Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

And then, after a little pause, we heard the opening and closing of the sitting room’s storm door, too. We had not seen Ikenna in two days because he’d hardly been at home, and when he was, he stayed in his room, and whenever he was there, no one, not even Boja with whom he shared the room, entered it. Boja had remained cautious of Ikenna since their last fight because Mother had asked him to stay away from Ikenna until Father returned to exorcise the evil spirits that had possessed him. So Boja mostly stayed with us, accessing the room only at times like this when he was sure Ikenna was not there. He rose to go to the room to take a few things he needed quickly while Obembe and I waited for him to return and continue the game. He’d barely gone out when Obembe and I heard him cry “ Mogbe! ”—a cry of lamentation in Yoruba. As we ran out, Boja began shouting “Calendar M.K.O.! Calendar M.K.O.!”

“What, what?” Obembe and I asked him as we rushed towards the room. Then we saw for ourselves.

Our prized M.K.O. calendar was charred to pieces, and meticulously destroyed. I could not believe it at first, so I glanced at the wall where it had always hung, but what I saw was a cleaner, shinier, and almost glossy, blank square surface of the wall, its edges slightly smeared with spots where it had been taped. The sight horrified me; my mind could not grasp it, for the M.K.O. calendar was a special calendar. The tale of how we obtained the calendar had been our greatest achievement. We always retold ourselves this story with great pride. It was in the middle of March 1993, in the heat of the presidential election campaigns. We’d arrived at school one morning while the assembly bell was ringing its dying chimes, and quickly merged into the group of chatting pupils, steadily forming lines and columns according to class on the assembly ground. I stood in the nursery line, Obembe in the first grade’s line, Boja in the fourth grade’s line, and Ikenna in the fifth grade’s line — just second to the last one near the fence. Once all the lines had formed, the morning assembly began. The pupils sang the morning hymns, said the Lord’s Prayer, and sang the Nigerian anthem. Afterwards, Mr Lawrence, the head teacher, stood on the podium and opened the large school attendance register. Then, with a microphone, he began calling out the names. When he called a pupil’s name and surname, we cried out “Present, sir!” and simultaneously raised our hands. In this manner, he took a roll call of all the four hundred pupils of the school. When Mr Lawrence got to the fourth grade’s line, and called the first name on the list, “Bojanonimeokpu Alfred Agwu,” the pupils burst into laughter.

“In all of your fathers’ faces!” Boja cried out, raising his two hands, his fingers spread apart, to waka at the pupils — a gesture of cursing.

That wiped out all laughter from the crowd of pupils, and still they stood, no one moving, no one saying a word except for a few murmurs that swiftly tapered off. Even the dreaded Mr Lawrence, the only person I knew who whipped sorer than Father and who was almost never seen without a whip, appeared dazed and momentarily incapacitated. Boja had been angered that morning even before we got to school. He had been embarrassed when Father asked him to take out the mattress he had wetted when he woke. What he did when Mr Lawrence called his name might have been caused by that; for it was usual for the pupils to laugh whenever Mr Lawrence, a Yoruba man, struggled to accurately pronounce Boja’s full Igbo names. Knowing Mr Lawrence’s deficiency, Boja had become used to his employment of approximate homophones, which, depending on his mood, ranged from the utterly jarring—“Bojanonokwu”—to the utterly funny—“Bojanolooku”—which Boja himself often recalled, and even sometimes boasted that he was such a menacing figure that his name could not be pronounced by just anybody — like the name of a god. Boja had often revelled in those moments and until that morning, had never complained.

The headmistress walked to the podium and Mr Lawrence, dumbfounded, stepped back. The megaphone made a prolonged shriek as it was passed from his hand to hers.

“Who said those words on the grounds of Omotayo Nursery and Primary School, a renowned Christian school built and founded on the word of God?” the headmistress said.

I was seized with the fear of an imminent severe punishment Boja would receive for this act — perhaps he would be whipped on the podium or asked to do “labour,” which entailed sweeping the entire school compound or weeding the bush in front of the school with bare hands. I tried to catch Obembe’s eyes because he was in a line two rows from me, but he would not turn away from Boja.

“I asked who?” the headmistress’s voice bellowed again.

“Me, ma,” a familiar voice replied.

“Who are you?” she asked, her voice lower than it was before.

“Boja.”

There was a brief pause, after which the headmistress’s distinct voice beamed “Come here” into the megaphone. As Boja made to go out to the podium, Ikenna ran forward, stood in front of him and cried out aloud “No, ma, this is unfair! What has he done? What? If you are going to punish him, you have to punish all of these people who laughed at him, too. Why should they laugh at him and mock him?”

The silence that followed these bold words, Ikenna’s and Boja’s defiance, was for a moment spiritual. The megaphone in the headmistress’s hands shook unsteadily and then fell to the ground with a loud shriek. She picked up the microphone, dropped it on the podium, and stepped back.

“In fact,” Ikenna’s voice rose again, above the noise of a colony of birds sailing towards the hills, “this is unfair. We’d rather leave your school than be punished unjustly. My brothers and I will all leave. Now. There are better schools out there where we can get better Western education; Daddy will no longer pay the big money to you.”

I remember, in sparkling mirror memory, the unsure movements of Mr Lawrence’s legs as he reached for the long cane, and the headmistress’s gesture that stopped him. Yet, even if she had let him, he would not have been able to catch up with Ikenna and Boja who’d begun to walk through the lines that gently parted for them among the pupils, who, like the teachers, seemed to have frozen with fear. Then, our older brothers grabbing my hand and Obembe’s, we ran out of the school.

We could not go home directly because Mama had just given birth to David and was convalescing. Ikenna said we’d get her worried if we returned home less than an hour after we’d left for school. We walked about in an end street that was mostly empty grassland, with signposts saying This land is owned by so and so, do not trespass . We stopped at the façade of a half-finished, abandoned house. Fallen bricks and crumbling pyramids of sand were scattered all over with what appeared to be dog shit. We entered the structure and sat on a slab of paved floor with a roof — something Obembe suggested would become the house’s sitting room. “You should have seen the headmistress’s daughter’s face,” Boja said. We mocked the teachers and pupils and raved about what we’d done, exaggerating the scenes to make them movie-like.

We’d sat there for about thirty minutes talking about what had happened at school when our attention was suddenly drawn to a distant rising noise. We saw a Bedford truck slowly approaching in the distance. It was covered with posters bearing the portraits of Chief M.K.O. Abiola, the presidential aspirant of the Social Democratic Party (SDP). The truck was loaded with people on top of its open back, and was abuzz with voices singing a song that appeared on state television frequently during those days: the song that held up M.K.O. as “the man.” The people were singing, drumming, with two of them — men dressed in white T-shirts with a photograph of M.K.O. — also blowing trumpets. All around the street, onlookers reared out of houses, sheds, shops, some peeping from windows. As the group went, some of them disengaged from the truck and distributed posters. They gave Ikenna, who stepped forward to meet them while the rest of us stayed back, a small one that had M.K.O.’s smiling face, a white horse beside him, and the words Hope ’93: Farewell to Poverty cascading downwards at the right-hand corner of the poster.