by Rob Spillman
I laughed, because he seemed to forget that he, too, was a future Biafran leader. Sometimes even I forgot how young he was. “Do you remember when I used to half-chew your beef and then put it in your mouth so it would be easier for you to chew?” I teased. And Obi made a face and said he did not remember.
The classes were in the morning, before the afternoon sun turned fierce. After the classes, Obi and I joined the local militia—a mix of young people and married women and injured men—and went “combing,” to root out Federal soldiers or Biafran saboteurs hiding in the bush although all we found were dried fruits and groundnuts. We talked about dead Nigerians, we talked about the braveness of the French and Tanzanians in supporting Biafra, the evil of the British. We did not talk about dead Biafrans. We talked about anti-kwash, too, how it really worked, how many children in the early stages of kwashiorkor had been cured. I knew that anti-kwash was absolute nonsense, those leaves were from a tree nobody used to eat, they filled the children’s bellies but gave no nourishment, definitely no proteins. But we needed to believe stories like that. When you were stripped down to sickly cassava, you used everything else fiercely and selfishly—especially the ability to choose what to believe and what not to believe.
I enjoyed those stories we told, the lull of our voices. Until one day, we were at an abandoned farm wading through tall grass when we stumbled upon something. A body. I smelled it before I saw it, a smell that gagged me, suffocated me, a smell so bad it made me light-headed. “Hei! He’s a Nigerian!” a woman said. The flies rose from the bloated body of the Nigerian soldier as we gathered round. His skin was ashy, his eyes were open, his tribal marks were thick eerie lines running across his swollen face. “I wish we had seen him alive,” a young boy said. “Nkakwu, ugly rat,” somebody else said. A young girl spit at the body. Vultures landed a few feet away. A woman vomited. Nobody suggested burying him. I stood there, dizzy from the smell and the buzzing flies and the heat, and wondered how he had died, what his life had been like. I wondered about his family. A wife, who would be looking outside, her eyes on the road, for news of her husband. Little children who would be told, “Papa will be home soon.” A mother who had cried when he left. Brothers and sisters and cousins. I imagined the things he left behind—clothes, a prayer mat, a wooden cup used to drink kunu.
I started to cry.
Obi held me and looked at me with a calm disgust. “It was people like him who killed Aunty Ifeka,” Obi said. “It was people like him who beheaded unborn babies.”
I brushed Obi away and kept crying.
The Igbo say that a fish that does not swallow other fish does not grow fat.
There was no news of Nnamdi. When a neighbor heard from their son or husband in the front, I hung around their room for days willing their good fortune to myself. Nnamdi is fine, Obi said in a tone so normal I wanted to believe him. He said it often during those months of boiled cassava, months of moldy yams, months when we shared our dreams of vegetable oil and fish and salt.
I hid what little food we had because of the neighbors, wrapped in a mat and stuck behind the door. The neighbors hid their own food too. In the evenings, we all unwrapped our food and clustered in the kitchen, cooking and talking about salt. There was salt in Nigeria, salt was the reason our people were crossing the border to the other side, salt was the reason a woman down the road was said to have run out of her kitchen and tore her clothes off and rolled in the dirt, wailing. I sat on the kitchen floor and listened to the chatter and tried to remember what salt tasted like. It seemed surreal now, that we had a crystal saltshaker back home. That I had even wasted salt, rinsing away the clumpy bottom before re-filling the shaker. Fresh salt. I interspersed thoughts of Nnamdi with thoughts of salty food.
And when Akubueze told us that our old pastor, Father Damian, was working in a refugee camp in Amandugba, two towns away, I thought about salt. Akubueze was not sure, stories drifted around about so many people being at so many places. Still, I suggested to Mama that we go and see Father Damian. Mama said yes, we would go to see if he was well, it had been two long years since we saw him. I humored her and said it had been long—as though we still paid social calls. We did not say anything about the food that Caritas Internationalis sent to priests by secret night flights, the food that the priests gave away, the corned beef and glucose and dried milk. And salt.
Father Damian was thinner, with hollows and shadows on his face. But he looked healthy next to the children in the refugee camp. Stick-thin children whose bones stuck out, so unnaturally, so sharply. Children with rust-colored hair and stomachs like balloons. Children whose eyes were swallowed deep in their faces. Father Damian introduced Mama and me to the other priests, Irish missionaries of the Holy Ghost, white men with sun-reddened skin and smiles so brave I wanted to tug at their faces and see if they were real. Father Damian talked a lot about his work, about the dying children, but Mama kept changing the subject. It was so unlike her, something she would call unmannered if somebody else did it. Father Damian finally stopped talking about the children, about kwashiorkor, and he looked almost disappointed as he watched us leave, Mama holding the bag of salt and corned beef and fish powder he gave us.
Why was Father Damian telling us about those children? Mama shouted as we walked home. What can we do for them? I calmed her down, told her he probably just needed to talk to someone about his work and did she remember how he used to sing those silly, off-tune songs at church bazaars to make the children laugh?
But Mama kept shouting. And I too began shouting, the words tumbling out of my mouth. Why the hell did Father Damian tell us about those dying children, anyway? Did we need to know? Didn’t we have enough to deal with?
Shouting. A man walked up the street, beating a metal gong, asking us to pray for the good white people who were flying food in for the relief center, the new one they set up in St. Johns. Not all white people were killers, gong, gong, gong, not all were arming the Nigerians, gong, gong, gong.
At the relief center, I fought hard, kicking through the crowds, risking the flogging militia. I lied, cajoled, begged. I spoke British-accented English, to show how educated I was, to distinguish me from the common villagers, and afterwards I felt tears building up, as though I only had to blink and they would flow down. But I didn’t blink as I walked home, I kept my eyes roundly open, my hands tightly wrapped around whatever food I got. When I got food. Dried egg yolk. Dried milk. Dried Fish. Cornmeal.
The shell-shocked soldiers in filthy shirts roamed around the relief center, muttering gibberish, children running away from them. They followed me, first begging, then trying to snatch my food. I shoved at them and cursed them and spit in their direction. Once I shoved so hard one of the men fell down, and I didn’t turn to see if he got up all right. I didn’t want to imagine, either, that they had once been proud Biafran soldiers like Nnamdi.
Perhaps it was the food from the relief center that made Obi sick, or all the other things we ate, the things we brushed blue mold from, or picked ants out of. He threw up, and when he was emptied, he still retched and clutched at his belly. Mama brought in an old bucket for him, helped him use it, took it out afterwards. I’m a chamber pot man, Obi joked. He still taught his classes but he talked less about Biafra and more about the past, like did I remember how Mama used to give herself facials with a paste of honey and milk? And did I remember the soursop tree in our backyard, how the yellow bees formed columns on it?
Mama went to Albatross hospital and dropped the names of all the famous doctors she had known in Enugu, so that the doctor would see her before the hundreds of women thronging the corridors. It worked, and he gave her diarrhea tablets. He could spare only five and told her to break each in two so they would last long enough to control Obi’s diarrhea. Mama said she doubted that the “doctor” had even reached his fourth year in medical school, but this was Biafra two years into the war and medical students had to play doctor because the real doctors were cutting off arms and legs to keep peop
le alive. Then Mama said that part of the roof of Albatross hospital had been blown off during an air raid. I didn’t know what was funny about that but Obi laughed, and Mama joined in, and finally I did, too.
Obi was still sick, still in bed, when Ihuoma came running into our room, a woman whose daughter was lying in the yard inhaling a foul concoction of spices and urine that somebody said cured asthma. “The soldiers are coming,” Ihuoma said. She was a simple woman, a market trader, the kind of woman who would have nothing in common with Mama before Biafra. But now, she and Mama plaited each other’s hair every week. “Hurry,” she said. “Bring Obi to the outer room, he can hide in the ceiling!” It took me a moment to understand, although Mama was already helping Obi up, rushing him out of the room. We had heard that the Biafran soldiers were conscripting young men, children really, and taking them to the front, that it had happened in the yard down our street a week ago, although Obi said he doubted they had really taken a twelve-year-old. We heard too that the mother of the boy was from Abakaliki, where people cut their hair when their children died, and after she watched them take her son, she took a razor and shaved all her hair off.
The soldiers came shortly after Obi and two other boys climbed into a hole in the ceiling, a hole that appeared when the wood gave way after a bombing. Four soldiers with bony bodies and tired eyes. I asked if they knew Nnamdi, if they’d heard of him, even though I knew they hadn’t. The soldiers looked inside the latrine, asked Mama if she was sure she was not hiding anybody, because that would make her a saboteur and saboteurs were worse than Nigerians. Mama smiled at them, then used her old voice, the voice of when she hosted three-course dinners for Papa’s friends, and offered them some water before they left.
Afterwards, Obi said he would enlist when he felt better. He owed it to Biafra and besides, fifteen-year-olds had fought in the Persian war. Before Mama left the room, she walked up to Obi and slapped his face so hard that I saw the immediate slender welts on his cheek.
The Igbo say that the chicken frowns at the cooking pot, and yet ignores the knife.
Mama and I were close to the bunker when we heard the anti-aircraft guns. “Good timing,” Mama joked, and although I tried, I could not smile. My lips were too sore, the harmattan winds had dried them to a bloody crisp during our walk to the relief center and besides, we had not been lucky, we got no food.
Inside the bunker, people were shouting Lord, Jesus, God Almighty, Jehovah. A woman was crumpled next to me, holding her toddler in her arms. The bunker was dim, but I could see the crusty ringworm marks all over the toddler’s body. Mama was looking around. “Where is Obi?” she asked, clutching my arm. “What is wrong with that boy, didn’t he hear the guns?” Mama got up, saying she had to find Obi, saying the bombing was far away. But it wasn’t, it was really close, loud, and I tried to hold Mama, to keep her still, but I was weak from the walk and hunger and Mama pushed past me and climbed out.
The explosion that followed shook something inside my ear loose, and I felt that if I bent my head sideways, something hard-soft like cartilage would fall out. I heard things breaking and falling above, cement walls and glass louvers and trees. I closed my eyes and thought of Nnamdi’s voice, just his voice, until the bombing stopped and I scrambled out of the bunker. The bodies strewn across the street, some painfully close to the bunker entrance, were still quivering, writhing. They reminded me of the chickens our steward used to kill in Enugu, how they flapped around in the dust after their throats had been slit, over and over, before finally laying quiet. Dignity dance, Obi called it.
I was bawling as I stared at the bodies, all people I knew, trying to identify Mama and Obi. But they were not there. They were in the yard, Mama helping wash the wounded, Obi writing in the dust with his finger. Mama did not scold Obi for being so careless, and I did not rebuke Mama for dashing out like that either. I went into the kitchen to soak some dried cassava for dinner.
Obi died that night. Or maybe he died in the morning. I don’t know. I simply know that when Papa tugged at him in the morning and then when Mama threw herself on him, he did not stir. I went over and shook him, shook him, shook him. He was cold.
“Nwa m anwugo,” Papa said, as though he had to say it aloud to believe it. Mama brought out her manicure kit and started to clip Obi’s nails. “What are you doing?” Papa asked. He was crying. Not the kind of manly crying that is silence accompanied by tears. He was wailing, sobbing. I watched him, he seemed to swell before my eyes, the room was unsteady. Something was on my chest, something heavy like a jerry can full of water. I started to roll on the floor, to ease the weight. Outside, I heard shouting. Or was it inside? Was it Papa? Was it Papa saying nwa m anwugo, nwa m anwugo. Obi was dead. I grasped around, frantic, trying to remember Obi, to remember the concrete things about him. And I could not. My baby brother who made wisecracks and yet I could not remember any of them. I could not even remember anything he said the night before. I had felt that I had Obi for a long, long time and that I did not need to notice him, really notice him. He was there, I felt, he would always be there. I never had the fear that I had about Nnamdi, with Obi, the fear that I may mourn someday. And so I did not know how to mourn Obi, if I could mourn Obi. My hair was itching and I started to tear at it, felt the warm blood on my scalp, I tore some more and then more. With my hair littered on our floor, I wrapped my arms around myself and watched as Mama calmly filed Obi’s nails.
There was something feverish about the days after Obi’s death, something malarial, something so numbingly fast that it left me free to not feel. Even Obi’s burial in the backyard was fast, although Papa spent hours fashioning a cross from old wood. After the neighbors and Father Damian and the crying children dispersed, Mama called the cross shabby and kicked it, broke it, flung the wood away.
Papa stopped going to the War Research Directorate and dropped his patriotic tie into the pit latrine, and day after day, week after week, we sat in front of our room—Papa, Mama and me—staring at the yard. The morning a woman from down the street dashed into our yard, I did not look up, until I heard her shouting. She was waving a green branch. Such a brilliant, wet-looking green. I wondered where she got that, the plants and trees around were scorched by January’s harmattan sun, blown bare by the dusty winds. The earth was sallow.
The war is lost, Papa said. He didn’t need to say it though, we already knew. We knew when Obi died. The neighbors were packing in a hurry, to go into the smaller villages because we had heard the Federal soldiers were coming with truckloads of whips. We got up to pack. It struck me how little we had, as we packed, and how we had stopped noticing how little we had.
The Igbo say that when a man falls, it is his god who has pushed him down.
Nnamdi clutched my hand too tight at our wedding. He did everything with extra effort now, as if he was compensating for his amputated left arm, as if he was shielding his shame. Papa took photos, telling me to smile wider, telling Nnamdi not to slouch. But Papa slouched, himself, he had slouched since the war ended, since the bank gave him fifty Nigerian pounds for all the money he had in Biafra. And he had lost his house—our house with the marble staircase—because it was declared abandoned property and now a civil servant lived there, a woman who had threatened Mama with a fierce dog when Mama defied Papa and went to see her beloved house. All she wanted was our china and our radiogram, she told the woman. But the woman whistled for the dog.
“Wait,” Mama said to Papa, and came over to fix my hat. She had made my wedding dress and sewn sequins onto a secondhand hat. After the wedding, we had pastries in a café and as we ate, Papa told me about the wedding cake he used to dream about for me, a pink multi-layered cake, so tall it would shield my face and Nnamdi’s face and the cake-cutting photo would capture only the groomsman’s face, only Obi’s face.
I envied Papa, that he could talk about Obi like that. It was the year Obi would have turned seventeen, the year Nigeria changed from driving on the left hand side of the road to the right. We we
re Nigerians again.
• Francophone Africa •
PATRICE NGANANG
•Cameroon •
THE SENGHOR COMPLEX
Translated by Cullen Goldblatt
Negro and Its Limits
I AM NOT a negro and I was never one. Whether it is written with or without a capital. The first time I heard the word used in relation to myself, I was twenty years old, and it was by then too late to become one. At the time I was in Germany. I was crossing the street, rushing a little, and bumped into a young man who threw out, “Neger.” This was in Saarbrücken. I remember, rather than being dumbfounded, I was merely surprised. I didn’t know the word had been addressed to me. I recount the episode here because Senghor, as we know from Jahn, translated Negritude into German as Negersein—the fact of being negro. Black, I was not that either until too late, and it too involved Germany, even though it was finally and especially the United States that taught me what black signifies. One could say that Senghor followed in his own way the path that I have just traced: the encounter with Germany, then the staggering discovery of African American texts, in particular the anthology The New Negro (1925), the impact of which on Senghor’s own Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre (1948) has not yet been adequately told. One method of verification: when I look in the mirror, I don’t see a black. Cameroonian, yes, that I am and will remain. I have defined myself as that since childhood, and even today, adult, and having lived on three continents, I always return to what is for me a simple fact—as well as a passport—despite it not being a commitment. There is a bit of a habit of giving all Africans the same history, whether they be Congolese, Nigerian, Senegalese, or Ghanaian, and regardless of their ages. The tendency is perhaps the reason why these defining preliminaries are important. That it be clear then: I never learned at school that my ancestors were Gaulois, but in fact quite the opposite; from very early on, I was made to feel the history of Cameroon in my body: my ancestors were Bamileké1—and that I was therefore “Bamileké,” a “bams,” “bami,” “gros bami,” “ngrafi,” “cochon,” “maquisard,” “bosniaque,” that I was one of “those people,” as one still says today in Cameroon. I did not read Mamadou et Bineta at school, even if, from my father, who taught me to write, I had a CMII workbook for practicing French. A workbook I never used because the reading passages were “too hard,” and did not help me resolve my own simple grammar problems. In short, the books I read at school, those that have stayed in my memory, had titles more along the lines of Afrique mon Afrique and J’aime mon pays, le Cameroun. It is simply that I was born in 1970, that symbolic year. And, according to my country’s, Cameroon’s, current statistics, more than half the population was born after 1970, that is to say, ten years after independence, and shares therefore, more or less, my past, and will perhaps understand the issues that I would like to articulate here.