Say You're One of Them (Oprah's Book Club)

by Uwem Akpan

  Bartholomew was a chorister in his village church, Saint Andrew’s Church, and a member of three pious societies, Saint Anthony of Padua, Legion of Mary, and the Block Rosary, in addition to being a member of the Catholic Youth Organization, to which every youth in the church belonged. So, naturally, when he started getting close to Aisha, pressure came from all these affiliations. But he could not stop. Things came to a head when the two rebelled against the jingoism of the community and started running away from home for days on end to Sapele and Warri and Port Harcourt.

  When Father Paul McBride, an optimistic, outgoing Irishman, noticed that his church was heading for a major scandal, he called on the two and counseled them. When he was sure of the depth of their love, he spoke to their parents. It was not long before they married. Though Aisha’s people were staunch Muslims, their tradition did not consider a woman converting to the “People of the Book,” as Jews and Christians are known in the Koran, apostasy. Aisha converted to Catholicism and was christened Mary. Jubril was the second child of this marriage.

  And, just as at his brother’s infant baptism three years before, when Father McBride insisted on Yusuf (Joseph), a saint’s name—something, according to him, without the traces of paganism the missionaries associated with native names—at Jubril’s baptism, he picked Gabriel. He entrusted the child to the patronage of Saint Gabriel, the archangel.

  They were a model family, a point of reference for intertribal and mixed marriage. In fact, in his homily at the wedding, Father McBride had reminded the congregation that the couple was a symbol of unity in a country where ethnic and religious hate simmered beneath every national issue, and he challenged the whole village to emulate the couple’s openness. Perhaps the myriad tribes and religions in the country could be welded together by the love within such marriages, Father McBride thought, and the respect accorded in-laws would at least instill tolerance. He did everything to support the marriage. Because Bartholomew and Mary were poor, Father McBride begged money from the white tycoons of nearby multinational oil companies to help celebrate the diversity of this marriage, building them a house and supporting their needs.

  But these were hard times. Due to decades of oil drilling, the soil was losing its fertility. Rivers no longer had fish, and, worse still, repeated oil fires annihilated hundreds of people each time. Shehu, fearing for his cows, moved away from the oil-rich villages to other parts of the south soon after the wedding.

  When ancestral worshippers began asking people to bring animals to sacrifice to Mami Wata and other deities whose terrains were supposedly desecrated, Father McBride told his faithful to forget the pagans. The problem deepened when little children began to develop respiratory diseases, and strange rashes attacked their bodies, and the natives started running away to the big cities.

  One day, without warning, Aisha escaped with the children to Khamfi, her father’s original home. Yusuf was five and Jubril two years and three months. Bartholomew was crushed, and his resulting depression left him open to the taunts of the community. To protect their Catholic marriage, Father McBride advised Bartholomew to follow his wife to Khamfi, offering to foot the bill and arranging for a nearby Catholic parish to hire him as a laborer. But Bartholomew refused to go for fear of recurring religious and ethnic cleansing in the north. His only hope was that the children would come back when they were old enough to ask about their roots. He remarried promptly, even after Father McBride told him his wife’s action was not sufficient reason to annul the marriage; he became a member of Deeper Life Bible Church.

  Yusuf and Jubril grew up in Khamfi’s sprawling Muslim-only Meta Nadum neighborhood and lost contact with their father and Ukhemehi. Their mother went back to Islam, and the brothers went to the mosque with their uncles. But Yusuf kept asking about his father and remembered a few things about his childhood in Ukhemehi and never quite felt comfortable in the mosque. Over the years, while Yusuf indulged in the snippets of their family history that often spilled out of their mother on her bad days, when she bemoaned her misfortunes, Jubril was the opposite. While his brother pulled closer to his mother to hear these stories, Jubril was distant. He blocked them out because they embarrassed him, and a measure of enmity came between the two boys as a result. Aisha was afraid for Yusuf because she could see he was in danger of apostasy.

  This was Yusuf ’s situation when one day neighborhood friends called him a bastard. The following month he decided to go back to Ukhemehi to search for his father. In spite of Aisha’s plea and his uncles’ threats, Yusuf ran away. Having been gone barely four months, he came back, surprising everyone, as a firebrand Deeper Lifer. It was from him that Jubril first heard about the supposed freedom of the south and the fantastic notions of a better life and how the whole village and the Deeper Life community welcomed him like the Prodigal Son. When Yusuf started insisting that his name was Joseph, instead of Yusuf, in Meta Nadum, Aisha could not sleep at night. Yusuf was not deterred by the antagonism this created between him and his brother or by the cold shoulder he was getting from his extended family. Seeing that he was determined, Aisha did not ask him to abandon Christianity altogether, but sneaked out to the nearest Catholic parish and recounted her ordeal to the priest. She wanted Yusuf to return to the Catholic Church because she knew that way his risk of being killed would be less than as a Deeper Lifer.

  Back home she sat Yusuf down and gently told him that he was not a Deeper Lifer but a Catholic because of his infant baptism. She explained to him that, according to Catholic theology, baptism leaves an indelible mark on a person’s soul—and whatever religion a person may choose later can not affect that Catholic mark. She told him that, in that sense, his Islamic faith and recent Deeper Life faith were nullified. She explained that though the Catholic Church, unlike Islam, would not force anybody to be loyal, the belief was that wherever you went you remained Catholic. But Yusuf refused to honor the appointment she had set up for him with the priest and continued to express his Deeper Life evangelism. Not only did he carry a Bible around Meta Nadum and recite the verses aloud, he set about trying to proselytize his neighbors, à la a Jehovah’s Witness, insisting that it was the duty of every born-again Christian. In tears, his mother had turned to Jubril, pleading with him not to have anything to do with his brother’s blood. But he too said he had to protect the honor of his family, neighborhood, and Islamic faith.

  It was not long after this that Yusuf was mobbed by some relatives and neighbors and stoned to death, like Saint Stephen, for apostasy. Though Jubril did not join in the killing of his brother, he was close enough to hear him pray in tongues as the stones rained down on him.

  STANDING IN THE BUS, these were some of the thoughts that swamped Jubril’s mind. Losing material things—like the dozens of cows in his care, which his Khamfi attackers would have destroyed or claimed since his flight—did not bother him. And it was beyond him at this point to think about the national consequences of the crisis. He did not want to think about all his former friends who helped rout him out of Khamfi. He did not want to remember his childhood years of racing down the dusty unpaved streets of Meta Nadum, or the afternoons spent planting carrots and cabbage in the wide valley of the seasonal river that bordered one side of the neighborhood. It was best now to forget these things. He did not want to recall their conversations as they poured out of the mosque after Friday Jummat, all in long gowns, babarigas and jhalabias, the epitome of friendship in that celebratory throng, or how they stopped by each other’s houses to eat and drink zobo. He did not want to consider the years spent together in the outskirts of Khamfi tending cows, or the times they fretted together about the health of some calf and one of them had to carry it home on his shoulders, like a good shepherd, or the times they made forays into the Christian areas during riots to firebomb churches.

  They had held Jubril as a true Muslim for not allowing family loyalties to come between him and his religion when Yusuf was given his just deserts, and Meta Nadum had rallied around him when he had
readily submitted his hand to be chopped off as punishment for stealing someone’s goat. When a few hard-nosed journalists interviewed him later, he had exuded unparalleled confidence in his faith, although he did not allow them to take his picture. He even pleaded with them to tell the human-rights group that had taken his case to the supreme court not to bother. Somehow he had become a hero. A rich man even entrusted him with the care of his cows.

  Now, he just wanted to cry for his mother, who had disappeared in this crisis, consoling himself that maybe she had been merely displaced, like him, not killed. He wanted to apologize to her for the enmity between him and Yusuf. For Jubril to begin thinking in depth about his brother’s death now, after his friends betrayed him, would have shattered him. So Jubril tried to think of Yusuf only in relation to his mother’s grief. He could not imagine life without her. He preferred to imagine her back home in the walled compound on the fringe of the neighborhood, where they lived with his maternal uncles. He imagined her moving from room to room, stroking her tasbih, prayer beads, and crying for him until her eyes became as red and dry as the mud walls of the local silos in the square courtyard. He could see her, her tall frame bent by the loss of a son, coming out into the courtyard as if her sorrow had filled the rooms and now overflowed.

  Once the riots broke out, he imagined his cousins and uncles standing guard with guns and machetes, to forestall the maddening mob of almajeris—Koranic-school pupils, some of whom had turned wild from years of begging on the streets—from plundering their home. He could see the faces of some of these almajeris. He could see the streets swarming with mobs, and endless clouds of dust rising as high as the minarets that jutted out of many private mosques in the neighborhood. He could not feel anything for these Muslims, nor for the Christians with whom he was fleeing. He could not be sure whether his Khamfi relatives would defend him, nor was he ready to entrust his life to anyone as he had done in the past.

  That fateful afternoon, when Khamfi exploded, Jubril was coming back from grazing his cows. He ambled along behind the beasts, which filled the dirt road that connected the fields to his home, and placed his stick on his shoulder. When he heard two sharp shouts coming from the direction of the city, he thought nothing of it.

  The blue sky had been bleached by the harmattan dust. The strong desert wind whipped the landscape, filling his babariga and drying the day’s sweat. Being this close to home, he usually would have heard cars and trucks honking their horns on the major highway that passed near the town, but he heard nothing but the sound of the savannah sharpening the endless sough into a whistle.

  When Jubril got to the corner, the beasts started trotting, anticipating a drink from the few pools in the valley. He jogged along with them, eager to take off his tire sandals and soak his feet in the pool while the cows drank. But as they turned to descend into the wide valley, the cows were startled by two people. Both carried leaves and were shouting to Jubril to pluck a branch from the bushes, but Jubril could not hear them clearly. Apart from the leaves, one carried a carton, the other a sack—their belongings. They ran as fast as they could into the savannah, as if they had stolen something and the owner was in hot pursuit. Jubril brought down his stick immediately and herded the animals to one side, positioning himself between them and possible danger.

  When he got to the pools, it worried him that he did not find other herds and cowherds. Uncharacteristically for that time of day, the remnants of the river trickled into the pools clear and undisturbed. Even the farmers, who would normally be watering and tending their cabbage gardens at that hour, were absent. The place was deserted, and the gardens, green and fresh in the dead of the harmattan, looked like new wreaths in an old cemetery. Scouting around, Jubril discovered that the edges of the hoofprints left on the soft ground by herds that had returned before him were jagged and tilted to the front, and that cow droppings did not stand in little hills but had poured out in crooked lines. He surmised that the animals had galloped past the pools. Quickly, he whipped his cows, and they ran toward home, and he ran after them.

  A CHANTING MOB THAT suddenly swung into Jubril’s path from a side road hesitated for a moment before going in the other direction. Though Jubril was far from the crossroad, the sight was so unusual that the cows panicked and stopped. They huddled together on one side of the road like schoolchildren around an akara seller. The mob kept pouring into the road, kicking up a haze of dust that moved like a low pillar of cloud. The people carried leaves, stones, knives, and sticks, and Jubril thought he recognized a few of them.

  “Sanu Jubril, sanu Jubril!” Lukman and Musa called out from the crowd. They were Jubril’s friends. They abandoned the throng and ran toward him, whistling and waving green leaves.

  “Sanu Lukman . . . sanu Musa!” Jubril said, and waved back to them.

  They were older than Jubril. Musa was a hulking figure, bare-chested, and had carved his beard into what the non-Muslims called “Sharia beard,” which Jubril would have loved to have had if he had been blessed with thick facial hair. Lukman was thin and the taller of the two. Apart from the leaves, Musa was carrying a sword, and Lukman clutched a clear jar of gasoline that had no lid. Running toward Jubril, Lukman used the palm of his hand to stopper the container, and Jubril suspected the bulge in his breast pocket was a box of matches.

  “Where your leap?” Lukman said to Jubril, panting and pointing at Musa’s leaves.

  “My friend, wetin dey haffen?” Jubril said, moving away from the cows to meet them. “Kai, wetin be de froblem dis time?”

  “You no come frotest, huh?” Musa said.

  “Which frotest? Gimme time,” Jubril said, and tried to nudge Musa on the rib, but he dodged.

  “Leave me alone,” Musa said.

  “Make I fark de cows pirst. I dey come.”

  “You no come frotest,” Lukman repeated, glaring as Jubril tried to pat him on the shoulder. Jubril stopped dead in his tracks. “You no be good Muslim . . . ,” Lukman said.

  “Me?”

  “Yes,” Musa said.

  Jubril laughed a short laugh. “Haba!”

  “Your mama no allow you pollow us to be almajeris in dose days . . . ,” Musa said, and looked at Lukman as if he wanted him to complete the accusation.

  “You two dey craze o!” Jubril taunted them.

  “She no allow make you join us kill dis Christians,” Lukman said.

  “My mama no be like dat,” Jubril argued. “I say I dey come. I go join una now now. Ah ah, no vex now. Come, pollow me go fark dis cows, and I go join.”

  Jubril moved back toward his cows, but the two lunged at him menacingly. Lukman put down the jar, and Musa adjusted his sword. The tiny bells that adorned the brown sheath jangled. Jubril stopped laughing, sensing trouble. His friends were not smiling and their eyes bore hatred. He had never seen them like that before.

  Remembering the two people who ran past him near the pools, Jubril jumped up and plucked some leaves from a Flame of the Forest, to show solidarity with whatever cause his friends were advancing. But his effort only alarmed them, for they thought he was trying to flee. They held him by his babariga.

  “OK now, I be one of you,” Jubril said, waving the leaves before them, dropping his stick.

  “One of who?” Musa said.

  “Dis no be matter of leap, you hear?” Lukman said.

  “Come, wetin I do you?” Jubril asked them.

  “Wetin you do us, huh?” Lukman said.

  “Yes . . . why you dey harass me like dis?”

  “OK, we no go fay you de money we owe you,” Musa said.

  “Which money? If you dey talk about de thousand naira you come borrow prom me, na lie o. You go fay me. Ha-ha, dat one no be talk at all.”

  “Cancel de debt now or else . . .”

  “You must fay me my money. Oderwise I go refort you to de alkali. Dis one we go hear por Sharia court!”

  With that, Jubril spun suddenly and freed himself from their grip.

  “Also we go hea
r por court say you be pake Muslim!” Lukman said. “You be Christian . . .”

  “Me? Christian?”

  “Traitor, traitor!” they charged.

  “Por where?” Jubril said. “You no go pit blackmail me por dis one.”

  “Yusup, your inpidel brother, better fass you,” Musa said.

  “Traitor, traitor,” repeated Lukman.

  Two men stopped and wanted to know what was going on.

  Jubril still thought there was a chance they were pulling his leg. He felt he had proved that he was a devout believer. He remembered the wild celebration that swept through the north a few months back, when the Manzikan governor launched his total Sharia, arguing that common law was rooted in the Bible and Christianity. He said the Muslims had been cheated by Christians all along and that the time had come for Muslims to enjoy a legal system rooted in the Koran and Islam. He maintained that with Sharia the state would be cleansed of all the vices and immorality that plagued the people.

  Jubril had joined the huge crowds chanting and brandishing the picture of their hero, the Manzikan governor. For three days, Jubril had gone out and demonstrated for the Sharia system to be established in Khamfi, though he, like most in the crowd, knew that in Khamfi there were as many Christians as there were Muslims.