by Okey Ndibe
In a perplexed tone I said, “I don’t get you.”
Dr. Mandi narrowed the space between us, to within the range of quiet speech. “The state, my friend, has decided to try you as a mad person. That’s the only reason the case was adjourned. After what happened in court, you must understand why.”
“But I don’t,” I protested.
“Don’t you understand the implications of saying in open court that His Excellency is a rapist and murderer?”
“But that’s the truth!” I cried, forgetting to subdue my voice. The doctor’s eyes danced in the direction of the door. I turned and saw Joshua watching us with alarm, the whistle between his lips. I said, “It’s true. These mosquitoes won’t let me sleep.” Joshua removed the whistle, shook his head and scuffed away. After his disappearance, I faced the doctor and continued in a lower tone. “What I said in court is the truth. The man is a rapist and murderer.”
Dr. Mandi put his mouth close to my ear and whispered, “Who in this country doesn’t know that? Remember he has run our lives for two decades.”
“But I’m speaking quite literally,” I said on a note of protest. “Even before he seized power he raped a woman I knew, a prostitute. He later killed her. Quite literally, I must repeat.”
“I know. And you know what?” A conspiratorial glint was in his eye. “Most believe your story. It’s the topic of conversation everywhere: here in this city, throughout the country, even overseas. The reports by the foreign media are what Bello’s most concerned about: he’s been trying to spruce up his regime’s image. That’s why you’re in trouble. You can’t publicize dirty secrets about the Life President and hope to sleep peacefully.”
I sighed bitterly. “I realize that.”
“I have received clear orders from His Excellency’s office to report that you’re a madman. I was compelled to sign a paper to that effect.”
I threw him a disgusted look. “I had little choice,” he said.
The anger that welled up inside me was of an odd kind, tinged with contempt and pity. As our eyes met again, I said, “Whatever happened to principles? And integrity?”
He shrugged, less ashamed than I thought he should be. “In the real world necessity sometimes takes precedence over conscience.”
“I pity any man who would say that!”
“I probably deserve pity. But I know it could have been worse. For both of us.”
“How?”
He again inclined himself forward, to whisper into my ears. I drew my head back, as though to avoid bad breath.
“You were to be poisoned,” he said. “That was the first plan.”
He saw the startled look on my face and smiled, as if privy to still darker secrets.
“Yes, my friend, I hear things. I know a statement was already drafted to the effect that you committed suicide. Yes, that you recanted, then took your own life. That you couldn’t live with the shame of the bare-faced lies you told in court. You owe your life to some anonymous fellow who published a letter in the international press to the effect that he could corroborate your allegations. He said he feared His Excellency would order you to be killed in order to cover up sordid facts in his past. The letter was published the very day your food was to be laced with enough cyanide to kill a cow. That’s what forced the presidency to abandon its original idea and switch to Plan B—to discredit you. Which is where I come in.
“I was told what to do, at gunpoint. When your trial resumes, I’ll take the stand and describe you as schizophrenic. Justice Kayode will pronounce you guilty on one count of second-degree assault and one count of second-degree murder. Because of the international attention, the death penalty has been ruled out. You’ll be sent to jail for a few years in the hope that the world will forget you and all you said in court. That’s the idea.”
“That’s the idea? And everybody knows it?”
“Well, let’s say the major actors. Certainly Justice Kayode, the prosecutors, the police. A new decree will be issued tomorrow that makes mad people legally responsible for their crimes. The decree will be made retroactive, specifically to cover your case.”
More out of fury than doubt, I asked, “Why should I believe you?”
“Good question. I don’t know the answer.”
After a moment I asked, still agitated, “If my fate is already sealed, then why are you here? Why is there a trial at all? The system you serve could have thrown me in jail without a trial. It happens every day. So why the needless ceremony? Why the adjournment?”
“The reason is called due process. This country is in deep trouble if Western diplomats send home reports to the effect that Madia doesn’t observe due process in criminal trials. Or that we don’t apply the rule of law. There’s nothing worse than that to discourage foreign investors, freeze international aid, and keep the tourists away. The state may make up its mind behind closed doors but it must stage a public show to impress upon the world that it’s an open, deliberative machine. Nor is Madia peculiar in this regard. It’s the same everywhere: Europe, the United States. In your case Justice Kayode must go through the necessary motions even if he has reached a verdict a priori. Indeed, especially then.”
Due process and the rule of law. The phrases resurrected a figure from years ago, a professor at the University of Madia who ran a course in Legal Ethics. He was a fattish man with restless eyes, popular with students for his unusual phrases and his classroom style. When he taught, he jumped and romped and beat up the air, like a novice karate artist in practice.
One day he strutted into class, wrote rule of law on the blackboard, and underlined the topic with a quick unsteady line. Then, making a sharp turn towards the class, he exclaimed, “To hell with the rule of law! Give me the rule of justice!”
He was crazy, that was the consensus of his colleagues. They said a professor like him was the price the country paid for recruiting jeans-wearing, cursing, American-educated academics. Nobody disputed that he was a legend in his own right. One day at a faculty meeting he put his hand in his pocket for a piece of paper but pulled out a condom instead. He had done it in error, this much his detractors conceded, but he still had to be a lunatic to carry such things around.
Sam Ajira—that was the eccentric professor’s name.
“Do you know how I feel right now?” I said to Dr. Mandi. “Like a fly trapped in beer. Drowning more and more each time I bat my wings to leap to freedom.”
“Talk to me,” he said. “Tell me your story.”
“You’re part of this charade,” I snapped. “I don’t want to participate in it any more than I have already.”
“Trust me,” he said.
“Trust you? You who have signed a false report. You who will say things in court you know to be untrue. Trust you?”
Briefly, his professional composure seemed to unravel. “A gun was put to my head. Yes, I could have chosen to die for integrity and principle. Sometimes, believe me, I feel ashamed that I didn’t. But what principle does a dead man defend? What truth does he espouse? You may not know it now, but I’m also going out of my way to help you.”
“What exactly do you want from me?”
“Tell me everything that happened.”
“Why? I tried to tell the police and Dr. Mara after my arrest, but they were not interested. I tried to tell it in court, but the system you serve stopped me.”
“The slaves of the system. That’s who stopped you,” he said.
“But aren’t you one of those slaves?”
“How can I deny it? But I’m an unhappy slave.”
“The only thing I’m left with in the world are memories. And I honestly don’t trust you enough to share them.”
He scratched his head. Then he said, “Do you know a fellow named Ashiki?” I trembled, but said nothing. “Well,” the doctor continued, “I haven’t met him yet, but I believe he found
out that I was working on your case. He left me a message to pass on to you.” He pulled a piece of paper from a file and handed it to me. The message was handwritten in capitals:
the journey began at good life
“A bewildering message,” the doctor suggested.
“Not to me,” I answered.
In silence, I thought about the implications of this development—the sudden exhumation of the one man who knew something about my previous existence.
“I’ll tell you my story, under certain conditions,” I said. “First, I want to write everything down. So I need pens and sheets of paper.”
He nodded his agreement and handed me a notebook and a pen to be going on with.
“I’d also like to see the Daily Chronicle reporter. I want him to be the custodian of my story.”
A frown crossed his face. “It’s impossible to smuggle a reporter in here.”
I shrugged. “If you want me to tell my story . . .”
He smiled at my persistence. “All right. Perhaps it will only be difficult, not impossible. I will try to arrange to bring him to you.”
“Thank you. Meanwhile let me write a message, just in case you see Ashiki.”
I tore out a sheet from the notebook and wrote, “Violet made death easier to bear.” The feel of the paper brought back pleasures I had long forgotten, the scratchy song of pen and ink.
Chapter Eight
Until my arrest and that ride in the back of a police car, I had lived under the illusion that nothing was misshapen about my life. It was the world that had gone mad, not me. But after the departure of the psychiatrist I looked at myself with hard, unsparing eyes, determined to pinpoint the very moment when, renouncing everything that lay in my past, I took a strange turn on the road of life. The details of my alienness flowed like light into my eyes. It was there in the stink of my armpit, in my smutty fingernails, in my tangled-up beard and long shaggy hair.
I saw myself as a man who, forgetting where he started his journey, was condemned to wander forever, without destination. Parts of myself lay in the mists of the past, lost. But which parts? How could I calculate what was lost when I could not say with any certainty how much of who I had been had survived?
My thoughts turned to Ashiki, the man Dr. Mandi had mentioned. He and I had served together on the editorial board of the Daily Monitor. It was he who introduced me to Iyese. In all likelihood, he was also the anonymous source who saved my life, the man who alerted the foreign press to the fact that I was in danger of being poisoned. It would be just like Ashiki to step out of the shadows after all these years.
How many years?
My mind went back to the day when I accepted a job at the Daily Monitor. It was in July of 1964. Two months earlier I had graduated from Madia University with a degree in journalism. The Monitor, a small but popular newspaper based in Langa, hired me as deputy political editor, a title whittled down to the acronym DePe, embossed in black on a silvery plate that hung outside the door of my cramped office. By virtue of this post I was also a member of the paper’s editorial board, six men and one woman who met three times a week to weigh the world’s problems.
On 1 October 1960 our country had groped its way through the dark waters of the British womb and emerged into the world as a nation in its own right. The birth had been a long time coming. In 1884 representatives of British trading companies had taken to Berlin a map with which they persuaded their European siblings to acknowledge a large parcel of land on the western hump of Africa as a possession of the British crown. But the Berlin map of the new British protectorate concealed more than it revealed. It did not show, for example, that Madia contained more people than several European nations put together, or that these people spoke more than two hundred and fifty different languages, worshipped thousands of different gods and ranged in hue from the gradations of brown among the darker-skinned Bantu to the sepia of the much lighter groups of Semitic origin.
Through close to eighty years of colonial gestation the members of this protectorate (later to be called colony) learned to speak in the name of a political community that was newfangled, strange and entirely of British conception. They demanded to be let alone to run their affairs as an independent nation. Some of their number who had mastered the whiteman’s tongue and read his books that spoke from both sides of the mouth (extolling human freedom and liberty on the one hand, slavery and the notion of supremacy on the other) travelled to London to press their demand at a number of constitutional conferences.
British officials, who never thought of their colonial possessions as nations-in-rehearsal, turned up their noses at these natives in breeches speaking the civilized tongue in strange accents. But the English uppishness neither deterred the natives nor prevented the unravelling of the British Empire, an event accelerated by the world’s second big war. In the end the Empire capitulated and Madia was proclaimed to the world as a new born nation.
Newborn Madia was welcomed with a swell of hope and expectation. Many outsiders predicted that Madia would grow into a bright dynamic youth, one of the new nations likely to assume the mantle of world leadership in the twenty-first century. We Madians thrust out our chests and crowned ourselves the giant of the continent. There seemed to be good reason for our confidence. On the eve of British withdrawal, crude oil, this century’s gold, had been discovered in Madia in vast reserves. We could dream, we assured ourselves, and transform our dreams into reality.
Instead, something went wrong early and never let up. The nation we inherited from the English was placed in the hands of politicians who sucked its blood until it became dry and anemic. Overnight cabinet ministers puffed out protruding bellies they themselves called PP, for Power Paunch. What was left of Madia’s swagger was a mere mask for impotence.
I read much of the history of Madia’s birth in books designed to inspire pride and heroism. But I was also there, a minor actor and riveted observer, at the hour of our failure and disillusionment.
By the time I joined the Monitor in 1964 the political upheaval that would ultimately blow up in the face of the government of Alhaji Askia Amin, first elected prime minister of independent Madia, had begun its slow build-up. The first minor crisis rocked the nation during my first week. The drama, which would be known as the Amanka—Yaw Affair (for its two principal actors), was a classic illustration of the government’s tendency to go out of its way to shoot itself in the foot.
An obscure German magazine had published a photograph of Chief James Amanka, then the country’s minister for External Affairs, dozing at a summit of the Organization of African Unity. The caption to the photo read, “An African Minister’s Rapt Attention.”
The story would have ended there had not Amanka convinced the prime minister to buy space in a number of local and European newspapers to denounce the magazine’s “malicious defamation.” The rebuttal backfired. A few days after its publication a British television company which had covered the summit aired footage of the minister in delirious sleep, his hands hugging his bulbous belly, his mouth agape.
Incensed, I wrote a column calling for the minister’s resignation. From all over the country letters to the editor poured in in support of my call. Other newspapers, academics, labor unions, students and opposition politicians joined in. “Resign or Be Fired,” shouted demonstrators, echoing the title of my article. Instead, the minister called “a world press conference” at which he dismissed me as an imperialist stooge. On a different tack, he boasted that other African ministers did not exist as far as the international media were concerned, “But when Honorable Chief James Amanka snores, the whole world pays attention!”
The protests intensified, forcing Prime Minister Askia Amin to reassign Amanka to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Those of us who had wanted him dropped from the cabinet altogether continued our campaign, but our cause was eclipsed by the controversy that erupted over the surprise ch
oice for the new minister for External Affairs.
Professor Sogon Yaw was at the time a political scientist at Madia University, a Marxist who detected a bourgeois plot in every imaginable event and situation. As a teacher, he cultivated a Marx-like beard and wore military fatigues that accorded well with his table-pounding, ranting style. Yaw’s life was driven by one mission, he often said: to peel the mask off the faces of the enemies of the people, to expose local traitors and their foreign collaborators to public view.
Many of Yaw’s fellow Marxists were shocked when his name was announced as Madia’s new minister for External Affairs. They urged him to tell Amin to keep his capitalist bait. But they had underestimated the lure of power. Within a few hours Yaw presented himself to be sworn in. He arrived for the ceremony clean-shaven and made his vows in a quiet, even voice.
I came to my post at the Monitor still under the influence of an idealism that had first captivated me when, as a youngster, I had overheard a discussion between two men in a village bar.
“After we chase away the British and regain our independence we’re going to adopt communism as our operational ideology,” declared a bearded fellow nicknamed Man-Mountain Buzuuzu.
“What is this thing you call komanizim?” his companion, Iji, asked.
“Communism,” Buzuuzu corrected.
“What does it mean?”
“It means that people own everything in common,” explained Buzuuzu.
“Everything?”
“Everything.”
“Even houses?”
“Even houses.”
“So I can go to the chief’s house and lie on his bed?”
“There willbe no chief. Everybody is equal under communism.”
“I can go to a wealthy man and tell him that he is nothing more in this world than a fart?”
“Yes. But there are no wealthy men under communism.”
“There are not?” For a moment Iji’s enthusiam seemed deflated. “Komanizim means a lot of poor people, then?”