did not want to be taken unawares again. “Na just a name,” he said to himself. “Just a name. Jubril and Gabriel dey mean de same ting.” He started to imagine himself in his father’s village and hearing people calling him, “Gabriel, Gabriel.” He imagined himself turning immediately to the source of the call. He imagined himself awaking in the morning as soon as he heard “Gabriel.” He learned to spell it backward. He started to sing the name in his mind, but he was having problems with the J and G.
Before the riots, it had pained him that his personal story was not as straightforward as he would have wanted. Over the years he did everything he could not to remember the parts that he knew. If people said anything about the delta or about the Atlantic Ocean, he would quickly change the subject, because, in his mind, that was the shameful place of his birth. He equated southerner with infidel, and even when someone told him there were Muslims in the south, especially among the Yorubas of the southwest, somehow his mind had refused to accept that these southern Muslims were real or genuine. He felt privileged to be a northerner and did everything to groom that part of his identity.
When people talked about the oil wealth of the south, he would feel anger rising in him and wonder why Allah would have given the oil to the land of the infidels. So he was relieved when during the recent campaigns, some politicians started telling the crowds that the crude oil actually belonged to the north and not to the people who lived in the oil fields of the delta. Like many, Jubril was swayed by their spurious argument: that the oil deposits in the delta were the result of years of sediments being carried from the north by the River Niger; the politicians wondered why the delta people should then claim the oil as their own; they wondered why they should ask for a bigger budgetary allocation from the new, democratic government. As they spoke, Jubril, who had skipped taking the cows to graze, had applauded and roared with the crowd. Though he could not read properly, he gladly received two copies of the booklet that propagated these arguments, one for himself and the other for his mother. Other northern politicians who came to town but did not say the oil wealth belonged to the north or that they would introduce total Sharia did not get a big crowd.
Now Chief Ukongo’s sarcastic “Who are you?” cut deep into Jubril’s soul. The events of the previous two days had knifed through his Muslim identity. Running in the bush from Khamfi, Jubril’s mind had become a whirlwind of questions: Allah, is it true that once a person is baptized, as my mother said I was at birth, he remains a Christian forever, never able to remove the mark from his soul? Are you punishing me for this infant baptism that I did not choose? You know that as long as I can remember, I have always felt every inch a Muslim, and to prove my steadfastness, I did challenge Yusuf ’s apostasy and sacrificed his brotherhood to you. . . . If the world will not accept me as a southerner-northerner, will you also condemn me as a Christian-Muslim? Though I was attacked by Musa and Lukman for being a fake Muslim, Allah, please, give me the wisdom to convince the Christians in this bus that I am truly one of them. Lead me home, merciful one, lead me to peace. . . . Allah, your religion of Islam is a religion of peace.
Suddenly there was chaos in the bus. The irresistible pull of the cable pictures was gone, replaced by grainy black-and-white pictures of refugees in a police-and-military barracks in Khamfi. The images were unsteady, as if the local cameramen were trembling with the pain of their compatriots while filming. When the pictures steadied a bit, you could see the people who had been displaced. They sat everywhere, in the fields, on the verandas, and some were still running into the barracks. Many were like the people in the bus or in Lupa Motor Park, clutching the few belongings they could escape with.
The passengers were now standing, agitated, searching around for the cause of the change in TV stations. The first person to find his voice was Emeka. He pointed at the screen and shouted, “My cousin, my