A Million Years with You (19 page)

 

No doubt I wasted the chief priest's time, but he certainly didn't waste mine, because, perhaps in hopes of diverting my attention from boiled water and western medicine, he agreed to talk about religious ceremonies. Often a sacrifice would accompany them.

At many of the important ceremonies, animals were sacrificed. I'd seen goats and even a dog sacrificed at various altars. Sometimes I was there and sometimes I saw the sacrifice on television, because the Nigerian broadcasting station covered the local events. On one occasion the sacrificed animal was an ox.

I was somewhat surprised, as I didn't understand how an ox could be traditional. Cattle didn't live in Yoruba country because the area is forested, and in the forest are tsetse flies, which are lethal to cattle. Cattle appeared in the Western Region only because Hausa or Fulani people drove them down from the north and sold them at a market just outside Ibadan.

It seemed unusual that people from an ancient culture would import sacrificial animals, because normally if people are going to sacrifice something, the sacrifice has cultural significance. In Uganda, the Dodoth sacrificed cattle because cattle were the most highly prized, most precious offerings. Nothing had more value than an ox as far as the Dodoth were concerned. So did cattle also mean something to the Yorubas?

I asked the chief priest, who told me that cattle had no traditional meaning. They were substitutes, he told me. When he didn't want to take this further and changed the subject when I asked what the substitute was for, I realized that cattle were substitutes for human beings.

Human sacrifice, a time-honored practice, has occurred all over the world, from the land of the Aztecs to the Holy Land. The Bible tells us that Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son, which is not something one would do unless it were culturally tolerable—and that was two thousand years ago. The practice was common in West Africa—most notably in Nigeria during the early 1900s, when a woman whose father was the king of Oyo and whose husband was the king of Ibadan was sacrificed to enable warriors from Ibadan to cross a swollen river. One thinks of the warriors of ancient Greece planning to sacrifice Agamemnon's daughter, Iphigenia, again for the purpose of crossing water. In Nigeria the British colonial powers forbade human sacrifice, but the memory of it was still fresh in the minds of anyone born in the precolonial period. That would include the chief priest.

I found this very interesting. Respect for humanity makes a person the highest possible offering. Christians would say that the most valued person in the world, God's own son, became a sacrifice to save humanity. I remembered the Episcopal boarding school I attended, where every Sunday we were expected to take communion in the form of a wafer which represented the body of Christ and a sip of wine which represented his blood. (Actually we took a sip of grape juice, which represented wine, which represented blood.) With cattle representing people, the Yorubas were doing something similar. Fourteen hundred years ago, a deer was substituted for Iphigenia, so the concept of substitution was not new. I asked the chief priest what kind of offering the Ibadan goddess wanted, but he didn't answer. I had made him uneasy with my interest in sacrifices.

One day the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation televised an important ritual for which an ox was sacrificed. A big crowd was present, me in the middle of it, and many other people tuned in, as there was nothing else to watch. Thus this event was witnessed by many, and soon gave rise to a rumor about the death a few years earlier of the alake of Abeokuta, ruler of the Egba Yorubas. Traditionally when an alake died, a person was sacrificed, and when this greatly respected ruler died, an ox should have been substituted. But perhaps that didn't happen.

A taxi with Abeokuta plates was seen trying to get a fare near the University of Ibadan. Students from afar attended the university and would not have known of the Abeokuta custom, or of the alake's death, for that matter. A student was rumored to have hailed the taxi and was never seen again. If a student did indeed become a victim, he or she would have been thrown off a famous cliff known as the Rock of Abeokuta.

Or that's what I was told. The rumor was not for me to judge, but plenty of Yoruba people believed it, and I was tempted to believe it myself when something similar happened. I had a book,
Religion in an African City
, by Geoffrey Parrinder, an authority on comparative religion, in which I read that on Easter Monday a human sacrifice was offered in a lake near Ibadan. So on Easter Monday morning I went to that lake.

Swarms of people were gathered on the shores, looking at the water as if they were waiting for something. Two or three men were swimming, and eventually one of them went under. I had been watching him from a distance, and right before he disappeared his expression was troubled, or at least preoccupied. He didn't come up. The crowd was absolutely silent. He still didn't come up. Then a deep, excited murmur went through the crowd and someone called the police, who came and made the crowd disperse.

Later I went to the police station and learned the name and address of the drowned man. On my behalf, Steve's friend Olu went to visit the man's family and learned that a few days earlier he had given away his motorbike and other personal items. Olu would have pressed the matter further, but the family didn't like his questions and in a threatening manner told him to leave.

The drowning was considered an accident, or at least not a homicide, and I was sure that the latter was true. I'd seen the whole thing not forty feet away, and I knew no other person was involved. Even so, I told the police what I had read in Parrinder. They were not from Ibadan and hadn't known about the annual sacrifice but were interested, and took Parrinder's information seriously. But they said that if the death was a sacrifice, it must have been a voluntary self-sacrifice, perhaps through the action of a crocodile, because at least one crocodile lived in the lake. The police also decided that the lake should be fenced off.

The fence went up, a massive construction, but I never learned if it was effective. By the following Easter, Nigeria was in a state of anarchy and was about to erupt into civil war. It was this that ended my conversations with the chief priest, which was unfortunate—not that he would have offered any insight, necessarily, as any spiritual matter above the fact that water has life was not what he cared to discuss. Yet few things would have been more informative than inquiry into the Easter Monday drowning. Human sacrifice was certainly traditional, but for Christians? Did Jesus inspire the custom? Jesus is said to have accepted his role, as did the man in the lake, evidently, so was the Christian story deeper, more real, and more immediate to Yoruba believers than it is to western believers? Millions of Christians in the western world and elsewhere ardently believe in Christ's sacrifice, but none of them offer themselves in a similar manner. Nigerians did, or so it seemed, and had done so for years, according to Parrinder. But with all that was happening between that Easter and the next, I had no hope of exploring the issue.

 

Before the election, I didn't see much campaigning as we in America know it, except that now and then a passing truck with a loudspeaker would remind the public to vote. After all, the political parties, not the candidates, were at issue, and the likelihood of persuading a voter to change parties was almost zero. Best just to get them to the polls. And people seemed eager to get to the polls, even though most assumed that the election would be rigged. I attended several sessions of the regional legislature, and during one of them a legislator leaned over to Chief Akintola, the premier of the Western Region, and said ferociously, “If you rig this election I will kill you.”

The assumption that rigging would take place brought voters to the polls in large numbers, but to no avail, as the election was evidently rigged successfully and plenty of thought had gone into the effort. For instance, an important political figure whose surname was Fani-Kayode—also known as “Fani-Power”—was said to have dressed as a nun and transported a coffin filled with illegal ballots in a hearse. The story was generally believed but not confirmed. Fani-Kayode granted Steve an interview, so Steve might have asked, but in the end he decided not to. Nonetheless, so many people did believe it that rumors of Fani-Kayode's death began to circulate. This confused the American embassy. “Fani dead, Kayode safe,” they reported in a written message, evidently unaware that Fani and Kayode were one person.

 

Despite the extensive, widely recognized rigging, the election itself was quiet enough. As I remember, I barely noticed it, although Steve certainly did. For a day or two after the results were announced, nothing happened. Few people had access to a newspaper or the radio, and it took time for word to spread. But when it did, the region erupted. People began killing each other and setting fire to cars and houses.

The following is from a letter I should never have written to my parents:

 

Violence and sorrow are everywhere. This region, and (it follows) our fieldwork, are by now almost entirely involved with violence and fear. I recently visited a town where one man, for political reasons, was beaten to death and two others were locked in their burning houses and burned to death, and another man had his hand chopped off before being soaked with gasoline and immolated (according to one story) or else pushed back in his house and burned with it (according to another story). The maimed and the dead were supporters of Chief Akintola's party. That party had opposed the Action Group, and its members were getting revenge.

 

I didn't mention another visit to a village where killings had taken place the night before. The person I had gone to see showed me the blood of the victims splashed on houses all up and down a street. He didn't seem to know the reason for this, or so he said, but I suspect it was because these victims too belonged to the wrong party. My host hadn't anticipated such violence, however, so it left him horrified and shaken. Another day, on a visit to a different person in a different village, I learned that an hour earlier a man and his wife had been rolled up in rugs and burned with their house. The ruins were still burning.

Much of the violence was against Hausas. Some of it might have been to settle scores, but most of it was because Hausas were from the Northern Region, home of the dominant political party, which apparently had rigged the election in its favor. Those who lost the election wanted revenge, not just against the higher-ups but against anybody. Once a teenage boy—who as I could see from his white clothing was a Hausa—dashed across the road in front of my car, a few feet ahead of a gang of tough-looking Yoruba men with clubs who were chasing him. I would have taken the boy in the car, but he was gone in an instant. To this day I think about that boy. My mind's eye still sees him.

Because of the general anarchy, the police had more than they could handle, and not a few people looked for ways to profit. Everywhere, gangs of crooks tore down the telephone lines to sell the wire. And everywhere, gangs of thugs—not the political party's “field assistants,” just self-employed thugs—put up roadblocks, mostly of rocks or burning tires, and when the oncoming cars had to stop because they couldn't pass, the thugs would demand money from the drivers.

Often enough my fearless Steve would meet such a roadblock, but with his unfailing sense of humor he'd get out of the car and make friends with the robbers. They'd all laugh for a while, and then he'd give them some money. They would thank him and wave as he drove away. Often enough they'd let him go back the other way without paying. One of our neighbors wasn't so lucky, perhaps because she had an attitude problem common to white people, especially those such as herself, a British expatriate. When she came to one such roadblock she got out of her car, marched over to the leading thug, and ordered him to let her pass. The leader beckoned to another thug, who brought a five-gallon can of gasoline. The leader poured the gas over her car, lit a match, and said, “Money.” Of course she quickly gave him money and the thug blew out the match, but the event left her permanently shaken.

One day Steve and I went to the Northern Region with our children. We started home the next afternoon. Just at dusk, we came around a bend in the road and saw a young man carrying a large rock. This must have been heavy work—he seemed tired and moved slowly because he had already brought about twenty other large rocks and had piled them up across the road. He was bringing the last rock when we came along. About two feet of open road were left, so we sped through the open place with the right wheels on the pavement and the left wheels on the roadside grass. The young man dropped his rock and sagged with disappointment as his unbelieving eyes watched our escape.

We were the only people who seemed to be traveling, and we could probably expect more bandits farther along, so we decided to spend the night nearby and travel in the morning. But where to go? We found a large excavation pit with mounds of earth which would hide our car unless someone actually came into the pit, and we slept there. Or we tried to. We got home the next day.

 

Every morning the radio announced itself not with words but with talking drums. These drums said clearly and in English, “This is the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation.” It worked as follows: This is (
tum ta
) the Nigerian (
ta ta-tum-ta-ta
) Broadcasting (
ta-tum-ta
) Corporation (
tum-ta-tum-ta
) . The drums had tones, though, as does the Yoruba language, and the tones seemed to clarify the message, which without them might have said something else. To hear this was a sort of bright spot in my otherwise anxious and sometimes terrified life. But there was very little news. As far as the radio was concerned, it almost seemed as if nothing much was happening, although the roadblocks, the fires, and the killings were spreading.