The Echo Chamber

by Luke Williams

  I stood to the side of the stage, with the children of the dignitaries, my hands resting on the edge. Young men perched in trees all along the street. Hawkers stopped, put down their wares; they too stared at the spectacle. Independence House, twenty storeys high, its windows flashing in the sun, shone brilliantly out above the crowd.

  The Governor held his hand up for silence; uplifted, his sleeve fell below the elbow, and the drums became quiet. Presently we saw, stepping up to the microphone, a tall, pale man in a grey suit, with a powerful moustache. He put his spectacles on and said, ‘Welcome, friends of Nigeria. It is an honour to be opening this splendid building, the tallest Nigeria has ever seen. Independence House is much more than a mere architectural triumph, however. As its name suggests, it is a symbol of the great strides Nigeria is taking towards nationhood.’ The Governor paused and surveyed the crowd. ‘However,’ he continued, ‘there is much work still to be done. For instance, we must encourage the northern territories to participate more enthusiastically in democratic Nigeria. Hausa, Yoruba and Ibo must learn to put their own narrow interests aside …’

  Suddenly I heard a rattling sound.

  ‘Ikoko Omon,’ said a familiar voice, a voice crackling like flaming leaves. ‘Ikoko Omon! Is that you?’ I turned, and gasped. Fighting her way through the children was the Honeymans’ cook: arms frail, wrapper hardly bulking out a withered crone’s frame, loose skin gathered below the chin, hanging like a lizard’s dewlap.

  ‘What have you been chopping, eh, Ikoko Omon? You are growing faster than a bamboo!’ I moved through the children to greet her. But she grabbed my hand and turned to face the stage, saying, ‘Not now. Listen. What a stupid man, with big big grammar. Look! Ikoko Omon. He begins to sweat for his pink face!’

  ‘Permit me to use an analogy,’ the Governor was saying. ‘If the wealth of Nigeria may be likened to a great communal pot of soup, then Lagos, this thriving city, is the ladle which serves the soup.’ He paused. ‘If the ladle does not serve the soup, then there will simply be no soup for the people. Nobody would be able to eat. Therefore, the ladle is important to everyone, to the soup, and to the whole country.’ He looked up from his notes. ‘Suppose,’ he said, mysteriously, ‘if there was no ladle to serve the soup, what would happen then?’

  ‘This question na war oh,’ cried the Honeymans’ cook. Several of the children turned their heads towards her. ‘Ikoko Omon! Not everything that comes from a cow is butter.’

  The Honeymans’ cook, peering between creased lids, turned from me to hurl a silent curse at the Governor. I shifted my weight. The Governor dropped his papers and bent to gather the loose sheets. Upright, he took his spectacles off and wiped his eyes. The Honeymans’ cook began to speak under her breath; chewing, spitting, formulating, with vitriol, arguments to undermine the dignitaries. She passed from curse to mockery, from mockery to incantation, as the Governor, returning the spectacles to the bridge of his nose, addressed us once again. Now he spoke of the darkness of Africa many years past, at the time of the Berlin conference, of the forces of evil, bad faith, cruelty and oppression, the intolerance, prejudice and poverty, the ignorance and superstition that had entombed the territory. ‘Empire has spanned a fine period in the transition of Nigeria,’ he said. ‘And the architects of Independence House have, in their own small way, contributed to that change. Thank you,’ he said, raising his arms and stepping back to take his seat.

  Drums sounded, hands were flung in the air, faces glared with heat. But the awe that shone in every face seemed to cast a cloud on the Honeymans’ cook.

  ‘This big big grammar oh, he is a useless man,’ she said. ‘Can’t he shut his mouth? He will have sunstroke for his tongue. Talking this nonsense …’

  Suddenly there was a shrieking sound. I reached for the Honeymans’ cook. Amid a great general roar, I saw a stream of women running down Broad Street towards the stage, leaping and screaming in a sort of frenzy. I saw that the women wore crowns of ferns and they had tied leaves around their waists, and they brandished sticks. The Governor and the dignitaries were hurrying from the stage, and voices were calling for we children to withdraw. But the Honeymans’ cook led me into the street, into the mass of bodies, and I didn’t stop her. I wanted to be there among the women. Perhaps I would come across Iffe! I raised my voice to ask after Iffe, but it was lost in the noise. It was exhilarating to see the women jerking left then right, answering unseen drums, kicking up their knees and thrashing their sticks.

  What was happening?

  As the crowd parted to let the women approach the stage, a voice rang out:

  Whiteness is the beauty of the teeth.

  Length is the beauty of the neck.

  Full breasts are the beauty of a woman,

  Whose nipples poke into mens’ eyes.

  The women were flourishing their sticks. I stood some ten yards back, keeping close to the Honeymans’ cook.

  The same voice cried out again: ‘All right, Balewa, it is four o’clock and we go come for you. Governor Mr Robertson don’t fear we will teach you a lesson with our sticks! Where is he who is called Robertson? Something very bad will happen to you!’

  The street was white and hot, the sun directly overhead, and the women shouted and spoiled for trouble. To our right I heard a high wailing; it grew louder, higher and seemed to come deep from within the mourner’s chest. The Honeymans’ cook pointed out a young woman surrounded by onlookers, some of whom were trying to calm her stricken movements. Her grief could not be checked. Her body convulsed, tears slid freely from her face; her despair was palpable, open. Suddenly I felt light. I closed my eyes. The mourner continued to wail but her cries came to me now from a great distance. I leaned against the Honeymans’ cook, who whispered to me. Apparently the grieving woman’s husband had been killed in the slum clearances. He had refused to leave his house, and the bulldozers had knocked it down with him inside.

  Suddenly there was a sharp crashing sound, and birds fled upward from the trees. In place of the dignitaries, soldiers had come on to the stage. They were shooting their rifles in the air. They stopped shooting, and a small dark man pushed through to the front of the stage. His voice was remarkably deep. I felt it in my stomach when he spoke into the microphone, ‘Quiet! Quiet please. Listen!’ He signalled to the soldiers, who shot into the air once more, several quick deafening shots.

  ‘Listen to me,’ the speaker said, ‘I have something to tell you. Do not worry yourselves. You will be compensated by the Executive Board. Every one of you. That is a promise. Remember, God can turn a poor man today into a rich man tomorrow!’

  There was more shouting, a tremendous noise. I was thrown violently forward. Then the voice which had sung out several minutes previously called out to the speaker on the stage. The voice demanded that his promises should be typewritten, stamped and put into registered envelopes.

  ‘That can be done,’ said the speaker, despatching a soldier, before stepping to the microphone again. Now he told the women that their former homes had been fever dens where diseases such as pneumonia, dysentery and malaria thrived, not to mention crime, drunkenness, prostitution, social unrest, vice, feckless poverty and mental pathology.

  ‘It is imperative for us to demonstrate that Nigeria can survive as a viable nation on her own,’ he said. ‘Your government will provide roads, water, electricity, a piped sewage system and drains!’

  ‘Mothers cannot chop. Picken cannot chop sef!’ someone shouted.

  The Honeymans’ cook bent to speak in my ear. ‘It is true what the people are saying, because the land which he has told the people will be theirs to build their houses on again is being given to big men in the government.’

  ‘Friends,’ the speaker said. ‘Perhaps you think you are still living your village lives. But you are mistaken. You are living in a city, a modern city, the domain of reason. Hence your problems must be solved by the exercise of reason alone. It is a question of finding the right road system,’ he said, ‘safe hou
sing, the correct proportion of green space, and so forth.’

  ‘I can no longer support my family,’ someone shouted.

  ‘From time to time it becomes necessary to eat the onion,’ the speaker said, ‘no matter how bitter, and sometimes in the interest of the well-being of your nation.’

  ‘What nation?’ someone asked.

  ‘The great nation of Nigeria. You may not find it easy at first to accept without question or reservation what I have to say,’ he continued, ‘but finally you will reconcile yourselves to it. It will take a bit of time. But modernization will come. You will have to accept it. Otherwise there will be no place for you in the new Nigeria.’

  I had heard these same words years ago, when Mr Honeyman came to our veranda and showed us the bird’s-eye view of Lagos, with the sites penned for destruction circled in red. He had spoken of sanitation and green space and skyscrapers, and I had thought these ideas mere dreams. Now his ideas had been adopted by the leaders of Nigeria. Land had been cleared, and the people of the market district had been forced from their homes. The speaker had brought along his own map, a hand-drawn view of central Lagos, and he had the soldiers scatter copies from the stage. The women reached to catch them as they fell through the air. I picked one up from the ground and put it in my pocket.

  ‘I have nowhere to sell my oranges!’ someone cried. But she was hushed by other members of the crowd, for the speaker had changed his argument. He was speaking of the benefits modernization would bring; soon, he said, the people of Lagos would be able to afford proper homes, filled with furniture of modern durable design, ‘metal tables, oak chests, china plate, booth seating, Bokhara rugs, lacquered cabinets, night stands, bubble lamps, glass sconces, telephones, coloured-glass coasters, as well as exotic foods, jam, hams, apples, sacks of almonds, walnuts, pistachios, raisins and sultanas, patisseries, candied fruits from France, everything a man can eat, everything a man can drink, all laid out before you on your metal tables. You will drown in plenty,’ he told the astonished crowd. ‘Have you ever tasted hare?’ he asked. ‘Or quail, or spit-roast pig? I do not think you have. Soon you will dine like the Gauls! You will see shopping centres rising from the ashes of old Lagos,’ he said, ‘skyscrapers climbing one hundred storeys high!’

  ‘Do not listen to that man!’ shouted the voice. ‘He wishes the food we chop to be insect wey we find on the street. The government is using us like goat.’ The crowd roared and surged forward, jeering, urging, indignant, crying, and I shouted my support. I was happy and dizzy in this hothouse of screaming and white light. And that was the thrilling thing, I thought, to be here, among the bodies, hearing the street rumbling with the weight of thousands and the cries of anger and sorrow.

  Now the women started to beat the stage with their sticks, and the speaker shouted for calm, and for the women to withdraw, but they took no notice and flocked forward. It was then I saw the soldiers lower their rifles. This time they did not fire over our heads, but right into us, into the crowd. I was stunned. We began to scatter. I held on to the Honeymans’ cook. We took a street to the side of Independence House, and emerged at the rear of the building. Amid the fleeing bodies and confusion and dust I lost hold of the Honeymans’ cook. I ran on, further from the site of the shooting, until, eventually, unable to run any more, I came to a stop. I heard drumming and I watched streams of women, some still running, others dragging themselves along the street, weeping and screaming. I searched for the Honeymans’ cook, and still full of the mood of the violence, not ready to turn and try to find my way back to my father, I managed to pick her out. She was walking slowly, supporting a wounded trader I recognized from the onion line. And there, right beside her, was Iffe! They came to a halt. I gazed at Iffe: now she was standing quite still among the wounded, set apart in the shade of an uprooted tree, her expression fixed in an attitude of profound grief. I jumped up, crying, ‘Iffe, Iffe!’

  It was not until I was beside her that she noticed me. Her gaze fell on me for a brief moment, then with her unhurried grace of movement, she turned her back on me.

  ‘Go away,’ she said with her back still turned. Those words astonished me. All the years I had known Iffe, she had been indifferent to my presence. At the onion stand, travelling home on the bus, sitting at the kitchen table eating our evening meal – she had seldom paid me any attention. Now she had addressed me directly and, what is more, she had demonstrated high feeling. And yet what she said sent a pain through my limbs, for with those words, spoken with her back turned, she no longer expressed indifference, but contempt.

  I walked away half stunned, half afraid, my feet hurting. I made my way further from the site of the shooting, dragging myself out of sight of Iffe and the wounded women. I stumbled and fell in a heap on the ground, weeping from sheer exhaustion.

  The place I had come to was almost unrecognizable. Shattered stalls and enormous upturned coils of corrugated iron poked out of the debris. I sat on a basket and looked out at the grey vista between two broken shacks opening on to the wreckage beyond. I could see no people, only squashed fruits, bright colours staining the ground. I had entered the former market district, which had been razed to the ground. I looked about me, seeing what was left of the trading lines, which could only tentatively be called lines, since all things appeared alike on the levelled land. To my right was a highway in the process of construction, and beyond this other new roads, lined with banks of trees, symmetrically spaced, and tall buildings forming street-canyons that reflected sounds, doubling them, making them collide, overlap and shooting them upward towards the high roofs, invisible in evening light.

  On the other side of the new thoroughfare I saw that fires had blackened the streets, and in places still burned. The smoking earth was dotted with irregular pale-red flares. I came across a trestle table shorn of its feet, propped against an upturned cart, and the pair formed a crooked tent-shaped space, into which I crawled. I told myself that I had come across the remains of the onion table, the very table under which I had spent so many hours, listening, and this made me happy and bitter. By my feet a few embers still lingered on the scorched earth, and I saw that the fire that had razed the market district had exposed a cluster of new shoots; those untouched by the flames shone the freshest green. I settled under my shelter, and my thoughts were sad and fearful, many-branched, thoughts that turned, first on Iffe, then on Ade, and finally on the pits, to which I longed to return. I had been drawn to that underground kingdom because I believed it would bring me darkness and silence. I had believed I would remain for ever in my husk. I had thought that I would live as truly as I had lived in the womb. And yet from that desperate kind of quest, from that heady feeling of having been able to make out a silent world, nothing now remained.

  It was early morning when I woke. I sat up, shivering. Drawing my blouse close, I found a piece of paper in my pocket. I unfolded it and spread it flat on the ground. It was the bird’s-eye view of central Lagos, one of the hand-drawn maps from the demonstration, which I had collected when the speaker with the deep voice had had his soldiers scatter them from the stage. As the sun rose I examined the map. And there I saw, laid flat before my eyes, the island on which I had spent my whole life; and at its centre I could pick out the nearly complete rectangle of Tinubu Square, the grey lines indicating the principal streets, with black dots representing the palm trees, as well as the lighter, more intricate paths of the market district, where the occasional forked outline marked the artist’s impression of a passer-by. And later, when I rose and ducked under my shelter and walked beneath the highway, over rubble which in places still smoked, I was myself standing on the grey streets lined with palm trees. I was myself the pale outline on the market path, a tiny blot on the wasted land. I looked around at the high buildings quivering in the new day’s light. And I felt crushed.

  PART THREE

  22

  The Hothouse

  This afternoon I travelled to Edinburgh to visit Mr Rafferty. Stepping from the b
us on to his street, I heard the church clock strike three. It was starting to get dark. A chill wind blew across my legs. By the churchyard gates I stopped to remove my earplugs: ever since I finished the chapter on the pits of the nightsoil workers, when the noise of the earth blighted my dreams, my tinnitus has become louder and louder – my head is filled with all kinds of whizzing, popping and hissing noises. I’m finding it harder and harder to press on with this history. Every now and then, if I am lucky, I manage to write for an hour or two. But it’s slow work.

  On the street I stopped to listen to a group of children running from school. Above the shapeless hubbub now and then I heard a cry – perhaps of joy, or of fear. A trio of cyclists coasted past. Did one of them ring her bell? I couldn’t say. I stood shivering, listening to the sounds. This occupied me for a while. Finally, the green man’s pips started up, and I crossed the road and entered the hospital grounds. It was getting colder. Nevertheless the December sun shone richly on the twisted grass.

  The door to my grandfather’s room was open, and I entered without knocking. He was waiting for me, dressed in his greatcoat and hat.

  ‘Hello, Evie,’ he said and kissed me on the forehead. Happily he knew me this afternoon. Happily he seemed to know himself too. This was a good sign, for I had come to ask him about 1961, the year I arrived in Scotland, of which I recall very little.