Foreign Gods, Inc.

by Okey Ndibe

  “Yessah,” she said, without raising her eyes.

  “Tell me.”

  “Uncle Ike.”

  “Wonderful! Where’s your mother?”

  “At Onitsha, sah. She will come next tomorrow.”

  “You mean the day after tomorrow?”

  “Yes, next tomorrow.”

  “You know,” he said, then resisted the impulse to correct her. “I haven’t seen your mother in eleven years,” he said, changing direction.

  “She sent me to stay with Mama for a few days.”

  “Are you not in school?”

  “We breaked, sah.”

  “You’re on break?”

  “Yessah.”

  “What grade are you in?”

  She stared straight ahead, confused. Quickly recalling that Nigerians used class, not grade, he rephrased his question.

  “Class four, sah.”

  “Where’s Mama?”

  “She go to church, sah.”

  “She went?”

  “Yessah, to church. It is not long since she went,” she said, finally catching on. “They’re having Thursday Harvest. I’m coming from there; I carried Mama’s basket of yams for her. Should I went to tell her that you came? The church is just there.” She pointed.

  He smiled, entertained by her misused tense. “Don’t bother. Is it a long service?”

  “Sometimes it’s lesser than two hours, sometimes more. If you want me to—”

  “No, no point,” he interrupted. “I’ll see her when she returns.”

  “Your room is ready, sah. I will on a lamp for you.”

  His smile became broader. “How about the electricity?”

  “It has reached more than one week that NEPA took light, sah.”

  Ike pointed to the building to the right. “Their bulb is lit.”

  “They use generator to on their own light, sah.”

  His ears picked up the spastic whine of a generator.

  Alice darted into the house and opened two rear and two front windows. The sun, trolling westward to its rest, threw tepid light. Once he stepped inside, he felt the sensation of being in a place that was at once familiar and strange. The furniture was the same from his youth, the cloth-covered dark green sofas in which, years ago, he would lounge and daydream. He could now see that the sofas were discolored, dirty and torn in places. There was the old center table on which his father was served his meals. Its top had bad scratches, and one of its legs had come unhinged, buckled in. The same familiar pictures hung on the walls: two of his father, dapper in a suit and tie, hand underneath his jaw; two of the entire family, his sister hoisted on their father’s lap, Ike on their mother’s; one each of Ike and his sister, taken on their respective tenth birthdays. But the pictures had accumulated so much dust and so many cobwebs that, rather than kindle fond memories in Ike, they stirred a desultory feeling in him. It was as if he’d walked into a gallery and gazed on disturbing alien figures from a time and place remote and different. Once again, he was bathed by commingled smells. He stopped outside the door of his bedroom, then veered toward a bookshelf. The shelf wobbled at his touch; his hand was smeared with dust. He peered at the tightly stacked books, then his pulse quickened when he saw Manfredi’s Ngene: The God That Owns Rain. He felt resistance pulling at the booklet; humidity had matted the covers of several books. When he finally extricated the booklet, part of its cover was peeled off. He slapped it lightly against the edge of the shelf and then ambled toward his room.

  The room remained astonishingly familiar, as if its bareness had been assiduously preserved. His room at Stopoff Hotel was splurgy by comparison. There was the same wooden desk on which he used to do his homework. Two of its legs had come loose, leaving it unsteady, a hazard. There was the old wooden clothesline that now held a handful of plastic hangers. There was a smoky standing mirror. Many years ago, when he was three or four, he would stand before the mirror making faces and sudden jerky movements, amazed that his every gesture or lurch was faithfully repeated by his double in the mirror. That object of childhood fascination was now a blemished relic, broken neatly in mid-spine, held precariously in place with a thick, ugly pad of tape. Another fixture was an oaken prie-dieu which the Irish priest who officiated at his parents’ wedding had given them as a gift. On its scratched shelf sat the old transistor radio on which his father used to monitor the BBC World Service. The radio was now a carcass, its knobs long lost, its voice forever stilled.

  Then there was his old bed, its coiled springs bereft of elasticity.

  “I dey go, sir,” said the driver, who had lumbered in with Ike’s suitcases and stood pat, as if awaiting further instructions.

  “Drive safely,” Ike said with spirit, even though he suspected the man had loitered in expectation of a tip.

  “Should I boil water for your bath?” Alice asked.

  “No. I just want to lie down and rest,” Ike said. The bed sagged with his weight; its springs creaked, tensionless.

  “I can bring you a lamp, sah,” she offered.

  “Don’t bother.”

  “There’s egusi soup. Should I make you gari?”

  His mouth watered at the thought of his mother’s delicious egusi. But he had a more pressing need to take a nap. He needed to rest, to be braced for the encounter with his mother.

  After Alice left the room, Ike unzipped one of his suitcases and pulled out a bottle of Hennessy, VSOP. He uncorked it and drew its nipple to his lips. He sucked a mouthful, gurgled, and swallowed. Serenity, or an impression of it, spread through his nerves. He flipped off his shoes and half lay on the bed, his upper body propped on his elbow. He took another swig, rolled the liquid in his mouth, and let it drain down his gullet. Then he stretched out on the bed, his nostrils saturated with the sheet’s smell of bar soap and camphor. Dug into the pillow, his head swarmed with images. The room swirled, seemed to twist into grotesque shapes and odd, disorienting angles. It was as if some manic force had seized control of things and had violently shaken him and his surroundings. Sleep, desperately needed, eluded him.

  Instead, he felt light, a floating, fragile speck whipped around by a capricious breeze. The speck glided in the sheer, swift air for a while before he realized that he was being swept to a destination that was at once mysterious and enchantingly intimate. Then, suddenly, the violent force was spent. The wind became motionless; the speck ceased its gyration.

  Ike, his senses keener than ever, was gripped by a spectacular sensation. He gazed out over a landscape where a familiar story unhurriedly unfurled itself. And then he realized it was the story of Reverend Walter Stanton, a tempestuous Anglican prelate, a man who, until his astonishing doom, had seemed like an indomitable, fearless foe to Ngene—and came close to sacking the war deity from its shrine. The good old English preacher was the first missionary to burst upon Utonki, arriving in grand style in the year 1898.

  Years ago—Ike was then a secondary-school student who loved to dawdle at the shrine of Ngene, eating peppered goat meat and quaffing milk-colored frothy palm wine to his heart’s content—he’d been obsessed with the missionary’s story. Ensconced in his favorite corner in the shrine, a shadowed spot that gave him the anonymity to flip his roving eyes from one man to another, Ike soaked up the stories and tales that his uncle and other elders told about the white preacher. Sometimes, in the midst of an account, Ike would drift off, only to awake to another part of the story. He wanted to ask questions but always suppressed the urge, afraid that his intrusion would still the story. His patience and silence paid off, for any question would finally be answered, any gap filled in, that day or later, by the same storyteller or another. It was as if Stanton’s story were woven into the fabric of the very air in the shrine.

  Osuakwu and the elders called the legendary missionary a man of the river. They said the Utonki River had belched one day and spat out the Englishman—and his coterie—onto the soil of Utonki.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Reverend Walter Stanton
appeared in Utonki on a day the sun had cast its evil eye on the world, leaving every living thing in a state of stupor, groaning. He came with a retinue of soldiers whose guns spoke from two mouths at once, two missionary underlings the people of Utonki described as his shadows, and an interpreter whose skin was as black as the blackest person in Utonki.

  The spectacle of the strange visitors drew the elders and people of Utonki to the square where the community celebrated its festivities. Then, speaking through his interpreter, Reverend Stanton announced that he had come to bring salvation to a people in darkness.

  The first few days, he stood in the shade of an ukpaka tree to declaim his message. Stanton sweated monstrously, for the shade could not keep the sweltering tropical heat at bay. At first, the missionary’s talk provoked laughter, derision, and a harmless, muted indignation. For more than a week, he cajoled and entreated without scoring even one convert. He harangued them, “Abandon your wooden phantom and embrace the living God.”

  One day, Stanton led his men deep into a mangrove sacred to Ngene to cut down tree limbs for use in building a shrine for his deity. The warriors of Utonki gathered together at the shrine of Ngene, armed with machetes and guns, determined to chase off the impertinent band of missionaries. Instead, Reverend Stanton and his soldiers handed the warriors of Utonki their most crushing defeat in living memory, felling their head warrior in the first moments of battle.

  The next day, Stanton got one convert. Then, in the days that followed, a few others joined. The converts began to chant the name of the pale man’s deity.

  In the end, it was Stanton’s display of strength that lent power to his message and won him a steady trickle of converts.

  Stanton’s soldiers, some of them recruits from other parts of Africa, came armed with contraptions nobody in Utonki had seen before: guns that simultaneously reported from two mouths, letting out a torrent of fire from both barrels. True, the warriors of Utonki had guns, too. But theirs were rather slow and labored; they spat fire only after inconvenient pauses for more gunpowder. Such sputtering guns, founded and soldered by the blacksmiths of Awka, were no match for the invaders’ weapons.

  Unaccustomed to defeat, the warriors of Utonki were disheartened. When Stanton ordered them to turn in their guns, only three resisted. One was an ocher-colored childless widow. Cradling her gun as one might a newborn baby, she waded into Utonki River. Without ever varying its purl, the river drew her down into its belly, and she disappeared forever. Another warrior was a hermit known for the power of his amulets. One morning, he climbed the ukpaka tree that used to afford Stanton some shade. After shooting four rounds of gunpowder in different directions, like a general saluting air, he aimed the fifth at his own heart. He tumbled from the tree like a prehistoric man-bird, thudded against the hard, red earth, twitched, and died. Another male warrior swallowed a leafy emetic in a quantity large enough to fell a horse. As his horrified friends and relatives looked on, he retched, dredged up a copious quantity of some greenish, viscous liquid, and then lay supine.

  Overwhelmed by the missionary’s armed ensemble, many in Utonki became believers. As one of the converts explained to his neighbor, “The white man’s guns outspeak the guns of Utonki. Who can argue that the white God isn’t stronger than Ngene?”

  Still, Reverend Stanton was often grieved by the converts’ heresies and ways. In turn, the converts were vexed by aspects of the new religion that sounded contentious, if not outright nonsensical.

  During one session, Reverend Stanton’s interpreter told the converts that the founder of the white man’s religion was a bearded Man-God born in Bethlehem by a virgin. The converts didn’t find the idea of a born god hard to swallow; after all, the deities in Utonki were carved by sculptors and then infused by men or women powerful in ogwu. “But born by a virgin?” one new convert whispered to another. Both men shrugged, bemused. “The white man knows many things,” the other whispered back, “but he doesn’t know how to tell a good lie.”

  SOMETIMES, THE CONVERTS VOICED their doubts. One day, the interpreter said the new God’s Father lived up in the sky, far beyond the clouds, beyond the reach of eyes. He said this divine Father was so huge his feet lolled all the way down the sky to rest on the earth. He then claimed that the missionaries’ God was present everywhere.

  “Our people, too, have Chukwu, the great god who lives in the sky,” one baffled convert said. “Everywhere, we see the signs of his work. The drifting clouds are smoke from his pipe. Rainfall is his sneeze. All great rivers were born from his spittle. Wherever he scuffed his feet, mountains arose. Valleys were formed wherever he stamped his feet. Chukwu is mighty, but we never say that he’s everywhere. His home is in the sky, and he hardly leaves his hearth to visit the earth. He comes down to peer around only when something big happens in the world. And when he comes, nobody waits to be told. New mountains, valleys, and rivers are born. The earth shakes with rain the like of which is seen once in ages. If your own God lives everywhere, then why haven’t my two eyes seen him?”

  The interpreter explained the parley to the chief missionary.

  “It’s because the true and living God is invisible,” Stanton explained.

  For a moment, the curious convert was silent, but his face wore an incredulous expression.

  “How can something be everywhere and yet invisible?” he asked finally.

  “He’s creator and maker of everything. With him, everything is possible. He can do and undo,” came Stanton’s retort.

  “Then he should do to make himself visible,” the convert suggested. “Why not tell him to appear to us in his body. Then all our brothers and sisters will leave their ways and come and follow him.”

  “We can’t tell God what to do.”

  “I’m not saying tell him. Take a sacrifice to him and beg him,” said the convert. “It is through sacrifice that gods are deceived.”

  “Our God cannot be deceived,” Stanton explained with visible impatience. “He knows everything, including the secrets of our hearts. You deceive your own so-called gods because they’re not gods at all, only phantoms. True Christians accept God’s wisdom. It’s not given to us to behold God in body, only as spirit.”

  “Ngene, too, is a spirit, but he also has a body,” insisted the convert. “Its spirit is buried in the river. But you can see its body at the shrine.”

  Stanton scratched at his neck, leaving splotches of reddened skin. His words tumbled out fast.

  “What you call Ngene is nothing. It’s a lie with which you’ve imprisoned yourself. It doesn’t live in the river. Nor does it own the river. Our God owns everything. He made your river and also the wood Ngene was carved from.”

  The convert’s face showed confusion.

  “All these years, our fathers and forefathers made sacrifices to Ngene. They gave it cocoyam and yam. They offered it chicken and goat. In fact, when their hands were strong with wealth, they brought cows to its shrine. When their wives had new babies, or when their farms had increase, they went to the shrine to say daalu to Ngene. We, too, learned to do like our fathers and forefathers. Mother goat chews yam peelings; her offspring watch her mouth and learn. As soon as we stopped suckling our mothers’ breast, we were taught the secrets of the river. We learned that the river belongs to Ngene, that the god’s spirit lives in the river. Are you saying, then, that Ngene stole the river from your deity? If the river belonged to your God all along, why didn’t he send a diviner to tell our forefathers and us about it?”

  “That’s why we’re here. We’ve come to tell you about the God who made all things. We’ve brought you the good news of the one true, indivisible God. We’re here to spread the word about he who alone sits on the mantle of glory.”

  “I still have one question that scratches my inside,” the inquisitive convert said with a mischievous glint in his eye.

  “Ask it,” the missionary invited eagerly.

  “Does your God owe money to another god?”

  Perplexed, S
tanton asked, “What do you mean?”

  “I still don’t understand why your God likes to be invisible. Around here, those who take to hiding are men who don’t wish to pay their debts.”

  An edge of exasperation nudged away Stanton’s eager mien. Fixing the interpreter with a glare, he spoke in a slow, halting manner.

  “Tell them to get it out of their thick heads, once and for all, that there aren’t other gods besides the one we worship. Tell them that our God can’t owe anybody because he owns everything in heaven and on earth. Tell them that he’s invisible because he’s holy. Tell them that we’re all tainted sinners, corrupted by the original sin of our first parents, Adam and Eve, who ate the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. Tell them that, because all have sinned and come short, our eyes can’t see God in flesh and blood. Tell them that nobody who beholds God can live to tell about it. Tell them, finally, that there will be no more questions for today.”

  DESPITE THEIR MANY QUESTIONS and doubts, most converts did not wander off. Instead, they returned day after day to the makeshift church Stanton and his retinue had built on the outskirts of the village, near the river.

  The church building was made of bamboo stems and a roof thatched with palm fronds. The roof had chinks through which the sun thrust shafts of light. One day, Stanton told the converts the story of Pentecost: about the tongues, as of fire, that rested on the head of each apostle. He said the apostles, filled with the spirit, began to speak in strange tongues.

  Many converts were moved. Pentecost, they surmised, was a form of agwu, the spirit of possession. Agwu inflicted madness on those it possessed. But it also gave them hawk eyes that saw in the dark and far, far into the future, tongues that spoke prophecies, and hands that knew which leaves, barks, and roots healed what sickness. Some converts thought the shafts of sunlight that stabbed through holes in the raffia and rested on their fellows were the same intoxicating spirits that descended at Pentecost. But when one of them, a woman who used to lead village women in songs, flung herself on the ground and began to speak in a strange, frenzied tongue, the missionary’s face turned red. He rushed at her, kicking and stamping. She writhed and trembled on the dirt floor, indifferent to his kicks. The other converts looked on, terrified and confused. Clearly, the woman was seized by a force neither she nor Stanton could call to order. Huffing and puffing, the missionary shouted, “No madness here! I wouldn’t stand for it! Carry the mad woman away!”