The Power(18)

There’s a girl and a boy making love in a back alley. She coaxes him with a crackling hand at the small of his back. The boy turns around to see Tunde’s camera pointing at him and pauses, and the girl sends a flicker across his face and says, ‘Don’t look at him, look at me.’ When they’re getting close, the girl smiles and lights up the boy’s spine and says to Tunde, ‘Hey, you want some, too?’ That’s when he notices a second woman watching from further down the alley, and he runs as fast as he can, hearing them laughing behind him. Once he’s safely out of the way, he laughs, too. He looks at the footage on the screen. It’s sexy. He’d like someone to do that to him, maybe. Maybe.

CNN take those pieces of footage, too. They pay. He looks at the money in his account, thinks, I’m a journalist. This is all it means. I found the news and they paid me for it. His parents say, ‘When are you going back to school?’

And he says, ‘I’m taking a semester off. Practical experience.’ This is his life, starting; he can feel it.

He learns early on not to use his cellphone camera. Three times in the first few weeks a woman touches the camera and the thing goes dead. He buys a boxful of cheap digital cameras from a truck in Alaba Market but he knows he’s not going to make the kind of money he wants – the kind of money he knows is out there – from footage he can take in Lagos. He reads internet forums discussing what’s happening in Pakistan, in Somalia, in Russia. He can feel the excitement tingling up his spine. This is it. His war, his revolution, his history. Right here, hanging off the tree for anyone to pick. Charles and Joseph call him up to see if he wants to go to a party on Friday night, and he laughs and says, ‘I’ve got bigger plans, man.’ He buys a plane ticket.

He arrives in Riyadh on the night of the first great riot. This is his luck; if he’d turned up three weeks before he might have run out of money or enthusiasm too early. He’d’ve got the same footage as everyone else: women wearing the batula practising their sparks on each other, giggling shyly. More likely, he would have got nothing – those shots were mostly filmed by women. To be a man, filming here, he needed to arrive on the night that they swarmed through the city.

It had been sparked by the death of two girls, about twelve years old. An uncle had found them practising their devilry together; a religious man, he had summoned his friends, and the girls had struggled against their punishment and somehow they had both ended up beaten to death. And the neighbours saw and heard. And – who can say why these things happen on Thursday, when the same events might have gone unremarked on Tuesday? – they fought back. A dozen women turned into a hundred. A hundred into a thousand. The police retreated. The women shouted; some made placards. They understood their strength, all at once.

When Tunde arrives at the airport the security officers at the doors tell him it’s not safe to leave, that foreign visitors should stay here in the terminal and take the first flight home. He has to bribe three separate men to sneak out. He pays a cab driver double to take him where the women are gathering, shouting and marching. It is the middle of the day and the man is frightened.

‘Go home,’ he says as Tunde jumps from the cab, and Tunde cannot tell whether he’s saying what he’s about to do or giving advice.

Three streets away, he spots the tail of the crowd. He has a feeling something will happen here today, something he has not seen before. He is too excited to be afraid. He is going to be the one to record this thing.

He follows behind them, holding his camera close to his body so it won’t be too obvious what he’s doing. But still, a couple of the women notice him. They shout at him, first in Arabic and then in English.

‘News? CNN? BBC?’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘CNN.’

They start to laugh, and for a moment he is afraid, but it passes like a wisp of cloud when they shout to one another, ‘CNN! CNN!’ and more women come, holding their thumbs up and smiling into the camera.

‘You cannot walk with us, CNN,’ says one of them, her English a little better than the others’. ‘There will be no men with us today.’

‘Oh, but’ – Tunde smiles his broad and winning smile – ‘I’m harmless. You wouldn’t hurt me.’

The women say, ‘No. No men, no.’

‘What do I have to do to convince you to trust me?’ says Tunde. ‘Look, here’s my CNN badge. I’m not carrying any weapons.’ He opens up his jacket, takes it off slowly, swirls it in the air to show both sides.

The women are watching him. The one whose English is better says, ‘You could be carrying anything.’

‘What’s your name?’ he says. ‘You know mine already. I’m at a disadvantage.’

‘Noor,’ she says. ‘It means the light. We are the ones who bring the light. Now, tell us, what if you have a gun in a holster on your back, or a taser strapped to your calf?’

He looks at her, raises an eyebrow. She has dark, laughing eyes. She’s laughing at him.

‘Really?’ he says.

She nods, smiling.

He unbuttons his shirt slowly. Peels it off his back. There are sparks flying between their fingertips, but he is not afraid.

‘No gun taped to my back.’

‘I see that,’ she says. ‘Calf?’

There are maybe thirty women watching this now. Any one of them could kill him with a single blow. In for a penny.