STRAY BULLETS 1: AFTER ABEOKUTA

 AFTER ABEOKUTA

To dig gold and diamonds, you need humans. To grow cash crops, you need humans. To trade and transport, you need humans. 

Humans are more valuable than all the gold and diamonds, cash crops and merchandise put together.

Ask history.

Ask economics.

But you can't sell humans.

That's how we got in trouble. When we sell humans, we devalue ourselves.

After Abeokuta. Before the fall of Nri.

Christophe was so far from home that he knew there was no going home again. He left home in the islands to go home to Africa and found that he was just as lost as he had ever been.

It was Dahomey that broke him in his heart. It was Dahomey that made him into something that he himself did not recognize. It was the great Dahomey king Ghezo in his oriental silks and Italian sandals and that stupid, vain parasol he carried above his head everywhere.

Christophe knew the tricks of politics that forced wise leaders to openly do things that they were steadfastly against. Ghezo was playing a game he inherited from his grandfather. Old Agaja knew that to traffick in people would make his kingdom weaker. In fact, it would make all the kingdoms weaker. Agaja wanted to trade in palm oil. And gold and minerals and metals. He wanted to trade in ideas and techniques. He wanted to compete in peace and for prosperity. But the other kingdoms on every side of him wanted glass. And textiles. And guns.

So he went to war, defeated them piece by piece and sold their people into slavery.

Refreshed by new resources and clothed in newly acquired powers of powers of terror and violence, he still tried to play the wise king. Agaja tried to use his new powers and wealth to bring his newly subdued subjects out of the slave trade and into a more prosperous peace. But besting an enemy in a battle and selling his captured soldiers as captives was not enough to convince the Oyo, the Aro and the half breed Portuguese traders on the coast to give up the source of all their wealth and power. The good king decided that to bring an end to the slave trade, there was only one thing to do - he had to conquer them all.

To do so, he would need more wealth and weapons. And the fastest way to get them? The slave trade.

Better than the annual head business, he comforted himself.

Perhaps he told himself that he was saving so many from having their heads separated from their necks. Every year, the Fon priests would sacrifice thousands of captives in a bloody festival meant to ensure that both Dahomey's enemies and its citizens would understand that the gods demanded the lives of all those who opposed the king. Perhaps he thought he had enough years left on his life to win the peace so completely that the next generation would not be diverted from the path he set for them.

He did not.

When he died, Dahomey did not pretend to be trying to end the slave trade by selling their enemies as captives.

Within two generations, his grandson Ghezo had reduced the plan for peace to a vain pretense. There would be no end to the people traffic. Not as long as the the West African royalty and nobles were growing more rich and powerful.

Christophe had sailed with the British for West Africa. He thought he was going to liberate Africans from slave traders.

When they bombarded a town for switching trade allegiances to the French, Christophe abandoned the British. He relieved himself of his uniform, except for his boots, belts and weapons and headed for Ouidah and Alladah. That's where he would meet up with the Dahomey.

The Dahomey army was everything a good soldier could want - except for being an effective fighting force against foreign slave traders. Because he was a soldier who had fought both against and on the side of the foreigners, he rose up in the Dahomey military, until he became a favorite of the king - one of the special guard who did not protect the king as much as do his bidding in ways that ensured no one could see the king's hand in the doing. He was, in effect, the king's favorite assassin.

It was all well and good being a Dahomey assassin under Ghezo's father, Agonglo and his brother Adandlozan. That war, politics and trade would meet at the end of his blade was still a better fate than what he escaped on the island. He could have ended up blacklisted from working on the docks for singing some satirical lyrics at a rum shop cabaret. He could have ended up back in jail.

When the pretty young prince took the kingship after his brother's death, he spoke the same words he grandfather, his father and his brother had spoken to keep the peace between the people of the Fon and beyond. For Ghezo, however, peace talk was just talk. He had no interest in peace or palm oil. He would sell his grandfather's corpse for a length of blue silk.

Twenty years fighting for freedom came to nothing.

It was a long way from Dahomey to Abeokuta. To make matters worse, many people had never even heard of the City of the Free and many of those didn't even think it was real.

A place in Africa with no slave trade? Ha!

Black skinned people were the single most valuable thing in the world. Why would any king with a strong warrior party not raid villages for captives? It's like saying a farmer would plough his field for crops instead of digging for gold when his tools started plucking nuggets out of the turned soil.

By the time Christophe reached Abeokuta, it was too late. He was only on time to help save them from annihilation. For the rest of his life, Christophe regretted not abandoning Dahomey sooner and heading for the free city the first time he heard about it. Twenty years in Dahomey had only made him hate the kings of Africa. Ten years in Abeokuta may have salvaged his love for humanity.

As luck would have it, he came just a year before it was time to watch it all fall down. All he could do was help slow down the invaders and organize the citizens into escape parties headed in the direction of another near mythical kingdom - Nri.

'How come we are stronger than them, but they can defeat us and trample over us and buy and sell us?'

'Weapons and traitors.'

'So simple? Guns and slave catchers?'

'Yeah. And, well...what supports the weapons. Like ships. And books. And a special kind of  greed. Greed that is not satisfied by having. Greed that is only satisfied by getting more.'

The blue man had a different lilt of speech and different features from all the rest. He was somehow blacker than any West African. Like Christophe, he did not resemble any tribe or ethnic group that anyone in West Africa could recognize. He was called Nilo and was friends with some powerful people on the council at Abeokuta.

'Why are you coming with us? Why don't you just go home?' Christophe had never spoken with him before, although they had met and exchanged pleasantries several times.

'Eventually,' Nilo replied. 'Home is very far away for me.'

'So after all this, you still have your own war to fight?'

'Not you? Are you ready to go home?'

'There is no home for me. My war is already over. And I lost. I just keep losing.'

The blue man laughed out loud.

'So...why do you keep fighting?'

JACKAL & SPARROWHAWK

Home.

It is important to have a place to go home to, even if you intend never to go home again. It's important to have people to go home to. Without home, you are just a wave on the endless ocean being birthed and crashing to your death with no purpose, no significance, no consequence.

'One day, they will tell stories of us, our escape and our exile. The children will sing about you when they play warrior games.'

Nilo was half-laughing to himself. Christophe did not have such a highly developed sense of humor.

'No one will remember us. No one cares about anything except a bunch of escaped slaves wandering the jungle like lost cattle. Nobody cares about these people.'

Christophe pulled himself away from where the water was dripping in through the makeshift roof. Both Nilo and Christophe had their legs pulled in, fetal position, because the shelter was too small for the full length of a man. Nilo curled up like a child, his face shining with excitement in this moment of despair. Christophe just looked uncomfortable.

'Nobody cares,' Nilo repeated. 'Nobody cares but you. And I, personally, think that will be enough.'

'I am not their leader. I am just a lost boy from an island made of fly shit who can never back.'

'Maybe...But you are the one they turn to in a crisis. You are the light in the dark, the great shield in the night of spears, the only bridge that leads away from the fire and over the river.'

'Your English is very good, Nilo.'

'My grandfather was a shoeshine at a British port.'

Did he teach you how to lie, thought Christophe. He didn't know who or what Nilo really was. All he really knew was that Nilo was against the trade, Nilo was warrior smart and Nilo's words usually matched his actions exactly - except when he was talking about himself. Of course.

'We like to think that people...you know...people are brave...people are smart...people are organized. But in the big song of everyone, people just want someone to lead them, to show it's okay to be brave, to bring them victory. They need somebody to show them how to be strong when the world is drowning in rain and armies of enemies are on their tail. They need someone who would die for them. They need someone they can die for.'

'Why don't they get someone they can live for?'

'They already have that. They have family. They need something else to die for. Something bigger than the life of a child or a wife. Bigger than a family or a tribe.'

'It's a nice bedtime story. The lost boy becomes a great warrior who leads runaway captives to a new promised land out of the reach of the cruel invaders.'

'Yes! You see it? You see it?'

Christophe couldn't help but chuckle. It would be an entertaining story if Nilo was talking about someone else.

'There's already a king where we are going.'

'You say that because you think we are stopping at Nri. But why would it be any different there? Abeokuta had a council chosen by people. Nri has a king. And we both know by now, all kings are bad.

'Even your king?' Would Nilo deny it or condemn his king?

'My king is not just a killer. He is the chief assassin of the land.'

'Does he terrorize his people?'

'He terrorizes his enemies. And in doing so, reminds his people what a terror he is.'

'And this is what you wish for me?'

Nilo turned to Christophe.

'You are no king. But you are a true warrior. The best kind. You don't betray and you don't die foolishly.'

'People died under my protection.'

'The children will sing for them too. Everyone will remember that revolt at Alladah. Everyone will remember that slave who went across the sea, made himself a free man and came back to burn the ports.'

'I only burned one port.'

'There's still time. They will burn other ports and give you the glory just so they can say, "I was there when the Sparrowhawk burned Ouidah. And Freetown. And Gold Coast."'

'All of that is behind us. And I am not turning back to burning them for my vainglory.'

'Well, brother. What can I tell you? That's just the way that legend works. It has nothing to do with you personally. People make the legend they need out of the leader they have. The leader is made of legend. The man is just a seed.

'You left home in the islands because it wasn't home. You came home to Africa but it wasn't home either. Because there is no home for you. But you will lead them home. That matters, Sparrowhawk. It matters a lot. More than either of us can know.'

'It's a good story,' Christophe conceded of Nilo's fiction.

'Yes,' Nilo agreed.

'Too bad it won't be true.'

Nilo turned to Christophe suddenly, eye to eye in the rain under the cover of branches and leaves.

'It's true. It is already true even though you haven't done it yet. Even though you never do some of it. It won't be fact. But it will be true.'

'What's the difference? Facts have to be true.'

'Facts have to be true, but truth does not always have to be factual. Sometimes, we know the truth before the fact. Sometimes, we know the truth in spite of the fact. But this time, it is no problem between facts and truth because the truth is you are taking these people to safety. You are taking them home. That's a fact. That's the truth.