WE SET OFF TO AWKA, EKE AND I. WE TRAVEL THROUGH Enugu in a bus driven by a boy not much older than we are. He looks wild, hair dirty and uncombed, and has a voice like metal scraping against metal. He keeps two souvenirs: one is a tooth knocked out of its hole, and the other is a long scar running across his temple. Maybe he got them from a fight, maybe from an accident, but either way they give him a severe look. Midway through the journey, he rips off his shirt, leaving the passengers with no choice but to gaze at his back with its ugly scales left by skin infections. In Enugu, we change buses. The driver of the blue-and-white bus marked ENTRACO who drives us to Awka is the opposite of the first driver. He does not swear at other drivers. He does not bump suddenly into potholes and throw a retort to anyone who complains of his rough driving—“Am I the government that refuses to pave the road?”—or turn his head to glare at the passengers as if daring anyone to challenge him. The drive to Agulu, and then to Anukwu, a remote community near Anaocha, where Eke lives, is mostly quiet and bushy. We seem to travel in arcs—we have done almost the full circumference of the region by the time we arrive—but it’s still a much shorter journey than the one to Lagos.
We arrive at a large, uncompleted house with a bleak veranda. An earth-coloured grave fills a wide space in the courtyard. Eke says the house belongs to a widow. Her husband passed on, leaving her a shell of a home and his own grave. I throw it another glance, wondering why the widow did not think to entomb her husband, who died before seeing their house complete. Eke leads me through a large, dark living room with a high ceiling, heavy columns, and windowless walls to his room. I see now that he lives in two skins: the one he wears here in this bleak one-room apartment and the other he puts on when he shows up in the village glistening like a rainbow. This place is a dark and well-protected secret, tucked away under the tarmac of a road stretching for miles.
His room, like the other rooms in the building, has nothing within its cold cement walls but a mat, a kerosene stove, a pair of pots covered with thick layers of soot, a few plates and spoons, and a few old clothes. He hadn’t washed the dishes, which still contain dirty water and remnants of food from his most recent meal before he travelled home. They are shimmering with maggots and houseflies, and give off a bad smell. The other rooms are all occupied.
“This place is a jungle,” he says that night as we lie on the mat in his cold, bare room, tired from travelling. He is naked, stripped of those secrets that enshroud him like darkness, now unfurling like daylight. “I never worked with Micheletti Limited,” he confesses. “I am a day labourer. Here it is survival of the fittest—this is the real world.” His voice is suddenly apologetic. “I am sorry I lied to you. It’s what the people back home believed, and I didn’t want to change the narrative. Besides, I didn’t want to discourage you. You needed to leave.” He paused. “I believe we will make something out of this place if we work hard.”
Eke’s revelation hits me like Ejiro’s punch.
The house is packed full of labourers who live in threes and fours to a room. The living room is empty, and doorless, with huge columns that seem to belong to the Middle Ages. This is where we will sit on mats and chat on Sundays with the other boys who do the same work, while a radio is playing, Joe’s radio. Joe sits on a bench on the veranda or leans against a pillar, sipping a beer and humming along to a highlife tune by Oliver De Coque.
“He is as deeply attached to the radio as he is to Premier beer,” Eke says. “He keeps it by his side when he is cooking or having his meals or when we are chatting after a hard day’s work. He seems to draw strength from the music.”
I watch Joe with interest. Dark. Muscular. Soft-smiling. Watching him, I at once become fond of highlife music and Oliver De Coque. I know I will eventually like Premier beer as well.
I wake up the next morning itching all over with bumps from tick bites. I don’t have time to dwell on it, though, because as soon as we are up we must hastily wash our faces, pick bitter leaf stalks for chewing sticks, and set off to work with spades and shovels. We pass beautiful houses buried in thickets, some unoccupied, looking lonely and sad. We arrive somewhere Eke calls Ogbo-Mmanu, an open area near a small, ramshackle market. The space is starting to get busy. Boys of my age in tattered work clothes appear with spades, shovels, head pans, and other tools, and fill up the space. Breakfast is served to the labourers by a food vendor, a thick, dark woman with a grouchy male voice sitting on a stool beside a wheelbarrow in front of the provision shop. She picks the okpa from a large bowl sitting in the wheelbarrow; uncovers the waterproof wrapper to reveal a steaming, delicious-looking yellow cone; and slices it onto a plastic plate for Eke and me.
“There are no gentlemen here,” Eke says again, his mouth yellow with okpa.
I watch Ogbo-Mmanu as it bustles with labourers, eating, talking, and laughing. They are scattered in groups, every sentence laced with humour, shovels and spades and head pans kept within a snatching distance.
Akata is a clownish boy with a wicked sense of humour. We share the same apartment. He entertains the labourers both at home and at Ogbo-Mmanu.
“Don’t make the mistake of bringing your head out first if robbers knock on your door at night,” he says to Uwoma, whose big head outsizes his spindly legs. “If you do, they will hit you real hard, thinking you are a big, strong fellow. But if you show your stick legs first, they will think you are a little boy and deal you light blows.”
The labourers roar with laughter. But I notice their alertness in spite of Akata’s jesting—every pair of eyes lingers on the long stretch of tarred road, waiting for the sight of a contractor or a tipper.
“To survive here you have to be fast, strong, and ruthless if need be,” Eke says to encourage me.
But hearing him talk like this leaves me with a feeling of dryness in my mouth.
“Loading a tipper truck with sand or laterite is not as hard as it seems—you only have to learn the techniques and tricks involved. You really have to sprint fast, because the first three or four persons to jump into the tipper truck are the ones who will get hired. But you have to be careful. Someone once slipped off the bucket and landed face-first on the tarred road. You will know how these things are done with time, though. There is always the softer work of serving the masons at building sites. The contractors don’t know you, so it is going to be hard to find someone to hire you, but I will use my contacts to give you small-small jobs. With time it will get easier.”
I answer with a nod. Everything looks strange. And scary. I am quietly watching the rowdy scene as the labourers abandon their food and conversations midway, snatch their shovels and spades, and sprint towards a contractor who shows up, a tipper truck that looms into sight, or a car that stops with a hand beckoning. In this way the small crowd steadily thins down. By midmorning, the eagerness begins to wear off, and a sense of frustration envelops the remaining labourers. If in the end they don’t get hired, they will walk home in a melancholy vein.
I spend the first few days following Eke around. The quarry is a steep, fast-receding prominence that feeds laterite to building construction sites in the neighbourhood. I sit away from the excavation site and watch boys and men dig with muscles that Mummy would have loved to sit half-naked near the pool and watch. They shovel the laterite into the bucket of a tipper truck with powerful, sweaty thrusts. In between loading the tipper truck and waiting while it races to a construction site to unload and return for more, they smoke and make conversation. I’ll learn that the saying “one-man show” was coined from the greed of labourers who will take on the loading of a tipper single-handedly. “Like a nosing rat who feeds itself to death on poisoned crumbs,” Akata sneers. The quarry looks dangerous. The labourers will dig and deepen its soft base until it hangs like a precipice. Like it might cave in under the weight of the peak and crash down on the labourers.
And crash down it will, and bury some of us alive.
Ijedi is no longer lying on the mat where the elderly women had surrounded her when Obochi returns with the midwife. She has been moved into the hut. The old woman who sent Obochi to the midwife is wrapping up two bloody bundles in banana leaves as Obochi and the midwife hurry in. The snakebite has forced Ijedi into labour. She has birthed a set of stillborn twins and lies groaning and writhing on the bare floor.
Obochi is stunned by a scene outside as she turns to flee the room in terror. Her father, swaying on the shoulder of the young man who found him unconscious at the farm, is being brought home.
“They offended a goddess,” says a tall, angular man, a seer who unrolls a tiger skin, nestles down on it, breaks a lobe of kola nut, throws the four parts into a gourd filled with water, and peers intently into the gourd as if it were a screen that played back hidden events.
“Someone in the family, a maiden, went to a forbidden territory to pick snails belonging to a goddess, and now the goddess wants the young woman as a bride as retribution for her trespass,” explains the seer. “There will be tragic repercussions if this penalty is not done at once. Every living thing in that family will lose breath: humans and livestock. Hurry! Find out who amongst their daughters did it, and then take her to the shrine of Ezenwanyi, the offended goddess in Ishiayanashi, beyond the thick forest that stretches to the boundaries of our community. Do this before sunset today to avert the tragedies that are looming.”