Twenty Ten
 

A short story by Emmanuel Iduma

This is a short biography of John Camp by Edwin Okoh, as it appeared in Big Basket, on January 30, 2011.

In 1990, there were seven lizards lined on the fence, and John Camp was watching. Ordinarily, there should have been tears in his eyes, tears to contrast the fine afternoon, but he said later to his friend, “I don’t know how I managed that afternoon. I did not feel like doing anything, neither crying nor laughing, and staring at the fence did a lot of good.” He had been born in that town, in 1970, a boy that brought his mother so much gladness, because the doctor at London had warned Isabella Camp about having another child. But when she entered her first trimester and her husband suggested an abortion, she resisted, saying she felt strongly about this one. Her husband, Job Camp, knew better. When her face was furrowed into a frown, parting her face into two, her will was insurmountable. This was the frown she wore in the photograph of John’s fourth birthday, the photograph taken after she had an argument with Job on whether to extend the distribution of the rice beyond the town, Afikpo, to other southeastern cities of Nigeria, like Enugu and Umuahia. She had said no, but Job was adamant.

Job had arrived Afikpo in September 1959 with his childhood friend Simon Ottenberg, who was returning for his second period of field research with his wife, Phoebe. Perhaps one stressor for accompanying Simon was Phoebe, because by now Job was still unmarried, and Phoebe had an attractive smile that gave him dreams. He knew she was his friend’s wife, but once or twice she had given encouraging glances, and he flirted with the thoughts that Simon might not have her forever, and then she’d be available for him. But Job had not defined his purpose with Phoebe’s encouraging glances. He had made it clear to Ottenberg that while he, Ottenberg, being an anthropologist, was concerned with finding more about the Afikpo people and writing a dissertation about them, his mission was different. Afikpo had good soil for rice, was popular for it, and rice had begun to attract the West African attention.

Between his arrival in September (a very cold month that reminded him so much of London; he’d write later that, “This was one of the reasons I decided to stay”) and June 1960, he made good rapport with some of the people, using the influence of Simon, and as he would find out later, in those early years the people had been deferential to him since he was white; his countrymen had instilled such deference both by innovation and exploitation. In August of that year, he concluded negotiations with a popular family and they transferred title to a large piece of land, which was finely situated, located several miles from the central Afikpo villages, near enough for visitors and far enough when he was moody from the sudden demons that visited him and made him slap his head continuously, or sometimes they made him cry. Because in another three months, materials arrived from overseas and he got cheap local labour, courtesy of the resident Engineer, who took the pain to ensure that the Rice Mill was built speedily and according to specification, and in the meanwhile rent a small wood-plank house to him.

The sudden demons visited him again in February of the next year, ’61, and his quick antidote was marriage. Travelling to London for marriage coincided with his arrangement to purchase equip.m.ents for the Mill and one can conclude that marriage was the minor stressor. In his own words, “Marriage seemed more of an obligation than a necessity.” John saw this later in his father’s diary, dated April 11, 1961, and it explained to him why so many things seemed obscure while he grew up, like a day he returned and found that his mother was sitting in the front of the house looking at the distance, an unrelenting tear on her face, and his father was whistling loudly from inside the house. On April 11, 1961 Isabella Farnfield wedded him in a private, cheaply organized wedding ceremony and after a week they arrived Afikpo. Isabella had kept Africa in her mind, tucked it in like a magnetic keepsake after she read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and when she found a husband with thin cheeks and a thick mustache and a set face, she did not mind.

Jamaica Camp was born only two hours after Job inspected the new neon elephant-size signpost that read, “Camp Rice Mill.” She had her father’s set face but was fleshier, and had the inquisition in her eyes that would make her the perfect laughing stock in McGregor College, where she underwent secondary education. Two hours after her birth, Job was inspecting the signpost and he wrote his exact thoughts in his diary that night, dated June 2, 1962, “I am so grateful that the Mill is coming on, but I am constantly being disturbed that having a child and starting a family might stand in the way.” Perhaps for this reason, it took almost a decade for Isabella to become pregnant again, or perhaps it was her congenital problem, her narrow pelvis. Nonetheless, the years after Jamaica, Job Camp poured his heart into the Mill, purchasing equip.m.ents and employing people, finding favour amongst the Afikpo people, and even finding footing in certain cultural inclinations. For example, he naturalized by joining a village secret society and an age group. It made him, like his daughter, a laughing stock, when he had to dance beside a masquerade, chanting incoherent lines which made no sense to him – he never learnt the language. In this he seemed perfectly satisfied and achieved, for he wrote later, on that day when he danced beside a masquerade, November 13, 1971, “So it is clear that home is anywhere you call it. Home shifts. Here has become my home. London my foot. And, ah, the mill.” On November 5 he had employed eight more people, because his rice was produced faster than the local mills and more people had come to depend on it; his customer base had enlarged from the Europeans to the indigenes, who preferred to eat rice without stones and brown chaff. These eight people included Nnachi Enwo, who had been an interpreter for Ottenberg, and who after the Biafran war had become unemployed and needed something to do to get his feet back. His designation was supervision, not separating the chaff or sealing the bags, a position Job scarcely gave out to uneducated people. Enwo had been a representative at the Federal House of Representatives before the civil war. “A man of your status?” Job had asked him. He said, “Yes. Yes. I’m okay with it.”

John Camp, in the mid-‘70s, was preoccupied with the thought that his father was a god of rice. He would talk to children of the indigenes, in a mixture of English and a badly pronounced version of the dialect, how rice was made from his father and how the world would starve if his father died. The truth was that his father made him believe this. He had large pictures of rice mills, pictures from afar; of Ribeirão Prêto, a city in Southeastern Brazil that had a flourishing number of rice mills. But later he would find that his father’s attraction to the Brazilian city was, as stated in his diary, dated December 2, 1976, “Low crime, low pollution, and an abundance of jobs enticed many Brazilians to move to Ribeirao Preto, away from the crowded and crime-ridden state capital, São Paulo. This is the future I want to create for Afikpo.” This would have no exactitude and apparent inference until an evening in May 1980, by this time John was ten, and the impact would make him tell a friend later, “That evening singularly altered our fates, especially my father’s. The thing, unfortunately, was that he did not know.”

John’s birth, two days after Nigeria completed her tenth year anniversary celebrations, coincided with the departure of J.D. Livingston Booth, erstwhile District Officer, whose send-off party his father attended, leaving Isabella sore from childbirth and crying for attention; the nurses on duty could not provide this attention, even though Mater General Hospital was tipped to be the best in that southeastern axis. This resulted in Isabella’s only written reaction to Job’s insensitivities. On the eve of John’s ninth birthday, October 2, 1979, she wrote to her unmarried eldest sister, Rosa Farnfield, who at that time was a visiting professor at Kharagpur College in eastern India, “The way this marriage is going, I am afraid Job would not think about it if asked to kill me to increase the lifespan of his mill. There are stories I’ve heard from my friend, Ugo Inya, about Igbo businessmen who are fetish and join terrible cults; these cults demand for the blood of their wives to grant them prosperity in business. I have a feeling Job is that kind of man. And it is absolutely funny that I’ve lived with him all these years. But for John and Jamaica, there’d have been no reason to remain.”

Friendship blossomed between Job and Nnachi Enwo. Enwo had risen from supervisor to confidant; this was manifestly illustrated when back in 1974 Isabella had disagreed with Job’s decision to expand the distribution to Enugu and Umuahia. Ordinarily, by Job’s exclusionary antecedents, she would not have known the plan. But Job had to tell her because Ugo Inya, her friend, was a businesswoman with contacts outside Afikpo. She disagreed, as she told John later, for no obvious reason, except to serve as an antagonistic check on Job, to remind him he could not get everything he wanted. Job would damn her, and seek advice from Nnachi, whose experience as Representative had involved him outside Afikpo.

Soon Nnachi became quite involved with the Presbyterian Church of Nigeria, formerly Church of Scotland Mission, and decided to seal his commitment by being baptized, especially because being baptized by the church was a requisite for membership. The baptism was slated for May 24, 1986, and on this day Job declared a free day at the Mill, since Enwo planned a post-baptism party at his house and had convinced Job that he would find a way to ensure that there’d be no holiday, as usual, the next day, Sunday.

On her bad leg, Isabella mentally wrote a curse for Job. Only Ugo Oko and Jamaica and John were present when the rattrap caught her leg, and she started bleeding and there was no one to take her to Mater General Hospital. Jamaica and John were reading the same novel, The Concubine by Elechi Amadi in the sitting room, competing for who would complete the novel first, gambling with a substantial part of their allowance. Isabella was with Ugo Oko in the kitchen, talking business and women empowerment in Afikpo, the conversation dominated by Ugo Oko, and Isabella only nodding. The rattrap was wrongly placed; rats had since become a menace in the Camp household, half-eating dried fish and yams. Isabella’s leg fell into the trap, and for minutes she screamed, grunting and bleeding, Ugo Oko tied the bleeding leg to the horror of Jamaica and John, but it still bled. This happened at almost 6p.m., but the bleeding continued until almost 9p.m. when Job returned from Enwo’s post-baptism party; when they got to Mater General Hospital, the attending doctor said it was too late, she had lost too much blood, that leg might not be useful anymore. And this useless leg, according to John, altered their fates, stringed together, especially Job’s fate; he had been the obvious item above the stringed fates. Isabella walked with an arm-crutch from then on.

What happened in early 1987 would substantiate John’s claim that the accident that impaired his mother altered his father’s fate. (Isabella had resorted to keeping long silences, smiling scarcely; now that Jamaica had travelled to London for her university, there was none left but John, who was just ending his secondary education at the Presbyterian-owned Hope Waddell Institute. Isabella’s long silences came even though Job had become merrier; more involved in the community, contributing to several infrastructural projects, even receiving a chieftaincy title in the nearby town, Uwana. John remembered how she stayed for long hours after daybreak in her room, curtains drawn, and when she called him in for an errand, at midday, she was still on her bed and her arm-crutch was reclining beside the bed.) On March 3 of that year, 1987, a delegation was sent to Job Camp, led by the newly ordained Evangelist of The Assemblies of God Church, Sylvester Enwo, of the same Enwo family as Job’s former employee (he had been elected to the state house of assembly and did not need the job again.) This delegation was a combined team of stalwarts from the Afikpo Progressive Union and the Afikpo Christian Fellowship. Sylvester had been appointed as President of the latter association and it was said he had an eye on the position of Chairman of the Union. More myths emerged at the heat of the later fracas; myths tying Nnachi Enwo to everything, the claim that he wanted the mill for himself, and his family.

This delegation told Job Camp how important his contributions were to the development of Afikpo. But on the other hand, he needed Afikpo as much as it needed him. If, most logically, a balance would be sought, he needed Afikpo more than it needed him. The speaker, Sylvester, traced the origin of rice production, in an astounding and eloquent manner. The first mill, he said, was established in 1902, the same year the Europeans entered Afikpo and began administering. A certain man who had been a messenger of the Long Juju of Arochukwu, dispersed by the fall of the Long Juju, had come to Afikpo and was surprised that rice was produced small-scale, for only family consumption. So he started the mill. And what was significant was that his focus was food availability, not profit. At this point he turned to Job and said, in a polite but straightforward manner, “Your focus is profit. Not food availability, not the development of our people.”

They put forward their proposal, and this was to change the name of the Mill to “Afikpo Rice Mill.” This was to be an outward manifestation of the fact that the Afikpo Progressive Union would supervise the activities of the Mill; a supervisory board would be set up by the Union. Job Camp was so annoyed he walked out of the meeting. Later they sent him a letter, signed by Francis Elu, Chairman of the Union, which ended as follows: “You are a foreigner, and you should do exactly what the owners of the land dictate, if you wish to remain here. What we are proposing would not deprive you of profit; you would only be accountable to us. If you insist, however, I assure you the consequences would be grave.”

John Camp would see this letter in early 1990, the year that his father would finally have his fate altered. It was that same year he saw the diary his father had kept all along, from his early days in Afikpo. By this time, his mother had concluded arrangements with Jamaica to move to London, finally, because she was frail and thin and her long silence did not make matters better. But this did not happen until the final act that severed his father’s fate.

On February 4, 1990, another delegation came to Job Camp. It consisted mostly of the members of the old delegation that had come in 1987 and Sylvester was still the spokesperson. They told him he had not done as they wanted; that though he had renamed the mill, he had not been accountable to the Union. They told him what they wanted: he had to leave Afikpo, the Union would consider certain retirement benefits for him. Job Camp would write later, this time in a long (unsent) letter to his friend Simon Ottenberg, that, “I could swear that it was a dream, and that everything they said was fake. I wanted to disbelieve it, but couldn’t. And till now, I want to disbelieve.”

He stormed out of the room as before and put a call through to Nnachi Enwo, who arrived the next day, together with some others, and when he explained, they left his house and headed to Francis Elu’s house. No one remembers what transpired in Elu’s house. The only thing not to be forgotten was that soon after he entered with his friends, Nnachi Enwo was seen entering his car with the accompanying men, and would not be seen until the unrest had ceased.

The next day after this, February 6, none of the workers at the mill came for work. Job was seen at the gate all day, standing and sometimes squatting, using a stick to write something on the floor. John had returned, on January 30, from London where he studied at Leeds University. The purpose of his visit was to finalize arrangements for his mother’s travel, finally, to London. That day he returned, his father had written in his diary, “Isabella is returning to London. I don’t want to return. Now, all I have left is this mill.” So it happened that when he stood at the gate, perhaps waiting for his employees, John would join him intermittently, saying nothing and perhaps expecting nothing to be said. If they had a better relationship, if John had not thought that all his life his father had never communicated in depth with him, and if John had not said to a friend, “I had the misconceived idea that staying with him at the gate would make a difference,” perhaps that silence would have been shut up.

On February 7, as early as 7am, there was a large crowd in front of the Mill. Mostly young men and some older men: one of them slapped the security man at the gate and marched in. John was awake in the sitting room, but his father and mother were asleep in their respective rooms. When he heard the noise of the approaching crowd, he did not think about his father but his mother, and he woke her, convinced her that the noise did not come from her dreams, and then he led her through the back gate. But his father’s fate had already been altered. He woke only later, when one of the men had kicked the front door open, and they dragged him out half-naked, his underpants barely concealed, and they beat him until Sylvester Enwo appeared and said, “Sir, you see that you have to leave. This people can kill you if you do not.” Halfway into a coma, Job cried and mourned incoherently until the coma took over. Sylvester Enwo drove him in his car to Mater General Hospital. The street was lined with people talking to themselves, analyzing the situation. Others ran into the Mill and began to carry bags of rice already prepared for sale.
**
John Camp would return to Afikpo two days after he turned 40, to conclude marriage plans with Chi Elu, Francis Elu’s youngest sister. Chi was among the children John had told that rice was made from his father and that the world would starve if his father died. He’d kissed her once, on the left cheek, (even though her eyes were closed and she told him later in a letter, it was because she expected a French kiss) on February 6, 1990, the day he had stood beside his father intermittently. Neither of them had married before 2010, and this was due to nothing John could explain. Chi, on her part, had planned never to be married, and even at 37 when John concluded the plans, she still doubted. She’d read Bridget Jones Diary by Helen Fielding and Still Here by Linda Grant, and these books reinforced her decision, because the heroines in those books married late. But when John proposed, after monthly letters since 1990 when he left Afikpo, she could not say no.

For she had stood with him in the afternoon of February 7, 1990, when the lizards had dispersed and scattered themselves on the fence of the motel he rushed his mother to after escaping from the Mill. She’d seen his face and how it looked as though he was not white, but as it would have been even if he was black and it led her to conclude that pain had no colour. When she visited him in London, before they returned together to meet her family, it did not matter if it was 2010. His face retained that non-whiteness that it had when the lizards were dispersing from the fence.

True to his words, Job Camp had not returned to London. He requested to be buried at the Mill, in the only time he woke up after the coma, two days after, and before he left with Isabella, John ensured that he granted this wish. Sylvester Enwo and Francis Elu cooperated, but did not consent to the burial place being few meters from the gate of the Mill. They chose a spot close to the fence at the back. This did not matter much to John. And it still did not matter much when he revisited the burial place in 2010, twenty years after; he only visited out of duty. But his surprise, as he told a friend, was that, “I saw seven lizards on that fence that overlooked my father’s grave and I swear, they were the same I had seen in that motel in 1990.”
 

The end.

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