Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth

by Wole Soyinka

  It was quite fortuitous, but lucky perhaps for one and all, that the newly recruited doctor, Ekundare, drove onto the family premises at that moment. His duty had ended the previous night, but he had put on formal attire and returned to take his place behind the cortege for the procession to the burial ground. It was the voice of the young doctor that brought Menka back from the edge of insanity, cutting through his own voice, which was now stridently slashing and lacerating the air of the staid neighbourhood. Menka heard young Ekundare saying to him, “No, you’re quite right, Dr. Menka. It is those who are opposing this who have something to hide. It’s they who have something to be ashamed of.”

  Only then did Menka become aware of what he had been screaming, and he could hear it echoing in his head all over again, demented chimes bouncing off the walls of his skull, the walls, the iron gates, the gravel paths that crisscrossed the frontage of Duyole’s home, and all it declaimed was that he had had enough of The Family obstructionists.

  Do you all hate him this much? Is there something I don’t know? Is there an awful family secret I don’t know about? Did my friend commit an abomination, some unspeakable act that would make the earth of Badagry spew him out if we tried to lay him in its bosom? Are the people of Badagry going to retch and spit on the coffin if they know he is being buried here? Is there some unpardonable crime he has committed that his funeral procession will not pass peacefully through the streets of Badagry, past the ancient slave barracoons, past the shacks and colonial houses? How can Duyole’s remains not pass through the house that he built, pass through the symbol of his achievement—how could all the people I have known who revered him, railed at him, and laughed with him, even those who envied his success, who applauded his achievements, who swore by his generosity, who were thrilled by his company, were tolerant or driven to distraction by his eccentricities and excesses, who sought to emulate him or distance themselves from his quirks, all those who knew all the foibles that made him human, yet greater than all of you—how have these suddenly become “busybodies” who must be excluded from the final rites of passage of their…yes, friend, mentor, and benefactor through their streets? If you Pitan-Paynes have a sinister secret in the family, lay it out in the open so we can all go home and you can then take his corpse and throw it in the evil bush, or dine on it if you prefer. Until that moment, however, until you reveal what bothers you, I am in charge of his remains. We have encountered nothing but obstruction, hostility, manipulations! Every inch of the way, sabotage! To what end? In fidelity to what custom, what usage, what tradition? Just what gods do you serve, if any? What crime has Duyole committed, I want to know now! What is the unspeakable secret? No matter, the body within this casket is mine. I brought him home and I have taken charge of him. Duyole is going through Millennium Towers, and no one is getting in the way!

  Damien had come out of the house, roused by Menka’s raving. He stood, looking a little frightened, beside a bewildered Cardoso, the executor of Duyole’s last will and testament. Menka did not know in fact that they had been parleying with Kikanmi, Cardoso largely playing broker between those who sought this homage for Duyole and those who were resolved to deny it. After Ekundare, Menka heard Damien saying, in a soothing voice of which he was also sometimes capable, “It’s all right, Uncle, it’s all right. Uncle Kikanmi has agreed. It’s all right.”

  Menka had, however, moved beyond appeasement. The real target of his rage was not the naysayers but himself. He felt he had somehow betrayed his friend by getting into a situation where anyone felt that they could bargain with his body. He held all the cards. The security detail was his, and they would take orders from him and no one else. He was inflicting on himself an avoidable wound called compromise, and it was festering. He turned his ferocity on Damien, and on a bewildered Ekundare.

  “Agreed or not, Duyole goes through Millennium Towers. The contents of that casket belong to me. Those who left their property in Salzburg should go there and look for it. But the body in that casket is mine. It goes where I direct it, and by what route I choose. I concede the casket. Anyone who thinks that the casket is his, feel free to open it, empty it, and take it away this minute. But that body stays with me!”

  Damien again reassured Menka that Runjaiye, Ekete, and others were now working out the finer details but that the passage through Millennium Towers was already conceded. That, at least, was settled. All that was left was to decide what route the cortege would take to the burial site. Menka laughed out loud, an incongruous sound that made the thin crowd flinch. It seemed to him that he had forgotten how to laugh, and now a funeral was teaching him how to be human once again. What had been settled? he asked again. Settled by whom? No one had any choice, he repeated, and the drivers of the pilot car and hearse would stick to his instructions. Nothing was left to decide.

  Once again capitulation was partial, it appeared, and the conceding side was constantly scrabbling for more concessions or nibbling at the edges of consent. Faced with the inevitable, even at that moment, Big Brother still balked at a graceful withdrawal. There seemed to be suddenly two worlds—Lagos and Badagry—and, not for the first time, Menka accepted a difference, or at least that the two defined two conflicting compositions even within one family. The Family might have their roots in Badagry, he realized, even an ancient family home, but they lived in Lagos, had been raised in Lagos. They ate, drank, and breathed Lagos. The patriarch himself was a Lagosian at heart, his confectionery store was in Lagos, his social orbit within Lagos, his affectations all Lagos-saturated, even his perception of the world outside it. He had created the quartet but failed to expand it to embrace the most human, most gifted, and most successful of his brood. Well, Menka resolved, he would make all understand at least that that day, in Badagry, Duyole was now the death of his colleagues, the death of his Badagry family, not of the Lagos Family, from whom, it became glaringly evident, he had had good reason to flee, albeit not sufficiently far. But he had distanced himself, from choice. He could have built Millennium Towers in Lagos, established the Brand of the Land in Lagos, but he had chosen Badagry. Badagry was his Gumchi. Duyole was simply not one of them. He ceased to be one of them from the moment he took his decision to move to Badagry, seek his personal identity, and plot his future on his own.

  After negotiations with the Head of the Millennium Towers staff in front of the house, while Menka paced restlessly in the living room, a compromise was finally reached. Duyole would not lie in state in Millennium Towers. On orders from Lagos? Or from his own, Kikanmi’s, reductionist allergy? Duyole’s cortege would now enter through the rear gates, built on a lower level, then make its way through the driveway that linked rear and front gates on the upper street level. The staff would line the driveway all the way up and bid him good-bye as he departed slowly through the frontage into and along the busy street. This took them straight into, and through the heart of the city of Badagry at an hour when workers and traders were moving into place, resuming work, and setting up stalls. Menka could only wonder what the Brain of Badagry felt he had gained for the quartet in the shortfall, the excision of the fifteen minutes when Duyole would have remained at an improvised desk in the conference room of Millennium Towers, honoured by his staff.

  Even so, it was with enormous difficulty that Menka restrained himself from screaming an astringent veto to the agreement. It would have posed no problem. The escorts were under his control. He had taken the precaution of ensuring that even the hearse had been donated by the non-family. And of course every person in the procession apart from members of The Family was an ally. Finally, the people of Badagry, the entire environs of Millennium Towers, constituted the renegades of the non-family. A word at no more than a minute’s notice and they would block any deviation as determined, take charge of the streets, and ensure that Duyole remained within their territory for as long as it suited them.

  There were, however, others waiting for them at the graveyard, friends
who had been successfully contacted, circumventing The Family’s barricades. Next consideration was the sense of desecration that was already real and would only be compounded by a tussle over Duyole’s body. It would teach The Family a lesson, but in the end? In any case, he had now calmed down considerably. He was grateful to the young doctor, who virtually took charge of him—he smiled—at his age! Ekundare’s calmness doused the furnace that was lit up in his head. Its contents had relapsed and settled back to functioning in a semi-detached phase, calling out orders to an automated form. They would all be diminished by any fracas, but most of all, it was his friend, already deprived of lawful rest through this unseemly succession of alienated burial, exhumation, the treacherous refusal to embalm him, his enclosure in a collapsible coffin, an orphaned reception at the airport…The list of aggravations was endless. He could not add to it. This was his friend, over whom one brother had uttered words on the tarmac, words that Menka had futilely tried to expunge from his mind—“Look at him, lying there helpless, where is all his gra-gra now?”—while the other had cast his disdainful eye on the moment of Duyole’s return to his own land. Yes, any further delay in laying him to rest was a further act of desecration, one that he did not deserve and that would diminish them all, without exception.

  Still, it hurt. Deep within him, Menka had to admit that it hurt. And he longed to lunge out like a vengeful wraith and let loose Selina’s goats on their straw masks of pretentiousness, hypocrisy, and fakery in a way that would make their patriarch long for his rightful space, now usurped by the son. The surgeon yearned to instruct them that he knew their son better than they could dream, that it was that son who had turned an Edo gong into a world brand with his illimitable slapdash, even freakish humour—to instruct the infidels that Duyole’s cortege was passing, as if by his own choice, past his beginnings, where he had first erected a temporary shack that had led to his more sophisticated constructions. For the first time Menka sought to assuage his bereavement with their humiliation, but he silently intoned the gong mantra. He could not turn Duyole’s return to the earth of his choice into a melodrama; there had been more than sufficient bathos already.

  * * *

  —

  Duyole had had little time for religion, though he tended to waver between belief and skepticism. Certainly he was no churchgoer. Unlike Badetona, however, he was no Scoffer. He simply preferred to let religion be, insisting in turn that religion let him be. There was never any question of a Christian funeral for him. The nonadherence to a religion proved the perfect excuse for The Family, as if the absence of Christian funeral offices meant that any such being should be buried like a pauper—no, worse, like a vagrant without an identity, or else like a cast-off branch of a suspect family tree. Still, a Christian priest had been engaged by The Family to conduct a truncated Christian office of the dead by the graveside, backed by a small choir. Menka had ensured the presence of two groups, a traditional chorus and a dance troupe. He had sent them ahead to perform by the graveside before the arrival of the cortege. Brother Kikanmi had also driven ahead of the cortege, presumably to ensure that all had been prepared and that goats had not eaten nearby flowers. Not for him a place in the procession—that contradicted his patrician abstemiousness.

  Menka’s traditional chanters were already assembled at the graveside, the Zangbeto chanters of Badagry. The Family had not anticipated any such addition. On arrival, Kikanmi failed to recognize the singers as artistes as they were not in costume, unlike the dancers, who were conspicuous in their decorated costumes and were thus easily identified. So the realtor shooed them off long before the arrival of the cortege. The singers opened up voices on sighting the cortege, and Kikanmi went into a controlled frenzy of exasperation. Menka watched him, still at a distance, continuing to urge himself—Calm, calm, Gong o’ Four—calm down, it’s nearly over. He watched the brother haranguing the leader of the group, who wisely stepped to one side, away from the singers. Kighare was none too exercised; his mission was virtually fulfilled, Duyole close to his final destination. Their leader, however, came up to him to complain that there was a man who kept urging them to disperse and forget the chanting—he promised that he would see that they were paid just the same. Kighare told him, “Take his money and then stop. When I give the signal, resume. Did he come at you with his fingers at your singers’ throats?” No, the leader admitted. “Well then, this being a university campus, we do things our own way here—he doesn’t know that. He’s a real estate agent, and he thinks he owns the earth. Begin with the solemn chants—I’m not Yoruba, but I am sure you have some chants which it would be sacrilege for anyone to interrupt. Am I right?” The man grinned and nodded. “Good, you start with one such, and when he comes at you, simply wave a deterrent signal with one finger, like this. He’ll retreat, I promise. From the ritual songs, move on to incantations, belt out the ewi, ijala—those are the only two names I know. You know how you honour your own kind, don’t you?” The leader nodded, rejoined his choir.

  The university went about its normal business, unaware that a few metres from the lecture rooms to the staff club, where Duyole had delighted audiences with his impromptu baritone voice, their colleague and friend was being buried. Students who had participated in Duyole’s infamous madcap street party admitted later that they had actually walked past, little suspecting that their agent provocateur was being buried there. So did a band leader who had played with religious regularity at Duyole Pitan-Payne’s famous New Year’s Eve parties. When he learnt of the burial, he broke down and bawled like a child. The first musical instruments that he had ever owned were bought for him by Duyole Pitan-Payne—the instruments that had enabled him to create his own band, which became famous as The Benders. He could not believe that this thing had been done to him, that he was within yards of Duyole’s open grave, preoccupied with nothing but his daily chores, when his friend and benefactor was being buried. Others were simply stunned, speechless, and confused. A number cursed. And not a few tried hard to puzzle it out and, failing, clung to a conviction that it was not Duyole whose body had been repatriated but a substitute, or nothing. An empty coffin. The rumour spread, took hold, and could not be dislodged that there was a disease hitherto unheard of, a disease so wasting that it had left no fragment of Duyole left to consign to earth. It had all been an elaborate, expensive charade in which his best friend, the National Award winner, out of loyalty, had collaborated.

  The priest intoned his last offices. The small but resentful group paid brief tributes, laid wreaths, and threw clods of earth onto the lowered coffin. Menka’s eyes sought out the dance troupe, which, he learnt, had been shooed off by The Family’s agents just before the arrival of the cortege, confused by the frenzied counter-activities of the graveyard prefect, supposedly a mourner and brother of the deceased. Menka gave a slight nod to them and they commenced their motley gyrations. Again the surgeon experienced bewilderment at the brother, as a hitherto unremarked animation took over his resentful limbs, a complete contrast from the sneering lethargy with which he had been suffused at the airport while the “too many cooks” searched for the box that contained his brother’s remains. He rushed to the dancers and tried to shoo them off again. They resisted, having seen the choral groups, both Christian and Zangbeto, deliver their wares. The mourners showed their disapproval, and the Brain of Badagry retreated. The troupe opened their limbs into another dance, a slow, sinuous routine that narrated the dirge of finality and set a seal on Duyole’s departure.

  The brief ceremony was over. For Kikanmi, the waiting gravediggers could not move fast enough to begin sealing the grave in concrete. That was a customary precaution, to thwart grave robbers in their nocturnal activities. In Menka’s accusing frame of mind, however, this eagerness read only as a continuation of an impatience to seal his brother off from sight, to place slabs of nullity over his existence. Still, even Menka agreed that this was no task to be left till later, and he knew that Damien, t
o whom the duty of supervision had been entrusted, would close up the smallest chink that permitted any sliver of light into the grave. For once the contentment was mutual, only, as he watched the concrete slabs cemented down impermeably, his came from knowing that this time Duyole would be finally at rest, would sleep deep beyond intrigues and pettiness. He stayed long enough to watch the trowel make the first incisions into the slurry, slap down the first concrete mush and flatten it. Then he turned around and left.

  * * *

  —

  Once again he was back among his bits and pieces, scattered as haphazardly as they had been since offloaded mere weeks before. It seemed strange to feel that he need not have arrived so early for a funeral, since it now struck him that this was all he had come to do in Badagry—bury his friend. He should have felt relief, he thought. He had finally discharged a burden that would have weighed him down for the rest of his life. This definitive burial should have constituted the release papers that would enable him to take back his life. True, he had failed to ensure the heart’s survival, but at least its casing was where it belonged, where he wished it to remain and turn to dust. This should have been the beginning of a withdrawal, of closure, and perhaps even the commencement of mourning. It proved to be none of these. He had yet to experience grief as a dimension of Duyole’s absence, and the cause was unmistakably the intrusive demands placed on a bond by the unnatural conduct that followed Duyole’s passing. He was in fact left in limbo, rather like the restless spirits of legend whose deaths remain unappeased.