The Extinction of Menai. Chuma Nwokolo
sewing machine started up, buzzing quickly around the hem of a wavy green outfit, taking advantage of the Rural Electrification Board’s generator, which ran for two hours most mornings. In the distance, a passing ferry foghorned a greeting to an empty jetty as it chugged up-creek. Oga Somuzo miscalculated a haggling gambit and called Ma’Bamou a white witch. Nearby traders rushed in to save him from the angry trader’s walking stick.
Utoma was still the only egg dealer in Kreektown, and his mood was more buoyant than usual. ‘Shine me,’ he said, as though he were doing me a favour. He owned the poultry shed by the creek, a kilometre south of Kreektown. He had fostered me for a year after my parents drowned, and his boots, which reminded me of the muddy, smelly poultry, needed me more desperately than I needed his money. He saw my face and snapped, ‘Emiko sita? So is only the shoe of dead president that you specialise?’
‘It’s not that,’ I said sullenly, wondering, suddenly, what it was. I stared at the mud-encrusted boots, straining for the optimism that had buoyed me when the short hawker opened the 1960 vent of glory. I wavered uncertainly between my black and brown tins of polish. ‘What colour was it before-before?’ I asked.
Utoma frowned, unsure whether he was being mocked. ‘Before-before what? I bought it brown and is still brown, boy, wha’s matter with you today?’
The money he was going to pay, less than my standard charge, was already scrunched into a parsimonious fist. I saw suddenly, transcendentally, that these terms of trade were so skewed that I would never prosper here. The suspicion had been there for a while, but right then I knew I was never going to save money for university from my shoeshine box.
I rose slowly, and the shackles of the Menai obsession with corporate existence fell away from me like a spent sentence. I would no more be Long-Lived in the land of fireflies, condemned to the Weekend Walk to Burials. I would not be a shoe-shiner for people who mostly wore slippers. I’d get to know people who weren’t about to die, live in a neighbourhood whose conversation didn’t hinge on kidneys, where traders prospered more than undertakers. Where the knowledge of world figures could be taken for granted. A capacious grave opened up in me. Into it slithered dead and dying Menai: Utoma, Etie, Ruma, even Mata Nimito, screaming, soundless, buried once and for all. There was something for me in the world beyond the circumscribed shores of the doomed People. Perhaps a library all of whose 359 books I had not yet read. Perhaps people whose eyes were not tinged with envy—and bitterness—that I was not like them, that I was born a few months too late to be inoculated with Trevi’s death.
As I brushed the dust of Kreektown off my clothes, it was as though the dust of Zik’s shoes, and the inebriating spirit of 1960, had infected me with a new and grandiose vision. Utoma could keep his custom and Kreektown could shine her shoes, but I was young and independent; and I was free of the curse of Menai.
‘Emeyama?’ he asked softly in Menai. ‘What’s the cryingmatter, Zanda?’
‘I’m not crying,’ I sniffed. ‘But I don’t have your type of brown.’
Then I turned and left my shoeshine box, and the square. When the ferry left that evening, it left with me.
* * *
I OPENED my eyes and sat up slowly. The disturbance that had roused me seemed to come from the yard: screams and Menai phrases, shouted in a voice too distorted by rage or pain to make out properly. I scrambled to the window. In that unguarded glance I took in the roof of my dad’s house halfway across the village. Then I looked down and there, in the midst of the rapidly filling courtyard, saw Jonszer.
He had a bloodied dagger, and people gave him a wide berth. A length of rope was fastened to his ankle. He leapt, pranced, screamed like one demented, hacking at his body with his blade; as I stood there, open-mouthed in the window, he stopped and pointed his broad knife at me. ‘Miyaka sia Menai!’ In that moment I saw his grief and pain. I gagged and slumped backwards until I was on the floor, leaning against the bed, the only furniture in the tiny room. I gasped. A few seconds of silence ensued, and then he resumed, his voice hoarse, unrecognisable, fading away in the direction of Kreektown Square. In moments the yard was silent, and I knew the crowd had followed him.
I sat there and watched the sky darken. When the shadows began to pool in the corners, I rose. I closed the shutters and switched on my rechargeable lamp. An hour passed before the people started to trickle back in. Their awed comments drifted up through the shutters. His voice still rang in my ears: Miyaka sia Menai! I hugged myself, walling myself off from condemnation. I was independent of his hopelessness and grief. I was free. I was Nigerian, not Menai. African, not Menai. And half of me was clearly not even African anyway.
Someone knocked. I did not move, willing whoever it was to go away, but she opened the door anyway and stood there, her face bereft of its residual mischief.
‘He drowned himself! Just like that! They said he tied his foot to an underwater root! How’s that even possible?’
‘GodMenai . . .’
‘Why do you keep saying that?’
I shrugged. ‘What happened to Jonszer?’
‘He returned from an errand in Ubesia, and some idiot at the motor park told him that Hundredyears was dead. He just went crazy.’
‘They shouldn’t have told him just like that!’
‘Yes. The divers haven’t found his body, but they’re burying Hundredyears now. Are you coming?’
I wanted to sit in that room forever, but I would stick out more by staying away. I rose. It was time to bury Mata Nimito. I had fled six and a half years before to avoid this funeral, but he had waited for me.
* * *
WE TOOK the low ridge, walking through the clump of raffia trees that fringed Kreektown. The village lay to the left, our abandoned farmlands to the right, with the blackened mounds where we used to smoke our fish. Beyond lay the thickets of the mangrove swamp.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you my own secrets. She’s only my African mother.’
I stared, ‘Really?’
She grinned, enjoying my surprise, ‘She’s my mother’s cousin. We first met when I was posted here three years ago.’
‘It’s hard to believe, the way you get along. Where’s your real mum?’
‘Mother, not mum. Dead. Cancer.’ She raised her finger, stopping my next words. ‘Don’t say it. She tried to kill me when I was a baby. I didn’t cry when she died.’ She looked at me defiantly. ‘And I’d probably try to kill my own children, so I’m not having any. It’s sometimes genetic, you know?’
I stared, wondering what had brought on this embarrassing level of intimacy. I tried to stem it: ‘Ah, this year’s harmattan is refusing to go—’
‘Have I told you I’ve been in jail?’
My butt clenched spontaneously. ‘As in . . . prison?’
‘I did time.’ She nodded cheerfully. ‘One year in Kuje Prison, Abuja. But I didn’t steal the money they accused me of, honest.’
‘I believe you.’
‘Your turn,’ she said grimly.
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I couldn’t dredge up any confidence remotely as candid as hers, but what I had, I was now compelled to share. ‘I’m Menai,’ I blurted finally. ‘I lied when I said I was Gabonese . . . and this is my hometown.’ I shut my mouth, realizing how dangerous the ambiguous company of a woman could be.
She glared at me for one long moment. ‘Fine! Don’t tell me! As if I care!’
She stalked ahead alone.
* * *
MOST PEOPLE from the new Kreektown were there, milling about, chatting, and watching the volunteer gravediggers at work. Much had changed in the enclosure: it was much smaller. There was still