We walked through the crowd. I recognized quite a few people that I had met in the course of my fieldwork. They were harmless, simple folk: Farmer Utoma, Ma’Bamou, Weaver Kakandu, even that old scoundrel, Kiri Ntupong. Normally these are the most polite and respectful people you will find anywhere in Nigeria, but today they waited for me to greet them first—which I did, in the interest of scientific enquiry—but even then it was like speaking to people in a trance. The wailing and the singing, it was enough to drive a fellow insane.
Then I saw their old man.
Our paths had crossed before. When I first arrived, I confused the Menai by asking for their chief. They are like the Igbos used to be, in not having proper kings. Eventually they took me to this very old man who has some kind of authority over them—what exactly it was, I still haven’t discovered. His house was rather outside the village proper. They called him Mata, which I suppose was Menai for ‘master’ or something. But apart from that there was nothing chieflike about him. Had probably forgotten how to be a chief, if he ever was that. His house was probably the poorest in the village. Doubt if it was electrified. I mean, I won’t give even my houseboy that sort of house for living quarters. I went to see him a couple of times, and all he ever did was offer me a dirty cup of water—which of course I rejected—and sit and stare at the skies. I am not exactly a guru in old age psychiatry (I despise the speciality) and without sticking out my neck—in the absence of an appropriate history and all that—I’d say this was classic dementia: answering every official query of mine with perfect silence.
He could not have looked more different today. He was playing an out-sized wooden xylophone like a man possessed. Although it wasn’t a very energetic performance—I mean, he was playing a dirge—still he was an immensely accomplished musician for a man of his age. Had his audience rapt. And even if this was not a funeral for a dead person, in my professional opinion there was going to be a dead old person in their midst very soon. It was entertainment on its own, watching him play, but it was also like waiting for a fatal accident.
Eventually I turned to go. To listen to their sad songs wasn’t a problem—I could have taken that all night. But to be very candid, there are some things that I won’t do, even for Nigeria. To come to a funeral and stand! In the past twenty, thirty years I can count on one hand the number of weddings, funerals, or housewarmings I have attended and was not immediately invited to sit at the high table. I mean, sometimes I’ve accompanied colleagues to their occasions and the organizers, even without knowing who I was, have called me up to the high table, perhaps on account of my personality, I don’t know. And then I attend an occasion in a village like Kreektown and stand? Really, there’s a limit to patriotism. To make matters worse, as soon as Jonszer stepped into the village square he fell under the spell of the old man’s xylophone. To talk to him was to address another tree in the forest.
Yet after I got to my car, something about that ‘funeral’ kept me from leaving. I am not much of an ethnographic investigator, but the scene unfolding before me seemed quite crucial to the construction of a psychiatric profile of the Menai. I was probably the only scientific eye ever to behold this sight: 95 percent of the world population of an ethnic nation gathered in one square, weeping and wailing. I could hardly leave a scene of such scientific, linguistic, and cultural significance out of mere physical discomfort. So I compromised. I instructed Akeem to begin a video recording of the event, which he did, fetching the kit from the boot and setting up the tripod three metres from the car so that I could monitor proceedings from the comfort of my Mercedes 300 SEL—at the time of writing, this is an eight-month-old import, and I hazard a guess that there are not a dozen of its specs within the borders of Nigeria.
This was the point at which Jonszer turned up again. I let down my window as he approached. His hand was out, his grin lopsided, with the effrontery that only drunks can muster. I gave him a half litre of cheap brandy, and it disappeared into a baggy pocket—I carry this questionable pedigree of alcohol purely for the appeasement of roughboys. It was difficult to know whether his eyes were red from weeping or from drinking.
‘Just come now,’ he said.
‘What now?’ I asked, but he was gone, walking hurriedly, in that demented gait of his, through the crowd and down a side street that led from the square. My driver had gone to ‘make water’ (to use his charming euphemism), and Akeem was tied to his recording. Reluctantly, I followed Jonszer alone. We did not go far. We walked down Lemue Street right up till the bend in the road that led towards the creek, and there he stopped. He waited in the darkness beside a car, the only one on the street. When I joined him, he tipped his head sideways, towards a small huddle in the doorway of the house opposite. I looked, but it was too dark to make out faces or figures.
I was angry. It was dark and stinging with mosquitoes. There was no satellite TV in my hotel room. Back in my hospital, the sly Dr. Maleek was positioning himself for the soon-to-be-vacant office of Chief Medical Director. My fellow consultants and contemporaries were attending conferences and seminars from Joburg to Stockholm, touring with escorts of polyglot, lanky ladies leaving trails of perfumes in their wake. I? I was walking dangerous streets with a drunk reeking of beer and week-old sweat.
‘That’s Sheesti,’ he said.
‘Who, where?’
He pointed with his jaw, and then he was gone.
I was afraid. This was precisely the point for me to call it a night. I urgently had to return to the safety of my car and the security of my boys—because scientific research is best conducted with two feet solidly on the ground. Any mugger looking at my clothes just then could reasonably expect to raise three or four hundred thousand naira between my wallet and mobile phones. I was a legitimate target. But the speed of Jonszer’s withdrawal made it impossible for me to remove myself from the area of risk without actually taking to my heels—an undignified option, which was out of the question. I was still undecided when a man stormed out through the huddle. He was carrying a box and cursing under his breath. The scientist in me paused, warring with the human in me, which desperately desired the owner’s corner of my Mercedes. ‘Are you okay?’ I asked, as the man flung the box into the boot of the car.
‘I am a detribalised Nigerian!’ he shouted, seemingly, addressing not just all of Lemue Street, but the entire Kreektown itself. ‘My father is Yoruba, my mother is Ibibio!’
‘Calm down,’ I told him.
He only shouted louder: ‘My hospital is in Onitsha! I have lived in Kano! In Calabar! In Lagos!’
‘Just like me,’ I told him, but he had slammed the boot shut and stormed back into the house.
I was free again to go, but by now the human in me was even more curious than the scientist. I approached the house, whose number I now saw was 43. The huddle resolved into two weeping women. The younger was begging the older, who was replying, ‘There’s nothing I can do, now, there’s nothing I can do.’
I clasped my fingers over the gentle rise of my stomach and, using a voice developed over thirty years of clinical medicine, asked, ‘Are you quite all right? I am Chief Doctor Ehi Alela Fowaka, JP. Is there anything at all I can do to help?’
I got the polite response that has been my lot, anywhere I go in this respectful country. They greeted me properly, the younger one curtseying, but before they could speak further, I-am-a-Detribalised-Nigerian stormed past, fuming, ‘You are all wizards and witches! I’m sorry! Wizards and witches, that’s what you are!’
‘Easy, Denle, this is . . .’ began the younger woman, but the man was having none of it. He had a half-packed bag in his hand, and with the other hand he grabbed the woman’s arm and pulled her towards the car.
‘Let’s go, Sheesti, before they actually kill you. Wizards!’
‘Is because we love you . . .’ began the older, but two doors slammed shut and one very angry Honda swerved away from Lemue Street.
I was standing before the older woman when suddenly I recognized the transcendental moment of the entire research project.