They stopped in front of a dilapidated building with hints of past glory, rusting filigree grillwork over the windows. Walls echoed the motif, engraved with gentle circles and other geometric designs.
Barbara hopped past chickens, goats, stray cats and skinny dogs at which the children threw stones. She issued a terse lecture on animal abuse. The children followed her, begging for money. Aminah shooed them away.
On the second floor of the building, they entered a small, dark, dank room where menacing faces peered at them through the gloom—faces that had lost all hope, all certitude of life, smothered by the drug’s jealous embrace. Water-filled jerry cans, plastic buckets and canisters littered the room. A jumble of people sat on mats, a few staring wide-eyed at nothing, some mouthing silent words. Others slept. Several rambled around the room, muttering to themselves.
“Poor souls,” Aminah whispered. “Everything they have is gone. What could possibly be encouraging them to survive?”
Barbara addressed the room. “Is Iggy here?”
“Who wants to know?” a surly addict mumbled from a corner.
“My name is Barbara Glass. I’m a good friend of Femi Jegee-dee. We were very close. Like brother and sister.”
“Who are you?” another asked, fighting to extricate himself from the drug’s haze.
“I work for Drop of Life in Canada on water rights.”
“Do any of you know,” Aminah’s voice echoed around the walls, slamming against delicate eardrums, “where Igwe is? We need to speak to him.”
“I’m Igwebuike,” a man slouched against a wall answered. He wore dark glasses, no doubt to protect bloodshot pupils from the intrusive daylight the duo had let in.
“Although to some you represent the dregs of society,” Barbara said in a reverential hush, tilting her head to one side, “the lowest form of life on this planet,” she looked at him with plaintive sympathy, “to me, I am you and you are me. There is no separation.” She nodded to herself, then shook her head in empathetic sorrow.
“Who … ?” someone hissed from the corner of the room, making everyone jump. “Who is calling my friend Igwe the lowest form of human life?” He looked like a king, his throne a broken stool.
“Please.” Aminah’s voice shot through the room, reverberating across the windowpanes. “Please—we don’t want to cause wahala. We are here on urgent business. We are looking for the leader of Wise Water.”
“You can talk to me. I am Femi Jegede, although my ‘sister’ here should doubtless recognize me.”
“You!” Aminah barked. “How can you be Jegede?” Everyone winced as she spoke. “He’s dead.”
Saddened faces erupted into rare laughter. A few who had lost their mental moorings became increasingly bewildered.
“I’m dead?” The king’s handsome eyes screwed up as he laughed. “How did I die?”
“Of, em, of …” Aminah hesitated. She sat down. “Of grief, sir.”
The room erupted once more into a fit of giggles.
“So …” Aminah talked a little more softly when the laughter died down, “… you’re really Femi Jegede? And this is Igwe?”
“Himself.” The man in dark glasses pointed at his own chest. “Am I dead too?”
“No, sir, no. You’re … you’re a drug addict.”
For a moment silence reigned as people fought to maintain control over their composure, but then all was lost. A collective scream of appreciation ripened into chokes of laughter, chuckles retched out in long wails.
One man in ragged clothes, his eardrums plugged with mud, who paced in chaotic circles, began to mewl in a chilly ascending note.
“Ubaldous. Everything is okay!” Igwe quickly got up to comfort him, following him on his desolate journeys with a protective arm around him.
Barbara, bewildered and impatient, put her hands on her hips. “What’s happening here?”
A sympathetic Aminah turned to her. “Naija gossip. If you’re out of circulation, one person will say you must be ill, the next says you’re very ill, the next says you’re dead. Nigeria is like a small village.”
“We had to move from Abuja,” Igwe explained.
“So you’re Femi?” Barbara asked the man on the stool. “You’re alive? And your friends—they’re not drug addicts?”
“We couldn’t afford drugs if we wanted to,” Igwe replied.
The room once more gasped with quiet laughter, as Igwe patted Ubaldous.
Barbara looked at Femi with fresh eyes, noting the aura that fanned out around him. He had a handsome face, with piercing, gentle eyes that told of recent tragedy. His demeanour suggested a weary strength, an exhausted fortitude. His voice resonated with a sad depth; even his laugh, a delightful snicker of descending notes, carried a melancholy charm.
She moved towards him. Eyes flitted to meet other eyes. The room’s nervous tension increased with each step. “I was so sorry to hear about your family. You know, like leaves, we are born, we live, we die, and new life begins in our place.” She put her hands on his shoulders. “None of us, in the great scheme of things, is more or less important than a leaf.”
“Enh?” Igwe stopped walking, gold logos flashing with vexation. “Who is not important?”
“A leaf?” another protested, the words producing some spittle that glinted in a dusty shaft of light. “Who is she calling a leaf?”
Femi looked directly at Barbara. “Did this oyinbo call the lives of one million people unimportant?” His eyes shimmered with fury.
“Stop!” a voice boomed, making the panes of glass rattle. Aminah scraped her chair as she stood. “No one is a leaf. No one in this room is a leaf! No one in Nigeria is a leaf!”
“But,” Barbara interrupted, “we’re all part of—”
“No one,” Aminah’s loud voice obliterated all other sounds, “no one is a leaf.”
Everyone looked at Femi in astonishment as he tried to stand. Several people rushed to help as if he might fall, gently admonishing him. Igwe ran most rapidly to his side. He held his friend under the elbow, gazing at him with worry, whispering softly to him with concern.
“What happened was not the work of nature,” Femi said, “but the work of man.”
“And/or woman,” Barbara corrected him. “Which is not to say—
“A leaf didn’t fall. A tree was cut dow—”
“You see what your problem is? You may have listened to what I was saying,” Barbara paused for Femi to assimilate this information, “but you didn’t hear. This leads to miscom-munication, which isn’t going to help when we’re working together.”
“Working together? No! Oh no! Someone get this wom—”
“You interrupted again!” Barbara looked around the room for confirmation. A vein on Femi’s forehead pulsed. “Have you ever read The Dance of Anger?” she asked.
“What?”
“The Dance of Anger. I’ll send it to you. It’ll really help you with the issues you have around rage.”
Femi looked at Igwe, aghast. “Have I gone crazy? Or is it this woman?”
“—meant to say,” she spoke over him, “was that what the caterpillar calls the end, the rest of the world calls a butterfly. That is my belief.” Barbara bowed in Buddhist fashion.
Femi stared at Barbara. “Who told you we would be working together?”
“Well, that’s why I’m here.”
“Femi,” Igwe interrupted. “Calm down. Don’t worry about—”
“Who told you to come?”
Barbara searched her memory. “I can’t remember.” She pondered the question again and then shook her head in defeat. “Someone.” She wandered off to her handbag. “By the way, I’ve brought some gifts. Probably in short supply over here.” She distributed the condoms, addressing a woman who sat paralyzed in embarrassment. “Best not to leave them on the floor. They’ll get dusty.”
She turned back to Femi. “We have a revolution to organize. Kolo intends to sell rights to the Niger, as well as outright ownership o
f water resources through licensing, and full custody of Nigeria’s electricity in exchange for the construction of the biggest dam in the world.” The room erupted into noisy confusion. She could hardly be heard above the din. “So,” she raised her voice, “we have to organize some riots, maybe target a few sites. Do you have any explosives, by the way? Obviously I couldn’t bring—”
“What are you bombing?” Femi cut her off.
“Sites.”
“What sites?”
“Important sites, of course.” Barbara twiddled with her beads. He stared at her, the twitches on his face becoming more violent.
“I’ve brought some dark clothing. It’ll be good camouflage.”
“You’re not bombing anything.”
“Well, we don’t have to bomb. Dynamite will do.”
“No! No bombing. No explosives. Not even a firecracker.”
“Look, you can’t stop me coming with you. Just because I’m a woman—”
“Coming with us? Where to? We’re not going anywhere! Anyway,” he shook his head as if to clear it, “what am I talking about? We’re not working together.”
“But—”
“No!”
Barbara looked around at the oddball assortment of activists lurking in the corners, realizing the futility of attempting to transform them into the efficient army she envisaged. Dejected but not defeated, she turned to leave. “Oh spirit of the trees,” she murmured to herself. “I’ll have to find the African Water Warriors—”
“Enh?” Femi grabbed her by the arm. “What do you mean, the Water Warriors? They’re terrorists! Nigeria will fall into anarchy!”
Barbara turned to face him, chin up. “I must continue my work,” she replied in a low, dangerous hush.
He paused as if taking in for the first time what she’d said about Kolo’s plans. “So you want to enter trouble. Maybe, then, it’s best if we work together.”
His voice contained an edge of panic, Barbara could not help but notice. Still, she beamed, feeling once more that she was merely a conduit. “You know, there’s a Taoist saying—”
“Please.” Femi rubbed his face with his hands. “I beg-oh, no more Taoist sayings.”
“It goes, ‘Be wary of men who have nothing to lose.’”
“I know another saying,” Femi replied. “It goes, ‘Beware of women who quote Chinese sayings.’”
She sat down on a mat and clicked open her purple pen. “So, where can we find some armaments?”
“Have you ever seen a dead person?” Femi asked.
Barbara waited for a suitable lull in the conversation around them before making her pronouncement: “I have no fear of death.” She gave a curt bow of her head.
“Ehen!” Femi gazed at her. “Let me show you some fallen leaves. Let me show you death. Then you can tell me if you fear it or not.”
SEVENTEEN
Fearsome Farewell
Early the next morning, before the sun grew too hot, Barbara took her yoga mat out onto the grounds of the famed Hill Station Hotel and practised in her purple leotard. A sizeable assembly of people gathered to comment on each posture, tone wavering between outrage and fascination.
At noon, she flew with Aminah and Femi to the area surrounding the collapsed Jebba Dam. Leaning over Aminah’s shoulder to look at her newspapers, Barbara stared at photographs of Kolo commiserating with local survivors. She shook her head in pity and tapped Aminah on the shoulder. “Your president seems touched by the tragedy.”
“Really?” Aminah’s eyebrows rose to meet a headwrap of architectural merit. “Then I wonder why his government didn’t warn those downstream of Kainji to move before the next dam burst!” She kissed her teeth with a proficiency Barbara could only admire.
A driver picked them up in a jeep, and they set off on their tour. Brown mists of faint sickly smells hung over them as they stopped at a pretty village on the outskirts of the catastrophe. Children ran up to them, shouting an excited welcome.
Round huts made of clay blended seamlessly into the landscape, throwing into relief a scattering of low concrete buildings with corrugated iron roofs. As she looked to the periphery of the village, Barbara spotted conical granaries with doorways built halfway up, surrounded by a multitude of earthenware pots filled with water.
While the other three stopped at a roadside eatery that had been hastily erected for sightseers, Barbara unwrapped a vegetarian sandwich with a certain fanfare. An ancient and garrulous vendor stood as the eatery’s proud proprietor. Femi gave him a bottle of water, which the vendor secreted away with pleasure, then brought some sticks of grilled meat with a glance of challenge at Barbara.
“So,” the vendor croaked, “you come look village or you come play?”
“We come play,” Femi replied, ripping apart the meat, eyes trained on the vegetation entering Barbara’s mouth.
“Play?” Barbara put her hands on her hips, sandwich quivering with her indignation. “We’re certainly not playing here, Femi!”
Femi spoke under his breath. “Play is Pidgin. We’re touring. As opposed to visiting people in the village.”
“Actually,” Barbara corrected the vendor, “we’re not tourists. We have important work to do. We’ve come to save people.”
“Missionary?” He wobbled on rickety legs.
“No. I’m Buddhist,” Barbara replied. The old man looked at her. “Well, a mix between Buddhist and Taoist.”
“Okay. I see.”
He clearly did not.
“I practice yoga. I meditate. I chant. I find it grounds me; it centres—”
Femi muttered something to the vendor in a local language. The vendor looked up at Femi, pity spreading across his shrivelled face.
“I respect the flow of nature,” she carried on. “That’s why I don’t eat meat.”
The vendor stared at her, chewing, though he had nothing in his mouth.
“We are worried about plans to build a new dam,” Femi interjected, licking the animal fat off his fingers with undisguised hostility towards his vegetarian guest.
“A dam?”
“Yes. Kolo is planning to build a bigger dam.”
“What! Is he mad? Why did no one tell us?”
“Does a hawk warn its prey?”
The vendor crossed his arms as he looked up at Femi, squinting, perhaps considering the separate qualities of the many hawks he had witnessed. Finally, he shook his head. “No, sir. No hawk like this exists in Nigeria,” he announced with certainty. His voice then went up a notch. “So, you have come to talk with chief?”
“No,” Femi replied. “Why?”
“He met Kolo long time ago. Yes, come and talk to him.”
He creaked off to find the chief, beckoning them to follow him. They walked through the village, which was filled with the sounds of women pounding yam. At a distance, Barbara could see women hoeing the ground, babies on their backs, while others carried water. She was creeping towards the field to snap some pictures when she heard a harsh whistling sound, as if alerting her to some danger. She turned around to find Femi snapping his fingers at the ground behind him, calling her back as if she were a disobedient dog. She obeyed with a disgusted huff.
The vendor led them inside a concrete building, where he introduced them to a group of men sitting in a semicircle. An unassuming figure with a cow-tail whip and a dirty agbada sat on a chair, higher than the others. He almost obscured a shrine on which a variety of objects sat, but through the flicker of candlelight Barbara spotted two identical dusty wooden carvings, bells and all manner of natural objects such as cowrie shells, bones and dried leaves. It all looked so exotic. She tried to elbow past Femi to get a closer look, but a strong hand yanked her back and pointed once more to the ground behind him. Barbara lingered in no man’s land, then unwillingly returned to her designated position.
Femi, Aminah and the driver laid themselves on the ground in prostration. Barbara looked down at them, then took a closer look at the man in the chair. It was t
hen that she noticed his aura—bright, luminous and crackling. She dived down, her breasts slapping the unforgiving clay.
The chief rose from his seat, then bent down to help her up, looking appalled. “Please, madam. Stand up. This is not necessary. Please, stand up. Welcome—welcome to our village.”
Barbara refused to move, pleased to be involved in some ancient ritual. Only when Femi poked her with his toe, and she peeped up to find the other three already standing, did she struggle to her feet. Her eyes darted around the room, fascinated by its atmosphere of primordial wisdom. “You must be the village chief.” She searched his face for clues to the mysteries of life. “How wise you must be! How very, very wise. What a magnificent aura!”
Femi glared at her for a long moment and then turned to the chief. “Sir, we greet you. We have heard that President Kolo came to see you some time ago.”
“Yes,” the chief replied, peeking around Femi to stare at Barbara. “He only branched for a few hours.”
“What was he doing in this area, sir?”
“Maybe the same reason a dog pisses on a tree. But Kolo does not waste his piss on small bushes.”
“Wise words, wise words,” Barbara agreed, imbibing the ancestral knowledge.
“What you say is true, sir.” Femi dodged to hide Barbara, obliterating her view of the proceedings. “As you say, sir, Kolo is not a stupid man. Apparently, he is trying to build a bigger dam at Kainji. Even though your village lies so far downstream, you will lose your water.”
“Aha! So that is why he was here. He just want parasite our water. We thought maybe he came to see Victoria. But it is not only to rest its belly that a snake hides in a tree.”
“And a snake is not a stripper just because it sheds its skin,” Barbara added.
“Pardon?” the chief asked.
“I said that just because a snake sheds its skin, that doesn’t mean you can hire it as a stripper.”
Doing Dangerously Well Page 18