[2 of 4] Half of a Yellow Sun, Part Two: The Late Sixties, Chapters 7 - 18

Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. "Part Two: The Late Sixties." Half of a Yellow Sun, Anchor Books, 2006, Chapters 7-18.

The Late Sixties

7

Ugwu lay on a mat in his mother's hut, staring at a dead spider squashed on the wall; its body fluids had stained the mud a deeper red. Anulika was measuring out cups of ukwaand the crusty aroma of roasted breadfruit seeds hung thick in the room. She was talking. She had been talking for quite a while, and Ugwu's head ached. His visit home suddenly seemed much longer than a week, perhaps because of the endless gassy churning in his stomach from eating only fruit and nuts. His mother's food was unpalatable. The vegetables were overcooked, the cornmeal was too lumpy, the soup too watery, and the yam slices coarse from being boiled without a dollop of butter. He could not wait to get back to Nsukka and finally eat a real meal.

“I want to have a baby boy first, because it will place my feet firmly in Onyeka's house,” Anulika said. She walked over to get a bag in the rafters and Ugwu noticed, again, the new suspicious roundness to her body: the breasts that filled her blouse, the buttocks that rolled with each step. Onyeka must have touched her. Ugwu could not bear to think of the man's ugly body thrusting into his sister's. It had all happened too fast; there had been talk of suitors the last time he visited, but she had spoken of Onyeka in such an indifferent way that he did not think she would accept his proposal so quickly. Now even their parents were too swift to talk about Onyeka, his good mechanic job in town, his bicycle, his good behavior, as if he were already a member of the family.

Nobody ever mentioned his stunted height and the pointed teeth that looked like they belonged to a bush rat.

“You know, Onunna from Ezeugwu's compound had a baby girl first, and her husband's people went to see a dibiato find out why! Of course, Onyeka's people will not do that to me, they don't dare, but I want to have a boy first anyway,” Anulika said.

Ugwu sat up. “I have tired of stories of Onyeka. I noticed something when he came by yesterday. He should bathe more often, he smells like rotten oil beans.”

“And you, what do you smell like?” Anulika poured the ukwain the bag and knotted it. “I've finished. You better get going before it gets too late.”

Ugwu went out to the yard. His mother was pounding something in a mortar and his father was stooped near her, sharpening a knife against a stone. The scrape of metal against stone set off tiny sparks that flickered briefly before they disappeared.

“Did Anulika wrap the ukwa well?” his mother asked. “She did.” Ugwu raised the bag to show her.

“Greet your master and madam,” his mother said. “Thank them for everything they sent us.” “Yes, Mother.” He went over and hugged her. “Stay well. Greet Chioke when she returns.”

His father straightened up and wiped the knife blade on his palm before shaking hands. “Go well, ije oma. We will send word when Onyeka's people tell us they are ready to bring palm wine. It will be in a few months' time.”

“Yes, Father.” Ugwu stood around while his little cousins and siblings, the younger ones naked and the older ones in oversize shirts, said their goodbyes and listed what they wanted him to bring on his next visit. Buy us bread! Buy us meat! Buy us fried fish! Buy us groundnuts!

Anulika escorted him to the main road. He saw a familiar figure near the grove of ubetrees and, although he had not seen her since she went to Kano to learn a trade four years ago, he knew immediately that it was Nnesinachi.

“Anulika! Ugwu! Is it you?” Nnesinachi's voice was as husky as he remembered but she was tallernow, and her skin was darker from the fierce sun in the North. When they hugged, he felt her chest push into his.

“I would barely have recognized you, the North has changed you so,” he said, wondering if she had really pressed herself against him.

“I came back yesterday with my cousins.” She was smiling at him. She had never smiled at him so warmly in the past. Her eyebrows had been shaved and penciled in, one thicker than the other. She turned to Anulika. “Anuli, I was on my way to see you. I hear you are getting married!”

“My sister, it is what I hear too,” Anulika said, and they both laughed. “Are you going back to Nsukka?” she asked Ugwu.

“Yes. But I will come back soon, for Anulika's wine-carrying.”

“Go well.” Nnesinachi's eyes met his briefly, boldly, before she walked on, and he knew he had not imagined it; she really had pressed herself against him when they hugged. He felt a rush of weakness to his legs. He held himself from turning back to look at her, just in case she turned as well, and for a moment he forgot the uncomfortable churning in his stomach.

“Her eyes must have opened in the North. You can't marry her, so you had better take what she is offering, before she marries,” Anulika said.

“You noticed?”

“How could I not have noticed? Do I look like a sheep?”

Ugwu narrowed his eyes to look at her. “Has Onyeka touched you?” “Of course Onyeka has touched me.”

Ugwu slowed his pace. He knew she must have slept with Onyeka and yet he did not like her confirming it. When Chinyere, Dr. Okeke's housegirl, first started to sneak across the hedge to his Boys' Quarters for hasty thrusts in the dark, he had told Anulika about it during a visit home and they had discussed it. But they had never discussed her; he had always made himself assume that there was nothing to discuss. Anulika was walking ahead of him, unbothered by his sulky slowness, and he hurried up to her, silent, their steps light on the grass where they, as children, had hunted grasshoppers.

“I'm so hungry,” he said, finally.

“You didn't even eat the yam Mama boiled.” “We boil our yam with butter.”

“We boil our yam with boh-tah.Look at your mouth. When they send you back to the village, what will you do? Where will you find boh-tahto use to boil your yam?”

“They won't send me back to the village.”

She looked at him from the corners of her eyes, up and down. “You have forgotten where you come from, and now you have become so foolish you think you are a Big Man.”

Master was in the living room when Ugwu came in and greeted him. “How are your people?” Master asked.

“They are well, sah. They send greetings.” “Very good.”

“My sister Anulika will be getting married soon.” “I see.” Master was focused on tuning the radio.

Ugwu could hear Olanna and Baby singing in the bathroom.

London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down,
London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady.

Baby's London, in her tiny unformed voice, sounded like bonbon. The bathroom door was open.“ Good evening, mah,” Ugwu said.

“Oh, Ugwu, I didn't hear you come in!” Olanna said. She was bent over the tub, giving Baby a bath. “Welcome, nno. Are your people well?”

“Yes, mah. They send greetings. My mother said she cannot thank you enough for the wrappers.” “How is her leg?”

“It no longer aches. She gave me ukwa for you.”

“Eh! She must have known what I am craving now.” She turned to look at him, her hands covered in bath foam. “You look well. See your fat cheeks!”

“Yes, mah,” Ugwu said, although it was a lie. He always lost weight when he visited home. “Ugwu!” Baby called. “Ugwu, come and see!” She was pressing a squawking plastic duck in her hand.

“Baby, you can greet Ugwu after your bath,” Olanna said.

“Anulika will be getting married soon, mah. My father said I should let you and Master know. They do not have a date yet, but they will be very happy if you come.”

“Anulika? Is she not a little young? About sixteen-seventeen?” “Her mates have started to marry.”

Olanna turned back to the tub. “Of course we will come.” “Ugwu!” Baby said again.

“Shall I warm Baby's porridge, mah?” “Yes. And please make her milk.”

“Yes, mah.” He would linger for a moment and then ask her if all had gone well in the week he was away, and she would tell him which friends had come, who had brought what, if they had finished the stew he had put in containers in the freezer.

“Your master and I have decided that Arize should come here to have her baby in September,” Olanna said.

“That is good, mah,” Ugwu said. “I hope the baby will resemble Aunty Arize and not Uncle Nnakwanze.”

Olanna laughed. “I hope so too. We will start cleaning the room in time. I want it to be spotless for her.”

“It will be spotless, mah, don't worry.” Ugwu liked Aunty Arize. He remembered her wine-carrying ceremony in Umunnachi about three years ago, how plump and bubbly she had been and how he had drunk so much palm wine that he had nearly dropped the infant Baby.

“I'm going to Kano on Monday to pick her up and take her shopping in Lagos,” Olanna said. “I'll take Baby. We'll pack that blue dress Arize made for her.”

“The pink one is better, mah. The blue one is too tight.”

“That's true.” Olanna picked up a plastic duck and threw it back into the tub, and Baby squealed and submerged it in the water.

“Nkem!” Master called out. “Omego!It has happened!” Olanna hurried to the living room, Ugwu close behind.

Master was standing by the radio. The television was on but the volume was off so that the dancing people looked as if they were swaying drunkenly. “There's been a coup,” Master said, and gestured to the radio. “Major Nzeogwu is speaking from Kaduna.”

The voice on the radio was youthful, eager, confident.

The Constitution is suspended and the regional government and elected assemblies are
hereby dissolved. My dear countrymen, the aim of the Revolutionary Council is to establish a
nation free from corruption and internal strife. Our enemies are the political profiteers, the
swindlers, the men in high and low places that seek bribes and demand ten percent, those that
seek to keep the country divided permanently so that they can remain in office, the tribalists, the
nepotists, those that make the country look big for nothing before international circles, those that have corrupted our society.

Olanna ran to the telephone. “What is happening in Lagos? Did they say what is happening in Lagos?”

“Your parents are fine, nkem. Civilians are safe.”

Olanna was dialing. “Operator? Operator?” She put the phone down and picked it up again. “It isn't going through.”

Master gently took the phone from her. “I'm sure they are fine. The lines will come back up soon. It's just for security.”

On the radio, the voice had become firmer.

I assure all foreigners that their rights will continue to be respected. We promise every law-abiding citizen the freedom from all forms of oppression, freedom from general inefficiency, and freedom to live and strive in every field of human endeavor. We promise that you will no more be ashamed to say that you are a Nigerian.

“Mummy Ola!” Baby called from the bathroom. “Mummy Ola!”

Ugwu went back to the bathroom and dried Baby with a towel and then hugged her, blew against her neck. She smelled deliciously of Pears baby soap.

“Baby chicken!” he said, tickling her. Her braids were wet, the ends tightened in a curly kink, and Ugwu smoothed them and marveled again at how much she looked like her father; his people would say that Master had spit this child out.

“More tickles!” Baby said, laughing. Her chubby face was slick with moisture. “Baby baby chicken,” Ugwu murmured, in the singsong way that always amused her.

Baby laughed and, from the living room, Ugwu heard Olanna say, “Oh, God, what did he say? What did he say?”

He was serving Baby's porridge when the deputy president spoke briefly on the radio, the voice understated, as if he were exhausted from the effort of saying, “The government is handing over to the military.”

There were more announcements later—the prime minister was missing, Nigeria was now a federal military government, the premiers of the North and West were missing—but Ugwu was not sure who spoke and on what station because Master sat next to the radio, turning the knob quickly, stopping, listening, turning, stopping. He had removed his glasses and looked more vulnerable with his eyes sunken deep in his face. He did not put them back on until the guests arrived. There were more today than usual, and Ugwu brought dining chairs to the living room to seat them all. Their voices were urgent and excited, each person barely waiting for the last to finish speaking.

“This is the end of corruption! This is what we have needed to happen since that general strike,” one guest said. Ugwu did not remember his name, but he tended to eat up all the chin-chinright after it was served, so Ugwu had taken to placing the tray as far away from him as possible. The man had large hands; a few generous handfuls from the tray and all was lost.

“Those majors are true heroes!” Okeoma said, and raised an arm.

There was excitement in their voices even when they talked about the people who were killed. “They said the Sardauna hid behind his wives.”

“They said the finance minister shit in his trousers before they shot him.”

Some guests chuckled and so did Ugwu, until he heard Olanna say, “I knew Okonji. He was a friend of my father's.” She sounded subdued.

“The BBC is calling it an Igbo coup,” the chin-chin–eating guest said. “And they have a point. It was mostly Northerners who were killed.”“ It was mostly Northerners who were in government,” Professor Ezeka whispered, his eyebrows arched, as if he could not believe he had to say what was so obvious.

“The BBC should be asking their people who put the Northerners in government to dominate everybody!” Master said.

Ugwu was surprised that Master and Professor Ezeka seemed to agree. He was even more surprised when Miss Adebayo said, “Those North Africans are crazy to call this an infidel versus righteous thing,” and Master laughed—not the usual derisive laugh before he shifted to the edge of his chair to challenge her; it was a laugh of approval. He agreed with her.

“If we had more men like Major Nzeogwu in this country, we would not be where we are today,” Master said. “He actually has a vision!”

“Isn't he a Communist?” It was the the green-eyed Professor Lehman. “He went to Czechoslovakia when he was at Sandhurst.”

“You Americans, always peering under people's beds to look for communism. Do you think we have time to worry about that?” Master asked. “What matters is whatever will make our people move forward. Let's assume that a capitalist democracy is a good thing in principle, but if it is our kind— where somebody gives you a dress that they tell you looks like their own, but it doesn't fit you and the buttons have fallen off—then you have to discard it and make a dress that is your own size. You simply have to!”

“Too much rhetoric, Odenigbo,” Miss Adebayo said. “You can't make a theoretical case for the military.”

Ugwu felt better; this was the sparring he was used to.

“Of course I can. With a man like Major Nzeogwu, I can,” Master said. “Ugwu! More ice!”

“The man is a Communist,” Professor Lehman insisted. His nasal voice annoyed Ugwu, or perhaps it was simply that Professor Lehman had the same fair hair as Mr. Richard but none of the quiet dignity. He wished Mr. Richard still came. He clearly remembered his last visit, months before Baby was born, but other memories of those tumultuous weeks were faded now, incomplete; he had been so afraid that Master and Olanna would never reunite and his world would crumble that he did not eavesdrop much. He would not even have known that Mr. Richard was involved in the quarrel if Harrison had not told him.

“Thank you, my good man.” Master took the bowl of ice and clinked some into his glass.

“Yes, sah,” Ugwu said, watching Olanna. Her head was supported by her clasped hands. He wished he could truly feel sorry for her friend the politician who had been killed, but politicians were not like normal people, they were politicians.He read about them in the Renaissanceand DailyTimes—they paid thugs to beat opponents, they bought land and houses with government money, they imported fleets of long American cars, they paid women to stuff their blouses with false votes and pretend to be pregnant. Whenever he drained a pot of boiled beans, he thought of the slimy sink as a politician.

That night, he lay in his room in the Boys' Quarters and tried to concentrate on TheMayorof Casterbridge, but it was difficult. He hoped Chinyere would slip under the hedge and come over; they never planned it, she just appeared on some days and didn't on others. He ached for her to come on this exciting night of the coup that had changed the order of things and throbbed with possibility, with newness. When he heard her tap on the window, he offered up a bashful thanks to the gods.

“Chinyere,” he said. “Ugwu,” she said.

She smelled of stale onions. The light was off, and in the thin stream that came from the security bulb outside he saw the cone-shaped rise of her breasts as she pulled her blouse off, untied the wrapper around her waist, and lay on her back. There was something moist about the darkness, about their bodies close together, and he imagined that she was Nnesinachi and that the taut legs encircling himwere Nnesinachi's. She was silent at first and then, hips thrashing, her hands tight around his back, she called out the same thing she said every time. It sounded like a name—Abonyi, Abonyi—but he wasn't sure. Perhaps she imagined that he was someone else too, someone back in her village.

She got up and left as silently as she came. When he saw her the next day across the hedge, hanging out clothes on the line, she said “Ugwu” and nothing else; she did not smile.

8

Olanna postponed her trip to Kano because of the coup. She waited until the airports were reopened, the Post and Telegraphs up again, the military governors appointed to the regions. She waited until she was sure there was order. But the coup was in the air. Everyone was talking about it, even the taxi driver in the white hat and caftan who drove her and Baby from the airport to Arize's compound.

“But the Sardauna was not killed, madam,” he whispered. “He escaped with Allah's help and is now in Mecca.” Olanna smiled gently and said nothing because she knew that this man, with his prayer beads dangling from his rearview mirror, needed to believe that. The Sardauna, after all, had not only been premier of the North, he had also been the spiritual leader for this man and so many Muslims like him.

She told Arize about the taxi driver's comment, and Arize shrugged and said, “There is nothing that they are not saying.” Arize's wrapper was pushed low, below her waist, and her blouse was loose-fitting to accommodate the swell of her belly. They sat in the living room with photos of Arize and Nnakwanze's wedding on the oily wall, while Baby played with the children in the compound. Olanna did not want Baby to touch those children in their torn clothes, milky mucus trailing from their noses, but she didn't say so; it shamed her that she felt that way.

“We'll catch the first flight to Lagos tomorrow, Ari, so you can rest before we start shopping. I don't want to do anything that will be difficult for you,” Olanna said.

“Ha, difficult! I am only pregnant, Sister, I am not sick, oh. Is it not women like me who work on the farm until the baby wants to come out? And am I not the one sewing that dress?” Arize pointed to the corner, where her Singer sewing machine was on a table amid a pile of clothes.

“My concern is for my godchild in there, not for you,” Olanna said. She raised Arize's blouse and placed her face against the firm roundness of Arize's belly, against the stretched-tight skin, in the gentle ritual she had been doing since Arize became pregnant; if she did it often enough, Arize said, the child would imbibe her features and look like her.

“I don't care about the outside,” Arize said. “But she must look like you on the inside. She must have your brain and know Book.”

“Or he.”

“No, this one is a girl, you will see. Nnakwanze says it will be a boy who will resemble him, but I told him that God will not allow my child to have that flat face.”

Olanna laughed. Arize got up and opened an enamel box and brought out some money. “See what Sister Kainene sent me last week. She said I should use it to buy things for the baby.”

“It was nice of her.” Olanna knew she sounded stilted, knew Arize was watching her. “You and Sister Kainene should talk. What happened in the past is in the past.”

“You can only talk to the person who wants to talk to you,” Olanna said. She wanted to change the subject. She always wanted to change the subject when Kainene came up. “I better take Baby to greet Aunty Ifeka.” She hurried out to fetch Baby before Arize could say anything else.

She washed some sand off Baby's face and hands before they walked out of the compound and down the road. Uncle Mbaezi was not yet back from the market, and they sat with Aunty Ifeka on a bench in front of her kiosk, Baby on Olanna's lap. The yard was filling with the chatter of neighbors and the shrieks of children running around under the kukatree. Somebody was playing loud music from a gramophone; soon, a cluster of men by the compound gate began to laugh and jostle one another,mimicking the song. Aunty Ifeka laughed, too, and clapped her hands. “What's funny?” Olanna asked.

“That is Rex Lawson's song,” Aunty Ifeka said. “What is funny about it?”

“Our people say that the chorus sounds like mmee-mmee-mmee, the bleating of a goat.” Aunty Ifeka chuckled. “They say the Sardauna sounded like that when he was begging them not to kill him. When the soldiers fired a mortar into his house, he crouched behind his wives and bleated, ‘Mmee-mmee-mmee, please don't kill me, mmee-mmee-mmee!' ”

Aunty Ifeka laughed again, and so did Baby, as if she understood.

“Oh.” Olanna thought about Chief Okonji and wondered if he too was said to have bleated like a goat before he died. She looked away across the street, where children were playing with car tires, racing with one another as they rolled the tires along. A small sandstorm was gathering in the distance, and the dust rose and fell in gray-white clouds.

“The Sardauna was an evil man, ajommadu, ” Aunty Ifeka said. “He hated us. He hated everybody who did not remove their shoes and bow to him. Is he not the one who did not allow our children to go to school?”

“They should not have killed him,” Olanna said quietly. “They should have put him in prison.” Aunty Ifeka snorted. “Put him in which prison? In this Nigeria where he controlled everything?”

She got up and began to close up the kiosk. “Come, let's go inside so I can find Baby something to eat.”

The Rex Lawson song was playing loudly in Arize's compound when Olanna returned. Nnakwanze found it hilarious too. He had two huge front teeth, and when he laughed it was as if too many teeth had been painfully crammed into his small mouth. Mmeee-mmeee-mmeee, a goat begging not to be killed: mmeee-mmeee-mmeee.

“It's not funny,” Olanna said.

“Sister, but it is funny oh,” Arize said. “Because of too much Book, you no longer know how to laugh.”

Nnakwanze was sitting on the floor at Arize's feet, rubbing her belly in light circular motions. He had worried a lot less than Arize when she did not get pregnant the first, second, and third year of their marriage; when his mother visited them too often, poking at Arize's belly and urging her to confess how many abortions she had had before marriage, he asked his mother to stop visiting. He asked her, too, to stop bringing foul-smelling concoctions for Arize to drink in bitter gulps. Now that Arize was pregnant, he did more overtime at the railway and asked her to cut down on her sewing.

He was still singing the song and laughing. A goat begging not to be killed:mmeee-mmeee-mmeee. Olanna got up. The night breeze was unpleasantly cool. “Ari, you should get to bed, so you are

rested in the morning for Lagos.”

Nnakwanze made as if to help Arize up, but she brushed him aside. “I have told you people that I am not sick. I am only pregnant.”

Olanna was pleased that the house in Lagos would be empty. Her father had called to say they were going overseas. She knew it was because he wanted to be away until things calmed down, because he was wary of his ten percents and lavish parties and slick connections, but neither he nor her mother said so. They called it a holiday. It was their policy to leave things unsaid, the same way they pretended not to notice that she and Kainene no longer spoke and that she came home only when she was sure Kainene was not visiting.

In the airport taxi, Arize taught Baby a song while Olanna watched Lagos careen by: the tumultuoustraffic, the rusty buses and exhausted masses waiting for them, the touts, the beggars sliding on flat wooden trolleys, the shabby hawkers thrusting trays toward people who either would not or could not buy.

The driver stopped in front of her parents' walled compound in Ikoyi. He peered at the high gate. “The minister they killed used to live around here, abi, aunty?” he asked. Olanna pretended not to have heard and instead said to Baby, “Now, look what you did to your dress! Hurry inside so we can wash it off!”

Later, her mother's driver, Ibekie, took them to Kingsway. The supermarket smelled of new paint. Arize walked from aisle to aisle, cooing, touching the plastic wrappings, picking out baby clothes, a pink pram, a plastic doll with blue eyes.

“Everything is so shiny in supermarkets, Sister,” Arize said, laughing. “No dust!” Olanna held up a white dress trimmed with pink lace. “O maka. This is lovely.” “It's too expensive,” Arize said.

“Nobody asked you.”

Baby pulled down a doll from a low shelf and turned it upside down, and it let out a crying sound. “No, Baby.” Olanna took the doll and placed it back.

They shopped for a while longer and then left for Yaba market, where Arize could shop for fabrics for herself. Tejuosho Road was crowded, families huddled around pots of bubbling food, women roasting corn and plantains in charred basins, bare-chested men loading bags into lorries with hand-painted wisdoms: no condition is permanent. god knows best. Ibekie parked near the newspaper stands. Olanna glanced at the people standing and reading the Daily Times and her feet grew light with pride. They were reading Odenigbo's article, she was sure; it was easily the best there. She had edited it herself and toned down his rhetoric, so that his argument—that only a unitary government could remove the divisions of regionalism—was clearer.

She took Baby's hand and led the way past the roadside hawkers who sat under umbrellas with batteries and padlocks and cigarettes carefully arranged on enamel trays. The main market entrance was strangely empty. Then Olanna saw the crowd ahead. A man in a yellowed singlet stood at the center while two men slapped him, one after the other, methodical leathery-sounding slaps. “Why now? Why are you denying?” The man stared at them, blank, bending his neck slightly after each slap. Arize stopped.

Somebody from the crowd called out, “We are counting the Igbo people.Oya, come and identify yourself. You are Igbo?”

Arize muttered under her breath, “Ikwunaokwu,” as if Olanna was thinking of saying anything, and then shook her head and started to speak fluent loud Yoruba, all the while casually turning so they could go back the way they had come. The crowd lost interest in them. Another man in a safari suit was being slapped on the back of the head. “You are Igbo man! Don't deny it! Simply identify yourself!”

Baby began to cry. “Mummy Ola! Mummy Ola!”

Olanna picked Baby up. She and Arize did not talk until they got back in the car. Ibekie had already reversed and kept glancing at the rearview mirror. “I saw people running,” he said.

“What is happening?” Olanna asked.

Arize shrugged. “We hear rumors that they have been doing this in Kaduna and Zaria since the coup; they go out in the streets and start to harass Igbo people because they said the coup was an Igbo coup.”

“Eziokwu? Really?”

“Yes, Aunty,” Ibekie said quickly, as if he had been waiting for the opportunity to speak. “My uncle in Ebutte Metta does not sleep in his house anymore since the coup. All his neighbors are Yoruba, andthey said some men have been looking for him. He sleeps in different houses every night, while he takes care of his business. He has sent his children back home.”

“Eziokwu? Really?” Olanna repeated. She felt hollow. She did not know that things had come to this; in Nsukka, life was insular and the news was unreal, functioning only as fodder for the evening talk, for Odenigbo's rants and impassioned articles.

“Things will calm down,” Arize said, and touched Olanna's arm. “Don't worry.”

Olanna nodded and looked out at the words printed on a nearby lorry: no telephone to heaven. She could not believe how easy it had been to deny who they were, to shrug off being Igbo.

“She will wear that white dress for her christening, Sister,” Arize said. “What, Ari?”

Arize pointed at her belly. “Your goddaughter will wear that white dress for her christening. Thank you so much, Sister.”

The light in Arize's eyes made Olanna smile; things would indeed calm down. She tickled Baby, but Baby did not laugh. Baby stared back at her with frightened eyes that were not yet dried of tears.

9

Richard watched as Kainene zipped up the lilac dress and turned to him. The hotel room was brightly lit, and he looked at her and at her reflection in the mirror behind her.

“Nkeakamma, ” he said. It wasprettier than the black dress on the bed, the one she had earlier picked out for her parents' party. She bowed mockingly and sat down to put on her shoes. She looked almost pretty with her smoothing powder and red lipstick and relaxed demeanor, not as knotted up as she had been lately, chasing a contract with Shell-BP. Before they left, Richard brushed aside some of her wig hair and kissed her forehead, to avoid spoiling her lipstick.

There were garish balloons in her parents' living room. The party was under way. Stewards in black and white walked around with trays and fawning smiles, their heads held inanely high. The champagne sparkled in tall glasses, the chandeliers' light reflected the glitter of jewelry on fat women's necks, and the High Life band in the corner played so loudly, so vigorously, that people clumped close together to hear one another.

“I see many Big Men of the new regime,” Richard said.

“Daddy hasn't wasted any time in ingratiating himself,” Kainene said in his ear. “He ran off until things calmed down, and now he's back to make new friends.”

Richard scanned the rest of the room. Colonel Madu stood out right away, with his wide shoulders and wide face and wide features and head that was above everyone else's. He was talking to an Arab man in a tight dinner jacket. Kainene walked over to say hello to them and Richard went to look for a drink, to avoid talking to Madu just yet.

Kainene's mother came up and kissed his cheek; he knew she was drunk, or she would have greeted him with the usual frosty “How do you do?” Now, though, she told him he looked well and cornered him at an unfortunate end of the room, with the wall to his back and an intimidating piece of sculpture, something that looked like a snarling lion, to his side.

“Kainene tells me you are going home to London soon?” she asked. Her ebony complexion looked waxy with too much makeup. There was something nervous about her movements.

“Yes. I'll be away for about ten days.”

“Just ten days?” She half smiled. Perhaps she had hoped he would be away for longer, so she could finally find a suitable partner for her daughter. “To visit your family?”

“My cousin Martin is getting married,” Richard said.

“Oh, I see.” The rows and rows of gold around her neck weighed her down and made her head look slumped, as if she was under great strain and, in trying so hard to hide it, made it all the more obvious. “Maybe we'll have a drink in London then. I'm telling my husband that we should take another small vacation. Not that anything will happen, but not everybody is happy with this unitary decree the government is talking about. It's just nicer to be away until things are settled. We may leave next week but we are not telling anybody, so keep it to yourself.” She touched his sleeve playfully, and Richard saw a glimpse of Kainene in the curve of her lips. “We are not even telling our friends the Ajuahs. You know Chief Ajuah, who owns the bottling company? They are Igbo, but they are Western Igbo. I hear they are the ones who deny being Igbo. Who knows what they will say that we have done? Who knows? They will sell other Igbo people for a tarnished penny. A tarnished penny, I'm telling you. Do you want another drink? Wait here and I'll get another drink. Just wait here.”

As soon as she lurched away, Richard went looking for Kainene. He found her on the balcony with Madu, standing and looking down at the swimming pool. The smell of roasting meat was thick in theair. He watched them for a while. Madu's head was slightly cocked to the side as Kainene spoke, her body looked frail next to his huge frame, and they seemed somehow to fit effortlessly. Both very dark, one tall and thin, the other taller and huge. Kainene turned and saw him.

“Richard,” she said.

He joined them, shook hands with Madu. “How are you, Madu?Ana-emekwa?” he asked, eager to speak first. “How is life in the North?”

“Nothing to complain about,” Madu said in English.

“You didn't come with Adaobi?” He did wish the man would come out more often with his wife. “No,” Madu said, and sipped his drink; it was clear he had not wanted anybody to disturb their chat. “I see my mother was entertaining you, how exciting,” Kainene said. “Madu and I were stuck with

Ahmed there for a while. He wants to buy Daddy's warehouse in Ikeja.”

“Your father will not sell anything to him,” Madu declared, as if it were his decision to make. “Those Syrians and Lebanese already own half of Lagos, and they are all bloody opportunists in this country.”

“I would sell to him if he stopped smelling so awfully of garlic,” Kainene said. Madu laughed.

Kainene slipped her hand into Richard's. “I was just telling Madu that you think another coup is coming.”

“There won't be another coup,” Madu said.

“You would know, wouldn't you, Madu? Big Man colonel that you are now,” Kainene teased. Richard tightened his hold on her hand. “I went to Zaria last week, and it seemed that all everybody was saying was second coup, second coup. Even Radio Kaduna and the NewNigerian, ” he said in Igbo.

“What does the press know, really?” Madu replied in English. He always did that; since Richard's Igbo had become near-fluent, Madu insistently responded to it in English so that Richard felt forced to revert to English.

“The papers ran articles about jihad, and Radio Kaduna kept broadcasting the late Sardauna's speeches, and there was talk about how Igbo people were going to take over the civil service and—”

Madu cut him short. “There won't be a second coup. There's a little tension in the army, but there always is a little tension in the army. Did you have the goat meat? Isn't it wonderful?”

“Yes,” Richard agreed, almost automatically, and then wished he hadn't. The air in Lagos was humid; standing next to Madu, it seemed suffocating. The man made him feel inconsequential.

The second coup happened a week later, and Richard's first reaction was to gloat. He was rereading Martin's letter in the orchard, sitting on the spot where Kainene often told him that a groove the exact size and shape of his buttocks had appeared.

Is “going native” still used? I always knew you would! Mother tells me you have given up on
the tribal art book and are pleased with this one, a sort of fictionalized travelogue? And on
European Evils in Africa! I'm quite keen to hear more about it when you are in London. Pity you
gave up the old title: “The Basket of Hands.” Were hands chopped off in Africa as well? I'd
imagined it was only in India. I'm intrigued!

Richard imagined that smile Martin often had when they were schoolboys, during those years that Aunt Elizabeth had immersed them in activities with her manic determination that there be no sitting around: cricket tournaments, boxing lessons, tennis, piano lessons from a Frenchman with a lisp. Martin had thrived at them all, always with that superior smile of people who were born to belong and excel.Richard reached out to pluck a wildflower that looked like a poppy. He wondered what Martin's wedding would be like; Martin's fiancée was a fashion designer, of all things. If only Kainene could go with him; if only she didn't have to stay to sign the new contract. He wanted Aunt Elizabeth and Martin and Virginia to see her, but most of all he wanted them to see him, the man he had become after his years here: to see that he was browner and happier.

Ikejide came up to him. “Mr. Richard, sah! Madam say make you come. There is another coup,” Ikejide said. He looked excited.

Richard hurried indoors. He was right; Madu was wrong. The moist July heat had plastered his hair limply to his head, and he ran his hand through it as he went. Kainene was on a sofa in the living room, her arms wrapped around herself, rocking back and forth. The British voice on the radio was so loud that she raised her voice when she said, “Northern officers have taken over. The BBC says they are killing Igbo officers in Kaduna. Nigerian Radio isn't saying anything.” She spoke too fast. He stood behind her and began to rub her shoulders, kneading her stiff muscles in circular motions. On the radio, the breathless British voice said it was quite extraordinary that a second coup had occurred only six months after the first.

“Extraordinary. Extraordinary indeed,” Kainene said. She reached out, in a sudden jerky move, and pushed the radio off the table. It fell on the carpeted floor, and a dislodged battery rolled out. “Madu is in Kaduna,” she said, and put her face in her hands. “Madu is in Kaduna.”

“It's all right, my darling,” Richard said. “It's all right.”

For the first time he considered the possibility of Madu's death. He decided not to go back to Nsukka for a while and was not sure why. Was it really because he wanted to be with her when she heard Madu was dead? In the next few days, she was so taut with anxiety that he too began to worry about Madu and then resent himself for doing so, and then resent his resentment. He should not be so petty. She included him in her worry, after all, as if Madu was their friend and not just hers. She told him about the people she called, about the inquiries she made to find out what had happened. Nobody knew. Madu's wife had heard nothing. Lagos was in chaos. Her parents had left for England. Many Igbo officers were dead. The killings were organized; she told him about a soldier who said the alarm for a battalion muster parade was sounded in his barracks and after everyone assembled, the Northerners picked out all the Igbo soldiers and took them away and shot them.

Kainene was muted and quiet but never tearful, so the day she told him, “I heard something,” with a sob in her voice, he was sure it was news of Madu. He thought about how to console her, whether he would be able to console her.

“Udodi,” Kainene said. “They killed Colonel Udodi Ekechi.”

“Udodi?” He had been so certain it was about Madu that for a moment he was blank.

“Northern soldiers put him in a cell in the barracks and fed him his own shit. He ate his own shit.” Kainene paused. “Then they beat him senseless and tied him to an iron cross and threw him back in his cell. He died tied to an iron cross. He died on a cross.”

Richard sat down slowly. His dislike for Udodi—loud, drunken, duplicity dripping from his pores— had only deepened in the past years. Yet hearing about his death left him sober. He thought, again, of Madu dying and realized he did not know how he would feel.

“Who told you this?”

“Maria Obele. Udodi's wife is her cousin. She said they are saying that no Igbo officer in the North escaped. But some Umunnachi people said they heard Madu escaped. Adaobi has not heard anything. How could he have escaped. How?”

“He might be hiding out somewhere.” “How?” Kainene asked again.Colonel Madu appeared in Kainene's house two weeks later, much taller-looking now because he had lost so much weight; the angles of his shoulder bones were visible through his white shirt.

Kainene screamed. “Madu! Is this you?Ogidiife a?”

Richard was not sure who walked toward whom first, but Kainene and Madu were holding each other close, Kainene touching his arms and face with a tenderness that made Richard look away. He went to the liquor cabinet and poured a whisky for Madu and a gin for himself.

“Thank you, Richard,” Madu said, but he did not take the drink and Richard stood there, holding two glasses, before he placed one down.

Kainene sat on a side table in front of Madu. “They said they shot you in Kaduna, then they said they buried you alive in the bush, then they said you escaped, then they said you were in prison in Lagos.”

Madu said nothing. Kainene stared at him. Richard finished his drink and poured another. “You remember my friend Ibrahim? From Sandhurst?” Madu asked finally.

Kainene nodded.

“Ibrahim saved my life. He told me about the coup that morning. He was not directly involved, but most of them—the Northern officers—knew about it. He drove me to his cousin's house, but I didn't really understand until he asked his cousin to take me to the backyard, where he kept his domestic animals. I slept in the chicken house for two days.”

“No! Ekwuzina!”

“And do you know that soldiers came to search his cousin's house to look for me? Everybody knew how close Ibrahim and I were, and they suspected he helped me escape. They didn't check the chicken house, though.” Colonel Madu paused, nodding and looking into the distance. “I did not know how bad chicken shit smelled until I slept in it for three days. On the third day, Ibrahim sent me some caftans and money through a small boy and asked me to leave right away. I dressed as a Fulani nomad and walked through the smaller villages because Ibrahim said that artillery soldiers had set up blocks on all the major roads in Kaduna. I was lucky to find a lorry driver, an Igbo man from Ohafia, who took me to Kafanchan. My cousin lives there. You know Onunkwo, don't you?” Madu did not wait for Kainene to respond. “He is the station master at the railway, and he told me that Northern soldiers had sealed off Makurdi Bridge. That bridge is a grave. They searched every single vehicle, they delayed passenger trains for up to eight hours, and they shot all the Igbo soldiers they discovered there and threw the bodies over. Many of the soldiers wore disguises, but they used their boots to find them.”

“What?” Kainene leaned forward.

“Boots.” Madu glanced at his shoes. “You know we soldiers wear boots all the time so they examined the feet of each man, and any Igbo man whose feet were clean and uncracked by har-mattan, they took away and shot. They also examined their foreheads for signs of their skin being lighter from wearing a soldier's beret.” Madu shook his head. “Onunkwo advised me to wait for some days. He did not think I would make it across the bridge because they would recognize me easily under any disguise. So I stayed ten days in a village near Kafanchan. Onunkwo found me different houses to stay in. It was not safe to stay with him. Finally he said he had found a driver, a good man from Nnewi, who would hide me in the water tank of his goods train. The man gave me a fireman's suit to wear and I climbed into the tank. I had water up to my chin. Each time the train jerked, some of the water entered my nose. When we got to the bridge, the soldiers searched the train thoroughly. I heard footsteps on the lid of the tank and thought it was all over. But they did not open it and we passed. It was only then I knew that I was alive and I would survive. I came back to Umunnachi to find Adaobi wearing black.”

Kainene kept looking at Madu long after he finished speaking. There was another stretch of silence, which made Richard uncomfortable because he was not sure how to react, what expression to have.“ Igbo soldiers and Northern soldiers can never live in the same barracks after this. It is impossible, impossible,” Colonel Madu said. He had a glassy sheen in his eyes. “And Gowon cannot be head of state. They cannot impose Gowon on us as head of state. It is not how things are done. There are others who are senior to him.”

“What are you going to do now?” Kainene asked.

Madu did not seem to hear her. “So many of us are gone,” he said. “So many solid good men— Udodi, Iloputaife, Okunweze, Okafor—and these were men who believed in Nigeria and didn't care for tribe. After all, Udodi spoke better Hausa than he spoke Igbo, and look how they slaughtered him.” He stood up and began to pace the room. “The problem was the ethnic balance policy. I was part of the commission that told our GOC that we should scrap it, that it was polarizing the army, that they should stop promoting Northerners who were not qualified. But our GOC said no, our British GOC.” Madu turned and glanced at Richard.

“I'll ask Ikejide to cook your special rice,” Kainene said. Madu shrugged, silent, and stared out of the window.

10

Ugwu set the table for lunch. “I've finished, sah,” he said, although he knew Master would not touch the okro soup and would keep walking up and down the living room with the radio turned up high, as he had been doing since Miss Adebayo left about an hour ago. She had banged so hard on the front door that Ugwu worried the glass would crack, and then when he opened it she pushed past him, asking, “Where is your master? Where is your master?”

“I will call him, mah,” Ugwu said, but Miss Adebayo had hurried ahead into Master's study. He heard her say, “There's trouble in the North,” and his mouth went dry because Miss Adebayo was not an alarmist and whatever was happening in the North had to be serious and Olanna was in Kano.

Ever since the second coup some weeks ago, when the Igbo soldiers were killed, he had struggled to understand what was happening, read the newspapers more carefully, listened more closely to Master and his guests. The conversations no longer ended in reassuring laughter, and the living room often seemed clouded with uncertainties, with unfinished knowledge, as if they all knew something would happen and yet did not know what. None of them would ever have imagined that this would happen, that the announcer on ENBC Radio Enugu would be saying now, as Ugwu straightened the tablecloth, “We have confirmed reports that up to five hundred Igbo people have been killed in Maiduguri.”

“Rubbish!” Master shouted. “Did you hear that? Did you hearthat?”

“Yes, sah,” Ugwu said. He hoped the loud noise would not wake Baby up from her siesta. “Impossible!” Master said.

“Sah, your soup,” Ugwu said.

“Five hundred people killed. Absolute rubbish! It can't be true.”

Ugwu took the dish into the kitchen and put it in the refrigerator. The smell of spices nauseated him, as did the sight of soup, of food. But Baby would wake up soon and he would have to make her dinner. He brought out a bag of potatoes from the store and sat staring at it, thinking about two days ago, when Olanna left for Kano to fetch Aunty Arize, how her plaited hair had pulled at the skin of her forehead and made it shiny-sleek.

Baby came into the kitchen. “Ugwu.”

“Itetago? Are you awake?” Ugwu asked, before he hugged her. He wondered if Master had seen her walk past the living room. “Did you see baby chickens in your dream?”

Baby laughed, and her dimples sank deep in her cheeks. “Yes!” “Did you talk to them?”

“Yes!”

“What did they say?”

Baby didn't give the usual response. She let go of his neck and squatted on the floor. “Where is Mummy Ola?”

“Mummy Ola will be back soon.” Ugwu examined the blade of the knife. “Now, help me with the potato peels. Put them all in the dustbin, and when Mummy Ola comes back, we will tell her you helped with the cooking.”

After Ugwu put the potatoes to boil, he gave her a bath, dusted her body over with Pears talcum powder, and brought out her pink nightdress. It was the one Olanna loved, the one she said made Baby look like a doll. But Baby said, “I want my pajamas, ” and Ugwu was no longer sure which it was Olanna loved anyway, the nightdress or the pajamas.

He heard a knock on the front door. Master ran out of his study. Ugwu dashed to the door andgrasped the handle first and held on, so that he would be the one to open it, although he knew it couldn't be Olanna. She had her own key.

“Is it Obiozo?” Master asked, looking at one of the two men standing at the door. “Obiozo?”

When Ugwu saw the hollow-eyed men with the dirt-smeared clothes, he knew right away that he should take Baby away, shield her. He took her food into the bedroom, set it on her play table, and told her she could pretend she was eating with Jill from the Jack and Jillcomic that was delivered with the Renaissance.He stood by the door that led to the corridor and peered into the living room. One of the men was speaking, while the other drank from a bottle of water, the glass ignored on the table.

“We saw a lorry driver who agreed to carry us,” the man said, and Ugwu could tell right away that he was Master's kinsman; his Abba dialect was heavy, each f sounding like a v.

“What happened?” Master asked.

The man placed the bottle of water down and said quietly, “They are killing us like ants. Did you hear what I said? Ants.”

“Our eyes have seen plenty, anyi afujugo anya, ” Obiozo said. “I saw a whole family, a father and mother and three children, lying on the road to the motor park. Just lying there.”

“What about Kano? What is happening in Kano?” Master asked. “It started in Kano,” the man said.

Obiozo was speaking, saying something about vultures and bodies dumped outside the city walls, but Ugwu no longer listened. It started in Kano rang in his head. He did not want to tidy the guest room and find bedsheets and warm the soup and make fresh garri for them. He wanted them to leave right away. Or, if they would not leave, he wanted them to shut their filthy mouths. He wanted the radio announcers to be silent too, but they were not. They repeated the news of the killings in Maiduguri until Ugwu wanted to throw the radio out of the window, and the next afternoon, after the men left, a solemn voice on ENBC Radio Enugu recounted eyewitness accounts from the North: teachers hacked down in Zaria, a full Catholic church in Sokoto set on fire, a pregnant woman split open in Kano. The newscaster paused. “Some of our people are coming back now. The lucky ones are coming back. The railway stations are full of our people. If you have tea and bread to spare, please take it to the stations. Help a brother in need.”

Master leaped up from the sofa. “Go, Ugwu,” he said. “Take tea and bread and go to the railway station.”

“Yes, sah,” Ugwu said. Before he made the tea, he fried some plantains for Baby's lunch. “I have put Baby's lunch in the oven, sah,” he said.

He was not sure Master heard him and as he left, he worried that Baby would go hungry and Master would not know that her fried plantains were in the oven. He made himself keep worrying about it until he got to the station. Mats and dirty wrappers were spread all over the platform and people were crumpled down on them, men and women and children crying and eating bread and tending wounds. Hawkers walked around with trays on their heads. Ugwu did not want to go into that ragged bazaar but he steeled himself and walked toward a man sitting on the ground with a red-stained rag wound around his head. Flies buzzed everywhere.

“Do you want some bread?” Ugwu asked. “Yes, my brother. Dalu. Thank you.”

Ugwu did not look to see how deep the knife wound on his head was. He poured the tea and held out the bread. He would not remember this man tomorrow because he would not want to.

“Do you want some bread?” Ugwu asked another man nearby, who sat hunched. “Ichoro bread?” The man turned. Ugwu recoiled and nearly dropped the flask. The man's right eye was gone, in its place a juicy-red pulp.

“It was the soldiers who saved us,” the first man was saying, as if he felt he had to tell his story inexchange for the bread he was eating dipped in tea. “They told us to run to the army barracks. Those madmen were chasing us like runaway goats, but once we entered the gates of the barracks we were safe.”

Arickety train pulled up, so full that some people held on to the outside of the coaches, clutching at metal bars. Ugwu watched as tired, dusty, bloody people climbed down, but he did not join those who rushed over to help. He could not bear to think that Olanna was one of those limping and defeated people, and yet he could not bear to think that she was not, that she was still behind, somewhere in the North. He watched until the train emptied out. Olanna was not there. He gave the rest of the bread to the one-eyed man, then turned and ran. He did not stop until he got to Odim Street and past the bush with the white flowers.

11

Olanna was sitting on Mohammed's veranda, drinking chilled rice milk, laughing at the delicious cold trickle down her throat, at the stickiness on her lips, when the gateman appeared and asked to speak to Mohammed.

Mohammed left and came back moments later, holding what looked like a pamphlet. “They're rioting,” he said.

“It's the students, isn't it?” Olanna asked.

“I think it's religious. You must leave right away.” His eyes avoided hers. “Mohammed, calm down.”

“Sule said they are blocking the roads and searching for infidels. Come, come.” He was already heading indoors. Olanna followed. He worried too much, did Mohammed. Muslim students were always demonstrating about one thing or the other, after all, and harassing people who were Western-dressed, but they always dispersed quickly enough.

Mohammed went into a room and came out with a long scarf. “Wear this, so you can blend in,” he said.

Olanna placed it over her head and wound it round her neck. “I look like a proper Muslim woman,” she joked.

But Mohammed barely smiled. “Let's go. I know a shortcut to the train station.”

“Train station? Arize and I are not leaving until tomorrow, Mohammed,” Olanna said. She almost ran to keep up with him. “I'm going back to my uncle's house in Sabon Gari.”

“Olanna.” Mohammed started the car; it jerked as he took off. “Sabon Gari is not safe.”

“What do you mean?” She tugged at the scarf; the embroidery at the edges felt coarse and uncomfortable against her neck.

“Sule said they are well organized.”

Olanna stared at him, suddenly frightened at how frightened he looked. “Mohammed?” His voice was low. “He said Igbo bodies are lying on Airport Road.”

Olanna realized, then, that this was not just another demonstration by religious students. Fear parched her throat. She clasped her hands together. “Please let us pick up my people first,” she said. “Please.”

Mohammed headed toward Sabon Gari. A bus drove past, dusty and yellow; it looked like one of those campaign buses that politicians used to tour rural areas and give out rice and cash to villagers. A man was hanging out of the door, a loudspeaker pressed to his mouth, his slow Hausa words resonating. “The Igbo must go. The infidels must go. The Igbo must go.” Mohammed reached out and squeezed her hand and held on to it as they drove past a crowd of young men on the roadside, chanting, “Araba, araba!” He slowed down and blew the horn a few times in solidarity; they waved and he picked up speed again.

In Sabon Gari, the first street was empty. Olanna saw the smoke rising like tall gray shadows before she smelled the scent of burning.

“Stay here,” Mohammed said, as he stopped the car outside Uncle Mbaezi's compound. She watched him run out. The street looked strange, unfamiliar; the compound gate was broken, the metal flattened on the ground. Then she noticed Aunty Ifeka's kiosk, or what remained of it: splinters of wood, packets of groundnuts lying in the dust. She opened the car door and climbed out. She paused for a moment because of how glaringly bright and hot it was, with flames billowing from the roof, with gritand ash floating in the air, before she began to run toward the house. She stopped when she saw the bodies. Uncle Mbaezi lay facedown in an ungainly twist, legs splayed. Something creamy-white oozed through the large gash on the back of his head. Aunty Ifeka lay on the veranda. The cuts on her naked body were smaller, dotting her arms and legs like slightly parted red lips.

Olanna felt a watery queasiness in her bowels before the numbness spread over her and stopped at her feet. Mohammed was dragging her, pulling her, his grasp hurting her arm. But she could not leave without Arize. Arize was due at anytime. Arize needed to be close to a doctor.

“Arize,” she said. “Arize is down the road.”

The smoke was thickening around her so that she was not sure if the crowd of men drifting into the yard were real or just plumes of smoke, until she saw the shiny metal blades of their axes and machetes, the bloodstained caftans that flapped around their legs.

Mohammed pushed her into the car and then went around and got in. “Keep your face down,” he said.

“We finished the whole family. It was Allah's will!” one of the men called out in Hausa. The man was familiar. It was Abdulmalik. He nudged a body on the ground with his foot and Olanna noticed, then, how many bodies were lying there, like dolls made of cloth.

“Who are you?” another asked, standing in front of the car.

Mohammed opened his door, the car still on, and spoke in rapid, coaxing Hausa. The man stood aside. Olanna turned to look closely, to see if it really was Abdulmalik.

“Don't raise your face!” Mohammed said. He narrowly missed a kuka tree; one of the large pods had fallen down and Olanna heard the crunching squash as the car ran over it. She lowered her head. It was Abdulmalik. He had nudged another body, a woman's headless body, and stepped over it, placed one leg down and then the other, although there was enough room to step to the side.

“Allah does not allow this,” Mohammed said. He was shaking; his entire body was shaking. “Allah will not forgive them. Allah will not forgive the people who have made them do this. Allah will never forgive this.”

They drove in a frenzied silence, past policemen in blood-splattered uniforms, past vultures perched by the roadside, past boys carrying looted radios, until he parked at the train station and shoved her onto a crowded train.

Olanna sat on the floor of the train with her knees drawn up to her chest and the warm sweaty pressure of bodies around her. Outside the train, people were strapped to the coaches and some stood on the steps holding on to the railings. She had heard muted shouts when a man fell off. The train was a mass of loosely held metal, the ride unsteady as if the rails were crossed by speed bumps, and each time it jolted, Olanna was thrown against the woman next to her, against something on the woman's lap, a big bowl, a calabash. The woman's wrapper was dotted with splotchy stains that looked like blood, but Olanna was not sure. Her eyes burned. She felt as if there were a mixture of peppers and sand inside them, pricking and burning her lids. It was agony to blink, agony to keep them closed, agony to leave them open. She wanted to rip them out. She wet her fingers with saliva and rubbed her eyes. She sometimes did that to Baby when Baby got a minor scratch. “Mummy Ola!” Baby would wail, raising the offending arm or leg, and Olanna would stick a finger in her mouth and run it over Baby's injury. But the saliva only made her burning eyes worse.

A young man in front of her screamed and placed his hands on his head. The train swerved and Olanna bumped against the calabash again; she liked the firm feel of the wood. She edged her hand forward until it was gently caressing the carved lines that crisscrossed the calabash. She closed her eyes, because they burned less that way, and kept them closed for hours, her hand against the calabash, until somebody shouted in Igbo, “Anyi agafeela! We have crossed the River Niger! We have reached home!”

A liquid—urine—was spreading on the floor of the train. Olanna felt it coldly soaking into her dress. The woman with the calabash nudged her, then motioned to some other people close by. “Bianu, come,” she said. “Come and take a look.”

She opened the calabash. “Take a look,” she said again.

Olanna looked into the bowl. She saw the little girl's head with the ashy-gray skin and the braided hair and rolled-back eyes and open mouth. She stared at it for a while before she looked away. Somebody screamed.

The woman closed the calabash. “Do you know,” she said, “it took me so long to plait this hair? She had such thick hair.”

The train had stopped with a rusty screech. Olanna got down and stood in the jostling crowd. A woman fainted. Motor boys were hitting the sides of lorries and chanting, “Owerri! Enugu! Nsukka!” She thought about the plaited hair resting in the calabash. She visualized the mother braiding it, her fingers oiling it with pomade before dividing it into sections with a wooden comb.

12

Richard was rereading Kainene's note when the plane touched down in Kano. He had only just found it while searching in his briefcase for a magazine. He wished he had known it was lying there the ten days he was in London, waiting to be read.

Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? Is love this safety I feel
in our silences? Is it this belonging, this completeness?

He was smiling as he read; Kainene had never written anything like this to him before. He doubted that she had ever written him anything at all, except for the generic Love,Kainene, on his birthday cards. He read over and over, lingering on each Ithat was so elaborately curved it looked like a sterling sign. Suddenly he didn't mind that the flight had been delayed in London and that this stop at Kano to change planes before going on to Lagos would delay him even longer. An absurd lightness draped itself around him; all things were possible, all things were manageable. He got up and helped the woman seated next to him carry her bag down.Islovethis safety Ifeelin our silences?

“You're so kind,” the woman told him in an Irish accent. The flight was full of non-Nigerians. If Kainene were here, she would certainly say something mocking—There go the marauding Europeans. He shook hands with the stewardess at the foot of the ramp and walked quickly across the tarmac; the sun was intense, a piercing white hotness that made him imagine his body fluids evaporating, drying out, and he was relieved to get inside the cool building. He stood in the customs line and reread Kainene's note. Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? He would ask her to marry him when he returned to Port Harcourt. She would first say something like, “A white man and no money to speak of. My parents will be scandalized.” But she would say yes. He knew she would say yes. It was something about her lately, a mellowing, a softening from which this note had come. He was not sure if she had forgiven him for the incident with Olanna—they had never talked about it—but this note, this new openness, meant that she was ready to move forward. He was smoothing the note on his palm, when a young very dark-skinned customs officer asked, “Anything to declare, sir?”

“No,” Richard said, and handed over his passport. “I'm going on to Lagos.”

“Okay, well done, sir! Welcome to Nigeria,” the young man said. He had a large, chubby body that looked sloppy in his uniform.

“You work here?” Richard asked him.

“Yes, sir. I am in training. By December, I will be a full customs officer.” “Excellent,” Richard said. “And where are you from?”

“I come from the Southeastern region, a town called Obosi.” “Onitsha's little neighbor.”

“You know the place, sir?”

“I work at Nsukka University and I have traveled throughout the Eastern region. I'm writing a book about the area. And my fiancée is from Umunnachi, not too far from you.” He felt a flush of achievement, at how easily fiancée had slipped out of him, a sign of future uxorious bliss. He smiled, then realized that his smile threatened to grow into a giggle and that he might be slightly delirious. It was that note.

“Your fiancée, sir?” The young man looked disapproving.

“Yes. Her name is Kainene.” Richard spoke slowly, making sure to drag out the second syllable fully.“ You speak Igbo, sir?” There was a slender respect in the man's eyes now.

“Nwannedinamba, ” Richard said, enigmatically, hoping that he had not mixed things up and that the proverb meant that one's brother could come from a different land.

“Eh! You speak! Ina-asuIgbo!” The young man took Richard's hand in his moist one and shook it warmly and started to talk about himself. His name was Nnaemeka.

“I know Umunnachi people well, they find too much trouble,” he said. “My people warned my cousin not to marry an Umunnachi man, but she did not hear. Every day they beat her until she packed her things and returned to her father's house. But not everybody in Umunnachi is bad. My mother's people are from there. Have you not heard of my mother's mother? Nwayike Nkwelle? You should write about her in your book. She was a wonderful herbalist, and she had the best cure for malaria. If she had charged people big money, I will be studying medicine overseas now. But my family cannot send me overseas, and the people in Lagos are giving scholarships to the children of the people who can bribe them. It is because of Nwayike Nkwelle that I want to learn how to be a doctor. But I am not saying that this my customs work is bad. After all, we have to take exam to get the job, and many people are jealous. By the time I become a full officer, life will be better and there will be less suffering….”

A voice, speaking English with an elegant Hausa accent, announced that the passengers from the London flight should proceed to board the flight for Lagos. Richard was relieved. “It has been nice talking to you, jisie ike, ” he said.

“Yes, sir. Greet Kainene.”

Nnaemeka turned to go back to his desk. Richard picked up his briefcase. The side entrance burst open and three men ran in holding up long rifles. They were wearing green army uniforms, and Richard wondered why soldiers would make such a spectacle of themselves, dashing in like that, until he saw how red and wildly glassy their eyes were.

The first soldier waved his gun around. “Ina nyamiri! Where are the Igbo people? Who is Igbo here? Where are the infidels?”

A woman screamed.

“You are Igbo,” the second soldier said to Nnaemeka. “No, I come from Katsina! Katsina!”

The soldier walked over to him. “Say Allahu Akbar!”

The lounge was silent. Richard felt cold sweat weighing on his eyelashes. “Say Allahu Akbar!” the soldier repeated.

Nnaemeka knelt down. Richard saw fear etched so deeply onto his face that it collapsed his cheeks and transfigured him into a mask that looked nothing like him. He would not say Allahu Akbar because his accent would give him away. Richard willed him to say the words, anyway, to try; he willed something, anything, to happen in the stifling silence and as if in answer to his thoughts, the rifle went off and Nnaemeka's chest blew open, a splattering red mass, and Richard dropped the note in his hand.

Passengers were crouched behind the chairs. Men got on their knees to lower their heads to the floor. Somebody was shouting in Igbo, “My mother, oh! My mother, oh! God has said no!” It was the bartender. One of the soldiers walked up close and shot him and then aimed at the bottles of liquor lined up behind and shot those. The room smelled of whisky and Campari and gin.

There were more soldiers now, more shots, more shouts of “Nyamiri!” and “Araba, araba!” The bartender was writhing on the floor and the gurgle that came from his mouth was guttural. The soldiers ran out to the tarmac and into the airplane and pulled out Igbo people who had already boarded and lined them up and shot them and left them lying there, their bright clothes splashes of color on the dusty black stretch. The security guards folded their arms across their uniforms andwatched. Richard felt himself wet his trousers. There was a painful ringing in his ears. He almost missed his flight because, as the other passengers walked shakily to the plane, he stood aside, vomiting.

Susan was still in her bathrobe. She didn't look surprised to see him arrive unannounced. “You look exhausted,” she said, touching his cheek. Her hair was dull and matted, loosely held back to reveal her reddened ears.

“I've just got in from London. Our flight stopped first in Kano,” he said. “Did it?” Susan said. “And how was Martin's wedding?”

Richard sat still on the sofa; he remembered nothing of what had happened in London. Susan didn't seem to notice that he had not spoken. “Small whisky with lots of water?” she asked, already pouring the drinks. “Kano is interesting, isn't it?”

“Yes,” Richard said, although what he had wanted to tell her was how he had watched the hawkers and cars and buses on the crowded Lagos roads with bemusement, because life continued to hurtle on here in the normal way that it always had, as if nothing was happening in Kano.

“It's rather silly how the Northerners will pay foreigners twice more rather than hire a Southerner. But there's quite a bit of money to be made there. Nigel's just rung to tell me about his friend, John, a ghastly Scot. Anyway, John's a charter pilot and has made a small fortune flying Igbo people to safety these past few days. He said hundreds were killed in Zaria alone.”

Richard felt as if his body was gearing up to do something, to shiver, to collapse. “You know what's happening there, then?”

“Of course I do. I just hope it doesn't spread to Lagos. One really can't predict these things.” Susan downed her drink in a gulp. He noticed the ashen tone of her skin, the tiny beads of sweat above her lip. “There are lots and lots of Igbo people here—well, they are everywhere really, aren't they? Not that they didn't have it coming to them, when you think about it, with their being so clannish and uppity and controlling the markets. Very Jewish, really. And to think they are relatively uncivilized; one couldn't compare them to the Yoruba, for example, who have had contact with Europeans on the coast for years. I remember somebody telling me when I first came to be careful about hiring an Igbo houseboy because, before I knew it, he would own my house and the land it was built on. Another small whisky?”

Richard shook his head. Susan poured herself another drink and this time did not add any water. “You didn't see anything at the airport in Kano, did you?”

“No,” Richard said.

“They wouldn't go to the airport, I suppose. It's quite extraordinary, isn't it, how these people can't control their hatred of each other. Of course, we all hate somebody, but it's about control. Civilization teaches you control.”

Susan finished her drink and poured another. Her voice echoed as he went into the bathroom and worsened the splintering pain in his head. He turned the tap on. It shocked him, how unchanged he looked in the mirror, how the hair of his eyebrows still stuck out unrestrained and his eyes were still the same stained-glass blue. He should have been transfigured by what he had seen. His shame should have left red warts on his face. What he had felt when he saw Nnaemeka killed was not shock but a great relief that Kainene was not with him because he would have been helpless to protect her and they would have known she was Igbo and they would have shot her. He could not have saved Nnaemeka, but he should have thought about him first, he should have been consumed by the young man's death. He stared at himself and wondered if it really had happened, if he really had seen men die, if the lingering smells from shattered liquor bottles and bloodied human bodies were only in hisimagination. But he knew it had certainly happened and he questioned it only because he willed himself to. He lowered his head to the sink and began to cry. The water hissed as it gushed out of the tap.

3. The Book: The World Was Silent When We Died

He writes about Independence. The Second World War changed the world order: Empire was crumbling, and a vocal Nigerian elite, mostly from the South, had emerged.

The North was wary; it feared domination from the more educated South and had always wanted a country separate from the infidel South anyway. But the British had to preserve Nigeria as it was, their prized creation, their large market, their thorn in France's eye. To propitiate the North, they fixed the pre-Independence elections in favor of the North and wrote a new constitution that gave the North control of the central government.

The South, too eager for independence, accepted this constitution. With the British gone, there would be good things for everyone: “white” salaries long denied Nigerians, promotions, top jobs. Nothing was done about the clamor of the minority groups, and the regions were already competing so fiercely that some wanted separate foreign embassies.

At Independence in 1960, Nigeria was a collection of fragments held in a fragile clasp.

13

Olanna's Dark Swoops began the day she came back from Kano, the day her legs failed. Her legs were fine when she climbed down from the train and she did not need to hold on to the blood-smeared railings; they were fine as she stood for the three-hour drive to Nsukka in a bus so crowded she could not reach out to scratch her itching back. But at the front door of Odenigbo's house, they failed. So did her bladder. There was the melting of her legs, and there was also the wetness of hot liquid running between her thighs. Baby discovered her. Baby had walked to the front door to look out, asking Ugwu when Mummy Ola would come back, and then cried out at the crumpled form on the steps. Odenigbo carried her in, bathed her, and held Baby back from hugging her too tightly. After Baby fell asleep, Olanna told Odenigbo what she had seen. She described the vaguely familiar clothes on the headless bodies in the yard, the still-twitchy fingers on Uncle Mbaezi's hand, the rolled-back eyes of the child's head in the calabash and the odd skin tone— a flat, sallow gray, like a poorly wiped blackboard—of all the corpses that lay in the yard.

That night, she had the first Dark Swoop: A thick blanket descended from above and pressed itself over her face, firmly, while she struggled to breathe. Then, when it let go, freeing her to take in gulp after gulp of air, she saw burning owls at the window grinning and beckoning to her with charred feathers. She tried to describe these Dark Swoops to Odenigbo. She tried to tell him, also, how the pills tasted, the ones Dr. Patel brought, clammy like her tongue in the morning.

But Odenigbo always said, “Shush, nkem. You'll be fine.” He spoke too softly to her. His voice sounded so silly, so unlike him. He even sang when he bathed her in the tub full of water scented with Baby's bath foam. She wanted to ask him to stop being ridiculous, but her lips were heavy. Speaking was a labor. When her parents and Kainene visited, she did not say much; it was Odenigbo who told them what she had seen.

At first, her mother sat next to her father and nodded as Odenigbo spoke in that silly-soft voice. Then her mother collapsed; she simply began to slide down as if her bones had liquefied until she half lay, half sat on the floor. It was the first time Olanna saw her mother without makeup, without gold clinging to her ears, and the first time Olanna saw Kainene cry since they were children. “You don't have to talk about it, you don't have to,” Kainene said, sobbing, although Olanna had not even tried to talk about it.

Her father walked up and down the room. He asked Odenigbo over and over where exactly Patel had read medicine and how he could claim that Olanna's inability to walk was psychological. He talked about how frustrated they felt to have to drive all the way from Lagos because the federal government blockade meant Nigeria Airways was no longer flying to the southeast. “We wanted to come right away, right away,” he said, so often that Olanna wondered if he really thought it would have made a difference when they came. But it did make a difference that they came, especially that Kainene came. It did not mean that Kainene had forgiven her, of course, but it meant something.

In the following weeks, Olanna lay in bed and nodded when friends and relatives came by to say ndo—sorry—and to shake their heads and mutter about the evils of those Muslim Hausa people, those black-as-he-goats Northerners, those dirty cattle-rearers with jigger-infested feet. Her Dark Swoops were worse on the days she had visitors; sometimes three came in quick succession and left her breathless and exhausted, too exhausted even to cry, and with only enough energy to swallow the pills Odenigbo slipped in her mouth. Some guests had stories to tell—the Okafors had lost a son and his family of four in Zaria, the Ibe daughter had not returned from Kaura-Namoda, the Onyekachi familyhad lost eight people in Kano. There were other stories, too, of how British academics at the University in Zaria encouraged the massacres and sent students out to incite the youths, how crowds at the Lagos motor parks had booed and taunted, “Go, Igbo, go, so that garriwill be cheaper! Go, and stop trying to own every house and every shop!” Olanna did not like to hear these stories, nor did she like the furtive way the guests glanced at her legs, as though to discover a lump that would explain why she could not walk.

There were days when she woke up from her naps feeling clearheaded, like today. Her bedroom door was open, and she could hear the rise and fall of voices from the living room. For a while Odenigbo had asked their friends not to visit. He had stopped playing tennis, too, so he could be at home and Ugwu would not have to take her to the toilet. She was pleased that they were visiting again. Sometimes she followed the conversation. She knew that the university women's association was organizing food donations for the refugees, that the markets and railways and tin mines in the North were said to be empty now that the Igbo had fled, that Colonel Ojukwu was now seen as the leader of the Igbo, that people were talking about secession and a new country, which would be named after the bay, the Bight of Biafra.

Miss Adebayo was speaking in her loud voice. “I am saying that our students should stop making noise. Asking David Hunt to go does not make sense. Give the man a chance and see if peace will come.”

“David Hunt thinks we are all mental children.” It was Okeoma. “The man should go home. Why is he coming to tell us how to put out a fire, when it is he and his fellow British who collected the firewood for it in the first place?”

“They may have collected the firewood, but we lit the match,” said somebody with an unfamiliar voice, perhaps it was Professor Achara, the new lecturer in physics, who had come back from Ibadan after the second coup.

“Firewood or no firewood, the important thing is to find a way to make peace before things explode,” Miss Adebayo said.

“What peace are we looking for? Gowon himself has said that a basis for unity does not exist, so what peace are we looking for?” Odenigbo asked. Olanna imagined him at the edge of his chair, pushing his glasses back as he spoke. “Secession is the only answer. If Gowon wanted to keep this country united, he would have done something long ago. For goodness' sake, not one of them has come out to condemn the massacres, and months have passed! It is as if all our people who were killed don't matter!”

“Didn't you hear what Zik said the other day? Eastern Nigeria seethes, seethes, and will continue to seethe until the federal government addresses the massacres,” Professor Ezeka said, his hoarse voice quickly fading.

Olanna's head ached. The sun shone weakly through the curtains Ugwu had drawn when he brought her breakfast. She needed to urinate; she urinated too often these days and she kept forgetting to ask Doctor Patel if her medication was the reason. She stared at the bell on the bedside cabinet, then reached out and ran a hand over the black dome-shaped plastic, over the red button in the middle that gave out a shrill sound when she depressed it. Odenigbo had insisted on installing it himself, at first, and each time she pressed it, there was a fire spark at the wall connection. Finally he brought an electrician, who chuckled as he did the rewiring. The bell no longer sparked, but it was too loud, and whenever she needed to go to the toilet and rang it, the echo reverberated all over the house. She let her finger linger over the red button, then drew away. She would not ring it. She lowered her legs to the floor. The sound from the living room was diminished now as if somebody had lowered the collective volume of the voices.

Then she heard Okeoma say “Aburi.” It sounded lovely, the name of that Ghanaian town, and sheimagined a sleepy cluster of homes on stretches of sweet-scented grasslands. Aburi came up often in their conversations: Okeoma would say that Gowon should have followed the agreement he and Ojukwu signed in Aburi, or Professor Ezeka would say that Gowon's reneging after Aburi meant that he did not wish the Igbo well, or Odenigbo would proclaim, “On Aburi we stand.”

“But how can Gowon make such a turnaround?” Okeoma's voice was louder. “He agreed to confederation at Aburi, and now he wants one Nigeria with a unitary government, but a unitary government was the very reason that he and his people killed Igbo officers.”

Olanna stood up and placed one leg forward, then the other. She swayed. There was a tight pressure around her ankles. She was walking. The firmness of the floor beneath her feet was stirring and her legs felt as if they had vibrating vessels in them. She walked past Baby's Raggedy Ann lying on the floor, and stopped to look down at the stuffed doll for a while before she went in to the toilet.

Later, Odenigbo came in and looked searchingly into her eyes in the way he often did, as if looking for proof of something. “You haven't rung in a while, nkem. Don't you have to urinate?”

“Have they all gone?”

“Yes. Don't you want to urinate?” “I did already. I walked.” Odenigbo stared at her.

“I walked,” Olanna said again. “I used the toilet.”

There was something she had never seen on Odenigbo's face, something precious and frightened. She sat up and he immediately reached out to hold her, but she shrugged him off and walked a few steps to the wardrobe and then back to the bed. Odenigbo sat and looked at her.

She took his hand and touched it to her face, pressed it against her breast. “Touch me.” “I'm going to tell Patel. I want him to come in and take a look at you.”

“Touch me.” She knew he didn't want to, that he touched her breasts because he would do whatever she wanted, whatever would make her better. She caressed his neck, buried her fingers in his dense hair, and when he slid into her, she thought about Arize's pregnant belly, how easily it must have broken, skin stretched that taut. She started to cry.

“Nkem, don't cry.” Odenigbo had stopped; he was lying next to her and smoothing her forehead. Later, when he gave her more pills and some water, she took them dutifully and then lay back and waited for the strange stillness they brought.

Ugwu's gentle knock woke her up; he would open the door and come in with a tray of food that he would place next to her packets of medicine, bottle of Lucozade, and tin of glucose. She remembered the first week she came back, the week that Odenigbo sprang up whenever she stirred. She had asked for water and Odenigbo opened the bedroom door to go to the kitchen and nearly tripped on Ugwu, curled on a mat right outside their door. “My good man, what are you doing here?” he asked, and Ugwu answered, “You don't know where anything is in the kitchen, sah.”

She closed her eyes now and pretended she was asleep. He was standing close to her and watching her; she could hear his breathing.

“When you are ready, mah, the food is here,” he said. Olanna nearly laughed; he probably knew all the times she pretended to be asleep when he brought her food. She opened her eyes. “What did you cook?”

“Jollofrice.” He raised the cover of the dish. “I used fresh tomatoes from the garden.” “Has Baby eaten?”

“Yes, mah. She is playing outside with Dr. Okeke's children.” Olanna picked up the fork and held it.“ I will make fruit salad for you tomorrow, mah. That pawpaw tree behind has a ripe fruit. I will give it one more day, and then I will pluck it fast before those birds come for it. I will use orange and milk.”

“Good.”

Ugwu still stood there, and she knew he would not leave until she had started to eat. She raised the fork to her mouth slowly, chewing with her eyes closed. It was as good as whatever Ugwu cooked, she was sure, but, except for the chalky pills, she had been unable to taste anything in so long. Finally, she drank some water and asked Ugwu to take the tray away.

On her bedside table, Odenigbo had placed a long sheet of paper with WE, UNIVERSITY STAFF, DEMAND SECESSION AS A MEANS OF SECURITY typewritten at the top and a patchwork of varied signatures at the bottom.

“I was waiting for you to be strong enough to sign it before I deliver it to the statehouse in Enugu,” he had said.

After Ugwu left the room, she picked up a pen and signed the letter and then checked through the text for any errors. There were none. But Odenigbo didn't need to deliver the letter because the secession was announced that evening. He sat on the bed with the radio placed on the bedside cabinet. The reception had little static, as if the radio waves understood the importance of the speech. Ojukwu's voice was unmistakable; it was vibrantly male, charismatic, smooth:

Fellow countrymen and women, you the people of Eastern Nigeria: Conscious of the supreme
authority of Almighty God over all mankind; of your duty over posterity; aware that you can no
longer be protected in your lives and in your property by any government based outside Eastern
Nigeria; determined to dissolve all political and other ties between you and the former Republic
of Nigeria; having mandated me to proclaim on your behalf and in your name that Eastern
Nigeria be a sovereign independent Republic, now therefore I do hereby solemnly proclaim that
the territory and region known as and called Eastern Nigeria, together with her continental shelf
and territorial waters, shall henceforth be an independent sovereign state of the name and title of The Republic Of Biafra.

“This is our beginning,” Odenigbo said. That false softness had left his voice and he sounded normal again, bracing and sonorous. He took his glasses off and grabbed Baby's little hands and began to dance around in circles with her. Olanna laughed and then felt as if she were following a script, as if Odenigbo's excitement would abide nothing but more excitement. She sat up and shivered. She had wanted the secession to happen, but now it seemed too big to conceive. Odenigbo and Baby were moving round and round, Odenigbo singing off-key, a song he had made up—“This is our beginning, oh, yes, our beginning, oh, yes…”—while Baby laughed in blissful incomprehension. Olanna watched them, her mind frozen in the present, on the cashew-juice stain on the front of Baby's dress.

———

The rally was held in Freedom Square, in the center of the campus, lecturers and students shouting and singing, an endless sheet of heads and placards held high.

We shall not, we shall never move,
Just like a tree that's planted by the water,
We shall not be moved.
Ojukwu is behind us, we shall never move.
God is behind us, we shall never move.

They swayed as they sang, and Olanna imagined that the mango and gmelina trees swayed too, in agreement, in one fluid arc. The sun felt like a flame brought too close, and yet it was drizzling andthe lukewarm raindrops mixed with her sweat. Her arm brushed Odenigbo's as she raised her placard: it read we cannot die like dogs .Baby was sitting on Odenigbo's shoulders, waving her stuffed doll, and the sun was bright through the thin drizzle, and Olanna was filled with a delicious exuberance. Ugwu was beside her. His placard read god bless biafra. They were Biafrans. She was Biafran. Behind her, a man was talking about the market, how the traders were dancing to Congo music and giving away the best of their mangoes and groundnuts. A woman said she would go there right after the rally to see what she could get for free, and Olanna turned to them and laughed.

A student leader spoke into the microphone and the singing stopped. Some young men were carrying a coffin with nigeria written on it in white chalk; they raised it up, mock solemnity on their faces. Then they placed it down and pulled their shirts off and started to dig a shallow hole in the ground. When they lowered the coffin into the hole, a cheer rose in the crowd and spread, ripplelike, until it was one cheer, until Olanna felt that everybody there had become one. Somebody shouted, “Odenigbo!” And it spread among the students. “Odenigbo! Address us!”

Odenigbo climbed up to the podium waving his Biafran flag: swaths of red, black, and green and, at the center, a luminous half of a yellow sun.

“Biafra is born! We will lead Black Africa! We will live in security! Nobody will ever again attack us! Never again!”

Odenigbo raised his arm as he spoke, and Olanna thought how awkwardly twisted Aunty Ifeka's arm had looked, as she lay on the ground, how her blood had pooled so thick that it looked like glue, not red but close to black. Perhaps Aunty Ifeka could see this rally now, and all the people here, or perhaps not, if death was a silent opaqueness. Olanna shook her head, to shake away the thoughts, and took Baby from Ugwu's neck and hugged her close.

After the rally, she and Odenigbo drove to the staff club. Students had gathered on the hockey field nearby, burning paper effigies of Gowon around a glowing bonfire; the smoke curled into the night air and mixed with their laughter and chatter. Olanna watched them and realized with a sweet surge that they all felt what she felt, what Odenigbo felt, as though it were liquid steel instead of blood that flowed through their veins, as though they could stand barefoot over red-hot embers.

14

Richard did not think it would be so easy to find Nnaemeka's family, but when he arrived at Obosi and stopped at the Anglican church to ask, the catechist told him they lived just down the road, in the unpainted house flanked by palm trees. Nnaemeka's father was small and albino, copper-colored, his eyes a grayish-hazel that brightened as soon as Richard spoke Igbo. He was so different from the large, dark customs officer at the airport that for a moment Richard wondered if perhaps he was in the wrong house and this was not Nnaemeka's father. But the older man blessed the kola nut in a voice so similar to Nnae-meka's that it took Richard back to the airport lounge that hot afternoon and to Nnaemeka's irritating chatter before the door burst open and the soldiers ran in.

“He who brings the kola nut brings life. You and yours will live, and I and mine will live. Let the eagle perch and let the dove perch and, if either decrees that the other not perch, it will not be well for him. May God bless this kola in Jesus' name.”

“Amen,” Richard said. He could see other resemblances now. The man's gestures as he broke the kola nut apart into five lobes were eerily like Nnaemeka's, as was the set of his mouth, with the lower lip jutting out. Richard waited until they had chewed the kola nut, until Nnaemeka's mother appeared, dressed in black, before he said, “I saw your son at the airport in Kano, the day it happened. We talked for a while. He spoke about you and his family.” Richard paused and wondered whether they would prefer to hear that their son had remained stoic in the face of death or if they would want to hear that he fought it, that he charged toward the gun. “He told me that his grandmother from Umunnachi was a respected herbal doctor known far and wide for her cure of malaria, and that it was because of her that he first wanted to be a doctor.”

“Yes, that is so,” Nnaemeka's mother said.

“He spoke only good words about his family,” Richard said. He chose his Igbo words carefully.

“Of course he would speak good words about his family.” Nnaemeka's father gave Richard a long look as if he did not understand why Richard had to say what they already knew.

Richard shifted on the bench. “Did you have a funeral?” he asked, and then wished he had not. “Yes,” Nnaemeka's father said; he fixed his gaze on the enamel bowl that held the last lobe of kola

nut. “We waited for him to return from the North and he did not return, so we had a funeral. We buried an empty coffin.”

“It was not empty,” Nnaemeka's mother said. “Did we not put that old book he used to read for the civil service exam inside?”

They sat in silence. Dust motes swam in the slice of sunlight that came through the window. “You must take the last piece of kola nut with you,” Nnae-meka's father said.

“Thank you.” Richard slipped the lobe into his pocket.

“Shall I send the children to the car?” Nnaemeka's mother asked. It was difficult to tell what she looked like, with the black scarf that covered all of her hair and much of her forehead.

“The car?” Richard asked.

“Yes. Did you not bring us things?”

Richard shook his head. He should have brought yams and drinks. It was after all a condolence visit, and he knew how things were done. He had been caught up in himself, in thinking that his coming was enough, that he would be the magnanimous angel who brought the last hours of their son to them and, by doing so, would assuage their grief and redeem himself. But to them he was just like any other person who had come to pay condolences. His visit made no difference to the only reality thatmattered: their son was gone.

He got up to leave, knowing that nothing had changed for him either; he would feel the same way he had felt since he returned from Kano. He had often wished that he would lose his mind, or that his memory would suppress itself, but instead everything took on a terrible transparence and he had only to close his eyes to see the freshly dead bodies on the floor of the airport and to recall the pitch of the screams. His mind remained lucid. Lucid enough for him to write calm replies to Aunt Elizabeth's frantic letters and tell her that he was fine and did not plan to return to England, to ask her to please stop sending flimsy air-mail editions of newspapers with articles about the Nigerian pogroms circled in pencil. The articles annoyed him. “Ancient tribal hatreds,” the Heraldwrote, was the reason for the massacres.Timemagazine titled its piece man must whack, an expression printed on a Nigerian lorry, but the writer had taken whackliterally and gone on to explain that Nigerians were so naturally prone to violence that they even wrote about the necessity of it on their passenger lorries. Richard sent a terse letter off to Time.In Nigerian Pidgin English, he wrote, whack meant eat. At least the Observer was a little more adroit, in writing that if Nigeria survived the massacres of the Igbo it would survive anything. But there was a hollowness to all the accounts, an echo of unreality. So Richard began to write a long article about the massacres. He sat at the dining table in Kainene's house and wrote on long sheets of unlined paper. He had brought Harrison to Port Harcourt, and while he worked he could hear Harrison talking to Ikejide and Sebastian. “You are not knowing how to bake German chocolate cake?” A cackle. “You are not knowing what is rhubarb crumble?” Another scornful cackle.

Richard started by writing about the refugee problem, a result of the massacres, about the traders who fled their markets in the North, university lecturers who left their campuses, civil servants who fled their jobs in the ministries. He struggled over the closing paragraph.

It is imperative to remember that the first time the Igbo people were massacred, albeit on a
much smaller scale than what has recently occurred, was in 1945. That carnage was precipitated
by the British colonial government when it blamed the Igbo people for the national strike, banned Igbo-published newspapers, and generally encouraged anti-Igbo sentiment. The notion of the recent killings being the product of “age-old” hatred is therefore misleading. The tribes of the North and the South have long had contact, at least as far back as the ninth century, as some of the magnificent beads discovered at the historic Igbo-Ukwu site attest. No doubt these groups also fought wars and slave-raided each other, but they did not massacre in this manner. If this is hatred, then it is very young. It has been caused, simply, by the informal divide-and-rule policies of the British colonial exercise. These policies manipulated the differences between the tribes and ensured that unity would not exist, thereby making the easy governance of such a large country practicable.

When he gave Kainene the article, she read it carefully, with her eyes narrowed, and afterward told him, “Very fierce.”

He was not sure what very fierce meant or whether she liked it.

He desperately wanted her to approve. Her aura of distance had returned since she came back from visiting Olanna in Nsukka. She had put up a photograph of her murdered relatives—Arize laughing in her wedding dress, Uncle Mbaezi ebullient in a tight suit next to a solemn Aunty Ifeka in a print wrapper—but she said very little about them and nothing about Olanna. She often withdrew into silence in the middle of a conversation, and when she did he let her be; sometimes he envied her the ability to be changed by what had happened.

“What do you think of it?” he asked, and before she could answer, he asked what he really wanted to. “Do you like it? How do you feel about it?”“ I think it sounds exceedingly formal and stuffy,” she said. “But what I feel about it is pride. I feel proud.”

He sent it off to the Herald.When he got a response two weeks later, he ripped the letter up after reading it. The international press was simply saturated with stories of violence from Africa, and this one was particularly bland and pedantic, the deputy editor wrote, but perhaps Richard could do a piece on the human angle? Did they mutter any tribal incantations while they did the killings, for example? Did they eat body parts like they did in the Congo? Was there a way of trying truly to understand the minds of these people?

Richard put the article away. It frightened him that he slept well at nights, that he was still calmed by the scent of orange leaves and the turquoise stillness of the sea, that he was sentient.

“I'm going on. Life is the same,” he told Kainene. “I should be reacting; things should be different.” “You can't write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be, Richard,” she said quietly.

But he couldn't let himself be. He didn't believe that life was the same for all the other people who had witnessed the massacres. Then he felt more frightened at the thought that perhaps he had been nothing more than a voyeur. He had not feared for his own life, so the massacres became external, outside of him; he had watched them through the detached lens of knowing he was safe. But that couldn't be; Kainene would not have been safe if she had been there.

He began to write about Nnaemeka and the astringent scent of liquor mixing with fresh blood in that airport lounge where the bartender lay with a blown-up face, but he stopped because the sentences were risible. They were too melodramatic. They sounded just like the articles in the foreign press, as if these killings had not happened and, even if they had, as if they had not quite happened that way. The echo of unreality weighed each word down; he clearly remembered what had happened at that airport, but to write about it he would have to reimagine it, and he was not sure if he could.

The day the secession was announced, he stood with Kainene on the veranda and listened to Ojukwu's voice on the radio and afterward took her in his arms. At first he thought they were both trembling, until he moved back to look at her face and realized that she was perfectly still. Only he was trembling.

“Happy independence,” he told her.

“Independence,” she said, before she added, “Happy independence.”

He wanted to ask her to marry him. This was a new start, a new country, theirnew country. It was not only because secession was just, considering all that the Igbo had endured, but because of the possibility Biafra held for him. He would be Biafran in a way he could never have been Nigerian—he was here at the beginning; he had shared in the birth. He would belong. He said, Marryme, Kainenein his head many times but he did not say it aloud. The next day, he returned to Nsukka with Harrison.

———

Richard liked Phyllis Okafor. He liked the verve of her bouffant wigs, the drawl of her native Mississippi, as well as the severe eyeglass frames that belied the warmth in her eyes. Since he had stopped going to Odenigbo's house, he often spent evenings with her and her husband, Nnanyelugo. It was as if she knew he had lost a social life, and she insistently invited him to the arts theater, to public lectures, to play squash. So when she asked him to come to the “In Case of War” seminar that the university women's association was organizing, he accepted. It was a good idea to be prepared, of course, but there would be no war. The Nigerians would let Biafra be; they would never fight a people already battered by the massacres. They would be pleased to be rid of the Igbo anyway. Richard was certain about this. He was less certain about what he would do if he ran into Olanna at the seminar. Ithad been easy to avoid her thus far; in four years he had driven past her only a few times, he never went to the tennis courts or the staff club, and he no longer shopped at Eastern Shop.

He stood near Phyllis at the entrance of the lecture hall and scanned the room. Olanna was sitting in front with Baby on her lap. Her lushly beautiful face seemed very familiar, as did her blue dress with the ruffled collar, as if he had seen both very recently. He looked away and could not help feeling relieved that Odenigbo had not come. The hall was full. The woman talking at the podium repeated herself over and over. “Wrap your certificates in waterproof bags and make sure those are the first things you take if we have to evacuate. Wrap your certificates in waterproof bags …”

More people spoke. Then it was over. People were mingling, laughing and talking and exchanging more “in case of war” tips. Richard knew that Olanna was nearby, talking to a bearded man who taught music. He turned, casually, to slip away, and was close to the door when she appeared beside him.

“Hello, Richard.Kedu?”

“I'm well,” he said. The skin of his face felt tight. “And you?”

“We are fine,” Olanna said. Her lips had a slight glisten of pink gloss. Richard did not miss her use of the plural. He was not sure if she meant herself and the child, or herself and Odenigbo, or perhaps wewas meant to suggest that she had made peace with what had happened between them and what it had done to her relationship with Kainene.

“Baby, have you greeted?” Olanna asked, looking down at the child, whose hand was enclosed in hers.

“Good afternoon,” Baby said, in a high voice.

Richard bent and touched her cheek. There was a calmness about her that made her seem older and wiser than her four years. “Hello, Baby.”

“How is Kainene?” Olanna asked.

Richard evaded her eyes, not sure what his expression should be. “She is well.” “And your book is going well?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“Is it still called The Basket of Hands?”

It pleased him that she had not forgotten. “No.” He paused and tried not to think about what had happened to that manuscript, about the flames that must have charred it quickly. “It's called In the Time of Roped Pots.”

“Interesting title,” Olanna murmured. “I hope there won't be war, but the seminar has been quite useful, hasn't it.”

“Yes.”

Phyllis came over, said hello to Olanna, and then tugged at Richard's arm. “They say Ojukwu is coming! Ojukwu is coming!” There was the sound of raised voices outside the hall.

“Ojukwu?” Richard asked.

“Yes, yes!” Phyllis was walking toward the door. “You know he dropped into Enugu campus for a surprise visit some days ago? It looks like it's our turn!”

Richard followed her outside. They joined the cluster of lecturers standing by the statue of a lion; Olanna had disappeared.

“He's at the library now,” somebody said. “No, he's in the senate building.”

“No, he wants to address the students. He's at the admin block.”

Some people were already walking quickly toward the administration block, and Phyllis and Richard went along. They were close to the umbrella trees that lined the driveway when Richard saw the bearded man, in a severely smart, belted army uniform, striding across the corridor. A few reporters scrambled after him, holding out tape recorders like offerings. Students, so many thatRichard wondered how they had congregated so quickly, began to chant. “Power! Power!” Ojukwu came downstairs and stood on top of some cement blocks on the grassy lawn. He raised his hands. Everything about him sparkled, his groomed beard, his watch, his wide shoulders.

“I came to ask you a question,” he said. His Oxford-accented voice was surprisingly soft; it did not have the timbre that it did over the radio and it was a little theatrical, a little too measured. “What shall we do? Shall we keep silent and let them force us back into Nigeria? Shall we ignore the thousands of our brothers and sisters killed in the North?”

“No! No!” The students were filling the wide yard, spilling onto the lawn and the driveway. Many lecturers had parked their cars on the road and joined the crowd. “Power! Power!”

Ojukwu raised his hands again and the chanting stopped. “If they declare war,” he said. “I want to tell you now that it may become a long-drawn-out war. A long-drawn-out war. Are you prepared? Are we prepared?”

“Yes! Yes! Ojukwu, nye anyi egbe! Yes! Yes! Ojukwu,Give us guns! Iwe di anyi n'obi! There is anger in our hearts!” The chanting was constant now—give us guns, there is anger in our hearts, give us guns. The rhythm was heady. Richard glanced across at Phyllis, thrusting a fist in the air as she shouted, and he looked around for a little while at everyone else, intense and intent in the moment, before he too began to wave and chant. “Ojukwu, give us guns! Ojukwu, nye anyi egbe!”

Ojukwu lit a cigarette and threw it down on the lawn. It flared for a while, before he reached out and squashed it underneath a gleaming black boot. “Even the grass will fight for Biafra,” he said.

Richard told Kainene how charmed he had been by Ojukwu even though the man showed signs of early balding and was vaguely histrionic and wore a gaudy ring. He told her about the seminar. Then he wondered whether to tell her that he had run into Olanna. They were sitting on the veranda. Kainene was peeling an orange with a knife, and the slender peel dropped into a plate on the floor.

“I saw Olanna,” he said. “Did you?”

“At the seminar. We said hello and she asked about you.”

“I see.” The orange slipped from her hand, or perhaps she dropped it, because she left it there on the terrazzo floor of the veranda.

“I'm sorry,” Richard said. “I thought I should mention that I saw her.”

He picked up the orange and held it out to her but she did not take it. She got up and walked to the railing.

“War is coming,” she said. “Port Harcourt is going crazy.”

She was looking in the far distance, as if she could actually see the city in its frenzy of excessive parties and frenetic couplings and speeding cars. Earlier that afternoon, a well-dressed young woman had come up to Richard at the train station and taken his hand. “Come to my flat. I never do it with oyinboman before, but I want try everything now, oh!” she had said, laughing, although the delirious desire in her eyes was serious enough. He had shrugged his hand free and walked away, strangely sad at the thought that she would end up with another stranger in her bed. It was as if the people in this city with the tall whistling pines wanted to grab all they could before the war robbed them of choices.

Richard got up and stood beside Kainene. “There won't be war,” he said.

“How did she ask about me?” “She said, How is Kainene?” “And you said I was well?” “Yes.” She said nothing else about it; he did not expect that she would.

15

Ugwu climbed out of the car and went around to the boot. He placed the bag of dried fish on top of the larger bag of garri, hoisted both onto his head, and followed Master up the cracked stairs and into the dim building that was the town union office. Mr. Ovoko came up to meet them. “Take the bags into the store,” he told Ugwu, pointing, as if Ugwu did not know from all the times he had come in the past to bring food for the refugees. The store was empty except for a small bag of rice in the corner; weevils crawled all over it.

“How are things? Ana-emekwa?” Master asked.

Mr. Ovoko rubbed his hands together. He had the lugubrious face of one who simply refuses to be consoled. “Nobody is donating much these days. These people keep coming here and asking me for food, and then they start to ask for jobs. You know, they came back from the North with nothing. Nothing.”

“I know they came back with nothing, my friend! Don't lecture me!” Master snapped.

Mr. Ovoko moved back. “I am only saying that the situation is serious. In the beginning our people rushed to donate food, but now they have forgotten. It will be a disaster if war comes.”

“War will not come.”

“Then why has Gowon continued to blockade us?”

Master ignored the question and turned to leave. Ugwu followed.

“Of course people are still donating food. That dull fellow must be taking the food to his own family,” Master said, as he started the car.

“Yes, sah,” Ugwu said. “Even his stomach is very big.”

“That ignoramus Gowon pledged a miserable, measly amount for more than two million refugees. Did he think it was chickens that died and it is the surviving relatives of those chickens who have returned home?”

“No, sah.” Ugwu looked out of the window. It filled him with sadness, coming here to give garri and fish to people who had fed themselves in the North, listening week after week to Master saying the same things. He reached out and straightened the rope that dangled from the rearview mirror. The plastic keepsake attached to it was a painting of half of a yellow sun on a black background.

Later, as he sat on the backyard steps reading The Pickwick Papers, stopping often to think and to watch the slender leaves of corn swish in the breeze, he was not surprised to hear Master's raised voice from the living room. Master was always short-tempered on days like this.

“And what about our university colleagues in Ibadan and Zaria and Lagos? Who is speaking out about this? They kept silent while white expatriates encouraged the rioters to kill Igbo people. You would be one of them if you didn't happen to be in Igboland! How much sympathy can you have?” Master shouted.

“Don't you dare say I have no sympathy! To say that secession is not the only way to security does not mean I don't have sympathy!” It was Miss Adebayo.

“Did your cousins die? Did your uncle die? You're going back to your people in Lagos next week and nobody will harass you for being Yoruba. Is it not your own people who are killing the Igbo in Lagos? Didn't a group of your chiefs go to the North to thank the emirs for sparing Yoruba people? So what are you saying? How is your opinion relevant?”

“You insult me, Odenigbo.”

“The truth has become an insult.” There was silence and then the squeaking sound of the front door being opened and banged shut. Miss Adebayo had left. Ugwu stood up when he heard Olanna's voice. “This is unacceptable, Odenigbo! You owe her an apology!”

It frightened him to hear her shout because she rarely did, and because the last time he had heard her shout was during those fractured weeks before Baby's birth, when Mr. Richard stopped visiting and everything seemed to be on the brink of drowning. For a moment Ugwu heard nothing—perhaps Olanna, too, had walked out—and then he heard Okeoma reading. Ugwu knew the poem: If the sun refuses to rise, we will make it rise. The first time Okeoma read it, the same day the Renaissance newspaper was renamed the Biafran Sun, Ugwu had listened and felt buoyed by it, by his favorite line, Clay pots fired in zeal, they will cool our feet as we climb. Now, though, it made him teary. It made him long for the days when Okeoma recited poems about people getting buttocks rashes after defecating in imported buckets, the days when Miss Adebayo and Master shouted and yet did not end the evening with her storming off, the days when he still served pepper soup. Now, he served only kola nut.

Okeoma left a little while later, and Ugwu heard Olanna's voice rise again. “You must, Odenigbo. You owe her an apology!”

“It is not a question of whether or not I owe her an apology. It is a question of whether or not I spoke the truth,” Master said. Olanna said something Ugwu did not hear and then Master spoke in a calmer tone, “All right, nkem, I will.”

Olanna came into the kitchen. “We are going out,” she said. “Come and lock the door.” “Yes, mah.”

After they left in Master's car, Ugwu heard a tap on the back door and went to see who it was. “Chinyere,” he said, surprised. She never came over this early, and never to the main house either. “Me and my madam and the children are leaving tomorrow morning for the village. I came to tell you to stay well. Ka o di.”

Ugwu had never heard her say so much. He was not sure what to say. They looked at each other for a while.

“Go well,” he said. He watched her walk to the hedge that separated the two compounds and slip underneath it. She would no longer appear at his door at night and lie on her back and spread her legs silently, at least not for a while. He felt a strange crushing weight in his head. Change was hurtling toward him, bearing down on him, and there was nothing he could do to make it slow down.

He sat down and stared at the cover of ThePickwickPapers.There was a serene calm in the backyard, in the gentle wave of the mango tree and the winelike scent of ripening cashews. It belied what he saw around him. Fewer and fewer guests visited now, and in the evenings the campus streets were ghostly, covered by the pearly light of silence and emptiness. Eastern Shop had closed. Chinyere's mistress was only one of many families on campus who were leaving; houseboys bought huge cartons in the market and cars drove out of compounds with their boots sunken by heavy loads. But Olanna and Master had not packed a single thing. They said that war would not come and that people were simply panicking. Ugwu knew that families had been told they could send women and children to the hometowns, but the men could not leave, because if the men left it would mean that they were panicking and there was nothing to panic about. “No cause for alarm” was what Master said often. “No cause for alarm.” Professor Uzomaka who lived opposite Dr. Okeke had been turned back three times by the militiamen at the campus gates. They let him pass the third day after he swore that he would come back, that he was only taking his family to their hometown because his wife worried so much.

“Ugwuanyi!”

Ugwu looked up and saw his aunty coming toward him from the front yard. He stood up.“ Aunty! Welcome.”

“I was knocking on the front door.” “Sorry. I did not hear.”

“Are you alone at home? Where is your master?”

“They went out. They took Baby with them.” Ugwu examined her face. “Aunty, is it well?”

She smiled. “It is well, odimma. I bring a message from your father. They will have Anulika's wine-carrying ceremony next Saturday.”

“Eh! Next Saturday?”

“It is better they do it now, before war comes, if war is going to come.”

“That is true.” Ugwu looked away, toward the lemon tree. “So. Anulika is really getting married.” “Did you think you would marry your own sister?”

“God forbid.”

His aunty reached out and pinched his arm. “Look at you, a man has emerged. Eh! In a few years it will be your turn.”

Ugwu smiled. “It is you and my mother who will find a good person when the time comes, Aunty,” he said, with a false demureness. There was no point in telling her that Olanna had told him they would send him to university when he finished secondary school. He would not marry until he had become like Master, until he had spent many years reading books.

“I am going,” his aunty said. “Won't you drink some water?”

“I cannot stay.Ngwanu, let it be. Greet your master and give him my message.”

Even before his aunty left, Ugwu was already imagining his arrival for the ceremony. This time, he would finally hold Nnesinachi naked and pliant in his arms. His Uncle Eze's hut was a good place to take her, or perhaps even the quiet grove by the stream, as long as the little children did not bother them. He hoped she would not be silent like Chinyere; he hoped she would make the same sounds he heard from Olanna when he pressed his ear to the bedroom door.

That evening, while he was cooking dinner, a quiet voice on the radio announced that Nigeria would embark on a police action to bring back the rebels of Biafra.

Ugwu was in the kitchen with Olanna, peeling onions, watching the movement of Olanna's shoulder as she stirred the soup on the stove. Onions made him feel cleaned up, as if the tears they drew from him took away impurities. He could hear Baby's high voice in the living room, playing with Master. He did not want either of them to come into the kitchen now. They would destroy the magic he felt, the sweet sting of onions in his eyes, the glow of Olanna's skin. She was talking about the Northerners in Onit-sha who had been killed in reprisal attacks. He liked the way reprisalattacks came out of her mouth.

“It's so wrong,” she said. “So wrong. But His Excellency has handled it all well; God knows how many would have been killed if he did not have the Northern soldiers sent back to the North.”

“Ojukwu is a great man.”

“Yes, he is, but we are all capable of doing the same things to one another, really.”

“No, mah. We are not like those Hausa people. The reprisal killings happened because they pushed us.” His reprisal killings had come out sounding close to hers, he was sure.

Olanna shook her head but said nothing for a while. “After your sister's wine-carrying, we will go to Abba to spend some time there since the campus is so empty,” she said finally. “You can stay with your people if you want to. We will come back for you when we return; we won't be gone for more than a month, at the most. Our soldiers will drive the Nigerians back in a week or two.”“ I will come with you and Master, mah.”

Olanna smiled, as if she had wanted him to say that. “This soup is not thickening at all,” she muttered. Then she told him about the first time she cooked soup as a young girl, how she managed to burn the bottom of the pot to a charred purple and yet the soup turned out very tasty. He was absorbed in Olanna's voice and so he did not hear the sound—boom-boom-boom—from somewhere distant outside the windows, until she stopped stirring and looked up.

“What is that?” she asked. “Do you hear it, Ugwu? What is it?”

Olanna dropped the ladle and ran into the living room. Ugwu followed. Master was standing by the window, holding a folded copy of the Biafran Sun.

“What is that?” Olanna asked. She pulled Baby to her. “Odenigbo!”

“They are advancing,” Master said calmly. “I think we should plan on leaving today.”

Then Ugwu heard the loud honk of a car outside. Suddenly he was afraid to go to the door, even to go to the window and peek out.

Master opened the door. The green Morris Minor had parked so hurriedly that one tire was outside the driveway, crushing the lilies that bordered the lawn; when the man came out of the car, Ugwu was shocked to see that he was only wearing a singlet and trousers. And bathroom slippers too!

“Evacuate now! The federals have entered Nsukka! We are evacuating now! Right now! I am going to all the houses still occupied. Evacuate now!”

It was after he had spoken and rushed back into his car and driven off, honking continuously, that Ugwu recognized him: Mr. Vincent Ikenna, the registrar. He had visited a few times. He drank his beer with Fanta.

“Get a few things together, nkem, ” Master said. “I'll check the water in the car. Ugwu, lock up quick! Don't forget the Boys' Quarters.”

“Gini?What things?” Olanna asked. “What will I take?”

Baby started to cry. There was the sound again, boom-boom-boom, closer and louder.

“It won't be for long, we'll be back soon. Just take a few things, clothes.” Master gestured vaguely before he grabbed the car keys from the shelf.

“I'm still cooking,” Olanna said. “Put it in the car,” Master said.

Olanna looked dazed; she wrapped the pot of soup in a dish towel and took it out to the car. Ugwu ran around throwing things into bags: Baby's clothes and toys, biscuits from the fridge, his clothes, Master's clothes, Olanna's wrappers and dresses. He wished he knew what to take. He wished that sound did not seem even closer. He dumped the bags in the backseat of the car and dashed back inside to lock the doors and close the window louvers. Master was honking outside. He stood in the middle of the living room, feeling dizzy. He needed to urinate. He ran into the kitchen and turned the stove off. Master was shouting his name. He took the albums from the shelves, the three photo albums Olanna so carefully put together, and ran out to the car. He had hardly shut the car door when Master drove off. The campus streets were eerie; silent and empty.

At the gates, Biafran soldiers were waving cars through. They looked distinguished in their khaki uniforms, boots shining, half of a yellow sun sewn on their sleeves. Ugwu wished he was one of them. Master waved and said, “Well done!”

Dust swirled all around, like a see-through brown blanket. The main road was crowded; women with boxes on their heads and babies tied to their backs, barefoot children carrying bundles of clothes or yams or boxes, men dragging bicycles. Ugwu wondered why they were holding lit kerosene lanterns although it was not yet dark. He saw a little child stumble and fall and the mother bend and yank him up, and he thought about home, about his little cousins and his parents and Anulika. They were safe. They would not have to run because their village was too remote. This only meant that he would notsee Anulika get married, that he would not hold Nnesinachi in his arms as he had planned. But he would be back soon. The war would last just long enough for the Biafran army to gas the Nigerians to kingdom come. He would yet taste Nnesinachi's sweetness, he would yet caress that soft flesh.

Master drove slowly because of the crowds and road blocks, but slowest when they got to Milliken Hill. The lorry ahead of them had no one knows tomorrow printed on its body. As it crawled up the steep incline, a young man jumped out and ran alongside, carrying a wood block, ready to throw it behind the back tire if the lorry were to roll back.

When they finally arrived at Abba, it was dusk, the windshield was coated in ocher dust, and Baby was asleep.

16

Richard was surprised when he heard the announcement that the federal government had declared a police action to bring the rebelsto order. Kainene was not.

“It's the oil,” she said. “They can't let us go easily with all that oil. But the war will be brief. Madu says Ojukwu has big plans. He suggested I donate some foreign exchange to the war cabinet, so that when this ends I'll get any contract I bid for.”

Richard stared at her. She did not seem to understand that he could not comprehend a war at all, brief or not.

“It's best if you move your things to Port Harcourt until we drive the Nigerians back,” Kainene said. She was scanning a newspaper and nodding her head to the Beatles on the stereo and she made it seem normal, that war was the inevitable outcome of events and that moving his things from Nsukka was simply as it should be.

“Yes, of course,” he said.

Her driver took him. Checkpoints had sprung up everywhere, tires and nail-studded boards placed across the road, men and women in khaki shirts with expressionless, disciplined demeanors standing by. The first two were easy to pass. “Where are you going?” they asked, and waved the car through. But near Enugu, the civil defenders had blocked the road with tree trunks and old rusty drums. The driver stopped.

“Turn back! Turn back!' A man peered through the window; he was holding a long piece of wood carefully carved to look like a rifle. “Turn back!”

“Good afternoon,” Richard said. “I work at the university in Nsukka and I am on my way there. My houseboy is there. I have to get my manuscript and some personal belongings.”

“Turn back, sah. We will drive the vandals back soon.”

“But my manuscript and my papers and my houseboy are there. You see, I didn't take anything. I didn't know.”

“Turn back, sah. That is our order. It is not safe. But soon, when we drive the vandals back, you can return.”

“But you must understand.” Richard leaned farther forward.

The man's eyes narrowed while the large eye painted on his shirt underneath the word vigilance seemed to widen. “Are you sure you are not an agent of the Nigerian government? It is you white people who allowed Gowon to kill innocent women and children.”

“Abu monye Biafra,” Richard said.

The man laughed, and Richard was not sure if it was a pleasant or an unpleasant laugh. “Eh, a white man who is saying that he is a Biafran! Where did you learn to speak our language?”

“From my wife.”

“Okay, sah. Don't worry about your things in Nsukka. The roads will be clear in a few days.”

The driver reversed, and as he drove back the way they had come, Richard kept looking back at the blocked road until he could no longer see it. He thought about how easily those Igbo words had slipped out of him. “I am a Biafran.” He did not know why, but he hoped the driver would not tell Kainene that he had said that. He hoped, too, that the driver would not tell Kainene that he had referred to her as his wife.Susan called some days later. It was late morning and Kainene was at one of her factories. “I didn't know you had Kainene's number,” Richard said. Susan laughed.

“I heard Nsukka was evacuated and I knew you would be with her. So how are you? Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“You didn't have trouble evacuating, did you?” Susan asked. “You're all right?” “I'm all right.” He was touched by her concern.

“Right. So what are your plans?” “I will be here for now.”

“It's not safe, Richard. I'm not staying here longer than another week. These people never fight civilized wars, do they? So much for calling it a civil war.” Susan paused. “I rang the British Council in Enugu and I can't believe our people there are still going off to play water polo and have cocktails at the Hotel Presidential! There's a bloody war going on.”

“It will be cleared up soon.”

“Cleared up, ha! Nigel is leaving in two days. Nothing is going to clear up; this war will drag on for years. Look what happened in the Congo. These people have no sense of peace. They'd sooner fight until the last man is down—”

Richard hung up while Susan was still speaking, surprising himself by the rudeness. There was a part of him that wished he could help her, throw away the bottles of liquor in her cabinet and wipe away the paranoia that scarred her life. Perhaps it was a good thing she was leaving. He hoped she would find happiness, with Nigel or otherwise. He was still occupied with thoughts of Susan, half hoping she would not call again and half hoping she would, when Kainene came home. She kissed his cheeks, his lips, his chin. “Did you spend the day worrying about Harrison and In the Time of Roped Pots?” she asked.

“Of course not,” he said, even though they both knew it was a lie. “Harrison will be fine. He must have packed up and gone to his village.” “Yes, he must have,” Richard said.

“He probably took the manuscript with him.”

“Yes.” Richard remembered how she had destroyed his first real manuscript, The Basket of Hands, how she had led him to the orchard, to the pile of charred paper under his favorite tree, her face all the time expressionless; and how afterward he had felt not blame or anger but hope.

“There was another rally in town today, at least a thousand people walking, and many cars covered in green leaves,” she said. “I wish they would stick to fields instead of blocking major roads. I've already donated money and I won't be held up in the hot sun just to help further Ojukwu's ambition.”

“It's about a cause, Kainene, not a man.”

“Yes, the cause of benign extortion. You know taxi drivers no longer charge soldiers? They get offended when a soldier offers to pay the fare. Madu says there is a group of women at the barracks every other day, from all sorts of backwater villages, bringing yams and plantains and fruit to the soldiers. These are people who have nothing themselves.”

“It's not extortion. It's the cause.”

“The cause indeed.” Kainene shook her head but she looked amused. “Madu told me today that the army has nothing, absolutely nothing. They thought Ojukwu had arms piled up somewhere, given the way he's been talking, ‘No power in Black Africa can defeat us!' So Madu and some of the officers who came back from the North went to tell him that we have no arms, no mobilization of troops, and that our men are training with wooden guns, for goodness' sake! They wanted him to release his stockpiled arms. But he turned around and said they were plotting to overthrow him. Apparently he has no arms at all and he plans to defeat Nigeria with his fists.” She raised a fist and smiled. “But I dothink he is terribly attractive: that beard alone.”

Richard said nothing. He wondered, fleetingly, if he should grow a beard.

17

Olanna leaned on the veranda railing of Odenigbo's house in Abba, looking out at the yard. Near the gate, Baby was on her knees playing in the sand while Ugwu watched her. The wind rustled the leaves of the guava tree. Its bark fascinated Olanna, the way it was discolored and patchy, a light clay alternating with a darker slate, much like the skin of village children with the nlacha skin disease. Many of those children had stopped by to say “nnonu, welcome,” on the day they arrived from Nsukka, and their parents and uncles and aunts had come too, bearing good wishes, itching for gossip about the evacuation. Olanna had felt a fondness for them; their welcome made her feel protected. Her warmth had extended even to Odenigbo's mother. She wondered now why she did not pull Baby away from the grandmother who had rejected her at birth and why she herself did not move away from Mama's hug. But there was a haunting, half-finished quality to all that happened that day—cooking in the kitchen with Ugwu, the departure so hasty that she worried the oven was left on, the crowds on the road, the sound of shelling—so she took Mama's hug in her stride, even hugged her back. Now they had gone back to being civil, Mama often came over to see Baby, through the wooden gate in the mud wall that separated her home from Odenigbo's. Sometimes Baby went across to visit her and run after the goats that wandered in her courtyard. Olanna was never sure how clean were the pieces of dried fish or smoked meat Baby came back chewing, but she tried not to mind, just as she tried to stifle her resentment; Mama's affection for Baby had always been half-baked, halfhearted, and it was too late for Olanna to feel anything but resentment.

Baby was laughing at something Ugwu said; her pure high-pitched laughter made Olanna smile. Baby liked it here; life was slower and simpler. Because their stove and toaster and pressure cooker and imported spices were left behind in Nsukka, their meals were simpler too, and Ugwu had more time to play with her.

“Mummy Ola!” Baby called. “Come and see!” Olanna waved. “Baby, it's time for your evening bath.” She watched the outline of the mango trees in the next yard; some of them had fruit drooping down like heavy earrings. The sun was falling. The chickens were clucking and flying up into the kola nut tree, where they would sleep. She could hear some villagers exchanging greetings, in the same loud-voiced way that the women in the sewing group did. She had joined them two weeks ago, in the town hall, sewing singlets and towels for the soldiers. She felt bitter toward them at first, because when she tried to talk about the things she had left behind in Nsukka—her books, her piano, her clothes, her china, her wigs, her Singer sewing machine, the television—they ignored her and started to talk about something else. Now she understood that nobody talked about the things left behind. Instead they talked about the win-the-war effort. A teacher had donated his bicycle to the soldiers, cobblers were making soldiers' boots for free, and farmers were giving away yams. Win the war. It was difficult for Olanna to visualize a war happening now, bullets falling on the red dust of Nsukka while the Biafran troops pushed the vandals back. It was often difficult to visualize anything concrete that was not dulled by memories of Arize and Aunty Ifeka and Uncle Mbaezi, that did not feel like life being lived on suspended time.

She kicked off her slippers and walked barefoot across the front yard and over to Baby's sand hut. “Very nice, Baby. Maybe it will still be standing tomorrow, if the goats don't come in the yard in the morning. Now, time for a bath.”

“No, Mummy Ola!”

“I think Ugwu is going to carry you off right now.” Olanna glanced at Ugwu.“ No!”

Ugwu picked Baby up and ran off toward the house. Baby's slipper fell off and they stopped to pick it up, Baby saying “No!” and laughing at the same time. Olanna wondered how Baby would take their leaving the following week for Umuahia, three hours away, where Odenigbo had been deployed to the Manpower Directorate. He had hoped to work at the Research and Production Directorate, but there were too many overqualified people and too few jobs; even she had been told there was no vacancy for her at any of the directorates. She would teach at the primary school, her own win-the-war effort. It did have a certain melody to it: win-the-war, win-the-war, win-the-war. She hoped Professor Achara had found them accommodation close to other university people so that Baby would have the right kind of children to play with.

She sat down on one of the low wooden chairs that slanted so that she had to recline in them in order to rest her back. They were chairs she saw only in the village, made by village carpenters who set up dusty signs by the corners of the dirt roads, often with carpenter misspelled: capinter, capinta, carpentar. You could not sit up on such chairs; they assumed a life of hard-earned rest, of evenings reclining in fresh air after a day of farm-work. Perhaps they assumed, also, a life of ennui.

It was dark and the bats were flying noisily above when Odenigbo came home. He was always out during the day, attending meeting after meeting, all of them on howAbba would contribute to the win-the-war effort, how Abba would play a major role in establishing the state of Biafra; sometimes she saw men returning from the meetings, holding mock guns carved from wood. She watched Odenigbo walk across the veranda, aggressive confidence in his stride. Her man. Sometimes when she looked at him she felt gripped by proud possession.

“Kedu?” he asked, bending to kiss her lips. He examined her face carefully, as if he had to do so to make sure she was well. He had been doing that since she returned from Kano. He told her often that the experiencehad changed her and made her so much more inward. He used massacre when he spoke to his friends, but never with her. It was as if what had happened in Kano was a massacre but what she had seen was an experience.

“I'm fine,” she said. “Aren't you a little early?”

“We finished early because there's going to be a general meeting in the square tomorrow.” “Why?” Olanna asked.

“The elders decided it was time. There are all kinds of silly rumors about Abba evacuating soon. Some ignoramuses even say the federal troops have entered Awka!” Odenigbo laughed and sat down next to Olanna. “Will you come?”

“To the meeting?” She had not even considered it. “I'm not from Abba.” “You could be, if you married me. You should be.”

She looked at him. “We are fine as we are.”

“We are at war and my mother would have to decide what will be done with my body if anything happened to me. You should decide that.”

“Stop it, nothing will happen to you.”

“Of course nothing will happen to me. I just want you to marry me. We really should marry. It no longer makes sense. It never made sense.”

Olanna watched a wasp flit around the spongy nest lodged in the wall corner. It had made sense to her, the decision not to marry, the need to preserve what they had by wrapping it in a shawl of difference. But the old framework that fit her ideals was gone now that Arize and Aunty Ifeka and Uncle Mbaezi would always be frozen faces in her album. Now that bullets were falling in Nsukka. “You have to take wine to my father, then,” she said.

“Is that a yes?”

A bat swooped down and Olanna lowered her head. “Yes. It is a yes,” she said.In the morning, she heard the town crier walking past the house, beating a loud ogene.“There will be a meeting of all Abba tomorrow at four p.m. in Amaeze Square!” Gom-gom-gom. “There will be a meeting of all Abba tomorrow at four p.m. in Amaeze Square!” Gom-gom-gom. “Abba has said that every man and every woman must attend!” Gom-gom-gom. “If you do not attend, Abba will fine you!”

“I wonder how steep the fines are,” Olanna said, watching Odenigbo dress. He shrugged. He had only the two shirts and pairs of trousers that Ugwu had hurriedly packed, and she smiled, thinking of how she knew what he would wear each morning before he dressed.

They had sat down to have breakfast when her parents' Land Rover drove into the compound.

“How fortuitous,” Odenigbo said. “I'll tell your dad right away. We can have the wedding here next week.” He was smiling. There was something boyish about him since she'd said yes on the veranda, something naïvely gleeful that she wished she felt too.

“You know it's not done that way,” she said. “You have to go to Umunnachi with your people and do it properly.”

“Of course I know. I was only joking.”

Olanna walked to the door, wondering why her parents had come. They had visited only a week ago, after all, and she was not quite ready for another monologue from her jittery mother while her father stood by and nodded his agreement: Please come and stay with us in Umunnachi; Kainene should leave Port Harcourt until we know whether this war is coming or going; that Yoruba caretaker we left in Lagos will loot the house; I am telling you, we really should have arranged to bring all the cars back.

The Land Rover parked under the kola nut tree, and her mother climbed out. She was alone. Olanna felt slight relief that her father had not come. It was easier to deal with one at a time.

“Welcome, Mom, nno, ” Olanna said, hugging her. “Is it well?”

Her mother shrugged in the way that was meant to say so-so. She was wearing a red george wrapper and pink blouse and her shoes were flat, a shiny black. “It is well.” Her mother looked around, the same way she had looked around, furtively, the last time before pushing an envelope of money into Olanna's hand. “Where is he?”

“Odenigbo? He's inside, eating.”

Her mother led the way to the veranda and leaned against a pillar. She opened her handbag, gestured for Olanna to look inside. It was full of the glitter and twinkle of jewelry, corals and metals and precious stones.

“Ah! Ah! Mom, what is all that for?”

“I carry them everywhere I go now. My diamonds are inside my bra.” Her mother was whispering. “Nne, nobody knows what is going on. We are hearing that Umunnachi is about to fall and that the federals are very close by.”

“The vandals are not close by. Our troops are driving them back around Nsukka.” “But how long is it taking to drive them back?”

Olanna disliked the petulant pout on her mother's face, the way her mother lowered her voice as if doing so would exclude Odenigbo. She would not tell her mother that they had decided to get married. Not yet.

“Anyway,” her mother said, “your father and I have finalized our plans. We have paid somebody who will take us to Cameroon and get us on a flight from there to London. We will use our Nigerian passports; the Cameroonians will not give us trouble. It was not easy but it is done. We paid for four places.” Her mother patted her headgear, as if to ensure that it was still there. “Your father has gone to Port Harcourt to tell Kainene.”

Olanna felt pity at the plea in her mother's eyes. Her mother knew she would not run away to England with them, and that Kainene would not either. But it was so like her to try, to make thisdoomed, grasping, well-meaning effort.

“You know I won't go,” she said gently, wanting to reach out and touch her mother's perfect skin. “But you and Dad should go, if it will make you feel safer. I'll stay with Odenigbo and Baby. We'll be fine. We are going to Umuahia in a few weeks for Odenigbo to start work at the directorate.” Olanna paused. She wanted to say that they would have their wedding in Umuahia but instead she said, “A s soon as Nsukka is recovered, we'll go back.”

“But what if Nsukka is not recovered? What if this war drags on and on?” “It won't.”

“How can I leave my children and run to safety?”

But Olanna knew she could and she would. “We'll be fine, Mom.”

Her mother wiped her eyes with her palm, although there were no tears, before she brought out an airmail envelope from her handbag. “It's a letter from Mohammed. Somebody brought it to Umunnachi. Apparently he heard Nsukka was evacuated and he thought you had come to Umunnachi. Sorry; I had to open it, to make sure there was nothing dangerous in it.”

“Nothing dangerous?” Olanna asked. “Gini? What are you talking about, Mom?” “Who knows? Is he not the enemy now?”

Olanna shook her head. She was pleased her mother would be going abroad and she would not have to deal with her until this war was over. She wanted to wait until her mother left before she read the letter, so that her mother would not search her face for an expression, but she could not help pulling out the single sheet of paper right away. Mohammed's handwriting was like him— patrician and long, with elegant flourishes. He wanted to know if she was well. He gave her phone numbers to call if she needed help. He thought the war was senseless and hoped it would end soon. He loved her.

“Thank God you didn't marry him,” her mother said, watching her fold the letter. “Can you imagine what a situation you would have been in now?Odiegwu!”

Olanna said nothing. Her mother left soon afterward; she did not want to come inside and see Odenigbo. “You can still change your mind, nne, the four places are paid for,” she said, climbing into the car, holding tight to her jewelry-filled bag. Olanna waved until the Land Rover drove past the compound gates.

It surprised her, how many men and women were in Abba, gathered at the square for the meeting, crowded around the ancient udala tree. Odenigbo had told her how, as children, he and the others, sent to sweep the village square in the mornings, would instead spend most of their time fighting over the fallen udala fruit. They could not climb the tree or pluck the fruit because it was taboo;udalabelonged to the spirits. She looked up at the tree as the elders addressed the crowd and imagined Odenigbo here as a boy, looking up as she was doing, hoping to see the shadowy outline of a spirit. Had he been energetic like Baby? Probably, perhaps more so than Baby.

“Abba, kwenu!” the dibiaNwafor Agbada said, the man whose medicine was said to be the strongest in these parts.

“Yaa!” everyone said. “Abba, kwezuenu!” “Yaa!”

“Abba has never been defeated by anyone. I said that Abba has never been defeated.” His voice was strong. He had only a few cotton-ball tufts of hair on his head, and his staff shook as he plunged it into the ground. “We do not look for quarrels, but when your quarrel finds us, we will crush you. We fought Ukwulu and Ukpo and finished them. My father never told me about a war where we were defeated, and his father never told him either. We will never run from our homeland. Our fathersforbid it. We will never run from our own land!”

The crowd cheered. So did Olanna. She remembered the pro-Independence rallies at university; mass movements always made her feel empowered, the thought that for a thin slice of time all these people were united by a single possibility.

She told Odenigbo about Mohammed's letter as they walked back from the village square after the meeting. “He must be so upset about all of this. I can't imagine how he must be feeling.”

“How can you say that?” Odenigbo said.

She slowed her pace and turned to him, startled. “What's the matter?”

“What's the matter is that you are saying that a bloody Muslim Hausa man is upset! He is complicit, absolutely complicit, in everything that happened to our people, so how can you say he is upset?”

“Are you joking?”

“Am I joking? How can you sound this way after seeing what they did in Kano? Can you imagine what must have happened to Arize? They raped pregnant women before they cut them up!”

Olanna recoiled. She tripped on a stone in her path. She could not believe he had brought Arize up like that, cheapened Arize's memory in order to make a point in a spurious argument. Anger froze her insides. She started to walk fast, past Odenigbo, and when she got home she lay down in the guest room and was not surprised when the Dark Swoop descended. She struggled to pull it off, to breathe, and finally lay in bed exhausted. She didn't speak to Odenigbo the next day. Or the next. And, when her mother's cousin, Uncle Osita, came from Umunnachi to tell her that she was being summoned to a meeting at her grandfather's compound, she did not tell Odenigbo about it. She simply asked Ugwu to get Baby ready and, after Odenigbo left for a meeting, she drove off with them in his car.

She thought of the way Odenigbo had said, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” with an edge of impatience, as if he felt entitled to her forgiveness. He must think that if she could be forgiving of what happened around Baby's birth, she could be forgiving of anything. She resented that. Maybe it was why she didn't tell him she was going to Umunnachi. Or maybe it was because she knew why she was being summoned to Umunnachi and did not want to talk about it with Odenigbo.

She drove over the bumpy dirt roads lined by tall grasses and thought how interesting it was, that villagers could tell you something like Umunnachi summons you, as though Umunnachi were a person rather than a town. It was raining. The roads were marshy. She glanced at the looming three stories of her parents' country home as she drove past it; they would be in Cameroon by now, or perhaps already in London or in Paris, reading the newspapers to learn what was happening back home. She parked in front of her grandfather's house, near the thatch fence. Her tires skidded a little in the clumpy soil. After Ugwu and Baby had come out of the car, she sat still for a while, watching the raindrops slide down the windscreen. Her chest felt tight and she needed some time to breathe slowly to free it, to free herself so she could answer the questions the elders would present to her at the meeting. They would be gentle, formal, everyone gathered in the musty living room: her elderly uncles and granduncles, their wives, some cousins, and perhaps a baby tied on someone's back.

She would speak in a clear voice and look down at the white chalk lines all over the floor, some faded from years, some simple straight lines, others elaborate curves, still others plain initials. As a child, she had watched her grandfather present the piece of nzuto his guests, and she would follow every movement of the men as they drew on the floor and the women as they smeared it on their faces and, sometimes, even nibbled it. Once, when her grandfather stepped out, Olanna had chewed the piece of chalk too and still remembered the dulling potash taste.

Her grandfather, Nweke Udene, would have led this meeting if he were alive. But Nwafor Isaiah would lead; he was now the oldest member of their umunna.He would say, “Others have come back and we have kept our eyes on the road for our son Mbaezi and our wife Ifeka and our daughter Arize as well as our in-law from Ogidi. We have waited and waited and we have not seen them. Manymonths have passed and our eyes ache from being focused on the road. We have asked you to come today and tell us what you know. Umunnachi is asking about all her children who did not return from the North. You were there, our daughter. What you tell us, we will tell Umunnachi.”

It was mostly what happened. The only thing Olanna had not expected was the raised voice of Aunty Ifeka's sister, Mama Dozie. A fierce woman, she was said to have beat up Papa Dozie once, after he left their sick child and went off to visit his mistress. Mama Dozie herself had been away harvesting cocoyams in the agu.The child nearly died. Mama Dozie, it was said, had threatened to cut off Papa Dozie's penis first, before strangling him, if the child were to die.

“Do not lie, Olanna Ozobia, i sikwana asi!” Mama Dozie shouted. “May chicken pox afflict you if you lie. Who told you it was my sister's body that you saw? Who told you? Do not lie here. Cholera will strike you dead.”

Her son Dozie led her away. He had grown so tall, Dozie, since the last time Olanna saw him a couple of years ago. He was holding his mother tight and she was trying to push him aside, as if to be allowed to pummel Olanna, and Olanna wished she could let her. She wanted Mama Dozie to hit her and slap her if it would make Mama Dozie feel better, if it would turn everything she had just told the members of her extended family gathered in this room into a lie. She wished that Odinchezo and Ekene would shout at her too, and question her for being alive, instead of dead like their sister and parents and brother-in-law. She wished that they would not sit there, quiet, looking down as men in mourning often did and later tell her they were happy she did not see Arize's body; everyone knew what those monsters did to pregnant women.

Odinchezo broke off a large leaf from the ede plant and gave it to her to use as a makeshift umbrella. But Olanna didn't place it above her head as she hurried to her car. She took her time unlocking the door and let the rain run over her plaited hair and past her eyes and down her cheeks. It struck her how quickly the meeting had unfolded, how little time it took to confirm four of her family dead. She had given those left behind a right to mourn and wear black and receive visitors who would come in, saying “Ndo nu.” She had given them a right to move on after the mourning and count Arize and her husband and parents as gone forever. The heavy weight of four muted funerals weighed on her head, funerals based not on physical bodies but on her words. And she wondered if she was mistaken, if she had perhaps imagined the bodies lying in the dust, so many bodies in the yard that recalling them made salt rush to her mouth. When she finally got the car open and Ugwu and Baby had dashed in, she sat motionless for a while, aware that Ugwu was watching her with concern and that Baby was almost falling asleep.

“Do you want me to get you water to drink?” Ugwu asked.

Olanna shook her head. Of course he knew she didn't want water. He wanted to get her out of her trance so she would start the car and drive them back to Abba.

18

Ugwu was the first to see people trooping on the dirt road that ran through Abba. They were dragging goats, carrying yams and boxes on their heads, chickens and rolled-up mats under their arms, kerosene lamps in their hands. The children carried small basins or pulled smaller children along. Ugwu watched them walk past, some silent, others talking loudly; many of them, he knew, did not know where they were going.

Master came home from a meeting early that evening. “We'll leave for Umuahia tomorrow,” he said. “We would have gone to Umuahia anyway. We're just leaving a week or two sooner.” He spoke too fast, looking at a point in the distance. Ugwu wondered if it was because he did not want to admit that his hometown was about to fall, or if it was because Olanna had not been speaking to him. Ugwu did not know what had happened between them but, whatever it was, it happened after the village square meeting. Olanna had come home in a strange silence. She spoke mechanically. She did not laugh. She let him make every decision about the food and about Baby, spending most of her time on the slanting wooden chair on the veranda. Once he saw her walk over to the guava tree and caress its trunk, and he told himself he would go and pull her away, after a minute, before the neighbors said she was going mad. But she didn't stay long. She turned quietly and went back and sat on the veranda.

She looked just as quiet now. “Please pack our clothes and food for tomorrow, Ugwu.” “Yes, mah.”

He packed their things quickly—they did not have that much anyway, it was not like Nsukka where he had been paralyzed with so many choices that he had taken very little. He put them in the car early the next morning and then went around the house to make sure he had missed nothing. Olanna had already packed the albums. She had bathed Baby. They stood waiting by the car while Master checked the oil and water. On the road, people were walking past in thick groups.

The wooden gate in the mud wall behind the house creaked open and Aniekwena came into the compound. He was Master's cousin. Ugwu disliked the sly twist of his lips; he always visited at mealtimes and then said “Oh! Oh!” in exaggerated surprise when Olanna asked him to join them in “touching their hands to their mouths.” He looked grim now. Behind him was Master's mother.

“We are ready to go, Odenigbo, and your mother has refused to pack her things and come,” Aniekwena said.

Master closed the bonnet. “Mama, I thought we agreed that you would go to Uke.” “Ekwuzikwananu nofu! Don't say that! You told me that we have to run and that it is better that I go to Uke. But did you hear me agree? Did I say ‘oh' to you?”

“Do you want to come with us to Umuahia, then?” Master asked.

Mama looked at the car, packed full. “But why are you running? Where are you running to? Can you hear any guns?”

“People are fleeing Abagana and Ukpo, which means the Hausa soldiers are close and will soon enter Abba.”

“Did you not hear our dibia tell us that Abba has never been conquered? Who am I running away from my own house for? Alu melu! Do you know that your father will be cursing us now?”

“Mama, you cannot stay here. Nobody will be left in Abba.”

She looked up and squinted in concentration as though looking for a ripening pod on the kola nut tree was more important than what Master was saying.

Olanna opened the car door and asked Baby to get in the back.“ The news is not good. The Hausa soldiers are close,” Aniekwena said. “I am leaving for Uke. Send word to us when you get to Umuahia.” He turned and started to walk away.

“Mama!” Master shouted. “Go and bring your things now!”

His mother kept looking up the kola nut tree. “I will stay and watch over the house. After you all have run, you will come back. I will be here waiting. Who am I running away from my own house for, gbo?”

“Perhaps it would be a better idea to speak to her gently instead of raising your voice,” Olanna said in English. She sounded very formal, clipped. Ugwu had not heard her speak to Master like that, except during the months before Baby was born.

Master's mother was looking at them suspiciously, as if she was sure that Olanna had just insulted her in English.

“Mama, will you not come with us?” Master asked. “Biko. Please come with us.” “Give me the key to your house. I might need something there.”

“Please come with us.” “Give me the key.”

Master stared at her silently and then handed her a bunch of keys. “Please come with us,” he said again, but she said nothing and tied the keys into one edge of her wrapper.

Master climbed into the car. As he drove out, he kept turning back to see his mother, perhaps to see if she would change her mind and dash after Aniekwena or wave to him to stop. But she didn't. She stood there, not waving. Ugwu watched her too, until they turned into the dirt road. How could she stay there all alone, not surrounded by relatives? If everybody in Abba was leaving, how would she eat since there would be no market?

Olanna touched Master's shoulder. “She will be all right. The federal troops won't stay in Abba if they pass through.”

“Yes,” Master said. He leaned over and kissed her lips, and Ugwu felt a buoyant relief that they were speaking normally again. The stream of refugees filing past was thinning.

“Professor Achara has found us a house in Umuahia,” Master said, his voice too loud, too cheerful. “Some old friends are already there, and everything will soon be back to normal. Everything will be perfectly normal!”

Because Olanna remained silent, Ugwu said, “Yes, sah.”

There was nothing normal about the house. The thatch roof and cracked unpainted walls bothered Ugwu, but not as much as the cavernous pit latrine in the outhouse with a rusting zinc sheet drawn across it to keep flies out. It terrified Baby. The first time she used it, Ugwu held her steady while Olanna cajoled her. Baby cried and cried. She cried often the following days, as if she too realized that the house was unworthy of Master, that the compound was ugly with its stubby grass and cement blocks piled in corners, that the neighbors' houses were too close, so close one smelled their greasy cooking and heard their crying children. Ugwu was certain that Professor Achara had fooled Master into renting the house; there was something wily in the man's bulging eyes. Besides, his own house down the road was large and painted a dazzling white.

“This is not a good house, mah,” Ugwu said.

Olanna laughed. “Look at you. Don't you know many people are sharing houses now? The scarcity is serious. And here we are with two bedrooms and a kitchen and living room and dining room. We are lucky to know an indigene of Umuahia.”

Ugwu said nothing else. He wished she would not be so complacent about it.

“We have decided to have the wedding next month,” Olanna told him a few days later. “It will bevery small, and the reception will be here.”

Ugwu was aghast. For their wedding, he had imagined perfection, the house in Nsukka festively decorated, the crisp white tablecloth laden with dishes. It was better they wait for the war to end, rather than have their wedding in this house with its sullen rooms and moldy kitchen.

Even Master didn't seem to mind the house. He returned from the directorate in the evenings and sat outside, contentedly listening to Radio Biafra and the BBC, as if the veranda did not have mud-encrusted floors, as if the stark wood bench there was like the cushioned sofa back in Nsukka. His friends began to stop by as the weeks passed. Sometimes Master went with them to the Rising Sun Bar down the road. Other times he sat with them on the veranda and talked. Their visits made Ugwu overlook the indignities of the house. He no longer served pepper soup or drinks, but he could listen to the regular rise and fall of their voices, the laughter, the singing, Master's shouting. Life came close to being as it was in Nsukka just after the secession; hope swirled around once again.

Ugwu liked Special Julius, who wore sequined knee-length tunics and was an army contractor and brought cartons of Golden Guinea beer and bottles of White Horse whisky and sometimes petrol in a black jerry can; it was Special Julius, too, who suggested that Master pile palm fronds on top of his car as camouflage and paint over his headlights with coal tar.

“Very unlikely that we will have air raids, but vigilance must be our watchword!” Master said, as he held the brush in his hand. Some tar had oozed down the fenders, marring the blue color, and later, after Master went indoors, Ugwu carefully wiped it off, until the black glob covered only the headlights.

Ugwu's favorite guest, though, was Professor Ekwenugo. He was a member of the Science Group. The nail on his index finger was so long and tapering that it looked like a slender dagger, and he smoothed it as he spoke about what he and his colleagues were making: high-impact land mines called ogbunigwe, brake fluid from coconut oil, car engines from scrap metal, armored cars, grenades. The others cheered whenever he made an announcement and Ugwu cheered too, from his stool in the kitchen. Professor Ekwenugo's announcement of the first Biafran rocket caused the loudest round of clapping.

“We launched it this afternoon, this very afternoon,” he said, caressing his nail. “Our own homemade rocket. My people, we are on our way.”

“We are a country of geniuses!” Special Julius said to nobody in particular. “Biafra is the land of genius!”

“The land of genius,” Olanna repeated, her face in that delicate phase between smiling and laughing.

The clapping soon gave way to singing. So-lidarity forever!

So-lidarity forever!
So-lidarity forever!
Our republic shall vanquish!

Ugwu sang along and wished, again, that he could join the Civil Defense League or the militia, who went combing for Nigerians hiding in the bush. The war reports had become the highlights of his day, the fast-paced drumming, the magnificent voice saying,

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty! This is Radio
Biafra Enugu! Here is the daily war report!

After the glowing news—Biafran troops were flushing out the last remnants of the enemy, Nigerian casualties were high, mopping-up operations were concluding—he would fantasize about joining the army. He would be like those recruits who went into training camp—while their relatives and well-wishers stood by the sidelines and cheered—and who emerged bright-eyed, in brave uniforms stiff with starch, half of a yellow sun gleaming on their sleeves.

He longed to play a role, to act. Win the war. So when the news that Biafra had captured the midwest and Biafran troops were marching to Lagos came over the radio, he felt a strange mix of relief and disappointment. Victory was theirs and he was eager to go back to the house on Odim Street, to be close to his family, to see Nnesinachi. Yet it seemed that the war had ended too soon and he had not contributed. Special Julius brought a bottle of whisky, and the guests sang and shouted drunkenly about the might of Biafra, the stupidity of the Nigerians, the foolishness of those newscasters on BBC radio.

“Look at their dirty English mouths. ‘Astonishing move by Biafra' indeed!”

“They are surprised because the arms Harold Wilson gave those Muslim cattle-rearers have not killed us off as quickly as they had hoped!”

“It is Russia you should blame, not Britain.”

“Definitely Britain. Our boys brought us some Nigerian shell cases from the Nsukka sector for analysis. Every single one had uk war department on it.”

“We keep intercepting British accents on their radio messages too.” “Britain and Russia, then. That unholy alliance will not succeed.”

The voices rose higher and higher, and Ugwu stopped listening. He got up and went out through the back and sat on the mound of cement blocks beside the house. Some little boys in the Biafran Boys Brigade were practicing on the street, with sticks shaped like guns, doing frog jumps, calling one another captain! and adjutant! in high voices.

A hawker with a tray balanced on her head ambled past. “Buy garri! Buy garri!”

She stopped when a young woman from the opposite house called out to her. They bargained for a while and then the young woman shouted, “If you want to rob people, then do so. Don't say you are selling garri for that price.”

The hawker hissed and walked off.

Ugwu knew the young woman. He had first noticed her because of how perfectly rounded her buttocks were, how they rolled rhythmically, from side to side, as she walked. Her name was Eberechi. He had heard the neighbors talking about her; the story was that her parents had given her to a visiting army officer, as one would give kola nut to a guest. They had knocked on his door at night, opened it, and gently pushed her in. The next morning, the beaming officer thanked her beaming parents while Eberechi stood by.

Ugwu watched her go back indoors and wondered how she had felt about being offered to a stranger and what had happened after she was pushed into his room and who was to blame more, her parents or the officer. He didn't want to think too much about blame, though, because it would remind him of Master and Olanna during those weeks before Baby's birth, weeks he preferred to forget.

Master found a rain-holder on the wedding day. The elderly man arrived early and dug a shallow pit at the back of the house, made a bonfire in it, and then sat in the thick of the bluish smoke, feeding dried leaves to the fire.

“No rain will come, nothing will happen until the wedding is over,” he said, when Ugwu took him a plate of rice and meat.

Ugwu smelled the harsh gin on his breath. He turned and went back indoors so the smoke would not soak into his carefully ironed shirt. Olanna's cousins Odinchezo and Ekene were sitting out on the veranda in their militia uniforms. The photographer was fiddling with his camera. Some guests were in the living room, talking and laughing, waiting for Olanna, and once in a while somebody went overand placed something—a pot, a stool, an electric fan—in the pile of presents. Ugwu knocked on her door and opened it.

“Professor Achara is ready to take you to the church, mah,” he said.

“Okay.” Olanna looked away from the mirror. “Where is Baby? She hasn't gone out to play, has she? I don't want any dirt on that dress.”

“She is in the living room.”

Olanna sat in front of the crooked mirror. Her hair was held up so that all of her radiant, flawlessly smooth face was exposed. Ugwu had never seen her look so beautiful, and yet there was a sad reluctance in the way she patted the ivory and pink hat on one side of her head to make sure the pins were secure.

“We'll do the wine-carrying later, when our troops recover Umunnachi,” she said, as though Ugwu did not know.

“Yes, mah.”

“I sent a message to Kainene in Port Harcourt. She won't come, but I wanted her to know.” Ugwu paused. “They are waiting, mah.”

Olanna got up and surveyed herself. She ran a hand over the sides of her pink and ivory dress, which flared from the waist and stopped just below her knees. “The stitches are so uneven. Arize could have done this better.”

Ugwu said nothing. If only he could reach out and tug at her lips to remove the sad smile on her face. If only it took that little.

Professor Achara knocked on the half-open door. “Olanna?

Are you ready? They say Odenigbo and Special Julius are already at the church.” “I'm ready; please come in,” Olanna said. “Did you bring the flowers?”

Professor Achara handed her a plastic bouquet of multicolored flowers. Olanna moved back. “What is this? I wanted fresh flowers, Emeka.”

“But nobody grows flowers in Umuahia. People here grow what they can eat,” Professor Achara said, laughing.

“I won't hold flowers, then,” Olanna said.

For an uncertain moment, neither of them knew what to do with the plastic flowers: Olanna held them half extended while Professor Achara touched but did not grasp them. Finally he took them back and said, “Let me see if we can find anything else,” and left the room.

The wedding was simple. Olanna didn't hold flowers. St. Sebastian's Catholic Church was small and filled only halfway with the friends who had come. Ugwu did not pay close attention to who was there, though, because, as he stared at the shabby white altar cloth, he imagined that he was getting married. At first his bride was Olanna and then she transformed into Nnesinachi and then into Eberechi with the perfectly rounded buttocks, all in the same pink and ivory dress and tiny matching hat.

It was Okeoma's appearance, back at the house, that brought Ugwu out of his imagined world. Okeoma looked nothing like Ugwu remembered: the untidy hair and rumpled shirt of the poet were gone. His smart-fitting army uniform made him look straighter, leaner, and the sleeve had a skull-and-bones image next to the half of a yellow sun. Master and Olanna hugged him many times. Ugwu wanted to hug him too, because Okeoma's laughing face brought back the past with such force that for a moment Ugwu felt as if the room blurred with the rain-holder's smoke was the living room on Odim Street.

Okeoma had brought his lanky cousin, Dr. Nwala.

“He's a chief medical officer at Albatross Hospital,” Okeoma said, introducing him. Dr. Nwala kept staring at Olanna with such annoyingly open adoration that Ugwu wanted to tell him to keep his froglike eyes away from her, chief medical officer or not. Ugwu felt not just involved in butresponsible for Olanna's happiness. As she and Master danced outside, circled by clapping friends, he thought, They belong to me. It was like a seal of stability, their wedding, because as long as they were married, his world with them was safe. They danced body to body for a while until Special Julius changed the ballroom music to High Life, and they pulled apart and held hands and looked into each other's faces, moving to the tune of Rex Lawson's new song, “Hail Biafra, the Land of Freedom.” In her high heels, Olanna was taller than Master. She was smiling and glowing and laughing. When Okeoma started his toast, she wiped her eyes and told the photographer standing behind the tripod, “Wait, wait, don't take it yet.”

Ugwu heard the sound just before they cut their cake in the living room, the swift wah-wah-wah roar in the sky. At first it was thunderous, and then it receded for a moment and came back again, louder and swifter. From somewhere close by, chickens began to squawk wildly.

Somebody said, “Enemy plane! Air raid!”

“Outside!” Master shouted, but some guests were running into the bedroom, screaming, “Jesus! Jesus!”

The sounds were louder now, overhead.

They ran—Master, Olanna, holding Baby, Ugwu, some guests—to the cassava patch beside the house and lay on their bellies. Ugwu looked up and saw the planes, gliding low beneath the blue sky like two birds of prey. They spurted hundreds of scattered bullets before dark balls rolled out from underneath, as if the planes were laying large eggs. The first explosion was so loud that Ugwu's ear popped and his body shivered alongside the vibrating ground. A woman from the opposite house tugged at Olanna's dress. “Remove it! Remove that white dress! They will see it and target us!”

Okeoma yanked off his uniform shirt, buttons flying off, and wrapped it around Olanna. Baby began to cry. Master held his hand loosely over her mouth, as if the pilots might hear her. The second explosion followed and then the third and fourth and fifth, until Ugwu felt the warm wetness of urine on his shorts and was convinced that the bombs would never end; they would continue to fall until everything was destroyed and everyone died. But they stopped. The planes moved farther away in the sky. Nobody moved or spoke for a long time, until Special Julius got up and said, “They have gone.”

“The planes were so low,” a boy said excitedly. “I saw the pilot!”

Master and Okeoma were first to walk out to the road. Okeoma looked smaller wearing only a singlet and trousers. Olanna continued to sit on the ground holding Baby, the camouflage-print army shirt wrapped around her wedding dress. Ugwu got up and headed down the road. He heard Dr. Nwala say to Olanna, “Let me help you up. The dirt will stain your dress.”

Smoke rose from a compound near the corn-grinding station a street away. Two houses had collapsed into dusty rubble and some men were digging frantically through the jumbled cement, saying, “Did you hear that cry? Did you?” A fine haze of silvery dust covered their entire bodies so that they looked like limbless ghosts with open eyes.

“The child is alive, I heard the cry, I heard it,” somebody said. Men and women had gathered to help and to stare; some dug through the rubble too, others stood and looked and still others shrieked and snapped their fingers. A car was on fire; the body of a woman lay next to it, her clothes burned off, flecks of pink all over her blackened skin, and when somebody covered it with a torn jute sack, Ugwu could still see the stiff charcoal-black legs. The sky was overcast. The wet smell of coming rain mixed with the smoky smell of burning. Okeoma and Master had joined in digging through the rubble. “I heard the child,” somebody said again. “I heard the child.”

Ugwu turned to leave. A stylish sandal lay on the ground and he picked it up and looked at the leather straps, the thick wedge heel, before he left it where it had been. He imagined the chic young woman who had been wearing it, who had discarded it to run to safety. He wondered where the other sandal was. When Master came back home, Ugwu was sitting on the floor of the living room, his back against the wall. Olanna was picking at a piece of cake on a saucer. She was still wearing her wedding dress; Okeoma's uniform shirt was neatly folded on a chair. The guests had all left slowly, saying little, their faces shadowed with guilt, as if embarrassed that they had allowed the air raid to ruin the wedding.

Master poured himself a glass of palm wine. “Did you listen to the news?” “No,” Olanna said.

“Our troops have lost all the captured territory in the midwest and the march to Lagos is over. Nigeria now says this is war, no longer a police action.” He shook his head. “We were sabotaged.”

“Would you like some cake?” Olanna asked. The cake sat on the center table, whole but for the thin slice she had cut off.

“Not now.” He drank his palm wine and poured another. “We will build a bunker in case of another air raid.” His tone was normal, calm, as if air raids were benign, as if it were not death that had come so close moments ago. He turned to Ugwu. “Do you know what a bunker is, my good man?”

“Yes, sah,” Ugwu said. “Like the one Hitler had.” “Well, yes, I suppose.”

“But, sah, people are saying that bunkers are mass graves,” Ugwu said. “Absolute nonsense. Bunkers are safer than lying in a cassava patch.”

Outside, darkness had fallen and the sky was lit once in a while by lightning. Olanna suddenly jumped up from a chair and screamed, “Where is Baby?KeBaby?” and started to run into the bedroom.

“Nkem!” Master went after her.

“Can't you hear it? Can't you hear them bombing us again?”

“It's thunder.” Master grabbed Olanna from behind and held her. “It's only the thunder. What our rain-holder kept back is finally unleashing itself. It's only the thunder.”

He held her for a while longer until, finally, Olanna sat down and cut another slice of cake for herself.

4. The Book: The World Was Silent When We Died

He argues that Nigeria did not have an economy until Independence. The colonial state was authoritarian, a benignly brutal dictatorship designed to benefit Britain. What the economy consisted of in 1960 was potential—raw materials, human beings, high spirits, some money from the marketing board reserves left over from what the British had taken to rebuild their postwar economy. And there was the newly discovered oil. But the new Nigerian leaders were too optimistic, too ambitious with development projects that would win their people's credibility, too naïve in accepting exploitative foreign loans, and too interested in aping the British and in taking over the superior attitudes and better hospitals and better salaries long denied Nigerians. He gestures to complex problems facing the new country but focuses on the 1966 massacres. The ostensible reasons—revenge for the “Igbo coup,” protest against a unitary decree that would make Northerners lose out in the civil service—did not matter. Nor did the varying numbers of the dead: three thousand, ten thousand, fifty thousand. What mattered was that the massacres frightened and united the Igbo. What mattered was that the massacres made fervent Biafrans of former Nigerians.

DMU Timestamp: November 06, 2024 03:33