The Morning the Soldiers Came

On the morning the soldiers came, Tyover Ityav was seventeen years old and sitting in the shade of the orange tree behind his father’s reception hut, fighting a losing war with a past-paper in Government. The question wanted him to discuss the doctrine of separation of powers with reference to the Nigerian experience. The Nigerian experience, as far as Tyover could see from the orange tree in December of 1984, was that the powers had recently been separated by the simple method of soldiers sending everyone else home, but he suspected this was not the answer the examiner wanted, and he was trying to find the answer the examiner wanted, which his father said was a different and more useful skill than being right.

His father held that a Tiv boy who wanted to survive Nigeria needed two things in equal measure: to read carefully, and to think clearly, and never to confuse the one with the other. Iorfa Ityav had said this so many times that Tyover could produce it in his father’s exact cadence, and did, behind his father’s back, to the great delight of his friend Terwase, who could produce it too.

Terwase was beside him. Terwase was beside him most mornings and had been most mornings since they were eight years old, when the Agber boy had crossed the low fence between the two compounds following the smell of groundnut soup off the Ityav fire and had, in the manner of a cat who has selected a house, simply never fully left. He was meant, this morning, to be revising Geography. He was instead lying on his back in the dust with his book tented open on his chest, watching the underside of the orange leaves and saying nothing, which with Terwase was never the same as thinking nothing.

They were Tyover and Terwase to the compound, and to the register at the mission school, and to Iorfa Ityav, who did not hold with shortening a name another man had chosen with care. To each other they were Ty and Terse, and it was Ty’s mother who had done it. She had taken the two long names in the first week the Agber boy started eating at her fire and found in each of them the part that was the person, and after that neither of them would answer to anything else from anyone who mattered. Terwase’s own mother had been three years dead by then. That was the thing underneath the groundnut soup, and the low fence, and the never quite going home, and in nine years not one of the four of them said it aloud.

It was Terwase who heard the vehicles. He always heard things first: a quality Tyover had stopped marvelling at and simply come to rely on, the way you rely on a dog’s ears. Terwase’s hand came out sideways and landed on Tyover’s forearm, flat, urgent, and Tyover looked up from the doctrine of separation of powers and saw that his friend had gone entirely still.

“Listen,” Terwase said.

Engines. More than one, heavy, coming up the laterite road from the Makurdi direction, slowing as they reached the turning that led to nowhere but the two compounds and the farms beyond.

The boys came around the side of the hut together and stopped.

Three vehicles had pulled up at the compound entrance. Two military jeeps, open-topped, and behind them a covered truck with soldiers in two facing rows in the back, rifles upright between their knees, their faces wearing the particular boredom of men who have been driven somewhere early to do a thing they have done before. The dust the vehicles had raised was still settling around them, drifting sideways in the dry-season light, catching in the boys’ throats.

Tyover’s father came out of the house.

He had heard them too. He came out unhurried, in his farm clothes, a cutlass still in his left hand from whatever he had been about to do with his morning, and he stopped at the entrance to the compound and stood there, and Tyover watched his father’s face do something he would spend the rest of his life trying to name.

It did not become afraid. Tyover looked for the fear, because he was seventeen and afraid himself and wanted the company of it, and did not find it. His father’s face had gone still instead: a stillness with weight in it, holding its shape against the morning the way a stone holds against a river. Years later Tyover would settle on the word dignity, and would spend a career in courtrooms watching for it in other men and seldom finding it. It was the rarest thing a man could own. Most never learned they had the option.

An officer climbed down from the lead jeep with a folder under his arm.

· · ·

The officer was young, younger than he wanted to appear, Tyover thought, the way the moustache was trying too hard, and he crossed the swept ground of the compound with a clipboard’s worth of authority and stopped a respectful distance from Iorfa Ityav, which was itself a small tell. A man wholly certain of his ground does not measure his distance.

“Are you the head of this compound?”

“I am Iorfa Ityav. This is my father’s ground.” Tyover’s father did not raise his voice. He had a way of speaking that made other people lean in, which was the opposite of how loud men got attention, and far more effective.

The officer opened the folder. “I have here an order of acquisition under the Land Use provisions, signed by the office of the Military Governor. This land and the adjoining parcel,” he glanced at the page, “are designated for development in the public interest. You will be compensated according to the schedule. You have fourteen days to remove yourselves and your property.”

He held the page out. Iorfa did not take it at once. He set down the cutlass, leaning it with care against the wall of the hut, as though to free both hands for a thing that deserved both hands, and then he took the page and read it.

He read it slowly. He read it, Tyover realised, the way he had taught his son to read, once for the words, then again for what was underneath them. The compound was silent but for the idle of the jeep engines and, somewhere out in the morning, a dove repeating its two soft notes into the indifferent air.

Godwin Agber came through the gap in the fence.

He had heard the engines from his own compound and he came now the way he had come for forty years, without being sent for, to stand beside his friend in whatever the morning had brought, and Tyover saw the two fathers fall into the old arrangement of themselves without a word, shoulder to shoulder, the way two trees that have grown up close lean into the same wind. Terwase’s breath changed beside him. To see your father walk toward soldiers is a particular thing.

Iorfa lowered the page. “This ground holds my father,” he said to the young officer, in English, so there could be no claim later that he had not understood. “And his father before him. It holds the Agber dead also, on that side. You cannot acquire what was never for sale. Tell whoever sent you that he is trying to buy something that has no price because it was never on the market. Tell him an Ityav said so.”

“Sir.” The officer’s jaw worked. “The order is lawful. I am not here to debate it.”

“I did not say it was unlawful,” Iorfa said. “I know it is lawful. That is the worst thing about it. I said it is wrong. A thing can be lawful and wrong at the same time. Your law and my wrong are standing in the same compound this morning. We will see which one is still standing in a hundred years.”

He folded the page once, with the same care he had given the cutlass, and held it back out. “Take your paper. I have read it. Reading it does not make me agree with it, and you cannot make me carry it.”

The officer took the page. For a moment, Tyover saw it, and would remember that he had seen it, the young man’s face showed something that his uniform had not been designed to accommodate. Then he mastered it, because that is what the uniform was for, and he turned and gave an order, and the soldiers did not get down from the truck, not that day. That day they only planted the first survey peg, at the corner of the Ityav farm, a wooden stake with a strip of red cloth tied to it that turned in the dry wind all afternoon like something trying to get free.

The fourteen days passed and nothing came, and the two families made the mistake that is always made, which is to read a delay as a reconsideration.

The grader came on the twenty-sixth day. It came with the same soldiers and a man from the Lands office with a camera, and it took the fence first and then the yam barn and then the long shed where Godwin Agber had kept forty years of tools, and it did all of it before noon, working across the two compounds without pausing at the line between them, because on the paper in the man’s folder there was no line between them. They were allowed to carry out what they could carry. Tyover carried his father’s books in four trips and a chair in one, and on the fifth trip he understood that he was not going to be able to take the orange tree, and stood in the road holding nothing and looking at it, and then went back in for the pots.

This passage is taken from Chapter Two of What Cannot Be Taken, a novel by Gbe Azenga, published by Takuruku Press. The book follows two boys from a compound outside Makurdi across thirty years of Nigerian life, from the morning their fathers’ land was taken to the night one of them drives the width of the country to stand between the other and a gun.

Gbe Azenga

Gbe Azenga is a writer from Nigeria's Middle Belt. He writes fiction and non-fiction, and the same preoccupations run through both: land and who is permitted to hold it, the distance between what is lawful and what is right. ‘What Cannot Be Taken’ is his first novel.

The book follows two boys from a compound outside Makurdi, Tyover Ityav and Terwase Agber, across twenty-three years of Nigerian life, from the dry-season morning their fathers' land was taken to a room in Ikoyi where one of them stands unarmed between a gun and the other.

‘What Cannot Be Taken’ is available in full on Amazon, alongside, ‘A Letter to Madiba’, fifteen letters written to Nelson Mandela on Afrophobia and what Africans owe one another; ‘How Africa Fought Apartheid in South Africa’, a history of the continental campaign that outlasted the regime; and ‘The Borrowed Ballot’, on democracy's promises and the mechanics of holding power once it is won. All can be found at amazon.com/author/gbeazenga. Visit Teambookshop for What Cannot Be Taken.