Unbury Our Dead with Song

by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

  She led with the bass until the band came to rest on a song I recognised: “I Would Rather Go Blind.” She was singing it in Amharic, her voice deep, reminding one of a young Mavis Staples, a voice made for the blues. They had found their grooves, and they took us on a long, 20-minute song journey. At some point, a young man joined them for a duet — him singing in isiXhosa, the different clicks adding to the beat of the song. This brought out the soft Amharic clicks, made them more pronounced. In The Corporal’s juke joint, we were in a Tower of Babel — an underclass one where there were no high-end languages and instruments, just people who loved music, who could play it well, for whom music meant life, getting together and jamming — music the soundtrack in the Tower of Babel.

  They played on as Maaza and I joined the old bassist at the bar — he smelt of tobacco and worked as a manager at a coffee plantation.

  ‘I hear you are writing a story about The Corporal,’ he said, pleasantly enough, which made what he said next all the more surprising.

  ‘Your Corporal is not the real Corporal. Think Sonny Boy Williamson as a ringer for the real Sonny Boy Williamson? Sonny Boy Williamson II, born Alex Miller, vs the real Sonny Boy Williamson, the original one, a mean harmonica player. Alex Miller, tall, handsome, and also gifted with the harmonica. He named himself Sonny Boy Williamson II, and easily overshadowed the original. Think Corporal I and Corporal II. This Corporal, he is good. But the real Corporal, the one who died in the war alongside all his men, he was the best,’ the old man told Maaza and me.

  The way I understood it, it was not like Elvis stealing Big Mama Thornton’s song; it was a case of Elvis actually becoming Big Mama Thornton, and so much so that he erased her. Sonny Boy Williamson II effectively erased Sonny Boy Williamson I.

  ‘How can that be?’ Maaza asked him.

  ‘I have heard from people I know very well, soldiers in the war, there was a corporal — the best masenko player to ever live — he died in the war alongside his whole unit. That one’ — and he waved at The Corporal — ‘is an imposter.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ I asked him.

  ‘No, but how can anyone be sure?’ he returned.

  ‘DNA, dental records, people who knew the real Corporal,’ Maaza answered.

  ‘What does it matter? He is very good. And the original one is dead, so he is him now. And in his hands, the masenko is divine. The masenko came first and then the Tizita. There would be no Tizita without the masenko. The masenko discovered the Tizita. And then the Tizita discovered The Corporal.’ He spoke with an old man’s patience.

  ‘Then why tell us if it does not matter?’ I asked him.

  ‘The truth in the mouth of a saint or in the mouth of a liar is always the truth. I told you so you know something important, so you know that music doesn’t care…. The Tizita is selfish — it just wants to be sung,’ he explained with his palms on our hands like he was leading us into prayer.

  Maaza looked at me and laughed. There was a part of me that did not care, as well. The Corporal lent himself very well to The National Inquisitor. In my write-up, I could focus on any one of his myths. The bassist had this smile, like he had accomplished his mission. And later, Maaza would tell me she had laughed because she caught him winking at The Corporal.

  It is possible he was creating these stories to keep us from getting to the truth of who he is. When a military helicopter comes under fire from a heat-seeking missile, the pilot will deploy flares — a countermeasure that misdirects the missile. The multiple stories could very well be The Corporal’s countermeasure.

  But all the same, with that many conflicting stories, there had to be something enigmatic about him. I did not need the truth; what I needed were the stories.

  The Corporal and the bassist’s daughter played on for a while. The band retired; it was bedtime for the old musicians, The Corporal joked.

  The Corporal almost fell down as he stood up to get another beer (to go, he said). It was time to leave. He was way too drunk to get home by himself — as we were too drunk to drive, but Maaza drove anyway — and through potholes that aggravated my stomach every time we hit one. We made it to his house, a one-bedroom apartment with a short winding path that went through a well-kept garden, in contrast to the small houses and apartments around his. There was no electricity, and we stumbled to his doorstep, where we found all sorts of dead and dying rodents. He stepped over them and invited us in.

  ‘My cat — when I have been away, it likes to leave me gifts. Cats are wild animals, like us,’ he said and lit a kerosene lamp. He found a bottle of an unlabelled something that smelled like whisky and three tin cups.

  I asked him what the 20-minute-long song was all about, explaining it was reminiscent of Kidane’s hour-plus-long song at The Diva’s juke joint.

  ‘The Tizita never rests, man,’ he answered. ‘The Tizita is always hungry. I try to feed it, but sometimes it just spits whatever I am trying to feed it back at me. But I want to keep trying — and why not? I think the people who listen to me want me to keep trying — it’s the trying they want, not the success. Look, man, there are all sorts of music — you know who created a three-minute song? The recording company. Fela Kuti — his best music — take “Sorrow Tears and Blood”— which one do you listen to? The 30-minute or three-minute version? The Tizita, you want it from many angles, and for that you have to play it for a long time,’ he explained, appearing relaxed for the first time.

  ‘What do you mean? Even if you record a 50-minute song, it is still on record, no? It will always be the same?’ I followed up.

  ‘No, it’s not. A 50-minute Fela is a journey. The ending changes the beginning; the middle will change the ending; the beginning will be something else by the time you get to the end. Its possibilities are infinite. A long song is a lifetime, my brother…a lifetime,’ he said and started drifting off.

  ‘Or a lifeline,’ Maaza added after a beat of silence.

  ‘Can we talk about the war?’ I asked. He laughed — not selfconsciously or to mask shame. He was amused.

  ‘You expect to find humanity in war? You go to war to become a better person? In war, you give yourself to it, or you get taken. But I do not want to talk about the war; I want to talk about music,’ he answered.

  ‘Do you know of a young man called Bekele, probably in the army at the same time you were?’ I pushed on.

  ‘No, I don’t recall,’ he evaded. ‘I know of many Bekeles though. The name is not very unique.’

  ‘He was a soldier. He came back; after a little while, he shot himself in the head,’ I clarified.

  For the first time, I saw The Corporal lose his cool. He coughed into his drink and put it down slowly.

  ‘Yes, I knew him. We were in the same company; we fought together. He was a brave young man,’ he answered.

  ‘Do you know why he killed himself?’

  ‘War — no one really comes back. If it were not for my music, where would I be? Only God knows.’

  I looked at him to see if there were any signs betraying remorse, or fear of being found out, anything, but he appeared more morose than anything.

  ‘You fight long enough, and only the war matters. You find meaning in the worst of things. To survive, your humanity has to be a notch lower than anyone else’s. You understand?’

  I decided to ask him about the other Corporal, the supposedly real one. I could see the violence in him rising up. Then he regained control. He looked at Maaza and me as if contemplating something.

  ‘Here, follow me — I want to show you something,’ he said, and we followed him to the sitting room.

  He rolled up a carpet and opened a trapdoor.

  ‘In the mountains, during the war, we dug tunnels. It’s okay, come on in,’ he encouraged on, seeing the look of surprise and concern on our faces.

  We followed him down what I can only call a path to a poorly dug cave. There were two chests covered with dusty plastic paper. He opened them. They were full of weapons, naturally.

>   ‘He is sane and crazy at the same time,’ Maaza whispered to me.

  ‘The war never ends,’ he said, even before we could ask.

  ‘There is always a war, but does yours ever end?’ I asked him as I found a dusty post to lean against.

  He looked at both of us — and here you really have to see it to get it. The moment we had been driving to all day and night — Maaza pulling back the plastic and running her fingers over the weapons like the war she had been fighting in the Addis courtrooms had become real, or reduced to simple violence. You have to see me, curious and interested, but scared, not for my life (physical danger was not it) — it was fear of seeing something that could undo everything, fear I could not contain it.

  And you have to picture the fucking dug-out cave and The Corporal, torn between having revealed too much and wanting to reveal more and hating what to him must have seemed like our bourgeoisie, protected lives, and him wondering why it had to be us.

  You have to see the cave itself — floor slightly muddy, nothing is finished, a one-man effort, a space that will never look better. You have to see how we keep moving around the small cave for position — there could be no comfort; Maaza putting her hair into a ponytail, me seeing her and running my hands across my hair to get rid of the soil, and The Corporal just fucking intense, himself a weapon, contained like a grenade.

  ‘You see this?’ he asked, pointing at an old-looking AK-47.

  ‘This is the gun I killed the real Corporal with — he was a real son of a bitch, someone had to put him down. He was the best masenko player I have ever known, but the war — it drove him crazy; he killed everything he came across. So I put him down, and I picked up his instrument,’ he explained.

  It was hard to know what the truth was. It was within the realm of possibility that there had been a real corporal, though that would make JB and the old bassists liars. It was more likely The Corporal viewed his soldier self as another human being, a version of himself he had killed when the war ended. A PTSD-induced complete disassociation?

  But then again, what did I really care whether the story he wanted to be true was true? I was not in Ethiopia to cover human rights violations; I was there to talk and write about music. My mandate was a good story. And for Maaza? She could take it wherever she wanted it to go — perhaps there were some generals to sue, families who deserved to know the truth.

  ‘Did you throw an enemy soldier, a young boy, on a grenade to save your men?’ Maaza asked him, and I wanted to elbow her into silence after she translated.

  The Corporal leaned against the dusty cave wall. ‘The other Corporal, he did that — he threw the boy onto a grenade. But he did save our lives.’

  ‘And his bottom-up method?’ she followed up.

  He looked puzzled, and so Maaza explained, asking, ‘Why would JB say it was you? Even you agreed that you saved his life.’

  ‘Did he seem completely sane to you? And how much beer did you buy him?’ he asked with a laugh.

  ‘Why are we down here?’ I asked, suddenly hit with how tired I was.

  ‘I told you already,’ an equally tired Corporal answered. ‘All wars have no end.’ The Corporal did not have to tell us it was time to leave, and we started for the door. He found a flashlight to walk us back to Maaza’s car. And so it was with The Corporal painting a bull’s eye on our backs that we left.

  ***

  Maaza dropped me off at my hotel. We agreed to have breakfast together and do a recap of our time with The Corporal. I took into my hotel room several competing stories about the origins of the Tizita. All put together, it amounted to the Tizita being a song unique to Ethiopia, sung by wandering griots before the coming of Christianity, but the psalms legitimise it, give it official sanction, if you will. Probably it was the masenko that was the Tizita’s instrument of choice, easy to carry and to make. And the masenko then became the instrument to carry the psalms. But it was the krar that was closer to speech, to talking. Slow down the krar, and you can hear a beautiful argumentative conversation; play it fast and it becomes a song.

  Regardless of the instrument, there were the singers who took the Tizita and the masenko back to the world of the secular and caught flack for it. That was as close to the origin as I was going to ever get unless I decided to give up journalism for musical anthropology. And even then, the question would remain — why should we assume something has a single point of origin? If a single origin were possible, wouldn’t that be an argument for multiple origins? That if one thing was possible then other things were also possible?

  ‘The Corporal, he is truly a legend,’ I had said to Maaza. I believed it.

  And I just had to pick one or two of the legends and tell them well. I liked the title “The Tale of the Two Corporals.”

  I drifted off to sleep.

  25

  ‘No bad human being can play a Tizita that well.’

  In the morning over breakfast, Maaza insisted that we find The Corporal’s CO. I asked why it mattered to her; it was my story after all, and she gave me a look that silenced me.

  She made a few calls, negotiated, promised, got into favourdebt and finally we had his name and deployment location — the African Union headquarters, a desk job for his service.

  The AU headquarters, magnificent from the outside, did not disappoint on the inside, and we found the CO at the reception desk. It was as you would expect: corporate, clean and efficient. I had not known what to expect, but the CO also looked the part, dressed in an old, faded, grey-striped suit; polished, aged leather shoes; his grey hair smoothed backwards and overly white teeth that suggest they might be false. But his only visible eccentricity — a long, greying, braided beard — told me that, like The Taliban Man’s Mrs. Hughes, they kept him around for some reason. It signalled some sort of power — could be persuasion, could be the power of mockery, giving African heads of state walking by something to have a quick laugh about.

  He was ready for us, he said, and we stepped outside and sat on a stone bench, a water fountain in front of us. With soldierly precision, he unpacked a steak sandwich and opened his can of coke. Thanks to Miriam’s connections, he had an idea why we were there, and after an exchange of more pleasantries, I wanted to ask him about The Corporal, telling him what JB had told us.

  He liked taking his time, like someone thinking as they talked. ‘The first thing you need to know is that The Corporal is…was…a soldier’s soldier. He served under me, but it was my privilege and honour to have him under my command,’ he said with pride.

  ‘He was a soldier’s soldier,’ he attempted to explain, but I looked at him puzzled. ‘Okay, let me give you an example, something I saw with my own eyes,’ he said, his voice muffled as he bit into his sandwich. ‘You want to know? I will tell you. We were just a few of us, ten or so. The enemy, about 40 of them, were sleeping. We attacked — element of surprise — we killed a few, wounded a few and captured those that tried to escape. We needed to know what they knew — and we didn’t have time. We threatened them; we did bad things to them, broke legs and hands, but they would not talk. The Corporal looked around their camp, and came back with a krar. He asked who played it, and one of the soldiers raised a hand up. The Corporal went to him, raised his pistol to his head. He then gave his pistol to the enemy soldier, who refused to take it.

  ‘The Corporal sat down and started playing. This, in the dead of the night — every sound was like someone was beating a loud drum next to your ear — sound carries. We were used to the sounds of gunfire and screams of torture. He started playing a Tizita. It was like watching a child being born, but not in a hospital. It was like a child being born during a war. He played, and he reminded us about life, about our wives and children at home…,’ he narrated, pride, memory and belief all rolled up in the way he sat, back straight, on the bench.

  ‘Yeah, but that story — I have heard it many times, about many wars,’ Maaza said to him.

  ‘As have I,’ I added.

  ‘Perh
aps so. I am only telling what I saw with my own eyes, my own ears. And aren’t all the wars the same? Anyway…the prisoners, they started crying — and they told him everything. How I know it’s true is because I would have done the same if the situation were reversed — I would have told him everything. No bad human being can play a Tizita that well.’ He kept quiet, as if listening to the Tizita all over again.

  ‘Did The Corporal shoot and kill unarmed civilians and torture prisoners of war? Yes or no?’ I pierced through his silence.

  ‘Who didn’t? You think missiles and atomic bombs were made to kill ants? Nagasaki, Hiroshima? A soldier is an instrument of war,’ he answered with so much derision that I knew we had lost any credibility we might have had.

  ‘Yes, but did he kill civilians?’ I asked again, not sure why it mattered. Perhaps outside moral judgement, I just wanted one true thing, as true as it could be without factual corroboration, about The Corporal.

  ‘He saved lives,’ he answered.

  His lunch break was over. He shook our hands and wished us all the best.

  ***

  Why had I been so resistant to the simplest of ideas — that The Corporal could be many things at the same time? Was I not many things, some of them of my own creation? Or The Diva? Or pretty much everyone I knew, except for Maaza, who had rejected multiplicity for singularity?

  Was the bassist right? That a song — the Tizita — is selfish; it just wants to be sung? Then why does it give us so much?