A gate twenty feet high screeched open to let our car through. In a fusty room redolent of bleach and, strangely, rosewater they stripped me naked, shaved me all over with a blunt razor. After, covered in cuts and bruises, I bled from scalp to groin and ankle.
I tried without success to wriggle free whilst one of them fiddled inside my rectum. What were they looking for? Fela’s missing saxophone? They yanked me onto the floor. I curled into a ball with arms over my head, screaming in the vain hope that someone senior would stop them. A boot connected with my head and I floated to the roof, looking down on my body my painfree bliss mingled with relief, sadness and pity at my beaten body until I saw to my terror that with each kick the body faded away, like a stain under the scrubs of a mop and in a few moments I would have no body to return to. I shrieked in panic uttered a, ‘Bismillahi,’ and promptly bumped down into my curled up body to be promptly engulfed in pain from another barrage.
They led me naked down a spiral staircase into a cell meant for one or two adults. It held eighteen. A blast of the stench of bodies unwashed for weeks, of fungating skin abscesses and of the shit bucket made me retch. Saliva gushed to my mouth. The orderly forced the steel door shut, casting us in darkness.
‘Wetin you do?’ asked someone with a sniffle.
A tired voice came from a next but one body. ‘You have to do something?’
‘Dem say I be student president so I must to know something,’ I said. They fell silent except for one man, a new comer too, who wailed all night. What had he done to deserve “dis kind double punishment oh”? His only sin was to sell rice at the market price but, param param, before he knew it, ‘den lock me for police station.’ He bought the rice with his own money. Were his customers not free to buy his goods or go their way? Was the government going to tell a footballer where to kick the ball? Doctors where to cut during operations?
‘Time to change position,’ said the leader of the room. How he told the time in the dark I don’t know but apparently they took turns in poking noses at a hole in the wall for some air. From where I was wedged it would take an death or an earthquake for me to get there and I remained wedged against the steel door, breathing recycled stale and escalating body odours.
The plaster peeling from the wall looked more appetising than the slice of stale bread offered us the next day. I passed and though dying of thirst but couldn’t bring myself to drink from the filthy mug passed around the cell over our heads. A portly orderly returned to take the mug, tossed me a green gown and led me down a narrow corridor. ‘Dr. True dey?’ asked the orderly when a heavily built woman opened the paneled door.
She made a sucking sound stood aside. The orderly shoved me into a huge room. At a vast table sat a fresh faced man in his mid thirties with squinty close set eyes peering through rimless square lenses. He had a square jaw, a tuft of hair on its right edge To the open neck of his baggy shortsleeved shirt dangled a six inch golden crucifix. Before him a stack of files rested between a sewing machine and a black Royal typewriter. I imagined him walking away with all the prizes from some foreign finishing school of torture. If it counted for anything there was no blood on the floor so they were probably not going to slaughter me like a ram. Hausa love songs played on a tinny transistor radio in the bay of a blacked out window. In the far corner a glass cubicle contained a metal armchair connected to all manners of cables and wires. Beside it pliers, scalpels, spirit levels, flashlights, blades and scissors, plugs, bulbs and knots of cables and a panoply of other equipment lay scattered across a rustic workbench.
Dr. True peeled open a turquoise folder, carefully turning the pages like an antiquarian would a precious manuscript. ‘Sorry for the delay, I’m checking on latest…your name oh yes Odemuyiwa, yes? Medical student eh, a colleague,’ he said, his voice lightening up but with an ironic lilt.
‘Yes, but I don’t know why I am here…’
The doctor whinnied and his upper lip curled up in a sneer. ‘To get at the truth, that is why…that is why they call me Dr. True, not so Mama Sunday?’
Mama Sunday half turned from the cubicle to eye me with ill will. ‘Why you are franking your face for me, ernh?’ she snapped. The trembling bright whites of her eye reminded me of the shivering yolk of a half boiled egg. Did the same Allah who brought forth our great heroines Nginja, Moremi, Cleopatra, Yaa Asantewaa and I might add my mum also
create this nasty specime
n? Why? For genetic and social diversity?
‘Sorry ma. Madam…ma…’ Some women prefer ma to madam.
Dr. True grinned and flicked his finger. Mama Sunday opened the door to let in a trio of muscular men in mufti. They dragged me into the cubicle, yanked my gown off and stood guard whilst Mama Sunday deftly strapped me to the chair and connected my nipples, testicles, armpits and other soft parts to a rectangular device with crocodile clips. Mama Sunday fixed a tight grille like chainmail armour to my chest. Those who say you always have a choice should try breathing in one of these. Ovoid labels showed that the machine came out of a collaboration between communist North Korea and racist Israel. I imagined our khakicratic government paying ten times the going rate for this sadist’s equipment. The men saluted and trotted out of the room closing the door behind them with a terrifying clunk.
‘Ok Mama Sunday, ready to calibrate? Yes?’
Mama Sunday made her sucking sound and Dr. Truth pressed a button on his desk. Photos of Eko Bridge on a rainy day appeared on the wall. Did I recognise this? Nothing controversial there. I nodded. Next he put up slides of Idiaraba students boarding the long Tata bus outside the Anatomy department in Yaba. I shuddered at the memory. Osteology, embryology, surface markings, histology. Again I nodded in recognition.
‘Mama Sunday good and stable electrogalvanic response, very good. Yes my friend?’ He sounded like a solicitous dentist. Slides of me at supper in the canteen and shooting the breeze outside the offices of the Medical Students’ Association offices followed.
‘Is that you in the photos? Yes or no my friend?’ asked the doctor.
‘Yes,’ I said, and began to relax. Maybe they knew I was innocent and were using me as a control for their equipment or experiment.
‘What of this?’ Several slides of me during the presidential debate with Seyi came up. ‘You don’t know that only a strong man can rule this Nigeria?’
I paused, horrified. Did they have spies on campus? Do these believers in the strong man think their elephant will never trample them too in the end? If you escape what of your loved ones? And when the strong man goes, dies or falls, how will they choose or know the next one? By his provenance, his birth, his myths or his deeds? ‘It is student talk.’ Who hadn’t gone a trifle over the top in the scramble for votes?
He put on a curious face as if he was hearing of one human one vote for the first time. Mama Sunday clicked a button. A photo of Remi, my anticipated crush, for want of a better description, came up. We were outside the female hall, she in a mauve frock handing me a receipt for some photocopying she did for me. The look on Mama Sunday’s face told me that anything I said could be used against Remi. I started to construct an answer but pain speared up my spine.
‘That one small,’ said Mama Sunday in reply to my gasps of pain. ‘Talk true…is it a list of trouble makers?’
Tears of pain and impotent fury stung my eyes. So this is how this lot got through the day, by the sadistic deployment of electricity and radiation? Was it any wonder we didn’t have reliable water and electricity supplies when our best brains worked down here underground converting human life into sand. Our Silicon valley. What will she tell her grandchildren when they ask what she did after the war? Yaro, that’s if they are allowed to be told that there was a war, stupid.
Dr. True clicked his fingers. ‘Oya don’t waste my time. You were in the war? Yes?’
‘Second battalion,’ I said. Better to admit it than try to weave a new story under duress.
‘So why you are making noise about Asaba. What about what the Biafrans did when they entered MidWest? Erhn?’ said Mama Sunday. Electric current tore through me. I smelled my scorched flesh and smoke rose from my charred nipples and chest hairs. My mouth was too dry to speak.
‘So you deny meeting Zakaria and Dimka? You think I don’t know that Dimka and Gowon are from the same area?’ asked the doctor, turning and projecting his voice as if to observers behind the blacked out window.
Mrs Jum Jum give me strength oh, but why was a coup always about kith and kinship, not about ideology, principle or policy? Because they had none, it was only about power, that’s why stupid boy. ‘We were planning a cultural weekend and Zakaria has materials in the archives…we were going to invite all the attaches, even from Dodan Barracks. Then this man Dimka came…I didn’t know…argh…’
I looked up to the ceiling but couldn’t for the life of me recall what I wanted to say. Mama Sunday pressed a button and the machine showered me in agonising prickly heat. But for the tight leather restraints biting into my arms the electric jolt would have shot me and through the roof. I felt a bone in my leg snap and must have passed out in pain but when I opened my eyes, the doctor appeared to be eating the same slice of biscuit. My ankle throbbed.
When Mama Sunday next pressed a button, the sizzle and hum from the cubicle faded and the lights in the room went out, casting us in almost complete darkness. The doctor cursed. ‘See what you caused, the thing has fused.’ Just then the main door croaked open. And a long head poked through. ‘Oga, no forget you get meeting.’ The doctor glanced at his watched and frowned. ‘Adjourn? Yes?’
I had a choice? Hausa love songs played on the transistor radio.
