Prince of Monkeys

by Nnamdi Ehirim

  Soon enough Effy realized that the figurines were a bigger deal than I had initially admitted, and her awareness of them was more of a secret than common knowledge, a secret to be kept at a price. She demanded that I give her a token every month to buy her loyalty. I bluffed and told her I had long since changed their hiding place. She laughed a bit too huskily for her age, calling out the impossibility of it and demanding an increase in the value of her monthly token. I rebuffed her again and walked away, to the bedroom, specifically, to indeed change the hiding place of my figurines. But they were gone! I hurried back to Effy; there was not much left to be said. That was the first time I gave a bribe.

  The nights Tessy disappeared through the window were usually on Fridays. On Saturdays, Uncle Adol dillydallied for an hour or two longer in bed while the rest of us swept and mopped and cleaned. Aunt Kosiso assigned chores to Tessy, Effy, and me as we filed out of our single bedroom, and in between our perambulation of house to abolish all speckles, she would point and scream more errands during errands.

  When her orders were not dominating the entire house, we would be able to hear the music tapes she played from the radio in the living room. The music was different from anything I had heard before, and the cassette case was like nothing I had seen. On the case was a caricature of a woman, half black and half white, but beautiful, with her full hair and colorful makeup. On the top right of the case was the name Chaka Khan, and on the bottom left, I Feel for You. The music itself had a less frequent drum pattern than Afrobeat, and somewhere in between the soulful voice and jazzy instrumentals was a certain funk I was altogether unfamiliar with. I had to skim through Crossroads by Tracy Chapman and Whitney by Whitney Houston before I entered the familiar territory of Oliver De Coque and Osita Osadebe.

  “Don’t you have any Afrobeat?” I asked Tessy, and when her face contorted into a quizzical stare, I added, “Fela Kuti? Lagbaja?”

  “Oh! Yoruba music,” she said with the enthusiasm of a block of cement, and then she bent over and continued her sweeping.

  Aunt Kosiso walked into the room and became livid. “Ihechi, is this why you’re here? Igbo men are not usually lazy like this, oh, abi, you have spent so much time in Lagos that you have forgotten who you are?”

  “He has spent too much time listening to Yoruba music, his brain is now soft,” Tessy added.

  “Ihechi!” Aunt Kosiso shouted, using her hand to pull her right ear open for emphasis, “the fact that a man swims in a river does not mean he should call the crocodile ‘father.’ A word is enough for the wise.”

  Every misplaced word or step I made for the rest of the day was attributed to Lagos or the Yoruba. They did not slander out of any feeling of spite or superiority, but as if their stereotypes were facts set in stone. They could not be dissuaded that they were in every way different from the Yorubas. The geographical divides set out by the imperial masters had been transferred from paper to ponds and parcels of land. These people had eaten up the paper and drunk the ink outlining our segregation, and now it had been absorbed into their blood, creating a slavery of the mind as real as the slavery of our forefathers.

  After we all had our dinner, Aunt Kosiso called me outside to sit with her on the stairs in front of the house. She made small talk as she separated the chaff from the beans in the tray on her lap, about how much more expensive things were getting in the market, and how she had been trying to convince Uncle Adol to open a store for her at the market so she could earn some money of her own. When she laughed, I laughed, and when she complained, I looked on with all seriousness.

  Then she hit the nail on the head: “Did your father ever tell you anything about the war?”

  “My father did not tell me much about anything,” I replied. “My father did not entertain chitchat except when it stood the chance of earning him money. Most times he talked about work with my mother because it earned him money, or he talked about school with me because it could earn him money in the future.” I did not add that my relationship with him, save for these two topics, was a blend of bitter memories brewed from an eternity of unvoiced sentiments—and as with aging wine, the strength of the brew had increased with the passage of time.

  “I cannot blame him. Parts of you die when you go through all that your father went through during the war and after it ended.”

  She started telling me from the very beginning what my father should have done a long time ago to allay the distempers of his soul, when the people of Enugu started gathering at marketplaces and schools and talk of a war was circulating with the wind. It was around the same time word started going around about some sort of rebellion. Comrade Odumegwu Ojukwu became a household name, not as the governor of the eastern region of Nigeria anymore, but as the head of state of a sovereign eastern region, and the Federal Republic of Biafra replaced the Federal Republic of Nigeria in conversational lingo. Then people started coming in from the north and the west, the north especially. There were stories of how the Igbos, our people, were being slaughtered like Ramadan cattle. Most of them brought along stories of destroyed towns and villages, each predicting the Nigerian military’s certain arrival. Biafra was just purgatory until the Nigerian bullets came to convey them all to their afterlife destinations. All of them brought ghosts of dead friends and family. Children played with their friends’ ghosts, wives reserved rations for their husbands’ ghosts, and husbands recited love poems in whispers to the ghosts of their wives. Finally, as anticipated, the head of state of Nigeria, General Yakubu Gowon, declared war on the breakaway region of Biafra, and all hell, from demon to shoulder minion, broke loose.

  Aunt Kosiso had dropped the tray of beans on the ground beside her and was now fiddling with the edges of her wrapper, poking the frayed cloth at her eye. Then she continued about how those of them in Enugu who were farther away from the borders of the region felt the hunger but not the violence of the war until after the first months. And when they eventually did, the Nigerian army still appeared as bloodthirsty as freshly weaned bloodhounds.

  Then she told me of the afternoon in the market. She didn’t remember the name of the market, but every other detail was crystalline—very awkward, given the fact that she wasn’t even there. The sun hovered oppressively low over the stalls at the market, illuminating the colorful array of fruits and foodstuff arranged in the different stalls. “But since we are Biafrans, the sun only nourished and beautified our skins,” she said, quoting my uncle Adol, the original teller of the story. My father, Cletus, had followed his mother to the market that day to collect rations that had been flown in over the weekend. The mishmash of dirt, which had become one with the landscape, and the stench, so dense it was almost visible, were not the most enticing of experiences, but nobody ever complained. Repetition had its way of converting things from unbearable to tolerable and then acceptable. The characteristic chatterbox mood of the market had been substituted with solemnity because of the previous day’s incident. News had spread of the five bombings in Umuahia by Nigerian warplanes, hitting a Red Cross camp and vehicle, a hospital, and a market. The word was that twenty people had been killed at another market in the small village of Eziama Mbano, about twelve miles east of Orlu. Another two miles from Orlu, at Umuowa, the Red Cross headquarters for Biafra was completely demolished, even though it had large red crosses distinctively marked on the roof, on the ground, and on vehicles, and was flying an enormous flag bearing the emblem. The people’s faith in the rebellion’s strength and ambition had been dwindling, and the bombings proved its vulnerability and the folly of sending their sons and husbands to fight for the godforsaken cause.

  The white reverend father from the Anglican cathedral in town was in the next stall, encouraging the women there to be steadfast in their prayers. He told them the eyes of the Lord weren’t blind to their sufferings, His ears weren’t deaf to their prayers, His arm wasn’t shortened that He couldn’t stretch it out to save them. Perhaps he underestimated the hunger for power that dwelled in the Nigerian h
eart. A moment later, he was preaching his message of hope to another pair of women. At the next stall, the trader and her customer were already exchanging opinions on what had happened at Eziama Mbano, based on what they had gathered from hearsay. The trader began describing to her customer how the plane had circled the Eziama Mbano market for about ten minutes, dropping bombs on the women and children, rotating her horizontally set palm in a circular motion and using her mouth for sound effects. For a moment it sounded so real, but suddenly, he couldn’t hear her anymore—her voice was drowned in a sea of screams. Cletus began hearing a loud groan, what he later learned was the engine of the Nigerian Ilyushin jet. The terror on the faces around him was hellish, and at the sight, he let out a maddening shriek before bursting into tears. His mother looked up to the sky to catch a glimpse of the jets, and almost immediately, she was shoved over by a charging trader. She struggled to her feet and joined the stampede.

  They hadn’t gotten past the first stall when he heard the loud noise, and the ground trembled. After that, he heard nothing else and felt nothing else. The dust rising from the sandy ground was choking, so he couldn’t smell anything, either. He could only taste the dust in the air and see the unfolding carnage. Some people headed straight for the bushes while some were running into the nearby police building. A few seconds later, a trail of smoke landed on the flag that stood atop the building, and it exploded into a raging fire. The burning flag still bore its emblem, that of the great rebel nation Biafra. Now everyone was heading into the bushes, but the ground trembled one more time, and Cletus saw drops of blood race past him. He looked back and saw his mother stagger behind him before dropping onto the sandy ground. His mouth opened to let out another shriek, but it was choked to silence by dust. He thought he heard his mother scream, but he wasn’t sure. He stopped and tried turning around, but he felt strong fingers sink into his skin; they began pulling him away from his mother’s body. He traced the fingers to a body and saw the pink face of the reverend father. The reverend dragged my father under the arms, just like he did to his Bible on Sunday mornings, and continued running. Cletus looked back at his mother for the last time, but he could see only her torso lying in an expanding pool of blood, trampled with the least degree of honor by her Biafran brothers and sisters. The ground trembled one more time, my father saw the reverend father clutch his rosary tight in his other hand, and then he blacked out.

  “And after all of that happened before his very eyes,” Aunt Kosiso concluded, “your father still opened his eyes and married one of them.”

  It was clear that as the imperial masters were kings and slave masters, so it was that tribalism was their unflagging horseman. And as observed by tradition in parts of Africa, the king’s death must trigger the ritual suicide of his horseman, whose spirit would then guide the king to the afterlife. If the tradition was neglected for whatever reason, the king’s spirit would wander the land and bring great terror to the people. When our imperial master died at independence, we failed to ensure his horseman justly committed suicide. Now the king roamed the land, in a spiritlike form less real and more apparent, entrapping minds and disrupting the balance of society by sowing ethnic hate. And through it all, no love was ever lost, and no love was ever found, because from the very beginning, no love existed.

  I was never certain if it was wholly a Nigerian trait, but in every place in our country that I ever visited, most people in most conditions acted with the simple reason being that they should not. As Edgar Allan Poe, who never even set eyes on the beaches of Bonny, described it a long time ago, we were hounded by the imp of the perverse; it became absolutely irresistible that the assurance of wrong was the one unconquerable force that impelled us to its prosecution. What else would explain one of the world’s largest producers of crude oil becoming a major importer of refined oil, or government contractors importing sand by the shipload into an African country? On the commoner’s level, what else would make three-piece-suited men piss by the roadside, not into the gutter but facing traffic? And bringing the matter closer to home, what else would cause Effy to hold on to my figurines even after I admitted they were craven images of Yoruba gods?

  The scare tactic had worked the week before, when Aunt Kosi used it against her. When Aunt Kosi went to pick her up from school, Effy’s schoolteacher had reported that she was developing a keen fondness for boys. Aunt Kosi approached the issue with unusual tact.

  “How many boys are in that class again?” she said as she served hot yams onto Effy’s plate for lunch.

  “Fifteen!” Effy replied excitedly, and obviously oblivious to her teacher’s report.

  “Just enough!” Aunt Kosi enthused. “You know you have started seeing your period, so if you allow a boy to touch you too much, you will just become pregnant.” Effy looked puzzled, but her mother continued without even checking for her reaction. “And you know your father is a real Igbo man. Just allow twelve of those fifteen boys to touch you so you can have twelve children, only twelve! And your father would have to follow tradition and slaughter one goat by your waist to celebrate.” For emphasis, Aunt Kosi crushed the butt of her kitchen spoon into the hot yams on Effy’s plate, but with a subtlety that matched the tone of her voice. “Never mind the goat blood or the stink of the goat skin or even the twelve times you will have to go through labor pains, just keep your mind focused on all that goat meat that will be available for us to celebrate with.” By the end of the week, Effy’s teacher had to call in Aunt Kosi again. This time she was reporting that Effy had picked a fight with every single boy in class at least once within that week.

  “Are you scared of a little blood?” I asked Effy on the afternoon I chose to implement my scare scheme. We had been watching Living in Bondage, a made-in-Nigeria home video. Most of the reviews about it were super: the disenchanting Andy and his ever devout wife, his ploy to murder her through juju for blood money, and how it was relatable to someone’s father or another person’s uncle. Aunt Kosi would never tolerate the slightest representation of anything that “sensitized our hearts to the devil,” so we watched the video that Tessy had borrowed from Tobenna in the afternoon, when Aunt Kosi had gone to the market. Effy had threatened to report the matter if she was not allowed to see it with us. Tessy had no qualms about her watching if she agreed to wiping the backs of the television and the video player with a damp rag to keep them cool: Aunt Kosi always checked their temperature to know if and why they had been used in her absence, but as the hunter had learned to shoot without missing her children, the birds had learned to fly without perching.

  Effy stood up to wipe the television down, shaking my question off, but I persisted: “You’re scared of a little blood and juju and you’re holding on to Esu? That’s nice.”

  Later that night, long after the movie was over, when we were both alone in the bedroom preparing for bed and Tessy was clearing up in the kitchen, Effy inquired as if forced, “What’s Esu, anyway?”

  I smiled within but tried to match her level of disinterest on the outside. “The figurine you took from me, the one with the wide mouth, long and pointy nose, and the longer and pointier back of the head? The one covered with cowries from neck to toe? That’s Esu.”

  “Nooo,” she insisted. Her concern was creeping into the forehead creases on her babyish face. “What does it—Esu—have to do with blood and juju, is what I’m asking.”

  I was not yet sure I was in charge of the conversation, but I had to appear to be, so I acted like someone almost in charge, like Rhett Butler from Gone with the Wind. I squinted softly as I spoke, placed one hand on the other, and smiled with half my mouth. “Esu is a spirit, one of the gods of Yoruba juju. I don’t know much about him, but when I asked my mother once, she said they said he was powerful, is very, very powerful, the link between heaven and earth.”

  “But what does that have to do with blood and the rest?”

  “Well, she said he is the god of mischief, that he balances good and evil and makes sure they happ
en whenever necessary. If you have a car accident and drive into a wall but come out whole, then Esu elegbara—Esu is the owner of power—and if a truck rams you into the wall as you’re stepping out of the wrecked car, then Esu elegbara also.” She looked puzzled, but I continued. “When I asked my mother, she said that Esu once visited a village where the people had stopped praying to him, wearing his best cap, which was painted red on one side and black on the other. The villagers on one side of the road can’t stop saying nice things about his red cap, and the neighbors on the other side of the road can’t stop pointing out that even though the cap is as beautiful as they say, it is actually black. The argument turns into a fight that doesn’t stop until the whole village is drowned in blood.”

  Tessy walked into the room as I said the final word, expanding my Rhett Butler half-smile to a full one in admiration of the dread all over Effy’s face. “What’s the story?” Tessy asked, and Effy replied as if the last five minutes of conversation had not happened: “Ihechi is making up stories for me because I told him I wasn’t feeling sleepy,” she said.