Nigerians in Space

by Deji Bryce Olukotun

  “My name is Rahim Odonkor. You heard it announced this evening.”

  She removed Wale’s ibeji doll from her purse. Then she passed him the statuette, watching his face closely. Bello held it in his palm, puzzled. But as he examined the figurine, his furrowed brow slowly relaxed. Wrinkles spread across his face and soon he was all smiles.

  “Do you know what this is?” he said.

  “An ibeji doll.”

  “That’s right. But it’s not just any ibeji doll. It was made by a very special carver. All of the dolls were. This hasn’t been seen since—” He paused, pulling the statuette close to his chest.

  “Since when?”

  “I suppose the cat’s out of the bag, isn’t it?” He took a deep breath. “Since it disappeared in Cape Town. She will be so thrilled! It’s superstition, of course. A token of memory, crenellated into wood. My people, you must understand, have numerous traditions, ancient and modern, that we adopt in syncretic harmony with the demands of modern life—”

  “You were there. Your name is Nurudeen Bello and you worked with my father.”

  The joy began to fade from Bello’s face. In response, Melle removed the veil from her niqab now, and stood in the open air, where faint moonlight struggled through the humid air.

  “That was a long time ago,” he said quietly. “You should forget about it.”

  “My father told me you would help me get treatment for my skin.”

  Bello smiled. “Ah, but then you wouldn’t be who you are today, would you? I have fond memories of your father.”

  She felt relieved that Bello wouldn’t deny that he’d known her father. That was at least a start. She removed a strap of her dress from her shoulder, forcing him to remain in place. “You haven’t answered my question, Mr. Bello. Where is he?”

  Bello chuckled, tilting back his head. For he now knew that he had information she desired, information he would guard more closely since she had just rejected his marriage proposal. Melissa regretted having turned him down so quickly.

  “We are wracked by possibilities, aren’t we, Melle? There are parallel constructions, complementary influences. Hypotheticals. You must understand it was a critical time in our nation’s history. We shook out the corrupt and separated the wheat from the chaff. Your father was riding on the crest of this wave of change, in which sacrifices, pivotal and plenary, had to be made—”

  He had taken on that tone again, the one he used to win over politicians and funders—and nearly herself—and she knew he was simply going to evade the question. She decided to try another tack: “What about the Brain Gain program?”

  “I don’t know what—”

  “I’ve seen the names,” she said. “I know all about the scientists you lured here. I know about the space program. They’re all dead now.”

  Bello opened his mouth, changed his mind, and, with determination, began pacing towards the parking area.

  “Melle, there are some stones that are better left unturned. For your own safety, I will have a driver escort you to the hotel. You are Melle now, and I am Rahim Odonkor. I will forget we spoke about this.”

  She ran before him. In Observatory, all she had needed was a sleeve to captivate Wale, but in the humid half-light in Abuja, she was forced to reveal much more of herself than she normally allowed. Both shoulders now. It was enough to keep him talking, but not to stop moving forward.

  To her surprise he began smiling. “Those were halcyon days of paradigm-shifting visions. Wale and his colleagues were the most capable scientists Nigeria would have ever seen. We would have harnessed the potential of our most accomplished expatriates. We were going to leapfrog the global North…”

  This time Bello interrupted himself, and, in so doing, revealed one of the secrets to his power, that he had the uncommon ability to string together persiflage and flattering words while thinking about something entirely different. For he pointed his finger in the air: “Fish, yes, fish! The President’s aide told me that you didn’t eat a morsel at dinner. Why don’t we grab some fresh fish? Would you like that, some fresh fish? The chef keeps a pond.”

  “I am hardly in the mood—“

  “Ah, but moods are unpredictable. You will not know your mood until the fish is in front of you, steaming and seasoned with our local spices, a hodge-podge of flavors from our peoples…” and on he went until they were at the front door of a building. He rang the doorbell and a butler opened the door, tucking in his shirttails after evidently awaking from sleep. He bowed slightly and Bello said a few words to him. He seemed almost piqued by Bello’s presence, as if he was a guest who had overstayed his welcome.

  “Please excuse the formality,” Bello said.

  The butler performed a thorough search of Melissa’s purse until Bello intervened, and they walked to a capacious dining room with a table that could seat fifty people comfortably. Hundreds of carvings lined the walls, with a Nigerian flagged draped in each corner. After some time, the butler opened a rear door and hissed some words. The chef, also looking sleepy, came carrying a basin with four or five whiskered catfish sloshing about, vying for water.

  “May we take this one?” Bello asked, pointing at a fat one.

  The chef nodded disparagingly. Like the butler, he didn’t seem happy to be doting on Bello, and Melle had the unusual sense that Bello was a guest in his own compound. Bello continued talking in his hyperbole, looking not at her but at the table, sipping at a malt soda and flicking a speck from the pristine tablecloth. She told him everything that Wale had advised her, watching him for reactions, for any clue about whether she could expect him to tell the truth. His manner changed from expecting to wed a world-renowned model to a man cringing in expectation of a blow.

  “I never made it back to Cape Town,” he said, mildly interested. “It was tit-for-tat during those pivotal times, a zero sum purge, the intractability of an illegitimate regime, the conflation of interests and needs, power absolutely corrupted…”

  “But Wale killed them all.”

  “No, it wasn’t Wale. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. He was a basketball fan, if I recall. A bureaucrat and a skilled scientist.”

  I would never kill anyone, he’d said to her. I’m only a scientist. And she shot him. She killed an innocent man. She robbed the son of his father.

  Her throat felt as if it was filling with gauze.

  “Are you feeling alright?” Bello asked.

  “Water, please. One squeeze of lime.”

  The butler scurried from the room and they were silent until he returned. She sipped and the bite of the lime juice made her feel that Wale might have survived. Perhaps the ambulance had saved him.

  Then she thought: forget Wale. Forget him anyway. This is about Daddy. Focus on Daddy or you’ll be alone forever.

  “Why did you contact my father in Zimbabwe?”

  “I needed his services. You might say that your father and I shared the same ideals. You might say that we were too idealistic, treading, like the freedom fighters of yore, against the rip tides of the status quo.”

  The room suddenly went dark. Melissa could hear footsteps and the rear door to the kitchen swing open. She heard the butler hiss some more orders and a few moments later he returned with a flashlight.

  “It’s normal,” Bello said. “We have an enormous problem of illegal tapping that drains the grid. The President is trying to clean it up. In a moment they’ll switch over to the solar generator.”

  She cared only about using light, or darkness, to her advantage. Bello had told her nothing so far, confirmed only that he knew Wale. She wanted to corner him, to pin his lofty words down to a reality. “My father told me to meet you in Paris. But when I arrived you weren’t there. I had no money and no one to look after me. I didn’t even speak French. You’d promised us that you would help me get treatment, but Mrs. Niyangabo put me in an orphanage. How could you do that to us?”

  He seemed to cower, slightly, at hearing the name. He beckoned Melissa towards him with h
er finger, throwing a suspicious glance at the butler. “I was,” he whispered, “I was in prison.”

  The lights flickered for a moment and remained off. Finally, the power switched on. Diesel, not solar, as he had said. The weak light did not help her.

  “But you’ve been here for years.”

  “Yes,” he agreed, matter-of-factly. He went on to talk about various things but Melissa had learned by now to sift through his words and knew that he wasn’t saying anything at all. His pose, staid and falsely noble, took her to France all those years back, for it reminded her of the august portrait of Bello that had hung in the living room in the suburb of Bandoufle.

  “Wale told me that you wanted to change the way things were done in Nigeria. But now,” she added, “you work for the government. Quite comfortably, it seems to me.”

  Bello was tapping his fingers on the table, not really listening. He seemed to be waiting for something, glancing at the front door, then from the door to the kitchen. When it wasn’t coming he began whispering again.

  “I was tortured there.” As if taking a cue from Melissa, he unbuttoned his collar and pulled up his undershirt. He showed her various scars on his torso, legs and ankles, some of them quite deep, and in doing so became less and less confident, practically ducking beneath the table as he described the beatings. The pain of these memories seemed to be the first sincere gesture he’d made the entire evening.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “In prison. I was caught in the crackdown before I could warn the others. There was a groundswell of democratic energy and elections had been held. I thought the nation was changing. No one even knew the Ibeji existed. Not even your father.”

  “What is the Ibeji?”

  “Look around you.”

  She looked more closely now at the carvings on the wall. There were ornamental masks, and headdresses, but now she realized that the entire room was ringed with ibeji dolls like the one Wale had given her.

  He spread his hands wide: “This compound is Ibeji. It’s the counterterrorism and intelligence unit, unofficial, unannounced, but very much alive. Ibeji was created by the late President Rawlson Bimini in 1993 to purge the country of all its enemies, at home and abroad, before he seized power. We were the enemies abroad. Of course, at the time I thought President Bimini’s response was heavy-handed. But now”—and now he began speaking much more loudly, pumping his fist in the air—“I realize that sometimes leadership requires rash decisions. There is perspective that is gained in steering the ship of state, wisdom cultivated. And while the keel beneath might swing from the left or the right, it must be there, keeping the ship afloat. Brain Gain—your father and I, Wale and his team—would have smashed the keel. We were going to tap Nigeria’s minds and not its oil. Our project would have taken the ship into uncharted waters, waters combed by industrial pirates and mercenaries.”

  Bello truly seemed to believe his own words. She could tell that he had really wanted Brain Gain to work. Wale was right: it had not been a scam.

  “What about the others?”

  “They—they were soon caught by Ibeji, too.”

  Melissa suddenly remembered what her father had written her, that he had been betrayed. Bello had said it himself, that he had joined the administration. And he’d been caught before the others.

  “It was you! You sold them all out, Bello! You betrayed your own program and then changed your name!”

  She tore off her gloves and threw herself upon him. His chair fell over backwards. He knocked his head against the ground as she scratched at him with her nails. The butler ran over with two kitchen attendants to pull her off. They tied her down, kicking and scratching, to a chair, so tight that the twine dug into her wrists.

  Bello searched the tiles for his eyeglasses. Eventually he picked them up. One of the lenses had popped out and the wires had bent, so they slipped off his nose, and he set them on the table. “I didn’t betray anyone,” he whispered, squinting. “Brain Gain was accused of being a coup d’état of the intelligentsia. And President Bimini was right. It was a coup—a coup of the mind. That’s why the Ibeji eliminated them. I’d planned for Nigeria to be ruled by its acumen and not by the wallet or the family. After President Bimini seized power, Ibeji began the worst crackdown the country has ever seen. Our luminaries were hanged, our leaders jailed, all while the rest of the world watched. When I confessed our intentions under torture, I revealed nothing but the truth. Our program was not traitorous, not perfidious, but bold—”

  “Where is he?” she interrupted. “Where is my father?”

  He ignored her as he gained momentum: “—and since then—since then, yes, bold!—I have spent every waking day trying to make good on the sacrifices that were made. President Bimini died fifteen years ago, from a heart attack, and new Presidents have come and gone—yet Ibeji lives on. There are hundreds of operatives. Each of these dolls represents a living, breathing member. There are no nations which are transparent, Melle. While I have been here, I can say with pride that I have cracked the opacity of our country and moved it, however modestly, towards translucency. We have legions of hungry young entrepreneurs lending their minds to our development. Our mobile networks are coursing through Nigeria, eradicating poverty by linking the marsh to the river. Nigeria just launched our fifth satellite into space. Our fifth! It’s not Brain Gain—the satellites are built by the Chinese—but I am proud of my contribution to the future of Nigeria.”

  She spat at him. “Sacrifices? You could have sacrificed yourself! You sold them out to live like a king!”

  “No, my appointment as Speaker of the Federal Territory was contingent upon stringent conditions.” He glanced again at the door.

  “Why do you keep looking at the door?”

  “I am under house arrest,” he confessed. “My every move is watched. But it’s the price that I paid for my country.”

  “Your country,” she sneered, trying to dislodge the twine on her arm.

  The butler disappeared into the kitchen and reported that the power had come back on. He inquired if they should switch back over to the grid.

  “Let it go for a few minutes,” Bello said, seeming to give it real thought. “Then we’ll see. You can untie her now. You’ll behave, won’t you?”

  Melissa didn’t reply as the butler begrudgingly snipped her bonds with scissors. As if none of the conversation had happened, as if Melissa was still interested, Bello tried to engage her in small talk about Abuja and suggested the convention center as a possible venue for her charity event. She watched Bello in disbelief. Servants brought bowls of jolof rice and the catfish as long as her forearm, with the eyes cloudy from grilling. He pushed the plate in front of Melissa in a paternal gesture. Then he took a knife and began cutting the fish, glancing at the front door from time to time.

  “Who are you waiting for?”

  “Who you wanted. I am not the one who can tell you about your father. The head of Ibeji is coming to join us.” He tugged at his collar.

  She pressed him for more, but he said that he’d already revealed too much and waxed about the succulent flesh of the fish that was imported from the Yangtze in China for its flavor. A kitchen attendant brought fresh lime water. Disgusted, Melissa pushed back her chair and headed to the front door.

  “I’m afraid you can’t leave,” Bello said. But he remained in his seat.

  She opened the front door to find two uniformed soldiers with rifles. They raised them until she backed away and returned to the table.

  “What will happen to me?”

  “I suggest you eat while you can. She will be here shortly.”

  He himself ate ravenously, salting the fish at times, squeezing lemon here and there, all as if he might never eat catfish again.

  Then they heard voices at the front door. No one knocked, but the butler quick-stepped to open it.

  Melissa watched the woman heel into the room. She felt bonded to her chair as if the twine had n
ever been cut from her wrists. The woman glanced briefly at Bello and then trained her eyes on Melissa. She had aged slightly, the rouge on her cheeks giving a caked, matted look, covering up what the years had done to her. Her hair was blacker than Melissa remembered it, perhaps dyed. But her gaze had lost none of its clinical frigidity. It was a gaze that was assessing tendons, tissues, valves, and ventricles, and considering how to sever the life flowing through them.

  I am not afraid of you anymore, Melissa thought.

  “Please, be lenient!” Bello whined. “Look! Look what she found!”

  He handed her the ibeji doll. For the first time, Mrs. Niyangabo softened in Melissa’s presence. She reached out her hand and stroked the doll’s hair as if it was a real person. “This was Remi’s,” she said. “He was one of our first. Now we can honor his commitment. We’ll hold a full ceremony for him.”

  She held the statuette for the butler to take. He approached her, bowed, and shuttled the doll into the kitchen.

  “What will you do with her?” Bello asked.

  “What she deserves!”

  Melissa rose from her chair to remove her shoes. She peeled down her stockings, unzipped her niqab, shaking her shoulders until it fell to the ground. Then she unfastened her bra, the diesel-powered light illuminating her form. It was the body that had turned lovers against themselves, taken her from Paris to Cape Town, and brought her here, naked before them. The comely standing before the homely.

  “You will not touch me,” she said.

  But Mrs. Niyangabo only wrinkled her nose in disgust as Bello rushed to Melissa’s side.

  “Please, let her go.”

  “Ah, but she knows too much now. I gave her a chance to get away. I gave her a chance to live. And she abused our hospitality.”

  She shouted for the guards. Four soldiers burst into the room, but halted at seeing the naked woman before them.

  “Don’t stop! Take her out of here! It’s time she joined her father.”