Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth

by Wole Soyinka

  Lo and behold, Mr. Silhouette reappeared, shimmered into position on the driver’s side, leaning over the door frame. This time Menka did not attempt to disguise his irritation—it was so sudden, and the park being unlit, he was again startled, even frightened. The quadrangle was deserted, never mind how safe Hilltop Mansion was reputed to be. His reaction annoyed him more than the intrusion—he hated to concede fright under any circumstances. The very rites of passage he had been made to undergo in Gumchi before his very first departure from home, to join a boarding school, had been based virtually on the ability to control even the most instinctive responses to the sudden or unexpected. Yet there it was, twice already within minutes the same evening, and caused by the same mysterious intruder, so he felt a heavy wave of aggression welling up in his gorge.

  “You again? What is it this time? I need to get some sleep.”

  “I’m sorry I startled you. I forgot something important—I would have remembered if we’d sat down even for a moment, but then our conversation also turned interesting, not quite the way I had anticipated. So I forgot.”

  Menka waited for him to continue. The voice was self-assured. “You won’t need to keep that appointment,” it said.

  Menka was momentarily lost. “What appointment?”

  “In the morning. The visit to the meat mall.”

  Menka snapped, “And why not? What is it to you?”

  “It is no longer there. The meat mall has relocated.”

  “What! When? Where to?”

  “Its location here was no longer viable. Economically. Some problems of security have also arisen. The board of directors decided it was time to move.”

  Menka sat still, speechless. Loudest of the alarms in his head was the fear that no one would believe him now. No one.

  The stranger accurately read his mind. “You don’t have to worry about your club unbelievers, either. I assure you, you can ignore them.”

  “Ignore! How do I do that? Would you believe me if you had participated in those exchanges?”

  “No. Obviously not. We are all born with that Doubting Thomas gene. Still, I assure you, that is something you do not have to worry about. Tomorrow your club members will be too preoccupied with more important matters.”

  Menka’s impatience had now reached its zenith. He engaged the gears and the car shot forward. The man’s lethargy vanished; he leapt backward with an impressive athleticism that consoled Menka somewhat—at least he had forced the man to do something unexpected. The stranger’s parting words would, however, ring in Menka’s ears for days afterwards: “Trust me!”

  Within minutes, such a drastic extension of the more than already oversubscribed, unprecedented revelatory evening! So what for an encore? Perhaps a rockfall from loose boulders lining the Plateau hill! Menka braced his shoulders, drove home, thoughtful and resentful at once. Sure, he had lost his cool, but was that sufficient to generate this spectral intervention? For a start, the man’s presence was clearly no accident, so who was he? Despite his theatrical attempt at self-effacement, there still emerged something from him that triggered recollection. It was there, elusive, constantly slipping from grasp, but Menka had no doubt about a linkage somewhere in the past. At the beginning he had thought, ah yes, a blackmailer, come to squeeze him with the threat of denunciation after the lavishly publicized award. A connection somewhere with that operation, the excision of the thieving arm? He strove to conjure up the various participants in that twenty-year-old event, in whatever role, however minor—the judges, the mandatory witnesses, the attendant nurses, the pursuant rehabilitation officials. He ran the reel over and over in his mind—the youth corps commander, a soldier who had handed him the assignment at the clinic, casually passing on instructions as if the operation were of no consequence. Just a wave of the hand—Your patient is waiting for you in the emergency theatre, Corper Menka. Let us know when you are done. None of the emerging sketches quite fitted the intruder of Hilltop Mansion. He appeared to be a sinister force propelling, shunting events into predetermined channels, but all leading—exactly where? For once Menka seemed to finally understand the full impact of the word vortex. That was his location, yes, a vortex. No sooner breaking loose from a sneak undertow than another surged, attempting to suck him under.

  A second shower, then the late, lingering, always restorative solitary dinner, his table set against the window looking tangentially downward across the hills. Not too far distant, he could make out, as always, the contours of the clubhouse, a few interior lights kept on all night, the solitary lamppost of the parking space that now lent the ill-lit quandrangle a sinister ambiance—the first ever such emanation since he had taken up residence in the hills. He caught himself observing more keenly his steward clear the plates, close the kitchen door, as if every gesture, every motion held a clue to the events of the day but particularly to that final encounter on its own. The entirety appeared to have played out in two movements. They stood apart from each other—with perhaps his phone exchange with Duyole the sorely needed interlude of clarity between the brawl with his disorientated club members and the intrusion by Mr. Silhouette. Clarity because it lent affirmation to a decision already taken—to take a break from the turbid atmosphere of Jos. He felt relieved that he had kept back something from Duyole—his letter of resignation, submitted only the day before. He would share that with him only after his arrival in Lagos, perhaps after the sumptuous dinner he knew awaited him—he did not need to be told—Duyole would plunge straight into plans for him in heaven alone knew what direction. He would arrive in Lagos and find consulting offers already awaiting him from some private hospital or business. Definitely from the university teaching hospital. There was also the pending visit to the meat mall—how would that change options still under consideration? The stranger wanted to keep him away—for what purpose? He was proceeding with that anyway, saying nothing to the others about the attempt to dissuade him. Backing out now was out of the question. Even if on arriving at the location they discovered it had been razed to the ground, the signs of a structure would remain. Then—pursuit? Or abandonment? Let the morning decide.

  Sleep did not evince any volunteer spirit of cooperation in bringing the much-needed relief. Leaving the only other place he could rightly call home was strangely troubling, and surprisingly, the prospect also filled him with regrets. He tried to take consolation in his approaching reunion with Pitan-Payne. Perhaps they would even rouse other surviving members of their comatose fraternity—all four prodigious members, no less! His smile was a mixture of self-deprecation and nostalgia, not quite sufficient to light up the built-up gloom from the unexpected tail to an evening of long-restrained monstrosities suddenly let loose. Well, Lagos/Badagry beckoned, and never did the prospect of an interlude seem more enticing.

  It promised more than an interlude, more a descent of packed transitions between multiple phases. Much had changed, Menka now consciously admitted, since those days of student idealism, with all their eccentricities. Even his own select quartet of dreamers, who wore T-shirts combatively emblazoned with The Gong of Four across the image of a Benin royal gong with four conjoined heads—even they, he ruefully conceded, had undergone irreversible changes. The group had formed around Duyole, the restless engineer, friend, and adopted family from the very earliest days of embattled idealism. Now the Gong members had gone their different ways, pursued by or confronting impositions and choices of sheer survival that ballooned by the day, by the hour. And now he found himself in the most drastic vortex of change, at fifty-seven, celebrated, yet faced with an indeterminate future.

  His situation, he feared, now approached the surreal. One moment an overworked and largely overlooked medic, virtually unheard of outside his immediate professional milieu, just another slave of commitment. The next a national reference point, honoured by his peers for the nation’s Independence Day Award of Pre-eminence. Now, barely a week in the role
, he had turned fugitive, albeit not from justice. But it all came to the same thing—an urgency to get as far as possible from where he was. He felt hunted like any common felon, already detached from his habitual awareness of Jos as a friendly, ruminant space, a city that was evocative of the landscape and tempo of his own Gumchi—of course with vast differences even so. All in all, Menka had begun to taste the beginning of existence in limbo.

  Hardy like the terrain itself, the Gumchi people eked out a rudimentary existence from the sparse patches of moisture and foliage that punctuated their vertiginous rocks. Early-morning commuters largely ignored the lines of Gumchi women, slightly stooped, waiting to cross the expressway. They emerged out of scanty huts to thread the spiky pathways on their way to markets for all the world like soldier ants, with water pots, firewood stacks, yam tubers, and other farm produce balanced on submerged shoulder pads, bead bracelets around shaved heads, a human formation that appeared to replicate those precariously poised boulders. The sight was a contrast to their counterparts of the southern tropical belt, city vendors and other supply chains of urban life who used their heads—literally, that is—for porterage. Summary of assets: one primary school wedged at rock base on the miserly plain; one charcoal-making homestead; a bead-making foundry only a little bigger than a domestic hearth; and the farm patches, which included a micro-plantation of kola nut trees, whose flavor had found favour on the discriminating palate of the head of state. There was ultimately nothing there for a freshly minted doctor, specialization surgery. In any case, there were the terms of his scholarship to fulfill—five years of service to the state. The Plateau called. Friendship tugged. The former won the tug of war—but that also enabled him to eat his cake yet keep it. His fast friend Duyole, the commencing link for a surrogate family, had equally turned homewards—in his case, southerly to Lagos and Badagry. For an orphaned survivor from an orphaned village—which in effect meant an occupied unit bypassed by the rest of society—Menka luxuriated in a friendship that cushioned the schooldays rites of passage. It grew only stronger during the period of castaway stressing on an inclement island known as the United Kingdom, its bond remaining intact as each came to terms with every fresh starting point called, nonetheless, home.

  When Menka was first assigned to Jos at the end of his year of compulsory youth service in the city of Kano, Jos was an envied posting, a languorous place—at least for those who could live without the frenzy called Lagos, or increasingly Kano, Kaduna, Calabar, Enugu, and a handful of other state capitals. Then suddenly there were human bombs everywhere, bombs strolling into markets on human feet, often of children as innocent carriers, around village squares, hawking food or queuing for a place in motor garages, liberally donated even to infant schools. Churches and mosques lost presumed sanctity—it was difficult to decide which of the two rivaling sects attracted the deeper venom of the black-flagged redeemers. And the daylong, weeklong flight of bullets, tracers, a full carnival of projectiles—audible, but still distant from the oasis of Hilltop Mansion, always creeping closer, beaten back, the treasured relief of relative silences and then the resumption of ominous whooshes and thuds of deadly pods. The townspeople even learnt to distinguish between the lethal subtleties of sounds. As for the assailants—it became a constant question with him—what did they want? What god did they worship? Finally his encounter with the marketers of human disaster, invading his clinic, bold as you please—well, after initial prospecting—to offer shares in their morbid merchandise. It was time to move. It had to be fate! Menka prided himself on not being superstitious—he needed this constant self-reassurance—but this did look as if something akin to fate had taken a hand. But first, to get away, if only for a few days. Then?

  The descent into the dense fog of human malformation in which Menka felt trapped called instinctively to past promises and designs of life affirmation, if only for the preservation of his sanity, or perhaps simply surfacing as the very material of nostalgia. It evoked memories of originating input into joint projects that belonged to a time of uncomplicated youthful vision. Skirting disdainfully round the outworn media language of a dream team—no sporting nation would be seen dead without one!—he and his fellow gladiators once settled for the adaptation of the Master Dream Collective! Nothing less grandiose was worthy of the summons from the realms of idyll as they were smitten, like most overseas students, with the transformative wand inscribed Get back and make a difference! After multiple trials and rejections, augmentations, winnowing, shameless plagiarizing and originating with equal fervor, the trigger word ended eventually on branding, more expansively rebranding, plucked—such is the logical irony of emptiness—from the prodigal jingoism of governments for whom it was merely a grandiose playword, banalized, mindlessly appropriated under junketing ministers of this and that on an ever-ballooning entourage of worldwide missions to rebrand the nation. Well, if rebranding, what do you rebrand? Let there be some stuffing in the shell, ideally something unique to the rebranding entity. Offhand rejection of the first comers’ “brand of rebranding” was predictable—where it led had become an embarrassment and a challenge. So out they leapt with their counter: By all means, let’s rebrand, but let the product do the rebranding. Then, once vetted, guaranteed, ennobled, its standard proved sustainable, on comes the branding. The world would come to terms with, come to reckon with, the national brand!

  It led to the creation of Brand of the Land. However modest, the term’s resonance would echo across the national landscape—continental also, why not?—leaving its mark everywhere, cross-referencing and mutually enhancing through sheer brand recognition and penetration. Quality tests would be paramount. Innovations, expertise, delivery promise, follow-up services pulling in sustainability, etc., etc., irrespective of project and product. It was only on a whim that one of them—it would be Badetona the Scoffer, the practical, finance savvy conspirator—proposed that they head for the patent office. You simply never know, he warned. Let’s brand the brand before reprobates take over. Every innovation would be the benchmark model, against which all other products—or undertakings—would be measured. No matter how disparate the products, they would be linked together as a master brand! Nothing out of the ordinary, simply unique, establishing its distinct, inimitable pedigree—BRAND OF THE LAND.

  Dreams happened to them all, provoked by that tenacious bug loosely labeled “giving back,” a ravenous tick among rookie graduates in the more productive fields of the learning adventure. National Independence Day found many still within or just across the Channel from the colonizer homeland, the United Kingdom, but that absence from the site of celebrations (of potential only, had they but known it!) just fired the eagerness of such overseas birds of passage. If they could, they would have altered the homeward migration pattern, redirecting even the motions of the trade winds so they could leave straight home from the convocation venue. The company diminished—that was predictable; many were there solely for the conviviality and by-products, not least of them local sex hospitality. By graduation, only four were left standing among a commencing group of a dozen or more fluctuating enthusiasts, determined to keep faith with the bug that had bitten deep and entered their bloodstream. It all seemed fated. At the time the nation was divided into only four regions. Duyole recalled a family heirloom, a four-headed conjoined Benin bronze, and that was it. Adopted as the brand logo! Was all this really a mere thirty-odd years ago? It felt like an eternity had passed. Each military coup seemed a lifetime.

  Menka was nothing if not susceptible. Duyole Pitan-Payne was already showing signs of becoming the irrepressible, restless, and inventive engineer with a modest register of clientele. All acknowledged that he held the group together—of course, he had the funds to travel and reach out to all of them; he came from a wealthy family—but a special bond existed between him and the boy from the hills, right from the start. Perhaps it was the differences that attracted them to each other—one, sophisticated scion of Lagos col
onial aristocracy and with a double-barreled, biracial family name. Duyole’s bonding with the lost-looking pupil from that obscure village was instant. A fragile, accident-prone stripling who had never stepped out of the outcrop settlement where trees grew mysteriously from rock clefts, the outsider was clearly in need of protection from the rest of the claques of all too savvy city-bred schoolmates. The cicatrix on his face marked him also as an instant outsider, stamped him with the stigma of a hinterland excrescence. Unlucky for his earliest aggressors, the instinctive bullies, his restrained bearing hid a stubborn temper constantly on recoil.

  On the euphoric morning of an autumnal seaside clime, to the clicking of official and family cameras, the white jacket was ritually slipped over the shoulders of the youth from a central highland in Nigeria, followed by the presentation of the lacquered box containing the silver scalpel and forceps. His shaky but elated voice recited the Hippocratic oath, plus other ritual affirmations of his membership of the “guild of butchers”—Pitan-Payne’s irreverence penetrated any role or activity. Menka silently added his own secret “Gumchicratic oath”—he always did his best to match Duyole’s deflationary improvisations. But Kighare Menka was anything but dismissive.