“Dem dey chow soudern towns o!” Tega said, as soon as the pictures became better. Jubril, who had longed to see the south since the beginning of his flight, now watched without blinking. He considered it a foretaste of where he was heading.
The magic of TV enthralled Jubril, then horrified him. He watched police and soldiers manhandling rioters in different southern cities. He watched them shoot at the mobs to quell the violence incited by the arrival of luxurious hearses from the north. He saw barracks brimming over with northerners while soldiers and police stood guard. The rioters were not retreating, in spite of the might of the security forces. He noticed that vast numbers of people were in Western clothes and that women were rioting alongside the men. Jubril saw the compact vegetation of the rain forest, creation in full bloom, which was quite different from the semidesert of Khamfi.
The south he saw that night on TV was not what he had expected. The roads were primitive, and in some places rain had washed them away completely. The military jeeps could not cope, and soldiers had to come down and chase the rioters on foot. Some primary schools had no roofs, and he could see blackboards hanging on mango and melina trees in the fields. The bald circles on the earth around trees convinced him that, just as in some parts of Khamfi, the children took their lessons outside.
After the TV had shown the military effectively chasing the rioters through the city, a reporter said that not everybody in the shell-shocked refugee crowds was from the north. The camera zoomed in on some southerners who he said were also hiding in the barracks. He said they had been chased there by the fury of their kin—for attempting to save the northerners—and added that the northerners were not comfortable with the presence of southerners, because not all of them knew why the southerners had joined them. The only difference Jubril saw between the two groups was the way they were dressed.
The reporter was still commenting when someone whispered in his ear. He stopped talking for a moment and then announced: “Because of the crisis in the country, the federal democratic government hereby bans the ferrying of corpses for burial from one part of the country to another until further notice. The government has given the military an order to intercept any bus or truck guilty of this.”
THEN THE CAMERAS ZOOMED in on a man whom the reporter identified as the leader of the Hausa-Fulani community in Onyera. He was tall and lean, as black as Tega. Though he wore a bandage on his head, blood ran down his face like tears. He spoke with his eyes closed, as if the camera flashes were hurting them. This image disturbed Jubril. He would have turned away, but the memory of Mallam Abdullahi, who was also Hausa-Fulani, calmed him.
“My name is Yo . . . Yohanna Tijani,” stammered the leader, into the reporter’s microphone. “I’ve never lived in the north. . . . My great-grandfather settled here a hundred years ago, like some of your people. I was born in Onyera and grew up here. My mother was a southerner, an Ibo, and I married an Ibo woman too, because the Ibos accepted us as their own. I appeal to you, my grandparents and in-laws: spare our lives. We didn’t begin the Sharia war in Khamfi. Most of us Muslims in this country are peace-loving people. . . . We who live with you here didn’t kill any of these people whose corpses are now arriving in Luxurious Buses. But now we are killing your people . . . in self-defense. We’re guilty of bloodshed. Forgive us—” The audio cut out, and the sound of static filled the bus. The police lowered the TVs’ volume until all they could hear was the soft purr of the bus, the hiss of the tires on the road, and the flutter of the window blinds. Then the pictures wobbled into large screwy lines and disappeared.
“God, make you no permit soldiers intercept our bus o!” Ijeoma said. “We no cally any dead people o.”
“What sort of country be dis?” one refugee said.
During the lull, they started analyzing the impact of the government order. The general opinion was that the government had no right to stop anybody from taking the corpses of their kinsmen back home to bury. They blamed the government for not protecting them in Khamfi. They blamed the president for not sending in the military early enough, as he would have done if oil installations in the delta were under threat, and the senators for not taking a strong stand against what was happening in the land—for being paralyzed by the same religious divide that had torn the country apart. They blamed the judiciary for never dealing promptly with cases of religious fanaticism.
“It’s a hopeless situation,” Emeka said, regaining a bit of his former ebullience.
“You want start trouble again,” the police accused him.
“Please, I’m sorry,” Emeka begged. “I won’t say anything more, I promise.”
“Just shut up!” the police said, turning up the volume. “De TV done clear now.”
“...On behalf of our people,” Yohanna Tijani was saying, “I want to thank you, Christians. If not for some of you who died hiding us and many who are here with us in the barracks, it would’ve been worse. . . . I want to say a special thanks to that family that hid me under their Sacred Heart altar and prayed their rosaries while Bakassi Boys stormed the house. . . . My wife, an Ibo Pentecostal Christian, who was visiting with her family, wasn’t that lucky. She was killed by her people for hiding some Muslims, one of whom was our son. . . . Everybody is saying our northern generals, who have stolen your oil money, are responsible for this betrayal of nationhood, for the extreme poverty in the land. The truth is that most of us here don’t know any generals and are not related to them. If we did, we too would be rich and our children would be studying abroad. We beg you, whatever the generals are doing, whatever the politicians are saying, it’s within our hearts to spare each other. They’re not losing wives and children. We are. Their money is safe and is reaping interest in Europe and America and Asia and the Middle East, but where shall we get money to rebuild our lives?” The sound and pictures broke up, then disappeared.
In the gloom, Jubril’s heart pounded, overpowered by the man’s plea and the wonder of TV. He thought he had escaped the sight of blood and killings in Khamfi. But, from what he had just seen and heard from Yohanna Tijani, the madness had spread to the south. His mind went back to the mob of Lukman and Musa, and the mob that came to Mallam Abdullahi’s house. He pressed his tongue against his teeth till it began to hurt, hoping against hope that the images on TV were fabricated.
In the semidarkness, it was easy to see that, apart from the mad soldier who was asleep, the refugees were agitated. Though what the northerner had said touched them, they wanted to know the extent of the damage. Would they make it to the south? Would they be mistaken for a busload of corpses and be impounded by the military? It worried them because since the Nigeria-Biafra War their people had never retaliated against the recurring massacre of their people in the north. Everyone was afraid. It was clear to them that the local channels were not ready to show the extent of the riots in the south. They pestered the policemen for cable TV, for nobody believed the local channels would tell them much.
“No worry,” the police said, “we no be luxurious hearse, OK? Dem no go intercept us.”