A Blood Stained Wrist Band And Colors Of A Race

By Nnaemeka Ugwu

He was bloodied and perhaps, disoriented. I couldn’t tell because I wasn’t close to him at the moment; I was trying to get into a vein in the arm of a day old child. But, I watched him from where I stood, as his fingers and toes twitched, his blood dripping from his body like rain from a leaky roof, as the stretcher rolled him in; something that looked like a large machete cut sliced his face apart. I could hear his groans- deep throated, and guttural. I could hear the song he was trying to sing, something about God not letting him die from the cuts of the wicked one, even though it was barely audible as it was masked by the shuffling sound of the hurried feet of the nurses and the broken voice of a girl who followed from a distance, crying. “My brother! My only brother!”

I looked at her with pity. Looking at her reminded of the woman who had come with her sick child yesterday, holding him so close to her chest, screaming at him to never shame her, pressing his face so tight to her breasts that I feared she was going to suffocate him. The girl’s clothes were torn, her hair disheveled. There was a trickle of blood on her left thigh. Her face screamed for help. But, I wasn’t focused on her as I hurried down to the man on the stretcher, my steps running into each other; I was as shaken as the people who were almost all on their feet, mouths open; hearts, beating fast, because the wound was enormous. It was during the period of the attacks and I had been seeing such cases. Knife cuts here, bullet wounds there, and I had been coping. But they were all little compared to what stared me now, in the face. A boy whose face I was trying to place somewhere at the recess of my mind, whose bloodied piercing eyes reached out to my heart and squeezed it to the point that I felt his soul reaching out and holding my hand, asking, “help me! Please, help me, brother”.

The voice sounded familiar; I felt a personal contact with him that I couldn’t explain. And so, I quickened my steps and ran from the stretcher to the changing room where I pulled out my white shirt, and covered my body with the scrubs and the apron, gloved my hands and covered my eyes and nose. The nurses got the stitches, the forceps, the swabs, and the injections. They were unusually fast because one of them had recognized the patient. I went back to him and stood over his face. “What happened to you?” I asked, lifting his hands which covered the wound. His eyes were closed. So, I wasn’t sure whether he had heard me, whether he could see me; the blood was thick over his eye, and I needed to get his face free from it. It was the right thing to do even as his pains made my hands unsteady, for with every dabbing of the swab, every piercing of the stitch, his pain sent shock waves over my entire body; he gnashed his teeth ceaselessly. I worked double fast in a bid to finish before the pain killer would wear down. And soon, we bandaged his face, to the relief of the young student nurse who was almost crying in sympathy. I quickly wrote down instructions for the nurses to take him into the ward. It was raining and the weather was cold. It made his body shiver, his teeth clattering, making it difficult for me to hear when he called out my name. “Doctor Nna, do you remember me? Don’t you remember the day of the shooting and how you saved my life?” his voice sounded as if he was about to cry. It broke something in me.

My memories back to the last two years, when we had first met, years which had been nothing short of painful and haunting for me, years full of nightmares about the deaths and anguish and injustice. I dropped the folders I was carrying and made a few steps backwards towards him. I looked at him and saw the red stain in his left eye. And then, I remembered. I had seen it too on the day of the shooting, the day he was brought in with tens of other young men who were reportedly shot by some men in uniform, simply because, in their own words, they had come into the town at night, to sing and remember their heroes who had died in the war. The scars were unmistakable. His name flashed in my mind. “Chike!” I called out softly, reaching to touch his face. “What happened to you?” I asked carefully, trying to keep my voice down because I didn’t want the men in uniform, sitting on chairs a few paces away to hear. I feared they would keep their eyes on him, if they heard us. And so I kept my eyes on his wrist band of the flag with the green, red, and black colours, and the half of a yellow sun. My eyes got misty looking at it because, the colours reminded me of that night of blood and tears, of Chukwuemeka, the fair boy who had laid side by side with Chike, breathing heavily as he handed me a little flag of same colors before saying his last words, “remember us doc. Remember that we did nothing wrong but sing and pray for our dead heroes.”

I loved to see that Chike was still alive, that he still held onto the colours in spite of all that had happened to him and his brothers. Things I would hear on the next day after the shootings, were unspeakable. Things about how according to reports, the injured boys with different degrees of gunshot injuries were whisked away by men in uniforms to different places unknown, with no atom of mercy and considerations of their injuries. Stories about how some of them had been bathed in acid. Stories of some of them being made to drink and swim in mud waters. Stories of inhumane things beyond imaginings. Stories of how people went online to point at their dead bodies and laugh. I wanted to hug him with the colours yet, I had to take the wrist band away from him. Because I knew it wasn’t safe for him to be holding onto it at that very moment. I had recently been told about a mass arrests of boys and men like him, who had memorabilia of the war, following the most recent ‘sit at home’ call that their organization had issued. I felt his pain as he looked at me imploringly as I slipped the wristband from him, mumbling with a great difficulty, “Please don’t… doc… Let it stay with me in case I die”.

There was something painful about taking something so dear to a man especially, when the man was helpless. I knew he would have fought me off as he did on that day of the killings but, somehow, I felt fortunate now, even with the pain, that he couldn’t. “You do realize that you can’t fight for the land of the rising sun, if you’re taken away today?” I whispered as I folded the wristband into the pocket of my ward coat. I tried not to think too much about his pains as I walked away, leaving the nurses to do their job. I instead, kept my mind occupied by the mini storm outside as the rain got harder, like the weight on my chest. The past haunted me with a renewed fierceness. I wished I could have saved them all. I wished I could’ve saved Chukwuemeka, and Omenka, and Obinna. I wished I could’ve stopped the cold hands of death, even though it overwhelmed the world on that night. I wished I had the powers of a god, to raise those who had died. Their voices would be in my head till daybreak when I would come back to know what exactly had happened to Chike. I had been too focused on stopping the bleeding to have bothered to hear the full story.

My night was a cacophony of nightmares. Even though it was full moon and I was supposed to revel in the winds and chirpings of the insects. My head was full of voices; voices of heroes dropping dead in battle at Onicha and Uzuakoli while charging against tanks and rapid machine guns. I thought and dreamt of children dying of kwashiorkor, their bellies rising to the sky in protest to the gods who had abandoned them. I saw my late father running from the blackness of the Illshyns as they bombed and strafed Onicha. I heard the cries of the women who were raped, sometimes, to death. I dreamt so much that my head was full of aches when I woke up on the couch in the consulting room. I looked up and saw the nurse standing at the door. It was daylight and I hadn’t seen the sun as it rose. I hadn’t even heard the early morning songs of the birds. I only saw the nurse. She said that Chike wanted to see me. I followed her to the ward. It was unusually calm now. I looked up and saw Chike.

I smiled, looking down at him. He was now trying to sit up on the bed even as he held his head in his palms, wincing in pain. “Guy, how far? Why don’t you want me to sleep?” I stared at his bandaging which was already soaked in blood. I found it difficult to look at it because it reminded me of that night, of all the blood and deaths. He tried to smile back. “I am getting a little more stable.” His effort to speak seemed to have made the blood soaked bandage begin to drip blood. He touched the trickle of blood and suddenly, the smile was gone. There was the renewal of the pain. I asked the nurse to get the things we would need in order to change the dressing. My voice was getting broken and my mind was about slipping back into the past and the scene of death and pain. I was brought back by Chike’s words. He was asking for his sister. “Doc you need to find her,” he managed to say, trying to fight the tears. “You need to take good care of her. You need to test her because she was raped.” He shook his head, as if weighed down by the sound of that awful word. I remembered, at once, the little girl with the trickle of blood on her left thigh. She was lying on a piece of cardboard mat beside her brother. I reached out for her and helped her rise. I took her in to the consulting room.

I sat her down on the chair directly facing mine and looked into her deep piercing brown eyes and torn clothes and superficial bruises and scratches which marred her near perfect yellow skin. I watched the furrows on her face, betraying her broken emotions. I watched as she breathed ever so slightly, her chest moving in rhythm with her shoulders heaving slightly up and down. I stared at the tear trails in her eyes. Trails which would become wetter when I asked her to tell me what had actually happened and she would find it difficult to speak. I reached for her hand and squeezed it so gently, urging her to tell me everything. She couldn’t stop herself from crying and so I had to strain to pick up the words.

She had gone to the farm to harvest cassava. It was midday and the farm was not peopled. She was almost done when she heard footsteps and animals hoofs stumping the earth, getting louder and louder, bearing down on her. She had gotten scared immediately but was still a little confident because she knew that her brother was bathing in the stream a few poles away where he was setting his fish traps. But, before she knew what was happening, four cattle men had descended on her. They were wry and tall, their lean build and light skin highlighting their narrow facial features and tribal marks. They were not Igbo. They spoke French and a little broken English. And another language I would later be told, sounded totally alien. They had daggers which were drawn, looking so sharp that their surfaces threw the light of the sun into her eyes. They surrounded her and demanded that she stripped for them. “Nyamiri, down,” they ordered, circling her, gesticulating at the ground, making a sign for her to remove her clothes. She had wanted to refuse but, had changed her mind when she realized that her assailants could easily kill her brother if she would alert him. He was her only brother and so, she wouldn’t risk his life. If it would take giving up herself to protect his life she was going to do it. So she asked them to keep the daggers and do it peacefully.

She took a few seconds now, and again to catch her breath as she spoke. “Doctor, I thought it was going to be bearable,” she sobbed. “But, I was wrong because they entered me very rough. They scratched my private parts. They cut little wounds in them in order for them to lick the blood, they wanted to take me with them afterward, to let their cattle enter me, too.” Her shoulders suddenly began to shake as she could not control her emotions anymore. My head got shaken too, and I became dazed. There was a certain kind of noise and cry coming from the labour ward but, I couldn’t hear it clear enough. The fan twirled and the children at the out-patient made their noises but, it all felt in my head like the world was about to crash in a very loud burst. I felt my shirt too tightly. I unknowingly unbuttoned it and stood up. I walked to her and held her. I was careful not to let her see my own heavily misty eyes.

“So what happened next, how did they get to nearly kill your brother?” I asked. I was struggling to conceal the fast developing crack in my own voice. I wanted her to be strong enough to finish her story about how her brother had come out at the point when the last of her assailants were on top of her. How he had come running toward her, muscles rippling, sweat, flowing like rain water, machete raised in the air as he ran and screamed, “nwannem oooo!” she wiped her tears. “He kept charging towards me, his machete raised, until the man who was holding me down, knocked me so hard with the head of his machete and I lost consciousness. I know he tried to fight them, and I think that’s when they nearly killed him.” I watched her breathing become more and more raspy. I watched her yellow skin turn entirely red. And I couldn’t bear it anymore. I freed my arms from hers and went outside. “Stop crying, child.” I called her ‘child’ because she was barely seventeen.

The day was getting older gradually. The birds were flying home. I could hear their distant songs. Earlier I had looked outside and for a brief moment thought about going outside to chase after the glass coloured Aku, flying in the newly freshened wind, like we did when we were children. I watched through the window as the cloud got dark again in preparation for another rain. The wind blew up red whirl wind and debris now and again. It was so cold, it reminded me of childhood in Nsukka. I had many out patients waiting and so I had to hasten up. I took the little girl to the lab for basic test. I wasn’t surprised when she tested negative for HIV and hepatitis. But, I was scared of the future. So I gave her the anti-retroviral myself. I told her relatives about hepatitis B immunoglobulin if they could afford to buy it. I wondered if the government would be able to help with the bill if they were to be informed of the attack. But then, I remembered that Chike and his group had been declared a terrorist group and so, I had to shelve the idea of going to report the case myself.

The rest of my day was too heavy with the image of the girl’s tears and sadness. There were too many questions in my head than I could answer. Why was the country letting this injustice happen? Why wasn’t the police doing something to curb the menace? Why was it becoming normal for blood to flow from the innocent? Every day we woke up to bloody news of an attack here, of killings there. People couldn’t even travel to the capital without dying of fear of being kidnapped. Some people, like Amaria, my customer could not even travel to their villages at the rich Benue basin anymore because, as she put it, their villages had been taken over by armed men who killed for fun. Why would cattlemen, as Dr Obinna put it, from different parts of West Africa have unfettered access to indigenous lands, to rape, to pillage and to kill? When would the people of this side of the divide truly have peace again? I remembered often, as I walked through the wards, setting lines, reviewing my new admissions, making the nurses do their jobs, the thing Chike told me after I had splintered his broken leg and resuscitated him on the night of the shootings. He had told me that their resistance was aimed at achieving freedom for our people as it was paramount in securing the land from those who would seek to forcibly take it from the native owners. “We are at risk of extinction, brother,” he had said with great difficulty following the gunshot. “Our resistance is aimed at stopping it.” I thought about the words resistance. There were now, too many questions I needed to ask him. Especially looking at him lying so sorrowful and broken on that bed, without his wrist bands and the colours which he had embedded in every light ray in his life. What was it that propelled him in his deep conviction that he and his group were capable of achieving the things he had told me they wanted to achieve? What was on his mind as the cattle men dug their daggers repeatedly into his flesh? Why was it so had for him to forget the war of many years ago and the heroes who had fought there in?

On the night of the shootings he had been so fascinated about the heroes that he couldn’t stop talking about them, especially when out of the necessity to give them hope as they lay writhing in pain and tears, rolling in their own blood and waste, watching their comrades die from the bullets of those who had killed millions of their kit and kin a few years ago, I started a detailed history of each of the men who had given their all during the great war. His eyes lit up from where he lay on the couch, wincing in pain from the wooden splinters, when I told the story of the junction, the great ambush at Abagana, and the story of Okigbo and his last poem, as he lay dying at Opi: when you have finished and done up my stiches, wake me near the alter and this poem will be finished… That was when, out of something I termed delirium Chike had promised to also lay down his own life like the heroes, a declaration which had drawn a strong rebuke from me, until a look at his face and the determination, the unyielding resolve in it, made me understand: that some people are too vested in an ideology for one to try to ask them why? His favorite heroes were Gossens and his boys who paid the price during operation Hiroshima at Onicha. I remembered his eyes and the light in them when I described a veteran’s account of that big battle that killed the mercenary, and the fight to retrieve his giant white body afterward. I relied now, on those memories as I tried not to focus too much on the little girl’s tears. I was reminiscing when the shrill voice of the young nurse broke my thought. “Doctor! Doctor! The patient is gasping! He is dying!”

I rushed to the ward to see Chike struggling for air. The ward was in a state of chaos as the people gathered around him, praying. His mother was in their midst, tearing at her hair and face. “My boy! My only boy!” The nurses were in a hurry, doing the things required at such moments to keep the hands of death away. I ran as fast as I could, my unbuttoned ward coat fluttering in the air as the stethoscope dangled here and there. My heart beat fast. I was worried that his people’s delay to move him to the teaching hospital as soon as I had stitched him up and stabilized him would now prove to be expensive. I quietly prayed that there would be time still because, I didn’t want him to die. He had already started calling me ‘friend’ and ‘brother’, already told me that he was a Chelsea fan; that he was in love with poetry, that he loved my ways; that he would own a dairy farm once it was safe to live in the forests of his village once again. I asked the gods to help him, to help me. But alas, they didn’t hear me because when I got to the scene and placed a stethoscope on his chest, there was no sound coming forth from his heart. His skin was cold. His eyes were fixed in a cold stare into the limitless horizon. When I turned his body to take a look at his sides, I saw the paper on which his roughly written words, read “I wish I were a thousand men.” He was dead.

The shrill cries that followed the death tore through the ward, and the cold, and the furious winds which bended the pine trees that surrounded the hospital. The little nurse was the first to walk away into the nurses’ changing room where I was sure she had been to cry her pent up tears; I had seen the tears build up persistently because she had known Chike since they were children. I tried in vain to get hold of Chike’s mother and his sister who threw herself on the floor several times, crying “this is the end! This is the end!” I couldn’t keep his relatives who had come to see him from breaking into tiny pieces. I couldn’t even keep my own tears from falling. For in his startled eyes and trails of blood and mucus, in the sadness on his cold face, the sadness of dreams that would now never be realized, I saw every bit of the decades of pain on the shoulders of the people, our people. And for a moment, I wished for freedom from whatever it was that had consistently broken our people and made such faces as Chike’s, a regular in many clans in our land. I began to cry when the matron came to help me walk away from the scene. She had been with me on that bloody night of the shootings and had seen how it would tear me apart the days that followed. I was only glad to walk away until I saw the little girl walking towards me, asking for her brother’s colours and wrist band. “I want it, doctor. Please give it to me,” she pleaded in between sobs, her right palm outstretched, her eyes boring a hole through my heart.

I had to look at her for a while before I could pick up the fire which now, was beginning to overwhelm the pain in her eyes, increasingly washing it away. I watched as it dried up her tears and as the heaving of her shoulders consistently disappeared and in place of it, a straightened frame of sinewy bones. Her shoulders were suddenly broad; I could see the rippling of her biceps. “Why do you want it?” I asked, turning fully away from the matron to face her. I wanted to point her to the uniformed men sitting just a few beds away, their assault rifles looking so menacing and cold. I wanted to tell her about the increased spate of arrests of people having those colours on their bodies, in recent times, to tell her that she would be better off without her brother’s attachment to those colours but, her words stopped me as did the new stoic and firm expressions on her face. She had totally stopped crying and wiping her eyes now. It was hard to understand that she had been the girl whom a few minutes ago, was throwing herself on the ground repeatedly. Her calmness screamed at the utter despondence surrounding the rest of us in the ward. I didn’t even know when I dipped my hands in my ward coat and produced the wrist band and the colours. I watched her slip the blood stained wrist band into her wrist and folding the little flag into a triangular shape, walk briskly away from the ward.

Outside, the rain storm raged on. And our tears were drowned by the sound of breaking tree branches.