gun on the ledge and looked at us from under his brow.
‘We’re looking for Major Okaka. This is Dr Bagado from Ibadan.’
Bagado leaned across me and said something in Yoruba to the officer. The officer’s other hand came up on the window and he leaned on the car as if he was going to roll it over. He grinned and spoke with an English accent that he must have picked up from the World Service in the fifties.
‘There is no Major Okaka on this exercise. We’re not expecting a Dr Bagado. You have entered a restricted area. If you return to the main road nothing more will be said. If, however, you prove yourselves troublesome we shall have to escort you down to Lagos for interrogation. Your passports, please.’
He flicked though our passports, the Browning still in his hand, his finger on the trigger and a certain studied carelessness in where he was pointing it.
‘Who is the officer in command of this army exercise?’ asked Bagado.
‘That is none of your business. You just go back to the main road. It’s dangerous out here. If you wish, my men can escort you back to the frontier and ensure that you cross the border safely.’
‘That won’t be necessary … er, Major …?’
‘Captain Mundo.’
He returned our passports and took us back to the main road. We drove towards Meko. The two vehicles disappeared back into the bush. Four kilometres outside Meko we came across a man walking in the dust at the side of the road, his jacket thrown over his shoulder and his white shirt filthy and patched dark by the hot morning sun. His trousers were no better. He looked as if he’d been kicked around. We offered him a lift. He removed a pair of black-framed glasses held together above his nose by electrician’s tape. He wiped the sweat out of his eyes and got in. His name was Sam Ifaki and he worked for a weekly news magazine called Progress.
‘Are you making any?’ I asked.
‘Not here.’
‘What’ve you been doing?’
‘Looking around.’
‘Akata village?’
Not any more.’
‘Those army people roll you around in the dirt and send you back?’
‘Army people,’ he said.’ They’re all the same, army peole.’
‘So you’re not interested in Akata any more?’
‘It’s not my job. I was looking at a farming project outside Ayeforo. Some people told me there’s something happening near Meko. I come. These people are rough with me. Tell me this business is none of mine. They tell me to go. So I go. If I don’t, they kill me. They say it’s nothing to them.’
‘What did you hear about Akata?’
‘Some sickness. They talk about the gods and such. That’s why I’m interested. Progress likes to report on witchcraft. You know, we like to show the people this pile of rubbish. When people get sick it’s not because of the gods, unless they think it’s god business putting faeces in the water supply. Nine times out of ten this is the problem. We’ve been having some rain. Strange for this time of year. Things are messed up, is all.’
‘We’ve heard about deformed babies in Akata.’
‘And sick cattle,’ said Sam, squeezing the bridge of his glasses, ‘and crops dying. Orishala is angry. Always the same thing.’
We arrived in Meko at lunchtime. Sam took us to a chop bar where an old man wearing a shift patched together from polypropylene fertilizer sacks sat outside. He had cataracts over both eyes and tapped the ground in front of him with a heavy stick as if summoning an audience for a foreign potentate. Inside, a couple of petrol barons, who sold cheap Nigerian gasoline in Kétou for half the Benin price, sat in full robes and started making elaborate gestures at each other so that we could see their Rolexes. Sam let us buy him a beer and some chop. The food was eba, a ball of steamed gari, cassava flour, which you could build a brick wall with if the cement works went out of production. It came with a red-hot sauce and two pieces of meat which looked like knee cartilage but turned out to be school rubbers. I ate the eba and sauce and left the rubbers for Sam and Bagado. The petrol barons were drinking Nigerian Guinness, which, at eight per cent alcohol, can creep up on you. Their mouths widened and their tongues flopped out. Occasionally they sat back from each other, stunned, as if they’d inadvertently called each other sons of whores.
The chop-bar owner was playing draughts with himself using beer-bottle tops on a board scored into the counter. He was roughly half the size of his wife, who appeared from the kitchen behind him and looked over his shoulder to make sure he wasn’t cheating. Bagado asked him about Akata village. He left the bar without a word and roared at the old man outside who stumbled in behind him, fresh from some pilgrimage of the mind. The barman gave us a bottle of ogogoro, distilled palm wine, which could get you nowhere quicker than a sandbag across the back of the neck. That was how they got the name for it, it was the noise a man made as he went down.
The bar owner suggested that we get our questions in between the first and third shot of ogogoro which proved to be good advice. After the first shot the old man looked around him as if his cataracts had demisted. Bagado spoke to him in Yoruba, sounding solicitous, respecting his elders, and made notes in his little book. Once Bagado had it straight on paper he gave the old man his third shot. Something short-circuited and the wavering twelve-volt lamps behind the white discs of the old man’s eyes went out.
Sam gave us a treasured business card and we left him in the chop bar with the sleeping petrol barons. The bar owner walked the old man outside, where he sat down and fell asleep with his head balanced on the end of his stick. He’d given Bagado directions on how to get into Akata from the north where there should be fewer patrols. It involved crossing a river twice. We hoped it would be dry. I bought some tinned corned beef and some old bread, which they’d coloured pink, and we set off into the bush in the mid- afternoon.
By 5.30 p.m. we’d crossed the river for the second time and abandoned the car, which we hid in the thick bush. I took the camera and a couple of empty water bottles for samples and we walked up to the top of a ridge and down a dry tributary to the river which the old man had said would take us close to Akata village.
A team of buzzards had found something and we watched them spiralling down in ones and twos into the trees. I was sweating cobs and not just from the heat – the gout didn’t like the shabby treatment it was getting from walking over rough ground and it seemed to have set up some kind of carpentry class in the joint of my big toe. The insects remembered there was a feast to attend and started rubbing their hands at the prospect. A type of fly which had a proboscis geared for getting through cow hide had just found that human skin was as buttery as the finest beef fillet. Bagado strode ahead with his hands clasped behind his back.
The light was failing rapidly as we broke out of the trees and on to a rough but graded track. This didn’t sound right from the instructions the old man had given us. Maybe that ogogoro had burnt more out of his brain than the bar owner thought. From the dusk came a deep, farting noise of a diesel engine – a tractor or an old truck. We walked towards it. As we drew closer the gearing of the engine changed, manoeuvring with more urgency. There were voices around it. We dropped off the graded road into a ditch and worked our way forward to what we could now see was a construction machine with a hydraulic shovel at the front end and an excavating arm crooked at the back.
Another engine started up and headlights flared across the road, lighting up the bush and attracting a whirl of insects. It blew out the last of the dusk and darkness floated down, black and velvety, with just a hole slashed by the truck’s lights. A transmission growled. Air brakes hissed. Universal joints shrieked. The slash of light arced across the forest and pointed down the graded road. The driver stirred the pudding and found another gear with a gnashing of teeth and shredded metal. The truck pushed forward. We sank back into the trees. The huge exhaust baffled past, the lights blinding us, the cargo invisible.
Torches