by Okey Ndibe
Stepping closer, I saw a gash on the baby’s right leg, an ugly knife wound from which blood still flowed. Was the baby also dead or simply asleep?
Afterwards I could not remember how long I had stood, staring. When I snapped out of my trance it was to a feeling of intense fear. What if somebody came in and found me at the scene of this horrible crime? Fetching a washcloth, I wiped my fingerprints off the door knob. Then I tiptoed out of her flat.
The storm had gathered still greater force. I walked in a daze, little caring about the rain, which soaked the photographs and presents in my plastic bag. The screech of tires on wet tarmac, then the long blast of a car horn startled me. I looked up in time to see a car stop sharply in front of me, hardly a foot between us.
“Bastard!” cursed the driver. “Akula! If you’re looking for death, go and jump into a latrine!” I stood transfixed, trembling all over. The driver reversed the car, turned the wheels away from me, then drove off, still cursing.
The streets were nearly empty. Yet I felt that many hidden eyes were fixed on me as I walked on through the rain.
Chapter Nineteen
Having eaten little all weekend, I arrived in my office on Monday tired and listless. I had just sat down when my phone rang.
“There’s a lady here who wants to see you,” said the female receptionist.
“Her name?”
“She refuses to say.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, but she’s been quite rude.”
In the background I heard somebody cursing. “Na your mama be quite rude! Na you be rude, you hear!” I recognized Violet’s voice.
“I’ll be there in a second,” I said.
At reception Violet stood akimbo, glowering, her mouth drawn into a contemptuous pout.
“Ah, Violet,” I said, feigning surprise. “Please come with me.”
I led the way outside.
“Do you want something to drink? There’s a bar nearby.”
“I no come to drink. I simply wan’ tell you say he done kill Emilia.”
I furrowed my brows as if confounded. “Who’s he? What did he do?”
“Isa. Major Bello. He kill Emilia.”
“Iyese is dead?”
“Yes, Emilia done die.”
I gasped. “Why? How?”
“She jus’ tell Isa say na you be the papa of her boy pikin.”
“Wait a minute. She told Isa I was the father of her baby boy?”
“Correct.”
“Why would he kill her for that?”
“Because Isa want boy pikin bad bad.”
I gasped again. “How can you be sure Major Bello did this?”
“Emilia been plan to do naming ceremony for the pikin last Saturday evening. She tell Isa say na your name she wan’ give the pikin. The news vex Isa well well. Na that same Saturday Emilia die. If witch fly for night and person come die, then the witch must to answer.”
“What happened to the baby? Is he dead too?”
“No. The banza man stab the pikin, but him no die. Child Welfare take the pikin go hospital. Na me police ask to identify Emilia’s dead body. Even self, na me tell Child Welfare the pikin name. After the pikin recover, Welfare plan to send him to Langa Orphanage. If you like, you fit go there see the baby. Emilia tell me say, true true, na you be the pikin papa.”
“I don’t think that’s likely,” I said.
Violet flared up. “Why you speak so? You mean to say Emilia lie? You two no sleep together? I been think say you be better man. Now, I know say you be nonsense man, true true.”
No doubt she considered my grief inadequate, and perhaps she was right. Although we were bound by a common loss, our concerns were different. One death, separate memories.
“Iyese did not deserve this,” I said, to break the silence. “She was such a sweet person.”
Violet continued to look at me in silence, as if my words were insipid compared to the emotions she felt. At last she said, “I jus’ say make I come tell you wetin happen. You be bad man, but I know say Emilia like you too much. More than too much.”
“Did the police ask you any other questions?” I couldn’t help worrying about the complications that might arise if the Child Welfare Department looked me up.
“They ask whether me know who killed Emilia. I tell them I no fit to talk. Thas why I say make I come ask you first.”
“I don’t think there is any use in accusing Isa,” I suggested. “The police won’t touch him. He’s a powerful emir’s son. And also an army officer. Besides, the case against him is only circumstantial.” Violet regarded me coldly. “Thank you for all the trouble you took. The best thing is to let Iyese rest in peace.”
“Otio!” she shouted. “Which kin’ peace? Which kin’ rest in peace? No, Emilia no fit rest in peace at all at all. She no go rest until bad death come kill Isa. Na that time Emilia fit rest.”
“Well, if Isa did this he will receive his just desserts eventually,” I said.
She looked at me reproachfully. “I dey go,” she said, already walking away.
Returning to my desk, I sat and brooded. I had the sensation of being in a time warp, trapped in the one unchanging moment when I found Iyese lying dead. I was back in Iyese’s room, staring at her bloodied body, her baby on her chest, also spattered with blood. Nothing I did could free my mind from that scene. I feared that I would live all my life shut up in that room, my eyes forever riveted on that horrific sight.
“Your letters, sir.”
The words broke into my consciousness long after the office messenger had spoken them and gone on to deliver mail to other desks. I thumbed through my letters indifferently until I saw an envelope that bore Iyese’s handwriting. My heart’s ferocious beating was compounded of fear and anticipation. My hands shook as I held the letter up to my face and read:
He looks just like you! Eyes, mouth, forehead—just like you. A happy, handsome little boy! Perhaps a carbon copy of you when you were a baby.
In my last letter I asked you for some photographs. Since I didn’t hear from you, I guess your answer is no. That won’t stop me telling this baby about the lift you gave my life.
Now, I have another favor to ask you. In two days the baby will be a week old. In my village the seventh day is when the naming ceremony is done. I want to name the baby Ogugua. I hope you won’t mind sharing the gift of a name with him.
Will I ever see you again? Have you ever thought about it?
Love, Iyese
P.S. Isa came around two days ago and asked me to marry him! Can you believe that? I’ll look for a new flat for me and the baby. Isa will be dangerous when he realizes that I won’t let him have this baby.
Again,
Iyese
Ogugua. The name my mother had muttered the very instant I was put in her arms, birth blood hardly dried on my soft, coppery skin. My father had intended to give me another name, but the moment my mother held me in her arms and said Ogugua, he knew that was what I would be called. She had pronounced the word as if it were written on my forehead, inscribed in a language she alone could decipher.
Ogugua—a male name. Yet my father was certain his wife would still have insisted on it even if I had been born a girl. For what mattered to her was what the name meant, the statement she wanted to make to the world. Ogugua, condensed from Oguguamakwa. Literally, the wiper of my tears. My consoler, vindicator and comforter. In my case the name was blighted by a terrible irony. I had wiped my mother’s tears, true; but I had also sent her to an early grave.
As time passed my guilt grew less acute; the image of Iyese seemed to fade. Then one day a colleague brought her newborn baby to the office. The baby’s penetrating eyes in its tiny, tender, vulnerable face made me think about Iyese all over again. I was tortured with the thought that Iyese’s baby might truly be my so
n, the first of the many children my grandmother had prayed that I should have. I considered going to the orphanage, but in the end fear outweighed curiosity: seeing the baby would wake up feelings I was not confident I could face, would exhume emotions I had buried in a shallow grave.
Yet Isa Palat Bello continued to haunt my mind. He was present in every soldier’s face, eyes peering out at me, lustful and ugly. I began to dread the approach of night, for his face would loom up out of the dark. Whenever I heard footsteps behind me I whirled around. I stopped going out at night. When friends complained about this I lied: I had been diagnosed with a rare disease that brought on sudden fainting spells; my doctor had ordered me to rest in bed.
Then, one day, I received an unexpected reprieve; it was reported that Bello was among ten officers on their way to Pakistan for a six-month advanced artillery course. That night I went out to visit some friends. A new drug had worked wonders for me, I told them.
I began to regain my former vitality. Sleeping became less grim.
Chapter Twenty
In late November of 1967 the Stockholm-based Hunger Institute issued its annual World Food Picture, a report that correlated food supply to life expectancy. The report listed thirteen countries as “disasters in progress”; Madia was sixth on the list. The Institute found that food production in the country had declined by 30 percent; the birth rate was increasing exponentially, and life expectancy had shrunk from 57, five years earlier, to 52. In an even bleaker prognosis, the report projected that within a decade two-thirds of the children born in Madia would live in “excruciating poverty” and that people would “literally drop dead in the streets from acute malnutrition.”
Alarmed by the report, the House of Representatives and the Senate summoned Dr. Titus Bato, the Honorable Minister of National Planning and Economic Development, to appear before their joint session on 6 December. Dr. Bato had a well-earned reputation as the most arrogant minister in the cabinet. He was awkward in appearance, his stringy body tipped to the left. But he managed a superciliousness that many saw as too obvious a compensation for his unfetching physique. His calling card listed all his degrees and the names of the institutions that awarded them: B.Sc., London School of Economics; M.Sc., Chicago; Ph.D., Columbia.
I arrived at the National Assembly at 11 a.m., an hour before Dr. Bato was scheduled to appear. The press gallery was packed. The minister strode into the chamber at 11:56 a.m., his face composed and confident. The Speaker of the House struck the gavel three times on his desk. When the requisite silence had fallen he announced that the session had formally begun.
He began by asking Dr. Bato what he thought of the Hunger Institute report.
“It’s either useless and untrue or, if true, it’s good news,” replied the minister. “On the whole, I think it is the most incoherent and meaningless economic report I have ever read. And I have read quite a few.” He spoke with the ease of one who, expecting that very question, had rehearsed a seamless response.
“Let’s take the first part of your answer, Honorable Minister. You said the report may be useless and untrue. Why?”
“Because I have yet to hear of any person in this country scavenging for food in refuse dumps. Therefore, the claim that Madians are starving sounds far-fetched.”
The response provoked suppressed agitation in the chamber, and when the Speaker asked a second question the calm in his voice seemed strained.
“Why would the Institute lie about this country’s food situation?”
“Only the Institute can answer that question. I’m here as a representative of the government of Madia.”
“I know who you represent!” the Speaker retorted in a raised voice. “You have asserted that these people lied in their report. I thought you might share with us the grounds for your conclusion.”
“Correction, Mr. Speaker. I have not reached any conclusions. Perhaps you should speak less and listen more closely.”
The Speaker fixed the minister with an icy stare. “A remark like that constitutes contempt. Be mindful, Honorable Minister, of the rules of conduct in this chamber!”
Dr. Bato returned his gaze with an expression nothing short of insolent, and the Speaker, unable to go on questioning calmly, turned to the President of the Senate and, with a slight nod, indicated that he was yielding the floor.
Chief Willy Wakka, the Senate President, was a stout man with a thug’s temper but a lawyer’s tongue. He cleared his throat.
“Honorable Minister, you have averred that in the event that the report under consideration is an accurate reflection of the facts you would regard it as good news. May I invite you to explain this rather startling view?”
“It is not hard to understand. The Hunger Institute claims that the food crisis will lead to a dramatic rise in the death rate in Madia. It also claims that there has been an explosion in the birth rate in recent years. The total picture is therefore that the death rate will cancel out the birth rate, thus preserving the standard of living. Even children who understand simple arithmetic can follow that logic. It is simple Malthusian economics.”
“Your considered submission, then, is that death is good?”
“I am putting forward the view that death is nature’s way of preserving a stable quality of life in any given society.”
“You’re not appalled at the prospect of poor Madians dying in large numbers?”
“Why would I be? No, I’m not.”
The unrest that had been building up in the chamber now threatened to overflow. Many law-makers spoke at once, calling for the minister’s immediate apology and resignation. Dr. Bato sat unmoved, his chin tucked in the palm of his hand, like a professor whose class had turned unaccountably rowdy. The voice of the Speaker shouting “Order! Order!” rose above the din, but did nothing to quell the pandemonium. Eventually he mounted his desk, stamping his feet and waving his hand. By this desperate measure he finally obtained silence. He spoke in a raised quavering voice.
“The good people of Madia have been insulted. I ask—in exercise of the power vested in me as Speaker of the House of Representatives and Chairman of the Joint Conference—I demand that the Honorable Minister of National Planning and Economic Development tender an immediate apology to Parliament and to the good people of this country.”
An eerie silence fell on the chamber. Everybody waited, parliamentarians and spectators alike. Photographers clicked away in a frenzy, anxious to capture the minister’s moment of capitulation.
“I’m not apologizing for anything I’ve said here today. I reaffirm my comments. Nor do I intend to resign. I was not appointed by Parliament and I don’t believe I hold my office at your behest.”
One legislator jumped up and moved menacingly towards Dr. Bato. Two parliamentary security guards rushed in and stood between him and his target. Four other security guards then escorted the minister out of the chamber amid curses and threats and salvoes of spit.
The next day university students and labor unions called for nation-wide strikes and daily demonstrations until the minister was fired. Instead, Prime Minister Askia Amin went on national television and described Dr. Bato as a national asset, “a man respected by the centers of world finance from New York to Paris.” The prime minister then warned that further demonstrations and disturbances of the peace would be severely dealt with.
One week later students of the National University massed in the football field carrying anti-Bato placards. Three lorryloads of anti-riot police arrived and ordered the students to disperse. A few students walked away, but most of them stayed behind, defiant. The police put on their gear and advanced. They threw a few tear-gas canisters at the students. The students gathered the smoking cans and lobbed them back at the police. The police launched an overwhelming arsenal of tear gas which sent the students scattering, eyes streaming. Then the police released a rattle of machine-gun fire.
Eyewit
ness accounts estimated that between twenty and thirty corpses were taken away in two police trucks. But in a short statement, the government insisted that “only four hooligans posing as students were killed.”
People began to speak of the “Bato Massacre.” Why, Madians asked, did so many young lives have to be sacrificed so that Dr. Bato could remain in office and fart in people’s faces? As the protests grew, Amin gathered his ministers and top aides and withdrew with them to the Presidential Lodge, a secluded fortress built on a small island, to consider his next move.
The goverment-owned Radio Madia began to broadcast a barrage of propaganda. Listening to the radio’s 7 p.m. newscast became a national obsession, as with each passing day the claims made by Madia’s leaders became more fantastic. They spoke of polls in which 99.9 percent of Madians expressed their loyalty to Askia Amin’s administration; of rallies in cities all over the country attended by hundreds of thousands of pro-Amin supporters. They asserted that the detained labor and student leaders, moved to shame by their unpatriotic perfidy, had confessed to being paid lackeys of unnamed Western nations intent on thwarting Madia’s march to progress. They quoted from “authoritative studies” indicating a dramatic rise in the people’s standard of living. They assured Madians that their leaders were spending sleepless nights over an economic plan that would make the country and its people the envy of other nations on the continent, nay the world.
Such blatant untruths provoked a bizarre reaction: laughter. Women laughed suckling their babies on sapped breasts. The vanquished and famished who craved the comforts of the grave laughed. Madians laughed in groups gathered round their radio sets; they laughed when they met in the street; they laughed in their workplaces and in the markets; they laughed themselves to sleep. There was no gaiety in this laughter: it was compounded of their blood, their sweat, their tears.
