Anthills of the Savannah (29 page)

Police and army checkpoints came and went fairly regularly and had dropped
their
pretence of looking inside the bus from the forward door. Now they took their money openly from the operators with seeming good humour on both sides. But the driver and his mate never failed to grumble and curse the fellows soon afterwards.

“Make your mother hair catch fire,” prayed the driver on one occasion as soon as he had pulled away from a policeman with whom he seemed to have had a few initial problems.

The bus had been travelling for a little over five hours when it pulled up in the famous dusty and bustling market-town of Agbata, rather large and active for that part of the country. It was the main watering-place of the Great North Road beloved of seasoned travellers on this route. The passengers were glad to escape from the stagnant, cooped-up heat inside the bus into the dry hot waves of the open air. As they disembarked they kicked the cramps out of their leg-joints and sought out what privacy they could find in that unsheltered, sandy terrain to ease themselves. Proprietors of eating-houses and other shacks had regular running battles with every batch of freshly disembarked passengers especially the women eyeing their backyards in spite of many bold scrawls:
DON’T URINATE HERE
. Most of the men emboldened by tradition and regular travel did not wander around to the same extent like a hen looking for a place to drop her egg but simply picked a big parked truck, moved up close enough and relieved themselves against one of the tyres.

The next concern, food, was more readily available. Scores of little huts with grand names competed for the travellers’ custom with colourful signboards backed up with verbal appeals:
Goat meat here! Egusi soup here! Bushmeat here! Come here for Rice! Fine Fine Pounded Yam
!

The word
decent
, variously spelt, occurred on most of the signboards. Chris and his companions settled for Very Desent Restorant for no better reason than its fairly clean, yellow door-blind. In the bus the three had prudently behaved like total strangers. But the last hundred and fifty or so kilometres had shown that they did not need that level of caution. And so now they sat boldly at one table and ordered their food; rice for Chris, fried yam and goatmeat stew for Emmanuel and
garri
and bushmeat stew for Braimoh.

They still did not talk much among themselves and could quite easily have passed for three travellers who perhaps knew each other slightly or even struck up acquaintance in the course of the journey.

The waitress brought them a plastic bowl of water to wash their hands and a saucer with caked soap-powder. It was clear the water had not been changed for quite a while and a greasy line of palmoil circled the bowl just above the murky water.

Chris to whom the water was first offered looked instinctively first at his palm and then at the water and shook his head. Emmanuel also declined. Braimoh, boldest of the group, asked the young lady to change the water, which immediately brought in the smiling-eyed proprietress who had been presiding from a distance.

“Change the water?” she laughed. “You people from the South! Do you know how much we pay for a tin now? One manilla fifty.”

“And the tankers have not come today,” chipped in the waitress still holding her bowl of dirty water.

“No,” said her mistress. “The tankers have not come. Those people you see over there are selling yesterday’s water at two manilla.” She pointed through the window to a man carrying across his shoulder like a see-saw a stout pole at each end of which was tied a four-gallon tin. There were two or three others like him manoeuvring their heavy and tricky burden expertly through the crowd.

A
FEW KILOMETRES
north of Agbata there was a fairly long bridge over a completely dry river-bed and beyond it a huge signboard saying: WELCOME TO SOUTH ABAZON. It was amazing, thought Chris, how provincial boundaries drawn by all accounts quite arbitrarily by the British fifty years ago and more sometimes coincided so completely with reality. Beyond that dried up river there was hardly a yard of transition; you drove straight into scrubland which two years without rain had virtually turned to desert.

The air current blowing into the bus seemed to be fanned from a furnace. The only green things around now were the formidably spiked cactus serving as shelter around desolate clusters of huts and, once in a while in the dusty fields, a fat-bottomed baobab tree so strange in appearance that one could easily believe the story that elephants looking for water when they still roamed these parts would pierce the crusty bark of the baobab with their tusk and
suck the juices stored in the years of rain by the tree inside its monumental bole.

At the provincial boundary Chris suffered a recurrence of sharp anxiety at the sudden sight of a vast deployment of police and troops larger than any they had encountered since leaving Bassa. But they took no interest whatsoever in the passengers, neither did they delay the driver who went down and across the road to see one of them. As he returned to resume his driving-seat he waved to them in what seemed to Chris like a very friendly goodbye. But no sooner had he driven clear of their road bar than he broke into loud and unrestrained complaints about their greed and finally called down the curse of fire to scorch their mothers’ bushes.

Security forces! Who or what were they securing? Perhaps they were posted there to prevent the hungry desert from taking its begging bowl inside the secure borders of the South.

As the bus plunged deeper into the burning desolation Chris reached into his bag and pulled out Ikem’s unsigned “Pillar of Fire: A hymn to the Sun,” and began to read it slowly with fresh eyes, lipping the words like an amazed learner in a literacy campaign class. Perhaps it was seeing the anthills in the scorched landscape that set him off revealing in details he had not before experienced how the searing accuracy of the poet’s eye was primed not on fancy but fact. And to think that this was not the real Abazon yet; that the real heart of the disaster must be at least another day’s journey ahead! The dust had turned ashen. A man on a donkey was overtaken by the bus, his face a perfect picture of a corpse that died in the harmattan.

… And now the times had come round again out of storyland. Perhaps not as bad as the first times, yet. But they could easily end worse. Why? Because today no one can rise and march south by starlight abandoning crippled kindred in the wild savannah and arrive stealthily at a tiny village and fall upon its inhabitants and slay them and take their land and say: I did it because death stared through my eye.

So they send instead a deputation of elders to the government who hold the yam today and hold the knife, to seek help of them.

After Agbata there were numerous empty seats in the bus. Braimoh moved down and sat directly in front of Chris who had
been joined by Emmanuel since the girl had deserted him to sit with a fellow student-nurse.

“Young men are not what they used to be,” said Chris. “You mean you let a girl like that slip through your fingers on a bus excursion?”

“I did my best but she wouldn’t bite. And do you blame her seeing these rags I’m reduced to?” He made a mock gesture of contempt with his left hand taking in his entire person decked out in ill-fitting second-hand clothes. “Such a tramp! And on top of it all you should have heard the kind of pidgin I had to speak.”

“Poor fellow,” said Chris with a gleam in his eyes. “I am truly sorry for all this inconvenience.”

“I must confess I became so frustrated at one point I began asking her if she had ever heard of a certain President of the Students Union on the run.”

“You didn’t!”

“No. But I nearly did. It is not easy to lose a girl like that.”

“And under false pretences!”

“Imagine!”

“Sorry-o.”

“Actually she is the shyest thing I have ever met in all my life. I don’t think it was my clothes alone.”

“I shouldn’t have thought so either. Your sterling quality would shine through any rags.”

“Thanks! The real trouble was getting her to open her mouth. She spoke at the rate of one word per hour. And it was either
yes
or
no
.”

“How did you find out she was a student-nurse?”

“Na proper tug-of-war.”

“What’s she called?”

“Adamma. Her father is a Customs Officer in the far north.”

“A lot of information to piece together from yes and no.”

They laughed and fell into silence as if on some signal. They had each independently come to the same conclusion that though everything had gone reasonably well so far they must not push their luck by talking and laughing too much. It was in the ensuing reverie that Chris, gazing out into the empty landscape, had become aware of the anthills.

When he had read the prose-poem through and read the last
paragraph or two over again he said quietly to Emmanuel: “You must read this,” and passed the paper to him.

It was Braimoh who first drew their attention to a large crowd on the road half-a-kilometre or so ahead. Almost simultaneously everybody in the bus seemed to have become aware of the spectacle so unusual and so visible in that flat, treeless country. Many of the passengers had lifted themselves to half-standing positions at their seats the better to see this strange sight. What could it be? A check-point? The driver slowed down to a wary pace. As the scene came closer, a few uniforms began to emerge out of the dusty haze. There were a few cars and trucks parked this side of the crowd and a bus that was heading South and perhaps other vehicles as well slowly became visible beyond.

The uniforms were greatly outnumbered by people in regular outfits, presumably passengers whose journey had been interrupted, and even by ragged peasants attracted from the arid lives of a few scattered hamlets of round huts dotting the landscape.

The bus continued its progress to this mystery but at a mere cautious crawl. A road accident? No! There was something discernible in the prancing about which did not suggest sorrow or anger but a strange kind of merry-making. And now there was no longer any doubt. Beer bottles could be seen in nearly all hands and the dancing—for no other name seemed better for this activity—was constantly accompanied by the throwing of the head backwards and the emptying of bottles direct into gullets without touching the lips.

The bus pulled up to the side. Some of the crowd were rushing towards it like a tipsy welcoming-party. But the pulling up of the bus and the sudden explosion inside it, like a hand-grenade thrown from the crowd, of the word COUP! came on top of each other. The bus was evacuated like a vessel on fire. The driver, unlike a good and honourable captain, shoved people aside to get to the ground first.

Chris plunged into the crowd looking for someone who might have coherent information. Ultimately he sighted the police sergeant and pulled him aside rather brusquely in his breathless eagerness. The fellow was pleased to oblige, a bottle in his right and a Mark IV rifle in his left.

“Na radio there talk am,” was how he began.
There
was an unsightly shack of cardboard and metal thrown together to provide
occasional relief to the check-point crew from the sun’s onslaught and perhaps also a little privacy for negotiating difficult bribes from motorists. A radio set in there had apparently given the news.

“So at the same time we hear the news this lorry wey dem load beer full up come de pass. So we say na God send am. The driver talk say the beer no be him own, na government get am. So we say: very good. As Government done fall now, na who go drink the beer? So we self we de stand for sun here, no water to drink; na him God send us small beer to make our own cocktail party.”

His laughter was actually quite infectious and the little crowd that had quickly gathered around their story-teller nodding assent and swilling the beer at intervals, joined in the laughter. Even Chris had to laugh, but really as a bribe for getting more information, not from genuine amusement.

“Where is the radio?” he asked, thinking they must be putting out other announcements in the midst of martial music.

“They done thief-am. As we dey for road de drink a thief-man go inside carry the radio commot. This country na so so thief-man full am. But na me and them. They no know me? Before any vehicle can move out from here today I go search am well well and the stupid arm-robber wey hold my radio na him soul go rest in peace, with the President.”

“Did they say anything about the President?”

The sergeant looked at him suspiciously. “Why you de make all this cross-examination? Wetin concern poor man like you and President, eh? I say wetin concern vulture and barber?” He was clearly enjoying the attention. “Anyways, the President done disappear. They no fit find am again. They say unknown persons enter Palace and kidnap am. So make everybody de watch proper for this check-point.” He burst out into another peal of laughter taking his willing hearers. “This our country na waa! I never hear the likeness before. A whole President de miss; like old woman de waka for village talk say him goat de miss! This Africa na waa!”

“No be you tell whiteman make he commot?” asked somebody from the crowd. “Ehe, white man done go now, and hand over to President. Now that one done loss for inside bush. Wetin we go do again?”

“We go make another President. That one no hard,” said a third person.

“He no hard, eh? Next tomorrow they go tell you say your new President climb palm-tree and no fit come down again,” said the second man to a tremendous outburst of laughter. He was obviously a wit to reckon with, and knew it.

“So wetin we go do now?”

“Make every man, woman and child and even those them never born, make everybody collect twenty manilla each and bring to me and I go take am go England and negotiate with IMF to bring white man back to Kangan.”

Chris had detached himself from this bizarre group to look for Emmanuel.

“Can you make any sense of this?” he asked when he found him.

“Not yet, sir. Except it appears His Excellency was kidnapped last night and the Chief of Staff has sworn to find him but has meanwhile taken over the reins of government.”