Any Human Heart (50 page)

Isaac has gone on a two-week holiday back to the east. His parents live in a village near Ikot-Ekpene, an area that has seen a lot of fighting. News came back that the village had been liberated by the Federal Army and he wants to see if the family home is still standing. Most of the damage is done by indiscriminate bombing rather than artillery, and it is the Nigerian Air Force rather than the army that seems to draw the civilians’ ire. The air force has a couple of squadrons of Russian MiG 15s piloted by East-German and Egyptian mercenaries. I saw a row of them parked at Lagos Airport when I came back; tubby olive-drab planes with a gaping intake at the front like an open mouth. The joke going around is that the pilots have been told that legitimate targets can be identified by the red crosses painted on them. Hospitals were the air force’s prime target but now the Biafrans have painted over their red crosses attention has been turned to markets — also very easy to identify from the air. Incidentally, all this was the subject of my last
Polity
article. It created something of a stir, according to Napier, and he wants me to go down to Lagos to receive full accreditation from the Ministry of Information.

Lagos. Press briefing at the Ministry of Information. A smart young captain with an Oxbridge accent blamed this year’s exceptionally rainy rainy season for the Nigerian Army’s lack of progress. A Polish journalist told me that a Super Constellation flies into Biafra every night packed with weapons and ammunition. They call it the Grey Ghost, and its deliveries are keeping Biafra alive as the heartland slowly shrinks. In fact the Biafran Army has never been better armed and supplied and now there’s so little territory left to defend the troops are highly concentrated. When he was asked about starving women and children, the young captain denied there was any malnutrition — all Biafran propaganda, he claimed.

I spend the night at the airport hotel, the Ikeja Arms — I’ll fly back to Ibadan tomorrow. I like this old hotel with its big dark bar filled with off duty aircrew and stewardesses. They provide that little hint of raffishness that the transient always brings to watering holes like this. Add to this a tropical night, copious alcohol, a nation involved in a civil war — I almost expect Hemingway to walk in.

A distraught Simeon came to see me and said that he’d received news from home that Isaac had been taken by a Biafran Army recruiting patrol. They are drafting anyone they find into the army — they’re not fussy. ‘Anyone with a penis will do,’ Simeon said. These men are given a few days’ basic training and are then sent to the front. He asked permission for leave to try to find him: I told him he could take my car.

Later. Change of plan. I’m going with him. I was taking the 1100
⁷
down to the garage to fill it up with petrol for Simeon when the idea came to me. Here was my chance for a
Polity
scoop. So I filled up and stuffed three extra jerry cans in the boot. Then I went to the bank and drew out 200 Nigerian pounds and returned home to tell Simeon the new plan. I painted PRESS on the windscreen of the car in whitewash and bought a small Nigerian flag that I fitted to the radio aerial. We set off tomorrow, before dawn. We’ll drive on back roads to Benin and then head down the Niger River delta to Port Harcourt and then circle round as close to Ikot-Ekpene as we can reach. I calculate it’s about a 400-mile drive, all told — about two days on Nigerian roads. In Nigeria time and distance have a different relation to each other than elsewhere. For example, it’s about a hundred miles from Ikiri to Lagos but one allows four hours for the journey: a dry-mouthed, hyper-cautious, nerve-racking drive on the most dangerous highway in the world.

Benin. Hotel Ambassador-Continental. Benin was captured by the Biafrans in 1967 on their blitzkrieg drive west in the early days of the war, the only time they managed to seize great swathes of Nigerian territory. I remember the panic even reached the university: Dr Kwaku had a slit trench dug in his garden just in case of air raids. The incursion didn’t last long but the Biafran Army at one stage was only a hundred miles from Lagos.

In the bar of the hotel I watch news footage on Nigerian TV. Federal forces occupy a Biafran village. Big men with guns — bigger in their uniforms — push around tiny skinny men in tattered vests and shorts.

The drive here was pretty uneventful and we were only stopped at one roadblock. I showed my accreditation papers, my pass and said ‘Press’ to the young soldier leaning through the window. He said, ‘BBC?’ I nodded and we were waved through. Clearly the magic word. I don’t think ‘Polity’ would have the same ring.

Simeon explained to me that he was against the war because he’s not an Ibo. He refers to it as ‘the Ibo war’. He is an Ibibio — they speak a different language from the Ibos. So too do the Efiks and the Ijaws, the Ogoni, Annang and many other tribes all subsumed under ‘Biafra’ by the dominant Ibos. They don’t want to be part of Biafra, Simeon said. They don’t want to be the wives to the Ibo husband.

Simeon is sleeping in the car and I have a room on the third floor overlooking an empty swimming pool. The hotel is busy, full of different nationalities, and most of them aren’t soldiers — Russian engineers, Italian contractors, Lebanese businessmen, British ‘advisors’. I asked a burly-looking Englishman about reaching the front and he said there was no front line, just a series of roads heading for Biafra with soldiers on them. When you could hear gunfire or the soldiers wouldn’t let you proceed further you could assume you had reached the front.

I had some chicken and rice in the dining room and returned to the bar for a final beer. There were a few drunk Federal Army officers with their girlfriends. I took a sleeping pill and went to bed.

We came through Warri and skirted Port Harcourt. A lot of military traffic on the road and also the bizarre sight of an ocean-going yacht on board a tank transporter — some brigadier’s loot, I suspect, going back to the marina at Lagos. Following Simeon’s directions we left the main road at Elele and headed vaguely eastwards. At Benin we had been told that Ikot-Ekpene had been recaptured by the Biafrans and that the front was now on the Aba-Owerri road. Simeon said that if we could reach Aba he would make his own way to the village by bush path. We had one tricky experience at a lonely roadblock where young soldiers, beer heavy on their breath, ordered us out of the car, waving their guns theatrically. I gave them some money and cigarettes, which calmed them down, and they told us that the other journalists were at the Roundabout Hotel near a town called Manjo, just south of Aba. We arrived at the Roundabout Hotel at four in the afternoon. When I stepped out of the car I could hear the distant thud and mumble of artillery somewhere to the north. Simeon slipped off his clothes, down to a pair of shorts, and said he would leave straight away. I gave him some cash and he set off up a bush path jauntily enough, I thought. I think he was pleased to be doing something — and this was home to him, after all. I told him I’d wait for three days, if possible, then I’d have to head back.

I checked into the Roundabout and was provided with a mean, insect-infested room of unpainted concrete. The single bed has grey nylon sheets and the electricity is very erratic. The hotel sits to one side of a half-finished roundabout, hence its evocative name. One metalled road comes into this roundabout and the same one leaves. Other junctions that would have given the roundabout a real function have yet to be created. Not far off is a supply depot for the troops who are either retaking — or consolidating their hold — on Ikot-Ekpene. The bar of the hotel, occupying most of the ground floor, is lit with purple and green fluorescent lights and is populated most hours of the day by a dozen or so bored prostitutes with afro hair and very short skirts. From time to time one of these girls will haul herself to her feet, shuffle over and listlessly proposition you. It’s hot in the bar, most of the roof fans don’t work, but the beer is slightly chilled.

At about 8 o’clock this evening, a jeep pulled up and deposited the two other journalists. One was the Pole I’d met in Lagos — Zygmunt Skarga — and the other was a lean, twitchy Englishman with long blond hair and mirror glasses. He was obviously put out to see me there and immediately asked if I was working for
The Times.
When I said
Polity,
he seemed to relax — ‘Good mag,’ he said. His name is Charles Scully. We drank some beer and talked. Scully has been inside Biafra and seems to have a disciple’s reverence for Ojukwu,
⁸
Zygmunt was more circumspect. He made the point that it’s all very well to secede but if you’re going to take 95 per cent of the nation’s oil with you there’s bound to be a fight. Scully became quite heated at this point — Nigeria was a false nation created by Victorian surveyors drawing arbitrary lines on a map; Biafra had tribal and ethnic integrity that justified its claim for independence. Here I threw in Simeon’s point about the other tribes not wanting to be the wives to the Ibo husband. This made Scully considerably more riled and he asked me, quite insultingly, just how long I’d been in Nigeria. When I said four years his belligerent tone modified somewhat — he’d been in the country for six weeks.

I went with Zygmunt this morning to interview Colonel
‘Jack’
Okoli, the self-styled ‘Black Lion’ of the Nigerian Army who was leading the assault up the Aba-Owerri road. He was a handsome, fit-looking man with a thin matinée idol’s moustache who never removed his sunglasses. He wore two automatic pistols on his belt and suede knee boots and possessed the massive self-assurance of all military commanders on the brink of victory. I asked him if Ikot-Ekpene was under his control. ‘My boys are mopping up,’ he said. He was full of talk about the ‘chaps’, the ‘fellows’, the ‘guys’. Zygmunt told me that Okoli had shipped back enough consumer goods to fill a fair-sized department store. Colonel Jack predicted the war would be over by Christmas. I wonder how many military men have made that boast through the ages.

Listless afternoon at the Roundabout Hotel sitting under the ceiling fan that worked, drinking beer and watching army vehicles negotiate the redundant roundabout. I spoke to a young prostitute whose name was Matilda. She suggested we go upstairs to my room. I said it was too hot and I was an old man. She told me she could provide me with a potion that would make me hard like a stick. I gave her a pound and bought her a Fanta. I asked her what would happen when the war was over. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Everything will be as it was before.’

Scully told me that inside Biafra ‘Harold Wilson’
⁹
was a curse, a swear word. He had heard a dying child muttering something familiar and had gone over to her to hear what was being said. She was mumbling ‘Harold Wilson Harold Wilson Harold Wilson’ again and again. She died with his name on her lips, Scully said, adding: can you imagine having that on your conscience? He had written personally to Wilson to let him know how hated he was. Not even Hitler achieved the status of being a swear word, Scully said. I was about to say you couldn’t equate Harold Wilson with Adolf Hitler but it was too hot for an argument. Scully is violently opposed to the UK government’s support for Nigeria, so much so that he’s writing a book about the war and Britain’s role, to be called
Partners in Genocide.
I wished him luck, I said, speaking as a fellow author. He was patently amazed to learn that I was a published novelist. ‘I even knew Hemingway,’ I threw in, to see if it would have any effect but he wasn’t impressed. That fraud, said Scully. He asked me if I’d ever met Camus. Alas, no, I had to say.

Zygmunt said he was going up to the front with Okoli tomorrow and we were welcome to come, but Scully said he was returning to Lagos. He says he’s going to Abidjan in the Ivory Coast and is going to hitch a ride on one of the supply planes that fly into Biafra each night. You should come along, Mountstuart, he said, give you some decent material for your next novel. I begged off, said I was waiting for a friend to arrive.

Zygmunt and I rode in Okoli’s jeep up the Aba-Owerri road. Colonel Jack was wearing a bush jacket and a beret with a scarlet cockade, and still resolutely sunglassed. We stopped at a battery of guns and watched them firing into the bush. Then we drove on past columns of troops plodding north up the road. We came to a village, which seemed deserted, but Colonel Jack sent his men in to flush out what remained of the population, mainly women and children. They seemed very nervous and ill-at-ease, standing with heads bowed as Colonel Jack lambasted the black devil Ojukwu and congratulated them on being liberated by the Nigerian Army. He pushed a young girl forward towards me and Zygmunt. She had a baby on her hip, big-bellied and moon-eyed, a dozen flies grazing on the snot that ran freely from its nose. She speaks English, Colonel Jack said. Zygmunt asked her if she was pleased that the Biafran Army had been expelled from her village. ‘Something must be done,’ she said, ‘to keep Nigeria one.’

We lunched with Colonel Jack under an awning he had had erected by the side of the road. Folding garden furniture was set out and we ate curried beef and yam, washed down with Johnnie Walker whisky. Colonel Jack had been at Sandhurst and quizzed me about parts of London he had known, casinos and defunct nightclubs he had patronized as a cadet. He asked me if I had ever been in the army and I said, no, the navy, the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve — in the Second World War. ‘What rank?’ he asked. I told him and he referred to me as ‘Commander’ from then on.

After lunch we motored on up a laterite road until we came upon two Saracen armoured vehicles and about a hundred soldiers sitting on the verges, all with bits of vegetation sticking out of their helmets and intertwined with their webbing. This was the furthest point of the Federal Army’s northward advance on the southern front, Colonel Jack said. Then he conferred some way off with a captain, who was accompanied by two machete-wielding civilians, after which he threw a temper-tantrum for our benefit, bellowing at his men, calling them bloody damn fools, terrified women, insects who deserved to be doused with pesticide. The Saracens started up, the men rose wearily to their feet and the column moved off up the road towards the rebel heartland once again.