Africa39 (41 page)

There was no way back after such a betrayal and so forward Colonel Benatari marched with his morning drill mantra: ‘The army is my mother. The army is my father.’ Under the military rulers in their dull khaki and now, in civilian rule, Benatari had served in the Delta. His name was an expletive in the region.

They found him in their canteen, sitting with the senior officers. Chike felt pity for these men whose rank entitled them to meals with Benatari. The Colonel swung between jocose familiarity and an exacting attention to military etiquette.

‘You two, come here.’

They went to his table and saluted.

‘Have you disposed of the rebel?’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘Go and get your food then. Beans and dodo today. What do you think of that?’

‘Good, Sah,’ Y
?
mi said.

‘And you?’

‘Very good, Sir.’

‘Remind me of your name.’

‘Lieutenant Ameobi, Sir.’

‘All this Sir, Sir, when you talk to the junior officers,’ Colonel Benatari said, turning to the men who always sat on either side of him. ‘At ease. Not you,’ he said, when Y
?
mi too relaxed into a slouch. ‘Are you a graduate?’

‘Yes, Colonel.’

‘What did you study?’

‘Zoology, Colonel.’

‘Wonderful,’ he said, turning to his supporters. ‘Gentlemen we have a zoo keeper for our company of animals.’

The officers who flanked him laughed, slapping their knees. Those outside Colonel Benatari’s circle smiled but continued to stare down at their plates.

‘Dismissed.’

It was harmattan now and the evenings were cool. Cool enough for some men to wear warm mufti to the mess if Benatari was in a good mood. The clothing at Chike’s table reflected the guilty conviction of that morning. One man wore a woollen hat, another had exchanged his camouflage shirt for a blue cardigan and the man opposite him had tied a wrapper over his trousers. Their camp was a makeshift affair. In well-ordered barracks, officers did not eat at the same table with the other ranks but in the Delta correct manners had begun to slide.

He liked to sit with the men and listen to their banter. At first they had been guarded around him, wary of the officer in their midst. The most experienced of them could never rise to the officer rank and the most incompetent of his kind would never sink into the other ranks. It was the way of the army. Some were trained to lead and others to follow. They stretched their fists forward in salute when he and Y
?
mi sat down but the conversation did not stop.

‘O, boy, you see Tina today? That her bobby.’

There was a new worker in the kitchen. Youngish and pretty enough. Since she started two weeks ago, she had been the subject of every wet dream in the barracks.

‘Her nyash.’

The men’s common language was a very basic version of pidgin that allowed for little more than sex and food. Benatari hated to see them grouped according to tribe, so on patrol and at meal times, conversations were confined to this Neanderthal fare. But in a smoking huddle by the lavatory, or on the way to the river to fetch water, he would hear softly spoken Igbo and Yoruba and Hausa. He knew enough of each to understand when a brother was sick, or a father had died, or a new governor was judged inept.

It surprised him how often these soldiers discussed politics. At NMS, they had been taught that officers and gentlemen did not get involved in that dirty game of persuasion and manipulation. The ethos had clearly not trickled down. Further proof of the disconnect between the officer class and the men they led.

Some of the other platoon commanders had no patience for the new privates.

‘Women and children,’ he had heard Lieutenant Adem
?
la complain when one of his men dropped his rifle during an attack. They had handled guns for so long, they could not fathom fear of them. His first time was when he was twelve; induction week in the Nigerian Military School, Zaria. Ten paces to his left was his bunkmate Ogboi, who had an older brother in the school and knew everything about everything. When Instructor Aminu shouted ‘Fire!’ Ogboi swung his AK-47 at him and held down its trigger. Too surprised to run, he had dropped his gun and raised his hands to shield his belly.

Strangely, Ogboi was laughing. ‘Blanks,’ he said, wiping tears from his eyes. ‘We don’t get bullets till SS1. See your face like Sallah ram.’

Instructor Aminu had caned them both.

‘Why me, Sir?’ he had asked before he bent to receive five strokes more than Ogboi.

‘Because a soldier never drops his weapon unless to surrender and a soldier never asks why.’

He would have followed Ogboi to the Nigerian Defence Academy if not for his mother’s obsession with higher education.

‘Just in case democracy should come back. I want the military to stay for ever because my son is there but you must still prepare for rain in harmattan.’

‘The beans sweet today.’

‘Dem over boil am. The thing dey poto poto,’ Y
?
mi said.

‘Private, this place no be restaurant,’ said Godwin, the Pentecostal who had seen Chike drop a Bible and begun spreading rumours that he was a wizard.

His books had not been allowed into the Delta. ‘
The Communist Manifesto
,’ the officer said, reading off the cracked spine of Marx, an author discovered on a final year elective. ‘Lieutenant, we do not want any manifestos on our base. We are soldiers, not politicians.’ In vain did he try to explain that the words in the book had lost almost all power to inflame, and only the most academic on the base would even be able to understand them. The slack-jawed man has seized not only Marx but Hegel and Aristotle and John Grisham out of spite.

The only books on base were the Bible and the Quran. The latter was written in an Arabic script that was solely art to him. He started reading the Bible, flicking to a new passage each day. With time, he grew expert at bibliomancy. Knowing that one’s fingers sought the middle, he dropped the book on the floor, letting the uneven cement decide which passage he would read. It was this Godwin had seen and branded him a wizard.

‘Sah, the Colonel no go like this.’

Benatari was a Catholic, or at least he wore a rosary wound round his wrist, a silver Christ, dangling crucified to his palm.

‘And who will tell him?’

The matter had ended there but since then Godwin had become his enemy, so far as a soldier of lower rank could be the enemy of an officer.

‘Private,’ Godwin said, speaking to Y
?
mi but looking at him, ‘Just close mouth and eat your beans.’

‘Before nko? I go open mouth eat am?’

Y
?
mi was the lowest-ranking man in his platoon but he was also one of the sharpest. He needed no defending. Chike got up and left the canteen.

With the exception of Y
?
mi, the men of his platoon did not like him. It was not an active dislike. They obeyed his orders and stood at attention while he inspected their kit but they could not warm to him. Officer training had not prepared him for this. He had been taught to lead men who would idolise him and to bring to heel men who would buck at his every order, sneering at his age and inexperience. But there were no lessons for apathy. What to do when eyes slid away from his attempts at contact.

He had tried to broach the matter with his Sergeant but either the man did not understand, or he had no intention of playing nursemaid to his new platoon commander.

‘They will soon get to know you,’ Sergeant Moloku said, cracking his knuckles. ‘It’s just our last Lieutenant, before he died suddenly, was so popular with them.’

His friendship with Y
?
mi had come about by chance. The man had been a loner before Chike arrived. Perhaps it was his face that drove people away – with eyes that were two slits, shielding his soul from scrutiny. His thin lips were un-African and as alien as his long nose, which ended in a point. Y
?
mi was also blunt, rude even, to soldiers and officers alike. With the latter, he was more circumspect but still, he would often find himself on extra patrol for mutterings, cloudy with insubordination. On the surface there was little to like in this man who freely admitted he was a coward.

‘I no want die,’ he would say, when the other men laughed at him for always finding his way to the back on any attack. Chike had not taken much notice of the lowest ranking member of his platoon until he chanced upon him one day, crying. Not in the attention-seeking way you would have expected from one so buffoonish but short, snivelling tears, wiped before they could fall.

‘Nah young girl. E no good,’ was all he would say. There were others who felt the same about the woman they had shot for harbouring militants in her hut but the only protest he had heard was from the butt of his platoon.

On leaving the canteen, he did not bother to join the groups holding cigarettes. The members would drift off like fireflies should he wander into their midst. No matter how amiable, Chike was still an officer. He could go to the tent that the officers had commandeered as their mess but increasingly he loathed the company of his peers. They were all complicit in Benatari’s crimes.

His quarters were a cramped affair, six bunks piled into a square with only one window, but he was lucky to have a room. Although each officer had a limited number of possessions, in the small space, the room took on an air of a badly kept store. Chike brought out his Bible and his torch.

The news that two sentries had been killed was all over the base the next day. Benatari was as quick in disposing of their corpses as he was with the victims of his trials. No one in the ranks saw the bodies before they were buried. Some said the hands were tied together with a stick shoved between the palms. Others said a note had been left over the face of one, ‘In revenge for our fallen hero.’ A few said Benatari had had two men shot and dressed in khaki so he could blame the village. An even smaller faction said the story was made up as the Major had said nothing about it all morning.

Benatari soon made light of the last rumour by assembling the men on the parade ground. He was dressed in full regalia, his white gloved hand resting on the hilt of a sword.

‘It is with great sadness that I report the loss of the two brave soldiers. We have been gentle with these people because our superiors have told us to promote national unity whenever we can. They don’t know what is on ground. The Niger Delta is not a place for ideas. You tell an Ijaw man about nation building, all he wants to know is what’s for lunch. These are stomach people and it is time to show them we are muscle people.’

Not for the first time, Chike concluded that Benatari was a man who enjoyed killing. You sensed that, if permitted, he would string the scalps of his enemies on to a belt and do away with the leather and steel contraption that circled his waist. The men would kill readily if they had to but they would not choose it over a morning lie-in or a night with Tina.

‘This evening, we attack,’ Benatari shouted.

They had attacked a few villages before. Benatari called it ‘smoking out the rebels’. A convoy of jeeps would drive through a village, shooting in the air or, if it was a floating village, they would take their patrol boats. They would round up the men, forcing them to kneel in the square or tread creek water. Anyone who tried to run or swim away was judged either a militant or a collaborator and was shot.

Once, he watched an old man struggle to keep his head above the oily slick that threatened to swallow him. He would go under and come up, each time his head taking longer to resurface. Chike had lowered the butt of his rifle into the water and tapped the man on the shoulder. Help, even mute help, is recognisable. The man grasped the bottom of the gun, his grip so strong Chike feared he would pull the weapon from his hands. He did not. He bobbed below less frequently and when Benatari was ready to go, the old man swam slowly back to his hut.

They would attack another village tonight. No work was given that day. No marching in the afternoon. Double lunch rations. A smoggy expectation hung over the base. Tina was not in the canteen today. She was a spy, the men said. A sexy spy. Chike wondered if she was from the village they would attack that night.

Evening swept briefly through the Delta: half an hour of mauve before the sky bruised to black. They could not all go. A station of seven hundred men could not possibly approach a village unheard. A century had been chosen and Chike’s platoon fell in the batch.

From their approach, the village seemed asleep. Inside the houses no doubt, there would be people lingering over meals, telling stories and having sex but as their small settlement had never been put on the national grid, they would be doing this in candlelight or darkness.

Tonight’s formation was different. Instead of roaring into the village, they drove slowly to its perimeter, Benatari and a group of ten officers continuing on foot. The moon was hidden. When the cloud passed, Chike saw the Colonel and his men walking laboriously under the weight of jerry cans. At every hut they passed, they flung what must have been petrol on its roof. A spark appeared in someone’s hand and jumped to a thatched roof.