The Fishermen

Chapter 5: The Metamorphosis

THE METAMORPHOSIS

Ikenna was undergoing a metamorphosis:

A life-changing experience that continued with each passing day. He closed himself off from the rest of us. But though he was no longer accessible, he began to leave shattering traces of himself around the house in actions that left lasting impacts on our lives. One such incident occurred at the beginning of the week following that altercation with Mother. It was a parents-teacher day, so school let out early. Ikenna remained alone in his room, while Boja, Obembe and I sat in our room playing a game of cards. It was a particularly hot day and we were all naked to the waist, seated on the carpet. Our wooden shutter was wide open, wedged with a small stone to let in air. Upon hearing the door of his room open and close, Boja said: “That is Ike going out.”

And then, after a little pause, we heard the opening and closing of the sitting room’s storm door, too. We had not seen Ikenna in two days because he’d hardly been at home, and when he was, he stayed in his room, and whenever he was there, no one, not even Boja with whom he shared the room, entered it. Boja had remained cautious of Ikenna since their last fight because Mother had asked him to stay away from Ikenna until Father returned to exorcise the evil spirits that had possessed him. So Boja mostly stayed with us, accessing the room only at times like this when he was sure Ikenna was not there. He rose to go to the room to take a few things he needed quickly while Obembe and I waited for him to return and continue the game. He’d barely gone out when Obembe and I heard him cry “Mogbe!”—a cry of lamentation in Yoruba. As we ran out, Boja began shouting “Calendar M.K.O.! Calendar M.K.O.!”

“What, what?” Obembe and I asked him as we rushed towards the room. Then we saw for ourselves.

Our prized M.K.O. calendar was charred to pieces, and meticulously destroyed. I could not believe it at first, so I glanced at the wall where it had always hung, but what I saw was a cleaner, shinier, and almost glossy, blank square surface of the wall, its edges slightly smeared with spots where it had been taped. The sight horrified me; my mind could not grasp it, for the M.K.O. calendar was a special calendar. The tale of how we obtained the calendar had been our greatest achievement. We always retold ourselves this story with great pride. It was in the middle of March 1993, in the heat of the presidential election campaigns. We’d arrived at school one morning while the assembly bell was ringing its dying chimes, and quickly merged into the group of chatting pupils, steadily forming lines and columns according to class on the assembly ground. I stood in the nursery line, Obembe in the first grade’s line, Boja in the fourth grade’s line, and Ikenna in the fifth grade’s line — just second to the last one near the fence. Once all the lines had formed, the morning assembly began. The pupils sang the morning hymns, said the Lord’s Prayer, and sang the Nigerian anthem. Afterwards, Mr Lawrence, the head teacher, stood on the podium and opened the large school attendance register. Then, with a microphone, he began calling out the names. When he called a pupil’s name and surname, we cried out “Present, sir!” and simultaneously raised our hands. In this manner, he took a roll call of all the four hundred pupils of the school. When Mr Lawrence got to the fourth grade’s line, and called the first name on the list, “Bojanonimeokpu Alfred Agwu,” the pupils burst into laughter.

“In all of your fathers’ faces!” Boja cried out, raising his two hands, his fingers spread apart, to waka at the pupils — a gesture of cursing.

That wiped out all laughter from the crowd of pupils, and still they stood, no one moving, no one saying a word except for a few murmurs that swiftly tapered off. Even the dreaded Mr Lawrence, the only person I knew who whipped sorer than Father and who was almost never seen without a whip, appeared dazed and momentarily incapacitated. Boja had been angered that morning even before we got to school. He had been embarrassed when Father asked him to take out the mattress he had wetted when he woke. What he did when Mr Lawrence called his name might have been caused by that; for it was usual for the pupils to laugh whenever Mr Lawrence, a Yoruba man, struggled to accurately pronounce Boja’s full Igbo names. Knowing Mr Lawrence’s deficiency, Boja had become used to his employment of approximate homophones, which, depending on his mood, ranged from the utterly jarring—“Bojanonokwu”—to the utterly funny—“Bojanolooku”—which Boja himself often recalled, and even sometimes boasted that he was such a menacing figure that his name could not be pronounced by just anybody — like the name of a god. Boja had often revelled in those moments and until that morning, had never complained.

The headmistress walked to the podium and Mr Lawrence, dumbfounded, stepped back. The megaphone made a prolonged shriek as it was passed from his hand to hers.

“Who said those words on the grounds of Omotayo Nursery and Primary School, a renowned Christian school built and founded on the word of God?” the headmistress said.

I was seized with the fear of an imminent severe punishment Boja would receive for this act — perhaps he would be whipped on the podium or asked to do “labour,” which entailed sweeping the entire school compound or weeding the bush in front of the school with bare hands. I tried to catch Obembe’s eyes because he was in a line two rows from me, but he would not turn away from Boja.

“I asked who?” the headmistress’s voice bellowed again.

“Me, ma,” a familiar voice replied.

“Who are you?” she asked, her voice lower than it was before.

“Boja.”

There was a brief pause, after which the headmistress’s distinct voice beamed “Come here” into the megaphone. As Boja made to go out to the podium, Ikenna ran forward, stood in front of him and cried out aloud “No, ma, this is unfair! What has he done? What? If you are going to punish him, you have to punish all of these people who laughed at him, too. Why should they laugh at him and mock him?”

The silence that followed these bold words, Ikenna’s and Boja’s defiance, was for a moment spiritual. The megaphone in the headmistress’s hands shook unsteadily and then fell to the ground with a loud shriek. She picked up the microphone, dropped it on the podium, and stepped back.

“In fact,” Ikenna’s voice rose again, above the noise of a colony of birds sailing towards the hills, “this is unfair. We’d rather leave your school than be punished unjustly. My brothers and I will all leave. Now. There are better schools out there where we can get better Western education; Daddy will no longer pay the big money to you.”

I remember, in sparkling mirror memory, the unsure movements of Mr Lawrence’s legs as he reached for the long cane, and the headmistress’s gesture that stopped him. Yet, even if she had let him, he would not have been able to catch up with Ikenna and Boja who’d begun to walk through the lines that gently parted for them among the pupils, who, like the teachers, seemed to have frozen with fear. Then, our older brothers grabbing my hand and Obembe’s, we ran out of the school.

We could not go home directly because Mama had just given birth to David and was convalescing. Ikenna said we’d get her worried if we returned home less than an hour after we’d left for school. We walked about in an end street that was mostly empty grassland, with signposts saying This land is owned by so and so, do not trespass. We stopped at the façade of a half-finished, abandoned house. Fallen bricks and crumbling pyramids of sand were scattered all over with what appeared to be dog shit. We entered the structure and sat on a slab of paved floor with a roof — something Obembe suggested would become the house’s sitting room. “You should have seen the headmistress’s daughter’s face,” Boja said. We mocked the teachers and pupils and raved about what we’d done, exaggerating the scenes to make them movie-like.

We’d sat there for about thirty minutes talking about what had happened at school when our attention was suddenly drawn to a distant rising noise. We saw a Bedford truck slowly approaching in the distance. It was covered with posters bearing the portraits of Chief M.K.O. Abiola, the presidential aspirant of the Social Democratic Party (SDP). The truck was loaded with people on top of its open back, and was abuzz with voices singing a song that appeared on state television frequently during those days: the song that held up M.K.O. as “the man.” The people were singing, drumming, with two of them — men dressed in white T-shirts with a photograph of M.K.O. — also blowing trumpets. All around the street, onlookers reared out of houses, sheds, shops, some peeping from windows. As the group went, some of them disengaged from the truck and distributed posters. They gave Ikenna, who stepped forward to meet them while the rest of us stayed back, a small one that had M.K.O.’s smiling face, a white horse beside him, and the words Hope ’93: Farewell to Poverty cascading downwards at the right-hand corner of the poster.

“Why don’t we follow this group and see M.K.O.?” Boja said suddenly. “If he becomes the president after the election, we’d be able to always brag that we’ve met the president of Nigeria!”

“Ah — true, but if we go along with them in our uniform,” Ikenna reflected, “they might probably send us away. They know full well that it is still early in the day and school couldn’t have let us out by now.”

“If they say so, we can tell them we left because we saw them,” Boja replied.

“Yes, yes,” Ikenna agreed, “they will respect us even more.”

“What if we follow them from a distance, through corner-corner?” Boja said. He met Ikenna’s nod of approval; encouraged, he continued: “That way, we can stay clear of trouble and still see M.K.O.”

This idea stuck. We walked through the corners of the street, rounding off a large church and an area where northerners lived. A pungent odour hung around the bend in the alley where the big abattoir was located. As we passed, we heard knives knapping on slabs and boards as the butchers chopped meat, the mob voices of patrons and butchers rising steadily, shoulder-to-shoulder, with the knapping. Outside the gate of the abattoir, two men knelt on a mat and bowed in prayers. A third, standing a few metres from the two, was doing ablutions with water from a small plastic kettle he held in his hand. We crossed the road, passed our neighbourhood and saw a man and a woman standing outside our gate. Their eyes were fastened to a book the woman had in her hand. We hurried past, casting furtive glances around to make sure none of our neighbours had spotted us, but the street seemed deserted. We passed a small church constructed out of teak and zinc roofing on whose wall was an elaborate painting of Jesus with a nimbus around his crown of thorns. From a hole in his chest, drops of blood dripped down, but held, below his visible ribs. A lizard crossed the line of trailing drops of blood with its tail erect, its vile shape obliterating the punctured chest. Clothes hung on the open doors of the shops in front of which were rickety tables crammed with tomatoes, canned beverages, packets of cornflakes, tins of milk and various effects. Just across from the church was a bazaar sprawled over a large expanse of land. The procession had zipped through the thin path between boulders of humans, stalls, and shops, their trucks plodding ponderously to attract the market people. All over the bazaar, the congested mass of humanity seethed like a tribe of maggots. As we plodded through the bazaar, Obembe’s sandal came loose. A man had placed his heavy shoe on the sandal’s strap and Obembe had to force it from under the man’s foot, in the process of which the strap had snapped, leaving the sandal with only a front cover strap like a flip-flop. He began dragging his feet as we made out of the bazaar down a wheel road with declivities.

We’d barely set on this path when Obembe stopped, cupped his hand over his ear and began crying, “Listen, listen” frantically.

“Listen to what?” Ikenna said.

Just then, I heard a noise similar to that of the convoy, closer and more palpable this time.

“Listen,” Obembe curtly said, gazing skywards. Then suddenly, he burst out: “Helicot! Helicota!”

“He-li-copter,” Boja said in a voice that sounded nasal because his eyes were still focused on the sky.

The complete picture of the helicopter had now appeared, gradually dropping to the level of the two-storeyed buildings in the neighbourhood. It was painted green and white, the colours of the Nigerian flag, with the portrait of a white horse poised to sprint engraved in an oblong circle in the centre of the single partition. Two men holding small flags sat on the threshold of one of its doors, shading out a man in police uniform and another in sparkling ocean-blue agbada, Yoruba traditional attire. The entire area was abuzz with cries of “M.K.O. Abiola.” Vehicles honked on the roads, motorcycles revved their engines to deafening wails as the gathering of a massive mob began somewhere in the distance.

“M.K.O!” Ikenna cried breathlessly, wailing. “M.K.O. is in that helicopter!”

He grabbed my hand and we ran in the direction where we thought the helicopter might be landing. We found it landing just outside a magnificent building that was surrounded by a league of trees, and a nine-foot barbed-wire fence, apparently owned by an influential politician. It was much closer than we’d imagined and we were surprised that, besides the aides and a chief who was outside the gate waiting for M.K.O., we were the first to reach the spot. We arrived singing one of M.K.O.’s campaign songs but stopped to watch the helicopter land, its fast swirling blades summoning a dust cloud that shielded M.K.O. and Kudirat, his wife, from sight as they stepped out. When it cleared, we saw that M.K.O. and his wife both wore shiny traditional attire. As a mob gathered, uniformed guards and guards in plain clothes formed a wall to edge it away. The people were cooing, cheering and calling his name aloud, and the Chief waved to acknowledge them. As this scene unfolded, Ikenna started singing a church song we’d hijacked, remixed, and constantly sang for Mother to soothe her whenever she was mad at us. We’d put “Mama” in place of “God.” But now, Ikenna replaced “Mama” with “M.K.O.,” and we had all joined in, singing at the top of our lungs:

M.K.O., you are beautiful beyond description.

Too marvellous for words.

The most wonderful of all creatures,

Like nothing never seen nor heard.

Who can touch your infinite wisdom?

Who can fathom the depths of your love?

M.K.O., you are beautiful beyond description.

Your majesty is enthroned above.

We’d started a repeat when M.K.O. signalled that the aides bring us closer. Frantic, we made our way over and stood in his presence. Up close, his face was round and his head conical. When he smiled, his eyes lent his features abundant grace. He became a real person: no longer a figure that existed exclusively in the realm of television screens and newspaper pages, but suddenly as normal as Father or Boja, or even Igbafe and my classmates. This epiphany filled me with sudden fear. I stopped singing, dropped my eyes from the bright face of M.K.O., and planted them on his shoes that glistened from polishing. On one side of the shoes was the iron sculpture of the head of a being that appeared like Medusa in Boja’s favourite movie, Clash of the Titans. Ikenna would tell me later, after I mentioned the head, that he’d polished one of Father’s shoes with the same embossment. He spelt out the name because he could not pronounce it: V-e-r-s-a-c-e.

“What are your names?” M.K.O. asked.

“I’m Ikenna Agwu,” Ikenna said. “These are my brothers: Benjamin, Boja and Obembe.”

“Ah, Benjamin,” Chief Abiola said, smiling widely. “That’s my grandfather’s name.”

His wife, who was dressed in an identical robe as M.K.O. and carried a shiny handbag, bent down towards me and stroked my head as one would stroke a densely furred dog. I felt metal scratch lightly against my short-haired scalp. When she withdrew her hand, I noticed that what had touched my scalp was a ring; she wore one on almost every finger. M.K.O. raised his hand to cheer the massive crowd that had now gathered all around the vicinity, chanting the theme of his campaign: “Hope ’93! Hope ’93!” For a while, he repeated the word awon—“these” in Yoruba — in different tones as he tried to get the crowd to hear him.

When the chant ebbed and a fair silence ensued, M.K.O. thrust his fist in the air and shouted, “Awon omo yi nipe M.K.O. lewa ju gbogbo nkan lo.”

The crowd responded with wild shouts of acclaim, some of them whistled with fingers curved on both sides of their mouths. He gazed down on us as he waited for them to quiet, then he continued in English.

“In all my life in politics to date, I’ve never ever been told this, not even by my own wives—” The crowd interrupted him with a roar of laughter. “No one, I mean, has ever told me that I’m beautiful beyond description—pe mo le wa ju gbogbo nka lo.”

The throng of voices cheered again as he rubbed my shoulder with his hand.

“They say I’m too marvellous for words.”

The crowd mauled his words with a tumult of applause, the tooting louder.

“They say I’m like nothing they’ve ever seen before.”

The mob waged in again, and once they calmed, M.K.O. — in the most aggressive cry possible — exploded: “Like nothing the Federal Republic of Nigeria has ever seen before!”

The crowd took the air for almost a limitless measure of time, after which they let him speak again, but this time to us and not to them.

“You will do something for me. You all,” he said, his index finger making a circle in the air above us. “You will stand with me and take a photograph. We will use it for our campaign.”

We nodded, and Ikenna said, “Yes, sir.”

“Oya, stand with me.”

He signalled one of his aides, an able-bodied man in a tight brown suit and a red tie, to come forward. The man bent towards him and whispered something in his ear from which the word camera was only just audible. In no time, a smartly dressed man in a blue shirt and tie approached, with a camera hanging on his chest by a black strap with NIKON crested all over it. A few more aides tried to push back the crowd as M.K.O. broke off from us now for a minute to shake hands with his host, the politician who stood close, waiting to receive his attention. Then M.K.O. turned back to us. “Are you ready now?”

“Yes, sir,” we chorused.

“Good,” he said. “I will come to the centre and both of you,”—he gestured to Ikenna and me, “move here.” We stood to his right and Obembe with Boja to his left. “Good, good,” he muttered.

The photographer, one knee on the ground, and the other bent now, aimed his camera until a bright flash lit our faces in a heartbeat second. M.K.O. clapped and the crowd clapped and cheered. “Thank you, Benjamin, Obembe, Ikenna,” M.K.O. said, pointing at each of us as he said our names. When he got to Boja, he paused in confusion, prompting him to say his name. M.K.O. repeated it in slanting syllables: “Bo-ja”.

“Wow!” M.K.O. exclaimed, laughing. “It sounds like Mo ja,” (“I fought” in Yoruba). “Do you fight?”

Boja shook his head.

“Good,” M.K.O. muttered, “don’t ever.” He wagged his finger. “Fighting is not good. What is the name of your school?”

“Omotayo Nursery and Primary School, Akure,” I said in the singsong manner that we had been taught we should use to answer the question whenever it was asked.

“Okay, good, Ben,” M.K.O. said. He raised his head towards the crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen, these four boys of one family will now be awarded scholarships by the Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola campaign organization.”

As the crowd applauded, he dipped his hand into the large side pocket of his agbada and gave Ikenna a bunch of naira notes. “Take this,” he said, pulling one of his aides closer. “Richard, here, will take you to your home, and deliver it to your parents. He will also take down your names and address.”

“Thank you, sir!” we cried almost in unison, but he did not seem to have heard us. He’d already begun walking towards the big house with his aides and hosts, turning every now and then to wave at the crowd.

We followed the aide to a black Mercedes parked across the road, and he drove us home in it. And from that day, we began to pride ourselves on being M.K.O. boys. The four of us were called out to the podium during the school’s assembly one morning and applauded after the headmistress, who seemed to have forgotten and forgiven the circumstances that had led to our accidental encounter with M.K.O., made a long speech about the importance of making good impressions on people — of being “good ambassadors of the school.” Then she announced, even to greater applause, that our father, Mr Agwu, would no longer have to pay our school fees.

Despite these obvious profits, the fame it brought us in and around our district, and Father’s financial relief and joy, the M.K.O. calendar embodied bigger things. It was a badge to us, a testimonial of our affiliation with a man almost everyone in the west of Nigeria believed would be Nigeria’s next president. In that calendar was a strong hope for the future, for we’d believed we were children of Hope ’93, M.K.O.’s allies. Ikenna was convinced that when M.K.O. became president, we could go to Abuja, Nigeria’s seat of government, and we would be let in by just showing the calendar. That M.K.O. would put us in big positions and probably make one of us the president of Nigeria someday. We had all believed this would happen, and put our hope in this calendar, which Ikenna had now destroyed.

Once Ikenna’s metamorphosis became cataclysmic and began to threaten the repose we had been living in, Mother became desperate for a solution. She asked questions. She prayed. She warned. But all to no avail. It seemed increasingly obvious that the Ikenna who was once our brother had been bottled in a tightly sealed jar and thrown into an ocean. But on the day the special calendar was destroyed, Mother was shaken beyond words. She’d returned from work that evening and Boja, who’d sat in the midst of the charred bits and pieces, weeping for long, gave her the remains of the calendar which he’d swept into a plain sheet of paper, and said: “That, Mama, is what our M.K.O. calendar has become.”

Mother, disbelieving, first went to the room to see the blank wall before unwrapping the paper in her hand. She sat on the chair that rested against the buzzing refrigerator. She knew, like us, that we did not have more than two copies and Father had gladly given one copy to the headmistress of our school who hung it in her office after the aides of Chief M.K.O. Abiola opened the scholarship there.

“What has come over Ikenna?” she said. “Isn’t this the calendar he would have killed to protect; the one for which he beat Obembe?” She spat “Tufia!” the Igbo word for “God forbid,” repeatedly, snapping her fingers over her head — a superstitious gesture meant to swish away the evil she had seen in Ikenna’s action. She was referring to when Ikenna beat Obembe for smashing a mosquito on the calendar, leaving an indelible stain — caused by the mosquito’s blood — on M.K.O.’s left eye.

She sat there wondering what had happened to Ikenna. She was worried because Ikenna was, until recently, our beloved brother, the forerunner who shot into the world ahead of all of us and opened every door for us. He guided us, protected us and led us with a full-lit torch. Even though he sometimes punished Obembe and me or disagreed with Boja on certain issues, he became a prowling lion when an outsider rattled any of us. I did not know what it was to live without contact with him, without seeing him. But this was exactly what began to happen, and as the days passed, it seemed he deliberately sought to hurt us.

After seeing the blank wall that night, Mother said nothing. She merely cooked eba, and warmed up the pot of ogbono soup she had prepared the previous day. After we’d eaten, she went into her room, and I thought she had gone to sleep. But at what must have been midnight, she came into the room I shared with Obembe.

“Wake up, wake up,” she called, tapping us.

I screamed upon her touch. When I opened my eyes, all I saw was two distinct eyes blinking in the stark darkness.

“It is me,” Mother said, “do you hear? It is me.”

“Yes, Mama,” I said.

“Shhhhhhh… don’t shout; you will wake Nkem.”

I nodded, and although Obembe had not shouted as I did, he nodded, too.

“I want to ask both of you something,” Mother whispered. “Are you awake?”

She tapped my leg again. In a jolt, I let out a loud “Yes!” and Obembe followed.

“Ehen,” Mother muttered. It appeared as if she’d had a long session of praying or crying or, just as likely, both. Not long before that day — when Ikenna refused to go to the pharmacy with Boja to be precise — I’d asked Obembe why Mother cried so often when she was not a child, and thus past the age of frequent crying. Obembe had replied that he did not know either, but that he thought women were prone to crying.

“Listen,” Mother, now seated on the bed with us, said. “I want both of you to tell me what caused the rift between Ikenna and Boja. I’m sure you both know, so, tell me — quickly, quickly.”

“I don’t know, Mama,” I said.

“No, you know,” she countered. “There must be something that happened — a fight or quarrel I do not know of; just something. Think.”

I nodded and started to think, to try to understand what she wanted.

“Obembe,” Mother called after only a wall of silence greeted her query.

“Mama.”

“Tell me, your mother, what caused the rift between your brothers,” she said, this time, in English. She knotted her wrappa around her chest as if it had come loose, something she often did when agitated. “Did they have a fight?”

“No,” Obembe replied.

“Is it true, Ben?”

“Yes, it is, Mama.”

“Fa lu ru ogu? — Did they quarrel?” she asked, returning to Igbo.

We both replied “No,” Obembe’s coming much later after mine.

“So, what happened?” she asked after a short pause. “Tell me, eh, my princes, Obembe Igwe, Azikiwe, gwa nu mu ife me lu nu, biko my husbands,” she pleaded, employing the heart-melting endearments she bestowed on us in times like this when she wanted to obtain some information from us. She’d bestow royalty on Obembe, ascribing him the title of an igwe, a traditional king. She’d confer the name of Nigeria’s first indigenous president, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, on me. Once she called us these names, Obembe began staring at me — an indication that there was something he did not want to say, but which — nudged by Mother’s entreaties — he was now wholly ready to say. Hence, Mother only needed to repeat the endearments just once more before Obembe spilled it, for she had already won. Both she and Father were good at digging into our minds. They knew how to burrow so deep into our psyche when they wanted to find things out that it was sometimes difficult to think they didn’t already know what they were asking about, but were merely seeking to confirm it.

“Mama, it began the day we met Abulu at Omi-Ala,” Obembe said once Mother repeated the endearment.

“Eh? Abulu the madman?” Mother cried, springing to her feet in terror.

Obembe, it seemed, had not expected this reaction. Perhaps frightened, Obembe cast his eyes on the bare mattress spread out in front of him and said nothing. For this was a metal-lidded secret, one that Boja had warned us never to reveal to anyone after Ikenna first started drawing a line between us and him. “You have both seen what it has done to Ikenna,” he’d said, “so keep your mouths shut.” We had agreed, and promised to wipe it out of our memory by committing a lobotomy on our minds.

“I asked you a question,” Mother said. “Which Abulu did they meet? The madman?”

“Yes,” Obembe affirmed in a whisper, and quickly glanced at the wall that partitioned our room from our elder brothers’ room, suspecting that they might have heard he’d revealed the secret.

“Chi-neke!” Mother cried. Then she sat back on the bed slowly, her hands on her head. She remained in that strange silence for a moment, grinding her teeth and tsking. “Now,” she said suddenly, “tell me at once, what happened when you met him? Did you hear me, Obembe? I said, and I’m saying for the last time, tell me what happened at that river.”

Obembe hesitated for a while longer, too afraid to begin the story he’d partly told in that one revealing sentence. But it was too late, for Mother had already started to wait anxiously, her feet suddenly set on the hill as if she’d seen a raptor advancing towards her fold, and she, the falconer, was ready for a confrontation. Hence, it was now impossible for Obembe, even if he’d wanted to, to resist her.

A little more than a week before the neighbour caught us, my brothers and I were returning from the Omi-Ala River with the other boys when we met Abulu along the sandy pathway. We had just completed a fishing session at the river and were walking home, discussing the two big tilapias we’d caught that day (one of which Ikenna had fiercely argued was a Symphysodon) when, upon reaching the clearing where the mango tree and the Celestial Church were located, Kayode cried: “Look, there’s a dead man under the tree! A dead man! A dead man!”

We all turned at once to the spot and saw a man lying on a mat of fallen leaves at the foot of the mango tree, his head pillowed on a small broken branch still foliated with leaves. Mangoes of different sizes, colours — yellow, green, red — and ones in different stages of decomposition lay about everywhere. Some were squashed, some rotten from bird bites. The soles of the man’s feet, which laid plain before our eyes, were so ugly that it seemed that athlete’s foot had carved sinewy lines all over them, giving them the resemblance of a complex map, coloured with dead leaves that clung to every line.

“That’s not a dead man; he is the one humming this tune,” Ikenna said calmly. “He must be a madman; this is how mad people behave.”

Although I’d not heard the tune before, I did now that Ikenna called our attention to it.

“Ikenna is right,” Solomon said. “This is Abulu, the vision-seeing madman.” Then snapping his fingers, he said, “I detest this man.”

“Ah!” Ikenna cried. “Is it him?”

“It is him — Abulu,” Solomon said.

“I didn’t even recognize him,” said Ikenna.

I looked at the madman, whom Ikenna and Solomon had revealed they knew, but I could not remember having ever seen him before. A great number of mad people, derelicts and beggars roamed the streets of Akure, and there was nothing noteworthy or distinct about any of them. It was thus strange to me that this one not only had a distinct identity, but also a name — a name people seemed to know. As we looked on, the madman raised his hands and held them strangely in the air, still, with a sublimity that struck me with awe.

“Look at that!” Boja said.

Abulu sat up now, as if glued to the spot, peering straight into the distance.

“Let’s leave him alone and go on our way,” Solomon said at that point. “Let’s not talk to him, let’s just go; leave him alone—”

“No, no, we should rattle him a bit,” Boja, who’d moved towards the man, suggested. “We shouldn’t just leave like that, this could be fun. Listen, we could frighten him, and—”

“No!” Solomon said forcefully. “Are you mad? Don’t you know this man is evil? Don’t you know him?”

While Solomon was still speaking, the madman burst into a sudden roar of laughter. In fear, Boja swiftly skipped backwards and re-joined the rest of us. Just then, Abulu sprang acrobatically to his feet with one prodigious leap. He put both hands together to his side, clasped his legs, and without a part of his body moving, fell back into his former position. Thrilled by this callisthenic display, we clapped and cheered in admiration.

“He is a giant — Superman!” Kayode cried and the others laughed.

We’d forgotten that we had been going home, darkness was slowly covering the surface of the horizon and our mother might soon begin looking for us. I was thrilled and fascinated by this strange man. I cupped my hand around my mouth and said: “He is like a lion!”

“You compare everything to animals, Ben,” Ikenna said, shaking his head as if the comparison had annoyed him. “He is not like anything, you hear? He is just a madman — a madman.”

Lost in the moment, I watched this awesome creature with all the concentration I could gather until details of him filled my mind. He was robed from head to foot in filth. As he rose spryly to stand, some of the filth rose with him, while some was left in patches on the ground. He had a fresh scar on his face just below his chin, and his back was caked with a dripping mess from some dead mango in a state of putrefaction. His lips were dried and cracked. His hair was unkempt; it stretched like tendrils, giving him the appearance of a Rastafarian. His teeth, most of which were blackened as if singed, reminded me of fire-blowing gypsies and circus players who blew fire from their mouths and probably, I thought, burned their teeth. The man lay bare before our eyes, stark naked except for a shred of rag which hung loosely from his shoulder down to his waist; his pubic region was covered with a dense foliage of hair in the midst of which his veiny penis hung limply like trouser rope. His legs were bursting with taut varicose veins.

Kayode picked a mango and threw it in the direction of Abulu, and at once, as if expecting it, the madman caught the mango in the air. Holding out the fruit as if it was an acrid substance he could not bring close to himself, he slowly rose to his feet. With a loud, piercing cry, he hauled the mango so high it might have landed at the town centre, some twenty miles away. This swept the ground from beneath our feet.

In silence, we stood there, frozen, watching this man until Solomon moved forward and said: “You see? Do you see what I tell you? Can an ordinary human being do this?” he pointed in the direction of the projectile that was the mango. “This man is evil. Let us go home and leave him. Haven’t you heard how he killed his brother, eh? What can be worse than a man who killed his own brother?” He put his hand to hold the lobe of his ear in the manner of an older person giving instruction to a child. “We must all go home, now!”

“He is right,” Ikenna said after a moment’s thought. “We should all go home. See, it is getting late.”

We started on our way, but once we began, Abulu burst out in laughter. “Ignore him,” Solomon urged, waving us on. The rest marched on, but I couldn’t. I’d become suddenly afraid, on account of Solomon’s description of him, that this man was so dangerous he could jump on us and kill us. I turned, and when I saw that he was coming after us, my fear was inflamed.

“Let us run,” I cried, “he will kill us!”

“No, he can’t kill us,” Ikenna said and turned rapidly to face the madman. “He can see we are armed.”

“With what?” asked Boja.

“Our fishing hooks,” Ikenna replied curtly. “If he comes any closer, we will tear his flesh with the hooks, just like we kill fish, and throw his body in the river.”

As if deterred by this threat, the madman stopped and stood still, his hands masking his face, making strange sounds. We continued and had walked a fair distance away when we heard a loud cry of Ikenna’s name. We pulled to an immediate halt in shock.

“Ikena,” the voice called again with a Yoruba accent that lengthened the e sound of the first letter and obliterated the second n so that it sounded as Ikena.

We glanced around in bewilderment to see who’d said the name, but Abulu was the only person within sight. He now stood a few metres from us, his arms folded across his chest.

“Ikena,” Abulu repeated aloud, inching closer towards us.

“Let’s not listen to Abulu’s prophecies. O le wu—it is dangerous,” Solomon shouted at us, his Yoruba thickening with a twang of his Oyo dialect. “Let’s go home now, let’s go.” He pushed Ikenna forward. “It’s not good to listen to Abulu’s prophecies, Ike. Let us go!”

“Yes, Ike,” Kayode said, “he is of the devil, but we are Christians.”

For a moment, we all waited for Ikenna, whose eyes now stayed on the madman. Without turning to the rest of us, he shook his head and cried, “No!”

“What no? Don’t you know Abulu?” Solomon asked. He caught Ikenna by the shirt, but Ikenna pulled away from him, leaving a piece of his old Bahamas resort T-shirt in Solomon’s hand.

“Leave me,” Ikenna said. “I’m not going away. He is calling my name. He is calling my name. How did he know my name? How — how is he calling my name?”

“Maybe he heard it from one of us,” Solomon said, matching Ikenna’s forceful tone.

“No, he didn’t,” Ikenna shouted. “He didn’t hear it from anyone.”

He had just said that when — in a softer, subtler voice — Abulu called again, “Ikena.” Then raising his hands, the madman burst into a song I’d heard people sing in our neighbourhood without knowing where it came from or what it meant, and the song was titled: “The Sower of Green Things.”

We all listened to his rapturous singing for a while, even Solomon. Then, shaking his head, Solomon picked up his fishing hook, tossed the piece of Ikenna’s shirt to the ground and said: “You and your brothers may stay, but I won’t stay.”

Solomon turned and Kayode followed him. Igbafe, conspicuously indeterminate, threw glances back and forth between us and the vanishing duo. Then slowly, he began walking away until, after about a hundred metres, he began to run.

Abulu had stopped singing by the time I had lost sight of those who had left us, and he had resumed calling Ikenna’s name. When it seemed he’d called it for the thousandth time, he cast his eyes above, lifted his hands and shouted: “Ikena, you will be bound like a bird on the day you shall die,” he cried, covering his eyes with his hands to demonstrate blindness.

“Ikena, you will be mute,” he said, and closed his ears with both hands.

“Ikena, you will be crippled,” he said, and moved his legs apart, folding his palms together in the way of spiritual supplications. Then he knocked his knees together and fell backwards into the dirt as though the bones of his knees had suddenly been broken.

When he said: “Your tongue will stick out of your mouth like a hungry beast, and will not return back into your mouth,” he thrust out his tongue, and curled it to one side of his mouth.

“Ikena, you shall lift your hands to grasp air, but you will not be able to. Ikena, you shall open your mouth to speak on that day”—the madman opened his mouth and made a loud gasping sound of ah, ah—“but words will freeze in your mouth.”

As he spoke, the din of an aircraft flying overhead mopped his voice into a desperate whimper at first, and then — when the plane had drawn much closer — it swallowed the rest of his words like a boa. The last statement we heard him make, “Ikena, you will swim in a river of red but shall never rise from it again. Your life—” was barely audible. The din and the voices of children cheering at the plane from around the neighbourhood threw the evening into a cacophonous haze. Abulu cast a frenzied gaze upwards in confusion. Then, as if in a fury, he continued in a louder voice that was whipped into faint whispers by the sound of the aircraft. As the noise tapered off, we all heard him say “Ikena, you shall die like a cock dies.”

Abulu fell silent and his face lit up with relief. Then he moved one of his hands in the air as if scribbling something on an invisible hanging paper or book with a pen no one else but he could see. When it seemed he was done, he started to go, singing and clapping along.

We watched the forward-and-backwards swing of his backbone as he sang and danced, the song’s charged lyrics falling back on us like wind-borne dust.

A fe f ko le fe ko

ma kan igi oko As the wind cannot blow

without touching the trees Osupa ko le hon ki

enikan fi aso di As no one can block the light of the moon with a sheet

of the moon with a sheet Oh, Olu Orun,

eni ti mo je Ojise fun Oh, father of the host for

whom I’m an oracle E fa orun ya,

e je ki ojo ro I implore you to tear the

firmaments and give rain Ki oro ti mo to

gbin ba le gbo That the green things

I have sown will live E ba igba orun je,

ki oro mi bale mi Mutilate the seasons so my

words can breathe, Ki won ba le gbo. That they yield fruit.

The madman sang on as he went away from us until his voice petered out, along with all of his corporeal convoy — his presence, his smell, his shadow that clung to the tree and the ground, his body. And once he was out of sight, I noticed that the night had descended heavily around us, covering the roof of the world with a crepuscular awning, and — in what seemed like the blink of an eye — had turned the birds nesting in the mango tree and the sprawling esan bush around it into black objects that were imperceptible to the eyes as they flew past us. Even the Nigerian flag that hovered over the police station two hundred metres away had darkened and the distant hills had merged with the dark sky as if there was no partition between the sky and the earth.

My brothers and I went home afterwards, bruised as if we’d been beaten in an easy fight, while the world around us continued to run with the machinery of things unaltered, with nothing suggesting that something of portentous significance had happened to us. For the street was alive, bustling with the night-time cacophony of roadside sellers with lanterns and candles on tables and people walking around whose shadows were scattered on the ground, walls, against trees, on buildings like life-sized murals. A Hausa man in northern garment stood behind a wooden shed covered with tarpaulins, turning a pile of skewered meat on a charcoal hearth set in a metal bowl from which thick black smoke was rising. Separated from this man by a running sewer were two women who sat on a bench, bent over an actual hearth, roasting corn.

We were only a stone’s throw from our house when Ikenna stopped walking, forcing the rest of us to a halt, so that he stood in front of the three of us, now a mere silhouette. “Did any of you hear what he said when the plane was flying past?” he said in a voice that was unsteady yet measured. “Abulu kept speaking, but I did not hear.”

I had not heard the madman; the plane had caught my attention so much that, for the time it was visible, I had watched it closely, my hand shaded over my eyes to try to catch a glimpse of its most likely foreign passengers heading, perhaps, somewhere in the Western world. But it seemed neither Boja nor Obembe had heard him, for neither said a word. Ikenna had turned and was about to start walking when Obembe said: “I did.”

“What then are you waiting for?” Ikenna thundered loudly. All three of us stepped back a few metres.

Obembe steeled himself, afraid that Ikenna would hit him.

“Were you deaf?” Ikenna shouted.

The rage in Ikenna’s voice frightened me. I dropped my head to avoid looking straight at him and focused, instead, on his shadow that was sprawled on the dirt. As I watched the actions of his actual body by the movement of his shadow on the dirt, I saw it throw what it held in its hand to the ground. Then his shadow flowed towards Obembe, its head elongating at first and then retracting back into shape. When it steadied, its arms flailed briefly and then I heard the sound of Obembe’s tin fall and felt a splash of its content on my leg. Two small fish — one of which Ikenna had argued was a Symphysodon — shot out of the tin, and began writhing and thrashing about in the dirt, muddied by the spilled water as the tin swung from side to side, spurting out more water and tadpoles until it stilled. For a moment, the shadows did not move. Then a hand that elongated and stretched across the other side of the street was followed by a cry from Ikenna’s voice: “Tell me!”

“Didn’t you hear him?” Boja asked menacingly even though Obembe — frozen in a posture of his hand shielding himself from an expected assault from Ikenna — had begun to speak.

“He said,” Obembe stammered, but stopped when Boja spoke. Now he began afresh again: “He said — he said that a fisherman will kill you, Ike.”

“What, a fisherman?” Boja said aloud.

“A fisherman?” Ikenna repeated.

“Yes, a fisher—” Obembe did not complete this, he was trembling.

“Are you sure?” Boja said. When Obembe nodded, Boja said: “How did he say it?”

“He said ‘Ikena, you shall—’ ” He stopped, his lips shaking as he gazed from face to face and then to the ground. It was with his eyes cast down to the ground that he continued: “He said Ikenna, you shall die by the hands of a fisherman.”

It is hard to forget the black cloud that covered Ikenna’s face after Obembe said those words. He glanced up as if in search of something, then he turned in the direction where the madman had gone, but there was nothing to be seen but a sky turned to orange.

We were almost at our gate when Ikenna faced us, but with his eyes cast on no one in particular. “He saw a vision that one of you will kill me,” he said.

More words dangled feverishly on his lips, but didn’t spill out. They seemed to retract inside as if they were fastened to a rope that was pulled back from within him by an unseen hand. Then, as if unsure of what to say or do, and without waiting for any of us to speak — for Boja was starting to say something now — he turned and walked on into our gate, and we followed him.