Adelola’s entrance into our lives motivated me to have children, if anything, to assuage my pride. I began treatments in earnest and reduced my hours at the clinic. Then the doctor recommended I remove my womb.
Radio Democratic Nigeria was Soye’s claim to fame. A radio station broadcast in hiding as the military dictatorship clamped down on dissent following the annulment of the ’93 elections. Soye had led marches demanding a return to democracy, and the government had come after them with a vengeance. Many fled the country, others not so fortunate were abducted, tortured and jailed. On the run and at the height of oppression, Soye and several others launched a guerrilla radio station. The government intensified its search, and several of them were taken in the most unlikely of circumstances, many never to see the light of day again. But they’d given their lives for a noble cause, to see their country free, democratic.
It was this goodwill that allowed Soye to permeate the political space, ascending from a lowly local government chairman to a state legislative member. Before Radio Democratic Nigeria, Soye had considered himself a disciple of Awolowo – a democratic hero – espousing his politics, consuming his books, reciting his speeches verbatim, blind to his flaws. By ’91, he’d participated in his first protest as a secondary school student, against another military dictator and was detained at the local army barracks until his mother came to plead on his behalf that he was only a boy who had no knowledge of left from right.
In the early days of our relationship, Soye spoke of the state of the country often – what it could be and the role he intended to play within it. My mother had lived most of her life under the instability of military dictatorships. She’d witnessed Nigerian independence, the coup that came only six years later and the civil war it led to, the rotations of military governments afterwards, the assassinations and brief whiffs of democracy. And I thought that my meeting Soye was a sign; it would be only right that I played a part in creating a country she’d longed for but had never gotten to see.
For the ’99 elections, we went door to door, convincing reluctant voters, galvanising support for party candidates and hiring buses to transport people to polling units. On Democracy Day, we set up a canopy on campus and shared packs of jollof rice even though our candidate had lost the presidential elections. Soye appeared in a white agbada and green cap, and every time the hired cameraman passed, he said excitedly, ‘Let’s take a picture, let’s take a picture’. For him, it hadn’t mattered that we’d lost – Nigeria had won.
Otunba Bankole’s Prado Jeep was parked in our compound when I returned from the clinic weeks later; as one of Soye’s benefactors, he visited often. Technically, I didn’t need to go into the clinic much. Soye had seen to that when he’d built a private clinic and staffed it, but going in reminded me of the reasons I’d chosen to become a doctor, and gave me a purpose outside being Soye’s handbag, as Onomavwe had put it.
Otunba Bankole was chewing on a fried chicken thigh when I walked in, his lips glazed with oil; in front of him was a wide serving stool crowded with plates of chicken, a bottle of red wine and a wine glass. His skin was a splotchy shade of yellow with green veins that protruded, like he’d tried to use bleaching creams but only had access to the cheap ones. But Otunba was anything but cheap. It was whispered that he’d made his money at the start of the internet boom via wire wire or credit card fraud and still ran a small unit of boys in America who remitted money regularly to him to be laundered. Like many big men, he dispensed a decent proportion of his wealth on two items: women and politics.
I knelt to greet him. He tapped my back with the side of his wide monogrammed fan. ‘Stand up, stand up. Thank you, my daughter,’ then to Soye, he said, ‘She’s so well behaved, I’m always surprised that she’s not Yoruba. It’s our women that understand respect like this, even her name belongs to us.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ Soye responded, beaming like a proud father.
I took a seat. ‘Is that enough? Should I get you anything else?’
‘No, no. I’m fine. It’s good you’re back. I was just asking your husband to help me with advice for a small problem I have. But now that you’re here, I think you’d give me better advice. You’re a smart woman.’
‘Ah, of course. Any way I can help you, Otunba,’ I said.
‘Thank you my dear. It’s my second and third wives. The second, Bosede, is really jealous of my girlfriends. I’ve tried and tried to talk to her but she won’t listen, in fact, she wants to call her people to negotiate a separation. If I didn’t keep girlfriends after marrying my first wife, would she have become my second? You women can be so unreasonable sometimes. We men are born polygamists, forget all this white people nonsense. A man keeping other women doesn’t make him a bad person.’ He shook his head, sincerely wounded.
‘And your third wife, Otunba?’ I asked.
‘Ireti? That one is a completely different story. She doesn’t even act like I exist, whether I come or go isn’t her problem, as long as her account is topped up every month, she is fine. I would have suspected her of having a boyfriend but she’s always with women. In fact, I think she might be a lesbian. Your husband here said I should hire a private investigator to trail her.’ I sent Soye an astonished look. ‘But I think that might be a little too much. My dear, what do you think?’
Soye blinked quickly at me from his end of the room. I looked away and pretended to think before I told Otunba what I knew he hoped to hear. ‘Otunba, you know we women are emotional, they should know you’re an elderly man, they shouldn’t be troubling you like this.’ Otunba nodded appreciatively. ‘I think hiring a private investigator to trail your Aunty Ireti might be too much but you can try speaking to her to find out if she’s unhappy about something, maybe she feels you’ve been giving too much attention to your other wives and she’s jealous; women express jealousy in different ways. Aunty Bosede is also jealous and is expressing hers more vocally. Try to appease her by opening a new shop for her or paying for a trip to Dubai. Women like things like these.’
Otunba’s face brightened, making it appear waxy, as a smile stretched from one side to the other. He turned to Soye. ‘You should count yourself lucky; you married a very wise woman. Do you know that?’
Soye bowed his head slightly. ‘Ah, yes, sir. I’m very aware.’
I excused myself from their midst a few minutes later, citing tiredness. As always, it was in my absence that the conversation about the real reasons behind Otunba’s visit started. I passed by the corridor adjoining the living room to catch snatches of their conversation. Soye was speaking. ‘How much is that?’ I peeped in. They were writing on plain paper like secondary school boys doing their homework.
‘Two hundred million.’
‘Good,’ Soye said. ‘We can include another two hundred thousand naira contract under the state agric ministry. I’ll call the commissioner first thing tomorrow morning. The budgets will still come to our committee for approval anyway, we’ll make sure you’re not left out.’
‘So that’s five projects now?’ Otunba asked.
‘Yes,’ Soye said, drawing a double line under a sum.
‘Soye, you’ve done well.’
‘Otunba, it’s the little I can do for financing our campaigns.’
Otunba relaxed deeper into the settee. ‘It’s because you’re an honest boy, you think so. You sponsor some of these nonsense boys and they forget you once they get into power and start misbehaving. They give all the contracts to their family and friends and forget those who helped them thinking four years is forever. But you? You’re loyal.’
Soye laughed, that same fawning laughter. ‘Thank you, Otunba.’
There was a time Soye would have denounced behaviour such as this. In fact, it had been one of the improprieties he’d held up against the military regimes, Fela’s ‘Army Arrangement’ his anthem as he berated them: ‘Thieving bastards!’ But that was before he’d understood how campaigns worked, the requirement to settle people, the ease with which they could be bought – a bag of rice, oil, fees for the children’s next terms.
And I’d long accepted that in criticising others, we overinflated our own perceived righteousness. We claimed to loathe power, but in truth, we worshipped it, eager for our own opportunity for a whiff of its might. In the meantime, we told lies, beautiful lies to appease the conscience we claimed to possess.
Otunba swished wine about his wine glass, exhibiting the placid contentment characteristic of the Nigerian wealthy.
‘Otunba, what about Agude that you sponsored for governorship? I heard he won. How is that going?’ Soye asked, to fill in the silence, I felt.
Otunba hissed. ‘That fool? He was humble and grovelling when he was still looking for a ticket. Within how many weeks, he’s already arresting people that criticised him instead of focusing on important things. I don’t want my name associated with such nonsense. If anybody asks you, I don’t know him.’
33
Spoils of war
My great-great grandfather – my father’s father’s father’s father – fought in the First World War, recruited by the colonial masters to fight on behalf of their government and king. He’d witnessed the amalgamation of the Northern and Southern protectorates – for budget deficit reasons – to become Nigeria. He’d been a storyteller, and so he told his son, who’d told his own son, until it got to my father.
His son would serve in the Second World War, and his grandson – my grandfather – would keep the uniforms hung as a reminder of our history in the library of his corrugated sheet-roofed house.
My grandfather was a learned man and my first introduction to politics. In his library, where the bookcases brimmed with aged, scuffed spines and the breeze from the window made the uniforms sway like reluctant flags, he told me the stories his father had told him, and passed on his informed views on the politics of the country. I was the only grandchild interested in his stories, the only one willing to sit quietly in a locally crafted chair for hours as he narrated events and postulations I didn’t always understand, nodding anyway because I was aware it made him happy.
Unlike my parents, he hadn’t been brought up under the fist of military coup rotations, and unlike me, he hadn’t been subjected to a revised history while the perpetrators still dwelt in our midst; his mind was unfettered in a way ours weren’t, in a manner we didn’t even know we were handicapped. He’d been a witness to the nation at different phases: reluctant colonial union, hopeful democratic nation, plaything for a selected ruling class.
When the civil war broke out in ’67, he declined to take up the uniform like his fathers before him – he would not fight for a cause he didn’t believe in. ‘The coup should never have happened in the first place; it became a justification for future atrocities,’ my grandfather always espoused, his thick-lensed round glasses making his eyes appear smaller than they were, like narrow slits in a wall. Other times, he was more agitated: ‘Ironsi made a mistake tearing up the regional governance agreement. A big mistake! This country is not meant to be centrally governed, we are a nation of over three hundred tribes and five hundred languages forced together into cohabitation by the imperialists. Those who won the civil war have taken up the country as spoils of war while the people continue to suffer.’
Perhaps it was because he was from the middle belt and a minority tribe and so he viewed his surroundings without the arrogance the major tribes possessed, refusing to admit the wrongs of the past, the ills others had been subjected to; one side in particular denying it had committed a colonial-assisted genocide.
