Tell Your Story Spring 2022 Writing Contest — Finalist

Finding Lord Lugard

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edge of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gap between the stories.

- Margaret Atwood

I grew up hearing that I was a fish in a well. Everywhere I turned was walled. I could not swim or flex my body or find a route of escape. From a very young age, I barely went to places. I was never allowed to. It would please my father to see me spend the whole of my life at home. Anytime I wanted to travel, his face conjured. He became the face of many unhappy things. He would say no, why travel when you can just sit at home? I was powerless to my father whose strictness filled me with fear. I could never go against his edict. Therefore, to my friends and lovers, I became a ‘kifin rijiya’, literally a ‘welled fish’. The only time I got to travel was in my stories. I delved into writing historical adventures and travelled to the old world where I met the Taureg rebels of Zinder (first known as Sinder), the French soldiers that invaded Niger Republic, the Detention Centre, Tripoli, in Libya, Kejetia in Ghana and Mombasa in Kenya. I went to the Djinguereber mosque and other places in Timbuktu, Mali, where I listened to the griots, heard stories of Sundiata Keta, who could not walk at the age of four and people thought he would amount to nothing but they were wrong, and Mansa-Musa, the richest man in the world, who traveled with thousands of slaves and gold to Mecca. I had been to many places in my writings and more places in the books I read.

However, traveling to Zungeru felt like I had finally broken out of my father’s well and I could swim as far into the ocean. It was the freedom I had been seeking for ten years now since I walked into adulthood. Adulthood had ways of taking away many things including the free-will to do anything, kindness, and childhood innocence. My kindness and dare-I-say innocence had not been completely washed away in the tide of adulthood but my freedom dwarfed as I grew. It came to my realization that this freedom was my final stage of liberation. I had been married for three months now. In those three months, my life felt new. It was as if I had grown a new scale and I was no longer the little fish in my father’s well, I had grown into a whale that could swim as far and as wide as possible.

The 65km journey from my city, Minna, to Zungeru took an hour and few minutes. We boarded a car from the Central Garage Minna and paid the fare for three people; me, my husband — Noor, and Ihsan — my cousin, who is practically my daughter now. We had put off going to Zungeru for two weeks now, mostly because things kept cropping up. It was either a sudden meeting at the school Noor taught or a family’s wedding we couldn’t escape. Weekends were the only days we had to be at Zungeru, so this week, having a free Saturday, we took off. In the car, I sat by the window. There was a Fulani woman beside me. She sucked on oranges as though she had been starving. I watched her for few minutes and looked away. There were two other men beside her. Across our legs were two live chickens owned by this Fulani woman. Noor sat in the front seat with a stranger, and the old driver who was silent all through the journey.

Gazing outside the window, the wind on my face, I thought about my father and wondered what he’d say if he knew I was travelling for pure adventure, not to school in Ilorin or to Katsina where I was deployed for my National Youth Service Corp. He had me redeployed back to my state to serve at home. My father knew people who knew other people who would do their bidding, so it was easy to have me deployed back home even when the law said everyone should serve in their places of deployment.

We arrived in Zungeru around twelve thirty PM. We sat on a bench at the waiting area and waited for Noor’s friend who was going to be our guide. Noor had notified him a week prior to our arrival. His friend arrived a few minutes later with two other men at the back of his motorcycle.

We boarded on okada and followed our guide to the colonial barrack. We alighted outside the barrack and paid off the riders. A look around the barrack, I saw emptiness. There weren’t soldiers around and the surrounding was in arid silence. Off-road tyres formed the gate around the barrack. A bulky soldier I hadn’t noticed approached us. He said something to the two men standing close to Noor and they said something in reply. He left. I watch the retreating figure of the soldier and wondered if he was in his forties or fifties. He came back minutes later with a paper in his hand. He gave the paper to the two men and turned around. The soldier was back in his post, a small cabin I figured was the security post.

The two men turned around and told Noor what was going on. A bile of irritation rouse in my throat. I hated being left out of a situation. We were there solemnly because of me. I deserved to know everything going on. Biting down my irritation, I moved closer to Noor and said, you’re not telling me what’s going on.

He typed on his phone: The soldier said we need permission from another soldier, but the soldier is not around. He got us the number but the number is not going as well.

Oh! I nodded. That was actually a pity. I had so badly wanted to go into the barrack and see the cemetery. For days, I had imagine walking through the cemetery containing about hundred graves of early white settlers who were colonial aids to Lord Lugard. As we turned to leave, I stared at the path I’ve heard led to the cemetery and imagined the graves with their tombstones bearing something like this;

Here lies:

GEORGE ROBERT DICKINS

A TRUE SOLDIER

11TH JANUARY, 1919

But I believed they were too posh for something so simple. Instead, it would be written in a way that immortalize the soldiers, their ranks boldly written at the top, not the common-man’s way. The halmos would bear something more eloquent and precise.

LIEUTENANT

T.D HARVEY

REGIMENT

MACHINE GUN CORPS

UNITED KINGDOM

17TH OCTOBER, 1918

I had asked Noor why the barrack was built around the cemetery. He said it was because the people ransacked through the graves of fallen white soldiers and took their remains. I was perplexed. I couldn’t believe that people could do something so inhumane. Or maybe I could actually believe it because they could do worse for money. I had grown up hearing the slogan ‘White people, white money’. It was a phrase that literally translated into ‘White people have a lot of legal money’. Perhaps, they thought if they used a white man’s body for rituals, they could get a lot of good money.

We left the colonial barrack on motorcycles and rode down a narrow pathway into a forest. I joked about how this was not the adventure I had imagine. I had wanted us to walk through the forest to wherever the destination led. Noor laughed at me. He would have none of that. He hated going on long walks and I knew. We rode deep into the forest until we came to an opening that reveled huts and few houses. There was a huge bridge by the right.

The motorcycles came to a stop by a blacksmith’s stall. There were two young apprentices, boys of barely ten years old, making hoes with him. We greeted him and walked into the opposite gate. The building looked old and tired, lost its beauty to years of abandonment. Confusion took over my excitement, and then disappointment. This was not what I had imagined for days. Two boys of about eleven years old were at the front of the building. One stood by the wall, drawing his fingers across it, and the other was sitting on the long pavement playing with a toy car. The second boy was shirtless. He wore a micky-mouse trouser with one of the trousers’ leg completely cut off and other leg tore from the knee to the ankle. There was a boy, older than the other two, probably in his twelfth to thirteenth years of age, standing by the door. They watched us with keen interest. Not long, an old man who looked to be in his sixties came out of the building. We greeted him. Our guide explained to him why we were there. The old man nodded and ushered us in.

Disappointment sank deeper into me. I was here to find Lord Lugard, but this was on an entirely different realm of what I had expected. There was no Lord Lugard like I was tricked into believing as a child. In one of my stories, I had mentioned that there was a Lord Lugard in town, in Zungeru where he lived right to the amalgamation of Nigeria in 1914, where he married his wife Flora Shaw, a town that became a tourist centre, rumored to bring in newly wedded couples to have their honeymoon thereby keeping the spirit of love glowing and further cementing the relationship between the old and young couples. I was hoping my husband and I would tap from such grace and have our bond stronger. But there was no Lord Lugard. His house had nothing to show for like I had hoped. No statue of him and his wife, Flora Shaw, like the one at Mount Patti in Kogi State where he previously lived before moving to Zungeru. And after the amalgamation paper was signed in Zungeru in 1914, he and his wife relocated to Kaduna State. Well, he never did stay one place.

Inside the building, there were photos. We watched and clicked our cameras at them. Pictures of S.L Akintola, Ahmadu Bello (Sardauna Sokoto) and Dennis Ossadebey in frames were placed above the door. By the right, there was a glass picture board with pictures of Nnamdi Azikiwe from when he was young to old age. I could guess why his pictures were more than the others. Nnamdi Azikiwe was the first president of Nigeria and was considered the father of Nigerian Nationalism. He was also born in Zungeru in 1904. Still disappointed, I asked my husband why there were nothing of Lord Lugard in the house, why the house was in such a state. He told me that most of what belonged to Lord Lugard had been transported to Kaduna, where they’re now preserved. Zungeru, which held a monument of Nigerian history, had been abandoned by the government. They had forgotten that the history of how Nigeria was formed was incomplete without Zungeru. Most of the colonial buildings had fallen. There weren’t much to see anymore. Finding Lord Lugard gone wrong.

The young boys walked into the building, stood by the door and watched us. I studied them. The shirtless boy looked hungry — wet eyes, dried lips and tired expression. He saw me watching him and offered me a big smile. It was so big that I felt something move in my chest. I envied how he could still have such a big pure smile despite his state. I looked away. When we were done snapping, we walked out. I noticed a huge river about 500 meters from the side of the house. I told Noor I was going.

“My people are calling for me,” I joked.

He eyed me. “You better don’t go down there. I know you’re a Mami Wata. I’m not about to have you go into the water,” he said.

But I wasn’t listening. I was already by the back door that led to the river. He was convinced that the only way to explain my extreme love for water was to relate me with Mami wata — water spirits. I had to be a water spirit to love water that much, he had insisted. I laughed out loud as I made my way down the river with Ihsan beside me. The two young boys from the earlier house raced past me to the river. It was a beautiful sight. Seeing how they happily ran woke the child in me.

“Let’s run,” I said to Ihsan.

Her hands in mine, we ran, jump over rocks and dunes. “Slow down,” I told her, noticing she was going too fast.

At the river, the young boys undressed and jumped into water. There were other boys already swimming in the river. The older boy among them struggled with a fishing net he was trying to fold. The river was long and wide, it crawled into distance, all the way to Kaduna. Noor told me that the name of the river is River Kaduna.

We took pictures, played on the dune, and ran after each other, our legs sticking into the hot fine sand. For the first time in many years, I was truly living.