The Bird That Cries Mayday
Friday, 12 April 1942, 6:15 PM. A German warplane flew over the rocky outcrops of Oke Lapa near Ikogosi in British colonial Nigeria. The Messerschmitt Bf 109 thundered over the hot and cold springs at Ikogosi, sputtering a dark plume from its distressed engine. Its engine stalled, killing the motion of its three-blade propeller, and it nose-dived straight toward a close tangle of trees. Somehow, the pilot managed to get its blunt nose into the air again. The plane flew into the final burst of golden light in the evening, jerking. The dense tree canopy fell away from the plane, and the three occupants didn’t see the jagged black rocks that rose from the earth, slick with moss and lichen.
The pilot held the control wheel down, and the bulk of the plane shuddered in the air, tossing the airmen against each other. He couldn’t control the metal hulk that moved sluggishly through heavy rain clouds. The plane nose-dived sharply, and the pilot pulled harder at the yoke. The German plane continued to descend, emitting fumes from its fuselage, over the small village of Aramoko. The pilot screamed into the radio, “Mayday! Mayday!” and gritted his teeth against the air drag. He frowned at the dinner fires and flickering lamps dotting the small break in the trees. He veered away from them. The dense forests didn’t help his visibility, but he saw the rocky outcrops of Oke Lapa in the distance and gunned the throttle towards them. He barely made it. The plane began to disintegrate as several explosions occurred, and the bombs it carried tumbled over the evening sky. At 7:46 PM, the plane crash-landed and skidded for a few moments, crushing rocks and uprooting trees before going up in flames.
The captain had been on a reconnaissance trip to the northern Kano airfield used by Allied troops as a stopover from the US on their way to attack the Axis forces in Libya. On board the aircraft were two burlap bags. Their top-secret contents, however, didn’t remain so. They spilled all over the Oke Lapa forest, turning into ash the moment they drifted over the burning plane.
A few kilometers away, in Aramoko, when the children heard the first pra-pra-pra from the warplane’s engine, they ran inside their family compounds and threw piles of clothes over their heads. And when the earth shook and trees flung roosting birds to the ground, the children ran out of the house into the streets, crying in fear. Their parents had to drag them back inside after the final explosion. When things quieted down, women, children, and the young men gathered in family courtyards across the town. They put out courtyard lamps and muttered in the darkness, confused and fearful. The elders and chiefs met in the Baale’s palace to talk about the ball of fire in the night sky that fell in the Oke Lapa rocks.
Sergeant Adeleke was the only policeman in Ekiti West; he lived in Emure, its chief town. It was several kilometers from Aramoko. He had served in the 23rd Nigerian Brigade of the British Army and had fought at Harar and Ghimbi in Ethiopia. His stint in the war had turned the affable man into a surly old man. His eyes acquired a dull glaze, which made him look bored with life all the time. He spoke using few words. He took seriously his service to his people and did nothing to hide his disillusionment with the colonial government. The Baale had sent a messenger, also the village town crier, to Emure, with instructions that Sergeant Adeleke come to Aramoko immediately. The messenger arrived at the police station early and had to wait for it to open. News of the explosion had reached Emure, and the cleaner eagerly asked the messenger while unlocking padlocks, “Is it true that the Oke Lapa forest is no more? We can see smoke from here,” she said. But before the messenger could respond, Sergeant Adeleke arrived, prompting the cleaner to disappear into the station; she didn’t want to incur the sergeant’s anger.
“Morning, sah,” the messenger said, “did your morning break well?”
The sergeant dropped his worn leather bag behind the counter before he answered, “What brings you to Emure, official or personal business?”
“Something fell out of the sky over the Oke Lapa forest yesterday,” the messenger said.
Sergeant Adeleke grunted, “I heard something like that.”
“The forests are still burning. We fear it will burn nearby farmlands,” the messenger said, his voice rising with each word.
The sergeant turned his back to the messenger and picked out a shining baton from several that hung on the police station’s blue wall. “Let us go.”
“But you didn’t receive the Baale’s message,” said the messenger, confused and disappointed at the same time.
The sergeant frowned, “I don’t need to hear it. I know he wants me to come to Aramoko immediately.”
The messenger didn’t say anything else; he made an about-turn and started the three-hour walk back to Aramoko. The officer handed over the police station, a one-room building shaded by an orange, to a noncommissioned young recruit with a nod: “Make no hasty decisions. I will be back by sundown.”
The messenger walked on in front of Sergeant Adeleke. He’d rather talk to a rock than try to start a conversation with the policeman. Instead, he thought about the fire that fell from the sky yesterday and the state he’d left the village in. It was a long six-hour walk from Emure to Aramoko, and he had made the trip many times; he knew the wide path that wove through the tall rainforest trees well. The messenger walked like a man who wanted to get to his compound to eat his wife’s dinner, but his pace soon slowed when he remembered the state in which he’d left his wife—she had refused to get up from bed. His two children had screamed all through the night, believing that the sun had fallen from the sky. He had dragged them out in the morning before his trip. They slapped his hands, trying to run back into the house, but he pried their eyes open, saying, “See. The sun is still up there, but our world has definitely been shaken.”
The sergeant, however, walked briskly; he didn’t listen to the noises of the forest around them. After returning from the war, he feared that his terrors might catch up with him if he stood still for too long. He’d seen men, white and black men, shat and wet their trousers at the bombs that moved earth and rock. The war shattered the sergeant’s beliefs in life and death; he believed the latter to be stronger because of its finality and detested the former for its frailty. He’d seen men running away from the battle front or be rooted in the earth as flesh melted off their bones. Every man bled red and died. Nothing was guaranteed to anybody. Everything seemed meaningless now to him.
The Baale’s courtyard was filled with the men of Aramoko. They didn’t sit in their age-grade groups. The younger ones stood behind and around the older men, who sat on dyed raffia mats and chewed on kola nuts.
“I have returned, Baale, with the policeman,” the messenger announced as he stepped through the palace’s main gate. Sergeant Adeleke’s appearance silenced the murmurs that floated all over the place. Eyes followed him as he walked into the courtyard. He stopped before the Baale’s gabled roof verandah. He did not prostrate before the Baale like other men. His khaki uniform made him a higher authority than the Baale. He nodded at the village chief. He did not shake the older man’s hand; that would have been too much disrespect. And the sergeant knew that too much of anything didn’t end well.
The Baale nodded at the policeman and didn’t waste words asking about the stoic policeman’s wellness. “In Aramoko, people are muttering here and there about the guns that fell out of the sky,” the Baale said.
“They aren’t guns,” the sergeant said.
“We are confused. But we know we should report to the authorities,” said a chief.
One of the older men said, “Policeman, then what was it?”
“It was a gun,” a young man said, “that didn’t run out of gunpowder.”
Another young man turned to the Baale, “Baba, I saw it. It was like the sun fell to the ground and broke into pieces that shot into the night sky.”
The only man older than the Baale said, “The sounds reminded me of war. This gun just spoke louder than the ones we use. Only this is a bigger one.” The older man had been part of the West African Frontier Forces and fought in Kameroun during World War I, and only he understood some of the things that affected Sergeant Adeleke since he returned from the war.
“Is someone fighting us? We do not know these enemies,” the Baale said.
The only time Sergeant Adeleke spoke fewer words was when he heard the word “war.” The assembly waited for him to speak, but he couldn’t. The impatient Baale looked away from the sergeant’s open mouth. He stood up and his words rushed out of him, “Could you investigate the matter for us, policeman? See this thing that fell from the sky for yourself and report back to your superiors.”
Annoyed, the sergeant looked at him. There were words in his insides that were supposed to be out. But the Baale words had forced his back inside him. It took the sergeant a while to say, “I must be back in Emure by sundown, but I am expected at Ikere today. I will be back tomorrow.”
At 2 PM sharp the next day, Sergeant Adeleke arrived to lead a group of hunters to the crash site. But the Baale, before they left his court, told the sergeant and his chiefs what the village’s Babalawo had told him about the strange occurrence: “Last year, our Ifa priest told me a wonder would happen in Oke Lapa near the Ikogosi Springs. There is an evil that will breach the perimeter of Ikogosi Springs, an evil that can’t be driven away. Sergeant, that evil has come.”
The sergeant, who acknowledged only tangible forms of evil, remained silent. He grunted, but everyone at court knew what the sound meant—what did these simple people know? He feared only what he could see; any force people attributed to things he couldn’t touch irritated him. “This is evil from men who allow their egos to dominate them,” he said.
The Baale too grunted in response to the sergeant’s words, and his chiefs nodded their heads; they understood the Baale’s grunt as well. The sergeant’s extensive travels made him despise the wisdom of his people.
The area around the mangled plane bore the brunt of the crash. The scorched earth still smoldered. The men walked through the burning forest, covered their noses with their clothes, and coughed, their eyes watering from the smoke. A vast crater contained most of the debris. Sergeant Adeleke and the hunters counted the remains of three bodies. One had ejected with his parachute on and was hanging from a tree. Only a badly burnt head remained of the second; maybe an animal had had a go at him. The last, the pilot, stayed in the cockpit and died with his hand on a pouch.
The men from Aramoko buried the pilots in the same grave in the forest. They placed a small heap of rocks over the grave so they could remember what was under them. But they left the plane, or what was left of it, as they met it.
“Let us go into it?” a young man said. His eyes lit up with curiosity.
“Death smells on you,” an older man said. “Be careful.”
The young man turned to the sergeant. “What do you say, sah?”
But Sergeant Adeleke froze midstride in front of the plane’s broken tail. The others called out to him, but he didn’t hear them. The swastika on the tail brought back memories that he had locked away. He spat on the ugly sign in front of him. “There may be unexploded bombs in the forest.”
The young man took a step away from the plane, “You mean those huge guns?”
“Yes, stay away from there. Tell your people. There is evil here.”
The crash site became known as the “Airplane Forest.” All the residents of the hamlets and towns along the Oke Lapa rocks stayed away. It became a forbidden forest. The recovering rainforest soon walled in its wounds, and it held the plane’s secrets within its bowels. But the people’s avoidance gave rise to stories about the mythical beings said to roam the forest. They said that in the Oke Lapa forest, something living cried, “Wo, Iku mi oni tase.” During two long rainy seasons, the forest covered the wreckage in moss and leaves, and new branches enveloped the charred, rusty plane chassis. And of that isolated patch, in the forest of Oke Lapa, the brave hunters who ventured near the crash site confirmed that something screamed, Wo, Iku mi oni tase. The villagers noticed that when a certain grey bird appeared on their roofs, it heralded evil; it screeched foreign words that the villagers interpreted as “Wo, Iku mi oni tase,” which means, “Look, my Death will not tarry.”
During the two years since the plane fell from the sky, some of the young men who were part of the group that had been at the crash site moved out of Aramoko. And the children, whose feet the earth had shaken, had forgotten their fears. One of them was Amoda. She snuck to the airplane forest. It was there that she found the biggest oranges. These trees made oranges like the pure water from the Ikogosi Springs—sweet and cold. Amoda picked oranges and sold them in the Aramoko market. She used the money she got to take care of her old grandmother. The old woman knew where the oranges came from because the trees belonged to her father’s father, but she believed her descendants had the right to the oranges even though the village head had made it a crime and a sin for anyone to return to the grave of the warplane.
But beneath the biggest orange tree was the grave of the pilots. Amoda couldn’t stay away from it. Each time she returned to the airplane forest, she took several steps closer to the three. On the day Amoda touched its smooth bark, the earth didn’t roll under her feet, and the sun’s rays still pierced through the forest canopy. She dashed about gathering fallen green oranges hidden in the thick undergrowth. Because of her preoccupation, it took her a while, but she soon heard a sound repeating itself. She stopped. She heard a whisper. She looked around but saw nobody. She packed the oranges into a heap and listened harder. When she didn’t hear anything, she filled a burlap sack that was hidden under a fallen tree with oranges. She lifted the basket on her head and lifted the burlap sack on her head. It was then she heard the infamous scream, “Wo ist meine Tasche?”
She froze. Every person from Aramoko knew those words—one’s Death was near.
A locust invasion swept across western Africa in 1947; waves of regimented hordes ate every green leaf in sight. The people said it was the evil that the Ifa priest prophesied years ago. They tried their best to appease the earth. When a drought followed the locust invasion, the successive failed harvests forced parents to send their children and wards to relatives in Lagos to work because there wasn’t enough food to feed them. In Ekiti West, farmers stopped tilling the parched earth, and family barns were dusty and empty. Unrelenting hunger pushed the plane crash out of people’s minds, and many forgot its grave in the Oke Lapa forest, but Amoda and a few others continued to scavenge there for anything green—Ikogosi Springs watered it.
On the only motorable road that passed through all of Ekiti West, two lorries stopped monthly at Aramoko. One was a Bedford lorry, the other an Austin. The village children looked forward to the coming of the lorries. They heard them kilometers away as they approached the village nestled near the Oke Lapa rocks. The older Bedford lorry grumbled through the morning mist as it climbed up the incline that led to Aramoko. The other one, a brand new Austin, purred as it came up the incline. Its driver loved the sound of the lorry’s horn. Every minute or so, its shrill cry would pierce through the morning, announcing its arrival.
The lorry drivers delivered letters to Aramoko families from their relatives in major cities, such as Lagos, Ibadan, Enugu, and Zaria. These letters demonstrated to both friends and foes that these families were making progress in life. They had wealthy relatives who sent letters and telegrams. During this time of famine, people used any means they could to show that they were better off than their neighbors.
Waiting travellers to Lagos rushed the older Bedford lorry as soon as it stopped; its fare was cheaper than that of the Austin. Two young people, not yet twenty, climbed through the partially open wooden sides of the carriage. The boy dropped down into a space on the long wooden seat beside the girl. In a corner, at the back of the Bedford’s wooden carriage, sat Amoda, along with the boy, Dayisi. They leaned against bags of palm kernel and cocoa beans piled on the floor of the lorry and crammed into any crevice that a sack could fit into.
The boy was two years older than the girl. Her grandmother had asked him to take her to Lagos to live with her only living son, as she feared that Death and his minions, the ajogun, lurked in her home. For several days, she had heard the unsettling call of the dreaded bird on her roof, and even her neighbors had reported the same eerie sound.
The girl didn’t like the boy. He talked too much, unlike his father, Sergeant Adeleke. People let him be because they believed the boy’s fate dictated that he inherit all the words his father could not speak. Amoda clutched a burlap bag tightly on her lap; she had never left Aramoko before. She forced herself to look away from the tiny speck that was the bent old woman waving at her only granddaughter. Tears filled Amoda’s eyes, obscuring her last glimpse of her grandmother and of Aramoko as the Bedford lorry drove away from the lean-to shed that served as the bus stop.
Dayisi noticed her tears and tried to cheer her up. “My father’s youngest brother, Baba Kekere, lived in Lagos. He was a carpenter. A tall, wiry man who visited Emuren once a year. And with each visit, he promised to take me to Lagos after I finished secondary school. He could not fulfill his promise because Death visited him before he could. The day his body arrived in the village for burial, I cried the most. I cried for the opportunity lost, but the next day I decided to run away to Lagos.”
Amoda gasped, “Were you not afraid of the big city?”
“There are bigger fears in our forests than in Lagos.”
“You do not lie.”
“I snuck into one of the lorries,” Dayisi continued. “I chose the Bedford; if Mother ran after it, if she discovered my absence early, I would not hear her cries over the rage of the lorry as it climbed up the first hill and drove away. If I had heard her cries, I would have jumped off that moving lorry. I could not refuse her anything. So, I sat on the Bedford lorry between a man and a woman, kola nut traders on their way to Lagos. I didn’t look at her or speak to her. She and my mother belonged to the same cooperative society, and if she had ordered me to get off the lorry, I would have complied. I didn’t sleep at all because I didn’t want to lean on the woman accidentally. My eyes took in everything on the way—mostly trees and toilet stops.”
“Did you like Lagos?” Amoda said.
Dayisi stopped and smiled sadly. “Lagos is the beginning of the end of my life,” he said.
For a while, he had forgotten about the burlap sack beneath his seat and quickly checked to ensure it was still there. He had emptied his father’s savings into the burlap sack he found under the old man’s bed. Dayisi was a salesboy for a Lebanese man in a supermarket in Yaba. He planned to use the stolen money to start his own small provision shop in Iddo. Lagos had taught him a lot. To survive, he had to learn the city’s ways on his own. He could not stay with relatives because his mother had told them to drag him to Emure if they saw him in Lagos. He slept under a Lagos bridge when he was a carrier boy at Iddo and a washer boy on Sundays.
“There is a loneliness in Lagos that can’t be described, only experienced. It is a continuous journey away from family.”
Amoda didn’t know what to say. The boy, known for being very talkative, surprised her. She hadn’t expected him to be insightful. She tried to comfort him: “May we bring home the rewards of our sojourn.”
The boy grunted exactly like his father, but he was far away from the lorry, so she left him to his thoughts. Dayisi’s mother had died before he could visit Emuren. The woman didn’t get to see her son return to her. Dayisi’s father didn’t forgive him; he believed he had caused his mother’s death. Amoda’s grandmother believed she wouldn’t see her granddaughter again before she died. She touched the burlap sack again to drive away her thoughts about death. The old woman had given Amoda all her money because she would need it more. Her grandmother reasoned that it was money Amoda had made from the oranges she had secretly harvested from the trees near the crash site.
In a few hours, the Bedford left behind a bumpy stretch of the journey, and the drive became smoother. The passengers settled into the relative quiet and peace—some dozed off. But if only they knew that peace was far from all of them. Under Dayisi’s feet, in one of the burlap bags from the German plane crash, was a stowaway. In the boy’s haste to run out of his father’s room, he didn’t notice that he had taken a small pouch. And because it was wrapped in many layers of newspaper by Sergeant Adeleke, the pilot’s cry was muted to a hoarse whisper: “Wo ist meine Tasche?” It was easily drowned out by the engine of the Old Bedford, which grunted every time the driver shifted gears or accelerated.
Nobody on the bus saw the bird perched on the roof of the lorry on its way to Lagos. Nobody in the vehicle heard its hoarse cry, either, because it waited for the driver to change gears before screeching, “Wo ist meine Tasche?” But if the passengers had heard something, their ears would have distorted the German words “Where is my bag?” to “Look, my Death shall not tarry.”
