older man. When children of men think of things that are unpleasant, their thinking patterns are not the same as they are when they ponder pleasant things. This was why his mind emphasized the age of his sister’s husband. He would call her from here, Instanbull: maybe it would make a difference. It might restore her faith in him as her brother, her only surviving family. But how could he do it? He did not have her number or her husband’s. It was she alone who called him from vendor pay phones on special occasions like Christmas, New Year’s, sometimes at Easter, and once on the anniversary of their father’s death. She’d cried on the phone that day in a way that had shocked him and given him hope that they may yet renew their relationship. But it didn’t matter. When she ended the call with the usual “I just wanted to call to know how you are doing,” he knew that she would be swallowed again into the void.

  He was thrown out of his thoughts by the sudden eruption of clapping and voices. Their faces filled with smiles, people began extracting their bags from the compartments, slugging on backpacks, propping up the retractable handles of their roller bags. The reason for their joy was varied, but he could tell by the clapping and by the shouts of “Praise the Lord” and “Hallelujah” from the back that people were happy the plane had landed safely. He reckoned that it may have been because of the string of recent occurrences regarding planes in Nigeria. For not too long before, a plane carrying dignitaries, including the sultan of Sokoto and the son of a former president, had crashed, killing nearly everyone on board. Only less than a year before that, another plane had crashed, killing a well-known female pastor, Bimbo Odukoya. But he thought even more that these people were happy because they had been lifted from places where they had been suffering into this new country. The plane had lifted out of the land of lack, of man-pass-man, the land in which a man’s greatest enemies are members of his household; a land of kidnappers, of ritual killers, of policemen who bully those they encounter on the road and shoot those who don’t bribe them, of leaders who treat those they lead with contempt and rob them of the commonwealth, of frequent riots and crisis, of long strikes, of petrol shortages, of joblessness, of clogged gutters, of potholed roads, of bridges that collapse at will, of littered streets and trashy neighborhoods, and of constant power outages.

  OLISABINIGWE, the great fathers say that when a man crosses into an unknown land, he becomes again like a child. He must rely on asking questions and on searching for directions. This is also why when they got off the plane, my host did not know what to do. The place they stepped into from the plane, an airport, was massive and filled to the brim with all kinds of people. At first he thought of his big bags, where he’d folded away most of his belongings that weren’t sold or burnt or kept with his uncle, but then he remembered he’d been repeatedly told he would pick them up in Cyprus. All he had now was the bag Ndali had given him, in which he kept his admission letters, her letter, photos, and all the vital documents which he needed to present to the school in the new country. The other black people from his country stepped into the chaos, too, and disappeared into the moving stream of people. Whether left or right or behind, they appeared in flashes, amongst the gathering. He walked up into the center of the great hall, where a big clock hung from the roof. He stopped behind an old yellow-skinned couple who stood there gazing at the clock as if it were the body of a man hanging on a tree. A small car came behind him and honked. He stepped aside, and it went on, honking at every stop, as it tried to navigate between the innumerable people crowding along the hallways like it was a market in Umuahia, with the intermittent announcement of arrivals and departures echoing through the expansive hall. He turned and walked in the direction where he’d seen many of his compatriots go.

  He’d walked for nearly half a kilometer, passing many curiosities with a load of thoughts in his head, when he came by a fellow with a long beard and dark glasses. He asked the fellow what he should do. The fellow asked him for his boarding card. He took out the slip of paper they had handed him at the airport.

  “Your plane to Cyprus will leave by seven. Now is only three, so you must wait. Me sef I’m going there. Just relax, er?”

  He thanked the man, and the fellow went his way, walking as if he were slightly dancing. “Relax,” the man had told him. It meant wait. It meant too that there are many things that a man cannot control. There are forces that must assemble, things that must come together, an agreed measure of time, and an accepted code which must, in the end, materialize into something that will occasion movement. This was an example of that. To leave here, he must assemble with others who also have paid to get to the same place. When they assemble, they will board the plane. There will be people waiting for them to fly the plane. But let’s not forget, Egbunu, that it will happen when the ticking hand of the clock strikes seven. That is what must summon them—him and all these people. In the days of the fathers it was the voice of the village or the town crier and the sound of his gong. As I have spoken about before, the White Man’s civilization depends on this. Take away the clock and nothing would be possible in his world.

  What must he do while waiting for the hand to strike seven? Relax. But I, his chi, could not relax, for I could sense that something had gone w
rong in the realm of the spirit, but I could not tell what it was. Presently, my host found a seat near a place where people gathered, drinking and smoking cigarettes. He sat watching the cubicle, the airy image of a bearded man who moved about as if possessed. It reminded him of how his beard had grown after his father died, how he hadn’t shaved for weeks, and how one day he looked at himself in the mirror and laughed at himself for a long time—so long that later he wondered if he had become mad.

  Beside him, a white woman was asleep, her eyelids twitching like a child’s. He watched her for a few minutes, his eyes on the greenish line of veins along her neck and on her long blue fingernails. She reminded him of Miss J, and he wondered if she was still a prostitute. While he sat there, Chukwu, I came out of him briefly. I had been longing to see what the spiritual world of this place was like, but I had not been able to do so because of my host’s uncertain state of mind. Now, once I stepped out, I saw that the place was filled with spirits, some so grotesque in shape and form that they were forever imprinted in my mind. One was arrayed in the misty costume of ancient ghosts and discarnate beings, the palest thing my eye had ever seen. It stood behind a withering white man who sat in a wheelchair, staring vacuously forward. A ghost sat by itself on the floor of the airport, unmoved by people who walked in and out through it. A child kicked a ball through its incorporeal torso, but it did not even stir. It kept on shaking its head, gesticulating, and speaking in quick, dribbling speech in a foreign language.

  My host had risen from his seat by the time I returned into him. He walked on for a long time before he chanced upon two Nigerian men who’d sat in the row directly in front of him on the plane. They had just emerged from a very brightly lit store and were carrying the same multicolored bag as many of those in the airport. From the bits of the duo’s conversation he’d heard while on the plane, and from the way one of the men carried himself, he knew this man had been living in Cyprus for a while. The man he thought had lived in Cyprus was dressed in a plain jacket and jeans, and his ears were plugged. The other, a man of similar height as my host, wore a cardigan. The man looked unkempt, with sleep in the side of one of his eyes. He bore the countenance of someone who was being inwardly tormented. My host hastened towards them, wanting to know from them what he was to do next.

  “Excuse me, brothers,” he called after them.

  When he came up to them, the man in the jacket moved his bag from one shoulder to the other and stretched out his hand as if he’d been expecting my host.

  “Please, are you from Nigeria?” my host said.

  “Yes, yes,” the man said.

  “Going to Cyprus?”

  “Yes,” the man said, and the other nodded.

  “You don go there before?” the other man said.

  “No, I neva go before,” my host said.

  The man looked at the other, who stared at him with a certain curious fixedness as some of those who had been on the same plane walked past.

  “I never go, too. In fact, my brother, I wish someone had warned me before I left Nigeria.”

  “Why?” my host said.

  “Why?” the man said, and pointed to the man in the jacket. “T.T. has been there before, and he said it is not a good place.”

  My host looked up at T.T., who was nodding.

  “I no understand,” my host said. “What you mean the place no good?”

  The other man muttered a faint laugh in response, and then continued to shake his head like one who had uttered a common universal truth only to see that his listener was not aware of it.

  “Let T.T. tell you himself. I never go there, I just sit with him on the plane from Lagos and he told me many things.”

  T.T. told my host about Cyprus. And the things he said were grim. T.T. paused only when my host asked a question—“You mean no jobs at all?”; “No, are you serious?”; “But is it not Europe?”; “No UK or US embassy?”; “They put you in prison?”; “How come?”—but even after he finished telling the story, my host could not believe much of it.

  “You know; I am fucked up. Aye mi, oh!” the other man, whom T.T. had identified as Linus during his speech, said. Then he put both hands on his head.

  My host turned from these men and muttered to himself that it could not be true, for he was very disturbed. How, he wondered, could there be no jobs in a country abroad, where white people live? Maybe the Nigerian students who were going there were lazy. If the place was as bad as T.T. had just told him, why would T.T. go there himself? These things contradicted everything his friend Jamike had told him about the place. Jamike had assured him that his life would change for the better once he arrived in Cyprus. Jamike had assured him that he could easily own a house soon after and that it would be easy to emigrate from there to Europe or elsewhere.

  While the man, T.T., continued on about many people who had been deceived into going to Cyprus, my host listened with half his ears, the other battling with the voice of his head. Chukwu, I flashed it in his mind that this was the right decision. Perhaps, he resolved, it was best to call Jamike and talk to him about these things rather than wait until he came to pick him up at the airport in Cyprus. Indeed—he recalled just as the last thought dissolved into his mind that Jamike had specifically asked him to call his phone once he reached Istanbul. Although T.T. was still speaking—now about a man who, on reaching Cyprus, discovered he had been deceived and now walks about the place in tattered clothes like a madman—my host moved his legs to signal that he wanted to leave. Once T.T. paused, he said, “I wan go call my friend. Make I call am, er.”

  The duo shook their heads, T.T. with a slight bemused smile on his face. My host went to the phone booth, determined to confirm from Jamike that all the things T.T. had told him were either untrue or just some effort to terrify the other man. Perhaps he was trying to swindle the other guy, and this false information was part of the plot. He must relate to these men with caution. I was thrilled with this reasoning, for I have lived among mankind long enough to know that any meeting between two persons who do not know each other is often dominated by uncertainty and, to a lesser degree, suspicion. If it is a person one has met at a marketplace and with whom one has engaged in some transaction, then there arises the fear. Is he going to cheat me? Is this grain, this cup of milk, this chain wristwatch worth so much? If it is a man who has just met a woman of interest, he wonders: is she going to like me? Will she, if possible, drink with me?

  This was what my host had just done. In that flustered state, with questions rushing into his mind like blood from a severed limb, he tottered off towards the other end of the airport to the phone booths. He stood behind two white men in white frocks for the second of three phone booths. From them came the smell of costly perfumes. They both had two of the same polythene bag nearly everyone in the airport carried—bags bearing the inscription DUTY FREE, the meaning of which he did not know. When the men in the frocks had finished their calls, he climbed into the cubicle. He brought out the foolscap sheet on which he’d scribbled Jamike’s number and, following the directions on the side of the phone, dialed it. But what returned was a recurrent burst of static and a voice that sometimes came on to announce that the number was invalid before trailing into some unfamiliar language. He repeated the dial, with the same result.

  Ezeuwa, not once since I’ve been with him had he been this shocked by something. He placed the bag he wore on his shoulder on the floor and dialed the number again, that same number from which Jamike had called him only the previous week. He made to ring it again, but turning, he saw that a queue had formed behind him, their faces eager and impatient. He hung the phone back on the grip and, with his eyes still on the paper, made his way through the crowded airport. When he got to the spot where the two men had been before, there was no trace of them. In their stead sat a heavily bearded white man with rheumy eyes gazing stoically at the world as if someone had set it on fire. Ebubedike, it was here that I first got a glimpse of all that was to come.

  OB
ASIDINELU, at the time, I did not know what I had seen, nor did my host. What I knew—and what he knew, too—was that something had gone wrong, but this was not a cause for panic. This was a world in which things go wrong. Most things. And the fact that things had gone wrong did not always mean that disaster was looming. This is why the old fathers say that the fact that a millipede has more than a hundred legs does not mean that he is a great runner. Things can misalign; darkness can mount and encroach on the light of the day; but it will not always mean that night has come. So I did not raise alarm. I let him walk on in search of the two men until he found them, just an hour before the next flight, by a waterfall, gazing into a computer. He ran up to them with the urgency of one fleeing a leopard. When he got to them, he was breathless.

  “We went to eat there,” T.T. said, pointing at the place on whose threshold hung a notice in the White Man’s language that said FOOD COURT. “Have you called your friend?”

  My host shook his head. “I have tried and tried, but it is not going. Not going at all.”

  “Why? Let me see the number. Is it correct—the code? It must be eleven.”