THE EARLY DAYS ARE INTERESTING, AT LEAST. I FLOW with the daily rhythm of my new life. It is exciting working and living all by myself, drawing my budgets, listing my priorities, cooking for myself, and managing my freedom. Now I know why Eke left the village for this place. He could have learned carpentry, painting, or any trade back home, but he obviously wanted to manage his own life without his stern mother breathing down his neck.
I take my first beer and smoke at Mama Obodo’s bar, where Eke and the others go to drink away their lives, their savings.
“Hei, Dimkpa,” Eke says, laughing, as I mark time over the bottle of Premier beer. “Why do you squeeze your face as if you are drinking bitter leaf juice?”
The barroom is bustling with people, and now they explode with laughter. It reminds me of Madam Bridget’s bar and her disparaging, inebriated clientele.
“He is an ohu ma and will never fully savour the taste of a good beer,” a cruel, familiar voice slurs.
I grab my seat tight to hold myself from falling as a nervous feeling streaks like lightning in my stomach at those words: ohu ma, again!
“Take a few puffs of cigarette, Dimkpa, and it will whet your taste buds for Premier beer.” Joe’s voice startles me.
I blink with suspicion at the half-drunken barroom crowd cheering in support of Joe’s suggestion, wondering if I had imagined the cruel voice.
“Eke’s right.” My glance moves from Eke to Joe, whose love of Premier beer crinkles in his eyes. “The beer doesn’t taste like bitter leaf juice, it tastes like acid.”
The barroom cracks up with laughter.
“Let Dimkpa be,” says a drunken old man whose oily beard is stained with a paste of his thick mucus. “He is chicken-brained. If you force him to smoke and he bugs out, you will be blamed for it.”
“Give me a stick of cigarette.” I wave at Mama Obodo, feeling insulted and emboldened by the old man’s mockery, not certain that the voice I heard earlier wasn’t an echo of my fears.
Mama Obodo, as round and goggle-eyed as an owl, serves me the cigarette from a gold pack. Eke lights it for me. A puff sends me into a spasm of coughing, and others into convulsions of laughter. But this puff initiates me into the clique of smokers, and into many evenings of boozing and squandering at Mama Obodo’s bar. As sour-mouthed as she is thick, Mama Obodo literally drives us away to close up every night.
“Leave my shop, you pigs from Wawaland,” she spits at us when one of us gets too full and throws up beer and morsels of manioc all over the place.
A round of guffawing shakes the barroom as she forces the fellow who has thrown up to clear his vomit, which he does by scooping it with his hands.
Mama Obodo continues to rail. She calls us all sorts of names and says we are good for nothing except working as houseboys, maids, latrine diggers, load carriers, hawkers of chewing sticks and toothpicks, that we are speakers of a dialect that doesn’t sound at all like Igbo, impoverished and slaving for the rich Agbenuman who pays us nothing for battering our bodies.
“There’s dignity in labour,” a dark, leathery fellow named Nwodo retorts. “Don’t look down on me because you see me in your barroom. I am a graduate. I studied psychology. I am only here because there are no jobs in the country and I don’t want to be a burden to my family after they struggled to train me. I am only here to save money to go back to university to become a lawyer and self-employed.”
The barroom swells with a deep grunt of doubt.
“I am saving for a house of my own and a pretty wife, so you know,” says another fellow I have seen at the bar a few times. He speaks in a half-sneering, half-serious voice.
“What woman will look the way of a poor, dirty concrete-casting church rat like you?” Mama Obodo hisses at him. “At the rate at which you are guzzling alcohol, you will end up living the rest of your miserable life in a wattle-and-daub hut, with the soaring cost of building materials in this country.”
The barroom roars its laughter.
The fellow who has vomited returns to his seat and asks for another drink after clearing the mess, but Mama Obodo ignores him.
“This body will break down if I don’t refuel it,” he moans.
“As for the aspiring lawyer . . .” Mama Obodo seems determined to send us off with her foul tongue so she can close. “I am sure what you have inside that head of yours now is a jar of alcohol, not a brain.”
The barroom laughs into the skies.
“What I don’t understand is where the Agbenuman is getting all the money to build his skyscrapers in these hard times.” Akata’s voice is unusually sober, a knowing smile planted on his face.
The barroom hisses into silence like a doused fire. Glances are exchanged, throats cleared, and beers sipped in that interval of uncomfortable silence. I remember what my mother said: I don’t like this idea of you going to live in Agbenuland with all those stories of rituals and blood money.
Coiled on my mat, lightheaded with beer, I take stock of the day, every letter of that hateful phrase ohu ma still echoing in my head. Who spoke it, I wonder, or was it actually my imagination? The labourers are mostly poor migrant workers from northern Igboland under an umbrella body called Wawa. Eke tells me that the group holds a meeting once in a while to discuss working conditions and welfare. Mama Obodo was right: the Agbenuman is rich and exploits our bodies to erect his skyscrapers, and then she sucks our pockets dry at her bar to keep the vicious circle going. We are nothing but tools, used to build their mansions or line their pockets. The moment their projects are standing, tall and proud, we are discarded like old rusty shovels and head pans.
I think of Ejiro, who is stuck in the mansion, fighting to entertain Mummy. “I have stayed for the money,” he said. How can he be sure that he will come out of the mansion with a kobo of his savings, or even with his own life? I must not forget the purpose for which I came all the way here. I promise myself that I will not be sucked into that whirlpool of beer and smoke in Mama Obodo’s bar at the expense of saving for the future, and for Okike’s tomb.
Sometimes, we are clearheaded enough to discuss politics and our ambitions. Eke wants to be a politician someday.
“I have been thinking about it for some time now.” Eke is wearing a crumpled face. “Politicians have sucked this country dry. I’d like to go in myself, to grab my own share. I am sick and tired of being sacrificed.”
I look at him, confused.
“Money ritual is not only when they slaughter you at some altar and harvest your human parts; labour exploitation is another kind,” he says to settle my curiosity. “We won’t be able to do this kind of work forever. That’s why I’ve joined MASSOB, to secure a position for myself when Biafra comes.”
Akata laughs in his usual satirical way. “I see that you want to spend the rest of your miserable life in prison.”
“If I join politics, it is not because I want to steal from the country,” Joe says. “It is because I don’t like how the northerners are treating us easterners.”
“I am not interested in MASSOB or Biafra,” Akata says. “If we have our own country, how do you know the Agbenuman will not play god over the rest of us his tribesmen, just as the Hausa and Fulani do to us now? We are better off as Nigerians than Biafrans, if they restructure the country to give other tribes a chance at being president.”
“Who dash monkey banana,” Eke says, not in Igbo, but in Pidgin English.
I have been drawn to MASSOB from the first time I heard of the movement from the captive gamblers in Uwakwe’s shopfront, so I follow Eke to the next meeting, which is at a football pitch. Abada, the leader of the group, is also a football coach. He is middle-aged, athletic, bow-legged, and a little hunched.
He begins to address us as soon as we are settled in the grass. “Let me first of all welcome the new boys amongst us. This is our seventh meeting since they took our indefatigable leader, and our agenda today is to update you regarding his arrest.”
Eke is staring at Abada with hands wrapped around his knees, forehead veined with interest when I glance at him.
“MASSOB is a peaceful group, and we do not understand why they have taken our leader on the accusation of violence.” Abada scans the sweaty faces of the young men just out of training. Anyone watching us from a distance would think he was just a football coach. “They may have taken our leader, but I want to assure you that it is not the end of the struggle for Biafra sovereignty. You shouldn’t panic. Our lawyers are working hard to get him released. We cannot be part of a country that treats us like slaves.”
We sit listening to Abada’s long and impassioned speech. It fills me up like food fills a famished man. On the way home, in the company of Eke and Nwodo, I ponder all that Abada has said. I am particularly intrigued by his claim that those who support MASSOB to a victorious end will be made councilors, local government chairmen, or even commissioners. “You will be leaders,” he said, “over those brothers of ours who have distanced themselves from the struggle.”
“Abada is right,” Nwodo says. “They drill our oil and leave us to die in poverty and pollution. He is right about the network of good roads in northern Nigeria, and the dilapidation of federal roads in the south, and airports that are in ruins and out of use. He is right about everything.”
I throw him an awed glance.
“I was stuck in university at the age of thirty, all because I am a southerner,” he says. “They made me sit the entrance exam five times before they offered me admission. Yet someone who sat the exam along with me the first time scored fifty marks less than my aggregate, but he was accepted and had long graduated and was working in the ministry before I finally was admitted. He was a northerner, of course.”
Nwodo is a hurting, bitter man; I can feel it. He goes on to rage about how the NNPC lost its autonomy under the watch of the leaders; how more than half of Nigerians are living below the national poverty line in a country that is one of the world’s largest oil producers, with more than fifty billion dollars in earnings from oil exports per year; how the universities have to increase tuition fees, yet students receive lectures while sitting on the floor in overcrowded lecture theatres or even standing outside the classroom windows; how the roads are dilapidated; how he has to work menial jobs after graduating from the university—in a country where the average legislator’s salary is more than fifty times the country’s GDP per capita.
I stare at Nwodo with mouth wide open, truly amazed by his intensity, his knowledge. He looks calloused, as if braided by his anger, his resentment of the state of the country.
“I am blaming them, our leaders, for all that went wrong,” he says.
I feel even more motivated after listening to Nwodo. Abada’s promises have reignited my curiosity and interest in Biafra, and I spend the evening with my friends at Mama Obodo’s bar nursing a bottle of Premier beer like a delicate dream. I imagine myself a councilor or a commissioner or a local government chairman. I will be in charge of the Nsukka administrative area. My village of Oregwu and its fraudulent Onyishi and his stolen little stool will be under my control. He will be forced to vacate the throne. It will be the end of poverty and shame in my family. And then I will build Okike a gargantuan tomb.