by Gavin Chait
‘All rise,’ she says.
Three senior judges, their scarlet robes lined with synthetic ermine, take their seats and adjust the consoles on their desks.
Shakiso struggles to follow the formality and process of the court. They are picking up where they left off in yesterday’s session. The elderly woman who seated herself near Shakiso takes her place at the witness stand.
The stand is uncomfortably placed in the centre of the court, before the judges but with the two opposing banks of attorneys directly behind. To listen to questions, the witness must twist and turn.
It seems, to Shakiso, a deliberate way to unsettle those testifying into reliving how their unseen assailants would surprise and torture them.
The woman leans to her left on the podium, her hips clearly causing her pain. She coughs through her replies. Eventually an orderly brings her a glass of water, and she is offered the opportunity to sit when she is not speaking.
‘You claim that my client raped you. Yet you came voluntarily to live amongst the people of Ansar Dine?’ says the small, calm-looking yellow-skinned lawyer leading Ag Ghaly’s official defence team. His tone is that of a mildly surprised librarian attempting to help a visitor find a vaguely remembered book.
The woman is rocked by the question. She stumbles over her words, eventually giving way to tears. ‘They kidnapped me from my home,’ she says, her voice a whisper.
Ag Ghaly’s ‘real’ lawyers – a group of self-proclaimed defenders who refuse to recognize the authority of the court – begin to shout. ‘Salope complètement cinglée!’
‘Completely crazy whore,’ the words dry and stripped of intent in the translation in Shakiso’s ears.
The judges call for order, and the shouting quietens.
‘He raped me. Himself. Every day until I escaped,’ pointing at Ag Ghaly, her arm rigid, her voice rising over the jeers.
‘Prostituée nymphomane!’ scream the defenders. ‘Nymphomaniac prostitute’ in Shakiso’s ears.
Her ordeal ends, and the woman is helped out of the court.
The man to Shakiso’s left rises and, with great dignity, makes his way to the podium. In his left hand, he clutches a small fabric bag.
The court recognizes him. Zoumana Guengueng, the first witness. The first person to file his case with the court. The first person whose story Viviane recorded.
He has waited twenty-five years.
‘Today, I keep my oath. An oath I made to myself while a prisoner of that man,’ he says, pointing at Ag Ghaly.
He taps at the console before him and reads his statement. He describes the conditions in the prisons. Confinement. Disease. Abuse. Torture. The smell of those suffering around him. The bodies he was made to sleep amongst. Those whose hands he held as they lay dying, giving comfort even unto death.
His jaw tightening, the muscles clenching in his face, he unwraps his bag. Taking out clumsy looking wooden implements. Revealing them individually, like trophies.
A spoon, knife and fork made from bones and flattened, misshapen pieces of metal. A comb made from bits of wood.
‘I made these so that, even there, I may live like a person. Even in the place of the shayāṭīn, I am still a person.’
Shakiso is astonished to see that many of the soldiers are brushing back tears.
He testifies. His voice calm and firm and patient.
When the defence attorney deliberately mispronounces his name, he corrects him. ‘I am Zoumana Guengueng. Zoumana Guengueng. That man would take even our names from us. I am a person. Zoumana Guengueng. Do not forget it.’
Shakiso’s throat is tight, clotted. She finds she has been gripping the armrests.
‘It is the end of the first session. Please rise.’
The judges leave.
Ag Ghaly moves for the first time. He stands. All the special forces soldiers gather tightly around him, their eyes wide and watchful. They walk as a unit towards the side exit.
As he goes, a large group of people rise and cheer, clapping loudly and enthusiastically.
Ag Ghaly raises his arms above his head, clasping his hands together as if in triumph.
39
‘Another lawyer.’ There is little inflection in Abdallah Ag Ghaly’s voice. His dark eyes are indifferent and his body slack in his oversized yellow prison uniform.
‘Janab,’ says Duruji, resisting an urge to scratch at the agonizing itch in his groin.
The cheap synthetic fabric of his newly acquired black suit is tight and unfamiliar, and attracts copious static. He is a hairy man, and his skin is on fire. Any movement results in painful shocks, and his one attempt at seeking relief merely increased the charge he generated. Even sitting motionless feels as if his skin is being bitten by millions of ants.
‘It was the white man’s idea. You are not allowed visitors but—’
‘Yes,’ says Ag Ghaly, waving one hand dismissively. ‘I may have lawyers.’
The white man. Belaya. The name the Russian mercenaries call him. He treats the remnants of the Ansar Dine army with derision. Duruji longs to knock off his head.
‘Janab, it is good to see you,’ says Duruji, relief and respect in his voice.
They are seated uncomfortably within Ag Ghaly’s cell, their chairs each positioned slightly too far from the table.
The room is deep within the basement of the African Court of Justice, converted from a secure filing room to contain this single prisoner. The front wall has been replaced with bomb-proof sheets of glass bolted between steel retaining bars. The walls themselves are welded steel sheets painted an extremely shiny white. There is a squatting toilet alongside the glass, but there are no lights inside the cell, only a spotlight from outside. Two camera lenses face in from the corridor, a console streaming news hanging on the wall between them. All the furniture is welded to the floor: chairs, desk, bed and bookshelf.
Duruji smells of slowly drying sweat, aftermath of his tortured experience reaching the cell. He presented his fake credentials at the court entrance, hoping they would work, fearful they would not, and trying not to respond to every itch and electric snap along his body. Then the march of thorns through increasing levels of security ever deeper beneath the court.
Ag Ghaly’s prison guards ignored him. Bored, underpaid and eager to return to watching a football match around a shared console propped over and obscuring the feeds from the cell.
Duruji feels dampness under his arms and over his back. No matter, for the cell has little ventilation and is already quite acrid.
‘The man is dead,’ he says.
‘Yes, and his body has left the Earth,’ says Ag Ghaly, his emotions a quiet void. ‘I saw his woman with him on the news. Now she comes daily to watch them torture me with lies. Where will I have my revenge?’
‘The Russians would have us destroy his solar farms?’
‘That,’ says Ag Ghaly, his voice caustic, ‘is not the vengeance I would have. I want him to suffer, not break his things. I want to tear his skin from him. Pour acid into his veins. Now he is safe from me. No, it is better for us that we keep the farms. Or sell them to the Chinese. They have also been to visit. More lawyers.’
Duruji is a fighter, accustomed to having a weapon in his hand, not to sitting at a desk negotiating the complexity of rival ambitions. His body itches, and he wishes he could scratch. He struggles to pull his concentration together.
‘I do not understand, Janab. Why are we working with these kuffār? They are unclean. It is unworthy of the ummah to consort with these—’
Ag Ghaly stands and slaps him. Duruji cowers, flinching as his movement causes static sparks to flare.
‘I am sorry, Janab. It is well. I am sorry.’
‘You are the one who is unworthy, Duruji. Where was your security when I needed it? Why am I here?’ his voice shrill, his indifference torn by frustration and loathing. He slaps at Duruji again, oblivious of the watching cameras.
Duruji quails beneath the blows, helpless as a c
hild before the wrath of an abusive parent. Ag Ghaly is sweating, his breathing fast and irregular. He tires, sits again. Resumes his sneering ambivalence.
Duruji sits hunched, his eyes lowered. Only the sound of Ag Ghaly’s rattling breath and the continual subdued chatter of news from the console through the glass behind him.
‘I deal with the Russians and Chinese because I use them,’ says Ag Ghaly. ‘You are too weak to free me without their help. Your men lack organization. Only I can restore the ummah.
‘Yes, they are kuffār, but they are rivals. Rosneft know they have lost the battle in Europe. They hope still to keep their business in China.
‘The Chinese see an opportunity to extract themselves from Russian control. They tried to take the machines which print those solar collectors. They failed. They are shamed. Now they hope that if we capture the fields we can sell the technology to them.
‘Each will help us even as they fear betrayal.’
Gong Yuanxing, or a grey man in a grey suit claiming to be him, had visited Ag Ghaly. Their meetings were brief. Each was quite clear about their requirements and neither pretended to have anything but distaste for the other.
‘The Russians give us guns, Janab. They have brought over one hundred and eighty of our men to the city. What will the Chinese do for us? They cannot fight. They are –’ he spits the word ‘– businessmen.’
Ag Ghaly sneers. ‘Do the Russians share their nice smart weapons with us? Or are we left with scraps?’
Duruji grinds his teeth, crushing his rage into a burning point at the memory of every slight and jibe which the Russians abrade into him and his men.
‘Janab, what does it matter? A man is equally dead no matter the weapon. What is better than even an inferior rifle?’
‘This is why you will never be a leader, Duruji. You think no further than the weapon in your hand. The Chinese have shared something far more valuable. Information.’
‘What could they know, Janab?’ asks Duruji.
‘The planes, you fool,’ he says. ‘The Russians won’t tell me where they are. The Chinese give it freely. The grey man was here this morning with the coordinates. He believes he has power over us. He with his, “We are not involved in whatever you do to free yourself or secure the fields”,’ mocking Gong Yuanxing’s metallic accent. ‘It is good they are so ignorant. None of them understand the importance of this cargo. They think only I wish to sell drugs.’
Duruji is sullen, trapped within his torturing suit. The itching around his testicles has become a driving pain he feels he will never escape. He remembers the look of mocking resentment when the white man gave him this suit and his credentials.
For weeks, he had demanded that he be permitted to leave the safe-house and meet Ag Ghaly. He was told that it would be impossible. Too dangerous. Instead they worked him harder and treated him worse. He refused to yield.
Each day, the Russians who mind them let them know how much they loathe their assigned task. The clothes they are given to wear are old and do not fit. The food they eat is often rotten. Many of the men suffer from stomach cramps. The Russians stay in nice hotels and sleep between clean sheets.
Each day, the Russians drive the men to a disused sports field and make them run and exercise, even in the middle of the day when the heat would drive a dog mad. The men have never trained like this. They have never been a professional army, and the Russians push them, goading them to break.
The men of Ansar Dine simmer. Their hatred growing. They know they must work with these apostates, that their hope of victory depends on them. Duruji grinds his teeth as he thinks on their debasement before the kuffār.
‘Janab, the planes. What are they to us?’
Ag Ghaly stares blankly at the mute surface of the table, tracing random patterns with a single forefinger.
‘The man is dead,’ he says. ‘I am alive.’
Duruji shakes his head, regretting instantly the movement.
Ag Ghaly stands and walks over to the glass, glaring up at the twin lenses of the cameras.
‘Our ummah is not like the caliphates of old. All bowed before them. Only peasants bow before us. We have been weak. Hiding in our holes in the ground, a danger only to farmers and herders.
‘The kuffār over the waters force us to cower beneath the shade of their weapons. They watch and fly their drones over our lands, and we are unable to stop them. We who fight with stones have more courage than they. Stripped of their power they are soft and cowardly. Even one death by our great šuhada¯ causes them to collapse in terror,’ he says, indicating the console showing footage of the burning Eiffel Tower. ‘Look at how a single martyrdom in Paris has made the French rush to join that Federation.’
He has had nothing to do but watch the news, distorting what he sees to fit his understanding of the world and his place in it.
He leans his head towards the glass, his breath misting on the surface. He breathes harder, creating a canvas of fine dew.
‘One man can draw a line, like so,’ running his finger through the precipitation. ‘And history is changed. The weak cannot cross.
‘The man did it when he came here and built those solar farms. He made the Russians dance for him. They ran this way and that, but they could not stop him. They have learned that they ran on a path of his choosing.’
Duruji adjusts himself carefully on his seat as he twists to listen. ‘He did that to us too, Janab.’
Ag Ghaly turns, the line on the foggy glass behind him eroding in the heat of the cell.
‘Yes. I have been taught a great lesson. To remember the power of one man with a clear vision for what he wishes to achieve. I thought little of the matters of the world. I had become complacent, forgotten our purpose. You failed to protect me, but it was I who opened the door and brought him inside.
‘Great men drive history, Duruji. Men who have the power to force others to their will. Men like me. But even a man of great force sometimes needs a tool to bring fear where it is needed.’
‘I still do not understand, Janab. What is on those planes?’
‘A weapon, Duruji, such that will make even the most powerful quake before us. We will not hide in the ground. We will own this world.
‘The man is dead, Duruji. Now there is only me.’
40
Sidiki Cissoko would love to take off his shoes and feel the soft sand of the Soumbédioune beach against the soles of his feet. He does not, self-consciously aware of his security team forming a phalanx along the road behind him. Above him, almost out of sight, hover his watching drones.
He sighs and tries to put them all out of his mind as he walks alongside the stillness of the ocean towards the jumble of boulders at the far end of the cove.
Growing out of the rock is a tangle of wood, plastic, animal bones and discarded clothing. Driftwood pillars wrapped in garbage, fantastical limbs pawing at the sky, their heads formed from rotting bottles or bleached horned skulls, stand in a circle around a beach hut layered in plastic sheets and old blankets.
Sidiki knocks on a plastic bowl hanging from the arch over the sea-side entrance.
‘Gaw Goŋ? Weatherman?’ he shouts.
‘Aha,’ comes an answering call, and a bone-thin man, his eyes grey with age and his hair an olive-coloured burst, bends awkwardly as he stoops under the plastic sheet covering the way out of the hut.
‘My president,’ he says, smiling warmly and putting out both his hands to clasp at those of Sidiki. ‘Are you a big man yet?’
Sidiki laughs uneasily. ‘No, and I hope never.’
‘The cloak of power has much less allure when you are not yet wearing it, yes?’
‘Yes, my father, and I struggle with it daily.’
The old man nods, holding on to Sidiki’s hands. ‘Aha, my child. It is well that you visit me. Do you have time for coffee? Or –’ gesturing towards the waiting guards and fleet of black limousines on the road ‘– do you have other matters?’
‘I have time,
my father,’ says Sidiki. ‘I have arranged for my next meeting to be here. One of those alluring matters which is set to tempt me.’
‘Aha, aha,’ says Gaw Goŋ, and he leads the way inside his sculpture garden.
He upends a plastic barrel and lays an old sheet over it, indicating that Sidiki should sit.
With many a cry of ‘Aha’, he busies himself finding a battered pot, filling it with water and then thrusting it into the centre of his always-burning fire. He props the pot carefully against the two-headed metal stave he carries, so that it will not tip.
Sidiki sits in the midst of the wild madness of Gaw Goŋ’s home looking at the gentle glittering of the ocean. Out in the distance, the horizon shimmers and flickers as if alive with shadows and light.
‘The genii have been close this last year,’ says Sidiki quietly, staring at the space between sea and sky. ‘What do they see, my father?’
He expects no answer, for that is not the way of the Weatherman.
Gaw Goŋ travels at the whim of the genii, collecting stories, but he has lived here on Plage Soumbédioune, beneath the gaze of the surrounding buildings close to the centre of the city, for as long as anyone can remember. He seems oblivious to the entreaties of the smart glass and steel hotels clustering around his beach for him to go somewhere less obvious.
Each morning, he rises early and plucks at whatever flotsam the ocean leaves behind or at the garbage piled up by the thousands of people living nearby. Returning to his sculptures with this random assortment, adding to a standing figure here, demolishing and recreating another there.
Each day, the sculpture shifts and changes.
In the weeks before an ocean storm, the pillars transform into angry, tearing beasts, and calm again once the weather has passed. Sidiki’s father has shown him pictures of the garden during the time when he was a student. The image chilling even across the gap of thirty years. Then the pillar beasts seemed to be attacking each other, leaning and violently ripping at the fabric forming their torsos and limbs, reflecting the street riots between youth and soldiers which erupted later that year.