by E. C. Osondu
The Elders told the young people in the village to treat the spaceship with respect the same way we had been told to respect the first billboard mounted in the village square that advertised Peak Evaporated Milk.
If the alien had come back after a few days to repair his spaceship and return back to his planet there would have been no story to tell. But a week passed and the alien did not return.
Villagers began to comment on the spaceship that was green in color and shaped like a terrapin’s carapace.
“It looks so solid and heavy yet it can fly really fast. Look how it glided noiselessly through the air, and when it landed it came to a halt without a single sound. The airplanes that pass through here make so much noise even though they are so far up in the sky. This one did not even make a single sound,” one villager said.
“Great things don’t make noise. It is only empty things that call attention to themselves by screaming aloud to everyone, look at me, look at me, why are you ignoring me? But solid things, ah, they never shout. Look, let me tell you, it is only rickety and ramshackle motor vehicles that you can hear their sounds from a mile away. The really good cars you won’t even know they are coming and then suddenly they are behind you. Thank goodness for their horns; otherwise they’d knock one down,” another Elder said, further reinforcing the fact that the broken-down spaceship was not like the proverbial empty vessel that reputedly made a lot of noise.
“You know what the he-goat said is quite true. According to the he-goat it is important to move around and not stay in one place; otherwise you’ll think that there is only one kind of leaf that is edible,” said another. “If we had not seen this one, how would we know that the airplane that flies past our village sky is not the only thing made out of metal that flies?”
Everyone in the village agreed that indeed the spaceship was a thing of wonder and that it was the most amazing thing that flew in the skies.
Matters would have ended just like they did regarding the billboard, which was soon obscured by tall weeds and was soon forgotten after a couple of weeks. But a few things happened that made people begin to talk more about the spaceship.
For the first time in the history of the village, the village elementary school St Matthews came first in the School District Bands and March Past competition. This was an unbelievable accomplishment considering that the school competed against students from the other schools like St Martin de Porres and Maria Goretti—schools from much bigger towns. Bigger towns had electricity and electric irons and bleach and starch and shoe polish all of which counted for much and could make a difference when it came to appearance. Bigger town schools also had more impressive musical instruments. Despite the fact that the students from our elementary school used charcoal irons to iron their uniforms, the judges said they were the best school at the march past. They said that our pupils were particularly impressive during the march past when they were commanded to turn their eyes right even as they kept on goose-stepping.
A week later the school’s relay team came first in the District Schools’ Athletics Competition. This again had never happened. Nothing close to it, even. There was no doubt that something was going on. Something had happened to the village water source or to the air that we breathed. The puzzle was soon solved. We had almost forgotten about the spaceship. But how could we have forgotten about it? Yes, it was the spaceship that had brought about our winning the competitions. Surely, the spaceship was a benevolent god of some sort; otherwise how could all these good things that have never been witnessed in the history of our village only begin to happen now that the strange vehicle was docked in our village?
The Elders, who had an explanation for everything, had an explanation for this one.
“Remember that time we had darkness in the afternoon that we were later told on the radio that it was something called an eclipse? Remember all the misfortune that followed in its wake? The poor harvest that year and how all the fish moved downstream and there were only scrawny crabs left in the river? And all that was because of the eclipse. No surprise that what has been happening is because of the spaceship. Every strange and new thing brings along with it something good or something bad,” said one of the Elders.
Elders have a long memory and they love to tell stories, so soon one story followed another. There was the year this other thing happened and there was a great change that happened that year and it was only after that people realized that there had been a link between what happened then and what followed …
The thing that nobody could explain though, was why it was taking the alien in the military uniform who had promised to be back to fix his broken-down spaceship that long to return for his space vehicle.
There was one more thing that happened after the spaceship docked in our village. Bell of Hope, the trader who owned the village store, bought a pickup truck. In a village where the ownership of a Raleigh bicycle was a major life achievement and where people aspired to ownership of the much revered Honda Benly motorcycle—the purchase of a pickup truck was like someone buying an airplane in the larger world.
Again, this was no mere occurrence and could not have happened without some causative agent.
Whose idea was it to begin making sacrifices to the alien ship? No one was sure, but it was probably the Elders.
We woke up one day and there were bottles of Fanta and Coke and shiny pennies and a couple of woven white fabrics right by the spaceship. Someone or some people had decided to make sacrifices to the spaceship.
The people who made the sacrifices promised to offer more things to the spaceship as their fortunes improved.
“If our village has received all the blessings we received recently even without giving anything in return you can imagine what is going to happen if we show our appreciation by offering a little sacrifice?”
Some people argued against the idea of sacrificial offering to the spaceship.
“Before you offer something to an idol, that god or idol must have a priest. The priest is the spokesperson of the god among us men. It is the priest that will now tell you what the god likes to eat and what is forbidden to the god. If you give gin to a goddess that drinks only Fanta, you would end up offending the god and there’d be consequences,” someone said.
“This one is not like the gods we know. What we need to do is what we have done. This god is from a different world. Let it choose what it likes to eat from what we have offered,” one of those who made the sacrifice said.
And that was where the argument ended. Nothing more was said because there was no noticeable improvement in the lives of those who made the sacrificial offerings.
But that was not the end of the matter. One day Keke, who had suffered migraines since birth, did something rather strange. He went to the spaceship with a bowl of water and rinsed off some part of the spaceship into the bowl and drank. The day after he drank, he told his neighbors that his migraine had subsided. He said it was not completely gone but that he had only done it once and he was sure if he did it many more times and even washed his face with the water, the migraine would disappear completely.
No one tried to stop Keke or argue with him. His migraines had become every villager’s headache over the years and anything that made him feel better was a welcome relief.
A fence made out of red rope and wood was found around the spaceship one morning. It was not a sturdy fence in any way but more like a demarcation tool. Again, it was the Elders who had made the decision to have the fence around the spaceship. They said it was not anything out of the ordinary, but a way to show a little reverence for the Visitor—for that was the euphemism for the spaceship these days.
At about this time people began to say that they observed some things about the spaceship.
Some said that it glowed in the inky blackness of the night when there was no moon. That its glow was faint like the low-watt glow of ancient fireflies.
Some said they heard a gentle hum from the ship when all was quiet at night
and even the night insects had gone silent and fallen asleep.
Some said they heard movements within the insides of the ship like the gentle near-quiet light footsteps of the chameleon.
Some said there was a strange smell in the air of the village that seemed to emanate from the ship. It was a smell that was different depending on the person describing it. Some said it smelled like the after-smell of burning grass.
Some said they had heard and felt the earth around the village shrug mildly and tremble on a few occasions. That it wasn’t anything major, but it was like the earth shrugged slightly. But because these phenomena had no negative effect on anyone, they were waved off as nothing significant.
One mid-afternoon a commercial vehicle pulled up at the village square and a man emerged asking for the way to his father’s compound. This in itself was unheard of in the history of our village. It was even stranger than the arrival of the spaceship. How is it possible for a man not to know the way to his father’s compound? Was that not where he was born? Where his umbilical cord was buried? Where he emerged from to go to the farm and the stream?
The man turned out to be Robert. Robert had set an academic record in the village elementary school that was unequaled to date. He had gone on to set a record in the secondary school as well. The villagers had pulled their resources together to send him to Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone. It was expected that he would in return come back and sponsor other children from the village for further education. But Robert never came back after his college education. There had been many letters and telegrams sent to him to remind him to return, but he did not respond to any. Now Robert was back.
There was great rejoicing at Robert’s return. He said he was going to build a community secondary school and serve as the principal. This was great news.
The big question remained why he had chosen to come back at this time. Robert said that it was as if a force was pulling him. He said he felt like a fish that was being reeled in by unseen hands. He said the best way to describe how he felt was how iron-filings found it impossible to resist the lure of a magnet.
Ah, the Elders said. What other force could have pulled him home if not our visitor—the spaceship?
There was now some anxiety about what would happen if the alien came back to take his ship. What would happen after the visitor leaves? Would our good fortune dry out like a lake that had its source cut off? What can we do to detain the spaceship further or even make it stay with us permanently?
One of the Elders said that we should treat the spaceship the way we would treat a visitor that we did not want to leave.
How exactly do you do that, someone asked?
The familiar scenarios known to everyone in the village are the strategies for sending away a visitor that was overstaying their welcome. You could yawn and say “oh by this time last night we were already asleep in bed” or you could get a broom and start sweeping and they’d take the hint.
Besides, the spaceship, even though it was euphemistically referred to as the Visitor, could not be treated like a human visitor. A human visitor could be offered food and drinks and made to feel at home. They could even be offered the most comfortable bed in the house. But how do you detain a spaceship?
Some people had made sacrifices to it but there was no sign that they were favored above those that did not. Someone else remarked that sacrificing the wrong thing to a deity might attract wrath instead of blessings.
We woke up to the smell of smoke. The village sky was covered with smoke. When we looked up we saw that the smoke was coming from the farmlands that lay about three miles from the village. Everyone began to run towards the farmlands. When they reached the farmlands they discovered that overnight a fire had burned through the farmlands destroying the corn, yam, cassava, and sweet potatoes that were the staple of the community. There was nothing left as all the farms lay next to each other.
Wailing rose up in the sky like the smoke from the burning farmland. What were people going to feed on? What would they sell to make money to buy the items they did not grow? Almost everyone in the village depended on the crops from their farms to live.
What has brought this upon us, the villagers asked?
What have we done wrong that we should have the very food taken from our mouths?
Who have we wronged that we are surely to die from starvation?
What other trade can we pursue now that our crops have perished?
No one asked what had started the fire or where the fire came from. In the village, all misfortunes were viewed as one and their external manifestations were not considered as important as their root cause.
The night after the fire that burned the farms it began to rain. The rain fell in gigantic pellets vehemently and relentlessly and did not pause to draw breath. It rained like that for two days without ceasing. People could not leave their homes for fear that they’d be swept away by the flood.
Just as the rain had started without thunder clouds, it stopped abruptly and the sun came out as if it had not gone anywhere. As the sun emerged, so did the Elders.
“We were young once, and now we are old, but we have never seen anything like this since our ancestors founded this village. First, it was fire, then water. Each of the elements is enough to kill,” the Elders said.
And then all the Elders arrived at the same thought all at once.
It must be the spaceship.
It must be the strange visitor.
First it lured us close with the empty gift of good fortune before unleashing its peril upon us.
It was decided by the Elders that the spaceship must go.
But how to do this?
There was no way of sending an emissary to the planet from which it came to come and carry their thing.
To make telephone calls to the city, the villagers had to go to the post office. But how do you place a call to the alien when he has not bothered to leave a forwarding address nor a contact number behind?
Even if a young man in the village volunteered to go, how would he prepare for the journey? How much food would he pack and how many gallons of water would be enough to take along for the trip? What was the distance between the planet from which the spaceship came and our village?
It was decided by the Elders to do to the spaceship what was usually done to recalcitrant gods—the villagers would ignore it and turn their backs to it. They would live their lives as if it didn’t exist.
And that was what they did.
Soon, grasses and creeping vines and thistles and wild shrubs began to sprout around the spaceship. The soil around the village was fertile. Soon the spaceship was covered with wild vegetation.
Sometimes when there was a strange noise at night we would say to ourselves it must be the spaceship calling out to its owner, Come and get me, come and get me, why have you turned your back at me?
Sacrifice
This was the way it always happened. Every year an alien spaceship would quietly descend. Its doors gently swing open. A young man from our village would obediently walk into the spaceship. The spaceship door then glides forcefully closed. After which the spaceship departs.
This was our entire relationship with them ever since the days of our ancestors. It is the way we have always done it and the same way our children would do it. Those are the terms of the treaty that our ancestors signed with them. It says that every year we must give them a young man or they’d attack us and take all of us away and sow chemicals on our land so that nothing could ever grow on it again and poison our streams so that whosoever drank from it will burn up and die.
It sounded fair, to us. We had nothing with which we would have fought them. We were just ordinary folk. All we had were our machetes for farming, our single barrel guns for hunting, and our fishing nets and hooks. There was no way we were going to be able to fight them and their spaceships that glided through the air. They could wipe us out by the press of one button.
There were different stories abou
t the young men and women who left on the spaceship.
Some said that they had gone to a better place, a place better than our lives of endless toil here in the village.
Others said that they’d train them to become Engineers and Pilots and Scientists and they’d soon be piloting spaceships like the aliens.
To some they have gone to a place where all the comforts can be summoned by the touch of a button. Over there they have robots that bring them cups of water and serve them tea, some said.
A few said that they were better off there. Over there they didn’t even have to lift a finger, was some people’s opinion.
Some people said that when they got to the place the spaceships came from, they were given beautiful women as wives and their only assignment was to reproduce with the women so they could bring forth a superior race of beings that were indestructible.
The more cynical types said that they were etherized in space labs while their bodies were examined under microscopes. That they stared all day with sightless eyes like fishes preserved in chloroform in a Biology laboratory.
Some of the other comments were too fantastic to believe if not downright cruel. They said that the young men and women were sacrificed on a piece of rock that was shaped like the spaceship the moment they got to the other place.
In spite of the different opinions, there was one thing that everyone was sure about and upon which there was no argument. Those who left never came back. Not a single one of them ever came back and nothing was heard of them again.
The truth is that we had peace. We could farm and harvest our crops and sit under the moon at night to share stories. We told ourselves that it could have been worse.