Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth

by Wole Soyinka

  Pitan-Payne would interrupt a long-laid agenda to commandeer a spontaneous office party for an employee who had just become engaged. Known to Menka only was perhaps the true impulse of the one that set a record in office binges within the upscale commercial sector of Badagry. The lovelorn employee had brought the fiancé round—it seemed to be the house tradition—for general inspection. From a quick lunch-hour drinks break, the party grew and spilled over into the adjoining boardroom, then downstairs to the display room to accommodate gate-crashers from other offices closing for the day—they knew a good thing was when the lights came on after hours in the Pitan-Payne iconic landmark. In Lagos for a medical conference, Menka found himself cast as impromptu guest of honour—For moral support, Gumchi, for moral support. I distrust the man. So why bother? Why go to all the trouble? Guilt, cheerfully admitted the engineer. Guilt. Never met the man before, never heard of him, so why should I distrust him? It’s her choice, and she’s one of the best. You see how everyone is pouring in? It’s for her. They all love her—ask anyone up and down the street, or the markets where she does our shopping.

  You’re just perverse, Menka sighed. Admit it, you like parties. The desk bores you, unlike the workshop. I’ve observed it—you never come up with a party idea from your workshop, it’s only when you’re in the office.

  And again the sudden stop, the five-second rumination. You think that’s true? A thought check crowned with a frown—duration five seconds maximum. Planning had already commenced for the next. Stress will kill one with casus belli—time we let casus belly dictate the pace! Same meticulous planning, even for the short-notice inflictions. Same attention. Same personal supervision. Same ardour. Same insane enthusiasm, once undertaken, his favourite formula of “inverse proportion” dominating the scale of extravagance as he extracted the hospitality checquebook—The lower the ranks, the higher the thanks.

  Impossible to accept that this was the man whose life was ebbing away before his eyes.

  Who else would set about so single-mindedly to dispel the regret that continued to prey on Menka’s mind—the usual mix of logic and zaniness, interspersed with anecdotal distractions and hard, creative propositions to take his mind off that past? You did what you considered your duty, now forget it. And if you can’t altogether, at least you’re doing something about those who won’t let you forget it—the flesh exploiters and racketeers. But the shadow did not prove that easy to dispel, wringing from Menka the sudden explosive wish that his path had never crossed that of the kilishi seller with goat abduction as a sideline! A mistake, when he finally confided the cause of the sudden descent of dejection, right in the midst of a gathering, reserving the gritty denouement for when they were alone. Kilishi seller! The perfect provocation for a compulsive raconteur and irrepressible mimic, even where he was a third- or seventh-hand recipient, not an eyewitness. Duyole needed no more than a phrase, perhaps simply overheard and detached from context, and the ready-made transmitter recast a scene and sent it tumbling on a wild ride to the uttermost limits of creative licence. Did I hear you right? Horsemeat hawker my foot! The man is a genius. You mean he actually said, “Your Worship, I did not steal the goat, it merely followed me home”?

  Duyole’s calculated pause and slowed-down motion of a skewered morsel en route to his mouth at the dinner table restored the broken smile on Menka’s face to its fullest dimension. Pity, it was still certain to have failed to bring even a fractional ghost of it to the wagging goatees of the Sharia court that pronounced the verdict. The learned jurists were not amused. They were even less impressed by the defence counsel, who rephrased the vendor’s version of events in convoluted legal jargon that was incomprehensible even to the court interpreter. The accused had already pleaded guilty, and the rest was “grammar.” Unlawful possession was stealing—and there an end. A double pity no one had thought of inviting Duyole Pitan-Payne to testify in his capacity as amicus curiae, albeit never called to the bar, contributing nothing beyond repeating the defence of the accused in his own vocal register to break the humourless wall of turbans set against the redemptive prospects surely lodged in the heart of the average goat stealer! Variations would be unnecessary, just Duyole’s mimic whine of the one-liner—The goat followed me home, Your Worships. Over dinner, Duyole needed no further provocation to embark on his routine, placing the fault squarely on the defence counsel: They should have insisted on rephrasing the charges. Changed it from stealing to enticement. Question: Was it a he- or a she-goat? Assuming it was a he, the accused probably bleated like a she on heat, thus inducing the goat to follow him home. Hunters do that, they master the calls of the wild to entice their quarry to the kill. The counsel should have called on the accused and made him bleat like a she-goat. The goat would respond amorously and…case dismissed! Anyway, isn’t it notorious knowledge that the verdict is always decided in advance, and by the village head? Much depends also on the party affiliation of the accused. In any case, where was the press? Not a bleat from them that anyone can recall….

  “A-M-B…”

  Stirred into consciousness, slowly, a little disorientated, but…

  “A.M.B.”

  Clear, unmistakable, albeit weak, the voice of his “twin.” A bass-baritone voice emerging almost spectrally enfeebled, as if it could not bear the weight of consciousness as he clambered into its peripheries. Menka was startled out of his bedside chair. He felt mildly displeased with himself. Watch and pray—wasn’t this why he had taken up residence by Duyole’s bedside? He passed the back of his hand over his eyes, blinked.

  “Duyo?”

  Who else could it have been? There were just the two of them in the screened-off corner of the recovery ward. And in any case, whose irreverent self ever called him Absent-Minded Butcher? Still somewhat shakily awake, Menka turned his eyes slowly in the direction of the sound that he was now certain had emerged from the propped-up head. The occupant of the bed tilted his head slightly in Menka’s direction.

  “Keep still.” Menka heard his own voice, hoarse with emotion. His reward was a febrile smile from the patient. Menka returned it. “Where have you been, my friend?”

  The retort was true Pitan-Payne. Menka stood over the bed and managed to lip-read, “No, where have you been? I’ve been watching you over an hour.”

  Menka grinned sheepishly, overwhelmed.

  Factually it was a mere five minutes, even slightly less, since he had emerged from the coma, kept still for some seconds, rolled his eyes to obtain his bearings, registered Menka through the watery corner of one eye, and settled there, puzzled. But that was Duyole Pitan-Payne for you. It was the only indication needed by anyone who ever crossed his path that the famed jewel in the Pitan-Payne dynastic crown had indeed been restored to the extended family display room, and with undimmed sparkle. Friends, family, and business had long abandoned all presumption that such an acknowledged technical mind would leave others discomfited by a strict adherence to facts, but no, the engineer blithely dismissed such dry-as-dust entities if they got in his way, that way being a mission to “celebrate” facts so as to eliminate boredom from the world. As for a mutually intertwined scenario being guided along Gumchi neural paths by Menka’s desperate watch to lure him back to his friends and family, he of course had no notion. Pitan-Payne woke up wondering what he was doing in a screened-off section of the reception room, scattering and reordering his thoughts for a prime ministerial audience. What he found strange, an instant later, was that he was not merely there but lying flat on his back, under some constraint, yet waiting to be summoned into His Presence. There was a bedside sink, with the now mandatory hand sanitizer, supposed to fend off the raging virus—that was the sole image that linked him to a slipped memory. He last recalled it as a cloud-blue porcelain sink, the moisturizer encased in a soft, padded sheath, branded with the national crest. Now the sink was a gleaming white, slightly cracked at eye level; the sanitizer bottle was plain, while a f
aint smell of antiseptic replaced the parfumerie of the anteroom to the reception. As his mind raced to unscramble the mystery, a name invaded his mind, an unfavourite but irresistible character from a distant fictional world to which Duyole had remained addicted all his life—the world of Charles Dickens. He made no attempt to explain it, even to himself, but that world dominated a large part of his existence, which appeared to have begun larger than life from birth. It required only the right provocation for Mr. Engineer Pitan-Payne to break into his hilarious rendition of Oliver Twist redux—“Please, sir, I want some more”—as he stood still, plate and cutlery in hand, eyes rolling in salivating admiration from end to end of a gastronomic spread on an accustomed Nigerian occasion. As for restaurants where the portion, he felt, was niggardly, he calmly desecrated decorum with his baritone rendition of the orphanage plea, voice deliberately raised to ensure that other diners heard and saw, then responded whichever way—he did not really care: discomfited, offended, conspiratorial, or openly nodding approval, sticking up their thumbs in solidarity with a long-sought champion of the fundamental rights of casus belly. The serious side to the overgrown Twist was hardly ever in public view, but it was at the heart of his unspoken contract with society. Gumchi Kid, everywhere I go, there is someone there who desperately needs some more. What do we do?

  But Duyole’s mind was far away from that orphanage castaway. It was a totally different kettle of Dickensian fish that bobbed up into his consciousness. Menka was only mildly surprised when, after a silence, a near-total stillness that followed Duyole’s first indication of life, his next sentence was “Why does Uriah Heep keep us waiting?”

  “Who the hell is Uriah Heep?” Placing his ear close to Duyole’s lips so as not to miss the sheerest sound. But it was as if Duyole’s notorious “dropping off” had merged with the massive pool of the deep in every mind. There was a smile on his lips as if he enjoyed Menka’s frustration, as he entered or perhaps merely reentered a world of his most insistent memories.

  Duyole’s mind wandered far and wide. It had arrived at that time of life when schemes sprouted from their winter headgear to supply heat to uprooted tropical sprigs like himself, poised like mushrooming clouds straining to discharge moisture on parched segments of the world. And which arid expanse needed that most? For him and his companion crusaders—Menka ever the constant figure—the answer was lodged in the common admonition “Charity begins at home.” And that was where their sights were set, each in his own field. For Pitan-Payne, engineer and gadget freak, it was to set up a precision tools company, explore the reaches of alternative energy. Training, graduation, practical attachment in Munich, Salzburg, Koblenz, overwhelmed by the then-notorious North European work ethic, sometimes credited to the Swiss, other times to the Germans. Until such practical contacts, Duyole had assumed that this was a monopoly of the Pitan-Paynes and allied families of colonial aristocracy, Anglican strain, where the catechism was drilled into their childhood existence even to the extent of making them work for their pocket money on chores that were obviously contrived just to impress on them the guiding fact of life: money was the manna from heaven that grew on the tree of diligence. Discovering much later that his father, the clan patriarch, Pop-of-Ages, had indeed directed his postgraduate feet towards Europe north to immerse him even deeper in that extracurricular reputation. “History falls on us in Badagry,” he exhorted his children, “and the Pitan-Paynes are the frontline of that historic call.” Duyole was never fully certain which end of history filled the old man with such pride—that the family fortune was built on their lucrative role in the slave trade or that the Pitan-Paynes were among the earliest to abjure the trade when British gunboats sailed up Badagry creeks to enforce their abolition crusade. The old man continued to see Duyole’s commercial success, culminating in this last international call to service, as the continuing march of the Pitan-Paynes in historic formation, from Badagry and the tragic point of departure to the United Nations! This was history rounding itself up in family triumph. Duyole frankly admitted there was some symmetry about it. Indeed, he found it quite gratifying, except, of course, for those protocol ports of call en route. There he was in filial disagreement with Pop-of-Ages. If it were possible, the old man would have accompanied him on the visit to Sir Goddie, togged up in his full uniform of the Rosicrucian Order.

  Duyole Pitan-Payne imbibed more than a rigorous Germanic regimen. A scientist committed also to the ethic of a rounded education, he did not neglect the refinements of the mind. And thus, Oktoberfest, the Munich Beer Festival, for instance, registered its first conspicuous African regular in the person of one Duyole Pitan-Payne, electrical engineering student from Badagry, Lagos, Nigeria. It was a short bus ride from Salzburg, at whose university the engineer obtained his initial degree, in a nation famous for its tradition of a different kind of music—the Viennese waltz. The elder Payne had encountered in his youth that elegant diversion then known as ballroom dancing, a colonial importation whose promotion was assiduously pursued by the rival cultural interests of Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, etc. Their colonial officers conducted classes, passed the tradition down to a line of dedicated local teachers and missionaries. The waltz was Otunba’s favourite whirl—no question about it. Pop-of-Ages in his youth became famous in Lagosian social circles as one of the most graceful terpsichoreans of that genre. His life ambition was fulfilled when he eventually visited the production centre of such marvelous music, Vienna, undisputed world capital of the waltz. Thereafter nothing mattered but to ensure that all his children headed for that city for the development of their minds. The pioneering son proved something of a wanderer and ended up in Pordenone, northern Italy, where he died in rather mysterious circumstances. Duyole had followed, a contrast in achievement. He did not obtain admission to Vienna itself, but Salzburg not merely came close, it pipped Vienna with its annual Salzburg Music Festival. From that fortuitous base, the young Duyole, heir to the musical gene that was passed down the family line in some erratic pattern, discovered a far more varied musical world than his father ever suspected existed. That multitalented son further expanded the family attribute in an eclectic spirit. Thanks to a fellow student, he discovered the largely harmonica-based chorales of Munich’s Oktoberfest, a beery event that Duyole found much closer to his temperament and less than a two-hour bus or train ride from Salzburg’s lecture halls. He made an exception for Mozart, attended the Salzburg Festival religiously whenever that composer was featured. However, Munich was a different impulsion, a different climate, one that fulfilled the primordial meaning of festal, as in festivity, in Duyole’s intuitive understanding. Steadily it turned into an annual pilgrimage—the same Badehof Hotel every year, converted from its YMCA hostel origins—the same reserved room, number 121, thereafter designated by him his lucky number. Even after an elaborate interior makeover and refitting, Room 121 succeeded in retaining its penthouse position with a generous balcony, from which he could survey the Bavarian rooftops and obtain a bird’s-eye view of the street parades of kettledrums, leather-kitted bandoliers, Tyrolean hats with their fluttering feathers, brass bands, and quaintly attired barmaids of the fiesta.

  A rushed marriage of convenience to a buxom fraulein was no surprise, largely promoted by the imperative, Yoruba brand, of never denying a child born out of wedlock the entitlement of your name, no matter how suspect the paternity. Did you ever? Or didn’t you never? DNA tests were yet unheard of. A court ceremony, swiftly followed by a divorce, proved a model of mutual amicable separation. Both remained friends for years afterwards. Endowed with an untrained booming voice which he had exercised in operettas since early school in Lagos, Pitan-Payne played Mario Lanza’s rendition of the title role of The Student Prince until the needle pierced through the groove of the Bakelite long-playing disk. He was the most astonished amateur musician ever to discover, years into mature life and expanded tastes, that Mario Lanza was not considered even a serious voice of the operatic stage, muc
h less the best tenor voice that had ever lived.

  The world of micro-engineering—electric specialization—was what set his fingertips, in his own words, “a-tingaling!” And that, most specifically, was the microworld he swore to implant in that hometown depot of former slaving, Badagry. Brand it with a product uniqueness whose seal would be globally recognized—and maximally valued—as a specialty that became synonymous with its soil of origin. Silicon Valley? Why not Badagry Vale, once the Vale of Tears? It would form his contribution to the “Master Dream Collective,” the parenting vision to which he was pledged, with the other three in their projection of “sweat after swot”—Duyole’s rendition of life after graduation. It all seemed to fit into the historic cycle of transformations, but that was just the romantic fillip, a marginal bonus. The trademark, marketed globally as Brand of the Land, was a gong from Benin—yet another and even more brutal slave depot. The linkages were unending. The story of the whimsical appropriation of that gong reached all the way back to student days, a mordant tale kept mostly secret “except among friends” and cigar-end ashes of all-nighters, when roaring reminiscences shattered the peace of the night. Twenty years had passed; the gong had indeed attained a status enjoyed by the equivalent of a hallmark seal on the gold block or the Green certificate of a Google site. And there was the landmark Millennium Towers to flaunt it before the entire city, and even nation! To say it had caught fire was to be unduly expansive. Certainly the flames had flickered into the precincts of the United Nations, and this had happened most fortuitously, through its cultural arm, UNESCO. Now what desperate fortune-teller would have dared predict such an unlikely trajectory?