The Thing in the Pipeline

(Adapted from "Double Barrel," a work in progress). First published in the Eco-Instigator Magazine.

You didn’t always know what the pipeline, which ran across your community, really carried. You thought it carried free uniforms, books, breakfast, and lunch for students. But now, standing in the Master’s camp kitchen, hands folded over your blue apron, you’re half-dazzled and half-worried by the activity on the campground — you realise what the thing in the pipeline really is.

You stare, through the small window, at your comrades — the Avtomat Kalashnikova-wielding men in white singlets and shorts, their heads, arms, waists, and legs festooned with black, red, white, or yellow ebuluku ("bullet-proof" bunting). They dance to a medley of war songs, chants, and ululations punctuated by sporadic gunshots in the air, circling the sturdy cotton tree in the middle of the campground in a frenzy.

"Alagba fiyeee...! Ogidi fiye o..! Toru-yanrin...!" ("Let the gun speak! Let the machete speak! Let the river stir!")

"Esinmene-gha—?" ("Are we afraid?”)

"Esingha!" ("We are not afraid!")

"Asainwana—!"

"Wana—!"

As with the songs and guns, your thoughts are blasting. You’re thinking if at some point you will also dance among these fierce-looking, gun-wielding men who move like angry nemuyou (madmen). At present, you serve as a common Camp Boss. What if it comes to bearing arms like them? What if the Master himself asks that you join the “operations”? Can you say “no” after all that the Master has done for you and your family? Ah!

Soon, your thoughts grow louder than the frenzy-medley. Though your eyes stay on the campground, your mind is paddling gently down the river of memory to before you knew what the pipeline in your community really carried. A time when you, too, had danced—a different kind of dance.

One morning in the Assembly Hall of C.S.S. Akuama, several years before your uncle, Commander Zimor, recruited you into the Master’s Liberation Force to serve as a Camp Boss because boy, can you cook, you and your classmates had shouted in excitement upon a special announcement by the principal, Mr. Aburu.

You all jumped up and down to catch the sweet words off the watery mouth of the big-bellied man, just as you would low-hanging mangoes. “Free uniforms and notebooks and breakfast and lunch!” Mr. Aburu had repeated that part of the announcement for emphasis, and the dancing intensified. Your tiny palms hit the desks, and your feet tapped the scarred cement floor of the hall in a riotous rhythm.

To be fair, Mr. Aburu had only restated to the students what the Commissioner of Education had said on radio the previous day: that the government was going to provide all the secondary schools in the State with free new school uniforms, writing materials, as well as breakfast and lunch every school day. You had also keenly listened to the Commissioner’s broadcast on your father’s radio that fateful evening. So when the principal confirmed it on Friday morning, you couldn’t help but display your awilo-logomba moves.

The following day, Saturday, you had rushed to the pocket-friendly community market and, with your little savings from okpoku (clams) diving, bought an okrika apron—the very blue one—in preparation for the Commissioner’s free breakfast and lunch. That what one actually needed for dining was not an apron but a napkin, had easily flown over your small head in your haste. Anyway, you aren’t one to leave everything to chance. After all, “Faith without work is dead,” the Chapel Prefect had said several times during devotions in morning Assembly.

Every school day, you and the other schoolboys ran to school in your old uniforms. If your right hands supported your beltless shorts, the left clutched your worn, nearly used-up notebooks. No matter, you ran with your heads held high in a cloud of hope. At school, you showed-off your apron at every opportunity, so much so that they began calling you Apron in place of Aaron, your surname. Although you objected at first, the name stuck to your skin like wet linen.

During Assembly, one of the boys would raise a hand to ask, “Sir, what about the food and the notebooks and the uniforms you and the Commissioner promised?” To this, your big-bellied Principal always replied, “It's in the pipeline; it's coming.” And so on.

But it wasn’t too long before the truth about the pipelines spilled. By the time you got to Junior Secondary Three, it had dawned on you if there was any good in the pipeline it was not coming to your wretched community secondary school. It was headed to Nobby Terminal and from there, to the international market, where it got sold for huge profits. And that it was greedy-guts like the Commissioner who squandered the proceeds, leaving you with only one means of getting a share of the thing in the pipeline.

What was delivered to the community instead came unceremoniously: the degradation of farmlands and fishing sites by incessant oil spills. Your hopes for the goodies became broken like the walls of your school building.

Even then, whenever you saw Mr. Aburu and asked about the goodies the Commissioner had promised, the big-bellied man’s reply was the same: “It’s in the pipeline.” Although you no longer danced to it in excitement, you laughed—a laughter that didn’t ring true because, like a chicken that has seen that a wild bird has been killed and is being plucked, your head had developed an ache that prevents you from laughing hard.

“Oil pipelines bring destruction, war, and death,” you sigh as your mind paddles back to the camp, back to the frenzy-medley.

You don’t find any of it funny or ideal. But the Master is convinced, as are you, painfully, that the government people and oil companies are deaf to word of mouth, or letters of demand, or even court action. Maybe, they’ll finally listen if the machetes and guns speak, and the river stirs. For now, you turn to tend to the kitchen as the singing continues:

“Ogbaseri ooo,

Ogbaseri nama-ama kpo ba-sinte, indi-ama kpo ba-sinte

fimi-wodeintei o—ikinyan sori ooo—ehh

fimi-wodeintei o—ikinyan seri ooo—ehh”*

(“Ogbaseri has killed all the animals in the animal kingdom; Ogbaseri has killed all the fish in the fish kingdom. So, war canoe, go to him. We are tired of dying. War canoe, go to him”).

End.

Note: *This dirge was culled from an Izon moonlight tale about Ogbaseri, a greedy hunter. The Thing in the Pipeline is not an endorsement of violence but based on true life events.