Still on Burma Boy

ANOTHER MAN’S WAR: THE STORY OF A BURMA BOY IN BRITAIN’S FORGOTTEN ARMY

by Barnaby Phillips

Oneworld, 336pp. 9781780747118

Isaac Fadoyebo was sixteen in 1943 when he signed up with the British Army to fight in Burma. Not that he knew where he was going at the time, or that such a country even existed. He was just a village boy in colonial Nigeria enticed by the promise of money and adventure when his father refused to send him to secondary school. A shilling a day – and all found - was twice what he could earn as a ‘pupil teacher’, which was the highest his elementary education could aspire to in his rural backwater where subsistence farming was the only alternative. There was also the promise of preferential treatment for services rendered the King of England should he survive, which turned out to be true in his case, although the story of his survival was itself improbable.

 

There were many Fadoyebos in Britain’s African possessions, and the imperial power was in dire needed of their services. Although things were looking up on the other fronts - Germany bogged down in the Soviet Union, the invasion of Italy underway and Monty triumphant in North Africa – the Japanese were wreaking havoc in South-East Asia. They had overrun Singapore, the Malaysian Peninsula and now Burma, leaving an already fractious India – the jewel in the crown – vulnerable. Moreover, Burma was a vital supply route for the Chinese, Japan’s longstanding enemy, who were receiving American weapons from India. Expendable manpower was required for the work of the world and Africa proved fertile recruiting ground, Nigeria alone providing about 120,000 of them.

 

They sailed first to the jewel itself, where Fadoyebo and his fellows were holed up for three frustrating months before they crossed over in December. Among the reasons for choosing them was their supposed familiarity with the topography they now faced - ‘The jungle is so thick that, when you are in the middle of it, you need a torch to see, although the sun may be high in the sky,’ to quote Fadoyebo himself – but in fact they had experienced nothing like it. Worse was to come with the onset of the monsoon in May when, for the next five months, three times as much rain would fall as ‘the steamy coast of Nigeria receives in an entire year’. But Fadoyebo was perhaps fortunate in this respect. Most of his contingent weren’t even from the steamy south but from the open savannah of the north bordering the Sahel.

 

It was tough going. With only picks, shovels, machetes and explosives, they were ordered to build a jeep track 75 miles long ‘through the wild jungle hills and ravines... In some sections, the track had to be cut into a cliff with a sheer drop of hundreds of feet.’ They completed the task in three months and named it ‘West African Way’ but it cost many lives, including 44 Gambians who died from cholera after drinking water from an apparently clear stream. In all of this, they received fulsome praise from their officers, who considered them alone of all the nationalities who fought in this campaign ‘capable of operating for months on end in the worst country in the world, without vehicles and without mules, and was alone able to carry all his warlike stores with him’. Another admired ‘men who tolerated so much so patiently, and...with such good humour and so little grumbling’.

 

Fadoyebo’s own conventional war was to be relatively short-lived. Barely two months into the crossing his unit was surprised by a Japanese patrol.  All except Fadoyebo and a man called David Kargbo from Sierra Leone were killed. Both had been shot in the initial exchange but for some reason their assailants spared them:

 

They spoke so quickly he couldn’t understand. But they repeated a phrase again and again. ‘English people. English people,’ they seemed to be saying. Were they asking him whether there were any other officers? Did they want to know where the survivors were hiding? Now they were gesturing for him to stand up. One of them pointed a rifle at his head. They were saying something else, it must have been. ‘Get up, get up,’ but Isaac could not even sit. He wondered at the idiocy of it all. Did they think that, if he could get up, he would still be lying here?

    He knew what was coming. The Japanese, take prisoner? A white  man...perhaps, but a black man? No chance. That was not how they did things. He closed his eyes and waited to be shot.

 

The shot never came. Of the two, Fadoyebo had sustained the more serious injuries and was later to lose his right kneecap, leaving him with a limp for the rest of what would prove to be a long, fruitful life.

 

And so began his and Kargbo’s personal war. Wounded, surrounded by the enemy and in the midst of a native population whose language they couldn’t understand and whose allegiance they couldn’t fathom, they only survived by what Fadoyebo himself termed ‘a stroke of unbelievable luck’, the title of the 60-page memoir he was to write many years later. Their luck was that they were near a Moslem village whose inhabitants were sympathetic to the British cause, which alone protected them from oppression by the Buddhist majority. For erratic days over the next few weeks, villagers visited their hideout with rice and water. They were fearful of taking them into the village proper at the risk of being discovered by a Japanese patrol, which wouldn’t have hesitated to do what they had recently done to a chief in a neighbouring village:

 

They stripped him. They laid him down in the sun and then pinioned him to the ground with bayonets through his hands and feet, and then carefully, and with skill, they stripped the skin from his back and rubbed rock salt into the tortured flesh. His village was forced to watch his execution, and stay watching until he was dead, which, though he was over sixty, did not come to him until six hours later.

 

However, after a harrowing few weeks in the open, and later under a makeshift shelter at the onset of the monsoon, an apparition by the name of Shuyiman appeared before them; in Fadoyebo’s recounting:

 

After twelve days hunger lying down hidden in the jungle, we saw an Indian Mohammedan coming towards us. On his arrival in this jungle the man said to us, ‘Oh African brothers, have you had a chop?’

    We said, ‘Oh, our father, for twelve days we have had no chop.’

    Tears ran down his eyes, and he said to us, ‘I will sacrifice my life to be feeding you from today till the troops come, no matter what will be the cost to Japanese wickedness.’

 

For the next seven months, he hid them in the only bedroom of his bamboo house which he shared with his wife and daughter (and, before long, a son). As it turned out, there was only one scare when a Japanese patrol undertook a house-to-house search and Shuyiman helped them into the bush behind. For the rest, Fadoyebo never detected any anxiety on the part of his saviour or his wife.

 

Phillips first came cross this remarkable story of the ‘unlikely’ and ‘beautiful’ bond between ‘two Africans and a Burmese in the Arakan jungle’ in 2009 when he stumbled upon Fadoyebo’s manuscript in London’s Imperial War Museum while researching a documentary for Al Jazeera. He tracked down the academic who had worked on the manuscript some years earlier and obtained an address. Wondering whether Fadoyebo was still alive, he asked a friend in Lagos, where he had once worked as a BBC reporter to see if he could track him down. Some weeks passed without any response and then he had his own stroke of unbelievable luck when the friend confirmed that Fadoyebo was indeed alive and well and anxious to speak with him. So began another unlikely – and beautiful - friendship.

 

Meeting with Fadoyebo and listening to his story, Phillips is perturbed by his own country’s refusal to acknowledge the services of men like Fadoyebo during the Empire’s darkest hour. He is especially incensed that they were excluded from Burma Victory, the official documentary commissioned by Lord Mountbatten, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in South East Asia, even though British army cameramen had gone out of their way to capture them on film. All Fadoyebo himself received was a certificate thanking him for his ‘Loyal Service’ and, under the column for medals, ‘Not Yet Decided’. It was still undecided when he died, despite Phillips’s own attempt to elicit a reason from the relevant authorities.

 

Perhaps Phillips’s book will go some way to rectify this anomaly and it would be fitting if it did so, albeit posthumously, but at least he has publicised their case. But what have we here in Nigeria done? Where are our own accounts of how our gallant men saved the empire from itself? Come to that, why did Phillips have to discover Fadoyebo’s manuscript in London and not Lagos, the author having tried and failed to get it published locally but for our broken-down system? At one point, Phillips himself wonders at what he calls ‘Nigeria’s sometimes baffling indifference to its own history’ but that hardly goes far enough. History as a subject, as an ongoing interrogation of who we are and where we are headed, has never been encouraged by the cabal which took over from the British in 1960, so much so that it was recently expunged from the school curriculum on the grounds that students shun it, and that History graduates have difficulty securing jobs. And if Burma – another man’s war, after all - seems too remote, especially in such a demographically young country, what are we to say about the civil war in the late 1960s when the breakaway state of Biafra attempted to secede and was crushed by the federal might on the grounds that, ‘To keep Nigeria one/Is a task that must be done’? There is still no official history of the central defining event of our post-colonial experiment in ruling ourselves, which in any case only merited a single page in the secondary school textbook I once came across in the days when History did feature in the syllabus.

 

In fact, there is no mystery about this ‘baffling indifference’, which is summed up in the meaningless slogan that justified slaughtering over one million people who merely wanted out of this polyglot colonial creation they never agreed to in the first place. Tellingly, even the document which finally amalgamated all the disparate parts in 1914 remains hidden, as if it might finally reveal the country to be a fiction after all, what one early nationalist called ‘a mere geographical expression’, which might also explain why it has been left to the writers to chart its trajectory. Burma itself was the subject of Biyi Bandele’s well received 2007 novel, Burma Boy, based on the tales his father, also a veteran, had told him, as well as Rotimi Babatunde’s short story, ‘Bombay’s Republic’, which won the 2012 Caine Prize for African Writing. Unsurprisingly, many more novels have tackled the civil war, the latest of which, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), was recently made into a film (directed, appropriately enough, by the same Biyi Bandele.)

 

*

 

Fadoyebo himself didn’t seem to have been particularly bitter about his hitherto invisibility but then he had made a success of his life, partly because his military service got him a good government position, partly because he belonged to a generation which enjoyed ‘the fruits of independence’, and partly because he finally got the ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels his father had denied him. But those were the long-ago days when the salary of a civil servant could buy a car, a house and raise six children, all of them now graduates with their own cars, houses and children. But he was bitter about what his country had become. As he recounts to Phillips, what had once been the serene, middle-class neighbourhood he had moved into with his young family had become a treeless, congested slum of high walls, colonised public spaces and the endless roar of generators fouling up the air because a country drowning in oil and flaring gas cannot provide constant electricity. On one of Phillips’s many visits to a man who he warmed to for his ‘modesty, integrity and gentle humour’, and who reminded him of his grandparents’ generation – ‘their emotional restraint, and how they would talk about the war when I was a small boy. Or, in fact, not talk about it very much, unless prompted’ – he waxed eloquent on the need for a revolution. Phillips, having himself endured life in the country, found it difficult to disagree with him, but is nevertheless seduced by the people’s fabled energy and optimism.

 

Medals aside, Fadoyebo’s greatest regret was that he never got to properly thank Shuyiman and his wife for saving his life. The occasion of their rescue was a matter of great fanfare in the village and then he and Kargbo were whisked away, although many years later, in London in 1969, he had a strange encounter which filled in a gap. He was attending a training course for Commonwealth civil servants, itself evidence of his ‘arrival,’ and was sitting alone in a restaurant near Victoria Station when he noticed an older white man openly staring at him. The man eventually came over, greeted him in Hausa and remarked that he had noticed him limping when he entered. As Fadoyebo started to explain, the man’s face ‘lit up in recognition’. It turned out that he was a retired Major who knew all about his and Kargbo’s ‘improbable survival’; and added: ‘By the way, that chap who hid you and looked after you. We gave him piles of rupees, and some cows as well. He became a rich man.’

 

It was only after the Major had left that it occurred to him that he might have asked for more information; and now, equally improbably, another Englishman had mysteriously turned up with the promise of closure. Both knew at once that Fadoyebo was too ill to undertake what would prove to be a gruelling journey, and Shuyiman, who was already in his forties when he rescued his African brothers in the bush, would have long since died, but Phillips was determined to go to Burma and deliver a letter to his surviving relatives:

 

 On my last morning in Lagos, I went to Isaac’s house in Surulere to say goodbye. He had not heard me enter the compound. I found him in the yard, hunched over a table, half-dressed in shorts and an old vest, but writing intently. For the first time, I saw Isaac’s misshapen right leg. He had no right knee as such, just a long dark scar underneath where his kneecap had once been. He was absorbed in composing the letter that he wanted me to deliver to Shuyiman’s family.

 

Phillips arrived in Burma during the monsoon. He had to pretend to be a tourist because journalists weren’t welcome. He did indeed manage to trace the village – an improbable event all by itself - and delivered the letter, as you can see from the documentary on YouTube. But what the documentary doesn’t convey is the wretched state they and their people were living in as unwanted minorities under a paranoid military regime: ‘Rangoon was a city of strange, stilted conversations. People seemed to talk to me in riddles, hinting at fears and frustrations rather than explicitly spelling it out, only to abruptly shut up whenever a stranger approached. The regime’s spies, I was warned, were everywhere, and wearing plain clothes.'

 

Nigeria also laboured under military rule but they never embedded themselves in this way. Phillips wonders whether this was because they just didn’t have the stomach for it or were simply not organised enough, but then Nigeria, unlike Burma, doesn’t have a dominant ethnic group under one religion with an idea of a past greatness. Moreover, Phillips himself is struck by the different responses to British subjugation when he contrasts the respective fates of the old colonial clubs. Those in Rangoon are all but closed down; those in Lagos are bubbling: 

 

The difference with Nigeria is striking. The clubs of colonial Lagos were just as important to the British, but most of them are still thriving today. Once the likes of Aduke Alakija [currently ‘the richest black woman in the world’] had forced their way into the Ikoyi Club they never looked back... In Nigeria, British snobbishness met its match in the local elite’s own sense of entitlement. Nigerians cheerfully adapted colonial traditions they admired and discarded the rest.

 

Perhaps it wasn’t so much that the Burmese didn’t feel entitled as that Nigerians have no lingering resentment about the colonial period, or even any quarrel over the name they were given and the language they were bequeathed. On the contrary, as the country’s first Prime Minister put on the eve of independence (and which Phillips quotes), Nigerians knew the British ‘first as masters, and then as leaders, and finally as partners, but always as friends’. It was a gracious thing to say, no doubt, but it was also true. However, it was also true that Nigeria didn’t have to endure foreign troops rampaging through it. The chapter on Burma makes for dismal reading. Even the sainted Aung San Suu Kyi comes off badly with her refusal to speak out on the plight of Shuyiman’s people.

 

And then there was David Kargbo, the man who had shared his fate in that faraway bush, and who Fadoyebo credits with electing to remain with him when he could have taken his chances in that same bush. They parted at Freetown on the ship that delivered Fadoyebo back home and never met or even corresponded again. Phillips, who is nothing if not as intrepid as his empire-building forebears, managed to track down his widow. She was in her late eighties, ‘a striking woman, with a fierce and proud stare’. She told him that her husband had died many years before in his early forties ‘because of the mysterious things that had happened to him in the war’. She had nothing to remember him by: the civil war in her own country had destroyed his photos and war records when their house was burnt down by marauding ‘rebels’ who specialised in disembowelling pregnant women and hacking off limbs.

 

It’s tempting to see Another Man’s War as the kind of gift every writer craves, a ready-made story of the hapless individual pitted against world historical forces and living to tell the tale - or having it told for him - by a stroke of ‘unbelievable luck’, but then it would never have been told but for the passion of the author. Phillips is a proud Englishman, hence his outrage over the matter of Fadoyebo’s medal; would that we were proud Nigerians, outraged by our neglect of those who have done us proud.

 

 

Adewale Maja-Pearce's latest book is The House My Father Built (Kachifo, 2014)

 

The no-choice election

I won’t be voting in this year’s election in Nigeria, the fifth since the return of civilian rule in 1999 following many years of the military. It’s partly my fault; partly the fault of the misnamed Independent National Electoral Commission (misnamed because the chair is appointed directly by the president, as he has repeatedly reminded us), which couldn’t find evidence of my 2011 registration despite the obscene amount spent on laptops.

But no matter; I wouldn’t vote if I could. Neither candidate – still less the parties they represent – will lead this country of embarrassing abundance to the Promised Land. Take the incumbent, Goodluck Jonathan of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), a Christian from the oil-producing Niger Delta in the south. To say that his performance has been abysmal is acknowledged even by his unsavoury handlers who ceaselessly attempt to counter the widespread notion that their boss is clueless – the adjective most used to describe him – thereby confirming the fact.

It is four years since Boko Haram launched its deadly campaign and yet it is only now that he has seen fit to address it, but only with the assistance of soldiers from neighbouring Chad and Cameroon (along with South African mercenaries), a humiliation for a country whose armed forces were once lauded by the UN for bringing peace to Liberia and Sierra Leone.

On the other hand, his opponent, Muhammadu Buhari of the opposition Alliance for Progressive Change, is a northern Moslem and former military dictator who thought nothing of executing three men with a retroactive decree, allowing for indefinite detention without charge or trial and having people whipped for not queuing at the bus stop. He is also believed by many in the south to be a Boko Haram sympathiser, having previously refused to condemn their murderous activities on the grounds that they were freedom fighters akin to the Niger Delta militants. Claiming now to be a born-again democrat, he has nevertheless insisted that he has no regrets for his past misdemeanours.

There is a perverse irony in the fact that a nation of 170 million people – the so-called ‘Giant of Africa’ – should be pulverized between two candidates who hardly represent the best on offer. Indeed, reading local and foreign reports one would hardly suspect that 10 other candidates are also vying for the top slot come polling day on 28 March. This is deliberate. The Constitution which berthed our recent experiment in democracy, the fourth such since independence from British colonial rule in 1960, ensures that only those with access to the oil money that is the raison d’être of Nigeria can hope to achieve high office. Buhari is no more or less ‘establishment’ than Jonathan. Both are merely tendencies within it, to use old-fashioned Marxist rhetoric.

The irony lies in the fact that these tendencies are now in open conflict for the spoils at a time when the value of this same oil is plummeting in the international marketplace. The point, at any rate, is that the outcome of this titanic battle can make little or no difference to ‘the masses’ – to use Nigerian parlance – who will continue to subsist on a dollar or day in a nation otherwise dubbed too rich to be poor. The fact that it doesn’t stop them from hoping, accounts in large part for the astonishing fact that a member of the reviled Hausa-Fulani aristocracy with unsavoury antecedents should be championed by Jonathan’s otherwise natural supporters, and tacitly acknowledged by Jonathan’s voluble wife, who is currently criss-crossing the country pleading that her husband be allowed a second term on the grounds that he has learned from his past mistakes.

The salient fact about the current elections is the complete absence of any coherent ideas from the two leading contenders about how they propose to ‘move the nation forward’ (as we also like to say). Instead, we are reduced to slanging matches over forged certificates – Did Buhari finish primary school? Did Jonathan get a doctorate in zoology? Salacious gossip – Was Buhari’s wife 10 years old when he married her? Is Jonathan’s wife old enough to be his mother? And plain drivel, with Mrs. Jonathan calling Buhari “as old as Jonathan’s father”, and Mrs. Buhari suggesting that all southern women who fetch up in Italy are prostitutes.

As I write, the smart money is on Buhari, an outcome which ‘the West’ would seem to favour – the Economist of London called him the ‘least awful’ option despite his questionable credentials (not just scholastic) at a time of paranoia against Islamic fundamentalism. But nobody wants to contemplate the disintegration that will surely be the result of another four years of Jonathan’s cluelessness.

© Adewale Maja-Pearce

(This piece first appeared in African Arguments, an online publication of the Royal African Society in the UK)

Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,

and Dream Chasers. The House My Father Built, a memoir, was
published last year.

Click here to see Maja-Pearce's amazon.com page: http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU

Between Jonathan and Buhari, how did we find ourselves in this mess?

One doesn’t have to be a member of the opposition All Progressive’s Congress in order to consider President Goodluck Jonathan a colossal failure. Whether he is the most corrupt of Nigeria’s long list of venal leaders is debatable and possibly pointless, but what really rankles in all but the most partisan is the impunity he has allowed to be celebrated.

As I write, there are reports that $700mn in cash was discovered in the home of Diezani Allison-Madueke, the long-serving petroleum minister (where all the money comes from, or what is left of it), who was earlier accused of blowing N10bn on chartered aircraft over a two-year period while she admonished the masses to stop ‘pointing to corruption, if we are not prepared to bear some of the hardship.’

And hardship is what Nigerians suffer daily. Five years after assuming office following the death of President Umaru Yar’Adua, most still live without reliable electricity or running water, and the Boko Haram Islamist insurgency continues to make a mockery of the county’s armed forces, abducting schoolgirls at will and decimating entire towns. They are currently threatening Maiduguri, the Borno State capital.

Ordinarily, Jonathan’s defeat in next month’s elections should be a foregone conclusion, the more so given his inability to come across as halfway coherent, as is painfully obvious in the (significantly few) interviews he has granted the international media. Clueless is the word most bandied about him in the pages of the newspapers. Unfortunately, his challenger, Muhammadu Buhari, a retired General and former military dictator, comes with questionable credentials.

Literally so: the raging controversy – and raging it is – concerns his primary school leaving certificate, which he does or does not have but which he needs in order to qualify for the job. He swore to it in an affidavit he filed with the Independent National Electoral Commission but then went quiet when the ruling People’s Democratic Party called him on it, only to produce a document containing subjects that weren’t offered back then in grades that didn’t exist.

The problem with the suspect certificate is that Buhari is running as Mr Clean, having overseen the ‘War Against Indiscipline’ in his previous incarnation in khaki, when he also caused three men to be executed with a retroactive decree and had soldiers whip people in the street for not standing in line. But then he was young and impulsive – ‘youthful exuberance,’ as we like to say – and is perhaps more tolerant now that he is older and wearing an Agbada.

Then there is the added problem of his apparent Boko Haram sympathies. Just two years ago he compared them to the Niger delta militants while arguing in favour of an amnesty for them on the grounds that both were fighting an ‘injustice’. His reasoning was difficult to follow but he has since distanced himself from ‘these barbaric purveyors of power’ and promised to mop them up within the first three months of his administration, although that would be a miracle given the impunity with which Boko Haram has so far annexed 20 per cent of the Nigerian state against a military mired in corruption. Unfortunately, a miracle is what Nigerians are looking for with Jonathan only promising more of the same.

At the root of all the angst over who we should or shouldn’t vote for is the idea that this is the moment when the country will break up. That Nigeria is already failing is not in doubt, which is why John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, is currently in town cautioning both candidates to play by the rules. But it was this same America which ten years ago predicted our collapse this year, at least according to popular mythology, which is invariably the prevailing mood in interesting times. In fact, America wasn’t the culprit but the Washington-based National Intelligence Council that envisioned ‘the outright collapse of Nigeria’ in 2015, but America (if not President George W. Bush himself) might as well have said so. Not that it matters. Most Nigerians believe it, if only because the Nigerian media has reiterated the same ad nauseam because checking the accuracy of their claims is not what they are primarily paid for.

The result, as I write, is a Buhari victory by a small margin, at least as gauged from the social media, from which most Nigerians – rural, largely illiterate – are excluded (this makes accurate polling very difficult). Nobody but Jonathan’s hangers-on and their dependants (the contractors, the civil servants, the fly-by-nights both foreign and local) seem to want him back.

But what might a Buhari presidency portend?  And why should the ‘Giant of Arica’, recently christened the continent’s largest economy, be polarised between these two representatives of 160 million people? That we should even ask the question is ‘the problem with Nigeria’ in all its ethnic, linguistic and religious ramifications, and not merely in the dismal quality of its leadership, as the late Chinua Achebe would have it. Achebe himself, the title of whose 1958 novel, Things Fall Apart, was prophetic enough, titled his last book, a memoir of the civil war of the late 1960s we seem intent on fighting all over again, There Was a Country.

But all of this is to assume that the elections will be held in the first place. A few days ago, Sambo Dasuki, the national security advisor (and himself a retired General), recommended postponing the elections – which in any case can’t possibly be held properly in Adamawa, Borno and Yobe states, where the emergency currently persists. Jonathan himself has little interest in Borno and Yobe (Adamawa is leaning towards the PDP), which Buhari swept in 2011 using the same affidavit concerning his academic qualifications (or lack thereof). The question really is: How did we find ourselves in this predicament so many years after we won the right to direct our own affairs?

Adewale Maja-Pearce

·         This piece first appeared in African Arguments, an online publication of the Royal African Society in the UK

 

Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,

and Dream Chasers. The House My Father Built, a memoir, was published last year.

Click here to see Maja-Pearce's amazon.com page: http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU

 

The House My Father Built 6

And so it was, at last, that I had entered into my possession, as the late Prince himself would have put it. The journey had begun twenty years earlier when my father died, although I had to wait another ten years for the terms of his will to be satisfied before I could lay claim to it. Naively, I had assumed that the tenants would leave of their own accord when I called on each of them in turn, and that the courts would quickly deal with any stragglers. Even at this distance I still clearly recall the Alhaji smirking at my English accent as he heard me out in his parlour. He knew the score. He also knew that I was unlikely to stay the course and he was almost proved right.

But I was also lucky. I was lucky that two of the tenants did indeed comply with the one year rent-free I offered them, lucky in a job that enabled me to travel back and forth at will, lucky in the nation’s on-going tragedy – Abiola, Abacha, Saro-Wiwa: the three faces of our collective dilemma – which kept the country centre-stage. I was lucky, finally, in having to fight for it, which was the measure of what it meant to me – and with it the country I desired to make my own.

Childhood was an unreliable guide, made more so by my privileged upbringing where the gutters didn’t overflow and there was more than one bathroom with running water. Now I had to see the country for what it was: the Alhaji laughing on his way out of the magistrates’ office while I waited three hours for the next date; Baba Ibadan ordering me to ‘sign, my friend’ at a police station which specialised in torture; Prince hiring suspected killers to dispose of me. As Prince himself used to say, ‘Move by faith and not by sight,’ which I thought a good philosophy, even if he didn’t seem inclined to follow it himself, as I would invariably remark whenever he uttered it, whereupon he would burst into laughter, revealing his missing front tooth.

But all that was a long time ago now, longer than the time it took me to dislodge the Alhaji and Ngozi and Pepsi, and longer again since my father died, the man who had willed me the house he built that made it all possible. I have written about him elsewhere. I had my problems with him; he had his problems with me. One of them was that I wanted to be a writer, not a physician, an incomprehensible decision which kept us estranged for years. The irony was that Nigeria was all that engaged me as a writer, which was why his gift was so apt, even if he hadn’t imagined it that way.

© Adewale Maja-Pearce

Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,

and Dream Chasers.

Click here to see Maja-Pearce's amazon.com page: http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU

The House My Father Built 5

We were all gathered in the charge room, Prince and his friend on one side, me on the other. The officer sat in front of us with a woman detective beside him. He read my petition then turned to me.

‘So what do you say happened?’

 

‘This man has refused to pay me any rent for almost four years now and when I finally told him to go, he threatened me.’

 

He nodded and turned to Prince. ‘And what is your own?’

 

‘OC, it is not that I don’t want to pay, only that I don’t have any money now. I am a politician. When my aspirants…’

 

‘Can’t you even pay something?’

 

‘Like I said, I am a politician and I have my aspirants…’

 

As he spoke, the charge officer turned to the woman detective and said something to her, then looked back at Prince.

 

‘Eh heh, what were you saying?’

 

‘My aspirants have promised me a post once they win the election.’

 

‘I think you should try and pay something,’ he said. ‘As you see me here, I also have to pay rent. Even this year, I had to beg my landlord to give me some more time to balance him, but I had to first give him something so that he could hear me.’

 

‘Like I said, OC, once my aspirants…’

 

As he spoke, the officer leaned over to the woman and said something and she replied.

 

‘He’s not listening to me,’ Prince said, giving up.

 

‘I think it is a matter of self-respect,’ the officer said. ‘Everybody must pay their rent.’ He shook his head in bafflement and wrote on a sheet of paper and handed it to Baba Ibadan, who beckoned us all to follow him, including the woman detective. On our way out, we collected a wretched-looking young man in handcuffs. At first, I thought we were going by police van, but we left the station and crossed the main road and stood waiting for a taxi. It was about 11 o’clock and people were going about their normal business, hustling in Lagos, as The Poet would say. Suddenly, the man in handcuffs legged it. Baba Ibadan and the woman detective tore after him. Prince laughed and said something to his friend. It was surreal. Here we were, standing on busy Western Avenue not far from where Pepsi was killed by a runaway bus, and there was nothing in the world to prevent Prince himself from taking off. He wasn’t even handcuffed.

 

Baba Ibadan and his colleague caught their quarry and we hailed a taxi. Prince and his friend squeezed in the front; the rest of us squeezed in the back. The price hadn’t been discussed but, as usual, I would be paying. There was some initial confusion about which of the four courtrooms we would still find a magistrate sitting. It turned out to be the other one in the same block where I had been coming and going with the Alhaji and Pepsi, with the same spreading almond tree in the middle, the same old man sitting under it and the same charge-and-bail lawyers looking for custom, one of whom quickly latched onto Prince.

 

It seems that the court had to be reconvened because the magistrate was getting ready to leave for the day. While we waited, the man in handcuffs, who was sitting on the concrete floor, made a drinking gesture. A shop nearby advertised ‘pure water’, so I bought two sachets and gave them to him. The woman detective smiled in approval; Baba Ibadan said that the man had raped an eight-year-old girl left in his care by his master. I don’t know what became of him because our case was called first. Prince stood in the dock, just like the tout who had run away with my phone money and looking just as bewildered. The charge was read out: hiring suspected assassins. Even I went a little weak at that. Prince was asked whether he wanted to plead guilty or not guilty. He looked to his newly acquired lawyer, who was himself getting to his feet. The lawyer gave his little speech but the magistrate, who seemed to be in a hurry, set a date for hearing one month hence and remanded him in custody on N100, 000 surety to be guaranteed by two people with landed property in Lagos State.

 

‘Oga, bring money,’ Baba Ibadan said to me.

 

‘What for?’

 

‘Abi you no see as we dey take N15 biro put person for prison,’ he said. ‘I wan’ take am go Ikoyi.’

© Adewale Maja-Pearce

 

 

Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon? A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka? From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,

and Dream Chasers.

Click here to see Maja-Pearce's amazon.com page: http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU

The House My Father Built 4

Back home, I felt shabby. How had I acted any differently from the tenants? Later that day, I went down to see Prince. He was standing on his balcony, rubbing his belly and eyeing the local talent as he nursed a huge reefer. I told him that I was thinking of leaving Pepsi and his family where they were. I didn’t tell him that the BQ wasn’t even mine. My father had given it to the younger of my two brothers in addition to his share in the main building and I was still smarting from the favouritism he had shown him. Prince considered me for a moment and then indicated that we should go inside. When we were seated, he said that I was making a mistake; that first I had to let Pepsi know who was boss by throwing him out. I could let him back in afterwards on new terms if I still felt the same way although he, personally, wouldn’t recommend it because a man who can call the police for you will do worse the next time. He was right, of course, and so, the next day, properly mobilized, off he went to bribe the High Court judge.

 

He was pleased as Punch when he returned.

 

‘I first went to greet Sunday and then I thought to check whether the judge was around. When I got to the office the clerk asked me if I wanted to see him. Just like that. The judge looked at the file and said, “Oh, you have a good lawyer. Yes, a good lawyer.” He read through the papers and said, “Oh, this is a simple case, yes, a simple case. Just tell your lawyer that it has no merit and should be struck out. No merit. That’s all.” I thanked him and asked if I could buy bread for his children. He laughed and told me to discuss it with his clerk, who demanded for N5, 000.’ He paused and watched me, waiting for the words to sink in. ‘Can you believe that?’ he continued. ‘Just N5, 000 for a whole High Court judge!’ He paused again and shook his head. ‘Naija done spoil,’ he concluded and laughed, not altogether disapprovingly.

 

And that was how it happened. But my lawyer from the fire-on-the-mountain chambers almost goofed even though Pepsi himself was absent at the hearing. Just before we entered the courtroom Prince told him that everything was sorted and he should just say blah blah blah, no problem. As he spoke, I noticed that my lawyer wasn’t paying attention, as though to say, don’t teach me my work. When our case was finally called he went into a long spiel citing this and that from all the books he had lugged along. The clerk, realizing that he was in danger of derailing, leaned over and whispered to the judge even as my lawyer prattled on. Finally, the judge raised his hand and asked him whether, in essence, he wanted the case to be struck out, whereupon my lawyer agreed and it was struck out. We immediately notified Sunday. He was happy to see us. Another payday.

 

So it was all over. Pepsi didn’t put up any resistance this time. Prince and I sat upstairs drinking beer as we watched the proceedings. It was a melancholy, overcast sort of day, always threatening to rain but never doing so and, for once, Prince wore a singlet over his protruding belly. As with the Alhaji, Pepsi had taken the precaution of stripping the place of every fixture and fitting, including the wire that ran from his meter at the front of the main building all the way to the BQ at the back. He must have done it when we were out, perhaps in revenge for me cutting his light. Replacing it alone cost me N6, 000.

 

As before, when Ngozi found herself similarly embarrassed, some of the neighbours offered space for Pepsi and his wife to store their belongings. The widow even said she could take in their daughter, but Pepsi’s wife declined. She was the one directing Pepsi where to put what. He once ventured an opinion but she shouted him down, ‘I said pack the plates, pack the plates,’ as if she was talking to a small boy, which scandalized Prince no end. One year later, I heard that Pepsi was dead. It happened that he was waiting for a customer at Ojuelegba, the busy intersection made famous by Fela from the time he lived there, when a runaway bus ploughed into him. I also heard that his widow and children were living at Akoka, just around the corner from the university. I thought of going to visit them but didn’t and then it was too late. Besides, what would I have said?

 

© Adewale Maja-Pearce

 

 

Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,

and Dream Chasers.

 

Click here to see Maja-Pearce's amazon.com page: http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU

 

The House My Father Built 3

By and by, my lawyer came back to say that all was now on course and that the eviction would be carried out the following week. Unfortunately, he failed to do the proper checks, otherwise he would have seen that Pepsi had gone down the same route as Ngozi and the Alhaji and filed a motion against the ‘purported consent judgement’ he had agreed to the previous year. As with the Alhaji, the matter had been heard in my absence and a date set for a hearing three months hence. Worse yet, we only discovered this when the bailiff and his boys came to evict him, but not before Pepsi himself received a beating.

 

The bailiff turned up with his boys just before dawn. I gave him money to go to the station to register the action and collect two policemen, as he should already have done, while the rest of us settled down in Prince’s parlour with the obligatory bottle of Chelsea and some reefers. Dawn was breaking when a jeep pulled up in front with Pepsi and four armed policemen. I was surprised because I hadn’t seen Pepsi leave. He must have been watching us from his kitchen window and had perhaps been doing so for a number of days. I went out to meet them and introduced myself as the landlord and asked them what the problem was. Their Oga said that Pepsi had come to complain about some ‘miscreants’ in the compound. I said that the only strangers around were from the High Court come to evict the very man who was making the complaint. I added that the bailiff was even now registering the matter at their station. As I spoke, they drifted back to their jeep, where they waited with bored expressions. Eventually, one of them said, ‘Oga, make we dey go, I never chop,’ and off they went.

 

Pepsi loitered about for a while, apparently confused as to what to do next, and then his wife came out and told him to go and wait at the junction. As soon as he was gone, Prince told the bailiff’s boys to follow him and keep an eye on him.

 

‘Can you imagine,’ Prince said. ‘Pepsi brought police to arrest us.’ He was incandescent, as well he might have been. ‘He is in trouble today. I was about telling the boys to go easy on him but because of this I will tell them to teach him a lesson. And it is his wife who is putting him up to it. Pepsi can’t go to police by himself.’

 

He entered his bedroom and emerged in a singlet and a flat cap. Prince favoured caps, which he pulled down low over his eyes.

 

‘Let me go and see what’s happening,’ he said and marched off with his springy step, his heels barely touching the ground, his back straight, his head held up: a man ready for action. I went upstairs to make my morning tea, but while I was waiting for the water to boil I saw a small crowd heading towards the compound. I got downstairs in time to see Pepsi being dragged along by a policeman. His feet were bare, his T-shirt was torn and blood was running down the side of his face. The policeman held him fast by the collar and the top of his shorts, which were filthy, as if he had fallen into a gutter. The bailiff’s boys followed behind, breathing heavily.

 

‘Why are you doing this to yourself?’ I said.

 

‘Do I know for him?’ the policeman quipped as he marched him to the back, where he stood him up against the wall.

 

‘Where is the key?’ the policeman demanded, pointing to Pepsi’s security gate, which was padlocked.

 

‘I don’t have it,’ Pepsi said as he crouched against the wall.

 

One of the boys kicked at the gate, which held fast. He turned to me. ‘Oga, bring money, let me go and get welder.’

 

I gave him and he set off.

 

Prince appeared. ‘His wife has the key,’ he said. ‘She’s refusing to come.’ He was breathing heavily, his big belly going up and down. He turned to me. ‘Come, let’s go inside.’ We entered his parlour, where he poured himself a generous shot of Chelsea and then told me what had happened. Apparently, they were all standing at the junction when the bailiff arrived with the two policemen. Prince pointed to Pepsi, who suddenly bolted, almost colliding with a car. The boys took off after him, closely followed by the policemen. They caught up with him at the next junction one hundred meters away ‘and beat hell out of him.'

 

‘It was terrible,’ Prince continued. ‘You should have seen him, curled up in a ball. The boys beat him for trying to get them arrested and then the police added their own for making them run this early morning. Afterwards, they carried him in the air and started coming until some people begged them to let him walk by himself for the sake of his dignity.’

 

‘What of his wife?’

 

‘That one? She just stood there and did nothing. Does she care?’

Aluta continua

© Adewale Maja-Pearce

 

 

Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,

and Dream Chasers.

Click here to see Maja-Pearce's amazon.com page: http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU