EKE’S SUGGESTION TO FOLLOW BEATRICE TO LAGOS FILLS my head like liquor. Beatrice is my father’s niece. She has lived in Lagos for as long as I can remember. She lost her own father and buried him without entombing him, despite all her money, all her Lagosness. For this reason, I’m a bit wary of following her, but it will certainly be easier for me to raise money for Okike’s tomb in Lagos. Though I am not sure my mother will let me go. It is such a distant city, I am told. I hear there is a sea in Lagos, and it is as restless as a cock coming back and running away again from a swarm of flies following its comb sores. Maybe Onitsha would be more acceptable to my mother, where people speak Igbo. If she lets me go at all, I think she will make me promise to keep away from the large river there. She has a phobia of flowing water. She would kill me if she heard that I sometimes travel long distances with Eke to swim and fish in a dark vernal pool where dead bodies of evil people are supposed to be dumped. I looked for those dead bodies my mother talks about the last time I went there with Eke, peering into hidden corners and undergrowth. But I did not find them, and I wondered if they had become ghosts since they were not interred, if they had migrated to Amalla Nkwa to live with the other ghosts. I have heard that all dead people go to Amalla Nkwa to become one big community of ghosts.
“I want to go to Lagos,” I say to my mother.
“Lagos. O di ka uwaozo?” my mother hisses. “That place, is it on another planet?”
“It’s where Beatrice lives,” I explain to her relief. “I want to go there, make a lot of money, and become wealthy.”
My mother laughs long and loud. “God will bless your ambitions, nna.”
When you think my mother will pitch into you for saying the wrong things, she’s suddenly all sweetness and light. I tell my mother that when I come back, I will take my family out of poverty and retrieve what was stolen from us. And then I will build a big, fine tomb for Okike. The very finest of tombs. I do not tell my mother that I also long to be far away from Machebe. He is strong and troublesome, and we fight every day. It is exhausting to have to fight a brother who is descended from a tiger. Even if I didn’t have my mother’s blessing, I think, I’d defy her opposition because there is no future for me here. But there is one problem. My cousin Beatrice has not come back to the village for many years, and we do not have her contact or address.
It seems the path to Lagos leads to a dead end. But then I remember what the priest of Ezenwanyi had said: The connection between them is very strong, stronger than you can imagine, that is why she comes to him in the dream, as a sign of that everlasting bond, a sign that she will be there for him if called upon in times of need or distress.
I did not understand then what the priest meant, but my father later explained that if I wished for anything and made my wish known to Okike with my hands raised to the sky, I’d have whatever I wished for. Since my dream is to go to Lagos and make enough money to take my family out of poverty and build Okike a tomb, I raise my hands to the skies and make a wish to my ancestral benefactress, willing Beatrice to come home.
My dreams of going to Lagos and working hard to raise money for the tomb fill out the empty days. Eke goes to school in the morning, and I go to Ogige market to carry loads, wheeling people’s purchases in a barrow for coins to buy snacks and chilled Coke to stop the ache in my stomach and my craving for cold things. I have a sneaking feeling that my mother so quickly approved my going to Lagos because then she will have one less mouth to feed. My father, more dejected and passive than ever, will not be an obstacle to my plan. He consents to anything my mother approves.
In the afternoon, after Eke returns from school and I return from load carrying, we go to the only chemist shop in the village to watch men play draughts and talk about politics, the civil war, and Biafra. They sit on benches at the shopfront to gamble and talk in the enlightened way of people who have travelled a lot. They talk mostly about Biafra and the marginalization of the Igbo people. I like the way the gamblers push the squares and rounds about the board, and their dramatic reactions to wins and losses, especially the assured way that Patty Onah, the porcine fair-skinned man, smacks his seeds on the board and talks with confidence. Though he fools around a lot when he is playing and laughs with his whole body, Patty Onah is a genius at winning games. He is very mathematical and has a way of trapping his opponents with Greek gifts, then finishing off the game in a dramatic win. He raises his eyes when he has his opponent cornered and asks the watchers to chorus his name, and, when they do, he laughs, his body shaking like a well-fed sow.
I watch his cigarette-stained mouth and flushed features the same way Ebube and Ihebube will watch my mother’s mouth when she is telling them moonlight stories. The gamblers talk excitedly about the coming sit-at-home order issued by a group championing the Igbo people called Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), a secessionist movement associated with Igbo nationalism. They hiss smoke down in their lungs and ponder the impact MASSOB’s sit-at-home will have on the struggle.
“A lot,” says Patty Onah. “You and I are rusting in this village, but when you go to the big commercial cities like Onitsha, Lagos, or Kano, you will see that we Ndigbo are controlling the commerce of this country.”
“It is going to take more than sitting at home to achieve the struggle,” Oluoha, his playmate and a grouchy little man, counters. He lights a cigarette. “Sitting at home is for women and children. Real men give expression to their anger, their agitation, in more practical terms. But this village is too dry, too effeminate. Nothing is happening here. I am going to try to establish contact with the leader of MASSOB.” He sinks his voice to a whisper. “I am mobilizing young men for a protest march on the day of the sit-at-home. I am taking my time to pick only the courageous. We are going to storm the local government headquarters and tear the place down.”
“This struggle cannot be achieved by violence,” Patty Onah insists. “The war shows that. Yet this country will not see an Igbo president unless Biafra comes to pass.”
“Tell me. What has anyone achieved in this country without violence?” Oluoha asks. “Is that not why we have Boko Haram in the north, Odua People’s Congress in the west, and Ogoni nationalism in the south? Why we even hear of al-Qaeda elsewhere in the world?”
“I am not in support of the struggle.” The man speaking is grey-haired and widely travelled, a grizzled gnome of a man. “I know it is just a waste of time. What about the oil in the south-south and southeast of the country? Do you think the rest of the country will let go of that? What about our so-called south-south brothers? Are they not occupying our so-called abandoned property from when we fled?
“Before the war I was living in Port Harcourt. I had sacrificed my comfort, sleeping in a shop and starving myself in the most stringent conditions ever known to be able to save enough money to acquire a property. I fled Port Harcourt at the outbreak of the war. At the end of the war, I returned only to discover that my property had been occupied. Is it not foolish of our kinsmen who are still living in the north to refuse to come home in spite of the destruction the northerners are visiting on them? Are they not building mansions there to be destroyed in riots orchestrated by the northerners solely for that purpose, to keep us down? I tell you, brothers, Biafra is not the answer. Every Igboman building castles in the northern air ought to come home, and together we shall work at developing Igboland with our God-given talents and brains.”
Stories of the civil war and the marginalization of my people resonate with me. The treatment of the Igbo people is a story of denial just like my father’s story. My father accepts his loss and chooses to wither at home like a plant in the Harmattan, but the Igbo people will fight back. I feel anger stirring in me, equal with the dismay I feel against my father for his inaction. I find myself going back to the chemist shop to listen to the gamblers again. They argue hotly, these men who are going through midlife crises after travelling out of this community and spending years in the big cities, only to return again poor and frustrated. They were at one time owners of flourishing businesses in large cities. Patty Onah’s textile business ended after insurgents burned down his warehouse in Kano. Each of them has a tragic story to tell. Left with nothing but their lives and families, they now carry loads at Ogige market and dig pit latrines for people to feed their families. Uwakwe, owner of the chemist shop, says some of them unjustifiably blame their failures on the violence against Igbo people in the north. Yet every afternoon they gather in his shopfront to smoke, drink ekpetechi, and gamble with what is left of their earnings.
“I want to know the full story, how the war started,” I whisper to Eke.
“Then ask them.” Eke nudges me.
“No. You ask.” I return the nudge.
“How much are you going to pay for me to tell you what you want to know?” Oluoha lifts his eyebrows at me.
Patty Onah comes to my rescue. “Do you need to be paid to tell him how Muslim Hausas in northern Nigeria woke up one morning and started to massacre the Igbo Christians living in their place?”
Oluoha scowls at him. “Don’t mislead the poor, ignorant soul. The Muslim Hausas did not just wake up and begin to massacre the Igbo Christians in the north. Something happened that preceded the massacre.”
“Whatever happened cannot be a justification.”
“The boy asked to know the reason, not the justification.”
“What reasons can there be other than envy?” Patty Onah inhales his smoke. “Because of the fortune of the Igbo people and the opportunities we had created for ourselves in post-colonial Nigeria. General Aguiyi-Ironsi had meant well for everyone. His offense was that he tried to unify a country divided along ethnic lines. Because he was an Igboman, they saw it as a calculated move to establish Igbo dominance when he abolished regional governments and introduced a unitary one. Not only did they conspire to get rid of him in a coup, but they also found a reason to massacre our people. We had no choice but to fight back, to repeal their oppression and try to free ourselves. We may have lost the war, but we will continue to fight until we are free from their enslavement.”
“They will never let us go as long as there is still oil left in the Niger Delta,” the grizzled little man says, point-blank.
Sometimes I walk down the quiet stream alone, thinking of Okike, my mind creating blurry images of her from my mother’s descriptions. “She was a rare beauty,” says my mother, “your father’s mother come back to life. She was your father’s gourd of palm wine, and it broke, and your father started drinking ekpetechi after she died.”
I sit in my father’s compound and watch the days as they spend themselves pleasantly, with sunsets that leave behind them landscapes tinted with deep colours over the hills. I am enthralled by the spectacle, in that moment full of dreams, imagining a sovereign oil-rich Biafra nation and the good life that awaits us Ndigbo. The resonant voice of Patty Onah echoes in the hills: We may have lost the war, but we will continue to fight until we are free from their enslavement. Sometimes I lie down on my naked mattress, wishing my father could fight back, or feeling good and thinking of nothing, only a little worried that in a few weeks I will be fifteen years old.