The Beach of Dead Whales

It was while swimming off the sandy beach at Tarkwa
Bay that a group of boys first beheld what looked like a
monster creature thrashing about the turbulent seas. It
was a huge monster, which looked like a jumbo fish, a
sea-dwelling animal and an amphibious prehistoric
bird all rolled into one. It was luminously black and its
lustrous hide glowered in the brilliant sunset creating
the effects of an optical illusion. It was a whale.
As the strange creature dived and banked in the
shallow waters in obvious distress, the boys
abandoned their tethered canoe and took to their
heels. The ripples were powerful and strong enough to
throw a big ship off course. At night and still trembling
under his mother’s murky bed sheet, one of the boys
told the matriarch about the strange sighting. She
hushed him up. “You fool, when I told you to finish the
malaria potion you refused. Now, it has returned”, the
harassed woman screamed at a delinquent son.
No one has sighted or seen a whale in these climes
before. There was not even a name for it either in
antiquity or contemporary parlance. The odd stray
shark has been sighted in adjacent waters.
Occasionally, the carcass of the solitary sea lion or
off-message seal has been washed ashore. Once in a
long while, a mammoth version of the barracuda has
been known to tangle with the fishing trawl. And awed
by its massive size, the local people named the
hippopotamus the water elephant.
Still, no word on or about the real thing: the whale. Up
till that historic moment, its existence belonged in the
realm of intrepid dreaming or the malarial imagination.
But since the whale is a migratory mammal, it is quite
possible that it had learnt to give these shores a wide
berth because it was hunted to extinction in an earlier
epoch.
On the other hand, since scientific legend has it that
the whale once lived on land but went back to water
when the going got too rough, ancient caution might
have led it to avoid the old killing shores of West
Africa. Even for savage mammals, the fear of these
shores is the beginning of wisdom.
All this became the stuff of airy speculations as
citizens of the crazed megalopolis woke up that rain-
soaked morning to find the troubling reality of a
beached whale as their august guest. By mid-morning,
a huge crowd had gathered to take a look at the
mammoth monstrosity.
No one had seen anything like this before. Those who
thought the elephant was the ultimate creation could
not believe their eyes. What was this thing that was
more massive than ten huge elephants combined? But
the monster simply ignored everybody occasionally
emitting a rumbling sound that drove the fear of the
lord into the crowd.
By the next morning, the stranded behemoth had been
joined by two other mammoth whales. This was no
ordinary coincidence. Something new was happening
in this turbulent part of Africa. No one had seen a
whale before not to talk of three jumbo whales at the
same time. A huge portion of the rehabilitated Maroko
beach was now occupied by beached whales.
Upon hearing the news of the strange visitants which
spread like wild bushfire in the harmattan, the entire
interior of the country emptied into an already
besieged mega city. Very soon, things took on the
colour and atmosphere of a beach carnival of the
oppressed and the unfortunate. The people were having
a whale of a time. For many upcountry vagrants and
joyless hobos, it was their first chance to see the city
in its glittering opulence matched only by the feral
nastiness of its slums and its decaying infrastructure.
It was like Havana before the Cuban revolution.
In fairness to the government of Alhaji Mallam Mansa
Musa, it quickly assembled a team of experts to study
the strange visitation. In view of the urgency of the
situation, they were given one year to submit their
report, with a provision for multiple extensions in case
they wanted to travel abroad. These chaps were
notable scientists and consultant oceanographers who
had seen action off the coast of New Zealand and on
the island of Okinawa.
They had worked with merchant whalers and other
offshore buccaneers. They measured the bulk and
breadth of the bulbous invaders and came to the
conclusion that by regular standards, these were no
regular whales. They recommended that they must be
towed back to the ocean depths without any further
ado.
But there was an immediate problem. In the history of
the country and throughout its length and breadth,
there was no, and there has never been, such a towing
contraption. Up till that point, the nation had lived on
miracles and survived by miraculous reprieves. Ever
since its birth, the nation has flirted with suicide, often
getting to the brink of an apocalypse before being
dramatically delivered by the god of the Blackman.
In 1992 September when the cream of the nation’s
middle ranking military officers perished in one of the
most infamous aeronautical scandals of the century,
the traumatised citizenry had to wait for a whole
twelve hours before help came from a German
company based in the country. By then it was too late
for the boys.
It was not the impact of the crash in the shallow
marshes of Ejigbo that killed the boys. Most of them
actually survived the headlong dive. The survivors
died of strangulation and asphyxiation. Throughout the
night, the inhabitants of outlying slums heard the wails
and cries of the brave chaps as they thrashed about
and struggled to wrench themselves free of the iron
coffin.
It was like being buried alive. When they were
eventually brought out, many of them had the residue
of the first aid treatment they had applied to
themselves in the sulphurous entombment. The nation
had lost the cream of its future generals and
marshals.
Oh boy, did the corpses of those illustrious chaps
stink. On the day of burial, the whole of Abuja stank to
high heavens like the abandoned abattoir that the
nation has become. What are we going to tell the
children of Major Sam Mesaba Ogbeha, a first class
officer and gentleman, or the newly promoted gentle
giant, Colonel Taiwo Ogunjobi and many others?
None of the ranking echelons in the military high
command saw it fit to resign at this epochal disgrace
of the black being. They were too consumed by the
vicious power play that was to lead the nation to the
brink of disintegration.
Meanwhile on the beach, things took a more dramatic
turn. More whales turned up as if in a historic reunion
of distressed mammals. The whales were piled so hard
and high that the entire coastline took on a dark,
deathly hue. An observer from the nation’s last
surviving military helicopter, in a strange turn of
imagery, described the scene as resembling a huge
offshore warehouse of whale waiting to discharge its
cargo.
Something began to give. While some of the whales
lay still in terminal lassitude, others plunged their head
deeper in the sand in fretful distress. All began
discharging some gory substance. Then the very first
one, now driven into the main road by the bulbous pile,
let forth a frightful bellow and lay still. It was dead.
Others quickly followed and the entire beach soon
became a tangled mass of dead and dying whales.
Many people, now convinced that the whales were a
harmless mass of protoplasm climbed the skyscraper
of soft, appealing meat, frolicking and sliding at will.
Then one man brought out a jack knife and with the
cry of “na better meat” heaved out a huge slab from
the dead whale. It was like a divine signal. Thousands
of hungry and famished humanity descended on dead
and dying whales with all manner of crude
instruments. In a moment, the entire beach became a
huge abattoir foaming with blood and gore.
As the news of this biblical bounty spread to the
interior, many descended on the beach to have their
share of the national whale. Salivating with apostolic
relish, the nation’s leading spiritual merchant
described the whalefest as “manna from heaven”.
Urging his despairing congregation to take full
advantage, it was God’s way of showing that he would
never abandon his own, the man of God added.
Then divine disaster struck, and for a nation that has
lived at the edge of the abyss, it was massive and
merciless. In the tropics, things flourish and perish
very quickly. Obeying the iron tropical law, the whales
began to decompose very rapidly. By the following
evening, the entire coast had been taken over by a
suffocating smell of decay and decomposition. Worse
still, many who had taken the strange meat started
vomiting and dying after a violent seizure.
Disoriented by the septic stench, the entire populace
started fleeing in all direction. As the pestilence took
hold, the remaining institutions collapsed and the
politicians, soldiers, clergymen, traditional rulers and
judges took to their heels, heading for the airports or
the interior. Unfortunately for them, a human
sandstorm of refugees had taken over all the airports,
while dead whales had taken over the seaports.
In three brisk days, it was all over. The entire land lay
still and quiet like a vast sepulchre. But this is not the
silence of lambs. Born a human disaster and fed by a
series of man-made disasters, it has taken a natural
disaster to overwhelm the nation. A plague has seen
off another plague. When politics and science fail,
nature triumphs. That is the only iron law of human
evolution. The early morning sun shone brilliantly. It is
a beautiful day on the Marina Quayside.