by B. Nyamnjoh
“Please, don’t, I beg you,” said the man, handing him a Mim$ 5000.
“This is too little,” the boy complains.
“That’s all I have got,” says the man.
At lunch that day, the boy takes out the Mim$5000 to show his dad, making his mother freeze with fear.
“Dad, here is money a man…”
“What man?” his father interrupts, furious. “I have told you never to accept money from people,” he yells. “Now, like a good Catholic boy, you go right away and confess your sin to the Reverend Father,” thundered his dad.
The boy abandons his lunch grumpily, rushes to church, and enters the confessional.
“Isn’t it dark in here?” the boy remarks.
“Not you again!” exclaims the man at the other end of the confessional.
“Cruel joke,” commented Lilly Loveless, laughing her lungs out, despite her stomach upset.
“Cruel joke?” said Bobinga Iroko, feigning disbelief. “Wait until you’ve heard this one.”
“Another?”
“Yes,” said Bobinga Iroko. “A little boy runs into his mother’s room and catches her topless. ‘Mommy, Mommy, what are those?’ he says pointing to her breasts, with typical innocence. ‘Well, son,’ says his Mom, ‘these are balloons, and when you die, they inflate and float you up to heaven.’ He goes his way, quite satisfied. After all, why shouldn’t he believe his mom? A few days later, Mom is in the kitchen cooking when the boy storms in again. ‘Mommy, mommy, Aunt Mimi is dying!’ A dubious smile on her face, the mother asks: ‘What do you mean?’ She is astonished as she knows no healthier person than her youthful pretty sister, Mimi. ‘Well she’s out in the orchard, lying down under a pawpaw tree. Both of her balloons are out, Dad’s blowing them up, and she keeps yelling: God, I’m coming! God, I’m coming!’”
“It takes a Bobinga Iroko to collect jokes like these,” Lilly Loveless laughed and hit him playfully on the shoulder. “You’ve got soft lovely hair,” she said, touching his hair gently. “Do you visit Lulu to have it retouched?”
“Retouch... my hair?” Bobinga Iroko found the question ridiculous.
Lilly Loveless nodded.
“Never!” Bobinga Iroko was categorical. “That’s women’s business. All I do is apply Vaseline on dry scarp, and when the hair is overgrown I know where to go to bring everything down.”
“I see,” said Lilly Loveless. “I have an Internet joke very similar to yours about the little boy,” she moved away from hair.
“Tickle my ears with it.”
“The boy runs into the room and catches his mom naked. ‘Mommy, what is that?’ he says pointing to her womanhood. ‘Jerusalem’, says the mother. Two days later, the boy catches his father naked. ‘Daddy, what is that?’ asks the boy, pointing to his manhood. ‘Jesus’, says the father. A few days later the boy’s sister surprises him watching through the keyhole of the parents’ bedroom. ‘What are you doing?’, inquires the sister. ‘I am watching Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem’, replies the boy.”
“Welcome to the Bobinga Iroko joke club,” said Bobinga Iroko, roaring with laughter. “You should tell the Reverend Sister that!”
***
On the way back, Bobinga Iroko stopped by his office to assign junior colleagues to cover various events planned for the day. He sent two reporters, a male and a female, down to the university where the strike was still raging despite efforts by various high level state officials to negotiate between the administration and the striking students. Demands made by students kept mounting, as the police and gendarmes acted with ever more brutality.
The VC gave them all the encouragement they needed with such incendiary declarations as: “If the family and lecturers cannot teach these delinquents right and wrong, then the state must do so with an iron fist”; and “Many of the students are actually using the strike to avoid what they loathe: ‘too much book, book, book at the university’.”
At night students mounted barricades at the university junction and other strategic locations round campus, but during the day, truckloads of police and gendarmes armed to the teeth descended to clear the barricades and impose a semblance of law and order, in tune with the VC’s determination “to prove that we are capable of taking tough decisions.”
“Any pictures yet of suspicious activity at the entrance to the university where rites were performed?” Bobinga Iroko asked one of the reporters.
“You mean the shrine?” asked the reporter, a smile on his face.
“That’s the name you’ve given it?”
“That’s what students call it,” said the reporter. “It is rumoured that no picture can be taken of the shrine.”
“Cameras are not allowed there?”
“When a picture is taken there, the film is blank,” said the journalist.
“Take your camera along and keep trying,” instructed Bobinga Iroko.
“Yes, Sir,” said the reporter, leaving for the assignment.
Through with assigning the reporters, Bobinga Iroko attended to a few more things, including telling off a student journalist on an internship in the hearing of all those present: “You fail to marshal your ideas. You write the way a hen eats; you peck. Emotion is good when you write, but it should not distort your facts. I prefer a boa constrictor…”
What a slave driver, Lilly Loveless thought, and a scary one at that.
Bobinga Iroko sat down for “just a couple of minutes to check my mail”. It took much longer than a few minutes, but he was conscientious, as he kept asking Lilly Loveless, who was reading the paper, to be patient and give him a little more time.
Finally through with his office, Bobinga Iroko and Lilly Loveless drove to the police station where Dr Wiseman Lovemore was in his 12th day of detention without trial. Their request to see him was turned down. Express instructions from above, they were told. What above? Bobinga Iroko almost exploded. What impunity! Mimboland na Mimboland. He was determined to put an end to this nonsense.
“Enough is enough,” Bobinga Iroko protested. “Mimbolanders are sick and tired of directionless leadership and impunity. How can Longstay claim to be in charge when no one knows where he is heading? To go round and round in circles like a beheaded cockroach is hardly what Mimbolanders expect of a leader who has been in power for over forty years. Has he never heard of the law of diminishing charisma? The Talking Drum will leave no stone unturned until there is rule of law in Mimboland! And all who truly mean well for this country should be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause. If he has taken us for a ride for four decades, it is because we have allowed him to think of us as a scorpion: it knows it has a deadly sting, but fears to lose its life if it uses it.”
As they drove off, they could hear one policeman asking the others amid explosive laughter: “Na which kontri he check sey he dey?”
“Foolish journalist,” they mocked. “We’ll make sure he goes on a long journey soon, if he continues like this.”
Bobinga Iroko told Lilly Loveless that modern leadership in Mimboland was a total disappointment. He referred to the past in glorious terms, painting what to her was obviously an overly romantic picture of enlightened kings. Both from oral traditions and his reading of the works of prominent historians of Africa’s glorious past, he gave her this lecture on kings who were sometimes so conscious of their role that they tried in every way to maintain contact with the people. They would go out of their way to investigate grievances directly, so as to feel the political and social pulse of the communities over which they presided. It was all too common for kings to disguise themselves at night and infiltrate lower class neighbourhoods incognito, listening to conversations and taking notes in the interest of policy. In cases where they stubbornly opted for the divine right of kings, extremely violent revolts by common people against their rulers were not uncommon. Royal families were completely wiped out in some cases, with the rebels ensuring that even foetuses were extracted from the wombs of women of royal descent
. Wasn’t it ironic that in a republic when freedoms should be most guaranteed and activated, liberty was most in chains? His argument, however exaggerated, was compelling, but all the more daring, given the repressive climate in which his subversive thoughts were being expressed.
Lilly Loveless feared for Dr Wiseman Lovemore. She feared for Bobinga Iroko as well. Even with the help of The Talking Drum, she could not see them bearing on the feebleness of their shoulders the full weight of having to contest a tropical dictatorship reputed to melt iron wills like butter? It was OK to joke in private, as often Bobinga Iroko did, that if one were to take out the retina of a dictator, one would see FEAR permanently etched onto it, which would explain why the eyes of dictatorship are constantly shouting. But he should know better than to dare to repeat that in public or publish a truly critical piece along these lines in The Talking Drum. Was it not a Mimbolander intellectual who wrote that ‘Power is a heady wine so sweet that none has been known to lay it down willingly’? If what she had read of the sterile brutality of Mimboland dictatorship was anything to go by, there was every reason to fear for her two friends.
11
Once there was a man sitting under a mango tree. He had six fingers on each hand and six toes. Most people in the village were perplexed by his desire to sit under the mango tree all the time. Only when the fruit came into season did they understand his undisputed claim for the seat under the tree which he had carved for himself using a knife which he kept very sharp with a stone that he kept close by. The children called him ‘keeper of the mango tree’ and loved screaming out his name in sunny or rainy weather. He kept the area around the tree clean and many believed he slept there. He would be up at the crack of dawn, before anyone was up. Nobody knew whether he had a wife, because when asked: ‘So where are your wife and children, Mr Mango?’, he answered, ‘Oh, they are all over...’ But he was clean and well dressed. He was polite and kind to everyone who passed by, wishing them good morning and goodnight even on those days when everybody had become so busy that paying the usual courtesies of centuries now seemed such a chore. They would rush to watch football, or go off to evening parties passing within yards of where he sat, but some would not remember to say a word. When he yielded to football, it was his favourite team he watched, and it was his favourite team he wanted victorious. He would curse, kick, swear and score better than the players actually involved. The sound of silence around him would be phenomenal as the game between the two teams kept him glued to his TV, a cold beer in hand such that the world beyond was almost forgotten. If and when his team lost, his disappointment was so telling and so profound as to give goose pimples even to a ghost. Away from football, he was not embittered, or rushed, or judgmental. Come the mango season, just deserts would be had. Desserts of mango and salt, mango juice or pulp or just juicy mangoes running between the fingers and watering the parched throat after all those seasons of waiting. Mmmmmmmmm…. Come the mango season.
With a story like that, how could Lilly Loveless resist buying the mangoes that this joyful old lady sitting by the roadside, weaving baskets to keep herself busy, was selling? Lilly Loveless paid thrice more than what she was asked to pay for four mangoes. “The rest is for your beautiful story,” Lilly Loveless told the elderly lady, who thanked her profusely and said: “Do come back again and again, for I have got many more stories up my mango tree.”
Lilly Loveless went home all spiced up with fruity feelings.
***
It was a Saturday and Lilly Loveless had invited Britney over to her place for a surprise. She had learned, discretely, that Britney’s birthday was coming up when she photocopied Britney’s national identity card as part of the documentation she needed to pay Britney. This was her own way of showing that Britney was more than just a hired hand.
Britney pressed the door bell just on time and Lilly Loveless rushed to pull on tan trousers and a green pullover top and get the door. It was the first time for Britney to visit Lilly Loveless’ place at Desire’s home, a sign of friendship in the making, she thought. She commented on how much natural light there was, compared to the cramped student residential areas where landlords seemed to have signed a pact with darkness in the interest of money.
“It is almost always dark there,” she told Lilly Loveless. “Our landlords believe a lot in the power of darkness to resolve problems or to create them.”
Meanwhile Lilly Loveless, an eye for outfits as always, admired the ingenuity in the design of Britney’s ochre-coloured dress that buttoned closed in front in a diagonal from one knee to the opposite shoulder, exposed her shoulder blades in the back and had a built-in scarf – that draped gracefully around her neck and down her back to her waist. I’m going to have to ask her to show me her tailor and have an outfit or two made, she thought, but wanted to keep the focus for now on work and on Britney’s birthday.
Lilly Loveless opened the window for fresh air and invited Britney to sit at a table near it and overlooking the small street. While Britney settled in, she went to the kitchen to boil water for tea. As the tea brewed, she brought to the table some cake, yoghurt and two mangoes, and went back for the teapot, teacups, milk, and sugar.
“I hope you brought your appetite with you?” said Lilly Loveless, as she readied the table with impressive precision.
“A really fancy breakfast,” commented Britney. And then when she saw Lilly Loveless put a pink candle in the cake, she exclaimed, “What is all this about?”
Lilly Loveless struck a match to light the candle and said, “Happiest Birthday.” She followed this with an attempt to sing Nico Mbarga’s pidgin birthday song. Midway, she abandoned it for Stevie Wonder’s.
Britney looked a little embarrassed. She explained to Lilly Loveless that it was very kind of her but that birthdays are not a big deal in Mimboland. Nonetheless, at the insistence of Lilly Loveless, she made a wish and blew out her birthday candle and the two settled down to their special breakfast of Mango, yoghurt, cake and tea, making Britney think of Maria Antoinette, one time queen in Muzunguland, who was said to have wondered why ordinary citizens should strike for want of bread when there was cake to offer them. Their conversation wandered from Britney’s sweet smells, lovely thighs and attires, and studies to Lilly Loveless’s research. “You really do put your whole self into it, don’t you Lilly?” observed Britney.
Lilly Loveless smiled. “Don’t you have to when you want to get inside something?” They both chuckled. “So,” Lilly Loveless got up to put on in the background a pirated CD of Grace Decca she picked up from a hawker the other day, “what inside stories do you have today?”
“More on how materialism can drive us,” said Britney, thinking to herself if she was exactly right when she said birthdays are not that fussed about in Mimboland. She could recall girls as far back as her secondary school days, who would not talk to their boyfriends if they as much as forgot their birthdays. Then, girls used to insist on buying biscuits, pizza, bread, blockade, sweets, a bottle of Fanta or Coke, gathering friends and classmates, and celebrating their birthdays. Whether or not there is a boyfriend or Mboma to make it grand, birthdays have been and remain important for Mimbo girls. So why had she told Lilly Loveless that they didn’t matter? Perhaps she was referring more to herself, that birthdays didn’t mean much to her, personally. Even then…
***
Lilly Loveless clicked her recorder on. “Eunice is a girl in lower sixth at a government high school. Her first boyfriend was a motor electrician. She says she loved him, which is why she went out with him. She encountered so many problems with him but still loved him. He dated several other girls and finally it came to a point where she herself was tempted to date her mathematics teacher, Donatus.”
“Donatus? Sounds like the name of a monk,” remarked Lilly Loveless, examining her recorder to ensure it was taping.
“Donatus was so caring though he went out with other girls,” Britney ignored the remark. “When her motor electrician got news, he fought with
Donatus. The result was that finally she fell out with the motor electrician. She continued with Donatus without problems. The relationship ended because of the fact that he joined a Pentecostal church and started kicking against such practices. Since Eunice could not conform to his new ideas, she left and stayed alone for some time.
“Her friends were very proud and dressed expensively. Seeing this, her taste for nice dresses increased and so she vowed to date a man who could give her much money, and a man with whom she will face fewer problems. One day as she was coming back from school a BMW ‘S’ stopped and offered to help her to her destination. The man inside gave Eunice an appointment in a hotel. She acted accordingly and they established a relationship. Brother, as the man prefers to be called, is the right man for her. He is married, but he lavishes Eunice with cash, as she and her youthful exuberance bring out the full meaning of his flashy BMW as a symbol of his achievements. She now affords expensive dresses. He equips her house, and her church and God have taken second place.
“All that?” quipped Lilly Loveless.
“Yes, the good things were flowing. Eunice’s problem with Brother was too much gossiping by people around them.”
“What we call congosai?”
“I see you’ve really been paying attention, and getting deeper and deeper into our society and its ways of seeing, doing and saying.”
“Not as much as I would like, but I am doing my best. That’s what research is all about, I think. At least the kind of research I do.”
“Eunice has problems with Brother’s wife at times,” Britney continued. “What she does is to run for her life whenever his wife faces her. Eunice has once been impregnated by Brother, but since she could not afford to keep the pregnancy, they aborted it. She is presently still in love with him and he takes great care of her and even helps her younger sisters. Though her society sees it as immoral for a young girl like her to be dating a middle aged man who is married, Eunice sees it as prestige dating a man who owns a BMW and much more. Something all her religion and fervent nonstop prayer sessions failed to deliver.”