The wind was fast, and it entered the bus through the windows and the open door where the conductor stood, right upon the entrance, shouting, “Aba! Aba! Main-Park, Aba!” Arinze was tired and hungry. His stomach sent signals to his brain and made stubborn sounds. And he restricted them by buying sachet water from a pregnant woman carrying them inside a transparent bucket. She was also carrying a baby suspended behind her back with a wrapper. One sachet was #20, and the woman was kind enough to give him three for #50. He admired water, its importance, and strangeness, and marveled at how something as abundant as it could be sold for such an amount.
As the woman walked away into the sun, he wondered how she was able to balance such weight on her head and body, how she skillfully maneuvered through the eyes and busy traffic, how she was able to psychologically stay active, kind, and even show a smile with a glittering-white set of teeth. “Where was her husband?” Arinze thought. He suddenly became angry. His furiousness spanned over a lot of reasons, and he rested his aggression suddenly on the bus conductor. He wanted to tell him to shut his mouth and stop screaming, that screaming would not force the pedestrians to enter the bus. He wanted to scream at the driver just like the conductor, telling him to move quickly and not stop! And spicily say with Igbo, “Give the car more fire.”
Slowly, the car jam-packed with people sitting and standing. He turned around and looked at the faces on the bus. Many were market women and businessmen. From the huge loads they carried on their heads, one could cipher they were coming from the big markets in the bush, or from any souk where humans sell and buy; others looked like pensioners, students, craftsmen, pastors, killers, and all other elements the society produces. Arinze was unsure if they were all humans if they could all feel, if they actually existed, or just lived; if they did love, where they were all going to. Each of them had something to say. Either they shouted at the conductor to give them balance or complained about the compacted seats wherein they squeezed in like sardines, like clothes in a box, or they talked about the sorry state of the roads. Some carefully discussed politics, trying their very best not to raise their voice or sound too critical as you never knew who was a saboteur, listening.
The market women discussed their rivals, how things went spiraling upwards and downwards like dollar and fuel, affecting the cost of fish and tomatoes; and how an educated man and his wife were arguing in the market on what to buy and what not. Listening to these market women, the strength and power in their voices aroused Arinze to listen, but when the pensioner, an evangelist, cautioned the driver about his speed and started preaching by shouting “Hallelujah,” it pricked Ari like a pin. One thing he wanted most was to get home, to Aba, safely and early. The passengers, mostly women, murmured “Amen” in response, and after several repetitions, pedestrians outside could easily hear the loud voices in the moving vehicle.
It was 4 pm. The sun from the western part of the sky, gave a bright beautiful orange hue on the skin, on the walls of the bus, on billboards, and on the trees standing on the road. It was a beautiful evening. The journey flowed at its own pace as the driver accelerated the bus along the roads built on jarred hills which made them look like the coarse skin on the neck of a dead cobra. The car’s shock absorber effectively performed its function but was unable to prevent the fervent jerking of the car. One woman complained of a man resting too close to her body, and another woman shouted while pointing at a man, “Don’t touch my breast again, you fool!” Suddenly, the car was brought to an upright halt, and Arinze became infuriated, again. This time, it was neither the fault of the driver, nor the passengers, nor was it the conductor but soldiers, police, customs, FRSC, and other uniformed men barricaded the road with used car tires, logs of wood, stones, nails sticking out of sticks, and roughly arranged bags of sand which was used to build a fortress. Ari remembered when someone told him- “Bullets cannot penetrate Sand.”
This was their office, where they slept, drank, and ate all the days of the weeks and months, waiting, in search of criminals who obviously knew that they were just right there. Some leisurely smoked marijuana under a tree which provided them a canopy and cool breeze, away from the whipping sun unleashing its fury on the surface of the planet with heat appreciated only by reptiles. Arinze felt the sun coming closer. Other officers, a greater number of them, stood along the road extorting money from drivers while caressing their weapons, fingers on the trigger, guns placed on top of the sandbags, like they expected a gun battle. There was a very long hold-up on both sides of the road. The cars moved slowly, like a sluggish march of ants of different colors. Some buses perhaps, charged with adrenaline, tried to overtake and jump the line, thereby creating a form of disorderliness. The heat continued its lavishing intensity and discomforted Ari.
Nobody could walk up to the military men and ask what was going on, but they kept rapping and complaining inside the buses. The road was bustling with activity like a busy market. Hawkers loitered along the road, swarming around the cars like bees and butterflies in a flower garden. Popular among them were women and young girls. Some sold ukpa -walnut tied in waterproofs, essentially made wet to make them look fresh although three out of five were spoilt. A few of them carried roasted groundnuts and bananas on a tray obstreperously balanced on their heads. Several adolescent boys and girls, clutching two bottles of chilled bottle water in their hands, separated by a finger (the thumb and last two fingers giving it a final grip), ran along with the buses, hoarded along the cars, and poked the bottles into the windows hollering, “Bottle water! Cold bottle water!” A few others carried coconut and roasted ukwa, roasted cashew seeds, and fried plantains, long and yellow, all tied in the shape of a cone.
One thing was peculiar among the people hawking. They intuitively knew when to leave the windows of a car to the next when they got no attention or response, and they knew how to quickly give a buyer his balance without delay, sometimes running with their wares on their heads. Smart passengers do not give them money until they have gotten their balance because the car might drive off. If it happens, the passenger throws the item out of the window for the hawker to pick up. Arinze pitied these women and children. He had an empathetic feeling toward them.
As his eyes wandered, he noticed the young adolescent girls. They were incredible in puberty. He could sense the shyness in their movement because they did not run and chase vehicles with their protruding breasts, unlike the boys who had nothing to protect from people’s eyes. Their nipples were like sharp thorns on an orange tree. They briskly walked along the road and did not swarm the buses or cajole passengers for too long. They seemed not to care about anything. He could not help himself. He observed they were extremely beautiful, wild, and for the most part, formally uneducated. He wished he could help them, wished he could get them off the road, teach them, wished he could stop staring at the full breast of the girl with a persuasive voice, who nearby his window called, “Bottle water! Clear-your-thirst-with-Cold-Bottle-Water!”
He wished he could touch it, hold and suck it, as he did with Stephanie’s. In his mind, he visualized himself as a government official with a Lexus jeep, stopping casually to buy cashews along the road, and one of them coming unsuspectingly to sell to him. He would buy all the cashews and even the tray. He would ask her into the car by promising her more money, and he would drive to the city and buy her clothes, jewelry, and shoes. He found himself with the girl alone in a 4-star exquisite suite and would tell her to bring in the slippers she removed in front of the door. Arinze created a craving into being in his mind for the girl, initiating into it by showing her wads of crisp currency and telling her to pull her clothes off. He was certain she would do it. Because of money, she would strip herself bare.
Anybody would, because of the severe economic-recessivism, inflation, and hardship perpetuated by the politicians and people in government positions. Of what use was her body to her when she could get a thousand times more money than she could get standing on the road, chasing buses, trucks, and lorries for hundreds of hours in a week and she has done thousands of minutes of her young life, exposed to the ravishing sun and to the eyes of wanting men, like himself? She would strip perhaps hastily, and without a second thought, raising both legs while lying on her back for him to insert anything into her body. He knew he would not hesitate in diving into that skin, tanned strong, blackened by the rays of the sun, adorning, glorifying, titivating, and giving it electricity and eccentricity. He was a government official. He could do anything he wanted, of course!
As they came towards the blockade, he came out of his thoughts and entered his senses. The soldier at the blockade did not accept the money that the driver offered to him, because it was too small. One hundred naira! He said, “Tellu me, whatu hundred naira fitu buy-iii? Na me you dey givu dis chickeni change? I telliu you say I be beggar wey beggi people money? Oya! Everybodi down! Your two hands for-di air!”
Everyone stepped down in a rush. No one wavered or hung back. No one showed reluctance or unwillingness. No one said a word. When Arinze let out a hiss, the soldier standing by the driver’s side with a scarred face heard it, and he looked like he had been stung on his buttocks by an ant hiding in his trousers. He pointed the mouth of his gun toward the passengers.
Everyone came down, their hands abandoned in the air, upwards to prevent them from drooping. The pensioner’s fingers and hands were shaking visibly. Sweat creased her face, soaking it, like a woman whose face was bleaching. Only the driver stood apart. His left hand was in the air, and the other behind his back, holding perhaps the car key, or more money to customarily bribe his way out of the blockade. It was no wartime. There were no reports of impending invasions, or wars read on the radio or written on the newspaper that morning. People religiously received injustice, threats to life, abuse of power, and several forms of maltreatment with fate, and faith. The passengers waited for him to decide their future and destiny.
“Who do that schuuuuu? Who do schuuuuuuu?” the soldier questioned after a long silence. Everybody seemed to be responding and talking at the same time, claiming ignorance, denying, the driver pleading, his conductor exhibiting cantankerousness.
“Nobody go comot hia today if una no talku who do thatu shuuuu. Nobody goes,” he continued to say with his left hand tenaciously cleaving the eponymous AK-47 hanging on his neck with a rope. Although he looked muscular, Arinze knew he could take him down and out with taekwondo in less than a minute. The soldier left and came back with three more soldiers, probably junior-ranked lance corporals. They wielded guns, daggers, and whips. All the passengers stopped talking and a cold silence enveloped everyone, apart from the honks and revving of engines.
Arinze knew the driver knew he was the one who had hissed, and when he looked at him, the driver’s eyes told him not to talk. Everybody denied it, and so did Arinze. The tarred road nearly opened up when he saw the evangelist looking straight in his direction; her unsteady hands were still shaky like a Parkinson’s patient. Her eyes were piercing him, like a teacher on a truant student seen outside the school during school hours.
“Ifu I countu four una neva talku who do datu shuuuuu, una go getu unaself to blame-u. All-u of una go hear whiiiiiiinnn this-u afternoonoon,” he said, touching his tongue with his right index and pointing at the skies. A swear. Arinze wanted the skies to fall at once. He wanted something out of the ordinary to happen before the woman pierced him with her eyes.
“One… two, three” the soldier counted. “So una wan try me this afternoonoon abi? O.K now, four,” and he signaled the junior officers, who lashed out their whips like it is done on animals, without considering the effect of the hot sun. They whipped the skin of innocent people standing there for more than half an hour, their hands high in the air. From the badge of one of the junior soldiers, Ari saw an inscription, Obi Okoro. They were of the same ethnicity, inflicting pain on his people!
Blood trickled down the ear of the first man that was hit. Others ducked and shouted as the whip struck their bodies. The conductor took to his heels and was pursued by one of the junior officers. The pensioner and evangelist slowly walked out of the chaos, straight towards the soldier, and spoke to him.
“Betrayers,” a market woman standing behind whispered to my hearing. The elderly woman turned around, robotly, slowly, and pointed towards Ari’s direction, and the soldier called out, “Hei, you, come-u here!”
Ari touched his chest, an indication or question to ascertain if it was him that was called. But instead of answering, the soldier quickly walked to where Ari stood and gave him a slap which made a sound like the clanging of two metals. Arinze could have retaliated at once, instantaneously responding with a brutal kick that could burst open the soldier’s scrotum sac. He thought about it in a split second but restrained himself when he saw the gun, the weapon of war that had rendered over a billion dead, leaving wounds, and scars on the African soil.
The whipping stopped. Arinze could not utter a word. He was sucking up the effect of the slap. He had not made such ravenous sound practically postulated by the soldier. He had hissed as he naturally did when upset; a raw sound produced by a snake. A bird flew above their heads, followed by another in quick succession. I, his brother, could have shot them down with two bullets, one at a time, their feathers floating, dripping lazily long after the carcass had fallen.
Arinze blankly denied it, “No be me! No be me do am!” he said; a bold and defiant reaction emanating from a cocoon of desperation, fear, and pain of the slap, the punishment to come.
“Then-e, Na who do am-u?” the scarred soldier asked, and his junior asked him, “Oga, this one na today exam-pulu?”
Arinze wished it was one-on-one combat, on fairgrounds with the soldier and even with his counterparts, one at a time so that he could teach them a long-lasting lesson. But there were quite a number of them, all bearing weapons. Ari lost his composure. It was useless fighting a war he could not win. But out of frustration, he still vehemently denied, using English, pidgin, and Igbo as if one language was not enough to convince everyone who could hear that he was not responsible for the sound postulated by the soldier.
The soldier was getting more infuriated. Ari was ordered to bring his luggage out of the car. His legs were limp. The conductor, a teenager, possibly nineteen years old, looking misshaped and unkempt most likely due to homelessness and use of drugs, opened the car boot, and held it with both hands in the air. “Oga, make I bring am for you, abi you no wan carry your bag?” the conductor said with good pidgin from a croaking voice, the sound of a matured toad.
He was talking to Arinze who in his mind, classified and painted him among the never-do-wells, those shackled by the chains of addiction, poverty, illiteracy, drug abuse, fast life, violence, crime, and thuggery; those who allow themselves to be used by politicians to trick their way into position and dump afterward left with no alternative than crime. These conductors are familiarly known as ‘agberos,’ and have jungle rights over streets, parks, and states.
Arinze was aghast when the boy brought out his bag from the boot and astounded at how he was able to distinguish his from other bags stacked in there. It was his job. He should be able to tell between the owners of the bags on the bus. Were there not stories of how conductors became rich when passengers forgot about their bags, mentally deficit passengers?
Two of the junior soldiers both looking like the conductor, distinguished only by uniforms, ransacked through the box and threw the books and papers, pots and journals, clothes, and hangers on the tarred road as they searched for incriminating paraphernalia.
While looking at them, Arinze precisely knew where to hit their bodies and send them spiraling on the floor, numb in pain. Seeing that they could not find anything implicating, one of them started rummaging through the pockets of his shirts and trousers. He instinctively knew what they were searching for. They were looking for traces of hemp or cocaine which they could use as an exhibit, to tie him down. He always found them in Stephanie’s books and clothes during the short spell they dated before she died.
Stephanie committed suicide. She died of depression. She was pregnant. She drank twenty-four abortion pills and hung herself on the chandelier in her father’s sitting room. Her father was a senator in the Fourth Republic. She bled until she died. The media called it ‘double suicide‘. The scarred soldier was opening the books and flipping through the pages, looking at things, words, and diagrams he could not cipher or read. And for no apparent reason, he started shredding them which warranted Arinze to utter a scream.
For those were his documents: manuscripts of experimental investigations he was carrying out, receipts, and registration forms into the Nigerian military, among others. He had applied on three consecutive occasions and was denied admission due to his ethnicity. Arinze became a teacher: a recent graduate from a Teacher Training college in Biafra, Eastern Nigeria- the home of all Igbos; a people marginalized, torn, and rendered destitute by wars technically engineered and fashioned by Britain.
Being an Igbo reflected in him, especially in his name, Arinze. He never thought about changing his name, and even if he substituted it with an English name like Christian, Charles, or John, he would still be identified as one of the Southern tribes, and be disqualified. What was the use?
The soldier unzipped the second bag and turned it upside down, spilling the contents right away, to conserve time. Ari’s phone, keys, and pen fell at once, the trio attempting to reach the ground first, followed by a novel, ‘The Stranger I married’, alongside grandmother’s sweater, his inheritance from her after she passed away from self-immolation.
The soldier could still feel the weight remaining in the bag, so he shook it, continuously. It was then Ableton, Arinze’s pet, a tortoise which he safely wrapped in an isiagu cap came tumbling down.
In his quest and personal research on animal behaviorism, Ari was trying to investigate the cause and effect and combination of two distinct syndromes occurring paramount in animals. Arinze quickly rushed to save Ableton from crashing on the floor, from hurt. He saw the soldier’s eyes flicker and tremble at his feet in soporific astonishment. He also heard others behind corking their guns, a click, ready to respond to any form of action or aggression against their man. The uniform made them one, the same, like fraternal brothers in some kind of unbreakable covenant.
Arinze was late. Ableton crashed to the floor, and in the next two seconds, inside the confinement of the crisscrossed patterns of red, white, and black wool which made the isiagu, a slow movement was seen. It was a spectacle, everything. To me, it was the culture and tradition crashing, hurt, broken, slowly crawling away, in flight. My brother’s indignation and resentment knew no bounds. Everyone was taken aback by the scene that just unfolded. Many thought they were seeing something separate from reality, something diabolic.
Arinze did not bother explaining himself or anything to anyone. Besides, there were things one could never really understand, like fire and water and some other things. He would have preferred something else than such an embarrassing scenario, especially as Ableton, miffed, landed on the floor.
A woman rounded her hand above her head and made a sound by rubbing the middle finger with a thumb after the conductor bravely unfolded the animal from the cap. One of the soldiers hideously picked up Ari’s phone and stashed it in his pocket, and his boot stepped on the pen, shattering it. Arinze wished the ink could stain the road, and scribble out the words in his mind, words he could not speak out because no one was listening, nobody to listen- no one listened.
The stupid soldiers asked my brother to pack the things they had littered on the road. They suddenly became afraid to touch anything else, as if it was he who desired to unpack his belongings and mess up the road, like the hundreds of thousands of lunatics roaming around with waste, littering trash around the country. He then was handcuffed and his belongings were sequestered.
Looking down both sides of the road for a moment, just before crossing it, the cars stood, watching like a quietly breathing audience in a theatre, stretching necks, unable to have a clear view of the scenes unfolding on the stage. They stood, ignorant of the reason for being withheld from revving, polluting, and moving.
He was directed to a gate in an isolated area, adjacent to the road, about fifty steps away from a filling station. He stared shortly at the price board and saw that fuel was #500, diesel and kerosene were #900, and cooking gas was #1000, and it occurred to him fully, that the country, one of the key producers of crude oil, depended on by many nations for their energy, import its gas and fuel because the government refused to build a refinery, but a crackdown on local refiners who break pipelines to make their fuel. Arinze thought people nowadays should probably use their anger to cook.
Something started ringing inside his head. It was a song by Olufela Ransome-Kuti named ‘Unknown Soldier.’ The air he sniffed as he entered the gate reminded him again of Stephanie; it smelt like her armpits, and he wanted to go on and on ravishing the taste of that scent with his nostrils.
Fela, a notorious musician, known for voraciously criticizing the government with his lustful voice, accompanied by the seductive voices of his backup singers and dancers who were his wives, stripped and exposed the corrupt practices of Nigerian politicians who pillage and plunder the human, and financial and natural resources of the country, leaving the masses in their greater number, perpetually impoverished, as they siphon money out of the country into international banks and treasuries. He received an invasion into his compound which he had declared was, a secession away from the Nigerian hoax, away from the zoological and animistic federation amalgamated by infringing imperial British colonists and enslavers without the consent of the native people.
He nicknamed his new country Republic, de Kalakuta. There he had a shrine for a religion where Ifa was worshipped; there, he was betrothed to twenty-three women whom he took as wives on a single day. In his republic, he held interviews and shows, sang and leaped, and danced. There his children were born, and marijuana was legal; there he had been mercilessly beaten to near death; there his mother was killed after being thrown down from a building; there, he laughed and cried; where everyone wanted to see, touch; where the government had denied their presence, claiming it was ‘Unknown Soldiers’ that invaded his compound and killed his mother, just like the mystic and undiscovered messenger who delivered a parcel to Dele Giwa, a young vibrant journalist who exposed the ills and evils of the government: a letter bomb from the office of Ibrahim Babangida, nicknamed Evil Genius, the then military Head-of-State, blowing Giwa up, right in front of his wife and daughter.
Kuti’s voice reverberates with his band and eponymous saxophone, entwined in a subtle, perverted, and distorted form of musical magnetism abstractly played in Ari’s head. It scintillated him and stimulated goosebumps on his skin. It stopped when he saw a soldier emerge from one of the empty stalls inside the gate which had been locked from the other side. The soldier was veiled with a black mask. A whistle of the soldier who had locked the gate had alerted him. He bore a gun with a color of thick bronze, like the Igbo-Ukwu pot, and thousands of artifacts stolen by the British- histories stolen, burnt, and wiped by experimenting colonists during what they named ‘Punitive-Plundering and Excavation-Expedition of Africa.’
Like blood, his Ak-47 did not reflect light as Ari stood facing him. Ableton separated them.
The masked soldier stared hard at Ari with bloodshot eyes. Arinze heard the revving of the engine of the buses. He felt the tiredness of the passengers, unable to wait, would continue without him to Aba. From the little distance that divided him and the soldier, he could perceive the reek of tobacco, alcohol, and hemp, the three producing a pungent smell like carbon monoxide from exhaust pipes.
Ari wished he could talk with the soldier and say the right words, and touch his face with a kiss, and tell him the world was enough for both of them, for all; that he needed a break, away, an escape from realism; that the pain in his eyes could go away, with love; that time could heal him; that he could just end it all.
“I go taste this bullet for your bodi,” he said or rather declared. It sounded like the declaration we saw on television and read in the newspaper when the federal government, headed by a ruthless and aggressive Chinese-genetically-engineered impostor and dictator who people said was named after Late Muhammadu Irahub, unconstitutionally imposed and instilled a governor of his choice for Imo state, through influence, injustice, and manipulation from the Supreme Court.
This governor enforced on Imo citizens named Hopeful, scored third at the polls: an election marked by bloodshed, ballot snatching, corruption, bribery, and vote buying.
Hopeful was chosen because of dubious and foul practices he performed as the Director-General of the Nigerian Maritime Association, NIMASA, where he singlehandedly siphoned billions of dollars and naira, and seized millions of containers and goods from well-meaning Nigerians who imported goods the country incapacitated by her leaders, could not produce.
Another reason was, that Hope belonged to APC, the same party as the dictatorial president, one highlighted for disregard for the people and their socioeconomic well-being. He also was involved in procuring funds to illegally immigrate thousands of foreigners from the Benin Republic and Chad, to vote with fake voting cards, making them automatic citizens.
All these were happening right under the nose of the Economic and Financial Crime Commission, EFCC, whose Director-General was also appointed by the president, alongside all other Heads-of-Parastatals and governing bodies, military, and federal institutions.
His tenure was ridiculed, heavily criticized, and full of unprovoked and wanton murdering of activists in cold blood, kidnappings, and political assassinations, unlawful detention of members of civil-right groups, sponsorship of banditry, ordering and denying the shootings recorded live on Instagram, killed over one hundred youths, wounding thousands on 20th October 2020, at Lekki toll gate, Lagos State. In the open air, the Nigerian army sporadically shot and massacred armless innocent and defenseless youths after switching off the traffic cameras: youths who stood and slept there for days and weeks in protest, chanting, crying, begging, their banners high in the air, pleading for restitution, freedom, for their future; tired of being silent as they watched their youth and their parents’ age in the hands of old power mongers and vagabonds. They walked and sang and barricaded the toll gate with their placards in-scripted – END SARS: ENDPOLICEBRUTALITY as a tool, for their voices to be heard.
And when Arinze heard the gunshot and felt hot liquid soak his white shirt, he fell. The ground rose to meet him. He saw Ableton slowly walking away, toward the man with the gun. The man raised his boot down, twice, to smash the shell of the yellow-legged tortoise. Ari knew he would not, and could not. His eyes closed, shut tight like a door, and his body went away with Earth, like Ableton, like the buses at the barricaded checkpoint, all going nowhere.
(The isiagu is a cap; highly symbolic and used as a cultural identification of the Igbos. It is worn only by men dignified with nze and ozo traditional titles. It attests to a superficial discrete form of aestheticism as it depicts so many significances depending on how it is worn and the mood of the wearer).
