Stay With Me

I ask him to sit on the wooden chair, where the light from the kerosene lamp is brightest. I go into my room and pull out the medical kit that I’ve been given. It is the size of a suitcase, packed with inflatable splints, saline drips, swabs, dressings, sutures, a stock of precious equipment that I don’t know how to use; but we have no alternative – there is no doctor, no access to treatment. It does not make me feel proud that I can offer this; it makes me feel angry that he has no choice but to come here to me.

When I return to the other room, he has his back to me and is sobbing, his shoulders jerking up and down, head bowed in silence. All of his front has gone, as if it is only here in the darkness of a stranger’s house that he is able to grieve for the many misjudgements that have been made; the many losses in the fight over scraps cast down from the high table. I want to soothe him but I know that no words can match the messy disgrace of things. Instead, I say nothing and set to work peeling away the stained, bloody strips of fabric that have been torn from his shirt and used to bandage his head, his back, his arms. His skin is inflamed and swollen, his wounds infected. Small yellow globes of pus ooze through the scabbed lines of the lacerations. I reach for him to show me his hands, but his fingers are broken and dislocated and he won’t allow me to touch them. The top of his skull has been sliced with a machete but it is too late now for stitches.

As I clean the wounds, he stiffens but never flinches and never complains. Once I am done, the fresh bandages fastened with surgical tape, he thanks me and is gone.

*

Late Friday afternoon and the boys are all dressed up, their skin creamed and gleaming, smelling of talc and MediSoft soap. They are sitting on the bench and broken down chairs outside Daddy’s shack, smoking weed from cigarettes emptied of tobacco. Each one of the boys raises a hand to me in greeting and smiles, blinking slowly with the labour of opening and closing their eyelids. The light has started to fade from its bright bleaching white to old gold, though the air still simmers over the mangroves that line the banks of the creek.

‘How far, Auntie Julie?’ Daddy’s eyes twinkle at me as he leans forward over the high counter of his shack. He is bare-chested, wearing a black wet-look waistcoat and a blue beret.

‘Dey fine-oh. Abi?’ I ask.

‘Fine, fine.’

It’s the second time we’ve met today so we skip the queries about our families, our work, his goats, his stock levels, the market boat, the price of fuel, my useless generator. Daddy’s wife, Vivian, waves at me shyly through the grille at the back window – she’s slight and short, a new mum who looks too young even for her fifteen years.

I ask for three small packages of groundnuts which Daddy takes from a screw top tub that he keeps on a small table to the rear of the painted shack. Wrapped in squares torn from the Atlantic Express, he hands the groundnuts over.

‘Yes please,’ he says. It is a statement not a question.

‘And two soft. Tonique?’ I ask, hoping to get the coolest bottles in the icebox to take back to my friend who is unpacking her bag at my place.

‘No tonique – just Fanta Orange.’

I’ve been told the Fanta contains chemicals that are banned in Europe – lips, teeth, tongue flash neon after drinking. I take two bottles and hand over 230 Naira in notes that are creased with dirt, their ink blurred with handling.

‘You look so fine Julie,’ Wapriye says from his place on the bench, his gaze fixed on my trainers, the ones that were stolen from my step one morning and returned the next. He taps his feet as if to a tune. I’ve grown used to the attentions of the area boys, accepting them as a kind of tax on my presence. I like that they make me feel who I am back home, and not who I seem to be here. I bat Wapriye’s approval away.

‘What are you up to tonight?’ I ask and the boys pass a giggle around, looking from one to another.
Precious’s eyes pop as he speaks to me, ‘too plenty palaver.’

‘Serious wahallah,’ Morris pitches in, placing a bottle of beer between his feet. Like me, he is a guest in the village, come from Delta State to work on the geophysical survey. He wears steel toe-capped boots, a boiler suit and an orange tabard. The colour is an exact match of the Fanta I hold in my hands

‘Party?’ I ask.

‘Party something, party somehow,’ says Precious, still grinning.

I have been to their parties, usually in a worn-out part of Kongho town on the edges of a night-long wake, their subwoofers dialled up and distorted, the air thick with heat. I shift my weight to one foot and feel the coolness of the bottles that I hold to my side soaking through my top. Sharing their anticipation, I smile back at Precious, wanting to laugh too but not knowing why.

‘Yes-oh, party-party Sista Julie,’ Shedrack says, serious and beautiful as a Benin bronze. He towers over the others, cigarette wagging on his bottom lip and steps forward to grab my hand, clapping it in his, then clicking my fingers. I fumble a little. Shedrack is a regular on our compound, coming on Sundays when the families are at church and lying out on the foam mattresses dragged over the sand and laid on the mud-brick stacks in the shade of the mango tree. Sometimes I find him at night sitting along the broad cement ledge that runs down the side of my house, listening to the music that drifts out through the fly screens. Shedrack looks down at me through the column of smoke that rises from his cigarette. Is he sneering at me or is he checking me out? I don’t know, both probably. I wait for them to say more, but they don’t, so I leave it there and turn to go, saying goodbye to Daddy and the rest.

Sara has arrived today from Abuja, two day’s travel away, first by bush taxi in the clattering Peugeot sedans that roar up and down the potholed highways and give this country’s roads the world’s deadliest safety record; and then by speedboat, two lurching hours from the mainland until you reach the very end of Nigeria and arrive here, on the island of Akassa.

Sara and I first met in a Heathrow check-in desk queue and had breakfast in am Abuja hotel where they served Brevilled eggs and had the Birdie Song on surround sound . Our friendship has flourished on a shared affection for the absurd and we are eager to kick start the weekend.

‘Are you sure this water’s alright?’ Sara calls to me from the bathroom as I bounce up the steps to the house.

‘What’s up with it?’

I poke my head around the door and Sara’s standing over the bath in a wrapper, trying to wash the journey from her hair. I peer into the bucket that she has drawn from the tank on the side of the house. The water is speckled with black flakes and tiny red worms that have settled in the base.

‘Oh, lucky you – that’s a deep conditioning treatment right there: mosquito larvae. Just like eggs – good for your hair,’ I tease, knowing that what I’ve grown used to living in the bush is beyond most people’s comfort zone. ‘And that bit of soot from the gas flares – ash, very cleansing.’

‘I don’t think so.’ Sara throws the plastic cup she had been using to ladle the water over her head back into the bucket.

I grab a couple of glasses and the Fanta and put them down by the chairs we have moved out onto the porch for a view of the creek. Sara appears, fully dressed, and triumphantly places a bottle of vodka down between us. I gasp.

We settle down to drink, stretched out in our chairs, popping the groundnuts from their skins and crunching their creamy, smoky flesh between our teeth. A whole basin of fish has come in off one of the dugouts and two women sit threading sprats onto wooden skewers. There is no sun now, though there is still a pastel light to the sky – enough to illuminate the tiny glass jars and brass manillas placed on an altar by the water’s edge. The children are running about, excited and happy, some of them skidding through the grass on their knees chasing early fireflies, the others taking turns to wheel a plastic lid around with a long stick for an axle.

It feels like a holiday. Sara has been posted to the National Human Rights Commission in the capital. An expert in violent abuses – intra-communal conflict, extra-judicial killings – she spends her days in high-spec government buildings, playing solitaire on an HP desktop; it’s turned out to be a token posting meant to show that people are watching, even when they’re not. My own work here is more outdoorsy – I’ve come on an invite from ACWA, the local women’s association, and spend my days trekking through swamps advising on the set up of education programmes.

As we are talking Ronami appears, a stout, brawny man with a square face and narrow slots for eyes. He is always around and about, the kind of man who never sits down. He once told me his name means ‘stay with me’ in Akaha, a mother’s talisman from the local language. We have been neighbours for months and yet I am still unsure which of the children that shoal through our end of the village are his. He lives in the long, one storey zinc house that runs along the edge of the bush behind my place with three adult women and two men, maybe more. It’s hard to tell, so many people come and go and I have never been invited inside. Ronami looks bad tempered as he saunters up to the porch and bids us good evening, though his face brightens when we shake hands. I offer him a drink, but he declines and pats his belly.

‘Too much kai-kai for day and our business also, it has been too plenty.’ He seems preoccupied, like he has news to impart. He shoves his hands into the pockets of his shorts and sways slightly as he looks away from us and towards the creek. In the motionless heat, I can smell the sourness of distilled palm wine radiating from his pores. Sweat beads across his forehead, trickling through the grey curls at his temples.

‘You have been busy?’ I ask. I have learned the national game of stating the obvious when there is nothing much to say.

‘Yes – oh. I have been working very hard. You see this place here?’ Ronami gestures with a sweep of his hand to an overgrown plot that spans the ground between his own house and the clutch of raffia shacks near the path to the village. ‘This is our community hall and I am the one responsible for building it.’

Sara and I nod doubtfully, looking over the half-built walls with their rotting, mossy bricks, their foundations submerged entirely in lianas and lavish crowns of ferns. A thickset palm, around fifteen feet high, grows in one of the back rooms.

‘Yes,’ he affirms. ‘You see – I have been finalising the work here. It is our top priority – this, our community place where we meet and take shelter from the rain.’

We look to where he points at the darkening sky, as if the wilfulness of seeing might reveal a roof we had missed before.

‘We have classes for the adult literacy and we bring machines for our tailors, engines for our mechanics, computers for our technicians. We are taking education very seriously in this community. Very seriously-oh, you see?’

Ronami says these last words forcefully, jerking his head for emphasis and prodding the air with his finger. He falls silent, puts his hands in his pockets again and looks at us both with his head tilted back, eyeing us along the bridge of his nose. He cannot be so drunk that he imagines all this right there beside us – workshops, classrooms, equipment, the chief’s council agreeing a budget. I push on through the confusion, putting it down to mis-translation, a case of bad grammar.

‘So I see,’ I say, ‘you have plans to turn this into a training centre?’

‘That is also a community centre?’ Sara adds.

He cuts us off abruptly. ‘No – it is here. Look. I have been working very hard,’ he insists before stopping to ponder a point. As he does, Vivian wanders past with her baby boy in her arms. Sara and I coo from our seats on the porch and Vivian returns our smiles, raising her baby’s hand in a wave, though she does not stop to talk. Once she has gone on by, Ronami continues, ‘You know, there is much that we do behind the scenes that nobody can see. Yes.’

‘Ahh,’ we say together. This we can understand.

‘Of course,’ Ronami hesitates as if trying to find the right line, ‘we have too much administration, too plenty paperwork. The council, you see, they want this and that stamped and this and that copied so many times, the T’s dotted, the floor-plans signed off. But we are doing it, we are doing it well-well.’

We nod emphatically, recognising the hierarchies and procedures that must be endured, the tiresome bureaucracy required to get anything done.

‘You see, here – in this village – we are empowered,’ the words burst from his mouth as he straightens his back and looks up. ‘My sistas – we are so tired of people chopping-chopping,’ he slices the air with his hand, ‘these bad-bad people who want to take our life and we are saying that we have had enough. We are taking over now,’ he jabs a finger into his chest. ‘We are taking control. What else can we do?’

We enthusiastically agree that this is absolutely the best course of action; we are impressed with his energy. I am feeling the effects of the drink, but make a mental note to talk to the women about helping the project along.

‘If you think education is expensive,’ I repeat a saying I have heard many times since I first learned it here, ‘you should try ignorance.’

‘Exactly,’ he declares, delighted and satisfied. ‘Exactly my sistas. That is it.’

Ronami takes a step back away from the porch and sighs, unburdened.

‘So, my friend,’ he turns to Sara. ‘This is your first time to Akassa?’

‘Yes - the most stunning place I have seen in all of Nigeria,’ she obliges.

‘Good. That is very good. You are highly welcome here,’ Ronami laughs, gratified. ‘We are blessed, it is true. Some say this is a Garden of Eden. There are many things that you must see in this place, for to travel is to learn, abi?’ He pauses and thinks for a moment. ‘I hope that you will let me take you around tomorrow. My boat is here - we can go far.’

Ronami indicates the large motorised dugout moored on the creek. Sara and I look at one another but we don’t need to discuss the offer. We had talked of trekking to the headland, but a boat would save a lot of sweat and time. We settle on a price for the fuel and Ronami seems happier now, pleased even. We agree to meet the next morning when the tides will be in our favour.

I bring a kerosene lamp out to the porch and we settle back into our chairs. The oil palms glisten under the moonrise as the night air is held close, densely scented with forest orchids. Blue bodied crabs scuttle over a shaft of light on the sand, burrowing in and out of the ground with claws the colour of palm fruit.

‘It’s a bloody paradise, this place,’ Sara says.

‘It has its moments,’ I smile.

We both go quiet, turning the thought over in our minds, wondering which of us will contradict the other first. Here the people enjoy none of the proceeds of the oil beneath their feet. The island has no electricity, no running water, no sanitation, no hospital, no roads, no cars, no telephones. The teachers have not been paid for more than six months and the youth are paid to stay home by oil companies looking to keep trouble down. It is only by the efforts of the community, of men like Ronami, that the children are educated at all, that the chance of work is created, that there are even tiny incentives to stay for young people who grow up here. Without literacy and without the means to travel the two hours to the mainland, the ordinary people have no voice to complain.

About to speak, I turn to look at Sara but she has put on an outsize pair of black plastic spectacles with a miniature basket attached to the bridge. She is throwing groundnuts up in the air and trying to catch them in the tiny plastic pot that rests on her nose. Giant comedy glasses, we have come to understand, are an essential piece of kit for this life.

The kids come rushing over, picking up bits of shingle and grit from the grassy sand, eager to have their turn. After a few minutes, above the squeals and shouts of our play, we hear glass shatter against the trunk of a tree. Some of the kids look round, but they are so absorbed in our game that they don’t stop and stare. Sara takes the glasses off and holds them out to one of the girls, but they are quickly snatched from her and the girl runs yelling after her oppressor.

A small crowd of young men have bustled in to the compound’s far side. I cannot see their faces – the only light is our kerosene lamp, one or two candles shining through the slats of the raffia huts. A tall lad in a flat cap is carrying a holdall full of glass bottles that he dumps down by his feet at the base of the mango. His silhouette trembles against a zinc wall, immense and looming. The young men reach for the bottles, smashing their ends off on the tree and thrusting their chins in the air. It starts with a few scuffles and then full fighting breaks out. Between who and who, we can’t tell. Very quickly, the crowd boils over into the village and is gone.

It is a juddering climb to the top of the lighthouse on the headland, sixty skeletal feet of iron and steel built by the British almost a century ago. My legs shake with each step as I pull myself up, hand over hand on the rail behind Sara, distrusting the corroded rivets and girders. Ronami follows with Vivian who has come for the ride. To reach the top, a platform gallery beneath the lantern room, is a relief; the day is dry-season clear, a thin line of clouds bulking only at the horizon.

‘Continue due West and you will arrive at Brazil,’ Ronami points proudly over the sea where the gun-metal swell of the river brightens to open water, ‘or happen you can find Guyana.’

He tugs down the brim of his cap to soak away the sweat. I pat my own face dry with a handkerchief as we recover our breath from the climb. Vivian skips lightly up the last steps to join us, her face joyful and bright.

‘Wow,’ she declares as she lifts her head to the view and I realise I have never before heard her express an opinion.

‘Your first time?’ I ask.

‘Yes-oh Julie,’ she grins and puts an arm around me. Her voice is hoarse, unaccustomed to speech. ‘Until now, I have never been here. It is too much!’ she exclaims, eyes glistening as she bounces on her heels.

‘What are those buildings there?’ Sara indicates the derelict metal huts that line a circle of sand scythed from the prayer plants and rattans below.

I tell her they belonged to the United Africa Company but are abandoned now, filled only with the hymns of the Shining Light Church when the congregation seeks asylum from the rains. Looking across the ocean, we can see the colossal struts of an oil rig being tugged down the coast. Workers in safety vests and hard hats follow behind on flat boats. Ronami directs our attention away to the far shore at the mouth of the river.

‘You see this palm point? Oginibiri, we call it – Place of Sound. It is where our great amadabos came from the bush, nesting wasps in their beards, and learned to embrace each other’s tongue, to speak with one voice. It is there that we have our burial grounds, you see. It is there that is the place where we begin and end.’

‘Yes,’ Vivian says the word quietly, affirming the facts.

‘But our young people, they have forgotten Oginibiri,’ he talks as if Vivian’s not here, ‘instead they say their prayers to these false gods who are claiming our kingdom,’ he jerks his head towards the workers on the sea.

‘And all day the people stay at their houses with only foul water for their stomachs,’ says Sara.

‘That is it,’ he says. ‘You know, it is everybody who says we must celebrate our freedom – it has been hard won, we cannot doubt it. But there are times when I wonder at what this independence has brought us, at what little we have built in the time that we have had.’

Such unguarded talk is scarce in Akassa. I nod, not because I agree, but because I am surprised that Ronami is confiding these thoughts in us. Sara shifts from one foot to another and frowns to herself. Freedom, and what that might mean, is a favoured subject of hers, but she knows there are times in this country when it is far better to listen than to talk.

‘Your forefathers, they may have been harsh, but when they ruled us they did not divide us,’ says Ronami.
Sara winces. Ronami trails off, sensing perhaps our discomfort. I long to have this conversation, I want to probe this colonial nostalgia I’ve met with so often here, want to know if it is possible for people like me and Ronami to transcend all the pasts and the presents that have brought us together here at the top of this rusted, broken tower and talk – really talk. But I can’t. Not now, not yet. I am still trying to find the right words, the right way to speak. As if there is one. We take photographs and say little for a while, lost in thoughts of our own. Sara crosses to the other side of the platform looking east as Ronami walks round and round the gallery a couple of times, humming a tune to himself. He decides to descend and return to the boat - ‘for security,’ he says.

The sun brightens and Vivian squints, complaining ‘the heat is much.’ The place feels like an idyll: the broad lip of the beach below where the turtles nest is scattered with seed pods and coconut husks, the weaver birds thread orbs of straw in the branches of bark cloth trees. Behind us, the rain forest extends, vast and abundant, unhindered.

Vivian’s eyes are held at a point down the coast, a kilometre or so to the north.

‘That is my place – Fishtown.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, but Vivian only blinks and keeps her eyes fixed on the coastline.

I have been told about Fishtown but I’ve never been there. Some say it was under a curse, others that oil was discovered close by and the village was forcibly cleared. It is deserted now, the community dispersed throughout Akassa, a village lost.

‘My mother, she is now there at the Place of Sound. Sometimes I think I can hear her calling my name.’
I put an arm around her now, knowing grief, wondering how young she was when her mother died.

‘She used to teach me so many stories, told me so many things that showed me how to live.’

I hear my own mother’s voice in my head. She had cried at the airport. She would shake her head if she saw me now, up here.

Vivian goes on, ‘but now there is nobody for me.’
‘There is Daddy?’

The chatter of the incoming tide below rises and expands in the quiet between us. Vivian looks up at me briefly, the heft of her world in a glance. I wait for her to go on.

‘Men think only of themself,’ she says, turning to the stairs. We follow her, the toll of each metal step descending into the trees. ‘It is like Perimote. You know him?’

I don’t.

‘Daddy, Ronami, Precious, Shedrack – they are all like that. My mother told me about Perimote – she said that he was a fisherman. He had a friend called Akirikata who farmed the land and grew cocoa yam, banana, pepe, rice - anything you can need. One day, Peremote carried some kai-kai and went to visit his friend at his house.’

‘Uh huh,’ I encourage her to go on.

‘ Akirikata asked his wife to cook some food for their guest and so, ever dutiful, she put a pot of sweetly spiced plantain on the fire and prepared some fish to roast in the coals. While the plantain was cooking, Peremote drank a too-greedy share of the kai-kai while Akirikata held back, not wanting his head to go bad or to drink up all that he had. When at last Akirikata’s wife arrived with the food for the men, Peremote had passed out on the ground and Akirikata sat back and enjoyed all the food for himself. That,’ Vivian says decisively, ‘is what men are like.’

The liquid crystal display of my clock says 5.49am when I’m startled awake by the urgent, low thud of bare feet running through the compound yard outside. I leap from my bed and rush to lock the doors, still open after the balmy ease of last night. I work instinctively to secure the house – nobody runs around here, no matter what time of the day. Sara whips back the sheet that was covering her face but I push back her voice with the flats of my hands, then raise a finger to my lips for silence.

Cries rise like nightjars kicked from their nests as more thudding feet enter the compound. I hasten to the front window and peer cautiously through the gap between the curtain and fly screen – it is barely first light. There is a group, I can’t tell how many, descending on us with rocks, machetes, sticks and bottles, their necks stuffed with cloth. They surround the low buildings. The sound of six gunshots detonates and is followed by the hack, hack, hacking of machetes, steel splicing through the zinc and stone of the houses; through tissue and bone and flesh, I can’t tell.

Sara is on her feet now, standing close to me. Through the thin weave of the curtain we can see torchlights frantically flashing, we can hear scuffling on the sand and grass, but there are no words, no shouts, just the determined, resolute rush of skin, metal and rocks colliding. I can make out the shape of someone hewing the ground with a machete, their eyes directed at our window. Sara is panicking.

‘Get dressed,’ I tell her as calmly as I can, wanting her to believe that I am in control, that I know what to do. ‘Gather what you can’t afford to lose.’

I go into my own bedroom, pull on trousers over my nightdress and trainers onto my feet. I get my passport and all the cash I keep at the house. A small figure, a child perhaps, is backed up to the bedroom window, edging along the broad concrete ledge that rims the house.

‘Vivian,’ I pull back the curtain and call to her quietly, ‘come inside, come,’ but she turns to look at me, says nothing and shakes her head ‘no.’

I can hear the sound of women’s voices lengthening to wails. An elderly lady, bowed and reedy, creeps along the edge of the bush with a chain of small children, a baby on her back. Vivian turns to me and, ludicrously, says ‘good morning,’ then darts off to join them, disappearing in the pale husks of cane.

A flash and fire ignites somewhere at the far side of the house. Wapriye shoots by and I call out to him, ‘what is happening?’ I want to know. He comes to me but he’s mumbling and stuttering, breathing fast, and I can’t make out his words. I think he says something about Fishtown, or maybe he says ‘it is our own,’ and then he is gone.

Sara is standing in the living room with her rucksack on, ready to move. We say nothing to one another, as if somehow speaking out loud would give us away. We listen at the door, waiting for a lull in the fighting, expecting rocks to come smashing through the windows and fire to crawl up the screens. A few seconds of quiet when the compound to the front has cleared momentarily and we go, running for the path through the village, past the half-built community hall and the clutch of raffia huts and Daddy’s painted shack and the big mango tree, running through the smouldering grass and the smoke and the scattered, broken bottles, out to the stillness of the morning beyond.

A way up the path, a woman tries to stop us from leaving. There are people standing outside their houses in the half-light, looking confused, heads still full of dreams. The woman tells us that it is not our fight, that we will be safe and we’re not to be frightened and I know that being run out of my house will bring shame to the village; shame that they have failed to take care of their guest. I understand that all this isn’t meant for us, but I do not trust the judgement of the young men here, knowing well that our skin is an occupational hazard all of its own to those who don’t know us, makes us targets of the kidnapping and ransom so commonplace on the Delta. A crowd has begun to gather behind the woman, commenting and arguing in Akaha. There is too much confusion– it is better that we leave.

There is nowhere to go. We are making our way along the path that runs through the forest when we are greeted by a woman I hardly know from ACWA. She is gathering washing from bushes at the front of a house set back in the trees. She is called Mrs Duwei. We tell her what we have just come from and she insists on taking us in, reminding us that there will be no boats until later, adamant that we must enter her house and take Maltex while the village ‘cools temper.’

I can feel the sweat runnelling down my ribcage, my feet swelling inside the closed shoes. Sara has calmed herself now, relieved to have got away. Mrs Duwei offers us water and soap and we clean the night sweats from our faces and then we wait for a few hours, overheating in too many clothes. Sara makes a record of this, taking some notes in her diary and we joke lamely about this being her busiest day at the office all year. Gallows humour.

Mrs Duwei goes away and comes back to tells us that some people in the village have tried to claim 700,000 Naira from the company running the geophysical survey, professing to be acting on behalf of a community project. She doesn’t - she won’t - say who. The attack on Friday night was a warning to those who were going to rat these people out to the company, this morning’s violence was the revenge.

All at once I am saddened, disappointed, irritated. I have no right to any of these feelings.

Such pay-offs are routine, large sums of money offered by the oil industry as compensation for damage to the environment, real and anticipated. The money is chopped, shared out, only some of it used for community projects: hospitals that get abandoned, water supplies that become salinated. Most people here survive by fishing, petty trading or logging, but the dynamite charges sunk in the riverbanks and the lines cut through the forest by the latest seismic exploration have devastated livelihoods. A colleague has just finished a survey that estimates the forest damage runs to millions, but the findings are not yet public and may be too inflammatory to disclose. I do not mention this now - to either Mrs Duwei or Sara – but the knowledge of it weighs heavily. It is not mine to keep. The compensation offered is consistently pitiful, but it is more than anyone here could ever hope to earn, even in a whole lifetime. Akassans know that they are being cheated, but their children’s stomachs are distended with hunger and worms. It isn’t hard to understand their actions.

When something like this happens, when people turn in against themselves, there has to be blame. You could blame poverty. You could blame the corruption that consumes the country. You could blame the oil industry. You could blame anyone who drives a car, a bus, a truck, a plane, a boat. You could blame the people who switch channels when the news comes on. You could blame the greed of a few selfish villagers. You could blame the breakdown of trust, blame the elders and youths for not pulling together. You could blame ignorance. You could blame the government, whole countries, rampant multi-nationals. Blame globalisation. Blame history. Blame God.

From Mrs Duwei’s we watch people come and go all morning on the path, some are off to church, others are engaged in a different kind of business. A group wades through the mangrove swamp nearby, armed with cutlasses and rope, as if searching for something. I want to go back home and find out what’s happened there, see where everyone is, but Mrs Duwei assures us we must stay a while longer; here we will be safe, here we cannot be harmed. There is a problem that has to be dealt with, a sickness that has to be cured, and that it is almost done.

Another group comes by, holding their sticks aloft in high spirits. They are dragging a man by the wrists - unconscious but alive - like bush meat through the dirt. Though his face is battered and bloated, I feel my stomach drop as I confirm what I already know. It is Ronami, the caked blood on his body so dark it is black.

*

I don’t see him again for many months. Then, a few days before I am due to leave Akassa for good, I see Ronami sitting at the foot of a plank bridge, rocking himself and staring at the water. I approach him and reach out to touch his shoulder.

‘Ronami?’

He looks up at me and frowns as if searching his mind for recognition, then nods as if to confirm something.
‘Sista Julie,’ he says, ‘how far? Come.’

His eyes are dull and glazed. Saliva is dripping from the corner of his mouth onto his chin. He starts to hold out his hand to shake mine, but it flops back down to his side, forgetful. There is a deep scar on the top of his head from the machete wound – it is clear, as they say here, his head is scattered. He doesn’t seem to want to talk. Instead, he gets to his feet and turns his back on me, muttering to himself as he wanders away.

‘Yes oh, there is much that we do that nobody can see, abi? We are behind the scenes, yes … making our plan - a business one. A very fine one. You see?’