Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

Our teacher disappeared early on when the commotion and the honking began. Once she’d left, my classroom emptied as children ran, crying for their mothers. The school was a three-storeyed building. The kindergarten and my nursery class were on the ground floor while the higher classes, the primary classes, started from the first floor up to the second. From the window of my class, I saw a mass of cars in different states — doors opened, driving off and some parking. I sat there, waiting for the moment when Father, like other fathers who had come to pick up their children, would come. But instead of him, Boja appeared at my classroom’s door calling my name. I answered and took my school bag and my water bottle.

“Come, let’s go home,” he said, climbing up the desks towards me.

“Why, let us wait for Daddy,” I said, looking around.

“Daddy isn’t coming,” he said, and put a forefinger across his lips to silence me.

He pulled my hand and led me out of the class. We ran between the scattered rows of wooden desks and chairs that had been uniformly arranged before the commotion began. Under an upturned chair lay a boy’s broken food flask and its content — yellowed rice and fish — strewn over the floor. Outside, it was as if the world had been sawn in two and we were all teetering on the edge of the chasm. I removed my hand from Boja’s grip. I wanted to return to my classroom and wait for Father.

“What are you doing, you fool!” Boja cried. “There’s a riot; they are killing people, let’s go home!”

“We should wait for Daddy,” I said, following him with cautious steps.

“No, we can’t,” Boja objected. “If these men break in, they will recognize we are M.K.O.’s boys, ‘Children of Hope ’93’, enemies, and, we’ll be in greater danger than anyone else.”

His words smashed my resilience into smithereens and frightened me. A crowd of mostly older pupils trying to get out had formed at the gate, but we did not head there. We crossed the fallen fence and began moving through a line of palm trees out of the school and joined Ikenna and Obembe, who were already waiting for us behind a tree in the bush, and together we ran.

The creepers crashed under our feet and a flood of air broke into my lungs. The bush spat us out into a small path that Obembe immediately identified as Isolo Street a few minutes later.

But the street was almost deserted. We ran past the timber market where, on normal days, we would have had to shield our ears because of the deafening noises of drilling machines. The many rickety trucks that transported heavy timber from the forests sat in front of a mountain of sawdust, but there was no one around them. From here, we saw the wide road split in two with a long rail the width of perhaps three of my feet placed in front of each other. It was the road to the Central Bank of Nigeria, the place Ikenna had suggested we go because it was the closest place protected by armed guards in which we could hide, because Father worked there. Ikenna insisted that if we did not go there, the junta’s forces — bent on cracking down on supporters of M.K.O. in Akure, his home state — would kill us. The road was heavily littered that day with all sorts of things — personal effects that had dropped from people fleeing the carnage — making Akure appear as if an aircraft had thrown out belongings from a great height. When we crossed to a side of the road where there was a walled compound with many trees, a car filled with people raced down the road with hellish speed. Just as the distance swallowed it, a blue Mercedes Benz with one of my classmates, Mojisola, in the front seat, emerged from the road we had come from. She waved at me, and I waved back, but the car raced on.

“Let’s go,” Ikenna said, once the car was out of sight. “We could not have stayed back at school; they would have recognized we are M.K.O.’s boys and we would have been in danger. Let us go through that road.” He pointed and glanced widely as though he had heard something we had not heard.

Every gripping detail of the riot my eyes saw, every smell of it, filled me with a concrete fear of death. We’d entered a bend when Ikenna cried: “No, no, let’s stop. We shouldn’t walk on the main road; it’s not safe.”

So we crossed to the other side, a major commercial lane, filled with shops that were all closed. The door of one of them was shattered, and pieces of broken wood, fecund with nails, dangled dangerously from the broken door. We were forced to halt somewhere in between a closed bar with crates of beer piled on each other and a truck littered with posters of Star Lager Beer, “33,” Guinness and other brands. That instant, a loud cry for help, spoken in Yoruba, came from somewhere we could not immediately make out. A man emerged from one of the shops and ran towards the road to our school. Our fear of the palpable danger grew.

We crossed the dump into a street where we saw a house in flames. The corpse of a man lay on its veranda. Ikenna ducked behind the burning house and we followed, trembling. It was the first time I, and probably the rest of my brothers, had seen a dead man. My heart raced, and that moment I became conscious of a gradual warmth that began to slowly seep down the seat of my school shorts. When I looked at the ground beneath me, I realized that I had wetted my shorts and watched the last few drops slip to the ground, trembling. A group of men, armed with clubs and machetes, trooped past, casting furtive glances about and chanting, “Death to Babangida, Abiola must rule.” Squatted like frogs, we maintained a silence of stones for as long as this clique was in sight. Once they had passed, we crawled behind one of the houses and found a van with a dead man in it parked just across from the backyard, its front door left open.

We could tell from the man’s attire — a long, flowing Senegalese robe — that he was a northerner: the main targets of the onslaught by M.K.O. Abiola supporters, who’d hijacked the riot as a struggle between his west, and the north, where the military president, General Babangida, belonged.

With a force no one thought he could muster, Ikenna hauled the dead man off the seat of the car. The man fell out of the car with a thud, blood spattering on the ground from his broken face. I screamed and began to cry.

“Keep quiet, Ben!” Boja cried, but I could not stop; I was very afraid.

Ikenna got in the driver’s seat and Boja sat beside him, Obembe and me in the back seat.

“Let’s go,” said Ikenna. “Let’s go to Daddy’s office in this car. Close the doors quickly!” he cried.

With the key in the ignition beside the large wheel, Ikenna started the car and the engine roared and blared into life with a prolonged groan.

“Ike, can you drive?” Obembe asked, trembling.

“Yes,” Ikenna said. “Daddy taught me how to some time ago.”

He revved the engine, pushed the car backwards with a jerk, and it went dead. He was about to kick-start the car again when the sound of ammunition in the distance kept us at a standstill.

“Ikenna, please drive it,” Obembe moaned, flapping his hands. Tears had begun to course down his face, too. “You asked us to leave the school, now we are going to die?”

There were bonfires and burning cars everywhere, for Akure was singed that day. We’d neared Oshinle Street on the east of the town when a military van filled with soldiers in full combat regalia sped past. One of them noticed it was a boy at the wheel of our car and tapped his friend, pointing in our direction, but the truck did not stop. Ikenna maintained a steady course, accelerating only when he saw the red clock-like arm of the speedometer move to a larger number, the way he’d always watched Father do it every time he sat with him in the front seat when he took us to school. We verged onto the road, staying close to its shoulder until Boja read out the sign Oluwatuyi Street and the small one beneath it with the inscription Central Bank of Nigeria . Then we knew we were safe and had escaped the 1993 election uprising in which more than a hundred people were killed in Akure. June the 12th became a seminal day in the history of Nigeria. Every year, as this day approached, it seemed as if a band of a thousand invisible surgeons, armed to the teeth with knives, trephines, needles and extraordinary anaesthetic materials, came with the influx of the north wind and settled in Akure. Then at night-time, while the people slept, they would commit frantic, temporal lobotomy of their souls in quick painless snatches, and vanish at dawn before the effects of the surgeries began to show. The people would wake with bodies sodden with anxiety, hearts pulsating with fear, heads drooping with the memory of loss, eyes dripping with tears, lips gyrating in solemn prayers, and bodies trembling with fright. They would all become like blurred pencil portraits in a child’s wrinkled drawing book, waiting to be erased. In that grim condition, the city would retract inwards like a threatened snail. And by the dim squint of dawn’s light, northern-born inhabitants would exit the town, shops would close and churches would convene for prayers of peace as the fragile old man that Akure often became in that month would wait for the passage of the day.