I Don’t Remember The War

We watch him creep forward, his hands running across the wall, then stretching through the air until they touch the sofa. He bends slowly, careful of his body that has lasted him so long. Finally he is seated and we may greet him. We kneel, my mother and I. At ninety-five, if you live to […]

We watch him creep forward, his hands running across the wall, then stretching through the air until they touch the sofa. He bends slowly, careful of his body that has lasted him so long. Finally he is seated and we may greet him. We kneel, my mother and I. At ninety-five, if you live to see it, this is how you will be greeted even when you are blind and cannot tell if people are kneeling or not.
I’ve come to find out about the war.
“The Biafran War?”
“No the World War.”
He straightens and laughs like a boy, Peter Pan aged and forgotten in Lagos.
“They told us Hitler was going to come and make us all slaves. Black slaves for his blue-eyed Aryans. That’s how they got us to go to Burma.”
“No not Hitler. The First World War.”
He loses interest. He was only a baby then, born the year of the Armistice, he has
no memories of that war. I press. He remembers vaguely, someone else’s memory handed down to him, a bush telephone running from Calabar to the front in German Cameroon, wooden stakes driven to the ground, wires strung above them, the bush crowding in on either side threatening to swallow the messages relayed from the edge of the British Empire to the edge of the Kaiser’s Empire. That is all.
The room is silent. My mum on the other side of the long parlour is tapping on the screen of her iPad. She makes a leaving sign.
“There were the tall tales those rascals brought back.”
“Which rascals?”
“The veterans.”
“What did they say?”
“Nothing.Lies. Don’t want to tell the BBC lies.”
He chuckles. He has written for the BBC before, when he was a student in London. He needed the money.
“Wrote them some nonsense.Picture postcard tripe.‘Life in Nigeria.’”
There are still traces of England in his speech, his clipped pronunciation of “absolutely not,” when I plead with him for one tall tale. Just one story. He is enjoying himself.
“Mariam,” he calls to my mother, “Your daughter’s wahala is too much.”
Yes, she agrees. My trouble is a lot. He knew my mother when she was a child, when her knees were close to the ground and she cried to be carried all the time.
There is something to be wondered at in the three of us in one room, seventy three years between the oldest and the youngest. He makes a great show but finally he capitulates. “But just one story.”
In England, it begins once upon a time, in Kenya, hadithi, hadithi, and in Nigeria, Alo o. The audience replies, alo.
There was a man, Baba Onifade, village drunk and ne’er-do-well. He counted the days in beer bottles, passed the nights in wine bowls, was soaked in alcohol from morning to night, his insides a constant ferment of spirits. He was married to Mama Onifade, long suffering and strong-armed, capable of lifting him from gutters and dragging him home to be doused in cold water. Throughout their village, Baba Onifade was known as the thoroughly useless devotee of Ogun.
Ogun, god of war in the Yoruba pantheon; the hunter’s god and god of all iron instruments: hoes, hammers, anvils, axes, mallets and machine guns.
One day, the King’s recruitment officers marched into town like a carnival, with drums and horns and cymbals, the soldiers oiled and shiny in their new kit. Baba Onifade was only half drunk that morning and by sun down, he had taken the King’s silver shilling and the King’s khaki uniform and the King’s leather boots but when he reached home and Mama Onifade began to cry at the sight of him, he realised something. He did not want the Kaiser’s bullet in exchange. It was a rather stiff bargain now that he thought of it, as stiff as the leather of his new boots that would take many miles of marching to break in.
The next morning, Baba Onifade went to consult the Ifa oracle.
“Ifa knows you are a soldier and you don’t want to die. Ogun will ask for a sacrifice.”
The sacrifice was not so heavy, Baba Onifade said to his wife when he returned home. A bowl of grain mixed with water to be thrown out of the window every morning along with a brief incantation.
“Tell your wife,” the oracle had said, “If she does this without fail you will return home to her bed and her arms.”
“Who said I want you in my bed?” Mama Onifade said. “Did you ask the oracle how I am going to get a bowl of grain every morning? I haven’t fed the children, you want me to throw food away.”
“So I should die? Mama Onifade I should die?”
Husband and wife glared at each other.
The next morning, Baba Onifade began the march to German Cameroon. It soon became apparent that he was not meant to be a soldier. He was often out of sync, his salute rising a fraction too late, his feet stamping attention in a rhythm of its own. At the front, his first instinct was to run from the bullets.
“Deserters will be shot,” they were told on their first day.
One afternoon, on a routine reconnaissance, Baba Onifade’s platoon ran into the Kaiser’s forces. They engaged the enemy, filling the bush with the steady drum of machine gun fire. They were outnumbered. Ammunition was running low. They would soon be overwhelmed. A sacrifice was needed. A soldier must stay behind, firing, while the rest escaped. No volunteers stepped forward.
“Well then,” the British officer said, red faced and fatigued, “We’ll cast lots.”
Lots, a method as old as Ogun and the cup of grain Mama Onifade had thrown out that morning. It fell to Baba Onifade to remain. The rest crept away leaving him manning three machine guns, then two, then one, then none until there was silence in the bush.
Baba Onifade looked for a token of Ogun. The iron! The iron of the guns. He placed the hot metal machine gun on his head and began to call on his deity.
“Ogun,” he said. “Ogun!Ogun!” He saw the god, running across a black sky, his white hunting dogs trailing behind him, in his hand a long iron sword, crimson with blood. The god stopped midstride and looked down to earth.
“Who is calling me?”
Onifade blinked and saw the Kaiser’s forces had surrounded him, all Africans except for a German officer, red faced and fatigued.
“Where are the rest?”
“Ogun!Ogun!”
“Take that gun from him. You three tie his arms. Shoot him deeper in the forest and bury him. Meet us back at base.”
“Ogun!Ogun!”
The Kaiser’s commanding officer waited until Baba Onifade’s arms were secured and then the Kaiser’s troops marched away. The three remaining soldiers led Baba Onifade deeper into the forest.
“Ogun!Ogun! Ogun!” he began to chant faster when they came to a halt.
“Gbe nu e dake.”
“You are Yoruba?” Baba Onifade said in shock.
“Yes and I am also a worshipper of Ogun. My wife is sacrificing daily for me to return home.”
“But how come you’re fighting for the Germans?”
“Whichever side you’re on, the matter is not our business.”
The man slit the bonds on his wrists.
“Disappear.”
Baba Onifade made his way back to base and for his bravery, he was kept in the kitchens until the end of the war. When he returned home, there were green corn stalks growing outside their window. Mama Onifade’s bed, despite many propositions, was still empty. She had not missed a single day of sacrifice.
“And that was how Baba Onifade survived the War. So really we have Mama Onifade to thank for this tall tale.”
“What happened to him afterwards?”
“The British treated the ‘native’ ex-servicemen rather well.” His mouth contracts.
“By rather well, I mean they made them labourers and prison wardens. That sort of thing. It wasn’t educated Africans that went to fight for them. The educated ones saw through all that propaganda. Well at least we had educated Africans. In German Cameroon they held the natives back. No education past standard six. No doctors. No lawyers. It was just one big banana plantation.”
“But surely there weren’t that many Nigerian graduates in 1914. Nigeria must have been one big palm oil plantation.”
“Mariam take this your daughter away. It’s time for my nap.”

* Chibundu Onzu is a Nigerian writer, she has shared her story as part of a collection of essays by writers from around the world, all under the age of 35 in the BBC World Service documentary: I Don’t Remember The War. Listen online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0239kqc