Another evening he said, ‘Evie, there are plenty of times when I wonder how different everything could be for us if we in Africa had developed our own Enlightenment. Our own science that will suit our African tempers better than as we find them today. Then we would not have been forced to adopt the European ways, and Africa might have opened up a world of technology entirely of its own.
‘Let me give you an example that I have been thinking about for quite some time. Imagine if we Africans had not been taught to keep our history in books. Before the missionaries and that Crowther, do you think we could forget our history easily at all? Do you think our memories were very short? Not for one moment! Our memories were very very long. I am not saying that writing and books are completely at odds with what might be called a good idea. What I am saying is that, if books had been invented by Africans they would have been printed on something that will not dissolve in the rains and flake away in the dry season and give an honest man a paper cut. And let me mention as well that they would not have been so strictly ordered page by page as they are today, so that there is no changing them. And even they would somehow allow for – how shall I say it? – a kind of conversation inside them. If this had happened, English books would not be as popular as they are, and talk of throwing away our native languages would be less noisy. But more than that. Our thoughts might not be imitating Europe but might have pushed forward into territories quite of their own! Do you follow me, Evie?’
I suspected Nikolas spoke faultily, yet there was much originality in his ideas. Besides, his words were touching me in places where mere facts were unable to reach. I felt they did not circle round the true things of the world, but, like Iffe with her sonorous voice, strike to their very centre. The description of the African book had taken me by surprise, and I was silent for a while. I thought about Mrs Honeyman. She had believed absolutely in book-learning. She told me that if I did not study I would fall in with ignorance, with the natives – savages. No doubt she would have taken great pleasure in seeing me here, dressed in a loose frock of sackcloth. I let out a wicked burst of laughter. The pale deceiver was right, I had black blood running in my veins, and I had no use for the sun.
I looked up at Nikolas. ‘I follow you,’ I said.
He bent to examine me. ‘What a beautiful face you have, Evie … you are a little bit vain, like myself! There will always be porsons who are stamped underfoot and hounded underground and these porsons must be honoured either with wonder or laughter.’ He spread his mouth in a wide grin. ‘As a matter of fact you have a fundamental character with plenty of creative talent. You will go on to achieve many significant things, and I even have a wish that one day you will inform the world of what is concealed in these pits.’
‘But I have heard it already.’
And I told Nikolas what I had heard, as I lay in my hollow, before he rescued me.
– a gasping of machinery. Narrow conduits debouching on vast enclosed spaces, on subterranean halls high as cathedrals, their vaults clustered with chains, pulleys, cables, pipes, conduits, joists, with movable platforms attached to jacks bright with grease.
– and, lower, mine galleries with blind, ageing horses drawing carts filled with ore and slow processions of helmeted miners; and oozing passageways, reinforced with waterlogged timbers, that led down glistening steps to slapping blackish water; flint-bottomed boats, punts weighed with empty barrels sailing across a lightless lake.
– and, even lower, nearing the earth’s centre, I heard a world of caverns whose walls were black with soot, a world of cesspools and sloughs, a world of grubs and beasts, of eyeless beings who drag animal carcasses behind them, of demoniacal monsters with bodies of birds, swine and fish, of dried-out corpses and yellow-skinned skeletons arrayed in attitudes of the living, of forges manned by dazed Cyclopses in black leather aprons, their single eyes shielded by metal-rimmed blue glass, hammering their brazen masses into dazzling shields.
Nikolas’ eyes with their flickering rings gleamed kindly on me. ‘You are feverish,’ he said. ‘Try to stay calm and quieten the raging in your head.’ And he blew the candles out.
20
How I Found My Way Home
The fever broke this evening. For two days and nights I have been lying on my mattress in the middle of the attic, plagued by torrid dreams, dreams of the dinning earth – brought on, no doubt, by my recollection of the pits. A tempest blew through my head. My body became a mass of cramps. I felt my blood beating through my arteries, and angry drums played between my ears. I recognize this fever; it’s come from inside me; I heard those same noises decades ago, when I lived with Nikolas in his kingdom underground.
Now, after washing and eating, I am back at my desk. The attic is almost completely dark. The noise in my head has subsided, but the blood is still beating at my temples. I must have knocked over my laptop computer in my delirium, since I found it on the floor. Lifting it on to the desk, I opened it up and saw it had been damaged; a crack runs diagonally across the length of the screen. My computer is old, as thick and heavy as a volume of the Encyclopaedia. It puffs and gasps like Mr Rafferty in his sleep. A moment ago I switched it on. Thankfully, it has survived its fall. I read over the last chapter. My words seem to dissolve rather than record my time in the pits, now sunk beneath a veil of marine light and rotten air. What was I thinking? Blind, ageing horses. Helmeted miners. Cesspools and sloughs and Cyclopses in black leather aprons! I don’t remember writing any of these things. Did I really ‘see’ these strange visions? Or was it the raging in my head that led me to type out those false imaginings? I have no way of knowing, for I was quite out of my mind.
Forward!
…
It was 1960, let’s say, when I emerged from the pits. The mist of morning stung my eyes. The sky, like every sky in Lagos before dawn, in the dry season, as I recalled it, rested darkly on the horizon of water. I stood and watched a canoe emerge from the gloom, and then, a little later, etched against the half-light of the sky, its fishing net. Presently the sun broke above the horizon, and I found myself drowning in white light. I covered my face with my hands. The sun shone … that is not the word. Sunlight poured down on me, spreading and contracting behind my closed lids, and I fell on the ground.
I dragged myself forward, feeling the ground with my hands, until I came to a stretch of elephant grass. Soon I was lying in its fronds. Happily they concealed the sun from me and me from the road, and I gained control of my breathing. How much time went by I do not know. My tongue felt dry, so I sucked dew from the elephant grass. At one point I heard footsteps on the road. Fearing discovery, I crawled through the fronds, away from the road, and came out at the water’s edge. In time I was able to open my eyes. I saw the lagoon: clear and calm, it appeared no different from the days before the pits; it worked lazily against the shore, sighing as it rolled, and when I broke its surface with my hand, it felt soft and cold, and it distorted the image of my fingers, just as it had done before. I got on to my knees and washed my face. How different I looked! My features were thicker and longer, my nose sharper, and my skin appeared dark. The eyes I saw were not those I knew from childhood. I took off my rags, then walked into the water and began to wash. The filth of the pits came off me, first in small flakes, then in clods. I rubbed my skin, scooping water on to myself, and as I did I began to cry, great sobs of unhappiness and shame. When I was fully clean, I rose and stood in the shallows and watched the last traces of the pits disappear below the surface, carrying away from me what seemed the only thing that could have made me truly happy.
It was late afternoon when I stepped out on to the road. The sun had weakened, but the air was still hot, and the feel of it in my lungs heightened my desperate mood. I walked along the shore-road, disorientated. Eventually I found my way to the square where Ade and I had taken refuge during the harmattan. And it will give an indication of my confusion or wickedness if I say that I didn’t think once of my friend and his fall. Perhaps it was because
the square was greatly changed. High concrete buildings now lined three of its sides. Crowds of office workers, shoppers, hawkers, vagrants, people of every kind, swarmed the paved way. At least that is how I remember it. But perhaps I am confusing several different occasions, and different times. Was I in the pits long enough for so much change to have occurred? I do not think so. Perhaps, then, I came across the square at a later time. No matter, I will relate it as I remember, even though it seems unlikely, for I must press on with my story. I looked for a place to hide, but there was none. Squatting by the fountain in the middle of the square, I remembered a shop I once knew, Hardy’s Euro-African Emporium. Ben had often sent Ade and me to buy rice or sugar, Ovaltine, dried fish or tins of hair oil. At other times Father would place in my outstretched palm a warm penny to fetch his tobacco, which Hardy spooned from outsized jars like ant-house colonies. I had smelled the variety of teas and the gummy smoke from Hardy’s pipe, lit always; and in the wet season, when the shop swelled and rain rattled the corrugated roof, the scent was of mushrooms. Now it was gone; in its place stood the glass heights of the Bank of Nigeria. But more than anything it was the square’s acoustical qualities that made me understand how different Lagos had become. Here the clamour of the city was louder than ever; and yet it was not so much the volume of noise that spoke of change, but rather the way the traffic suggested by its boom that air could be perforated. And just as, years previously, the return of the swallows had signalled the end of the rains, suggesting to me a new life at the market, so now it was the lack of birdsong, and indeed any of the sounds of nature, that made me feel my old life had come to an end.
I returned to Ikoyi. I don’t know how I got there. I recall passing through alleyways, backyards, gardens, crossing roads and footbridges, avoiding people as much as possible. I remember the sun sparking on the lagoon. And its rays beating down upon me. I remember the aching of my body. And my dizziness. For long stretches I knew neither where I was, nor where I was going, nor how I arrived at this place, which seemed like another world. At night I slept in boats moored by the shore and suffered appalling dreams. It was in this way I found my way to Ikoyi. It took a long time. I even got there without knowing it. ‘Evie!’ a voice cried one day. That is how I remember it. It was my father. His chest was heaving, his breath hot, and he lifted me up and carried me to the house that I could no longer consider home.
In the weeks after I returned to Ikoyi, I fell sick. I had emerged from underground and the sun-shafts had worked on me. I felt limp, breathless, crushed, unable to endure light. Every voice cut into my head. Every touch was rough. Days passed before I could take in food. I felt hot, yet did not sweat. In time my breathing eased. The fever broke. And I became aware that my father had cared for me during the sickness; it was he who had pressed wet cottons to my forehead and offered water through a straw and peeled fruit to feed the pulp between my lips, which were broken. I did not see Ade in my periods of waking and I feared he had died from the impact of his fall. Later, when I had recovered from my fever, I learned he’d survived, but that he was no longer living with us. There had been trouble between my father and Iffe over Ade’s accident and my disappearance. Now Iffe, Ben and Ade lived in the new township of Suru Lere on the outskirts of Lagos.
With the breaking of the fever my father began to question me about where I had been. I tried to tell him about the pits, about Nikolas and the nightsoil workers, but he would not believe me. He thought my sickness had affected my mind and claimed I’d been absent for no more than several days! If my father himself had been more complete in the mind, I might have trusted his judgement. But I noticed something tragic and false about him. Although he still worked for the Lagos Development Board, although the slum clearances had begun and every day he went to oversee the demolition work, although the last years of Empire seemed to have inspired in him a kind of manic confidence – despite all this, I saw that the lines on his forehead had deepened, and his long figure seemed curved inward at the middle, and his pale eyes expressed continually less sense. So I did not believe him when he told me I had lost my sense of time. Even today, when I ask myself how long I lived with Nikolas in the pits, I defy my father’s judgement and estimate it to be something like nine months. Of course, the figure satisfies something in me.
At that time the British were preparing to leave Nigeria: Independence was approaching; Nigeria had her first prime minister, Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, and in December 1959 federal elections had been held. In the European quarter of Ikoyi several houses were already boarded up. During the day I sat in the garden and watched the light creep up my leg, or listened to the silence, which rose like vapour from the lagoon. The air was still, hot, thick, and light cloud-columns split the sky. Everything felt deadened, not least my feeling for time, which seemed both to slow down and to change rhythm. Although the calendar above my bed continued to count the days, it counted days that lacked new occurrences. Father told me I would start school once we arrived in Scotland. The prospect neither disturbed me nor made me especially excited.
Conscientiously, if somewhat morosely, I sought silence, and I plugged my ears with clods from the walls of my pit, the only trace of that underground kingdom I had managed to keep. When I had lain alone in my hollow I had delighted in the emptiness and silence; now, that same emptiness and silence left me feeling lost. The world and its energies seemed far removed; and the more distant they seemed, the more my thoughts reached out to them.
I tried to persuade Father to take me with him into town, but he would not be moved, the demolition work was too dangerous, he said. To keep me company he gave me a radio of my own, a shiny portable device with a sky-blue case and concealed speaker, which emitted a beautiful deep, crisp sound. I listened to it obsessively, and for a while I forgot my loneliness. Of course, I no longer believed that the announcer lived inside the radio. My father had explained that he lived in England, and the broadcast came all the way from Bush House, in London’s Strand. The announcer’s voice, Father said, was carried through the medium of air, and sounded in all the radios of the world at once. The idea that it did not stop at the edge of the city, and that it jumped rivers, mountains and seas, amazed me. To think that a voice could hop continents. And that it was able to bring so many people simultaneously under its spell!
It was strange to think that people in Britain, fellow citizens of the announcer, might be strolling down the Strand at the very moment he began broadcasting the news and by chance might look up at the sky, where, invisible but apparent, pleating the air with its waves, his voice would be floating above their heads. I had lost forever the belief that the announcer lived in our radio. And yet I’d gained a new feeling of sanctuary: now I knew there was a community of listeners on verandas all around the world. I liked to think that my grandfather, Mr Rafferty (who I’d never met, but whom Father had told me about – I was to meet him when we got to Scotland), might be tuning in at the same time every evening, hearing the same words spoken with the same voice. Like Father, I learned, Mr Rafferty was a cricket fan, so I took an interest in the test match reports, broadcast after the main items. My thoughts reached out to Mr Rafferty; they travelled up from our garden, so I imagined, and over the Atlantic Ocean, describing a parallel path to the radio waves, but in the opposite direction, until they found their way into his ear.
One evening after supper Father poured me a glass of lemonade and asked me to bring the radio out on to the veranda. He was nervous and excited. I knew this because he worried the scar on his chin.
‘Lagos will be on the radio tonight,’ he said, and laughed. ‘Switch it on!’
Soon the Bow Bells chimed out over the dark garden. I recall only one item from that evening, the story of a signal worker at Euston Station who had been run over by a train. When, finally, the news broadcast ended, the announcer said, Now for a special report from Lagos, capital of the British territory of Nigeria … How strange to hear the name of our home town broadcast on the radio!
Tomorrow in Lagos a special building will be opened. Independence House. For years the British administration has been building a wonderful capital city for Nigeria, which will soon take over the reins of self-governance. Independence House, symbol of all that the British have given to this once-impoverished country, will be opened by the Governor, Sir James Wilson Robertson … The announcer continued to speak in his lulling and authoritative voice, in ‘BBC English’, whose intonation seemed to draw out the vowel-sounds, and I had the impression that Lagos had been held for a moment in his mouth, exposed, freed from the daily concerns of us, its inhabitants, in order to reveal its pure form. We are witnessing the awakening of national consciousness in a people who have for centuries lived in the dependence of some other power. A wind of change is blowing through Nigeria, and Lagos, its glittering capital, is the centre of the change.
21
Exile
The crowd came from all over the town: people poured out of lanes, out of houses and backyards and made their way to Broad Street to join the celebrations. Before the glass façade of Independence House stood a makeshift stage, painted black, with a microphone, and chairs for the dignitaries. It was three o’clock. The Governor stepped out from the motionless shade of Independence House, on to the bright stage. Then came the architect, accompanied by Tafawa Balewa, the Prime Minister, in his white robes. For ten minutes, possibly more, the civic leadership emerged, followed by the members of the Lagos Executive Development Board, including my father and Mr Honeyman. A boy worked a fan to keep the flies from the Governor’s face. There was a pause. The crowd made a peculiar high-pitched noise. Drums sounded, there was a collective gasp as a pair of wooden poles were raised above the stage; unseen hands drew the poles apart to reveal a banner painted with the words: ‘MAY GOD GRANT PROSPERITY TO THE NEW NIGERIA’.
The Echo Chamber Page 22
