But King Dòsùnmú hadn’t invited the reverend over to the palace to make an enemy of him. If anything, it was quite to the contrary; not only was Crowther the only black man in Lagos who spoke Yorùbá as fluently as he spoke the king’s all-powerful òyìnbó enemies’ language, he was also the only black man they seemed to fully trust. It would be sheer folly to make an enemy of such a man. The king knew he had to take the edge off the hostility towards the clergyman at once.
He began by retiring his choice weapon of pre-emptive assailment: the artifice of ever so politely eyeballing a speaker until they became just a little uncomfortable; not so uncomfortable that they imagined any ill designs towards them, but uncomfortable enough to make them think he could read their minds, that he somehow knew their innermost secrets. When this ‘look me in the eye’ flimflam worked, as all confidence tricks will when sprung upon the unsuspecting world perfumed in the pheromones of wealth and power, it had been known to transform cocky, belligerent swaggerers into servile, self-seeking flatterers. Never with Reverend Crowther, though. The king had long noticed that the reverend had a penchant for running off at the mouth and a habit of talking to his betters as if they, not he, were the ex-slave. That had not changed; it was never going to change.
And so the king deftly replaced the piercing stare of inquisition, the projectile with which he had tried without success to impale Crowther, with a look of mortified embarrassment. This change of weaponry was instantly telegraphed across the chamber and the bellicose snarls on some faces turned, without warning, into fawning solicitude.
The reverend took it all in with a slight, if gracious, smile that only served to further antagonise those chiefs who were not yet aware that peace had broken out. At least one of them was heard muttering under his breath that he would die a happy man if he could wipe the snooty smile off that Sàró man’s face.
‘I know what you are thinking,’ Crowther said. ‘You’re thinking, how dare he! How dare he, a common ex-slave, come here to lecture us.’
This was exactly what was going through their minds, but they would sooner die than own up to it. Only an imbecile would own up to such a thing. It just so happened that among the chiefs was a man who, as a middleman for one of the Portuguese slave traders and from the ten per cent he earned on each transaction, had amassed great wealth during the heyday of the trade in human flesh. This man’s imbecility was said to be as of the magnitude of his great wealth, so it didn’t exactly come as a surprise to anyone when the man began to nod, quite enthusiastically, at the reverend’s statement about impertinent ex-slaves. Olóyè Alábẹtútù only stopped nodding when he saw the king bearing down on him with a frosty look on his face.
‘But I do completely understand Olóyè Alábẹtútù’s feeling, Kábíyèsí,’ Crowther hastened to assure the king. ‘It’s only natural to feel that way. There was a chief, during my stay here as a guest of the late king, a bosom friend of His Highness the king, your father, who turned up at the iga one day while His Highness was entertaining guests. I shall not mention the man by name – everyone in this room would know who I’m talking about, and that’s not the point. The point is – I’ll tell you what the point is in a moment. This man was a fine-looking person of about forty; he was wearing a black velvet silk covering, as I recall. The minute he noticed me and my wife and the other Sierra Leoneans in the gathering, he launched into a speech about the number of slaves he had sold and how many more he would sell. He asked us whether the people liberated in Sierra Leone did not tell us that he had sold them and that he would sell more of the Sierra Leonean people if he could come at them. He lavished praise on Domingo Martínez, the Brazilian slave trader who used to be a close ally of King Akíntóyè and whose career attained its greatest heights when he lived in Lagos, a trading partner of King Akíntóyè during the era of the king’s first reign. Domingo is known to have accrued a fortune of close to two million dollars during King Akíntóyè’s first reign. This chief talked at length about Domingo’s four ships riding at anchor off Porto Novo, waiting to open the slave trade with the powerful people of Abẹ́òkuta who would seize the opportunity of doing business with Domingo if Lagos was closed for business to him.’
Someone at the back of the room was gasping for breath. It was Olóyè Alábẹtútù. He had roared with gleeful laughter all through Crowther’s speech.
‘I know who you are talking about, slave boy!’ yelled the retired ten-per-center. ‘You are talking about that fat fool Ògúndìran.’ His cheeks rolling with tears, he turned to the man sitting next to him. ‘The slave boy is talking about your good-for-nothing Uncle Ògúndìran,’ he said.
‘Tútù!’ the king snapped at him.
‘Kábíyèsí!’
‘Raise your hand, Tútù.’
Alábẹtútù found the very idea side-splittingly funny. ‘I should raise my hand, Kábíyèsí?’ When he finally stopped laughing, he raised his hand in mock obedience and informed the king, ‘I have raised my hand, Kábíyèsí.’
‘Good,’ said the king. ‘Now, cover your mouth with it and hold it there.’
Alábẹtútù’s face darkened, then he realised it couldn’t possibly be the king talking to him; he gave His Highness a knowing wink and asked, with a guffaw, ‘Have you been drinking again, Your Highness? Champagne for breakfast. Have you been imbibing an early breakfast?’
A well-aimed nudge from his neighbour’s elbow made sharp contact with Alábẹtútù’s ribs and he doubled over in agony.
‘Are you trying to kill me?’ he yelped.
‘Did I step on your foot?’ the elbowing neighbour asked in apparent surprise. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘You son of a concubine’s slave!’ Olóyè Alábẹtútù shouted at the man. ‘Does my stomach look like a foot to you?’
The man who was called the son of a concubine’s slave was indeed the son of a concubine’s slave, and from these humble beginnings he had risen to become a stellar member of the ruling class. He now stamped on Alábẹtútù’s foot, quite viciously, a move he would later put down to an ‘absence of mind’, meaning an accident, at a mediation hearing before a cohort of chiefs. The mediating chiefs, who had all witnessed the incident and who knew it couldn’t possibly have been an accident, skewed their judgement in favour of the defendant when they unanimously agreed that it, in fact, couldn’t possibly have been anything but the sort of unfortunate accident caused by an absence of mind. The plaintiff was therefore awarded an apology and a bullock, which was to be shot in the fields, instead of the apology, five bullocks and seventy heads of cowries Tútù, the prize fool, had asked for. Their message was easy to decipher: that it was one thing to be the son of a concubine’s slave, quite another to be called one.
At the palace, on the night of the incident, Alábẹtútù sat in a heap, his enormous body, which was plump and rounded and extremely well fed, bent forward in a foetal position, moaning in pain.
‘Kábíyèsí,’ he cried to the king. ‘These upstarts are trying to kill me, Kábíyèsí.’
‘Nobody’s trying to kill you, Tútù,’ Kábíyèsí assured him.
‘I’m about to die,’ Alábẹtútù declared, his gin-soaked eyes swimming in their sockets. ‘I’m in so much pain, I’m going to die.’
‘You’re not about to die, Alábẹtútù.’ A note of exasperation had crept into Kábíyèsí’s voice.
‘I am, Kábíyèsí. I am,’ Alábẹtútù insisted, clutching at his foot as searing pain shot through it.
‘That is not the foot I stepped on,’ noted the man who stepped on his foot.
Instantly, the tears rolling down Alábẹtútù’s cheeks dried out. He shot the man a frosty look and snapped, ‘That is where I’m feeling the pain,’ before letting go of the foot he was holding and clutching at the other foot. ‘I have one request to make, Your Highness,’ he wailed at Kábíyèsí, ‘before I go calling on my ancestors. One minor request.’
‘You’re not about to die, Tútù, but go ahead.’
‘I request permission to seal my lips shut.’
The king waited for Alábẹtútù to go on, then he realised he wasn’t going to go on because, ‘That is your request?’
Alábẹtútù nodded, grimly. ‘I insist, Your Highness.’
‘What a thoroughly civilised idea,’ said the king, slipping in the new buzzword, which meant that he thought Alábẹtútù was thoroughly mad. ‘And I dare not turn down a man’s last wishes. It would simply be wrong. You have my permission to seal your lips shut. But tell me, Tútù, how do you propose to do it?’
Alábẹtútù showed him. He did it, just as the king had earlier suggested, by raising his hand to his mouth and pinching his lips between his thumb and finger. After that, any time he felt the urge to speak, he clasped his lips between his thumb and finger and pinched them shut. It worked perfectly well.