“Your report is riddled with irrelevant details,” the news editor criticized, his face dour. Then, as my spirits sank, he brightened up: “But, oh, so bold! This will earn you a file at the State Security Agency. Perhaps even a visit. Be prepared!”
For four days after my story’s publication my nerves were set on edge. I shuddered whenever a human shadow approached me from behind and trembled when I heard an unfamiliar voice.
On the fifth day I awoke to the discovery that the nervousness had vanished. Strangely, I missed it. While it lasted, it had imbued my life with meaning and purpose, a sense of being in the dark swirl of events, in danger. The story, with its rich details of the courtroom drama, had made me an enemy of the state, an object of interest to the dreaded security apparatus. When nothing came of it and my life went on much as before, I felt that time passed dully, purposelessly. Other assignments seemed poor distractions. I could come alive again only when the trial resumed. Until then, there was little to do except count the days.
The ninth day after the adjournment, I was set to go home after a dull day spent covering a trade fair when a call came through from the switchboard.
“The caller says it’s urgent,” the operator said to me.
I put the receiver to my ear, expecting an animated voice. Instead, the caller spoke in a carefully calibrated tone.
“My name is Dr. S. P. J. C. Mandi,” came the measured voice. “Let me warn you that this call concerns a highly confidential issue.” Then he asked me to meet him the next day at 12:45 p.m. outside the gates of Bande maximum security prison. I was not to tell anybody about the meeting, he said. Not even, he stressed, my editor.
“It’s essential that you are on time, Mr. Adero. And please wear a jacket. A fairly good one, but not too fashionable.”
He must have anticipated that I wanted to say something, because he quickly cut in: “Any questions you may have must wait till we meet tomorrow. I wish to stress, again, that punctuality is of the essence. And appearance. Goodbye, Mr. Adero.” Then he rang off.
I was incensed by the caller’s air of mystery. Who did he think he was, to order me to a secret meeting, even instruct me on how to dress, without offering the slightest hint of what it was all about? His calm, clinical voice added to my irritation. My thoughts were a formless whirl, torn between fear and an instinct for self-preservation on the one hand and a hunger for danger and recklessness on the other. In the end I decided to go. Even so, I wanted to be cautious. At the top of a sheet of paper I wrote, in case i’m missing. I gave details of my conversation with the stranger, then put the note in my top drawer.
I left home at 9:00 a.m. the next morning in a rented Peugeot, taking the expressway out of Langa. About two miles to the tollgate, I ran into jammed traffic, cars moving forward at tortoise pace, the drivers besieged by hawkers and beggars. It was not until 10:11 that I passed the tollbooths. The caller had said the trip would take no more than forty minutes once the city was behind me. I turned left, southbound, onto a minor road which, according to my directions, should terminate at Bande prison.
It was a bumpy, potholed, dusty road through a flat and sorrowful landscape. For a long time I drove alone. Then I spied, far in the distance, the hazy outlines of a glistening object. It crystalized into a vehicle, the first I had seen for many miles on this sullen stretch of road. As it swept past I saw a marking on its side: madia prison department. I ran full tilt into the cloud of dust it raised; through the rearview mirror I saw it swallowed up in mine. The fear inside me grew.
Shortly afterwards the road detached itself from the parched, flat plain and climbed a hill. From the top I could see the prison. My eyes skimmed the series of squat structures enclosed within its high walls. The prison was surrounded by lush vegetation.
At 10:50 a.m. I maneuvered the car into one of the parking spaces marked for visitors. A moat ringed the prison, and a bridge connected the two worlds this moat sundered. An iron gate secured the bridge from traffic. The notice on the gate was somber: warning: prison vehicles only beyond this point. There was a security post beside the gate, manned by two officers.
The prison’s footpaths, however, were laid with raked gravel. Freshly painted stones dotted the edges, and beds and borders were planted with flowers that glowed in the sunlight: amaranth, zinnia, lantana, impatiens, African violet, bougainvillea, hibiscus, red roses, morning glory, sunflowers, Africa-never-dies. The carefully tended flowers diffused a heady perfume in the air.
Bande maximum security prison was the brainchild of Askia Amin, our country’s first prime minister. He had seen a model for it during an official visit to Latin America. Upon his return he signed an order for a replica to be built in a reclaimed swamp, in a location as remote from the bustle of life as possible. He had no wish for the intended inmates—his political enemies—to be reached by the familiar sounds of the human world. Such sounds could only be a distraction to men and women secluded in the prison to contemplate the truths of life.
A few weeks after the completion of the prison Isa Palat Bello led a group of junior officers to stage our country’s first coup. Amin and many of his ministers became the prison’s first inmates.
W
As I waited in the car park for Dr. Mandi I grew drowsy with the gathering heat. My head began to throb. I shut my eyes.
“Mr. Adero, I presume?”
I awoke with a start. The man whose voice had roused me was bent over the open window of my car, his face level with mine. He was smiling, but I could not tell his smile apart from a snarl.
“Yes,” I said, belatedly—after he had already proffered his hand. “Femi Adero.”
“S. P. J. C. Mandi. Pleased to meet you. I hope it wasn’t too much trouble for you, at such short notice and with all the secretive circumstances.”
He paused, waiting, the smile steady.
“It was no trouble at all.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Adero, if I ask you for some form of identification. Anything with your photograph. Perhaps you have your driver’s license handy, no?”
My heart beat fiercely and I could only stare at him.
“Sorry,” he said, “but I cannot proceed until I’m sure you’re the person I invited. It’s important.”
I fumbled through my wallet for my driver’s license. He inspected it without taking it from my hand. Smiling again, he motioned me out of the car. He walked towards the bridge and I followed, a step behind. We had only taken a few strides when he stopped.
“You already know my name, but let me introduce myself formally. I am a psychiatrist with the Madia Military Hospital. I have been asked to provide a new evaluation of suspect number MTS 1646.” He noticed my bewildered expression. “That’s the name officialdom gives the man you name Bukuru in your newspaper.” He laughed quickly, then became business-like.
“The suspect asked me to arrange this meeting. I know why he wants to see you, but it’s not my business to tell. If everything goes well, you will meet him in ten or so minutes and hear from the horse’s mouth.
“My own concern is to make our visit hitch-free. I’m taking a great risk in playing facilitator. You must now listen carefully.”
Dr. Mandi said he was going to introduce me to the prison superintendent as Dr. A. F. Tijani, a psychiatrist attached to His Excellency’s office. He would say that he had received a call that morning instructing that I should participate in the evaluation.
“Now all I want you to do,” he said, “is to play your part well. Affect a distant demeanor. Act like a man who understands power. Be a little arrogant. A little, I stress. And, of course, humorless. Leave most of the talking to me. If you have to say anything, be brief. And remember to throw in one or two scientific terms. Not pretentious stuff, just standard fare: psychosis, schizophrenic malady, aggravated neurosis. Anything to befuddle the prison strongman.”
His face became severe as he sized me up. Did he see the perspiration on my forehead, my trembling legs?
“Let me also warn you beforehand, Mr. Adero—I’m sorry, Dr. Tijani,” he continued. “You’re going to see things inside the prison that may shock you. But don’t show that anything is new to you. Act like one who has seen everything, a man who is accustomed to the workings of power.”
We had reached the superintendent’s office. Dr. Mandi tapped on the door and without waiting for an answer twisted the knob and walked in. The superintendent’s assistant gave us an indifferent look. Long thin strands of her braided hair fell over her eyes, which seemed dull with boredom. Her skin was sallow, daubed with black splotches, and a smell like that of rotten onion gave her away as a skin bleacher.
“Is your oga in?” asked Dr. Mandi.
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell him Doctors Mandi and Tijani are here to see him.”
“I remember you from yesterday, sir,” she said, indicating Dr. Mandi. “Take a seat, gentlemen.” As she ran off to the inner office to announce us, Dr. Mandi turned to me and flashed a wide satisfied smile.
As we talked, the superintendent shifted in his seat, his eyes darting from Dr. Mandi to me, back and forth. His office was clean, uncluttered. A grey filing cabinet. A standing fan that blew hot air across the room. A large bookshelf bearing only a copy of The Prison Manual. A dust-coated vase that held a bunch of plastic roses. Two desk trays marked by somebody in a fit of bad spelling, Pennding and Addrest.
After listening to Dr. Mandi’s account of the reasons for my presence the superintendent complained that he had not received any direct communication about me from His Excellency’s office. Dr. Mandi interrupted him with a high spurt of laughter.
“You should know the way of authority. The powers-that-be hardly deign to communicate their will directly to lower servants.”
The superintendent seemed about to say something in reply, but Dr. Mandi’s derisory laughter had wilted his confidence. He rammed his fist on a desk ringer and the assistant poked her head into the room, the rest of her body tucked safely behind the door. He asked her to run, quick quick, and fetch Corporal Felix. Moments later the warder sprang into the room, looking guilty, like a miscreant child.
“Bloody malingerer, what took you so long?” the superintendent bore down on him. Corporal Felix began to explain that he had come right away, but the superintendent raised his large, powerful arm. The warder hushed up in mid-sentence.
“Take these gentlemen to 1646. Immediately, with double quick march!”
Corporal Felix jumped at the command—a show of obedience that brought a small smile to his boss’s face.
The prison compound was deadly quiet, bare and barren. Grass lay about the surface like sun-dried algae churned out by the sea. A crisscross of concrete paths led to small detached buildings, each containing ten cell units. The cells were sunk in darkness. A horrible stench flowed out of each door we passed, the stink of unwashed bodies mingled with the foulness of things that come from within them: feces, urine, vomit, blood.
My bladder was bursting. I asked Corporal Felix where the toilet was. He shook his head and told me there was no running water. He pointed me to a spot on the wall.
“Na there we warders dey pee. Even superintendent, na there him too dey pee.”
A swarm of flies buzzed around the greyish spot.
“Thanks, but I’d rather not,” I said.
We stopped outside the cell marked 1646. Corporal Felix unlocked the iron-barred door, then stepped aside to let us into the cell.
Bukuru stood, his back propped against the wall that faced the door. His eyes gazed vacantly, hard.
“Thank you, corporal,” Dr. Mandi said to the warder. “You must leave now. Evaluations are conducted in private.”
The warder slunk away.
Bukuru’s hard eyes seemed to soften, but he remained silent.
“Meet Mr. Adero,” Dr. Mandi said to Bukuru. “But he’s known within these walls as Dr. A. F. Tijani.”
Bukuru steered his eyes to me. “Thank you for accepting my invitation. I liked the reports you wrote on my arrest and the trial.”
“Thank you.”
“You must wonder why I wanted to see you. It’s simple. I wanted to ask you to be the voice for my story.”
Voice. Voice?
“I don’t know the meaning of what you ask,” I said.
“My life’s in grave danger. For what I said in court, a decision was made to poison me.” He glanced at Dr. Mandi, who gave an absent-minded nod. “The plan has been shelved for now, because somebody leaked the information to the foreign press. But I don’t know what might happen in the future. Isa Palat Bello could become desperate.”
Mandi, without looking at us, nodded again.
“The doctor has been very kind. He’s given me sheets of paper to write my story—to describe my journey to this terrible place. I wanted to entrust the story to your hands. You never know, one day it may become possible to make it public.”
He sought my eyes. “Like you, I started out as a young man working for a newspaper. But I was weak: I never wanted to be touched by anything that quickened the heart or made the soul sweat. Now, when I wish to speak out, I have no way of making my voice heard—unless you will help me.”
I bore the weight of the two men’s eyes in silence, unable to fasten on any response. Why carry another man’s load? Especially under the circumstances, when I could not tell how profusely it would make my own soul sweat.
“I know I have asked a difficult thing,” he said, reading my thoughts. “But put yourself in my place. What choice do I have? This is a vicious fight, and I’m the underdog.”
Under the beseeching pressure of his gaze, I broke out shrilly, “I, too, know how it feels to be an underdog.”
I fought back the temptation to sketch for them the dreary facts of my own life. The day the mask I took for my true face was tom away, making me a mystery to myself. The terrible way I found out, at twelve, that I was an adopted child. The fruitless search for my biological parents. How, only a year ago, my girlfriend had deserted me, giving as her reason her parents’ discomfort with a suitor who was unaware of the source of his genes.
Bukuru and Dr. Mandi waited in silence. Would I extend a helping hand to one of the losers in the brutal game of life? I had to: I could not turn my back on him.
Bukuru said he would finish writing in a matter of days, at most a week. We agreed that Dr. Mandi would deliver the story to my home. In the guise of Dr. A. F. Tijani, psychiatrist, I could come back to see Bukuru if I had any questions.
“Why have you become involved in this dangerous scheme?” I asked Dr. Mandi as we walked to our cars.
He halted and raised his head to scan the sky. Then he sighed and his gaze came down, revealing eyes that had misted over.
“You and Bukuru both spoke of yourselves as underdogs. Well, I have known my share of troubles too. If you knew what they were, you might say that I have been the greatest underdog of all. But that’s another story.”
I extended my hand. “Here’s to the adventure of three underdogs, then. Goodbye.”