Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

Alas, it was not the same for me. I trace the beginning of my destruction or mental unravelling to the following incident. At Ologbio, where we were resting before the final push, I was called before the Admiral. Perhaps I had mistranslated something, and one of the village chiefs had not kissed his left boot. I protested. But he was set on my punishment, and out came the hippopotamus whip. I was made to strip, kneel, and my hands were tied to a water cart. I am unable to recall what happened next. Therefore, I will quote from the diary of E. J. Grave, an English solider who witnessed such a flogging that same year: ‘The chicotte of raw hippo hide,’ Grave writes, ‘especially a new one, trimmed like a corkscrew and with edges like knife blades, is a terrible weapon, and a few blows bring blood. Not more than twenty-five blows should be given unless the offence is very serious. Though we persuade ourselves that the African’s skin is very tough, it needs an extraordinary constitution to withstand the terrible punishment of one hundred blows; generally the victim is in a state of insensibility after twenty-five or thirty blows. At the first blow, he yells abominably; then quiets down, and is a mere groaning, quivering body till the operation is over … I conscientiously believe that a man who receives one hundred blows is often nearly killed and has his spirit broken for life.’

The next thing I knew we were at Benin City. I was lying in a tent, gasping for air, writhing, nearly slayed, with a thousand rats scratching at my back and flies sucking at my wounds. I became delirious and remained that way for several weeks.

Terrible fate!

I returned to my village. My mother embraced me and put me to bed. I dreamed of my History. From between the covers of those (as yet incomplete) tomes came howls of anguish and hysterical laughter. I woke up trembling. After that I refused to leave my room. I lived as if in a dream. I was no longer able to walk or read or grasp a pen. Instead I listened into my thoughts. They scolded me in the harshest terms, mocked my life, my goals and ambitions. I did not eat for several weeks. And when I finally ate, at the bidding of my mother, nothing tasted as it had tasted before. Potatoes tasted like onions, and onions tasted like apples, and apples tasted like goat, and goat tasted like okro, and okro tasted like figs, and figs tasted like stew, and stew tasted like mud, and mud like bones left out in the sun and eaten out by rats, and these bones tasted like porridge, and porridge like vomit, and vomit like champagne, champagne on the king’s table, which tasted like iron, and this iron like smoke in my mouth, which stung like smoke in my eyes.

What troubled me more than my malfunctioning taste buds were the howls and mad cries of my African brothers who had perished and who made a sound in my ears like forests falling, hideous cries like the sky in flames.

Who was torturing me?

I asked myself this question more than once.

In time I got better. I began to read. I told my mother to unpack my library and began to study. With the end of the old rope we begin to weave the new . For the next decade I lived in my mother’s compound. I did nothing but write my long-planned History, and I forgot about the screams of my African brothers. I buried them between the covers of the tomes I was writing.

And here I am, today, an old man without the strength to leave my bed, or the courage to kill myself. The howls of my African brothers have returned to plague me. Now I make an effort to understand them, and they say to me, The destruction of our African continent was not a unique event in the history of the world. They say to me, Honour, justice, compassion and freedom are ideas that have no converts. They say to me, There are only people who intoxicate themselves with words, shout them, imagining they believe them without believing in anything else but profit and personal advantage. They say to me, There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

Today, I visited my maternal grandfather, Mr Rafferty. I had not intended to break from writing, but three nights ago, after finishing ‘Massacre at Benin’, I found myself unable to progress. I barely remember the process of transcribing the pamphlet; I worked without pause, hardly taking in the sense of the words — the relief of abandoning my own history and copying another’s! It was not until the following day when I printed the chapter out and read it slowly, checking it against the original (two errors: ‘smiled’ for ‘soiled’, ‘odours’ for ‘orders’), that I was stricken with fatigue and emptiness. I found myself in a bind. Far from calming me, as I had hoped, far from allowing time for the din of my past to quieten and become intelligible to me once again, the process of transcription stirred up clamours of a more disturbing kind — in me, but not of me. I was haunted by the swarms of bullets, the screams and hysterical laughter of the Benin army. It was as if the process or undertaking of these last months had been reversed: no longer was I traducing sounds of the past on to my computer, into words on the page; now words on the page — Kemi Olabode’s words — were, as I copied them out, evoking ancient sounds.

I did not fully understand the source of those disturbing feelings, which were quite different — more painfully wretched, heavier — than the depression which sets in when confronted with barbarism, with evidence that all power is a form of violence exercised over men and women. I merely lay on my mattress, haunted by the sounds.

After seeing my grandfather this afternoon, however, I have a better understanding of my response. I had concentrated on ‘Massacre at Benin’ because I had wanted to take a break from writing my own history. But there was a second, more important reason: I realize I chose this text because Kemi Olabode’s experience told me something about the country of my birth; something that was hidden from me during my childhood; something that, being unsavoury, and brutalizing, the British in Lagos did not talk about. Kemi Olabode sought to enlighten us; that is why he sent his pamphlets to every colonial officer, at his own expense. But he was mistaken; he had worked under the illusion that the British in Nigeria were ignorant, that they were unaware of the crimes of slaughter that had won them control of the colony. And perhaps some of us were genuinely ignorant. Perhaps there were people who, like the children of the colony, did not know how our home had been established and administered. But these were few. Most, like my father, knew enough. And so Kemi Olabode’s writings were ignored. It was not knowledge the colonials lacked. What was missing was the courage to understand what they knew and to draw the right conclusions.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Before I understood this, I needed to dress myself, leave the attic, and the house, and travel to Edinburgh to visit Mr Rafferty.

…

The city was cold and dark. The pavements were damp, and people were walking with purpose. Orange streetlamps flickered on at some point; it can’t have been much past two. I took my grandfather to the central library to choose some books, Marine and Pocket Chronometers, English House Clocks. As we left the library, walking along George IV Bridge, past empty cafés and slow-moving traffic, I said, for no reason in particular, ‘When I take you back to the institution, perhaps I could stay on with you.’

Mr Rafferty cocked his head.

‘Well,’ I said as we stepped out into the road to pass a group of tourists. ‘I feel as though I’m in need of a … rest.’

Mr Rafferty said nothing.