This comes more than a year too late. But I wrote it a few days after the events it describes. Today is a black day in my mind because of the dark shadow of terror that rests on the face of the world, as we remember the bomb blasts that blinkered London’s public transport system in four places on the 7th July, 2005.

Terror is in our backyard now, here in Nigeria to stay, it seems. But I cannot help thinking that versions of terror, without the panic trigger that a bombing induces, have existed here for a time. There is the organised aspect of it, the sense that certain elements have taken it upon themselves to make the pain and haunting of death- the living nightmare of always-impending disaster- a cause, which reduces even the hardiest of Nigerians accustomed to enduring perennial wahala to trembling. But the thing itself, the spectre and the horror, the furore and the sorrow, have been a theme here since I was a boy.

So, instead of writing a new wreath for the wretchedness that envelopes us, I have chosen to ring today with a memory from last year, that demonstrates the measure of our helplessness in this country. I speak Nigerian when I speak of the almost-forgotten Aluu 4…

THE FIRES OF CONSCIENCE

It must have been a Saturday, because I do not recall any mention of Church that morning. None of my father’s friends had arrived for their Saturday ritual of table tennis and epele, his favourite board game. My father was still upstairs with my mom. I knew he was shaving because the rancid smell of his shave powder sat heavy on the air in the upstairs corridor. There had been shouts of excitement on and off all morning which we had taken no notice of. That is, until the first hoarse shout of ‘Burn them!’ carried up the street.

I looked to the housegirl, playing catcher with me in the backyard of our house. Her face was strained in excitement much as mine must have been. The whites of her eyes shone and her cheeks glowed. I felt a rush which I now know to be adrenaline. ‘Burn them!’

It was a cry fired with the same menace as the gunshots which had terrorised our estate in the weeks before that Saturday. Twice already, I had hidden with my mom and my siblings in the shadow of her queen-sized bed, tasting the metallic urgency of a surging heart. I knew that my mother would be unable to shield me if these armed men decided to break into our home. We drew the curtains shoulder to shoulder to keep light from filtering out more than to stop it coming in. If they saw any sign that you were around, any stray flash of electricity, they were sure to steal in, only to kill and destroy. Through those nights, we breathed on a ration, living through the holler of bullets and frightened neighbours.

We finally ran outside, me and my siblings, even the elder two girls who were at that stage of adolescence when they were making yanga, pretending that they were already grown women who did not chase or hustle. My younger brother was an eager swish of legs alongside me, as we raced to the end of the street.

We were a sheltered bunch, we children. At that stage, we remained untouched by the truth of tragedy. Death, up till then, was the somewhat sexy, intoxicating thing that happened to the bad guy Sally in ‘Commando’ when Arnold Schwarzenegger let him drop by the ankle off the edge of a cliff.

At that end of the street, the knobby asphalt road terminated in a cement pavement. Three houses stood sentinel. Our estate was a close, shaped into a U with a flat yansh. Adebayo Munis Close. We lived at number 1b right at the top, so it took about twelve seconds or so to dash down, the length of a 100-metre sprint. We were breathing in heavy spurts by the time we arrived, in danger of anti-climax because that dash of itself was a rare pleasure in our dull morning. Already my mother’s strict warnings not to run down the street were ringing in our ears.

Two men sat with their palms in their thighs, dressed in nothing but their underwear. (My brother giggled, scandalised). They were wrapped in dust on their upper halves and on the underside, knees and feet of their legs. I could see they had been made to roll around in dirt. Their boxer shorts were ripped here and there. One of them, the one with a tangle of dada around his head, had a lateral rip along his thigh. His penis leaked through, dormant, having spent its fluid on said thigh. (My sisters giggled, scandalised). I looked up at their faces. The first had blood woven in and out of his reckless dada locks. The second had shorter hair and was spotted with a tattoo of blood-and-dirt on the left side of his face where somebody had done their best to teach him a lesson. I could not make much out of their features apart from the dead-eyed stare they focused on a distance beyond the gathered crowd. They were easy to hate.

I saw my friend David. All I knew was that he was the man Friday at one of the houses on the bottom of the U, doing pretty much everything that needed doing. I had played football with him on weekends on that same cement pavement. It had drawn my blood too after one reckless lunge too many. David was holding a lean switch plucked off one tree overhanging the back fence which bordered a swampy expanse behind the close. After that episode, the trees would be cut down for all time. But that was much later. That Saturday, the trees still stood tall and the robbers had been able to use them as leverage to get into the estate while their colleagues used them as camouflage for escape. David was holding his tree branch with the loose grip of a confident orchestra conductor. He knew that these two men would not dare move after they had felt his power and knew they would feel it again if they misbehaved.

I asked David why the men were seated there. He said they were armed robbers. I asked David how he knew. He said he was there when they arrived. He said he caught them red-handed. I asked him what he had done to them. He said he showed them pepper. I asked him what he would do to them now. There was a pause.

“Na only because them never tell us how many follow them come, na why I never fire them finish.”

He was energised, pacing around the men, something dangerous sparking in his eyes. His flat, broad nose flared now and then when he barked a question. He seemed like a circus master; there was something imposing and yet cartoonish about his bandy-legged gait. The others at the scene were his motley troupe and it was they, in clothes hastily thrown over night garments, who had been screaming ‘Burn Them!’ I looked round at my neighbours and saw familiar faces. Parents did not call out at us as they might have done on a good day; they held their children close and avoided my eye.

At some point, David rolled forward two innocuous-looking tyres which had been lying off to the side of the scene like useless props. He tossed them over the men with casual and, in hindsight, practiced ease. The two men did not say much. Their eyes remained a silent black in their faces, the resolute faces of hardened criminals, I supposed. It was easy to hate them. A petrol keg materialised, pfut, like a rabbit from a top hat. The atmosphere at that moment was the bubble before the boil, when a kettle of water is on the stove. My father arrived to burst that bubble.

He strode up to the sparse neighbourhood mob of a dozen and some without hurry. Then he told us, in his way, to go to the house. My siblings and I were disappointed at first that he would not let us see the men punished. When would we ever again get a chance to see two men aflame on our own street outside our own house? Later, we were angry when we learnt that no one had been set afire, eventually. There had been no burning, no excitement.

Around the same time- I’m sure I was eight because it was the year we had no driver and I used to wash the cars myself- my mother gave me a copy of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’. I have my mother to blame for my tastes in books because she was always doing this sort of inappropriate thing, feeding my imagination with books quite dissimilar to anything my peers were reading. It hit home.

Atticus Finch, the young heroine’s father, reminds me of my own father, a tall, straight-backed man, always clean-shaven and low cut. One of his neighbours testifies to his honesty when she says ‘Atticus is the same in his house as he is on the public streets’. My father is a lawyer as Atticus was, with a firm belief in what the law ought to be and what it ought to do for the society that depends on it to settle its passions.

In ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, the heroine- Scout – and Jem, her brother, are a little disapproving of Atticus. He does not hunt, fish or lug wood. In consequence, there are no physical exploits of his that they can boast about to friends at school. They think of him as an inactive do-nothing who is most vigorous when playing checkers. See, my father was no slouch (nor was Atticus for that matter) but he was only ready for action when he was playing epele on a Saturday, sort of like Atticus, himself a checkers-master. It was not really enough for a young boy pumped full of action films to boast of a dad with a slow temper, who had never beaten anyone up or yelled at anyone in traffic, whom you could not really be sure could defend you if armed robbers came around. In short, he was not dangerous. I read Scout and Jem’s story with some awareness that those disappointments were mine, interposed amongst theirs on the page.

When my mom told me why my father had stopped the burning of those evil barbarians, I was not convinced. She said things about justice and such other jabber. In my eight- nine- or ten-year old ears it felt to me like my father was the most annoying spoilsport on our street.

***

On Thursday two weeks ago, or thereabouts, someone mentioned in the office blackberry group chat that some University of Port Harcourt boys had been rounded up and roasted to death for minor theft. The incident was still remote, and still had the fugacious drift of rumour. I admit that I paid no mind to the matter, dismissing it as soon as I saw it.

In this case, though, I was wrong to ignore it. The story of these UNIPORT boys has risen into the same hall of infamy occupied by the recent death of Cynthia Okwusogu and the news of innocents crushed to the bone under the wheels of a luxury bus after a robbery on the Benin-Ore expressway a couple of years ago. When it came together, all the different pieces of this report, the scale of the sadism was frightening. Not only was it a shock that four university students were beaten and burnt to death for stealing, but the fact that somebody found in them the dead-eyed insensitivity to record the entire witch hunt on a camera phone, shows this mystery videographer to be a victim of a new culture that delights in the celebrity of publicity, no matter how grim. I mean, somebody stood there while four human beings rolled in their own grist and pulp and covered every minute of it with a steady hand. Somebody watched unblinking as four naked young students as much flesh and bone as anyone else, were burnt alive.

Yet, there were floods of calls on the radio from people saying that these things happen all the time in Nigeria. Enough Nigerians had already been lost in the weeks prior, because of the bad weather conditions. Forty-six students had been murdered in Mubi, Adamawa State. These incidents left people unsurprised at the reaction of members of the Aluu Community. Jungle Justice is not unusual, they said, the police force is ineffective and does not merit the trust of our people so we parade criminals naked and defenceless and torch them. We do it for the safety of our community and, truly, some of these people deserve what they get. Look what happened when Bakassi boys were let loose in the East, and the streets were made safe again. Could the kidnappers of today have been so brazen while Bakassi Boys slaughtered suspects and carved the fear of crime into the hearts of the people? Could the armed robbers terrorising the back alleys of Lagos have dared to try it when OPC had charge of the South West? Could they?

The truth about these systems of vigilante justice is that they are unfair. The spirit of natural justice enlivens the modern legal institution with its doctrines which guarantee that the law is built around principles of fairness, equity and the satisfaction of good conscience. It is vital that each person involved in a dispute must be given the chance to have their own say. Also, no man may be the judge where matters concerning himself are the subject of dispute. My father once joked to me that even at the Garden of Eden the Bible recounts that Adam and Eve, ashamed of their sin, were given fair hearing. Instead of smiting them there and then, the all-knowing and all-seeing God asked them to tell their own side of the story. Thereafter, a second tenet of natural justice arose because human beings know full well that we are not all-knowing, all-seeing gods so we have yielded to the reasoning that a man cannot be a judge in his own case. Even if you do not believe in God, It is inevitable that personal considerations could weigh against fair and equitable judgment.

During that botched burning at the bottom of the U on Adebayo Munis Close, I can still remember my father walking with purpose towards two men who looked to me like they could have killed him if given a half-chance. My father saw those two men on one side, wearing pitiful necklaces of Michelin rubber and our snappy neighbours on the other. Most of them lived closer to the bottom of the U than we did. I saw that they had been awake all morning and perhaps through some of the night. My mother explained how my father asked the robbers, in his way, why they had done what they did and, turning to David, asked him his own version of events. Noticing that both stories did not quite meet, he persuaded all present to take the men to the police so that a full investigation could be carried out.

They could have ridiculed him and his naïveté. Our neighbours were convinced of the guilt of these men and that morning they abandoned all neighbourly cheer to stand together with unforgiveness in the jut of their jaws. Those men had probably been part of the gangs that had struck before and they would strike again. Equally, the Aluu community decided to punish those four students so that they would never strike again, and any others like them would look on their deaths in fear.

After covering the trial of a one-time Nazi, Kurt Eichmann, the Israeli journalist Hannah Arendt introduced the phrase ‘the banality of evil’. Eichmann had been living in hiding in Argentina when he was taken in an extra-judicial operation by Israeli Mossad agents and smuggled to Israel for a show trial and execution. It was a difficult thing for her to conclude that evil is often the result of ordinary people conforming to mass opinion without thinking about the evil of the thing which that opinion condones since that explanation seemed to put this Israeli action in the same bracket as Nazi behaviour during the Holocaust. The events in Aluu Community bear a singular resemblance to Arendt’s thesis: regular, everyday Nigerians found it in them to allow the torture, humiliation and killing of fellow Nigerians in a fashion so cruel it is impossible to defend. It would not be stretching the point to say that the material of our collective consciousness, even we who are headline-hardened, news-weary Nigerians, was frayed in the days following the incident.

I do not believe that the members of the Aluu Community are demons. They were simply doing what they thought was necessary. Lawlessness is aided and abetted by an unresponsive justice system which sometimes convinces us that we are all in a perpetual state of war; to protect ourselves, nothing is out of bounds. Many years ago, I felt that state of war. I was young but I had felt the thump of dread that follows the boom of a gunshot. I had heard the screams at night which continued unspoken the morning after in the faces of those for whom some of the joy of living had been aborted. I had lusted for blood. In my experience, my father’s actions quelled my bloodlust so that I along with everyone else at the bottom of the U that Saturday, could face my conscience.

Atticus Finch spoke a gem of truth when he said: ‘The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience’. There is at least one little boy, eight, or nine, or ten, who would have been among the Aluu Community when those men were burnt. That boy could have been me. His injured conscience will not be ruled by the majority. It will forever feel the lick and the spit of the flames that swallowed the Aluu 4. And it will forever burn.