Jagua Nana

Jagua got up. Instinct told her that something suspicious was going on. Many years later when she remembered that night she never could tell just why she felt so very uneasy. She passed the man at the gate, looked outside the club. Over to her left, near the gutter, a crowd gathered, watching something which looked to her like an accident.

Jagua pushed through, forcing her way to the front. A man was lying in the gutter with the blood gurgling from his mouth. His head seemed to have been broken into two halves. At first she thought he was quite dead, but looking closely, she saw that he moved his hands. It was Freddie Namme. And nobody could say who had done this to him or what it was all about.

‘What you all standin’ there for!’ cried Jagua. ‘Ring for ambulance. Go into de Club and ring for an ambulance!’ But as nobody moved, she began running back to the Tropicana, murmuring, ‘I know who do this! Dem done kill my poor Freddie!’

For three successive days now Jagua had been trying to see Freddie in hospital. Always it was the same orderly who barred her way. ‘Is better you go back, Madam. Dem say he critical now. Too critical!’ He lingered on the word he had obviously been taught to recite.

As she went back, she saw Nancy in a neat blue frock and white shoes pass her. Nancy did not so much as glance at her. Nancy received a courteous bow from the orderly who opened the door wide for her. Jagua squirmed. Whatever she had been to Freddie, Nancy was the woman they recognized as his wife.

Freddie was lying in a private hospital. Jagua remembered now that it was their ambulance which had arrived when she telephoned and took Freddie away. The story came out in the O.P. 1 paper that the man who had called Freddie out of the Tropicana was an O.P. 2 man dressed as an O.P. 1. When Freddie came out he was set upon and beaten up. The paper called on the leader of O.P. 2 to account for Freddie’s injuries and critical condition. But she heard that the O.P. 2 people denied knowing anything about Freddie’s beating-up. They called everything connected with it a ‘frame-up’ – down to the doctor who owned the hospital in which Freddie lay. They said this doctor was known to have O.P. 1 sympathies and therefore any report he might give for the court hearing must be discredited as he was a biased witness. All this Jagua heard as a kind of rumour and she knew now that it was all the kind of complex situation she disliked.

On this particular afternoon Jagua dug in outside the hospital, hoping that when Nancy left, she could bribe the orderly into letting her in – just for one moment. She could not bear the thought of Freddie so critically ill without some comfort from her. She kept pacing up and down in front of the gate and when one Land Rover drew up she saw it but it did not at first strike her as unusual. Close behind the first Land Rover came an ambulance which parked aggressively into the gate; but the sign she noticed on the ambulance did not belong to this private hospital. From the ambulance emerged two policemen, one of them, the driver. Jagua sensed something unusual. She was now all eyes. Soon afterwards she saw a third Land Rover, slightly shorter than the first and bearing the sign POLICE just beneath the aerial. One of the Officers was holding a mike in front of him and shouting, ‘Calling Robot Two … Calling Robot Two … Over! …’

Jagua saw the crowd beginning to press against the door of the police ambulance. In a few moments, market women, clerks, cars, lorries, taxis, they all took up position and they were an angry crowd. ‘Stop dem! … Dem want to remove Freddie from de hospital. Is all engineered by O.P. 2! …’

‘Suppose he die? Jus’ let dem try. Dem responsible for Freddie’s life!’

‘Them can’t remove him. The doctor won’ agree …’

The police cars had blocked up the road. Horns blared impatiently from the far end of the street. But the drivers, getting no attention, reversed their cars and branched out on a side street. It seemed to Jagua that this went on for hours, and that some deadlock had been reached within the hospital. The passers-by kept swelling the crowd and shouting angry words at the police. Among them Jagua could see the Volkswagens of O.P. 1 supporters and some newspapermen she had often seen at the Tropicana. They stood in a corner, writing furiously in their slim notebooks. The police would not budge. The crowd surged away from the hospital gates. Jagua saw the stretcher bearing Freddie come down the steps into the ambulance. She caught one glimpse of Nancy’s face, red with weeping. She was crying quite shamelessly. She tried to see Freddie’s face, but it was all wrapped up in bandages. She watched the ambulance drive off, carrying Freddie on the stretcher and guarded front and back by the Land Rovers. The police had won.

Jagua walked home in fear. She was thinking how very stupid the police can be, how ordinary people she knew became transformed by this strange devil they called politics. When so transformed a man placed no value on human life. All that mattered was power, the winning of seats, the front-page appearance in the daily papers, the name read in the news bulletins of the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. When they asked her, she never could tell whether Freddie was alive or dead. But she knew this strange fear and it was something she could not dismiss lightly.

Jagua mingled with the crowd and slipped into the Namme household, the house of death and mourning. Nancy was sitting on the bare cement floor surrounded by weeping women. Her eyes were red, and there was still a look of doubt, of hopeful disbelief on her face. She turned these yellowish-red eyes here and there as more and more men and women flooded the sitting room, her small lips parted, the breath coming in short puffs like the panting of a small engine.

With all, J

agua found her attractive in her raggedness and misery. When she saw Freddie’s friends, all dressed in black, she seemed to crumple up, and a loud moan escaped her. One man dressed as a lawyer went up to her and said: ‘On behalf of all of us at the bar, we come to express our heartfelt sympathy …’ He stopped short because a chorus of wails answered him. He turned to his friends: ‘Let’s go outside, friends. She can’t take it.’

The body of Freddie Namme lay on the bed, behind the mosquito netting. They said he had died in that long drive to the hospital. They had dressed it up in black with white socks and white gloves. The head was bandaged in white and the nostrils had been plugged with cotton wool. Jagua looked at it and began to sob quietly. It could not be true, she kept telling herself. Freddie dead! The shuffling feet of strangers, the thudding, scraping feet of curious men who had come because of the big incident outside the hospital, the sighs, the groans, the moans and expressions of sympathy, all seemed to her like something happening in a film she was watching. She sat completely mesmerized and surrendered herself to the atmosphere of gloom. She saw old women in white, attractive young girls pulsating with life, one of them especially caught her eye: a light-brown-skin girl in a fanciful headtie and blue velvet wrapper. So alive, and so incongruous in the room of death. Who was she? And did Freddie, alive, know all these people?

Turning her eyes towards the bereaved Nancy, Jagua came face to face with the two wet red eyes and their look of hostility. At that moment she could see that grief was a private thing, to be shared only by friends; and she was an enemy. As soon as Nancy saw Jagua she sprang to her feet.

‘What you want here? Leave de house, at once!’

‘Nancy, no talk like dat, I beg. We all feel de sorrow for your husban’ death; especially as de police handle de sick man. I beg you, let me stay an’ cry with you; I do a lot for Freddie, you know. And he love me in him own way, though is you he marry after all!’

‘You love him, and you kill him! You an’ your Uncle Taiwo. You kin have de seat in Obanla now. But jus’ leave me with me own sufferin’, and de children too. Leave one time, or I will call police for you, quick-quick!’

Jagua began to mutter in protest, but she felt the imperativeness of the cold silence. She was not wanted.

‘Awright, Nancy; I goin’ to leave! But look all de people who love your Freddie! You know all of dem? Or you goin’ to drive de ones you don’ know? Your Freddie was a famous man who people love. If to say he livin’ he for no drive me from his house.’

Slowly Nancy sat down as Jagua slipped out. But Jagua was unable to leave. She heard the elderly people suggesting that because of the manner of his death, Freddie must be buried quickly. Normally they would have kept his body two or three nights. But he had been badly beaten up and the very next afternoon the hearse was waiting outside the church, bundled with wreaths and flowers. The legal practitioners were all dressed in black and stood nearest it, and then the women of O.P. 1 had all come in one uniform dress: blue headtie, thin nylon blouses, blue wrappers. They formed a very striking block. Freddie’s former students at the National College came too, carrying a flag. They all wore white and looked sweet with their wreaths.

Inside the church, Jagua listened to the parson when he began to speak about Freddie’s illustrious career as a teacher. Then he went on to the years of struggle in England when Freddie ‘unknowingly was sowing the seeds of his own destruction by joining a political party, but he could not help it; he had a deep feeling for his people and thought he could speak their case in that manner’. He talked about the wonderful bereaved widow who had been his wife. Nancy came to Nigeria, became a Nigerian, though her parents were Sa Leonean. Her parents had been in the civil service, helping Nigeria at a time when the country did not have its own trained men. ‘God bless her and the children.’

They were opening hymn books all about her, but as Jagua had none, she peeped over a woman’s shoulder. The pipe organ moaned out a painful tune, and as soon as the tune came to an end another voice, more solemn, began to preach in Yoruba. The congregation said, ‘Amin!’ to almost every phrase he uttered, and Jagua joined them too, saying ‘Amin! … Amin! …’ a split-second after the others. She stole a glance at Nancy. Her eyes were blurred with tears. A man beside Jagua began weeping openly.

‘Let us pray!’ said the parson.

Jagua had a confused impression of deep throaty voices, of rhythmic ‘Amin!’ and of the pipe organ stealthily swelling with soft sweet music. The music became infinitely finer as the coffin began to come out, born on the shoulders of the Law Society. Suddenly, Nancy broke away from the crowd. She ran after the coffin but hands grabbed her, pinned her back.

‘Freddie! … Come back to me and de children! …’

Jagua wept too.

All along the way, crowds came out on the pavement to watch the already famous man, to join in the singing. Nancy was surrounded by a number of men who watched her with keen eyes. They passed over the last bridge before the cemetery. Men in canoes sat still and seeing the funeral train bowed their heads. Some took off their caps.