They obeyed his orders but questions about their lives and families were met with a silent hostility. He felt an officer should know the men he was in charge of even though these soldiers under his command would rather not be known. Still, he ate dinner with them instead of joining the junior officers’ table. “ Night had come, and with it the sense that Chike could be anywhere.” There was always a struggle to clear the colonel’s table, lower ranks jostling for the remnants of fresh fish and the dregs of wine left over in the bell-shaped crystal glasses. They ate from a private stash of food cooked separately in the kitchen. The most senior officers on the base flanked the colonel. Chike’s commanding officer was a stocky box of a man, his bulk filling the head of his table. Officers and lower ranks sauntered into the building in an assortment of mufti: woolen bobble hats and black T-shirts, wrappers knotted over the arm or tied around the waist, the slovenly slap of slippers flip-flopping their way inside.Ĭolonel Benatari sat by the door, watching the soldiers file past. He had grown quite fond of the canteen he was making his way to now, a low, squat building with thick plastic sheets tacked to the windows, the walls crumbling with damp. He would spot the garganeys and ruffs gliding through the sky, their long migration from Europe almost over. Later, he would note the birds perched on the loops of barbed wire wheeling around the base.
Out of this desolation had risen the grey walls of his new home. They came to a clearing of burned soil with charred stumps still rooted in it.
His first sight of the base had been on an evening like this, bumping through miles of bush, leaves pushing through the open window, insects flying up his nostrils and down the dark passages of his ears. It was Chike Ameobi’s twelfth month as an officer in Bayelsa, twelve months on the barren army base. She writes for the Guardian, with a special interest in Nigeria.Įvening swept through the Delta: half an hour of mauve before the sky bruised to black. Chibundu Onuzo's previous novel is The Spider King's Daughter. As they move toward the city, they meet other deserters and runaways who join them in searching for new opportunities. Abandoning the Nigerian army after being ordered to kill innocent civilians, Chike Ameobi travels to Lagos with his junior officer. The following is from Chibundu Onuzo's novel, Welcome to Lagos.
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