Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

Whenever the sounds become a meaningless clamour and I cannot concentrate on my past, I turn my attention to my present, to the objects that surround me in the attic, those still, meaningless, decrepit, mostly silent companions. It strikes me that I’ve hardly told a story unless it was about an object, or referred to an object, or else I would appropriate an object, borrow from it, by transcribing it, as illustrated by my mother’s diary. The objects we think we know are shallow things, existing on a flat and insubstantial surface, because we value them only in terms of common use. Whenever I take up one of my objects, however, I spend a lot of time getting to know it. I seek out its various properties, smell, feel, taste, all of which I absorb readily and happily. Even to be near my objects is a pleasure for me, and I toy with the idea of naming my chapters in their honour: Radio, Pocket Watch, Unica, Mother’s Trunk .

It is my intention now to focus on one object in particular: the mappa mundi. How shall I begin to describe it? The most striking feature is its dilapidation. The moths are feasting on the vellum, and the gaps and fissures grow larger and more numerous every month. Yes, that fantastical image of the world, with its lands and seas, its painted myths and imaginary beings, is disintegrating week by week, which at once pleases and saddens me. I have decided I will do nothing to halt the course of its decay.

Whenever I examine the mappa mundi, my gaze is drawn to the monstrous races — Amyctyrae, Androgini, Astomi, Blemmyae, Cyclops and their sisters — depicted at the outer edges. They are my sisters too: I feel an affinity with those freakish souls, because of my monstrous late birth, perhaps.

Of all the living beings on the map, they are located farthest from Christ, who is shown nailed to the cross at the disc’s centre. The monsters are cut off from the world by the Nile river, and from one another by the circumscribed frame in which each dwells, both graphic ornament and prison, ranked alongside one another and yet never touching.

Only two of the monsters are not enclosed in frames, and yet they are hardly free. The first, in Africa proper, west of the Nile, between Nubia and the Mountains of the Moon, is a member of the tribe Gorgades, the hairy women. She is running from a small army of Christian soldiers and is sweating what appears to be blood. A rubric to the right, entitled ‘Letter of Alexander to Aristotle’, comments on this scene: ‘Then we saw women and men hairy in the manner of beasts, who, when we wished to approach nearer, fled towards a river and threw themselves into it.’ Slightly to the left of the unfortunate Gorgad, dwelling in a kind of desert wasteland, is the second monster, a member of the Panotii tribe, with giant ears flapping frantically about her head in a pathetic attempt to take flight, but prevented from doing so by the ropes which bind her to a stake, held over the fire by a soldier with a forked stick.

If I have chosen to interrupt my history to focus on the mappa mundi, it is not only because the sounds in the attic and the din in my head distract me from my past. Nor is it only because I wish to fix the map in my mind, in words, before its deterioration is complete. Neither is it due solely to my feeling of kinship with those outlandish beings. No, I have chosen to speak about the mappa mundi because I wish to introduce a new character into my history. A man about whom I know little, despite my investigations, but whose writings mean a great deal to me. A man who, over the years, I have come to think of as both heir to, and modern-day chronicler of, the monstrous races, like myself. His name is Kemi Olabode, and his story will be the subject of the present chapter.

In 1956, during the months of June and July, colonial officers in Lagos received a series of pamphlets through the post. My father did not read them at the time. Nevertheless, he did not throw them out, whether deliberately or not, and the collection survived the end of Empire and found its way to Gullane. It was not until his final years that my father discovered the pamphlets among his papers. For a brief period he read them obsessively, and called me up to the attic to tell me about them. Collectively, the pamphlets tell the story of the first decades of Empire in Nigeria, from initial contact between British traders and West African chiefs, to the missionary movement, to the savage wars during which the chiefdoms fell to the British. It is a story which I have always associated with the mappa mundi (which, at the time of my father’s obsession with the pamphlets, was barely touched by decay). Although the pamphlets concern events that took place several centuries after the mappa mundi was conceived, they tell of people whose fate mirrors that of the Gorgades, Panotii and their sisters.

I have the pamphlets before me now. There are five in total, printed on rough off-white paper, folded in half and stitched together with what looks like fishing wire. I wish to focus on one pamphlet in particular, entitled ‘Massacre at Benin’. It concerns a particularly violent episode in the British colonization of Nigeria, depicting the brutalization and slaughter of the inhabitants of that ancient kingdom who tried to resist the forces of Empire.

The story set out in ‘Massacre at Benin’ begins in 1955, in a hut in Lagos. A frail old man is sitting at a table, before a wall of books, old volumes collectively entitled The Complete History of Africa . As the title suggests, the books concern the history of the entire continent, from the very first inhabitants to the Great War, and are authored by Kemi Olabode himself — who, we learn, is the very man sitting at the table. A strange odour rises from the volumes, writes Kemi Olabode, a strange and bitter, subtle-smelling odour, the odour of death. He goes on to describe how he locates then opens Volume IX, entitled ‘The Savage Wars of Empire’; and, as he does so, writes Olabode, dust rises from the pages, obscuring the first sentences. He continues: I wrote those sentences over three decades ago. I was an ambitious youth, full of pride and rude health. I thought those sentences were a truthful account of my continent’s past. I thought I was chronicling the birth of Nigeria. But, Not everything that comes from the cow is butter . Now, in my dotage, I see that those sentences are nothing but lies. Let me therefore get rid of them. Let me do away with those words, which, like the dust rising from the pages, serve only to conceal the past, which seems to surface from a veil of darkness and forgotten time. Instead I will rely entirely on my old man’s memory. You see, dear reader, I am a Nigerian and I lived though the first years of the British Empire. Let me take you back to that time, a time of great hope, for me and my masters. Listen!

In those days I was travelling with the Protectorate. I was dealing with important business, and my job as a translator was carrying me far into the interior. I was assisting the British in signing treaties with the chiefs, whose lands they had acquired unlawfully at Berlin. ‘In return for your forests,’ I translated, ‘we will protect you and make you rich!’ And the chiefs signed. It was 1895. The Atlantic slave trade was over. Those greedy dupes who once sold their people to sugar barons in the West now gifted their land and rights, their laws and property, their dignity, their arts and their sovereignty, to the lords of Empire, who were the same hucksters as before, I came to realize, but they wore pith helmets instead of top hats. A monkey broke the razor after shaving, not knowing that his hair would soon grow again . With their bejewelled fingers the chiefs signed, some never having even held a pen until this moment. It did not matter. If they did not sign, they were made to sign. If they signed without understanding the true consequences of the pact, and objected, well, we unleashed our precision technology. We confounded them with bombs, we amazed them with bullets, we shelled them until they kissed our boots and begged to be allowed to sign all over again. ‘Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not.’