No Way But Gentlenesse by Richard Hines

Author:Richard Hines
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-09-25T04:00:00+00:00

One evening a Nigerian waiter brought a paraffin lamp to my chalet and told me I was the only guest staying in the chalets at the Government Rest House. So early next morning I was surprised to hear English voices and occasionally an African woman’s voice talking earnestly as I walked across for breakfast. Sitting around a table in the restaurant were Ian, my boss, and another Englishman I didn’t know, who to my surprise had a Nigerian wife. Wondering what had prompted them to leave their homes and meet up here so early I walked across to join them. As I sat down, the man I hadn’t met before said in pidgin English: ‘Plenty palaver.’

Confused, I looked at him, then he told me that last night a mob of northern Nigerians, who were from the Hausa tribe, had roamed the town searching for eastern Nigerians from the Igbo tribe. And that they’d found six Igbos, dragged them out of their homes and killed them. Ian butted in, saying if the mob had come anywhere near his bungalow carrying their flaming torches and machetes he’d have come out with his double-barrelled shotgun and blasted a barrel over their heads. And if that hadn’t stopped them he’d have blasted the other barrel into the mob before reloading. Turning to me, Ian then said: ‘You’re lucky they didn’t make it up here.’

‘What?’

He told me the mob were on their way to the Government Rest House to search the chalets for more Igbos to kill, but that when they were a couple of hundred yards or so away, the police had managed to turn them back after persuading them there were no guests staying in the chalets.

There was one guest staying in one of the chalets fast asleep and unaware. Me.

Pointing at me, the Nigerian woman began to laugh.

‘Look at his face,’ she said.

I was terrified, as I imagined what might have happened: being woken by voices; the door crashing in; being dragged out of the chalet; the seething resentment against arrogant white expats being directed against me by machete-wielding men in the light of flaming torches.

That afternoon Ian needed to go to the bank in Potiskum. I went with him, and as the Land Rover inched along behind a herd of bleating goats, he filled me in on the recent events which had led to last night’s trouble. He told me there had been retaliatory massacres earlier in the year against eastern Igbos, when Igbo plotters had killed northern leaders in a government coup in which General Ironsi, an Igbo, had taken power and become President of Nigeria. Through the windows of the Land Rover we could see, plastered on the mud walls of flat-roofed buildings, posters of Colonel Gowon, who had recently taken over as President in a counter-coup. Nodding towards one of the posters, Ian told me he had been surprised by last night’s massacre of Igbos in Potiskum now that Gowon, who was from the northern region, was in power.

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