3. The Book: The World Was Silent When We Died
He writes about Independence. The Second World War changed the world order: Empire was crumbling, and a vocal Nigerian elite, mostly from the South, had emerged.
The North was wary; it feared domination from the more educated South and had always wanted a country separate from the infidel South anyway. But the British had to preserve Nigeria as it was, their prized creation, their large market, their thorn in France’s eye. To propitiate the North, they fixed the pre-Independence elections in favor of the North and wrote a new constitution that gave the North control of the central government.
The South, too eager for independence, accepted this constitution. With the British gone, there would be good things for everyone: “white” salaries long denied Nigerians, promotions, top jobs. Nothing was done about the clamor of the minority groups, and the regions were already competing so fiercely that some wanted separate foreign embassies.
At Independence in 1960, Nigeria was a collection of fragments held in a fragile clasp.
13
Olanna’s Dark Swoops began the day she came back from Kano, the day her legs failed. Her legs were fine when she climbed down from the train and she did not need to hold on to the blood-smeared railings; they were fine as she stood for the three-hour drive to Nsukka in a bus so crowded she could not reach out to scratch her itching back. But at the front door of Odenigbo’s house, they failed. So did her bladder. There was the melting of her legs, and there was also the wetness of hot liquid running between her thighs. Baby discovered her. Baby had walked to the front door to look out, asking Ugwu when Mummy Ola would come back, and then cried out at the crumpled form on the steps. Odenigbo carried her in, bathed her, and held Baby back from hugging her too tightly. After Baby fell asleep, Olanna told Odenigbo what she had seen. She described the vaguely familiar clothes on the headless bodies in the yard, the still-twitchy fingers on Uncle Mbaezi’s hand, the rolled-back eyes of the child’s head in the calabash and the odd skin tone—a flat, sallow gray, like a poorly wiped blackboard—of all the corpses that lay in the yard.
That night, she had the first Dark Swoop: A thick blanket descended from above and pressed itself over her face, firmly, while she struggled to breathe. Then, when it let go, freeing her to take in gulp after gulp of air, she saw burning owls at the window grinning and beckoning to her with charred feathers. She tried to describe these Dark Swoops to Odenigbo. She tried to tell him, also, how the pills tasted, the ones Dr. Patel brought, clammy like her tongue in the morning.
But Odenigbo always said, “Shush, nkem. You’ll be fine.” He spoke too softly to her. His voice sounded so silly, so unlike him. He even sang when he bathed her in the tub full of water scented with Baby’s bath foam. She wanted to ask him to stop being ridiculous, but her lips were heavy. Speaking was a labor. When her parents and Kainene visited, she did not say much; it was Odenigbo who told them what she had seen.
At first, her mother sat next to her father and nodded as Odenigbo spoke in that silly-soft voice. Then her mother collapsed; she simply began to slide down as if her bones had liquefied until she half lay, half sat on the floor. It was the first time Olanna saw her mother without makeup, without gold clinging to her ears, and the first time Olanna saw Kainene cry since they were children. “You don’t have to talk about it, you don’t have to,” Kainene said, sobbing, although Olanna had not even tried to talk about it.
Her father walked up and down the room. He asked Odenigbo over and over where exactly Patel had read medicine and how he could claim that Olanna’s inability to walk was psychological. He talked about how frustrated they felt to have to drive all the way from Lagos because the federal government blockade meant Nigeria Airways was no longer flying to the southeast. “We wanted to come right away, right away,” he said, so often that Olanna wondered if he really thought it would have made a difference when they came. But it did make a difference that they came, especially that Kainene came. It did not mean that Kainene had forgiven her, of course, but it meant something.
In the following weeks, Olanna lay in bed and nodded when friends and relatives came by to say ndo—sorry—and to shake their heads and mutter about the evils of those Muslim Hausa people, those black-as-he-goats Northerners, those dirty cattle-rearers with jigger-infested feet. Her Dark Swoops were worse on the days she had visitors; sometimes three came in quick succession and left her breathless and exhausted, too exhausted even to cry, and with only enough energy to swallow the pills Odenigbo slipped in her mouth. Some guests had stories to tell—the Okafors had lost a son and his family of four in Zaria, the Ibe daughter had not returned from Kaura-Namoda, the Onyekachi family had lost eight people in Kano. There were other stories, too, of how British academics at the University in Zaria encouraged the massacres and sent students out to incite the youths, how crowds at the Lagos motor parks had booed and taunted, “Go, Igbo, go, so that garri will be cheaper! Go, and stop trying to own every house and every shop!” Olanna did not like to hear these stories, nor did she like the furtive way the guests glanced at her legs, as though to discover a lump that would explain why she could not walk.
There were days when she woke up from her naps feeling clearheaded, like today. Her bedroom door was open, and she could hear the rise and fall of voices from the living room. For a while Odenigbo had asked their friends not to visit. He had stopped playing tennis, too, so he could be at home and Ugwu would not have to take her to the toilet. She was pleased that they were visiting again. Sometimes she followed the conversation. She knew that the university women’s association was organizing food donations for the refugees, that the markets and railways and tin mines in the North were said to be empty now that the Igbo had fled, that Colonel Ojukwu was now seen as the leader of the Igbo, that people were talking about secession and a new country, which would be named after the bay, the Bight of Biafra.
Miss Adebayo was speaking in her loud voice. “I am saying that our students should stop making noise. Asking David Hunt to go does not make sense. Give the man a chance and see if peace will come.”
“David Hunt thinks we are all mental children.” It was Okeoma. “The man should go home. Why is he coming to tell us how to put out a fire, when it is he and his fellow British who collected the firewood for it in the first place?”
“They may have collected the firewood, but we lit the match,” said somebody with an unfamiliar voice, perhaps it was Professor Achara, the new lecturer in physics, who had come back from Ibadan after the second coup.
“Firewood or no firewood, the important thing is to find a way to make peace before things explode,” Miss Adebayo said.
“What peace are we looking for? Gowon himself has said that a basis for unity does not exist, so what peace are we looking for?” Odenigbo asked. Olanna imagined him at the edge of his chair, pushing his glasses back as he spoke. “Secession is the only answer. If Gowon wanted to keep this country united, he would have done something long ago. For goodness’ sake, not one of them has come out to condemn the massacres, and months have passed! It is as if all our people who were killed don’t matter!”
“Didn’t you hear what Zik said the other day? Eastern Nigeria seethes, seethes, and will continue to seethe until the federal government addresses the massacres,” Professor Ezeka said, his hoarse voice quickly fading.
Olanna’s head ached. The sun shone weakly through the curtains Ugwu had drawn when he brought her breakfast. She needed to urinate; she urinated too often these days and she kept forgetting to ask Doctor Patel if her medication was the reason. She stared at the bell on the bedside cabinet, then reached out and ran a hand over the black dome-shaped plastic, over the red button in the middle that gave out a shrill sound when she depressed it. Odenigbo had insisted on installing it himself, at first, and each time she pressed it, there was a fire spark at the wall connection. Finally he brought an electrician, who chuckled as he did the rewiring. The bell no longer sparked, but it was
too loud, and whenever she needed to go to the toilet and rang it, the echo reverberated all over the house. She let her finger linger over the red button, then drew away. She would not ring it. She lowered her legs to the floor. The sound from the living room was diminished now as if somebody had lowered the collective volume of the voices.
Then she heard Okeoma say “Aburi.” It sounded lovely, the name of that Ghanaian town, and she imagined a sleepy cluster of homes on stretches of sweet-scented grasslands. Aburi came up often in their conversations: Okeoma would say that Gowon should have followed the agreement he and Ojukwu signed in Aburi, or Professor Ezeka would say that Gowon’s reneging after Aburi meant that he did not wish the Igbo well, or Odenigbo would proclaim, “On Aburi we stand.”
“But how can Gowon make such a turnaround?” Okeoma’s voice was louder. “He agreed to confederation at Aburi, and now he wants one Nigeria with a unitary government, but a unitary government was the very reason that he and his people killed Igbo officers.”
Olanna stood up and placed one leg forward, then the other. She swayed. There was a tight pressure around her ankles. She was walking. The firmness of the floor beneath her feet was stirring and her legs felt as if they had vibrating vessels in them. She walked past Baby’s Raggedy Ann lying on the floor, and stopped to look down at the stuffed doll for a while before she went in to the toilet.
Later, Odenigbo came in and looked searchingly into her eyes in the way he often did, as if looking for proof of something. “You haven’t rung in a while, nkem. Don’t you have to urinate?”
“Have they all gone?”
“Yes. Don’t you want to urinate?”
“I did already. I walked.”
Odenigbo stared at her.
“I walked,” Olanna said again. “I used the toilet.”
There was something she had never seen on Odenigbo’s face, something precious and frightened. She sat up and he immediately reached out to hold her, but she shrugged him off and walked a few steps to the wardrobe and then back to the bed. Odenigbo sat and looked at her.
She took his hand and touched it to her face, pressed it against her breast. “Touch me.”
“I’m going to tell Patel. I want him to come in and take a look at you.”
“Touch me.” She knew he didn’t want to, that he touched her breasts because he would do whatever she wanted, whatever would make her better. She caressed his neck, buried her fingers in his dense hair, and when he slid into her, she thought about Arize’s pregnant belly, how easily it must have broken, skin stretched that taut. She started to cry.
“Nkem, don’t cry.” Odenigbo had stopped; he was lying next to her and smoothing her forehead. Later, when he gave her more pills and some water, she took them dutifully and then lay back and waited for the strange stillness they brought.
Ugwu’s gentle knock woke her up; he would open the door and come in with a tray of food that he would place next to her packets of medicine, bottle of Lucozade, and tin of glucose. She remembered the first week she came back, the week that Odenigbo sprang up whenever she stirred. She had asked for water and Odenigbo opened the bedroom door to go to the kitchen and nearly tripped on Ugwu, curled on a mat right outside their door. “My good man, what are you doing here?” he asked, and Ugwu answered, “You don’t know where anything is in the kitchen, sah.”
She closed her eyes now and pretended she was asleep. He was standing close to her and watching her; she could hear his breathing.
“When you are ready, mah, the food is here,” he said. Olanna nearly laughed; he probably knew all the times she pretended to be asleep when he brought her food. She opened her eyes. “What did you cook?”
“Jollof rice.” He raised the cover of the dish. “I used fresh tomatoes from the garden.”
“Has Baby eaten?”
“Yes, mah. She is playing outside with Dr. Okeke’s children.”
Olanna picked up the fork and held it.
“I will make fruit salad for you tomorrow, mah. That pawpaw tree behind has a ripe fruit. I will give it one more day, and then I will pluck it fast before those birds come for it. I will use orange and milk.”
“Good.”
Ugwu still stood there, and she knew he would not leave until she had started to eat. She raised the fork to her mouth slowly, chewing with her eyes closed. It was as good as whatever Ugwu cooked, she was sure, but, except for the chalky pills, she had been unable to taste anything in so long. Finally, she drank some water and asked Ugwu to take the tray away.
On her bedside table, Odenigbo had placed a long sheet of paper with WE, UNIVERSITY STAFF, DEMAND SECESSION AS A MEANS OF SECURITY typewritten at the top and a patchwork of varied signatures at the bottom.
“I was waiting for you to be strong enough to sign it before I deliver it to the statehouse in Enugu,” he had said.
After Ugwu left the room, she picked up a pen and signed the letter and then checked through the text for any errors. There were none. But Odenigbo didn’t need to deliver the letter because the secession was announced that evening. He sat on the bed with the radio placed on the bedside cabinet. The reception had little static, as if the radio waves understood the importance of the speech. Ojukwu’s voice was unmistakable; it was vibrantly male, charismatic, smooth:
Fellow countrymen and women, you the people of Eastern Nigeria: Conscious of the supreme authority of Almighty God over all mankind; of your duty over posterity; aware that you can no longer be protected in your lives and in your property by any government based outside Eastern Nigeria; determined to dissolve all political and other ties between you and the former Republic of Nigeria; having mandated me to proclaim on your behalf and in your name that Eastern Nigeria be a sovereign independent Republic, now therefore I do hereby solemnly proclaim that the territory and region known as and called Eastern Nigeria, together with her continental shelf and territorial waters, shall henceforth be an independent sovereign state of the name and title of The Republic Of Biafra.
“This is our beginning,” Odenigbo said. That false softness had left his voice and he sounded normal again, bracing and sonorous. He took his glasses off and grabbed Baby’s little hands and began to dance around in circles with her. Olanna laughed and then felt as if she were following a script, as if Odenigbo’s excitement would abide nothing but more excitement. She sat up and shivered. She had wanted the secession to happen, but now it seemed too big to conceive. Odenigbo and Baby were moving round and round, Odenigbo singing off-key, a song he had made up—“This is our beginning, oh, yes, our beginning, oh, yes …”—while Baby laughed in blissful incomprehension. Olanna watched them, her mind frozen in the present, on the cashew-juice stain on the front of Baby’s dress.
———
The rally was held in Freedom Square, in the center of the campus, lecturers and students shouting and singing, an endless sheet of heads and placards held high.
We shall not, we shall never move,
Just like a tree that’s planted by the water,
We shall not be moved.
Ojukwu is behind us, we shall never move.
God is behind us, we shall never move.
They swayed as they sang, and Olanna imagined that the mango and gmelina trees swayed too, in agreement, in one fluid arc. The sun felt like a flame brought too close, and yet it was drizzling and the lukewarm raindrops mixed with her sweat. Her arm brushed Odenigbo’s as she raised her placard: it read WE CANNOT DIE LIKE DOGS. Baby was sitting on Odenigbo’s shoulders, waving her stuffed doll, and the sun was bright through the thin drizzle, and Olanna was filled with a delicious exuberance. Ugwu was beside her. His placard read GOD BLESS BIAFRA. They were Biafrans. She was Biafran. Behind her, a man was talking about the market, how the traders were dancing to Congo music and giving away the best of their mangoes and groundnuts. A woman said she would go there right after the rally to see what she could get for free, and Olanna turned to them and laughed.
A student leader spoke into the mic
rophone and the singing stopped. Some young men were carrying a coffin with NIGERIA written on it in white chalk; they raised it up, mock solemnity on their faces. Then they placed it down and pulled their shirts off and started to dig a shallow hole in the ground. When they lowered the coffin into the hole, a cheer rose in the crowd and spread, ripplelike, until it was one cheer, until Olanna felt that everybody there had become one. Somebody shouted, “Odenigbo!” And it spread among the students. “Odenigbo! Address us!”
Odenigbo climbed up to the podium waving his Biafran flag: swaths of red, black, and green and, at the center, a luminous half of a yellow sun.
“Biafra is born! We will lead Black Africa! We will live in security! Nobody will ever again attack us! Never again!”
Odenigbo raised his arm as he spoke, and Olanna thought how awkwardly twisted Aunty Ifeka’s arm had looked, as she lay on the ground, how her blood had pooled so thick that it looked like glue, not red but close to black. Perhaps Aunty Ifeka could see this rally now, and all the people here, or perhaps not, if death was a silent opaqueness. Olanna shook her head, to shake away the thoughts, and took Baby from Ugwu’s neck and hugged her close.
After the rally, she and Odenigbo drove to the staff club. Students had gathered on the hockey field nearby, burning paper effigies of Gowon around a glowing bonfire; the smoke curled into the night air and mixed with their laughter and chatter. Olanna watched them and realized with a sweet surge that they all felt what she felt, what Odenigbo felt, as though it were liquid steel instead of blood that flowed through their veins, as though they could stand barefoot over red-hot embers.
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