My earlier courier jobs for the major general and his friends had hinted at the need for efficiency and invisibility in unclear terms. But the lesson echoed more significantly after the choosing, which made it necessary for me to relate more closely with them. The method to their maggot madness was simple enough—their every move and appearance had to occur for a definite reason that played a part in achieving a greater goal. Outside of these necessities, they existed in total isolation from the public space. This was the first principle of political godfatherism: invisibility. When they needed to obtain relevant information, they purchased the integrity of the individuals who possessed it, and when they needed to share relevant information, they purchased the creativity of journalists. When they were called upon by higher powers in government, they sacrificed profit to come to the aid of the nation, and when they needed the higher powers in government for minor favors, they tinkered with the supply of one or two consumer goods to create a scarcity and the public strike action and protests that ensued, ultimately leading to the government calling them to the round table; at this juncture, favors were bartered.
Invisibility did not mean just being unseen and unheard but being unnoticed. The way to being unnoticed was to recognize the stance of the person with the most leverage in the room, usually the representative of the military regime, and to align with it. If they were invited to a dinner by the head of state and he held his fork in his right hand and his knife with his left, the principle of invisibility demanded they do the same. If he referred to the Federal Republic of Germany as East Germany and West Germany, they were to follow suit, and if the need to discuss Zimbabwe arose, they were to show proactiveness and refer to the African country as Rhodesia. Aligning with ignorance was one of the perks of allowing your country to be ruled by illiterates.
Sometimes the paradox of invisibility translating to outright flamboyance occurred because being unnoticed translated to fitting in. And in the environment of Nigerian politics and upper-class living, flamboyance was the norm. Not just in one-off appearances but as a lifestyle. The flashier the attire of the person, the bigger the person’s car, the longer the car’s entourage, the greater the number of armed policemen in the entourage, the greater the number of titles these armed policemen saluted the person by, all translated proportionally to how much a person fitted into this absurd environment. The objective of the charade is neither comfort nor happiness but, rather, a chronic addiction to recognition that is captured in Nigerian parlance as Shakara. The less Shakara a person displayed, the more the person was prevented from being comfortable, to the point that even a passing glance could not come across without a judgmental undertone.
The major general and his friends were efficient in their Shakara, as in all else they did, unstoppably efficient. It was the second principle of political godfatherism: invincibility. Efficient meaning not that they were in control of all the decisions being made but that they ensured all the big decisions swaying in their favor. Some favors, however, required more coercion than others. The transition program by the military regime was one such favor, in the works for almost three years.
After the annulment of the 1994 democratic elections, the major general and his friends had sponsored pro-democracy organizations that incessantly staged protests, invited and guaranteed the safety of international news agencies that showed interest in the fracas, and ultimately hiked the prices of many consumer goods, bumping the cost of living to unbearable levels that swept the trade unions to the streets. In a few weeks, the oil industry that lined the nation’s foreign-exchange coffers was almost grounded. Instead of inviting the major general and the other power brokers to the usual round table, the military regime struck back by arresting trade union leaders and taking control of their offices and assets. The pro-democracy organizations were infiltrated with bribed informants, and their key members were arrested indefinitely. The power brokers united in sabotaging multinationals operating in Nigeria; these multinationals ran crying to their governments; their governments came at the military regime with blaring voices and arms in the air. It was shortly afterward that the transition program became hot gossip.
Eventually, the gossip cooled and was gradually being forgotten. The major general and his friends constantly offered private words of reassurance to the multitude they had gathered under their banner, but there was very little indication in the public space that their claims were any realer than pigs with horns. If they had just claimed pigs existed, they would have been fine, because the military regime had in truth announced a transitionary program, but they did not describe what sort of transition it would be. Optimists, like the major general, hoped for open democratic elections. Realists not blinded by vested interest knew the same sinister people at the helm of the military regime were looking to contest and rig their election to office in a staged national referendum.
We were also aware of these prevalent rumors, but our determination prevailed higher than all else. A party-sponsored, pro-democracy rally was arranged in Lagos, to be the first of many. Prominent trade union leaders and civil rights activists had been scheduled for attendance, as well as a few traditional rulers who had sworn to show up and brave any backlash from the military regime. However, the bulk of the masses were the unemployed and the street hustlers who would leap to the moon for the slightest stipend.
Alhaji had hinted that I was going to talk for a few minutes at the rally, so I had been stuck awake all night, pondering what to say. The crowd would expect fire and brimstone from anyone who was going to come within a five-meter radius of the microphone, to flaunt a deep knowledge of government impunity, and to pass a sentence of their eternal damnation. The observing journalists would want quotes from Nietszche and other things more attuned to Mendaus. The more refined audience, following events over radios and televisions from the safety of offices and living rooms in Lagos, would expect staunch declarations that, when handed power, our party would transform Lagos to London, Nnewi to New York, Gombe to Geneva, and Port Harcourt to Paris. But if I could script the future, I would rubbish all of such transformations. I would preach neither capitalism nor socialism—in fact, I would burn every instituted temple devoted to Adam Smith and Karl Marx.
I would not have an African civilization that would be an annex of Europe and America in administration and culture. That was Mendaus’s dream. I would rather have modern versions of our great cities of centuries ago, like Zaria and Ijaiye, where wealth was defined by the abundance of the community, not the profit of single individuals, where both largesse and famine were endured communally, unlike modern cities, where dozens starve on the same street as one man’s dog with leftovers, but the street is heralded in greatness because of that one rich man. If I lived and died a million times, I would prefer a progression to the present past, with morality determined by communal values, not by the sentiments of the deepest pockets. But I did not know how to shape these ideas into a speech, let alone muster the courage to voice it.
The morning of the rally was spent setting up the stage and sound system at the Tafawa Balewa Square. As soon as that was done, loud music started blaring and a few of the idle gathered. I was with the major general and his friends, seated in the stands behind the stage. The traditional rulers and other dignitaries were relaxing with us in the shade, made even more reassuringly comfortable by the retinue of armed security men patrolling the stands.
Actual musicians began to climb the stage as the blaring music turned into live performances and a few more people gathered. Food hawkers noticed the crowd and came around to milk any lactating pocket. Then actors, comedians, and football stars from the World Cup team showed up on stage, and the crowd kept growing as each personality handled the microphone.
Finally, a party leader got to the microphone; he asked the DJ to play back some of the earlier performed songs, danced galala to the beat for a while, and spent about five minutes repeating some of the comedians’ jokes. Just before the crowd had completely forgot
ten why they were gathered, he went on a forceful tirade, throwing questions to the crowd, demanding to know the names of their oppressors, of those who held on to power without the voluntary empowerment of the people, of those who plundered their resources like the spoils of military conquest, of those who had arrested and locked up their neighbors without charge, all the while never actually mentioning the names of the culprits himself. The people were not as discreet. They shouted the names and positions of members of the military regime; they cursed and jeered and made a riotous noise.
Even with all the noise, the gunshots fired into the air at the far end of the Tafawa Balewa Square rang loud and clear. All eyes searched frantically for the exact position of the shooters, but white fumes of tear gas were rising every few meters apart. A few hefty armed men in police uniforms mounted the stage and rammed the butts of their guns into the astounded faces of the party leaders. The policemen tried to make their way to the stands where we were still seated, but our armed security came to the fore, causing a deadly stalemate, with weapons drawn on both sides but neither galvanizing the courage to start a gunfight in such open space.
The crowd refused to disperse, splitting into many factions and confronting the police, tossing stones and glass bottles at them. The policemen, without helmets or shields, scuttled through the rain of danger and retaliated with all they had: bullets, batons, bare knuckles, boots, and belts, all purchased with their victims’ taxes. Their bulletproof vests read POLICE IS YOUR FRIEND.
The guns blasted in a continuous spree and the batons swung unendingly, but the dispersing crowd stopped in their tracks and gathered around, their backs to their uniformed assailants. Their forlorn faces stared down at a little boy in a school uniform sprawled on the road, his gaping head pouring blood and brains. The crowd stood still, even the police officers. More people gathered, and revenge festered in the cluster of the angry mob. There were cries and yells in pidgin and Yoruba and a medley of other languages. Slowly, they encircled the policemen, the radius reducing drastically by the second until the circumference and the center were one.
Tires and kerosene were thrown into the melee, and a bonfire was made of three policemen. Every other man and woman in uniform turned on their heels, stripping off their clothing as they desperately sought the nearest refuge. Stones were hurled in their direction. Abandoned police guns were emptied toward the sky. Car windows were busted, and fires lit up the street. The major general and his friends hurriedly took off their bulky agbadas and crouched down and away from the stands in their singlets and white trousers, and I trailed them, peeping out the corners of my eyes at the baptism of the revolution. The blood of the enemy splattered on the faces of their assailants as the twitching corpses purged themselves of all life. The people we had gathered and aggravated had spiraled out of control. A few minutes ago, we were the cock of the walk, but in the face of a revolution, the revolutionaries had become the feather duster.
“It’s always darkest before the dawn,” they said. Bastard poets always knit together pretty words that hold hardly any truth. The truth is: When it’s darkest, it stays dark for a long while after. I could not understand why it all had happened at the same time, but things went from bad to worse faster than food from the mouth to the anus during a bout of diarrhea.
Effy might have grown a lot in the last few years in mind and body, but she managed to still be as mischievous as always. Boardinghouse peers were not loving family members who repaid mischief with reprimand and candor; rather, they repaid with chiding and vengeance. So, when the senior prefect ordered Effy to fetch a bucket of water from the borehole a thousand galaxies away, and Effy eased her bladder’s burden of a little urine into the bucket of water as recompense, she hardly expected that when she was nabbed and reported to the senior prefect by the snollygoster of a friend who escorted her, she would be forced to drink from the very bucket. She gargled and swallowed while half the dormitory laughed and pointed. She went to bed drenched in water, urine, and tears.
It took just over seven hours, one yawn before dawn the next day, for her to start purging recklessly in the bushes on the path from the dormitory to the laundry where the girls bathed. The purging went on for two days, after which the school clinic deemed her sickness an unnecessary expense and contacted her guardian to take her home for any further treatment. For a double measure of certainty, they sent a letter to the address registered in her file, which was my mother’s house in Omole, and placed a phone call to the number registered in her file, which was the phone line of her parents’ house in Enugu, as my mother had stubbornly refused to install one. My mother responded with alarming urgency, and Effy was leaving the school premises just a few hours after the letter had been dispatched. Aunt Kosi had responded to the phone call with equal urgency, although not as efficient, and arrived in Lagos by bus just a bit under seven hours after the call had been placed.
Aunt Kosi arrived at the given address of Effy’s school up in arms, embodying worry and overreaction in the true fashion of the typical Nigerian mother, and was livid when she heard her daughter had already been sent off with her guardian. She huffed and puffed but was completely ignored by her informant in the true fashion of the typically carefree Nigerian receptionist. Instead of returning to Enugu cradling her beloved daughter through a bumpy bus ride, she gathered all she had, which was really just her handbag and the address to my mother’s house obtained from the receptionist, and stormed toward Omole. I never knew all of this had happened the day before, as I was dodging rioters at Obalende. I sneaked through the chaotic streets all the way to Berger and then the serene obscurity of the Omole suburb, looking to find refuge under my mother’s roof, all the while having not the slightest clue that I was spiral-backflipping from the frying pan into the fire.
I banged on the gate four times, waited a few seconds, and then banged once more out of habit, the same way I had banged on the gate every evening for many years when I returned from playing football after school. Back then my mother would come to the gate with a sachet of water, so I would not have an excuse to hang around the kitchen pinching on the dinner being prepared instead of heading straight for a shower. This time she arrived at the gate as brisk as ever, and as she peeped through the pigeonhole, her forehead wrinkled. I straightened my jacket and pressed my palm on my trim hair, so the waves would rise; even though it had been true of my last few visits, I did not want her under the impression that I showed up only when something disastrous had happened.
But her mind was obviously on other things as the gate clanged open. “Is this how you people do in Enugu,” she whispered, “showing up without invitation or even asking for permission?”
“Permission for what now?” I gave her a loose hug. “Since when do I need permission to come to my mother’s house to hug her? Abi, does a baby ask for permission before jumping out from the womb into his mother’s arms?”
“Isi Aki. Coconut head,” she teased through a narrow smile. “How I wish you had asked for permission, it would have saved me all this your stress.”
I poked at her pudgy belly and started singing. “Sweet mother, I no go forget you. For the suffer wey you suffer for me.”
“Shhh! That’s not what I’m talking about!” She slapped away my poky fingers as she returned to her whispers. “Your auntie from Enugu is here.”
“Impossible! Aunt Kosi? She has never gone farther than Ogbete market. She doesn’t know the road.”
“She arrived yesterday evening and said someone told her that Effy was sick in school. I had only just picked up Effy from school. I had not even finished preparing her agbo. How did she know Effy was sick? Who told her? Is that how their Holy Spirit works? Or has she been monitoring us in the spirit world?”
I would have confirmed that this was exactly how the Holy Spirit worked and immediately offered her a chance to switch allegiances and give her life to the Jesus Christ who monitored all concerning the spirit world, but I was much too stupefied by the news. �
�And you let her sleep here under your Yoruba roof and eat your Yoruba soup? She did not wail about the civil war?”
“Was I meant to allow her to carry that poor girl back to Enugu on a night bus in that condition? And she had to eat, as long as she was staying, before she goes back and says I’m the witch who starves her in-laws the same way I starved their brother till he ran away from me.”
“She never needed any excuse to call you a witch since she found out I never set foot in church all through my childhood. Does she know you have converted Effy to—you know?”
“Converted Effy to what? Say ‘witch,’ let me slap you.”
“You know what I’m talking about. Ifá.”
“Ihechi! Is that you?” Aunt Kosi bellowed from within the compound. My mother’s face turned skyward, and she fiddled with her wrapper as if she had no right to have a conversation with her son. It was obvious she had not done any proper gossiping in a long time. Aunt Kosi went on, “I know I put some meat on your bones when you were in Enugu, but with everything I’ve seen your mother show Effy, I feel like I owe you so much more.”
I knew my mother’s affection for Effy was a desperate striving to fill up the trenches of loneliness in her heart that had been excavated by my and my father’s departures, trenches that had been eroded to gullies by the attrition of neighbors’ wicked words and silent snobs who stigmatized her devotion to Ifá. If Effy had not come along, my mother would have found someone else to fawn over—maybe the little children brave enough to defy their parents’ instructions by coming to play in front of the “witch’s house.” I was bemused by how my mother could hate me for choices I made in my own life when she had first-class experience on how entrenching it felt to be hated for personal choices. But maybe it was because we have only what we receive and can give only what we have. And so if she spent her life receiving intolerance, then that was all she could give. I laughed at Aunt Kosi and swore that heaven could not have treated me better than she did.
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