by Wole Soyinka
“The Brand of the Land?”
Sir Goddie’s smile was twisted. “The same. His firm consulted for us, you recall? Over the energy crisis. Well, while he was here, I had him set us up with his Austrian partners. Didn’t use their local people—no way! But he facilitated the process. Their experts came and set up the blocking system. Any eavesdropping bug and it zings nastily.” He pressed a button on the speakerphone on his desk. A red light came on, and a scratchy voice responded.
“Yes, People’s Steward?”
“Tell Merutali they can break for lunch whenever. Get Shekere to look after that item and make them thoroughly comfortable.”
“Yes, PS.”
“And I do not wish to be disturbed till I signal.”
“Very good, sir.”
Sir Goddie rose, disrobed himself of his voluminous agbada, leaving just the less cumbersome long-sleeved tunic. He began to roll his neck and shoulders like a gladiator about to enter a ring, resumed his seat, and sat facing Teribogo squarely.
“All right. I’m listening.”
Teribogo rose, began lifting the turbanlike headpiece, unwound the loose shawl that looped around his jaw, and arranged it all carefully on the corner of his side of the desk. His countenance changed to one of relief.
“Very good, Sir Goddie, here we go.”
“Drop the sir. We are alone. Just assume we are at the lodge.”
Teribogo shrugged. “I’ll bring you into the full operation. Just remember this, we are in this together.”
“But not all together. Bear that in mind.”
“Those are niceties. We sink or swim together.”
“At this stage, I do not need reminding,” replied the People’s Steward. “It’s two sides of the same coin. Yours the spiritual side, mine the political. The meeting point is business. But you have the advantage of me, because mine is time-bound. Just four more years to go—assuming we win, which is no assumption or my name is not Godfrey Danfere. But yours is guaranteed to go on and on and on and on. In the meantime we are put to pasture while you regulate your alliance with the newcomer. So remember that, Teribogo. It means I am likely to be more desperate. And right now I wield the power. Is that understood?”
Teribogo nodded. “Time we both laid our cards on the table, face-up. We should not work at cross purposes—there is far too much at stake. It’s not good for business.”
“That is exactly the kind of sound I like to hear.”
“Very well, I shall bring you up to date, beginning from the night before the explosion. A call came through to me at Ekumenika. It came on a dedicated number, known only to perhaps a dozen subscribers. It is used only in extremity—our cardinal rule, as I keep reminding you, is that we keep flesh away from the realm of the spirit. That way, each is protected against any weakness in the other. And so, receiving a call on that number, it could portend only something close to a catastrophe.
“The voice was that of a frightened young man whom I had personally recruited and trained on the job. All he said was, ‘Medina has fallen.’ ”
23.
Clash of the Titans
Student days over, followed by inevitable dispersals, the ancient Gong o’ Four mostly kept loose touch with one another—at least to begin with. Farodion was the first to vanish. He had always been the most prominent outsider—a badge that he carried with pride, often boasting that he would be an outsider even in a group of two. Except with the female sex, with which he was never short of company, yet even within those relationships he remained the outsider, and so the attachment never took root or lasted long. The closest in temperament was Badetona, but his detachment was of a different cast—it was simply that figures alone were his true friends and lovers. He had time for little else. Duyole, all acknowledged, was the gregarious hub, the mine of ideas that could be shared, not hoarded. No wonder they all gravitated around that hub, but of course his bond with Kighare was special. When the then student engineer found himself a designated father, the gang rallied round—Four for one, one for four, gong-ho! They shared the chores and the fallouts, mundane to the sensitive, such as who would notify Pop-of-Ages that he was again Grandpop-of-Ages, willy-nilly. He was exceedingly willy—an Austrian? An entire breathing and breeding Austrian in the family? He always knew that class called to class, pedigree to pedigree. He could hardly wait to visit his newly acquired in-laws and never understood why an invitation never arrived in the post or was conveyed by his son. He sent chocolates; they responded with the eau-de-vie called Korn. But there it ended.
There were lesser chores, such as the search for an immigrant versed in Yoruba tradition. Duyole desperately craved one for the naming ceremony, ideally one who knew where to find the sacred items—palm oil, kola nut, orogbo, camwood, etc.—for the newcomer’s induction. In the end they improvised. A student recited liturgy from an anthropology doctoral thesis that contained the odu of Ifá divination. And they dug out a willing employee at the embassy in Vienna who cooked Nigerian food, so an authentic Nigerian feast ushered the newborn into the world. Each in his own way ensured that the mother felt herself part of the close family of four. They accompanied Duyole when he took the child to parks, rode donkeys with him, turned up at the home to take him out to a passing circus, or simply donated entire afternoons out on the town. Divorce came not long after. The child’s mother remarried soon after. For them it merely imposed an additional charge—to ensure that the young one did not feel isolated or unwanted in the new home. They monitored him as he grew up, observed the commencement of character formation, especially his outlook on his personal situation.
Perhaps it was to be expected—young Damien soon took to blaming paternal abandonment for his indifference even to a modest achievement in studies. It alarmed them. Duyole kept in touch with the ex-wife as far as her new situation permitted. Education was primal to him; he ensured the young man’s financial comfort, even to the extent of compensatory indulgence, all through school and into university, until Damien chose to graduate as a confirmed dropout. Growing up, the young scion showed signs that he expected to be kept in the style to which he felt his father was accustomed.
That father became disillusioned. He was dealing with an adult parasite, who, despite being now married and the father of two children of his own in quick succession, still expected to be subsidized for life. The engineer wrote him off. The self-styled paternal collective progressively withdrew, but not entirely. One continued to study him, check on news about him until he himself vanished from sight—that was Farodion. He studied everyone, himself included, but not with any accuracy. Like the others, he identified a weak character, easily manipulated. He kept in touch with him, even bailed him out once or twice when he received a note from him in a tight spot—a shifting zone that was also second home to the budding marketing guru and man of many parts. It was Uncle Farodion who prodded the delicate intervention by Menka that eventually led to his father’s reaching out. Damien received an open invitation to try his paternal home as an alternative habitation and the chance of a steady career. And thus home came the prodigal son, his wife and children. Apart from the cloud of unremitting, barely disguised hostility from the wife’s aunt-in-law, Selina, and her halting proficiency in English, it was culture shock on all fronts. She soon abandoned an inclement environment and returned to her successful career in Graz, an Italian-speaking part of Austria. Damien remained behind, visiting from time to time, bringing his family home for the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.
The congenial environment of his father’s firm was not, however, without a strong dose of resentment. The young scion had assumed that he was brought back to be the heir-apparent, as the eldest and indeed only son. It was difficult adjusting to Duyole’s sense of a career ethic. The engineer made him begin at the bottom, like every new employee. Damien seethed at taking orders and being served formal queries by his superiors. He looked around, r
esolved to strike out on his own. He mixed with the expatriate community and soon felt totally at home with local life. His recruitment by talent scouts for any high-flying enterprise was limited only by his own choice—young Damien Pitan-Payne was very much in demand.
Engineer Duyole had a tenacious mind. He continued to worry the code—never mind his concession that the code was beyond his skills; nothing was further from the truth. It preyed on his mind, became a challenge. Being an electronic and micro-engineering fiend was not sufficient. One of his hobbies was crossword puzzles. As a student, he had also been a Scrabble champion in the two languages in which he operated, German and English. Even while his fingers toyed with some sensitive wiring on a modular board, his mind was engaged in acronyms and wordplay. Brand of the Land was his concoction; so was Gong of Four, not to mention minor lunch and dinner ditties such as tongs and tonsils, tongue and tonsils, and allied Muhammad Ali poetics. And thus for two or three nights after the visitation, a small cluster of letters he had deciphered from the charred pages continued to juggle and reform in his head, morphing into one another. Finally something coherent stuck. Quite ordinarily, he remarked on the coincidence to his wife, Bisoye—it was something he did all the time, bouncing off ideas and gestations. He continued to toss the word round his head. That word was median. Let it rest, Bisoye advised. You know it will all fall into place of its own accord.
At an unusually early hour the following morning, Duyole sat up in bed, eyes popping in his head. He scrambled out of bed, flew downstairs to his studio and straight to the shelves on which rested the heavy tomes of manufacturers’ bibles. He extracted one and dashed to his desk. Duyole was like a man possessed. He gathered up the scraps of paper on which he had scribbled word combinations and associated images. He resumed—this time with fingers working frenetically—his arrangements of word scraps on crisscrossing grids vertical, horizontal, thematic, random. He opened his fat volume of a long-forgotten German Medina technical cookbook—began to rearrange letters more methodically on the magnetic board he had unearthed from his junk shelves since he had taken possession of the scorched notebook…
Median: borders—separation and connection. Medina was a German invention. Duyole lifted the heavy pages. The description summed up his recollection: “pre- and post-processor…element analysis…” The clues flew up and hit him in the face! And they frightened him. The engineer calculated the odds of any local manufacturer being in possession of a tome he had secured as a student over thirty years before, a copy of its very first print run—not on open sale—when Daimler-Benz patented the system. Again his brain attempted to calculate the odds against any other firm being in possession of that pioneer edition. As he turned over heavily laminated pages with bristling multicoloured page flags, he began to encounter underlining, annotations, circles drawn around diagrams and photos of automotive and aerospace parts. He stopped at a marginal notation—CS followed by a figure; it was undoubtedly a page reference. “If CS does not stand for Codex Seraphinianus, then my name,” he muttered, “is not Aduyole Pitan-Payne!” Both Medina and Median—it leapt out without any effort—acronyms of one name: Damien! The two volumes acting together held the code, easy to access by cross-referencing, simply matching Codex images to the mechanical spare parts. It was ingenious, sophisticated—but also conceited.
Now, far more calmly, fully possessed of all his faculties, Duyole sat back and prodded himself into recall. He began with a number of unusual absences, strange callers on Damien, parcels arriving and vanishing through special delivery services. The young man had once requested a different office from his original allocation—and that was not long after joining Brand of the Land. As the son of the house, he was quietly accommodated—in any case, there was nothing unusual in a young expatriate requiring his own secluded space. He opted for a disused storage space with strong barred windows, supposedly suited to requirements of his specialized assignment. After all, he had been brought back home to Badagry under a highly confidential breakthrough with foreign partners, a discovery that was already a target for technological espionage by rival firms, from Western powers to North Korea—who were his colleagues to argue?
Damien’s activities noticeably intensified during Duyole’s prolonged stint in Abuja, where the boss was fully preoccupied with his government assignment. Damien established an aura of a hush-hush operation that brooked no interlopers. The space was off-limits to all, gradually opening out to tolerate a very select few, who in turn took on the airs of an elite, privileged cabal. The boss remained blissfully absorbed in the challenge of power production. His sole orders had been given: the new recruit was to be treated just as one of the junior executive staff. The few breaks that the engineer took to reoccupy Badagry found him in his penthouse office, taking critical decisions for Brand of the Land. The dramatic increase in parcel traffic—delivered and redirected—was beneath his radar. He did not, however, fail to remark the increased flashes of ostentatious wealth—a brand-new Mazda SUV, certainly beyond Damien’s means and earnings. He explained that it was a gift on his thirty-fifth birthday from his Graz wife. The father chose not to interfere. There were nights on the town, company with the children of billionaires, cruises and weekend parties on private yachts; only the rarest social heights were acceptable to the fastidious young executive. But above all there was the ease and rapidity with which the new entrant had slipped into the cream of society. It was as if he had arrived with an advance master key that opened every door, or a socialite chaperone dedicated to just that purpose, over and above anything even the Pitan-Payne family had ever known…Duyole stared down on a remorseless book of indictment—Millennium Towers as the epicenter of Codex transactions! A glorified meat mall for a steadily expanding clientele.
Only five more days before his departure, and the engineer spent more and more time in his studio, feverishly transcribing. What he encountered was no less than a roll call of names, and assigns of the infamous Okija shrine in Anambra State, eastern Nigeria, a saga that had transfixed the nation on its necrophiliac exposure some ten to twenty years before. The most riveting aspect of the Okija cult was that its members were compelled, by fearsome oaths, to donate their remains to the shrine after death. It was an unbreakable commitment, it appeared, as irrevocable as the oaths administered to recruited prostitutes, most conspicuously from a sister state, Edo. Thereafter the recruits, mostly young and vulnerable, committed to serve the exotic needs of Europe and other destinations. So compelling were the oaths that young girls, once trapped in the trade, feared not only for their lives and sanity but for those of their families if they even thought of breaking their terms of service. It took the equally revered traditional ruler, the Oba of Benin, to challenge the state of enslavement. The Oba performed a mass public exorcism ritual, in which he attempted to liberate the girls from their oaths, then place their “managers” and madams under a complimentary curse.
The gruesome feature of the Okija shrine was that the corpses were never buried but condemned to lie exposed in open air, some in their coffins—the upper class, perhaps?—but still exposed until they decayed, dessicated, and then—what? In return, members asked for whatever was their innermost desire—wealth, children, fame, power, position, American lottery win, women, or whatever. The roll call, it was alleged, included a former head of state or two. This was not a mumbo-jumbo, cockatoo-feather, dried-leather-thong, cowrie-and-tortoiseshell operation but a sophisticated, bureaucratized enterprise, every bit as methodical as the Otunba’s Lindtz chocolate outlet service. It kept records, meticulous ledgers of payments and dues, names and addresses with signatures—and thumbprints. Its carapace of secrecy was cracked, however, when the governorship of Anambra came under contention—not before or during elections but after, with a declared winner. The successful aspirant found himself kidnapped, detained, then locked in a toilet until he fulfilled conditions imposed by Okija for taking up his governance reins.
Th
e luckless technocrat was saved by a sympathetic police sergeant turned gaoler, who found his oath of office bombarded by the intolerable clamour of conscience. He aided the governor’s escape. In the interest of his own safety, the endangered incumbent let out a squawk that was heard in the Urals, fled to the protection of a counterforce of the spiritual realm—his church—unburdened himself, and underwent purification rites. The chief of police, for whom it appeared merely a routine summons to duty—there was a clear break in the communication chain—raided the domain, scattered its sacred contents wider than King Pentheus the crow feathers and other sacred appurtenances of the shrines of Tiresias in the Bacchantes.
To his chagrin, Mr. C of P found himself called to order by authorities beyond his understanding. Too late, the marauding innocent had already revealed publicly that he had taken possession of the Okija register of membership and that the nation would be shaken by its list of subscibers. Thereafter the nation was abandoned within a cocoon of silence. The police chief, no raving innocent himself, later found himself dangling on the rope of indictment—billions had entered his personal accounts, of which there were many. The accounts, never touched by himself, were administered by ghostly signatories, serving as conduits to other mysterious accounts, which petered out like rivulets into parched outlets of insatiable irrigation fields. He was indicted, convicted, and sentenced to a derisive spell of imprisonment. For good measure, a fine was also imposed, which could barely cover the cost of a calabash of stale palm wine.
That history, long forgotten, speeded Duyole’s mastery of the encryption. As he decoded name after name, place after place, sum after sum, item on item, all was laid plain; the pioneer manifest of Human Resources had merely entered the ultramodern spreadsheet age. He could read the rest blindfolded and sleepwalking.