MICHAEL HEY'S

TALES FROM WARRI

I N D E X

Dateline Warri, Nigeria, 20 March 2003

The Day that Eric became a Muslim

It is February in Warri, midwinter and the hottest time of the year. The temperature is in the low thirties and the humidity in the high nineties. The windows of the battered Peugeot 306, a model assembled in Nigeria under license, are shut and the air-conditioning is humming, vainly, but at least it keeps out the stench from the Warri roads, the overpowering, cloying mixture of rotting waste that lines the streets and piles up between the containers and wooden shacks and the sharp acrid fumes billowing from the exhausts of the buzzing Okada (small 125cc two stroke motorbikes that weave recklessly between the vehicles carrying passengers from one part of the town to another). Within the containers and wooden shacks brightly clad local citizens offer wares for sale that range from fresh fruit and vegetables to vehicle spares and rusting scrap components filched from Oil company storage yards.

My driver is Eric. Eric is always smartly dressed, his shirt fresh and laundered, his jeans scrubbed spotless, his feet encased in open leather sandals. He is twenty-nine years old, married to a lovely young woman with a smile as sweet as honey. They have three pretty young daughters that showed up some weeks ago at Cindy’s farewell.  They were beautifully turned out in party frocks with coloured ribbons tied to spikes of hair that stuck out from their skulls like electrodes.

Eric is gloomy. I can see creases of worry across his face. His concentration on the traffic is wavering; we are crawling along in a go-slow. I am sitting in the back, behind the front passenger seat. This is where the ‘Oga’ (the boss, the big man) sits. Anyone looking into the car will see I am the boss because of my position.

“Eric!”

No response

“Eric!” I nudge him.

“Wa’ dat?”

“Eric! Don’t go to sleep!” I said, reminding him of one occasion when he actually did fall asleep at the wheel in a go-slow.

“I not sleeping now” he says

“Then what is the matter? Are you sick?”

“I not sick”

“Then?”

“It is de burial of dat my father-in-law”

“Your father-in-law?”

“Yes, him”

“But Eric, he died last year didn’t he?”

“He die in November, he die from heart attack, he fifty years old.” The last with emphasis on the fifty, as though fifty was close to creaking senility.

“Why is he not buried yet?”

“We mus’ get de moneys together. It is too much money to bury him.”

“What?”

“He from a big family, we will have very big ceremony. I mus’ pay for de funeral.”

“Eric!  Where is his body now?”

“In de mortuary”

“It’s been lying in the mortuary since November?”

“Yes – o”

Grisly visions in my head. I recalled a long conversation I had had the previous year at Murtala Muhammed airport in Lagos. I was sat on an iron bench next to the Shell Nigeria doctor, Loes Van der Velveheeven; we were waiting for boarding time on the KLM flight to Schipol.

“They never bury their dead during the rainy season in Warri,” he said, “Because the water table is so high that the grave fills up and the coffin will not sink. I watched one funeral where three men stood on the coffin to try and get it to stay underwater but it kept floating up before they could bury it.”

“So they embalm the bodies and keep them in the mortuary?”

“Ja! And they have these protracted funerals so it can be months after the death before the burial.”

“I cannot imagine what the mortuary must be like”

“It is horrible. Gott! I have been there! I went in late summer. There were three bodies in every drawer, piled on top of each other, then there were bodies piled up on the floor of the mortuary, then out the door and along the corridor, piled so high, then almost spilling out the front door into the yard and dirt outside.”

“Are the bodies not wrapped up?”

“Yes, but the cloth is torn, you can see feet, hands and arms sticking out! Gott!”

I snapped back to the present.

“Eric?” I asked “Eric, has your father-in-law been at the mortuary since he died?”

“Yes”

“Do you not have to pay the mortuary to keep the body?”

“Yes. I pay dat de mortuary every day for dat.”

“How much do you have to pay?”

“It cost two hun’red Naira for one day”

“Two hundred Naira per day?” I repeated, quickly doing a sum.. “Six thousand Naira per month?”

“Yes-o”

I was silent for a moment. Eric’s gross salary was only twelve thousand Naira per month (about U.S. $ 120.00). There was no way he could afford the mortuary fees.

“Eric, how can you pay that?”

Eric was quiet. Then; “I hav’ to borro’ the money”

“And why should you pay? Did not your father-in-law have some sons as well as a daughter?”

“He have five sons, but they not working, some jus’ school chill’en.”

“I think you should become a mortuary manager Eric. With all the bodies they have he must be making a fortune.”

“Too much money”

“And how much will the funeral cost?”

“Dey is canvas, den dey is de bands, de food, chairs, tables, drinks, costum’, preacher..it wi’ cost too much..”

“How much?”

“At leas’ one hunner an’ fifty t’ousan Naira.. more..”

I winced. That was more than twelve months gross earnings for him. I had been to a local funeral once. The ‘canvas’ - awnings to shelter from sun or rain - extended to cover three or four hundred chairs laid out in rows, and tables that were laden with great steaming tureens of jollof rice, pounded yam, starch, ebba, plates of do-do, roast chicken, cow meat, saucepans bubbling with fish peppa soup, egussi soup, ogbonna and plates of snails, roast grub and suya. Other tables held bottles of Maltina, stout, fanta, coca-cola and the highly favoured sweet white non-alcoholic sparkling wines. As night fell the crowds gathered and the seats filled up with relatives, friends, families all dressed in bright traditional costumes, then the bands arrived, three of them, raucous, competing in a shrill disharmony that battered the ears. Then the dancers wriggling lithe bodies into an ever increasing crescendo of movement until the chief mourner, a young woman dressed all in white joined them, perspiration streaming down her face and then the guests would go up, in small groups and plaster her with money so that she disappeared behind a rainfall of grubby twenty and fifty Naira bank-notes that fell behind her to the ground to be collected and placed in plastic buckets by her attendants. The ceremonies had apparently lasted until dawn. I left before then accompanied by the friend from Schlumberger who had invited me. I never saw the body, but somewhere in the heaving throng it had appeared in the back of an old estate car and the coffin had been slid out and buried in a plot of waste land nearby.

“Eric! You cannot afford all that on your own. You must get some of his relatives to share that cost.”

“Mebbe I can do dat.” He replied

“Eric, why do you have to go through such an elaborate and expensive ceremony? You know at my home funerals are generally simple affairs and if the family can only afford a small funeral then that is all it is.”

“If I don’ have big funeral den all my family and my village not talk to me. Dey excise me. I mus’ do it.”

I could see his dilemma. The local culture, which it seemed to me favoured lots of small local suppliers, insisted on grandiose funerals.

“Well, Eric, why have you waited so long? I mean every day costs you money at the mortuary.”

“But de family of dat my father-in-law say before I can bury him I mus’ pay my dowry.”

“What??!”

“Dey say dat before dey will let me bury him I mus’ pay my dowry.”

“So, Eric, you got married to your lovely wife but you have not paid her dowry yet.”

“No”

“Why not?”

“Because I had no money den, an’ we wanted to get married, so I owe de dowry to the family my father-in-law.”

“Goodness. How much is the dowry?”

“Dey wan’ forty t’ousan”

“Anther forty thousand Naira?” I said, shocked

He nodded glumly. But by now we had reached the end of the go slow and crawled up to the ‘T’ junction at the intersection of Airport Road and the Warri-Sapele Road where we were to turn right before reaching the bank, my destination. This junction is known variously as ‘confusion junction’ or ‘malfunction junction’ because the traffic follows no rules other than trying to squeeze into any gap. It was the cause of the endless go-slow. Eric was silent as he scraped the Peugeot through and suddenly free onto a wider carriageway.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

I came out of the bank and back into the Peugeot, my mind filled with Eric’s mounting debts.

“Eric, you are going to be in debt for years trying to pay all that money off.”

“I know” he replied, his gloom deepening, “Dese funerals too much Naira.”

Silence for a while as we returned to malfunction junction to retrace our journey back to the camp.

“An,” he added, sinking into almost total depression, “My mother-in-law still alive, and her brother still alive and my father still alive..  but dey all sick.. and mebbe soon dey will die.. one by one..”

Eric, I thought, all you can see ahead of you is years of penury paying off funeral debts..

“When we get back what will you be doing for the rest of the day?” I asked, as much to change the subject as to check if anyone else had booked him from our team.

 “I mus’ take Assem to shopping.” He said

Assem was a lecturer with strict religious observances. He had earned the respect of everyone by his courtesy and manner.

“You know Eric, it is part of Assem’s religious practice that when someone of their faith dies he or she must be buried on sacred ground within twenty-four hours.”

There was silence from the front. The traffic eased and Eric shifted into third gear, our speed increased to twenty, then thirty kph. The perspiration on the back of my shirt dried out as the car cooled down inside.

I glanced up at the rear view mirror and I noticed a relaxation spread across Eric’s furrowed features.

“I know what I do.” He said, “Tomorrow I make all my chill’en Muslims, den I make my wife Muslim, den I become Muslim! ……I will as’ Assem.” He resolved and added “Den I save all de funerals expenses”

© Michael Hey; All Rights Reserved

Dateline Warri, Nigeria, 22 February 2003

Basil and the Flying Corpse

It was early one week in June of the millennium year and finally the month long strike organized by PENGASSAN, the union for the company's middle management, had fizzled out.  In fact by the previous Friday the pickets had departed and many persons were returning to work. This meant also that lecturers could leave the camp during the day without fear of being prevented to return by angry PENGASSAN activists lounging at the camp gates. It was also safe for me to return to my office and it was there that I was when Basil came in.

He sat opposite me peering at me with his owl-like expression.

“I cannot mark de Belbin tests for de new intake,” he began with his precise, measured and very clear diction.

I must have raised my eyebrows. Basil recoiled slightly. “Why not, Basil? You know how important it is to get these marks out quickly”

“It is my chest.”  He explained, “My chest is very sore”

“Oh?”

“It is severely bruised,” and he coughed a little cough to demonstrate,

“And I cannot lift my arms for very long ...”

“Unfortunately Basil, I am not a doctor,”  I responded, “So I cannot prescribe a cure ... but what happened?  Have you have been up to some adventurous nocturnal perambulations?”

Basil giggled but he was clearly in pain.

“It is because de steering wheel hit my chest,” he said between gasps.  

I looked at him. ‘He has had a car accident’, I thought – not surprising – I had once been a passenger in Basil’s car. A vehicle of Japanese make, but indeterminate vintage, the various major components of which jiggled independently of each other as it proceeded crab like along the switchback roads of Warri. In fact I recalled the last time I had seen his vehicle it was in a ditch, having failed to negotiate a sharp bend.

“You had a car accident?”

“I had an accident,” he began in his chatty way .., “I decided that after several weeks of enforced confinement on dis Edjeba camp I would take a run out in my motor car, round de express, and meet with my fren’ at DSC.”

I nodded.  DSC is the Delta Steel Corporation, a fully functional steel mill that was built and commissioned in the early 1980’s, designed to produce up to two million tons of steel per annum. After about four years of operation it had produced a grand total of five hundred and fifty thousand tonnes of re-bar and strip and was then mothballed because there were insufficient funds to pay for essential maintenance.

DSC stood at one end of the expressway, referred to as De Exprezz, a dual carriage roadway that forms the curve of a ‘D’ that encircles Warri; river and swamp form the upright of the ‘D’. At the opposite end of the D stands the Warri refinery, one of four in Nigeria, the products of which are mostly smuggled across the borders to neighbouring countries.

“Oh dear,” I said.

“It was on Friday, when I was goin’ to see my frien’ at DSC.”

“You said that ... you had an accident ...” I reminded him.

“Very serious one.” 

“What happened?”

“I was travelling along the express towards DSC, then suddenly dis ...”

“What speed were you doing?”

“About one hundred ...”

“Everyone goes fast on that express ...”

“Den dis ambulance just came across from de side and drove de wrong way towards me on the road ...”

Not an uncommon occurrence, dual carriageway was rare in Warri and local drivers always took what they perceived to be the shortest route between any two points.

“An ambulance?”

“Yes, it had come all the way from Benue State and I don’t think he knew the roads in Warri very well.”

“From Benue?  Don’t they have any hospitals there?”

“No, you see it was carrying a ...”

“But how did it come at you?”

“I think he was trying to get into my lane from the other side.  He just came right in front of me and I hit him.  Then my chest hit the steering wheel.”

“You were wearing a seat belt?”

“Yes, but the speed was much.”

“It was the fat that saved you ... “ I said

Basil laughed again, broke down into giggles then doubled up in pain ...

“Sorry Basil, I don’t mean that, you are no fatter than I.”

“It is alright”  he wheezed, his mouth contorted between a grin and a grimace.

“Was anyone else hurt?”

“Only de corpse.”

“The ... corpse?”

“Yes, de ambulance was carrying a corpse from Benue, I told you, to be buried in Warri.”

“Oh”

“De doors opened from de ambulance and de corpse came flying out!  Den it hit de road and rolled along until it hit a tree!”

“Well I guess it died twice.”  I said.

... but unaccountably this reduced Basil to paroxysms of mirth interspersed with paroxysms of pain and he collapsed wheezing and crying onto the floor in front of my desk, unable to reply.

© Michael Hey; All Rights Reserved

Dateline Warri, Nigeria, 26 January 2003

Invasion of De Spiritual Force 

On Tuesday 5th February I began to feel unwell.  I left work early, cooked a fried egg sandwich and at 17:30 lay, dozing on the sofa.  Ann-Marie called at about 20:30 and after that call I noticed the room beginning to sway.  I went to bed and fell into a heavy sleep. 

At about 23:30 I got up and could hardly stand.  The bedroom was moving round in slow circles and I had developed a high fever.  I focussed unsteadily on the telephone book and dialled 122, the emergency number for the Shell clinic on the camp. 

"Dis Emergency Clinic..  who dat callin'?" 

"Michael Hey..  I am at.." 

"Who?" 

"Michael Hey..." 

"What yo' name?" 

"Michael Hey..  I am at.." 

"Hey? Dat yo' name?" 

"Yes" 

"Spell it.." 

"H..  E..  " 

"H..  e..  WHAT??" 

"H..E..Y..  Hey" 

"Hey?" 

"Yes" 

"Wah' de matter?" 

"I am dizzy and feverish, I think I may have Malaria.." 

"Dizzy?" 

"Yes" 

"You want ambulance?" 

"Yes.  Please send the ambulance.." Nausea was filling my throat..

  "Wheah yo' callin fro..?" 

"6 Tolofa, I am at 6 Tolofa.." 

"WHEAH?.." 

"6 Tolofa.." 

"Siss? Siss? Wheah?" 

"Tolofa" 

"Siss?" 

"Yes, SIX.." 

"Spell dat!.." 

"S...  I...  X..." 

"Six..  Yo' at Six?" 

"I am at Number Six Tolofa, the road is called Tolofa..." 

"Six Tolofa..  wheah dat?" 

"On this camp, Ogunu, the same camp where your clinic is.." I was becoming exasperated, demons were whirling in my head..

  "Is dat RA (Residential Area) or IA (Industrial Area)?..."

  "RA..RA."

  "De Ambulance comin'"

  I put the phone down, my head was spinning, I staggered down to the toilet and was violently sick, I became drenched in a cold sweat, I returned to the sofa and dropped down.  After about ten minutes a vehicle turned into our little drive.  I went to the door, the same nurse who answered the telephone steered me into the ambulance.

  "You sit on de seat? Or on de bed?"

  I looked at the bed and chose the seat.  It was high backed and firm.  She struggled with the safety belt..

  "We are only going a short distance, inside the camp, do not worry about the belt.." I gasped.

  She called the driver round to the back to help.

  The belt was jammed; they pulled it, wriggled it, beat on the back of the seat and suddenly it was free.  It hung loosely about my shoulders.  The Nurse filled in a questionnaire, took my blood pressure, which by now was stratospheric and the ambulance took off with a jerk.

  The nurse then sat beside and began to murmur; 'Sorry, I be sorry-o, sorry' over and over whilst simultaneously stroking my head and shoulders as though I were a pet dog going to the vet..

  * * * * * * * * * * *

  I counted every sleeping Policemen, all fourteen of them, as the ambulance, a variety built without suspension bucked and jerked its way round to the clinic.  I alternatively sweated and chilled.  With a final grinding of unsynchronised gears we reached the entrance and I was wheeled in on a chair.

  A Doctor was waiting in the small ER together with a laboratory technician and two Nurses.  Blood pressure, temperature and blood sample were taken efficiently and within half an hour the doctor had determined that blood pressure and temperature were normal, pulse normal, blood showed no sign of malaria parasite.  They wheeled me down to the intensive care unit and shortly I was hooked up to wires that monitored my heart and every two hours took my blood pressure.  They inserted a drip and took another blood test. 

I did not sleep well, my eyes remained fixed on the drip.  I had only to tap on the window and one of three nurses was beside me crisp and fresh in her uniform.  I relaxed finally but the spinning would not leave my head. 

Wednesday came and at 11:00 they also connected me to an e.c.g.  There were wires everywhere and at that moment Dennis decided to visit.  His eyes grew like saucers, he must have thought my final days had come..  he stared at the monitor..  'Your pulse is between 48 and 50' he read out astonished..  'Because I am so physically fit..' I assured him..  his eyes portrayed disbelief... 

By the evening I was ready to have my first meal, fluids only, a bowl of tomato soup was ordered.  By then I had had four blood tests with excellent results, I was on my third intravenous dip bag and every non-invasive bodily sample had been taken and analysed.  Coteries of doctors had attended me and advised on my health.  I began to feel a little like a laboratory specimen.. 

The soup arrived, lukewarm and gelatinous; it was landed like an alien discharge in the bottom of the bowl, it was red and menacing. 

I swallowed several spoonfuls before I gagged and lay back exhausted.  About an hour later I rolled out of the bed and dragging the intravenous assembly with me shuffled to the toilet.  I sat down and was sick into a small plastic basin.  I returned to the bed. 

The nurse came in and I told her that I had been sick, sorry, but could she clear out the basin.  She went into the toilet just as my two doctors arrived for evening rounds. 

"Dis Oyebo!" The Nurse cried out..  "He has been vomiting BLOOD-O!" 

 * * * * * * * * * 

For a moment blind panic!.  Thoughts of barium meals, radioactive pills, miniature cameras disappearing down my throat, a completely new set of tests filled my imagination.. 

..  the Doctors were looking round, concern on their faces.. 

"It is OK," I said..  "It was only the tomato soup!" 

Everyone relaxed.  The Nurse cleaned up the bathroom and finally I fell into a fitful doze. 

Later in the evening I was able to call Veronica at the Sheraton Hotel in Lagos.. 

"I am OK," I reassured her..  "I am in intensive care, but it is not serious." I could hear a gasp at the other end of the 'phone. 

At 02:00 on Thursday I woke with a start.  I looked around the room and thought of ***** Had he been in here when he died the previous week? Was this the last thing he saw? My imagination ran riot... 

Later in the day, by about 11:00 Veronica arrived to a hero's welcome from the Nurses. 

"In thirty seven years of knowing him he has never been into hospital" She said..  I felt proud.  I had received excellent care at the clinic, professional, thorough and open. 

That night I returned to the bungalow and by the middle of the following week was fully recovered.  The Nigerian lecturers were sympathetic and overwhelming in their pleasure at seeing me.  One wrote me a nice note, which I will always retain, welcoming me back from the other side of the Great Divide..  I began to suspect that Dennis had given them a highly coloured version of my ailment..

And the ailment? The general view was that it was a slightly trapped ventricular nerve, that can affect the balance.  I consulted Akpokene, a Nigerian colleague.  "I am not sure what was wrong," I began, "The tests showed I am in perfect health, and.."

He looked at me through his spectacles and interrupted..  "We call dis 'ting Invasion of de Spiritual Force.."

"You mean someone has been practising Ju-Ju on me?" I asked

© Michael Hey; All Rights Reserved

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