The Beatitude of Unknowability

The only thing you may see or testify about me are feet. Feet carrying the bodies of men and women and everybody seeking something. Going to something, being something, orchestral something, speech in feet motion. A clinical drum that assails me daily. It is the dum dum, the cha cha, or the slappiness of sound. On the cold and foggy morning of 3rd January 1997, when many didn’t expect a strong harmattan, a man sat on a bench at a bus stop, reading a newspaper, cars and motorcycles interrupting his line of sight and leaving behind an infinite echo of sounds. Dirt litter of the city of Kuje rose and scattered with passing wind. He’d rest the paper and steal a look at his wristwatch. There was scarcely a morning buzz in the beginning of the year and the city felt empty. When he stole another look at his wrist, it became 6 minutes past 8; the sun was out but the sky was still a dull mixture of grey and pale blue. A rushing number of lads, with faces and skin white as the weather, came before him. Ka taimake mu, Dan Allah. Mu na jin yunwa, they said. He stared through his glasses with a blank expression, until one of the scouts hushed the others and stepped forward. Oga, abeg, help us, we dey hungry, he said.

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At the epiphany, a smile did magic to his face. He reached for his wallet which contained crispy two-heads, and slipped a bill to the boys. And as they scurried off elated, one shouted, Happy New Year; while another, rather hysteric, rejoiced, Hallelujah!

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As a result of Kuje’s new local government chairman Zhin, pronounced jin, like the Chinese xing, who was elected in March last year, all promise and youth, some major construction had begun and a few buildings and landmarks were brought down for the making of new things. All the noise and marching of men and machines throbbed each day. In Angwan Gade, one of the small settlements in the city of Kuje, the road leading from Secretariat Road to it was coiled, a long constrictor boa that continued and continued till the end of the settlement, where a slope began into Angwan Gade Extension. By a sharp bend was a great vambe tree that was merged with the road, so that it seemed its trunk disappeared into the ground. It was sometime in the dry months of 1987 when the road was first constructed, when the settlement was only an insignificant town, it has been said—that the construction engineers couldn’t fell the tree using all the gear they had, even their EMVs and such and such, because the tree had the ancestral powers of the people inhabiting it. Now, it stood there as testament, its smooth and gnarled bark, green and brown and large and obstructing. Many passed by the tree without ever noticing it or the lore which hid behind it, except myself and a few kindred spirits, the insufferable flâneurs.

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So it is with the new buildings and ongoing road constructions; once they are completed, no one remembers a thing, for all the noise and the inconvenience of moving things around is over, allowing the people to return to their lives once more. And no one will keep record, will know about how they came to be, the men whose sweat or blood made them happen,  or remember the names of new streets, or the old ones whose names are resold or disappear in the metabolism of things, or know about the nights where a dog dies because it was stoned by a frightened human, whose wraith, the dog’s, will not disappear, ever-present in the psychic atmosphere, like the spirit of old John Gbemanayi who once lingered for a long time before he finally bade me farewell. Many nights, I kept him company when he returned to the old grounds where he was once a Gbagyi drummer to see if the people had come out and set a fire and played music and danced and called on the names of his ancestors. The people always did, surprisingly, every celebratory night for a wedding, a newborn, life, or the bridal showers, where now, because some of them had become Muslims, the dancing was reduced to avoid a sybaritic atmosphere. But it became hard to keep up with what part of the city any  of these parties were  happening, so me and old John Gbemanayi would traverse all over trying to catch the parties, where he sometimes complained about the younger breed of drummers whose skill wasn’t as good, but there was always something orgiastic about his pursuits these nights he came by, something buried in the invisible air for which old John Gbemanayi reached for that I could never fathom, that brought him back by-and-by, always obliging me to take him wherever he wanted. A true spirit of the night, he was; but then one day he never returned again, maybe he’d found what he was looking for, old John Gbemanayi.

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One of the roads that had become popular in that time, which I and old John once walked those nights, had on it a nightclub that was built by Zhin too, in the years before he went into politics. We’d been dragged in one night by the music that was coming out of its oval-shaped clubhouse, which had in its centre a large dancefloor neatly excavated into the earth, and around it, an elevated, circular deck of seats and tables, where the young and every other party to the hedonism in the air sat and drank and dragged on the pipes of hookahs. It was the biggest and most alive, or rather, most beastly of such night gatherings I had ever seen, the mad bodies and their masses gyrating to the intoxication of sound, the ground wet with spilt alcohol bathing people in merriment and celebration. The road started from the gate of the clubhouse and continued to the city’s main thoroughfare, and I couldn’t help but notice that when the night was over and the partygoers spilt onto the road, it felt like the same scene after every New Year’s eve, where people poured from churches, from the vigils, and walked this same road, guided by the quiet night and the proximity of other human souls who just partook in the same ritual they all emerged from, as one of the boys in the  moving mass thought about it—that years ago under a soft evening sun, as he played Jesus in his church’s Passion of Christ drama, he’d carried a cross and walked this same road to a phantom Calvary those now around him didn’t know about.

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He had been away for school for some five years in another state. The bar with an adjoining brothel at the junction to his street, which was nicknamed Cashew Tree, after the cashew tree that covered its entrance, had become a madrassa. In the former days, it was usually from here most nights, after getting very drunk, that he hailed a bike and headed to the inner city to the clubs. On this recent visit, he’d waited for dusk, had a bath, had worn a fine cloth to the cashew tree, his palate already jubilant for the taste of cold beer, when he saw the banner on the gate to the premises, the Arabic writing on it in defiance to the colourful beer posters he was once used to. Wasn’t it here he had befriended that prostitute just because she had the body of an Amazon and he liked women big? It was here—she was thick and heavy with fat lips of God, to which she applied equally thick and heavy lipstick, gloried red, gold, purple, and with boobs that never sagged, so taut and firm for a lady of her trade. It wasn’t that he expected to see her, the years had passed just as the city had shifted in many places, but it was a strong memory that ensured its victim always sought such reincarnations. However, the incarnation of what was before him wasn’t lost on him; it was very persistent, he imagined, this human love for God, which took flesh in many ways. And in the manner which thoughts drift into the head and out, this made him think of how a place or thing could morph, whether we paid attention or not, and made him remember a friend of his by the name of Zhin, at the Zuba College of Education where they had both been studying English Education, who’d shown him the beginning of a short story he tried his hand at, which this particular moment reminded him of.

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Zhin himself had been thinking these same thoughts, of the uncanniness of change, the morning he wrote it. He’d got out of his mud house and went to the back for a morning pee where he faced a small farm of cassava whose leaves were almost up to his face. It was the sound of vehicles in the distance reaching him that made Zhin think of the fast ways his village of Kuje had gone from a number of houses to what it had become, from the time the country’s capital was moved from Lagos to Abuja; Abuja, a new state carved out of several  to form an entity in the centre of the country’s map, dislocating many, robbing many of land and history and family name, making some wealthy overnight, and everything that happened for good or bad. Zhin remembered that the road where he heard the sound of the vehicles used to be a tiny path to a stream that was now no more; and he had returned into the mud house and began writing, by some rare morning inspiration, to take himself back to the first days—

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—Hotel Street was named after Hotel de Royale, and Hotel de Royale was one of the primordial signs of modern occupation in the then-new settlement, built by mysterious big men who planted colossal, massively-fenced and barb-wired buildings that became an island of architecture in an aggressively green vegetation where nobody needed it, except for the gravel-teeth tarred road that led to it, plied by cars with unmindful shock absorbers. Then, a mai gaadi, the hired security man of the hotel, will have some of his kin from the upper north visit, then a shack will be built close-by to house his visitors who become labourers working at the sites of other islands emerging from the greenery; then you’ll have a corner demarcated with boulders for salats, then a mai shayi shop, then the coming of other new settlers hoping to find home again like Mr. Biswas; then you’ll have the middleclass and their shielded children, and the lowerclass with their wanton children, then the rich parents will send their children to the new mushroom primary schools started by quacks believing themselves to re-enact the forgotten spirit of blessed teachers in the mottos of their establishments—Knowledge Is Power, Discipline Is Strength, Education for the Future; then you’ll have provision shops at every turn, people selling tap water in front of their fenced houses, the man who always has electricity to the chagrin of neighbours because he works with NEPA, then, of course, you’ll have some idiot name his daughter after a football club, like Chelsea, and the neighbourhood will have the envies that grow with such closely-knitted settlements, because everybody knows everybody and their possessions, and the place called Hotel Street—one breathing beast of hypocrisy . . .

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It was not a good story, and it continued in its unhinged carelessness and run-on plot, but anyone who read it could tell that Zhin had tapped into something that morning. It was the sort of thing that—though he never pursued becoming a writer afterwards—many writers had found between rare moments of trance and dream captured in vivid images, or the sort of magic that lingered in the air, being present in the minds of men unknowingly grasping hold of it. A cock crowed and birds were chirping and the smell of dew wasn’t far from Zhin’s nostrils. Another cock crow and another cock crow and the inimitable sounds of morning to be found in a half-city half-village, the penumbra, changing tides. And even Zhin knew, as he traced back, through story, the days of his childhood, the blessed son that he was, who rose to build this city, that, believe it or not, even then, when it was all greenery and small footpaths, the only thing you could see or testify about me were feet. Feet carrying the bodies of men and women and everybody seeking something, going to something, being something, orchestral something, speech in feet motion.

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