Until my arrest and that ride in the back of a police car, I had lived under the illusion that nothing was misshapen about my life. It was the world that had gone mad, not me. But after the departure of the psychiatrist I looked at myself with hard, unsparing eyes, determined to pinpoint the very moment when, renouncing everything that lay in my past, I took a strange turn on the road of life. The details of my alienness flowed like light into my eyes. It was there in the stink of my armpit, in my smutty fingernails, in my tangled-up beard and long shaggy hair.
I saw myself as a man who, forgetting where he started his journey, was condemned to wander forever, without destination. Parts of myself lay in the mists of the past, lost. But which parts? How could I calculate what was lost when I could not say with any certainty how much of who I had been had survived?
My thoughts turned to Ashiki, the man Dr. Mandi had mentioned. He and I had served together on the editorial board of the Daily Monitor. It was he who introduced me to Iyese. In all likelihood, he was also the anonymous source who saved my life, the man who alerted the foreign press to the fact that I was in danger of being poisoned. It would be just like Ashiki to step out of the shadows after all these years.
How many years?
My mind went back to the day when I accepted a job at the Daily Monitor. It was in July of 1964. Two months earlier I had graduated from Madia University with a degree in journalism. The Monitor, a small but popular newspaper based in Langa, hired me as deputy political editor, a title whittled down to the acronym DePe, embossed in black on a silvery plate that hung outside the door of my cramped office. By virtue of this post I was also a member of the paper’s editorial board, six men and one woman who met three times a week to weigh the world’s problems.
On 1 October 1960 our country had groped its way through the dark waters of the British womb and emerged into the world as a nation in its own right. The birth had been a long time coming. In 1884 representatives of British trading companies had taken to Berlin a map with which they persuaded their European siblings to acknowledge a large parcel of land on the western hump of Africa as a possession of the British crown. But the Berlin map of the new British protectorate concealed more than it revealed. It did not show, for example, that Madia contained more people than several European nations put together, or that these people spoke more than two hundred and fifty different languages, worshipped thousands of different gods and ranged in hue from the gradations of brown among the darker-skinned Bantu to the sepia of the much lighter groups of Semitic origin.
Through close to eighty years of colonial gestation the members of this protectorate (later to be called colony) learned to speak in the name of a political community that was newfangled, strange and entirely of British conception. They demanded to be let alone to run their affairs as an independent nation. Some of their number who had mastered the whiteman’s tongue and read his books that spoke from both sides of the mouth (extolling human freedom and liberty on the one hand, slavery and the notion of supremacy on the other) travelled to London to press their demand at a number of constitutional conferences.
British officials, who never thought of their colonial possessions as nations-in-rehearsal, turned up their noses at these natives in breeches speaking the civilized tongue in strange accents. But the English uppishness neither deterred the natives nor prevented the unravelling of the British Empire, an event accelerated by the world’s second big war. In the end the Empire capitulated and Madia was proclaimed to the world as a new born nation.
Newborn Madia was welcomed with a swell of hope and expectation. Many outsiders predicted that Madia would grow into a bright dynamic youth, one of the new nations likely to assume the mantle of world leadership in the twenty-first century. We Madians thrust out our chests and crowned ourselves the giant of the continent. There seemed to be good reason for our confidence. On the eve of British withdrawal, crude oil, this century’s gold, had been discovered in Madia in vast reserves. We could dream, we assured ourselves, and transform our dreams into reality.
Instead, something went wrong early and never let up. The nation we inherited from the English was placed in the hands of politicians who sucked its blood until it became dry and anemic. Overnight cabinet ministers puffed out protruding bellies they themselves called PP, for Power Paunch. What was left of Madia’s swagger was a mere mask for impotence.
I read much of the history of Madia’s birth in books designed to inspire pride and heroism. But I was also there, a minor actor and riveted observer, at the hour of our failure and disillusionment.
By the time I joined the Monitor in 1964 the political upheaval that would ultimately blow up in the face of the government of Alhaji Askia Amin, first elected prime minister of independent Madia, had begun its slow build-up. The first minor crisis rocked the nation during my first week. The drama, which would be known as the Amanka—Yaw Affair (for its two principal actors), was a classic illustration of the government’s tendency to go out of its way to shoot itself in the foot.
An obscure German magazine had published a photograph of Chief James Amanka, then the country’s minister for External Affairs, dozing at a summit of the Organization of African Unity. The caption to the photo read, “An African Minister’s Rapt Attention.”
The story would have ended there had not Amanka convinced the prime minister to buy space in a number of local and European newspapers to denounce the magazine’s “malicious defamation.” The rebuttal backfired. A few days after its publication a British television company which had covered the summit aired footage of the minister in delirious sleep, his hands hugging his bulbous belly, his mouth agape.
Incensed, I wrote a column calling for the minister’s resignation. From all over the country letters to the editor poured in in support of my call. Other newspapers, academics, labor unions, students and opposition politicians joined in. “Resign or Be Fired,” shouted demonstrators, echoing the title of my article. Instead, the minister called “a world press conference” at which he dismissed me as an imperialist stooge. On a different tack, he boasted that other African ministers did not exist as far as the international media were concerned, “But when Honorable Chief James Amanka snores, the whole world pays attention!”
The protests intensified, forcing Prime Minister Askia Amin to reassign Amanka to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Those of us who had wanted him dropped from the cabinet altogether continued our campaign, but our cause was eclipsed by the controversy that erupted over the surprise choice for the new minister for External Affairs.
Professor Sogon Yaw was at the time a political scientist at Madia University, a Marxist who detected a bourgeois plot in every imaginable event and situation. As a teacher, he cultivated a Marx-like beard and wore military fatigues that accorded well with his table-pounding, ranting style. Yaw’s life was driven by one mission, he often said: to peel the mask off the faces of the enemies of the people, to expose local traitors and their foreign collaborators to public view.
Many of Yaw’s fellow Marxists were shocked when his name was announced as Madia’s new minister for External Affairs. They urged him to tell Amin to keep his capitalist bait. But they had underestimated the lure of power. Within a few hours Yaw presented himself to be sworn in. He arrived for the ceremony clean-shaven and made his vows in a quiet, even voice.
I came to my post at the Monitor still under the influence of an idealism that had first captivated me when, as a youngster, I had overheard a discussion between two men in a village bar.
“After we chase away the British and regain our independence we’re going to adopt communism as our operational ideology,” declared a bearded fellow nicknamed Man-Mountain Buzuuzu.
“What is this thing you call komanizim?” his companion, Iji, asked.
“Communism,” Buzuuzu corrected.
“What does it mean?”
“It means that people own everything in common,” explained Buzuuzu.
“Everything?”
“Everything.”
“Even houses?”
“Even houses.”
“So I can go to the chief’s house and lie on his bed?”
“There will be no chief. Everybody is equal under communism.”
“I can go to a wealthy man and tell him that he is nothing more in this world than a fart?”
“Yes. But there are no wealthy men under communism.”
“There are not?” For a moment Iji’s enthusiam seemed deflated. “Komanizim means a lot of poor people, then?”
“You don’t understand,” Buzuuzu said in a weary voice. “Communism makes everybody wealthy. Nobody goes hungry. Poverty is swept away.”
“So if I’m hungry . . .”
“You can go to your neighbour’s house and share his food.”
“I like it,” announced Iji. “Where can people find this komanizim?”
“It was invented by a man called Karl Marx.”
“God will bless him.”
“There is no God in communism.”
“Really? No God?”
“No. The people are their own god.”
There was a lull in the conversation. Sipping their drinks, both men seemed to savor the promised sweetness. A moment later Iji turned to Buzuuzu.
“Let me ask you,” he said, his eyes shining with mischief. “Can I go and fuck one of the chief’s wives when you bring this komanizim?”
“No!” snapped Buzuuzu. “Communism isn’t about sex. Sex is decadent.”
Iji looked dejected. “Leave the world as it is,” he said.
This conversation had made a great impression on the mind of the boy I was then, sent to the bar by my grandmother to collect her daily gourd of palmwine. By adulthood I knew that the seeming paradise of communal ownership was no more proof against wickedness and misery and horrible injustice than any other human political system, but I still nursed remnants of my early idealism in my heart.
My father was another reason I was thrilled about the job. My mother had died young. Thereafter my father, who was by all accounts a gifted broadcaster, had given up his budding career and taken a job as a teacher in order to be able to devote more time to bringing me up. Out of gratitude, when I went to university I decided to read journalism.
In my second year I was chosen to edit the departmental weekly newspaper. My father often wrote to me, offering criticisms and praise on my articles. Then in a letter that raised goose pimples all over my flesh, he assured me that my reputation as a print journalist was one day certain to surpass his as a broadcaster. I had hoped he would one day make the connection, that he would recognize my work in terms of his. But, coming too soon, the acknowledgement saddened me. My debt to him was much larger than his letter seemed to suggest.
My father’s mother, Nne, also gave me cause for uneasiness when she foretold that I would achieve success and fame only if I washed my eyes in water, only if I was wise enough to avoid the misfortunes fate would put in my path. I had a dread of my grandmother. My father had told me many stories of her quirky wisdom, her habit of surprising people by divining their innermost thoughts, or their dreams, or foretelling events exactly as they would happen. The day her husband died she had begged him not to climb the particular palm tree from which he would have the fatal fall.
“Why are you speaking like a drunk this early in the day?” her husband had asked. The years he had lived with her had bred in him, not respect for her clairvoyance, but dismissive contempt.
“I saw in my dream a thing so terrible my mouth cannot speak it. That tree is bitter. You must sacrifice a cockerel to it to assuage its anger.”
Her husband had laughed her off. “If that tree wants to eat a chicken, it must go to the market and buy itself one,” he said. One of his customers had ordered seven gourds of palmwine for a marriage ceremony, and my grandfather was not the kind of tapper to promise seven gourds without delivering.
When he set out that morning for his tapping rounds she followed him part of the way, admonishing in proverbs.
“The death that kills a puppy first blinds him. The headstrong who won’t listen will finally obey the summons of the death mat. The housefly who has nobody to advise it follows the corpse into the grave.”
Her husband swaggered on in silence. Later that day, an old man returning from his farm heard muffled groans. Following the direction of the sound, he discovered my grandfather in a heap, blood surging from his mouth, dripping from his nostrils and seeping from his ears. The farmer ran to the village with a speed indifferent to the weariness of old bones. But when a small party arrived at the scene, my grandfather was already dead.