Tefuga

by Peter Dickinson

  Now that he was out of sight of his people the Sarkin seemed to admit to weariness. His spine drooped slightly. His head went forward on his neck and he walked with an old man’s half-shuffle to the shade of the big tree, where the brolly-man opened his chair for him. He sat slowly down and closed his eyes. It was a good minute before he seemed to remember Jackland’s existence, and opened them again. Jackland, in fact, was out of sight, having given way to the European instinct to poke around among ruins. By the time he emerged and came strolling across the Sarkin had regathered his energies and was sitting bolt upright.

  “I have been advised to turn all this into a tourist attraction,” he said. “What do you think, Mr Jackland?”

  His tone, though calm, made it apparent that he was not specially interested in the question, but was carrying out the royal duty of getting a conversation going on minor matters, whatever else might be on his mind.

  “As a romantic ruin, or a practical demonstration?” said Jackland.

  “My consultants suggest complete restoration, with life-size models of the inhabitants. I have estimates in my office of the numbers of black tourists who possess the means and urge to investigate their own African-ness.”

  “Plenty of money in it for the consultants, anyway.”

  “Oh, yes. But also substantial grants from Central Government for capital projects likely to earn hard currency. Furthermore there is a high level of unemployment in Kiti.”

  “But you’re not going to do it.”

  The Sarkin smiled.

  “I am still considering. But what do you think? You have, after all, come to Kiti yourself in an effort to re-create your own past.”

  “Only marginally mine, old boy. But I’d have thought, supposing you can get the tourists out this far in the first place, a reconstruction might be a success. Nostalgia seems to be an almost universal urge.”

  “It is becoming so, but it is strange to me. Where I was born … It seems to me, Mr Jackland, that there are two kinds of peoples. The difference does not lie in colour or wealth or climate, but in what is expected of life. There are people who expect tomorrow to be the same as today. To them, all the past is the same. They have a myth of their own origin, but no history. Only when times are bad they have another myth, of a golden age.”

  “Before the White Man came it seems to be, these days.”

  “Not only these days. It was so when I was a child. I was born among just such a people, but I left them when I was a young man and found a different kind, people who expect tomorrow to be better than today, themselves richer, their lives easier, their power more. They expect to know things their fathers never knew, and to their own children they will soon seem fools. All over the world now, not only in Africa, these people are eating up the other sort. And all over the world at the same time they are searching for something they have lost in their own past. The richer and freer they are, the more the future holds for them, the more they search. This is what I find strange.”

  There being no chair for Jackland he had settled unselfconsciously on to the ground, sitting cross-legged and looking up at the Sarkin with his habitual mask of interest, inquisitive but tolerant. Despite the good shade the Sarkin had not removed his sun-glasses, and his real feelings were equally unreadable.

  “Where do you stand, Sarkin?” said Jackland. “After all, you were kind enough to help me get this film off the ground. I doubt if we’d have got the various permissions without you.”

  “You would certainly not.”

  “I’m very grateful. Much in your debt, in fact. But why did you bother if you don’t share in the general nostalgia?”

  “Because you are your mother’s son.”

  “Ah. There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you about her, Sarkin …”

  Jackland paused, but there was no nod or grunt of permission from the Sarkin, who sat very still, apparently brooding at the leaning silvery pillar of the dead tree-stump.

  “My mother kept a diary,” said Jackland. “Now …”

  “I am an Elongist, it seems,” said the Sarkin.

  “Rather a compliment in some ways,” said Jackland, not apparently put out by the deliberate rebuff. For several seconds it seemed as though the Sarkin did not wish to expand on this topic either. Voices rose from beyond the outer wall. Burn’s squeak, exaggerated by tiredness, was the dominant note. Clearly there had been yet another interruption in the apparently simple process of filming six people walking across a patch of bare earth and disappearing through a door.

  “I will tell you the history of this so-called Elongism. Tefuga … The Incident … The British understood some things, but not others. After the Incident they saw that our agreement with the family of Kama Boi was ended, but not why. They abolished the Emirate of Kiti, which meant nothing to us. They chose a young man, Yakali, from the family of Kama Boi to be District Head of Kiti Town, but so that the disgrace should not be too apparent they let him call himself Sarkin Kiti, as Kama Boi had called himself before the British made him Emir. Both town and province of Kiti they placed under the Emirate of Soko. All the Kitawa would now pay taxes, but because they were very poor the amounts would be nominal, and the British gave assurances that no extra taxes would be levied by the Native Administration, and no seizing of people in lieu of taxes would take place. It was, in British eyes, a tidy compromise. It did not seem to them to matter that the Emir of Soko was a Fulani, and an hereditary enemy of the family of Kama Boi, nor that his ancestors had been those who used to raid the Kitawa for slaves.

  “In the eyes of the Kitawa the arrangement was also a compromise, but a different one. They had unmade the agreement with the family of Kama Boi and had made a new one with the White Man, but the agreement itself was almost identical. There was even, under this new agreement, an official who spoke for the Kitawa to the White Man. Indeed they continued to refer to him as the Bangwa Wangwa, though the White Man called him his Messenger. All this was ratified in their eyes not by the conference of elders which was called by your father after the Incident, but by the Incident itself, at which both the White Man and the new Bangwa Wangwa had been present. The payment of taxes was a disagreeable necessity.

  “There was, however, one major difference, unforeseen by the Kitawa and of no obvious importance to the White Man. Kama Boi had ruled for over thirty years. Each White Man seldom stayed for as much as thirteen months. After your father died there was Mr O’Farrell, then Captain Roth, then Mr Smith Hampson, then Captain Roth again—I will not tell you all the names. In 1931 there were three different D.O.s at Kiti. The Messenger, however, remained. I was the Messenger.”

  “You didn’t go for promotion? I’d have thought …”

  “I could not then read or write. I had no wish to leave Kiti. Elders listened when I spoke. So, soon, did my masters. New D.O.s would come with instructions from Kaduna to respect the Messenger’s views on matters affecting the Kitawa. Moreover I had been on the hill at Tefuga that day. I was, in my own eyes, bound to the task.”

  “You still are?”

  “Yes.”

  “Things have changed a lot since then.”

  “In those days change seemed far off. The world was one where today was the same as yesterday. If your mother had come back to Kiti in 1945 she would have found very little difference. None at all out in the villages, apart from a few dirt roads and travelling health clinics.”

  “De Lancey didn’t get his bridge?”

  The Sarkin shook his head, smiling with what seemed like nostalgic half-regret at this forgotten foible.

  “Mr de Lancey and his bridge. I saw the plans. He contracted hepatitis and was invalided home. Soon with the world recession there was no money for such things. No bridge then, no bridge now.”

  “How did that happen? I take it that your young admirer outside …”

  “Oh no, Mr Jackland. He is, in a s
ense, right. It is part of the history of Elongism. Would you like me to go on? I was speaking of the war. Now, though nothing had changed, I could smell change in the air. White Man and Black Man might talk as though the British would still be here for a hundred years—the emirs especially talked like that—but in their hearts they did not believe it. Then in 1951 there was a new constitution. Political parties now permitted. Suddenly it became apparent to all thinking people that in a few years the British would be gone. They talked of limited self-rule, but we all knew this was nonsense. A ruler has authority over the ruled. It is not divisible. As soon as they take the smallest part of it back they have effectively taken it all.

  “Now, there was a rush to form parties. Those who already had power and authority formed parties to protect themselves. The rest formed parties to take it from them. Here in the north the emirs and chiefs formed the N.P.C. Yakali, who was Sarkin Kiti, was among them. I will tell you about him.”

  “I met his son in Lagos, as a matter of fact. One Umani Ban.”

  The Sarkin closed his lips tight, sucking them inward, as if to seal off the pressures of speech. The check was a physical effort, a measure of the vehemence of those pressures. The old man had hitherto shown himself affable but in no way self-revealing. Now, though, circumstances—the young thatcher’s public attack on him, the mention of his obligation to Jackland’s mother, perhaps even the place where he was sitting—seemed to have compelled him to rebut that attack for the benefit of Betty Jackland’s son. Whatever the causes, the reference to Umani Ban pulled him up short. His head tilted back. His unseen eyes could only be looking half-sideways down at Jackland with querying suspicion. Jackland as a very experienced interviewer may simply have recognized the nature of reassurance now required. On the other hand his response may have been perfectly genuine—despite his pose of tolerance he was given to sudden vehement dislikes.

  “I thought he was a total and unmitigated shit, if you want to know,” he said.

  “Umani Ban is my brother-in-law.”

  “Ah well. We can’t choose our relations. Or our wife’s.”

  The Sarkin laughed aloud, not an old man’s cackle but a hardly enfeebled version of the open, generous laughter Betty Jackland had remarked on.

  “I chose my father-in-law, at least,” he said. “Umani Ban is as you describe him. We Kitawa would say that he has a small spirit in him. Small and mean. He intrigues continually against me. Yakali was a vain, lustful, greedy man, but with a big spirit in him, such as Kama Boi had too. Yakali’s great wish was to be Emir of all Kiti, and we knew when he joined the N.P.C. and became a politician this was his chief aim. I resigned my post as Messenger and went out among the villages. The Kitawa wanted to form their own party, but I persuaded them that the emirs would then eat us up. I was right. This is how it has been in Nigeria. So I told the Kitawa to collect money, and I went to the Emir of Soko and paid him two hundred pounds for nomination on his list of candidates. Politicians, radicals and men from the south, came and pleaded with me to tell the Kitawa to vote against the N.P.C. but I refused. I had worked almost thirty years with the British and I knew they would not let the emirs be unseated.

  “There were then five constituencies among the Kitawa, and at the next elections I agreed that two should choose members of Yakali’s household. One of those thus elected was the then Bangwa Wangwa, an office that had become purely ceremonial since the Incident. This man was too stupid to understand the new situation, and within a year complaints were brought against him for extortion and corruption …”

  “By his constituents?”

  “Who else?”

  “But with your help?”

  “They came to me for advice, of course. Since I had stood on the hill that day it was my task to prevent such oppression, both in their eyes and in mine. Let me go on. The Bangwa Wangwa was sent to prison and I then asked Yakali to give me his office. I gave Yakali presents. It was the custom. No doubt he saw other advantages. He believed that I would become, as it were, his Messenger and he would thus control all five constituencies. Later I married his daughter. Yakali was already working to bring about the K.H.P.—the Kiti Highway Project, you know?—and he wanted to feel secure on his own power base. By this time the British had left. Instead of a white Resident at Birnin Soko we had a black Provincial Commissioner to represent the Government at Kaduna. The emirs still ruled. They chose the candidates for the N.P.C. lists. They treated the candidatures much as they used to treat the offices in their Native Administrations, things to be given away in return for presents. Among the Fulani and Hausa there is still great competition for the prestige of office. It is part of their culture.

  “The emirs despised the black men from Kaduna. Many of them thought that now the British had gone they could begin to do just what they liked. Our Emir of Soko was such a one, a pious scoundrel of the old sort, learned in the Koran, very dignified in public, always making speeches about his duty to lead and protect his people while stealing by double handfuls from his own treasury. Yakali went to him with presents and unfolded his scheme for the K.H.P. It was very grand—a bridge at Kiti, great highways into the interior, communal farming schemes, the fish-factory, and so on. Of course the Emir was eager for the Project. He saw that immense sums of money could be milked from it in one way and another. He did not foresee there was any need to take precautions against being found out, because now that the British were gone Kaduna would never dare depose an emir. Yakali thought otherwise. He too, of course, intended to milk the Project, but more carefully. At the same time he intended to collect evidence of the Emir’s depredations and then inform against him. The Emir would then be deposed and Yakali, by giving presents to the right people, would get the old Emirate of Kiti revived in his favour.”

  “I don’t suppose the Kitawa were even consulted. How did they take it?”

  “No peasant will refuse a road to his door, provided it goes through his neighbour’s garden and not his own. Motorway protests are a phenomenon of rich countries. The proposal for farming co-operatives was always nonsense. The land is mostly useless. Everybody knew that. My concern was to see that Yakali was not made Emir, so I collected evidence to prove his frauds—it was not difficult, he was a man who talked to women and I was married to his daughter.

  “Then in 1963 the Emir of Kano, one of our great emirs, was forced to resign on a charge of corruption. Now our little Emir was frightened. He had already begun to milk the Project, though the actual construction had barely started. I went to Birnin Soko and had audience with him and laid bare for him Yakali’s scheme. I told him that while there was a Sarkin of Kiti who was of the lineage of Kama Boi there would always be intrigues for the revival of the emirate. The solution was not far to seek, for one versed in Fulani and Hausa politics of the traditional kind. Yakali must be deposed and the lineage of Kama Boi replaced by another. Therefore on my advice the Emir disburdened himself of such sums as Yakali might have evidence of his taking, and let Yakali learn that he had done so.

  “Now, I knew through my wife that Yakali had long held schemes for the construction of a grand new palace when he became Emir. Seeing that time postponed he was likely—he was not a patient man—to begin building at once. Furthermore, now that he was not going to be able to bring evidence of fraud against the Emir, his need to protect himself against counter-accusations …”

  During the ten minutes or so it had taken the Sarkin to tell his story Jackland had listened with apparently total attention, not even stirring when another outburst of frustrated cries told of further breakdowns in the process of filming six people walking from A to B. The interruption to the story came from the other direction. Miss Boyaba appeared at an opening in the inner wall so small and dark that it might have been taken for the entrance to a dog-kennel. Blinded by glare, despite her sun-glasses, she craned towards the sound of the Sarkin’s voice, then evidently made out who was there and stilted over, laug
hing with delight. She prostrated herself in front of her great-uncle then rose and kissed him on the cheek. He seemed equally pleased by both gestures, though a bystander might well have thought they were performed as much for Jackland’s benefit as for his.

  “Look what I found,” she said.

  She unclenched her left hand, holding it low enough for Jackland to see. In the pale palm glinted what looked like a fluffy piece of seed-head. She smoothed it with a gentle fingertip and it became a few criss-crossing threads, gold, with crumbling faint millimetres of green silk caught here and there.

  “In the diary,” she explained. “Don’t you remember—when the wives got out the best dresses so that Betty could paint them? I found it in a tiny room beside the harem courtyard. I wonder if it’s all that’s left.”

  “Of course not,” said the Sarkin. “They are stored in the new palace. I have offered some to museums, but they are not interested in the traditional dress of women.”

  “Typical,” said Miss Boyaba. “So they just sit there. What a waste.”

  “Nonsense, Annie. You have seen some with your own eyes. When you last came to the anniversary celebrations of my inauguration as Sarkin, your great-aunts wore them. And I will give you one for yourself on the day you marry.”

  “It almost makes it worth the awfulness.”

  There is a curiosity about conversation with royalty, in that the faces of courtiers may express reactions at variance with the superficial politeness of their prince but expressive of his inward feelings. To judge by the brolly-man, though the Sarkin smiled at Miss Boyaba’s unthinking liveliness, he was not amused. He turned to Jackland.

  “Many are of Damascus weave,” he said. “The ancestors of Kama Boi were nobles in Katsina long before the jihad.”