Republic of Insects – Fiction by Nigerian Writer, Feyisayo Anjorin

Sanya would have travelled to the US to prove the intensity of his feelings for Johanna, but the FBI could have him on their long list of wanted people from all over the world. He had heard stories of people like him who had been called aside by uniformed officers with neat knowing smiles at US airports; “Can you please step aside?”

Those FBI guys were not like Nigeria’s EFCC who would hop to the nearest TV station in their new black suits to announce the arrest of this or that suspect based on merely circumstantial evidence, just to be seen as effective. A few days later, their publicity stunt would have been stripped by the courts and exposed as what it is.
Unlike the jokers, the FBI, just like in the movies, would get their target or targets completely sealed in their legal traps while pretending to know nothing; they would set a trap or traps and wait patiently for either the ignorant or the self-confident fools to be drawn to the bait.

Sanya was one of the rare smart ones who would never travel across the Atlantic to hear those commands from men and women with the authority of the state; those words that would seem like harmless requests. A journey to see Johanna was a risk he was not ready to take. As a child, he had read the story of Samson in an illustrated bible storybook and had wondered at the foolishness of a man said to be filled with the holy spirit. It seemed too ridiculous to him that a man would be so gullible to walk into such an obvious trap that was Delilah.

With Johanna, he had been chatting and hearing a sweet voice on the phone and had become tired of using technology. As far as he was concerned, it was time to do things that lovers do, so he kept wishing he could change something about the seemingly impotent love.

It all changed when he saw Johanna’s message one rainy evening, with smileys and hearts. She would come to Nigeria if he would handle all the travel expenses.
“Oh my God!” he jumped up from his desk. The gleeful move almost got his hand injured by the ceiling fan rotating above.
He had downloaded her pictures from Facebook. He loved the one she took by the poolside, with a glasshouse in the background, and blue skies above the glasshouse, just like the water in the pool. Johanna, in a white bikini, on the edge of the pool, with her legs in the water, pouty lips, and dark sunglasses on. She had a golden-brown tan.

He had never been with a white woman, he told her in one of their chats. He thought their bottoms were too flat, unlike the curvy African women he had come to love. But there was something about Johanna that was different, something compelling, like a force that didn’t seem like a force. She sent him three smileys and four hearts when she read this.

On his bed, in his room, on those dark rainy nights when he had managed to disentangle himself from the smiling girls pretending to be his friends because of the things he would buy for them without checking his account balance, he would open his favourite sites to watch skinny white women and their partners.
He loved the way they moaned, he loved the acrobatic approach, he loved their shameless expression of pleasure, the way their mouths worked on skins. The Nigerian girls he had been with seemed too self-conscious, too restrained, too dull for his wild tastes. Johanna looked like one of the enthusiastic women he had seen in the video clips.

Two months ago, he could not even afford a decent meal. He lived in a shack made of rusted corrugated iron sheets; where mosquitoes, flies, and cockroaches moved around freely like co-tenants. It was like the republic of insects. He would wake up to the smell of stale urine and sewage. His sleep would be interrupted by the shrill voice of a woman and her bell, telling him to repent or roast like suya in the fires of hell. He would take his bath in an enclosure behind the shack, also made of rusted iron sheets but smaller, like the vertical positioning of the coffin of a fat man. He would take a dump on a nearby refuse heap, and he watch in disgust as pigs rushed it. The shack would feel like an oven during the day, and like an air-tight container at night.

The change was too sudden for him; shocking, for the pleasures he could get simply by paying. He had dreamed of this life, but living it felt surreal; sometimes the choices, the options, seemed to choke him.

Now in his air-conditioned four-bedroom duplex that was a few minutes’ walk from the state governor’s residence, he would wonder whether to sleep upstairs or downstairs; whether to drive the black Benz or the red Toyota; whether to call one of the girls to cook or to eat at his latest favourite restaurant at the mall; chicken or beef; palm wine or champagne.

Everything changed; he got smiles easily. Even in the church where his pastor got 300,000 Naira monthly for being a good preacher, one of the ushers, the tall slim woman known for her body-fitted outfits and stilettos, who had in the past been treating him like dirt, showed her pearly white teeth when she showed him to the front seat.
Last Sunday he sat beside the pastor’s wife in the front seat. The pastor mentioned him in the sermon;
“I’m encouraged by Brother Sanya’s faith, which is why I am not surprised by God’s great blessings upon his life. This is what happens when you faithfully pay your tithes!”
Sanya had nodded, not minding the flattery; but also wondering if the pastor believed all he had been teaching over the years.

Johanna called him on his cellphone before sunrise to tell him she was at the airport in Lagos. He sat up on the bed and tried to speak as if he had been awake for a while. He asked about the flight. How are you, Johanna?
“I’m fine, so glad to be finally here. I will be in Akure in about an hour. I’ve got my ticket already, but I want to pick something near the airport.”
“Johanna, what are you picking? I can help you with anything you need. I don’t want you moving around carelessly, it’s dangerous.”
“Come on, it’s not that bad. This is not my first time in Lagos.”

This is not her first time in Lagos, maybe she has done this before, the thought hurt him. He would have loved to be the only one to tell her about Nigeria. He would have loved to be the expert. He wanted her to be the student. The learner who would take notes about the workings of this 21st-century African jungle.

“Johanna, what are you picking?”
She waited, knowing she would not tell him, wondering how to make it all seem normal. “These guys at the airport wanted me to get some antimalarial pills. They insisted on a particular brand. I just want to get it so that I won’t have to fall sick when I’m with you. I’m really scared of this malaria thing, the way they were talking about it.”

She heard a sigh of resignation. “Okay, Johanna dear. Please be careful. Lagos is such a chaotic place. If I had known I would have come for you at the airport in Lagos.”
“I appreciate it, babe.” And he felt a sensation between his legs when she said this. Once again he saw her face in his favourite porn video clip. She could be that passionate girl to him.
He had never received any foreign national, so he was not familiar with the required medications or inoculations. She was believable, so he believed her.

She got to know when she asked a few friends how possible it was for a Caucasian to get almost anything illegal done in Nigeria. With a few dollars, any door could open, anything could be forgotten, and police officers would look away. You can get anything if you can pay, she had heard that again and again. She went about it like a journalist working on a piece about Nigeria. She wanted to be sure she would get what she had in mind.

When the plane landed at Akure airport, she walked to a smiling taxi driver who had parked near the exit of the arrival terminal with the door of his car open. She made her destination known, but kept her need in mind. In Sanya’s happiness at the sight of her, she would draw her happiness.

She told the driver to stop when she saw “Owode” on the signpost. She realized she had gotten to that farming settlement near the airport. A bare-chested hairy man sat outside a mud hut, looking in her direction, grey smoke coming out of his mouth and bottles of beer near his feet. When she approached him and saw his bloodshot eyes, she was tempted to change her mind even though he was the perfect fit for the kind of man she was looking for.

She greeted him. He answered in Yoruba-accented English and avoided her eyes.
She wanted to know where she could get a gun. He stared at her and looked around him as if he had just heard a secret that had been told too loudly and carelessly.
“I need it to hunt.” She said.
The man kept staring.
“I’m a tourist.”
“I know.” the man grunted. “Obviously, there are no white Nigerians.”
She did not need to tell him she was a tourist; something about the look on his face made her do it.
He wanted a hundred dollars, and another hundred dollars to make a few calls.
“I understand if you need a hundred dollars for the gun, but could you possibly need a hundred dollars to make calls?”
“Are you ready to buy a gun or not?”

“I’m in Alagbaka,” she said a few hours later when she called Sanya.
She had planned the surprise. “I’m in Alagbaka'”, seemed better to say. He had told him about his wealth. He had explained to her on one of their phone conversations that the rich and famous in Akure lived at Alagbaka. She was too close; he was too excited to be hurt. He gave her the address.
He would never know that she had been busy for about five minutes, trying to get the pronunciation of “Alagbaka” right, causing the man who had sold her the gun to roll his eyes wearily again and again, until he finally beamed and said, “Yes, that’s it. You got it”.

Sanya opened the gate and saw her come down from a cab. When he saw the old wrinkled face, he tried to hide his disappointment. He hugged her before taking one of her two bags. She did not give him her handbag.

She was not the one he had been admiring in the pictures on Facebook, but a white woman is a white woman.
He recovered from his disappointment, adjusted his expectations, and got excited. He could do this one; he had made millions pretending to be someone else. He wouldn’t mind her deception, he would not mind her desperation to get love. She had deliberately posted the beautiful pictures that made him long for Johanna. He wouldn’t mind if it was not her real name.

She waited a bit to admire the lush green lawn, the swimming pool, the shining cars parked in the distance, and the white building surrounded by bright flowers.
“What a nice place you’ve got.” She said with a coquettish smile.
She wanted to know if he lived alone, and he said yes. She asked if he was the only one at home. He said yes, her questions and his answers worked on his ego like lights on reflectors.
Her smiling face changed and she showed him the gun as soon as he closed the door behind them.
“Johanna, what’s with the gun?” He said; frozen, wide-eyed, breathless.
“Shut the fuck up!”
“Johanna, come on, calm down, what is this about?”
She watched him closely, ready to target his head if he made any funny move.
“You are Balo Badoo. Aren’t you? The general manager who will sign the check for the lottery I won.”
Then he knew he was in trouble.
How could he be so foolish? Why was he looking forward to sex with a white woman as if it would be some life-changing experience?
This Johanna must have been planning this for some time. This Johanna was the woman gullible enough to believe his lies as Balo Badoo. She was his escape ticket from the Republic of Insects. Without her foolishness, he would still be in the slums, bathing in a coffin-like enclosure. Now she was here with him, with fire in her eyes, milky white teeth bared like fangs, and with a gun. He said a quick prayer.
“I’m sure you’ve got the wrong man I swear.” He knew it was pointless, but he tried.
“You lying bastard! You’ve been squandering my pension! You sit on your computer and make shit up and rob people!”
“That thing about our love? That wasn’t a lie. I built all this for us. From the very first time I saw your pretty face, I knew that you were the one I really wanted. Someone mature, someone stable, some feisty and adventurous and…” The lies rushed out as if his mouth had become a broken tap. He was hoping she would buy it.
He waited for her. He waited for the softening of her features, for the lowering of the gun, for a repeat of the welcoming embrace, a signal of forgiveness. He waited for a new beginning after the crucifixion of the man of the past and his resurrection with the new forgiving Johanna.

She fired three times. She got him on his right elbow and one bullet for each kneecap.
Like she had been told by the self-declared experts on all things African, no one came to help the bleeding man all through the time she spent packing the stash of dollars she saw under his bed in one of the rooms.