"Egberifa."
The story is over.
CHAPTER 52
Moonlight tales and palm-wine music.
If nothing else, the oil company bulldozers had opened up the views. You could see gas flares above the jungle far into the distance, thin towers plumed with fire, the flames uncurling, illuminating the underside of clouds. One such tower had been built on the very edge of Nnamdi's village, and when the winds shifted, the air tasted like tin.
A humid swamp, exhaling fire, the Niger Delta was webbed with countless creeks and endless channels. But the Shell Men had found Nnamdi's village anyway, had tracked satellite photos and followed footsore surveys to get there.
They had changed the very nature of night. Nnamdi was now thirteen or fourteen and was having trouble sleeping with the eerie glow of gas flares and the heavy thumps underground. A muffled heartbeat in the earth below.
The oil men had cleared seismic lines through the jungle so that they could search for oil without drilling. They would carve out a grid, clearing the forest in strips, and then plant detonations at the cross points. In this methodical, mathematical manner they could read the shock waves that bounced back the way a diviner might read signs in the toss of sticks or the colour of a moon. The oil men could chart the unseen, decipher what lay hidden below.
These underground explosions had caused cracks to appear in the cement walls of Nnamdi's home, hair-thin fault lines that only got bigger. He would lie on his mat under the mosquito netting and listen to the dull thuds of Shell Men chasing the echoes of oil.
He could feel the vibrations under his mat, would watch orange shadows play along the walls, would dream of hearts buried in oil.
There were times when Nnamdi scarcely seemed tethered to this world. "Your soul got lost in the clouds on the way down," his mother would scold. "You were entangled in stars at ya birth."
"Leave the boy in peace," his father would say. "It's the agreement he made before he was born."
"
Egberiyo!"
the children would cry.
"Egberiyo?"
his father would reply.
Nnamdi's father had started to incorporate the gas flares and seismic surveys into his nightly narratives. "The Story of Lightning and Thunder," for example, was now turned upside down. Originally, Thunder had been an old mother sheep, and her son Lightning a ram; you could see tufts of their wool caught on trees, in the small clouds that formed after a storm. But now their arguments raged underground as well, flaring up in bursts of raw temper, exploding above ground.
South of the village, more tales were unfolding. The oil companies were building a Road to Nowhere. The raised hump snaked its way through the squelchiest of the mangrove marshes, forcing a path from the clustered wellheads at the village edge to flow stations in far-flung swamps where only screeching monkeys and coiled snakes dwelled. Nnamdi and his father had followed this muddy scar a ways through the forest, had marvelled at the sheer determination of it. Work crews blocked their way farther down, though, with armed guards standing, rifles ready, behind mirrored sunglasses. So they never got to see the end of nowhere.
As they walked back, Nnamdi's father had pointed out how the roadbed blocked the water from seeping across. "Do you see how it's backing up on this side, and draining on that? The road is acting like a dam. This side will flood, that side will wash away. Not good for fish or forest." And so it proved. The wine palms died on one side of the road, and the fish drowned in the loam-rich waters on the other.
The cooking oil continued to arrive in ever larger tins.
Soon the lagoon behind the village was all but dead. Fishermen still made the trek, out of habit more than anything, pulling what few gaping mudskippers they could from the oil-slicked flats.
Orphan fish, gills opening and closing, clogged with crude.
The diviners had failed; all their rattle-shaking dance steps and eye-rolling visions could not bring the bounty back. And try though they might to shift the blame onto broken pacts made with the past, these intermediaries of the gods had fallen from grace in the village. "The
owumo
have been silent. Why? Have they left us?
Do you even know?" This was the accusation, unanswerable and spiked with venom.
In the lagoon, a shark had rolled in on one of the tides, already dead and covered in crude. This was taken as a sign, but of what?
That the Shell Men were stronger even than sharks? That the oil was, as the elder members said, "the devil's excrement"? The tidal Ijaw had once cast a pall of fear across the lesser nations of the Delta; known as "swamp sharks," they had prowled the inlets with a predatory gaze. And now? Suffocating in crude. For some, the appearance of the shark was taken as an exhortation that they had lost their way. But no one would touch the carcass. It rolled away on the next tide, but every few days it would reappear, still coated in oil. It was a long time decaying.
New words had entered the village vocabulary:
pipeline, flow station, manifold.
Successive spills had left successively higher lines of tar along the mangrove shores and had spread into secondary creeks as well, forcing fishermen farther and farther into the mangrove swamps. Their canoes, carved from a hardwood that was even now disappearing under bulldozed paths, were not meant for deep water. The pirogues would sink as soon as they turned over, and more than one body of a fisherman had washed up, sheathed in oil as well.
The flare-offs had tainted the clouds, bringing down rains that itched and burned and left the plantain and palm leaves spotted with blisters. Children had begun coughing up blood, and village meetings became shouting matches. The village itself was divided into clans and the clans into larger
ibe.
Connected families were now accused of profiteering, of secretly siding with the Shell Men.
And they were all Shell Men; it didn't matter whether they were
oyibos
or Igbos, and it didn't matter what the colour of their coveralls was or which particular tribal markings were sewn onto their chest pockets: Chevron, Texaco, Mobil, Agip, BP, Exxon. Total from France, Eni and Saipem from Italy. Even the NNPC, Nigeria's own National Petroleum Corporation. It was all Shell.
The Shell Men built a school (without teachers) and a health clinic (without doctors) and installed a pharmacy (without medicine): tidy-looking cinder-block buildings with corrugated tin roofs. They took photos of themselves clasping forearms with
ibe
elders, and when the lack of teachers, doctors, and medicines was pointed out, the Shell Men replied, "We build them, we don't staff them. Talk to the state administrators. Or send a letter to the national government in Abuja." But Abuja city hardly seemed real, that distant capital far removed from oil spills and gas flares. Shell?
Shell was here, Shell was now, and the people's anger only grew.
So after the photographs had been taken and the soldiers had back-walked the Shell Men out of the village to waiting jeeps, the village was left to argue with itself.
"The health-care clinic has no roof!" people shouted at the members of the larger
ibe.
"How much dey payin' you?"
"No roof? And why is that? We all know it's you who stole it.
Where are the palm fronds was once atop your house? How'd those turn to tin like so?"
"Not stolen,
taken.
That clinic was empty. No nurse, no doctor.
Why let the roof just sit over nothing like that?"
"A nurse comes!"
"Once a year! If that. Once a year from Portako, nurse be coming to inject us with inoculate for everything except the oil.
Where is the inoculate for blood in the lung? For oil on the creek?
For poison in the air? And now dey buildin' a brand-new pier with concrete pilings. Why? So they can land larger boats. You think those boats be filled with fish? Filled with medicine?
Ozu enini!
So ah'm askin' you again. How much dey paying you?"
It began with small acts of sabotage.
Sand in gas tanks, pilfered tools. The reaction this provoked was swift. Soldiers swept through on the Shell Men's behest, reclaiming tools and rifle-butting young men to their knees. Soon the soldiers outnumbered the workers. The oil crews were clearly on edge, landing at the village jetty at shift change with the precision of a military operation. When the village men tried to barricade the dock, the soldiers turned on them, torching the homes they'd decided belonged to troublemakers and plundering family supplies of plantain and breadfruit.
"You are caught between hammer and anvil," the officer in charge told the Ijaw men who watched, sullen and seething, as the soldiers moved through. Hammer and anvil.
"No," the men of the village replied. "It's not we who are caught between hammer an' anvil. It is you." It was less a threat than a statement of fact—and a warning.
Over in Warri, a mob had stormed the oil company compound, shattering windows and trapping the staff inside. And when the army fired tear gas into the crowds, the protesters—inured by now to acidic fumes—simply picked the canisters up and threw them back. The protesters finally dispersed, but only after leaving an empty coffin at the company's front gate.
In Nnamdi's village, however, any gestures would not be merely symbolic.
"Soldiers at their sides or not, the Shell Men be easy enough to kill. From the forest, we pick dem off one by one, collect their skulls, pile them in the middle of the village like yams on market day." These were the cries of young men, their anger stoked by gin. The older members of their
ibe
talked them down, but they couldn't stop events from escalating.
When torrential rains chased the crews and their armed guards from the village site, the workers returned the next day to find the scorched remains of bulldozers and jeeps toppled on their sides.
The crew foreman walked through the aftermath. "How did they manage to set a fire in a downpour?" he asked, voice in a whisper.
Maybe the
orumo
spirits had played a hand in it; maybe the forest had struck back.
Or maybe, with enough gasoline, anything will bum.
And that was when the Man from the Graves returned. It was the same pale-pink presence Nnamdi had encountered in the forest that day, no longer smiling, striding into a village council meeting forcefully and uninvited. He arrived during a heated debate over whether capturing the site foreman and setting him on fire would be enough of a gesture, or whether the entire crew needed to be doused and set alight as well. The man walked right in, along with an armed contingent of Mobile Police, the "Kill and Gos" as they were known.
He took the floor without ceremony or proper modesty.
"I see angry young men," he said, meeting the glowering gaze of the gin drinkers at the back. "Young men with no prospects. No work. Come. We will train you, we will feed you, we will pay you."
He turned to the older members of the
ibe.
"Give me the names of your finest youths and I will grant them employment. Give us your young men, and we will give you prosperity."
He left with the same sure stride.
"We don't want prosperity, we want clean water!" someone shouted in Ijaw, but by then it was too late. The Man from the Graves was gone.
CHAPTER 53
They would prove no hollow promise, these Shell Jobs. The next night, as the elders mulled the matter over, compiling tentative lists, and the air outside hung with the smell of sulphur and sour gas, the children gathered in the yard, unable to sleep.
"Egberiyo!"
they yelled.
Too old to sit at his fathers feet without feeling childish, but too young for gin, Nnamdi held back instead, listened from a distance.
"Story!" the little ones yelled, but the story was never told, because the evening was interrupted: a sudden commotion, and the children were shooed aside.
The Man from the Graves had returned, armed with a clipboard and paperwork. A crowd followed him through the village in a hubbub more hectic than any masquerade of masks, and when they arrived at the council hall the entire village tried to cram itself inside. At the front of the hall, the man, flanked as before by his personal "Kill and Go" guards, tipped back a plastic bottle of water and drank deeply as the elder
ibe
members berated him formally and at length, listing each grievance in turn to a chorus of confirming shouts.
Fishermen had been compensated for ruined fishing nets (with many a rotting net hastily dunked in oil and then presented to the Shell company), but it was not enough. "You have taken our past; give us a future," they shouted in Ijaw. This was translated by the Igbo aides as "They want more money."
"Not money," the Man from the Graves said. "We have already given you enough of that. No more handouts. Jobs instead. Give a man a fish, and you will feed him for a day. But teach a man to fish—"
"We already know how to fish! What we need is for you oil men to go!"
He tilted back another long drink of water, waited them out.
And in the sweltering heat, it was done: forms were signed, names written down. Many of the elder
ibe
members couldn't read what was written, but they made a great production out of poring over the papers anyway, frowning and nodding, making their X's to mark the spot. A long, laborious procedure, and as it dragged on, the pale man let his gaze float around the room. His eyes met Nnamdi's.
The Man from the Graves smiled. Nnamdi smiled back.
"I remember you!" the man said, and he stood and came around from behind the table to clasp forearms with Nnamdi. "I met this boy when I was still tramping about in the jungle," he told the others. Then, smiling at Nnamdi, "You were at the lagoon that day, keeping an eye on the other children ya? I remember you.
