Season of Anomy by Wole Soyinka

Author:Wole Soyinka [Soyinka, Wole]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

to damn: read the asymmetric lettering.

The board was nailed to a tree, an arrow by the same amateur effort pointed like a barbed monkey tail along a deep furrowed road, two deep tracks and a middle weed-covered hump.

Ofeyi braked, reversed and re-read the sign. “Must mean Dam. I thought we were close to the Shage project.”

“Do we want to see it?” Zaccheus’ voice was justifiably querulous.

“It may clean my mouth completely of that last encounter.”

“I doubt any work is being done at the moment.”

“No. But the works will be there. I only want to see something our men from Aiyéró have helped build in Cross-river, something to reassure me that all that is happening now cannot add up to zero.”

The monkeys seeing a sudden erratic motion of the car cancelled their escort service, wheeled about and vanished into the forest, dispensing bare-gummed maledictions to the last.

The high-wheel base of earth-removers had created the hump; it threatened to suspend the car and leave the wheels dangling. Ofeyi took a set of wheels onto the hump and the other rode on the shoulder. The forest closed about them, ominously still and silent. Zaccheus voiced his fears.

“Listen man, suppose there are some of these wild villagers about?”

“We are not recognizably from the scapegoat town” Ofeyi assured him.

“But how will they know that?”

“The cicatrice on your face. Why else do you think I reconciled myself to your coming with me. Those horror scars have become our protective talisman. We can move at will.”

Zaccheus thought over this for a long while. “Look, I agree it all sounds okay to you. Only as I keep telling you…”

“Don’t worry. I don’t take foolish risks. Before you made your way back I had already worked it out. If you hadn’t showed up I was going to come anyway, taking a driver with huge tribal marks.”

Zaccheus resigned himself to Fate. “All I know is the scapeclan has expanded to cover just about everyone who doesn’t speak their language. Don’t tell me in this wild outpost…”

“It is not a wild outpost Zaccheus. This is the one place the animals could not touch because the union was strong. They had a meeting here and they decided to suspend work at the first sign of victimization.”

Zaccheus’ face grew rounder with suspicion. “What are you keeping from me man? How come you know so much?”

“I don’t know all that much Zack. Only that we did manage some work before the bloated Corpse exploded. New projects like the Shage Dam meant that we could start with newly created working communities. New affinities, working-class kinships as opposed to the tribal. We killed the atavistic instinct once and for all in new ventures like Shage.” He saw Zaccheus’ bewildered gaze, and he knew he was about to resume the old suspicions. “You helped too.”

Zaccheus exploded. “Leave me out of it. I knew nothing of it and I don’t want to know.”

“Well you did suspect. And more than once. But you helped. Remember

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