The Famished Road (23 page)

I lay on the mat and didn’t go to school that day. Mum lay with Dad on the bed till the afternoon and then she went off to the market. When I awoke, Dad was still asleep. He slept with his suffering still on his face.

That evening the van of bad politics returned. The women, children, and jobless men of the area went up and down the place as if something terrible were going to happen.

The street became crowded. I went across to the photographer’s studio and saw the van of the politicians who had poisoned us. They blared passionate speeches through their loudhailer. We listened in silence to the politicians of bad milk. We listened as they blamed the other party for the milk. We listened as they maintained, with ferocious conviction, that it was their rivals, the Party of the Poor, who had been impersonating them, pretending to be them.

‘THEY WERE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE MILK, NOT US. THEY WANT TO DISCREDIT US,’ the loudhailers cried.

We found their statement very strange because at the back of the van were the very same people who had come round the first time. We recognised them all. Now they came with bags of garri, but with twice the number of thugs. They had whips and clubs among the garri bags and they seemed prepared for charity and war at the same time.

‘WE ARE YOUR FRIENDS. WE WILL BRING YOU ELECTRICITY AND BAD ROADS, NOT GOOD MILK, I MEAN GOOD ROADS, NOT BAD MILK,’ the politicians maintained, with great vigour.

People massed round the vehicle. The photographer darted around with his camera.

He wasn’t taking pictures, but he seemed to have awoken completely from his hunger and his fever. The thugs handed out pans of garri but no one came forward to receive any. The people massed silently round the van. It was as if a message was being passed along. There was something ominous in their silence.

‘TRUST US! TRUST OUR LEADER! TRUST OUR GARRI! OUR PARTY BELIEVES IN SHARING THE NATIONAL GARRI AND...’

‘LIES!’ someone cried from the crowd.

‘THIEVES!’ said another.

‘POISOneRS!’

‘MURDERERS!’

The four voices broke the stranglehold of the loudspeaker. The politician who had been launching into his litany of promises lost control and stammered. The loudspeaker gave off a high-pitched screeching noise. The people increased round the van. They were silent again and they followed the van silently as it moved, women with hungry resentful faces, men with thunderous brows. The thugs jumped down from the back of the van. One of them said:

‘WHO CALLED US THIEVES?’

No one answered. The thug’s eyes fell on the photographer. His camera made him conspicuous. As the thug moved towards the photographer the politician cried, through the agency of the loudhailer:

‘WE ARE YOUR FRIENDS!’

Then he repeated the words, with other entreaties, in his language, appealing to local sentiments. At that same moment the thug punched the photographer, whose nose started to bleed. No one moved. The thug lifted his great fist again and the photographer ducked into the crowd, screaming, and the men went on offering pans of garri, and the politician went on with his claims, and suddenly a stone smashed the van’s window and undammed the fury of angry bodies. Several hands clawed at the van; someone cracked the politician on the head and he screamed into the loudspeaker. The driver started the vehicle; it jerked forward and knocked a woman over. The photographer recorded the moment. The woman howled and the men hurled stones, breaking the side windows and shattering the windscreen. The crowd surged to the front of the van, preventing it from moving. The thugs jumped down and whipped people, the photographer frenziedly took pictures, and the people went on stoning the side windows till they gave completely and then they threw rocks at the men handing out garri. The men shouted, blood appeared on their faces; the politician appealed for calm; someone in the crowd cried:

‘Stone them!’ Another said:

‘BURN THE VAN!’

The thugs went on whipping till a fierce crowd of men surged over them. When the thugs reappeared they were almost naked. The women, with a special vengeance, cracked firewood and planks on their heads. And a smallish woman, whose three children were still suffering the worst effects of the poisoning, was seen rushing from her house, shouting:

‘I’m going to pour boilingwater on them! CLEAR THEWAY-O!’

And people cleared a way for her and she emptied the basin of boilingwater on to the thugs who were hiding at the back of the van; they screamed and scattered everywhere, tripping over their garri bags, falling over the furious bodies, and when they hit the ground the crowd lashed at them with whips and sticks and when they ran the crowd pursued and stoned them. The thugs ran, pleading, but no one listened, and they were stoned till they were bloody all over. They fled into the mudflats and the marshes and a contingent of people followed them. The thugs waded thigh-deep in marsh and brackish waters and disappeared into the wild forests; the contingent returned with the news, their anger unabated.

Only the driver was left in the van. The violence had so stimulated the people that we set about punishing the vehicle, kicking and denting its bodywork, hitting its tin and aluminium construct with metal rods and firewood, and the van did not scream, and so chanting and cursing, we gathered and heaved all our energies together and lifted it and tipped it on its side and, with the tentative agility of a cockroach, the driver clambered out and managed the distinction of being the only one to escape without a beating, for as soon as he got out he fled down the street towards Madame Koto’s bar, where he was offered invincible asylum.

The van stayed overturned. Through the night people went on sporadically wreaking their impotent vengeance on the van. They went on even when we heard that a truckload of policemen were on their way, armed with guns and batons. By the time the policemen arrived the impotent rage had turned sulphurous; burning brands had been stuck into the petrol tank and the night exploded into yellow incandescence at the same moment that the policemen, barking orders, blowingwhistles, jumped down from their trucks. They stood around watching helplessly as the van burst into flames and thunder. They questioned a few people but everyone had just arrived, just been awoken from sleep, no one had seen or heard anything, and the police took in five suspects. They couldn’t do anything about the flaming van, which cracked the air in a final spasmic explosion. All night the van smouldered and the fire brigade did not come to put out the flames. And it was only when the police were pulling away that we saw the faces of those taken in for questioning. The photographer was one of them. He had managed to get rid of the evidence that was his camera. He looked stony-eyed and brave. He waved at us as they dragged him away.

The burnt van stayed in the street for a long time. At night shadows came and scavenged the engine. One morning we woke to find that it had been uprighted and moved as though the night had been attempting to drive it away. The children of the area found in it a temporary new plaything. We learned how to drive it, wrenching around its steeringwheel, taking long journeys across great wastes of fantasies.

Rain poured on the burnt van, the sun and the dust bleached its paint, and after a while all the big flaking letters of the party’s insignia were obliterated, and nothing was left to identify the vehicle, or to rescue it from forgetfulness. It wasn’t long before it vanished from the street, not because it was no longer there, diminishing with each day’s sunglare, but because we had stopped noticing it altogether.

The photographer was released three days after he was taken away. He said he had been tortured in prison. He was louder and more fearless than before. Prison seemed to have changed him and he went around with a strange new air of myth about him, as if he had conceived heroic roles for himself during the short time he had been away.

When he arrived the street gathered outside his room to give him a hero’s welcome.

He told us stories of his imprisonment and of how he had survived fiendish methods of torture inflicted on him to get out the names of collaborators, planners of riots, destabilisers of the Imperial Government, and enemies of the party. He made us dizzy with his stories. People brought him food, palm-wine, ogogoro, kola-nuts, kaoline, and he could have selected quite a few wives from the admiring female faces of that evening if he had not already permanently entered new mythic perceptions of himself that excluded such rash decisions. I hung around outside the photographer’s studio, listening as the adults talked in solemn tones and as they drank long into the night of his triumphant return. Even Dad went over to pay his respects.

The next day woke us up to a great excitement. Everywhere people were talking in animated tones. Everywhere people who had been content to listen to the news of the country only in the form of rumours were now to be seen scrutinising the same page of the newspaper, as if overnight newsprint had been given a new importance. It was only when I got back from school that I understood the excitement. For the first time in our lives we as a people had appeared in the newspapers. We were heroes in our own drama, heroes of our own protest. There were pictures of us, men and women and children, standing helplessly round heaps of the politicians’ milk. There were pictures of us raging, attacking the van, rioting against the cheap methods of politicians, humiliating the thugs of politics, burning their lies. The photographer’s pictures had been given great prominence on the pages of the newspaper and it was even possible to recognise our squashed and poverty-ridden faces on the grainy newsprint. There were news stories about the bad milk and an editorial about our rage.

We were astonished that something we did with such absence of planning, something that we had done in such a small corner of the great globe, could gain such prominence. Many of us spent the evening identifying ourselves amongst the welter of rough faces.

Mum was clearly recognisable among the faces. Ten million people would see her face and never meet her in their lives. She was carrying a basin of rotten milk; and the dreadful newsprint distorted her beauty into somethingwretched and weird; but when she returned from the market in the evening people crowded into our rooms and talked about her fame, how she could use it to sell off her provisions, about the thugs, who had sworn terrible reprisals, and about the landlord, who was furious that his own tenants had partaken in the attack on his beloved Party.

Most of us were delighted to see ourselves on the front pages of a national newspaper; but nothing amazed us as much as seeing a special picture of the photographer himself, with his name in print. We pointed at his name over and over again and went round to his room to congratulate him. He was very high-spirited that evening and he went from place to place, followed by a swelling tide of wondering mortals, talking about national events in intimate terms. He came to our compound and was toasted in every room and he laughed loudly and drank merrily. Neither his new fame, nor the alcohol made him fail to remind us that we still owed him money for our photographs.

When Dad returned from work and learned of Mum’s picture in the papers he was both a little proud and a little jealous of her. He said she looked like a starvingwitchdoctor.

But that didn’t stop him from cutting out the page of the paper and sticking it to the wall. Every now and again, while smoking a cigarette, he would look at the picture and say:

‘Your mother is getting famous.’

The photographer eventually made it to our room and Dad sent me to buy some drinks. When I got back the photographer was staggering about the place, quite drunk, diving behind the chair, shooting an imaginary camera, acting the part of thugs and politicians, while Mum and Dad fell about in laughter. He was very drunk and he kept wobbling on Dad’s chair and saying:

‘I am an International Photographer.’

He went on to tell us how many commissions he had received since he became famous. People who had gone to congratulate him now wanted him to photograph them in their huts, their shacks, their crowded rooms, their filthy backyards, along with their extended families, in the hope that he would publish their images on the pages of the newspapers. The photographer got very drunk indeed and fell off Dad’s chair. We made him sit up straight. He would be talking and then he would doze off, his mouth still open. He would suddenly wake up and with amazing precision continue his speech exactly where he left off.

He sat there, back against the wall, the window over his head. With his lean face, his excitable eyes, his bony forehead, his sharp jaws, and his energetic gestures, he seemed as if he belonged in the room, as if he were a member of our hungry and defiant family.

One moment he was talking and the next moment I didn’t hear him any more. His mouth moved, but his words were silent. The candle flickered on the table. I was confused by the phenomenon.

‘Prepare food for the International Photographer,’ Dad said, with great warmth.

I went with Mum to the backyard. We prepared eba and stew for everyone. When we got back to the room the photographer was fast asleep on the floor. We woke him up and he carried on with a conversation whose beginning eluded us. He ate with us, declined any more drinks, thanked and prayed for us and, wobbling at the door, he made a statement which touched us.

‘You are my favourite family in the compound,’ he said.

Then he staggered out into the night. Me and Dad walked him to his door. Dad shook hands with him and we came back. Dad was silent, but he looked proud and tall and he didn’t stoop under the memory of all those weights. When we passed the burnt van Dad paused and studied its form in the darkness. Then he touched me on the head, urgingme on, and said:

‘Trouble always happens after celebration. Trouble is coming to our area.’

AFTER SCHOOL THE next day, I came home and found strange people around the van. Our landlord was among them. He kept waving his arms furiously, pointing at all the houses along the street. The other men looked very suspicious and wore dark glasses. We watched them for a while. They went round the van, talking intensely about it; they touched the van, poked it, looked round at the street, then, nodding, they went towards Madame Koto’s bar, looking back in severe scrutiny at the van as they went. When they had gone a few of the street’s people went and gathered round the van and studied it and prodded it as if by doing this they would find out what the men’s interest was all about.