The Extinction of Menai

by Chuma Nwokolo

  ‘You know everything. I told the truth, that’s all.’

  ‘You told the truth?’ He lost his temper. ‘That’s more than you told me! All I know is the hundred thousand you gave me—’

  ‘What more do you want to know?’

  ‘Everything!’ he snapped. ‘Those blank permits I backdated and registered for you, what did you use them for? There’s no record—’

  ‘Was that not the point of the bribe? If they wanted records all over the place, wouldn’t they have paid the official fifty naira fee?’

  ‘So what were they for?’

  I cracked all my knuckles, one by one. He waited patiently.

  ‘The Menai case in London.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What’s all this drama?’ I demanded. I was never this rude to Fijaro before, but I don’t care anymore. With all his connections as a prince in the palace, what more can he do to me? I am already suspended. But as for me, I can still do plenty of pulling down. ‘I arranged their backdated vaccine-testing authorisations. And I paid you very well, so what are you making noise about?’

  ‘This is what you dragged my name into? My God!’

  ‘So God can now come in, eh?’

  ‘Don’t you have any principles? Don’t you have any conscience? People died in that inoculation! Women and children!’

  I stood up. My legs were shaking but not from fear. I’m not sure what it was, but I was not afraid. ‘“Women and children!” Always women and children! When you want pity it is women and children! As if men that died there are donkeys! Okay, so people died! Is it more than what can be settled? When your nephew killed that innocent Kanuri woman in the hit-and-run and you came running to me—’

  ‘Thousands of people died . . . ’

  ‘Thousands of people die every day! Go to the roads! Go to the mortuaries! You’re preaching to me now.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Okay, so they didn’t get permission to test. . . . am I supposed to shoot them? Those thalidomide doctors, who shot them? Tell me that. All those tablets you take every day, were they tested on human beans? When your drunk nephew killed that pregnant Kanuri woman and you came—’

  ‘I said it’s okay! Hah!’ He paused. ‘How much did they pay you?’

  ‘You mean to me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I sat down just before my legs gave way. I didn’t know what was happening to me. ‘Is that what we’re talking about now? Or are you now working in the tax office?’

  ‘Omakasa said everything on the tape. If you told Badu, you might as well—’

  ‘Okay! Do you mean everything together?’

  ‘Yes, everything. Because that Trevi case in London is also against Megatum. And those companies think in foreign exchange, those people. They don’t even have a naira account.’

  I sucked my teeth. Still, I said it on the video, and there’s no point in swallowing my own words. What I have eaten, I have eaten. ‘One million US.’

  I saw the whole six-mile length of his tongue. Plus all the gold fillings in his mouth. Then he flung his brandy glass at my coffee table—wicked man! Pieces of brandy glass and coffee table glass scattered in every direction!

  From my head to my toes, I was full of pieces of glass! The man is a maniac. With all his American education, Yaba Psychiatric Hospital is what fits him.

  He screamed, ‘Bastard! Bastard! Were! Aje! You take one million US dollars and give me a hundred thousand naira!’

  I am angry myself. ‘What did you bring? Was it not ordinary photocopy form? Hundred thousand for a fifty-naira paper, was that not enough?’

  ‘And you kept one million US dollars? You alone?’ His voice cracked. ‘Am I your houseboy?’

  ‘It wasn’t for me alone,’ I said calmly. ‘And I also had to give police protection . . .’ but he was not listening, just screaming all over the place. I let him shout. I don’t care; he can shout from now till kingdom come. That money is now part of my pension.

  Without being called, the housegirl ran in with a broom and packer, her ears flapping like an elephant’s. Bloody gossip, looking for news to sell to that useless Punch. Where she got the temerity, I’ll never know.

  ‘Get out and close that door!’ I screamed, and she leapt out of the room like a frightened rabbit.

  That’s the problem. They see your prick once and the fear’s gone forever.

  ZANDA ATTURK

  Limbe | 19th March, 2005

  I was stretched out on creaking boards. Someone was shaking my shoulders and speaking in long and rambling sentences. I was suffused with a sense of loss greater than the sum of all my current woes. I realised I was mourning my parents all over again. When I thought ‘Dad,’ the image of Tume Atturk no longer materialised unequivocally in my mind. Tobin Rani had broken down a house he could not rebuild. I shut my eyes and drifted off again.

  I WAKE in a world the colour of watermelon, where people were turtles. There is a party in progress whose music is a dirge and whose dancers are dressed in mourning white. The natter of conversations in strange tongues washes over me. I wade through the bloodiness of the world, until I find a waistcoated grey turtle, the patterning of whose shell was vaguely familiar. I offer a handshake and find it is a paw.

  I am also a turtle.

  ‘I see you’re new,’ drawls GreyShell, ignoring my paw indulgently. He speaks a manicured Menai whose verbs are conjugated in the ancient style. ‘I am Grand Menai; you’re one of mine.’

  ‘Where are we?’ I ask.

  ‘The Council of Dead Languages.’

  ‘That’s why I cannot understand a word!’

  ‘No one understands anyone. That’s the beauty of our conversation.’

  ‘There’s no communication,’ I marvel.

  ‘And no disagreement either.’

  ‘Is this a party, then?’

  ‘It’s a party as the dead call parties. It is my induction night.’

  ‘You still look quite good to me,’ I say, ‘not dead at all.’

  ‘You said it,’ he replies genially. ‘You said it, yourself.’ He kicks his limbs slowly, proudly, but when I look up again, his head is sinking gently into his shell and a soft, good-natured snore replaces his cultured Menai.

  I wade away disconsolate. I am sleepy as well, but I am now the last chance of Menai. I will not capitulate. I try to dance but the dirge is worse than a lullaby and the dance floor is cluttered with sleeping turtles.

  In the centre of the dance floor a brave geriatric entertains with a spot of break-dancing. When he is done there are drowsy nods of applause. As we help him gather the broken pieces of his shell, I try to strike up another conversation but every turtle will only speak his own tongue. From across the hall I hear a well-lubricated duffer deploy a perfectly turned proverb in Menai. I promptly buttonhole him. ‘You speak Menai,’ I say.

  ‘Only in the area of untranslateables,’ he concedes in Menai. ‘But I am the last repository of Esha’—at which point he continues his conversation with himself in Esha.

  I find myself by a bar, whose maid gurgles with a seismic laughter reminiscent of Amana’s; because of that association I accept a drink offered in a tongue so guttural that I do not wonder that it is dead. I sip her drink in sympathy and feel its soporific draught leaden my limbs. My head sinks into my shell.

  I WOKE again to the smell of food. I was in a dark and listing cellar. Hollow footfalls rang out overhead, the ceiling so low I could barely sit up. Disembodied voices and the clang and whir of machinery, none of it as pressing as the burnt fish whose smell had roused me. I was vaguely aware of a benevolent giant ladling out watery beans from a saucepan, but I took three mouthfuls and faded away.

  WUIDA ATTURK (ANCESTORMENAI)

  Kreektown | 12th January, 1980

  Wuida’s first funeral took place in 1956. For the next twenty-four years, she lived in exile in Bida, where she raised her sons and lost her husband. In January 1980, already suffering the ailment from which she die
d, she arrived at Kreektown Square with Tume, the younger of her sons. There was the pathos of a woman who had literally returned to be buried in her family house. All that week the Mata had been predicting an eclipse. When she arrived, the Menai stopped looking skywards for the cosmic aberration.

  Her story was well-known, even to the Menai born after her funeral: A charismatic Fulani trader had arrived in the early ’50s. He had fallen in with the Menai and set up his stall in the village square. He had a gift for languages and quickly picked up enough Menai to prosper as a shopkeeper and to woo and marry Wuida with the blessing of the Mata, for he had no problem with the oath to give their children his wife’s name and make a home in Kreektown. They had two sons in quick succession. Then Wuida’s world was blasted apart by the rocket of a message from her husband’s hometown: his father and elder brother had died in a crash, and a thousand head of cattle were looking for an heir.

  The Menai were not easily tempted by wealth, but even they recognised the lure represented by a thousand head of Fulani cattle and saw that he had to go.

  She and her husband quarrelled nightly over their children. She was ready to yield her marriage but not her children—and of course it was impossible to give up her people. Then came the night he slipped away with the boys.

  What followed were two weeks of a death that was life, until the Mata called her in for a sky-gazing. That was August 12, 1956. Her funeral was held that same night, and she was sent off with sadness and prayers, never to see her people again.

  Until she returned that January.

  All that history would have made no difference, for the living had no truck with the dead; but Wuida sat there at the square and wailed for someone to dig her a grave, until the Mata ordered a new festival, a Restoration, a celebration muted only by her imminent death; but it was as much about her son, Tume, as it was about her. The Menai had last seen Tume as a two-year-old. He was a young man now, a little too loud, a little too brash, and a little too dreamy for life in creek country. But all his flaws were neutralised by his flawless Menai and his unnerving knowledge of the way of the Menai. He had come to stay, and he spoke like a native.

  In that sense, his mother had ruined him for life in the real world. She had arrived in Bida to find her husband fitting out another shop. The father and brothers were still alive, and there were no cattle. The message had been a ruse, and the move from Kreektown was for his career: he had decided that Kreektown was too small, after all, to build the prosperity he craved, so he had relocated to a real town. Years passed. A Muslim, he went on to marry two other wives, which enabled Wuida to retreat even more into the Menai of her mind. Her first son did not follow her there. He would understand his mother but would rarely reply in Menai. Ahmed belonged to the Bida of his father.

  It was Tume who was sold on her fables of the homeland, the remembered stories of her childhood, related from the earliest days of his own childhood. She reconstructed the texture of the Menai in their rooms in Bida. He knew Kreektown in the map of his mind; he knew the names of all his relations and knew an anecdote, sometimes three, on each and every one of them. He knew a dozen historysongs, which was more than quite a few born and bred Menai. Although he was uncircumcised, he knew how to carve a mean circumcisionhead in whitewood with closed eyes. He also pined for the mananga, whose sound he had never heard, for that peaceful land of the tom-toms, and for the stories that always ended in the good trumping the bad, and the weak the strong, of justice winning out and the evil getting their just recompense.

  His father had mapped out Tume’s destiny as second assistant shopkeeper in a prosperous provision store that had swamped the street, swallowing up a house on either side and swarming daily onto the sidewalks with vats of beans and rice and millet and pumpkin seeds. Yet Tume did not want a life locked in by shelves; he did not want to sell grain from dawn to dusk, to snatch three meals a day from the same countertop. His father delighted in things like that—in the 55 percent margin he managed to make on the batch of soap he picked up cheap.

  Such commercial coups did not excite Tume. As he neared his majority, his father despaired of teaching him the basics of business, regretting his overfamiliarity with Wuida, who had infected him with a dreaminess that was anathema to the businessman. Tume lacked even the most rudimentary greed. He was so popular with customers that he was a liability to a shopkeeper.

  Their father’s sudden death left Ahmed in hostile charge of the shop, with their mother ailing of the sickness that had killed her husband. Ahmed ran tighter purse strings than his father, but Wuida was not as dreamy as the world imagined. Her father was Raecha, a seafarer and herbalist of the first water, and she knew enough herbal remedies to be consulted by womenfolk in the locality. She never charged for her services, which caused her husband to discount the business potential of her gifting. The grateful donations pressed into her hands were rarely disturbed, and over two decades they had slowly built up. When she counted them into Tume’s hands, he had more cash to start their new life in Kreektown than his brother had to run the family shop in Bida.

  CHIEF (DR.) EHI A. FOWAKA

  Yaba | 19th March, 2005

  We are ruled by frightened politicians. There are a hundred and one health care priorities more deserving of research funding than the psychiatric fate of this doomed ethnic nation, but they are afraid that the Menai will become another Ogoni and that the Menai Society will become another Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. Yet, Tobin Rani is no Ken Saro-Wiwa. Neither is Sheesti Kroma-Alanta—bless her pretty soul. This thing will end in a whimper, not a bang.

  And if the extinction of Menai is such a tragedy, we should all go and plait nooses! None of the children of my Urhobo, Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa, and Efik colleagues can ask for water in any language besides English. If the instructions of Life were written in our ancestral languages, our next generation would be doomed. It will take a few more years, but even our bigger languages are heading for extinction with a psychedelic accent. With my own daughters, I have tried to change things, addressing the odd comment to them in our language, but they just give me this pitying look, and I have to admit that, at ages thirteen and fourteen, I may have left it too late.

  The Menai are facing a double whammy, of course: they will die out with their language. It is rather outside the terms of reference of my psychiatric enquiry, but I shall be recommending a symbolic state funeral when the last ethnic national dies. For them and for the dozens of other languages on the brink of extinction.

  Right now, though, I have a job to do and consultancy fees to earn: and I am earning them. I have had untrammelled access to Kreektown—at least to the areas where my Mercedes 300 SEL can now safely go—and no year has passed, since my appointment in the wake of Gideon Orkar’s abortive coup, that has not seen the publication of an Annual Interim Report on the Menai. (And as long as my connections in the Ministry of Health endure, long may it continue.)

  * * *

  I AM, of course, the most important academic authority worldwide on the Menai. In this connection, I have to mention, for the sake of completeness, the recent frenzied outpourings from ex-Oxford don Dr.—or is it Professor—David Balsam. (His affiliation with Oxford University ended three decades ago under cloudy circumstances, which I will not advert to here—beyond the brief observation that intellectual honesty is the lodestar of academic aspiration—but he seems quite incapable of resisting a dropped name.) He has rushed to blog with an interesting perspective, but his work appears bedevilled by a certain Indiana Jones approach. And as for the sincere work of Mrs. Sheesti Kroma-Alanta, who is like a daughter to me, it is while reading her maudlin pages that one best understands the benefit of objective distance to scientific enquiry.

  But as for me, my research project has enjoyed and survived the patronage of no less than five presidential regimes. I am not one to drop names, but I worked for the general, Babangida (stepped a little too far to the side and fell off the plot); the company man, Shonekan (ni
ce, harmless fellow, my old boy as well); the generals Abacha (the less said about this one the better) and Abubakar (brevity was the name of his game, poor fellow); and our dear military-civilian loose cannon, Obasanjo.

  Sadly, by the time my final report is published, it is clear that the Menai will have become history and their psychiatric condition will be of only academic interest to scholars. So I might as well make the interim observation that in my considered opinion, the problem with the Menai is a focus on the past at the expense of the future. I mean, in most parts of Nigeria, all a five-year-old will know of his ancestry is that his father is called Papa and his mother, Mama. The average Menai five-year-old will name five or six generations of his maternal and paternal ancestry without breaking a sweat. And I have seen Menai gatherings with forty, fifty adults reciting hour-long, word-perfect historysongs in tandem. All that investment in remembering their ‘glorious’ past was clearly at a cost.

  Their future.

  In my trained opinion, the chances of this ‘past-psychosis’ infecting other Nigerian ethnic nations is nil. My compatriots have buried their own glorious histories and slabbed over the graves. Concrete cities have replaced our earthen homes, even if they mostly end up slums. New religions have replaced our old ones, even if they’re still mostly idolatrous cults.

  My enthusiasm for fieldwork has received a considerable fillip with the arrival of my 2005 Mercedes W220 S500, but at the date of this writing, the registered numbers of the Menai have dropped below two dozen. It does appear that this illustrious chapter of Chief (Dr.) Ehi Alela Fowaka’s life may be drawing to a close. (No, I am not afflicted by the malady of false modesty: I have worked hard for my distinctions and only a handful of my 140 million fellow nationals have the skills and perspicacity to shadow my achievements.) I do not at all relish returning to the envious stares of Dr. Maleek and my other colleagues in my old hospital or leaving the field of my latter-day speciality to the overzealous expatriate scholar David Balsam.