by Wole Soyinka
Menka took the semi-charred notebook, turned it over in his hands, scrutinized the scribblings, the drawings, and suddenly his face lit up.
“I know who! Even if Duyole himself can’t, he’s on his way to the UN. I can’t think of anyone better placed to do this for us right now.” He grew visibly excited as he reached for his phone. “I’ll call him right away,” only to have Costello place a restraining hand on his arm.
“One moment, Doctor. Is this someone you can trust? We have to keep this very close to ourselves.”
Menka smiled. “This is someone I’ll trust with my life.”
“Who is he?” Old Man Desert queried.
“Name is Pitan-Payne. He’s an electronic engineer. I don’t know if cryptography is among his talents, but we’ll soon find out. We’ve been friends since childhood. He’s my host. He owns this apartment.”
“Alhamdulillah.” The Old Man grinned. “If you say you trust him with your life, that’s good enough for me.”
“Definitely with me, too.”
Menka dialed. The exchange left the two visitors staring.
“Mission station?” Menka asked.
“Pistons cooling.”
“Jos spillover. Here in flesh.”
“Oh.” There was a pause. “Can do can do?”
“Twosome labials.”
There was relief, even delight in Pitan’s voice. “Gung-ho gung?”
“Collaterals.”
“Gung-ho gung.”
“One-five check-in?”
“Gung-ho gung.”
Switching off the phone, Menka nodded at the duo and said, “He’s home. Told him we’ll be with him in fifteen minutes. He’s expecting us for lunch.”
Costello couldn’t resist blurting out, “What language was that?”
“Pitan-Paynese,” Menka said. “Well, we all did contribute, but it’s mainly his. It’s a habit, then he inflicts it on the rest of his gang. I know he’ll like to tackle this. If he can’t, he’ll find us someone who can. Shall we go?”
Damien was waiting at the door to receive and usher them into the living room, Dr. Menga introducing him as the “overseas” Pitan-Payne who had decided quite recently to return home. Baba Baftau offered him his card and an open invitation to visit him anytime in Jos. Their host shortly emerged in a kitchen apron, wiping his hands, full of apologies for his wife’s absence. She was busy at the factory, winding down towards their departure, and he did not want to interrupt.
“Ignore that,” Menka said. “It’s his chance to get in the kitchen and prove he’s a better cook than his wife.”
Baba Baftau remained scandalized. He continued to stare, disbelieving.
“Good old Godsown is on duty—that’s the steward. Damien will lend a hand, so why should I bother her? Damien, look after them while I conclude business in the powerhouse.” And with that he was off, a somewhat regretful figure of deprivation because he could not put up in the short time a sumptuous feast for Dr. Menka’s very first visitors since he had relocated. And they all the way from Jos! No matter, they would meet for a full “working dinner” before their return to Jos and his own U.S.-bound departure. In the meantime he was working something out with the housemaid, so could they relax for a few minutes? If only Menka could learn to give decent notice…
Menka threw up his hands. “Listen to him. They only called me up this morning.”
But Duyole was already off. They heard him issuing instructions on his way back to the kitchen. Baba Baftau appeared to wake up from a trance.
“Your friend is cooking?”
Costello laughed. “But I’ve told you, I cook. Most Italians can cook. We enjoy messing around in the kitchen.”
“Even if he doesn’t cook,” Baftau insisted, “wallahi, this friend of yours, ko, is he always like that? Are there many like him in Lagos?”
Menka shrugged his shoulders in resignation. “You wait. You’ve only known him for two minutes.”
Pitan-Payne rejoined them within twenty. At the table he placed the charred notebook beside his plate and turned it over page by page. Finally he released a sigh and firmly shook his head in defeat. Too deep. Yes, he had fooled around with the war codes of the Axis powers—all part of their electronic curriculum. This was, however, different from improvising a magpie language for a cabalistically inclined foursome of youth, of which perhaps only two full-time members still retained any recollection. He would copy a page and send it to some contacts from his university days. They are great encrypters over there, he assured his guests, even though the British did succeed in cracking one famous code in World War II. That crippled Hitler’s plans for invading the island.
By the end of a protracted lunch that lasted into early evening, all were agreed that Costello was right—there was more than sufficient matter to engage the mind, such as a sturdy network of the specialized body parts trade. Boriga was not an isolated case.
Allah willed it; Baftau rendered praise. Costello had indeed stumbled on a long-discarded notebook of rudimentary beginnings, a phase that had long been surpassed, had burgeoned into a sophisticated commercial life within life as an accomplished fact. An underground language was already in progress, not vastly different from SMS texting shorthand but integrated into images, the new language of a wired generation, the harbingers of space-age minds gone haywire, thriving in a world of virtually charged emoticons. Ingenious refinements continued steadily. A glossary of terms was already in limited circulation, tailored to the needs of both veterans and novitiates, with heavily coded symbols for the more problematic ways of extracting the needed body parts and introducing new variations in the art of meat carvery that accorded the special commodity just as much aesthetic reverence as beef, mutton, venison, horse, and other herbivores, including ostrich meat, which had lately become fashionable among the cholesterol-conscious elite.
The success of the new enterprise and the rapidity of its growth were a surprise only to those who failed to give credit to specialist marketers who were masters of the profession, had done their feasibility studies across vastly different strata of society, including even the new science of consumerist simulation. The locals being a notoriously suspicious breed of business humanity—not without cause, as every single enterprise, before it was even off the drawing board, had already spawned a dozen or two imitations, fakes, adulterations—care was taken to ensure that no room was left for any confusion between the authentic item and even suspiciously marginal beings like Mami Wata, ologomugomu, ebora, witches iwin, monkey meat, and all other unsuspected, liminal creatures that sometimes appropriated human forms, if the testimonies of fishermen and farmers returning home at twilight were to be believed. Certifications were introduced for halal and nonhalal.
Secrecy was of course the most expensive commodity that went into production—the complete security of operations had to be guaranteed, and by whatever means necessary, given the yet undeveloped state of mind of a populace which was not quite ready to accept innovations even where such innovations were already proliferating and approaching the norm. Hence the intricate alpha-numerical Codex—what a historical cast of mind could possibly have thought that up!—augmented by new images. The inventory expanded all the time, supplementary pages being added online to a bowdlerized version of the Codex Seraphinianus, augmented by images from ancient mythologies—these were developed into an easy-to-memorize lexicon, constantly updated. The choice of the Seraphinianus was a master stroke of public entrapment, since, among other charismatic churches, the cherubim and seraphim order exerted the utmost fascination for even chronic infidels, their immaculate white robes, male and female, floating over the landscape, women’s heads topped by a fluffy bonnet, bell and rosary swinging across streets and markets both in and out of devotional services, their demure comportment alternating with musical excitations during the tambourine, drum, and bell chorale
s at dedicated hours of worship. The mere reference to a Codex Seraphim-whatever was sufficient to imbue the Codex—and the business it served—with the air of scriptural authority that was equaled only by the more ancient catechisms of Christianity and Islam, the priesthood of both well versed in the skills of recruitment and conversion. Once the new commodity market acquired a tinge of religiosity, any lingering reservations among the weak-minded vanished. Trade blossomed under the aegis of spirituality.
It began with just a few, spread to embrace communities, but always under the tightest of controls. Expansion of this shopping community was measured, every sector carefully cultivated, meticulously consolidated. Dissidents were simply bypassed or neutralized through sustained online campaigns of attrition that left them choosing between silence and consignment to mental institutions, their accusations progressively enfeebled by being cast in such a preposterous light as to make them doubt their own faculty of observation, judgment, or sanity. In extreme cases there were disappearances—these had become commonplace anyway. No one asked questions of such sudden gaps in homes, businesses, or family gatherings anymore; the most recent pin-up photos behind the Missing Persons desks at police stations were at least ten years faded. Recruitment was fastidious. Each new client was pledged to recruit only from within a trusted circle, the longer the acquaintance, the safer. Even so, outsiders, especially politicians with diehard constituencies, once thoroughly vetted by the local board of trustees, could also win approval as targets for recruitment.
Penetration of the growing circles of patronage was thus largely groping in the dark. Nonetheless, there had been slips; a few, like Boriga, had been successfully closed down. These were, however, largely training centres whose security was not yet watertight. The wonder was that not one single arrest had been made. Somehow the police raids took place just when the school had shut down operation, or closed down “for vacation,” never to resume—that is, not in the same location. What closed down in Yenogoa simply resurfaced in Potiskum. Yet reliable testimony about the training curriculum had been gathered—how to introduce the subject, gauge receptivity, probe leaning, proselytize, when to make the final, factual disclosure—the point of no return. The clean-cut, city-slick salesmen and -women learnt when to abandon early promising clientele as hopeless, what to do where a mistake had been made and the hesitant recruit turned dangerous, betrayed signs of whistle-blowing, or simply acted suspiciously. Cells were already self-reproducing. Each cell had its own supervisor, unknown to other members. But it was mostly a one-on-one process—one-on-one and that one on another ad infinitum. Delivery systems were constantly refined, storages rotated, schedules staggered, and depots changed to frustrate investigation. When a link was broken, it was left alone, unrepaired, but a new circuit was swiftly constructed around the weakened point, just like the stent in a coronary bypass.
The trail was long but meticulously laid. It led inexorably to where the errant limb was destined after excision, what they actually did with the newly designated spare part. It led in turn to that slow, agonizing discovery that in several supermarkets, items on display in the refrigerated glass cases were only a cover—well, not quite; the innocent still went shopping for normal family consumption—but others also for far more exotic varieties, and on the sustainable delivery list, was on sale within the hidden warrens of the stores, of exotic varieties, than in the average shopper’s imagination, far more than even the most extravagant crop exacted by law from kilishi vendors and allied goat enticers. No wonder the latter had such contempt for Boko Haram and other pretenders to a higher calling, on homicidal duty to the hereafter.
The head received the utmost reverential treatment, not surprisingly. When the suicide bomber struck, hardly any negotiable parts were left without some drastic degradation, except the head. For some reason the head always flew off, and not just Nigerian heads, befittingly known as coconut heads from sheer bounce-around retrievable credentials—it appeared to be simply the law of Nature or, more strictly, the law of dynamite or whatever was packed into the suicide belt. History and art have stayed on the side of the head. All the way from Salome and the Dance of the Seven Veils to Saddam Hussein and his terminal danse macabre on the hangman’s rope, when the head separated from the body as the lever was pulled, so the drop proved to be a rarity, a fleeting rarity of suspension, then a total drop, since the noose simply slipped off the unanchored neck and the body slammed downwards into the shallow void. Nigerians are avid followers of the stellar events of their world, and perhaps these created the phenomenal appreciation of that crown of the human anatomy. Whichever way, the head was the prime prize, remained very much in demand even if degraded, as sometimes in the case of a suicide bomber. Even then its value depreciation was negligible, and it did not take any self-respecting pathologist that much time to make even a severely mangled one the centerpiece of the display room in the innermost sanctum, into which admission was granted only to the crème de la crème of valued customers. It explained why the police were forever catching suspects with human heads, sometimes in cellophane wrapping, a shopping bag, inside a bag of beans, garri, or yam or cassava powder. Even once in a student rucksack, smothered in loaves of bread and bags of marijuana. The weed, it turned out, was a clever device by the student cultists. If intercepted, they were certain that the police would pounce on the weed as their share—that was more immediately marketable and did not require refrigeration. They met their match on that occasion, however, since it was a very strict, no-nonsense patrol which insisted on seizing both head and weed to let the students go free. The forlorn raiders were taking the head to a nocturnal football field to complete a quartet of goalposts—each head stuck on a pole—and they would not start the game until the fourth post was capped, otherwise the ritual was incomplete, which forced them to send a raiding team to the camp of the rival cult for the crucial number four. It was the same cult group, it turned out, that had been negotiating an alliance with Boko Haram for a regular supply of heads, but the match took place at the time of one of the military exercises, code-named Atari-afori, and the local commander who had placed himself at the head of Boko Haram’s negotiating team was nabbed while buying weapons from one of the military field commanders.
Of course, there was always Onitsha Market—You can find anything in Onitsha Market, even a human head. That was supposed to be hyperbole, a permissible turn of phrase or song of praise. In the case of Onitsha Market, it was the latter. A case of gallows humour. You mine humour out of what you know was never meant to be funny. It was also selling strategy—where else do you send souvenir-hungry tourists? Okporoko or secondhand clothes markets, even craft villages and historic caves, soon pall. No matter, all tourists love to slum—call it the offbeat sectors where other tourists (package variety especially) never dared invade. Onitsha Market was it, but did it retain that reputation after Independence? Always some fire in Onitsha Market, razed to the ground again and again to rise from its ashes—it’s known as the phoenix syndrome. War put an end to all that. War of secession, when reality overtook hyperbole. And that was one war that began with images of shell-shocked widows returning to Enugu with the heads of their husbands on flat trays, sitting on their laps…The mystique of the head had a long history, long before it became such a commodity hungered after by cultists and politicians, money launderers and kidnappers, to be stored in the refrigerated vaults of upscale supermarkets, supplied on order in advance of elections, court trials, and other heavy-investment ventures.
The infant head remained in a special category of its own, worth a thousand mea culpas in its restoration of innocence invoked and conferred through the cyclic route of infanticide, the sublime irony that mandates commission as guarantee of immunity. Otherwise, liver, lungs, kidneys, genitals, spleen, all the vital organs—female breasts, fingers, etc., etc.—nothing is wasted, all come under prescription, but the head now, even a fragment of the skull, moved to join rhinoceros horn as the guaran
teed enhancer of male libido and metaphysical control of the rest of humanity, come rain, come sunshine, come reckoning on Judgment Day…
* * *
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Moral judgments are risk-laden. Was it truly fair to call the markets perverse? Scavengers are essential to the Nature cycle; someone had to clean up the mess, and abandoned property does not discriminate. True, dead men tell no tales, but they mostly leave tell-tale belongings behind. A brand-new pair of Nike sneakers, a gold bracelet, even the occasional gold watch—some of the wearers just arriving straight from Dubai and driving home. Christmastide and Ramadan noted most especially for traffic accidents, accidental discharges, rise in trafficking, and so on and on. One can hardly cavil at such voluntary sanitation schemes. Nature hates waste. That it had attained the level of human devaluation was—pause, pause, now one thinks of it—isn’t it all only a matter of perspective? Another point of view could be, and most legitimately, revaluation. A revaluation of human. So what exactly is that? Who had the moral status to assess? Perhaps only nonhumans, hopefully from outer space.