Suddenly Ade pulled out a wooden box.
‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Open it!’
Inside were rows and rows of stamps representing letters of the alphabet. They were arranged in no order I could perceive, neither alphabetical nor, I suspected, into words. We sat on the ground with the printer’s set open at our feet.
‘Pick one,’ Ade said, pointing to the letters.
‘Which?’
‘Your favourite.’
Forgetting Babatundi, I passed my fingers over the set, feeling the raised pattern of the letters. Unable to read, I knew them principally as shapes, and yet I had an idea of the sound they made. As I pointed to each letter, Ade voiced its sound. I paused over the a. There was something attractive about it. I felt it belonged wholly to my friend. I knew other words beginning with A, but I had come to think of these as steeped or tinted in his character, as a puddle takes on the colour of the sky.
‘Choose one,’ Ade said, and, laughing, I reached and took the p. It was surprisingly heavy. I held it up to the light. Then without warning Ade took it from me and stamped it on my arm. The ink made my skin tingle.
‘Choose another,’ Ade said, and I picked the b, because of the marvellous symmetry, and because I liked its curved belly, and because at that moment it seemed to me the greatest friend I could ever have. This time, aware of the game, I handed it to Ade, who stamped it on the same arm, higher up, just below my elbow. Again, my skin prickled and shivered.
Now it was Ade’s turn to pick a letter. He chose the A. What was there to do but take it and stamp it on him? His arm quivered, and he raised it to the light. The ink was having an effect on him, penetrating his skin perhaps, giving him a pleasant feeling. He looked around to make sure Babatundi was still occupied with the dancing girl, and when he saw he was rubbing his loins back and forth on the ground, he picked another letter – D – which I took and stamped on him. One after another, we chose letters and stamped them all over our arms, laughing, setting our skins alight.
But now Babatundi’s moaning grew in intensity, and I looked over and all at once I thought of the crackling thistles and the sap glistening on the grasses.
‘We had better get back,’ Ade said, and began to gather the stamps and put them back in their box.
I gazed at my arm; there they were, the small, dark letters, scattered from my elbow to my wrist. I shivered with delight.
‘Wait,’ I said and held up my arm. I let my finger run over the letters, and Ade named them: ‘S … n … D … a … t … r … B … d … o … a … e … v.’
I pointed to the final two letters again.
‘e,’ said Ade, ‘v.’
That is how I acquired my name.
13
Map of the World, 2: Massacre at Benin
Autumn has arrived. In my attic the air crackles with cold. Whenever the wind blows with extra force, the ceiling, long since rotten within, and yellowed by Father’s tobacco smoke, rains down on me a kind of mustard dust or pollen. At the far end from where I sit, the roof has started to buckle, no doubt beginning to cave in. To the left, at knee-height, a crack has appeared in the boards. I have papered over it with sheets of old newspaper, but the wind blows them unstuck, and they flap violently against the wood. Sometimes, leaning my head against the wall, breathing deeply from tiredness, my hair a matted mass of curls, I think about how much of my history there is still to record. I think about my papers, which are scattered in the attic: novels, histories, reference books, magazines, reports, diaries, articles, letters and such like, most left by my father, some I brought here myself. I think about the times when each of them was new in the world: freshly printed, written, the ink still wet.
In the previous chapter I related how I acquired my name, an event that signals for me the end of my early childhood. I was six years old. My plan for this chapter was to focus on my life and adventures from then until my thirteenth year – my age at Nigerian independence, when I left Lagos with Father and moved here, to Gullane. For several hours I tried to make a start, in vain. I could barely compose a single sentence. What is more, the radio switched itself on, setting off a powerful ringing in my ears, dragging me further from my past. It seems I cannot distinguish between the noise of the radio and the hubbub of my recalling. The hissing, rasping and popping, the irregular voices buzzing, that low asthmatic drawl, all this merges with the noises in my head.
Whenever the sounds become a meaningless clamour and I cannot concentrate on my past, I turn my attention to my present, to the objects that surround me in the attic, those still, meaningless, decrepit, mostly silent companions. It strikes me that I’ve hardly told a story unless it was about an object, or referred to an object, or else I would appropriate an object, borrow from it, by transcribing it, as illustrated by my mother’s diary. The objects we think we know are shallow things, existing on a flat and insubstantial surface, because we value them only in terms of common use. Whenever I take up one of my objects, however, I spend a lot of time getting to know it. I seek out its various properties, smell, feel, taste, all of which I absorb readily and happily. Even to be near my objects is a pleasure for me, and I toy with the idea of naming my chapters in their honour: Radio, Pocket Watch, Unica, Mother’s Trunk.
It is my intention now to focus on one object in particular: the mappa mundi. How shall I begin to describe it? The most striking feature is its dilapidation. The moths are feasting on the vellum, and the gaps and fissures grow larger and more numerous every month. Yes, that fantastical image of the world, with its lands and seas, its painted myths and imaginary beings, is disintegrating week by week, which at once pleases and saddens me. I have decided I will do nothing to halt the course of its decay.
Whenever I examine the mappa mundi, my gaze is drawn to the monstrous races – Amyctyrae, Androgini, Astomi, Blemmyae, Cyclops and their sisters – depicted at the outer edges. They are my sisters too: I feel an affinity with those freakish souls, because of my monstrous late birth, perhaps.
Of all the living beings on the map, they are located farthest from Christ, who is shown nailed to the cross at the disc’s centre. The monsters are cut off from the world by the Nile river, and from one another by the circumscribed frame in which each dwells, both graphic ornament and prison, ranked alongside one another and yet never touching.
Only two of the monsters are not enclosed in frames, and yet they are hardly free. The first, in Africa proper, west of the Nile, between Nubia and the Mountains of the Moon, is a member of the tribe Gorgades, the hairy women. She is running from a small army of Christian soldiers and is sweating what appears to be blood. A rubric to the right, entitled ‘Letter of Alexander to Aristotle’, comments on this scene: ‘Then we saw women and men hairy in the manner of beasts, who, when we wished to approach nearer, fled towards a river and threw themselves into it.’ Slightly to the left of the unfortunate Gorgad, dwelling in a kind of desert wasteland, is the second monster, a member of the Panotii tribe, with giant ears flapping frantically about her head in a pathetic attempt to take flight, but prevented from doing so by the ropes which bind her to a stake, held over the fire by a soldier with a forked stick.
If I have chosen to interrupt my history to focus on the mappa mundi, it is not only because the sounds in the attic and the din in my head distract me from my past. Nor is it only because I wish to fix the map in my mind, in words, before its deterioration is complete. Neither is it due solely to my feeling of kinship with those outlandish beings. No, I have chosen to speak about the mappa mundi because I wish to introduce a new character into my history. A man about whom I know little, despite my investigations, but whose writings mean a great deal to me. A man who, over the years, I have come to think of as both heir to, and modern-day chronicler of, the monstrous races, like myself. His name is Kemi Olabode, and his story will be the subject of the present chapter.
In 1956, during the months of June and July, colonial officers in Lagos received a series of pamphlets throu
gh the post. My father did not read them at the time. Nevertheless, he did not throw them out, whether deliberately or not, and the collection survived the end of Empire and found its way to Gullane. It was not until his final years that my father discovered the pamphlets among his papers. For a brief period he read them obsessively, and called me up to the attic to tell me about them. Collectively, the pamphlets tell the story of the first decades of Empire in Nigeria, from initial contact between British traders and West African chiefs, to the missionary movement, to the savage wars during which the chiefdoms fell to the British. It is a story which I have always associated with the mappa mundi (which, at the time of my father’s obsession with the pamphlets, was barely touched by decay). Although the pamphlets concern events that took place several centuries after the mappa mundi was conceived, they tell of people whose fate mirrors that of the Gorgades, Panotii and their sisters.
I have the pamphlets before me now. There are five in total, printed on rough off-white paper, folded in half and stitched together with what looks like fishing wire. I wish to focus on one pamphlet in particular, entitled ‘Massacre at Benin’. It concerns a particularly violent episode in the British colonization of Nigeria, depicting the brutalization and slaughter of the inhabitants of that ancient kingdom who tried to resist the forces of Empire.
The story set out in ‘Massacre at Benin’ begins in 1955, in a hut in Lagos. A frail old man is sitting at a table, before a wall of books, old volumes collectively entitled The Complete History of Africa. As the title suggests, the books concern the history of the entire continent, from the very first inhabitants to the Great War, and are authored by Kemi Olabode himself – who, we learn, is the very man sitting at the table. A strange odour rises from the volumes, writes Kemi Olabode, a strange and bitter, subtle-smelling odour, the odour of death. He goes on to describe how he locates then opens Volume IX, entitled ‘The Savage Wars of Empire’; and, as he does so, writes Olabode, dust rises from the pages, obscuring the first sentences. He continues: I wrote those sentences over three decades ago. I was an ambitious youth, full of pride and rude health. I thought those sentences were a truthful account of my continent’s past. I thought I was chronicling the birth of Nigeria. But, Not everything that comes from the cow is butter. Now, in my dotage, I see that those sentences are nothing but lies. Let me therefore get rid of them. Let me do away with those words, which, like the dust rising from the pages, serve only to conceal the past, which seems to surface from a veil of darkness and forgotten time. Instead I will rely entirely on my old man’s memory. You see, dear reader, I am a Nigerian and I lived though the first years of the British Empire. Let me take you back to that time, a time of great hope, for me and my masters. Listen!
In those days I was travelling with the Protectorate. I was dealing with important business, and my job as a translator was carrying me far into the interior. I was assisting the British in signing treaties with the chiefs, whose lands they had acquired unlawfully at Berlin. ‘In return for your forests,’ I translated, ‘we will protect you and make you rich!’ And the chiefs signed. It was 1895. The Atlantic slave trade was over. Those greedy dupes who once sold their people to sugar barons in the West now gifted their land and rights, their laws and property, their dignity, their arts and their sovereignty, to the lords of Empire, who were the same hucksters as before, I came to realize, but they wore pith helmets instead of top hats. A monkey broke the razor after shaving, not knowing that his hair would soon grow again. With their bejewelled fingers the chiefs signed, some never having even held a pen until this moment. It did not matter. If they did not sign, they were made to sign. If they signed without understanding the true consequences of the pact, and objected, well, we unleashed our precision technology. We confounded them with bombs, we amazed them with bullets, we shelled them until they kissed our boots and begged to be allowed to sign all over again. ‘Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not.’
Those savages were standing in the way of progress, of civilization, of commerce, obstructing all the forces working towards the great scheme of perfect happiness, and not only for the citizens of Europe, but for the entire population of the world as well, including (so I thought) my beautiful proto-nation of Nigeria. We (the British and educated Nigerians such as myself who assisted them in their work) took no account of incidental suffering, and our soldiers exterminated such brutes who stood in the way. We were alone in the forest. Who would talk, if we held our tongues?
So I translated, and the chiefs signed, and all the while I was harbouring a secret desire as ambitious as the British whose work I facilitated. I wanted to be the African Herodotus, the first to chronicle my continent’s past, completely and exhaustively, studying every angle, cultural, economic, anthropological, diplomatic, social, geographical, intellectual, economic, martial, medical, political, psychological, etc., etc. For that, I required stories. The difficulty (which I hoped to turn to my advantage) was that Nigeria had no written record of her past. It was stored between the ears of griots, fetid ancients whom I grabbed with my young man’s fingers and grilled at every opportunity, even when they were in the line of fire, especially then, since I needed their stories before they were lost. Then, later in my tent, I transcribed their words into my India-paper jotter. I had a vision of our nation’s history set down in ink, then printed and bound, and presented to the world, in a book! I was the Edison of History (so I thought), my pen like the needle of the phonograph, that sensitive point which scratches at the wax disc, translating sound and preserving it as signs.
Do not think I was unaware of the butchery going on in the name of Progress, or that I was ignorant of my part in this butchery. Regarding the suffering of my African brothers, well, I suffered along with them (so I imagined). Their pain stabbed me like a spear in the heart or a bayonet in the heart. That was the price I paid for electing to chronicle our history.
But let me return to the story at hand. I have told you that we visited many chiefs and used various methods of flattery, threats, bribery and violence to make them sign our treaties. In time, however, we encountered a chief who was wiser than the rest. Or prouder, richer, or less greedy, or more ignorant, or better armed, or else unable to understand my translation. This chief was the Oba of Benin, and he rejected the opportunity to gift his kingdom for illusory gains. One who has been bitten by a snake lives in fear of worms (as the prophets say). He not only defied the British, he banished them from his territory as well, killing over 200 of their men, including several whites!
This was in late December 1896. Soon news of the ‘Benin Disaster’ reached England. It was put about by the press that this Oba was a savage king. He had ambushed an innocent party who were trying to liberate the people of that territory, themselves exploited by their Oba. A cannibal, a great man for human sacrifice, men and women were being disembowelled on the orders of the fetish priests, and the Oba’s palace was filled with human skulls. It was also agleam with gold, ivory, bronze, palm oil, valuable antiquities, etc., etc. The press named Benin the ‘City of Blood’ and demanded revenge.
Two weeks later the British had amassed a mighty force. The ‘Benin Punitive Expedition’ consisted of eight warships, 1,400 soldiers (armed with rifles, Maxim guns, rocket tubes, 7-pounders and mines), as well as 2,000 bearers, several doctors and 1 translator (myself). One morning in February 1897 we started up the Benin River. On either side of us rose steep walls of trees, millions of them, massive trees with rotting foliage, dripping thickets, hairy vegetation and provocative flowers clinging to their trunks. The river was narrow in places, and, as the ships steamed along, we could almost touch the trees (if we dared). I, however, stayed in the hold. Never without my notes and textbooks, I read, amassed knowledge and marshalled my arguments. At Warrigi we put ashore and set up camp.
It was later that evening (the moon was rising through a screen of crimson dust) when for the first time I set eyes on our leader, Rear-Admiral Harry Rawson. As he came o
ut of his tent to detail the plan of attack, the night got darker, and the forest grew closer, and those who minutes before were chatting or smoking or cleaning their guns or eating or drinking or passing round pornographic playing cards, stopped. In the instant of seeing him, I knew him, without however knowing much about him. Let me mention, briefly, what I knew.
His eyes were like boiled eggs.
His lungs were like a diseased plant.
His fingers were like fufu squeezed inside pig-skin gloves.
When he spoke black rainbows came from his mouth.
His jokes were like wasps attacking a sick goat.
His stomach was like a barrel of maggots, and his arms were like legs.
His tongue was a hamper of soiled laundry left out in the sun.
His teeth were like gravestones.
His promises were like tsetse flies.
His orders were like being flogged with hippopotamus hide.
I should have mistrusted those orders. I should have thought: What do those orders mean? I should have asked myself which kind of man flogs you instead of telling you what to do. I should have consulted Herodotus for historical examples of fanatical leaders and I should have correctly identified the orders of Admiral Rawson as marking the beginning of my destruction.
But I did not, and that night went to my tent and fell asleep to the sound of witches feasting, whispering and copulating.
The following day the temperature reached 140 degrees. We could go no further by boat, and were forced to battle through the steaming bush. The column of scouts, Hausa soldiers, probed ahead, cutting through the foliage and searching out the enemy. Between the 10th and 12th our columns were engaged in sharp fighting. This removed any suspicion that the capture of Benin would be easy or that the people were cowardly or reluctant to fight, as the press had claimed.
The Echo Chamber Page 15
