“We want cable TV o!”
“When Abacha hanged Saro-Wiwa because of our oil, we saw it first on foreign TV!”
“When Abacha himself die na foreign press talk am first!”
The police instructed the driver to turn off the hazard lights and turn on the cabin lights so the bus would not be mistaken for a hearse. The driver did. The passengers’ anxieties rose and fell as the bus skirted the corners, yet some were urging the driver to move faster: death by motor accident seemed more desirable to them than the forms of death meted out by the ethnic cleansers at both ends of their country.
By the time they started encountering vehicles traveling the other way—mainly tractor trailers and smaller trucks, the kinds that transport cows from the north to the south—even the police officers were eager to know the real situation in the south. All vehicles seemed to be going north, blazing with a full complement of hazard lights and horns. Luxurious hearses were also heading north.
HAVING LIVED THROUGH THE ordeal in Mallam Abdullahi’s house and having just heard the testimony of Yohanna Tijani about the generous southern Christians, Jubril felt that with heroic people like this, his nation would rise above all types of divisiveness. Instinctively, in his yearning for consolation, he envisioned the different peoples of his country connecting at a deep, primordial level, where one’s life was irreversibly connected to one’s neighbor’s, like a child’s to its mother’s.
THE FRIGHTENED PASSENGERS HAD now turned inward, for strength, and peace reigned among the different religions on the bus. Everybody seemed tired of screaming about their god in someone else’s face. Meanwhile, the police kept flipping the foreign channels for the updates they wanted. It was not long before the truth was told:
Breaking News: Reprisal Violence in Onyera and Port Harcourt
Both city centers were matted with corpses and gore, and the anchor said other southern cities were preparing for vengeance against the Muslims and northerners in their midst. She said buses full of southern corpses were beginning to arrive in Onyera and Port Harcourt. She said that trucks had also begun ferrying corpses of northerners killed in the southern riots back to the north, and that the country was on the verge of a north-south war. She said that what mattered in the conflicts was the fighters’ tribes, insofar as external features and dressing and language could identify them. She confirmed that the government had banned the movement of corpses to check reprisal violence.
Images of the riots poured into the bus, the cameras pursuing the action as if it were a UEFA Champions League match. The southern youths were uncontrollable and spilled out with their machetes, guns, and clubs in every direction, like the lava of an erupted volcano. They killed and killed, as if in this singular madness they would avenge all the massacres of their people who lived in the north, in the past and in the future. The audio was so clear that the refugees could hear the slurp of machetes slashing into flesh and the final cries of the victims.
Then, the broadcast split into three interactive frames. One showed the reporter, who was in direct contact with the news anchor in another frame. They discussed the carnage being shown in the third. Then the third frame anticipated and zoomed in on a mosque and expanded to fill the whole screen. The golden dome sparkled in the sun like a bishop’s skullcap, the corners of the mosque reaching up in four beautiful minarets, like carefully sculpted bedposts, the sky above them a rich blue canopy decorated with woolly clouds. The green and white motif of the fenced compound stood apart, like an eternal freshness, from the widening chaos of the city. Then youths with torches surrounded it, smashing doors and windows. The minarets started spewing thick black chimneys of smoke, like an industrial plant. Because there was no wind, the smoke enveloped the golden dome, which caved in before the mosque erupted in a ball of fire.
The coverage returned to Khamfi, recapping the past two days of crisis. Tempers flared again in the bus. Jubril never thought the people of the south could be capable of such violence. And no one had ever told him that there were northerners who lived in the south, whose lives could be in danger.
Suddenly, everybody on the bus stood up and cheered, even the police. They were like soccer fans, urging their teams to victory.
“We’re tired of turning the other cheek!” Madam Aniema said.
“No more northerners in Igbo land!” Emeka said.
“Urhobo land for de Urhobos!” Tega said.
“De Musrims done burn my church four times in Khamfi!” Ijeoma said.
This shouting had little effect on Jubril. The sight of a mosque going up in flames had given him an instant fever, even though he himself had set churches on fire. It was too much for him, and he wept. Jubril had not cried since the gas spilled into his eyes when he lay among the Christians in Mallam Abdullahi’s house. Now the tears kept coming, and with one hand he caught their watery beads. Sobs shook his body, like that of a convulsing Nduese. He twisted in his seat to shield his face from the TV, and in this valley of tears he forgot himself—and lifted his right wrist to his face.
HE TRIED TO PUT it back in his pocket, but it was too late. Those who saw it moved away from him, including Tega. Looking at the stern faces around him, Jubril knew it was no use trying to hide. The police asked him to stand up and come into the aisle. They frisked him for firebombs and guns.
His hand had been sliced off just above the wrist. It had not healed yet and could not be fully straightened. It was covered by a loose ball of dirty bandage, which had all along bulged in his pocket like a gloved fist. The police removed the ban-dage and threw it out the window. The wounded skin of the stump was white and taut.
Passengers were asking the driver to stop the bus and make Jubril get off. He refused, saying the road was unsafe. Looking at the others, Jubril knew that they were going to lynch him. Trembling more with fever than with fear, he did not shout or struggle against those who started to push him.
“Stop! Just hold on!” Chief Ukongo intervened. “My people, a tick that sockets itself into your skin is not removed by force. . . . A stone thrown in anger cannot kill a bird . . .”
“Old man, we no get time for proverb o!” the police told him.
“My people, how would our Lord Jesus react to a situation like this?”
“Pagan . . . you know Chlistianity pass us?” Ijeoma said.
They pulled at Jubril’s shirt and tore it off, watching him the way one watches a wild animal that has just been captured. They acted slowly, deliberately, as if their anger was being bottled up somewhere inaccessible to them.
“Gabriel, please,” Madam Aniema said, “don’t tell me you are a northerner!”
Emeka said, “He is. Guilty . . .”
“Sssh, be quiet!” she shushed Emeka, and everybody else kept quiet as well. “You’re not a Muslim, Gabriel?”
“Ah . . . ah . . . I come prom soud, but I be prom nord,” he said with a Hausa accent. “I be Catolic. I do child baftism. Mama say once you be Catolic you be Catolic porever. I want remain Catolic, abeg.”
“Are you a Muslim?” Madam Aniema asked him again.
He shook his head. “I no be Muslim again.”
“I see,” she said, and broke into tears. She tried to appeal to the passengers to give her more time to talk to him, but they pushed her aside. They scolded her for crying, saying she was too emotional to face the truth.
“Now, let’s be serious,” Chief Ukongo said. “Which north? Which south? Are you from Niger or Chad?”
“No, Chief.”
“Are you a mercenary?” he continued.
“No, Chief.”
“Because, my son,” he said, “we know some politicians in the north have hired mercenaries from Niger and Chad to fight this Sharia war with Arab money.”