“Yes, sah.”
After Harrison left, Richard turned up the volume of the radio. He liked the cadence of the Arabic-inflected voice on Radio Kaduna, but he did not like the gleeful certitude with which it said “Port Harcourt is liberated! Port Harcourt is liberated!” They had been talking about the fall of Port Harcourt for the past two days. So had Lagos radio, although with a little less glee. The BBC, too, had announced that the imminent fall of Port Harcourt was the fall of Biafra; Biafra would lose its viable seaport, its airport, its control of oil.
Richard pulled the bamboo stopper from the bottle on the table and poured himself a drink. The pink liquid spread a pleasant warmth through his body. Emotions swirled in his head—relief that Harrison was alive, disappointment that his manuscript was buried in Nsukka, anxiety about the fate of Port Harcourt. Before he poured a second drink, he read the label on the bottle: REPUBLIC OF BIAFRA, RESEARCH AND PRODUCTION DIRECTORATE, NENE SHERRY, 45%. He sipped slowly. Madu had brought two cartons the last time he visited, joking that locally made liquor in old beer bottles was part of the win-the-war effort.
“The RAP people claim that Ojukwu drinks this, though I doubt it,” he said. “I drink only the clear ones myself because I don’t trust that coloring.”
Madu’s irreverence, calling His Excellency Ojukwu, always bothered Richard but he said nothing because he did not want to see Madu’s amused smirk, the same smirk Madu had when he told Kainene, “We are running our cars with a mix of kerosene and palm oil” or “We’ve perfected the flying ogbunigwe” or “We’ve made an armored car from scrap.” His we was edged with exclusion. The deliberate emphasis, the deepened voice, meant that Richard was not part of we; a visitor could not take the liberties of the homeowners.
And so, weeks ago, Richard was confused when Kainene first told him, “Madu would like you to write for the Propaganda Directorate. He’ll get you a special pass and petrol supplies so you can move around. They’ll send your pieces to our public relations people overseas.”
“Why me?”
Kainene shrugged. “Why not?”
“The man hates me.”
“Don’t be so dramatic. I think they want experienced insiders to do stories that are about more than just the number of Biafran dead.”
At first the word insider thrilled Richard. But doubts soon crawled out; insider had been Kainene’s word, after all, and not Madu’s. Madu saw him as a foreigner, which perhaps was why he thought he would be good at this. When Madu called and asked if he would do it, Richard said no.
“Have you thought about it?” Madu asked.
“You would not have asked me if I were not white.”
“Of course I asked because you are white. They will take what you write more seriously because you are white. Look, the truth is that this is not your war. This is not your cause. Your government will evacuate you in a minute if you ask them to. So it is not enough to carry limp branches and shout power, power to show that you support Biafra. If you really want to contribute, this is the way that you can. The world has to know the truth of what is happening, because they simply cannot remain silent while we die. They will believe a white man who lives in Biafra and who is not a professional journalist. You can tell them how we continue to stand and prevail even though Nigerian MiG-Seventeens, Il-Twenty-eights, and L-Twenty-nine Delfins flown by Russians and Egyptians are bombing us every day, and how some of them are using transport planes and just crudely rolling out bombs to kill women and children, and how the British and the Soviets are in an unholy alliance giving more and more arms to Nigeria, and how the Americans have refused to help us, and how our relief flights come in at night with no lights because the Nigerians will shoot them down during the day…”
Madu paused to catch his breath, and Richard said, “Yes, I’ll do it.” They simply cannot remain silent while we die rang in his head.
His first article was about the fall of Onitsha. He wrote that the Nigerians had tried many times to take this ancient town but the Biafrans fought valiantly, that hundreds of popular novels had been published here before the war, that the thick sad smoke of the burning Niger Bridge had risen like a defiant elegy. He described the Holy Trinity Catholic Church, where soldiers of the Nigeria Second Division first defecated on the altar before killing two hundred civilians. He quoted a calm eyewitness: “The vandals are people who shit on God. We will overcome them.”
As he wrote the article, he felt as if he were a schoolboy again, writing letters to Aunt Elizabeth while his headmaster monitored them. Richard remembered him clearly, his mottled complexion, how he called science “muck,” how he ate his porridge walking about in the dining hall because he said it was what gentlemen did. Richard was still not sure which he hated more at the time, being forced to write letters home or having the letter-writing session monitored. And he was not sure what he disliked more now, imagining Madu as his monitor or realizing that he cared very much what Madu thought. A note came from Madu some days later. It was very well done (perhaps a little less flowery next time?) and they have sent it off to Europe. Madu’s handwriting was crabbed, and on the writing paper the NIGERIAN of NIGERIAN ARMY had been crossed out in ink and BIAFRAN written in hasty block letters. But Madu’s words convinced Richard that he had made the right decision. He imagined himself as the young Winston Churchill covering Kitchener’s battle at Omdurman, a battle of superior versus inferior arms, except that, unlike Churchill, he sided with the moral victor.
Now, weeks later, after more articles, he felt a part of things. He found pleasure in the new respect in the driver’s eyes, jumping out to open the door although Richard told him not to bother. He found pleasure in how quickly the civil defenders’ suspicious glances at his special duties pass changed to wide grins when he greeted them in Igbo, in how willing people were to answer his questions. He found pleasure in the superiority he adopted with foreign journalists, speaking vaguely about the background to the war—the implications of the national strike and the census and the Western Region chaos—knowing all the while they had no idea what he was talking about.
But his greatest pleasure had come from meeting His Excellency. It was at the staging of a play in Owerri. An air raid had shattered all the louvers in the windows of the theater and the evening breeze blew some of the actors’ words away. Richard sat some rows behind His Excellency, and, after the play, a top man at the Mobilization Directorate introduced them. The solid handshake, the “Thank you for the good work you’re doing” in that soft Oxford-accented voice had filled Richard with equanimity. Even though he found the political play too obvious, he did not say so. He agreed with His Excellency: It was wonderful, just wonderful.
Richard could hear Harrison in the kitchen. He tuned to Radio Biafra, to the ending of an announcement about the enemy’s being wedged in Oba, before he turned the radio off. He poured a smaller drink and reread his last sentence. He was writing about Commando Special Forces, how popular and revered they were by civilians, but his dislike of their commander, a German mercenary, made his words stiff. The writing was stilted. The sherry had sharpened his anxiety rather than deadened it. He got up and picked up the phone and called Madu.
“Richard,” Madu said. “How lucky. I just stepped in.”
“Is there news on Port Harcourt?”
“News?”
“Is it threatened? There’s been shelling in Umuokwurusi, hasn’t there?”
“Oh, we have secure information that some saboteurs got their hands on some shells. You think if the vandals were really that close they would do that kind of halfhearted shelling?”
The amused tone in Madu’s voice made him feel instantly foolish. “Sorry for the bother. I just thought …” He let his voice trail off.
“Not at all. Greet Kainene when she comes back,” Madu said, before hanging up.
Richard finished his drink and made to pour himself another but decided not to. He forced the stopper back into the mouth of the bottle and went out to the veranda. The sea was still. He stretched and ran a quick hand through his hair, as if to shrug off the foreboding. If Port Harcourt fell, he would lose the town he had come to love, the town in which he loved; he would lose a bit of himself. But Madu had to be right. Madu would not be in denial about a town that was about to fall, certainly not a town where Kainene lived. If he said Port Harcourt was not under threat, it was not.
Richard looked at his hazy reflection in the glass door. He had a tan and his hair looked fuller, slightly tousled, and he thought of Rimbaud’s words: I is someone else.