Under African Skies

by Charles Larson

  The death of a cook became one of those events that muster everyone’s curiosity. If it was the shooting of a public figure, nobody would have cared. That was something to be expected. But a cook. A simple and humble cook. Unfeigning and innocent. How could ignorance have led to such cruel sport? A plain cook so draped with sweet everydayness that everyone would have wanted to pick these qualities and swallow. Chei!8 How could such innocent terror have evaded the responsibilities of a mutually human-regarding society?

  A few days later, the Head of State had come over the National Radio and expressed his grief. Small indeed was beautiful. And everybody knew that. For where in the world would the Head of State express his sorrow publicly over the shooting of a cook? All over the world, children have died of napalm. Sometimes even from the napalm of starvation. But who gives a damn? All over, priests have been shot, their efforts frustrated and their convictions nullified. Innocent women and children kidnapped, terrorized, and thrown into the careless trash bins of the streets. So why would a Head of State express his grief over the shooting of a cook in a world accustomed to treachery, murder, and blood? Chei! Only in Kololi could that happen.

  The Tambedou family had mourned for days. For them, the Head of State’s gesture was at best one of public relations. Beyond that, it was empty. The Head of State was on the side of the merchants and therefore of the Lebanese. He had manured the ground for their success and given them the lantern light for their abuse of every norm of acceptable behavior. The catalogue of Lebanese misbehavior was lengthy—from receiving mostfavored treatment from the banks and from all respectable government institutions to the rude flouting of local customs to sometimes engaging in incest and drugs. They picked the leanest meat from the markets and arrogantly displayed their wealth with unrefined alacrity. And as in Kololi, so was it all over the region.

  “These Lebanese,” remarked Badou, the younger Tambedou, “they think they own Africa. I heard that in Sierra Leone they run the state.”

  “I am not surprised,” commented a friend.

  “I even heard of one of them … a powerful one … in Sierra Leone, who had his private plane, private airport, and private bank.”

  “And I’m sure private army!”

  They chuckled in a cynical laughter. Their faces locked in silent agreement.

  “They run states within our states,” continued the younger Tambedou. “In Sierra Leone, that rich Lebanese is so powerful that he tells the Head of State what to do. And so when the Lebanese speaks, everyone, including the boss of the government, listens.”

  “But how can our countries function like that?”

  “You tell me, I swear to God.”

  A silent pause. A moment of meditative thought-gathering. A strange glow of helplessness glimmered on their faces. Helplessness like someone with a thirst to quench, in the middle of a desert: the desert of human anguish.

  “How can our society allow this? For my father to vanish like the flame of a matchstick?”

  “This is grab-bag independence, you know. The gold diggers receive soft strokes from the state.”

  “No matter for human blood spilled?”

  “No matter. Human nature is like a prostitute here. It can sleep with whoever pays for the bed.”

  The cook had been buried. The burial, a protest ritual. It could have happened to any private Kololian, it seemed. The oscillations of arrogance supported by the pillars with pearls could not match the angelic force of a people bent to assert their essence in the ceremonial catharsis of a society of hydra-headed leaders and gold-worshipping back scratchers. All works of life came, exuded their support, washed their grief in the festival of the affirmation of life.

  Weeks after the burial, the younger Tambedou filed a suit against Fouad Aziz. The storms gathered their force as Fouad’s father hired one of the best lawyers in Kololi to defend his son. The younger Tambedou had no money, and therefore was up for a scorpion fight. He had decided to fight for a New Earth and did not care about the repercussions. Hurricanes may strike, he thought to himself. Even hack the branches to which soothsayers cling. But the vision of the New Earth is more noble than the fears of the moment.

  The trial was held at Bul Falleh9 Courthouse. Bul Falleh used to be called Borom Hallis.10 But after independence, the Kololian officials changed the name, for reasons of not being too explicit about the hidden agenda of the court. The courthouse was packed like a sports stadium or a street sabarr. 11 The walls of the court appeared garish, combining whitewash with peeling blue paint and suspended cobwebs. The buzz word for the ill appearance of the courts was “austerity.” The judge sat behind a huge and brightly polished wooden structure. On his left was a witness box, in which the plaintiff and the defendant presented their cases. The court audience listened attentively and gave a loud applause when Fouad’s defense lawyer bamboozled the judge in a fit of eloquent and persuasive argument, invoking specific passages from ihe Kololian constitution.

  The accused denied his guilt, contending that the killing was an accident.

  “But why would you point a weapon, of all things a gun that is loaded, at an innocent human being?”

  “It was an accident, your honor.”

  “An accident? Pointing a live weapon at a living person?”

  “Yes, your honor. You know …”

  “I know what? Answer my question!”

  “You know … the gun is often locked in my father’s safe. It was the late Koto Tambedou who unlocked it and let me have it.”

  “He is lying!” the young Tambedou interrupted. Then he was hushed by the judge and admonished to order.

  “Continue your testimony,” the judge commanded.

  “Well, that’s all I have to say, your honor.”

  In the interim, Fouad’s lawyer stood up and made a case for the latter’s innocence.

  “Your honor, you can see from my client’s testimony that there was no willful intention to kill. My client was a victim of the late cook’s negligence. By deliberately opening a regularly locked safe and releasing a loaded gun to this inexperienced young man, he willfully assumed some risks. I contend that the young man be exonerated from the criminal accusations.”

  There was silence in the court. The younger Tambedou stared fiercely into the eyes of the Aziz family. His heart pounded faster as he waited for the judge to return with a decision. The court audience was split in their loyalties. The half that sided with the younger Tambedou waited with bated breath for the spinning coin to turn in their favor. But they had not known about the plaintiff’s father unlocking a safe. This point added ambiguity to a case that his admirers reasonably thought was a foregone conclusion.

  The judge returned and declared Fouad acquitted. He praised Fouad for his conduct in the court, which he labeled with such adjectives as “orderly and well-mannered” and “somebody predisposed to exercise reasonable care.” Fouad’s entourage of supporters stood up and hugged each other in a fit of merriment immediately as the judge finished his last word. The younger Tambedou received handshakes of encouragement from his supporters, some of whom stared bitterly at the grizzled mustache of Fouad’s father. The younger Tambedou himself shifted his eyes around and flashed them on the dictatorial face of the judge. He swallowed his saliva in optimism and walked gracefully out of the courtroom.

  —1988

  Ken Saro-Wiwa

  (1941-95) NIGERIA

  Shortly before his execution by hanging on November 10, 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa wrote: “Literature in a critical situation such as Nigeria’s cannot be divorced from politics. Indeed, literature must serve society by steeping itself in politics, by intervention, and writers must not merely write to amuse or to take a bemused, critical look at society. They must play an interventionist role … The writer must be l’homme engagé: the intellectual man of action.” Saro-Wiwa did not realize that these words would be his obituary.

  Saro-Wiwa’s execution by Nigerian authorities was swift and brutal, a travesty of human right
s and a failure of international diplomacy. Writers rarely go gentle into that good night, but Saro-Wiwa’s murder will certainly go down in the record as despicable. The inexperienced hangman brought in for the occasion attempted to hang the poor man five times before he succeeded. Saro-Wiwa had spent the previous two years being moved from prison to prison by Nigerian authorities because of his outspoken defense of his people, the Ogonis, and for protesting against the ecological destruction of their homelands by the international oil cartels, most notably Shell Oil.

  Before his death, Saro-Wiwa was one of the most popular Nigerian literary figures of recent times. He had been a newspaper columnist for many years, and also published his own creative works, including books written for the primary-school market. Novels, poems, and plays—he excelled in all these forms, though his most famous novel, Sozaboy (1985), was not available in a Western edition until 1994. His enormous popularity in Nigeria, however, was largely the result of his immensely successful soap opera, Basi & Co., which ran on Nigerian TV from 1985 to 1990. Saro-Wiwa wrote 150 episodes for the series.

  Before he became a writer, Saro-Wiwa was a schoolteacher and a businessman in his family’s grocery business. These endeavors occupied him during most of the 1970s, but the event that radicalized him and led him to take up the Ogoni cause occurred in the 1960s, when Nigeria cracked apart during the Civil War, or the Biafran War, as it is also called. At the outbreak of the fighting, Saro-Wiwa found himself in the wrong place, in Ibo secessionist territory. His sympathies, however, were with the Nigerian government, because he feared that oil-rich Ogoniland had become a political football. (By 1980, only 1.5 percent of the oil proceeds found their way back to the Ogonis. Most of the profits were siphoned off into the pockets of the country’s military leaders. The Ogonis had “no representation whatsoever in all institutions of the Federal government of Nigeria,” no electricity, no pipeborne water.)

  Sozaboy was carved out of the author’s experiences and observations during the Civil War. William Boyd has called the book “a great anti-war novel—among the very best of the twentieth century.” The novel’s unforgettable opening sentence fragment dangles in the air, holding the reader breathless and begging for more: “Although, everybody in Dukana was happy at first.”

  In his posthumously published volume, A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary (1996), Saro-Wiwa recorded many of the events of the last year and a half of his life, though he did not describe his final imprisonment. Of the plight of his Ogoni people he wrote: “The silence of Nigeria’s social reformers, writers and legal men over this issue is deafening. Therefore, the affected peoples must immediately gird their loins and demand without equivocation their rightful patrimony. They must not be frightened by the enormity of the task, by the immorality of the present. History and world opinion are on their side.”

  AFRICA KILLS HER SUN

  Dear Zole,

  You’ll be surprised, no doubt, to receive this letter. But I couldn’t leave your beautiful world without saying goodbye to you who are condemned to live in it. I know that some might consider my gesture somewhat pathetic, as my colleagues, Sazan and Jimba, do, our finest moments having been achieved two or three weeks ago. However, for me, this letter is a celebration, a final act of love, a quality which, in spite of my career, in spite of tomorrow morning, I do possess in abundance, and cherish. For I’ve always treasured the many moments of pleasure we spent together in our youth when the world was new and fishes flew in golden ponds. In the love we then shared have I found happiness, a true resting place, a shelter from the many storms that have buffeted my brief life. Whenever I’ve been most alone, whenever I’ve been torn by conflict and pain, I’ve turned to that love for the resolution which has sustained and seen me through. This may surprise you, considering that this love was never consummated and that you may possibly have forgotten me, not having seen me these ten years gone. I still remember you, have always remembered you, and it’s logical that on the night before tomorrow, I should write you to ask a small favor of you. But more important, the knowledge that I have unburdened myself to you will make tomorrow morning’s event as pleasant and desirable to me as to the thousands of spectators who will witness it.

  I know this will get to you because the prison guard’s been heavily bribed to deliver it. He should rightly be with us before the firing squad tomorrow. But he’s condemned, like most others, to live, to play out his assigned role in your hell of a world. I see him burning out his dull, uncomprehending life, doing his menial job for a pittance and a bribe for the next so many years. I pity his ignorance and cannot envy his complacency. Tomorrow morning, with this letter and our bribe in his pocket, he’ll call us out, Sazan, Jimba and I. As usual, he’ll have all our names mixed up: he always calls Sazan “Sajim” and Jimba “Samba.” But that won’t matter. We’ll obey him, and as we walk to our death, we’ll laugh at his gaucherie, his plain stupidity. As we laughed at that other thief, the High Court Judge.

  You must’ve seen that in the papers too. We saw it, thanks to our bribetaking friend, the prison guard, who sent us a copy of the newspaper in which it was reported. Were it not in an unfeeling nation, among a people inured to evil and taking sadistic pleasure in the loss of life, some questions might have been asked. No doubt, many will ask the questions, but they will do it in the safety and comfort of their homes, over the interminable bottles of beer, uncomprehendingly watching their boring, cheap television programs, the rejects of Europe and America, imported to fill their vacuity. They will salve their conscience with more bottles of beer, wash the answers down their gullets and pass question, conscience and answer out as waste into their open sewers choking with concentrated filth and murk. And they will forget.

  I bet, though, the High Court Judge himself will never forget. He must remember it the rest of his life. Because I watched him closely that first morning. And I can’t describe the shock and disbelief which I saw registered on his face. His spectacles fell to his table and it was with difficulty he regained composure. It must have been the first time in all his experience that he found persons arraigned on a charge for which the punishment upon conviction is death, entering a plea of guilty and demanding that they be sentenced and shot without further delay.

  Sazan, Jimba and I had rehearsed it carefully. During the months we’d been remanded in prison custody while the prosecutors prepared their case, we’d agreed we weren’t going to allow a long trial, or any possibility that they might impose differing sentences upon us: freeing one, sentencing another to life imprisonment and the third to death by firing squad.

  Nor did we want to give the lawyers in their funny black funeral robes an opportunity to clown around, making arguments for pleasure, engaging in worthless casuistry. No. We voted for death. After all, we were armed robbers, bandits. We knew it. We didn’t want to give the law a chance to prove itself the proverbial ass. We were being honest to ourselves, to our vocation, to our country and to mankind.

  “Sentence us to death immediately and send us before the firing squad without further delay,” we yelled in unison. The Judge, after he had recovered from his initial shock, asked us to be taken away that day, “for disturbing my court.” I suppose he wanted to see if we’d sleep things over and change our plea. We didn’t. When they brought us back the next day, we said the same thing in louder voice. We said we had robbed and killed. We were guilty. Cool. The Judge was bound hand and foot and did what he had to. We’d forced him to be honest to his vocation, to the laws of the country and to the course of justice. It was no mean achievement. The court hall was stunned; our guards were utterly amazed as we walked out of court, smiling. “Hardened criminals.” “Bandits,” I heard them say as we trooped out of the court. One spectator actually spat at us as we walked into the waiting Black Maria!

  And now that I’ve confessed to banditry, you’ll ask why I did it. I’ll answer that question by retelling the story of the young, beautiful prostitute I met in St. Pauli in Hamburg when our ship
berthed there years back. I’ve told my friends the story several times. I did ask her, after the event, why she was in that place. She replied that some girls chose to be secretaries in offices, others to be nurses. She had chosen prostitution as a career. Cool. I was struck by her candor. And she set me thinking. Was I in the Merchant Navy by choice or because it was the first job that presented itself to me when I left school? When we returned home, I skipped ship, thanks to the prostitute of St. Pauli, and took a situation as a clerk in the Ministry of Defense.

  It was there I came face-to-face with the open looting of the national treasury, the manner of which I cannot describe without arousing in myself the deepest, basest emotions. Everyone was busy at it and there was no one to complain to. Everyone to whom I complained said to me: “If you can’t beat them, join them.” I was not about to join anyone; I wanted to beat them and took it upon myself to wage a war against them. In no time they had gotten rid of me. Dismissed me. I had no option but to join them then. I had to make a choice. I became an armed robber, a bandit. It was my choice, my answer. And I don’t regret it.