Things Will Never Be the Same Page 11

  “Yes. I haven’t.”

  “Robert, two of these are pure trash. I am glad to see you have brought at least one good play. But your other choices are just, just . . . You might as well have poured your coppers down a civet hole as buy these.” He held up Clio’s Whips. “Does your mother know you read these things? And this play! The Swearing Stick is about the primitive superstitions we left behind before independence. You want people to believe in this kind of thing again? You wish blood rituals, tribal differences to come back? The man who wrote this was barely literate, little more than just come in from the brush country.”

  “But . . .”

  “But me no buts. Use the library of this schoolhouse, Robert, or the fine public one. Find books that will uplift you, appeal to your higher nature. Books written by learned people, who have gone to university.” Robert knew that Mr. Yotofeka was proud of his education and that he and others like him looked down on the bookstalls and their books. He probably only read books published by the universities or real books published in Lagos or Cairo.

  Mr. Yotofeka became stern and businesslike. “For being tardy you will do three days detention after school. You will help Mr. Labuba with his cleaning.”

  Mr. Labuba was the custodian. He was large and slow and smelled of old clothes and yohimbe snuff. Robert did not like him.

  The principal wrote a note on a form and handed it to Robert. “You will take this note home to your hardworking mother and have her sign it. You will return it to me before second bell tomorrow. If you are late again, Robert Oinenke, it will not be a swearing stick I will be dealing with you about.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Robert.

  When he got home that afternoon Robert went straight to his small alcove at the back of the house where his bed and worktable were. His table had his pencils, ink pen, eraser, ruler, compass, protractor, and glue. He took his copybooks from his satchel, then placed the three books he’d bought in the middle of his schoolbook shelf above the scarred table. He sat down to read the plays. His mother was still out doing the shopping as she always was when he got out of school.

  Mr. Yotofeka was partly right about The Play of the Swearing Stick. It was not a great play. It was about a man in the old days accused of a crime. Unbeknownst to him, the real perpetrator of the crime had replaced the man’s swearing stick with one that looked and felt just like it. (Robert knew this was implausible.) But the false swearing stick carried out justice anyway. It rose up from its place on the witness cushion beside the innocent man when he was questioned at the chief’s court. It went out the window and chased the criminal and beat him to death. (In the stage directions the stick is lifted from the pillow by a technician with wires above the stage and disappears out of the window, and the criminal is seen running back and forth yelling and holding his head, bloodier each time he goes by.)

  Robert really liked plays. He watched the crowds every afternoon going toward the playhouse in answer to the drums and horns sounded when a drama was to be staged. He had seen the children’s plays, of course—Big Magic, The Trusting Chief, Daughter of the Yoruba. He had also seen the plays written for European children—Cinderella, Rumpelstiltskin, Nose of Fire. Everyone his age had—the Niger Culture Center performed the plays for the lower grades each year.

  But when he could get tickets, through the schools or his teachers, he had gone to see real plays, both African and European. He had gone to see folk plays for adults, especially Why the Snake Is Slick, and he had seen Ourelay the Congo playwright’s King of All He Surveyed and Scream of Africa. He had seen tragedies and comedies from most of the African nations, even a play from Nippon, which he had liked to look at but in which not much happened. (Robert had liked the women actresses best, until he found out they weren’t women; then he didn’t know what to think.) But it was the older plays he liked best, those from England of the early 1600’s.

  The first one he’d seen was Westward for Smelts! by Christopher Kingstone, then The Pleasant Historie of Darastus and Fawnia by Rob Greene. There had been a whole week of Old English European plays at the Culture Hall, at night, lit by incandescent lights. His school had gotten free tickets for anyone who wanted them. Robert was the only student his age who went to all the performances, though he saw several older students there each night.

  There had been Caesar and Pompey by George Chapman, Mother Bomby by John Lyly, The Bugbears by John Jeffere, The Tragicall History of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Broke, Love’s Labour Won by W. Shaksper, The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage by Marlow and Nash, and on the final night, and best of all, The Sparagus Garden by Richard Brome.

  That such a small country could produce so many good playwrights in such a short span of time intrigued Robert, especially when you consider that they were fighting both the Turks and the Italians during the period. Robert began to read about the country and its history in books from the school library. Then he learned that the Onitsha Market sold many plays from that era (as there were no royalty payments to people dead two hundred fifty years.) He had gone there, buying at first from the penny bin, then the two-cent tables.

  Robert opened his small worktable drawer. Beneath his sixth-form certificate were the pamphlets from Mr. Fred’s. There were twenty-six of them; twenty of them plays, twelve of those from the England of three hundred years before.

  He closed the drawer. He looked at the cover of Thomas Goffe’s play: he had bought that morning—The Raging Turk, or Bajazet II. Then he opened the second copybook his mother had seen that morning. On the first page he penciled, in his finest hand:

  MOTOFUKO’S REVENGE:

  A Play in Three Acts

  By Robert Oinenke

  After an hour his hand was tired from writing. He had gotten to the place where King Motofuko was to consult with his astrologer about the attacks by Chief Renebe on neighboring tribes. He put the copybook down and began to read the Goffe play. It was good, but he found that after writing dialogue he was growing tired of reading it. He put the play away.

  He didn’t really want to read Clio’s Whips yet; he wanted to save it for the weekend. But he could wait no longer. Making sure the front door was closed, though it was still hot outside, he opened the red, green, and black covers and read the title page:

  CLIO’S WHIPS: The Abuses of Historie

  by the White Races

  By Oskar Oshwenke

  “So the Spanish cry was Land Ho! and they sailed in the three famous ships, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Elisabetta to the cove on the island. Colon took the lead boat, and he and his men stepped out onto the sandy beach. All the air was full of parrots, and it was very wonderful there! But they searched and sailed around for five days and saw nothing but big bunches of animals, birds, fish, and turtles.

  “Thinking they were in India, they sailed on looking for habitations, but on no island where they stopped were there any people at all! From one of the islands they saw far off the long lines of a much bigger island or a mainland, but tired from their search, and provendered from hunting and fishing, they returned to Europe and told of the wonders they had found, of the New Lands. Soon everyone wanted to go there.”

  This was exciting stuff to Robert. He reread the passage again and flipped the pages as he had for a week in Mr. Fred’s. He came to his favorite illustration (which was what made him buy this book rather than another play.) It was the picture of a hairy elephant, with its trunk raised and with that magical stuff, snow, all around it. Below was a passage Robert had almost memorized:

  “The first man then set foot at the Big River (now the New Thames) of the Northern New Land. Though he sailed from the Portingals, he came from England (which had just given the world its third pope), and his name was Cromwell. He said the air above the Big River was a darkened profusion of pigeons, a million and a million times a hundred hundred, and they covered the skies for hours as
they flew.

  “He said there were strange humped cattle here (much like the European wisents) that fed on grass, on both sides of the river. They stood so thickly that you could have walked a hundred Congo miles on their backs without touching the ground.

  “And here and there among them stood great hairy mammuts, which we now know once lived in much of Europe, so much like our elephant, which you see in the game parks today, but covered with red-brown hair, with much bigger tusks, and much more fierce-looking.

  “He said none of the animals were afraid of him, and he walked among them, petting some, handing them tender tufts of grass. They had never seen a man or heard a human voice, and had not been hunted since the very beginning of time. He saw that a whole continent of skins and hides lay before European man for the taking, and a million feathers for hats and decorations. He knew he was the first man ever to see this place, and that it was close to Paradise. He returned to Lisboa after many travails, but being a good Catholic, and an Englishman, he wasn’t believed. So he went back to England and told his stories there.”

  Now Robert went back to work on his play after carefully sharpening his pencil with a knife and setting his eraser close at hand. He began with where King Motofuko calls in his astrologer about Chief Renebe:

  motofuko: Like to those stars which blaze forth over head, brighter even than the seven ordered planets? And having waxed so lustily, do burn out in a week?

  astrologer: Just so! Them that awe to see their burning forget the shortness of their fire. The moon, though ne’er so hot, stays and outlasts all else.

  motofuko: Think you then this Chief Renebe be but a five months’ wonder?

  astrologer: The gods themselves do weep to see his progress! Starts he toward your lands a blazing beacon, yet will his followers bury his ashes and cinders in some poor hole ’fore he reaches the Mighty Niger. Such light makes gods jealous.

  Robert heard his mother talking with a neighbor outside. He closed his copybook, put Clio’s Whips away, and ran to help her carry in the shopping.

  During recess the next morning he stayed inside, not joining the others in the playground. He opened his copybook and took up the scene where Chief Renebe, who has conquered all King Motofuko’s lands and had all his wives and (he thinks) all the king’s children put to death, questions his general about it on the way to King Motofuko’s capital.

  renebe: And certaine, you, all his children dead, all his warriors sold to the Moorish dogs?

  general: As sure as the sun doth rise and set, Your Highness. I myself his children’s feet did hold, swing them like buckets round my conk, their limbs crack, their necks and heads destroy. As for his chiefs, they are now sent to grub ore and yams in the New Lands, no trouble to you forevermore. Of his cattle we made great feast, his sheep drove we all to the four winds.

  This would be important to the playgoer. King Motofuko had escaped, but he had also taken his four-year-old-son, Motofene, and tied him under the bellwether just before the soldiers attacked in the big battle of Yotele. When the soldiers drove off the sheep, they sent his son to safety, where the shepherds would send him far away, where he would grow up and plot revenge.

  The story of King Motofuko was an old one any Onitsha theatergoer would know. Robert was taking liberties with it—the story of the sheep was from one of his favorite parts of the Odyssey, where the Greeks were in the cave of Polyphemus. (The real Motofene had been sent away to live as hostage-son to the chief of the neighboring state long before the attack by Chief Renebe.) And Robert was going to change some other things, too. The trouble with real life, Robert thought, was that it was usually dull and full of people like Mr. Yotofeka and Mr. Labuba. Not like the story of King Motofuko should be at all.

  Robert had his copy of Clio’s Whips inside his Egyptian grammar book. He read:

  “Soon all the countries of Europe that could sent expeditions to the New Lands. There were riches in its islands and vast spaces, but the White Man had to bring others to dig them out and cut down the mighty trees for ships. That is when the White Europeans really began to buy slaves from Arab merchants, and to send them across to the Warm Sea to skin animals, build houses, and to serve them in all ways.

  “Africa was raided over. Whole tribes were sold to slavery and degradation, worse, wars were fought between black and black to make slaves to sell to the Europeans. Mother Africa was raped again and again, but she was also traveled over and mapped: Big areas marked ‘unexplored’ on the White Man’s charts shrank and shrank so that by 1700 there were very few such places left.”

  Miss Mbene came in from the play yard, cocked an eye at Robert, then went to the slateboard and wrote mathematical problems on it. With a groan, Robert closed the Egyptian grammar book and took out his sums and ciphers.

  Mr. Labuba spat a stream of yohimbe-bark snuff into the weeds at the edge of the playground. His eyes were red and the pupils more open than they should have been in the bright afternoon sun.

  “We be pulling at grasses,” he said to Robert. He handed him a big pair of gloves, which came up to Robert’s elbows. “Pull steady. These plants be cutting all the way through the gloves if you jerk.”

  In a few moments Robert was sweating. A smell of desk polish and eraser rubbings came off Mr. Labuba’s shirt as he knelt beside him. They soon had cleared all along the back fence.

  Robert got into the rhythm of the work, taking pleasure when the cutter weeds came out of the ground with a tearing pop and a burst of dirt from the tenacious, octopuslike roots. Then they would cut away the runners with trowels. Soon they had made quite a pile near the teeter-totters.

  Robert was still writing his play in his head; he had stopped in the second act when Motofuko, in disguise, had come to the forgiveness-audience with the new King Renebe. Unbeknownst to him, Renebe, fearing revenge all out of keeping with custom, had persuaded his stupid brother Guba to sit on the throne for the one day when anyone could come to the new king and be absolved of crimes.

  “Is he giving you any trouble?” asked the intrusive voice of Mr. Yotofeka. He had come up and was standing behind Robert.

  Mr. Labuba swallowed hard, the yohimbe lump going down chokingly.

  “No complaints, Mr. Yotofeka,” he said, looking up.

  “Very good, Robert, you can go home when the tower bell rings at three o’clock.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Mr. Yotofeka went back inside.

  Mr. Labuba looked at Robert and winked.

  motofuko: Many, many wrongs in my time. I pray you, king, forgive me. I let my wives, faithful all, be torn from me, watched my children die, while I stood by, believing them proof from death. My village dead, all friends slaves. Reason twisted like hemp.

  guba: From what mad place came you where such happens?

  motofuko: (Aside) Name a country where this is not the standard of normalcy. (To Guba) Aye, all these I have done. Blinded, I went to worse. Pray you, forgive my sin.

  guba: What could that be?

  motofuko: (Uncovering himself) Murdering a king. (Stabs him)

  guba: Mother of gods! Avenge my death. You kill the wrong man. Yonder—(Dies)

  (Guards advance, weapons out.)

  motofuko: Wrong man, when all men are wrong? Come, dogs, crows, buzzards, tigers. I welcome barks, beaks, claws, and teeth. Make the earth one howl. Damned, damned world where men fight like jackals over the carrion of states! Bare my bones then; they call for rest.

  (Exeunt, fighting. Terrible screams off. Blood pours in from the wings in a river.)

  soldier: (Aghast) Horror to report. They flay the ragged skin from him whole!

  “But the hide and fishing stations were hard to run with just slave labor. Not enough criminals could be brought from the White Man’s countries to fill all the needs.

  “Gold was more and more pre
cious, in the hands of fewer and fewer people in Europe. There was some, true, in the Southern New Lands, but it was high in the great mountain ranges and very hard to dig out. The slaves worked underground till they went blind. There were revolts under those cruel conditions.

  “One of the first new nations was set up by slaves who threw off their chains. They called their land Freedom, which was the thing they had most longed for since being dragged from Mother Africa. All the armies of the White Man’s trading stations could not overthrow them. The people of Freedom slowly dug gold out of the mountains and became rich and set out to free others, in the Southern New Land and in Africa itself. . . .

  “Rebellion followed rebellion. Mother Africa rose up. There were too few white men, and the slave armies they sent soon joined their brothers and sisters against the White Man.

  “First to go were the impoverished French and Spanish dominions, then the richer Italian ones, and those of the British. Last of all were the colonies of the great German banking families. Then the wrath of Mother Africa turned on those Arabs and Egyptians who had helped the White Man in his enslavement of the black.

  “Now they are all gone as powers from our continent and only carry on the kinds of commerce with us which put all the advantages to Africa.”

  ashingo: The ghost! The ghost of the dead king!

  renebe: What! What madness this? Guards, your places! What means you, man?