by Rob Spillman
“So I told him—look, I know who the writer is, he is one of the prisoners, isn’t he? That surprised him. He couldn’t figure out how I knew. But I was glad he didn’t deny it. I told him that. And if we are getting married, there shouldn’t be secrets between us, should there?”
Ah, I thought, so my Sappho has worked the magic. Aloud I said, “Congratulations.”
She nodded. “Thanks. Muftau is a nice person, really, when you get to know him. His son, Farouk, was in my class—he’s finished now—really, you should see them together. So touching. I know he has his awkward side, and that he was once married—but I don’t care. After all, I have a little past too. Who doesn’t?” she added the last quickly, as if scared she was revealing too much to a stranger. Her left hand went up and down as she spoke, like a hypnotist, like a conductor. After a brief pause, she continued, “After all the pain he’s been through with his other wife, he deserves some happiness. She was in the hospital a whole year before she died.”
Muftau. The superintendent had a name, and a history, maybe even a soul. I looked at his portrait hanging on the wall. He looked young in it, serious-faced and smart, like the cadet warders outside. I turned to her and said suddenly and sincerely, “I am glad you came. Thanks.”
Her face broke into a wide, dimpled smile. She was actually pretty. A little past her prime, past her sell-by date, but still nice, still viable. “Oh, no. I am the one that should be glad. I love meeting poets. I love your poems. Really I do.”
“Not all of them are mine.”
“I know—but you give them a different feel, a different tone. And also, I discovered your S.O.S. I had to come . . .” She picked the poems off the table and handed them to me. There were thirteen of them. Seven were my originals, six were purloined. She had carefully underlined in red ink certain lines of them—the same line, actually, recurring.
There was a waiting-to-be-congratulated smile on her face as she awaited my comment.
“You noticed,” I said.
“Of course I did. S.O.S. It wasn’t apparent at first. I began to notice the repetition with the fifth poem. ‘Save my soul, a prisoner.’ ”
“Save my soul, a prisoner” . . . The first time I put down the words, in the third poem, it had been non-deliberate, I was just making alliteration. Then I began to repeat it in the subsequent poems. But how could I tell her that the message wasn’t really for her, or for anyone else? It was for myself, perhaps, written by me to my own soul, to every other soul, the collective soul of the universe.
I told her, the first time I wrote it an inmate had died. His name was Thomas. He wasn’t sick. He just started vomiting after the afternoon meal, and before the warders came to take him to the clinic, he died. Just like that. He died. Watching his stiffening face, with the mouth open and the eyes staring, as the inmates took him out of the cell, an irrational fear had gripped me. I saw myself being taken out like that, my lifeless arms dangling, brushing the ground. The fear made me sit down, shaking uncontrollably amidst the flurry of movements and voices excited by the tragedy. I was scared. I felt certain I was going to end up like that. Have you ever felt like that, certain that you are going to die? No? I did. I was going to die. My body would end up in some anonymous mortuary, and later in an unmarked grave, and no one would know. No one would care. It happens every day here. I am a political detainee; if I die I am just one antagonist less. That was when I wrote the S.O.S. It was just a message in a bottle, thrown without much hope into the sea . . . I stopped speaking when my hands started to shake. I wanted to put them in my pocket to hide them from her. But she had seen it. She left her seat and came to me. She took both my hands in hers.
“You’ll not die. You’ll get out alive. One day it will be all over,” she said. Her perfume, mixed with her female smell, rose into my nostrils: flowery, musky. I had forgotten the last time a woman had stood so close to me. Sometimes, in our cell, when the wind blows from the female prison, we’ll catch distant sounds of female screams and shouts and even laughter. That is the closest we ever come to women. Only when the wind blows, at the right time, in the right direction. Her hands on mine, her smell, her presence, acted like fire on some huge, prehistoric glacier locked deep in my chest. And when her hand touched my head and the back of my neck, I wept.
When the superintendent returned, my sobbing face was buried in Janice’s ample bosom. Her hands were on my head, patting, consoling, like a mother, all the while cooing softly, “One day it will finish.”
I pulled away from her. She gave me her handkerchief.
“What is going on? Why is he crying?”
He was standing just within the door—his voice was curious, with a hint of jealousy. I wiped my eyes; I subdued my body’s spasms. He advanced slowly into the room and went round to his seat. He remained standing, his hairy hands resting on the table.
“Why is he crying?” he repeated to Janice.
“Because he is a prisoner,” Janice replied simply. She was still standing beside me, facing the superintendent.
“Well. So? Is he realizing that just now?”
“Don’t be so unkind, Muftau.”
I returned the handkerchief to her.
“Muftau, you must help him.”
“Help. How?”
“You are the prison superintendent. There’s a lot you can do.”
“But I can’t help him. He is a political detainee. He has not even been tried.”
“And you know that he is never going to be tried. He will be kept here for ever, forgotten.” Her voice became sharp and indignant. The superintendent drew back his seat and sat down. His eyes were lowered. When he looked up, he said earnestly, “Janice. There’s nothing anyone can do for him. I’ll be implicating myself. Besides, his lot is far easier than that of the other inmates. I give him things. Cigarettes. Soap. Books. And I let him. Write.”
“How can you be so unfeeling! Put yourself in his shoes—two years away from friends, from family, without the power to do anything you wish to do. Two years in CHAINS! How can you talk of cigarettes and soap, as if that were substitute enough for all that he has lost?” She was like a teacher confronting an erring student. Her left hand tapped the table for emphasis as she spoke.
“Well.” He looked cowed. His scowl alternated rapidly with a smile. He stared at his portrait on the wall behind her. He spoke in a rush. “Well. I could have done something. Two weeks ago. The Amnesty International. People came. You know, white men. They wanted names of. Political detainees held. Without trial. To pressure the government to release them.”
“Well?”
“Well.” He still avoided her stare. His eyes touched mine and hastily passed. He picked up a pen and twirled it between his fingers. The pen slipped out of his fingers and fell to the floor.
“I didn’t. Couldn’t. You know . . . I thought he was comfortable. And, he was writing the poems, for you . . .” His voice was almost pleading. Surprisingly, I felt no anger towards him. He was just Man. Man in his basic, rudimentary state, easily moved by powerful emotions like love, lust, anger, greed and fear, but totally dumb to the finer, acquired emotions like pity, mercy, humour and justice.
Janice slowly picked up her bag from the table. There was enormous dignity to her movements. She clasped the bag under her left arm. Her words were slow, almost sad. “I see now that I’ve made a mistake. You are not really the man I thought you were . . .”
“Janice.” He stood up and started coming round to her, but a gesture stopped him.
“No. Let me finish. I want you to contact these people. Give them his name. If you can’t do that, then forget you ever knew me.”
Her hand brushed my arm as she passed me. He started after her, then stopped halfway across the room. We stared in silence at the curtained doorway, listening to the sound of her heels on the bare floor till it finally died away. He returned slowly to his seat and slumped into it. The wood creaked audibly in the quiet office.
“Go,” he said, not
looking at me.
The above is the last entry in Lomba’s diary. There’s no record of how far the superintendent went to help him regain his freedom, but as he told Janice, there was very little to be done for a political detainee—especially since, about a week after that meeting, a coup was attempted against the military leader, General Sani Abacha, by some officers close to him. There was an immediate crackdown on all pro-democracy activists, and the prisons all over the country swelled with political detainees. A lot of those already in detention were transferred randomly to other prisons around the country, for security reasons. Lomba was among them. He was transferred to Agodi Prison in Ibadan. From there he was moved to the far north, to a small desert town called Gashuwa. There is no record of him after that.
A lot of these political prisoners died in detention, although the prominent ones made the headlines—people like Moshood Abiola and General Yar Adua.
But somehow it is hard to imagine that Lomba died. A lot seems to point to the contrary. His diary, his economical expressions show a very sedulous character at work. A survivor. The years in prison must have taught him not to hope too much, not to despair too much—that for the prisoner, nothing kills as surely as too much hope or too much despair. He had learned to survive in tiny atoms, piecemeal, a day at a time. It is probable that in 1998, when the military dictator Abacha died, and his successor, General Abdulsalam Abubakar, dared to open the gates to democracy, and to liberty for the political detainees, Lomba was in the ranks of those released.
This might have been how it happened: Lomba was seated in a dingy cell in Gashuwa, his eyes closed, his mind soaring above the glass-studded prison walls, mingling with the stars and the rain in elemental union of freedom; then the door clanked open, and when he opened his eyes Liberty was standing over him, smiling kindly, extending an arm.
And Liberty said softly, “Come. It is time to go.”
And they left, arm in arm.
MOHAMMED NASEEHU ALI
• Ghana •
THE MANHOOD TEST
ON THE DAY of Mr. Rafique’s manhood test, he woke up at half past three in the morning. He had barely slept, haunted in a dream by images of a market scene, where a group of old women hawked phalluses of every size, shape, and color. He remained lying on the hard-foamed couch in the sitting room, where he had slept for the past week. He pressed his limp penis gently—the way doctors press blood pressure bulbs—hoping it would become fully erect, something he had not seen for three whole weeks.
Mr. Rafique came alert on hearing the loud crows of roosters in the courtyard, and was suddenly overpowered by the crippling fear that had tormented him since the day, about a week ago, when his wife accused him of unmanliness at the chief’s palace on Zongo Street. To verify the wife’s allegations, the chief’s alkali, or judge, had ordered Mr. Rafique to take the manhood test, a process that required Mr. Rafique to sleep with his wife before an appointed invigilator.
The test was scheduled for half past four this afternoon, and the mere thought of being naked with his wife and in the presence of a third person made Mr. Rafique’s body numb. He brushed the fingers of his left hand around the edge of his penis. “Why are you treating me so?” he whispered to himself. “Eh, tell me! Why are you treating me so?” He lifted his head from the pillow to look at his crotch, as though he had expected the penis to answer. “What am I going to do, yá Allah!” he said, his voice now just above a whisper. “What am I going to do if I fail?”
Mr. Rafique lifted his arms and silently began to pray in the most distant region of his heart, where no one—not even the two angels said to be guarding each mortal day and night—could hear him. He prayed for a miracle to transform his limp phallus into a bouncing, fully erect one; he begged Allah to steer his destiny clear of the imminent humiliation that threatened to put him and his family to shame.
Mr. Rafique had been married for a little over eight months to a young but worldly woman named Zulaikha. Zulai, as she was called affectionately, was the last of four daughters of Baba Mina, a rich transportation business owner who used to live on Zongo Street. Like other once-very-poor-and-suddenly-turned-rich types, Baba Mina had moved to Nhyiaso, an expensive suburb of Kumasi, as soon as he became wealthy enough. He and his family visited their Zongo Street clan-house only on weekends or whenever there was an important social function.
Zulaikha had been raised a spoiled child. Her parents—her mother especially—never denied her things she desired. She wore expensive blouses and skirts instead of the traditional wrapper and danchiki worn by girls her age. And while some of her schoolmates drank water to quench both hunger and thirst during lunch break, Zulai ate boiled eggs and drank Fanta instead. At twelve, she had stood as the tallest girl among her age mates. She was slender, with a curvaceous figure that sent the eyes of men darting wherever she walked. Her thighs were muscular, supported by her long, athletic calves. Zulai also had deep, sensuous lips and eyes that were as clear as the moon at its brightest. Her cheeks were lean and dimpled, her eyebrows dark and silky. Her hair was always “permed,” or straightened, its length touching her broad shoulders. By the time she was fourteen, Zulaikha’s blouses could no longer contain her large breasts.
Her beauty, coupled with her family’s riches, turned her into the most popular and desired teenager among the young men on Zongo Street. Before long, all the rich Muslim men in the city were knocking at her family’s door, seeking the young girl’s hand in marriage. Her father had planned to marry her off by the time she was sixteen, the usual marriage age for girls; but to the father’s shock and disappointment, Zulai one by one rejected the dozen or so suitors he and his clan chose for her. She refused to even see the men when they called, and she even went so far as to threaten killing herself if forced to marry a man she didn’t choose herself. Her family then asked her to bring home her own suitor, but she told them point blank that she was not ready to marry until she had finished middle school. Such a thing was unheard of from a girl on Zongo Street.
As all of this unraveled, the street’s young men were on a quest to see who would be the first to sleep with Zulaikha. And it wasn’t long before one of them succeeded. His name was Muntari, a twenty-one-year-old disco-goer and school dropout who three years later found himself in the middle of a scandal when Zulaikha married his uncle, Mr. Rafique, who lived in the same compound with the young man.
Not long after her first sexual experience, Zulaikha quickly turned into a “sex monster,” as some called her. Wild stories about her encounters with men abounded on the street. One was about how she slept with six men, who mounted her one after the other, but she was still left unsatisfied. Another story related how she had sex with a young man until he fainted and fell sick afterwards. Soon Zulaikha’s loose sexual behaviour began to drag her clan’s name in the mud. Her father then insisted she bring home a suitor, or he would marry her off to the man of his choice. By now most of the men who had earlier sought Zulaikha’s hand had left off their pursuit of her, afraid the girl’s bad name might tarnish their reputations. A few of them persisted, though, and Mr. Rafique was one of them.
Zulaikha knew from the start that most of the men who sought her hand were rich men with two or three wives already, a practice sanctioned by Islam, the street’s predominant religion. The idea of competing for a man’s attention with two or three other women, along with its concomitant sexual starvation, seemed repugnant and stifling to Zulai. So, even though Mr. Rafique was only a temporary clerk at a local shea-nut butter co-operative union, he was the one she preferred. She was confident that her father would give him capital to start his own business, or at least offer him a position in his transport company. The truth was, Zulai had a genuine fascination for Mr. Rafique—and because of that not even the knowledge of Mr. Rafique’s illegitimate child, Najim, a seven-year-old-boy who lived with his mother on Roman Hill, was enough to change her mind about him. Friends and a few family members tipped Zulai that Najim’s mother was a jilted l
over, who was still in love with Mr. Rafique and may cause her problems down the line in her marriage. But Zulai merely brushed this aside. Zulai was also captivated by the fact that, unlike all the other suitors, Mr. Rafique was somewhat educated. He had attended school only up to Form Four (the equivalent of twelfth grade), but on a street like Zongo, where most of the folks never stepped foot in an English school classroom, Mr. Rafique and a few others were like one-eyed kings in the kingdom of the blind. But most importantly, Zulai was attracted to Mr. Rafique’s handsome appearance. She liked the blazers and suits he wore, even on extremely hot days. In short, he conformed to her ideal of the handsome man: not too tall and not too short either, and definitely without a pot belly, which she abhorred.
Not long after Zulai mentioned Mr. Rafique to her family, rumor reached their ears that he was a drunkard. The family didn’t worry too much about the rumor, hoping that, “even if it were true, he will change his ways once he is married and saddled with the responsibility of looking after a family of his own,” as Baba Mina said.
At the time of the wedding, Zulaikha was nineteen, three years older than the age at which most girls were married. She was only two years shy of finishing middle school, and some among Baba Mina’s clan pleaded that he allow her to finish, but the father said to them, “Of what use would schooling be to a woman? She is going to end up in the kitchen, after all!” With those words, the father sealed off the mouths of those who pleaded with him. Customary rituals were hastily carried out after that, paving the way for the marriage ceremony, which turned out to be one of the grandest functions the city of Kumasi had ever seen. Not that anyone expected less from the bride’s wealthy father.
The marriage was on shaky ground from the very beginning. Certain things Zulaikha had not given any thought to before suddenly developed into uncomfortable situations that were rife with the potential of creating serious problems for the marriage. The first involved having to live in the same compound as Muntari, the young man who had deflowered her. Although Muntari’s room was located outside the main compound, he went inside at least twice each day to fetch hot bath-water in the mornings and to pick up his supper in the evenings. And as much as Zulai attempted to ignore Muntari’s presence in the compound, the two still ran into each other. Now a married woman, Zulai was quite embarrassed about this situation and lived with the constant fear of her pre-marital affair with Muntari being leaked out to her husband.
