I must admit that I
felt a little bit guilty here because Okere is very
good-looking. Nearly six feet tall, probably no more than
175 lbs, light in complexion, with hair so full and soft
that I always felt tempted to ask him if he was mixed. Girls
always wanted him in those undergraduate school days but he
was either too shy to respond or too busy with academics to
find the time. He always wore a purposeful and determined
look, though a little bit menace there when he is angry. I am simply the
epitome of evil, an insane monster, a mad lion preying on
innocent deer…I have spawned a jungle of evil to sully our
world of angels. I actually picked up
a copy of the poem again and started studying my words as if
somebody else wrote it… The Worlds We
Make (For Dr. Chuma
Maduora) The worlds we make
and what we do The greed and
cowardice and failed dices Will give earth the
ears she does not deserve Innocent blood which
the goddess does not want The words of the
good will ever live there With weeds of evil
where flowers grow My garden has learnt
to endure like a mule Where the
life-giving dew is small and light Like the little
things which one in want knows Because of the well
of light in us Holding firm against
the deep night winds Against the storm
between blood and air What ears will ever
hear those words Without a blast in
its passageways The devil walked
there into this man’s heart Pitched a tent of
cactus and bramble And poor Chuma whose
golden heart Always thirsts for
love and fun and peace And a world where
smiles will rule all hearts Walked into that
realm of death by fire The tale of evil
will always sail there From waters conjured
by our strange passions To the burning
shores of all desert dreams Where our madness
stoops to drink like lions Whose preys the day
has already made With the thundering
hoofs of a hapless deer… Now, I am no longer
sure about this whole thing. I got up, stretched, and with a
yawn, walked into my room, rummaged through my travel bag
and fished out the Burlington Daily Comet to read the
news all over… “GRISLY
MURDER NEAR ST. MICHAEL’S CHURCH An African immigrant cab driver, Noli
Okere, 45, was arrested this Sunday morning for the
cold-blooded murder of his wife, Pat Okere, 39, a Pharmacist
at Lion Crest Pharmacy on Leesville Crossings and a Carnegie
Research Fellow, Dr Chuma Maduora, 51, attached to the
Institute of Peace in Burlington. Burlington city police are
still talking to the African immigrant community as they try
to make sense of the strange Sunday morning killings. There
is a flood of information flowing in from immigrants, and
police are trying to piece the details together. All that is known for
now is that Mr. Okere brought his wife to Burlington several
years ago, put her through school where she qualified as a
Pharmacist. Mr. Okere and his wife separated last year
because, according to immigrant community sources, the wife
was not cooperating with him over family responsibilities
and so forth. Dr. Maduora was a family friend before the
separation and shared the friendship and goodwill of the
couple because they all came from the same part of Africa.
He is survived by his wife and four children who are back in
Africa to give him a one year breather to pursue his
research under a Carnegie Fellowship at the Peace Institute.
The murder may have been driven by jealousy because after
the separation, Dr. Maduora still retained the friendship
of either party. Apparently, he was
lured out from his house by Mr. Okere’s invitation to join
him and his wife for Thanksgiving at St. Michael’s. When the
surprised Dr. Maduora said his car was in bad shape, Mr.
Okere volunteered to pick him up. He agreed to follow to
what became the scene of tragedy impelled by both curiosity
and his good nature. About fifty yards or
so to the portals of St. Michael’s, Mr. Okere suddenly
stopped, pulled out a hand-gun from the folds of his big
African robes and in a flash pumped bullets into Dr. Maduora
who was sitting in the rear. He next turned to his obviously
surprised wife and did the same before turning the gun to
himself. He probably would have killed himself successfully
but there was apparently only one bullet left in the
magazine. That one bullet passed through his neck. clean. By
the time trooper James Gantt pulled up beside the vehicle,
Mr. Okere had slumped unto the steering wheel, unconscious.
He is in the ICU of Burlington’s Thompson Memorial Hospital
on Westphalia Drive in critical but stable condition…” The first time I
received this paper several weeks ago, and read this news, I
had flung the newspaper aside in disgust. This time, I
placed it on the reading desk like a sacred object, overcome
by what I could not exactly tell. From what vantage point do
I begin to contemplate the strange undulations of this thing
called life? I wondered. Now, can you believe that many
years after our undergraduate years at the University, I ran
into our room mate’s elder brother. He remembered me because
he used to take us out for chats and drinks when he came to
visit his brother during his leave in those days. Do you
know what he told me in the course of our conversation? Our
room mate hanged himself because he refused to give him
enough pocket money to accommodate his membership in the
Alpha Fraternity, a pretentious undergraduate campus club
which claimed they were the “best”. Best in what I could
never tell. And here now is the second green bottle on the
wall. He is in jail for murder. And here I am, the last
green bottle, 55 years old, a somewhat complacent and
taciturn bachelor, living as if life has no terminus. I
always jokingly tell my friends that Journalism is in my DNA
with a mad rider on a bucking nomadic beast as its dynamo…
Strange harmony there, is it not? I assume I know but do not
really ever know where I am headed. Deep night winds and the
horizon remain my sweet sirens. I arrived in Florida
on leave from Enugu Daily Bubble, a national
newspaper in Eastern Nigeria, where I have been
working since graduation as Features Editor. I won a one
year Fellowship at the South East Florida University
Writer’s Workshop. I had to drive up to Burlington, about
three hours from my campus when I heard about the killings
from a friend. I am not very much of a poet even though two
anthologies of African writing have featured six of my
poems. I wrote this poem riding on a monster wave of
violent passion of unknown origin. I submitted the poem,
with little revision, “The Worlds We Make”, to the African Catholic, a kind of monthly bulletin published
by the African immigrant community in Burlington. Even
though the poem was published with my name and address, I
do not know how it got to Okere or how he found the facility
to write back to me from prison. I did not even know he had
recovered from the self-inflicted bullet wound reported in
the newspaper. His letter came with some real surprise. I
had thought the name was a coincidence. I wrote the poem
without any idea that he was my old room mate from
under-graduate school ! The confluence of actors and the
merging of stage is becoming too much for me. Until I got his
reply, I was not part of the drama. Neither was he as
somebody I knew. Almost everybody in our generation knew Dr.
Maduora. He graduated while we were freshmen. And he did not
just graduate. He graduated with First Class Honors and was
the recipient of the National Union of Journalists coveted
prize for the best Journalism graduate that year. He was a
role model to so may of us whether or not you were in his
discipline or associated areas. From then on, he was always
in the news. He did graduate work in Philosophy and Peace
Studies with, I think , the Fulbright-Hayes fellowship. I am
not sure. On his return to the alma mater as Professor of
Philosophy, he became affiliated to the Africa Center Human
Rights Watch shuttling always between the University and
Lagos especially during national crises. The day I got the
letter from Okere was the same day I got the email
directive from the Managing Editor of Enugu Daily Bubble to do this story for the newspaper. It should educate
our people back home about the plight of those who go
overseas for further studies, claimed the Managing Editor.
Perhaps he was right. There were before this tragedy a
thousand and one bizarre stories out there on spousal
violence and brutality in the African immigrant community in
the United States. I never ever imagined I would find myself
in the center of one of them. As I paced up and
down my room wondering about point-of-view and objectivity,
my phone rang. I looked at it with some hesitation and
inexplicable trepidation. I picked it up. It was the friend
out in Waycross near Burlington, who suggested a hotel to me
because of its location near the tenement called The Loft,
and a host of apartments teeming with African presence in
Burlington. While we chatted about this whole thing, I told
him that for me to write objectively about this story I
needed access to Okere to know how he really feels. His
children…Dr. Maduora’s family back home and all sorts of
questions about life, beyond what he wrote to me, other
feelings…I would love to see him especially since we have
never seen each other since graduation. How did my
supercilious smile come across like a shroud on a dead
clown’s face? That was a tough one…something incongruous
here with anger and the morbid probably getting the better
part of him. I would like to have all kinds of trivia in
that letter and indeed from that troubled mind in the
penitentiary explained… Hello Yes How are you and your
sleuthing? I am trying. Have you been able
to find out how to gain access to the prison to see Okere? Not yet. Well. You don’t have
to worry any more. Why not. Do you have
a solution? Well…We just heard
that Okere is dead. What? He hanged himself in
his prison cell last night! SLQ | 