The Multiple Intelligences programme

He writes about the world that remained silent while Biafrans died. He argues that Britain inspired this silence. The arms and advice that Britain gave Nigeria shaped other countries. In the United States, Biafra was “under Britain's sphere of interest.” In Canada, the prime minister quipped,

“Where is Biafra?” The Soviet Union sent technicians and planes to Nigeria, thrilled at the chance to influence Africa without offending America or Britain. And from their white-supremacist positions, South Africa and Rhodesia gloated at further proof that black-run governments were doomed to failure.

Communist China denounced the Anglo-American-Soviet imperialism but did little else to support Biafra. The French sold Biafra some arms but did not give the recognition that Biafra most needed.

And many Black African countries feared that an independent Biafra would trigger other secessions and so supported Nigeria.

The Late Sixties

25

O

lanna jumped each time she heard the thunder. She imagined another air raid, bombs rolling out of a plane and exploding in the compound before she and Odenigbo and Baby and Ugwu could reach the bunker down the street. Sometimes she imagined the bunker itself collapsing, squashing them all into mud. Odenigbo and some of the neighborhood men had built it in a week; after they dug the pit, as wide as a hall, and after they roofed it with clay-layered palm trunks, he told her, “We're safe now, nkem. We're safe.” But the first time he showed her how to climb down the jagged steps, Olanna saw a snake coiled in a corner. Its black skin glistened with silver markings and tiny crickets hopped about and, in the silence of the damp underground that made her think of a grave, she screamed.

Odenigbo bashed the snake with a stick and told her he would make sure the zinc sheet at the entrance of the bunker was more secure. His calmness bewildered her. The tranquil tone he used to confront their new world, their changed circumstances, bewildered her. When the Nigerians changed their currency and Radio Biafra hurriedly announced a new currency too, Olanna stood in the bank line for four hours, dodging flogging men and pushing women, until she exchanged their Nigerian money for the prettier Biafran pounds. Later, during breakfast, she held up the medium-size envelope of notes and said, “All the cash we have.”

Odenigbo looked amused. “We're both earning money, nkem.”

“This is the second month the directorate has delayed your salary,” she said, and put the tea bag on his saucer in her own cup. “And you can't call what they pay me at Akwakuma earning money.”

“We'll get our life back soon, in a free Biafra,” he said, his usual words lined with his usual forceful reassurance, and sipped his tea.

Olanna placed her cup against her cheek, to warm it, to delay the first sip of weak tea made from a reused tea bag. When he stood up and kissed her goodbye, she wondered why he was not frightened by how little they had. Perhaps it was because he did not go to the market himself. He did not notice how a cup of salt cost a shilling more each week and how chickens were chopped into bits that were still too expensive and how nobody sold rice in large bags anymore because nobody could buy them. That night, she was silent as his thrusts became faster. It was the first time she felt detached from him;

while he was murmuring in her ear, she was mourning her money in the bank in Lagos.

“Nkem? Are you all right?” he asked, raising himself to look at her.

“Yes.”

He sucked her lower lip before he rolled off and fell asleep. She had never known his snoring to be so rasping. He was tired. The long walk to the Manpower Directorate, the sheer mindlessness of compiling names and addresses day after day, exhausted him, she knew, yet he came home each day with lit-up eyes. He had joined the Agitator Corps; after work, they went into the interior to educate the people. She often imagined him standing in the middle of a gathering of rapt villagers, talking in that sonorous voice about the great nation that Biafra would be. His eyes saw the future. And so she did not tell him that she grieved for the past, different things on different days, her tablecloths with the silver embroidery, her car, Baby's strawberry cream biscuits. She did not tell him that sometimes when she watched Baby running around with the neighborhood children, so helpless and happy, she wanted to gather Baby in her arms and apologize. Not that Baby would understand.

Ever since Mrs. Muokelu, who taught Elementary One at Akwakuma, had told her about the children forced into a truck by soldiers and returned at night with their palms chafed and bleeding

from grinding cassava, she had asked Ugwu never to let Baby out of his sight. But she did not really believe the soldiers would have much use for a child as young as Baby. She worried, instead, about air raids. She had a recurring dream: She forgot about Baby and ran to the bunker and after the bombs had fallen, she tripped on the burnt body of a child with its features so blackened that she could not be certain it was Baby. The dream haunted her. She made Baby practice running to the bunker. She asked Ugwu to practice picking Baby up and running. She taught Baby how to take cover if there was no time for the bunker—to lie flat on her belly, hands wrapped around her head.

Still, she worried that she had not done enough and that the dream portended some negligence of hers that would harm Baby. When, toward the end of the rainy season, Baby began to cough in drawn-out whistles, Olanna felt relief.Something had happened to Baby. If the heavens were fair, wartime misfortunes would be mutually exclusive; since Baby was sick, she could not be harmed in an air raid.

A cough was something Olanna could exercise control over, an air raid was not.

She took Baby to Albatross Hospital. Ugwu removed the palm fronds piled on top of Odenigbo's car, but each time she turned the key, the engine wheezed and died out. Finally Ugwu pushed it before it started. She drove slowly and stepped on the brake when Baby started to cough. At the checkpoint, where a huge tree trunk lay across the road, she told the civil defenders that her child was very sick and they said sorry and did not search the car or her handbag. The dim hospital corridor smelled of urine and penicillin. Women were sitting with babies on their laps, standing with babies on their hips, and their chatter mixed with crying. Olanna remembered Dr. Nwala from the wedding. She had barely noticed him until after the bombing, when he said, “The mud will stain your dress,” and helped her up, Okeoma's shirt still wrapped around her.

She told the nurses that she was an old colleague of his.

“It's terribly urgent,” she said, and kept her English accent crisp and her head held high. A nurse showed her into his office promptly. One of the women sitting in the corridor cursed. “Tufiakwa! We have been waiting since dawn! Is it because we don't talk through our nose like white people?”

Dr. Nwala raised his willowy body from his seat and came around to shake her hand. “Olanna,” he said, looking into her eyes.

“How are you, doctor?”

“We are managing,” he said, and patted Baby's shoulder. “How are you?”

“Very well. Okeoma visited us last week.”

“Yes, he stayed a day with me.” He was staring at her, but she felt as if he were not listening, as if he were not really there. He looked lost.

“Baby has been coughing for some days now,” Olanna said loudly.

“Oh.” He turned to Baby. He placed the stethoscope on her chest and murmured ndo as she coughed.

When he walked over to the cupboard to look through some bottles and packets of medicine, Olanna felt sorry for him and was not sure why. He spent too long looking through so few things.

“I'll give you a cough syrup, but she needs antibiotics and I'm afraid we've run out,” he said, staring at her again, in that odd way that locked his eyes with hers. His expression was filled with melancholy fatigue. Olanna wondered if perhaps he had recently lost a person he loved.

“I'll write a prescription and you can try one of those people who trade, but it should be somebody reliable, of course.”

“Of course,” Olanna repeated. “I have a friend, Mrs. Muokelu, who can help.”

“Very good.”

“You should come and visit us when you have time,” Olanna said, standing up.

“Yes.” He took her hand in his and held it for a little too long.

“Thank you, doctor.”

“For what? I can't do much.” He gestured toward the door, and Olanna knew he meant the women

who were waiting outside. As she left, she glanced at the near-empty cupboard of medicine.

Olanna ran past the town square on her way to Akwakuma Primary School in the morning. She always did that in open spaces, running until she got to the thick shade of trees that would give good cover in case of an air raid. Some children were standing under the mango tree in the school compound, throwing stones up at the fruit. She shouted, “Go to your classes, osiso!” and they scattered briefly before coming back to aim at the mangoes. She heard a cheer when one fell, and then the raised voices as they quarreled over whose throw had brought the fruit down.

Mrs. Muokelu was in front of her classroom fiddling with the bell. The thick black hair on her arms and legs, the fuzz on her upper lip, the curled strands on her chin, and the squat muscular limbs often made Olanna wonder if perhaps Mrs. Muokelu would have been better off being born a man.

“Do you know where I can buy antibiotics, my sister?” Olanna asked, after they hugged. “Baby has a cough, and they did not have any at the hospital.”

Mrs. Muokelu hummed for a while to show that she was thinking. His Excellency's face glared from the fabric of the boubou she wore every day; she often announced that she would wear nothing else until the state of Biafra was fully established.

“Anybody can sell medicine, but you don't know who is mixing chalk in his backyard and calling it Nivaquine,” she said. “Give me the money and I will go to Mama Onitsha. She is authentic. She will sell you Gowon's dirty pant if you pay the right price.”

“Let her keep the pant and just give us medicine.” Olanna was laughing.

Mrs. Muokelu smiled and picked up the bell. “I saw a vision yesterday,” she said. Her boubou was too long for her short body; it dragged along the ground and Olanna feared that she would trip on it and fall.

“What was the vision?” Olanna asked. Mrs. Muokelu always had visions. In the last one, she had seen Ojukwu personally leading the battle in the Ogoja sector, which meant that the enemy had been completely wiped out there.

“Traditional warriors from Abiriba used their bows and arrows and finished the vandals in the Calabar sector.I makwa, children were walking over their bones to go to the stream.”

“Really,” Olanna said, and kept her face serious.

“It means Calabar will never fall,” Mrs. Muokelu said, and began to ring the bell. Olanna watched the swift movements of the masculine arm. They really had nothing in common, herself and this barely educated primary-school teacher from Eziowelle who believed in visions. Yet Mrs. Muokelu had always seemed familiar. It was not because Mrs. Muokelu plaited her hair and went with her to the Women's Voluntary Services meetings and taught her how to preserve vegetables, but because Mrs. Muokelu exuded fearlessness, a fearlessness that reminded Olanna of Kainene.

That evening, when Mrs. Muokelu brought the antibiotic capsules wrapped in newspaper, Olanna asked her to come inside and showed her a photo of Kainene, sitting by the pool with a cigarette between her lips.

“This is my twin sister. She lives in Port Harcourt.”

“Your twin!” Mrs. Muokelu exclaimed, fingering the plastic half of a yellow sun that she wore on a string around her neck. “Wonders shall never end. I did not know you were a twin, and, nekene, she does not look like you at all.”

“We have the same mouth,” Olanna said.

Mrs. Muokelu glanced at the photo again and shook her head. “She does not look like you at all,”

she repeated.

The antibiotics yellowed Baby's eyes. Her coughing got better, less chesty and less whistling, but her appetite disappeared. She pushed her garri around her plate and left her pap uneaten until it congealed in a waxy lump. Olanna spent most of the cash in the envelope and bought biscuits and toffees in shiny wrappers from a woman who traded behind enemy lines, but Baby only nibbled at them. She placed Baby on her lap and forced bits of mashed yam into her mouth, and when Baby choked and started to cry, Olanna, too, fought tears. Her greatest fear was that Baby would die. It was there, the festering fear, underlying everything she thought and did. Odenigbo skipped the Agitator Corps activities and rushed home earlier, and Olanna knew he shared her fear. But they did not talk about it, as though verbalizing it would make Baby's death imminent, until the morning she sat watching Baby sleep while Odenigbo got dressed for work. The resonating voice on Radio Biafra filled the room.

These African states have fallen prey to the British-American imperialist conspiracy to use the committee's recommendations as a pretext for a massive arms support for their puppet and tottering neocolonialist regime in Nigeria….

“That's right!” Odenigbo said, buttoning his shirt with quick movements.

On the bed, Baby stirred. Her face had lost its fat and was eerily adult, sunken and thin-skinned.

Olanna watched her.

“Baby won't make it,” she said quietly.

Odenigbo stopped and looked at her. He turned the radio off and came over and held her head against his belly. Because he said nothing at first, his silence became a confirmation that Baby would die. Olanna shifted away.

“It's only normal that she doesn't have an appetite,” he said finally. But his tone lacked the certitude she was used to.

“Look how much weight she's lost!” Olanna said.

“Nkem, her cough is getting better and her appetite will come back.” He began to comb his hair. She was angry with him for not saying what she wanted to hear, for not assuming the power of fate and telling her that Baby would be well, for being normal enough to continue to dress for work. His kiss before he left was quick, not the usual lingering press of lips, and that too she held against him. Tears filled her eyes. She thought about Amala. Amala had made no contact with them since the day at the hospital but she wondered now if she would be expected to tell Amala if Baby were to die.

Baby yawned and woke up. “Good morning, Mummy Ola.” Even her voice was thin.

“Baby, ezigbo nwa, how are you?” Olanna picked her up, hugged her, blew into her neck, and struggled with her tears. Baby felt so slight, so light. “Will you eat some pap, my baby? Or some bread? What do you want?”

Baby shook her head. Olanna was trying to cajole Baby into drinking some Ovaltine when Mrs.

Muokelu arrived with a knotted raffia bag and a self-satisfied smile.

“They have opened a relief center on Bishop Road and I went very early this morning,” she said.

“Ask Ugwu to bring me a bowl.”

She poured some yellow powder into the bowl Ugwu brought.

“What is that?” Olanna asked.

“Dried egg yolk.” Mrs. Muokelu turned to Ugwu. “Fry it for Baby.”

“Fry it?”

“Is something wrong with your ears? Mix it with some water and fry it, osiso! They say children love the taste of this thing.”

Ugwu gave her a slow look before he went into the kitchen. The dried egg yolk, fried in red palm oil, looked soggy and unnervingly bright-colored on the plate. Baby ate all of it.

The relief center used to be a girls' secondary school. Olanna imagined the grassy walled compound before the war, young women hurrying to classes in the morning and sneaking to the gate in the evening to meet young men from the government college down the road. Now it was dawn and the gate was locked. A large crowd had gathered outside. Olanna stood awkwardly among the men and women and children, who all seemed used to standing and waiting for a rusted iron gate to be opened so they could go in and be given food donated by foreign strangers. She felt discomfited. She felt as if she were doing something improper, unethical: expecting to get food in exchange for nothing. Inside the compound, she could see people moving about, tables set out with sacks of food, a board that said world council of churches. Some of the women clutched their baskets and peered over the gate and muttered about these relief people wasting time. The men were talking among themselves; the oldest-looking man wore his red chieftaincy hat with a feather stuck in it. A young man's voice stood out from the others, high-pitched, shouting gibberish, like a child learning to speak.

“He has serious shell shock,” Mrs. Muokelu whispered, as if Olanna did not know. It was the only time Mrs. Muokelu spoke. She had slowly edged her way to the front of the gate, nudging Olanna to follow her each time. Somebody behind had begun a story about a Biafran victory. “I am telling you, all of the Hausa soldiers turned and ran, they had seen what was bigger than them….” The voice trailed away as a man inside the compound strode toward the gate. His T-shirt, land of the rising sun written on it in black, was loose around his slim body and he carried a sheaf of papers. He walked with an air of importance, his shoulders held high. He was the supervisor.

“Order! Order!” he said, and opened the gate.

The swift scrambling rush of the crowd surprised Olanna. She felt jostled; she swayed. It was as if they all shoved her aside in one calculated move since she was not one of them. The firm elbow of the elderly man beside her landed painfully on her side as he launched his run into the compound. Mrs.

Muokelu was ahead, dashing toward one of the tables. The old man in the feathered hat fell down, promptly picked himself up, and continued his lopsided run to the queue. Olanna was surprised, too, by the militia members flogging with long whips and shouting “Order! Order!” and by the stern faces of the women at the tables, who bent and scooped into the bags held out before them and then said,

“Yes! Next!”

“Join that one!” Mrs. Muokelu said, when Olanna moved to stand some way behind her. “That is the egg-yolk line! Join it! This one is stockfish.”

Olanna joined the queue and held herself from pushing back at the woman who tried to nudge her out. She let the woman stand in front of her. The incongruity of queuing to beg for food made her feel uncomfortable, blemished. She folded her arms, then let them lie by her sides, and then folded them again. She was close to the front when she noticed that the powder being scooped into bags and bowls was not yellow but white. Not egg yolk but cornmeal. The egg-yolk line was the next one. Olanna hurried over to join it, but the woman who was dishing out the yolk stood up and said, “Egg yolk is finished!O gwula!”

Panic rose in Olanna's chest. She ran after the woman. “Please,” she said.

“What is it?” the woman asked. The supervisor, standing close by, turned to stare at Olanna.

“My little child is sick—” Olanna said.

The woman cut her short. “Join that line for milk.”

“No, no, she has not been eating anything, but she ate egg yolk.” Olanna held the woman's arm.

“Biko, please; I need the egg yolk.”

The woman pulled her arm away and hurried into the building and slammed the door. Olanna stood there. The supervisor, still staring, fanned himself with his sheaf of papers and said, “Ehe! I know you.”

His bald head and bearded face did not look familiar at all. Olanna turned to walk away because she

In document Perspectives on curriculum and pedagogy in a private kindergarten in China (Page 162-170)