The Extinction of Menai

by Chuma Nwokolo

  I processed that. ‘Badu?’

  She searched my face with alarm, her fingers massaging her tattoo. ‘Yes, but it’s not how you think. You know how you do things and go places and don’t remember them? Give him a chance, please.’

  We walked back to the room. The ladies had not moved a muscle. ‘I’m ready now,’ I said.

  ‘Zanda,’ said Amana hoarsely, and the bathroom door opened slowly. My image looked out from a mirror, and growing a mind of its own, stepped out carefully, bearing the vase of himself across the room. I saw how my clumsy embarrassment was not my fault but that of my genes. He offered me a glass of water. ‘Amis andgus, Humphrey,’ he said.

  I took the glass. My eyes did not leave his face. I drank. ‘Andgus ashen. It’s been a long time, younger brother.’

  ‘You may have come out first,’ he said with a grin, ‘but in Menai culture, the senior twin sends the younger out first to scope out the world.’

  The ladies laughed, and I knew then that even though my brother was the most dangerous terrorist in Nigeria, he was all right.

  Then, for the first time—outside the womb, at least—we hugged.

  ESTELLE BAPTISTE

  Hilton Hotel, Abuja | 25th April, 2005

  I love this country. Within ten hours my husband had gone from a courtroom where he was on trial for his life to a cocktail party to mark his national award. I looked at my watch. It was 8:00 p.m. Mishael was probably standing in the kitchenette, buttering a baguette and shouting at the surfers in the café to keep the noise down. I grinned in spite of myself. I was in the Congress Hall of the Abuja Hilton with my husband, his strange family, and maybe seven hundred other awardees, spouses, and friends.

  If I was not having the time of my life it was because I was worrying about what would happen next. Finding Rubi was the least of our problems. Sheesti had her telephone number at the Sacred Heart Convent in Ikot Ekpene. We still had not spoken to her, though, because she not broken the vow of silence she took in November 2002 when she got the news of her brother’s death. She had not forgiven herself, poor woman, for breaking the news of their mother’s death by letter. Still, they would soon know the truth in Abidjan. She would testify by letter, and Bamou’s murder investigation would close. Izak was a free man. I should have been enjoying the occasion.

  I was not.

  I was beginning to recognise the onset of Izak’s illness. He had not said a word for five minutes, and I saw the muscles of his face grow rigid. A distant look entered his eyes. Take a bow, Estelle Baptiste! This is the public stage of your international disgrace! That Fuju Club freakout was just a trial run. Dieu du ciel! . . . I raised my eyes to the ceiling. They filled with tears as I said a silent prayer.

  When I looked down, Izak had disappeared. I looked around desperately, and he was cutting across the hall in the direction of an overloud group of men who had attached themselves to a minibar. I left Amana and Zanda abruptly and hurried after my husband.

  There were not many Europeans in the room. This one was loud and friendly and wore a blue dashiki—which looked pretty good on him. Izak pushed himself into the man’s circle just as I got to his side. He did not do anything crazy or over the top, just offered a handshake. I took Izak’s other arm. My heart was pounding with relief as they shook hands warmly. I realised that maybe I was the one freaking out.

  ‘Are you Dalminda Roco?’ Izak asked.

  The other man made a face. ‘Dalminda Loco? What sort of name is that?’ He seemed offended to have been mistaken for a mad Dalminda, and he reclaimed his hand to his chest and stared hard at Izak. Indeed he seemed the very opposite of the character described in Izak’s bomber story. The introductions broke down then; he did not give his name, and Izak did not introduce us. The cocktail clot around us melted away and reformed elsewhere. It is easy to look miserable at a cocktail party: just stand by yourself and don’t talk. We looked miserable, as Izak slowly retreated into himself. His eyes followed the European who was not loco around the room.

  ‘He said he’s not Dalminda Loco,’ I said impatiently, trying to distract him. ‘Let it go!’

  ‘Roco,’ said Izak. ‘Roco.’

  * * *

  DURING THE presentations, the man Izak had mistaken for Dalminda was called up to the dais. His name was Daniel Sheldon, and he was introduced as a company director and a philanthropist who was patron to many Nigerian charities. My husband went up for his own award without crisis, but he barely looked at it.

  Afterwards, there were photographers outside. I tried to bring a smile to his face for the pictures. ‘Just smile, Izak! You must have been mistaken . . . he’s a philanthropist.’

  ‘Terrorist, not philanthropist.’ He gestured at the award I was holding proudly to my breast. ‘You are real, I know that, but as for this award, this ceremony, this Sheldon, I’ll wake up tomorrow and it will all be a dream.’

  I glared at him. ‘At least you can make some money for us when you write it up for Balding Wolf!’

  That seemed to do it. It still was not a proper laugh, but it was enough. The bulbs flashed and that was the picture in The Punch newspaper the very next day.

  * * *

  Ubesia | 26th April, 2005

  I had never before seen my husband cry. When we attended his parents’ funeral soon after our wedding in Abidjan, he did not shed a tear. Yet when I returned to our bedroom, he was alone in the dark. And when I drew the curtains apart, his eyes were red.

  ‘Izak! What happened?’

  Of course he tried to ‘be a man’! There was a faster way to find out, so I stormed off to the grill bar beside the marina where I had left the brothers laughing barely an hour earlier. Zanda was still there with Lantanya, and Sheesti was just arriving. ‘What did you do to my husband?’

  ‘He’s just gone to the loo,’ said his brother. ‘He’ll soon be back. We have an appointment with Sheesti—’

  ‘Well, he’s in the bedroom crying!’

  Zanda rose, worried.

  ‘We were just listening to a recording,’ said Lantanya. ‘Then he said he had to use the loo . . .’

  ‘What recording was that?’ asked Sheesti.

  ‘Our torqwa,’ said Zanda. ‘I recorded Mata Nimito’s recital of our ancestry . . .’

  Sheesti took his hand and mine and pulled us down onto the bench. She has a quality about her, this woman, like calamine lotion on a back prickly with heat rash. When we were sitting again, she said quietly, ‘He’ll be fine. It’s a normal response to your first torqwa. It’s a shock to go from not knowing your parents to knowing your ancestors from a thousand years ago.’

  She took Zanda’s phone, and in a moment we were listening to an old man’s voice singing in a strange language. Sheesti started. I saw goose pimples on her arms. She took my hand and placed it so I could feel her baby kicking. ‘He likes Mata Nimito’s voice.’ She smiled.

  ‘I want to meet this man,’ I whispered.

  ‘You will. I’m back from London in four days. You must come with us to Khartoum.’

  TOBIN RANI

  Sudan | 27th April, 2005

  We had made camp at dawn, and I was so tired from driving the last shift that I slept until the sun was overhead. I woke hungry, to the aroma of a simmering soup, and found the Mata and David on deck chairs under the shade of the tailgate. David was learning to count in Menai. ‘Better late than never,’ he laughed, passing me a plate.

  We ate facing the Keep of Njakara; it was still a hundred kilometres away, a scenic range of hills that had materialised overnight on the northern horizon. The granite outcrop was cobalt blue, with a private retainer of clouds on a plateau of date palms, and it overlooked silica-rich dunes that glistened in the sun. David scratched his new beard. ‘I’m not complaining, you understand, but I’m hoping we’re not digging up five-hundred-year-old mummies in this mountain.’

  The Mata smiled, and his eyes moistened. ‘Ariemo mai Njakara nasuti kaisoko.’

  I looked at the range with ne
w eyes. I had gone to sleep before the sun came fully up and had not really taken in the view. In awe I said, ‘Our greatest poems from antiquity describe the beauty of the Keep of Njakara. Mata Nimito always wanted to see it before he died.’

  Minutes passed. ‘Was it worth the journey, Mata?’ asked David softly.

  ‘Anobi, Tobin ba Davidi,’ sighed the Mata gratefully. ‘Journey? It is worth living through three centuries to see this sight. Once upon a time, we ruled all this.’ His finger pointed from the eastern end of the range to the middle, then slowly came to rest in his lap.

  As I translated the Mata, I thought it odd that he claimed just one half, when the Menai historysongs claimed the entire plateau. Perhaps he was finally losing his memory. Then I looked sideways and saw the smile with which Mata Nimito had left for eternity.

  He was a hundred and ten years old.

  DAVID BALSAM

  Sudan | 27th April, 2005

  It was a moment of no particular significance, the sky beyond the Keep of Njakara remaining the featureless azure of the previous week, a bland blue soup variegated by the flimsiest strands of white. David watched his companion closely, waiting for the outburst, the breakdown, but it did not come. Tobin washed and rubbed down the Mata’s thin onionlike skin with a fragrant oil. Then he robed him in red and shrouded him in Kakandu’s last weave.

  ‘Are you okay?’ David asked.

  ‘I’m fine. I’ve been mourning him since I was a boy.’

  Then he zipped up the last Mata in his body bag.

  ‘We don’t have much time now, in this heat.’ It was the end of the quixotic quest for an ancestral Field of Stones, but David felt no vindication, only a strangely disorienting loss. ‘Where do we bury him?’

  Tobin glanced around the desert. ‘Any old place,’ he said quietly. ‘Any bloody old place.’

  David pulled out the log. ‘I’ll call it “under the shadow of the Keep of Njakara,” right?’

  Tobin ignored him. David took the spade down from the truck, moved the Mata’s deck chair, and began to dig. Tobin made no effort to help. During his first rest stop, David sat amidst the pile of the old man’s clothes that Tobin had thrown down from the truck. He picked up some rolled-up leather scrolls and looked at them with quickening interest.

  ‘This is impossible!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Is this . . . a Menai script? You have writing? Mata Nimito could read this?’

  ‘Our writing is older than the Latin alphabet. Everyone raised in the way of the Menai can read and write it.’

  ‘I know exactly where the “Field” is.’

  ‘What?’

  David rose and scrambled toward the truck. He reached inside for the satellite phone and the paper maps. ‘This script, I’m positive, belongs to the Meroe family. The civilisation of the Meroes disappeared from history about eighteen hundred years ago, but thousands of writings in their script survive in museums across the world.’

  He pulled up the map on which we had sketched our hopeful journey. He powered on his tablet and scratched his head ruefully. ‘You know that empty patch we thought we were heading for? My GPS may consider it empty desert now, but a century ago, it was a city of dead kings. Begrawiya. If the Mata’s stories are accurate, he was heading to the pyramids of the Meroe kings.’

  Pause. ‘And the Meroe kings are . . . ?’

  David stared. ‘Now you surprise me. They had a kingdom . . . the Egyptians called it the land of Kush. The height of its majesty was 200 BC. For Christ’s sake, they conquered Egypt at one point! Their kings were called the black pharaohs!’

  ‘Oh. That Meroe. I know about them. I’m just confused about the connec—’

  ‘You know about them! You’re fifty, for God’s sake. What did you teach your children? All you know is Menai this and Menai that! The Meroes also built pyramids—far more than the Egyptians. They have over two hundred in Begrawiya. They adopted the Egyptian script, but they had their own written language!’

  ‘And these scrolls?’

  ‘As a curator, I’d place them in a Meroitic gallery today.’

  Tobin took a deep breath. ‘You never said so.’

  ‘I never saw them.’

  Tobin paused. ‘What are we waiting for?’

  David grabbed his phone. Waving the maps, he said, ‘These maps are not historically annotated. I’ve been out of the field for years, I’ll need to call colleagues in England. Put the Mata in the truck. Move your ass and clean up here. I have to make contact with Khartoum.’

  * * *

  TOBIN HAD been driving for three hours, and David had been working his phone intermittently all through the drive. He pulled gloomily at his beard.

  ‘There are any number of places we could take him . . . Dongola, Karima . . . but they are all historical sites. Pyramids and all. We couldn’t drop a bubblegum wrapper there, much less bury an old man, even if he is your great Mata.’

  ‘I’ll talk to them.’

  David laughed humourlessly.

  * * *

  DAVID BRACED himself against the bumps of the desert floor as he studied the scrolls. He cursed and slammed his hand again and again against the dashboard of the truck.

  ‘What now?’

  ‘I met the holy grail of African archaeology, a living expert of a close relative of the Meroitic script, and I let him slip through my fingers! Am I a retard or what?’

  ‘I guess we are agreed on one thing then.’

  * * *

  DAVID SNIFFED. He rustled through his maps. ‘We have more immediate concerns. We need to have the old man embalmed.’

  ‘Not if we’re burying him today.’

  ‘Be realistic. Karima is still twelve hours away even at your speed. On the strength of these scrolls, there is a ghost of a chance we can give the old man his last wish, but we still have weeks and weeks of paperwork and political lobbying to get through!’

  A minute passed, and Tobin eased off the accelerator. ‘What are you saying?’

  David pointed at the map. ‘That’s a tarred road. Bede is only a hundred miles northeast. It is not much of a deviation.’

  ‘Not much chance of a mortuary there. Folks tend to bury the same day or the next in this neck of the woods.’

  ‘Worth the chance. Besides, it looks big enough for fuel. We’re running low.’

  David plotted the coordinates into the GPS, and Tobin followed the new course.

  Eventually, they found the highway. There wasn’t much tar left on it, but they made forty miles per hour steadily and travelled northeast. The land was deserted, lifeless. Bustards and eagles drifted in the clear skies, but apart from that, they were alone in the world. Two hours into the road they found out why: it terminated on the lip of a wadi with a steep cliff on the far side. The bridge across had been swept away.

  * * *

  ABANDONING THE GPS, they spread a physical contour map on the bonnet. David located the wadi and traced its course. It ran eighty miles south and only twenty-five miles north. They looked north. The northern miles, furrowed by ridges and pitted by pustules of black tar, did not seem motorable as far as the eyes could see. David put a point on the map and drew a six-inch-diameter circle around it.

  ‘The fuel circle,’ he said grimly.

  Tobin drew a concentric circle with double the radius. ‘The water circle. I shouldn’t have washed the old man back there, but I thought we were going home.’

  ‘We are now,’ David told him, ‘unless we’re really lucky.’

  * * *

  A LATE lunch lightened their depression.

  ‘There’s one circle we didn’t draw,’ said Tobin, ‘the trek circle. We could camp here, cross the ravine on foot, and walk overnight to get fuel. It’s only sixty more miles to Bede. We could make it by dawn.’

  ‘I love that word, only—’ He broke off, and Tobin turned to follow his gaze. They both rose as a small herd of goats emerged from the wadi.

  * * *

  THE TEENAGE goathe
rd’s English was rudimentary, but the word water was enough. They drove after him at the pace of his goats, into the motorable bed of the wadi and another two kilometres north to his village, announced from afar by the limbs of a great baobab. It was a sprawling settlement with a few hundred homes and an overhead tank fed by a borehole. Yet both the village and the dirt road that served it were invisible on their maps, electronic and paper alike.

  ‘No fuel station here,’ sighed David.

  They did not get much welcome either. The looks that greeted them were not as friendly as the goatherd’s. But the villagers let them fill up their water tanks from the hose at the borehole.

  An old woman approached on a cane. She seemed to carry some authority, as her circuit of the truck attracted more than the usual amount of attention. Speaking volubly, with some violence, she bore down on David and Tobin as they finished bathing in a line of communal stalls whose walls ended just above the neck.

  ‘Wonder what she’s saying,’ muttered David, beginning to wish they had trekked to Bede.

  ‘Our grandmother says,’ said a coal-black youth beside the goatherd, ‘“Where do these idiots always going with so much stuff?”’

  The two men exchanged glances over the dwarf walls. Then they stared at their new interpreter.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Tobin asked.

  ‘Deen.’

  ‘You want to know?’ He struggled into his clothes. ‘Come.’

  * * *

  THE MATA’S body brought on a thaw. The villagers found something noble in the carrying of an old man—who had died on a trip—across the Sahara to his ancestral home. Suddenly David and Tobin found themselves invited to a meal, which grew in impromptu leaps into a funeral feast.

  The village was New Aria. It was less than ten years old. The New Arians had migrated south when their old settlement was burnt in the war between rebels and their government. They spoke tearfully of their ancestral home, vowed to go back, and then laughed and brought the subject back to the burial of old men.

  It was a sad little place, a soft underbelly of the parched desert. Dozens of juvenile economic trees too young for shade or fruit. A crop of camels crouched under a shelter built of palm fronds. A village square of packed earth darkened by donkey droppings. Several trucks, sturdy and virile despite their age, sat ready for the next cross-Saharan trip, which would take place on the morrow. Bales of hay, of dried spices, of fodder. Uniformly lanky children with wide-eyes, modest women, earnest men . . . David’s wandering eyes were dragged back to the feast by the old woman’s wagging finger.