(first published in 2023 Mukana Press Anthology of African Writing)
The day we hunted for a parrot, a kind of bird we could train to call the dogs on an unwelcome visitor for fun, we found a baobab tree. And a man sprawled dead under it.
Fuelled by curiosity, we inched closer to the man, angling our noses to sniff him. We drew our faces back almost immediately. He hadn’t brushed his teeth before he died. There was alcohol on his breath.
We quivered our arrow and hung our bow across our shoulder.
We drew closer to the body again, feeling it for a pulse. We didn’t find a pulse but we found something strange. Half his body was hot and the other half was cold, as if evenly divided between heaven and hell. His body soon began to jingle as coins fell from the front pockets of his pants. It was almost as if the coins were spilling from his body. We nudged him gently and more coins poured from him, like the rain snaking down the hillside.
Perhaps alarmed by the noise of coins falling out, a fly emerged from his nose. Another fly followed, both buzzing about us. A third fly burst out his mouth, its wings bruised from squeezing through the gritted teeth. It crashed with a soft thud to his chest, which was built broad and flat.
Four angry bees left each ear. Even though blinded by the brightness of the day outside the ears, they smelled the buzzing flies and chased them, zapping into the morning sphere.
We had no time to waste on thinking and looking at the flies and bees. The coins were still falling out in a single file to the soft grass under the baobab tree.
The bruised fly, out of fear for its life, we guessed, hid under the man’s baban riga. And it died in there anyway because we heard its wailing buzz once and no more.
The dead man’s potbelly was rotund and hard, protruding awkwardly like a pregnant wasp. We could deduce three reasons for this. Beer consumption along with eating pork, coins which he had swallowed up to his throat and the dead body bloating. How could the body so bloated smell no worse than an infant’s fart?
We lifted his pouted lips and viewed his dark gums.
“Is that biscuit?” Laka asked.
“Mashed melon, maybe,” I said.
Our heads leaning forward, with our two hands we tried to force his mouth open. His teeth wouldn’t part apart.
We rolled him over. Our eyes traced the outlines of the wet patch on his pants. We concluded he had pissed his pants before dying. We ferreted for something to identify him, like a national identity card, driver’s license, international passport or anything at all to tell us who this man was. All we found in his piss-wet, worn-out wallet were different women smiling at us, half naked in the half dozen pictures. We did not recognize one face.
Disappointed, we continued our search for a token of identification. We even parted his hair which was jet black, silky—even slimy. Silly! His face was smooth and shiny and nothing about him showed that he had ever toiled. It was beginning to make sense how he had come about possessing these billion coins.
Under his nape, we found a name with a bar code. Was this a beast, a bandit with some sort of a bar code? We hadn’t seen a tattoo before, only in movies. And the henna we knew was done by girls during occasions, like naming ceremony, wedding or Sallah.
We mouthed the tattooed name. Alitoto. It rang a bell. Alitoto. Alitoto. It rolled off our tongues slowly, until it faded off. Laka’s eyes locked on mine immediately and we both jolted up like a bolt of electricity ran through us, springing away as fast as we could.
Could this be the same Alitoto the politician, who approved every political appointees list, who was said to be sponsoring banditry in the communal villages with rich gold deposits?
Our father forbade his children from joining a political party or even working for politicians.
“Never near a politician,” the Shamaki said. “Never allow yourselves to be a tool in their hands.” But our older brother Musa who was born stubborn, had followed his friends to a campaign rally. They had dangled dangerously from the car windows, like monkeys on tree branches, chanting the party slogan. At the venue, the gubernatorial candidate threw wads of naira notes to the crowd. Musa was handy. A six-foot athlete, he leaped into the air. With both luck and fate, he had caught the cash.
As he escaped the fists that pounded him next—as if he were a yam to be pounded, as if he stole the cash—Musa made toward the gate with capital speed, his blood trailing behind from a blow that had gashed the back of his skull, unfelt by him. Some dogged hand drove a dagger deep into his side. That Musa felt and dropped.
When his friends brought home Musa’s corpse, our father was in the mosque, his fingers counting his iridescent rosary. He gazed at his son’s bloodied body with confused calmness, his mouth filled with the words “inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi rajiun.” Our mothers discarded their scarves and wrappers on their body, rolled on the ground, wailing “Wayyo Allah!”
The police came, took statements and went away. At the murder scene, the two police detectives observed the setting sun had licked some of Musa’s blood, and the sandy soil had sucked the rest with a straw.
Nobody died in return. The governor’s golden signature wasn’t for appending death sentences but for awarding contracts to cronies and phonies. If the government had offered compensation for Musa’s murder, the Shamaki would have simply asked for justice for him. But they didn’t. No money was offered. It was difficult paying salaries to civil servants at the same time sponsoring their candidate as next governor.
Our father quietly buried his first son, whom he had hoped one day would be the Shamaki. His only prayer for Musa’s murderers: Allah ya isa.
Panting and grasping for breath, Laka and I slowed down and turned towards the baobab tree. We started discussing how we were going to deal with the corpse. Maybe call the police. But we reasoned we were too far out in the Sambisa forest. Too far removed from Sambisa town to blow a whistle for even our dogs Rali, Babarov, and Scream to come, swishing their tails.
Beneath the calm and hushed conversation, we were frightened. Although the police always told us ‘The Police is your friend,’ we never completely believed them. We knew that some policemen loved money more than bears loved honey. Allah ka rabamu da sherin dan’sanda, the usually people said. We had read about a monkey and a snake swallowing money in a government office in the national dailies. We feared the police may pin this politician’s death on us. And no other word would be uttered, as some otters in black uniforms would swallow those billion coins.
We didn’t think of packing the coins, now quite a pile. We didn’t want blood money. Indeed, we scrubbed our hands in the fine sand and then washed them with the dew on the grasses.
To our right, red roses rose to puncture the August air with ample scent. It was a sharp contrast to the smell of death we had just run away from.
It crossed our minds to bury the dead politician but almost immediately, we remembered the deplorable state of our hospitals, our roads and our schools. Our water pipes squeaking with rats running a marathon. Anger imploded within us and we burned with scorn.
We began to think of the many ways we could hurt the body and make it suffer. We wanted it to account for all the crimes against the people.
Skin the body, cut it up in tiny pieces for the vultures now circling above. Prop it up against the tree trunk and pop the eyes with arrows. Dig a hole, stick into the ground the thick, sharp spikes to make a bed; and throw the body down to splatter clotted blood. Or plant the body as a scarecrow in the field; sticking a direction reading “From grace to grass.” All these wild thoughts raced through our minds and our excitement was already building up to a heightened frenzy.
However, when we touched the thought of burning the body, we froze. We recalled our school hostel in flames. Trapped inside were some of our mates, whose cries rang deep into the night and settled permanently in our heads. Some of them were our friends, our juniors and some were as young as eleven years old. Twenty-one students screaming to be saved from the terrible charring of their flesh. So horrible.
Yet, the fire truck was stuck in the same spot, out of water and out of fuel. There was only one officer at the fire office that night. The more people screamed, the more the fire fumed, grabbing more woods, walls, roofs. Later, the fire, tired of the soap water thrown on its back by daring schoolchildren, dancing naked in the night wind, unable to grab anybody by their cloth, died down. That year, our school made headlines.
But nobody was fired for the unfortunate fire incident. Instead, the fire truck got two spare tires. The government ordered for a brand new fire truck which knocked down one hundred kilometers from the wharf. The commandant got two eagles pinned to his shoulders and the fire service department received an allowance for hazard. Everyone moved on, and like pouring an ocean on a lit candle, the matter died.
Five years after, the blackened walls of the hostel stood prominent against the background of dilapidated classes, a dark monument of the school’s history, besides the notoriety of its neglect by government. The people talked less about the incident, as if frightened by the haunting of the torched souls.
We turned toward the east, moving away from the baobab tree. And the dead politician. And those billion coins. We heard the vultures swoop down on the baobab tree. Overhead, a jetting military plane missed jamming some bandits of sparrows.
We plodded a hundred feet through short bushes. Our anger dissipated. We hushed the little men inside our heads urging vengeance, nudging violence.
“What killed him?” I asked.
“Greed or a curse,” Laka said.
We said nothing further. We were made of few words. Besides, the dead was dead. There was no need to gossip or bad-mouth it.
After a while, we returned to the baobab tree. With their bald heads and bloodied beaks, the vultures scattered into the air at our arrival. Already, the vultures had eaten his eyes—and put fleas in his ears. Hollow were the two holes through which—like binoculars—we glimpsed the dark void: his soul. And a smoke rose from within it, leaving through the chimney of his nose.
As good Sambisans, we collected leaves, twigs and grasses and heaped them on the body, head to toe.
We began our journey back home, the parrot we wanted for hunting forgotten for another day. After walking a while, we were now on top of the Goza hill. We watched a massive smoke rise from under the baobab tree where we had abandoned the dead politician, hidden in the heap of dry leaves, twigs and grasses. The heap crackled into a huge ball of fire, hurtling toward the scarlet sky with a stripe of rainbow. We turned away. The heat in our heels, we stopped to take a breath.
