Season of Anomy

by Wole Soyinka

“I know my people—they are cowards!”

  Batoki confronted the raised eyebrows of his guests with a confident stare and repeated, “I tell you they are cowards. When you have killed a couple of them and put away some tens behind bars, the rest will behave themselves and toe the line. If they don’t, add a zero to the numbers. Kill a couple of tens of them and put some hundreds behind bars. If that doesn’t break them kill a few thousands and take no more prisoners. And let them know it. If that fails I give you permission to call me a bastard.”

  Over a champagne dinner for his associates of the Cartel, Chief Batoki gave vent to his contempt for his own people. But his real audience was Zaki Amuri the all-powerful tyrant of Cross-river. It confirmed his own loyalty to a sodality that transcended mere regionalism. The only party that truly transcends local boundaries, Batoki chuckled as he entreated his guests to his daughter’s crabmeat delicacies—“is the party that runs the mint.”

  “And the guns.”

  All three in mufti turned to the speaker, the Commandant-in-Chief who represented the fourth arm of the Cartel. His late predecessor had occupied the same seat the year before. No one drank a toast to his memory. Perhaps this omission, even of a libation to the departed prop of the Cartel occurred to him at that moment as he handed his glass to a waiter to be re-filled. The glass was already full, his confusion increased. He scraped his boots nervously on the marble floor and gulped his drink, spilling some over his ribbons. Belatedly he felt that he had made a mistake coming in uniform. Somehow he had hoped that this would impress his own power on the group; instead it simply marked him as an outsider, a tool, a mere representative symbol. Probably dispensible.

  Lamely he added, “The alliance of the purse and the gun is of course…I mean…the hope of er…I mean, national stability.”

  “That reminds me” Batoki said, “I mean to change your speech-writer. He is not reliable.”

  “I am quite happy with his…” The C-in-C’s voice trailed away.

  Not far away, rehearsals for the big parade continued. The quarterly meeting of the Cartel would be incomplete without full-dress airing of the props of power. It was both demonstration and warning. A flexing of muscles to bring waverers back to heel. Moreover—so claimed Chief Batoki—I look in the eyes of every man on parade and, where I sense disloyalty I speak to that man. When their officer hears me ask how fares that man’s family and whether he would not prefer to be near them, he knows I never want to see that man within ten miles of us.

  Publicly, the pomp, the ceremony continued to fill the hollow reed with seeming substance. The trappings of authority cloaked a universal abomination and Batoki became the secondary cause for a people’s unanimity, expended though it was on hatred and loathing. Even to such a mockery of their strength were they reduced. Nerved to a pitch of destructiveness they hurled the granite boulders anyway, hurled them at targets far beyond their reach. The missiles fell short, fell often on themselves. The head they sought to stick on a public pike clowned through the passages and sounds of death, himself inaccessible.

  Protected by an army of minions, Zaki Amuri remained equally immune in Cross-river.

  Chief Biga paraded boldly where he pleased, surrounded by motorcades of his private army.

  The Commandant-in-Chief carried out orders, made speeches as they were drafted by the civilian trio; but the genius of their language was Batoki himself.

  And Batoki sowed a forest of bayonets in the sun, laughed through the curses of the people and mocked their tears of frustration. He was endowed with the patience of a lizard and he bridged time with mounds of the dead and mutilated.

  In those fields which surrounded a bristling network of aerials and teleprinter waves the desperate gecko was decked in the colours of authority. Amidst quasi-military manoeuvres, the provincial police bands polished their pieces while the shock-squads polished their batons and boots while the drill-major in his baggy shorts shrilled his orders at the ever increasing corps of recruits—“Wait the corner, wait the corner before you sharp wheel!”—himself the very antithesis of precision.

  On that rehearsal trip Ofeyi had fastened on the discordance of the drill major, his old parchment face a slip in bureaucratic postings, more comic mascot than drill-major. It recreated an idyllic image of slumber and fallen corrugated sheets, browsing goats in thoroughfares and the solitary patrol of the village head in an ex-serviceman’s cast-offs. Remote from the present reality.

  “I know my people” Batoki continued to insist, “I tell you they are cowards. God must be on our side or he would never have made them such cowards.” This time, to his wife and daughter.

  The brass band played Viennese waltzes. An officer in gleaming turnout crossed himself repeatedly sword in hand, marched up and down, inspected the lines with a stand-in for Chief Batoki. The drill major with his bunch of recruits looked over to where the professionals drilled and pointed the example to his wards. “Look over there and see what you have to do.” He sighed, bit into a colanut and muttered, “Ah, in the time of D.O.s and those white governors in their white uniforms and gold buttons, beautiful medals all the way across the breast. Now those were men worth all this energy, not like these present fools…” He turned sharply on his giggling row of recruits and they quickly dried up.

  “Unfortunately” the Dentist muttered, “I’ve lost my telescopic sight—smashed in an accident. A parade of this kind would have been ideal. So I have to get closer you see. More risk. I can’t afford an error in decision because I cannot repeat the same trick twice. So I have to know whose elimination will most weaken the Cartel. We must be effective.”

  The guns of the rehearsing guard of honour—all from Cross-river, Batoki would not take a chance with his own people—their guns looked deceptively like toys. Varnish on the stocks appeared too shiny and the straps from which the guns were suspended over their shoulders looked like the retrieving thongs for cork missiles. That, and the games excitement on the faces of watching recruits made it all a Saturday afternoon village parade. Ofeyi pictured the ancient sitting on his verandah, firing cork missiles at stubborn goats.

  “Czech made” the Dentist commented, handing Ofeyi his binoculars. “Fires twelve rounds. Pounds lighter than the average air-gun believe it or not.”

  Ofeyi put the lenses to his eyes and wondered how from the midst of this treachery that elusive justice could ever be retrieved. Tangled in a mesh of aerials, among high-tension hammocks and scrambled pulses and electronic codes, dragged along undiscriminating air-tracks onto beetle-nosed troop carriers, to cordons of cartridge-belts and enslaved to one colossal usurpation of a thousand minds. One had to presume that they had minds, these drilling automatons. Something is bought at a salary, something is surrendered, something is swapped for the legal glow of dealing death. Whatever this was, it had been taken in hand, caught in the warp of one megalomaniac mind. To release these minds, it was difficult to escape the thought that the shortest and justest course was—to use the Dentist’s phrasing—elimination!

  The wires seemed to emit nothing but aeons of destruction. He felt his skin crackle under their bombardment. Among a welter of images one that constantly monopolised evocation was the mystery of a woman dead of machine-gun bullets, whose hand still tightly clutched an infant’s legs. The infant’s head was a pulp of brain and bone. Did madness enter her with that same bullet which first passed through the child that was feeding at her breast? The breast hung free and her milk had mingled in blood to paint a testament of damnation on earth, beside spilled peppers, an upturned stool and a bowl of pap. Even the soldiers had been afraid to touch her where she lay. A tourist, a total stranger had recorded the scene long after the departure of the death-dealers.

  It seemed a sacrilege, with memories such as this, to admit to death-wish as contained in a refusal to accept the burden of decision when that decision could—if the Dentist was right—end all repet
ition of such images as this. The truth was too bare for self-deceit, the call for urgent action too strident for any evasion. The Dentist appeared to have set his course on the only possible sanity, leaving the rest slaves to rationalist or emotive fantasies.

  “If we could line them all up, publicly, against that whitewashed wall and shoot them, then we should. But we cannot. We lack the means. But we can take them out one by one, hitting them from safety. You must know that each successful elimination makes the next doubly difficult. My role survives on borrowed time; that time must serve the most effective purpose. That is where you come in, you have known them longer, so you must tell me who goes first.” He gave one of his rare smiles. “I sometimes think it should be the member from Cross-river. Isn’t he supposed to be the real power? If we eliminate him, Batoki would die of a heart attack, so that would be two with one bullet. Is that a merely fantastic idea?”

  Ofeyi shook his head. “Batoki may appear obsequiously dependent on him but he is much tougher than that.”

  Demakin nodded slowly. “Yes, at other times I think that too.”

  There remained the miasma of unreality through which Ofeyi tried to cut by brutal phrasing. Shaking his head he said, “You do realize what you are asking me don’t you? Who do I first assassinate?”

  “Yes. You’ve seen their preparations, evidence of a costly rehearsal for the real blitz. If there is a better way to stop them, tell me and I’ll carry it out. Otherwise just answer the question—which of them must I first pursue and—kill?” He returned the binoculars to its case. “I have to plan. I do not forgive myself mistakes.”

  “You know almost as much as I do about them,” Ofeyi grumbled.

  “Almost, but not quite as much. If I choose and make a mistake, the responsibility is yours.”

  * * *

  —

  Batoki, acknowledged clown of the team, but also the subtlest strategist: did that make him the lynch-pin of the vicious ring? It was he who first thought of recruiting whites from South Africa into the Secret Police: “if their methods weren’t good their minority wouldn’t still be in control.” Kilgard with his hunched back, rheumy eyes and scalpel thin smile became the forerunner of a trickle of experts on the many refinements of interrogation. And Kilgard was also fond of black children, stopped his car to chuck them under the chin, watched them roll and fight in the dust for his scattered pennies. He had no children of his own, sighed and told Batoki he envied him his beautiful family—in between reports and secret orders, at all hours night and day. Until he was so much one of the family that they also called him Uncle.

  A habit of age deference, a virtue adapted from tradition, Ofeyi ruefully reflected, which their undiscriminating nature had also applied to him. Excepting Biye the eldest they all called him Uncle. She had quickly become the lady. As soon as she felt old enough she began to call him by name, her thin voice rising to a crescendo of shrillness in frustration at his failure to take her advice, echoing her father’s words.

  The enemy, to him, was not faceless, not without flesh and blood. Ties. Even pleasant recollections of past association. Batoki especially he knew, had supped often at his family board, even flirted inconclusively with his precocious daughter, Biye. And Batoki had tried to use this link to tear him from his course. He heard the father’s calculating comments in her salvationist intensity.

  “Why do you mix with these gutter boys, these riffraffs. They are rotten with envy, their lives are built around nothing. Why do you pretend that you do not have a background as decent as ours for instance? You have nothing in common with them!”

  “Listen to me Biye…”

  “No I won’t listen. You waste yourself on these dregs of society. They want to turn the country upside down because they have nothing in themselves. They want to drag everyone down to their own level. Can you imagine it, only the other day one of them, these so-called communists said to my father…”

  His hand had sought hers and he tried to interrupt. “That is the trouble. You listen too much to your father.”

  “And you try to pretend you have none. You pretend you sprang from nowhere, you have turned your back on your own background. They are merely using you Ofe, you know nothing of how insecure and insignificant their existence would be without people like you!”

  A loud, mocking whistle. “Whew! All these big words….”

  “Be serious Ofe. Look, my father likes you. He doesn’t really understand you but he likes you. That is why he made the Corporation send you on that study tour, to give you time to cool down. They were beginning to round up troublemakers. Look, ask anything, any post you want. You know it’s yours for the asking. My father really respects you. He respects your family. He wants to help you. So why do you abuse your intelligence by keeping company with these born losers?”

  Depressed by her impregnable insulation, the crust of which had coarsened by daily proximity to such a man as her father, he could only offer her the simplest advice to take back to the man. “Tell him to leave the country, and quickly. Tell him to stop using you, to stop abusing your beautiful generous nature. You give with such admirable ease, so selflessly. But it is also thoughtless giving and this will only lead you to despair. He will eat you up. He is like those ancient witches of ours who must eat up their young to rejuvenate themselves. Don’t let him eat you up!”

  He felt the sting on his face, then the shock and wonder on hers as she realized that she had actually slapped “Uncle” Ofeyi. At that moment, he felt protectively drawn to her by her very fragility. In spite of the fawning and flattering which went with her status as favourite daughter of one of the “terrible quads,” in spite of winters and summers in villas on millionaire beaches from Capri to Miami where she ran sands and fortunes through her fingers, in spite of pampering by a hundred commercial relations, the world-wide extended families of the Cocoa Cartel, the state balls and state parades and hostessing on nights of diplomatic assemblage on her father’s lawns, her vulnerable self and lack of brains stuck scarecrow bones through affluent pretensions. She never could, despite her undoubted vitality, endure the punishment of pace. Often before the night was over, she barely managed to animate a face of crinkled negligee abandoned on a winter line, frozen in fragile folds. The shock of her impulsive action drained the last drop of self-assurance from her face leaving only a shell of tiredness and a suspicion that Ofeyi might be right, that she never truly permitted herself to think. It led to her breaking down completely, tearfully begging his advice.

  “Take a holiday,” he counselled. “Forget what is happening here. Divorce yourself from the enjoyment you have begun to take from being Batoki’s daughter. Go and study something and leave your father to stew in his own juice if he will not take the advice I gave you earlier. Go to one of those summer resorts your father has bought himself with our people’s money.”

  Too late he realized that he had again aroused her fierce loyalty. There was perhaps something admirable in such pride but Ofeyi shook his head in pity, knowing that she would only destroy herself in the process. And now to quicken that process, as he must, by nominating the father for prior choice in the round of elimination? And if another? Domestic scenes filled with other Biyes, Habibas, Chinyeres rising before his eyes.

  And the other image also, in violent protest, the faceless mother whose fingers even in death rigor still clutched the legs of an infant with a pulped head….

  Biye’s face was flashing past him, hissing, “I thought you could be saved but you belong in the gutter, you and the rest of the social failures who call themselves radicals.”

  Staring at her vacated chair he could only regret that they were not even her own thoughts, much less words. The crime of Batoki and his vulgar noisy circle became even more heinous, acquiring dimension in its deliberate corruption of susceptible minds, creating mindless captive loyalties from dependants by blood or by inducements. This in
timate corruption of their power loomed larger in the scale of menace than the catalogue of brazen thievery and daylight massacres.

  4

  HARVEST

  IX

  Ofeyi turned the car into the lesser used road, feeling a need to gather and store within himself all the calm and peace that such routes could offer. Soon there would be none of the serenity on the face of nature, no moisture in the soil, no leaves on the wind.

  They came to the grove of rain-trees, the famous stretch planted by a now forgotten missionary eccentric. It led from the small town of Omola and spread for miles in an arcade of interwoven branches high above the road. The sun filtered through in yellow shafts, weightless insubstantial bamboos, organ-pipes which yielded to contact on the car, ran lightly over the panels, ran through the windscreen and played on their faces. Birdsong came down those gilded pipes, played among the restful shadows.

  Sensations, mere sensations. He felt as always dissatisfied, cheated. These golden wafers were so cruelly beguiling, he stretched his hand through the window and they danced all over his arm in elfin abandon. Within that glade they were cut off from the world, wrapped in a mist of sun motes in a forest of song. Ofeyi sank deep into the enchantment, consoling himself by thinking, I store it up for later needs.

  He glanced at Zaccheus. He looked bound also underneath the spell. When the last pair of trees had diminished to a garden shrub in the mirror Ofeyi spoke at last. “Places like that seem to possess reserves of healing powers.” And this idea of healing possessed him again in his legacy of an older experience. “I knew a man” he began, “some sort of madman, I suppose. His obsession was numbers. Weights and measures, distances, money. And he would rattle off these figures at a speed that gave you no time to catch on. You never knew what the figures actually meant for him or what he did with them—addition or subtraction, multiplication or what. He was a school-teacher before he went mad. Maybe he taught mathematics. He came round to the compound where we lived, once a week, sat down in the front room and proceeded to assess each household millions and millions of pounds. It had to be paid on the spot. After a long sermon of numbers he would accept a settlement of sixpence or threepence and enter it most meticulously in a ragged notebook, tear off a receipt and read out the balance owed to the last zero on the million pounds and the last fraction of the pence.