Vernon Mooers writes

THE WHITE MAN'S GRAVEYARD

chapter 19 (2)

Outside the main office was a white Peugeot and parked in the shade were several Volkswagens. The Peugeot was Dibal's car. He still remembered the license plate. Since there was little variety in cars, he had got in the automatic habit of memorizing the numbers. Alex walked in the front door and Dibal was standing talking to the secretary, Aishatu, the one who had always given him a hard time, been intentionally ignorant to him and refused to type anything or run the Gestetner for him.

"Oh, hoh. Malam Alex. Sannu. Lafia?"

"Lafiya lau. Ina aiki?" He put his hand to his chest, a gesture which meant his friend was still in his heart.

"Ah, aiki da godiya."

"Ina gida?"

"Lafia. They are fine. Zo. Come in to my office."

Dibal was smiling his big warm smile. He was happy to see him and Alex was really glad he'd stopped by to greet him. Dibal sat down behind a big desk and offered him a kola nut, which Alex took and chewed. It was as good as coffee.

"So you are the principal now?"

"Ah Yes. What of you. We thought you had gone to work in London."

"No, I got married there. I got a job with Stirling Estalda, was in Gabon and Egypt for awhile, now back in Kano working on the road through to Hadeja."

"Ah, Yes. Ina gida?"

"They were killed in an accident."

"Sorry, my friend."

"Well, it didn't work out. I came back to help build the roads of West Africa."

"Ah, it's good to be away from the students. After awhile you begin to think like them."

"What of Musa? Quereshi? I suppose they are still here."

"There is none of your colleagues. Musa transferred to the WTC in Biu and Dr. Quereshi went back to India on final leave. It's  only NYSC here now and some local government teachers. There is still a shortage. My people all want to make naira, they don't want to teach. Come, I'll show you around."

Alex followed him out. He greeted the cooks by the kitchen. Some of them would remember the Bature. They walked through the sand past the still windowless classrooms with the paint chipped off and written on. "Marley, I'm coming," was the latest graffiti to don the walls. Past the baobab tree where the vendors sat. Several junior students were buying groundnuts and guavas. 

"Kai!" Dibal yelled and the students scattered to the bush back of the classrooms. They were Form 1's and 2's Alex knew, up in the classrooms at the far end, with no Masters to them except maybe older brothers in senior forms when they had time. There were not enough teachers still and the Form 1's could hardly speak English even. Not much had changed.

They walked to the staff room and stepped inside. Alex scanned the room but there was not a face he recognized. The principal introduced him and they greeted him.

"Remember Malam Ali?" Dibal said.

"Oh yes. I'm surprised not to see his Form 3 girls serving  biscuits and tea," Alex laughed. Ali hardly taught a class. He knew English and had been hired by the Local Government. He was officially in charge of having the girls serve Nescafe and tea at break time and in charge of all the social events, the send-offs and other celebrations.

"He ran," Dibal chuckled. "They caught him in the market selling curtains from the staff room."

Ali had never been trusted. Everyone knew he took a cut from the cases of minerals and biscuits for the celebrations. Half the supplies Ali signed out from the school store room were unneeded and never seen again. Ali had supplemented his meagre income by selling paper, textbooks, biros and tape, even light bulbs and soap and toilet paper in the town. People always kidded Ali he must have burned a lot of electricity and his rear end too.

Alex didn't stay at the school long. Dibal walked him back to the jeep and invited him to come again. They parted and he drove on out of the school, past the track he used to run on in the evenings with his friend Yemi, the Youth Corper. He was glad he had come and glad that he was not teaching any more, and that he was leaving, thankful he had a good engineering job with Stirling Estalda.

He remembered how the dust in Harmattan hung over the school so you could barely make out the lights of the railway, how he had heard the blasts from the  midnight train departing for Kano when he'd lain in bed before falling asleep. Long walks to the railway in the rainy season when everything smelled so humid and fresh and the sounds of the crickets and other insects. He remembered the taste of the coffee with the Dutch tinned milk in the evenings when he sat on the porch with the outside lights off if the mosquitos weren't too thick and watching the m'guardies pray and the sounds of their wives pounding grain. There would be the rough buzz of a motorcycle going to town, perhaps the distant thud of drums beating in the village by the railway, on clear nights full of stars. He had been so aware, his consciousness been so timeless, suspended in Africa, hanging in a rich sky. These memories were etched in his mind, probably reason he'd returned.

On the way to town Alex passed the old run-down Government Residence Area, houses with torn-screened porches and over-grown untrimmed trees. Some of the houses were vacant now. It seemed a peaceful area, a remnant of the colonial past. But he had never wanted to live there. That era of evening parties and discussing the future, the building of a nation, was long gone. Now it was too isolated there at night, too removed from the people and the rest of the town. He had preferred to stay in the school where he felt safe, where the military knew where to find him, to go to the railway station or into the town and be a part of the activity. 

The town of Ngami was a world of its own. It had always been a town that had seemed run-down. It had had things going for it once. The remnants were still visible -- the groundnut oil mill now shut, the slaughter-house buildings, the warehouses, now half-empty provision stores. The railway and electricity had opened up trade in the North, but then the roads had come. Now the roads were half washed out, almost returned to desert. Ngami was a dying town, a place where buildings gradually fell apart from neglect, disintegrating into heaps of cement, chipped walls and fading wind-worn paint, from a lack of maintenance. The desert was claiming them again.

Alex didn't want to stop in the town, just drive down the main street,  past the market, past the cinema and even past Alhaji Tijani's store. He pulled in front of a kiosk but didn't get out.

"Akwai, mineral. Sani ba?"

"Eh. Akwai, coke Bature." He used to stop at this kiosk sometimes, but they didn't recognize or remember him. From a distance, white men looked all the same.

"Zo." He dropped fifty kobo into the man's hand.  "Na gode."

Down the dust-covered rutted street he slowly drove, watching the bicycles and the labourers lugging loads on their heads. Under the niim tree by Post Office, men were washing and then kneeling for their afternoon prayers. Several Ibo mechanics sat on their tool kits or lay on benches under the pair of billboards which still advertised Golden Girl margarine and OMO detergent. Ngami was timeless. Nothing had changed. He swung onto the round-a-bout and back onto the highway. 

There was only one road block out near the entrance to the military base going out of town, past the lake and the WTC. They waved him through. Things were relaxed now. There was no political trouble, no border clashes with Chad, and the Cameroonian border had been opened up again. He drove straight through to Hadeja and reached there just before dark.