EVEN IF I SWALLOW THE INSULTS THE TEACHERS AND my classmates heap on me and continue with school, I will be studying for many years. I am over eighteen. I may very well be an old man by the time I finish, and Machebe will be running his own workshop full of apprentices. I must drop out, but how do I face my family? How do I look into my father’s eyes and tell him that I am withdrawing from school and wasting his only inheritance? My head is in a whirl. My family expects me to go to school on Monday morning, so I have until Sunday evening to think of something. I wish Eke were alive. I have had no one else to confide in or turn to for help since his death. I am friendless.
The tomb is a mess, grained with chicken droppings, but I have too much on my mind to bother about cleaning it. Maybe my mother is right. I have given the grave too much attention. And in return I have ended up with one frustration after another.
“Aren’t you going to clean your bedroom?” Machebe’s voice is heavy with sarcasm.
I ignore Machebe and the tomb he calls my bedroom and stroll to Uwakwe’s shop to clear the cobwebs, to see if he has news about the Biafra Zionist Movement. On my way, I see children returning from church in their Sunday clothes, and a man pedaling a bicycle and whistling. And then a familiar voice comes floating over in the gentle afternoon wind. Inyinya pops up. He is walking alone. Inyinya is the teacher who writes hymns for the Holy Trinity church choir, a fine middle-aged man in a well-ironed, short-sleeved white shirt tucked into grey trousers. He is singing a hymn, a file tucked under his arm. At a closer range, I see something I have never seen before on Inyinya’s face. He is radiating happiness. I watch him as he ambles down the road, crooning. Nothing else seems to matter other than the hymn and the flow of blessedness oozing out of him. I watch him until he branches off into a corner out of sight. I have never seen anyone with such an aura of innocence.
“I have nosed out a secret place where the new group holds meetings,” Uwakwe whispers with a crooked smile.
I flinch to attention.
“I am already a member.” His grin broadens.
“Can you take me there?”
“Of course. They need younger men like you. Zealous young men who can keep secrets. Meet me here tonight. I will take you there, but you are expected to pay weekly dues, and you must remember to keep it a top secret. You don’t want the police harassing us at this early stage.”
I promise my discretion even though I am not sure how to raise dues on a weekly basis.
The news makes me restless all evening. I sneak out after dinner back to Uwakwe’s shop. He is waiting for me. He has already locked up and is sitting on the bench in front of his shop, in utter darkness. It’s easy for him to meld into the darkness, becoming one with it like oil and Bambara flour when my mother mixes both with water to make okpa. We set out to the venue with torchlight. The meetings are held at the primary school classroom at night. We arrive as things are just getting started. The men are sitting in absolute darkness.
“There are spies stationed in the dark premises to watch out for danger,” Uwakwe had warned me.
Someone points torchlight in my face as Uwakwe introduces me as a new member. “He is young,” says a whispery voice. He makes it sound like a demerit.
My eyes ache from the light.
“Tell us your name, age, and what you do for a living.” The voice speaking now is deep and authoritative, the torch still pointed to my face.
The men asking the questions seem to relax after I finish introducing myself, explaining that I was once a member of a MASSOB group in Anambra State. The light is withdrawn, leaving me completely blinded.
“Sit down,” he says.
I grope my way to a seat.
“You are young, but because you were once a member of MASSOB, you will be given consideration,” he growls. “We are admitting you not because we share the same ideologies with MASSOB, but because we will not let this zeal, this enthusiasm burning in you, die for nothing.”
My eyes get used to the darkness. I make out more than a dozen men seated in the class like school pupils. Many of them are not familiar, but others are people I see every day. The man addressing me, Ikuku, is not known to me. Though small, he seems full of enthusiasm and speaks in a strong, motivational voice.
He picks up the thread of a speech he had started before we arrived. “The MASSOB leader is a selfish man who is only after what he can make for himself from the struggle. He accepted a payoff and abandoned the struggle, and all those who were detained with him. Our leader, Benjamin Onwuka, will not abandon any of us, no matter the situation. He is dedicated to this struggle, and will give his life to see it succeed. Like I said, he is an international lawyer with the right connections to deliver a fresh Republic of Biafra to us at no other cost besides our steadfastness. Only those who endure to the end will be rewarded. They may laugh at us now. They may call us loafers or any names they choose to call us, but we shall have the last laugh.” His eyes rest on me again. “You should study hard. You have more potential as an educated man, and better chances of making it to the hierarchy than most of us when Biafra comes.”
A few other men also make speeches hinting at the same points he had raised. And then dues are paid, and the meeting ends.
“Try and pay your dues by the next meeting,” Uwakwe says as we make our way home through the dark and silent night. “The payment determines your membership.”
“I will try.” I can’t tell Uwakwe that unless I steal the money from my mother or lower myself to the indignity of load carrying at Ogige market, I will not be able to raise the weekly dues of one hundred naira.
In bed I lie awake, fighting a maelstrom of thoughts. Ikuku says that I will have more potential than most as an educated man. I muse over a new Republic of Biafra where I am a ward councilor or even a commissioner. I see myself pulling down my father’s chicken coop of a house and building a mansion. I will send my siblings to school and open a big grocery business for my mother at Ogige market. There won’t be any need for her to roam in the bushes picking things to sell to feed the family and pay tithes. My mother is becoming more and more religious. She treks about four miles to a church way up in the Ikeagwu Hills, a small congregation that meets four times each week to sing, clap, and condemn Catholics for their use of images and reverence of the Virgin Mary. My mother says it is idol worship, the use of images. I will make sure that my father has sufficient snuff and palm wine always, and will not need to go to any of his treacherous kinsmen. My self-respect, which I have almost lost, will be restored.
I just have to persevere with school.
Gbaghalu cannot sleep. He is filled with self-reproach for hurting the woman his heart throbs for so violently. Obochi is the only reason he hasn’t taken his own life. His world had been a dark void before she came along like a waft of breezy sunshine and filled the space around him with light and a soft scent.
Obochi has been avoiding him, her anger worsening every time she remembers that, aside from peeping at her nakedness, he also killed a man. He claims that the man provoked him. How true is this? Where is the evidence that he was actually provoked, and that he did not murder a man in cold blood? He seems good at making excuses. They used to walk together to the fields, chatting and laughing, but now she walks without him and keeps the company of other outcasts in his place.
Work is tedious. Ezenwanyi owns acres of farmland, and the attama is using the outcasts to push back her endless stretch of forest. The outcasts do the work of producing the crops, which they store in barns for the use of the attama and his subjects. In return they are allowed small portions of farmland to make food for themselves. Gbaghalu and other men of the shrine work tirelessly to raise large mounds of earth and sow yams into the mounds. Obochi and other female outcasts plant maize, melon, and other crops. Work goes on endlessly, season to season: from yam to cocoyam to cassava to potatoes, from ploughing to planting to weeding to harvesting, supervised by the attama.
While they are working, the outcasts share their sad stories to reduce the drudgery of labour. Nweke, a beautiful young maiden, became Ezenwanyi’s bride after buying a trinket that had been stolen from the shrine.
“Ezenwanyi is a goddess of moral conduct with the ability to detect when theft has been committed in her territory,” Nweke moans. “But I did not know that the trinket was stolen. I fell sick after the first day I wore it. The illness grew stubborn. I had only just finished seeing my first blood, but the strange illness ceased it again, and I did not see it in the following months. My father took me to herbalists, but they found no solution. And then I started to recover, my blood coming again. Suitors started to come, attracted to my beauty.”
She walks around with a pout, swinging her hips.
“Please finish the story before the priest catches us fooling around in the middle of work,” one of the maidens scoffs at Nweke playfully. “I don’t want to be punished because you are flaunting your outcast body.”
Nweke laughs a hollow laugh. “I married one of them,” she continues. “The sickness returned as soon as I moved into the man’s house. My blood fled again. My husband got frustrated, thinking I wasn’t going to give him a child. He started to mistreat me. We fell apart, and I went back to my father’s house, was healed, my blood returning. The cycle started: I got married, fell sick, got healed again, and my blood came back the minute I left the marriage back to my father’s house. The villagers started to call me a witch, but upon investigation by a seer, it became known that the trinket I had bought some time in the past had been stolen from the shrine and sold to me at the local market. And, as penalty, Ezenwanyi demanded to have me as bride as the only condition for my healing. This is how I ended up as an outcast.”
“But what happened to the thief?” Obochi asks after listening to Nweke’s story.
“I don’t know. He is not known to me,” Nweke explains. “I went to the market, saw a trinket that caught my fancy, and bought it. How was I to know that it was stolen? But I know that nobody steals from Ezenwanyi and gets away with it.”
Obochi finds Nweke’s story pathetic, and similar to hers. Obochi had fallen in love once. His name was Odoja, and he was a fine, lanky young man. Odoja and Obochi’s brother, Ugwu, had been close friends. Odoja would visit her brother, and, while they were sitting outdoors and chatting, Obochi would hide in the hut and watch him as he flicked his thick eyebrows up and down while talking softly. She liked the luxuriant way his hair grew close to his forehead, his bright dark eyes and soft cat gaze. There was something feline about him, an aura of masculinity beneath a supple exterior. She had watched him in secret, a strange sensation forming a lump in her chest. She had imagined him alone with her in a hut filled with his virility, and that sweaty odour of men her brother sometimes secreted. She had become so prepossessed with him that she had found herself comparing him with her suitors, seeing flaws in every suitor. Odoja’s charm was so great it exposed the incompleteness of each suitor. Gbaghalu and Odoja are opposites, she thinks. Where Odoja is graceful, Gbaghalu is rugged. And where Gbaghalu is brawny, the strength Odoja exudes comes from within. Where Gbaghalu’s laughter threatens to rupture the fabric of his voice, Odoja’s laughter gathers and crumples in his eyes, and then it lingers in a light dance to the soundless rhythm of his voice.
As the maidens work and gossip, Gbaghalu’s laughter, that violent rupturing, is carried on the wind across the field to them. He at once becomes the subject of their gossip as he materializes farther afield.
“He is by far the most handsome man in this shrine,” says one maiden.
“He is good-looking in a cruel kind of way,” says another. “I heard he killed a man of this shrine, but overpowering and killing a fellow man makes him all the more attractive to me.”
“I would give everything to have him,” chips in a third maiden. “I wish more young men like him would come here to claim us.”
Obochi is tired and does more listening than talking as the ladies carry on with their praise of him, their gossiping and giggling. She has had a hectic day. Night is fast approaching. It is beginning to dye the fields in indigo, with smears of pink and orange in the sky. Obochi is relieved when the day’s work finally draws to an end.
At home, she is overcome by a feeling of sadness, weighed down by a sense of loss. The night is warm. The sun had been intense all day, sucking the moisture dry. She sits alone outside for fresh air, her gaze wandering now and again to Gbaghalu’s grass hut. He is nowhere within eyeshot. She hisses, walks to a pepper fruit tree, and leans against it. Maybe he is tired and has gone to bed early. The light from his oriona is still on. She lets out another hiss. Could she be missing him? She savours the evenings when they sat together in front of her hut, chatting. Maybe she overreacted. For days she has been sulking, refusing to talk to him, and resenting him.
It is dark and the sounds of insects fill the cold, still void of the night. Suddenly, she notices a sidling movement among the trees.
A thief!
She opens her mouth to scream but holds back. She has never heard of an incident of stealing in the shrine since her arrival. She follows the figure with her eyes until it melts into the looming darkness outside Gbaghalu’s hut, but not before she has seen that it is a woman’s figure.
In bed she cannot sleep, suspicious that one of the maidens in the shrine may have snuck into Gbaghalu’s hut in the night. “What is she doing in his room?” she wonders, realizing at once the folly of her question. What would a full-grown woman who sneaks into a man’s room in the night be looking for? She blames herself. The gods had given Gbaghalu to her so cheaply. He is strong and handsome, the dream of every woman, but she has spent too much time resenting him. And now she has succeeded in driving him into the arms of another woman.
She bursts into tears on her bamboo bed.
Obochi’s uriri burns brightly, illuminating the sinewy frame in the doorway when she opens her eyes. A scream starts and dies again in her throat.
“You startled me.” She sits up.
“I didn’t mean to creep in on you.” Gbaghalu stares at her briefly, a wild, hungry look in his eyes. He had arrived at her door, unnoticed, like a thief.
She summons him in with her eyes.
“I came to say I am sorry again.” He moves in fully, sits next to her.
She stares at the fingers of ripe pepper fruit in his outstretched palm with wide eyes.
“For you, as a token of my apology.”
“What have you done?” she whispers. He would be whipped mercilessly if caught plucking the fruit. The attama had ordered one hundred strokes of bullwhip scourge on one of the outcasts for plucking oranges. He was whipped by his fellow outcasts before the entire village.
“No one saw me.”
She accepts the gift with a fair amount of reluctance, savours the strong taste of one, and puts the rest away. He places a big hand on her lap. She lets the probing hand linger, lets her body warm to his touch. Sure of the chemistry, she forgets in that moment of heaven when the big warm hand in her lap wrapped around a man’s throat and squeezed the life out of him.
“You are so pretty, I couldn’t help myself.” He confesses as they lie side by side, united in a splotch of her blood on the mat, a shy smile of guilt playing on the broad estuary of his face.
She laughs and buries her face in the forest of his hairy chest. “You don’t have to apologize for making a woman out of me,” she says sweetly.
“Thank you for giving me the honour and privilege.”
Suddenly the thought of a pregnancy clouds over her feelings of pure bliss. Hereditary characteristics always show themselves, her father would say. She could have a murderer for a son, an ogler, or a rebel who robs fruit trees.
“What are you brooding about?” He notices her withdrawal, her recoiling from him.
“You could have impregnated me.”
The prospect seems to entice him. “We will get married. We are permitted to do so.”
By enslaving offenders and allowing physical relationships among the outcasts, Ezenwanyi cleaned up the society and freed it of vermin, carried out her responsibility of protecting the village and continuing her repopulating and expansionist mission, and made available outcasts for human sacrifices to strengthen her own powers. But he doesn’t want to scare her with too many details.
“We will speak to the attama about it, tell him we are in love, and perform the necessary rites. I am sure we will have children and a happy home.”
“Who talks of love and a happy home in a place like this?” she moans.
If he was hoping the promise of a marriage and a happy home would clear the frown from her face, he may have succeeded in driving her fears and doubts deeper. She would love to marry him. His presence always fills her with a sense of safety in this odd new world, but her fear is about the future, about the children they would have together as a couple.
“Have you thought about our offspring?”
His face broadens in a smile. “Our children will be the very definition of beauty.”
“They will grow up as ohu ma.” She groans. He had misunderstood her by a wide berth. “Like me. Like you. The girls will grow into old, haggard women who have reached menopause without husbands because they are outcasts, stained and untouchable. The boys will grow up with stigma following them everywhere they go like the dung-stained, fly-infested tail of a cow because they are the possessions of a fierce and overprotective goddess, and decent society has no place for them.”
The truth sinks in, draws a sigh from him. He pulls her closer and tries to shake her out of her low spirits. “We should make the most of this moment. Somehow we find ourselves in this situation by an unfortunate conjunction of circumstances.” He strokes her hair. “Please accept my proposal as the happy-ending story of its conquest.”
She hesitates.
“I accept.” She snuggles closer to him.