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Revisiting A Journal Entry
He had caught grenades with his bare
hands and turned them into inconsequential specks of dust. He carried
with him a staff that had deflected a torrent of bullets. He had
converted would-be assassins to his flock on the spot, singling
them out from a crowd of thousands. They all swore they had seen
this with their eyes.
He could appear and disappear. Just like that; one minute he was
there and the next he was gone. They said he had been ‘cooked’
with the most potent juju; he had spent six days and six nights
in the forbidden forests of Oku. Justice was on his side they insisted,
but most of all, the medicine people, from the Aghem thunder-makers
to the Batibo spirit-catchers, were on his side. He was untouchable.
The uniformed goons couldn’t touch him. He was divine. He
was truth. They couldn’t lay their accursed hands on him for
he was the honey-tongue genie of elusive dreams with the power to
conjure the apocalypse.
So, he was a messiah, our own latter-day saint.
In our sleepwalking dreams, we heard bullets singing hosannas to
the moon. We saw rebels in brand new boots hiding in the shadows
across the border, bidding their time, just waiting, to unleash
fleeting justice — vengeance on our omnipresent malefactor.
They never came.
Words were hurled like grenades toward the fort protecting the source
of our collective misery, the oracle of our destiny. Power to the people! We shall overcome! Suffer Don Finish! But, the suffering
had just begun, so after the political circus of those years we
found ourselves making frequent trips to the latrine to rid ourselves
of nauseating slogans.
*
Enow was with me when I heard that
my father had been put under house arrest. It was a Friday evening.
He was with me at the house of the Vice Principal, Mrs. Daniel,
later that day when she granted me permission to go home the next
morning. That night, he volunteered to accompany me to town and
then spend a day with his family. We set out before dawn, knowing
that there was a chance we might have to walk all the way. It would
have been a two-and-a-half-hour walk.
We tore through the morning fog, marching on the thorny grass of
a nearby abandoned airstrip. It was still dark when we emerged in
front of the erstwhile popular Safari Hotel, its cobble-stone walls,
the only relic of civilization in this part of the savannah. As
we hit the road, we ran into the bread delivery car, which was returning
from making a delivery in our school. The battered accumulation
of moving metal, a Toyota DX in a past life, was driving along with
no lights. The driver, a loquacious character with dodgy eyes and
a torn shirt on his bony frame, spent most of the trip posing questions
and reminding us, at least a dozen times, how lucky we were to have
come across him. He said the city was dead. He boasted that very
few people had the heart to make this trip. ‘E no easy but
a no di fear die,’ he said, ‘man must chop o!’
By the way, why were we going to the city? Save for a funeral
or serious sickness in the family, we had no business going to the
city. How were we going to get back? Had we heard some people
had been arrested? Others had been killed! Did we know that
the town was under siege? There were even rumours of war.
Rebels trained in Nigeria! Rumours of war, he whispered….
Eventually, we arrived in Bamenda without incident, after taking
back roads that neither Enow nor myself, who traveled the road frequently,
knew existed. We paid him, thanked him and bade him farewell.
It was Saturday morning. The road from Bali Park through Azire,
going past Metta quarters all the way to the city center was deserted
- except for a few passers by and the occasional military truck.
The trucks looked like giant insects, patrolling the streets, filled
to the brim with combat ready troops petting their guns, eyes reddened
as if anticipating a fight. - A fight with a non-existent enemy.
Commercial Avenue was dead…The cluster of buzzing okrika
sheds that animated the cracked asphalt and crammed sidewalks on
regular days was empty, the skeleton of the sheds covered and sheathed
from the November dust. A gut-wrenching silence resonated in the
emptiness. They were no fruit sellers, no honking taxis, no akara sellers, no blaring speakers, no market women, and no newspaper boys.
It was as if there was no news to report, as though life had come
to a sudden halt. The banks, clothing shops, handicraft center,
restaurants and bars were all closed. The market was closed. It
was as if the weather had conspired with the troops: the clouds
on that Saturday morning were gray. Bamenda was gray. A quiet hum
seemed to resonate from the depths of its being, a dirge of sorts;
a blues song to commemorate a city’s coma.
We walked right into this coma.
We took the back roads from City Chemist Roundabout through Ntamulung
all the way to Nkwen. Occasionally, we would come across people
carrying bundles and bags headed for their respective ancestral
villages. It was one of them who alerted us of the different checkpoints
around the city. There was one on Finance junction and another on
Mile 2 Nkwen, but there were others in Ntarinkon, Azire Old Church
Junction amongst other locations. Yet, the most notorious was the
one on Mile 2 Nkwen, which had already earned itself a reputation
for its heavy-handedness, and most certainly its cruelty. It was
the one to avoid, they warned. The troops stationed in Nkwen were
the most vicious, from the Koutaba barracks.
Enow and I passed through Ntamulung onto Ghana Street in Nkwen before
going our separate ways. I had a hill to climb and he had a few
slums to navigate, if he wanted to avoid the Mile 2 checkpoint,
which was on the main road to Foncha Street, his destination. I
ascended the Sisia hill to avoid the checkpoint at Finance Junction.
From a distance I could see the blue-greenish clump of troops regulating
movement in the main artery of the city, the station hill. I took
a trail through Sisia all the way to my neighborhood, climbing the
hill, avoiding the main road. When I emerged on the streets of Up
Station, one of the first persons I saw was my Auntie T in the distance,
carrying a food flask and coming from the direction of the Brigade
Mixte Mobile. Without even uttering a word, what had seemed like
mystifying puzzles the previous day began to unravel. The answers
revealed themselves. He was imprisoned after all, not just under
house arrest.
Our house was not immune to the grayness of the weather that morning.
The whiff of power, unrestrained in its posture and rude in its
manners, still permeated the hallways of our home. It was in my
room. It was in my brother’s voice; in my cousins’ eyes.
It had lurched into the sanctity of my parents’ bedroom. Power,
prying and guiltless, had forced itself into the intimacy of our
home, desecrating its sacredness and homeliness. Three weeks after
the invasion, my mother’s bruises had not healed. She had
been kicked repeatedly in the shin the morning of the invasion when
she tried to block soldiers from forcing themselves into their room.
She still projected strength, but the ghosts of that morning now
hovered around her like invisible sentinels, a shadow on her beam.
The fingerprints of power were on every wall. The telephone lines,
which were cut during the invasion, crisscrossed the yard, a serpentine
monument to their callousness. It was a reminder of our powerlessness
in the face of such power.
In the parlour, inside the glass cabinet that ran across the wall
was a picture of my father wearing a full gray beard and a brown
Kaunda suit, an easy smile on his face. The photo was courtesy of
a representative of the National Human Rights Commission, an official
smokescreen, as a gesture of goodwill and as proof that nothing
had happened to him. At the time the picture was taken no visitations
were allowed for family members, my mother included. So, there he
was, gray and frail but smiling assuredly. Smiling, perhaps, at
the comedy beneath the on-going tragedy.
Right before dark, my older brother, his friend and I arrived at
Bali Park, where I would get transportation to school. There were
at least three cars waiting in line, willing to defy the curfew
and take their chances with the dozen or so lingering passengers
hoping to catch a ride to the village. Some of the passengers readily
confessed that they were escaping the coming war. Like me, a lot
of the passengers were leaving behind the wreckage of misplaced
rage, the duplicity of pseudo-messiahs, the helplessness of arrested
citizens, an empty market and a desolate city. Unlike them, I was
forever altered, but returning to school and my own version of normalcy.
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