Time
I was crying. I couldn’t stop crying. Zina’s phone kept ringing.
‘Please, please pick up,’ I begged the invisible Zina on the other end.
On the very last ring, Zina answered, her voice frail like she’d been crying. ‘This isn’t a good time, Eriife. But in case you’re calling because you saw me at the toll, I’m fine, I left early.’
The spectral hand around my rib cage loosened just a little. ‘Zina, my daughter,’ I choked out. ‘Please, I need your help.’
Zina was many things – erratic, audacious, impetuous – but she wasn’t cruel. ‘What happened to your daughter?’
‘She was at the toll,’ I sobbed. ‘I can’t find her anywhere.’
‘I can’t hear you well,’ Zina said, her end of the line crackling. The network was still unstable around the island.
‘My daughter, she was at the toll.’
Zina was immediately alert. ‘Have you tried her phone number?’
I tried to steady my voice. ‘Yes, it’s not going through. Her phone is switched off.’
‘Do you have a recent picture? Send it to me and meet me at the Lekki Phase 1 gate,’ Zina said. I could already hear the jangle of her keys.
Soye had already left with his security detail. Before he’d left, we’d searched the house – the extra bedrooms, the other living rooms, the guest house – screaming Adelola’s name. We tried her phone number as we moved through the rooms, then the gateman informed us she’d left through the back gate sometime after 4pm.
‘How didn’t you notice? What kind of mother are you?’ Soye screamed in my face before he stormed out, clutching his phone to his ear as he made desperate phone calls to his contacts.
Fifteen minutes after our call, Zina was already parked at the gate. Gunshots were still ringing, the source uncertain as the soldiers had already left; eyewitnesses would later say the police had returned to finish what the army started. Someone had set the toll gate on fire and the flames blazed upwards, like a beacon.
I sent the driver back, not wanting to put him at risk, and got into Zina’s car. A scarf was tied around the cornrows on her head – she hadn’t bothered with a wig – and her blouse looked like it had been pulled on in a hurry.
‘Ego will meet us on the way,’ she informed me as soon as I was seated and set the car into motion.
On the way, she told me several injured protesters had been taken to hospitals that had volunteered free care for the wounded. I no longer ran the clinic, but I called the management to suggest they do same.
‘It’s not safe to go towards the toll; the soldiers have carried most of the bodies away,’ Zina said. ‘We should check hospitals first, if we don’t find her.’ At the mention of the possibility, I burst into another bout of tears. ‘We can check the shanty towns around. Some people ran in that direction when the shooting started.’
We drove slowly, paying attention to every movement around us, checking the few faces we saw, hoping to see Adelola amongst them, and stopping to pick up injured people or those who just needed help getting away from the scene. Was this what it felt like to live in a war zone?
The first hospital was overladen with the injured, fully in a state of mayhem. The hallways, beds and corridors crowded with bleeding heads, arms and legs. Physicians and nurses ran around attending to the most critical first, like the man who had received two bullet shots at the side of his chest. We searched the wards, bed to bed, and showed the frazzled nurses pictures, asking if they’d seen a patient that looked like her. Ego arrived as we left the first hospital; we hadn’t found Adelola.
She looked between our disappointed faces. ‘Any luck?’ she asked.
Zina shook her head slowly. I covered my face with my hands and wept. I felt their arms engulf me.
It was the same at the next hospital and the next and the next, until we’d searched five hospitals. As daybreak approached, the darkness already beginning to lift, Zina suggested we try one more hospital before heading towards the shanty town.
We found her there, unconscious with a head trauma and attached to a ventilator. A kind someone had brought her in after she’d fallen in the stampede that had followed the beginning of the shooting. She wasn’t yet stable, but the doctors were hopeful she would survive.
Outside the hospital walls, anarchy was unleashed, security agents conveniently absent from every corner as complexes were looted, homes robbed, people harassed and shops burned, many losing lifetime investments. The message: they were willing to let the city burn to bring the people to heel. A 24-hour curfew was announced, closely followed by an announcement of a three-day curfew.
The governor gave a speech, a poor-spirited and cowardly speech. I fumed as I watched on the large TV screen from Adelola’s bedside. ‘For clarity, it is imperative to explain that no sitting governor controls the rules of engagement of the army… while we pray for swift recovery for the injured, we are comforted that no fatalities were recorded as widely circulated on the social media,’ he said.
A coordinated campaign of misinformation had already begun, first with the army denying any involvement in the attack on protesters, then systemic circulation of falsified images and videos to make it appear as though there were no casualties. By the third day, I’d begun questioning my own sanity. Were it not for Ego and Zina assuring me that they’d also joined the livestream and witnessed the massacre, and Adelola’s unconscious state, I might have believed that it had all been a figment of my imagination.
The president was more forthright. ‘Did this man just basically say the international community should mind its business?’ Zina asked, disbelieving from the other side of the room.
‘It sounded more like “if you protest again, I’ll have you killed. We’re doing our best,”’ Ego said. She sounded resigned, and I wished she hadn’t returned to the country – another mishap I was to blame for.
‘People are yet to bury their dead and this is the insensitive nonsense we have to listen to?’ Zina said. She sent me an apologetic glance. I didn’t mind the conversation, it kept me from thinking; not thinking was the best thing I could do.
They had not left my side since I’d called Zina in desperation. When one left to shower and return with food, the other stayed behind to keep me company. The first morning I was alone with Ego, I finally had the opportunity to apologise like I’d been meaning to.
‘I knew you were sorry. I just didn’t want to hear it,’ she said to me with an understanding smile.
But I needed to explain. ‘It’s not an excuse but I knew how powerful the people behind Kamsi were. I told myself I was trying to protect you, but I was being a coward and protecting Soye’s position.’
She put a hand over mine. ‘Let’s talk about it later.’
Soye had Adelola moved to the ICU of our private hospital with foreign doctors and nurses. While we waited for her to wake up, he stayed away, checking on his business interests. At the end of each day, he called me, demanding, ‘Is she awake yet?’ We didn’t speak otherwise.
The media were wary of letting the government propaganda define the narrative around the events of the movement and took to the streets to gather evidence as to what really happened at the Lekki toll gate.
What took place after the military left? Who set the toll on fire? Why were gunshots still heard until the early hours of the following day? Had the curfew allowed the authorities time to cover up? It was all shrouded in unspeakable darkness. The government threatened sanctions even as interviews and eyewitness accounts were broadcast.
‘There is no scratch of blood anywhere there,’ the state governor asserted in an interview with CNN, but bodies had floated up the lagoon and behind people’s homes. Residents of the shanty town claimed there had been more, many who would retain that unresolved status of ‘missing’. Months later, the state government would announce plans to clear out the slum.
In the shadow of the aftermath of the massacre, messages poured in from within the region and across the Atlantic, many in condemnation of the state-inflicted violence on its citizens, but some called for ‘calm and dialogue between parties’, and it made me wonder how we were meant to negotiate with the barrel of a gun.
