Tefuga Page 25

  “And somebody has to do the running, so why not you?”

  This time the Sarkin seemed genuinely affronted.

  “I did not choose, Mr Jackland. I was chosen.”

  “Yes, you told me, old man. I accept that. But I wonder whether you’re right about the voters. I saw the start of that little market riot you had—was it only yesterday?—and it struck me rather forcibly …”

  “I have heard the reports. And I tell you, Mr Jackland, that there was not one man or woman in that mob who would have hesitated to accept dash, or to take whatever small pickings came their way. You have talked to my niece Annie, I think. I have heard her very indignant over corruption in high places, but she thinks nothing of driving a car paid for, ultimately, in bribes from the manufacturers of foreign dental equipment supplied by her father to Nigerian state hospitals. One of the reasons this coup will achieve so little is that many of its leaders—I do not yet know who they are, but I can assure you of this as a fact—are as deeply imbued with this so-called corruption as any of the politicians they are trying to replace. But suppose they were not. Suppose they were each and every one of them untainted and untaintable. How long can they rule a people without our consent? How long can they retain that consent—they will have it for a while because of the unpopularity of the present leaders, which has as much to do with the decline of world oil prices as with the excessive depredations of a few individual politicians and businessmen—how long can they retain consent without display of the virtues which Nigerians truly feel and understand? What have they to offer instead? Discipline? Is that a virtue that springs to mind when you think of Nigeria? I tell you, Mr Jackland, I have given my life to my people. I have consistently done what seemed to me necessary in view of the circumstances that arose. I refuse to be presented in a military court as a scapegoat for the failings of others.”

  “I’m sorry …”

  “I am not blaming you. All I am saying is that you may perceive certain facts about Nigeria, but unless you can also feel certain other facts you do not know the truth and have no right to pronounce. This is as true now as it was in your parents’ day, for all your modem open-mindedness. Should you try the engine again?”

  Jackland pinched out his cigarette, switched on and tried the starter for several long bursts. There was no sign of a spark, only the smell of petrol as before.

  “Not the fuel-pump, anyway,” he said. “Come and hold the torch for me, while I waggle the odd wire.”

  The Sarkin made no more fuss about acting as Jackland’s garage-hand than he would have sixty years before about carrying Betty Jackland’s easel. They craned in under the raised bonnet while Jackland tested the leads to the sparking plugs, unclipped the distributor and peered at its points, and with visibly pessimistic fingers tugged at cables to see whether there might not be a loose connection. Having done that he climbed back into the driving seat and tried the engine again, without result. After a few more tries he gave up and lit fresh cigarettes for the pair of them.

  “May I ask you a few questions?” he said.

  “Of course. But I would advise you for your own sake not to broach subjects that might be of interest to my accusers.”

  “It wasn’t that, actually. I still feel I haven’t got to the bottom of my parents’ story. I’d be interested to know what you made of them. When I’ve asked you before you weren’t very forthcoming. I thought perhaps now …”

  “Now that we are half way to Tefuga? What do you want to know?”

  “Anything you care to tell me.”

  The Sarkin sat for a while in silence, perhaps first making up his mind and then collecting his thoughts. But when he spoke it was as though he had been doing something more than these, undergoing an almost spiritual transformation as he willed his own time-tangled perceptions back to an earlier phase. He spoke in the same deep voice with the same purity of diction, but now with a faint lilt, and in shorter sentences, with longer pauses between them.

  “All times are the same to a child,” he said. “Then something happens, and they are no longer the same. He becomes aware of other times before and after. I remember that very day. We were called from our hut by our chief uncle, and all the people from other huts were called too, except for the men who were out in the bush. We stood in an arc before the huts. Before us stood a great black man on a horse. There were other men on horses besides—two were white—as well as strange black men in clothes like the white man’s but with red hats and guns. But the big man on the horse was the one at whom I stared. There was gabble in strange words, and then another black man spoke to us in Kiti, but though I knew the words they had no meaning for a child. One of our elders answered very humbly. I knew he was very afraid of the black man on the horse, and so were all the others, and I too. When we went back to our huts I knew that what had been said and done was very bad. I did not know how or why.

  “That was Bestermann’s Patrol. They came to us after they had burnt Blini and shot three men who tried to stop them, but they did no harm at Tefuga. I understood then that the world had changed, and new times had come. I had bad dreams in which the big man pursued me on his horse. The people were still afraid and spoke in small voices. They feared the white gabblers, and the men with red hats, but those were, so to speak, day-time fears. They were fears such as one might have of a leopard when one is alone in the bush and finds his fresh track. Their fear of the big black man was different. That was a night-time fear. It was one fear, filling all the people. They did not speak of it.

  “I grew older. My age-set moved to the houses of the women who would teach us to be men. My teacher was Femora Feng. She was a woman in whom the spirit was very strong. Often she would speak before the uncles and they would listen. In her hut I learnt that all times are not the same, and that there had been another and a better time when Kama Boi had been our protector, but then certain white men had come and worked a magic which tricked the spirit in him so that it sought to punish us. In the hut of Femora Feng I learnt to long for the days before the white man came. This was the great longing of our people when I was becoming a man, and that is the time, Mr Jackland, that makes you what you are. That is when the clay of the pot hardens.

  “Next my age-set moved again and I left Femora Feng, but before I had finished making my first garden she sent for me, which she had the right to do. She told me she had seen a dream. She had seen it three times, so she knew it came from the ancestors. She had seen a terrible black horse trampling among the huts, smashing them down, stamping on the cooking-pots. A termite rode this horse, driving it mad. But then the termite arched itself up and bit the horse on the neck and it fell down and died. Then she saw me, Elongo Sisefonge, come out of the hut with my mattock and smite the termite so that it broke into little pieces and crawled away.”

  “A termite with a woman’s face?”

  “No. Later, after she had spoken with your mother at Tefuga, she began to say that she had seen that the termite had a woman’s face. I think she told your mother when they met again …”

  “That was somebody called Atafa Guni.”

  Surprised by this apparently lost fragment from the past the Sarkin chuckled.

  “I had forgotten.”

  “I don’t think she met Femora Feng again until just before the Incident.”

  “It does not matter. All the women dreamed this dream in the end. It caused great dissension between them and the men, and by then certainly the dream showed the termite so, and the women agreed that it signified your mother. But when Femora Feng told me to go and find the white man and ask for work on the house he was building she did not know that your mother was coming. The termite was simply a termite.”

  “Wasn’t there something about your sister being stolen?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “It’s in my mother’s diary. You told her.”

  “I cannot have tol
d her in those words, but yes, one of the nephews of Kama Boi who was overlord of Tefuga had taken my sister to work for him for a year because my uncles could not pay their full taxes. This was common. We did not like it, but since Bestermann’s Patrol we did not dare fight against it, so the custom had grown up.”

  “I’d have thought it broke the agreement you’d made with Kama Boi and his predecessors.”

  “It was not done by Kama Boi himself, but by his nobles and family. He benefited because of the presents they were thus able to send him.”

  “He must have known.”

  “He knew and he did not know. But to us Kitawa the case was that his spirit had been tricked by the white men. We did not want to harm him. We wanted to release him from the magical power of the white men, so that he could protect us again, and we could go back to our golden age. It was Femora Feng and then the other women who first saw that this could not be done, and that therefore Kama Boi himself must somehow be destroyed. The oppression, you see, was not static. As the Hausa discovered they could get away with one thing, they then went on to another. The case of my sister was only a minor example. Her overlord, seeking a favour from Kama Boi, had included her in his gift. This was against custom but my uncles did not dare complain. Only that rains a man who had caused offence by trying to bring a complaint had been beaten to death and his body left by the track for all to see.”

  “So you went to the river. How did you manage to get taken on?”

  “I do not know. Perhaps because of what Femora Feng had seen me do in her dream I did not feel afraid of the White Man. I stood up straight in front of him. I spoke very little Hausa, but one of the river Kitawa had taught me what to say. At least your father gave me work. Then, without my doing anything more, your father asked me to stay and be his houseboy when his new wife came.”

  “She didn’t know much about Africa. He thought experienced servants would take advantage of her and cheat her.”

  “Probably. I thought the White Man a very strange creature. He was old and rich. He had two horses and many huts, but only one wife and she neither old nor young, but ugly. I thought perhaps he had eaten his other wives. He certainly ate much boiled chicken in order to keep himself white, and kept a smoking-stick in his mouth for the same reason.”

  “It must have been pretty confusing.”

  “That is not the reason I tell you. I want you to understand what sort of boy it was who saw these things, how he thought, what was the shape of his mind. For then, you see, your mother caused me to change again, in a new way, the first of my people. Just as Femora Feng had taken me into her hut to show me how to be a man, so your mother took me into hers to show me how to be a White Man. Indeed she spoke to me once in words such as Femora Feng might have used, telling me to do something in a manner I could not refuse. This was very important to me. I owe those two women an equal debt.”

  “What did you make of her as a person?”

  “She had a strong spirit in her, much more than your father. In some ways I did not find her so strange. She was like any young bride. Of course there were many things I did not understand. She drew and painted everything she saw. At first I was a little afraid to see how she could take a big river and trap it on a small piece of paper, but then … I remember a day when she painted Kama Boi and some of his people in front of Kiti Gate. I kept the flies off her while she did so, so I saw how she took that great and dreadful man and made him small on the paper. I saw him with her eyes, and for a little while I was not afraid of him. I learned by her painting to see our world in the way the white man saw it. And she taught me English also.

  “But I was always wary of her. You do not change in one week from being a simple savage into being a westernized politician. Despite her kindness to me I continued to think of her as having dangerous powers, but I decided that these were mostly devoted to preventing her husband from marrying a second wife. She had a magic for this which she would wear inside her before they copulated, which they did often and with vigour. At night I would hear her crying out aloud to encourage him. But yet she had no children. Among our people when a wife has no children she must find another woman to bear her children for her, so all this was very hard to understand. I could not ask her about it. It is women’s talk. But I watched all her movements, and your father’s, because of what Femora Feng had told me about my part in her dream.”

  “You still took that seriously?”

  “Of course. Why not? I take it seriously to this day. Femora Feng was a great spirit. Such people are close to the ancestors. She had foreknowledge of what would happen. Dreams do not speak clearly, but that one spoke clearly enough. There is as much evidence for its truth as there is for many of the scientific propositions which you accept without question. Because of what your mother did and said Kama Boi was destroyed and the rule of the Hausa over the Kitawa ended.”

  “And then you smote the White Man with your ballot-box and he fell to bits and crawled away.”

  The Sarkin laughed.

  “You hadn’t thought of it like that?” said Jackland.

  “Not that interpretation.”

  “Oh?”

  But the Sarkin was apparently more interested in the details of this new reading of the dream.

  “Certainly the White Man fell to pieces,” he said. “How can you rule when you doubt both your own right to do so and the means by which you do it? In the ’Fifties you could hardly find one British administrator who would not tell you openly that in his opinion the whole system of Indirect Rule had been mistaken from the start.”

  “Some of them must have felt that all along. Judging by my mother’s diary, my father had a fairly pessimistic view of the system.”

  “Ah, yes, the diary.”

  “Did you know she was keeping it?”

  “I knew she wrote often in a book. I thought there was a magic in it which renewed her spirit, because when she had finished writing she put it away in the box where she kept her other magic and the spirit was bright in her eyes.”

  “Yes.”

  A slight pause, a definite tension, as though both men knew what was coming.

  “I’ve tried to ask you about this before, Sarkin,” said Jackland. “You’ve always shied off, but it is something I seriously would like to know. For my own spiritual peace, if that’s not too grandiloquent a phrase. My mother says in the diary that she is going to finish by writing her version of the Incident and then give the book to you and ask you to bury it in a termites’ nest in the bush. Evidently that did not happen. I would be grateful for any light you can throw on the question.”

  “I do not remember,” said the Sarkin.

  “The mystery is that I found the diary among my father’s gear. I would like to know how it got into his hands. You see why?”

  “I tell you, I do not remember.”

  “I’m sorry about that.”

  They sat in silence, stiff and still.

  “I can tell you this, Mr Jackland,” said the Sarkin at last, speaking with evident care. “The boy I then was would have been reluctant to do what your mother asked. She would have seemed to him, especially after the Incident, to possess truly dangerous magical powers, of which she herself was largely unaware. Some of these powers would have been connected with her pictures, but those would have been as it were the outward manifestation of a central magic. That magic lived in the book in which she wrote. Now, what would it mean to such a boy that he should be told to bury such a thing in the land of his people? In a termites’ nest? Remember that we had only recently, after much tribulation and danger, contrived to rid ourselves of another magical presence. To the European mind these arguments may seem fanciful, but I can assure you that to such a boy they would seem as solid and practical as the arguments, say, for fiscal responsibility.”

  “Yes, I see. Thank you. You can’t tell me what you think the boy would ha
ve done, then?”

  “He would have done the best he could, no doubt. Now, Mr Jackland, I think the time has come to do as the White Man did and crawl away.”

  “Hadn’t you better wait till it’s light?”

  “It is possible Major Kadu will follow your tracks. I would like to be well clear of the truck by then. I am not afraid. I belong to this land, but I have lived long enough in contact with the outside not to believe in bugbears any more.”

  “I was thinking about leopards.”

  “I will take my chance with them. Perhaps Major Kadu can be persuaded to think I was unlucky.”

  The Sarkin climbed slowly from his seat and stood by the car, a tall pale pillar like an i, with the dot of his white cap separated from the column of his white robe by the invisible patch of blackness which was his face. The pillar swayed and the dot disappeared as he tossed the cap on to the passenger seat. After a rustle and slither the robe joined it, followed by a string vest and linen underpants. He knelt to unlace his shoes. When he stood up his blackness, lacking the contrast of linen, seemed less, and his figure was clear in the moonlight.

  “Will you be warm enough like that?” said Jackland. “The harmattan’s about due, isn’t it?”

  “Overdue, if anything. I have a blanket. To that extent I go back to the bush richer than when I came out of it. Goodnight, Mr Jackland. My only fear is that the breakdown may result in your part in my flight being discovered.”

  “Can’t be helped. I wish I could have got you the whole way.”