The Extinction of Menai

by Chuma Nwokolo

  The Extinction of Menai

  Modern African Writing

  from Ohio University Press

  Laura Murphy and Ainehi Edoro, Series Editors

  This series brings the best African writing to an international audience.

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  The Extinction of Menai

  Chuma Nwokolo

  ISBN: 978-0-8214-2298-4

  CHUMA NWOKOLO

  The Extinction of Menai

  A NOVEL

  Ohio University Press

  Athens

  Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

  ohioswallow.com

  © 2018 by Chuma Nwokolo

  All rights reserved

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  Printed in the United States of America

  Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper ™

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Nwokolo, Chuma, author.

  Title: The extinction of Menai : a novel / Chuma Nwokolo.

  Description: Athens, Ohio : Ohio University Press, [2018] | Series: Modern African writing series

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017053684| ISBN 9780821422984 (softcover) | ISBN 9780821446201 (pdf)

  Subjects: LCSH: Nigeria—Fiction. | Nigerian fiction (English) | BISAC: FICTION / General. | LITERARY COLLECTIONS / African.

  Classification: LCC PR9387.9.N947 E93 2018 | DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017053684

  Article 10.1

  Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights

  All language communities have equal rights.

  Prologue

  Notes from the National Historian

  Nigeria Archives, Abuja

  6th March, 1990

  Today, six Menai children died from the effects of the 1980 Trevi inoculations in Kreektown. A half-naked procession of a few hundred men and women carried their dead twenty kilometres to the Sontik State capital in Ubesia. Police trucks arrived to keep order, pouring out dozens of armed men, but the topless mourners were tragic, not threatening, and they flowed past checkpoint after checkpoint, chanting Menai dirges, provoking sympathy from policemen and an unprecedented empathy from the public, so that by the time the six bodies were laid out by the gates of the Governor’s office in Ubesia, the numbers of topless mourners had swollen into the tens of thousands. . . .

  No mass hysteria of this nature had ever been reported in Nigeria before, or since.

  22nd April, 1990

  An attempted coup led by Major Gideon Orkar failed to unseat the government of General Ibrahim Babangida, which had been in power since 1985. It was the bloodiest coup attempt in Nigerian history. Many of the plotters were from Sontik State in the Niger Delta region of the country, and the coup had been inspired by the feeling of exploitation of the region’s minority ethnic nations. After the failed coup there was increasing talk of secession in Sontik State.

  17th May, 1990

  Denying any connection with the coup of April 1990 or the secession agitations, the government established several commissions and enquiries to attend to minority issues, including the Petroleum Communities Development Fund (PCDF), the Department of Research and Cultural Documentation (DRCD), and a certain Psychiatric Enquiry by Dr. Ehi Fowaka. . . .

  * * *

  Extracts from the 1990 Interim Psychiatric Evaluation of the Menai People

  Executive Summary:

  The Brief:

  As the notorious Topless Procession case demonstrated, the Menai ethnic nation manifests an insular clannishness and resistance to modernity. Is this a symptom of an underlying psychiatric condition afflicting the entire ethnic nation? Are those traits likely to spread to Nigeria’s three-hundred-odd ethnic nations? Do they threaten Nigerian nationalism? Is this condition treatable, and if so, by what means?

  The Subject:

  The Menai is a minor ethnic nation whose global population at the date of this interim report is about one thousand. Ninety-five percent of all Menai live in Kreektown, an impoverished village on Agui Creek in Sontik State. Although there is only one known instance of public nudity among them, they are pathologically incapable of adapting to city life. They are victims of a group indoctrination that prevents them from emigrating from Kreektown. This made them particularly vulnerable to the defective Trevi inoculations during the 1980 Lassa fever outbreak. They address themselves as Menai, call their language Menai, and (although apparently of average intelligence) stubbornly speak Menai to the exclusion of the official Nigerian language in their village square.

  Extract from the Glossary:

  It is a feeble language, as I have mentioned elsewhere. There is actually no word for ‘suicide,’ which is understandable, I suppose: before this trauma of their imminent extinction, they had no cultural memory of Menai taking their own lives. Their word for ‘death’ is a portmanteau word that opens up into the English equivalent, sleepcatastrophe. Quaint, that. Sums up their entire world view.

  Chief (Dr.) Ehi A. Fowaka

  M.B.B.S.–F.R.C.Psych.–W.A.C.S.–F.M.C. (Psych)–F.W.A.C.P.–J.P.

  * * *

  Log One

  SLEEPC
ATASTROPHES

  Kreektown | March/April, 1990

  Felimpe Geya

  Sussie Bomadi

  Filed Bomadi

  Bolu Maame

  Dubri Masingo

  Sonnie Abah

  Adje Makande

  Ena Praye

  Halia Gorie

  Nala Nomsok

  Solo Atume (aka “Chemist”)

  Births

  Nil

  Extant Menai population: 1,160

  (National Population Commission [NPC] estimates)

  CHIEF (DR.) EHI A. FOWAKA

  Ubesia | 19th January, 1994

  I was having dinner that evening at the Big Time Hotel in Ubesia, when Jonszer arrived. Apart from the bills for my daughters’ school fees at Loyola Jesuit College, nothing brings tears to my eyes like a steamed catfish trembling in a hot bowl of egusi. I had one such before me, and I was eating it with many prayers of thanksgiving to the munificent God that watches over Ehi Fowaka. Then Jonszer arrived. My chief regret for taking this assignment is my new familiarity with souls like Jonszer. He was halfway across the restaurant, black-clad, wild-eyed, and pungent, when I saw him. Fortunately the headwaiter was there. He is a diligent fellow from my town; I knew his godmother. He would have done well if he had gotten his four GCEs. He was just serving my stout, and I spoke to him with my eyes—really sharp fellow, that headwaiter—and he intercepted Jonszer two yards from me and took him outside. I then, regretfully, made short work of my pounded yam.

  Then I went out to meet Jonszer. This is what I am wearing today: a white linen outfit, one of the dozen I ordered at the start of Mr. President’s assignment. It is light but dignified, perfect for getting around in these wretched parts where efficient air conditioners are few and far between. Jonszer was quaffing a beer. That headwaiter! He knows how to engage characters like this! When Jonszer saw me he put his bottle to his mouth and gobbled efficiently, putting it down when it was empty. ‘You come, now,’ he said, rising.

  He did not mean to be rude, or imperious. His English was rudimentary, very much a second language spoken only when the other person couldn’t be forced to speak Menai.

  There were several good reasons not to follow the amiable drunk. Yet Kreektown’s only hotel was a major apology. Working with people like Jonszer allowed me to stay in the relative comfort of Big Time Hotel, while doing excellent fieldwork in Kreektown. That appalling name alone was enough to drive my business elsewhere, but my regular hotels were full. I wanted to ask more questions of Jonszer, but we were attracting attention. This is not the sort of riffraff you want to be socially associated with. I summoned my driver, and we set off. Jonszer sat up front. I took the owner’s corner. Beside me was Akeem, my PA, cameraman, interpreter, and general dogsbody.

  ‘So tell me about this place you’re taking us to.’

  ‘Is a funeral. A Menai funeral.’

  ‘A funeral?’

  ‘Yes, Doctor.’

  I sighed. This assignment was moving me closer to anthropology than pop psychiatry. I had no interests in funerals where I knew neither the corpse nor its relatives. Yet it was better that I be called out to too many things than too few; besides, it would be an opportunity for me to meet people, for the Menai were notoriously quiet, sit-at-home types. And frankly, I’d rather be doing this than be stuck at my desk at Yaba Psychiatric Hospital contesting seniority with the likes of Dr. Maleek.

  ‘So who died?’ I asked.

  ‘Nobody,’ replied Jonszer. ‘Is a funeral, not a burial. Is for Sheesti Kroma, Ruma’s daughter.’

  Akeem caught my eyes, and we indulged some exasperated headshakings. Nobody died! Yet we were going to a funeral! This was the sort of thing that happened when you were forced to recruit a drunk as your local fixer. It was like that old joke, It was a very fatal accident, but, thank God, nobody died. Yet Kreektown was just twenty kilometres away, and frankly, my car was more comfortable than my hotel room. No surprise there, since the car was more expensive than the entire hotel. Which was the crazy thing about Ubesia: though the capital of an oil-producing state and cultural heart of the Sontik people, it had a local economy more stunted than the national average and has never quite moved from township into city status.

  So I let my driver continue.

  Kreektown was locked down when we arrived. There was a funeral under way, all right. The businesses were shut. The pool shop and beer parlours had their doors padlocked and their chairs stacked up under their awnings. The villagers had turned out in black robes like Jonszer’s. Never seen that many Menai out at the same time before. They gathered at the village square. It was dark and depressing. There were none of those high-wattage bulbs that organizers of funeral parties would have thought to provide in any civilized village. It was like stumbling into the really Dark Ages, complete with traditional architecture: there were people but it wasn’t a party; there was music—and it is really stretching it, to call that menacing witchery ‘music,’ but I am being scientific here—but no dancing. All they did was weep in song. People stood there like tree trunks and wept and sang these haunting Menai songs, songs that made you feel wretched, like the world was ending tonight, and they sang them one after the other. You don’t want to be in this square for a real funeral. The most sinister thing was the children, some of them as small as five and six, standing and chanting like the adults. These were kids who, in normal funerals, would have been running around at play. It was clear that a severe order of group psychosis was at work here. I don’t mind admitting to a most unscientific unease.

  Akeem took photographs while we waited for something else to happen, but nothing else happened. They just stood there and sang.

  We walked through the crowd. I recognized quite a few people that I had met in the course of my fieldwork. They were harmless, simple folk: Farmer Utoma, Ma’Bamou, Weaver Kakandu, even that old scoundrel, Kiri Ntupong. Normally these are the most polite and respectful people you will find anywhere in Nigeria, but today they waited for me to greet them first—which I did, in the interest of scientific enquiry—but even then it was like speaking to people in a trance. The wailing and the singing, it was enough to drive a fellow insane.

  Then I saw their old man.

  Our paths had crossed before. When I first arrived, I confused the Menai by asking for their chief. They are like the Igbos used to be, in not having proper kings. Eventually they took me to this very old man who has some kind of authority over them—what exactly it was, I still haven’t discovered. His house was rather outside the village proper. They called him Mata, which I suppose was Menai for ‘master’ or something. But apart from that there was nothing chieflike about him. Had probably forgotten how to be a chief, if he ever was that. His house was probably the poorest in the village. Doubt if it was electrified. I mean, I won’t give even my houseboy that sort of house for living quarters. I went to see him a couple of times, and all he ever did was offer me a dirty cup of water—which of course I rejected—and sit and stare at the skies. I am not exactly a guru in old age psychiatry (I despise the speciality) and without sticking out my neck—in the absence of an appropriate history and all that—I’d say this was classic dementia: answering every official query of mine with perfect silence.

  He could not have looked more different today. He was playing an out-sized wooden xylophone like a man possessed. Although it wasn’t a very energetic performance—I mean, he was playing a dirge—still he was an immensely accomplished musician for a man of his age. Had his audience rapt. And even if this was not a funeral for a dead person, in my professional opinion there was going to be a dead old person in their midst very soon. It was entertainment on its own, watching him play, but it was also like waiting for a fatal accident.

  Eventually I turned to go. To listen to their sad songs wasn’t a problem—I could have taken that all night. But to be very candid, there are some things that I won’t do, even for Nigeria. To come to a funeral and stand! In the past twenty, thirty years I can count on on
e hand the number of weddings, funerals, or housewarmings I have attended and was not immediately invited to sit at the high table. I mean, sometimes I’ve accompanied colleagues to their occasions and the organizers, even without knowing who I was, have called me up to the high table, perhaps on account of my personality, I don’t know. And then I attend an occasion in a village like Kreektown and stand? Really, there’s a limit to patriotism. To make matters worse, as soon as Jonszer stepped into the village square he fell under the spell of the old man’s xylophone. To talk to him was to address another tree in the forest.

  Yet after I got to my car, something about that ‘funeral’ kept me from leaving. I am not much of an ethnographic investigator, but the scene unfolding before me seemed quite crucial to the construction of a psychiatric profile of the Menai. I was probably the only scientific eye ever to behold this sight: 95 percent of the world population of an ethnic nation gathered in one square, weeping and wailing. I could hardly leave a scene of such scientific, linguistic, and cultural significance out of mere physical discomfort. So I compromised. I instructed Akeem to begin a video recording of the event, which he did, fetching the kit from the boot and setting up the tripod three metres from the car so that I could monitor proceedings from the comfort of my Mercedes 300 SEL—at the time of writing, this is an eight-month-old import, and I hazard a guess that there are not a dozen of its specs within the borders of Nigeria.

  This was the point at which Jonszer turned up again. I let down my window as he approached. His hand was out, his grin lopsided, with the effrontery that only drunks can muster. I gave him a half litre of cheap brandy, and it disappeared into a baggy pocket—I carry this questionable pedigree of alcohol purely for the appeasement of roughboys. It was difficult to know whether his eyes were red from weeping or from drinking.

  ‘Just come now,’ he said.

  ‘What now?’ I asked, but he was gone, walking hurriedly, in that demented gait of his, through the crowd and down a side street that led from the square. My driver had gone to ‘make water’ (to use his charming euphemism), and Akeem was tied to his recording. Reluctantly, I followed Jonszer alone. We did not go far. We walked down Lemue Street right up till the bend in the road that led towards the creek, and there he stopped. He waited in the darkness beside a car, the only one on the street. When I joined him, he tipped his head sideways, towards a small huddle in the doorway of the house opposite. I looked, but it was too dark to make out faces or figures.