The Extinction of Menai

by Chuma Nwokolo

  Only weeks had passed since he arrived, but he had found the corner of his universe that was attuned to his heartbeat. Yet as his money ran out, he fell into crushing want. His father’s shop had allowed him to indulge the dreaminess of youth. Now, nothing insulated him from starvation. And it was especially galling, with Malian in the picture, the shy daughter of an Uromi trader, who had lately caught his eye.

  His big idea was to kit out a restaurant for the oil workers that drove past Kreektown for Ubesia each day. All he needed was the capital to do so. The pressure of Malian’s pregnancy focused his mind. He spent three days on his back in Raecha’s house, digging deep for the desperation he needed. His inspiration was the 1975 coup that had brought General Murtala Mohammed to power. Soldiers had broken into Nigeria’s State House and stolen power. They were toasted and feted across the world. In 1976, though, more soldiers, led by Lieutenant Colonel Dimka, tried to break in and failed. They were strung up and shot as bandits. With sudden clarity Tume realised that his breakthrough required a grievous and catastrophic wrongdoing. Afterwards he could settle into a rich and moral lifestyle.

  He just had to make sure his originating act of banditry succeeded, like Murtala Mohammed’s.

  The robbery was a fiasco. The setting was the expressway. He had fallen in with two men from Ubesia, but he’d had no idea there were bullets in the pistols they had brandished as mere props. When the shots rang out, he had frozen. At the sight of blood he had abandoned the operation and fled three kilometres through the forest until he got to the Agui, where he threw up. Then he followed the river home.

  It was difficult to reconcile the death and destruction he had caused only a few kilometres away with the drowsing village. He found himself wishing fervently that his two partners were dead. If they were caught they would bring the law to his door. He stripped and fell into bed.

  He woke up, conscious that something was wrong. It was still dark, but his door stood open. There was an intruder, but he was not in the doorway. He turned his head slowly, and there, in Old Raecha’s chair, was the oldest man in the world. His eyes were sunken but steely, as though his life was distilled in those orbs. He wore a cloth cap, and his entire body was encased in a thin red robe. Tume jumped to his feet.

  ‘Mata . . . I did not hear you come in.’

  The old man did not blink.

  ‘I . . . I . . .’ he faltered. The old man was an eerie presence in the room. Tume had seen the Mata just twice in his life: during the restoration festival that co-opted him into his ethnic nation, and during his mother’s sleepcatastrophe. But he remembered his mother’s teachings and stumbled into the kitchen, coming out with a pitcher and a cup. He poured for the old man. Minutes passed. Then the old man took the cup and raised it to his lips.

  ‘Amis andgus.’ The voice was more resonant than Tume remembered.

  ‘Andgus ashen,’ Tume said in response.

  ‘All the wellbeinghealing in the world . . .’

  ‘In this cup of water.’

  The old man did not blink.

  ‘In this gourd of water,’ corrected Tume.

  The old man drank deeply, Tume following suit. A little tension seeped out of the room.

  ‘The sky covers the world like a skinwall, but it is a mirror.’

  ‘Is it well, Mata?’

  ‘Not for you, it isn’t, not for your victims on the blackpath.’

  Tume clenched his teeth. It was nothing supernatural, he told himself, nothing mystical. Something had gone wrong and they had fingered the stranger. It was deduction, and he only needed to keep mum to get through this. He shrugged. ‘What?’

  The old man stared. The minutes passed. Tume offered food, made conversation, but failed to evoke a reaction. In the twentieth minute, Mata Nimito spoke, simply, accusingly. ‘I saw you.’

  ‘Yes, like you saw the eclipse on the day we arrived.’ The words were out as soon as he thought them; they had escaped him like a fart. Despite Wuida’s efforts, Tume lacked the instinctual reverence the Menai had for their Mata. He had not grown up under the moral authority of the sage, and once the words were spoken, their aural stigma darkened Mata Nimito’s eyes.

  The Mata rose slowly, raising himself on his singate. His eyes were wells of pity. ‘The eclipse was you, but the ancestors are wrong. For once. You are not worth saving; you are not one of us. Despite Raecha’s bloodlife, you are not one of us. A lamb that foraged with goats cannot graze with sheep.’ He walked to the door, ignoring the Menai ritual of leave-taking.

  ‘You cannot drive me out the way you did my mother. This is my grandfather’s house. I have rights.’

  Mata Nimito turned and stumped his way back until he was standing before Tume. Defiantly, Tume refused to stand, and when the old man raised his hand he did not flinch. He had made corpses that night, and there was nothing this waif of a man could do, to make him flinch. He caught the strong whiff of age, of tawny leather, of mottled hide. Then the thin digits settled on his head, shifted, became comfortable, and then, blindingly, Tume thoughtfeltsaw himself bound and gagged and blinded, convulsing in a hail of bullets; he tasted blood as he chewed his own tongue. He had never tasted terror so liquidised, so forcefed him through clamped open mouth, and he thought he screamed his pain but the blinding fire of the sound only echoed in his skull . . . then the Mata’s digits lifted and Tume was back in his Kreektown house, sitting defiantly before an ancient, red-robed antique on feet. Wondering at his stinging tongue and the alien taste of blood.

  ‘I won’t drive you out,’ the old man said softly. He turned for the threshold once again, and this time, he did not pause there.

  Tume rose, but his knees were so weak that he fell back down. The image had been so real, and it had connected powerfully with his unease the night before. He had known in his guts that it was his last operation, but he had not suspected it would be for such a terminal reason as a firing squad. He scrambled to his feet again and stumbled to the door. Mata Nimito had disappeared into the night. Tume felt an overwhelming desire to flee, but Malian was intricately knit to Kreektown, and he was irretrievably knit to her.

  It was 3:20 a.m.

  By 3:30 a.m. he was at the Mata’s pavilion. He had to wait another twenty minutes before the old man arrived. There were no pleasantries, and the old man walked past into his pile of masonry, which was half recessed into the ground.

  As Tume stood there, flashes of the horror of the evening’s operation passed through his mind. He thought of Wuida, of Ahmed, and he thought of all those tales his mother had told him of the Mata. Presently the Mata emerged again, this time dressed in a white shift. He carried a sheath.

  ‘What do you want, fartfaecal son of Wuida and the Fulani Trickster?’

  Tume dropped wordlessly to his knees. He had never practised the ritual, but he knew it, inerrantly, in his bones. He leaned forward and kissed the Mata’s feet. ‘I want to belong.’

  ‘You are not one of us.’

  ‘The bloodlife of brotherhood is not always convenient.’

  The Mata sighed grudgingly. ‘Wuida taught you well.’ Twenty minutes passed. Tume’s time sense slowed further as he sank into a slow ebb of centuries. A roost of chickens clucked excitedly in the undergrowth to the south of the Mata’s enclosure, as a nocturnal snake hunted eggs. ‘Rise,’ he commanded.

  Tume rose. The place where the Mata’s fingers had touched him throbbed. A swell of remorse swamped him, and he felt the sway of ancestors, he smelled Wuida, he smelled the Raecha that he had never known . . .

  ‘Undress.’

  ‘What?’

  The Mata did not speak again. Clumsily, Tume stripped until he was standing naked, his clothes neatly balled at his feet. A cool breeze riffled the enclosure, stoking his gooseflesh. Mata Nimito glanced at him and shook his head again. ‘If the ancestors were right, if your circumcisionhead and recital are spectacular, then you will serve me, and you will catch my singate when I fall. I will pay enough for your needs but not for your g
reed, but you will learn.’ He paused. ‘Will you pay the price?’

  Tume’s heart began to pound. He nodded.

  ‘You cannot make a sound,’ said the Mata. ‘It is the most painful thing you will ever feel, but you cannot make a sound.’

  Tume nodded.

  ‘It is more honourable to flee a circumcision,’ mocked the Mata, softly, ‘than to scream in the middle of one. Flee, coward.’

  Tume shook his head.

  ‘I will cut slowly,’ warned the old man vindictively, ‘painfully, for the souls that died at your hands tonight.’

  Tume nodded. Hot tears coursed down his cheeks. He felt his disgrace rear, felt his mother’s shamed gaze burn.

  ‘And if the pitcher of your mind remains reprobate, I will pour no knowledge into it. You will live and die the Mata’s cleaner, nothing more!’

  A whisper. ‘Yes, Mata.’

  Mata Nimito unsheathed the knife and pulled out a bag of cotton strips.

  * * *

  THE MILITARY policemen arrived just before 6:00 a.m. Their stony sergeant had seen it all before, but he was still taken aback at the sight of a naked man with a red bandage around his penis and a lump of wood being whittled in his hand. The old man lay on his back, in a trance, his narrowed eyes trained on a drift of cirrus clouds in the lightening skies. Neither man responded to the sergeant’s shouts, the old man because he couldn’t, the young man because he dared not. The policemen searched the house and the environs with stabs of bright torchlight and were regrouping at the enclosure. Despite the early hour, Tume’s body was irrigated by rivulets of sweat. His muscles vibrated in tiny, involuntary spasms, accentuated now in fear, as he bit down on his tongue and whittled away.

  A hush fell on the military policemen as a senior officer entered the clearing. The sergeant hurried over.

  ‘What’s this?’ barked the officer. ‘Break time?’

  ‘Their ritual, sir. One possible suspect, but he won’t talk.’

  ‘If he won’t talk here, he’ll talk in the station.’

  By now the officer was standing before Tume. He studied the young man, and his frown grew dubious. He prodded Jonszer, who had been conscripted into the role of guide, ‘How long has he been standing here?’

  ‘Sometimes’—Jonszer shrugged, inscrutably—‘he can be here two daynights . . . and if he talk before daybreak, he start again.’

  There was silence as that sank in.

  ‘What did he do?’ asked the officer. ‘Another man’s wife?’

  Jonszer shrugged again as the policemen picked and prodded over the curios in the Mata’s pavilion, finding nothing more of interest. Minutes later, they drifted away, speculating on every possible crime except the obvious one.

  The endurance test stretched on all day. By evening Tume’s eyesight was a red-veined vision. His circumcisionhead stood impaled on a spike before him. His mind was ravaged by the gore and the ghosts he had made, and he lived for the next slaking of thirst from the long-armed gourd of the old man. As the daylight failed, the Mata’s mananga struck up a tanda ma, and the menfolk donned their ceremonial dress sewn of Menai weavecloths and found the path to the pavilion. They inspected the circumcisionhead and took their places.

  Snatches of the circumcision song they knew, but the spirit of the circumcised inspired its arrangement, and they listened raptly, knowing it was the Mata’s own history he sang, and theirs. Once again, the spirit of the mananga possessed the Mata.

  ‘Amie Menai anduogu,’ he started, cuing the chorus with a note on the mananga.

  ‘It is of Menai stock I sing,’ they repeated.

  He continued

  ‘Near the spawn of Rawadi,

  is the plain of our Kantai,

  that was berth for the People

  for a generation and some

  in the days of Mata Doa.’

  ‘It is of Menai stock I sing.’

  ‘On the dawn of Indu day,

  the boys that would be men

  would climb and watch the sun clearing

  the eastern rump of Jabal Jinn.

  They would prime their knots of wood

  in the soakingpool as the sun

  went down the western rump of Jabal Jinn

  and darkness claimed the hills

  that GodMenai gave the Menai.’

  ‘It is of Menai stock I sing.’

  ‘With the last fingers of light,

  Mata Doa would circumcise each boy,

  giving the bloodied blade to him.

  Darkness can hide a face

  but not a scream.

  There were no screams that night.

  Mata let blood down the line,

  taking foreskin one by one.’

  ‘It is of Menai stock I sing.’

  ‘The Menai boys on the cusp of manhood

  willed their trembling hands to still,

  willed the blades that caused their pain

  to become sixth fingers,

  to carve, of the knot of wood,

  a face to awe Mata.’

  ‘It is of Menai stock I sing.’

  ‘From night to dawn,

  they carved from feel,

  those Menai boys.

  If they slept they did not snore,

  if they cried they did not weep.

  Their dreams were wood

  Their nightmares were of wood.’

  ‘It is of Menai stock I sing.’

  ‘He viewed the heads, Mata Doa did,

  that would henceforth sit on plinths

  in household tynes.

  “It is not spectacular, but it will do,”

  he said, as he walked down, making men,

  “It is not spectacular, but it will do,”

  then he stood before the trembling Nimito

  and said nothing.’

  ‘It is of Menai stock I sing.’

  ‘They scrambled home,

  the Not-Spectaculars,

  bursting with pain,

  and pride.

  They were walking wounded,

  but men. They were new Menai men.’

  ‘At the edge of the keep

  Nimito’s father watched.

  He feared the worst.

  A thousand boys had gone up Jabal Jinn

  in the years of Mata Doa

  and come down adequate.

  Had Nimito carved so bad a face?

  Would he spend another night on Jabal Jinn?

  His father feared the worst.’

  ‘It is of Menai stock I sing.’

  ‘Nimito stayed seven months

  and came down old and far away

  dressed in a robe of red

  and the tanned leather of a mountain buck.

  His left earlobe was swollen

  and a thin bone skewered it.

  His father saw his royal bib and bowed.

  His brothers saw his royal bib and bowed.

  Menai saw his singateya,

  a splitting image of the old Mata,

  installed now on a singate the height of men,

  and bowed.

  “Mata is dead,” Nimito announced.

  “Long live Mata,” they said.’

  ‘It is of Menai stock I sing.’

  ‘The burial took a month.

  The anointing took another month.

  It was time to move,

  it was written in their blood—

  to migrate on the death of an old Mata,

  to follow a new Mata to found a new Menai,

  but the new Mata was little Nimito.

  It was hard not to see he had barely left his teens,

  he had barely grown a beard.

  And the Keep of Kantai

  was the only home they knew.

  They did not prepare,

  they did not break camp.

  they did not kill and skin and

  smoke their smaller beasts.

  They anointed Nimito Mata

  and went back to their farms.’

&nb
sp; ‘It is of Menai stock I sing.’

  ‘Moons waxed and waned.

  The new Mata left his mountain house

  in the peak of Jabal Jinn

  and toured and scoured

  the land for a future home.

  Then

  fifteen hundred and twenty years after

  the flight of the Crown Prince,

  as my father counts the years,

  the Mata’s horn preceded dawn

  and they heard the clear report.’

  ‘It is of Menai stock I sing.’

  ‘It was the signal they had feared,

  and they stumbled angry from their homes

  and stood, rooted,

  at the sight of the single plume of smoke

  that stained the skies of the dawning day;

  it rose from the peak of Jabal Jinn.

  Mata Nimito had burned his home

  and led his goats down to the plains.

  Mata had burned his home

  and led his goats down, to the plains.’

  ‘It is of Menai stock I sing.’

  ‘There were times in the lives of men

  to wonder what might have been

  if such and such had not happened.

  If the Mata’s horn

  had blown at noon

  when fires boiled their lunches,

  when the farms engaged the husbands . . .

  but it had blown at dawn

  when the spirits of the old Matas

  had freshly communed with their souls . . .

  before the quicksand of Kantai

  had mired them afresh . . .’

  ‘It is of Menai stock I sing.’

  ‘By the time the young Mata arrived,

  there were plumes of smoke from homes

  whose owners lit the torch themselves,

  there were asses piled and readied,

  cattle strung and fed.

  And the young crop was strafed, and

  the old was taken in.

  Yet there were many,

  many who loved Kantai,

  who did not want to leave,