*Mama Igosun runs riot

*On the banality of evil

Tatalo Alamu

It was while swimming off the sandy beach at Tarkwa Bay that a group of boys first beheld what looked like a monster creature thrashing about the turbulent seas. It was a huge monster, which appeared like a jumbo fish, a sea-dwelling animal and an amphibious prehistoric bird all rolled into one. It was luminously black and its lustrous hide glowered in the brilliant sunset creating the effects of an optical illusion. It was a whale.

As the strange creature dived and banked in the shallow waters in obvious distress, the boys abandoned their tethered canoe and took to their heels. The ripples were powerful and strong enough to throw a big ship off course. At night and still trembling under his mother’s murky bed sheet, one of the boys told the matriarch about the strange sighting. She hushed him up. “You fool, when I told you to finish the malaria potion you refused. Now, it has returned”, the harassed woman screamed at a delinquent son.

No one has sighted or seen a whale in these climes before. There was not even a name for it either in antiquity or contemporary parlance. The odd stray shark has been sighted in adjacent waters. Occasionally, the carcass of the solitary sea lion or off-message seal has been washed ashore. Once in a long while, a miniature version of the piranha has been known to tangle with the fishing trawl. And awed by its massive size, the local people named the hippopotamus the water elephant.

Still, no word on or about the real thing: the whale. Up till that historic moment, its existence belonged in the realm of intrepid dreaming or the malarial imagination. But since the whale is a migratory mammal, it is quite possible that it had learnt to give these shores a wide berth because it was hunted to extinction in an earlier epoch.

On the other hand, since scientific legend has it that the whale once lived on land but went back to water when the going got too rough, ancient caution might have led it to avoid the old killing shores of West Africa. Even for savage mammals, the fear of these shores is the beginning of wisdom.

All this became the stuff of airy speculations as citizens of the crazed megalopolis woke up that rain-soaked morning to find the troubling reality of a beached whale as their august guest. By the mid-morning, a huge crowd had gathered to take a look at the mammoth monstrosity.

No one had seen anything like this before. Those who thought the elephant was the ultimate creation could not believe their eyes. What was this thing that was more massive than ten huge elephants combined? But the monster simply ignored everybody occasionally emitting a rumbling sound that drove the fear of the lord into the crowd.

By the next morning, the stranded behemoth had been joined by two other mammoth whales. This was no ordinary coincidence. Something new was happening in this turbulent part of Africa. No one had seen a whale before not to talk of three jumbo whales at the same time. A huge portion of the rehabilitated Maroko beach was now occupied by beached whales.

Upon hearing the news of the strange visitants which spread like wild bushfire in the harmattan, the entire interior of the country emptied into an already besieged mega city. Very soon, things took on the colour and atmosphere of a beach carnival of the oppressed and the unfortunate. The people were having a whale of a time. For many upcountry vagrants and joyless hobos, it was their first chance to see the city in its glittering opulence matched only by the feral nastiness of its slums and its decaying infrastructure. It was like Havana before the Cuban revolution.

In fairness to the government of Mallam Mansa Musa, it quickly assembled a team of experts to study the strange visitation. In view of the urgency of the situation, they were given one year to submit their report, with a provision for multiple extensions in case they wanted to travel abroad. These chaps were notable scientists and consultant oceanographers who had seen action off the coast of New Zealand and on the island of Okinawa.

They had worked with merchant whalers and other offshore buccaneers. They measured the bulk and breadth of the bulbous invaders and came to the conclusion that by regular standards, these were no regular whales. They recommended that they must be towed back to the ocean depths without any further ado.

But there was an immediate problem. In the history of the country and throughout its length and breadth, there was no, and there has never been, such a towing tug. Up till that point, the nation had lived on miracles and survived by miraculous reprieves. Ever since its birth, the nation has flirted with suicide often getting to the brink of an apocalypse before being dramatically delivered by the God of the Blackman.

In 1992 September when the cream of the nation’s middle ranking military officers perished in one of the most infamous aeronautical scandals of the century, the traumatised citizenry had to wait for a whole twelve hours before help came from a German company based in the country. By then it was too late for the boys.

It was not the impact of the crash in the shallow marshes of Ejigbo that killed the boys. Most of them actually survived the headlong dive. The survivors died of strangulation and asphyxiation. Throughout the night, the inhabitants of outlying slums heard the wails and cries of the brave chaps as they thrashed about and struggled to wrench themselves free of the iron coffin.

It was like being buried alive. When they were eventually brought out, many of them had the residue of the first aid treatment they had applied to themselves in the sulphurous entombment. The nation had lost the cream of its future generals and marshals.

Oh boy, did the corpses of those illustrious chaps stink. On the day of burial, the whole of Abuja stank to high heavens like the abandoned abattoir that the nation has become. What are we going to tell the children of Major Sam Mesaba Ogbeha, a first class officer and gentleman, or the newly promoted gentle giant, Colonel Taiwo Ogunjobi and many others?

None of the ranking echelons in the military high command saw it fit to resign at this epochal disgrace of the black being. They were too consumed by the vicious power play that was to lead the nation to the brink of disintegration.

Meanwhile on the beach, things took a more dramatic turn. More whales turned up as if in a historic reunion of distressed mammals. The whales were piled so hard and high that the entire coastline took on a dark, deathly hue. An observer from the nation’s last surviving military helicopter, in a strange turn of imagery, described the scene as resembling a huge offshore warehouse of whale waiting to discharge its cargo.

Something began to give. While some of the whales lay still in terminal lassitude, others plunged their head deeper in the sand in fretful distress. All began discharging some gory substance. Then the very first one, now driven into the main road by the bulbous pile, let forth a frightful bellow and lay still. It was dead. Others quickly followed and the entire beach soon became a tangled mass of dead and dying whale.

Many people, now convinced that the whales were a harmless mass of protoplasm climbed the skyscraper of soft, appealing meat, frolicking and sliding at will. Then one man brought out a jack knife and with the cry of “na better meat” heaved out a huge slab from the dead whale. It was like a divine signal. Thousands of hungry and famished humanity descended on dead and dying whales with all manner of crude instruments. In a moment, the entire beach became a huge abattoir foaming with blood and gore.

As the news of this biblical bounty spread to the interior, many descended on the beach to have their share of the national whale. Salivating with apostolic relish, the nation’s leading spiritual merchant described the whalefest as “manna from heaven”. Urging his despairing congregation to take full advantage, it was God’s way of showing that he would never abandon his own, the man of God added.

Then divine disaster struck, and for a nation that has lived at the edge of the abyss, it was massive and merciless. In the tropics, things flourish and perish very quickly. Obeying the iron tropical law, the whales began to decompose very rapidly. By the following evening, the entire coast had been taken over by a suffocating smell of decay and decomposition. Worse still, many who had taken the strange meat started vomiting and dying after a violent seizure.

Disoriented by the septic stench, the entire populace started fleeing in all directions. As the pestilence took hold, the remaining institutions collapsed and the politicians, soldiers, clergymen, traditional rulers and judges took to their heels, heading for the airports or the interior. Unfortunately for them, a human sandstorm of refugees had taken over all the airports, while dead whales had taken over the seaports.

In three brisk days, it was all over. The entire land lay still and quiet like a vast sepulchre. But this is not the silence of lambs. Born a human disaster and fed by a series of man-made disasters, it has taken a natural disaster to overwhelm the nation. A plague has seen off another plague. When politics and science fail nature triumphs. That is the iron law of human evolution. The early morning sun shone brilliantly.

It is a beautiful day on the Marina Quayside. (First published on this page in August 2008.)

 

 

Mama Igosun runs riot

After days of dreary and dismal weather, it was a different Friday morning. The sun rose early and shone with remarkable vigour as if to make up for the forlorn weather of preceding days. Some ebullience and optimism had returned to the nation. After five weeks of a distressing lock-down as a result of the raging pandemic, the heart warmed at the prospects of a partial relaxation.

Snooper himself has been in a pernickety mood. The possibility of some prized delicacies returning to the menu, baring Okon’s penchant for sadistic mischief, sent one virtually swooning with expectations. The last time the crazy fellow had been sent to the market to get fresh eggs, he had returned with something looking like miniscule coconut which turned out to be Iguana eggs.

The mad boy had told his boss that that was what was available in the market and he should just get on with it. Snooper was so enraged that he threw the frying pan at the crook, which he ducked and which caught a dozy Mama Igosun pat on the ankle whereupon that one went ballistic berating yours sincerely for not being in control of his household.

All of a sudden, the fragrant and aromatic smell of sandal wood and some ancient pomade invaded the entire space. Yours sincerely thought the aroma faintly and quaintly familiar, a throwback to ancient times in the village when damsels and debutantes prepared themselves for Christmas festivity. As snooper sniffed the wondrous aroma while wondering where it was all coming from, Okon crashed through the door panting and heaving with fright.

“Oga, oga, mama’s head don catch fire. He don set himself ablast and ablaze. Na dem kainkain and dem Red Indian taba him dey smoke go finish dem woman ooo”, Okon shrieked in fear and terror.

“Where, where, oh my God?” yours sincerely screamed as he crashed down the stairs and swept through the kitchen into the backyard only to be met by arguably the most surreal spectacle of his adult life. There was the ancient stormy petrel sitting straight and ramrod amidst the receding fumes as she beheld herself in smiling self-admiration from an ancient mirror of Ottoman Turkish provenance. In the background were the dying embers from the damsel’s inferno and the red-hot native iron comb the old woman had been plying back and forth through her hair.

“Akanbi, wetin be matter? Wetin dem kukuruku boy tell you?” Mama Igosun asked calmly and with a mischievous glow in her face. “I don whack him coconut head dis morning”.

“Mama, what is all this?” snooper asked, deflated and crestfallen.

“Wetin be wetin?” the old woman shot back. “I been dey fire and iron my hair. Na the thing wey I been dey do with your mama over seventy years. That’s how your papa see am come say better dey there. Old age no mean Kusimilaya no dey again. Akanbi, dem say arugbo (Old woman) no dey Ghana”.

“Mama nobody does this kind of thing anymore. You can go to the hairdresser.” Snooper remonstrated with the ancient troublemaker.

“Which hairdresser? Wetin him dey dress? Dem wound my head?” Mama snarled in mock anger.

“ When you burn the house, you will be happy”, yours sincerely sulked as he retreated.

“Wo (look) make him burn patapata, dat one no concern me”, mama sneered at snooper’s heel.

 

 

 

On the banality of evil

(Mallam Abba Kyari and the Adolf Eichmann paradox)

This column has been inundated with requests to comment on the passing of Mallam Abba Kyari. There has been a rash of inquiries about our opinion. Even when this columnist objected that we never met or sighted the late eminent public bureaucrat, notable Nigerians insisted that column-writing is a public obligation not a question of private desire.

An irate fellow pointedly asked whether columnist could not make a link between the shoddy nature of the president’s last speech and the fact that the master is missing. Abba Kyari himself was known to have confided in his friends that it was when something happened to him that people will know how crucial he had been to preventing the country from sliding into chaos and ungovernability.

It is with public order in mind that this brief intervention is imperative. If we are hoping to build a sane country ruled by rationality and modern ethos, the impact of a public career must not be judged by private testimonies and personal affirmation of sophomoric friendship. The peddlers of this shameful betise are ironically reaffirming how much Nigeria is in the throes of feudal anomie.

The politicization of obituary that we have witnessed shows how polarized Nigeria has become and an ironic evidence of how polarizing and divisive a figure the late Kyari himself was. While his numerous friends and admirers lined up to celebrate a man they have always known for his humility, his Spartan self-denial, his kindness and his spectacular acts  thoughtfulness, others demurred while a few went for his jugular. There were also significant silences.

When Hanna Arendt, the late Jewish philosopher, arrived in Jerusalem to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, she was so horrified by the ordinariness and provincial mediocrity of the defendant that she wrote an essay titled, The Banality of Evil. When they give their life to a power project of complete domination over other people, ordinary-looking people are capable of acts of extraordinary wickedness and cruelty.

The evidence of scandalous preferment, institutional chaos and presidential disorder left behind by Kyari calls for a structured and rational template for that post.