22 February, 1945.

As Allied forces battled imperial Japan for the island of Ramree, Dan Udoffia was walking home with a friend, Akpan Etuk, 9500 kilometres away in Ikot Okoro, a small town in present-day Akwa Ibom, Nigeria. They were going to tap palm wine near a river when, according to Akpan’s testimony, a leopard sprang from the bush and attacked Udoffia.

When Udoffia broke free, the men ran to the local court compound where Udoffia collapsed from his injuries. Okon Bassey, a court messenger and Udoffia’s employer, arrived on the scene and moved the wounded man into his home. Udoffia died there the next day. Frederick Kay, District Officer (DO) for the Ikot Ekpene division1, read of the incident in the Nigerian Eastern Mail2.

MURDER AT IKOT OKORO - LEOPARD ALLEGED

Leopards, or human leopards as some suspect, have been waging a relentless war on the people of this division, particularly those living in Ikot Okoro Area. Again and again the people have appealed to Government for help. They have wailed for a long time, but no help has been forthcoming. Day after day reports are made of loss of several lives due to the ravages of these ferocious animals. Nobody knows what Government thinks of this state of affairs.

Recently the house boy to Court Messenger Okon Bassey was attacked and killed while on his way to tap palm wine near a riverside. The people are like sheep without a shepherd.

Nigerian Eastern Mail, 10 March 1945 (Pratten, The Man Leopard Murders)

Human leopards? Maybe Frederick Kay knew of the infamous Sherbro leopard murders in Sierra Leone when he launched an inquiry into Udoffia’s death3. Akpan, the sole witness, swore in his initial statement that he saw a leopard attack his friend. An autopsy, however, concluded it was a human using a sharp instrument that had inflicted the fatal injuries.

Speculation flourished. Kay heard rumours that Okon Bassey, Udoffia’s employer, was a member of a feared cult, ekpe owo, which used Idiong charms to transform into leopards and kill. The Idiong is a traditional diviner in Annang society, roughly analogous to the Igbo dibia or Yoruba babalawo. Despite similarities in name, ekpe owo (leopard men) was distinct from the ekpe society (leopard society). The ekpe society was a fraternal society that had thrived for centuries in South-Eastern Nigeria and Cameroon. The society enforced laws, maintained internal peace and even supervised trade4. Ekpe owo, however, was a cult allegedly motivated by ritual bloodlust5 as much as the manillas6 they charged those who hired them as assassins.

As Kay investigated Udoffia’s death, an informant claimed to have heard Okon arguing loudly with Udoffia over a land debt before the attack. Another informant reported that Okon had taken Udoffia’s wife and tried to sleep with her after the burial. When questioned by police, Okon’s senior wife gave a contradictory statement that finally broke Okon’s alibi and implicated him in Udoffia’s death. Okon Bassey appeared in court on 27 November 1945 on a murder charge and received the death sentence two days later. The Crown prosecutor was a certain young lawyer named Barrister Louis Mbanefo7.

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Udoffia’s murder put the authorities on alert. By the end of 1945, 36 active investigations were in progress, and many more murders were reported as the work of ekpe owo. Sometimes the victims were mutilated—severed limbs, missing hearts, flesh taken from faces or necks. Many victims were women.

Etuk Ebere was killed on her way to visit her daughter in September 1945 (This newspaper mentions her death). Adiaha Akpan Udo was returning from the farm along with seven other women when she was ambushed and killed. A man was killed for felling a sacred ndêm tree and selling it to Christians. A young girl was beheaded by her father, who confessed he did so to make potent charms. On 20 November 1945, villagers in Ikot Akam found the dead bodies of four women. Three more women died two days later, this time at Ikot Essiet.

By January 1946, there was a “total collapse of law and order” in the leopard area, the collection of towns and villages in which the murders occurred. There was no laughter from little children hard at play to quicken the humid afternoon air, and trips to farms had to be made in the company of several others. In hushed tones, villagers discussed rumours of powerful chiefs collaborating with the leopard men, rumours of severed tongues, arms and breasts in raffia bags smuggled to buyers in Ogoni land.

Frederick Kay felt the murders undermined colonial authority, which makes sense because a government draws legitimacy partly from its monopoly on violence. In January 1946, Kay asked the government to impose the Peace Preservation Ordinance8 on Abak and Opobo Districts. The ordinance allowed authorities to arrest suspects arbitrarily and hold them for up to a year, besides other egregious violations of personal liberty. The imposition of the ordinance in the region amounted to an admission of failure by a government that was still looking for a central motive for the murders.

As I read Pratten’s book, two questions gnawed at me.

Puzzle #1: Why were the victims usually women? The motives in many of the investigated cases were usually marriage-related (divorce, jealousy) or debt-related. Economic uncertainty from falling oil palm profits, the growing influence of Christianity and tensions from indirect rule in the Eastern province widened fissures in domestic life and gendered relations in colonial Annang society. Human labour was crucial to their agrarian culture, and labour needs were often met by marrying multiple wives. Child betrothal was commonplace, but the government saw it as a form of “covert slave trade”.

Divorce-related suits dominated the native courts’ caseload. Although native court reforms granted women more freedom to divorce their husbands, crafty husbands also brought spurious divorce suits against wives they were tired of. Divorce customs at the time required a woman’s parents to refund the full bride-price, which was often an onerous thing to ask simple villagers years after they had probably spent all the money.

Yet, the native courts were controversial even in their time. Warrant chiefs, indirectly supervised by district officers such as Frederick Kay, heard cases at these courts. Besides being wildly corrupt, these warrant chiefs often had no traditional basis for authority. The recognised leaders in the community did not draw their authority from a collective mandate of their people, an unfortunate fact that plagues Nigerian politics even today.

People also mocked the native courts for their lenient punishment. A native court might give a thief six months in Abak prison, whereas the more “effective” traditional punishment was a vigorous beating and public shaming in the market square. In summary, native courts lacked legitimacy in the eyes of the people.

So, a possible explanation for Puzzle #1 starts with situating ourselves in this atmosphere of judicial frustration, where economic and marital pressures led to divorces, and husbands or bride-giving families took matters into their hands rather than rely on the slow and often confusing court process.

Puzzle #2: What purpose did the idiom of the leopard serve in these murders? It might have been easier to poison one’s victim using a well-known toxicant like partially processed cassava roots. Why did the killers have to invoke leopard imagery at all in such gory murders?

Let’s situate ourselves once more in the rural society of the 1940s and consider a 60-year-old adult in an Annang village. Such an adult would have grown up in a pre-colonial community organised around traditional institutions and customs that provided a stable lens through which they could view their world. Children joined their age grades and aspired to progress to the next; parents enquired about the bush souls9 of prospective husbands to ensure compatibility with their daughters; old men poured drink with their left hand to ward off evil spirits and sought the favour of benevolent ones using libation from the right hand.

By the 1940s, the entrenched colonial government and growing Christian influence would have subverted all these traditional institutions. Our fictional person would wake one day and find one leg on either side of a widening schism. It is hard to describe the damage this revelation does to one’s spirit and the broader collective psyche of a community. We know of the material cost of colonialism. I think there is also a violence the colonised mind does to itself to rationalise its condition, a sort of mental autophagy that is just as ruinous.

As such, I think leopard imagery in these murders channelled traditional myth and lore in a violent protest against the advancing world order. Viewed in such a light, the murders are almost a conservative movement, one that sought to invoke in the people’s imagination a time when power/justice was swift, merciless and of the gods.

On 5 January 1946, a large police force moved into the leopard area, established police camps and imposed curfews on the villages. Five days later, Chief Mbodi’s daughter-in-law was killed near one of the new police camps. As in many other cases, the police suspected a personal motive and arrested Chief Mbodi for the murder. He was later released because of insufficient evidence for a murder charge.

A major challenge for investigators was the lack of solid evidence and witnesses. They moaned that ekpe owo had so terrified the rural population, and the fear of retaliation was so great, that it was hard to find people brave enough to testify against suspects. By the end of 1946, the number of murders investigated rose to 157.

On 12 January 1947, villagers found PC Evan Chima’s body by a bush path near Ikot Obon Akam. Chima was an officer involved with the leopard murder investigations so his death was seen as a direct challenge to the colonial government. One suspect arrested for the murder confessed that he sold mutilated body parts from previous murders to Idiong diviners, who used them to prepare powerful charms and other medicines.

The police rejoiced. They had long theorised that the murders and mutilations were done to meet ritual demands of the Idiong divination cult. The suspect’s confession finally gave them the “proof” they needed.

The government had long seen the Idiong sect as hazardous to colonial authority. In general, British administrators were paranoid about influential secret societies, as they could covertly mobilise the native population against colonial rule. For example, government consensus in the aftermath of the 1929 Women’s War was that only a shadowy Igbo secret society could have coordinated and mobilised women to protest across the region so quickly10.

The suspect’s confession gave the colonial government the perfect pretext to move against the Idiong divination cult, and move they did.

For weeks, officers compiled the names and locations of every Idiong diviner. On 24 February 1947, the government outlawed the Idiong cult. Three days later, the police mounted surprise raids on over 300 shrines. Officers detained hundreds of diviners in the camps and destroyed over 1000 shrines by the end of the week. It mattered not that the police eventually found no solid evidence in any of the raided shrines that linked to a murder.

Meanwhile, police took four suspects to court for Chima’s murder. The trial began on 27 November 1947, but the sitting judge concluded that police fabricated part of the suspects’ written confessions; he acquitted all the suspects. The judge’s name? Justice Adetokunbo Ademola11.

In summer 1947, the Ibibio Union delegated 36 chiefs on a peace-keeping tour of the leopard area. Its stated purpose was to appeal directly to the native population and curb the murders. The delegation held over 80 meetings attended by 213 villages and 65,000 people in May, June and July 1947. Besides hearing public grievances in each place they visited, the 36 chiefs also made each village swear mbiam, a ritual oath, that they would neither join nor aid ekpe owo.

…the ceremony started with the burying of a palm frond (àyèì) across the road leading to the village, after which an elephant tusk (nnûk éníìn) was blown three times. Salt, sand and water from the village were mixed and poured over the buried palm leaf. Villagers then walked across the buried palm leaf in order to undertake the ‘solemn agreement’ that they would not join or hide ékpê-ówó.

- David Pratten, The Man-Leopard Murders

Usen Udo Usen, secretary of the Ibibio Union, was part of the delegation. He released a report at the tour’s end that agreed with the government’s view that the ritual demands of the Idiong diviners had contributed to the murders. Usen’s report caused an uproar. The union’s official stance was that the government’s ban on Idiong was unjustified, and the union was actively lobbying for its reversal. After Usen refused to retract the report, the union expelled him from their ranks and banned him for life.

During the union’s tour, John McCall, District Officer for Opobo division, looked into the murders with his assistant, Dennis Gibbs, and concluded that real leopards were killing people. They posited that “too many leopards were hunting too little game in the area”. To test this theory, they organised a leopard hunt and trapped several leopards, including a “7-foot man-eater” caught in the same area where a double murder of a man and woman had occurred just 2 weeks earlier.

McCall wrote to the government, insisting that they had “hanged the wrong men” for various murders and that it was real leopards that were attacking people. The government responded by relieving him of duty and posting him back to Lagos.

But our friend, Usen, was not quite done. In 1948, and without union support, he launched another “leopard area” tour. He found a stronger mbiam and made the villagers swear stricter oaths to neither aid nor abet the ekpe owo. It is ironic that although he strongly supported the prohibition of Idiong, he used the same “fetish” tools in his oath-swearing.

Akpan Eto, son of Chief Ukpong Eto, was one of those who swore Usen’s new mbiam. Both men were widely suspected of being members of ekpe owo, especially as Chief Eto was a prominent Idiong diviner before the government’s ban. Akpan died two weeks after taking the oath. Usen’s reputation soared, and tales of his powerful charms spread throughout the region. Remarkably, apart from a single death in 1948, the killings stopped.

Usen shows how people at the time navigated cultural schisms and straddled both colonial and traditional modes of understanding. An educated clerk, Usen surely aspired to British values and ideas of propriety. But he also knew that the colonial investigation was a futile attempt to establish truth and justice through the alien machinations of Crown prosecutors and written confessions. Usen knew, perhaps subconsciously, that truth in his land could only be established by “testing” (ndómó, to test and see), that mbiam was mightier than the gavel.

According to Pratten, many who remember the events of 1945-1948 claim it was Usen’s mbiam that finally stopped the killings. Usen himself, mere months after his infamous solo tour, died in Enugu. The police suspected poison.

The final tally at the end of investigations in 1948: 196 murder investigations, hundreds more murders that were never investigated, 96 convictions (all men) and 77 people hanged in what is possibly still the largest police investigation in Nigerian history.

Was it shape-shifting leopards, or maybe actual leopards? Colonial records insist there were no leopards and that the murderers were opportunistic men who cloaked their bloodlust in the garment of ancient folklore.

So was the entire ordeal just an extreme case of mass hysteria as the people of South-Eastern Nigeria grappled with economic and cultural anxieties during and after World War 2? Mass hysteria that became a self-fulfilling cycle of death, suspicion and fear; restless men waiting for their wives to return from the farm at dusk; nervous mothers searching for their children who had strayed too far from the family compound in play.

And, come night, doors and windows shut tight as the restless bush creeps closer, glowing eyes piercing its swirling darkness; silent figures crouched low in the ferns, placing a careful paw in front of the other.

David Pratten’s extensive research on the murders, “The Man-Leopard Murders,” was an invaluable resource. I recommend it to anyone who wants to go beyond my sweeping outline.

"My name is Enejo," Enejo said to the four other women seated on mats in her tiny living room. "I will take you to Atani for afia and bring you back."

She told them about the Nigerian officers stationed at Atani who would look the other way for the right price. She mentioned the fifty-kilometre trek that separated her home in Eziora from the schoolyard in Atani that served as the market grounds. The Nigerian currency redesign in 1968 excluded coins; Enejo offered to exchange any Biafran pounds they held for Nigerian shillings at no cost. She told them of the risks, too. The women would have to travel for hours through isolated forests where any number of things could harm them: trigger-happy and lascivious soldiers, hunger, thirst, unexploded mines, and disease. If the women were scared, they did not show it. As she spoke, the flame from the candles that illuminated their circle threw shadows on the otherwise rapt faces of her audience.

"We will leave tomorrow morning," Enejo continued, "Do you all have your passes?"

All but one woman produced passes, browned and softened from numerous foldings, which the Ministry of Interior issued to enable blockaded civilians to cross beyond the frontlines and into Nigerian territory. Enejo handled the passes gently and inspected each, comparing the printed name and face to each woman who had handed it to her. Erinma. Martina. Adaego.

"I don't have a pass," the fourth woman said in an even voice.

"How come?" Enejo asked.

"I did not know I needed it."

"This is your first crossing?"

The young woman nodded.

Enejo considered the matter. The passes were only helpful in getting past Biafran soldiers at the frontlines. But Atani was not on the frontline, having fallen comfortably into Nigerian hands a year prior, and no Biafran soldier had marched its grounds ever since Major Achuzie moved his battalion north an eternity ago – they were probably fine without the passes. In the worst case, Enejo could make arrangements to procure a fake pass, but that would delay their mission by a few days by which time the last Nigerian trader would have already left.

"What is your name?" Enejo asked the young woman.

"Kainene," she said.

Kainene fought a losing battle, and only with immense mental effort was she able to marshal her thoughts away from the people she left behind. She was ashamed of the abruptness of her departure, but that shame was dwarfed by an acute longing for her family's company, to sit in their midst and absorb their warmth. Olanna would undoubtedly be outside this minute searching for her, quizzing everyone in the refugee camp and the local militia. There was something else, too: a nagging fear. Had she been too rash in deciding to make the journey herself? Mrs Muokelu, who had plenty of experience in these journeys, could have easily organised something on her behalf. But Kainene knew she would be deeply uncomfortable with someone else risking their life to procure salt and fish for her. Still, her unburdened conscience could not assuage the fear that hers was a hollow bravery, especially when conversation eased between the women and they exchanged stories.

Erinma had narrowly escaped when Onitsha fell. She had fled with her daughters-in-law and grandchildren to Obosi where the shelling was less intense. It was there she met Adaego. Adaego was the quieter of the pair, only grunting in disgust when Erinma narrated the razing of the market in Onitsha which exacerbated the famine. Together, they began monthly afia missions to purchase desperately needed goods and resell them to the remaining civilian population. Erinma and Adaego's partnership was so successful that they soon amassed a moderate fortune as salt and palm oil suppliers, establishing slow but reliable supply lines that reached as far as Nkwerre.

Kainene learned that Martina was there in the crowds which welcomed Victor Banjo into Asaba in 1967, and Martina was also there in the town square a few months later with her husband and infant daughter dressed in akwa ocha and singing One Nigeria before all the men and boys were separated. She never found her husband's body. She fled with her infant daughter to Port Harcourt to live with a cousin who was an officer stationed at Kidney Island. She told them of the day the shelling started in Port Harcourt, a day that Kainene herself witnessed. But hearing someone else describe the deep tremors in the earth that followed each exploding mortar made Kainene's memory feel alien and unreliable, as though her memory was wholly imparted from secondhand recollections and as if she had not seen the severed head of Ikejide, her former steward, incarnadine the bottom of the raffia bag in which it lay.

Martina did not explain how she escaped from Port Harcourt and the events that eventually led her to this tiny living room in Eziora. The other women did not ask for an explanation, not out of indifference but an acceptance of the discrete nature of time ever since the war began; a recognition that time and memory, beyond a certain threshold of grief, will fragment into pieces that organise themselves around bright, violent vignettes that resist erosion and are sustained by their joyless effulgence.

Enejo knew these vignettes well. Three days after Nsukka fell, a breathless deserter who had fought alongside Chuma, her husband, stood bare feet on her verandah and told her that Chuma had died in defence of the town. She allowed herself only a few hours of grief before returning her attention to their infant daughter, Jachi. That joyless light endured until it was subsumed by an even brighter one. On a hot afternoon 10 months later, Jachi held up her hand and showed Enejo where a nail had pierced her skin. Jachi had just turned four but was already known as an exuberant and playful child, so Enejo was not unduly worried. Maybe she will finally stop her rough play, Enejo mused. She rinsed Jachi's injury with water, and then they had dinner together as they had done every night since Jachi's first day on Earth. 

The fever and spasms started a week later – violent spasms that contorted Jachi’s body for minutes and left her gasping for air afterwards. There was nothing the makeshift hospital in Eziora could do. 

"Sorry ma, but we don't have any medicine for tetanus here," an apologetic nurse told a wailing Enejo. "Take her to Orlu. Look for the Holy Ghost Fathers. Maybe they will have treatment." 

But the child's body could only bear so much. Jachi passed the following day before Enejo could carry her to Orlu, and a hundred supernovas exploded in Enejo's universe. Their blinding light bleached the artefacts of Enejo's world, drained their colour and unified all palettes under an anaemic standard. Onitsha, Enugu, and Port Harcourt had already fallen. The people of Eziora now whispered of Nigerian forces massing across the Niger and an imminent invasion from the West, an invasion that would eventually reach Eziora. In response to this threat, a few villagers hatched a plan and sent their fastest messenger, Mmesoma the carpenter, to Nzam on a special mission.

Mmesoma returned to Eziora two days later with an old Igala man who was blind in both eyes and had no teeth. The old man was among the last surviving traditional healers in Nzam and was rumoured to be 115 years old. By this time, those who could leave Eziora had already fled deeper into the interior; the only people left in Eziora were the old, sick and stubborn. Enejo belonged to none of these categories. She could not bring herself to leave the home that contained the memory of her child's laughter within its walls. She was not stubborn, she was weak.

But when the old man steadied Enejo's head with a coarse palm and retrieved the hot knife from the kerosene stove, a new strength filled Enejo’s veins. Enejo did not flinch when he placed the blade on the right corner of her mouth and sliced a path towards her ear. And again. And again. Some blood got into Enejo's mouth. Enejo still did not flinch when he moved to the left side of her face and repeated the process. The man dropped the knife and, without wiping the blood, pressed a hot piece of metal firmly against the open wounds; Enejo's vision blurred as she swayed under the weight of the pain. The smell of burnt flesh filled the room. The man soaked a piece of cloth in a bowl of saline and then cleaned the dried blood around the cauterised scars that sat like shallow gullies on her face; three on this side, three on that side.

Enejo did not know it then, but she had already accepted flux as a condition of war and impermanence as a necessity. She had already made peace with a reality in which there was no future beyond surviving the next day, hour, and second. The Nigerian forces eventually crossed the Niger but halted their advance at Atani, content to sit out the war as part of the economic blockade. They never reached Eziora. Enejo and the other villagers who tried to disguise their identities through the facial scarifications of the Igala would now carry forever those permanent reminders of the impermanence of their lives.

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The women rose early the next morning. The night was in its final throes, pitch black ceding to dark blue. They fastened their wrappers and scarves, filled small bottles with water and counted their shillings in the weak candlelight. Two routes led from Eziora to Atani. The simpler option was the main road that connected Eziora to Atani. The unpaved, dusty road could hardly accommodate two vehicles abreast but presented only a four-hour journey for anyone on foot. The second option, favoured by Enejo, was to trek through the forest. The women who had gone before her had carved a narrow path through the thick vegetation of neck-high grass, lofty teak and palm trees. The journey would take seven hours this way. Still, Enejo found this an acceptable trade-off for an additional layer of stealth, for travelling by the main road would expose them to soldiers, not to talk of vandals and other opportunists. Enejo led the women to the path's entrance at the edge of Eziora and ushered them in, placing one assured foot in front of the other.

Just one more, Enejo thought. Just one more then I’m done. There was an Anglican grammar school situated close to the centre of Atani. Its classrooms and courtyard had stood empty ever since the first Ilyushin bomber swooped down and strafed the town. The school was now the unofficial meeting ground for Nigerian sellers and Biafran buyers who were allowed to meet once a month after the venal officers stationed there were adequately compensated. In Enejo's last two missions, the officers had demanded almost double the usual bribe. The price of goods was rising, too; women parted with expensive wrappers and precious jewellery only to secure a beer bottle cap's measure of salt. The sellers knew very well that the buyers had no alternatives. So Enejo decided this would be her last time coming to Atani. She had learned of a new location near Ikang where Cameroonian traders with reasonably-priced goods were present three days a week. Just one more then she would be done.

Two hours into the journey to Atani, Adaego had broken into a song. Although the other women did not join in, they were all grateful for the trembling falsetto that reinvigorated their spirits and made them forget the punishing sun and the little insects that orbited their heads. The familiar sounds of Eziora had long yielded to the forest's vegetal silence. Dry branches reached for each other across the dry path which had been compacted into barrenness by the numerous women who had made this journey before them. The forest was alive, and their gaze did not linger on the parched bushes surrounding them, for it was shifting, following their progress. The forest path had sharp turns and was so narrow that they had to move in a single file in some places. Kainene remained mute. The initial adrenaline she felt had ebbed into tepid wariness. She rooted herself outside the warmth of Adaego's song and refocused her mind on the objectives of her mission: The refugee camp sorely needed gauze, disinfectant and fresh bandages. However, Chiamaka, who had already experienced the loss of a friend to kwashiorkor, needed stockfish or powdered eggs to prevent the same fate. Some thread would be nice, too, and Kainene was certain Odenigbo would deeply appreciate it if she returned with a cigarette containing real tobacco.

As it often did, Kainene's mind reached for the family she had left. She imagined her return to Orlu. On that first night back, she would hold Richard tightly and ensure she was alive to him in a way that would have been impossible if the last three years were merely a bad dream. He had stayed with her throughout. She would love how his face flushed as he ate anything even moderately peppered. She would read all his articles, and laugh at his wry humour. She thought of her sister. It had been two days since Kainene left Orlu; would Olanna still be searching for her? The war had stripped them to bare elements, scoured away their old lives and the parameters of interaction they thought were inviolable. They were forced to stand unadorned in each other's presence and rediscover a base vulnerability. Kainene wanted more than anything to sit with her sister once more. No words needed to be spoken; simply sharing the same space was enough.

But a searing resentment pierced through Kainene's longing. She had neither asked to fight a war nor asked to be strong. She resented a world where faceless people three times removed could hold such power over you, where they could command you to be strong and then ask you to move on when your strength no longer pleases them. Kainene understood that one day after all this was over, she would have to shed her skin, coerce the growth of a new one and hope that her scars would not survive the moulting. But what was the basis for this hope? She thought of Ikejide and his headless body which continued sprinting until it collapsed; there was no respite even in death.

Many decades later, Adaego, feeble in old age and now blind in one eye, will describe the events which occurred next and insist that the vultures appeared first, their wings almost touching as they circled overhead. But Erinma will consistently dispute Adaego's recollection, insisting to whoever was listening that, in fact, the gunshots came first and the vultures appeared much later. However, they would both agree on the sudden charge that filled the air moments before these events unfolded. A damp and restless breeze that did not soothe, as though the air itself was burdened with a secret it thought too dreadful to share.

Enejo and Kainene were walking in front of the other three when two bullets split the air and struck Kainene, one in her left shoulder, the other close to her heart. A third bullet struck the sand by Enejo’s left leg and kicked up a small cloud of dust. The gunshots startled a flock of waxbills perched atop a nearby tree, sending them scampering in a soft flutter of wings. Kainene staggered backwards, her eyes wide as her eyebrows formed an incredulous arch, sceptical that the spreading purple patch on her blue shirt was truly fueled by her blood.

All sensations drained from Enejo's world except for a shrill ringing in her ears. Her tongue turned to lead. She was vaguely aware of Adaego screaming something at her, but she was watching Kainene who had now fallen to her knees, her eyebrows still in a surprised arch. Enejo would remember for years the soft sigh that escaped Kainene as she hit the ground. The sort of sigh that would prelude an admonishment from a tired mother to a balky infant. Erinma and Martina were already moving, kicking their sandals off and diving for the bushes.

Enejo turned in the direction Kainene was facing and saw them. Ninety yards ahead of where she stood, four men, all wearing faded khakis, emerged from the bushes on either side of the path, their faces blackened by what Enejo guessed was charcoal. One carried a gun, the others wielded machetes. She could also make out the faint but unmistakable emblem on their sleeves: a rising sun. Enejo had heard of these men, guerilla squads of Biafran vigilantes and leaderless conscripts who operated deep in enemy territory. Kainene collapsed onto her back, blood seeping from the corner of her open mouth and watering the parched earth. Enejo faced the men who were now chanting sabo and sprinting towards her. The one with the gun levelled the barrel straight at Enejo. Time dilated.

I will look him in the eye, Enejo thought. I will look him in the eye, and then I will go to meet Jachi. Enejo felt a firm grip on her shoulder. She turned as Adaego started running for the bushes, dragging Enejo along with such strength that it forced her out of her trance. The three seconds it took to run into the bushes felt like an eternity. Erinma and Martina were already out of sight. Enejo felt a bullet strike the back of her left arm just below the elbow, but she felt no pain.

The women that Enejo guided across the frontlines and back could never understand her motivations. Enejo found a private pleasure in their confusion as she refused any payment after a successful afia attack. The people of Eziora were puzzled, too. Everyone knew her daughter had died before she started sneaking into Atani, so for whom was Enejo risking her life? The active speculation from all sides made Enejo lazy, for she became incurious about her motives. But when she watched Kainene's blood dampen the earth, Enejo glimpsed a clear distillate of truth. She finally understood that her courage was not rooted in altruism — no. She accepted that she began sneaking across enemy lines — 22 afia attacks altogether — because she hoped that one day she would not survive.

But now, as bullets crashed all around her and screams of sabo chased her, Enejo felt a strong desire to live, a desire that surprised her with its instantaneity and its intensity. She had entered this war as a whole human, flawed but complete, and after years of abasement, she was now only a fraction of her former self. She could not die now, not in this state. She resolved to live, to expand her shrunken core and reclaim the space that separated her body from her soul. Only then would she be ready to be reunited with her Jachi and Chuma, and not a moment sooner. One more and I am done, she affirmed as she ran. She feared her world would crumble when her husband died, but it did not. She thought her heart would turn to dust and the hopeless grief would cling to her forever after her daughter died, but it did not. The women forced their way through the tangled vegetation using arms and legs to clear the way, unable to distinguish the dull thunk of bullets striking bark and soil from the frantic pounding of their hearts.

Decades later, as a one-armed Enejo struggles to cut her 90th birthday cake to the cheerful singing of her children and grandchildren, the soft flutter of the fleeing waxbills will return to her memory. She will recall that she and the other women stopped running only when they could no longer hear the men in pursuit. Their swollen feet throbbed, and a thousand tiny cuts from the dry, sharp vegetation covered their bodies. Adaego ripped a strip of cloth from her wrapper and broke off a dry branch to improvise a tourniquet for Enejo. A pulsing pain spread from the bullet wound in Enejo’s left arm into her torso, but the bleeding was stymied for now. I hope this doesn't get infected, Enejo thought. They were crouched low in the elephant grass at the base of a bare teak tree, neither daring to speak nor swat away insects which explored their bodies for fear that their pursuers still lurked.

They could not have known that the vigilantes barely sustained the chase for five minutes before abandoning the hunt and returning to the original mission to lay mines along routes patrolled by Nigerian forces. They hid in the grass for hours until the sun set and the nocturnal forest orchestra struck its tune. Nary a cloud in the harmattan sky. As her family sings Happy Birthday, Enejo will remember that, bathed in the moon’s silver, the earth seemed incapable of violence; incapable of bearing witness to any violence.

The women began to retrace their steps. They moved slowly through the grass, one woman gripping onto the wrapper of the woman in front of her. Enejo led the column. The bent grass and broken branches were breadcrumbs which led them back, eventually, to the forest path on which Adaego's song had filled them with hope just a few hours earlier. Enejo will remember how beautiful Kainene looked, even in death. It mattered not that vultures had descended to gouge her eyes and dig holes into her soft belly. The women did their best to arrange Kainene's limbs without breaking her bones, for her joints were already stiff. They moved her off the path, straightened her clothes and covered her with broken branches, dry leaves and grass. As they turned to face the direction that would lead them back to Eziora, Enejo’s cheeks glistened with tears from a soundless cry.

As for me, I have roamed the desolate landscape of past and future and revisited these valleys continually. I remember the aching fear that seized me as I lay dying on that dirt; I am no longer afraid. I remember the bright timbre of my sister’s laughter and the warm breeze of my lover’s breath on my neck; I will always cherish it. The telling is now done. I will go now to join the others that have gone before me, their familiar and strange faces, equally discarnate and unmoored from the passage of time, equally lonely in that place which is no place at all.

In 1971, two British filmmakers flew to Paris to make a documentary on James’ life as a writer called Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris. When filming began in earnest Baldwin’s attitude changed. He declined all questions and even denied them permission to film him. He simply refused to cooperate. In one scene, Baldwin and the filmmakers stood before the Place de la Bastille, a memorial for the French Revolution. After increasingly heated exchanges as Terrence, the director, tried to determine the source of Baldwin's uncooperativeness, Baldwin finally confessed. “I cannot speak to you,” he said. “I need to speak to someone who can understand.”

Of all the ways to describe a person, starting with their eyes might be the most trite. Yet I find it hard to think of any other way to describe James Baldwin without first mentioning his large eyes (those pupils wide and dark as udara seeds sucked clean!) that shined with a moist glisten, as though he was eternally on the verge of tears, and in other moments seemed to disappear deep into the ridges of his flesh whenever a gap-toothed smile crumpled his face. Part of me secretly wished for him to break down in tears in any of the recorded interviews; the tension was unbearable.

The unbounded nature of words on paper invariably compels a writer to stray out of the familiar (or unfamiliar) space of their body and into the wider world, into other people and other problems. But what is this astral effort in service of? Does the writer use the exterior world to understand their own lives better, or do they turn to their internal experiences to unravel the mystique of society? In any case, Baldwin The Witness was deeply aware of his place in the world. He spoke frequently of his responsibility to the wretched of the earth for which he was spokesman and confessor. Baldwin knew he was in the unenviable situation of being one of a handful of black people who had a voice in the middle of the 20th century.

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He served as a witness to death in its various forms. The 2017 movie, I Am Not Your Negro, detailed the particular devastation Baldwin experienced after the deaths of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Byron De La Beckwith shot and killed Medgar, an activist and close friend to Baldwin, right in his driveway. All-white juries found Byron not guilty of the murder on two separate occasions. It was not until 1994 that the case was reopened at the insistence of Medgar’s widow, and the killer was finally found guilty by a majority black jury. Byron was sentenced to life in prison at the age of 71. Baldwin, despite his role as witness, did not live to see this belated justice for his murdered friend. Byron died in prison at age 80; Medgar was 37 when he was killed. Malcolm X was killed at the age of 39, as was Martin Luther King; Baldwin was present for all three funerals.

He also witnessed the intangible death of dreams. By the time Baldwin published, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, in 1985, the USA lay tense in its post-civil rights era bed, the Apple Macintosh computer had spent a year on the market, and people had accepted racial integration as a self-evident truth. But Baldwin was deeply suspicious – even critical – of integration and viewed it as a deviation from the original goal of desegregation. Desegregation, in its original form, would have allowed the black people of America to preserve the parallel institutions they had built from scratch and refined over the centuries-long othering endured at the hands of white power the moment the first slave alighted onto the wet plank of a Virginia port. Black Americans had established alternative financial institutions, cooperative societies, farms, schools, churches and neighbourhoods. Desegregation would simply outlaw the barriers that artificially separated the populations.

On the other hand, integration was coloured by a fatal belief in the malleability of human love and that it was possible – by legislative means – to stretch the heart of the white majority and create space for their darker siblings. But laws and amendments can only do so much. It is one thing to outlaw discrimination, and it is another thing entirely to arbitrate yourself into acceptance. Integration, it was argued, was not worth the effort. Firstly, whiteness was a thing that was created to be as different from blackness as possible. Trying to compel white people to accept their darker siblings was futile because that meant that the white identity would have to be dismantled. Secondly, integration caused black Americans to abandon their parallel institutions so much so that the only one that has survived until now is the Black Church1. I suspect that the Black Church’s endurance comes from the fact that the black and white populations in the USA use Christianity to achieve very different goals (The same occurs in Nigeria, but I will revisit this in a future essay). Figures like Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey were vocal in their opposition to integration. Baldwin himself asked pointedly, “Is it worth integrating into a sinking ship?”

A striking aspect of his recorded interviews is how often he alludes to his failure. Baldwin’s artistic output was for humanity; I am certain he would cringe at being labelled a black writer. Yet, he was well aware that precisely the same people who would have benefitted the most from hearing his message were the same ones who would refuse any such understanding. They go by many names: White Capital, the World Order, the Ruling Class, or any such designation that elevates some groups at the expense of others who are relegated to the bottom.

I have not written anything substantial to earn the ignominy of being called a writer, but in the short period in which I wrote fiction, I was crippled by a fear of not having anything to say and not finding the right ways to say it. But this dilemma is simpler than that which faces one whose writing scales those initial hurdles only to be confronted with a mind impervious to persuasion, or, even worse, moral responsibility. So, why did he persist? Perhaps the answer is in his relationship with those he described as the wretched of the earth. He was aware of and accepted the responsibility to “witness” for these people. And I believe Baldwin was much too proud a man to shirk that responsibility despite the measure of failure that was guaranteed to come with it.

I call him proud but I never met the man. I often wonder who exactly was the man Baldwin, familiar yet distant as he was. We cannot call him a revolutionary writer. In his words, “I am just a writer in a revolutionary situation.” Critics accused him of selling out and even becoming a tool for white oppression, especially in the later years of his career. We cannot call him a fearless civil rights legend but he did give a voice to its spirit. He was a preacher who ended up vehemently denouncing religion. His friends called him Jimmy. He once had a romantic relationship with a 17-year-old Swiss boy. He was prone to colourful and expressive speech littered with obliquities that teased an audience towards a truth he seemed to have already reached. He was a very Homosexual and very Black man and endured a two-pronged social stigma as a result. His stepfather once told him he was the ugliest child he had ever seen.

Standing in front of the Place de la Bastille, his eyes still wet despite the biting cold, Baldwin seems small and exposed. Behind him rises a monument to a specific type of liberation, formidable in size and in the number of lives sacrificed to secure it. In front of him, several British men, frustrated at his uncooperative spirit, ask him why he ignores their questions as he wonders how the imagery of the situation is lost on them. Later, in another scene, Baldwin is finally cooperative and speaks to the filmmakers indoors. He wears a simple tweed jacket and appears to be freshly shaven. Terence, the director and interviewer, asks Baldwin what he thinks of the people who say Baldwin is there in Paris because he has escaped.

  “What have I escaped from?” Baldwin asks, a smile crumpling his features. “Where, anyway, in the world can a black man who is fleeing escape to?”

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