They swayed as they sang, and Olanna imagined that the mango and gmelina trees swayed too, in agreement, in one fluid arc. The sun felt like a flame brought too close, and yet it was drizzling and the lukewarm raindrops mixed with her sweat. Her arm brushed Odenigbo’s as she raised her placard: it read WE CANNOT DIE LIKE DOGS. Baby was sitting on Odenigbo’s shoulders, waving her stuffed doll, and the sun was bright through the thin drizzle, and Olanna was filled with a delicious exuberance. Ugwu was beside her. His placard read GOD BLESS BIAFRA. They were Biafrans. She was Biafran. Behind her, a man was talking about the market, how the traders were dancing to Congo music and giving away the best of their mangoes and groundnuts. A woman said she would go there right after the rally to see what she could get for free, and Olanna turned to them and laughed.
A student leader spoke into the mic
rophone and the singing stopped. Some young men were carrying a coffin with NIGERIA written on it in white chalk; they raised it up, mock solemnity on their faces. Then they placed it down and pulled their shirts off and started to dig a shallow hole in the ground. When they lowered the coffin into the hole, a cheer rose in the crowd and spread, ripplelike, until it was one cheer, until Olanna felt that everybody there had become one. Somebody shouted, “Odenigbo!” And it spread among the students. “Odenigbo! Address us!”
Odenigbo climbed up to the podium waving his Biafran flag: swaths of red, black, and green and, at the center, a luminous half of a yellow sun.
“Biafra is born! We will lead Black Africa! We will live in security! Nobody will ever again attack us! Never again!”
Odenigbo raised his arm as he spoke, and Olanna thought how awkwardly twisted Aunty Ifeka’s arm had looked, as she lay on the ground, how her blood had pooled so thick that it looked like glue, not red but close to black. Perhaps Aunty Ifeka could see this rally now, and all the people here, or perhaps not, if death was a silent opaqueness. Olanna shook her head, to shake away the thoughts, and took Baby from Ugwu’s neck and hugged her close.
After the rally, she and Odenigbo drove to the staff club. Students had gathered on the hockey field nearby, burning paper effigies of Gowon around a glowing bonfire; the smoke curled into the night air and mixed with their laughter and chatter. Olanna watched them and realized with a sweet surge that they all felt what she felt, what Odenigbo felt, as though it were liquid steel instead of blood that flowed through their veins, as though they could stand barefoot over red-hot embers.
14
Richard did not think it would be so easy to find Nnaemeka’s family, but when he arrived at Obosi and stopped at the Anglican church to ask, the catechist told him they lived just down the road, in the unpainted house flanked by palm trees. Nnaemeka’s father was small and albino, copper-colored, his eyes a grayish-hazel that brightened as soon as Richard spoke Igbo. He was so different from the large, dark customs officer at the airport that for a moment Richard wondered if perhaps he was in the wrong house and this was not Nnaemeka’s father. But the older man blessed the kola nut in a voice so similar to Nnaemeka’s that it took Richard back to the airport lounge that hot afternoon and to Nnaemeka’s irritating chatter before the door burst open and the soldiers ran in.
“He who brings the kola nut brings life. You and yours will live, and I and mine will live. Let the eagle perch and let the dove perch and, if either decrees that the other not perch, it will not be well for him. May God bless this kola in Jesus’ name.”
“Amen,” Richard said. He could see other resemblances now. The man’s gestures as he broke the kola nut apart into five lobes were eerily like Nnaemeka’s, as was the set of his mouth, with the lower lip jutting out. Richard waited until they had chewed the kola nut, until Nnaemeka’s mother appeared, dressed in black, before he said, “I saw your son at the airport in Kano, the day it happened. We talked for a while. He spoke about you and his family.” Richard paused and wondered whether they would prefer to hear that their son had remained stoic in the face of death or if they would want to hear that he fought it, that he charged toward the gun. “He told me that his grandmother from Umunnachi was a respected herbal doctor known far and wide for her cure of malaria, and that it was because of her that he first wanted to be a doctor.”
“Yes, that is so,” Nnaemeka’s mother said.
“He spoke only good words about his family,” Richard said. He chose his Igbo words carefully.
“Of course he would speak good words about his family.” Nnaemeka’s father gave Richard a long look as if he did not understand why Richard had to say what they already knew.
Richard shifted on the bench. “Did you have a funeral?” he asked, and then wished he had not.
“Yes,” Nnaemeka’s father said; he fixed his gaze on the enamel bowl that held the last lobe of kola nut. “We waited for him to return from the North and he did not return, so we had a funeral. We buried an empty coffin.”
“It was not empty,” Nnaemeka’s mother said. “Did we not put that old book he used to read for the civil service exam inside?”
They sat in silence. Dust motes swam in the slice of sunlight that came through the window.
“You must take the last piece of kola nut with you,” Nnaemeka’s father said.
“Thank you.” Richard slipped the lobe into his pocket.
“Shall I send the children to the car?” Nnaemeka’s mother asked. It was difficult to tell what she looked like, with the black scarf that covered all of her hair and much of her forehead.
“The car?” Richard asked.
“Yes. Did you not bring us things?”
Richard shook his head. He should have brought yams and drinks. It was after all a condolence visit, and he knew how things were done. He had been caught up in himself, in thinking that his coming was enough, that he would be the magnanimous angel who brought the last hours of their son to them and, by doing so, would assuage their grief and redeem himself. But to them he was just like any other person who had come to pay condolences. His visit made no difference to the only reality that mattered: their son was gone.
He got up to leave, knowing that nothing had changed for him either; he would feel the same way he had felt since he returned from Kano. He had often wished that he would lose his mind, or that his memory would suppress itself, but instead everything took on a terrible transparence and he had only to close his eyes to see the freshly dead bodies on the floor of the airport and to recall the pitch of the screams. His mind remained lucid. Lucid enough for him to write calm replies to Aunt Elizabeth’s frantic letters and tell her that he was fine and did not plan to return to England, to ask her to please stop sending flimsy air-mail editions of newspapers with articles about the Nigerian pogroms circled in pencil. The articles annoyed him. “Ancient tribal hatreds,” the Herald wrote, was the reason for the massacres. Time magazine titled its piece MAN MUST WHACK, an expression printed on a Nigerian lorry, but the writer had taken whack literally and gone on to explain that Nigerians were so naturally prone to violence that they even wrote about the necessity of it on their passenger lorries. Richard sent a terse letter off to Time. In Nigerian Pidgin English, he wrote, whack meant eat. At least the Observer was a little more adroit, in writing that if Nigeria survived the massacres of the Igbo it would survive anything. But there was a hollowness to all the accounts, an echo of unreality. So Richard began to write a long article about the massacres. He sat at the dining table in Kainene’s house and wrote on long sheets of unlined paper. He had brought Harrison to Port Harcourt, and while he worked he could hear Harrison talking to Ikejide and Sebastian. “You are not knowing how to bake German chocolate cake?” A cackle. “You are not knowing what is rhubarb crumble?” Another scornful cackle.
Richard started by writing about the refugee problem, a result of the massacres, about the traders who fled their markets in the North, university lecturers who left their campuses, civil servants who fled their jobs in the ministries. He struggled over the closing paragraph.
It is imperative to remember that the first time the Igbo people were massacred, albeit on a much smaller scale than what has recently occurred, was in 1945. That carnage was precipitated by the British colonial government when it blamed the Igbo people for the national strike, banned Igbo-published newspapers, and generally encouraged anti-Igbo sentiment. The notion of the recent killings being the product of “age-old” hatred is therefore misleading. The tribes of the North and the South have long had contact, at least as far back as the ninth century, as some of the magnificent beads discovered at the historic Igbo-Ukwu site attest. No doubt these groups also fought wars and slave-raided each other, but they did not massacre in this manner. If this is hatred, then it is very young. It has been caused, simply, by the informal divide-and-rule policies of the British colonial exercise. These policies manipulated the differences between the tribes and ensured that unity would not exist, thereby making the easy governance of such a large country practicable.
When he gave Kainene the article, she read it carefully, with her eyes narrowed, and afterward told him, “Very fierce.”
He was not sure what very fierce meant or whether she liked it.
He desperately wanted her to approve. Her aura of distance had returned since she came back from visiting Olanna in Nsukka. She had put up a photograph of her murdered relatives—Arize laughing in her wedding dress, Uncle Mbaezi ebullient in a tight suit next to a solemn Aunty Ifeka in a print wrapper—but she said very little about them and nothing about Olanna. She often withdrew into silence in the middle of a conversation, and when she did he let her be; sometimes he envied her the ability to be changed by what had happened.