Say You’re One Of Them (35 page)

Jubril’s whole being seemed to levitate as the bus pulled away, and he welcomed the semidarkness wholeheartedly. If he could have made the darkness absolute he would have done it. It was as if it could conceal his whole history until daybreak. He sat up for the first time since he leaned forward on the headrest, still not knowing whom to trust. He surveyed the place the way he had wanted to when there was light, though now he could not see anyone’s face clearly. He remembered the time he lay under the mats in Mallam Abdullahi’s home, covered in darkness, and how consoling that darkness was after he learned they were prayer mats.

As he looked out into the passing savannah, the wind from the open window whipped his face. He thought of how Mallam Abdullahi had released him in the bush under the cover of darkness, how he ran in the direction the
mallam
had indicated. How in the daylight, he had slipped from tree to tree, like an eaglet too young to handle long flights, knowing he was vulnerable to attack in the open spaces between the stout savannah trees. He hid from bands of fellow refugees because he could not trust anybody. At night, he listened for signs of danger within the howls of the wind, yet he covered more distance, keeping close to the Khamfi-Lupa Road. He remembered his constant plea before Allah, his maker: “If you do not accept me and my plans to embrace my southern identity and lead me safely home, who will?”

AS
THE
BUS
GATHERED
speed, the police wished them a pleasant journey and told them not to worry about those left behind and promised to turn on the TV. The driver honked and turned on his hazard lights, like the recently arrived luxurious hearses from the north. Before long the bus was going at top speed, slipping quietly through the savannah toward the rain forests.

In spite of the circumstances of his travel, for Jubril, being on this bus was like a dream: the rush of wind in his face; the sight of the bus’s headlights cutting through the darkness in an unending thrust; the feeling of being still while the dark bushes sped past, streaked by the flashing hazard lights; the gentle pull of the seat to one side as the bus took wide corners or descended into the valleys. He was thankful to Tega for giving him the seat and looked at her often as she stood beside him in the dark. By the time the police turned on the TV and went to the local channel, Jubril was so happy to be in this crowd he could no longer restrain himself from watching. Though the pictures were fuzzy, he could make out some of the images.

“Dem
dey
chow soudern towns
o!
” Tega said, as soon as the pictures became better. Jubril, who had longed to see the south since the beginning of his flight, now watched without blinking. He considered it a foretaste of where he was heading.

The magic of TV enthralled Jubril, then horrified him. He watched police and soldiers manhandling rioters in different southern cities. He watched them shoot at the mobs to quell the violence incited by the arrival of luxurious hearses from the north. He saw barracks brimming over with northerners while soldiers and police stood guard. The rioters were not retreating, in spite of the might of the security forces. He noticed that vast numbers of people were in Western clothes and that women were rioting alongside the men. Jubril saw the compact vegetation of the rain forest, creation in full bloom, which was quite different from the semidesert of Khamfi.

The south he saw that night on TV was not what he had expected. The roads were primitive, and in some places rain had washed them away completely. The military jeeps could not cope, and soldiers had to come down and chase the rioters on foot. Some primary schools had no roofs, and he could see blackboards hanging on mango and melina trees in the fields. The bald circles on the earth around trees convinced him that, just as in some parts of Khamfi, the children took their lessons outside.

After the TV had shown the military effectively chasing the rioters through the city, a reporter said that not everybody in the shell-shocked refugee crowds was from the north. The camera zoomed in on some southerners who he said were also hiding in the barracks. He said they had been chased there by the fury of their kin—for attempting to save the northerners—and added that the northerners were not comfortable with the presence of southerners, because not all of them knew why the southerners had joined them. The only difference Jubril saw between the two groups was the way they were dressed.

The reporter was still commenting when someone whispered in his ear. He stopped talking for a moment and then announced: “Because of the crisis in the country, the federal democratic government hereby bans the ferrying of corpses for burial from one part of the country to another until further notice. The government has given the military an order to intercept any bus or truck guilty of this.”

THEN
THE
CAMERAS
ZOOMED
in on a man whom the reporter identified as the leader of the Hausa-Fulani community in Onyera. He was tall and lean, as black as Tega. Though he wore a bandage on his head, blood ran down his face like tears. He spoke with his eyes closed, as if the camera flashes were hurting them. This image disturbed Jubril. He would have turned away, but the memory of Mallam Abdullahi, who was also Hausa-Fulani, calmed him.

“My name is Yo . . . Yohanna Tijani,” stammered the leader, into the reporter’s microphone. “I’ve never lived in the north. . . . My great-grandfather settled here a hundred years ago, like some of your people. I was born in Onyera and grew up here. My mother was a southerner, an Ibo, and I married an Ibo woman too, because the Ibos accepted us as their own. I appeal to you, my grandparents and in-laws: spare our lives. We didn’t begin the Sharia war in Khamfi. Most of us Muslims in this country are peace-loving people. . . . We who live with you here didn’t kill any of these people whose corpses are now arriving in Luxurious Buses. But now we
are
killing your people . . . in self-defense. We’re guilty of bloodshed. Forgive us—” The audio cut out, and the sound of static filled the bus. The police lowered the TVs’ volume until all they could hear was the soft purr of the bus, the hiss of the tires on the road, and the flutter of the window blinds. Then the pictures wobbled into large screwy lines and disappeared.

“God, make you no permit soldiers intercept our bus
o!
” Ijeoma said. “We no cally any dead people
o.
”

“What sort of country be dis?” one refugee said.

During the lull, they started analyzing the impact of the government order. The general opinion was that the government had no right to stop anybody from taking the corpses of their kinsmen back home to bury. They blamed the government for not protecting them in Khamfi. They blamed the president for not sending in the military early enough, as he would have done if oil installations in the delta were under threat, and the senators for not taking a strong stand against what was happening in the land—for being paralyzed by the same religious divide that had torn the country apart. They blamed the judiciary for never dealing promptly with cases of religious fanaticism.

“It’s a hopeless situation,” Emeka said, regaining a bit of his former ebullience.

“You want start trouble again,” the police accused him.

“Please, I’m sorry,” Emeka begged. “I won’t say anything more, I promise.”

“Just shut up!” the police said, turning up the volume. “De TV done clear now.”

“...On behalf of our people,” Yohanna Tijani was saying, “I want to thank you, Christians. If not for some of you who died hiding us and many who are here with us in the barracks, it would’ve been worse. . . . I want to say a special thanks to that family that hid me under their Sacred Heart altar and prayed their rosaries while Bakassi Boys stormed the house. . . . My wife, an Ibo Pentecostal Christian, who was visiting with her family, wasn’t that lucky. She was killed by her people for hiding some Muslims, one of whom was our son. . . . Everybody is saying our northern generals, who have stolen your oil money, are responsible for this betrayal of nationhood, for the extreme poverty in the land. The truth is that most of us here don’t know any generals and are not related to them. If we did, we too would be rich and our children would be studying abroad. We beg you, whatever the generals are doing, whatever the politicians are saying, it’s within our hearts to spare each other. They’re not losing wives and children. We are. Their money is safe and is reaping interest in Europe and America and Asia and the Middle East, but where shall we get money to rebuild our lives?” The sound and pictures broke up, then disappeared.

In the gloom, Jubril’s heart pounded, overpowered by the man’s plea and the wonder of TV. He thought he had escaped the sight of blood and killings in Khamfi. But, from what he had just seen and heard from Yohanna Tijani, the madness had spread to the south. His mind went back to the mob of Lukman and Musa, and the mob that came to Mallam Abdullahi’s house. He pressed his tongue against his teeth till it began to hurt, hoping against hope that the images on TV were fabricated.

In the semidarkness, it was easy to see that, apart from the mad soldier who was asleep, the refugees were agitated. Though what the northerner had said touched them, they wanted to know the extent of the damage. Would they make it to the south? Would they be mistaken for a busload of corpses and be impounded by the military? It worried them because since the Nigeria-Biafra War their people had never retaliated against the recurring massacre of their people in the north. Everyone was afraid. It was clear to them that the local channels were not ready to show the extent of the riots in the south. They pestered the policemen for cable TV, for nobody believed the local channels would tell them much.

“No worry,” the police said, “we no be luxurious hearse, OK? Dem no go intercept us.”

“We want cable TV
o!
”

“When Abacha hanged Saro-Wiwa because of our oil, we saw it first on foreign TV!”

“When Abacha himself die
na
foreign press talk
am
first!”

The police instructed the driver to turn off the hazard lights and turn on the cabin lights so the bus would not be mistaken for a hearse. The driver did. The passengers’ anxieties rose and fell as the bus skirted the corners, yet some were urging the driver to move faster: death by motor accident seemed more desirable to them than the forms of death meted out by the ethnic cleansers at both ends of their country.

By the time they started encountering vehicles traveling the other way—mainly tractor trailers and smaller trucks, the kinds that transport cows from the north to the south—even the police officers were eager to know the real situation in the south. All vehicles seemed to be going north, blazing with a full complement of hazard lights and horns. Luxurious hearses were also heading north.

HAVING
LIVED
THROUGH
THE
ordeal in Mallam Abdullahi’s house and having just heard the testimony of Yohanna Tijani about the generous southern Christians, Jubril felt that with heroic people like this, his nation would rise above all types of divisiveness. Instinctively, in his yearning for consolation, he envisioned the different peoples of his country connecting at a deep, primordial level, where one’s life was irreversibly connected to one’s neighbor’s, like a child’s to its mother’s.

THE
FRIGHTENED
PASSENGERS
HAD
now turned inward, for strength, and peace reigned among the different religions on the bus. Everybody seemed tired of screaming about their god in someone else’s face. Meanwhile, the police kept flipping the foreign channels for the updates they wanted. It was not long before the truth was told:

Both city centers were matted with corpses and gore, and the anchor said other southern cities were preparing for vengeance against the Muslims and northerners in their midst. She said buses full of southern corpses were beginning to arrive in Onyera and Port Harcourt. She said that trucks had also begun ferrying corpses of northerners killed in the southern riots back to the north, and that the country was on the verge of a north-south war. She said that what mattered in the conflicts was the fighters’ tribes, insofar as external features and dressing and language could identify them. She confirmed that the government had banned the movement of corpses to check reprisal violence.

Images of the riots poured into the bus, the cameras pursuing the action as if it were a
UEFA
Champions League match. The southern youths were uncontrollable and spilled out with their machetes, guns, and clubs in every direction, like the lava of an erupted volcano. They killed and killed, as if in this singular madness they would avenge all the massacres of their people who lived in the north, in the past and in the future. The audio was so clear that the refugees could hear the slurp of machetes slashing into flesh and the final cries of the victims.

Then, the broadcast split into three interactive frames. One showed the reporter, who was in direct contact with the news anchor in another frame. They discussed the carnage being shown in the third. Then the third frame anticipated and zoomed in on a mosque and expanded to fill the whole screen. The golden dome sparkled in the sun like a bishop’s skullcap, the corners of the mosque reaching up in four beautiful minarets, like carefully sculpted bedposts, the sky above them a rich blue canopy decorated with woolly clouds. The green and white motif of the fenced compound stood apart, like an eternal freshness, from the widening chaos of the city. Then youths with torches surrounded it, smashing doors and windows. The minarets started spewing thick black chimneys of smoke, like an industrial plant. Because there was no wind, the smoke enveloped the golden dome, which caved in before the mosque erupted in a ball of fire.

The coverage returned to Khamfi, recapping the past two days of crisis. Tempers flared again in the bus. Jubril never thought the people of the south could be capable of such violence. And no one had ever told him that there were northerners who lived in the south, whose lives could be in danger.