“Yes, it’s all of that, but do you know the history behind it? That it was an abode of those who resisted the oppressive military government and declared independence from it? That it was burned down and had its followers beaten to bloody pulp and thrown to their death from its windows? And despite all of that persecution, it was rebuilt at this new location with the same undaunted resistance to oppression of all forms. And I know it looks like a lot of the people who come here are bloody riffraff and write-offs.”
By this time I was a bit distracted by one of the dancers on the stage, and he tapped me on the shoulder to regain my attention. “But they come here because they share in the solidarity of this movement that resists all forms of oppression in their lives. And when they toil for their freedom by day, and are put down and frustrated, they come by here at night to hear the message that would spur them on by sunrise and keep that fire alive. Now to come home to my point, my brother, I’m not expecting or suggesting that you should know all of who you are and what you do today. Most people die without ever answering those questions. All I’m saying is you should never give up trying to answer those questions, because by the blood of my mother, I swear that there is a superhero, as you call it, in each and every one of us.”
“So now that you’re retired from being a superhero,” Mendaus said, laughing, “who are you?”
“I am Anikulapo—he who emanates greatness, carries death in his pocket, and cannot die,” he said in a hoarse tone as he stepped out of the darkness. I laughed out loud, slightly embarrassed by my drunkenness but way more humored by his reply. I lost my balance and fell off the chair. When I regained myself and tried to sit up, I could see the flush on Mendaus’s and Zeenat’s faces.
“I knew this whiskey was much stronger than I was used to,” said Mendaus, and he, Zeenat, and Pastor’s son burst out laughing. The stranger, the king of Afrobeat, laughed as well. He then withdrew some folded-up naira notes from his tight pockets and threw them in the middle of our table.
“I guess I carry more than just death in my pocket,” he said with a smile that exposed browning teeth. “Use that to have yourselves some fun tonight. Get another drink or something. As for me, I have a show to perform.” Then he walked away, as slow as he was assured.
Mendaus obliged and called the waiter. I tried to pull myself together, to no avail, so I allowed myself to collapse slowly back to the ground and sit there till blackness covered my eyes.
I’m not sure what exactly I felt first, the bucket of water that was thrown at me or the migraine. My neck and back felt a bit sore, and it wasn’t hard for me to realize why when I saw myself lying on the floor of a dark, musty room. Mendaus, Zeenat, and Pastor’s son were standing beside me. A man in a police uniform, holding an empty bucket, was on the other side of the steel bars of a prison cell. I tried to recall the events of the night before and how I could have gotten there. “The inspector has resumed, oh,” the policeman shouted at us, “very soon he will call you to his office and ask you to tell him your side of the story. Just make sure you tell him the truth in black and white.”
Mendaus waited for the police officer to go away before speaking—in a lighthearted tone, given the situation. “You know why you should never trust anyone who asks for a witness to tell a story in ‘black and white’ whenever he claims to want to hear nothing but the truth?” I paid predatory attention, like a seagull would attend to a trawler at the marina when expecting sardines to be thrown into the sea.
“It’s because words, sounds, and actions are too loud to conceal the secret of this world, and so hush-toned messages are best conveyed in colors. A black-and-white picture of a sickly child with skinny limbs and a swollen belly, wrapped in nothing but a knitted scarf bearing a design of the rising sun, tells well-known facts of starvation in Africa. But a colored picture showing a sickly child embracing the red, black, and yellow of the Biafran flag, even at the point of starvation, tells the less-known secrets of the oppressed African child’s resilience and defiant hope. Always pay attention to the secrets in colors that are too terrible to be mentioned out loud.”
Part 1
1985
In Omole, where I grew up, the colors of childhood were white and blue. I never got out of bed until the white and blue shades of misty morning diluted and ultimately wiped the darkness from the sky. After I got out of bed and tasted the fresh morning in jaw-breaking yawns, my mother cleaned me up and dressed me in the white short-sleeve shirt and blue shorts of Oasis Primary School. Then with my schoolbag strapped across my chest, as if to anchor me to the earth and save me from the treacherous morning breeze, I would march the two lonesome streets to school, wary of strangers, each step knee-high, as instructed by my mother to keep my white socks and navy blue Cortinas unsullied.
In school I would smudge and stain the white spaces and blue lines of my notebooks with the incoherent pencil marks that my teacher demanded of me until she was pleased. During free periods, these white spaces and blue lines were torn out and reshaped into paper goalposts, and the button of someone’s white shirt was donated as a ball, so my friends and I could play kanta-ball on our classroom tables. And after school, we returned home and had our lunches and all came out to partake of the elixir of life itself: the white and blue football.
As expected, he who was the best at football ruled the world, so Boniface was king. And as king, he was called Maradona. After school, Maradona always wore an oversize purple hoodie with LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY across the chest. The hoodie had been given to him by his father, an alumnus of the British university, and for this and other reasons, Maradona always talked about his father, whom none of us had ever seen. One time when we had trouble with some older boys who tried to bully us out of playing football, he threatened to call his father, who was in the army and therefore stronger than all their civilian fathers. One of the older boys called Maradona’s bluff and struck him across the cheek, leaving a whisker of blood. Maradona cried and ranted. His father never showed up, but at least we kept our ball. The whisker of blood on his cheek turned into a permanent scar to join the hundreds of dark bruises on his body. The first and last time he took off his purple hoodie when we played football, Pastor’s son kept calling him a leopard till Maradona threatened to have his father arrest Pastor’s son and their entire family just because. Pastor’s son pissed on himself that day.
Pastor’s son’s actual name was Enoch. His father headed a rather new Pentecostal church in Omole, so all our parents called his father Pastor and him, Pastor’s son. Pastor’s son was a beautiful boy. He always wore the smile of a tickled baby and was blessed with neatly laid hair and brows. He would always try to sabotage all of this with ugly oversize shirts advertising his father’s prayer crusades tucked into undersize trousers, but it always proved futile. Personally, I didn’t know anyone who attended Pastor’s church; the drinks mart in front of their house seemed to attract larger crowds. Another thing about Pastor’s son was that he pissed on himself whenever he was scared; the day Maradona threatened to have him arrested was neither the first nor last time. He pissed on himself whenever he was among the homework defaulters in school and the teacher made to flog them with her cane. He even cried when we played too long, forgetting the progression of time, and his elder sister came around to announce that his father had arrived home from work and was asking about him. But Pastor’s son was also really good at football, so nobody cared too much about these things.
In our little group, I was the only one whom everybody called by his actual name—Ihechiluru. Maybe except Mendaus. He was much smaller than the rest of us, and he didn’t even play football. He walked with us to and from school, but no one knew his house because it was much farther down the street than the rest of ours. And when we came out to play in the afternoon, he came out with a book and would stick it to his thick glasses as if to get a focused perspective of the world; he raised his head only when an argument broke out.
Honestly, the only reason we allowe
d him to stay was that he cheered when we scored and laughed the hardest when Maradona dribbled with skills that had the boys sprawled like banana peels in his dusty wake, even though most times Mendaus never saw what actually happened because his face was buried in his book, and he reacted only after other boys had begun howling.
If Mendaus had no other lasting purpose, we could always depend on him for the occasional bright idea. One afternoon we all came out to play football after school to find a little fence being built around our field. We all stood firmly at the boring side of the fence, staring more out of a lack of understanding of what was going on than a show of resolve. Then a man in blue jeans, T-shirt, and helmet walked over to us to tell us that we could no longer play football on our field; the landlord had decided to develop his property, and we would have new neighbors in about a year or so.
That was the way Omole was at the time, a land of potential. It was not a forest of tall concrete structures with a mass of beautiful Negro petals adorning the ground below, like the pictures on the Lagos postage stamps. From a story above the ground, the windowsill view had the lush green appeal of virgin land. It was still barren of the overcrowding and overhustling of the city center, and so pregnant with the possibility of a postcolonial utopia. It was a settlement of small intermittent houses along dust paths of imaginary road networks that spewed forth construction engineers and estate developers of all sorts each day. When all hope was being buried with the foundation blocks of the fence and we were retreating home, Mendaus came up with the idea of simply carrying the tires we used as goalposts, and the old kegs and other things people sat on while waiting their turn to play, to a new field.
This new field was a field out of our desire, not necessarily by its nature. Its grass was still strong and sharp, unlike that of our old field, which had turned barren under constant trudging, and it sloped awkwardly toward the road. We set up regardless and settled at our new field, and all was rosy till we discovered Professor Nebuchadnezzar, the university professor–cum–lunatic scoundrel who plagued this area of Omole. Nobody knew exactly how long he had been in the area, or who had christened him, not even the boys who lived nearby and joined us in football. But we were all cautious of the legend that described the short, frail figure with grayed Afro and beard who walked around in slow, calculated steps while rambling all dialects of gibberish. Some boys said that he carried a collection of pens and pencils and chased down the occasional stranger who came a bit too close, but we acted like we did not care as long as we had a field for football.
Eventually, what we feared the most did come upon us. On that day, the goalkeeper at one of the posts wandered away from his position. An opposing player had suddenly picked up possession of the ball and had tried to catch him off guard with an audacious lob from the other end of the field. He had been slightly too eager and overhit the football, sending it flying all the way across the field, over the goalpost, the bordering fence, and into the bush of the adjoining property. None of us assumed the extent of the danger at first, so we all jeered and laughed until we saw Professor round the corner of the fence at terrifying speed, arms akimbo, wielding an office pen in each hand.
Everybody scampered in a different direction. I could not attempt running in the direction of home simply because that was the direction the Professor had been headed, so I bounded up the dirt road with every morsel of strength I could muster till I heard my name called from behind me. I turned around without stopping and saw Mendaus trying to catch up with me. I slowed to a stop as he lumbered toward me in tiny, uncoordinated leaps. He collapsed to the ground, his body spread out, after he finally reached me. I stared at him for a while, then burst out laughing. He began laughing, too.
“Okay, get up, juh,” I said after a while, stretching out my arm to help him up. “I don’t even know where we are.”
“Are you serious? My house is right there,” he said, pointing forward and farther away from my house. He got up and started walking; I stood still, caught in both directions. “C’mon, Ihechi, you can’t even be thinking of going back now. Professor would be running around there till evening.” The thought of that shook me, but I contained my fear and followed him. We walked side by side in silence.
“Why don’t you play football?” I asked.
“Because Marcus said so . . . Marcus Aurelius.”
I scratched my head and nodded very slowly.
“He’s my friend,” Mendaus continued. “I want to be like him when I grow up.”
I tried to figure if I knew any Marcus who went to our school or lived in Omole, to no avail. “What school does he go to?”
“He’s not in school anymore,” he replied with a giggle. “He was the emperor of Rome, that’s somewhere far away, sha.”
“What’s an emperor?”
“Like a king. Their ruler.”
“So you want to be a king?”
“No. Not really. But I want to know something about everything. Like Marcus.”
I stared at Mendaus for a minute as we continued walking through the valley of thicket and bushes, too confused to even nod.
“What do you want to be?” he asked.
“A footballer,” I said. I puffed my chest and raised my shoulders with pride. “I want to travel and play for Abroad or Argentina, like Maradona. I mean the real Maradona, not Boniface.”
We got to a boulevard of taller houses, much bigger than the types around my house. I swirled to take in everything, and by the time I came to a stop, I saw Mendaus standing in the open gateway of the very first house. It was beautiful. You could see the verdant garden and tall white walls of the house through the circular patterns cut in the fence.
“C’mon, Ihechi,” he said, waving me in, “are you waiting for Prof to get here?”
I walked toward him cautiously, half-expecting a security man afflicted with Professor Nebu’s disease to rip open the gate at any moment and pursue us for trespassing unto sacred ground. Mendaus, with his tacky, uncombed hair and his thick glasses, did not look like he belonged to this kind of place. Neither did his ever dry skin, which was a pale shade of black, nor his scrawny arms and legs, which dangled from his undersize clothes. I would have been less surprised if he’d brought me to a collection of trees bound by a wire gauze fence that bore an indiscreet sign:
Welcome!
This is the home of the mysterious Mendaus.
Do not cross over!
Do not feed!
Eventually, I walked with him through the gateway. We were in the compound hardly a second when the huge door embedded in the tall white walls cracked open with an obnoxious creak that prepared me just in time for the girl, or woman, or female, who came running from them. I’m still not sure what Zeenat was on that first day I saw her. She definitely had the small frame of a girl, even though she was much taller than Mendaus and I. But she moved with more surety of step than any of the girls at my school, briefly swaying her hip to one side when she walked and flinging her arms in a way that allowed them to dangle from her elbows. Her skin was a darker black than Mendaus’s when she stood beside him in the light, away from the leaning shadow of the house, with a glossy sheen like my mother’s sculpted image of Ọṣun that lay among many others in her room.
“Lester! Lester!” she shouted, walking toward Mendaus in brisk but calculated steps, and for the first time I heard her feline voice.
“Urrgh, Zee, you’ve been watching Mami’s videos again, abi?”
“Watching Mami’s videos? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she replied, fiddling with her lips as she spoke. “And I’m Jackie now, so don’t call me Zee anymore. I’m Jackie Shawn. And you’ll be my boyfriend, Lester.”
“You see! You have been watching Mami’s videos. She’s going to get you one day or I’ll report you to her myself.”
“What else should I do when all of you forget me in this stupid house every day?”
“Why don’t you just watch the videos Mami bought for you, like that A
ristocats one? I’m sure they kiss in those videos.”
My mouth dropped. I had heard about Aristocats—my seat partner from school had told us about it after he had returned from his holiday in Abroad last year, and I had imagined the scenes he’d described for days and nights—but Mendaus had never mentioned that he had the video. He had never even mentioned that he had a video player at home.
“I’ve seen Aristocats too many times. It’s boring. And is that why you’re afraid of being my Lester?” she asked, placing her long arms around his neck and making a pout with her lips. “You’re afraid of a little kissing, Lester?”
“No, urrgh, leave me alone, Zee.” He pushed her away and walked toward the front door. I followed.
“Then your friend could be my Lester,” she said as she caught up with us. I didn’t turn to look at her but hoped she’d try to put her hands around my neck like she had with Mendaus. I wasn’t afraid of kissing. I had imagined it plenty of nights before going to bed. “Have you seen the movie Shampoo?” she asked, placing a hand on my shoulder. That was good enough for me.
“No,” I replied after a second’s hesitation. My voice came out a bit soft, so I cleared my throat before I continued. “I haven’t seen any movies.”
We were inside the house now. We had taken our slippers off at the door; now the warmth of the colorful carpet that spread across every inch of floor ushered us in. The walls were hidden behind heavy wooden shelves with glass panes that reflected a skewed image, but when you peered through closely enough, you would see shiny white ceramic plates standing upright and side by side, like the proper officers of the air force on the posters in school. After we were past the officers, there was a gentleman in white laying dishes on the table.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Thomas,” Mendaus and Zeenat said. He acknowledged them both with a smile and continued with his doings before I could say anything. They marched up the steps, and I followed until we got under a large arch that opened into a larger room. On the other side of the room, directly opposite where we stood, was a television, bigger than the one at my house, with a small box I assumed was a video player settled above it, and more shelves on either side. I attempted moving toward the shelves, but the floor between us was an uncoordinated soiree of books spread open and videos half-tucked into their flaps, with names and titles I could barely recognize or even pronounce.
Prince of Monkeys Page 2