I arrived at the terminal that morning feeling groggy. There had been a storm the night before and everything still carried its imprint — wet shacks, puddles, snapped foliated branches lying about everywhere. I hurried through my purchase of tickets from Makurdi to Jos and settled in a car.
As one of the first passengers to arrive, I had carefully chosen my seat next to the window in the back row and placed my backpack to secure it. But climbing in now, I found that my backpack had been moved to the middle and, on my chosen seat, a man sat.
He was an imposing figure, perhaps an inch or two taller than my six feet. There was sleep in his eyes. He wore a stained white T-shirt whose edges were browned with sweat, multiple rubber wristbands and army camouflage trousers. I had meant to protest, but seeing the man’s appearance, I swallowed and dropped myself between him and a middle-aged woman who sat on the other side.
As the wagon pulled on to the highway, a man in the second row that separated where I sat from the driver’s row removed his traditional Tiv black-and-white hat and, as if it’d been agreed upon beforehand, said, “Let us bow our heads in prayer.”
“In the name of Jesus!” he shouted.
“Amen!” everyone, it seemed, replied.
“Balm of Gilead, mighty man in battle . . . ”
Much of this was familiar to me. I had lived in Nigeria for the first 21 years of my life. I left for the first time in 2007 for North Cyprus and began visiting at least once a year when I moved to the US in 2012. Since then, I have often been astonished by aspects of the culture today. How was it that someone could simply demand that strangers in a public place bow their heads in prayer? Among my American circle of writers and academics, this would have seemed absurd.
We were already on the highway by the time the passengers chanted the last “amen”. I straightened my back and turned to find the man beside me mumbling quietly to himself. We were now passing through some village, red huts on the side of the road. Under a tall tree a police pick-up sat, its doors ajar. On the road, two cars in front, more policemen stood collecting bribes from motorists. Our driver, looking in his mirror at the man beside me, called out, “Officer, this na why I wan make you sidon for front . . . I no get money — I swear. Na only fuel money they give me for park.”
“No problem — go,” the man said. “Dem no go disturb you again.”
We neared the pick-up, its front side heavily dented. The man wound down the window, stuck his head out and, gesturing to the policeman inside, cried, “Na army sergeant I be. I am going to Sambisa, so let am go.” And without hesitation, the policemen allowed us passage.
Before I had even become a writer, I wanted to write about the Biafran war. I had read widely about the conflict. I knew that the seeds were sown in 1966, six years after Nigeria gained independence from Britain. A coup by young idealists in the Nigerian army had shocked the country. The officers and soldiers who’d planned this were mostly of the Igbo ethnic group from the east and most of those killed were northerners — mainly Hausa-Fulani.
Although these officers, who were non-tribal intellectuals, made clear that they were not ethnically motivated, the harm was done. All year, retaliatory killings were carried out against Igbo civilians and military personnel. Feeling unwanted and marginalised, the eastern elite began to call for secession. On May 30 1967, the republic of Biafra was declared by Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, the governor of the eastern region. A few weeks later, in a sleepy town in the eastern region, Nigerian forces opened fire, starting off one of the most destructive wars of the modern era.
As the years went by, it became clear that no matter how much I might learn of the forces that led to the war, the major battles and the death tolls, there was something about the experience of the conflict, its impact on those on and off the field, that eluded me. That summer of 2018, in Nigeria for the purposes of renewing my passport and with my war novel under way, I felt I needed to seize every opportunity to learn.
From the moment the soldier revealed his identity, questions began rustling around the lightbulb of my mind like wingless insects. This man, about my age, was an active soldier in Nigeria’s current war against the Boko Haram terrorist group. What might the experience be like? Before I was ready, the question flew out of me: “Sa, you are a soldier?”
“Yes,” he said, and nodded. “And, why you ask?”
“Because of when they stop us,” I said in haste.
Again, he nodded many times.
I should have stopped there, seeing that he seemed lost, frequently looking at an old GSM phone with cracked edges. But I couldn’t.
“I want to know . . . emm, do you know anyone who has fought Boko Haram?”
His eyes on me this time, and with the sleep still in them, felt threatening.
“Wetin you say?” he said.
I asked the question a second time. He nodded and his laughter rang through the bus. He bent his head, and almost as if whispering to himself, I heard him repeat “Boko Haram” again and again. I worried that I may have annoyed him.
“I . . . I am sorry, Oga. I jus’ I am writing a book . . . a book about war.” My heavy breathing was showing, evident in the gaps between my words.
“Leave am alone,” the woman on my other side said to me in soft, quiet rebuke. “No be if you see person, you go begin ask am all these questions — eh? Leave am!”
“I don hear, ma,” I said, nodding. I pushed myself back in my seat, inclined my head against the headrest and closed my eyes.
The soldier’s tap on my thigh felt so sudden and violent that I let out an anguished cry.
“Shey you ask me question, abi?” he said, gazing at me, his eyes bloodshot. “I wan answer, so no sleep — no sleep!”
“Yes-sa!” I said, shaken.
“As you see me so, I have been fighting since February 2017. We have been . . . with my boys . . . inside-inside Sambisa killing those animals you call ‘Boko Haram’.”
He grinned — his mouth a crooked twist.
“Boko Haram doesn’t exist, my brother. Nothing-nothing like that. In that forest, we have drug addicts, bandits, thieves, hooligans and crazy religious fanatics — you get me? No Boko Haram!”
We had stopped at a fresh checkpoint, and the driver was negotiating with a highway policeman.
“Who dey delay us like this, eh?” the soldier cried, banging the seat in front of him. “Open the seat make I pass!”
The soldier stepped out of the car and charged at the policeman, shouting. He kicked at one of them in the belly. They let our driver back in the wagon.
“Look, driver, no stop again, else I go fuck you up!”
“Roger sa!” the driver said.
“I must reach Maiduguri this night — my boys are there . . . Dem dey wait for me!”
When he returned to his seat, it was clear that the combination of my question and the actions of the policeman who’d opted to check the driver’s documents had angered him. I’d become afraid of this man who’d meted out quick violence against the policeman. I took a book out of my backpack and began feigning concentration. The man stretched out his hand, looking at me. Without a word, I handed him the book.
“So, you be student, abi?”
“No, sir. I’m a professor.”
“What?” he said, his voice earnestly curious.
“Assistant professor, sir . . . one university in America.”
“Wetin be your age?”
“Thirty-two, sir.”
He looked at me, shook his head — “And you be don?”
I nodded.
“So, the book you dey write na for work, eh?”
“Yes. Na . . . em, novel.”
Despite this shift in tone and mood, I was still unsettled. The wagon was moving slowly now, climbing over several speed bumps.
“You see,” he began, his voice low. “Two weeks ago we were inside Tac HQ — tactical headquarters inside Sambisa. Around 2am, some of our boys were on alert, but most of us were sleeping. Our mumu sergeant major was smoking, listening to sermon. And, next thing, we hear gbom!”
The sound the soldiers had heard was that of a fragmentation bomb lobbed into the bunker that was the tactical post. The group had only just arrived there and were still constructing a full trench defensive position. When he opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was the moon, the room suddenly awash in its glow. Next, a dozen flashes of bullets crashing against the walls.
One of his comrades had died, his head nearly shot out of his neck and hanging by a chain of bone and sinew against the wall. Luckily for the soldier, he’d been sleeping directly behind a stack of sandbags not yet fully added to the trench’s parapets. They fought for nearly three hours before the remaining terrorists fled, the sound of their motorcycles trailing into the night. It was only then, after the rumbles could no longer be heard, that the officer discovered he’d been wounded. One of the bullets had hit him in the chest just below his neck.
He pulled down his shirt and I saw the healed wound — a scar still bearing faint marks of its stitching. The bullet had pierced cleanly through the “bulletproof” vest he wore — the new one the Nigerian army had issued them.
“It was fake!” he cried, his fist in the air, his eyes reddening. “We are out there fighting — out there dying like fowl! But our government supply us fake bulletproof!” Under his breath, the officer was cursing the politicians, Nigeria. “E no go better for all of them!”
He pulled me again towards him as if unaware of the force of his arm around my neck.
I sat wondering what I had provoked in him, wanting only that the man forget that I had asked any questions. But then he said in a quieter voice, “Don?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Write your book . . . write it.” He put his face between his palms. He was sobbing.
I wanted to say something, but I was stunned with fear.
“Don,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Sambisa is hell . . . hellfire. Pray that nothing can bring people like you there. If na me be you, I will remain in that US jeje. I will not even come back here at all. I will not —”
His phone was ringing — a Nokia sound familiar to me from when I had a similar phone. The soldier shifted in his seat, shouting “hello, hello!” A man in the front seat began speaking, but the soldier cried, “Shut up there! You no see say I dey phone?”
He strained to hear what the other person on the phone was saying. “Raise your voice, I no dey hear you . . . I no hear! . . . service what . . . ehn? . . . say dem attack — ah, Janitor, Janitor . . . Janitor die? . . . Jesus!”
He struck the side of the wagon. I moved as close as I could to the woman on my other side, praying that the journey would soon end; that this troubled man would leave. My mind climbed into clouds of my own failures: though I had been disturbed by the rise of Boko Haram and its brazen attack on defenceless school girls, I had not paid much attention to it. Absorbed in my own world and living in the relative comfort of the US, I had not even contemplated the reality of men and women fighting these terrorists, let alone imagined I would meet one of them. I had been researching a brutal war that ended nearly 50 years before and that seemed only possible in the remote past. But here was a man around my age who was heading back into one.
The call ended on some promise to reach the front that same night for something that was to take place just before dawn. The soldier fell quiet. From Jos, he was to take a bus to Maiduguri, then from there into the Sambisa Forest — an expanse of grassy mountains where Boko Haram fighters were believed to be camped.
At the entrance to Jos city, the wagon pulled up on the shoulder and the soldier alighted. I tried not to look back as his bag was unloaded — a jute sack the shape of something long. I could tell at once that in the bag were weapons, perhaps a rifle. The driver put it on the ground, and suddenly there were quick movements. Through the back windscreen, I saw the driver stepping away, his hands poised in pleading posture.
“I fit off you now! I fit shoot you!” the soldier was shouting.
“Sorry sa! Sorry, officer!”
The driver continued pleading in his conciliatory voice until the soldier, hefting his bag on to his back, crossed the road to the other side, where there was another terminal with vehicles awaiting passengers.
The driver returned, blood on his face. What had happened? He had been beaten because he put the soldier’s sack on the ground.
The passengers all commiserated. The man at whom the soldier had shouted to shut up earlier cursed the soldier and called him a drunk.
“It is PTSD,” the man said. “What they are seeing there — in that place — is really hell. You just have to be careful with such people. He could have shot you.”
The driver nodded, accelerating.
“And even you,” the man turned now to me. “You don’t try to interview such people . . . It is dangerous. Anything can happen.”
For days afterwards, I couldn’t stop thinking about what could have gone badly.
I returned to the US feeling like a new world had opened within me, one fashioned by the collective testimonies of the Biafran war veterans I’d interviewed as well as the soldier. Each time the veterans spoke to me about their experiences, it seemed that I had relieved them of a burden. They often thanked me. Only the young soldier heading into an active war had been different. His face and voice were what I had in my head when I returned to my desk and reworked my main character from the ground up. And sometimes while writing in the middle of the night, I’d find myself drifting into vivid dreams of the soldier as he left the car that afternoon, carrying his rucksack on his back and a heavy black cross on his heart.
Chigozie Obioma’s novel ‘The Road to the Country’ is published on May 30 by Hutchinson Heinemann
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