He was a typical dockyard worker – short, squat, ashy black and pleasantly ugly – a member of the class that unknowingly holds the power in Nigeria, but which, since it is too ignorant, peace-loving and cowardly, preoccupied with the past, cares only for the immediate and never gives a thought to the future, has entrusted it to a few selfish men.
Written all over his furrowed fleshy face was the legend ‘I work terribly hard but get very little pay.’ The thick arm muscles which rippled under his threadbare brown shirt, the short powerful legs and the air of rude health and bodily strength that enveloped him, resulted from his strenuous work rather than good nourishment.
He might have been only twenty-seven, but the expression of his face was set, and he already had that sad, resigned air peculiar to the middle-aged. Members of his class often skipped adolescence. One moment they were boys, the next, old men.
That morning he came to work in the same shirt and French shorts he had been wearing for two years, and on his feet were thick slippers made of old motor tyre. He hesitated slightly before jumping from the boat which brought him to Apapa. His hesitation stemmed from fear caused by the gap between the boat and the concrete platform. Even though he had worked for eight years at the dockyard, he was still very much afraid of its darkish green, oily waters.
Reaching his place of work, he unslung from his shoulders the cloth sling containing his meagre breakfast and lunch. His look of pleasant anticipation disappeared as he remembered the strike was still on. He became uneasy, as he began to worry about the outcome of the strike. For the first few days he had enjoyed sitting around doing nothing, his thoughts unbridled, tasting with relish what his seniors enjoyed hourly. But now it was boring. He could no longer look forward to a day filled with that sense of close companionship and brotherhood that often prevailed wherever people did arduous physical work together.
Instead, the day stretched empty and gloomy before him – no ribald jokes, no emotion-freeing shouting, no feeling of pride and well-being at a job well done – nothing. Only his thoughts, dreary thoughts of his poverty, the unhappiness of his wife and child in the uncomfortable and expensive tin shack he called a home, his inability to better his lot, kept him company.
‘Hey, John!’ shouted another dock worker. ‘Come here the tin way dende talk-o!’
A dirty handkerchief tied round his neck like a bandana, John moved closer to the other dock workers. They were in the space between the third and fourth sheds, that partition between the old and the new long, wagon-like warehouses, facing the huge gates of the quay.
John walked slowly, delaying the time when he would reach the massed, mostly unwashed bodies. The sun was turning red. It was going to be another hot day, and he knew the heat created by the crowd would be stifling.
‘Talk, talk, talk,’ he muttered wearily, ‘Na soso talk, talk!’
And he remembered that was exactly what his wife had said to him that morning as she made a cup of gari for his breakfast and lunch. Their son, five years old, was awake too, staring at the kerosene stove with large, soulful eyes. The single stuffy room served as bedroom, sitting room and kitchen and the rent was three pounds a month.
‘The strike is three days old now,’ she had said quietly in their fluid native dialect. She wasn’t pretty and she knew it, so she made the most of what she had – a wiry yet shapely body and a dulcet tone. She often said she knew her face was no good: ‘broad, flat nose, mouth as wide as a gutter and complexion like mud.’
‘When will it end, John?’
Seated on the edge of a large brass bed which had bands of iron in place of springs, and a mat-covered, grass-filled mattress, and chewing a kingsize yellow stick, John murmured, ‘I don’t know, Eliza.’
Gari made, Eliza straightened up, and one could have wondered why such a tall woman had married short John, but the eyes she tenderly and protectively bent on his head answered the question. A pleasant smile tugged the corners of her thick lips, as she said, ‘Don’t you think, the less days you work, the less pay you get?’
‘I think so.’
The child whimpered and John turned to him, easing the old Army blanket that covered him and wiped the perspiration from his feverish forehead. ‘Don’t worry, Barna, you’ll soon be all right.’
Eliza put the pot of soup on the stove, turned down the lantern that gave a sickly yellow light and opened the only window.
‘It’s day already,’ she said as she parted the torn curtains and looked into a filthy, smelly gutter that was their backyard. Immediately beyond that was another tin shack, and each shack was like the other – one door, one window.
John went out to wash his face in preparation for work. Eliza rearranged the room, pushing the bed against the corrugated iron sheet wall, opening three wooden chairs and placing them round a small table near the door.
‘As I was saying, John, have they agreed to increase pay yet?’
‘I don’t know,’ John replied, changing his lappa for a pair of shorts. ‘I think they’re still talking it over.’
‘Talking, talking, always talking …’
‘… and so comrades, we must not succumb. We must keep fighting till they give way to our wishes. After all, we are asking for a little amount compared with what they spend on large American cars, girlfriends and tours. But remember, no violence, just passive resistance, and God being our helper, we will yet move mountains,’ said the Secretary of the Trade Union.
John lost interest in what the man was saying. What was the use, he thought, of kicking against stones, when one would only hurt oneself. The Secretary might advocate passive resistance, because he was sure of his next meal, had no wife and sick child to face each day, and no aged grandmother to send money to.
‘… we must show them we can’t be pushed around …’ shouted the Secretary, obviously carried away by the sound of his own voice. His arms were slicing the air mercilessly while his long beard tried to keep pace with the movement of his jaws. The big robe covering his lean body assumed a life of its own.
‘Na so,’ John said quietly.
‘Supposing dem push you, wetin you go do?’
Already the riot police were tightening their cordon round the dockworkers, batons ready, shields up and gas masks slung round their necks.
The Secretary jumped down from the massive iron ingot that had served as a platform and the huge fat-tummied Chairman took over.
John liked him very much. Here was his idol. John pushed his way nearer the platform amidst curses and ill-tempered jabs on the ribs. The workers were becoming ugly-minded with impatience and inactivity, and, like a pack of hounds, waited for their leader. The Chairman’s tutored voice seemed instantly to soothe the prevailing mood as he explained the progress of his negotiations to increase pay. Tomorrow, or perhaps the next day, would see the end, and arrears would flow into pockets.
Just then, five open lorries drove into the dockyard, and men resembling the striking dockworkers – tattered and worn – piled out. Before long, the sound of drilling shattered the air and men’s voices sang raucously as they unloaded the cocoa and groundnut-laden lorries that had stood untouched for days.
Suddenly a voice rang out from the midst of the striking dockworkers.
‘Wetin you say to dat, Chairman? I tink say we too big for people to cheat us?’
There was silence. Even the newly hired men stopped working. Suddenly it raced through John’s mind that his job was at stake. He thought, ‘These men have been employed by the very people with whom the Union was supposed to be negotiating for more pay. What treachery! What an underhand deal!’ A slow mortifying feeling clogged John’s breathing. It was not anger, but fear of that starvation status fondly called ‘applicant’. He had tasted that state for many years, and he could still remember the sheer horror of it – no food.
The riot police, sensing the growing hostility of the strikers, began driving them towards the gates, tapping some laggards on the head, prodding others in the ribs. John was one of those being prodded. He was remembering his plate of food.
The strikers had just reached the flower-studded roundabout forty yards from the main gate when a big, flashy new American car with its almost five-foot-long radio aerial, quivering in the sunlight, drove through the side gate, followed by two smaller cars.
The voice that had shouted at the Chairman bellowed again, ‘Una see! They don come laugh we. They wan’ see the tin we de do. Bastards! Oya-o make we hold them.’
‘Hollam, hollam! Hollam, hollam!’ became the chant, and the crowd divided into two, one half going for the cars, the other charging the police.
John suddenly found himself in the forefront of a crowd bent on destruction. He had a healthy fear of the police, and, in his effort to draw back, was catapulted into the hands of one of them, who cracked down with his baton in a desperate attempt to save his own life.
John fell, his head a mass of blood. His shouts for help were ignored. As the police gained the upper hand, the strikers began to scatter. John managed to crawl for a few yards, calling his friends by name, but none came to his aid, so much were they bent on their own safety. Some dockworkers, stumbling on him, cursed him for being in their way. He had become a nuisance.
This last hurt John badly for, just a week before, he had risked his life saving a fellow dockworker, whom he didn’t know, from drowning. And now, people shunned him like a leper. By the time John was lifted into an ambulance, he was dead.
That night, there was no one to console his widow as she wept in the tin shack she would soon have to leave. In her arms was her sick son, who she knew was doomed to the life of ‘hard work and little pay’. Who would send him to school? Who would even know he existed?
Two days later the workers revolted against their Union leaders and went back to work. In that action they lost their bargaining power.
Life went on as usual at the docks. The incidents of the strike were already history. After all, it was only a labourer who had died – an expendable material.