Lajide watched him. The directness of the offer left him gasping. He had always thought that no one could excel him in blunt talk. He stroked his chin. Why had they picked on him? On the other hand . . . Beatrice! Here was a chance to spend some real money on her and stun her. That five thousand he had received from Zamil, where was it? Gone . . . he must have some more cash.
‘Excuse me gentlemen. Kekere! Kekere! come and get beer for the gentlemen. We can talk better with drinks.’
‘Just so, sah!’
Kekere bustled about the inner room. She came out, carrying a tray with bottles and glasses. She set the tray down near them and left. Their eyes followed her.
‘You have a very beautiful wife,’ the one with the brief-case said.
‘And young,’ the other added.
‘Women are trouble,’ said Lajide, thinking about Beatrice. But he could not disguise his pleasure.
‘Women soften life. Life is too hard,’ said the man with the brief-case.
‘Yes; when you have one wife it may be true. But a man like me, I have eight.’
Lajide filled his glass. ‘Of course they come and go. Today, six, tomorrow eight. I use to worry myself about them. Not now.’ Kekere came out now and wandered about the room. She picked something and slipped back behind the curtains. The men licked their lips.
‘Where are these lorries?’ Lajide asked.
‘Not far from here.’
‘What kind of lorries?’
‘Very good ones, have no fear. Ex-Army. Used by the Americans and the British during the war. Very good for the timber business.’
While they talked, Lajide kept thinking how he could double-cross these men. The idea did not come all at once. Slowly he rose and went indoors to change.
Kekere lay in bed, half-draped. She looked up. ‘Are they gone? Have you come?’
‘Pss! Listen! This is what I want you to do. If you bungle things, I won’t come to you any more . . .’ In a few quick words he gave her his orders and said, ‘Now, don’t waste time.’
Again and again he warned her that she must do as she was told. Then he went out and met the robbers, who had been waiting impatiently.
It was one of those moonlit nights when a man has to peer into a face to identify it. Lajide approached the men who took him to inspect the lorries. To his amazement he discovered that the lorries were sound: that they needed mere paint – in fact, these men were dealing with him as honestly as one rogue with another. But that did not alter his plan. He too, needed the money and knew well the risk involved.
If Kekere had done her share, the police should be here now. He peered into the darkness, but saw nothing. Then he began to haggle with them, to fill in the time. His ears were tuned for the faintest sounds, and he identified the crunch of boots before anyone else.
A group of men broke into their conversation, two of them in police uniform. Lajide saw the glint of moonlight on handcuffs. The robbers cursed him, but his own men (so he thought) were there awaiting his orders.
‘Take these lorries to the Eastern Greens and sell them. You must travel only by night.’
‘What are you talking?’ asked the uniformed man.
Lajide peered into the face, a strange one and very likely that of a real policeman. Kekere had bungled his plans. He had instructed her not to summon the real police but his own accomplices disguised as policemen. Kekere’s stupidity would cost him thousands of pounds.
He drew back. ‘I don’t speak to you. Am laughing at the thief-men.’
‘You done your duty well,’ said the policeman, gleefully. He turned to the lorry thieves and said harshly: ‘Inside!’ As they clambered into the police van he shook Lajide by the hand. ‘Well done!’
Lajide forced a smile and mumbled something but his thoughts were fixed on how best to discipline the frivolous Kekere. When he got home she was nowhere to be found and she did not show up until Providence dealt Lajide a blow.
His third wife, Alikatu, returning from market one evening, had a stroke. By morning there had been a relapse and she lay in a coma – not alive, not dead, not suffering. Lajide was distraught. He dared not leave Alikatu to go and visit Beatrice.
•
The news spread quickly. The financier’s wife was dying. Sango heard it in the Sensation office and booked a van to take him to Molomo Street. As he stepped out of the lorry he recognized the leader of the Realization Party who had offered him a free room, rushing round in his siesta jumper and cloth as if trying to shake the sleep from his eyes. From the neighbouring houses women poured into Lajide’s compound, pressing their noses against the windows. This whole part of the city seemed to be agitated and anxious as the last moments ticked by in the life of someone they knew and liked.
Sango squeezed through till he could see Alikatu lying on the bed. Her face was pallid. Gone was the radiance that made her one of Lajide’s favourite wives. The head wife, fat and busy, pushed him aside and took Alikatu’s head in her lap, like a baby’s.
She pressed a tumbler to the sick woman’s lips. ‘Drink it!’
Alikatu gurgled and turned away. ‘Drink it,’ echoed the politician. Alikatu gurgled again, spat out the liquid and lay still.
Lajide’s head wife looked into the sky with the palms of her hands facing her Creator and called out, ‘Olorun-O!’ in this manner offering to God all her prayers for more help and possibly a miracle.
‘I think we better fetch a taxi, before is too late!’ said the politician. The word taxi was taken up till it was echoed outside. ‘Taxi is here!’ someone shouted from the streets. An argument arose and in the end the politician said: ‘Tell the taxi to go! Is best not to move her. We’ll send for a doctor.’
Lajide arrived and saw Sango. ‘I don’t want you here! Go away. You and that Lebanese thief Zamil, you worry the life out of me. Everywhere I go I see you. Have I no private life?’
The politician held Lajide back, for he was advancing with clenched fists. Sango stood his ground. Tender hands managed to calm Lajide, who sat beside Alikatu and held her head in his arms.
‘Alikatu!’ he called softly. The feeling he injected into that whispered word, the loving care with which he held his wife, created a restlessness and pain in all present. The man was laying bare his soul before them. He kept glancing behind him expectantly.
Almost on his heels a tall and well-dressed man in European clothes walked into the room and put down his bag. He took out a stethoscope, pressed it to the woman’s heart. They watched him in silence. His face betrayed nothing.
He took his bag and went downstairs accompanied by the politician. Sango listened to their whispered conversation. He heard nothing. The doctor continued down the stairs and had hardly gained the street when a wailing cry broke out from the room where Alikatu lay. The story was there – plainly written on every face. But in every face was also engraved that stubborn shade of hope . . . that there might still be just the barest chance . . . that the body lying there – the body of Alikatu – was not dead, only resting. She would still breathe, surely. She would answer when called loudly by name.
A tense crowd hovered in hushed silence along the corridor. Now a man with a black bag – a doctor in the African manner trained by tradition in the ways of the past – this man went down the stairs and began to chalk up the ground and to spatter the blood of a chicken about the house, muttering incantations. He made a great show of the ceremony while the gentle wind blew the feathers about the compound. To Sango it was rather early to begin to frighten off Alikatu’s ghost from Twenty Molomo. The herbalist seemed to be giving the final order to the ghost, to be tilting the balance in a particular direction.
‘Alikatu!’ Everyone knew now. People threw themselves down into convulsions, crying: ‘Alikatu!’
The lament in that cry could tear the heart out of a stone. It chilled Sango’s blood. As he stood there and listened to the wailing and the moaning, he could also hear the prayers, exhortations, wishes, rebukes, regrets. His soul
was stirred. The sobs and sighs shook the frail rafters of Twenty Molomo. Something in the ritual reminded him of the terrible night at Lugard Square, the night of the Apala dance. Why, if Alikatu’s spirit still hovered around this place, did it not have pity on the poor mortals and re-inhabit the body where it belonged? O, pitiless death.
The mourners came in groups. Sometimes Twenty Molomo was so quiet that one could hardly guess it was inhabited by even a single soul. Then a new and noisy group would come and start the wailing and the moaning and the deafening cries.
What Sango noticed specially was that not one of the people who had been at the festive party at the All Language Club set foot in Lajide’s house. They must have heard of his bereavement. Instead they sent flowers. It must be the sophisticated thing to do. They were too busy to come, too busy to hearken to the voice of death which must one day call them one by one.
•
Sango went to the ‘Waking’ because Bayo had promised him there would be lots of girls. A waking in the city was a sad affair, but the living had eyes to the future and many a romance had been kindled in the long-drawn-out hours between night and morning, when resistance is at its minimum and the whole spirit is sympathetic and kindly disposed.
It was no surprise to Sango when, moving among the mourners, the drummers, and those who drank palm wine, he saw Aina. She had indeed bought and tailored her Accra dress and it heightened her charm. Plum velvet it was, bordered with white lace and sewn in the latest style. The blouse showed off the roundness of her arms, and the skirt, a long piece of material artfully tied round the waist, showed off just so much tantalizing thigh, and no more. Sango wondered how the men could keep their minds on death, with Aina so very vibrant with life.
Only one moment before that, Sango had seen Lajide sitting motionless, unaware of the world about him. Lajide’s head had been sunk on his breast while Zamil came in briefly to console him. The fact that Lajide had not lifted his head, that he was surrounded by a group of friends who were chosen to prevent him from trying to take his own life, showed Sango the depth of his grief.
The contrast between his attitude and Aina’s was clear. Aina had not come to mourn. She was not dressed like the others, in the aso-ebi, the prescribed dress of mourning.
She too had seen Sango and she now came towards him, bright-eyed. Some feet away, Sango caught a whiff of her perfume and the dry feeling came immediately to his throat. He desired her immediately. With shame in his eyes he tried to look away, to ignore her presence.
‘Hello, Sango, I called at yours several times after that night!’
‘Aina, not here! We have come to mourn, not romance!’
‘I heard something; is it true that you went home to marry? They said when you went to the Eastern Greens during the crisis you paid the bride-price on your future wife. Is it true she will join you soon?’
Sango smiled. ‘Aina! But why are you so angry about it?’
‘Don’t you know why? It means you have been deceiving me!’
‘But did I ever promise to marry you?’ He left her abruptly and mingled with the crowd. He wished he could have seen Beatrice, but she was not here, neither was she at the funeral which took place in the afternoon.
•
Because of the death at Number Twenty, Sango was not allowed to practise with his band at the Muslim School on Molomo Street. The manager of the school, a good friend of Lajide’s and a devout Muslim, told Sango that practice was out of the question for a long time to come. There were ceremonies still to be performed at Number Twenty, and again the Ramadan, their own festival, was very near and the school premises would be used for rehearsals during the next month or two.
The boys in Sango’s band had already begun to disperse to undertake free-lance assignments. Another door had been closed in his face.
11
By polling day all energy had been spent. The politicians were now tired of making promises and had taken their proper places – in the background. Clerks, motor drivers, butchers, market women, shopkeepers, who as responsible citizens had previously registered their names, went to the polling stations that dotted the city, and cast their votes. For that single day, the power was in their hands and the politicians waited with beating hearts and speculating eyes for the results.
It turned out that out of the fifty seats in the Town Council the Self-Government Now Party had won thirty-nine, leaving eleven seats for the Realization Party. This meant that the government was now in the hands of the S.G.N. Party and that they would elect a mayor from one of their leaders.
There had never been a mayor in the West African city and now the first one was to be an African. It was a great triumph for the S.G.N. Party. The West African Sensation had been working hard on the elections with such leaders as:
WHO WILL BE MAYOR?
CHOICE OF MAYOR CAUSES SPLIT IN SELF-GOVERNMENT NOW PARTY
TIME TO REDEEM ELECTION PROMISES
REALIZATION PARTY THROWS BOMBSHELL
NATURAL RULERS AND THE NEW CONSTITUTION
Sango found himself with less and less work to do. Lately he had developed a habit of leaving the office for longer than he should, searching for a place of his own, and a place for his band. Money was the limiting consideration. They were asking for too much, and he had very little.
The crime boys seemed to be taking a rest and the pages of the Sensation were losing their spice. McMaster called him into the office and told him to turn his hand to other assignments. There was a shortage of good men and it was a loss to the paper to have a man of Amusa Sango’s calibre counting the minutes and doing nothing.
Then the great opportunity came. It was on a morning when the rain had added to his irritations and he had come into the office soaked. He remembered stamping his shoes as he entered the office. Layeni, the night editor, had not left. They were all discussing a subject of national importance.
‘A great shock for the nation . . . but anyway, he was an old man . . . Good-bye to the wizard of statesmanship, the inspiration for the new movement . . .’
‘Without him, there would be no nationalism today on the West Coast . . .’
Sango knew they were talking about De Pereira, the greatest nationalist of all time. He was eighty-three and though he did not involve himself now in the physical campaigns and speech-makings he was the brains of the S.G.N. Party. For the last twenty years he had been the spiritual leader of the party and the party dramatized his ideals. Sango listened to the idle talk. He did not know as he stood in the Sensation office what this would mean in his life. How could he? He was not detailed to cover the item: McMaster selected a special political correspondent. Most offices broke off for the day, and Sango could have gone home if he chose. Instead, he listened.
And as he heard more and more he found what he had missed by not being an active nationalist. The city, the whole country, rose together to pay tribute to De Pereira. Almost within the hour the musicians were singing new songs in his name; merchants were selling cloth with imprints of his inspiriting head. Funeral editions of the Sensation featured his life story from the time of Queen Victoria of England to Queen Elizabeth II, in whose reign he died. They asked the question: in view of De Pereira’s death at so critical a time in the history of the S.G.N. Party, who would guide them to ultimate victory for the whole nation? This was too much of a loss for African nationalism. Who else had the experience, the wizardry, the insight, the centuries-old diplomacy of this man who had so long defied death?
During the funeral not a single white man was to be seen in the streets of the city, or anywhere near the Cathedral Church of Christ where his body lay in state. Even those who lived near the Cathedral were shut off by those overflowing crowds that vied for one peep at the magnificent coffin. In the trees above and around the Cathedral people hung like monkeys. Some had even defied the captains of ships anchored in the lagoon and climbed on deck, bravely trespassing, unmoved by the heavy smoke pouring from the funnels.
Sango
was seeing a new city – something with a feeling. The madness communicated itself to him, and in the heat of the moment he forgot his worldly inadequacies and threw himself with fervour into the spirit of the moment.
He was one of the suffocated and crumpled men who groaned and gasped to keep alive in the heat and the pressure of bodies half a mile from the Cathedral. He strained to get nearer, and though it was barely two o’clock and the funeral service would not be due for another two hours, he knew he could never get near the coffin.
‘Since morning, I stand here!’ groaned a man in the crowd. ‘I don’ know that people plenty like this for this city!’
The heat made time stand still. It was baking hot. It was irritating and unbearable. Two hundred thousand people forming themselves into an immovable block of fiery nationalists who jammed the streets, waiting, hoping to catch one glimpse of the coffin. Death had glorified De Pereira beyond all his dreams.
And Sango was there, more dead than alive, completely stifled by the sweat and squeeze of bodies. He was almost raving mad with irritation. When the wave of movement began from the foot of the Cathedral it came in a slow but powerful wave and beat against the spot where Sango stood. The current reminded him of a river overflowing its banks. Before this pressure the strongest man was flung irresistibly backwards like cork on an angry sea. Amusa staggered, off balance. At the same time he heard a faint cry. A girl in an immaculate white dress was in trouble. She had slipped, and if he did not do something about her that merciless crowd would trample her to death. And she would be the day’s sacrifice to the spirit of De Pereira.
He sweated. He tried to disentangle his limbs. The pressure never relented. With his veins almost bursting he managed to bend over, to draw her to her feet. His eyes bulged so much he feared they would burst. His head cracked with pain. He stuck his elbows out so as to receive the surging crowd on a sharper point, shepherded the girl to a lane. Even the lanes were overflowing with people. He managed to push her into a little crevice and then looked at her face. It was tired, but attractive.
People of the City Page 11