The Extinction of Menai

by Chuma Nwokolo

  Eventually, we lapsed into a sober silence, and I knew he was also thinking about the maker of his unfinished shroud. Outside, the wind began to rise, and I went to haul the supplies in.

  WEAVER KAKANDU (ANCESTORMENAI)

  Lagos | 18th March, 2005

  When I got Jonszer’s message from Kreektown, I struggled to finish, really, I did. But the evening came and my fingers were heavy with sadness and they stopped trying. My head was saying weave and weave on, try! For the greatest of all Menai, weave and weave on! But they stopped. That old rabbit was chewing and chewing my insides, but that was not the reason why my eyeswater was running. All the eyeswater from a war is too salty to quench even a small child’s thirst, so what’s the point? Me that am expert in many different designs of marriage cloths, but for years now, is only burial shrouds that I weave! May GodMenai forgive my sins.

  So I remove the thread from the koma and push the ajila back into their storage holes. I pack the body of the jamaya carefully, the way my father taught us, the way his father taught him, the way I taught my ancestor-daughter and have tried to teach these boys and girls that government brought me to Lagos to teach so that the Menai’s weave won’t die out like the Menai. But to teach them is to cry, because—may GodMenai forgive my sins—to watch them with jamaya is punishment . . . and the way they call the jamaya ‘loom’ is the worst thing, to call me ‘man,’ when my name is Kakandu . . . jamaya that is the mistress that makes wives jealous. Jamaya that is the lover that vexes husbands, and that is how it should be. My fingers play her without tire from sunbirth to sundeath. Between a jamaya and her owner there is no divorce. That is how it is. She breaks and he repairs her. She is dull it is polish. That is how it is.

  Yet the worst is how they talk, those students they sent to punish me in my last days. A weaver is a person whose jamaya does his talking: chakata-chakata-chakata, and the koma is flying in and out, building the cloth one line by line by line . . .

  No . . . the worst thing is my memory! May GodMenai forgive my sins! I remember how after two or three hours the head of our kamira will slow down—kata-kata-kata—and we will push the jamayas into the centre of the room and the snuff will come out and the roast corn and eighty or ninety knuckles will crack and one quiet joke, one nineteen-year-old memory—remember that time that Daudi won the pools and ordered six manos for his wife? One for every year of marriage? Ah!—another old man’s joke, and ten minutes, twenty, will pass and the head of our kamira will pull up his jamaya and chaka-chaka—which is how one jamaya sounds when it is weaving alone, because no matter how fast you are, you must slow down to reverse the koma and that is that.

  So one jamaya making cloth is one old man talking to himself. But three? Five? Eight? May GodMenai forgive my sins! There is no song in this world like the sound of eight jamayas singing. Before my legs grew long enough to pedal a jamaya I used to sit and watch my father—whose hands were the fastest hands in Menai—and I’ve seen grandpa and his brothers and my brothers and my father’s brothers weave, so I know what I’m saying—I used to sit and watch my father throw the koma and listen to the song. So the head of our kamira will put away his snuff and suck the last corn from the holes in his teeth and . . . chaka-chaka . . . and slowly by slowly the rest of us will start, the laughter and the jokes and the clearing of the throat and the sucking of the corn from the teeth and the cracking of the last of the knuckles will continue for a while but all that will pass until suddenly, I am like a child in the middle of a room with a low roof and the song of eight jamayas . . . chakata-chakata-chakata . . . and on and on like that forevermore!

  * * *

  BUT NO more. May GodMenai forgive my sins. It is the pride of the weaver to attend the marriage or baptism or party of his customer. To see how people are praising the skill of his weave and the beauty of his design. These past few years my work has gone down graves. I spend my life making cloth that my customers will never see. I am weaving food for termites. The fellowship of the kamira is broken. It is a long time since I knew that as the last weaver, I, Kakandu, master weaver of Menai, will not have a burial shroud himself . . . but now that the last Mata has died, who will play my tanda ma?

  I stand and go.

  Although I am bent, I am not old. My neck and back are the weaver’s. My bowlegs are the weaver’s. A neck bent over jamaya, legs pedalling ajilas, for forty, fifty years, will they not bow? I am not old but it is time. When Grandpa’s hands grew too slow to throw his koma, he was not too old to sit in Menai’s kamira, hands running over the latest cloth, to test the weft, to stretch and knob and roll the bale, and he was sitting there, in the fullsurround of perfection, listening to the song of eight jamayas, and that was where he was on the day of his sleepcatastrophe, when the head of our kamira pushed his jamaya away. There was no kata-kata, which is how a weaver slows to stop, it was just cha! and his koma was tumbling across the kamira, and we followed his eyes to the wall where Grandpa’s head was bent lower than a noviceweaver’s looking for his mistake, and the weaver’s song ended in a sigh. And that’s the road to GodMenai: a songcorridor of six or seven jamayas. I cannot go back to the loneliest sound in the world, the sound of one jamaya. Especially one that goes chaka-cha chaka-cha. I won’t stutter any more, or wait for the rabbit to eat his fill and close Menai’s last kamira.

  * * *

  THERE ARE more important things, like the voice of the girl.

  She is hawking bread on a wooden board. She is too thin to be Salia, but it is Salia’s voice, so I follow her. What else is there to do? I follow her. And may GodMenai forgive my sins.

  I don’t come too close. A dream is not searched with suspicious eyes. A dream is followed with trusting eyes. I follow from far. Ajima soa kocheya. It is warmhot . . . even early like this before the sun is coming out, it is warmhot. Like as if the ground kept the fire from yesterday’s sun like leftover soup. All around, traders and students and workers are passing, but my eyes are for the hawker. She is singing, with Salia’s voice:

  Buy bread,

  Buy bread,

  Buy sweeeet bread,

  Buy sweeeeet butter bread.

  Salia! I still remember the weight of her as I laid her down in her bedroom grave. She is going again.

  My eyeswater is flowing. Why is this? I am not an old man. Menai does not count forty- or fifty-something as old. To die at fifty is a curse. But the rabbit is biting, and although I know it is not her, it is good to dream. To use that sweet bread voice to bring my daughter back to call me to the house of Old Menai. Because only my daughter can call me into the wadigulf of the great taboo that has no name.

  Chakata-chakata-chakata-cha chakata-cha.

  She stops before a basket of onions. And I stop. I see her hand go up and bring down a bar of bread and a blade and a can of margarine. Her fingers are quick and wiseknowing. She cuts the bread still in the wrapper. That is how she cuts it. She spreads the margarine and gives the bread to a hand coming out of the basket of onions. She does all this with the board of bread on her head, her head moving side to side to balance her load. We continue. Her rubber slippers slap-slapping the road, the motor park conductors crying,

  ‘Oshodi, Oshodi, Oshodiooo!

  Oshodi, Oshodi, Oshodiooo!’

  . . . then I hear Mata Nimito’s voice singing in my head and I freeze. It is my circumcision song!

  Aya simino ganumu

  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 . . .

  By the time the young Mata arrived,

  the
re 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,

  but Exodus was a week in the making,

  and when Menai flowed from Kantai

  There was not one of her children left behind.

  There was not one of her children left behind.

  The weight of taboo presses me, heavy, heavy, I cannot breathe. Mata Nimito’s skies read my mind, they frown on me. I am hot. GodMenai! There is no shelter from his searching gaze, from the knowledge of ancestorsMenai.

  The nylon shine of bread wrappers disappears in the crowd . . . I see it far away, running across an expressway.

  Mata’s voice dies away. Who will sing my tanda ma? I that have shrouded hundreds of Menai in their graves, who will shroud me, the last Menai? For what am I living now? And I am running, running, I can see the breadwrappers of the bread of the breadhawker running. I can see the eyes of traders and bus stop girls and soldiers and bus conductors, opening wider and wider, I can hear their shouting. And the breadhawker turns, and it is not . . . it is not . . . it is my daughter Salia, may GodMenai forgive my sins, whose fingers threw a cheerful koma, who sold her mother’s sweet butterbread in Kreektown Square, and she is laughing . . . no, she is crying . . . and I am running to comfort her through the doorway of the runninglorry.

  TOBIN RANI

  The Oasis at Gozoa | 24th April, 2005

  I did not sleep until morning. I lay there, counting the seconds between every wheeze of the old man’s laboured breathing and allowing the bleakness of my situation to sink in. Some sound and fury my life had been, yet I was as lonesome as an eagle in the Saharan sky. With my nation and language dead, and my sons estranged, it was hard not to think of life as pointless, too. The hours drained; the wind speed grew.

  There was a call from fifty metres away. I looked out of the tent. The Tuareg were packed and ready to go, with impossibly clumsy bundles strapped to their camels. There was concern on their faces, but without David and his phrasebook, very little communication between us. There was another consultation in Tamajaq and then a blue-clad young man brought over a goatskin. I tried to pay and watched anger replace his gap-toothed smile. I watched them go in an undulating file. Presently the boy returned and dropped a hoe wordlessly near the tent. He had not retrieved his smile, and the gesture to make my grave-digging easier seemed suddenly more sinister than friendly. They passed from sight, and eventually I fell asleep.

  The burning heat woke me up. The sun was halfway across the sky. I rolled into the cooler shade of the tent, discovering a tangled blanket where the old man had lain. I rose immediately. I looked around and headed across to the oasis.

  It was different without the Tuareg. The land continued to rise to the northeast, and there was nothing to date the landscape—nothing to say, looking towards the highlands of Darfur, that I was not standing eight, nine centuries in the past. On both sides, the land fell away steeply. To the southwest, a rising wind had erased the tracks of David’s truck. I walked down the main causeway of packed dirt. There was something eerie about the boulders that towered over me, the clumps of brown date palms and rows of stringy cacti. I walked slowly, not so much seeking the Mata as seeing, with new eyes, this patch of earth that so transfixed him. Then I saw him by the entrance of a cave, under fading rock art with the imprimatur of the Menai, reminiscent of the art on his Kreektown adobe house, and I knew.

  ‘The Oasis of Gozoa?’

  He nodded.

  My mouth dried up. This was the root of the great taboo. He sat upright on a granite platform, his singate between his legs, in the extremity of the oasis, in that place that bordered soil and sand. I walked around him slowly, marvelling at the surge of life that had brought him to where he sat, staring glassily into his skies.

  I hurried back to the tent, where I filled a jug with water. I returned and sat by him. I offered him a drink, and we toasted, studying the same skies that had spoken to our ancestors. Ten minutes passed. Under that monstrous sun he was wilting, but something was happening to him that I did not have the power to stop. He was more with them than with me.

  I hurried back to the tent and broke it down. I was panting and breathless. My joints were killing me, but I was alive, energised. I carried the pins and ropes and wands and canvas across the oasis and rebuilt the tent around the Mata, wheeling the mananga across when I was done. When it was installed at the entrance of the cave, I collapsed by him and poured another cup of water.

  ‘Amis andgus.’

  ‘Andgus ashen.’

  I saw the root of our tradition of the water toast, that sharing of water that was primal, central to hospitality. That word, untranslatable into English: andgus—a portmanteau of wellbeinghealing. In the desert, the drink of water that greeted the traveller was the greatest gift of all, combining healing, blessing, love, wellbeing . . . No one could say the words Andgus ashen, and truly mean it, who had not had a scourging desert thirst slaked by a gourd of life-giving water.

  The Mata spoke: ‘I see this horizon of sand with the eyes of Mata Asad, whose singate knows me. Fields of grain and herds of long-horned goats. Thousands and thousands of Menai roofs as far as eyes can see. A town four times as large as Kreektown ever was. Home of the People for a hundred years and five.’

  He fell silent, and I stared wordlessly at the desert, imagining an oasis fed by a lake rather than a seasonal well, imagining how Kreektown would look in a century or two.

  ‘Ajanu,’ he said.

  Slowly, I began to play. I was rusty, and I knew it. It had been years since I last played the mananga, but it was not possible to forget. I thought I did okay, and I knew he was old indeed, for he did not, as in years past, snatch the instrument and show me how it was done. Instead, he sat, his legs folded beneath him, teasing out, to the beat of my tanda ma, the words of a historysong I had never heard before. I was so engrossed in the history that I looked up only when the Mata broke off. He was staring at David Balsam who was paces away.

  ‘I thought you left with the Tuareg,’ he joked nervously. ‘I almost turned around.’

  There was a split-second surge of relief, and then an incontinent rage took over. I leapt over the mananga and slammed into him. We rolled in the dust.

  ‘Stop!’

  We froze. We sat up, stunned. The Mata had spoken English. It had slipped from him like a fart, and now he continued, embarrassed, ‘Brothers don’t fight like jackals. Ajia!’

  ‘This is not my brother.’

  ‘He is.’ The Mata’s English was languid, so overlaid with the burr of his encrusted Menai that it sounded like a third language. ‘The only brother you have left. We are Mata . . . we make Menai.’ He extended his cup to David, who crawled over, dazed. ‘Amis andgus.’

  ‘Andgus ashen,’ said David shakily.

  ‘We are not so senile now, no?’

  ‘I . . . am sorry,’ said David.

  I rose and walked to him. I took his hand and pulled him up. ‘Sorry, I lost it.’

  ‘Where did you learn to fight like a thug?’ he grumbled.

  * * *

  DAVID TOLD us he had run into a drilling caravan and had bought fresh provisions. He brought the truck around and pitched his tent in its shadow. Then we had the first meal of the day. We ate silently inside the tent, away from the wind, which was now stinging with sand. I finished my meal, took my drugs, and sat back, reluctant to stir. The Mata had eaten more than he had in several days, and he was expansive and more animated than he had been in months. In my exhausted depression, I began to believe that he would outlive me as well.

  David passed around drinks from a cooler. ‘Anobi,’ said Mata Nimito gratefully. ‘May you have your hundred and ten.’ />
  ‘Hundred and ten what?’

  ‘Years,’ I explained. ‘It’s a Menai blessing: we’re greedy for life. We believe the normal human life-span is a hundred and ten years.’

  ‘If there’s a hundred-and-ten-year blessing, is there a curse as well?’

  I began to shake my head, but the Mata was speaking. ‘In the old days, there was a curse on the thief and the murderer: he cut his life-span in half. In the old days, crime was rare.’

  ‘Was there any way of . . . ending the curse?’

  Mata Nimito took a handful of dust and let it filter through his fingers.

  ‘That means no,’ I interpreted. ‘Yet if the old curses still worked, all those children we buried in the last ten years, I’d have cursed them all, given them another forty years of life at least!’

  There was a sober silence as the wind died. Finally the Mata took up his singate. I rose to help him up.

  The sun was two hours away from death when I followed him to the entrance of the cave. He recited three stanzas from three separate historysongs, and then, orienting himself by the sun and the rock art, he measured ten paces into the cave. Then he took an eleventh.

  ‘It should be ten,’ I whispered, ‘by the songs . . .’

  ‘Noriegamu.’ He agreed with a grin. ‘But Mata Asad was a short man. Esua aroko.’

  I nodded, although I desperately wanted to shake my head instead. I took up the Tuareg hoe. It was impossible not to feel Mata Nimito’s excitement, but I had been labouring all day, and I was not looking forward to the exercise. With his singate, he marked a rectangle on the packed earth just inside the cave, where there was just light enough not to need a lamp, and I began to dig.

  David entered, incredulous. ‘That’s rather morbid.’

  ‘It’s not the Mata’s grave.’ I panted. ‘It’s the grave of Crown Prince Alito, the last Prince Menai. Mata Asad buried him here.’

  ‘And when was this?’