is safe and is reaping interest in Europe and America and Asia and the Middle East, but where shall we get money to rebuild our lives?” The sound and pictures broke up, then disappeared.
In the gloom, Jubril’s heart pounded, overpowered by the man’s plea and the wonder of TV. He thought he had escaped the sight of blood and killings in Khamfi. But, from what he had just seen and heard from Yohanna Tijani, the madness had spread to the south. His mind went back to the mob of Lukman and Musa, and the mob that came to Mallam Abdullahi’s house. He pressed his tongue against his teeth till it began to hurt, hoping against hope that the images on TV were fabricated.
In the semidarkness, it was easy to see that, apart from the mad soldier who was asleep, the refugees were agitated. Though what the northerner had said touched them, they wanted to know the extent of the damage. Would they make it to the south? Would they be mistaken for a busload of corpses and be impounded by the military? It worried them because since the Nigeria-Biafra War their people had never retaliated against the recurring massacre of their people in the north. Everyone was afraid. It was clear to them that the local channels were not ready to show the extent of the riots in the south. They pestered the policemen for cable TV, for nobody believed the local channels would tell them much.
“No worry,” the police said, “we no be luxurious hearse, OK? Dem no go intercept us.”
“We want cable TV o!”
“When Abacha hanged Saro-Wiwa because of our oil, we saw it first on foreign TV!”
“When Abacha himself die na foreign press talk am first!”
The police instructed the driver to turn off the hazard lights and turn on the cabin lights so the bus would not be mistaken for a hearse. The driver did. The passengers’ anxieties rose and fell as the bus skirted the corners, yet some were urging the driver to move faster: death by motor accident seemed more desirable to them than the forms of death meted out by the ethnic cleansers at both ends of their country.
By the time they started encountering vehicles traveling the other way—mainly tractor trailers and smaller trucks, the kinds that transport cows from the north to the south—even the police officers were eager to know the real situation in the south. All vehicles seemed to be going north, blazing with a full complement of hazard lights and horns. Luxurious hearses were also heading north.
HAVING LIVED THROUGH THE ordeal in Mallam Abdullahi’s house and having just heard the testimony of Yohanna Tijani about the generous southern Christians, Jubril felt that with heroic people like this, his nation would rise above all types of divisiveness. Instinctively, in his yearning for consolation, he envisioned the different peoples of his country connecting at a deep, primordial level, where one’s life was irreversibly connected to one’s neighbor’s, like a child’s to its mother’s.
THE FRIGHTENED PASSENGERS HAD now turned inward, for strength, and peace reigned among the different religions on the bus. Everybody seemed tired of screaming about their god in someone else’s face. Meanwhile, the police kept flipping the foreign channels for the updates they wanted. It was not long before the truth was told:
Breaking News: Reprisal Violence in Onyera and Port Harcourt
Both city centers were matted with corpses and gore, and the anchor said other southern cities were preparing for vengeance against the Muslims and northerners in their midst. She said buses full of southern corpses were beginning to arrive in Onyera and Port Harcourt. She said that trucks had also begun ferrying corpses of northerners killed in the southern riots back to the north, and that the country was on the verge of a north-south war. She said that what mattered in the conflicts was the fighters’ tribes, insofar as external features and dressing and language could identify them. She confirmed that the government had banned the movement of corpses to check reprisal violence.
Images of the riots poured into the bus, the cameras pursuing the action as if it were a UEFA Champions League match. The southern youths were uncontrollable and spilled out with their machetes, guns, and clubs in every direction, like the lava of an erupted volcano. They killed and killed, as if in this singular madness they would avenge all the massacres of their people who lived in the north, in the past and in the future.