But Filo would not speak. Adesua crouched down further till there was only the space between teeth separating them. She snaked an arm around Filo’s back in support, held Filo’s body while she slowly stopped shaking and the sniffling subsided. Outside in the distance the laughter of the palace inhabitants was heard. Adesua didn’t know it but the birds that had been repeatedly circling above Filo’s chamber, listened too. They heard Adesua’s anger, noted the confusion in her voice and still they did not move.
Finally when her concern burst through the roof and touched their heavy wings, they huddled their heads together, and waited. One bird fluttering down to the doorway would have seen the two women sitting with their knees raised to their chins, holding hands as if they were little girls on a farm rather than young women in a palace, their bottoms against the soft, weather-beaten earth, providing a temporary ceiling for the bugs and worms that scurried and slid layers beneath.
Meanwhile Adesua and Filo clung together listening to the sounds of the palace, bearing the weight of a silent thing, cloaked in a comfortable peace. Somehow within that chaos the two women had found a temporary relief. The silence crooned its intent, and unspoken words were exchanged through the small space between their raised knees and entangled fingers. They ignored the comings and goings outside the fragile bubble they were in, the noise from the rest of the palace that at times threatened to burst it. Adesua listening to Filo’s breathing even out again continued to hold her hand and waited. Not because she thought Filo would confide in her, but because she knew she wouldn’t.
Eventually, Adesua dragged her feet up to leave. By then Filo was staring blankly at her walls, but the corners of her lips were no longer pulled down and by the time Adesua walked away with the brass head tucked under her arm, Filo’s shoulders had ceased to hunch up. For the first time Adesua felt as if it wasn’t just a piece of art that belonged to her, but it was a real, live human trophy.
She left Filo’s quarters with a new, slick, uncomfortable knowledge. Of the darkness of Filo’s bedchamber, from the brown cloth she’d hung over the window to stop light flooding through. The wooden platter of days old half-eaten cassava and stew rotting in the far corner and the pungent, rotten smell that filled the room loitering just beneath their nostrils. Of the garments strewn across the floor, leaving a rainbow-coloured mess of materials you navigated your feet through to find a space. Next to the window, a once beautiful, wooden chair sat, chipped and worn. Bits of its top layer had been scraped off, leaving an awkward, bruised thing. It looked lonely, in a jumbled room where the mouth of the green bed mat grazed the terracotta walls.
Beside the bed area was a small, rectangular brass box on a wooden mantle, its one drawer half open, like a jaw dropping in shock. Inside it, you could see Filo’s jewellery. Glinting silver bangles, winking gold necklaces, dark maroon rings peeping coyly from the edges, a fountain of lime-coloured beads dripping out and down the side of the box. Beneath your feet, the hardened floor felt hot and unsettling. As if you were subject to its moods.
Unaware that the brass head had been found, the servants gave up looking for it. In fact, they secretly wished it were never found. Of course the Oba would rant at them and they would soak it up, as they always did. But that artefact seemed to brew nothing but jealousy and resentment.
It was sweltering as Adesua trudged back to the main palace, suspiciously so. She knew something was amiss. The air was thick with promise. Even the flies seemed skittish. Sun-stroked, burnished green leaves from the Iroko tree had abandoned their branches to scatter and rustle against the scorched ground. There were shouting, agitated voices mingling into a chorus of noise you couldn’t clearly decipher ricocheting through the air. Above the clouds seemed to frown before shifting, one moment a face, the next a half-bitten guava.
Adesua decided that night she must see the Oba. Her husband. A man she knew less well than her personal servant. Gone were the days when she felt like a young girl, and all she worried about was falling from tall trees or the scorn of her Papa’s tongue whipping at her when she was caught attempting to wrangle her way into wrestling matches with boys from the village. Now a new, sneaky awareness had arisen, simmering to the surface, a slow burn. There was no going back; she was the young wife of Oba Odion. A king’s bride, a coveted and envied position, but this did not give her comfort, it never had. And as she followed the winding path back under the half-watchful gaze of the guards who held their spears too loosely and their slack mouths even looser, suddenly a rock of fear lodged in her throat. She tried to imagine what this thing she felt was coming could possibly be. Moments later the tantalising smell of roasted fowl infused the air and filled her nostrils. She imagined the palace cooks with their sweaty brows and teeth-dented bottom lips flapping around each other to prepare the meal on time, while her visit to Filo still weighed heavily on her mind.
Oba Odion did not delude himself into thinking he was a particularly wise man. In fact, as a boy he had been laughed out of several challenges set by his father Oba Anuje. Oba Anuje would create a riddle for him to solve and then summon him back later in the day when the hum of the palace had died down to a buzz trapped in his ear. The boy Odion would watch as Oba Anuje gleefully rubbed his large, dark brown, calloused hands together as he stood before his father trembling, pressing his thumbs against the other forlorn fingers desperately trying to settle himself. Telling bulbs of sweat would pop out of his armpits before sliding down his sides to languish in the flesh above his hips. Inevitably, when he failed, Oba Anuje would stroke his strong, jutting jaw and nod his head as if confirming what he already knew.
Several times when this ritual humiliation occurred, a boiling, yellow thought would conjure a heat so strong, it spread from Oba Odion’s head to every part of his body. It lit him up, and he was shrouded by this gleaming yellow aura before his father. Even then his father knew. Oba Odion could see it in the narrowing of his father’s eyes till they became black slits and the curling of his top lip. Finally, Oba Anuje would roar, “Get out of my sight.” And Odion would jump out of the protective gold light, which then shrank, to a dot in the air.
He remembered his father’s room as it was then. The circular shape of it, with its fading sickly plum-coloured walls. Sometimes he thought he heard the walls laughing at him and whispering to the bronze masks that decorated them, to the sturdy, shining brass chair with its crisscrossing pattern that left holes just big enough to stick fingers through. To the long, polished wooden stick that often lay by his father’s feet. It had smelled like new sweat and something else. A sickly sweet scent that cocooned something rotten which subtly oozed through the walls. Many times Oba Odion had tried in vain to figure out what that rotten smell was. He never did.
As if by doing so he would kill a memory possessing too many lives, the first task Odion completed when he became Oba was to have that room knocked out and rebuilt. On several occasions Oba Odion found himself making decisions based on avoiding his father’s haunting disapproval, although this revelation did not show its face at first. It was only when it began to eat up the ingredients that made up his judgement that the Oba ceased denying this truth. When he caught himself gauging how Oba Anuje would have reacted in a given circumstance and then vehemently deciding to do the opposite, it became even clearer.
So when Sully stood before him and the council, Oba Odion found himself clinging to the young man’s words, plucking them from his mouth as though they were fruits. And what words! It struck him that this stranger had what could only be described as a gift. With spit and perfect intonations he weaved his tale, rocking on the balls of his feet, talking not just with his lips but his hands, shoulders and it seemed every part of his body. Shrugging dramatically, angling his head at all sides of the room, and pointing to his bruises he informed them that he was an explorer from England who had travelled to India and around Europe, the Americas and the far corners of the East along his adventures. That he had heard so many tales of the great Benin kingd
om from the Portuguese he had decided to come see for himself, bringing copper, brass bracelets and other items to trade.
Oba Odion had judged him before he even opened his mouth to speak, in the moment when their gazes held and Sully did not blink, his eye not automatically dropping down in false humility, nor cowering to their corners. The councilmen shifted in their seats, as though somebody had rubbed nettle leaves there to itch their backsides. They drew long, slow breaths that puffed out their cheeks and short, shallow ones through dry, pursed lips. They drummed their fingers and tapped their feet, throwing cynical glances for each other to catch. They shot Sully clever threats posing as questions which curled above their heads in circular patterns before wilting on contact with his skin. When a tiny, fleeting smile cracked across the Oba’s face, the councilmen noted it. Clasped hands unclasped and their coughs fell at Sully’s feet.
Talking before the Oba and his council, Sully felt the heat of their gazes. He was pleased. He did not crumble nor lose his will. At that moment, he thought of purpose and how it could con you into a different direction, lull you into a trap. He could hear the comings and goings of the palace above a bubble of gas, which roiled and gurgled in his stomach.
Booming laughter, strangled shouts, what sounded like the blade of a cutlass slicing into a coconut shell. He imagined juice spitting as it split into two. He curled his fingers into his palms to stop himself from running to the large window overlooking the grounds and sating his curiosity.
“And you say you have no family?” The question from a councilman stilled him. He turned to face the culprit.
“No sir, I have moved from place to place since coming to Africa.” This was met with a rigid “humph.”
Beneath his chest Sully’s heart quickened and the cut on his lip began to burn as he forced a bright, deceptive smile. He wondered how long this ordeal of questioning would last, not that it worried him because challenging trials were part of life, just as long as they came to an end before you did. The Gods would see to that, but he knew that sometimes the Gods displayed a vicious humour.
The ground began to swim a little and he rubbed his right hand over both eyes to wipe the fatigue away. He felt as if his body was about to cave in on itself. So he chided himself, not here, not now. In his head, a whistling sound began to grow louder and take shape, slowly, till it became bigger swirls of white noise that blew out of his ears. He waited for Oba Odion’s ruling, as all the men did. And when it came it was this, “Welcome to Benin.”
Journal Entry December 12th 1955 Peter Lowon
I am not a sentimental man, but on this day, the eve of my 26th birthday, I Peter Lowon have joined the ranks of the Nigerian army as a second lieutenant. So, I am tasting a kind of happiness that is hard to reign in. A few of us are in Lagos staying in the house of General Akhatar. Earlier this evening, my fellow officers and I celebrated in style, having been invited to another higher-ranking officer’s house party. There, we drank Guinness and watched the women shaking their waists in that effortless way that African women do. A few of my fellow officers mocked me, joked about the way I speak and my education at the hands of British missionaries. “Ah Ah Peter! Sometimes you sound just like a white man from the BBC,” one said chuckling into the mouth of his beer bottle.
Predictably, some of the men there were also high-ranking officers and generals. You could spot who they were even out of uniform. It was there in the respectful way others hailed them, and how they carried themselves tall, crooking their fingers at the houseboys and girls in someone else’s home to demand “come come, more beer for my friend.” As though it was their right. Watching them chuckling mid conversation and absentmindedly patting the fat wads of Nigerian British pound notes in their pockets. I can tell you that power is an aphrodisiac. It is an infection difficult to describe but you know you want to catch it, you like the reception it commands. I am a man of potential. I like to keep my eyes open because you learn so much from doing so.
At the party, I exchanged jokes with my group, hemmed into a darker corner of the room as more people arrived and the noise reached the ceiling. High Life music was keeping people shimmying, and one or two had conked out indiscreetly on the floor and on chairs. Something else was playing on my mind. I was on the periphery of the exclusive club of big players! So I was looking to see whose ear to bend. The British colonial influence is still visible in Nigeria but grumblings have continued. Things are changing here, and change means opportunities. Oil production is increasing, an exodus of people are leaving the villages to rush to the cities. In Lagos you see rusty Volkswagen cars defiantly pushing along the roads, their bonnets almost bursting open with engine noise. On some streets there are children and adults with their heads tossed back gulping Coca Cola from long, elegant looking bottles.
I am sharing this room with Obi and Emanuel, also new to the army and both of whom snore so loudly, it is a wonder this room is not vibrating. Lazy boys! They still have their party clothes on, Obi on his back with his arm carelessly flung over his forehead and Emmanuel nearly off his creaking mattress face down into the floor.
Right now the kerosene lamp is burning a steady, low flame of light as the night sounds of the city become fainter. I am leaning this journal against a short stool that wobbles initially before stabilising. It is only a stool but I like this flaw in it, so applicable to human beings and the new situations we often find ourselves in. There is something about being here and seeing how the rich live that makes you yearn for more. Here, everybody “wan chop”, so I want my piece as well! I cannot sleep; it is my excitement over what is to come that has me reaching for this journal, a parting gift from my father along with his letters. And his neat handwriting seeming to say: “ Be careful! Say your prayers, God is watching.”
This writing and reflection is giving me an appetite, I wish I could go down into the kitchen to help myself but since I am only a guest, I will have to bear the stomach rumblings till morning. To the left of our room is a stiff wooden door and hanging on a nail is my uniform, a dark green tunic with patrol collar, light coloured khaki-style trousers and a peaked, jaunty cap with gold braid. Something strange happens every time someone comes through that door. As logic would have it, I don’t expect it to make my uniform fall in a heap on the floor. Instead, I see the yanked door handle lift my uniform off the nail so it stands to attention before me. One sleeve of the green tunic raises to the cap in a salute. I actually want to try my uniform again right now, it fits very well, but if Obi and Emmanuel wake up and find me dressed in it at this time, I will be the butt of their jokes for days.
Somebody else is awake; I can hear their feet shuffling downstairs, the creak of a window sliding open. By the time that sound ceases, it has become a different window from the past. My mother is leaning out, reliable shoulders hunched up, bits of springy hair sticking to her sweaty forehead, screaming for me to come in from the streets. Usually, I would be loitering on a corner somewhere when I heard it, swapping marbles with boys who bore neighbourhood war wounds of freshly scraped knees and healed cuts. Or I’d be testing catapults from a safe enough distance on strangers who crossed my eagle-eyed view.
Whoever was moving downstairs must be trying to get back to sleep. I am admiring the round buttons on my tunic. They are spotless and a coppery colour, I polished them yesterday. They could be coins, like the ones my father used to give me to buy white Tom Tom American candy from the sweet seller that were so sweet your teeth hurt and gave your mouth a zingy coolness. Inside the copper buttons another memory is moulding itself to them. This time I am twelve or thirteen, my head is buried in a book as my father points out the inconsistencies in my arithmetic, teaching me the way good missionaries do. This lesson would then be followed by English. Then later on, sitting in a church pew wriggling my bottom in anticipation of the ending, of the clapping and singing out of tune. Obi has now turned onto his front, dishevelled, doing a very good impression of a tortoise. He sleeps too deeply; this is a weakness for
an officer. I will make a good officer; I am controlled and swift to react in most situations. There is no way I could have failed the recruitment process. Tests, endurance exercises but more importantly, who is open to bribes.
I watch people because human beings are fascinating. A person’s body language can tell you what you need to know, even shows when they are weaker than you. Look at an unsteady arm and you will see a lie reflected there, a sweaty upper lip in a tight situation and sooner or later that person will crack from fried nerves. My most useful skill is my ability to adapt, something I learned early having been the child of Christian missionaries, a child with no real interest in faith whatsoever. Since it was clear that you couldn’t escape God because he was either watching you, having plans for you, or making a way (God will always make a way!), I decided to have a talk with him. When I was nine, I took him aside right by the guava tree that dipped its branches into our small compound. I warned him, don’t give me any wahala and you and me will be okay. Of course, I did not tell my father this. I believed he would have had a heart attack, his thin-rimmed, round spectacles steaming up, his body keeling over right there on our black and white squared linoleum floor.
I have made friends with Obi and Emmanuel, not because they are my sort of people but because you have to have team spirit in the army. You cannot be seen to be a loner or an outsider looking in. In fact I am not a team player, never have been and never will be.
Recently, I have taken to smoking cigarettes. I think too much as some form of a release. I like taking long, slow puffs of sin. I see myself at the army barracks in Epoma. The wide grounds with dark, unevenly, shaped buildings popping out of it like teeth. The identical hard beds set in rows and dressed in flat green sheets with thinly stuffed pillowcases. The thud of feet pounding in unison on the concrete during training exercises. The officers with bags containing stuffed, squashed versions of their lives spilling onto their beds and the floors. The black truncheons flashing in warning, tucked under the stiff arms of officers who look as if they’ve been swabbed in liquid discipline. The high wire fence surrounding the building that surely had the scrutiny of superior officers welded into it, and the taut, shrill, piercing sound of whistles that sent your socks rolling down your legs. The green and white Nigerian flag raised on a high, white pole flailing like a ship’s mast as if the grounds could set sail at any moment.
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