Voice of America (2 page)

“Sometimes I want to join the Youth Brigade, but I am afraid; they say they give them
we-we
to smoke, and they drink blood and swear an oath to have no mercy on any soul, including their parents.”

“Sister Nora will be angry with you if she hears you talking like that. You know she is doing her best for us, and the Red Cross people too, they are trying to get a family for you.”

“That place called Dakota must be full of rocks.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Just from the way it sounds, like many giant pieces of rock falling on each other.”

“I’d like to go to that place with angels.” “You mean Los Angeles.”

“They killed most of my people who could not pronounce the name of the rebel leader properly, they said we could not say ‘Tsofo,’ we kept saying ‘Tofo’ and they kept shooting us. My friend here in the camp taught me to say ‘Tsofo,’ he said I should say it like there is sand in my mouth. Like there is gravel on my tongue. Now I can say it either way.” Acapulco passed his tongue over his dried lips as he said this. His eyes looked a bit wet.

“That’s good. When you get to America, you will learn to speak like them. You will try to swallow your tongue with every word, you will say
larer, berrer, merre, ferre, herrer.”

“We should go. It is getting to lunchtime.”

“I don’t have the power to fight. Whenever it is time for food, I get scared. If only my mother was here, then I would not be displaced. She would be cooking for me; I wouldn’t have to fight to eat all the time.”

We both looked up at the smoke curling upward from shacks where some of the women were cooking
dawa.
You could tell the people who had mothers because smoke always rose from their shacks in the afternoon. I wondered if Acapulco and I had yet to find people to adopt us because we were displaced, we did not have families. Most of the people who have gone abroad are people with families. I did not mention this to Acapulco; I did not want him to start thinking of his parents, who could not say “Tsofo.” I had once heard someone in the camp say that if God wanted us to say “Tsofo,” he would have given us tongues that could say “Tsofo.”

“Come with me, I will help you fight for food,” I say to Acapulco.

“You don’t need to fight, Orlando. All the other kids respect you, they say you are not afraid of anybody or anything and they say Sister Nora likes you and they say you have a book where you record all the bad, bad things that people do and you give it to Sister Nora to read and when you are both reading the book both of you will be shaking your heads and laughing like
ama-riya
and
ango,
like husband and wife.”

We stood up and started walking toward the corrugated sheet shack where we got our lunch. I could smell the
dawa,
it
was always the same
dawa,
and the same greenbottle flies and the same bent and half-crumpled aluminum plates, and yet we still fought over it.

Kimono saw me first and began to call out to me; he was soon joined by Aruba and Jerusalem and Lousy and I’m Loving It and Majorca and the rest. Chief Cook was standing in front of the plates of
dawa
and green soup. She had that look on her face, the face of a man about to witness two beautiful women totally disgrace themselves by fighting and stripping themselves naked over him. She wagged her finger at us and said, “No fighting today, boys.” That was the signal we needed to go at it; we dove.
Dawa
and soup spilling on the floor. Some people tried to shove some into their mouth as they fought for a plate, in case they did not get anything to eat at the end of the fight. I grabbed a lump of
dawa,
tossed it to Acapulco, and made for a plate of soup, but as my fingers grabbed it, Lousy kicked it away and the soup poured on the floor. He laughed his crazy hyena laugh and hissed, “The leper may not know how to milk a cow, but he sure knows how to spill the milk in the pail.” Chief Cook kept screaming, “Hey, no fighting, one by one, form a line, the
dawa
is enough to go round.” I managed to grab a half-spilled plate of soup and began to weave my way out as I signaled to Acapulco to head out. We squatted behind the food shack and began dipping our fingers into the food, driving away large flies with our free hands. We had two hard lumps of
dawa
and very little soup. I ate a few handfuls and wiped my hands on my shorts, leaving the rest for Acapulco. He was having a hard time driving away the flies from his bad ear and from the plate of food, and he thanked me with his eyes.

I remembered a book Sister Nora once gave me to read about a poor boy living in England in the olden days who asked for
more from his chief cook. From the picture of the boy in the book, he did not look so poor to me. The boys in the book all wore coats and caps, and they were even served. We had to fight, and if you asked the chief cook for more, she would point at the lumps of
dawa
and the spilled soup on the floor and say we loved to waste food. I once spoke to Sister Nora about the food and fights, but she said she did not want to get involved. It was the first time I had seen her refuse to find a solution to any problem. She explained that she did not work for the Red Cross and was their guest like me.

I was wondering how to get away from Acapulco—I needed some time alone, but I did not want to hurt his feelings. I told him to take the plates back to the food shack. We did not need to wash them because we had already licked them clean with our tongues.

As Acapulco walked to the food shack with the plates, I slipped away quietly.

T
he year I turned thirteen, my father took me and my elder brother, Yemi, to Lagos’s Bar Beach to witness the death by firing squad of the notorious armed robber Lawrence “The Law” Anini and his gang of seven robbers. A few years later my brother Yemi was also to die by firing squad as an armed robber.

Anini and his gang had held Lagos hostage for over three months, so much so that the head of state had asked the inspector general of police on national television how soon the robber was going to be arrested.

We did not hate The Law; he did not bother us. He only stole from the very rich and from the banks. On one occasion when the police were after him and his gang, he had torn open a bag of naira currency notes and flung fistful after fistful into the air. There had been a stampede as the people on the street ran into the road to pick up the money. In the ensuing melee, he had escaped with his gang, and the next day the
Lagos Daily Times
ran the headline “The Law Beats Police Once Again.”

My mother objected to our going to witness the shooting of
the robbers, but my father paid her no heed. He told her that these days some robbers were as young as twelve, and that he wanted us to see with our eyes what happened to those who did not obey the laws of the land.

“Did you not see the ten-year-old boy nicknamed Smallie who was shown on television the other night? The robbers said he was the one who crawled in through the air conditioner chute into most of the homes they robbed. They said he ran away from the Lagos Remand Home at six and was a hardened marijuana smoker.”

“But think of all that blood, Baba Yemi. I don’t think it is something that the children should see. There are other means you could use to persuade them. Besides, the beach is usually filled with people smoking and drinking on execution days.”

My mother said this while looking at me and my brother Yemi for support, but none was forthcoming. I was looking forward to attending the executions. My friend in school who had attended one told me there were
suya
sellers hawking barbecued meat on sticks and itinerant
bata
drummers drumming for a gift of pennies. I was not about to miss this because of Mama’s squeamishness and misgivings. My brother Yemi was silent as usual. He was busy polishing his sandals. First he applied very little polish to the sandal’s leather surface; then he took it out beyond the concrete steps to dry in the sun. He then brought it back indoors and began rubbing the leather tenderly with a piece of clean rag. Dad had once remarked that if only Yemi paid as much attention to his books as he paid to polishing his sandals, he would come out tops in his class.

The Lagos Bar Beach, which was formerly named Victoria Beach in honor of Queen Victoria of England, had lots of
myths surrounding it. It was said that once every seven years a large animal that was neither fish nor fowl was cast on the beach by the furious waters of the Atlantic. A crowd would gather from the length and breadth of Lagos armed with knives and baskets to get a piece of meat for their cooking pots. The most amazing thing, according to those who had witnessed this event, was that no matter how much each person cut, there was always enough for the next person. This was why the meat was called the inexhaustible Bar Beach meat. It was said that just as mysteriously as the animal had appeared, the inhabitants of the city would wake up one morning to discover the big animal had disappeared.

It was also said that a beautiful mermaid would lie naked on this beach every full moon during the seventh month of the year and admire its own beauty as reflected on the water, that whoever was lucky enough to see the mermaid naked could ask for anything that he wished for and his desire would be granted. It was said that the mermaid called Mamiwata was the one that gave a guitar to the legendary guitarist Sir Victor Uwaifo.

We were going to the beach in Dad’s brown Lada car. It was still new then. That was before he was retrenched in the confectionary factory where he worked and began to use the car for
kabukabu,
ferrying baskets of decaying tomatoes and half-rotten yams from distant places for market women. Dad was wearing his favorite milk-colored French suit, and his hair was dyed and neatly combed. He was pointing out different places to Yemi as he drove, but Yemi was as surly as an unhappy dog and only twisted his handkerchief around his fingers.

“This road used to be the only road that ran through Lagos. It was narrower than this then, and very few cars plied it.” He
turned to Yemi, leaning his neck back, his eyes darting to the road in front and back to look at him.

“Even back then, CMS Grammar School was already in existence. It is the oldest school in Lagos; that was why I was so happy when you got in.”

Yemi was silent. I was embarrassed for Dad, but Yemi was always making me feel this way. Creating big silences never embarrassed him. Street hawkers were poking cones of ice cream and multicolored candy sticks into the open window of the car for us to buy, but Yemi only glared at them.

“That used to be Fela’s former house and nightclub; it was burned down by soldiers from Abalti barracks,” Yemi said to me. It was the only time anything had excited him since we left the house. He was interested in music and was learning to play the guitar, which was a sore point between him and Dad.

“You cannot fight the government—he was harboring miscreants in his club, and his girls were smoking marijuana and moving around half naked all over the street. He should have known that you cannot challenge soldiers and get away with it,” Dad says.

“He was fighting for the people with his music,” Yemi insisted. “The soldiers threw down his mother from a six-story building, which was what led to her death.”

“A stubborn child always brings disgrace and sorrow to his parents. This is why I keep telling you children to always listen to me and your mother because we want the best for you.” Dad said this in a tone that suggested the argument would go no further.

Yemi became silent again and only stared into the lagoon that we were driving past, from which a decayed smell of shit and garbage wafted into our nostrils.

We could hardly find a place to park the car as we approached
the Bar Beach. There was a large crowd of people on foot walking toward the beach. There were hawkers carrying plastic buckets filled with block ice and soft drinks, screaming, “Buy cold minerals, cold 7 Up, and Pepsi here.”

Dad took my hand and Yemi’s hand, but Yemi snatched his hand away and made to walk ahead of us. Dad shouted at him to stay close to us.

The robbers were already tied to tall metal drums buried in the sand by the time we got to the beach. They were tied so tightly the blue nylon rope was cutting into their skin. Their leader, Lawrence Anini, was puffing a cigarette. He held the cigarette with his teeth because his hands were tied by his side and blew out the smoke through his nostrils and one side of his mouth. Sweat was running down his face, which looked ashen, as if coated with a thin film of powder. He was wearing a deep frown. As the cigarette burned down and he spat it away into the sand, people began to scramble to pick up the cigarette butt. A police guard picked it up, pinched dead the burning end, and put it in his pocket. I heard someone in the crowd say that the cigarette was a good luck charm; he said anything from the body of a dead man was powerful, but Dad only sniffed.

Soon the soldiers who were to carry out the execution arrived in an olive green truck. Policemen wielding horsewhips created space within the crowd, and the soldiers began to take crouching positions before the robbers. A woman screamed that someone had snatched her purse, which led to a discussion among some people in the crowd.

“Can you imagine? In a place like this somebody is stealing. You know the best thing for thieves is just to shoot them like this
gabadaya.”

“I hear The Law’s native doctor is somewhere around, casting spells and mouthing incantations so that no bullet can penetrate his body,” someone in the crowd said.

“I heard he shot and killed his native doctor some time ago so that she cannot prepare the same
juju
she made for him for someone else.”

“Let them start, I want to see their blood flow, we shall see today whether it is not the same red blood that flows in the veins of law-abiding citizens that flows in theirs.”

“Ah, look, one of them is crying like a baby already; look at the crocodile tears, the way they are flowing out of his eyes.”