The Extinction of Menai

by Chuma Nwokolo

  ‘Who settled it?’ asked Saint John, who knew the story only too well.

  ‘Motor park touts,’ replied Mukaila. ‘They said they didn’t know where the boy came from, but that Onitsha prostitute don’t use to wear badge . . . I swear to God, that apprentice sell all his master’s okrika that day, to pay the nice lady.’

  ‘Me, I’m not an apprentice . . .’ protested the hawker, over loud laughter.

  ‘Is it that you’re stranded?’ asked Salif solicitously. ‘How much is your bus fare?’

  ‘If it is a matter of ordinary bus fare,’ said Ajo insincerely, ‘if you ask politely, is a thing of which I can easily lend you . . .’

  The hawker straightened up angrily with an armful of newspapers. The retort was fully formed in his mouth when his eyes fell on his tablecloth. By this time I’d had seventy seconds with the left shoe. It was enough. I was reaching for the right shoe when the hawker screamed in horror and leapt on me.

  ‘It’s free! It’s free!’ I cried, trying to dodge the hawker’s blows, struggling to keep possession of the right shoe. I could be as pushy a salesman as any good shoe-shiner had to be. I knew how to seize and polish shoes still on the feet of objecting owners, who sometimes paid up when their shoes were buffed; yet, months and months of shoe-shining had not prepared me for the thing with the hawker. And it was free! I had said so myself! Eventually I yielded the shoe, but by then my shirt was torn and I was lying on my side in the dust of Kreektown Square.

  The short hawker was on his knees, cradling his shoes like babies. The one was shining; the other was still grey and mottled with age. His self-assurance was gone. He rocked to and fro in the dust, muttering: ‘He has cleaned it away, the very dust of Independence Day!’ The throng stood in mystified silence, which turned into consternation when he sniffed and wiped his eyes.

  Ruma rolled her eyes knowingly and tapped her head with a discreet finger. A ripple of nods validated her judgment: the last time the staff of Warri Asylum went on strike, this was how lunatics had turned up in the square, bearing branches for rifles, asking for the recruitment office of the Biafran Army. Our honour was safe. This was no premeditated insult to Kreektown. This was a lunatic, pure and simple. She returned to her stall. Her own illness was advancing and did not brook much standing.

  The hawker squared his shoulders and rose. He returned to his stall, straightened up the askew tablecloth, and set the shoes down carefully. He shrugged manfully. ‘Okay,’ he told his audience, ‘because of the polish, I will off five thousand naira—but that’s all. Not one kobo more. Who will buy the shoes?’

  A few ruffians laughed, but we stared them down. ‘First of all,’ called Kiri Ntupong gently from the safety of his joint, ‘what makes you think your shoes are worth one thousand, even?’ He cradled a snuff hand on a gnarled knee. His eyes were red and rheumy from overindulging his own brew.

  ‘These are Doctor Nnamdi Azikiwe’s shoes,’ said the hawker quietly. He recovered the circulating affidavit and waved it proudly. ‘The very shoes that he wore on the first of October 1960 for Nigeria’s Independence. Imagine that. These shoes are older than me! They are almost forty years old! They stood next to the Queen of England, see—’ And he opened up the affidavit page of a magazine picture of a youthful queen and a grinning, dashing president for those that cared to look. ‘These shoes you’re looking at were inside the very same room with Tafawa Balewa and Awolowo and Nanga Saul, and all those famous people . . . you can still see the very dust of Independence Day on this one . . .’

  There was polite silence in Kreektown Square. The villagers knew their own history. As Nigeria’s first president, Dr. Azikiwe had been central to the Independence ceremony. He was a contemporary to Nanga Saul Bentiy of the Sontik. In the dust where I sat, the photographs from my history books came to life with a trumpeting of destiny. The red tablecloth became a red carpet. The shoes standing at waist level acquired new grandeur; the hands with which I’d handled them began to tingle.

  Yet, if I was star-struck, my fellow villagers were cut of more phlegmatic cloth. They did not lose their heads. That was how a classmate returned from his first geography lesson to tell his illiterate mother how Agui Creek—this same Agui we treated with such levity—was actually called River Niger way up north, how it sprung to life more than four thousand kilometres away in Fouta Djalon Mountain, how it watered five great countries and millions of people before going to pieces in our delta, fragmenting into many creeks of which the Agui that washed Kreektown was a tiny finger, and how it finally emptied into the ocean a few kilometres from where we stood. His mother, who had lived all her life by the breadth of the creek without ever having to contemplate its length, allowed her son to finish before asking, ‘So? Is it now too famous for me to baf inside?’

  It was Saint John who asked the pertinent question: ‘So?’

  The hawker’s mouth dropped open. ‘So? So? These are the most important shoes in Nigeria!’

  ‘They’re old fashion,’ decided Mukaila. ‘Me, I can never wear them.’

  ‘You don’t buy shoes like this to wear them!’

  ‘Why should I buy shoe again, if not to wear?’

  ‘You buy this type of shoes to keep,’ explained the hawker passionately. ‘These shoes are like a pension plan; you keep them inside a glass cupboard, or trunk box, with plenty of camphor . . .’

  ‘So you’re the messenger of the latest madness, eh?’ said Ntupong. He had walked up to the shoes for a closer look. His trembling snuff hand granted him easy passage through the crowd, for he was given to explosive sneezes when he snuffed. He studied the shoes at length and nodded sagely. ‘First I am to burn my wooden circumcisionhead, eh? Now I am to replace it with Nnamdi’s shoes, eh?’ He shook his head. ‘Thank you very much.’ He took a final pinch and dusted off his snuff palm on his baggy shorts, but as he turned toward the suddenly thinning crowd, he sneezed. The hawker flinched as the shoes acquired a little more than the dust of independence. ‘Tell those who sent you that Kiri Ntupong was not at home,’ he said as he returned to his shelter.

  The hawker took a deep breath and began a desperate sales pitch. ‘So you didn’t hear about Marilyn Monroe’s shoes? One pair of shoes that sold for more than thirty thousand dollars! That’s millions and millions of naira! Think about that! These very shoes you’re looking at are far better than Marilyn Monroe’s shoes! This is Zik of Africa I’m talking about! Even, they’re better than a government pension! See: it’s like having History inside your house! Then one day you bring them out, maybe when you retire, and it’s worth like ten million naira! Think! Ten million naira! That’s like winning the lottery—except—where’s the risk? No risk! You buy it cheap, and the value is only going up and up! A pair of shoes like this is better than a plot of land!’

  He stopped only because he ran out of breath.

  There was a long silence in which the only sound to be heard was the hawker’s heavy breathing and the commotion of a hen succumbing—with ill grace—to her cockerel. Then Sisi Mari asked politely, ‘Who is this Magdalene Mari?’

  ‘You don’t even know Marilyn Monroe?’ asked the hawker in a stricken voice.

  ‘Where’s the shame there?’ she demanded, taking offence. ‘Does she know me?’ There were nods of support from her fellow, democratically inclined Kreektowners.

  The hawker realised belatedly that he had travelled too far down the Niger River and had arrived at a market that time had forgotten. He sat down slowly beside his stall as the glow of the red tablecloth slowly faded.

  I shared keenly in the fading glory of Azikiwe’s shoes. It was difficult to come to terms with the reality of my own exploding expectations. This was not the business turnaround I had expected. This was not the life I had expected either. I had needed a renaissance so badly. The opportunity of Zik’s shoes had seemed tailor-made to make me shine. Yet right before my eyes, the precious crowd was melting away—and I had not even closed a sale.

  ‘I knew that 419 people w
ould find the road to Kreektown one day,’ said Etie to her customer as they drifted back to her stall. ‘I should now sell my papahouse and buy a pair of shoes, not so?’

  ‘But how do they hook so many people when their scams are stupid like this?’

  ‘You should take your business to Warri,’ suggested Mukaila helpfully, ‘either Warri or Lagos. Lagosians are more . . .’ His words tailed off into a circular, lunatic gesture around the head. Then he headed toward his canoe at the riverside.

  Utoma, Ajo, and I were among the last to leave the hawker’s stall. ‘Lagos people copy these foolish things better than Menai people,’ agreed Ajo, not unkindly. He was an undertaker drawn to Kreektown by the bonanza of death. ‘If is the bus fare that you need, just say.’ He slipped away before his offer could be taken up.

  Sisi Mari’s electric sewing machine started up, buzzing quickly around the hem of a wavy green outfit, taking advantage of the Rural Electrification Board’s generator, which ran for two hours most mornings. In the distance, a passing ferry foghorned a greeting to an empty jetty as it chugged up-creek. Oga Somuzo miscalculated a haggling gambit and called Ma’Bamou a white witch. Nearby traders rushed in to save him from the angry trader’s walking stick.

  Utoma was still the only egg dealer in Kreektown, and his mood was more buoyant than usual. ‘Shine me,’ he said, as though he were doing me a favour. He owned the poultry shed by the creek, a kilometre south of Kreektown. He had fostered me for a year after my parents drowned, and his boots, which reminded me of the muddy, smelly poultry, needed me more desperately than I needed his money. He saw my face and snapped, ‘Emiko sita? So is only the shoe of dead president that you specialise?’

  ‘It’s not that,’ I said sullenly, wondering, suddenly, what it was. I stared at the mud-encrusted boots, straining for the optimism that had buoyed me when the short hawker opened the 1960 vent of glory. I wavered uncertainly between my black and brown tins of polish. ‘What colour was it before-before?’ I asked.

  Utoma frowned, unsure whether he was being mocked. ‘Before-before what? I bought it brown and is still brown, boy, wha’s matter with you today?’

  The money he was going to pay, less than my standard charge, was already scrunched into a parsimonious fist. I saw suddenly, transcendentally, that these terms of trade were so skewed that I would never prosper here. The suspicion had been there for a while, but right then I knew I was never going to save money for university from my shoeshine box.

  I rose slowly, and the shackles of the Menai obsession with corporate existence fell away from me like a spent sentence. I would no more be Long-Lived in the land of fireflies, condemned to the Weekend Walk to Burials. I would not be a shoe-shiner for people who mostly wore slippers. I’d get to know people who weren’t about to die, live in a neighbourhood whose conversation didn’t hinge on kidneys, where traders prospered more than undertakers. Where the knowledge of world figures could be taken for granted. A capacious grave opened up in me. Into it slithered dead and dying Menai: Utoma, Etie, Ruma, even Mata Nimito, screaming, soundless, buried once and for all. There was something for me in the world beyond the circumscribed shores of the doomed People. Perhaps a library all of whose 359 books I had not yet read. Perhaps people whose eyes were not tinged with envy—and bitterness—that I was not like them, that I was born a few months too late to be inoculated with Trevi’s death.

  As I brushed the dust of Kreektown off my clothes, it was as though the dust of Zik’s shoes, and the inebriating spirit of 1960, had infected me with a new and grandiose vision. Utoma could keep his custom and Kreektown could shine her shoes, but I was young and independent; and I was free of the curse of Menai.

  ‘Emeyama?’ he asked softly in Menai. ‘What’s the cryingmatter, Zanda?’

  ‘I’m not crying,’ I sniffed. ‘But I don’t have your type of brown.’

  Then I turned and left my shoeshine box, and the square. When the ferry left that evening, it left with me.

  * * *

  I OPENED my eyes and sat up slowly. The disturbance that had roused me seemed to come from the yard: screams and Menai phrases, shouted in a voice too distorted by rage or pain to make out properly. I scrambled to the window. In that unguarded glance I took in the roof of my dad’s house halfway across the village. Then I looked down and there, in the midst of the rapidly filling courtyard, saw Jonszer.

  He had a bloodied dagger, and people gave him a wide berth. A length of rope was fastened to his ankle. He leapt, pranced, screamed like one demented, hacking at his body with his blade; as I stood there, open-mouthed in the window, he stopped and pointed his broad knife at me. ‘Miyaka sia Menai!’ In that moment I saw his grief and pain. I gagged and slumped backwards until I was on the floor, leaning against the bed, the only furniture in the tiny room. I gasped. A few seconds of silence ensued, and then he resumed, his voice hoarse, unrecognisable, fading away in the direction of Kreektown Square. In moments the yard was silent, and I knew the crowd had followed him.

  I sat there and watched the sky darken. When the shadows began to pool in the corners, I rose. I closed the shutters and switched on my rechargeable lamp. An hour passed before the people started to trickle back in. Their awed comments drifted up through the shutters. His voice still rang in my ears: Miyaka sia Menai! I hugged myself, walling myself off from condemnation. I was independent of his hopelessness and grief. I was free. I was Nigerian, not Menai. African, not Menai. And half of me was clearly not even African anyway.

  Someone knocked. I did not move, willing whoever it was to go away, but she opened the door anyway and stood there, her face bereft of its residual mischief.

  ‘He drowned himself! Just like that! They said he tied his foot to an underwater root! How’s that even possible?’

  ‘GodMenai . . .’

  ‘Why do you keep saying that?’

  I shrugged. ‘What happened to Jonszer?’

  ‘He returned from an errand in Ubesia, and some idiot at the motor park told him that Hundredyears was dead. He just went crazy.’

  ‘They shouldn’t have told him just like that!’

  ‘Yes. The divers haven’t found his body, but they’re burying Hundredyears now. Are you coming?’

  I wanted to sit in that room forever, but I would stick out more by staying away. I rose. It was time to bury Mata Nimito. I had fled six and a half years before to avoid this funeral, but he had waited for me.

  * * *

  WE TOOK the low ridge, walking through the clump of raffia trees that fringed Kreektown. The village lay to the left, our abandoned farmlands to the right, with the blackened mounds where we used to smoke our fish. Beyond lay the thickets of the mangrove swamp.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you my own secrets. She’s only my African mother.’

  I stared, ‘Really?’

  She grinned, enjoying my surprise, ‘She’s my mother’s cousin. We first met when I was posted here three years ago.’

  ‘It’s hard to believe, the way you get along. Where’s your real mum?’

  ‘Mother, not mum. Dead. Cancer.’ She raised her finger, stopping my next words. ‘Don’t say it. She tried to kill me when I was a baby. I didn’t cry when she died.’ She looked at me defiantly. ‘And I’d probably try to kill my own children, so I’m not having any. It’s sometimes genetic, you know?’

  I stared, wondering what had brought on this embarrassing level of intimacy. I tried to stem it: ‘Ah, this year’s harmattan is refusing to go—’

  ‘Have I told you I’ve been in jail?’

  My butt clenched spontaneously. ‘As in . . . prison?’

  ‘I did time.’ She nodded cheerfully. ‘One year in Kuje Prison, Abuja. But I didn’t steal the money they accused me of, honest.’

  ‘I believe you.’

  ‘Your turn,’ she said grimly.

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I couldn’t dredge up any confidence remotely as candid as hers, but what I had, I was now compelled to share.
‘I’m Menai,’ I blurted finally. ‘I lied when I said I was Gabonese . . . and this is my hometown.’ I shut my mouth, realizing how dangerous the ambiguous company of a woman could be.

  She glared at me for one long moment. ‘Fine! Don’t tell me! As if I care!’

  She stalked ahead alone.

  * * *

  MOST PEOPLE from the new Kreektown were there, milling about, chatting, and watching the volunteer gravediggers at work. Much had changed in the enclosure: it was much smaller. There was still the old house half sunken into the soft creekside earth. There was still the elevation from which the Mata had scoured his skies, but there was also the overgrowth that had stormed right up to the perimeters of his pavilion. Yet Jonszer had clearly kept the fight up till the end: the compound itself was as clean and Spartan as I remembered. The Menai had gathered here for festivals, but the compound had yielded acreage to the forest as the population had decreased. What was left of the pavilion was an old man’s house, and it was swamped now by the new Kreektowners.

  He lay there, on his clay plinth, which seemed a hundred years old as well. A low, thick-thatched sun shelter stood over him, but otherwise he lay in the open, in the shroud of his red robe, as though in yet another trance. I stopped several feet from the pavilion, reluctant to go any farther. Involuntarily, I brooded on the contrast between the straitened circumstances of the Mata of the Menai and the grandeur of the Nanga of the Sontik.

  If I had come the day I arrived, I would have met him alive.

  A clean-shaven man with an unruly flare of grey hair walked toward the pavilion. He wore an expensive black jacket, but his sweat was plebeian enough. His eyes were intense and piercing, fixing on me from a long way off. Then he approached and offered me a handshake.

  ‘I’m Professor David Balsam.’

  Something clicked from an earlier conversation I’d overheard at Ma’Calico’s, something about a harmless black British professor of history who carried around pictures of a bronze head. The locals called him Questionnaire—because he would ask silly questions until he was shooed away. I glanced across at Amana, and she glared vindictively as she slipped away. It was too late for me.