I NOW PLAY FOOTBALL AS SPARINGLY AS POSSIBLE, not because my injury is preventing me or because Nnamdi Adaka is boasting to his friends about sending me to a bonesetter when next we play against each other. Grace wants me to stop to avoid hurting myself again. My classmates have started to notice my attachment to her. They call me woman wrappa. Because I don’t want them taunting me, I dash out to play when Grace is not looking, shooting to the field and back in again like a restless tongue unsettled by a sweet taste sticking around the mouth.
But I will never have the courage to ask her for sex, as my classmates are urging me to. What I do now, which I learned from Eke back in Anukwu, is sneak into the bathroom with soap and water if I feel heavy in my groin. I will close my eyes and imagine a girl’s supple body with an oily sheen stroking my erection until a slimy, snot-coloured matter jets hotly out, leaving my body racked with spasms. It is usually accompanied by a muffled groan that I try to keep within the dark dungeon of the bathroom.
One evening, during the Biafra Zionist Movement meeting at the primary school, something unexpected happens. I almost don’t believe my own eyes. I think it is his ghost when I see him there, and, throughout the meeting, we don’t say a word to each other, though our eyes meet now and again. I’d never have expected it, but Nnamdi Adaka does embody the qualities the group wants. He is strong and plucky. I think about it all night in bed, what having my bully there means, with goose bumps washing all over me.
I walk to school the next morning like a wet hen and sit distracted through my classes after I catch him scowling at me. I find him waiting outside the classroom at break time. He probably sensed I would try to give him the slip and intercepted me.
Drawing me aside, he demands, “Are you pretending you didn’t see me last night?”
“No.”
“What’s no? You did not see me or you are pretending?”
“I am not pretending.”
“You are a liar,” he says. “I am sure you were pretending not to have seen me because you didn’t want to pay dues for the both of us.”
“That’s not true.”
“Are you calling me a liar?”
“No.”
He considers me with suspicion. “How long have you been a member?”
I tell him, hoping Grace will not see us together.
“I will see you at the next meeting.” He begins to walk away, and then he stops and turns to look at me with sincerity in his eyes for the first time since he tackled me. “I am sorry for your injury.”
With wide staring eyes, I watch him walk away.
The final exam is drawing nearer. I begin to study in the night with my family’s oil lamp, but it doesn’t take long before sleep conquers me.
“Is this how you are going to study for the big exam, dozing off even before you open your book?” Machebe sniggers in front of the family as we eat together.
“What business of yours is it?”
“Your education is family business. It became so after you were given what belonged to all of us. I am one of the shareowners.”
Machebe makes it sound like I’ve stolen from him personally. Truth is, I haven’t paid him back for the money he gave me when I left for Lagos. I may pretend to ignore him, but he leaves me with a huge sense of responsibility every time he talks that way. And he makes my heart lurch each time I remember the exam.
“I heard you have been sneaking out to secret meetings,” my father says.
I throw Machebe an accusing look. I am sure he has told on me. “I have not been going to any secret meetings.”
“That’s a lie,” Machebe says brusquely. “You have been there many times.”
“How do you know that?” my mother snaps at Machebe.
“It’s an open secret in this village,” says Machebe. “Some people have joined a new pro-Biafran secret organization.”
“What is this about you and Biafra?” My mother flares up, turning to face me. “Have you forgotten how those who were arrested were dehumanized? The trauma still hasn’t left their bodies. Who will bail you out if they throw you into detention?”
“As a father, it is my duty to speak out when I notice any of you derailing. If Biafra will be, it will be, but not because you are a member or not of any so-called group. You better leave the scratching for those who have fingernails.”
I had thought I would bluff my way out of their accusation. I know I am never going to stop going to the meetings no matter how upset they are with me. Not at this time when momentum is building. This time when frustration is growing and public resentment of the government is deepening. When the smell of a fresh country is thick in the air.
A brand-new Republic of Biafra that belongs to the great and resourceful Ndigbo, Ikuku says.
Sometimes I am able to study deep into the night, and I manage this on the eve before the first day of the exam, but then I wake up late the next morning. I grab a bucket of water, wash my hands, my face, and my legs. And then I put on my school uniform. I will not eat cocoyam and cowage soup for breakfast on the morning of my first exam—that kind of food could give me bad luck—so I take off to school on an empty stomach.
Teachers are moving about briskly, papers in hand, and students are standing in small groups. Around ten o’clock, a white van with a team of invigilators and the exam papers speeds up like a politician’s convoy. When it stops with a screech of tyres, the invigilators jump out like military men and women. The movement of the teachers becomes frantic. Around eleven, we are summoned into the exam hall and given our papers.
“You have until one thirty to pass your papers,” says an invigilator, a middle-aged man with a stern look. “That means you have an entire two and half hours. Begin.”
Grace is also taking the exam. I can see her sitting in front of me. Her bride price has been paid by the rich man despite her protests. He is waiting for her to finish her exam to complete the marriage ceremonies and whisk her away. The speed with which everything has happened has left me dazed. I talked to my mother about Grace, but she warned me to avoid any kind of intimacy with her if I did not want to be heartbroken. “Forget her, because her parents will never like you,” she said, point-blank, then added, “Being with her amounts to fornication in any case.”
It was hard for me to do what my mother had asked. I have never before liked any girl as I do Grace. I did not tell her what my mother had said, but I did nothing to help her fight for our relationship after that. I stopped going to her house, making sure we saw less of each other, lying to her that my mother would make a big scene if she caught us together, for religious reasons. I had to frighten her to stop her from coming to our house, to restrict our seeing each other to the school. She must have realized that I was avoiding her.
The exam period is a full month. I will see Grace every day. Her suitor drives her to school in the morning in a big car. He comes to pick her up in another bigger car. I often watch them with jealous eyes from a distance, but I wish her well in her marriage. She may think she has a crush on me, which I consider odd because I am only a poor boy from a poor family, a boy with one ear and a half, and I am nothing compared to that charming man who smells of money.
Christmas is coming again. The marriage between the coming Christmas and Harmattan births dust, cold winds, and mad rush. People will start chasing money about like it is a ball they are trying to kick. Money they will spend buying Christmas things. Business will pick up at Ogige market, with traders bringing in more goods from Onitsha and stocking up their shops. A week before Christmas, the market will explode in frenzied buying and selling. The university staff will spend their December salaries buying what they’ll need when they travel to their various hometowns. Girls will braid their hair and paint their nails so that they will look attractive to young men who will be returning from large cities with a lot of money. Farmers will bring their harvests from remote villages to sell and will spend the money on clothes and shoes for their families. There will be more business for load carriers, many of whom will be caught stealing, then beaten thoroughly. In Lagos, crowds will set them on fire with tyres and petrol.
I sneak out to go to one of the nighttime meetings at the primary school. I have not been able to attend any since the exam period began, but now I have only a few papers left. Ikuku says a brand-new Republic of Biafra will be declared at the next United Nations meeting, and I don’t want my membership to be put to question on account of poor attendance. “Biafra is as sure as precipitation in the rainy season,” he says. He raises the stakes whenever he speaks like that, so that membership almost always soars by the next meeting. I can feel the breadth and intensity of the struggle rising. I can smell Biafra like crayfish in my mother’s fried stew. But each time I remember the warning from my family I tense up, a nervous feeling now snowballing into a premonition. The feeling gets stronger and stronger. And then one night, while we are waiting for Ikuku to arrive like pupils in a class, something happens.
There is no moon. It is so dark that Uwakwe is a mere phantom. Suddenly we are covered in a flood of torchlight as gunshots rend the night air. The group breaks up, fleeing in all directions. I head to the door, aware of people stumbling and falling, others climbing walls. I realize that the building is surrounded as a harsh voice orders me to put up my hands. A shove sends me pitching forward, followed by a kick to my buttocks. They push me roughly into a van. Uwakwe and a few others are sitting in the van already, in handcuffs. They shove in more people, and then they whisk us away, driving past a sleeping Ogige market down the valley of Bishop Shanahan and up a small hill, where the police station sits in the company of tall mango trees. And then they push me in, leaving me cringing in the middle of a cold, dark cell, and startled by the rasp of steel meeting steel as the savage-looking police officer locks the cell bars.
The strong, unpleasant smell of feces welcomes me as I wait for my eyes to get used to the darkness. I smell humans, too, the rancid odour of unwashed, sweaty bodies. And then six inmates are staring hungrily at me as if I were a delicious plate of rice as vague shapes begin to outline themselves in my vision. All six men—excepting one who is lying down, a thick, keloided man of middle age—are squatting around the space that at best is the size of a cubicle, giving the impression of a crowd.
My greetings are met with silence and twelve brutal eyes devouring me, not even a sit-down gesture. The mistake I make is going to squat without being permitted. My buttocks hardly touch the floor when a massive hand slams a welcome blow to the top of my head. The blow quickly sends me back up on my feet. Illuminations form stars as big as moons. The stars fade into sable savannahs as I slowly return from the Milky Way back to the tiny republic of seven inmates now including me. I realize that the man lying down is speaking to me, or growling at me rather.
“Abeg, move back!” barks the voice in Pidgin English. He doesn’t sound like he is from my tribe. “Wetin be ya name, sef?”
“Dimkpa.”
“Which kain name be dat, sef?” He cackles. Others laugh, too, as if they are mandated to laugh when he laughs, and not laugh otherwise. “Oya. Go salute kodo.”
It’s one of the many cruel treatments given to a new inmate, forcing them to punch the image of the skull and crossbones sketched on the wall of the cell.
“And you beta punch am hard if you no wan collect beta punch from somebody to show you how hard you suppose punch,” says the man they call Presido.
They make me punch the wall again and again until my knuckles are burning. It is part of my initiation rite, and also my punishment for daring to come into the cell without “something” for Presido and his republic, and then for allowing myself to be arrested too cheaply and on such a cowardly excuse as attending a meeting. And because I am a disgrace to Odumegwu Ojukwu, the founder of Biafra, who was such a fine, gallant soldier.
“Abi lion dey born dog?” growls Presido.
My position and work in the republic are made known to me after my initiation. I will run errands for my older inmates. They make me stay awake and fan Presido with my shirt while he snores through the musky cell heat. It is also my duty, as the newest inmate and the most cowardly, to dispose of the shit bucket every morning. Presido is the oldest and the “president” of the “republic.” He got locked up for stabbing and robbing a man. Other inmates’ crimes range from rape to robbery to murder.
The cops are just as villainous. “Small Ojukwu,” says Opurum, the scraggly, sneering man who is my investigating police officer. He taunts me ceaselessly. “You tink say wetin Odumegwu Ojukwu no fit do, na you go do am jus like dat? Muscle you no get like me. See ya chest like dat of the bird nkele.”
Opurum’s taunting, the acts of wickedness I am being subjected to by fellow inmates, and the thought of being whisked off to a prison cell and dumped there to await a trial that might take forever to come fill me with fear. I become even more terrified when one of the inmates gets violently sick. It is clear the sick man will die if he is not rushed to a hospital, but no one makes a move to save him. The inmates can do no more than press a wet cloth to his burning forehead. The thought of watching someone die in the cell next to me frightens me.
It is now three weeks and there’s little hope of my getting out anytime soon. I have been worried about my remaining exam, wondering about Uwakwe and the others who were also arrested and put in different cells. If no one comes with bail for me, I will be taken to court and remanded to a prison cell indefinitely. I know that my family cannot raise the kind of money the police will demand for my bail. The best they can do for me is the food my mother has managed to smuggle into the cell a few times, which Presido seizes for himself anyway.
Opurum shows up one morning after a month of my incarceration. He cuts a grumpy figure as he fiddles with the cell locks.
“Oya, small Ojukwu, follow me,” he says casually.
A cold chill washes over me. It descends on the other inmates, too, that familiar feeling that something terrible is about to happen to me, to one of us. It has happened before, an officer arriving casually at the door and saying to an inmate, “Dem wan hear ya case today. It fit be ya lucky day. As I see am, sef, dem fit to discharge you if the prosecution no get strong evidence.”
The inmates would jubilate and hug the lucky inmate, the pain of losing him eclipsed by the hope of freedom. But is there freedom? Is there even a court sitting? The manner with which the officer slams the door and the angry rasp of irons as he locks up the cell raise questions. The answers are obvious. The ruling party is hell-bent on retaining power in the coming elections. So they set out to intimidate their opponents, and there’s no more savage way of achieving this than by extrajudicial political killings. Abandoned inmates without connections or “Ghana Must Go” bags are smuggled out of their cells and murdered at strategic locations.
The attama passes on.
Obochi considers the passing of the Ezenwanyi priest. She decides it doesn’t take away or add to her sorrows: her othering and this thing sitting right in front of her. She hasn’t managed to refer to it in human terms, to relate to it as a parent since she gave birth to it seven months ago. Its conception ruined her relationship with Gbaghalu. It provoked her first big fight with him, its tiny kicks vocalizing her resentment of him and causing her to spit every rush of nausea into his face. She starved herself, eating only those things meant to flush the fetus out, poisons that became nourishments.
Finally, it slipped out of her like wind.
The baby is screeching on the floor, bathed in its own snot and tears, eyes begging for her motherly affection. But affection is a luxury she cannot afford. It’s hard enough on her to have to breastfeed it. Bad enough that she has to take it in her hand.
Gbaghalu hurries in, alarmed by the baby’s sobs.
“Show this child some love.” He picks the baby up from the floor and croons to him on his wide shoulder, his voice more asking than upbraiding her.
The baby stops squealing and nuzzles up against its father, breath coming in convulsive gasps, its sad eyes following her to the door as she walks away from the claustrophobic scene. Everything—the house, the baby, Gbaghalu—is driving her out of her mind. She did warn him of dire consequences, but he persuaded her to consummate their relationship.
He comes outside with a sulky face and sits with her after feeding his child and putting it to sleep. He has just returned from where the male outcasts were summoned to dig the attama’s grave.
“That boy needs your affection. How long are you going to deny him that?”
He looks even more attractive when he sulks, she muses. Over the months since the birth, he has alighted from shouting his protest over her attitude towards the baby to coaxing it, and now he talks about it with hurt in his voice, sounding utterly exhausted.
“When will they bury him?” she asks about the priest, not desiring to talk about the baby. Had the attama not passed on, they would all have been out working in the fields all day with the thing tied to her back, shrieking itself red in the face from the harsh sun.
His frustration with her finds expression in a deep sigh. “The ekwe, timber drum, will summon us,” he explains. “It is not a good time for the outcasts. One of us will be buried alive today with the priest.”
She almost tumbles off the bench.
He wishes he hadn’t mentioned it, seeing her reaction, how terrified she looks, but he had to warn her ahead of time. Ezenwanyi’s outcasts are sacrificed to the goddess in a periodic ritual to strengthen her powers. The village elders have decided that, since it’s the year of the sacrifice, which ritual involved burying the sacrifice alive, it’s only proper to bury him with the late attama.
Falling to her knees and grabbing his hands, she says: “Let’s run away. Let’s flee to a distant place where we will be free from this evil life.”
“There’s no escaping from Ezenwanyi.” He realizes how hopeless and helpless he must sound. Ezenwanyi will cast afflictions on anyone who tries to run away. He will be cursed with madness, blindness, leprosy, and wandering. He will end up a corpse for the vultures to feast on.
He doesn’t want to scare her more by telling her that the goddess usually makes her choice of sacrifice from outcasts who were enslaved because they took another life. Sometimes an outcast perceived to be rebellious is chosen. The goddess might also instruct the attama to sell such rebels to merchants from other clans, who then decide how best to use their slaves for different kinds of ritual sacrifices or for economic purposes. But he tells her that the new attama is consulting to determine the outcast the deity has chosen to be buried alongside the late attama. The timber drum will be sounded to summon the outcasts to the burial, where the victim will be made known.
They set off to the burial shortly after they hear the deep tones of the timber drum. The baby is a koala, and Gbaghalu is sure he will sleep through and will still be drowned in it when they return. He is too young to be taken to the scene of so much cruelty. Once the sacrifice is named, the rest of the outcasts will breathe a sigh of relief. And then the undertakers will prepare the sacrifice, gagging, blindfolding, and tying him up naked to be lowered into the grave side by side with the attama’s slatted raffia coffin.