‘Stone them!’ Another said:
‘BURN THE VAN!’
The thugs went on whipping till a fierce crowd of men surged over them. When the thugs reappeared they were almost naked. The women, with a special vengeance, cracked firewood and planks on their heads. And a smallish woman, whose three childrenwerestillsufferingtheworst effectsofthepoisoning,wasseenrushingfrom her house, shouting:
‘I’mgoingto pour boilingwater on them! CLEAR THEWAY-O!’
And people cleared a way for her and she emptied the basin of boilingwater on to the thugs who were hiding at the back of the van; they screamed and scattered everywhere, tripping over their garri bags, falling over the furious bodies, and when they hit the ground the crowd lashed at them with whips and sticks and when they ran the crowd pursued and stoned them. The thugs ran, pleading, but no one listened, and they were stoned till they were bloody all over. They fled into the mudflats and the marshes and a contingent of people followed them. The thugs waded thigh-deep in marsh and brackish waters and disappeared into the wild forests; the contingent returned with the news, their anger unabated.
Only the driver was left in the van. The violence had so stimulated the people that we set about punishing the vehicle, kicking and denting its bodywork, hitting its tin and aluminium construct with metal rods and firewood, and the van did not scream, and so chanting and cursing, we gathered and heaved all our energies together and lifted it and tipped it on its side and, with the tentative agility of a cockroach, the driver clambered out and managed the distinction of being the only one to escape without a beating, for as soon as he got out he fled down the street towards Madame Koto’s bar, where he was offered invincible asylum.
The van stayed overturned. Through the night people went on sporadically wreaking their impotent vengeance on the van. They went on even when we heard that a truckload of policemen were on their way, armed with guns and batons. By the time the policemen arrived the impotent rage had turned sulphurous; burning brands had been stuck into the petrol tank and the night exploded into yellow incandescence at the same moment that the policemen, barkingorders, blowingwhistles, jumped down fromtheir trucks. They stoodaroundwatchinghelplessly asthevanburstintoflames and thunder. They questioned a few people but everyone had just arrived, just been awoken from sleep, no one had seen or heard anything, and the police took in five suspects.They couldn’t doanythingabouttheflamingvan,whichcrackedtheairina final spasmic explosion. All night the van smouldered and the fire brigade did not cometoput out theflames.Andit wasonly whenthepolicewerepullingawaythat we saw the faces of those taken in for questioning. The photographer was one of them. He had managed to get rid of the evidence that was his camera. He looked stony-eyed and brave. He waved at us as they dragged him away.
The burnt van stayed in the street for a long time. At night shadows came and scavenged the engine. One morning we woke to find that it had been uprighted and moved as though the night had been attempting to drive it away. The children of the area found in it a temporary new plaything. We learned how to drive it, wrenching around its steeringwheel, takinglongjourneys across great wastes of fantasies.
Rain poured on the burnt van, the sun and the dust bleached its paint, and after a while all the big flaking letters of the party’s insignia were obliterated, and nothing was left to identify the vehicle, or to rescue it from forgetfulness. It wasn’t long before it vanished from the street, not because it was no longer there, diminishing with each day’s sunglare, but becausewehad stopped noticingit altogether.
The photographer was released three days after he was taken away. He said he had been tortured in prison. He was louder and more fearless than before. Prison seemed to have changed him and he went around with a strange new air of myth about him, as if he had conceived heroic roles for himself during the short time he had been away. When he arrived the street gathered outside his room to give him a hero’s welcome. He told us stories of his imprisonment and of how he had survived fiendish methods of torture inflicted on him to get out the names of collaborators, planners of riots, destabilisers of the Imperial Government, and enemies of the party. He made us dizzy with his stories. People brought him food, palm-wine, ogogoro, kola-nuts, kaoline, and he could have selected quite a few wives from the admiring female faces of that evening if he had not already permanently entered new mythic perceptions of himself that excluded such rash decisions. I hung around outside the photographer’s studio, listening as the adults talked in solemn tones and as they drank long into the night of his triumphant return. Even Dad went over to pay his respects.
The next day woke us up to a great excitement. Everywhere people were talking in animated tones. Everywhere people who had been content to listen to the news of the country only intheformofrumourswerenowtobeseenscrutinisingthesamepage of the newspaper, as if overnight newsprint had been given a new importance. It was only when I got back from school that I understood the excitement. For the first time in our lives we as a people had appeared in the newspapers. We were heroes in our own drama, heroes of our own protest. There were pictures of us, men and women and children, standing helplessly round heaps of the politicians’ milk. There were pictures of us raging, attacking the van, rioting against the cheap methods of politicians, humiliating the thugs of politics, burning their lies. The photographer’s pictures had been given great prominence on the pages of the newspaper and it was even possible to recognise our squashed and poverty-ridden faces on the grainy newsprint. There were news stories about the bad milk and an editorial about our rage. We were astonished that something we did with such absence of planning, something that we had done in such a small corner of the great globe, could gain such prominence. Many of us spent the evening identifying ourselves amongst the welter of rough faces.
Mum was clearly recognisable among the faces. Ten million people would see her faceandnevermeet herintheirlives.Shewascarryingabasinofrottenmilk;andthe dreadfulnewsprint distortedherbeautyintosomethingwretchedandweird;butwhen she returned from the market in the evening people crowded into our rooms and talked about her fame, how she could use it to sell off her provisions, about the thugs, who had sworn terrible reprisals, and about the landlord, who was furious that his own tenants had partaken in the attack on his beloved Party.
Most of us were delighted to see ourselves on the front pages of a national newspaper; but nothing amazed us as much as seeing a special picture of the photographer himself, with his name in print. We pointed at his name over and over again and went round to his room to congratulate him. He was very high-spirited that eveningand he went from place to place, followed by a swelling tide of wondering mortals, talking about national events in intimate terms. He came to our compound and was toasted in every room and he laughed loudly and drank merrily. Neither his new fame, nor the alcohol made him fail to remind us that we still owed him money for our photographs.
When Dad returned from work and learned of Mum’s picture in the papers he was both alittleproud and alittlejealous of her.Hesaidshelookedlikeastarvingwitchdoctor.But that didn’t stophimfromcuttingoutthepageofthepaperandstickingit to the wall. Every now and again, while smoking a cigarette, he would look at the picture and say:
‘Your mother is getting famous.’
The photographer eventually made it to our room and Dad sent me to buy some drinks. When I gotbackthephotographerwasstaggeringabouttheplace,quitedrunk, diving behind the chair, shooting an imaginary camera, acting the part of thugs and politicians, while Mum and Dad fell about in laughter. He was very drunk and he kept wobblingon Dad’s chair and saying: