The Extinction of Menai

by Chuma Nwokolo

  Yet, deep inside, I knew. When I held his hand, I was wanting him to be Izak. I was wanting him as badly as I wanted Izak. Mon dieu. For years I had had to live without my husband . . . and now there were two of him? There ought to be an instruction manual on how to love one of twin brothers.

  EX-ALHAJI QUDUS

  Lagos | 22nd April, 2005

  Ex-Alhaji Rasaq Qudus’s current church was a converted warehouse, so its architecture was not quite cathedral. Yet the head pastor was nothing if not creative. A new facade had risen to disguise the original garage entrance. The street front now boasted massive roman pillars and a marbled porch that led into the church hall, which unfortunately still looked like a warehouse.

  Qudus headed for the administrative offices built into the east wall for his appointment. Normally conscientious church workers hung around the television in the reception, watching Badu’s second tape of Pitani’s confession. Qudus had watched it four or five times already since its release that morning, but he still felt that surge of relief as he watched it again. He cut a rotund figure, the sort of physique that was flattered by voluminous robes. That afternoon he was wearing a yellow lace agbada, heavily perforated for ventilation, with black stones sequined into fish patterns.

  Finally he was shown into the office of the head pastor, who did not appear to be looking forward to the meeting. ‘What can I do for you today, brother?’

  ‘You see . . .’ began Qudus. He spoke as always, with glacial dignity, opening up gaps in his sentences long enough to make a cup of tea, and drink it. He wanted advice on which wives to send off and which one to keep. He had accumulated four spouses during his life as a Muslim. Now that he had converted to Christianity, he wanted to get his house in monogamous order.

  The pastor’s answer was straightforward.

  Qudus did not like it. ‘But MamaRisi is the oldest out of all of them,’ he protested, ‘and is only three girls that she born for me . . .’

  ‘That is absolutely irrelevant to God!’

  But Qudus hadn’t finished his sentence. ‘. . . and she swears that, unless it is her dead body, she can never enter church . . . now, as for my number four . . .’

  This time the pastor let him finish. The answer was no longer straightforward, and he promised to pray about it. The pastoral interview was over . . . but Ex-Alhaji Qudus did not rise. The unease that followed him in had not lifted, and it seemed that the weighty question of the four wives had been little more than a smokescreen.

  The ex-alhaji pulled out his blue notebook—which housed a wealth of connections and the telephone numbers for godfathers and godsons, for business contacts and mistresses—and leafed absently through it. He did not need any contact details; it was a power gesture that he indulged regularly. ‘Say, for example, that somebody’s money, you know, his . . . business, his everything . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Say, for example, that it is base on a big sin . . . you know, a really big sin . . . If that, then what?’

  ‘What is this really big sin?’

  Qudus laughed incredulously. ‘I don’t know! I’m not the person! I’m just asking!’

  ‘It will depend on what,’ said the pastor a trifle testily. If he desired to be more forthright, he did not give in to the temptation: Qudus was central to the construction of the church’s true cathedral. ‘Tell your friend to come for prayer and fasting. There’s nothing beyond God.’

  ‘That’s what I told the man,’ Qudus agreed. ‘That’s what I told him.’

  * * *

  EX-ALHAJI RASAQ Qudus’s first wife had never been in any real danger of divorce. Indeed, all his junior wives had been chosen and married into the family by MamaRisi. Apart from the fact that he practised his religion du jour with judicious utilitarian variations, she knew things about him that ensured her place in his heart till death parted them.

  For a while it had served him to sit down at prayer with the Muslim colonels and majors of his acquaintance. That time had gone with their eviction from government. The president and his circles were now pretty Christian, but Qudus was loathe to strip himself of the alhaji title he had acquired at such cost, even if he had to put a prefix before it to fit into his new religion; and he certainly was not going to break up his family.

  He did what he had to do and got on with business.

  What did trouble him, though, was that original sin. It was such a vile memory that now, fifteen years on, it still woke him up in a cold sweat even in the chilliest harmattan season. The thought of it only had to cross his mind in a village meeting for him to hack up into his face towel. For all his pragmatism, his personal faith was a very real one. His personal God was not domiciled in any one mosque or warehouse church. He was powerful, with patrician aloofness, neutral to the little, crooked businesses that oiled His tithes and offerings but red-eyed and brutal on matters of Good and Evil.

  Qudus had an Evil Secret, and one of these days he would find the guts to confess it to a pastor and have the horror of it prayed out of his life.

  At the entrance of the church he glanced quickly around, pausing to allow two suspicious Rastafarians to walk far enough away. The Badu business had really gotten on his nerves. He had done business with both Omakasa and Pitani. When the second video ended without mentioning his name, it was like a personal deliverance from God Himself.

  He had thought the nightmare would end with Badu’s arrest, but the video had been released while the man was standing in the dock! Or perhaps there were now many Badus—which was much worse. He wondered whether to skip town, like his mentor Penaka Lee usually did at the first sign of trouble. Yet he had once been abroad, hadn’t he? And that had been the most miserable week of his life, a week in which his blue book of connections was quite impotent. He now knew that there was no life for him outside his beloved Nigeria, where anything could be made to happen. Slowly, he realised that he had only one real option: to go public himself sooner rather than later, or to be dragged public by and by.

  Going public! It had a resoundingly cathartic ring to it. Going to church so regularly without having something sink in was impossible, and that Christian formula of sin/confession/forgiveness was persuasive. It had bleached the inky blackness of South Africa’s apartheid via truth and reconciliation. It had even cleansed the travesty of the Rwandan genocide. Of course it was out of the question with a sin as noxious as his own Original Sin . . . but in the matter of the submachine guns . . . he looked carefully around before hurrying across the car park to his car . . . in the matter of Daniel Sheldon, and the arms he had helped to distribute in Kreektown, it might simply be a matter of going public early and becoming a heroic accomplice who outed more reprobate criminals, or waiting to be outed by a Badu victim—or worse still, becoming a Badu victim himself! He glanced quickly around his car, wiped his hands carefully with his face towel, and balled it into a pocket.

  Then he pulled it out and folded it carefully, as his mentor Penaka Lee always managed to do with his filthy handkerchief, even when he was hiding in the boot of Qudus’s car.

  After all, what was the worst that could happen? It could never be as bad as becoming a houseboy again. He eased himself into the Ikeja traffic and tried not to remember his houseboy days.

  PENAKA LEE

  Lagos | 21st April, 1990

  ‘Qudus!’

  ‘Sir!’

  Penaka Lee tried hard to not to laugh. He told his estate managers that he wanted stupid but clean houseboys in his homes around the world, but this was ridiculous. Not only did Qudus woefully fail his exams, he looked like someone who failed exams woefully. And with his great stomach he also looked anything but smart. Yet Penaka could afford to be generous. The man was in his late thirties and came with the house.

  ‘What’s that scrap heap in the carport?’

  Qudus sidled closer to Penaka Lee. There was a proud, oily grin building on his face, and from behind him he produced a cheap bottle of gin with an aged and mottled label. ‘Is
mine, sir.’

  ‘And what exactly is it doing there?’

  He raised the gin with a nervous smile. ‘Is for you to bless it, sir.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Is a big Nigerian custom, sir. Is my first car. Is just for you to bless it.’

  Penaka Lee smiled his displeasure. ‘Remove it immediately,’ he said, without heat, and walked upstairs. From his bedroom he watched the deflated houseboy drive the Peugeot, which had to be at least thirty-five years old as well, out into the street. There had to be something wrong with his PR if things like this could happen, he thought. He could indulge silly local customs in the course of wooing a prospect . . . but for a houseboy? Preposterous. He shook his head and turned to other matters.

  The Nigerian project was coming to a head.

  * * *

  IT WAS the perfect time for a coup. He had found the right soldiers with the bloody-mindedness to take it on, and the right business team. The country was ready—the military dictatorship was unpopular, had more than outstayed its welcome. A coup would literally be greeted with dancing in the streets. He had put down some money for Corus. It was the group’s most ambitious project since the death of their previous leader, Lord Risborough, and Penaka was anxious to pull it off. Nigeria was a big prize—to get a walk-in pass to the office of the president. And it was very doable. He knew it.

  He only had to talk some sense into the strategists of the coup plot. They had planned to announce the coup by excising the northern states from the federation. The northern states had the largest numbers at all levels of the army, and he knew that such addled thinking would ensure that the excised states fought the coup right to the wire. He was trying to get them to delay the ‘remapping’ of Nigeria until the takeover was successful, but it was tough going. Yet there was still time to change their minds: D-Day was weeks off. They still had some battalions to seduce into the plot.

  He had scheduled to leave the country by the weekend. There was no sense in taking risks. As he soaked in the bath, he made his calls around the world. An hour later, he turned his attentions back to his Nigerian affairs. He called his local manager and told him to sack Qudus immediately. A stupid houseboy would not understand Penaka’s mail, even if he read it, but a resentful one could spit in his food. He liked to keep his life simple like that.

  ‘Why, sir? Did he steal? Did he—’

  ‘Do you need a reason?’

  ‘No, sir, but . . .’

  ‘Good.’

  He replaced the phone and fell asleep in his bath.

  * * *

  QUDUS RECEIVED his termination letter and reacted most unpredictably. Penaka had prided himself with his experience of the world, but Qudus redefined the word obsequious. He was still volubly prostrate on the carpet when the commercial service of the radio trailed off into martial music and a rambling voice announced a ‘new government.’ Qudus got off the carpet as Penaka collapsed onto it.

  Penaka’s telephone shrilled. It was his coup contact: the plot had leaked, a prospect had tried to go to the government, and the plotters had been forced into a preemptive strike. Penaka heard out the interminable radio broadcast. The fools had stuck to their plan to excise northern Nigeria from the federation. He knew there and then that the coup was doomed. It was impossible to hide his involvement from his houseboy, but by then that was the least of his problems. Rockets began to explode from the direction of the presidential barracks. He was only three miles away from the barracks and six hundred metres from Flag Staff House. The two generals who ran the country were supposed to be killed at those locations, and if the coup failed he would be the first to be pulled into the net of retribution. He called the airport, and although commercial flights were cancelled, he put his pilot on standby.

  He grabbed a briefcase and bolted outdoors. His drivers and the rest of his staff had fled. Penaka got behind the wheel and swung the limousine through his unmanned gates. Outside the house, the shells exploding at Dodan Barracks on the outskirts of Ikoyi became more threatening. He saw a military checkpoint ahead and lost his nerve. Swerving into a side road, he barrelled down empty streets, heart thumping, and doubled back to his house. Qudus had brought his ancient car back to the house for safety, parking it right in the carport.

  Penaka Lee stole upstairs without a word. The phone lines had been cut, and he spent the night on his satellite phone, calling international contacts. They confirmed his intelligence. Dozens had died in the attempted putsch, but the coup plot was broken. The government was in control and the plotters were being rounded up by the minute, undergoing interrogations. There could be no help for him if he was taken. The military police arrived with dawn. He heard them only because he had been wide awake all night. They parked on the street, swarmed over the fence, and were crossing the lawn before he was able to tumble down the stairs. He crept through the laundry chute and disappeared under the chicken wire covered with passionflower vines in the back garden.

  The soldiers set up guard in the house and made themselves at home. He heard their voices as they drank his beer and wine and sometimes saw their uniforms through breaks in the lush foliage. He knew it was only a matter of time before he was caught. He sat there in his urine and sweat, embedded in the manure of his garden, and only the certainty of the death penalty for coup plotters stopped him from bringing forward the inevitable moment of discovery.

  As evening fell, Qudus brought his car alongside the servants’ quarters and loaded it up with personal effects. Then he opened the trunk and motioned to his former master, who crawled in on all fours.

  Qudus lived with his wife and three daughters in a large room in a riverine Lagos slum. It was a near-bestial life of unimaginable squalor. Only the fear of the death sentence kept Penaka there, listening to Qudus’s bogus plans of disingenuous cross-border escapes. Penaka spent four days in one of Qudus’s castoff, moth-eaten garments, listening to his lifetime ambition of becoming a managing director of a manufacturing company. It was inconceivable that any jail could offer worse conditions.

  Eventually, the penny dropped and Penaka promised to make Qudus’s ambition come true. Things started to move immediately thereafter. To seal the deal, Qudus drove his children out of the room, gave his wife a beat-up Polaroid camera, and tugged at his roped trousers, which promptly fell down his spindly legs. ‘You have to kneel down and suck, for insurance,’ he told his former boss. When Penaka, dumbfounded, only stared, he grumbled, ‘Me myself, I hate it more than you.’

  In the event, it did not seem like he did.

  That same evening, after the worst moment of his life, bar none, Penaka Lee was back in the trunk of the scrap heap he had declined to bless. He crossed the Nigerian border at Seme and caught a flight to Europe from Accra’s Kotoka International Airport. He was ensconced in his accustomed luxuries in a matter of hours and developed an amnesia concerning the occurrences in the immediate aftermath of the Orkar coup plot, an amnesia that was cured by a BBC broadcast on the execution of forty-one of his fellow coup plotters in Nigeria. He had caught that broadcast at a board meeting in Lausanne and had dashed to the toilet to throw up. Soon after, a photo album with only one picture arrived from Lagos. That same week, he set up a front company for his former houseboy’s business in Nigeria, although he did not dare return, himself, until after the death of the begoggled General Abacha in June 1998 and the return to democracy the year after.

  * * *

  THAT LEG up was all that Qudus had needed. By the time Penaka visited Nigeria again in 1999, Qudus was much larger than the sum of his shares in the ceramic factory. Although he was only functionally literate, he was also invested with a serpentine cunning. He did not know the first thing about balance sheets or equity assets, but it was not possible to dupe him twice. And one thing he knew better than anyone else was how to look a tenders officer straight in the eye and ask, with sleepy-eyed mischief, ‘Okay . . . so how much do you want?’

  GABRIEL IDOWU

  Abuja | 22nd Apri
l, 2005

  Dr. Idowu hurried through the corridors of Aso Rock with his file, in search of his president, finally tracking down his quarry in a state lounge with the wreck of a buffet in the background. Although there was no meal in progress and the president was consulting with his advisers, Idowu’s frown deepened: he did not approve of briefings on national emergencies conducted in dining accommodations. The large television was overloud, and the company was motley, but there was no question of attempting to relocate the briefing.

  Besides, he had other, more pressing issues for the president’s ears. Unfortunately, there were some three dozen other aides, ministers, party chiefs, and waiters in the room, all of whom took rather too literally the challenge of getting close to the ears of the president. Dr. Idowu sighed long-sufferingly, wrapped his starched robes closer around him, and pressed forward.

  Chief Eleshin was raging, ‘We’re back on CNN!’

  He was assistant deputy director general in the Office of Presidential Remediations. He did not often sit in audience with the president himself, and he was not sleeping on his opportunity. ‘Your Excellency recommissioned a billion-dollar refinery last year, and nothing! Now there’s a small riot in Sontik State and we are headline news! Racist news!’

  ‘Change the channel!’

  ‘Yes, change the channel!’

  Halfway to his destination, Dr. Idowu sighed in exasperation. Perhaps they were going to vote on it.

  Someone changed the channel to a local station, and a rapt silence fell on the room as Charles Pitani’s naked top filled the TV screen. It was the dreaded second video. Pitani was kneeling in what appeared to be a poultry cage. His eyes were teary and scared, and he was speaking in a shrill wheedle most unlike the authoritarian bass the Nigerian public was used to. Pitani spoke for fifteen minutes. As his confession progressed, handkerchiefs were used liberally, and one after the other, six of the president’s aides and ministers abruptly left for the toilet and failed to return. Sure enough, Pitani went on to mention their names and deals moments after they left.