To my consternation, Mother returned home alone hours later. Ikenna had typhoid and had been admitted at the hospital, receiving intravenous injections. When Obembe and I, gripped by fear, broke down, Mother comforted us saying assuredly he would be discharged the following day and that he would be fine.
But I had begun to fear that something bad was going to happen to Ikenna. I spoke little at school and fought when anyone provoked me until I was whipped by one of the disciplinary teachers. This too was rare; for I was an obedient child not only to my parents, but to my teachers as well. I dreaded corporal punishment and would do anything to prevent it. But the sadness I felt for my brother’s deteriorating situation had inflamed a bitter resentment towards everything, especially school and all it contained. The hope that my brother would be redeemed had been destroyed; I was afraid for him.
After his health and well-being, the venom next robbed Ikenna of his faith. He’d missed church for three consecutive Sundays, giving illness as an excuse—plus the one he could not attend because of the two nights he spent at the hospital. But on the morning of the next one, perhaps emboldened by the news that Father—who had travelled to Ghana on a three-month training course—would not be visiting Akure again until his return, Ikenna declared that he just didn’t want to go to church.
“Did I hear you well, Ikenna?” Mother said.
“Yes, you did,” Ikenna replied forcefully. “Listen, Mama, I’m a scientist, I no longer believe there’s a God.”
“What?” Mother cried, stepping backwards as if she’d stepped on a sharp thorn. “Ikenna, what did you say?”
He hesitated, a deep scowl on his face.
“I asked you: ‘What did you say,’ Ikenna?”
“I said I’m a scientist,” he answered, with the word “scientist,” which he had to say in English because there was no Igbo word for it, resonating with alarming defiance.
“And?” The silence she met would prompt her to say “Complete it Ikenna; complete this abominable thing you have said.” Then, with her finger pointing to his face, charged, she said: “Ikenna, look here: one thing Eme and I cannot take, and will never accept, is an atheist of a child. Never!”
She tsked and snapped two fingers over her head to superstitiously stave off the possibility of that phenomenon. “So, Ikenna, if you still want to be a part of this family or eat any food in it, stand up from that bed of yours now, or else you and I will fit into the same trousers.”
Ikenna was cowed by the threat; for Mother used that expression “fit into the same trousers” only when her anger had reached its peak. She went into her room and returned with one of Father’s old leather belts wound halfway around her wrist, fully ready to flog him, something she almost never did. At the sight of it, Ikenna dragged himself to the bathroom to bathe and get ready for church.
On our way home after the service, Ikenna walked ahead of us, so Mother wouldn’t pick issues with him in public and because Mother usually gave him the key so he could unlock the gate and the main door for us. She almost never went home directly after church; she always waited with the little ones for post-service women’s meetings, or attended one visitation or the other. Once we were out of Mother’s sight, Ikenna began quickening his steps. I and the rest followed him in silence. Ikenna, for some reason, took a longer route home through Ijoka Street, a street that was populated by the poor who lived in low-cost houses—mostly unvarnished—and in wooden shacks. Little children were playing in almost every corner of this dirty area. There were little girls jumping around within a big square of columns. A boy, not more than three, stooped over what appeared to be tawny ropes of excreta trailing down from him to form viscous pyramids. As this pyramid formed and polluted the air, the boy played on, marking the dirt with a stick, undisturbed by the league of flies that hovered around his fundament. My brothers and I spat into the dirt, and then by unquestioned instinct, immediately erased the spittle with the soles of our sandals as we passed, Boja cursing the little boy and the people of the neighbourhood—“pigs, pigs.” Obembe, trying to cleanly erase his spittle, trailed behind momentarily. By spitting and erasing it, we were observing the superstition that if a pregnant woman stepped on saliva, the person who had spit—if male—would be rendered permanently impotent, which I understood at the time to mean that one’s organ would magically disappear.
This was indeed a dirty street, the street in which Kayode, our friend, lived with his parents in an unfinished two-storeyed building whose floor alone had been paved. The house was in such a raw shape that masts of unshaped concrete and iron stretched from the attic, thrusting skeletal beams upwards. Unvarnished piles of blocks greening with moss were scattered around the entire compound. In the holes in the bricks and in its entire frame nested multitudes of lizards and skinks that scurried everywhere. Kayode once told us of how his mother found a lizard in the drum in their kitchen where they stored drinking water. The dead lizard lay atop the water for days unnoticed until the water acquired a sour taste. When his mother emptied the drum and the dead lizard slid to the ground in the pool of water, its head had swollen double, and like all things that drown, had started to decompose. At nearly every corner of the neighbourhood, heaps of trash ate into slabs and thrust into roadways. Some of the dirt piled in open sewers, brooding and choky like tumours, curved around pedestrian bridges like boas, nestled like bird nests between roadside kiosks, festered in small land cavities and peopled clearings. And all over the place, stale air hung, linking the buildings together with its invisible stench.
The sun was fierce in the sky, forcing trees to create dark awnings under their canopies. At one side of the road, a woman was frying fish in a pan on a hearth under a wooden shack. The billows of smoke rose steadily from both sides of the hearth, pooling towards us. We crossed to the other side between a parked truck and the balcony of a house whose interior I glimpsed briefly: two men seated on a brown couch, gesticulating while a roving standing fan slowly turned its head. A goat and her kids were squirrelled under a table in front of the balcony, surrounded by black pods of their own waste.
When we got to our compound, waiting for Ikenna to open the gate, Boja said: “I saw Abulu try to enter the church during the service today, but he was not allowed in because he was naked.” Boja had joined a team of boys who played drums for our local church. The boys played by rotation and he’d played that day, and had thus sat at the front of the church near the altar—hence the reason why he’d been able to see Abulu come through the rear door of the church. Ikenna was fumbling in his pocket for the key, and had to turn the pocket inside out because the key had become tangled in a twine of the linen and unfurled fibres, wrapping itself out of his reach. The pocket was dirty: it was stained with ink, and small pieces of groundnut husks showered to the ground like dust when he thrust it out. When he tried to untangle the key without success, he tore it out with force, causing the pocket to spring a leak. He was starting to turn the key in the hole when Boja said, “Ike, I know you believe the prophecy, but you know we are children of God—”
“He is a prophet,” Ikenna replied curtly.
He opened the door and as he extracted the key from the keyhole, Boja said, “Yes, but he is not of God.”
“How did you know?” Ikenna snapped, turning to face Boja now. “I’m asking you; how did you know?”
“He isn’t, Ike, I’m sure.”
“What is your proof? Eh, what is your proof?”
Boja said nothing. Ikenna’s eyes were raised upwards above our heads and we all followed, and saw the object of his view: a kite made of different polythene materials gliding aloft in the distance.
“But what he said cannot happen,” Boja said. “Listen, he mentioned a red river. He said you will swim in a red river. How can a river be red?” He made a gesture that vocalized impossibility by spreading his hands, gazing at us as if asking for assurance that what he’d said was right. Obembe nodded in reply. “He is mad, Ike; he does not know what he says.”
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Boja drew closer to Ikenna and in an unexpected show of courage, put his hand on Ikenna’s shoulder. “You have to believe me, Ike, you have to believe,” he said, shaking Ikenna’s shoulder as if he was attempting to demolish the mountain of fear deep within his brother.
Ikenna stood there, his eyes fixed on the floor—apparently moved by Boja’s words. It was a moment of hope, one in which it seemed that we could restore him who was lost to us. Like Boja, I, too, wanted to tell Ikenna that I could not kill him, but it was Obembe who spoke next.
“He. Is. Right,” Obembe stammered. “None of us will kill you. We are not—Ike—we are not even real fishermen. He said a fisherman will kill you, Ike, but we are not real fishermen.”
Ikenna looked up at Obembe and his face wore the expression of one confounded by what he’d heard. Tears stood in his eyes. It was now my turn.
“We cannot kill you, Ike, you are strong, and bigger than us all,” I said in a voice that was as collected as I could manage, having been nudged by the feeling that I, too, had something to say. But I did not know what gave me the audacity to take his hand and say: “Brother Ike, you said we hate you, but it is not true. We like you very much more than everyone.”
Although at that point my throat became warm, I said with all the calm I could muster: “We like you even more than Daddy and Mama.”
I stepped back from him and my eyes fell on Boja, who was nodding. For a moment, Ikenna seemed lost. Our words, it seemed, had had an impact on him, and for the first time in many weeks, my eyes and those of the others met his. His eyes were bloodshot and his face pale, but there was an expression on it that was so indescribable, so beyond recognition—as my memory at the time could afford—that it became the face that I now mostly remember of him.
A moment of great expectation followed, all of us waiting for what he would do next. As if nudged by a pat from a spirit, he turned and hurried into his room. Then from within it, he yelled: “I don’t want anyone disturbing me from now on. All of you mind your business and leave me alone. I warn you, leave me alone!”
The fear, after destroying Ikenna’s well-being, health and faith, destroyed his relationships, the closest of which was with us, his brothers. It seemed that he had fought the internal battle for too long, and now wanted to get it over with. As if to dare the prophecy to come true Ikenna began to do all he could to harm us. Two days after our attempt to persuade him, we woke to discover that Ikenna had destroyed our prized possession: a copy of the Akure Herald of June 15th, 1993. The newspaper had our photos on it; it had Ikenna’s on the front page with the caption Young Hero drives his younger brothers to safety. The photos of Boja, Obembe and me were placed in a small rectangular box just over Ikenna’s full image, under the title Akure Herald. The newspaper was priceless, our medal of honour even stronger than the M.K.O. calendar. At one time, Ikenna would have killed for it. The newspaper told the story of how he led us to safety during the internecine political riots, a seminal moment that changed everything in the life of Akure.
On that historic day, barely two months after we met M.K.O., we were in school when cars began honking interminably. I was in my class of mostly six-year-olds, unaware of the boiling unrest in Akure and around Nigeria. I’d heard of a war that had happened long before—a war Father often mentioned in passing. When he said the phrase “before the war,” a sentence unconnected to the events of the war would often follow, and then sometimes end with “but all these were cut short by the war.” There were times when, while chiding us for an act that smacked of laziness or weakness, he’d tell the story of his escapade as a ten-year-old boy during the war when he was left to cater for, hunt for, feed and protect his mother and younger sisters after they all took to the big Ogbuti forest to escape the invasion of our village by the Nigerian army. This was the only time he ever actually said anything that happened “during the war.” Alternatively, the phrase would be “after the war.” Then, a fresh sentence would take form, without any link to the war mentioned.
Our teacher disappeared early on when the commotion and the honking began. Once she’d left, my classroom emptied as children ran, crying for their mothers. The school was a three-storeyed building. The kindergarten and my nursery class were on the ground floor while the higher classes, the primary classes, started from the first floor up to the second. From the window of my class, I saw a mass of cars in different states—doors opened, driving off and some parking. I sat there, waiting for the moment when Father, like other fathers who had come to pick up their children, would come. But instead of him, Boja appeared at my classroom’s door calling my name. I answered and took my school bag and my water bottle.
“Come, let’s go home,” he said, climbing up the desks towards me.
“Why, let us wait for Daddy,” I said, looking around.
“Daddy isn’t coming,” he said, and put a forefinger across his lips to silence me.
He pulled my hand and led me out of the class. We ran between the scattered rows of wooden desks and chairs that had been uniformly arranged before the commotion began. Under an upturned chair lay a boy’s broken food flask and its content—yellowed rice and fish—strewn over the floor. Outside, it was as if the world had been sawn in two and we were all teetering on the edge of the chasm. I removed my hand from Boja’s grip. I wanted to return to my classroom and wait for Father.
“What are you doing, you fool!” Boja cried. “There’s a riot; they are killing people, let’s go home!”
“We should wait for Daddy,” I said, following him with cautious steps.
“No, we can’t,” Boja objected. “If these men break in, they will recognize we are M.K.O.’s boys, ‘Children of Hope ’93’, enemies, and, we’ll be in greater danger than anyone else.”
His words smashed my resilience into smithereens and frightened me. A crowd of mostly older pupils trying to get out had formed at the gate, but we did not head there. We crossed the fallen fence and began moving through a line of palm trees out of the school and joined Ikenna and Obembe, who were already waiting for us behind a tree in the bush, and together we ran.
The creepers crashed under our feet and a flood of air broke into my lungs. The bush spat us out into a small path that Obembe immediately identified as Isolo Street a few minutes later.
But the street was almost deserted. We ran past the timber market where, on normal days, we would have had to shield our ears because of the deafening noises of drilling machines. The many rickety trucks that transported heavy timber from the forests sat in front of a mountain of sawdust, but there was no one around them. From here, we saw the wide road split in two with a long rail the width of perhaps three of my feet placed in front of each other. It was the road to the Central Bank of Nigeria, the place Ikenna had suggested we go because it was the closest place protected by armed guards in which we could hide, because Father worked there. Ikenna insisted that if we did not go there, the junta’s forces—bent on cracking down on supporters of M.K.O. in Akure, his home state—would kill us. The road was heavily littered that day with all sorts of things—personal effects that had dropped from people fleeing the carnage—making Akure appear as if an aircraft had thrown out belongings from a great height. When we crossed to a side of the road where there was a walled compound with many trees, a car filled with people raced down the road with hellish speed. Just as the distance swallowed it, a blue Mercedes Benz with one of my classmates, Mojisola, in the front seat, emerged from the road we had come from. She waved at me, and I waved back, but the car raced on.
“Let’s go,” Ikenna said, once the car was out of sight. “We could not have stayed back at school; they would have recognized we are M.K.O.’s boys and we would have been in danger. Let us go through that road.” He pointed and glanced widely as though he had heard something we had not heard.
Every gripping detail of the riot my eyes saw, every smell of it, filled me with a concrete fear of death. We’d entered a bend when Ikenna cried: “No, no, let’s
stop. We shouldn’t walk on the main road; it’s not safe.”
So we crossed to the other side, a major commercial lane, filled with shops that were all closed. The door of one of them was shattered, and pieces of broken wood, fecund with nails, dangled dangerously from the broken door. We were forced to halt somewhere in between a closed bar with crates of beer piled on each other and a truck littered with posters of Star Lager Beer, “33,” Guinness and other brands. That instant, a loud cry for help, spoken in Yoruba, came from somewhere we could not immediately make out. A man emerged from one of the shops and ran towards the road to our school. Our fear of the palpable danger grew.
We crossed the dump into a street where we saw a house in flames. The corpse of a man lay on its veranda. Ikenna ducked behind the burning house and we followed, trembling. It was the first time I, and probably the rest of my brothers, had seen a dead man. My heart raced, and that moment I became conscious of a gradual warmth that began to slowly seep down the seat of my school shorts. When I looked at the ground beneath me, I realized that I had wetted my shorts and watched the last few drops slip to the ground, trembling. A group of men, armed with clubs and machetes, trooped past, casting furtive glances about and chanting, “Death to Babangida, Abiola must rule.” Squatted like frogs, we maintained a silence of stones for as long as this clique was in sight. Once they had passed, we crawled behind one of the houses and found a van with a dead man in it parked just across from the backyard, its front door left open.
We could tell from the man’s attire—a long, flowing Senegalese robe—that he was a northerner: the main targets of the onslaught by M.K.O. Abiola supporters, who’d hijacked the riot as a struggle between his west, and the north, where the military president, General Babangida, belonged.
The Fishermen Page 11