FLASH FICTION
If you tell a wise one, he understands
A tuoro omara, o mara, a tuoro ofeke, o fenye ishi n’ohia- Igbo proverb.
Two hours…
You are still trying to process everything: the possibility of completing the task within the time and the jarring reality of the moment. But it is hard to think clearly with the slams and thumps, with the yelling, “Be careful!”, “Easy!” and “Make una do fast.”
You have stopped looking at the majestic pillars that have always held the duplex and the attention of first-time visitors. You have turned your back to the glistening marbles, the stuccoed walls, and the glittering chandelier that transformed your terrestrial front porch into something celestial.
You walk along the interlock stones that bear marks of your tires, grit crunching beneath the soles of your leather mules.
Days ago, the floor would have been swept clean by Ahmed, your security guard. The pool with the thin film of dust beneath the transparent pool cover rid of dust and debris as though vacuumed — the blue waters glittering like sapphires under the sun.
“Nwanem, we no go fit make am ooo,” Chima, one of the many boys you are training, one of the several you have passed through a system that has made your tribe a symbol of trans-generational wealth and a study in apprenticeship in the Western nations, reminds you of the least of your worries.
You wave him away. Your back is turned to what you consider a waste of years and resources; you are determined that your words won’t join the pile.
Heat blazes in your chest, and you want to yell at him, yell at everyone. You slip your hand back into your pocket and tighten your grip on your mobile phone.
Did he think you were foolish enough to believe you could empty an eight-bedroom with two boys’ quarters in two hours? Was he not smart enough to know that you were merely doing this because your wife Omoshewa nagged you when you told her you would want to leave everything and move on?
“Leave everything and move on ke, Emeka?” She repeated slowly the way she did when she tutored your kids when they hadn’t gotten lesson teachers, those Lekki-based tutors that spoke through their noses and charged you by the hour. The ones who said with the self-assurance of captured minds that teaching your children Igbo affected their British accent.
Only you weren’t a kid, and there was no smile on her spotless oval face with that dimpled chin you love.
“After two years, with all we have done here,” she gestured at the second living room with its royal furniture from Turkey, carpets from Italy, a 75-inch UHD TV, and smart home features from California.
Light from the chandelier glinted angrily off her French-tipped nails as if it were supporting her.
Her wig, Peruvian, Indian, or whatever nationality she wore, danced across her shoulders as she shook her head.
You only knew those names because she sometimes told you to buy them for her on your numerous business trips.
You would have bought her the world if you knew where it was being sold. It wasn’t just because you loved her. You did. It was how things were; it was how you were raised. It is how your father did with your mother, how his brothers did to their wives.
Your wife and two kids were why you still worked hard, even after people began to say you had arrived. You still don’t know what that word, to arrive, meant, but you have come to associate it with the image of the building behind you, the one the government had told you would be pulled down in two hours.
She was right. As right as facts can be.How could you leave the labors of years and walk away?
She was also wrong, as wrong as facts can be when stacked alongside the truth.
The truth.
You have asked yourself what the truth was, especially since the last polls. You still ask yourself if you had been foolish not to join forces with others: your fellow brothers from the East, business people like you who had all come from Abia, Anambra, or wherever as young pre-pubescent boys laden with your possessions in tattered sacks and the weight of your dreams decades ago.
Had you been foolish for not supporting the ruling party and its infamous candidate? The one everyone agreed was as unsellable as ice cream at the onset of winter.
They had told you that you were foolish to your face in the manner of your people. They had said it with the candour that made many, especially the Yoruba, always call your tribe the people who always wake their fathers up in the morning with a kick. Omoshewa had also told you this in the hope that you would tone down your straightforwardness on the day she took you to meet her parents.
“Your candidate can only win if this country is Amelica,” your brothers said.
Like yours, their large bellies heaved as they laughed at you from tables, groaning under the weight of platters of isi-ewu, palm wine, and Hennessy.
You all were wealthy enough to build schools and send hundreds to schools, rich enough to have homes in Monaco and Laos, rich enough to hire Indian and Lebanese men as managers for your businesses. But you still called America, Amelica and peppered your English with Ibo.
“The country is changing,” you told them with the same assuredness with which you told your business partners from China when they asked your thoughts about the elections. Even if you knew that the investors didn’t care about your country but their cuts; their share of their investments.
Back then you wondered if your brothers didn’t see how your candidate was welcomed in the markets; didn’t they see how the North was agog with a messianic fervour?
The youths, women, and even babies all chanted his name.
Your candidate was oxygen, and everyone wanted a lung full.
You had never been political, but you could remember the last time the country had united around a candidate like that was in 1993 and 2007. But even then, you could tell that it wasn’t like that.
You watched them nod then, even if you could still see the cynicism on their faces. You would have been surprised then, but you weren’t;
your tribe had never united around a candidate, course, or cause.
Independent-mindedness, that trait that made your people hard to govern by the British colonists, was both the blessing and curse of your tribe.
In moments like that, you always envied the Yorubas and their parapoism, that sentimental act of binding together along tribal lines.
You always wished your tribe was like the Hausas with their blind followership and predisposition for not using their ‘head’ and sticking with the herd.
So you told your brothers they would see the ‘truth’ at the end of the elections.
By the time the results were released that day in the middle of the night, you were awake like millions across the country. Your heart throbbed with excitement, your eyes glued to the T.V. like hardened cement.
You were awake not just because you had a bet with one of your brothers, Chike, the unofficial king of nightlife in the country, the one who also had vested interests in real estate and retail just like you.
Ten thousand dollars were at stake, but it was more than your ego and crisp Benjamins. A win would mean victory over the bigotry that dictated the days before the election. It would mean validating your hope and negating your father’s pessimism.
Your father had warned you before his death to invest more “at home.” “Those people hate us,” he would say vehemently, referring to the entire country but mainly to a particular tribe. You concluded that, like many of his ageing and dying contemporaries, he had yet to recover from the post-civil war years. The years when they were stripped of their possessions and dignity, left with twenty pounds and balls in their hands.
“And our people are selfish; we cannot unite for our candidate,” he would add whenever you asked him why the Ibos hadn’t unanimously supported a candidate.
You didn’t disbelieve him, yet you didn’t believe him entirely.
It was how you saw hell and heaven. You didn’t believe in the reality of either because no one had returned from either, yet you also knew that there must be a reward for good and evil.
You settled for the bias each tribe had for the other. You, for one, thought the Yorubas were too superficial; you learned this a few years after you moved to Lagos and discovered that your poor Yoruba neighbours often had the largest and loudest parties. The same neighbors who always begged for salt and school fees afterwards.
After you survived the Sabo market riots, you also concluded that the Hausas were too satisfied, simple, and religious.
In the name of Allah or at the beckon of an ethnic or religious leader, they could ruin all they have ever laboured for.
You also knew that the Yorubas treated every Ibo person with the suspicion a person for a calm man person.
To them, Ibos were ritualists, thieves, con artists, or all.
The Hausas, or Abokis as they called them, were simple-minded fools, beings prone to violence.
When you saw the falsified election result, you laughed because you thought it was a joke.
A joke like the story of a snake swallowing millions of naira, like the joke of a senator collapsing when posed with a corruption allegation on live television, or the missing satellite that disappeared hours after its launch. There is a saying in the country, Nigeria na cruise, so you concluded that it was all fun and games.
The election results were another cruise. The real thing will unfold in the morning.
You switched off the T.V. angrily, flung the bedside remote, and pulled the covers over your face.
When you woke up, you realize what you have always known. Truth has several versions: the version of those in power and those who aren’t.
The rumours started before the elections: the Ibos that didn’t vote would be punished.
They would be sent back to their villages to develop it like they claimed they developed this city.
Stories like that on social media always began or ended with Yoruba ronu.
Your wife explained that Yoruba ronu meant Yoruba think.
She didn’t need to explain further; after two decades of doing business in the city, you could understand Yoruba enough to know what the head of the transport union said about the Ibos and their properties.
And his plans to make them pay for not supporting his benefactor.
The trucks swallowing whatever can be salvaged from your property are headed to another of your properties on the Island.
You and your brothers know another version of the truth; you guys were the ones that gave the city the life thousands throng to every day in search of opportunity — the markets, the plazas, the factories were the oasis you created in the desert the city was when you moved in.
But you also know another version of the truth: some people would say that you didn’t build the city that the indigenes built it.
That the former governor and the ones he installed after him built it.
Your head jerks up as the sound of the approaching bulldozers and the blare of police sirens fills the air.
Your eyes dart to your wrist, and for a country where people are perpetually tardy.
A country where the police arrive hours after the robbery and fire trucks arrive days after the blaze.
You wonder how the bulldozer is on time.
You wonder how it beat the traffic, braced the potholes and touts, and made it here in precisely two hours.
Although the government has denied it, but the demolition of properties in Igbo dominated parts of Lagos still continues.
GLOSSARY
1. Tuoro omara, o mara, a tuoro ofeke o fenye ishi n’ohia : If you tell a wise one, he understands; tell a dunce, he runs into the bush.
