Tefuga

by Peter Dickinson

  “Mr Jackland?” she said, holding out a card. “I am Annie Boyaba, A.N.B.C.”

  The card confirmed the information, adding that A.N.B.C. was “The Voice of the West.”

  “I am hoping that you will grant me the honour of an interview,” she said.

  Her voice was crisply English, almost absurdly so. Shut your eyes and you might have been listening to minor royalty.

  Jackland smiled, not apparently at her but at some sudden private thought.

  “This is Major Kadu of the Nigerian Army,” he said. “We’ll give you a lift into town and talk about it there. Let Miss Boyaba up, Major. She will provide excellent camouflage. By the same token, I wonder if you would mind removing your cap.”

  “What is this for?” said the Major.

  Jackland smiled yet more broadly. His pale blue eyes sparkled beneath the jutting brows.

  “Please,” he said. “I want it to be a surprise.”

  With obvious doubt the Major moved to the centre of the bench seat and took off his cap, revealing short iron-grey hair. Miss Boyaba climbed up and Jackland drove on. The highway, though built mainly to link with the unfinished bridge, continued along the line of the old road as far as the ferry, skirting New Kiti, a sprawl of buildings ranging from two-storey breeze-block houses to iron-roofed huts, none at all pleasing. It was still barely a town, having expanded far less than most Nigerian conurbations. The hinterland of Kiti was too thinly populated to swell it greatly, and most of those with the initiative to leave their villages had also perceived its hopelessness as a place of opportunity and moved on, at least as far as Birnin Soko. Its only truly town-like feature was the fine tree-lined avenue that cut through the architectural mess and ended at the twin towers of the Old Town Gate. Beneath the trees spread Kiti Market, a drifting crowd of men and women between rows of stalls selling the usual hotchpotch—ingredients for traditional dyes, cassette players and radios, plastic kitchen­ware, magical drugs, brass trinkets, cheap imported cotton, cans of oil, the locally abundant fish already reeking with the heat under a maze of flies. The only variation from the standard African market was a queue of patients waiting at the W.H.O. clinic for treatment for river-blindness contracted in the spray of the rapids; also, perhaps, the absence of tourist-ware. It was the apparently least successful traders who gave the market its sense of being a timeless custom rather than a transitory commercial convenience—an old woman sitting beside a basket of dark orange beans, a child from the hinterland with nothing but a single kid to sell.

  At the entrance to the avenue the police had set up a roadblock, partly to extract unofficial tolls on the excuse of inspecting permits, and partly for the pleasure of browbeating, and occasionally just beating, those who came. Two policemen manned the block. Both carried guns, though one wore jeans instead of his uniform trousers. Another four drank beer with their friends under an awning commandeered from a nearby stall. The men on the block waved the Landrover to a halt. The one on Jackland’s side rested the muzzle of his gun on the door.

  “Where you steal this truck, now,” he shouted.

  He was fairly drunk, the road-block being a self-financing binge that ran from Christmas through the New Year. Miss Boyaba’s presence may have stimulated an extra show of aggressiveness, but he seemed not to have noticed Major Kadu.

  “This was the problem I was talking about, Major,” said Jackland, completely ignoring the soldier. “I wonder if you could make, ah, representations.”

  The Major hesitated. This was another example of Jackland’s characteristic behaviour, too deliberate to be described merely as tactlessness, the streak of the gambler that led him to take risks over personal relationships and to play what were almost practical jokes on the moral level, though he would have been far more cautious about, and less amused by, purely physical dangers and pratfalls. The policeman rattled his gun-barrel on the metal of the door. The Major put his cap on and stood up.

  It was an odd movement, but sandwiched as he was between Jackland and Miss Boyaba he may have felt it was the only means by which he could assert his presence. Certainly it achieved that effect. The arrival of a car driven by a European and the bellowing of the policeman at it had already attracted mild interest along the nearer stalls. The sudden emergence of an Army officer, standing aloft and holding the top of the windscreen with one hand as if he were the central figure on some grand parade, produced an actual gasp, silence, a few murmurs, and then a single hoarse shout, clearly of welcome, from somewhere at the back of the crowd. The shout was taken up in several places and became a general bay, attracting attention from further and further down the avenue. Standing as he was, the Major could be seen from the furthest end. The shouting grew. Even the river-blind turned inquisitive milky eyes to try and stare, as though their saviour had come who would heal them at a touch. The crowd began to move in, but those nearest the truck stood their ground, not knowing any more than the Major what was expected of them.

  Meanwhile in this, say, twenty seconds, the policeman had fallen back a pace allowing Jackland to open the door and get out, and the men under the awning had jumped up, gathering equipment and uniform and at the same time trying to shoo their cronies out of sight. Their corporal lined them up and came over with a straight-spined marching step. He snapped up a salute, disciplined but not deferential, one power waiting formal confrontation with another. The effect was partly spoilt by his having put on a cap belonging to a colleague with a quite different skull-shape. Its brim only touched in two places, so that it teetered at every move.

  The Major glanced down at him, but before descending to his level raised his right arm palm-forward to the crowd, a gesture which clearly showed that he too recognized and accepted his role as the expected saviour. A cheer rose, criss-crossed as it died away with shouts of anger. The crowd began to move again as the Major climbed down. As soon as he was clear Jackland slipped into the driving-seat and nudged the truck forward through the mob. This was only in fact a few hundred people and the road was wide enough to allow some movement, so that after the first twenty yards he was almost clear, though one or two late-corners to the crush insisted on leaning into the truck and shaking his hand to congratulate him on the part he had played in the epiphany.

  “God,” he said. “I didn’t mean to start anything like that. I must apologize for dragging you in.”

  “But it was marvellous, wonderful,” said Miss Boyaba. “Everything in this country has been so … You know, Mr Jackland, often I have felt positively sick to be Nigerian.”

  She pushed her spectacles up on to her forehead and stared at him with large and earnest eyes. She was younger than she had seemed at first approach, very appealing in her naïve vehemence. Before Jackland could answer, the hubbub at the top of the avenue was pierced by two shots. It died away, then rose on a sharper note.

  “Quick,” said Miss Boyaba. “They will shut the gates.”

  Indeed as Jackland drove towards the Old Town entrance two men in loose white cotton robes were dragging one leaf of the main gate across the archway. Jackland sounded his horn. They did not look up. Miss Boyaba rose and shouted in Hausa. The word “Sarkin” was part of the phrase. The men stopped and waved the truck urgently through, but now apparently recognizing Miss Boyaba called a greeting to her as she passed. Jackland braked in the clear arena inside the gateway and looked back at the closing door.

  “I suppose the Major’s all right,” he said. “I feel a bit responsible …”

  “Oh, they won’t hurt him! He’s what they’ve been waiting for. We’ve all been longing for something like this to happen.”

  “You’re a local, then?”

  “I meant everyone in Nigeria, but actually I am sort of quarter-local. We used to come up often for holidays. The Sarkin is my great-uncle, you see.”

  “Is he indeed? These things have their uses. Um, I take it your selection to do this interview is not a
n entire coincidence?”

  Miss Boyaba had pulled her spectacles down, but now, despite the hazy but powerful glare of mid-morning, pushed them up again and looked at Jackland with deliberately widened eyes.

  “I’m afraid I haven’t been quite straight with you, Mr Jackland,” she said. “I’m only a trainee, really. Our head reporter wanted to do an interview with Mary Tressider but your publicity people turned her down. This was when you were at Ilorin. But when I heard you were up in Kiti I went to my boss and said because of the Sarkin being my great-uncle I might be able to wangle an interview here. It’s how things work in Nigeria, you see.”

  “And elsewhere.”

  “But really it was you I was longing to meet.”

  “Speaking as an old hand to a trainee I’d say you’d started off on the right foot but now you’re overdoing it slightly.”

  “Oh, no. I promise. Ever since I first saw your name—it was on a programme you did about President Marcos, actually—I’ve been hoping one day you’d come to Nigeria. That’s true. That’s why I was desperate to wangle the job. If you can spare me ten minutes I’ll tell you.”

  “Sounds as though we may have more than that,” said Jackland, jerking his head towards the continuing clamour from beyond the gateway. “I want to go and check what’s happening down at the Old Palace. Apart from that I have no pressing engagements. On the other hand, it’s a bit hot here.”

  “Let’s go to Uncle Elongo’s. That’s what we call him, you know.”

  “Is that all right?”

  “Of course.”

  From immediately inside the gate the Old Town seemed hardly to have altered since Betty Jackland had described it in her diary. Two or three cars and an ancient truck were parked in the gateway arena; a radio wailed Cairo-style rock from an upper floor; but otherwise there were the same thick-walled mud buildings and the same allotment-like strips of cultivated ground, where labourers still smote rhythmically between the rows with long-handled mattocks. But as Jackland drove out from between the flanking houses a new and dominant feature came into view. The whole southern segment of the Old Town, almost a third of the space between the walls, had been completely cleared. Down its centre stretched a long single-storey building, red-tiled and white-walled, with a deep colonnade running from end to end. In the shade beneath its arches groups of Africans waited, some probably for audience with the Sarkin, others to see minor officials, and yet others on no business at all but simply allowing time to flow by, enlivened by argument and gossip. Some of these had moved out into the open, evidently to listen to and discuss the new noises arising from the market. Behind them a dozen old men sat unperturbed in facing pairs, playing the ludo game. Down at the further end a dozen boys sat round their mallam, learning the lines of the Koran by chanting them aloud. There were no women visible.

  The cleared spaces surrounding the palace had been landscaped into a formal garden, lawns, flights of white steps, cannas, yuccas, clipped low hedges of Jesus-thorn surrounding beds of scarlet pelargoniums. A stream diverted from the river separated the area from the rest of Old Kiti. The effect of both garden and building was international. One might have been looking at a palace, or more likely a hotel, in almost any hot, dry country—Jordan, Mexico, anywhere. Only the people made it African.

  Miss Boyaba directed Jackland across the stream and round to the left of the palace. The building was H-shaped, with the Sarkin’s private quarters, including those of the women, running in a mirror-image block parallel to the official wing in front. A shorter range joined the two, thus forming a pair of open-ended courtyards. Round the one into which Jackland now drove the colonnade was widened to make a series of parking-bays for the cars belonging to the Sarkin and his household.

  Jackland chose an empty one, swung the Landrover round and reversed into the shade.

  “OK?” he said.

  “Perfect. I promise I won’t keep you long, but I do want to explain why it’s so important to me to meet you.”

  “If you like, but before we start, though it’s none of my business, thank God, don’t you think that as a rising young reporter your first duty isn’t to go and find out what’s happening out there and file a story on it?”

  Miss Boyaba sounded surprised.

  “A little market riot?” she said. “Not a hope. They’re always happening. This isn’t Yola, Mr Jackland. Anyway, I want to tell you about my granny.”

  Despite being out of the glare she had not removed her sun-glasses, and had now twisted herself half-sideways into the furthest corner of the bench. The effect was of shyness and sudden uncertainty, of having discarded the easy pushiness she thought appropriate for her job and returned to an earlier style.

  “Your grandmother?” said Jackland.

  “Yes. You see, when I was a little girl I spent most of my time with her. She was Dad’s mother, which meant she was a real Bakiti, so we used to talk Kiti together. She’d spent most of her life in Ibadan, so she knew Yoruba, but she wanted to make sure I knew Kiti too. It’s sad. I’ve forgotten it all, almost. I can still say a few things like ‘Hello’.”

  “A strong spirit in Annie Boyaba.”

  “That’s right. Only it isn’t quite ‘spirit’. It’s … I don’t think there’s a word for it. Where was I?”

  “Ibadan.”

  “Oh, yes. That’s where my grandfather had been exiled to. He was dead ages before of course. He was sixty years older than she was.”

  “A somewhat unusual disparity, even in Africa.”

  “Not really. Or it didn’t used to be, not with the big men going on taking wives all their lives. You’d have thought it was ghastly for Granny but I don’t know. She used to take me to help look after his grave every Sunday. She put little fetishes there. That was for him, you see. The Kitawa don’t do that but she said it was what he wanted. Daddy and Mummy were Christians and Granny used to come to church with us, but I don’t know what she really believed.”

  “Your grandfather, I take it, was Kama Boi.”

  “Didn’t I tell you?”

  “Not in so many words. And your grandmother was the sister young Elongo had come to look for when he asked for work building my parents’ house?”

  “I didn’t know about that.”

  “Apparently Kama Boi had stolen the girl.”

  “Oh, no. I mean I don’t think it was quite like that. Her uncles sent her away—she wasn’t the only one—to work in strangers’ fields. That wasn’t too bad. But then she was sent away from there again to a big, big hut full of women. That was my grandfather’s harem, of course, but she didn’t understand that. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do or where she fitted in. That’s absolutely terrible for someone who’s spent all her life in a village. There were some Kitawa women there but they didn’t talk to her much. She was miserable. She used to say her spirit-thing kept crying to go home.

  “Then one day a white woman came to make pictures of my grandfather’s wives and she was told to go and keep the flies off her. She was terribly afraid of the white woman. In her village they were full of stories about how dangerous white people could be. But the white woman didn’t look at her or speak to her.”

  “You are aware it was my mother?”

  “Yes, but how did you know?”

  “She kept a diary. I’ll show you.”

  “Oh, please!”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, when the painting was over the white woman turned and looked at Granny and spoke to her, just a few words, in Kiti. She spoke like a friend. She told Granny to keep her spirit-thing in her. I expect she was only saying ‘Hello’, but that made Granny terribly happy. Just then my grandfather came up to talk to the white woman. I know this sounds funny but Granny and my grandfather had hardly noticed each other before. Of course he hadn’t paid any attention to her, creeping about being miserable, but she hadn’t eit
her. It was the women who’d filled her view. But suddenly he saw her looking happy and young, and I expect having the white woman so close made him feel a bit randy anyway. Anyway, he took Granny to his bed that afternoon and made her pregnant. He was pretty bucked about that because he hadn’t had any children for a year or two, and then nine months later when the baby came and it was a boy that was terrific. The last few had all been girls. It’s sort of symbolic, you see. That didn’t happen till after he’d been deposed. Daddy was actually born on the journey to Ibadan. My grandfather was allowed to take a few wives into exile and of course he’d chosen Granny to be one of them because she was carrying his child. Her being a Bakiti was important, too. Everybody took it as a sign that my grandfather was still really King of Kiti—that’s what Sarkin means. The White Man could take the emirship away because they’d given it to him in the first place, but they couldn’t stop him being King. That wasn’t anything to do with them.”

  “I don’t imagine they grasped that point.”

  “Course not.”

  “My father may have. It’s hard to tell. Go on.”

  “Well, it meant that Granny was my grandfather’s favourite. She looked after him when he was dying. And of course he adored the little boy, so though the English didn’t let him have much of a pension he arranged things all right for her. She got a hut and a garden and a little money, and Daddy went to a mission school and got educated and became a dentist and built himself a proper house and Granny went to live with him.”

  “Fascinating. I wish I’d known some of this earlier.”