Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

The crowd responded with wild shouts of acclaim, some of them whistled with fingers curved on both sides of their mouths. He gazed down on us as he waited for them to quiet, then he continued in English.

“In all my life in politics to date, I’ve never ever been told this, not even by my own wives—” The crowd interrupted him with a roar of laughter. “No one, I mean, has ever told me that I’m beautiful beyond description— pe mo le wa ju gbogbo nka lo .”

The throng of voices cheered again as he rubbed my shoulder with his hand.

“They say I’m too marvellous for words.”

The crowd mauled his words with a tumult of applause, the tooting louder.

“They say I’m like nothing they’ve ever seen before.”

The mob waged in again, and once they calmed, M.K.O. — in the most aggressive cry possible — exploded: “Like nothing the Federal Republic of Nigeria has ever seen before!”

The crowd took the air for almost a limitless measure of time, after which they let him speak again, but this time to us and not to them.

“You will do something for me. You all,” he said, his index finger making a circle in the air above us. “You will stand with me and take a photograph. We will use it for our campaign.”

We nodded, and Ikenna said, “Yes, sir.”

“ Oya , stand with me.”

He signalled one of his aides, an able-bodied man in a tight brown suit and a red tie, to come forward. The man bent towards him and whispered something in his ear from which the word camera was only just audible. In no time, a smartly dressed man in a blue shirt and tie approached, with a camera hanging on his chest by a black strap with NIKON crested all over it. A few more aides tried to push back the crowd as M.K.O. broke off from us now for a minute to shake hands with his host, the politician who stood close, waiting to receive his attention. Then M.K.O. turned back to us. “Are you ready now?”

“Yes, sir,” we chorused.

“Good,” he said. “I will come to the centre and both of you,”—he gestured to Ikenna and me, “move here.” We stood to his right and Obembe with Boja to his left. “Good, good,” he muttered.

The photographer, one knee on the ground, and the other bent now, aimed his camera until a bright flash lit our faces in a heartbeat second. M.K.O. clapped and the crowd clapped and cheered. “Thank you, Benjamin, Obembe, Ikenna,” M.K.O. said, pointing at each of us as he said our names. When he got to Boja, he paused in confusion, prompting him to say his name. M.K.O. repeated it in slanting syllables: “Bo- ja ”.

“Wow!” M.K.O. exclaimed, laughing. “It sounds like Mo ja ,” (“I fought” in Yoruba). “Do you fight?”

Boja shook his head.

“Good,” M.K.O. muttered, “don’t ever.” He wagged his finger. “Fighting is not good. What is the name of your school?”

“Omotayo Nursery and Primary School, Akure,” I said in the singsong manner that we had been taught we should use to answer the question whenever it was asked.

“Okay, good, Ben,” M.K.O. said. He raised his head towards the crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen, these four boys of one family will now be awarded scholarships by the Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola campaign organization.”

As the crowd applauded, he dipped his hand into the large side pocket of his agbada and gave Ikenna a bunch of naira notes. “Take this,” he said, pulling one of his aides closer. “Richard, here, will take you to your home, and deliver it to your parents. He will also take down your names and address.”

“Thank you, sir!” we cried almost in unison, but he did not seem to have heard us. He’d already begun walking towards the big house with his aides and hosts, turning every now and then to wave at the crowd.

We followed the aide to a black Mercedes parked across the road, and he drove us home in it. And from that day, we began to pride ourselves on being M.K.O. boys. The four of us were called out to the podium during the school’s assembly one morning and applauded after the headmistress, who seemed to have forgotten and forgiven the circumstances that had led to our accidental encounter with M.K.O., made a long speech about the importance of making good impressions on people — of being “good ambassadors of the school.” Then she announced, even to greater applause, that our father, Mr Agwu, would no longer have to pay our school fees.

Despite these obvious profits, the fame it brought us in and around our district, and Father’s financial relief and joy, the M.K.O. calendar embodied bigger things. It was a badge to us, a testimonial of our affiliation with a man almost everyone in the west of Nigeria believed would be Nigeria’s next president. In that calendar was a strong hope for the future, for we’d believed we were children of Hope ’93, M.K.O.’s allies. Ikenna was convinced that when M.K.O. became president, we could go to Abuja, Nigeria’s seat of government, and we would be let in by just showing the calendar. That M.K.O. would put us in big positions and probably make one of us the president of Nigeria someday. We had all believed this would happen, and put our hope in this calendar, which Ikenna had now destroyed.

Once Ikenna’s metamorphosis became cataclysmic and began to threaten the repose we had been living in, Mother became desperate for a solution. She asked questions. She prayed. She warned. But all to no avail. It seemed increasingly obvious that the Ikenna who was once our brother had been bottled in a tightly sealed jar and thrown into an ocean. But on the day the special calendar was destroyed, Mother was shaken beyond words. She’d returned from work that evening and Boja, who’d sat in the midst of the charred bits and pieces, weeping for long, gave her the remains of the calendar which he’d swept into a plain sheet of paper, and said: “That, Mama, is what our M.K.O. calendar has become.”

Mother, disbelieving, first went to the room to see the blank wall before unwrapping the paper in her hand. She sat on the chair that rested against the buzzing refrigerator. She knew, like us, that we did not have more than two copies and Father had gladly given one copy to the headmistress of our school who hung it in her office after the aides of Chief M.K.O. Abiola opened the scholarship there.

“What has come over Ikenna?” she said. “Isn’t this the calendar he would have killed to protect; the one for which he beat Obembe?” She spat “ Tufia! ” the Igbo word for “God forbid,” repeatedly, snapping her fingers over her head — a superstitious gesture meant to swish away the evil she had seen in Ikenna’s action. She was referring to when Ikenna beat Obembe for smashing a mosquito on the calendar, leaving an indelible stain — caused by the mosquito’s blood — on M.K.O.’s left eye.

She sat there wondering what had happened to Ikenna. She was worried because Ikenna was, until recently, our beloved brother, the forerunner who shot into the world ahead of all of us and opened every door for us. He guided us, protected us and led us with a full-lit torch. Even though he sometimes punished Obembe and me or disagreed with Boja on certain issues, he became a prowling lion when an outsider rattled any of us. I did not know what it was to live without contact with him, without seeing him. But this was exactly what began to happen, and as the days passed, it seemed he deliberately sought to hurt us.

After seeing the blank wall that night, Mother said nothing. She merely cooked eba, and warmed up the pot of ogbono soup she had prepared the previous day. After we’d eaten, she went into her room, and I thought she had gone to sleep. But at what must have been midnight, she came into the room I shared with Obembe.