Cor-tiddely-at
on Fantastic Voyage (Nigeria), 15/Jun/2011 14:17, 34 days ago
One of my most vivid childhood memories is of sitting in a theatre during a play that was probably a vaguely musical version of the life of Christ. In the scene where Mary Magdalene was dragged onto the street, before being condemned to stoning, her accusers walked around her in a circle, pointing at her beneath red lights and singing‘cor-tiddely-at’ repeatedly. I was utterly, utterly terrified. Why were they saying this? What did it mean? Why were they looking at her with such hatred, exposing her in this monstrous manner? When would the nightmare end?(Eventually– and it really did seem, to my tiny self, that it went on for hours – I sat on my mum’s lap and hid my face until it was over.)Apart from the general horror of everything (and at that point I didn’t understand that they were going to stone her – I remember how disturbing it was when my dad explained that particular judicial process to me and still read of it with unmitigated revulsion – I found it so frightening because I didn’t understand what was happening. It was dizzying, out ofcontrol, no longer a story I wanted any part of because it wasn’t about my world any more. They were, of course, in fact saying ‘Caught in the act’, but I wasn’t at an age when being caught in any act would be particularly odd let alone punishable as a capital offence. The utterly banal nonsense sounds of cor-tiddely-at still carry to me a cold clutching sensation of dreadful imprecation and undisguised malice: it echoes to me when I read Lear’s dreadful curse on his daughters or watch Triumph of the Will.I think that’s what has frightened and disturbed me so much when I drove (was driven) through the southern towns of Kaduna state, which has taken up much of the four weeks I’ve been back in Kaduna. We pass through Zonkwa – a small, thriving township with a vibrant, colourful market which formerly spilt onto the street and made driving through theplace actually quite tricky and slow. It’s quiet now. On either side as you approach the corner, a wasteland of barren mud and rubble and scorched earth has replaced – consumed? – the people and their houses and their goods. Where buildings stand,they’ve been damaged: some more, some less. But nowhere is unmarked.In Kafanchan (which is the town where my teacher training team is based), street after street after street after street after street comprises buildings hardly buildings: little lines of memory now burned. Mosques stand without rooves. The market– an absolute centre of any town in Nigeria – is a blackened lump that should have been vomited up by Saturn in an earlier age of the world.The people tell you stories about their houses, surrounded and set on fire, while they sat inside with their families. Their choice: run outside and know you’ll be cut down; or stay inside and hope you can control the flames until the crowd disperses. A village just outside Kafanchan has been wiped out: fifty human lives eradicated. Those women who fled into the bush with their children crept back in the morning to bury the dead and retrieve what they could from their homes. And were cut down by the blades that had waited for them.I can understand the Western impulse to remain silent about this. The elections which took place in April were, after all, largely peaceful and probably fairer than most preceding polls in this massively and extravagantly corrupt nation. Media organisations generally find it impractical to convey the subtleties of grey any situation requires, and Nigeria had received negative coverage prior to voting: the only story possible was a positive one.But they weren’t peaceful, and they weren’t fair, and these faultlines created by fear and hatred will surely run desperately deep for many generations.The visible evidence of murder and destruction is banal, stark– plain as a wardrobe. It’s impossible for me to take it in, really, or to conceive of what it means for my colleagues to ‘be ready’ and have weapons together to attack other families should the word come. And I’ve never felt that hatred, that rage. I’ve never been that scared. I’ve never woken up one morning and known that I burned people I used to know to death the previous evening. And the depth of my lack of understanding frightens me. I don’t understand it, I can’t connect with it, I can’t communicate with it. It’s not a story I want to hear, to tell, or to bea part of. But it does appear to be the world we’ve shaped together, so I don’t seem to have much choice.