Encountering Time
"When did it happen, when did all these children have their own children? That is how time went. It flew and we did not see it flying" — NoViolet Bulawayo (We Need New Names)
To the Ékwé
By that time in August, I had three homes: one in Surulere, Lagos where I left two months ago in June; another in Etim Ekpo, Akwa Ibom where I was domiciled upon my conscription for national service; and the third in Nimo, Njikoka, Anambra state where I now stayed with my uncle and his family of five. Upon my arrival in Anambra state after being permitted to leave the state by my Local Government Inspector, the bearded and short-statured Mr. Joseph Anyom, I realised there was more creative inflow in this village than I could get anywhere else, if you excluded Lagos. Nimo shares, as with Lagos, an abundance of stories to be told. And if the stories don’t come by their own freewill, you prey upon the muse present in the very air. However, I know my time here would not be long, and so I prepare myself to cash in on this moment. Nimo is on the polar end of the razzedness of Lagos. In Nimo, I walked with the free air of an indigene, a brother. In Lagos, there was the unsaid need to prove a point, to let the other man on the street know that however foreign you were to this place, we all had a share of the cake.
In Lagos, every conversation is a transaction. At the end of every conversation — and here, they are usually quick, clipped, timed — you knew whether you had won or lost. The conversations with bus conductors and traders in the markets were most important. The tiniest wrong you said could cost you a fortune. Lagos taught you naturally to be street smart. You beat before you were beaten. Here is a transaction. Everyone wants to win. And so you don’t go around asking the woman selling cups of rice how much a cup costs. If you do that, you’re a sure JJC. An enquiry signalled a sure loss of the transaction. And so you claim. Na 250 I dey buy am. Give me one cup. You were most likely going to win in one if you tried that in three shops. In Nimo, things are different. I’m in ancestral home. Like an uncertain lover, though, however far I prostitute, Lagos still has a place in my heart. Lagos is where I would return. Lagos is time that pulls me towards itself.
It was merely a matter of drinks. One man took too many bottles, and the next thing happened — the Ékwé had been assaulted. I had just feasted on a cold dinner of rice and stew when the distress call came. It was to my uncle, my host and the Chairman of the village. My uncle, Mr. Okwudili Amalu, a tall and gangling man who I had always known to sway when he walked, dressed up slowly, tired, squeezing himself into his big shirt.
"There is trouble. Get me the umbrella and go to sleep," he said to me.
I was not going to miss out on a chance to witness a village brawl, and so I informed him that I was going with him. In any case, it was late. What if something went wrong, uncle?
"Are you sure? It is late, and it’s going to rain."
I laughed, giving the hint that I was used to being beaten by rain. He got the message.
"OK, get an umbrella. Take the good one. I would use the other bad one."
We used torches, wading through bushes and decrepit houses. The weather was cold and it had begun to drizzle, tiny bits of rain falling to the earth. I rolled down the hands of my cotton shirt. My uncle, swaying in the darkness, walked in front of me, his unsolicited orderly, not looking back. I thought I saw in the dark bush the figure of a person (or people) crouched in the darkness. I imagined them stop what they were doing and watched my eyes making out their form. We reached a shop and I assumed it to be the nexus of the brouhaha. A small crowd was gathered, and in their midst stood a short man, naked to the waist. It didn’t take me much effort to know this was one of the belligerents. Last year, I had completed an extra course in journalism, and my stint as a journalist had accustomed me somewhat to conflicts and investigations. The man’s name was Dike. He held between his fingers a burning cigarette, and would take deep drags in between incantations to Arusi avowing his innocence in the matter. He spoke Igbo, pacing back and forth. On one occasion, he found a nearby ditch, entered it, kneeling and cursing.
"If I ever am at fault in this, kill me, Arusi!"
I watched the drama with interest. It was a most amusing spectacle indeed, and I perceived he was drunk. I'd get to confirm he was truly soon after. My uncle asked questions. Dike came to us again. He inched close to me and said something in Igbo which came close to the rough translation, "Do you know me? I am a believer in Arusi." I smelt his breath. It reeked. He had been drinking. I ignored him, evading conversation. He hummed courteously. A man with an obscenely huge stomach trudged in with a group of men. This man looked dignified. He grabbed Dike around his belt and made a move to drag him towards whence he came. Dike was strong, and so the exercise proved futile.
"Let us go home. You have had too much," big-bellied man said.
"Mba, no. I need drink.”
"There is drink at home. Let us go.”
"Lekwe anya m. Look at my eyes," Dike instructed. A torch was directed to his face and I saw it. He had a side of his face bashed in, close to his left eye, blood already clotting.
"Inoh did this to me. I am not going home until he kills me!"
A smallish woman, presumably one of Dike’s wife (or wives) joined to intervene. She seemed to be crying. It was night and dark. I could not be sure.
"Go home, woman. I am coming. Arusi would kill me if I am guilty." Although a fairly truant student, I had studied topics in Igbo mythology. I thought Arusi could have taken Dike seriously had he not been a tipsy devotee. The gods here are quite potent. A witness came forward to my uncle to testify.
"Inoh had stop at the shop to beat the ekwé and Dike start to joke with him. Inoh did not want the joke and ask him to stop. He slapped Inoh and Inoh wrestle him to the ground, hit him with the ekwé."
The decision was taken. Dike was wrong, having assaulted Inoh on his duty. It was a taboo. The Ékwé was never to be accosted while on his rounds. Who was this innocent Inoh?
I followed my uncle away from the scene and into a house. Inside the dark room were the shadows of three men seated, discussing the issue of the night. Life here was different. In this village, internecine disputes were settled away from the police on round tables packed with gin and palm wine. These makeshift committees sprung up at the heat of the moment, in someone’s house, at any time of the day. Had this been Lagos, things would have ended differently with both Inoh and Dike in a bucolic cell somewhere, or out of it after rubbing very full palms with the police who were ever present to collect such "tips."
"Put off your torch," my uncle said. In a moment, I saw in the darkness the vague shapes of two other people: women, sitting, and a child lying supine on the ground. I shook unseen hands and sat on a bench away from the elders.
"What he did was wrong," my uncle started.
"Inoh is not to blame. Dike would be sanctioned in the meeting tomorrow," one of the men said.
"We need to ensure that we address this issue of drunkenness in this village," came the voice of a young man. He probably forgot they were right in the midst of strong bottles of gin. "Something worse could have happened. I move that Dike be punished."
"You’re still coming up, young man. We handle this with diplomacy. A man has never carried his own brother to court. We would treat this as the hen treats her chicks." This man spoke decent English, and his argument was met with sighs.
"Let us go and bring Inoh here," my uncle said to them. They stood up to go and the young man followed. He walked with a swagger. We went off again into the bush, passing a narrow passage and entering a small compound filled with people. Coming out as though on cue was an old man, stooped, dark and, like Dike, naked to the waist. He held a cutlass that glistened from the moonlight. He exuded a calm dignity and power I could not associate with a man his age. Inoh. He was decidedly old enough to be Dike’s father. I wondered how an old man could inflict such damage on a man as young and agile as Dike.
Inoh spoke with a cracked, shaky voice. He addressed my uncle who served as the village chairman and leader. A revered position in Njikoka, one of my uncle’s duties, asides sitting over meetings in the ilo and judging disputes like these, was the supervision of the village's central borehole where I sometimes held sway.
"Dike came here to hack down my door," Inoh said, showing us knife marks on a wooden door. "He also broke four of my louvres."
We all returned to the dark room and the men talked a bit more, deliberating on what could be done to Dike.
For months, I had stopped writing. Lagos takes as much from a man as much as it gave. You could replace the peace of the bucolic villages in the interior of Akwa Ibom where I stayed with the traffic and utter madness of Lagos, but there would always be the argument of the opportunities you lost. Lagos gave as much as it took. The great roads of Uyo and the fresh food, cheap housing and quiet of Etok Uruk Eshiet could try hard, but for the ambitious, it failed to come close to the promise of great jobs, networking, and exposure Lagos gave on a platter. In Lagos, time overlapped into time: days into weeks, weeks into months, months into years. In no time, you were already old and graying. Time existed differently in Lagos. Here, time is as quick, restless and reckless as the vehicles on Third Mainland Bridge. Coincidentally, the bridge has witnessed the end of time for many. Many, tired of the madness of life here, have got out of their cars, led by a force known only to them, and plunged into the welcoming lagoon beneath. When time passes and their bodies are exhumed by a selfless canoe rider, they are already bloated, pale, dead. Heads shake, and everyone moves on to their businesses. The canoe paddler wonders what to do with his catch. He abandons the body for the government to carry. Life continues. Time flies.
Inoh is asked to wear a shirt to continue his duty. He returns home and comes out regally dressed, the ékwé taking the place of the cutlass. He beats the ékwé then, and I could feel the sound reverberating throughout the street and neighbouring villages. I feel my own body pulsate as he hits the drum. The sound is beautiful, enchanting, passionate. When he begins to call out the news, his voice booming with power and aged authority, I feel within a deep, strange sense of affinity to the old man. I feel I know this man. We are connected. I, a young investigative journalist and fledgling broadcaster, and Inoh, the old man beating this ancient ékwé, an illiterate sage vast in an experience I could only imagine but too culturally limited to enter. We are two men, generations apart, bonded in a Gordian knot of journalistic brotherhood, one archaic, crude and assured; the other uncertain, green. The boom of the ékwé strikes chords within me.
Was Inoh thinking same? Had he, perhaps, been to Lagos? My uncle was now walking ahead of us, slowly, in line. Did Inoh, too, his body aged and scarified with experience, feel how time seemed to move forward without our permission and pull us along? Did he also grieve the passing of time, the speed of it? Did he also feel this grudging reluctance to stay in the present and move without answering the call of time? The ékwé, eternal-seeming, spoke words into the night and a future I never want to meet on its own terms. James Baldwin's words come to me from his essay, "A Fly in Buttermilk": "for the future is like heaven — everyone exalts it but no one wants to go there now." Coincidentally, like G., the centre of Baldwin's essay, a brilliant negro boy who tries to fit in and grow in different all-white schools in the South of America, I am also stuck, as it were, in a cultural and geographical tripod, unsure which origin truly would work out for me. Time would tell.
It was raining now. I cover Inoh with my umbrella, exposing myself to the now urgent, cold drops of rain. It is a worthy sacrifice. We walk into dark streets, and he chants the same announcement. I could tell that Inoh, like Dike, was drunk, too. But I did not mind this assault on my nostrils when he spoke, in much the same way the villagers did not mind Inoh injuring Dike. He was the Ékwé.
"My friends in journalism school would learn the world from you, old man," I whispered into the night.
"Isi gini? What did you say?" he asked, facing me for the first time.
I said nothing, and we continued our walk.
I thought of a title if I were to run this story: A Night Assault on the Ékwé? The "night" in the phrase might be too wordy, better clipped out. An Assault on the Ékwé. Inoh announced that there would be a meeting tomorrow by 7am at the ilo. Inoh never says it, but with every beat he makes on the heavy wooden gong and in every word he utters, I can hear him say: "...and there, we would discuss the assault on the Ékwé!"
