Chapter 6

Sunday 18th February.

 

Gerhard’s people were dedicated and came in as early on Sunday mornings as they did during the week. They gave us coffee and directions. We crossed the border into Nigeria just after 8 a.m. and headed north from a town called Meko on a dirt road. After ten kilometres we hit a roadblock guarded by men wearing army fatigues and holding AK-47s loosely in capable hands.

‘They look like the real thing,’ I said, as we cruised up to the soldier standing with his hand raised.

‘This is no place for armed robbery, unless they’re very stupid.’

The soldier came to my window and looked in and over our shoulders.

‘Where you going?’ he asked.

‘Akata village.’

‘Closed.’

‘For why?’ asked Bagado.

‘Big sickness. Nobody go in. Nobody come out.’

‘What sort of sickness?’

‘Typhoid. Cholera. We don’t know. We just keeping people from going there ’til doctah come telling us.’

‘Which doctor?’

‘No, no, medical doctah.’

‘I mean, what’s his name, this doctor. Where’s he come from?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said and looked back at the other soldiers who gave him about as much animation as a sloth gang on downers. He turned back to us and found a 1000-CFA note fluttering under his nose. His hand came up in a Pavlovian reflex and rested on the window ledge. He shook his head.

‘This not that kind thing. You get sick, you die. A white man out here, what do I say to my superiah officah?’

‘You give him this,’ I said, and produced a bottle of Red Label from under the seat.

‘No, sah. You go back to Meko. No entry through here, sah.’

‘Who is your superior officer?’

‘Major Okaka.’

‘Where’s he?’

The soldier shrugged.

We drove back to Meko and headed west for about fifteen kilometres before cutting north again, but not on a track this time, through the bush. Within twenty minutes we were stopped by a jeep and a Land Rover, one with a machine gun mounted on the cab. Four soldiers armed with machine pistols got out of the jeep and stood at the four points of the car. An officer type levered himself out of the Land Rover and removed a Browning pistol from a holster on his hip. The gun hung down his side in a slack hand. He approached the window and rested the gun on the ledge and looked at us from under his brow.

‘We’re looking for Major Okaka. This is Dr Bagado from Ibadan.’

Bagado leaned across me and said something in Yoruba to the officer. The officer’s other hand came up on the window and he leaned on the car as if he was going to roll it over. He grinned and spoke with an English accent that he must have picked up from the World Service in the fifties.

‘There is no Major Okaka on this exercise. We’re not expecting a Dr Bagado. You have entered a restricted area. If you return to the main road nothing more will be said. If, however, you prove yourselves troublesome we shall have to escort you down to Lagos for interrogation. Your passports, please.’

He flicked though our passports, the Browning still in his hand, his finger on the trigger and a certain studied carelessness in where he was pointing it.

‘Who is the officer in command of this army exercise?’ asked Bagado.

‘That is none of your business. You just go back to the main road. It’s dangerous out here. If you wish, my men can escort you back to the frontier and ensure that you cross the border safely.’

‘That won’t be necessary... er, Major...?’

‘Captain Mundo.’

He returned our passports and took us back to the main road. We drove towards Meko. The two vehicles disappeared back into the bush. Four kilometres outside Meko we came across a man walking in the dust at the side of the road, his jacket thrown over his shoulder and his white shirt filthy and patched dark by the hot morning sun. His trousers were no better. He looked as if he’d been kicked around. We offered him a lift. He removed a pair of black-framed glasses held together above his nose by electrician’s tape. He wiped the sweat out of his eyes and got in. His name was Sam Ifaki and he worked for a weekly news magazine called Progress.

‘Are you making any?’ I asked.

‘Not here.’

‘What’ve you been doing?’

‘Looking around.’

‘Akata village?’

‘Not any more.’

‘Those army people roll you around in the dirt and send you back?’

‘Army people,’ he said. ‘They’re all the same, army people.’

‘So you’re not interested in Akata any more?’

‘It’s not my job. I was looking at a farming project outside Ayeforo. Some people told me there’s something happening near Meko. I come. These people are rough with me. Tell me this business is none of mine. They tell me to go. So I go. If I don’t, they kill me. They say it’s nothing to them.’

‘What did you hear about Akata?’

‘Some sickness. They talk about the gods and such. That’s why I’m interested. Progress likes to report on witchcraft. You know, we like to show the people this pile of rubbish. When people get sick it’s not because of the gods, unless they think it’s god business putting faeces in the water supply. Nine times out of ten this is the problem. We’ve been having some rain. Strange for this time of year. Things are messed up, is all.’

‘We’ve heard about deformed babies in Akata.’

‘And sick cattle,’ said Sam, squeezing the bridge of his glasses, ‘and crops dying. Orishala is angry. Always the same thing.’

We arrived in Meko at lunchtime. Sam took us to a chop bar where an old man wearing a shift patched together from polypropylene fertilizer sacks sat outside. He had cataracts over both eyes and tapped the ground in front of him with a heavy stick as if summoning an audience for a foreign potentate. Inside, a couple of petrol barons, who sold cheap Nigerian gasoline in Kétou for half the Benin price, sat in full robes and started making elaborate gestures at each other so that we could see their Rolexes. Sam let us buy him a beer and some chop. The food was eba, a ball of steamed gari, cassava flour, which you could build a brick wall with if the cement works went out of production. It came with a red-hot sauce and two pieces of meat which looked like knee cartilage but turned out to be school rubbers. I ate the eba and sauce and left the rubbers for Sam and Bagado. The petrol barons were drinking Nigerian Guinness, which, at eight per cent alcohol, can creep up on you. Their mouths widened and their tongues flopped out. Occasionally they sat back from each other, stunned, as if they’d inadvertently called each other sons of whores.

The chop-bar owner was playing draughts with himself using beer-bottle tops on a board scored into the counter. He was roughly half the size of his wife, who appeared from the kitchen behind him and looked over his shoulder to make sure he wasn’t cheating. Bagado asked him about Akata village. He left the bar without a word and roared at the old man outside who stumbled in behind him, fresh from some pilgrimage of the mind. The barman gave us a bottle of ogogoro, distilled palm wine, which could get you nowhere quicker than a sandbag across the back of the neck. That was how they got the name for it, it was the noise a man made as he went down.

The bar owner suggested that we get our questions in between the first and third shot of ogogoro which proved to be good advice. After the first shot the old man looked around him as if his cataracts had demisted. Bagado spoke to him in Yoruba, sounding solicitous, respecting his elders, and made notes in his little book. Once Bagado had it straight on paper he gave the old man his third shot. Something short-circuited and the wavering twelve-volt lamps behind the white discs of the old man’s eyes went out.

Sam gave us a treasured business card and we left him in the chop bar with the sleeping petrol barons. The bar owner walked the old man outside, where he sat down and fell asleep with his head balanced on the end of his stick. He’d given Bagado directions on how to get into Akata from the north where there should be fewer patrols. It involved crossing a river twice. We hoped it would be dry. I bought some tinned corned beef and some old bread, which they’d coloured pink, and we set off into the bush in the mid-afternoon.

 

By 5.30 p.m. we’d crossed the river for the second time and abandoned the car, which we hid in the thick bush. I took the camera and a couple of empty water bottles for samples and we walked up to the top of a ridge and down a dry tributary to the river which the old man had said would take us close to Akata village.

A team of buzzards had found something and we watched them spiralling down in ones and twos into the trees. I was sweating cobs and not just from the heat—the gout didn’t like the shabby treatment it was getting from walking over rough ground and it seemed to have set up some kind of carpentry class in the joint of my big toe. The insects remembered there was a feast to attend and started rubbing their hands at the prospect. A type of fly which had a proboscis geared for getting through cow hide had just found that human skin was as buttery as the finest beef fillet. Bagado strode ahead with his hands clasped behind his back.

The light was failing rapidly as we broke out of the trees and on to a rough but graded track. This didn’t sound right from the instructions the old man had given us. Maybe that ogogoro had burnt more out of his brain than the bar owner thought. From the dusk came a deep, farting noise of a diesel engine—a tractor or an old truck. We walked towards it. As we drew closer the gearing of the engine changed, manoeuvring with more urgency. There were voices around it. We dropped off the graded road into a ditch and worked our way forward to what we could now see was a construction machine with a hydraulic shovel at the front end and an excavating arm crooked at the back.

Another engine started up and headlights flared across the road, lighting up the bush and attracting a whirl of insects. It blew out the last of the dusk and darkness floated down, black and velvety, with just a hole slashed by the truck’s lights. A transmission growled. Air brakes hissed. Universal joints shrieked. The slash of light arced across the forest and pointed down the graded road. The driver stirred the pudding and found another gear with a gnashing of teeth and shredded metal. The truck pushed forward. We sank back into the trees. The huge exhaust baffled past, the lights blinding us, the cargo invisible.

Torches floated like fireflies in the night. A single voice shouted orders. Then silence and the insect metropolis moved in.

‘Are they building?’ asked Bagado. ‘Out here?’

‘If they’re excavating why truck the stuff away?’

‘At night?’

Bagado gripped my arm as if he’d had some premonition at what was about to come screeching out of the forest.

A terrible scream, a horrific mortal howl ripped open the night, the noise so loud and piercing that life paused for a moment before rumbling on. We stiffened as if shivved in the back. A cold steel bowl of fear grew in my stomach and pressed on my guts. Another scream. The trees crouched. Voices panicked in the dark. The start of the third scream shredded the man’s voice box and the rest came out like fingernails tearing down a granite rock face.

Another engine started and simultaneously a blue flash of light exploded through the trees. The clearing had become a dome of light, a circle watched over by the ferocity of a dozen halogen lamps. We jogged, keeping low, and crashed into the trees just in front of the arena under whose brilliant whiteness all colour was drained from the scene.

The strangeness of it, like black-and-white, incomplete stop-frame animation of life. The sweat steeled cold on my face. A group of men were huddled, just away from a body lying on the ground, their hands on their knees as if completely out of breath. Squares of halogen light stared out unflinching all around. Two other men converged in such a way that I knew they didn’t want to but they were drawn. The body, my Christ, the body was smoking. Smoking thin trails of God knows what into a light so brutal it prickled the vision to graininess. Ten feet beyond the men, stacked up into the darkness more than twelve foot high, higher than the light dome, were hundreds of drums, some dull and plastic, others with the sheen of metal, some whole, some split. A gap in the edifice showed where a single drum had fallen from. The drum, capless and split, lay some feet from the body. The cap, stuck upright in some sludge, was at the foot of the drums. A slicked track from the open drum showed where the man had tried to crawl out of himself.

Details crashed into my mind, some magnified by horror. The man’s skull was visible, his ribcage too. Rubber gloves and boots on his hands and feet twitched. Two men stood up from the huddle and vomited black. Four armed men appeared from the circling darkness. Their rifles were pointed at the group. The two men converging finally arrived. One of them said the single word.

‘Acid.’

The armed men put their hands up to cover their noses and mouths. One of them peeled off and went to talk to the man in the digger. The digger started up, moved to the edge of the lights and planted its feet. The driver manipulated the levers and the elbow straightened at the back. He scooped out a deep trench in the earth. The soldiers herded the group of men away from the body, their rifles pointing at the ground. The digger lifted its feet and reversed in a wide arc and dropped the hydraulic shovel. The shovel tilted. The machine moved forward and consumed the top six inches of earth and the dead man before throwing its neck back and swallowing. The digger manoeuvred to the side of the trench and tipped out the shovel and scraped the earth in over it.

‘Toxic waste,’ said Bagado.

The soldiers stood with their backs to the drums, the other workmen in front of them. The noise from the generator and digger overwhelmed the scene. I stepped out from the trees and shot off half a roll of film. Bagado and I moved back into the trees. We made a rough calculation of the size of the dump and put the figure at around a thousand two-hundred-litre containers; a lot of them were in poor condition and all the ones we could see had Italian language printed on them.

From where the soldiers had come into the light we guessed the direction of Akata village. At the back of the dump there was a track of dead vegetation leading from the drums down a slight incline. At the end of it we found a stream running towards the village. Bagado filled the water bottles.

We circled back round to the other side of the dump to get some shots of the machines and men with the dump in the background. The digger was scraping more earth away from in front of the drums and dumping it in the forest. There was a jeep parked up near the generator with its licence plate facing our position. The workmen were on their haunches, eating. The soldiers looked down on them, still with their rifles but at ease.

I was more nervous this time and didn’t step close enough to the light. When I reeled off the shots the automatic flash operated. I might as well have used a heliograph to yoo-hoo them over here. One of the soldiers pointed at me. I stumbled back and fell hard on my shoulder tying to protect the camera. Bagado dropped a water bottle and hauled me up by the collar. We bolted into the trees. All I could see was the black-and-white scene burned on my retina—two soldiers running, the other two kneeling and loading. I blundered through the forest. Bagado was gone. The first bullets snapped through the foliage, hungry but wide, well wide.

I ran like all people in films should learn to run who’ve just seen the lunatic making his selection from the Sabatier block. I ran with no control over my tongue. I ran faster than my bowels. I found the quickest cure for gout—three pints of adrenaline injected directly into the heart.

Just when I’d begun to think I could see something beyond the X-ray of the halogen-lit scene in my eyes, the generator cut. The light imploded behind me and with a jack-hammer jolt a jagged crack of light opened up in front of me. I ran into it, but it was too small, too tight. Then I wasn’t running any more and it was dark. So dark I thought I hadn’t been born.