Rotten Row

by Petina Gappah

  Pepukai tried to tune out Johnny as she looked at the passing billboards, one after the other, advertising mobile telephone service providers and cigarette brands. One billboard dominated with its picture of smiling Saloneans, enjoying the blessings requested in Johnny’s song as they played pool with an enjoyment, the advert suggested, that was exclusive only to the smokers of its cigarettes. A token white man presumably included to give an international touch grinned inanely, while below were the words, doubtful, like the report of a rumour: ‘The Director of Medical Services Has Said that Smoking May be Dangerous to Your Health’. Beyond the billboard, in the distance the Atlantic shone in the majesty of its vastness.

  ‘The Court appears to be an oasis of efficiency in the middle of chaos,’ Anton said as they entered the Special Court. Pepukai knew that Anton had ambitions beyond being a mere assistant producer, he wanted to write, and he was always making up and testing aloud the lines that he thought the narrators of their films would say. It had become a tic, and one, Pepukai thought, that made him sound like a single-voiced Greek chorus of singular unoriginality.

  He was not entirely correct. In the Visitors’ Room at least, the Court was unable entirely to shake off the poverty of the country outside. They sat on white chairs covered in grime on the backs of which the word SECURITY had been traced with an uneven hand. The air conditioner circulated only hot air while the ‘Notice to the General Public’ was peeling off with only the bottom legible.

  Pepukai worried about their metal detector, and tried to remove her fifteen thousand bracelets, which normally set off the alarms at airports. She passed through with no sound. She surrendered to a search by the guard who did not rise from her chair for the search. She sat with her legs splayed as Pepukai stood between them, and ran her hands over her legs and bottom. With a wide smile, she gave Pepukai a friendly slap on the bottom as she finished searching her, and said, ‘I finish.’ Pepukai was too amused to protest.

  ‘Is the court in session?’ Pepukai asked her.

  ‘Trial Chamber I is sitting in the matter of the AFRC accused and Trial Chamber II is sitting in the matter of the RUF accused,’ the guard said without drawing breath. She spoke like an air hostess whose uncertain English was confident only in making stock announcements.

  ‘And will the prisoners be in court?’ Pepukai asked her.

  ‘Detainees,’ said the male guard who had been silent up to that point.

  ‘Excuse me?’ Pepukai said, confused.

  ‘No prisoners, they are detainees,’ he said.

  Now Pepukai could truly believe that she was in a place run by the United Nations. No doubt, after endless debates at endless meetings, circulars had been sent in every official language to instruct the employees how to address the men accused of bearing the greatest responsibility for the killing of tens and tens of thousands.

  A tall fair man strode towards them with a loping grace. He had the tensile strength of a man who spent half his life on a bicycle. ‘I’m Patrick O’Connor,’ he said. ‘We have emailed. I am the Special Assistant for Public Affairs in the Regis trar’s Office.’

  His accent was Irish. Pepukai was amused to see that he was dressed in the way common to men from cold climes who found themselves in hotter ones for work and not leisure. Used to seeing the heat as an excuse to dress down, they were completely incapable of finding the happy medium between comfort and formality. He seemed dressed for the beach in flapping shorts, a short-sleeved shirt with the three top buttons undone and bare feet in brown moccasins.

  He walked them out of the security centre. Outside, they passed smartly dressed Mongolian soldiers who stared ahead without moving. Pepukai resisted a childish impulse to wave in their faces to see if they would flinch. Patrick O’Connor pointed to a building on the right.

  ‘Those are the detention cells.’

  ‘They are not at Pademba prison then?’ Pepukai asked. ‘Isn’t that the largest prison in the city?’

  ‘Oh Christ, no,’ said Patrick O’Connor. ‘They would not last a day there. The agreement is that they are to be housed in their own complex. And, of course, if they are found guilty, they will be imprisoned in countries willing to take them. And they won’t be sentenced to death, like the poor buggers in Pademba.’

  ‘So that means that if you kill a person now, today, you could actually get the death penalty, but none of these guys who killed so many people will get it?’ said Anton.

  ‘Funny that, no,’ Patrick O’Connor said cheerfully. ‘Charles Taylor was imprisoned just two hundred metres from here. It is a pity you cannot see him because of his transfer.’

  He spoke of the former Liberian President as a zookeeper might of the passing of his favourite exotic animal. His face brightened as he said, ‘But maybe you can do a segment of the documentary in The Hague and you can see him there.’

  As he spoke, Pepukai saw women exiting the detention compound, six moving pillars of elegance in the local costume. What must it be like, she wondered, what must it be like to go through that security office and announce that your lover, husband, father, brother and maybe son is one of those men in that complex?

  They walked to the canteen. It was called the Special Fork. Almost all the white men were dressed like the Special Assist ant; as if they were on holiday, in casual clothes and flip-flops, while the women wore stringy tank tops with khaki trousers or dresses that were either diaphanous or very short. Only the locals, in their neat-ironed skirts and blouses, shirts and ties and flowing local clothing looked like their clothes had any sort of acquaintance with laundry soap and an iron. Pepukai shivered from the air conditioning. Here the notices were legible including one that instructed people to raise the alarm in the case of fire by shouting ‘Fire, Fire, Fire’.

  ‘The Special Court for Sierra Leone is unique,’ the Special Assistant for Public Affairs in the Registrar’s Office said. ‘It is a hybrid court, an international court in a domestic setting. That is the element you should focus on.’

  He spoke to both of them but mainly to Anton. In their world of office memos and Monday morning staff meetings, Pepukai is Anton’s boss with an office bigger than his, where he comes to see her with impractical ideas for documentary programmes. Pepukai had a horror of pettiness and small-mindedness, and thus did not push herself forward, she knew that she made the decisions however much people like Patrick O’Connor and Johnny might assume otherwise, and that was enough for her, some of the time. Better this, she thought, than the nudge-nudge-wink-wink that Anton and Pepukai had been getting at the Mamba Point Guest House as the other guests assumed that they were having steamy interracial sex under the mosquito net. Mo Hassan, the proprietor, had positively leered when he came over to their table to welcome them to the guest house as they had a late dinner last night.

  A penetrating laugh from the next table brought her back to the conversation. ‘You should be able to film inside the detention centre when you come with the crew,’ Patrick O’Connor said. ‘It is really first class; air-conditioned, with the best medical facility in Sierra Leone. In fact, I’d say the guys there have a better deal than they would in Europe or the US.’

  ‘What do they do, the prisoners, I mean, the detainees, what do they do all day? Do they do any work?’ Pepukai asked.

  ‘Well, they sure as hell watch a lot of movies. They are supposed to do a few cleaning jobs and are paid under a Detainee Earning Scheme. Between you and me and the lamp-post, they do nothing but cause a hell of a lot of trouble. Christ, was there ever a bigger bunch of pains in the arse?’

  ‘And do they get on, I mean, there are like what, leaders of three warring sides in there, right? The AFRC, the RUC, the CDC?’

  ‘Oh, they get along all right. Very friendly. The only arguments they have had recently were about the World Cup.’

  *

  Later that night, in her hotel room, as a fan whirred overhead and she lay in bed under a mosquito net and leafed through the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commi
ssion, Pepukai decided that she did not care for Patrick O’Connor. It was not anything in particular that he said, it was just something in his manner, a certain ‘I am here to do good’ attitude that she found insufferable. It was an attitude that Pepukai had met before from arrogant officials in different foreign capitals as well as well-meaning Christian aid workers.

  But once she had fulminated about the arrogance of these attitudes, once she had dissected the patronising racism of low expectations that underpinned them, there was still this fact: they were here for a reason. It was conditions on this ground that fed such attitudes. The blood shed on this soil, the innocent blood, the bodies buried in this soil, in piles of corpses. That blood mattered. And it was then that she felt the weight of pain, the stain of collective victimhood. She could not avoid the question that forced itself on her.

  What is it about us that these are our lives?

  On an intellectual, cognitive level, she understood where it had gone wrong. She understood how it had all begun. She knew all the critical theory, about the image of Africa in the West, that Africa is not a country, that the terms of global trade were inequit able. She understood slavery, and colonialism. She knew all about the might of Bismarck’s Ruler – that at the Conference of Berlin, all that long time ago in 1888, nations and ethnicities, rivals and enemies had been corralled into unitary states, and that now, in those forced nations, old hatreds played out to the staccato sound of new weapons.

  She understood that rebel secessionist movements were sometimes nothing but assertions of age-old loyalties. She understood too that other regions had had their own Dark Ages, darker, bloodier than her continent’s current problems would ever be; she understood all this, the burning witches, the Crusades, the madness and mayhem that had accompanied plunder and conquest around the world. It had all happened elsewhere, in other places. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again, and there is nothing new under the sun.

  But still. But still, but still, but still.

  In the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission she read of the fighters from every side who forced villagers to play games of chance that determined if they lived, and if so, with how many limbs. Villagers picked out their fates on scribbled bits of paper. Between the extremes of life or death, holding on to limbs or parts of limbs was also a prize, because to pick out a paper with ‘long-sleeve’ on it meant the loss of a hand, ‘short-sleeve’ meant an arm was cut off from the elbow, ‘sleeveless’ meant that the entire arm was hacked off from the shoulder. It was calculated and deliberate. In the hand was the power to vote, the rebels said, so the hand and sometimes the whole arm had to go.

  Soldiers from all sides raped women and girls who went on to give birth to the children of war. And they developed weeping fistulas. The rebels armed children, drugged them and trained them to kill. They gambled and laughed as they guessed the sex of the babies in their mothers’ wombs. To prove who was right, they sliced the mothers open. And the men who are said to bear the greatest responsibility for these crimes earned money in an air-conditioned detention centre and argued over the World Cup.

  A song comes to her memory from her childhood. ‘They held a congregation, the Apostolic Faith of Marange, to find out who it was who had painted us black, with paint from the can labelled “suffering”.’ This is at the core of the pain that she feels once she has stripped away the intellectual and analytical buffers. In her most despondent moments, there is only that pain, the pain of the lives lost and ruined.

  The innocent blood.

  As a law student who cared about lofty principles, she had believed that she had the power to influence what happened in the world, even in conflicts as old as those in the Middle East. She had armed herself with every international law degree she could get. She had had one life aim, and one alone, pure in its clarity, determined in its singlemindedness and arrogant in the stubborn certainty of its own righteousness. She had wanted to change the world. For what purpose was she on this earth if not to bring some justice to an unjust world?

  She had then come to realise that actually, she had only the power of anger, of frustrated anger, that her agony for a just world was no more than the powerless cry of the child who first real ises that the world is not good and loving at all, but that it is unjust, unequal, unfair and unkind. She had come to accept that the only power she had, if she had any at all, is that of witness.

  She had also learned to accept that it is her part of the world in which injustice most frequently found its expression. And again, she was able to wrap her understanding of it all in the intellectual fabric of Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon or Achille Mbembe. She could dress it in post-colonial studies and intersectionality, but there was no intellectual reasoning, no analysis that would help her get over the fact that the paint in which her people had been dipped came from a can labelled ‘Suffering’, nothing that could remove from the soil of this land the stain of that innocent blood.

  Pepukai spent the next five days listening to accounts of the causes of the war. ‘The West has a lot to answer for,’ said an aid worker. ‘The roots of the war stretch all the way to the founding of the country.’ ‘It is the usual resource curse,’ said a political scientist. ‘We should never have discovered those diamonds. Because mineral wealth combined with weak governance in a poor country is a recipe for wars over primitive accumulation.’ ‘It was endemic corruption that did it,’ said an opposition politician. ‘How can there not have been a war?’ a taxi driver asked. ‘The soldiers were getting bags of rice instead of a salary.’ ‘And even then, there was so much corruption that someone would siphon off half the bag, so that they only got half-bags,’ said a parliamentarian. ‘The reason there was a war in this country’, said the Secretary-General of the local chapter of a global human rights organisation, ‘is because there was no human rights culture in Sierra Leone.’ There were many reasons, concluded the Report of the Reconciliation Commission, but it ultimately came down to this: the nation had lost its dignity.

  Pepukai highlighted that word. Dignity. When that went, abominations came in which men faced the choice to die, or to live, but to live meant that they were forced to rape their own mothers, sisters or daughters. When that went, children still to turn ten years of age were fed on drugs and taught to kill.

  Pepukai read of an old man who was stopped by a group of fighters on his way to hospital. ‘Where are you going, Old Father?’ they asked. ‘To the hospital, my children,’ he answered. ‘My leg has been troubling me for some time, and I am going to have it seen to.’

  ‘We will see to it for you, Old Father,’ they said, as they hacked it off. For good measure, they saw to both his arms as well.

  Then there was the woman who was forced to eat a piece of the heart of her son, the six-year-old forced to drink her sister’s blood and told to laugh and dance as she did so, the seven-year-old whose arms were cut off, and the young girl raped by soldiers from all sides, including the men from the West African rescue force. The nation had lost its dignity. And all the men who had done all this, if they were not dead, were now living in that society, presumed rehabilitated, and only eleven were supposed to pay for it all.

  Pepukai had not yet found a title for the documentary, but she knew that it would open with the words of Von Logau, a German poet she had read at university in Austria. ‘Gottes Mühlen mahlen langsam, mahlen aber trefflich klein. Ob aus Langmut er sich säumet, bringt mit Schärf ’ er alles ein.’ She would use the English translation from Longfellow: ‘Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small; Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness grinds He all.’

  Maybe it was the nature of justice that it was not blind at all. Maybe justice, when it came, always came late. Maybe a justice that came late and that came imperfectly was better than none at all. It reminded her of a saying of her own ancestors. Mhosva haiori. Every crime will find its recompense.

  ‘Your brother’s blood cries out to
me from the ground. What have you done, Cain? For the earth has opened up its mouth to receive the innocent blood that has been shed by your hand.’

  *

  The next day, Pepukai sat in the public gallery of the Special Court as judges delivered this late justice in air-conditioned courtrooms. This was the trial chamber sitting in the trial of the three AFRC Accused: Alex Tamba Brima, Santigie Borbor Kanu and Brima Bazzy Kamara.

  Patrick O’Connor, slightly more formally attired in a blue shirt and khaki trousers, assured her that the transparent glass of the public gallery was bulletproof. The judge from Nigeria questioned the Prosecuting Counsel on a point of law. There followed a duel between the Prosecuting Counsel and Defending Counsel of the three men, none of whom was in the dock. The woman sitting next to Pepukai nodded in her sleep, and her head touched Pepukai’s shoulder.

  The woman was startled awake by the sudden burst of laughter as the judge from Mali said something apparently witty and the judges, Prosecuting and the Defending Counsel all laughed.

  The court called Witness 232 for the prosecution. He was a small nervous man who rocked in the witness chair the minute he sat in it and licked his lips. ‘He cannot give his name as he is under witness protection,’ Patrick O’Connor said in a sibilant whisper. Witness 232 licked his lips and rocked as he began his testimony.

  ‘I was walking along a road when the men came and …’

  ‘Will Counsel please direct the witness not to fidget?’ The judge from Nigeria spoke. He did not look at the Witness, but made notes on the pad before him.

  ‘Please don’t fidget,’ the prosecutor said, through the interpreter, who left out the please and just gave the command.

  The witness continued. ‘They walked along the road led by Commander Five-Five and then …’

  ‘Witness 232, this is a courtroom and you are asked to maintain the proper decorum. Please keep still while giving your testi mony,’ the judge interrupted again.