“Why don’t we follow this group and see M.K.O.?” Boja said suddenly. “If he becomes the president after the election, we’d be able to always brag that we’ve met the president of Nigeria!”
“Ah—true, but if we go along with them in our uniform,” Ikenna reflected, “they might probably send us away. They know full well that it is still early in the day and school couldn’t have let us out by now.”
“If they say so, we can tell them we left because we saw them,” Boja replied.
“Yes, yes,” Ikenna agreed, “they will respect us even more.”
“What if we follow them from a distance, through corner-corner?” Boja said. He met Ikenna’s nod of approval; encouraged, he continued: “That way, we can stay clear of trouble and still see M.K.O.”
This idea stuck. We walked through the corners of the street, rounding off a large church and an area where northerners lived. A pungent odour hung around the bend in the alley where the big abattoir was located. As we passed, we heard knives knapping on slabs and boards as the butchers chopped meat, the mob voices of patrons and butchers rising steadily, shoulder-to-shoulder, with the knapping. Outside the gate of the abattoir, two men knelt on a mat and bowed in prayers. A third, standing a few metres from the two, was doing ablutions with water from a small plastic kettle he held in his hand. We crossed the road, passed our neighbourhood and saw a man and a woman standing outside our gate. Their eyes were fastened to a book the woman had in her hand. We hurried past, casting furtive glances around to make sure none of our neighbours had spotted us, but the street seemed deserted. We passed a small church constructed out of teak and zinc roofing on whose wall was an elaborate painting of Jesus with a nimbus around his crown of thorns. From a hole in his chest, drops of blood dripped down, but held, below his visible ribs. A lizard crossed the line of trailing drops of blood with its tail erect, its vile shape obliterating the punctured chest. Clothes hung on the open doors of the shops in front of which were rickety tables crammed with tomatoes, canned beverages, packets of cornflakes, tins of milk and various effects. Just across from the church was a bazaar sprawled over a large expanse of land. The procession had zipped through the thin path between boulders of humans, stalls, and shops, their trucks plodding ponderously to attract the market people. All over the bazaar, the congested mass of humanity seethed like a tribe of maggots. As we plodded through the bazaar, Obembe’s sandal came loose. A man had placed his heavy shoe on the sandal’s strap and Obembe had to force it from under the man’s foot, in the process of which the strap had snapped, leaving the sandal with only a front cover strap like a flip-flop. He began dragging his feet as we made out of the bazaar down a wheel road with declivities.
We’d barely set on this path when Obembe stopped, cupped his hand over his ear and began crying, “Listen, listen” frantically.
“Listen to what?” Ikenna said.
Just then, I heard a noise similar to that of the convoy, closer and more palpable this time.
“Listen,” Obembe curtly said, gazing skywards. Then suddenly, he burst out: “Helicot! Helicota!”
“He-li-copter,” Boja said in a voice that sounded nasal because his eyes were still focused on the sky.
The complete picture of the helicopter had now appeared, gradually dropping to the level of the two-storeyed buildings in the neighbourhood. It was painted green and white, the colours of the Nigerian flag, with the portrait of a white horse poised to sprint engraved in an oblong circle in the centre of the single partition. Two men holding small flags sat on the threshold of one of its doors, shading out a man in police uniform and another in sparkling ocean-blue agbada, Yoruba traditional attire. The entire area was abuzz with cries of “M.K.O. Abiola.” Vehicles honked on the roads, motorcycles revved their engines to deafening wails as the gathering of a massive mob began somewhere in the distance.
“M.K.O!” Ikenna cried breathlessly, wailing. “M.K.O. is in that helicopter!”
He grabbed my hand and we ran in the direction where we thought the helicopter might be landing. We found it landing just outside a magnificent building that was surrounded by a league of trees, and a nine-foot barbed-wire fence, apparently owned by an influential politician. It was much closer than we’d imagined and we were surprised that, besides the aides and a chief who was outside the gate waiting for M.K.O., we were the first to reach the spot. We arrived singing one of M.K.O.’s campaign songs but stopped to watch the helicopter land, its fast swirling blades summoning a dust cloud that shielded M.K.O. and Kudirat, his wife, from sight as they stepped out. When it cleared, we saw that M.K.O. and his wife both wore shiny traditional attire. As a mob gathered, uniformed guards and guards in plain clothes formed a wall to edge it away. The people were cooing, cheering and calling his name aloud, and the Chief waved to acknowledge them. As this scene unfolded, Ikenna started singing a church song we’d hijacked, remixed, and constantly sang for Mother to soothe her whenever she was mad at us. We’d put “Mama” in place of “God.” But now, Ikenna replaced “Mama” with “M.K.O.,” and we had all joined in, singing at the top of our lungs:
M.K.O., you are beautiful beyond description.
Too marvellous for words.
The most wonderful of all creatures,
Like nothing never seen nor heard.
Who can touch your infinite wisdom?
Who can fathom the depths of your love?
M.K.O., you are beautiful beyond description.
Your majesty is enthroned above.
We’d started a repeat when M.K.O. signalled that the aides bring us closer. Frantic, we made our way over and stood in his presence. Up close, his face was round and his head conical. When he smiled, his eyes lent his features abundant grace. He became a real person: no longer a figure that existed exclusively in the realm of television screens and newspaper pages, but suddenly as normal as Father or Boja, or even Igbafe and my classmates. This epiphany filled me with sudden fear. I stopped singing, dropped my eyes from the bright face of M.K.O., and planted them on his shoes that glistened from polishing. On one side of the shoes was the iron sculpture of the head of a being that appeared like Medusa in Boja’s favourite movie, Clash of the Titans. Ikenna would tell me later, after I mentioned the head, that he’d polished one of Father’s shoes with the same embossment. He spelt out the name because he could not pronounce it: V-e-r-s-a-c-e.
“What are your names?” M.K.O. asked.
“I’m Ikenna Agwu,” Ikenna said. “These are my brothers: Benjamin, Boja and Obembe.”
“Ah, Benjamin,” Chief Abiola said, smiling widely. “That’s my grandfather’s name.”
His wife, who was dressed in an identical robe as M.K.O. and carried a shiny handbag, bent down towards me and stroked my head as one would stroke a densely furred dog. I felt metal scratch lightly against my short-haired scalp. When she withdrew her hand, I noticed that what had touched my scalp was a ring; she wore one on almost every finger. M.K.O. raised his hand to cheer the massive crowd that had now gathered all around the vicinity, chanting the theme of his campaign: “Hope ’93! Hope ’93!” For a while, he repeated the word awon—“these” in Yoruba—in different tones as he tried to get the crowd to hear him.
When the chant ebbed and a fair silence ensued, M.K.O. thrust his fist in the air and shouted, “Awon omo yi nipe M.K.O. lewa ju gbogbo nkan lo.”
The crowd responded with wild shouts of acclaim, some of them whistled with fingers curved on both sides of their mouths. He gazed down on us as he waited for them to quiet, then he continued in English.
“In all my life in politics to date, I’ve never ever been told this, not even by my own wives—” The crowd interrupted him with a roar of laughter. “No one, I mean, has ever told me that I’m beautiful beyond description—pe mo le wa ju gbogbo nka lo.”
The throng of voices cheered again as he rubbed my shoulder with his hand.
“They say I’m too marvellous for words.”
The crowd mauled his wo
rds with a tumult of applause, the tooting louder.
“They say I’m like nothing they’ve ever seen before.”
The mob waged in again, and once they calmed, M.K.O.—in the most aggressive cry possible—exploded: “Like nothing the Federal Republic of Nigeria has ever seen before!”
The crowd took the air for almost a limitless measure of time, after which they let him speak again, but this time to us and not to them.
“You will do something for me. You all,” he said, his index finger making a circle in the air above us. “You will stand with me and take a photograph. We will use it for our campaign.”
We nodded, and Ikenna said, “Yes, sir.”
“Oya, stand with me.”
He signalled one of his aides, an able-bodied man in a tight brown suit and a red tie, to come forward. The man bent towards him and whispered something in his ear from which the word camera was only just audible. In no time, a smartly dressed man in a blue shirt and tie approached, with a camera hanging on his chest by a black strap with NIKON crested all over it. A few more aides tried to push back the crowd as M.K.O. broke off from us now for a minute to shake hands with his host, the politician who stood close, waiting to receive his attention. Then M.K.O. turned back to us. “Are you ready now?”
“Yes, sir,” we chorused.
“Good,” he said. “I will come to the centre and both of you,”—he gestured to Ikenna and me, “move here.” We stood to his right and Obembe with Boja to his left. “Good, good,” he muttered.
The photographer, one knee on the ground, and the other bent now, aimed his camera until a bright flash lit our faces in a heartbeat second. M.K.O. clapped and the crowd clapped and cheered. “Thank you, Benjamin, Obembe, Ikenna,” M.K.O. said, pointing at each of us as he said our names. When he got to Boja, he paused in confusion, prompting him to say his name. M.K.O. repeated it in slanting syllables: “Bo-ja”.
“Wow!” M.K.O. exclaimed, laughing. “It sounds like Mo ja,” (“I fought” in Yoruba). “Do you fight?”
Boja shook his head.
“Good,” M.K.O. muttered, “don’t ever.” He wagged his finger. “Fighting is not good. What is the name of your school?”
“Omotayo Nursery and Primary School, Akure,” I said in the singsong manner that we had been taught we should use to answer the question whenever it was asked.
“Okay, good, Ben,” M.K.O. said. He raised his head towards the crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen, these four boys of one family will now be awarded scholarships by the Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola campaign organization.”
As the crowd applauded, he dipped his hand into the large side pocket of his agbada and gave Ikenna a bunch of naira notes. “Take this,” he said, pulling one of his aides closer. “Richard, here, will take you to your home, and deliver it to your parents. He will also take down your names and address.”
“Thank you, sir!” we cried almost in unison, but he did not seem to have heard us. He’d already begun walking towards the big house with his aides and hosts, turning every now and then to wave at the crowd.
We followed the aide to a black Mercedes parked across the road, and he drove us home in it. And from that day, we began to pride ourselves on being M.K.O. boys. The four of us were called out to the podium during the school’s assembly one morning and applauded after the headmistress, who seemed to have forgotten and forgiven the circumstances that had led to our accidental encounter with M.K.O., made a long speech about the importance of making good impressions on people—of being “good ambassadors of the school.” Then she announced, even to greater applause, that our father, Mr Agwu, would no longer have to pay our school fees.
Despite these obvious profits, the fame it brought us in and around our district, and Father’s financial relief and joy, the M.K.O. calendar embodied bigger things. It was a badge to us, a testimonial of our affiliation with a man almost everyone in the west of Nigeria believed would be Nigeria’s next president. In that calendar was a strong hope for the future, for we’d believed we were children of Hope ’93, M.K.O.’s allies. Ikenna was convinced that when M.K.O. became president, we could go to Abuja, Nigeria’s seat of government, and we would be let in by just showing the calendar. That M.K.O. would put us in big positions and probably make one of us the president of Nigeria someday. We had all believed this would happen, and put our hope in this calendar, which Ikenna had now destroyed.
Once Ikenna’s metamorphosis became cataclysmic and began to threaten the repose we had been living in, Mother became desperate for a solution. She asked questions. She prayed. She warned. But all to no avail. It seemed increasingly obvious that the Ikenna who was once our brother had been bottled in a tightly sealed jar and thrown into an ocean. But on the day the special calendar was destroyed, Mother was shaken beyond words. She’d returned from work that evening and Boja, who’d sat in the midst of the charred bits and pieces, weeping for long, gave her the remains of the calendar which he’d swept into a plain sheet of paper, and said: “That, Mama, is what our M.K.O. calendar has become.”
Mother, disbelieving, first went to the room to see the blank wall before unwrapping the paper in her hand. She sat on the chair that rested against the buzzing refrigerator. She knew, like us, that we did not have more than two copies and Father had gladly given one copy to the headmistress of our school who hung it in her office after the aides of Chief M.K.O. Abiola opened the scholarship there.
“What has come over Ikenna?” she said. “Isn’t this the calendar he would have killed to protect; the one for which he beat Obembe?” She spat “Tufia!” the Igbo word for “God forbid,” repeatedly, snapping her fingers over her head—a superstitious gesture meant to swish away the evil she had seen in Ikenna’s action. She was referring to when Ikenna beat Obembe for smashing a mosquito on the calendar, leaving an indelible stain—caused by the mosquito’s blood—on M.K.O.’s left eye.
She sat there wondering what had happened to Ikenna. She was worried because Ikenna was, until recently, our beloved brother, the forerunner who shot into the world ahead of all of us and opened every door for us. He guided us, protected us and led us with a full-lit torch. Even though he sometimes punished Obembe and me or disagreed with Boja on certain issues, he became a prowling lion when an outsider rattled any of us. I did not know what it was to live without contact with him, without seeing him. But this was exactly what began to happen, and as the days passed, it seemed he deliberately sought to hurt us.
After seeing the blank wall that night, Mother said nothing. She merely cooked eba, and warmed up the pot of ogbono soup she had prepared the previous day. After we’d eaten, she went into her room, and I thought she had gone to sleep. But at what must have been midnight, she came into the room I shared with Obembe.
“Wake up, wake up,” she called, tapping us.
I screamed upon her touch. When I opened my eyes, all I saw was two distinct eyes blinking in the stark darkness.
“It is me,” Mother said, “do you hear? It is me.”
“Yes, Mama,” I said.
“Shhhhhhh… don’t shout; you will wake Nkem.”
I nodded, and although Obembe had not shouted as I did, he nodded, too.
“I want to ask both of you something,” Mother whispered. “Are you awake?”
She tapped my leg again. In a jolt, I let out a loud “Yes!” and Obembe followed.
“Ehen,” Mother muttered. It appeared as if she’d had a long session of praying or crying or, just as likely, both. Not long before that day—when Ikenna refused to go to the pharmacy with Boja to be precise—I’d asked Obembe why Mother cried so often when she was not a child, and thus past the age of frequent crying. Obembe had replied that he did not know either, but that he thought women were prone to crying.
“Listen,” Mother, now seated on the bed with us, said. “I want both of you to tell me what caused the rift between Ikenna and Boja. I’m sure you both know, so, tell me—quickly, quickly.”
“I don’
t know, Mama,” I said.
“No, you know,” she countered. “There must be something that happened—a fight or quarrel I do not know of; just something. Think.”
I nodded and started to think, to try to understand what she wanted.
“Obembe,” Mother called after only a wall of silence greeted her query.
“Mama.”
“Tell me, your mother, what caused the rift between your brothers,” she said, this time, in English. She knotted her wrappa around her chest as if it had come loose, something she often did when agitated. “Did they have a fight?”
“No,” Obembe replied.
“Is it true, Ben?”
“Yes, it is, Mama.”
“Fa lu ru ogu?—Did they quarrel?” she asked, returning to Igbo.
We both replied “No,” Obembe’s coming much later after mine.
“So, what happened?” she asked after a short pause. “Tell me, eh, my princes, Obembe Igwe, Azikiwe, gwa nu mu ife me lu nu, biko my husbands,” she pleaded, employing the heart-melting endearments she bestowed on us in times like this when she wanted to obtain some information from us. She’d bestow royalty on Obembe, ascribing him the title of an igwe, a traditional king. She’d confer the name of Nigeria’s first indigenous president, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, on me. Once she called us these names, Obembe began staring at me—an indication that there was something he did not want to say, but which—nudged by Mother’s entreaties—he was now wholly ready to say. Hence, Mother only needed to repeat the endearments just once more before Obembe spilled it, for she had already won. Both she and Father were good at digging into our minds. They knew how to burrow so deep into our psyche when they wanted to find things out that it was sometimes difficult to think they didn’t already know what they were asking about, but were merely seeking to confirm it.
“Mama, it began the day we met Abulu at Omi-Ala,” Obembe said once Mother repeated the endearment.
The Fishermen Page 7