FOUR

WHEN MUM CAME back from hawkingthat eveningI told her about the white man. A light of interest flickered in her eyes. But it died when she said:

‘The thugs came again today. Election time is near.’

What I had seen was greater than my empathy at that moment.

‘How can a man become two? How can a black man turn white?’ Mum asked, with weary interest.

‘By magic.’

‘What magic?’

Then I told her about the illuminated bulb and the cables and electricity, about how the white man had killed a lizard and how he wanted to catch us and take us away.

‘What wereyou doingthere?’ sheasked.

I didn’t say anything. She looked lean and worried. She complained of a headache. She lay on the bed and I noticed that she had a wound that was bleeding just above her ankle. Her blood was unnaturally dark. The wound was beginning to fester. I told her about it, but she didn’t stir. The flies tried to settle on it and I drove them away. She opened her eyes and, in a rough voice, said:

‘Go and play!’

I lingered at the door. The flies settled on her wound. I watched her foot twitch. She lifted up her head and was about to shout something when I hurried out of the room.

In the street, people were fighting. They fought round the van. The sun turned red. The people who were fighting moved away in opposite directions, shouting threats. The evening darkened. Birds circled in the air. Dust and smoke, like a thin veil, hung in the sky. The wind roamed our street, blowing the rubbish along, and sweeping away the smell of incinerated rats and burnt rubber. Slowly, the stars began to appear.

We waited all night for Dad to return. It seemed our lives kept turning on the same axis of anguish. When Mum had slept enough she dressed her wound with the ash of bitterwood. She showed no signs of pain. She made food, cleaned the room, and counted her money in a tin-can. She calculated her profits without any light in the room. When she finished she began to repair our clothes, sewingon buttons, patching holes in Dad’s trousers. She stayed silent and worked with abnormal concentration, her forehead wrinkled, like someone using one action to focus on the pain of waiting. When she had darned Dad’s trousers, she began on mine. She tore off the back pockets of my shorts to patch the holes in between the legs. She gave my shirts many different buttons. She would not speak. The light got very dim in the room and I shut the windows to encourage her to use a candle. But she went on working in the absence of light. When she finished, she sighed. She put the clothes on the line in the room. The line was weighted down with a profusion of threadbare towels, old shirts, trousers, wrappers, and sundry rags. It looked ready to snap at any moment. Mum sat down. She was motionless. Then she said:

‘Polish your father’s boots.’

What she really meant was: ‘What has happened to your father?’ I searched for his boots and polished them in the dark. Then I put them in a corner and went to wash my hands. When I got back Mum wasn’t in the room. I found her sitting on the cement platformat thecompound-front.Shewaswavingawaythemidgesandtheflyingants andslappingatthemosquitoesthatinvadedherbody.Itwasnightalready andthesky was of the deepest blue. The air was cool and it tasted of rain. In the distance, towards the centre of the city, a white light kept flashing towards the sky. Some of the compound people joined us outside and made small talk.

‘Is it true’, one of them said, ‘that Madame Koto now has prostitutes in her bar?’

‘That’s what I heard.’

‘And that she has joined the party?’

‘Not just that.’

‘What else?’

‘They have promised her contracts.’

‘For what?’

‘For their celebrations and meetings.’

‘We will be looking at her and she will become rich.’

‘She is rich already.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Peoplesay sheisgoingtobuy acar?’

‘A car?’

‘And get electricity?’

‘Electricity?’‘And she paid cash for bales of lace.’‘Bales of lace?’‘To do what?’‘To sew dresses for party people.’‘How did she manage?’‘She knows what she wants.’‘My friend, we all know what we want, but how many of us ever get it?’‘That’s true.’‘She must have used witchcraft.’‘Or juju.’‘Or joined a secret society.’‘Or all three.’‘Plus more.’They fell silent. They contemplated the night, their condition, and the whole area sunken in poverty. One of them sighed. ‘Why is life like this, eh?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Some people have too much and their dogs eat better food than we do, while we suffer and keep quiet until the day we die.’ ‘And even if we don’t keep quiet who will listen to us, eh?’ ‘God,’ one of them said. The rest of them were silent. The wind blew over us, bringing dust, discarded newspapers, and the certainty of rain. ‘One day, by a quiet miracle, God will erase the wicked from the face of the earth.’ ‘God’s time is the best.’ ‘I wish God’s time and our time would sometimes agree.’

‘God knows best.’

‘That’swhatmy brotherkeptsayingtwomonthsbeforehedied.’

‘My friend,’ one of them said with sudden passion, ‘our time will come.’

They fell silent again. Mum moved, started to say something, but stayed quiet. Then she got up, took me by the hand, and we walked down the raw street, towards the main road. She made it seem like an innocent walk, but I could feel the strength of her anxiety.

All around us voices were raised in laughter and in pain. We passed a patch of bushes behind which resonated the singing and the dancing of the new church. They sang with a frightening vigour, with terrifying hope, great need, great sorrow. They made me feel that any minute the world would end. The singing from the church made me afraid of life. We passed them and could hear them long afterwards. Further on, behind a grove of trees, the earth throbbed with more chanting, dancing, singing. But this was different. Thechantingwas deeper, thedancingmorevirile,makingtheearth itself acknowledge the beating on its doors, and the singing was full of secrets and dread-making voices. They sounded like the celebration of an old pain, an ancient suffering that has refused to leave, an old affliction renewed at night. They were the worshippers at the shrine of suffering and we listened to their cries for the secrets of transforming anguish into power. We could hear the incantations, the money-creating howls, the invoked names of destiny-altering deities, gods of vengeance, gods of wealth, womb-opening gods. They too made me afraid of life. They too had come from the hunger, the wretchedness, of our condition. Mum didn’t seem to notice them. Her face was ridden with anxiety, her bright eyes searched the street-corners, the bat-fronts, hoping to see Dad. After we had walked a while, and when the wind lifted the edges of her wrapper, I asked her to tell me a story about white people. She said nothing at first. And then she said:

‘I will tell you a story another time.’

We were silent. It seemed she changed her mind.

‘When white people first came to our land,’ she said, as if she were talking to the wind, ‘we had already gone to the moon and all the great stars. In the olden days they used to come and learn from us. My father used to tell me that we taught them how to count. We taught them about the stars. We gave them some of our gods. We shared our knowledge with them. We welcomed them. But they forgot all this. They forgot many things. They forgot that we are all brothers and sisters and that black people are the ancestors of the human race. The second time they came they brought guns. They took our lands, burned our gods, and they carried away many of our people to become slaves across the sea. They are greedy. They want to own the whole world and conquer the sun. Some of them believe they have killed God. Some of them worship machines. They are misusing the powers God gave all of us. They are not all bad. Learn from them, but love the world.’