sighed. This assignment was moving me closer to anthropology than pop psychiatry. I had no interests in funerals where I knew neither the corpse nor its relatives. Yet it was better that I be called out to too many things than too few; besides, it would be an opportunity for me to meet people, for the Menai were notoriously quiet, sit-at-home types. And frankly, I’d rather be doing this than be stuck at my desk at Yaba Psychiatric Hospital contesting seniority with the likes of Dr. Maleek.
‘So who died?’ I asked.
‘Nobody,’ replied Jonszer. ‘Is a funeral, not a burial. Is for Sheesti Kroma, Ruma’s daughter.’
Akeem caught my eyes, and we indulged some exasperated headshakings. Nobody died! Yet we were going to a funeral! This was the sort of thing that happened when you were forced to recruit a drunk as your local fixer. It was like that old joke, It was a very fatal accident, but, thank God, nobody died. Yet Kreektown was just twenty kilometres away, and frankly, my car was more comfortable than my hotel room. No surprise there, since the car was more expensive than the entire hotel. Which was the crazy thing about Ubesia: though the capital of an oil-producing state and cultural heart of the Sontik people, it had a local economy more stunted than the national average and has never quite moved from township into city status.
So I let my driver continue.
Kreektown was locked down when we arrived. There was a funeral under way, all right. The businesses were shut. The pool shop and beer parlours had their doors padlocked and their chairs stacked up under their awnings. The villagers had turned out in black robes like Jonszer’s. Never seen that many Menai out at the same time before. They gathered at the village square. It was dark and depressing. There were none of those high-wattage bulbs that organizers of funeral parties would have thought to provide in any civilized village. It was like stumbling into the really Dark Ages, complete with traditional architecture: there were people but it wasn’t a party; there was music—and it is really stretching it, to call that menacing witchery ‘music,’ but I am being scientific here—but no dancing. All they did was weep in song. People stood there like tree trunks and wept and sang these haunting Menai songs, songs that made you feel wretched, like the world was ending tonight, and they sang them one after the other. You don’t want to be in this square for a real funeral. The most sinister thing was the children, some of them as small as five and six, standing and chanting like the adults. These were kids who, in normal funerals, would have been running around at play. It was clear that a severe order of group psychosis was at work here. I don’t mind admitting to a most unscientific unease.
Akeem took photographs while we waited for something else to happen, but nothing else happened. They just stood there and sang.
We walked through the crowd. I recognized quite a few people that I had met in the course of my fieldwork. They were harmless, simple folk: Farmer Utoma, Ma’Bamou, Weaver Kakandu, even that old scoundrel, Kiri Ntupong. Normally these are the most polite and respectful people you will find anywhere in Nigeria, but today they waited for me to greet them first—which I did, in the interest of scientific enquiry—but even then it was like speaking to people in a trance. The wailing and the singing, it was enough to drive a fellow insane.
Then I saw their old man.
Our paths had crossed before. When I first arrived, I confused the Menai by asking for their chief. They are like the Igbos used to be, in not having proper kings. Eventually they took me to this very old man who has some kind of authority over them—what exactly it was, I still haven’t discovered. His house was rather outside the village proper. They called him Mata, which I suppose was Menai for ‘master’ or something. But apart from that there was nothing chieflike about him. Had probably forgotten how to be a chief, if he ever was that. His house was probably the poorest in the village. Doubt if it was electrified. I mean, I won’t give even my houseboy that sort of house for living quarters. I went to see him a couple of times, and all he ever did was offer me a dirty cup of water—which of course I rejected—and sit and stare at the skies. I am not exactly a guru in old age psychiatry (I despise the speciality) and without sticking out my neck—in the absence of an appropriate history and all that—I’d say this was classic dementia: answering every official query of mine with perfect silence.
He could not have looked more different today. He was playing an out-sized wooden xylophone like a man possessed. Although it wasn’t a very energetic performance—I mean, he was playing a dirge—still he was an immensely accomplished musician for a man of his age. Had his audience rapt. And even if this was not a funeral for a dead person, in my professional opinion there was going to be a dead old person in their midst very soon. It was entertainment on its own, watching him play, but it was also like waiting for a fatal accident.
Eventually I turned to go. To listen to their sad songs wasn’t a problem—I could have taken that all night. But to be very candid, there are some things that I won’t do, even for Nigeria. To come to a funeral and stand! In the past twenty, thirty years I can count on one hand the number of weddings, funerals, or housewarmings I have attended and was not immediately invited to sit at the high table. I mean, sometimes I’ve accompanied colleagues to their occasions and the organizers, even without knowing who I was, have called me up to the high table, perhaps on account of my personality, I don’t know. And then I attend an occasion in a village like Kreektown and stand? Really, there’s a limit to patriotism. To make matters worse, as soon as Jonszer stepped into the village square he fell under the spell of the old man’s xylophone. To talk to him was to address another tree in the forest.
Yet after I got to my car, something about that ‘funeral’ kept me from leaving. I am not much of an ethnographic investigator, but the scene unfolding before me seemed quite crucial to the construction of a psychiatric profile of the Menai. I was probably the only scientific eye ever to behold this sight: 95 percent of the world population of an ethnic nation gathered in one square, weeping and wailing. I could hardly leave a scene of such scientific, linguistic, and cultural significance out of mere physical discomfort. So I compromised. I instructed Akeem to begin a video recording of the event, which he did, fetching the kit from the boot and setting up the tripod three metres from the car so that I could monitor proceedings from the comfort of my Mercedes 300 SEL—at the time of writing, this is an eight-month-old import, and I hazard a guess that there are not a dozen of its specs within the borders of Nigeria.
This was the point at which Jonszer turned up again. I let down my window as he approached. His hand was out, his grin lopsided, with the effrontery that only drunks can muster. I gave him a half litre of cheap brandy, and it disappeared into a baggy pocket—I carry this questionable pedigree of alcohol purely for the appeasement of roughboys. It was difficult to know whether his eyes were red from weeping or from drinking.
‘Just come now,’ he said.
‘What now?’ I asked, but he was gone, walking hurriedly, in that demented gait of his, through the crowd and down a side street that led from the square. My driver had gone to ‘make water’ (to use his charming euphemism), and Akeem was tied to his recording. Reluctantly, I followed Jonszer alone. We did not go far. We walked down Lemue Street right up till the bend in the road that led towards the creek, and there he stopped. He waited in the darkness beside a car, the only one on the street. When I joined him, he tipped his head sideways, towards a small huddle in the doorway of the house opposite. I looked, but it was too dark to make out faces or figures.
I was angry. It was dark and stinging with mosquitoes. There was no satellite TV in my hotel room. Back in my hospital, the sly Dr. Maleek was positioning himself for the soon-to-be-vacant office of Chief Medical Director. My fellow consultants and contemporaries were attending conferences and seminars from Joburg to Stockholm, touring with escorts of polyglot, lanky ladies leaving trails of perfumes in their wake. I? I was walking dangerous streets with a drunk reeking of beer and week-old sweat.
‘That’s
