A Short Story by Myles idoko Ojabo

No Love for Biafra

By Myles Idoko OjaboMonday, June 23, 2012.

BEFORE
THE WAR

Our love, up in roaring flames

Our voice, the body of an engine

Like engine boats, we drift

Drifting over the Niger

Ozoemena spat
on the grave of his late father which was situated beside the family house he
lived in with his mother and brothers. He hated to be called an Igbo man because
of the life his father had lived. He hated every man that exhibited pride as an
Igbo. It was that selfless and appalling pride that sent his father to the
grave earlier than his time. Ozoemena drew up the sleeve of his oversized shirt
revealing a scar. The dark, vein-like blotch was the only inheritance his
barking father had left him. If Ozoemena hated his mother, it was only because of
the name she had given him. The meaning of the name, Ozoemena, spoke of a
broken affliction that her marriage had suffered.

On heading out
of the compound for the school where he heard a teacher was needed he met his
mother, who had a cluster of firewood over her head, coming back from the
market.

‘Sorry Mama, I
can’t help with the firewood. I have to see Headmaster Ofoenagoro before the
school closes.’

‘My son, if you
are dressed like that going in search of a job, be sure that you will not get
it.’

‘Are you
cursing me, Mama?’

‘Listen to my
advice and go and put on one of your brothers’ shirts.’

‘Let’s see if
you are right or not. I’m going like this,’ he said pompously, raising his
shoulders and then groping the mildly rumpled shirt.

She watched him
walk away quickly in unyielding fuming strides. The shirt he wore swayed from
side to side embracing the pressure of a hasty breeze. She nodded her head,
sighed and walked into the compound. What can she do? If only she had enough
money to get him a better shirt from Mama Nneka’s boutique. It was almost a year
since it was rumoured that a certain Odumego Ojukwu would free Igbos in Nigeria
from poverty.  

Later that
night, after she covered all the windows in her late husband’s obi with some banana leaves in
anticipation of the heavy storm that a certain traditional chief priest had
been warning everybody about, Ozoemena arrived back home. At first she thought
he had come with the menace and agony of the night, and searched his face for
his uncanny frown.

She watched him
fetch water from the jar to drink, and after a lengthy belch he burst into a
deafening laughter. ‘Ozoemena, please be quiet. Your brothers are already deep
asleep and have a long day tomorrow.’

He stopped
laughing, sniggered and replied, ‘What you and my brothers wish me didn’t work.
I am now a teacher at Saint Mary’s Secondary School, Okigwe.’ He sent his
laughter bouncing and echoing through the house. This continued until after
midnight, adding to the sound of the persisting rain tapping heavily against
the roof.

It was freezing
the next morning and she was in the market early. The shoemaker neighbour of
hers, who always shouted good morning, didn’t greet her and even ignored her
smile. ‘I heard your last son is now a teacher at Saint Mary’s,’ he would only
say, after she opened her store and began sweeping her frontage.

She swept
underneath the table where her basket of onions sat before replying, ‘Yes oh.
We can only give thanks to God.’

He wouldn’t say
more, even though he remained less busy that morning. Before she could spread
out her vegetables on the table, Mama Chichi arrived and told her about the
gossip she had heard from her neighbours. ‘They say Ozoemena used juju to get the job at Saint Mary’s.
People are angry about this oh.’

What else could
she do but shut her ears to the words that were about to take over the day. She
herself had been shocked when Ozoemena revealed the news. Days passed. Weeks
passed. And everyone in Okigwe had to embrace the intolerable truth that Ozoemena
was now a teacher.

Coming back
from the market on a certain week day, the mother met some children
bare-chested and displaying a large board in front of the compound. On the
board was a sketched human face with a massive nose, and above were the words –
‘Ozoemena the Teacher’. She gazed into the compound, and there was Ozoemena
seated in his white oversized shirt, eating from a bowl of akpu on the stool in front of him. In as much as the children
laughed and read out the words on the board, he gave them no attention. The
mother dropped the basin she was carrying, loosened her wrap and retied it,
making it firmer. She picked up some stones. On noticing this, the children
took to their heels laughing. She chased them a distance before aiming at them.
Her efforts were futile.

‘How can you
let them insult you like that?’ she confronted Ozoemena.

He hissed and
replied, ‘Why should I care? Do I not have a massive nose?’

She nodded her
head disappointedly and went into the house. When he had finished eating he
washed his hands in a calabash bowl, and then brought in the basin of cassava
she had left at the entrance of the compound.

The next day he
ran back home from work tearing off his shirt in joy. He announced the biggest
news of his existence. He had won the heart of one of his female students.
‘Nwamaka is the daughter of a rich chief in Asaba. Her father was one among the
privileged Asaba men that have visited Oyibo
land.’

‘Teacher
Ozoemena, who are you deceiving?’ his brother, Nurse Kandibe, whose face was
drawn and trounced, asked him.

‘Don’t call me
Teacher Ozoemena. The illiteracy in this house has to stop. I will make sure I
educate all of you including Mama. Because I am now a teacher doesn’t give you
the liberty to add ‘teacher’ to my name. 
Everyone in Okigwe calls you Nurse Kandibe only because of their uncivilised
and barbaric understanding.’

‘What then
should we call you?’ Maduka, his eldest brother, asked.

‘Call me Ozo
the Poet,’ he replied, smiling. ‘I used some romantic lines of poems to win
Nwamaka’s heart. Those lines put both tears and laughter on her face at the
same time.’

‘Ozo the Poet!’
Maduka hailed.

‘Ozo the Poet –
my foot!’ Nurse Kandibe added. ‘Maduka, we can’t believe him until we see him
with her. Only a mad girl will accept someone with your kind of nose.’

Maduka laughed
uncontrollably, his hands on his protruded stomach.

Laughter was
indeed cruel at times. Ozoemena had better pictures in his thoughts to nurture
and had to walk away.

*****

‘The dangling
dove that excretes love potions all over my heart,’ he sang, sighting her
approaching from a distance the next day after school. ‘The dancing damsel in
my dreams lighting up every dark part of my soul…’

She smiled
shyly, looking at the hardened ground carpeted with tiny thorns and weeds. She
had agreed to meet with him in the forest behind the school building.  Her hair was tightly woven. On her slim, tall
body the young growing breasts and widening hips were qualities he had told her
he could die for, on the cross like Jesus Christ. ‘The most beautiful of
Queens. More beautiful than Queen Cleopatra,’ he went on.

She hid her
face in his embrace, asking, ‘How many poems did you write for me today?’

He searched
himself, getting two rumpled sheets of paper out of his pockets. ‘I wrote four
exotic poems, my love.’

It was while
they were both squatted, while he was reading, giggling and coddling Nwamaka’s
attention, that Headmaster Ofonagoro lurched into their presence, the sound of
rustling grasses coming with him. The stout, bald-headed man, with cane in
hand, stamped his foot loudly, raising dust from breaking crispy leaves into
the air. ‘Ehe… Ozoemena… instead of doing what I hired you to do, you are
spoiling the girls…’

 ‘I am only reading her some poetry, sir.’

‘Reading
indeed…’ The headmaster said, beckoning his cane at them. ‘When I first heard
this, I didn’t believe it. I have been behind that iroko tree,’ he pointed, ‘…listening and seeing all that was
going on. On top of this, she is a boarding student and isn’t supposed to leave
the school premises.’

Nwamaka was on
her feet almost taking to her heels. She was shivering and tears were pouring
from her eyes.

The headmaster
shouted, ‘Stand there. I will teach you a lesson.’ He went toward her and
lifted the cane.

She closed her
eyes, squeezing more tears out. She didn’t feel the cane come down on her.
Instead she heard the sound of vigorous struggles over swishing dried leaves.
When she opened her eyes, to her surprise, Ozoemena had wrestled the headmaster
to the ground and was releasing a massive gale of blows. She had to flee.

In the
dormitory her tears rained heavily upon her bed. What will she tell her father?
What will her mother say? Her stepmothers would now have a song to sing.

Kelechi, her
friend, who was on the opposite bunk that had faint rusts at its edges, lashed
her with venomous stares. ‘What is in him even attracts you? Is it his big nose
or the big white shirt he wears to class?’

‘You cannot
understand,’ Nwamaka replied.

‘Am I blind,
Nwamaka? No girl in this entire dormitory will look at that man twice.’

‘And that’s the
difference between me and the rest of you. I am different.’ She sighed, rubbed
off her tears and rested her head on her pillow.

‘I am sorry,
Nwamaka, but your decision angers me. I feel so bitter. I wonder if you realise
the cost of this.’

The next morning
in the headmaster’s office, she stood with tears still in her eyes, her back
against the door while her father, wearing his chiefly Asaba hat and clutching
his noble walking stick, was seated listening to everything the headmaster,
with a swollen lower lip, said.

While in her
father’s car heading away from Okigwe, she sighted some women jumping in joy
and singing about a new Biafra. Her father tuned the car stereo to a broadcast
and for the first time she heard the name, Odumego Ojukwu. The man had declared
the South Eastern Region free from Nigeria. Her father said nothing. Just drove
whistling. She was scared to speak. When they got on the newly constructed
bridge over the river Niger and sighted the flag with the colour red and black,
he nodded his head and said. ‘There’s going to be war.’

*****

Ozoemena
continued preserving Nwamaka’s heart for himself, writing her poems and sending
them through some market boys that often came from Asaba to supply his mother
fresh bambara nuts. Nwamaka’s father could hawk Nwamaka away from Okigwe and
Headmaster Ofonagoro could sack him, but no one could stop his poetry from
steaming. She replied to him twice. In her first letter she claimed his poems
were her smiles. But the second letter was an agonising bomb blast in which she
revealed her father’s intention of marrying her to a soldier from the north.

Nurse Kandibe
laughed and laughed at Ozoemena’s frozen stare at the letter. ‘I know you have
been deceiving yourself.’

Maduka was
speechless at first. He drew closer to Ozoemena to read the words scrawled on
the sheet. ‘All Asaba girls are the same,’ he said. ‘Mama should have
enlightened you before you gave her your entire heart.’

When the moon
shone at its brightest later that night and Mama’s snore filled the house, he
turned on the lantern in his room, quickly squeezed two trousers and a shirt
into an old briefcase Maduka had given him, and left the house. He reached
Asaba in a noisy lorry the next afternoon. Nwamaka had told him their big house
was opposite the Anglican Cathedral and, fortuitously for him, there was no one
in Asaba that didn’t know where the Cathedral was. He had walked two kilometres
and Asaba dust had coloured the white long-sleeved shirt and brown khaki
trousers he wore. His briefcase was worse. He would beg the priests at the
Cathedral to let him do some washing so Nwamaka wouldn’t see him this
dirty.  His timing was great but there
was no time for a wash. From his hideout between the two malaina trees in front of the house he could see the impassiveness clouding
Nwamaka’s face. She was already ceremoniously dressed, having numerous red
beads around her neck, and marching in a procession. After seeing the crowd of
people in the compound eating pounded yam, he decided to sneak in. He had some
drink like any other well wisher. Had some pounded yam since he was hungry and
watched a cultural troop dance impressively. Nwamaka’s eyes met his at the
point her father, with boisterous laughter, took her hand to give it to a tall,
slim man in a colourful kaftan. She wrenched her hand away. ‘I won’t marry this
man.’

The cultural
song on the lips of the dancing troop stopped.

‘Who will you
marry then?’ her father asked, confusion and rage instantaneously settling on
his face.

Nwamaka’s stare
fell on Ozoemena.

Three soldiers
in the crowd reached for him. They dragged him out of the compound, his legs
rasping against the sandy ground. A really dark-skinned soldier with several
tribal marks on his face flogged him severely with a belt in front of the
Cathedral. Swollen, purplish marks appeared all over his weakened body. A
different soldier kicked his face when he fell flat on the ground and he could
only raise his head slightly to spit out a bloody tooth.

He thought he
heard Nwamaka scream. Since darkness had overtaken him he couldn’t search for
her face among the gathering of onlookers.

DURING THE WAR

As you drift north

I soar aimlessly on the Niger

Too rainy a month

Too dark the shore of light

While in the
back of the van lying half-conscious with the stench of Nigerian soldiers all
around him, he dreamt of Nwamaka. And in the dream he saw that she was being
dragged by the monster husband onto an aircraft. While these reeking soldiers,
chit-chatting and sniggering, were taking him perhaps back to Okigwe, their boss
was flying Nwamaka to the north. Ozoemena could only confuse his dreams and the
grubby stories of these soldiers. He felt he stank of death. It was obvious in
his gory state that he looked dead to them.

When they had
reached Okigwe, the moon was hiding behind the clouds. One of the soldiers
jumped off the van and asked a drunkard walking by the roadside for the
direction to Mama Maduka’s house. The house sat about sixty feet from them and
was beside a guava tree. They left
Ozoemena on a footpath, yards away from the house. And slowly the van ambled
away.

Nurse Kandibe,
who had wandered out to urinate near the broken wall beside his father’s grave,
had seen what looked like a bag of rice falling from the van. When he got out
of the yard the moon had appeared briefly. 
He pushed the body to lie on its side and squatted staring at the face.
It was a human being. ‘Chineke!’ he
lamented. Darkness soiled his hand as he tilted the lifeless head. Blood was
oozing from the neck down into Nurse Kandibe’s cupped hand. Mama’s scream
jolted him. He hadn’t heard her footsteps at all when she came from behind.

After placing
Ozoemena on the bed in their late father’s obi,
he soaked a towel in the steaming bowl of water, squeezed it and cleaned the
wounds. Just before dawn Ozoemena opened his eyes, staring at the door. Nurse
Kandibe wasn’t sure Ozoemena recognised him. He watched Ozoemena struggle to
his feet before offering to help him to the toilet, draping Ozoemena’s arm over
his shoulders. Ozoemena walked in agony and could only piss a few drops.

He led Ozoemena
back to the bed, placed his head gently on the pillow and watched him go back
to the unusual state of slumber. For the first time in seventeen years Nurse
Kandibe couldn’t laugh at Ozoemena. He opened the bottle of the thick purplish
GV, dipped in a finger and gently drove it into his brother’s mouth finding the
swollen gums and the space a tooth had gone missing. Nurse Kandibe needed to
sleep to be strong for the next day since he was supposed to join the youths in
the neighbourhood in constructing some basements underground that would shelter
people in case bombs came raining.  The
clinic where he worked had been closed down since it was rumoured a hospital in
Enugu had been blown up. He hoped Ozoemena would forget Nwamaka. Any sensible
Igbo man would only fight in defence of Biafra at this critical period.

Ozoemena’s
health improved quickly. It was merely a month after he had been thrown off
that van and he could now stir and swallow akamu
on his own. He could limp to the pit toilet at the back of the house, and could
even pluck mangoes using the long stick his mother kept on the roof of their
house.  Some Biafran soldiers arrived in
numbers surrounding Okigwe, increasing the town’s fear and horror. One evening,
Maduka brought home a soldier in a well ironed Biafran uniform.

‘I bring home
some good news,’ Maduka announced. ‘The men of this great family will declare
their loyalty to Biafra today.’

‘What’s good
about it? Do I look like someone who could lift a gun?’ Ozoemena asked while
leaning against a door frame.

‘I understand
your situation, Ozo. Your brothers have both agreed to join the army to defend
this land. Whenever you feel well enough you can let us know… I don’t need to
convince you. You have suffered at the hands of these Nigerian monsters and
know better.’

‘Sergeant
Onwubuariri is very right,’ Maduka added, nodding his head.

Ozomena hissed.
‘This is senseless. Even if I was as strong as Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, I will not join you
people. I cannot join a horde of nincompoops on their way to the grave.’

‘Ozoemena!’
shouted his mother, who was filling the big pot with water by the side of the
entrance door.

Even after
becoming strong enough to handle a gun and able to help Mama in the farm
weeding the grasses on the heaps fostering yam tubers, he never considered
changing his mind about joining the army. One morning shortly after the first
cockcrow, Mama languidly got up from bed and headed straight to his room to
pass on the rumour about Obollo, which was now believed to be in the hands of
Nigerian forces. A possible and imminent hit on Okigwe was now a burden to
her.  She was met with the faint smell of
a lantern’s fumes, an empty bed with turned back sheets and a flattened pillow.
She walked back to her room feeling heavy, her mind drenched in mud. Seated on
her bed beside the window she began to cry. She felt like a paper, adrift and
alone, wet and almost drowning. Her sons were all out there, in front of both
seen and hidden nozzles.

It was only
after a couple of days that bombs rained down from Nigeria’s fighter jets on
Okigwe. Mama snatched the sheets off her bed and ran underneath the star-like
lights of aircraft all over the dark sky and among screaming and scuttling
children and women on bare feet. Mama survived it, clutching shivering children
and some teenage mothers under the ground. She wasn’t unfortunate like her
sister, Mama Ndidi whose body a missile tore through. The pot on her head
filled with water fetched from the stream shattered half a yard in front of her
gory body. Why on earth would she go to the stream an hour before midnight?
After Nigerian soldiers had dug them out of their hiding underground, they were
all marched to a deserted secondary school where a Hausa soldier attained a
position in front of them and said, ‘We are friends. We are one Nigeria. Our
mission is to keep Nigeria one. ’

Amidst the
fear, silence and panic of her own people, Mama soon fell on her knees and
whispered a prayer for her sons. Her forehead was moist with sweat.

‘Hey woman,’ a
tall slender soldier shouted at her. ‘Get up and follow me.’

‘Chineke!’ She lamented quietly catching
a wink of this same soldier at one of his colleagues. This time she prayed in
her heart as she ambled after the soldier that God should cause her to
menstruate even though it had only been two weeks since the last one.   

A yellow
learner airplane scrambled into the sky and a tumble of cloud rested on some
bare hills. While she had been praying, Ozoemena was amidst some fellow Igbo
men packed in the back of a truck heading over the River Niger towards the
River Benue. The driver was a Tiv man who had told them about the absence of
war in Otupko and Makurdi.

‘To be sure…
very sure about your safety, I can get you all to Makurdi. Otupko is safe but
one can never tell if Ojukwu might want to move toward that direction provoking
more tension,’ said the man in a perceptive and thoughtful voice, after
collecting over 300 Nigerian pounds from one of them, a desperate man from
Onitsha whom Ozoemena had bumped into in Okigwe.

‘I heard our
Igbo poet, Christopher Okigbo, was killed in a village not far from Otupko by
Nigerian soldiers. There’s no way I am getting off at Otupko,’ the Onitsha man
said. ‘My family left the country ahead of me and I promised I would join them
as soon as I could but right now it all looks bleak.’

All of them,
apart from Ozoemena, were fleeing from war, from the crushing power of poverty.
They had no choice. 

‘It’s better to
get to Makurdi. My sister’s husband said Igbos catch buses going to Cameroon
from there,’ another man said.

‘My fear is on
this road. Nigerian soldiers are bound to surprise us,’ a fair skinned man
squatted next to the Onitsha man said.

‘The driver
claimed to be the father of a respected Nigerian soldier. Any Nigerian soldier
should listen to him,’ Ozoemena said and cleared his throat. His furtive plan
was to find a lorry heading to Maiduguri from Makurdi. He had to find Nwamaka.

And of course,
they met a road block and were all ordered down.

The Tiv man
protested, ‘I am the father of Major-General Tsav…’

A full bearded
Nigerian soldier responded pointing a gun and pulling the trigger. Blood
spilled against Ozoemena’s face as the driver slumped to his knees. They were all
forced to lie flat on their stomachs. The soldiers, about seven in number,
searched their bodies.

Ozoemena’s
heart was filled with Nwamaka’s images. So this was it. Death was staring
boldly at his face and even became restive flapping its wing inside him as
though a bee clinging on to the inside wall of dog’s nose. A chubby and
double-chinned soldier Ozoemena believed to be Yoruba, found some of the sheets
in his pockets. They had poems he had written while in deep thought shortly
after he had recovered in Okigwe. He watched the soldier smile and snort,
cheeks spreading like tearing a loaf of white bread, while he read through the
lines. Ozoemena tried to imagine how Christopher Okigbo could have been killed.
Perhaps tied to a car and driven around the village square somewhere in Idoma
land.

Their hands
were tied behind them and they were forced into the back of the same truck. Two
soldiers with their guns held firmly stayed with them all through the bumpy
ride that lasted five hours. In Makurdi, they were taken to a military
detention. Ozoemena had a cell to himself, and had eba and a watery soup once a day. On one hot afternoon, while
sweating and struggling to breath, positioning his nose in front of the small
cell window, he heard a sound at his door. It was unlocked and the
double-chinned soldier that had his poems entered. ‘Would you like to have some
air?’

‘I wouldn’t
mind.’

As they walked
out of the gates, it came to Ozoemena’s realisation that the detention centre
was in a barrack. He saw the statue of a soldier perhaps clinging on to a full
blown parachute at the centre of a roundabout. There were lines of
indistinguishable brown houses on the street at the end of the roundabout.

‘Where did you
get those poems from?’ the soldier asked, commandingly, his face fixed right in
front of them.

‘I wrote them.’

‘Are you a
poet?’

‘Not really. I
write for a woman I love.’

‘You do not
have to lie about who you are… Are you a poet?’

‘Only the woman
I love reads what I write… Yes, on one hand I am a poet.’ Ozoemena felt a
gentle wind hitting his face and noticed the soldier’s stare settling on him.
His sweaty face got drier. ‘Before the war she used to be my student. We had
fallen in love and my poetry became her idol. When the principal of the college
realised this, he didn’t only fire me but expelled her. Her name was Nwamaka.
Her father then married her off to a soldier, a northerner. During the wedding
in Asaba, I had surfaced and I received the most terrible omen that kept me in
bed for months until the war started. I was beaten senseless by soldiers. I
lost a tooth.’ He opened his mouth displaying the gap. ‘I couldn’t walk on my
own for nearly sixty days.’

‘You make a
soldier want to cry, my dear poet. Do you know you are treated differently
compared to the other Igbo men? I knew you were all non-Biafran soldiers but my
superior thinks otherwise. The reason I spare you of all the brutalities that
the others face is because of my wife. My wife likes the poems. It might
surprise you she is Igbo. Only a few know this because she has adopted my
culture. She speaks Yoruba like she’s really a Yoruba woman. I told her I wrote
them for her and she has never been so joyous since our wedding day. Now she
wants more and I have no other option than to come to you…’

‘I don’t know
her and understand what she likes…’

‘Write it as if
you are writing to Nwamaka, and I will adjust it to suit. That’s exactly what I
did to the other ones.’ The soldier smiled, his cheeks spreading. ‘I am a
specialist in adding ingredients, changing taste.’

Ozoemena had
found a new friend who provided him more food and candles and sheets at night.
Just before Christmas the soldier, who he now called Major Ibikunle, put him on
a military lorry filled with policemen heading to Maiduguri, wished him good
luck and waved his hand with tears in his eyes. Even though the blood of
Biafran soldiers might be encrusted beneath Major Dauda Ibikunle’s fingernails,
Ozoemena will try to post him more poems.

Once let off
the lorry in Maiduguri, the sun tore through his skin. The population of men
and women in respective kaftans and hijabs was a spectacle. A policeman had
cautioned him before the drop-off, telling him to be wary of Hausas. ‘About
three Igbo traders were hung from a tree and burnt,’ the policeman warned.

In the brown,
short-sleeved shirt gifted to him by Major Ibikunle, he sauntered through the
central market wondering where to start his search. The Major had told him
there was hardly a person in Maiduguri who wouldn’t know Nwamaka’s husband, Colonel
Mamman Baga. It wasn’t the case. He couldn’t even find anyone who could speak
English. And when he did, the banana-seller who gave him a banana for free said
he didn’t know any soldier with such a name.

He slept along
with some Moslems outside a Mosque in the market during the night after each
day’s fruitless wandering, befriending soldiers he met, inquiring from them if
they knew Colonel Baga. Then he would return to the Mosque to eat leftovers
reserved for him before sleeping. He began worshipping like his new friends
did, even though his beliefs still lingered at Saint Augustine, in Okigwe where
he was baptised. He got to know a few Hausa words after a month. One evening
after wandering about, one of his new friends pointed at a man saying, ‘That na your brother.’

It was a man
leaning against the body of a mango tree, fetching pints of snuff and throwing
it into his nostrils. He was nodding his head indulgingly when Ozoemena got in
front of him. The man, who wore a kaftan like any other Maiduguri man, didn’t
look Igbo at all and kept his beard like they all did.

‘Are you really
Igbo?’

‘Only a few
people know… and I like it that way. It’s safer. Not that they might kill me
if they knew. It’s all for the sake of my business,’ Alhaji Maxwell said. ‘Someone
hinted to me about you before today. I can only be sure you came here because
of the war.’

‘Nobody seems
to care about the war in this part of Nigeria. But I heard three Igbo men were
killed.’

‘That’s a lie.
People here are friendly unlike the people in Kano. It was in Kano that Igbos
were beheaded.’

‘Where are you
from?’

‘Obollo. You?’

‘Okigwe.’

 ‘I have a fleet of taxis in this town – that’s
my business. I pretend to worship their Allah and I also married a Maiduguri
woman,’ Alhaji Maxwell said, nodding his head. ‘How did you come to Maiduguri?’
he asked. He was tall and as skinny as a young girl, and didn’t have the
mystery of an Igbo trader.

Ozoemena wanted
to tell him of Nwamaka but changed his mind. He might sound irrational. At
least not now. ‘I was captured by Nigerian soldiers who thought I was a Biafran
soldier and was in detention in Makurdi for nearly six months. A kind Nigerian
soldier, who had an Igbo wife, had pity on me and sent me here in a lorry
filled with policemen.’

Alhaji Maxwell
sniffed in more snuff and slightly tapped his head with his left palm. ‘I used
to have a big cloth factory in Kano. I knew going back to Biafra would be worse
after they burnt down my business. I had the knowledge that Gowon would stop
food from entering Igbo land and I had to use my head when almost every Igbo
man and woman was forced back on a train.’

Ozoemena
already liked the man. There was something about him. An insane quality about
the his smile, and also a deep reassuring undertone to his voice