Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

‘Listen to me,’ the speaker said, ‘I have something to tell you. Do not worry yourselves. You will be compensated by the Executive Board. Every one of you. That is a promise. Remember, God can turn a poor man today into a rich man tomorrow!’

There was more shouting, a tremendous noise. I was thrown violently forward. Then the voice which had sung out several minutes previously called out to the speaker on the stage. The voice demanded that his promises should be typewritten, stamped and put into registered envelopes.

‘That can be done,’ said the speaker, despatching a soldier, before stepping to the microphone again. Now he told the women that their former homes had been fever dens where diseases such as pneumonia, dysentery and malaria thrived, not to mention crime, drunkenness, prostitution, social unrest, vice, feckless poverty and mental pathology.

‘It is imperative for us to demonstrate that Nigeria can survive as a viable nation on her own,’ he said. ‘Your government will provide roads, water, electricity, a piped sewage system and drains!’

‘Mothers cannot chop. Picken cannot chop sef!’ someone shouted.

The Honeymans’ cook bent to speak in my ear. ‘It is true what the people are saying, because the land which he has told the people will be theirs to build their houses on again is being given to big men in the government.’

‘Friends,’ the speaker said. ‘Perhaps you think you are still living your village lives. But you are mistaken. You are living in a city, a modern city, the domain of reason. Hence your problems must be solved by the exercise of reason alone. It is a question of finding the right road system,’ he said, ‘safe housing, the correct proportion of green space, and so forth.’

‘I can no longer support my family,’ someone shouted.

‘From time to time it becomes necessary to eat the onion,’ the speaker said, ‘no matter how bitter, and sometimes in the interest of the well-being of your nation.’

‘What nation?’ someone asked.

‘The great nation of Nigeria. You may not find it easy at first to accept without question or reservation what I have to say,’ he continued, ‘but finally you will reconcile yourselves to it. It will take a bit of time. But modernization will come. You will have to accept it. Otherwise there will be no place for you in the new Nigeria.’

I had heard these same words years ago, when Mr Honeyman came to our veranda and showed us the bird’s-eye view of Lagos, with the sites penned for destruction circled in red. He had spoken of sanitation and green space and skyscrapers, and I had thought these ideas mere dreams. Now his ideas had been adopted by the leaders of Nigeria. Land had been cleared, and the people of the market district had been forced from their homes. The speaker had brought along his own map, a hand-drawn view of central Lagos, and he had the soldiers scatter copies from the stage. The women reached to catch them as they fell through the air. I picked one up from the ground and put it in my pocket.

‘I have nowhere to sell my oranges!’ someone cried. But she was hushed by other members of the crowd, for the speaker had changed his argument. He was speaking of the benefits modernization would bring; soon, he said, the people of Lagos would be able to afford proper homes, filled with furniture of modern durable design, ‘metal tables, oak chests, china plate, booth seating, Bokhara rugs, lacquered cabinets, night stands, bubble lamps, glass sconces, telephones, coloured-glass coasters, as well as exotic foods, jam, hams, apples, sacks of almonds, walnuts, pistachios, raisins and sultanas, patisseries , candied fruits from France, everything a man can eat, everything a man can drink, all laid out before you on your metal tables. You will drown in plenty,’ he told the astonished crowd. ‘Have you ever tasted hare?’ he asked. ‘Or quail, or spit-roast pig? I do not think you have. Soon you will dine like the Gauls! You will see shopping centres rising from the ashes of old Lagos,’ he said, ‘skyscrapers climbing one hundred storeys high!’

‘Do not listen to that man!’ shouted the voice. ‘He wishes the food we chop to be insect wey we find on the street. The government is using us like goat.’ The crowd roared and surged forward, jeering, urging, indignant, crying, and I shouted my support. I was happy and dizzy in this hothouse of screaming and white light. And that was the thrilling thing, I thought, to be here, among the bodies, hearing the street rumbling with the weight of thousands and the cries of anger and sorrow.

Now the women started to beat the stage with their sticks, and the speaker shouted for calm, and for the women to withdraw, but they took no notice and flocked forward. It was then I saw the soldiers lower their rifles. This time they did not fire over our heads, but right into us, into the crowd. I was stunned. We began to scatter. I held on to the Honeymans’ cook. We took a street to the side of Independence House, and emerged at the rear of the building. Amid the fleeing bodies and confusion and dust I lost hold of the Honeymans’ cook. I ran on, further from the site of the shooting, until, eventually, unable to run any more, I came to a stop. I heard drumming and I watched streams of women, some still running, others dragging themselves along the street, weeping and screaming. I searched for the Honeymans’ cook, and still full of the mood of the violence, not ready to turn and try to find my way back to my father, I managed to pick her out. She was walking slowly, supporting a wounded trader I recognized from the onion line. And there, right beside her, was Iffe! They came to a halt. I gazed at Iffe: now she was standing quite still among the wounded, set apart in the shade of an uprooted tree, her expression fixed in an attitude of profound grief. I jumped up, crying, ‘Iffe, Iffe!’

It was not until I was beside her that she noticed me. Her gaze fell on me for a brief moment, then with her unhurried grace of movement, she turned her back on me.

‘Go away,’ she said with her back still turned. Those words astonished me. All the years I had known Iffe, she had been indifferent to my presence. At the onion stand, travelling home on the bus, sitting at the kitchen table eating our evening meal — she had seldom paid me any attention. Now she had addressed me directly and, what is more, she had demonstrated high feeling. And yet what she said sent a pain through my limbs, for with those words, spoken with her back turned, she no longer expressed indifference, but contempt.

I walked away half stunned, half afraid, my feet hurting. I made my way further from the site of the shooting, dragging myself out of sight of Iffe and the wounded women. I stumbled and fell in a heap on the ground, weeping from sheer exhaustion.

The place I had come to was almost unrecognizable. Shattered stalls and enormous upturned coils of corrugated iron poked out of the debris. I sat on a basket and looked out at the grey vista between two broken shacks opening on to the wreckage beyond. I could see no people, only squashed fruits, bright colours staining the ground. I had entered the former market district, which had been razed to the ground. I looked about me, seeing what was left of the trading lines, which could only tentatively be called lines, since all things appeared alike on the levelled land. To my right was a highway in the process of construction, and beyond this other new roads, lined with banks of trees, symmetrically spaced, and tall buildings forming street-canyons that reflected sounds, doubling them, making them collide, overlap and shooting them upward towards the high roofs, invisible in evening light.

On the other side of the new thoroughfare I saw that fires had blackened the streets, and in places still burned. The smoking earth was dotted with irregular pale-red flares. I came across a trestle table shorn of its feet, propped against an upturned cart, and the pair formed a crooked tent-shaped space, into which I crawled. I told myself that I had come across the remains of the onion table, the very table under which I had spent so many hours, listening, and this made me happy and bitter. By my feet a few embers still lingered on the scorched earth, and I saw that the fire that had razed the market district had exposed a cluster of new shoots; those untouched by the flames shone the freshest green. I settled under my shelter, and my thoughts were sad and fearful, many-branched, thoughts that turned, first on Iffe, then on Ade, and finally on the pits, to which I longed to return. I had been drawn to that underground kingdom because I believed it would bring me darkness and silence. I had believed I would remain for ever in my husk. I had thought that I would live as truly as I had lived in the womb. And yet from that desperate kind of quest, from that heady feeling of having been able to make out a silent world, nothing now remained.