by Wole Soyinka
And the bombastic self-attributions among the contestants in the race for paradise. Their identities had long ceased to matter—deadly nomadic herdsmen or the latest aspirants to the mantle of the Chosen, apparently sprung from the regions of Burkina Faso—they called themselves ISWAP. Or perhaps sleepers from the same unsuspecting home front, suddenly galvanized into action through some mystic telegraph, intoxicated by the fumes of religious rapture that the Harmattan wind blew over the Sahel and along the Niger and Benue Rivers, imposing an all-engrossing reign of morbidity over sleeping villages! Who cared what name they were called or called themselves? Their calling remained the same—morbidity. Doctors were trained to deal with river blindness, but river madness had simply never featured in his medical curriculum—there was no such registered ailment in the known repertory of diseases since the earliest known shamans, sangomas, babalawo, so to what did one ascribe this affliction that appeared to be river-borne from the Fouta Djallon hills? How to diagnose, then prescribe for it?
The madness of civil society was in a class of its own, and it sickened him. Haunted him. Like the wide eyes of the mutely accusing three-year-old violated by a grandfather of seventy-six. If only it remained—as it did for millions—mere fodder for the lurid pages of the media, easily exorcised by immersion in activities, occupations of one remedial kind or another! Alas, it did not. The body count from such wars of rivaling human ruinations might be lower, but the inner ravages exceeded both stalking bombs and gleefully swiveling AK-47s, and didn’t all meet at one common point—the negation, at least the prospect of the end, of humanity?
It had been quite a while since he had begun questioning the difference, then finally decided there was none. When the deviants were caught, interrogated, and paraded before media cameras, the public had learnt to expect invocations of the routine extenuating influence—The Devil! Please, I am very sorry, the Devil made me do it. I don’t know what came over me, but I know the Devil was behind it. And then the crowning insolence, the plea for attenuation of abhorrence—If people can just forgive me, I promise not to do so again. I’ll dedicate the rest of my life to Jesus, to Allah, to Jesusallah. The rapist duo, father and son, did not disappoint. The Devil pushed me, wailed Rapist Senior. Check with my priest, he will testify. Ask him how often I have gone to him to be delivered. And your son, Chief? What of the heir apparent? He caught me in the act, so he joined in. The Devil is no respecter of age.
And indeed, were there not others, even more authoritative, versed in theological niceties—the governor paedophile leading the charge, attesting to the culpability of that universal tempter and, by logic, exoneration of the human perpetrators, to be seen as mere vicarious agents of the Devil’s machinations? But what a brilliant variant in demonologic from the gubernatorial pulpit—it was indeed the Devil, argued His Devout Excellency, but operating through absence. Never was self-applause more resounding—acquittal through demonic absence, one step only, in effect, to beatification of the Devil! A serial stud of the underaged, augmented by cross-border trafficking of that vulnerable grade, he perched smugly, unassailable, on the saintly minaret! The Quran does not forbid copulation with the girl-child, nowhere is there such an interdiction, so who are you to accuse? What the Quran does not forbid, I am free to do. And for good measure: The Prophet himself—trust His Excellency the Punctilious not to forget the ritual “peace be upon him” tripping from the lascivious lips of immunity—did he not espouse the underage Aisha? End of discourse. End of innocence. Beginning of vaginal fistula.
And that, Menka silently raged, is where we are summoned to clean up the mess of appetites for fruits that should set teeth on edge.
Not forgetting the ghosts of those he had never met, would never know—case histories tucked among his predecessors’ handing-over of notes in the cabinet marked Extremely Confidential. The cryptic warning that read “Handle with Care,” handiwork of the Untouchables. The graphic photos. Precedents are efficacious teachers. Restored to life, triggered awake, those case files burst through the scrim of time no matter how effectively the seductive environment imposed itself between viewer and pulsing replications, clambered over the insulating range of hills—sunsets or sunrises, mists, social clubs, or whatever—where many continue to seek escape. Images on surmounting images—how many did one take into account in a week’s tally of ritual imbecilities, now being slobbered over by these colleagues luxuriating in the haven of a colonial refuge whose ancient walls, burnt brick chimneys and framed precepts merely evoke images of the altar-hearth of a distant church, a presiding priest in full regalia, pious hands raised to harvest God’s blessing. In those hands, alas, a silvery axe raised above a trusting head bowed in supplication, her superfluous pieces destined for burial beneath the altar in a ritual—predictably the same illusion—to make millionaires of the guardian of the lambs of God and his anointed cohorts, vital portions served as communion among them.
Images in pursuit of images of a ten-year-old—only that was no image for Menka but a flesh-and-blood patient, leg amputated for fleeing home from the eighty-year-old groom to whom she was betrothed in settlement of a debt. And who carried out that surgery? Her own enraged father, to whose home she had returned as sanctuary from the unwanted nuptial. She dishonoured me, the indignant papa lamented, and returned her minus one leg to the love-stricken octogenarian. She was back in Menka’s hospital a few weeks later, this time minus the other leg. The ingrate had again fled, this time to nowhere, just hobbling as far as she could on crude crutches and alms but not far enough to escape a now incandescent father, invoking Allah as witness of righteous restitution, of patriarchal honour. Right on that dirt road he slashed off the other leg for humiliating him before man and God.
And then—and Menka shook his head from habit, not that it brought relief or remorse—his own past haunted him; that much he found himself compelled to concede. Again and again it rose in accusation. He looked through the same prism at his own special community of peers, skilled, trained in an envied run of proficiencies—could they presume to volunteer for the angelic hosts that would assuage the self-inflicted trauma of the world he inhabited? No, not even the micro-community in which they strutted around, privileged among the herd. It was, after all, from the same implanted nurseries of presumed enlightenment that new profanities, hitherto unheard of, had emerged, from nurseries that nonetheless did breed dreams of transformation. Year after year, one after the other, those dreams had faded, drooped, or rotted. Year after year he had deferred his modest—well, somewhat on the ambitious side, but attainable—dream for Gumchi, a modest return of privilege, nothing more. How did those youthful claimants to allied professional nurturing attune themselves to the supremacy cults that plagued such sanctuaries of knowledge—weren’t they products of the same ennobling rites of passage? Was it really too much to expect of them—no, no, not even a plausible, futuristic dream, just avoidance of devouring the dreams of others? They strutted in that dark alley of power fixation—or was it simply the thrill, the sheer thrill of killing? Oh yes, more mimic surgeons, indeed the elite of those elites, theirs was a shorthand primer to brain surgery, a simple arrival point with that feudal proceeding: Off with his head! They could pride themselves also as belonging to an elite corps of innovators, their feet set upon glazed paths to recognition. It all ensured reputation of a kind, the recognition of the dead end of innocence!
His mind attempted to dialogue the minds—if they had any—of the midnight soccer games whose originality had riveted and outraged the nation. Four freshly severed heads stuck on poles; they had once belonged, and not so long before, to members of a rival cult. The players did not lack recourse to their own empowering devil—trade name Tradition, perhaps? Universal Tradition. College fraternity tradition with a local cultural flavour to enhance the awakened, aggressive sporting spirit of a continent? And so they stuck the heads of their victims on poles and played soccer between the totemic goalposts, the fie
ld lit by headlamps of their expensive, indulgent-parent-donated motorcars. The screams of outrage and condemnation were to be expected, but Menka shrugged; it all sounded hollow, insincere. It was all of a tune with the cross-border paedophiles, the promoters of vaginal fistulas, infant mortality, and proliferation of street girl beggars. For this was where they ended, thrown out of marital homes when their malodorous emissions became unbearable to the once-triumphant groom who had basked in the adulation of his peers, fellow legislators, for a job well done—yes, theirs was a tradition stoutly maintained.
Pilloried by the public, did that lawgiver not receive a standing ovation as he resumed his seat in the senate chambers? The mere student campus was the state breeding ground for such future leadership. It shared borders with pulpit, minaret, and senate. The students deserved their initiation grounds, no different from the kidnap gang not far from that governor’s state, post-modern vampires who kept their victims in designer cages, some for upwards of a year, pending ransom. The ghoul leader’s complaint—hubris eventually led to his capture—was a study in reversed culpability: Their relations were not serious about ransom. I had to kill some so I could drink their fresh blood. What was the public outcry all about, anyway? Tradition under co-option, albeit unvoiced—echoes from time past resounding in the present from neighbouring palm oil estates turned slave kingdoms. In those ancient times of trade and glory, forebears of today’s human commodities of cash and carry, progenies of historic exemplars in action. Eager to impress on visiting naval officers their control over all within their territory, did not the kings lop off the heads of a few slaves and play polo with them, skewering and tossing them from one lance point to the next? So why the rage? Why do the nations so furiously rage together, and why do the people imagine a vain thing? In vain he also tried to recall where he had last heard the anthem, gave up. The outrage was pure sentiment. The football fiends did no worse than play modern variations on the old tunes. A new generation of the digital, democratic, informational age. The students should be honoured for offering the World Cup an original idea in totemic culture—those goalposts should have been adopted as the nation’s emblem. His Independence Day national honour belonged to them, not him.
Drop in on the Hilltop clubs, proliferating under whatever name, on campus, off-campus, debating joint or clusters around news vendors, enjoying their free morning read—sooner or later the same consensus was reached: comb the desert, sweep the Mediterranean, bring back the migrating hordes, load them into capsules and fire them into space, to discover and settle new habitations where, just maybe, redemption awaited. They would subjugate the galactic natives and perform daring feats like the old colonial explorers, just like the ancient European transportation of bankrupts, highwaymen, mountebanks, prostitutes, atheists, reprieved suicides, chronic antiestablishment dissidents, press-ganged vagrants, and nomadic soldiers of fortune. And yet others proposed the establishment of dedicated killing fields—perhaps the first of their kind—as a conscious, deliberate social relief facility, to be patronized entirely by the willing to kill or be killed. After all, it was already happening, had moved beyond rhetoric or palliatives. Each day seemed empty, incomplete, and even unreal without competing news of yet another gross human depredation.
There was so much that Menka had long wished to push in the faces that crowded him in that club. He saw his own face among theirs, and its scattered clones, wherever he happened upon such hubs of complacency, but always he felt inhibited, even strange. And there was the fear of conflating nightmare with reality—Hilltop Mansion with the National Hospital, surgery wing. Which was the nightmare, which the testable reality? Even his award swam between, a slithery eel, morphing into human anatomical parts—were these all parts of the nightmare? The jury was out, but did the jury know of his history, and did they approve it? Excuse it? Dismiss it? Rationalize it, as he had done? Being fêted that evening perversely brought it all to the surface, a long-repressed bilge, and he felt his gorge rising. The trouble, he wanted to scream, is that it always happens elsewhere, far from this Hilltop observatory, ancient or sleekly, breathtakingly modernized, scattered countrywide. It only happens elsewhere, even when it takes place close by, even if at a short distance, just below these hills, on the built-up plains; it happens grimly, explosively, all the time, where my overworked staff on duty can testify to its palpable immediacy—that is the difference. It still remains elsewhere, even if the sounds occasionally carry uphill from the advancing northeast corner of the nation—Borno, Yobe, Taraba, Adamawa, Benue, overwhelming sections of Kaduna and sister cities, once remote from the madness, coming nearly within reach of our nicely lubricated gathering in this secular cathedral. Conversation remains measured, predictable, detached, faithful to inherited decorum that appears to cling to these Victorian portraits, the restraining décor, and MMMs, just like the one-and-a-half-century-old creepers cling to the outer walls, dispensing the soporific balm of a British countryside, the original mythical inventors and custodians of sangfroid. And of course we are only too grateful for those interjections of the rhetoric of learned detachment, even escapism, the exonerating transfer of grim reality to ideological paraphrases—all that so conveniently subsumes even the most accusing horrors, dispenses them in neat capsules we can pop down the throat and feel vindicated in our lofty indifference and pompous impotence. But we can explain it all we want; we still cannot wish it away.
It suddenly burst out in the open. The bouillabaisse of multiple ingredients, the devil’s pottage, finally completed the rout, and Dr. Kighare Menka’s Gumchi stomach rebelled. He began to sense his very presence within that environment as self-inculpation, even as flaring hypocrisy. Did he wallow in an unfair advantage because he was a doctor and thus thrown right into the consequences of decades of hideous derelictions? It was too late to ask, to call himself to order and sense of balance. Something snapped. Memory pointed accusing fingers at his own self. Suddenly the famed bedside manners, so lavishly lauded at the ceremony of the world-televised National Pre-eminence Award, crumbled under the protesting assault of a deeply embedded Gumchi idyll, their debris flying out of the stone-arched, wood-trellised British windows. It caught his innocent tormentors unprepared, right in the midst of a new round of banter over do-it-yourself unregistered members of the Order of Short Knives, who dissected their patients by the riverside, having anaesthetized them with potent ogogoro for lack of chloroform. Not forgetting the rest of the motley fraternity, also doctors in name—the government spin doctors, the cosmetic surgeons of national image, the specialist doctors of financial ledgers, the self-protective ascendancy of body-part combine harvesters and transplant specialists of reality, the appropriators of the vital organs of social survival who displaced and replaced at will. Like himself, albeit not so technically, they exercised powers of life and death, more inclined, however, towards those choices that defined them first and foremost, no matter their professions, as social morticians.
It was one of those days when Menka would wish afterwards that he could reverse the hands of the clock, or else that he could have found a way of reconciling the imbibed mores of childhood with the pragmatism so necessary for adult adjustments—one lived among others of the species, after all. Failing, he simply wished he had never left the hills of Gumchi, almost wished he had never set foot below the severity of the eternal self-sufficient rocks, never even met his bosom friend, the irrepressible Duyole Pitan-Payne, and their Gong of Four, never even approached the gates of a college of medicine. Usually such moods did not last long; duty and the needs of others were ever-ready to remedy the feeling of impotence.
But there he was, seated at the bar, his back turned to the main body of the lounge, and he woke to a realization that his beer mug appeared to have slammed itself on the bar, spilling its contents over the intruders and soaking the newspaper whose contents had sparked off the new round of self-savaging. He spun around on the high stool to confront the voices that had bee
n united in his laudamus barely an hour before and were still luxuriating in a share of their member’s public recognition. An out-of-body experience? Without question, he was indeed conscious of watching himself at one, even several removes. All that belonged in the purely academic realm or—resorting to his own people’s summative formulation—medicine after death. Even he could not explain it, but yes, there was a crack in that mostly expressionless face, an additional streak to the cicatrix that somehow succeeded in not disfiguring his appearance. All he heard was his own voice in top register: “Cut it out! Yes, just turn it off—that tap! That’s more than enough. What do you know? All of you, what have you seen? I said, where do you all live? Hypocrites!”
At the beginning of the outburst, no one knew it for what it was—the enraged kind. They thought he was entering into the spirit of the game. Then they saw his face, and all chattering froze. Eyes turned on one another, furrows dug deep into foreheads, a few raised glasses hung suspended halfway to destination. There was nothing more immediately forthcoming, so they remained confined to swiveling faces and bodies, seeking explanations. A handful, including Muktar, the club secretary—he had personally presided over Menka’s induction into club membership—scrambled to recall who had sponsored him in the first place. Maybe he could explain, and apologize on the man’s behalf. If not, both memberships would be a matter for review. The ensuing silence could not have been more convulsing if Dr. Menka had merely announced, “Isn’t it about time we granted YoY laureates automatic membership in Hilltop Club?”