by Frances Ogamba
What happened next happened very quickly. The sequence of events at the Lekki Toll Gate was walled off by the suddenness of a blinding light. We only remembered that some of us were at the front lines, leaning or sitting on pentagon-shaped bricks, and got hit point blank by opened fire.
A girl lay prone, her hands loosely interlocked above her head, like a worn-out child. The bullets did a thorough job in the head of a boy lying next to her. Another girl’s eye dangled on her cheek. Another stayed quiet because of a bullet lodged deep into his throat. We all waited together: the dead and the undead.
A lady in a bloodied white tee shirt came to us. She had died at the first bark of bullets. She sat beside us on the ground. She said that soldiers were taking some of the bodies away, possibly to cover up tracks. She saw the face of the soldier that shot her and what kind of gun he used. We remembered her from the protest. She was the one who always screamed melodies into the megaphone, twirling her legs to songs.
“Are the soldiers still here?’ one of us who was not yet dead asked.
“Yes. Some of them,” the dead lady in the bloodied white tee shirt said.
“Is help coming?”
“The soldiers are blocking ambulances from getting here.”
“I know you from the protest. You dance really well,” someone said to the dead lady in the bloodied white tee shirt.
“Thank you,” she replied. “I have a degree in Dance and Cultural Arts.”
“That’s great. Never heard of that course. Which school?”
“University of Nigeria, Nsukka.”
“I went to UNN too. I was in the sciences.”
“Are you serious? Wow!”
“My name is Donald.”
“My name is Blessing.”
We heard a gurgle from the boy with the bullet in his throat. Then he left his body and sat near Blessing. His eyes looked lost, his whole body a question. He did not speak but we knew. He had been plucked from a life he was just settling into. He was one month into his new job before the protests began. He had a lover and a date scheduled for their wedding. We now knew some of these things.
Another lady lying spread-eagled some distance away from us hadn’t been shot. The stampede buried her underneath the running feet of a terrified crowd. Her head pulsed with the blood collecting inside it. Our bodies were cushioned deep in different conditions — torsos torn open, brain matter leaking out of opened skulls, gaping holes in the neck regions.
“Is it painful? Does it hurt to come over?” one of the undead asked Blessing.
“Yes. Imagine the deep prick of a needle on your stomach. But it is quick.”
The dense whispers slowly petered out, except for the croak of frogs, the chirping crickets coming from a nearby river on which the moon’s glitter path rose, and the groans of the undead who were too afraid to cross over. They stayed detained in their bodies by their will or thoughts for loved ones, or by thoughts of projects left fragmentary. For some of us, our own bodies had grown heavy and all the conditions we dreaded erupted in full.
Femi, a young DJ, wept until he became weary. He did live sound mixing for years and just this year, before the #EndSARS protest, he was named the most promising DJ in Lagos. He performed at parties hosted by Wizkid and Simi. He still had a couple of jobs to do at big shot parties. He begged us not to let him die even though he already had.
A pressman, Philip, who hadn’t spoken all night voiced his wish to capture our bodies littered in the arena, if only he could find his camera. He said he took photos of the soldiers.
“When they were approaching us?” one of us asked.
“Yes. And while they were aiming.”
“Did you know this would happen?”
“I don’t think anybody thought they would shoot.”
“I thought they would just plead with us to go home.”
“I thought the same. We were only protesting,”
“And singing.”
“Were we singing?”
“Yes. The Nigerian National Anthem.”
“And we were waving our flags”
“Oh, true. And soldiers do not shoot at people holding national flags.”
“But we were holding national flags, and they shot at us.”
We fell silent, clinging to the darkness, afraid of dusk and the exposure that could trail it. We did not want to be found on phone screens and on Twitter with our clothes deeply soaked in blood or completely ridden off our bodies, or with under wears and intestines and brain cortex in full glare of the sun.
“Do you hear that? Someone is coming.”
The feet shuffling morphed into the cries coming from a girl’s physical body. She was sprawled some distance away from us. Some of us went to her. The undead were too weak to come with us. The girl had the face of a child but had limbs and thighs too long and fat to be a child’s. She looked fourteen or fifteen or sixteen. The cold might have roused her.
“Mummy, water!” she whispered.
We imagined her mother combing neighbours’ houses and street corners, nursing a wild hope of seeing her daughter burst from nowhere.
“Mu-mmy!”
There was a roomy hole in her neck. Dark red blood glued most of her dress to her body. We carried her past the soldiers keeping guard at the west of the Lekki Toll Gate, past police officers picking up littered bullets. We were hopeful to save her because she was too young to join us. Two nurses ran towards us from the ambulance and took the girl. A young man in their team also hastened to us.
“How did you get past the soldiers? Please, get into the ambulance. We will get you the help you need now.”
“Please make sure the girl is fine, and that her parents find her,” we said.
“You are going back there? Please join the ambulance let’s go!”
We told them that there were others still hanging on, those who wept for long and had stilled.
“We can get them through to you since you cannot get to them,” we assured the medics. We moved some of the warm bodies to the ambulance. Some of them did not speak to us all night, but their bodies still carried tottery signs of life. We also moved some of the bodies too heavy to still have their owners in them. We moved Blessing’s body. We moved the boy with a bullet lodged deep in his throat. We moved the body of Philip, the pressman who could not find his camera. We moved some of our bodies, hoping to increase the chances of our families finding us in a more decent manner. Femi, the DJ, protested while we moved his body. He cried that we were suffocating his chances of survival.
“What about you?” the nurses asked us.
“What about us?” we asked back.
When we brought the last body, one of the nurses gave a muffled scream. Her eyes were glued to one of us who was exactly the same with the body we brought.
“Jesus! These people are all dead! They are carrying their own bodies o! Jesus!”
“Jesus Christ!” a male nurse screamed.
“Holy Ghost fire! Oloun ma je! God forbid!”
All the medical staff began to scramble into the ambulance. Their shouts were like the refrain of an experimental song. The driver fumbled and fumbled with the keys while screaming and glancing at us.
As the ambulance rolled away with its door half closed, some of the silent ones, whose bodies had little signs of life when we carried them, disembarked from the speeding ambulance and now stood with us. The girl we first carried to the ambulance joined us too. She was smaller. Her skirt was a camouflage. She wasn’t at all fourteen or fifteen or sixteen. She looked eleven. She said she accompanied her brother to the protest. We marched back to be with the undead.
*
The #EndSARS protesters at the Lekki Toll Gate were different for most days. Those who protested on Monday were often absent on Wednesday. Those who came in the morning were mostly always gone by evening. There were boys who lurked about in loose tees with a comb in their tangled hair and a muffler around their necks. They said nothing, except tap the keyboards on their iPhone with long natural nails and take selfies. There were girls who flaunted tummy rings and anklets, who grumbled about the sun or the drizzles, who offered their phone numbers to the boys with combs in their tangled hair. There were other boys and girls whose rage locked the world around them away from their notice. They only sang and cried and prayed aloud for the change they wished for Nigeria.
The bullets caught pieces of everyone — the morning protesters and evening protesters, the once-a-week protesters, the non-protesters, siblings to protesters, children to protesters, administrative assistants, business owners, trainee-level professionals, welders, customer service reps, teachers, laboratory technicians, graphic designers. Dreams deflated within minutes. Irrespective of our religion and everything we were born guilty of — Yoruba, Igbo, Ishan, Nupe, Fulani — we were hit by the flying missiles. It did not matter if our differences easily marked us out for hate; if we wore hijabs or scarves; if we recited the rosary or the subha; if we prayed in the name of Jesus or said Allahu Akbar. On the evening on that October day, we were marked for a different crime: for being the children of Nigeria.
*
A nationwide curfew was put in place to curb the protests which boiled in different cities across Nigeria. Lagos residents were ordered to be in their homes before 4pm. Anxiety sifted through the city and the roads became gridlocked.
Worried partners and friends and siblings called their people when it was 4pm.
“Can you still get home?”
“Don’t try to come yet. Stay where you are. There are road blocks everywhere.”
“I love you. Please call me every thirty minutes.”
“Be careful, okay?”
It was a little before 6pm when the soldiers came. Some people were just leaving, escaping the carnage by a hair’s breadth. First, it appeared as if the soldiers were speaking and waving their arms at us. Soldiers were friendly. Soldiers helped civilians fix their car tires. Soldiers teased civilians. Soldiers laughed with civilians. Soldiers defended civilians.
We were not sure if they spoke to us at all, or if the waving we thought we saw were guns being angled. People scrambled for safety, convinced that the guns only came to scare, until our feet wobbled beneath us. There was blood on the flags we held and on the ground we stood. There was blood flooding our ears and our stomachs and our heads.
*
One-of-us Lola told us about a child she miscarried the year before. A doctor’s wrong prescription killed the child.
“What kind of doctor? Because I am a gynecologist,” One-of-us, Deji said.
“Oh, you are? That’s great because I am pregnant.”
There was Somadina who came from Nnamdi Azikiwe University in Awka to visit his friend here in Lagos. They were at the #EndSARS protest and separated during the pandemonium. He worried about his friend and worried more about his parents who were unaware that their son was about nine bus hours away from the school where he should be. He feared what unsavoury possibilities might befall him when they found out. We almost pointed his limp body out for him. But we did not want him to feel more lost than he already felt.
*
The dead slowly outnumbered the undead. We told one another our names and promised to see again some other time. We knew the undead by their whimpers of agony as they waited for their fate to be decided. We knew the dead by the regrets sprawling through their souls and their aimless walking around the toll gate. There was a dead girl and an undead boy sitting with us. They told us how they both found kinship in the songs that were played at the protest ground. They held hands and looked into each other’s eyes. They looked like a beautiful dream. Maybe if the soldiers hadn’t come. Maybe if Nigeria hadn’t turned her guns inwards.
Some of the dead we put in the ambulance followed their corpses while some still stuck with us. We all wanted to leave and not leave. We circled the toll gate, unable to detach from the point where we were plucked brutally from everything we knew. We raised our fists and shouted, “Soro Soke! End SARS! End Police Brutality!” When someone called us the coconut head generation, the dead laughed, the undead chuckled.
Before the rescuers came, we kept ourselves warm with stories. Eunice told us about a woman whom we suspected was her mother, who abandoned her child at birth and never returned for her. Ugo told us about a groom, who turned out to be him, left wifeless at a church altar. Oluchi told us about herself, how she boarded a bus already hijacked by kidnappers.
“They cut up two people daily and sold their body parts.”
“How did you escape?” we asked her.
“The buyers rejected me, saying I gave off an aura they didn’t like.”
“Glory!” one of us cried.
“Thank God you escaped,” we told her.
When the rescuers arrived, the light from their torchlights touched everywhere. Our anger was kindled against the soldiers that came with them.
The rescuers were kind. Some of them wept as they lifted dead bodies. Some revealed that they learned of the tragedy on DJ Switch’s Instagram Live and on Twitter. Some wondered why no Nigerian media bothered to arrive at the scene.
“Did this thing not happen about eight hours ago?” one of them asked.
Some of the rescuers were brothers and siblings and friends to us. They called out names and got no answers. But their loved ones among us leaped in joy, screaming, reaching to touch them. “I am here! I am here!” they screamed until the rescuers either found the bodies they sought or left to check nearby hospitals.
We wished to get to our backyards as soon as possible and do the chores we had always detested — cook, throw out the bin, wash some corn for pap, prepare our own soya beans, weed the overgrown yard. We were getting antsy but still hopeful.
One-of-us Sobula likened the shooting to Haiti earthquakes, “This is exactly how tectonic plates can determine when thousands of people die.”
”But we do not live on subducting plate boundaries,” one-of-us Deji told Sobula, “We were not attacked by forces of nature but by human forces, fully armed and knowing.”
“Ah! My fellow geographer!” Sobula hailed.
“Great Nigerian student! Nice to meet you brother!”
*
All the undead were taken away. There was nobody for us to watch anymore.
“I am leaving, are you?”
“Yes. I live at Ojota.”
“Anybody going to Island?”
“I hang with a friend in Lekki.”
“Oh, let’s go. I stay with my cousin at Ajah.”
“It’s too early to catch a bus to Awka. Maybe in the morning.”
“Yes, in the morning.”
“Who is going to Ikotun area?”
“Please remember to add me on WhatsApp.”
“I will find you on Facebook.”
We rose like hot-air balloons, scattered all over the sky as if that was all the space we owned. We met other people stationed in the air, with fresh gunshot wounds on their heads and necks and chests. They looked unsure of their next route. There were some others in mad haste, paying mind to little else. They told us they were all #EndSARS protesters from the Lagos mainland ─ from Oshodi, Ikeja, Orile, and Yaba. They were trying to go home too.
“I live at Abule-Ado.”
“Along the railway?”
“Yes. By Norpet fuel station.”
“I’m going to Island o!”
“Join those two. They are going to Lekki-Ajah axis.”
“I will beep you, my number ends with 3457, my twitter handle is @Shiny_diva, goodbye, goodnight, sleep tight,” we said.
© Copyright 2023 Frances Ogamba
About the Author
Frances Ogamba is a 2022 CLA fellow at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. A winner of the 2020 Kalahari Short Story Competition and the 2019 Koffi Addo Prize for Creative Nonfiction, she is also a finalist for the 2019 Writivism Short Story Prize and 2019 Brittle Paper Awards for short fiction. Her fiction appears or is forthcoming on Ambit, Ninth Letter, Chestnut Review, CRAFT, New Orleans Review, Vestal Review, The Dark Magazine, Uncharted, midnight & indigo, Jalada Africa, in The Best of World SF and elsewhere. She is a 2022 Pushcart Prize Nominee and her stories have been recommended on must-read lists by Tor Magazine. She is an alumna of the Purple Hibiscus Creative Writing Workshop taught by Chimamanda Adichie.