People of the City

by Cyprian Ekwensi

  ‘So, Aina told you about this place?’

  ‘Yes; and your servant, Sam. He comes from near our village. You know we are not Lagos people. We only come here for a while.’

  Your servant Sam. But – no, Sam wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t take a powder from you to sprinkle over my breakfast beans. I have been very kind to him. So that’s out of the question. You cannot poison me through Sam.

  ‘Well, I’ll think about it. I’ll see if I can help her.’ He tried desperately to sound all-powerful and authoritative. ‘But if she has really stolen that cloth —’

  ‘Don’t listen to them.’ The energy behind her words startled him. She had absolute faith in the honesty of Aina. She rose. ‘I want to tell you this: I may leave the city without notice. My work involves travelling to Abeokuta. I sell cloth, you see.’

  ‘The same thing here,’ said Amusa. ‘It is going to be as if I run away, if I bail her and leave the town. That is against the law.’

  She did not understand. Her wine-red eyes were regarding him malevolently. He broke off, his mouth half open. In that moment he felt the full impact of the woman’s power. He knew he had no other choice than to obey.

  •

  He called at the charge office after breakfast. Aina was not there. A policeman told him that along with other prisoners —

  ‘Prisoners? Magistrates Court No. 2? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Yes. Her case will be tried this morning.’

  When Sango got to the magistrate’s court, the magistrate had not arrived. A number of men and women sat inside and outside the court, waiting. Some of them had waited six months for their cases to be heard. And yet Aina’s case was being heard so very soon.

  Sango saw the Black Maria standing under the mango tree. It was empty. Looking upstairs he saw a window with stout iron bars. A dangerous-looking man with a grizzled beard tried to bend the bars. What if he did? Could he survive a fifty-foot fall to the traffic below? Sango looked at the next window and saw only women. An overwhelming flood of shame swept over him. Aina would be with them. But why did he feel ashamed? What was different about her case? He had often come here to this same court and it had meant nothing to him. He went back into the court and sat in the wooden chair and looked at the magistrate. This was Dirisu, a man feared for his cold-blooded strictness. Around the table a handful of police inspectors, plain-clothes detectives of the C.I.D., shuffled papers. They looked important, with that power to grant or remove personal freedom.

  The prisoners began to trickle in, but Sango was looking for a particular one. Suddenly there was a hum. Aina was led into the court. Amusa felt a lump rise in his throat. He should have done something to save her, but hadn’t. As it was, she stood alone against a city determined to show her no mercy. She would never win. Sango could hardly bear to look at her face, grey and drawn with suffering, the sheepishly straining eyes, one of which appeared to be swollen.

  From the witness box she was repeating after the policeman: ‘I promise to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.’

  It all looked so formal with a constable standing behind her in the witness box. ‘On 26 March at 0430 hours you, Aina, did enter and break into the residence of Madam Rabiyatu Foleye of 19A Molomo Street and at the said time did remove, without her prior knowledge or consent, one wearing apparel, valued at £30. Do you plead guilty or not guilty?’

  ‘Guilty!’ came the faint voice. This must have been what the young policeman told her the night before. Do not say ‘not guilty’ because that will complicate things and annoy the magistrate. Plead guilty and he will be lenient. You will be fined, that’s all. A few pounds at the most. Her voice came up again. ‘I – I stole the cloth. I am guilty.’

  ‘You are guilty?’ There was a sneer on the magistrate’s face.

  ‘Yes, your worship.’

  A moment’s silence as heavy as the entire twenty years of Aina’s life. What would happen now? Sango wanted to disappear immediately.

  ‘Three months!’ The magistrate’s voice was like a whiplash. ‘Next case!’

  And immediately an old woman at the back of the court broke out in a wail. Two policemen seized Aina. She fought violently, kicking their shins, clawing, biting. ‘O, my mother! My mother, come and save me. O Lord, I am dead – O!’

  But the stalwart men had been hand-picked and she might just as well have saved her breath. ‘Ha,’ they laughed. ‘Your mother did not follow you on that day! Ha!’

  Amusa sat cowed. His limbs were heavy and inactive, his throat parched. He needed a drink. He got up ponderously; walked out of the court. Under the mango tree, the Black Maria was leaving. He caught a glimpse of the policeman with the rifle at the back door, Aina’s slim waving hand through the bars. She still clung to him even when condemned.

  An old woman shuffled beside Sango. She stopped, and said: ‘Thank you for all you did, and may God bless you.’

  He did not need to look at her, could not bear it. He heard her footsteps as she walked up to the mango tree, mumbling in her dejection; and then he was alone.

  3

  When Sango got to the Sensation office, McMaster, editorial adviser, had not yet arrived. Amusa talked to the art subeditor about the poor quality of the sports pictures that had appeared in recent issues of the paper. He saw the night editor, Mr. Layeni, shuffling towards them with sleepy eyes. Sango looked at him, said good morning, and continued talking to the art sub-ed.

  Layeni stopped. He was one of the old school of Africans who believe that the younger generation were getting too cute. They were rude, did not bow to their elders as of old. They called it ‘education’, but he had another word for it. They lacked ‘home-training’. He would show them. He always showed them.

  ‘Why didn’t you greet me?’ he demanded of the art sub-ed. ‘That’s how you younger people disregard your seniors. I don’t profess to be very educated, but I’m your senior in age.’

  ‘But I said good morning; Sango, did you not hear me?’ The art sub-editor stared helplessly round the office. Protesting and apologizing voices were raised from all tables. The art sub-ed was told to say good morning again, which he did, but Layeni continued to harass him at the top of his thin voice. He was now in the position of a man who has started a row for which no one has any use. He was merely talking to keep face. No one listened to him. He had become a nuisance.

  All of a sudden his manner changed. He stopped near the stairs, looking down. Sango followed his gaze. The man coming upstairs wore a gilt-edged velvet fez with golden tassels. He was smoking a cigar, and smoking it as only a big man knows how. His robes radiated wealth.

  ‘That’s Lajide coming,’ Sango said.

  ‘Perhaps he wants to insert an advert in the Sensation.’

  Lajide waved his cigar. ‘Hello! How is everybody?’ His voice was warm and friendly.

  Everybody was all right. Everybody waited to know the source of this sudden display of goodwill. Lajide joked. He laughed at the inconvenience of leaving one’s home at night to work for somebody. But people had to do it. It was the same in all countries. If people did not work at night, things would not go on. Layeni laughed, but Sango could see that he was nervous about something.

  ‘Well,’ Layeni stammered. ‘I – I must be going now.’ He looked about him, smiling uneasily.

  Lajide blocked his way. ‘It’s you I’ve come to see. That’s why I’m up so early.’

  ‘Me?’ said Layeni.

  ‘I’ve come to collect my money.’

  ‘Ha, Lajide! Give me some more time!’

  Lajide’s whole manner changed. The warm and friendly smile vanished into the hot morning air. On his face appeared that cold metallic sheen so familiar to financiers. He had become a snake contemplating his hypnotized victim.

  ‘Every day you say give me time, but I don’t see a penny. And you are paid every month.’

  ‘I’ll pay . . .’

  ‘That’s what you always s
ay.’

  ‘End of this month,’ Layeni pleaded. He looked quite subdued and sober standing there, his feet arrested and frozen in a movement contrary to the direction he was facing. All the blustering and bullying had faded from him.

  In the office, they whispered about him.

  ‘Drinks too much . . .’

  ‘What does he do with his money? He earns a fat salary yet he owes. Everywhere he’s in debt! God save us!’

  ‘And we, his juniors, can manage on our poor salaries . . .’

  ‘But you haven’t a wife and children.’

  ‘Children! Does he pay their school fees? Don’t you see them coming here every day to ask for fees? I wonder, such a man! And he claims to be old and sensible!’

  Lajide said: ‘I’m waiting, Layeni.’

  ‘The old drunkard,’ someone muttered. ‘He doesn’t respect himself, and he expects us to respect him.’

  The phone rang. Sango went over.

  ‘West African Sensation.’

  ‘May I speak to the editor, please?’ The voice was strained, excited and high-pitched. Sango could feel the tension.

  ‘Not in the office.’

  ‘Any reporter there?’

  ‘Amusa Sango, crime reporter. Who’s speaking, please?’

  The office became silent. Even Lajide and his debtor had frozen and were staring at the telephone with expectant mouths. Sango knew the smell of news. It always gave him a kick. The breeze blew in from the windows, scattering the papers. No one tried to pick them up. The telephone voice was louder, more tinny than ever, clear enough to be heard by all in the room.

  ‘If you want something for your paper, come at once to the Magamu Bush, and you’ll get it. Never mind who I am.’

  ‘Magamu Bush. Where are you speaking from? Hello, Hello . . . He’s gone, hung up! I must get out to the Magamu Bush at once.’

  He went across to the map and stared at it. It was an uninhabited part of the city on the road that led from the wharf. Sango had a vision of a broken motor road lined on both sides by dense woods, swamps and bogs. How often had the Sensation drawn the attention of the authorities to the need for developing this area! The crimes committed there were becoming tiresome and monotonous.

  ‘Be careful, Sango,’ someone said, as he put on his hat at the rakish angle he loved. The typewriters were clattering again, someone was picking up and sorting out the scattered papers. Lajide was saying: ‘Attend to me, Layeni. I’m a busy man, you know that!’

  He went outside and hailed a Sensation van. In half an hour he was at the railway crossing. The gates had just closed in front of him. Sango fumed and got out. It was always like this. The gates always closed when he was in a hurry. A single shunt engine steamed up. It stopped in the middle of the road and rail junction. The driver in his blue jeans wiped his forearms with waste and smiled. He got down and a woman in blue, with a child strapped to her back brought him a tray and he began to extract the plates of food. His fireman leaned out, shovel in hand, and said something.

  Sango looked back. The queue of traffic was now a mile long, awaiting the pleasure of the shunt engine driver and his wife (or mistress).

  ‘They killed somebody in the Magamu Bush —’

  Sango heard the words distinctly. He was furious with impatience. The shunt engine belched smoke. The driver’s wife (or mistress) moved away. She and her child waved at Papa. Papa climbed slowly back and the engine moved away. The gates swung open. Everyone wanted to get through at the same time. Some day the city would learn to build rail and road crossings on different planes as they did in sensible cities. Sango’s van was not the last in the queue of cars, vans, trucks, wagons, bicycles, motor-cycles and scooters. Bells were clanging, horns were screeching and blasting, the entire junction had been transformed into a mixture of fire engines and ambulances in a hurry to get to a church and school where all the bells were ringing at the same time.

  ‘Drive fast,’ Sango begged, but it was unnecessary. The mad noise was enough command.

  Magamu Bush was not difficult to locate. As they neared it, Sango saw the number of cars parked close by. The van parked on the side of the road and Sango stepped into the bush. People who met him had grave and frightened faces. They picked their way with awe. He barged his way through the crowd and arrived at the front of the huge crescent.

  She was lying on the floor, dead. They had killed her, and her child too. Must have torn the poor thing from her back in a fury. Evidence of foul play was there on the floor beside her: two rough-looking clubs. The police in cork helmets and white cuffs took measurements, glanced at their watches. They entered figures methodically into their black notebooks while a photographer flashed lights at the bodies.

  ‘Some people are heartless,’ someone said. ‘I can’t understand it. Kill the woman, yes. But the innocent child – no! That’s too much!’

  ‘Too bad,’ said an old man. ‘And she don’t do them nothing.’ He folded his arms across his brown jumper.

  ‘You mean they killed her for fun?’ Sango asked.

  ‘What else!’ The old man shot back. ‘What is a gramophone that they will kill someone for? Of course they were drunk. But does that mean they should kill her? For her own thing?’

  ‘No,’ Sango said. ‘But in this world many people die defending “their own thing”, whether it is a material thing, or just a belief.’ He hurried back to the office and wrote:

  I have just witnessed the most gruelling murder since I became crime reporter for the West African Sensation. In Magamu Bush, I saw her, a woman of twenty-five, lying with face twisted. And beside her lay her child, condemned in all its innocence by a gang of drunks. I saw also the two brutal clubs with which she had been done to death. The question I must ask the people of the city is this: Why? Why was the young woman killed in this heartless manner? And why the child too? The answer is simple: greed. The men who killed her borrowed a gramophone of hers. When she went to collect it, they would not part with it, but lured her into the Magamu Bush. The young woman, unsuspecting, followed the drunkards. And having defiled her in bacchanalian triumph, they clubbed her to death and strangled the child.

  Let me assure these criminals that the whole of the Metropolitan Police, crime branch, is out in full force, looking for them. Let me assure the people of this city that the West African Sensation will give the police every support to bring the criminals to justice and to safeguard the life and property of the law-abiding citizens.

  The weeks of investigation that followed only confirmed much of what Sango had written. The woman had been killed by drunken men for a quite trivial reason. The two men arrested were bachelors who lived on the outskirts of the city. They had come to the city from a fishing district in the delta of the Great River. They had known Muri as a girl, and now that she was married and lived in the city they looked at her with the same eyes of their childhood.

  Her husband worked for a coastal vessel and was often away from the city. They persuaded her to lend them the gramophone while he was away. But Muri heard he was on his way back, and quickly went to them to return the gramophone lest her husband make trouble.

  She found them drinking. One of them, Thomas, persuaded her to come with him to a neighbouring bush – the Magamu Bush. ‘That is where the repairer lives,’ he told her.

  ‘Repairer?’

  ‘Something went wrong with your gramophone. I gave it to him to repair.’

  Muri would not go. ‘I left no one in the house. Is only me and the child here, and —’

  ‘Come on! We won’t take long.’

  A little maid who saw Muri leave her home went to the police after a restless night, waiting for her to return. What had actually happened between Muri and the drunken Thomas in that lonely strip of bush no one would ever know.

  Sango did not often sit at his typewriter with satisfaction. As Crime Reporter, he had seen the beginning of many crimes that made the headlines, but never the end. In this case, it was different, and hence his
smile: MAGAMU BUSH MURDER SOLVED BY CITY POLICE, ran his headline.

  Readers of the West African Sensation will recall my scathing remarks in these columns some weeks ago about the way the police handled the murder case of Mr. Trobski. Well, I must now hand it to the police for their brilliant performance in the Magamu Bush murder. The man who perpetrated the atrocity, who defiled the mother, strangled and killed the child, this devil has now been apprehended by the police. If only the police in this city were as hardworking as the corporal who handled the case, life and property would be much safer in this city, and in the country as a whole.

  He paused and looked up. One of the reporters had just come in, and turning to Amusa Sango, he smiled.

  ‘Mystery calls are not always safe – or true.’

  ‘Mine was,’ Sango said.

  ‘I just received one of those mystery calls. A complete hoax. Spent the last six hours roaming the wilds.’ He looked it, too. He blew at his open shirt while fanning himself with his reporter’s notebook.

  Sango smiled and continued with his story.

  •

  Sango made a routine call at the pathology laboratory near the hospital. From the pathologist’s window he had a clear view into the prison yard. As he came down the steps a note was thrust into his hand by a stranger in warder’s uniform. Aina wanted to see him, the note said.

  ‘I take you there,’ said the male warder, and Sango followed him. He tried hard to imagine what she would look like, but failed.

  In a little separate group from the out-patients stood a number of women in numbered white frocks. They all looked alike. Sango saw the female warder in her austere khaki holding a book and checking her stock of mixtures. Beside her stood a pharmacist.

  How had the male warder got hold of Aina’s message? Were there love affairs behind the barbed wire between prisoner and captor? Sango stood thinking about Aina’s power over men and he could not but hand it to her. From an adjoining store a girl – also in a numbered white uniform – came in carrying a freshly-filled winchester bottle of medicine. Amusa’s heart missed a beat.