Black sunshine, p.19
Black Sunshine, page 19
“Mother, it’s me,” Sade said, feeling her eyes brimming with tears.
“Sade?” Mother asked, surprised.
“Mother, I need your -”
“I have been waiting to hear from you,” Mother interrupted her. Sade gritted her teeth, anxious, her eyes on Soja’s back. Mother, unaware of the urgency of her call, went on as if Sade had not spoken. “I have some excellent news, Sade. Your sister has married.”
“What?” Sade asked, surprised. She almost forgot her surroundings, her plan, as she registered the news. She shook her head, clearing her thoughts. “Listen, Mother, I -”
“She is now Mrs Moneke,” Mother said, her voice clipped, as if readying herself for an argument. Sade blinked hard, confused. “She has married Achike.”
The shock hit her then and Sade stared, unseeing, as Soja tossed his cigarette to the floor and crushed it into the ground at his feet.
“Sade?” Mother prompted her. “Did you hear me?”
Sade hung up the line and quickly tossed the phone back onto the dashboard as Soja turned around. He walked back to the car and joined her, his clothes smelling of smoke now. He hesitated at her expression, and he frowned.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
Sade managed to nod, though her mind raced with the news that Mother had imparted to her. She did not understand, thought she must have misheard her, though she knew that she had not. Bunmi had married Achike. Her Achike. She thought of the boy she loved, married to her younger sister.
She blinked hard, wishing away the tears she knew threatened. Soja leant forward, alarmed, and stroked her face.
“What’s wrong?” he asked her.
“Nothing, I’m fine,” Sade replied, shaking her head, wiping quickly at her eyes and swallowing down the emotion she felt. She forced herself to smile at him, hardly noticing the concern on his face. “It’s okay.”
She could not help but glance at the phone on the dashboard. Soja caught the look, and there was no mistaking the realisation as it dawned on him. Sade felt nervous as Soja reached for the phone. It took only a few seconds for him to see the number she had dialled, realise what she had done.
“Sade?” he asked, looking from the screen to her. He looked hurt. “What -?”
“I’m sorry,” Sade cried, shaking her head. Tears slid from her eyes. “I had to -”
“I trusted you,” Soja shook his head. He looked torn between anger and sadness, the conflict clear in his eyes, on his face.
Sade did not know what made her do it, but she reached for the door handle. She had to escape, had to run. Every instinct inside of her told her to. She threw the door open and clambered out of the car. She ran down the track, aware that Soja followed, that he was faster, stronger than she was. She could not hope to beat him, but still she ran.
Footsteps pounded the dirt behind her, closing in on her. Sade panted hard, did not dare look over her shoulder. She felt Soja’s fingertips reach for her, and then his arms slid around her, caught her and pulled her against him.
“Why are you running?” Soja demanded, breathing hard as she struggled against him, though she knew it was futile. “Why are running from me? I’d never hurt you, Sade.”
Sade stopped fighting, her shoulders slumping, the fight gone from her. She burst into tears, her body sagging. Soja held her tight to him, stroking her head as if she were a child that needed soothing. He did not speak, did not ask what was wrong, just held her.
“I’m sorry,” Sade managed, after several long minutes had passed.
“You don’t have to apologize,” Soja whispered to her. “Not to me.”
Sade believed what he said, though she did not understand why he should be so understanding. He put his arm around her and led her back to the car, where they sat in silence. Sade wondered if he would stop his visits now.
When he drove back to the highway, Sade hesitated as she reached for the door handle. As if sensing the question on her lips, Soja smiled tenderly at her.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he assured her. “Same time as always.”
Sade gave him a smile, a genuine one, as she got out of the car. She was about to close the door behind her when a scream pierced the air.
Up and down the highway, the girls froze in their places at the roadside, eyes darting up and down the street, trying to establish where the sound had come from, the tension on the road heightened at once.
“Get back in the car,” Soja called from the driver’s seat, alarmed.
Sade froze. Twenty feet ahead of her, a girl staggered from the bushes. She recognised her from the house. She was new here, and Sade did not know her name.
“Sade,” Soja shouted from the car, “Get back in.”
Sade stepped forward, walking towards the girl. She saw her hands were dripping with blood, saw that her eyes were wide with terror.
“She’s dead,” the girl was stammering, as Sade approached her. She repeated the words over and over and pointed to a spot a few feet into the bushes, thick with undergrowth, hidden from the highway.
Sade pushed her way through the shrubbery and stopped, letting out a strangled cry.
In a small clearing, surrounded by leaves and discarded rubbish, her legs splayed, her breasts exposed, Mbeke lay on her back. There were bloody, messy, wounds on her stomach. Her throat was opened, and Sade gagged, unable to look at the gore.
“Go back to the house,” Soja told her, his voice urgent, over the cries of the other girl. “Take that girl with you, calm her down before she gets hysterical, and wait there for me. I need to call Kelechi.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Soja swallowed hard as he pressed the phone to his ear and watched Sade put an arm around the wailing girl’s shoulders and half-drag, half-carry her across the highway. He hoped that she managed to get her back to the house without drawing to much attention. The girl was hysterical and as Soja ducked back into the overgrowth and looked down at Mbeke, he could understand why. The girl had been stabbed to death. It was brutal and violent.
“What’s up?” Kelechi answered.
“We have a problem,” Soja told him.
Kelechi cursed after Soja had filled him in.
“Stay there,” he told him. “I’m on my way.”
He hung up and Soja was left to stand over Mbeke’s body. He hoped she had not suffered. She had not deserved this, he thought. Nobody did. She had a daughter. He wondered if the girl would ever know what had become of her mother as she grew up.
Soja looked away from her, though he was no stranger to violence. He had been born from it and he had known it all his life. This was a reminder that as far as he had come, he had not yet escaped it.
He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to distract himself as memories floated into his mind.
His mother Nneka had been fifteen when she fled her home in the small village of Kizara, in the north western Nigerian state of Zamfara, carrying a child in her belly. The product of rape, she knew that he would not be welcome.
She had given birth to him alone atop a hillside, beneath a tree in the middle of the night. Sweat dripped from her, only the moonlight illuminating her, as she gritted her teeth and swallowed down her screams, lest she be heard and set upon. After hours of straining, hours of torturous pain that had felt like a lifetime, Nneka finally pulled the baby boy from her.
She had named him Soja. The name had meaning for her; it meant soldier, and that was what he would need to be in this harsh world that he would have to fight to survive in.
Tearing a piece of cloth from her dress, she had woven it into a sling, which she placed Soja inside, tight against her bosom, and continued her tiring journey.
Nneka had nothing to keep her rooted in Nigeria. She had nobody but herself and her precious son. She had a plan to ensure that her son had a better life than she had been given. She would travel to Europe, to the land she had heard stories about, of riches and opportunities that she could never have dreamt of for her son here. A land where they would be safe.
It took years for her and Soja to reach Somalia. They made the two-thousand-mile journey by coach and by train when they could afford to, and by hitch-hiking rides from farmers and truckers. Soja sat on the roadside or played whilst his mother repaid the men for their help in kind.
At ten years old, when they reached the eastern coasts of Somalia, Soja watched his mother pay a Somali man with a boat, whom she had tracked down at the docks of the north eastern city of Bossaso, to take her son to Europe. Unable to pay her own fare and fatally ill after years of hardship, Nneka had promised Soja she would always watch over him from heaven. She used the last of her money, and after kissing Soja goodbye as he boarded the boat, she had waved him off, tears in her eyes.
It was the last time he had seen her.
Though the rocking of the boat scared him, Soja climbed on board as he knew was her wish, refusing to acknowledge the fear he felt. The captain and some of his men were armed with guns. Soja hid behind a man and his wife, frightened by the guns and the crashing waves of the ocean. The wife gave him a kindly smile and patted the top of his head, ruffling his hair. When the boat was full of people; crying children, anxious mothers, men whose backs were bent from years of labour, people from all walks of life, from all over Africa and even from Sri Lanka, the captain gave the order to set sail.
Soja was one of the few passengers who was not sick as the boat rocked in the waves, flecks of saltwater raining down on the open decks, the coastline and cityscape of Bossaso fading out of sight on the horizon. The deck soon stunk of vomit and waste. The captain ordered two of his men to fill buckets with sea water and throw it over the people they were transporting to ease the smell a little.
He slept, resting his head on a man’s back. When the man looked as if he might protest, his wife put a reassuring arm on his shoulder and the man relented, letting Soja sleep, his head moving in time with the man’s laboured breathing as he tried to swallow down the bile that rose in his stomach with every drop the boat made as it went over the crest of a wave.
It had felt like days when Soja heard people calling out excitedly. The sky was darkening, a reddish tinge illuminating the soft clouds above them, streaking across the sky as if the heavens were on fire, and Soja looked to where people were pointing. Land rose from the ocean, waves breaking on the rugged cliffs, a beach spreading before them, the sand beckoning Soja, who longed to plant his feet on solid ground and jump for joy at his arrival in Europe. But that was not to be.
“I heard the coastguard over the radio,” one of the captain’s men called. “They’re coming.”
The captain rushed into the cabin, that was off limits to the people on the decks. Soja bristled with fear as a rush of panic swept the decks. They were still a mile or two from shore; so close, and yet so far, Soja thought. The husband and wife beside him held each other, rigid with apprehension.
The captain came out onto the deck, flanked by four of his men, all of them armed with guns, that rested easily in the palms of their hands, rope slung over their shoulders to keep their weapons in place.
“We can’t take you any further,” the captain shouted. Silence fell over the deck, the only sound the slapping of the waves against the boat. Soja realised the engines had stopped. “You’ll have to make your own way to land.”
“We paid for you to take us to a port,” a man cried out.
“I can’t swim,” a woman in a headscarf shouted.
“The coast guard is coming, and we can’t be caught,” the captain shouted, unmoved by the calls from his passengers. “Everyone, overboard.”
There were cries, shouts of anger, sobbing from mothers and their young children. Some faces were blank, confused, unable to understand the language, unaware of what was going on. An older man, with greying hair, rose to his feet, unsteady in the swell of the ocean.
“What if we refuse?” he demanded.
The captain nodded to one of his men. The man raised his rifle, took aim, and fired off a warning shot. The man refused to be intimidated. The captain nodded again. The shot hit the man in his chest. He fell to the deck, people screaming and scattering out of the way of his falling body, blood splattering those closest to him. Two of the captain’s men moved through the crowd, the people parting to let them through. They grabbed the man around his hands and ankles and heaved him overboard. He tried to speak, to call for help, but he soon sank beneath the water, the sea turning red where he had been just a moment before.
People began to jump overboard, screaming, sobbing. Families held hands, scrabbling to stay together. Women held babies over their heads. The captain’s men shot those who protested, those who refused to jump ship. The water frothed and foamed with the kicking, frantic bodies of those who had obeyed. Soja stood by the edge of the deck, looking around, frightened. The husband and wife who had sat beside him jumped into the water, hands held tightly together. They landed atop of a man struggling to keep afloat, and he did not resurface.
Soja looked at the captain. He thought of the promise the man had made to his mother, of taking him safely to land. The captain caught his eye and held his gaze. He stepped over the deck, careful not to slip in the blood, and came to him. Perhaps he was remembering his promise after all, Soja thought.
“I’m sorry,” the captain said. “This is as far as we go.”
Soja averted his eyes. The captain’s hands slid under his armpits and he lifted the young boy. Soja took a deep breath and closed his eyes, squeezing out the tears. He had to be brave. The captain lifted him over the railing and told him to take a deep breath.
“God have mercy on you, child,” he said.
He threw Soja into the foaming water beneath him.
The water was freezing as he slipped under the waves. His skin seemed to burn with the cold as it stung and bit at every inch of his body. He kicked out hard and rose to the surface, his head emerging to a cacophony of noise and screams and rushing water in his eardrums. He took a gulp of salty air and then another. The captain looked down at him from the ship. He seemed relieved that Soja had resurfaced. He shouted an order to his men and the last of the passengers crashed into the water around him as the engines roared to life once more. The ship shot away across the sea to escape the coast guard.
People tried to cling to him in their desperation to stay afloat, pushing him beneath the water. Soja kicked his legs and swung his arms, clawing at the water as he headed for the shore, away from where people were screaming and trying to swim. He made it away from them and realised how far the sands of the beach were now that he was off the boat. He saw the couple that had sat beside him on the deck; the woman was tiring, weighed down by her skirts and shawls, her head slipping beneath the water as her skin turned blue with the cold. Her husband was trying to hold her head up, desperate for her to breathe, almost drowning himself to save her.
Soja swam on, trying not to look back. Some people were closer to land. It must be possible, he thought. He sawm until his body ached and his throat burned from the sea water, his eyes stinging from the salt. All he could hear now was the crash of water in his ears, the screams no longer reached him, or perhaps there was nobody left to scream.
He began to tire, his arms and legs flailing, his energy fading. Just as he felt that he would slip beneath the water, never to resurface, he saw the land closing in on him. The water was moving faster around him, the current dragging him towards the beach. His muscles eased, and a large wave washed him further along in the tide. His body tumbled over itself, and he sucked in a lungful of water and spluttered, his head banging.
Then he felt hot sand beneath his body, the grains of sand digging into his skin as he lay face down on the shore, water rushing around him. He clawed his way up the beach, unable to stand. He saw a few people had made it. As he looked closer, he realised many of them were not moving, were not crawling up the beach like he was. Their eyes were open, their skin blueing with death; they were just bodies now, he understood.
Safely away from the water, he rolled onto his back and let the beating sun warm his body as he lay on the sand, drenched and cold, hungry and frightened. At that moment, he was relieved. He had survived, and that was more than most, he thought, as he watched the husband and wife he had sat beside wash ashore on the tide, face down in the current, together even in death.
Soja had been washed ashore on the south western coast of Italy’s Campania district, near the small town of Destra Volturno. He and a handful of other survivors from the ship made their way to the town, desperate to escape the beach before the coast guard or the police arrived. They arrived in a town already swamped with immigrants; the streets here may have been made from tarmac instead of dirt, but the poverty was just the same as that they had left behind hundreds of miles away on the Somali shores. People lived in the shells of long-abandoned houses, the windows and doors broken out, rugs and mattresses lining the floors, the smell of seat, decay and human waste stagnating the air in these darkened rooms.
He scraped a living; some of the people here, mostly older men, allowed him floor space and occasionally threw him scraps of bread. Others were willing to let him starve, unmoved by his age or his pleas. Others tried to help him, the locals, but Soja quickly learnt that most of those offering him their help wanted something in return. Often that something was unthinkable. Soja had travelled from one life of misfortune to another, and he wondered if his mother’s sacrifices had all been for nothing, thought of her looking down over him with tears in her eyes.
It had been a month before he was picked up by strangers in uniform who he could not understand and taken to an immigration camp. He was given a blanket and a bowl of sludge and the metal gates closed behind him.
The camp was a shantytown of corrugated sheets of iron and wooden lean-tos, a sea of blankets and black faces and squalor. Soja wanted to leave, but the soldiers standing guard at the entrance scared him more than whatever awaited him in the camp and so he did not go.
