Sometimes telling the truth can get you killed. Before the night when the call came, the evening finished like any other. We watched the news. We checked that the doors were locked. We made sure that our bags were ready, just in case we needed them. We didn’t know that we would need them that night.
Sometimes, when you have expected something for a long time, the event itself can still take you by surprise. The harsh sound of the phone dragged me out of a dream. Adrenaline rushed through my system, dragging my body and brain to sharp alertness, as my body got ready for fight or flight. The clock showed the time: 3.15 AM. The voice on the phone said, “There is a car waiting for you outside your house. Get inside. You don’t want to ignore this.” My wife rolled over, blinking as I turned on a light. She asked “everything okay?”
“It was the call. We need to go, now.” I was already getting out of bed.
“They used the phrase?” she asked.
“Yeah.” You don’t want to ignore this. This was the phrase which meant that the people urging us to leave our home were not the secret police. This was not a trap. We hoped.
Soon we were walking out of the door of our home with our bags in our hands. The car was big, old and dirty. It was waiting in a patch of darkness, underneath the street light which had been broken years ago. People in our street refused to pay the bribe which the repair crew had demanded to fix the light, so it remained broken, just another reminder of the corruption in our society. As we got into the car, I noticed a nasty oily odour. This was the sort of car that you would choose if you really didn’t want to stand out. When I saw the size of the car, I wondered if they had chosen a big car so that they could hide us in the back under a rug or something. Instead, the driver and his friend motioned us to sit behind them.
As we left town, I saw a man in uniform carrying a rifle, waving for our car to stop. A military checkpoint! Several soldiers were searching cars ahead of us. One driver was kneeling on the ground beside his car, his hands behind his head, while a soldier pointed a gun at him. “Look bored,” said the driver, “imagine you do this every day.” The soldier pointed a torch into the car, making us blink in the sudden light. He demanded proof of our identity. My wife and I handed over the passports which we had been given.
The pictures in the passports were ours, but the names weren’t. The problem with trying to escape is that you need a passport to cross into another country. If you don’t have a passport and if the secret police suspect that you have joined the democratic underground movement, then you’re in danger. If they were suspicious of you before, then their suspicion will increase when you tell them that you want permission to leave the country. Your name will be on the watch-list issued to every military checkpoint and police station. The only practical solution is to obtain a good forgery of a passport. Even then, you’d better be prepared to bribe your way past the checkpoints.
Carrying a forged passport is dangerous, of course, but not carrying it would be worse. I’ve seen what happens when people try to escape and don’t manage it. A few months after we got married, I remember watching children picking through a waste dump, looking for anything valuable. Then they cried out with shock. They had found a dead body, lying among the rubbish like a broken doll. Some poor man who had not made it. Just from a quick glance, I could see that they had not treated him well, before they killed him. The rumours about what happened in the detention centres were true. After that, I joined the democratic underground. They weren’t hard to find – my wife had joined already. She has always been braver than me.
The soldier’s question brought me back to the moment like a splash of iced water to my face, “where are you going in the middle of the night?”
I was ready for this question. “My wife’s mother is sick. She needs medicine. We’re taking her what she needs.”
The soldier was not satisfied. “Why are you travelling with these men? Are they family members too?”
That question was a trap. If I had said yes, then they could have interrogated everyone in the car, separately, to see if we gave consistent answers about each other’s birthdays, addresses and other things which family members would know. I did not fall into the trap. “No, they agreed to give us a lift, if we kept an eye out for street gangs who might want to take their car. You know how dangerous the streets are these days.”
The soldier stared at me for a long moment. It looked like he was reaching a decision. “Alright, move along.” He tapped the roof of the car with the flat of his hand. I thought that my answers had satisfied the soldier. Afterwards, my wife told me that she had seen the driver hand over some money to the soldier, the notes looked like Nigerian naira.
Soon after we left the checkpoint behind, I heard the thrumming sound of a helicopter’s rotors and saw a searchlight sweeping the streets behind us. “They’re moving in,” observed the driver. “We got out just in time.”
That night, we took turns to drive. The next day, and for several days after that, we kept on going as long as we could, driving at night and finding somewhere to hide and rest in the daytime. Perhaps the government would close the port – we had to get there before they did that. That night, we slept in a disused warehouse, sharing the unfamiliar space with maybe twenty-five or thirty other people. At least the broken windows provided some ventilation. Seeing how many other people were here startled me. I hadn’t realised how many people were leaving at the same time. I knew that things were bad, but seeing how many people were here, looking tired, frightened and desperate, I realise how bad things had become. When I saw how many people were waiting for the fishing boat, I couldn’t believe it. My wife reached into her bag for the envelope containing a large amount of cash to pay the people smugglers who would take us across the sea. The cash was Nigerian naira, of course – the smugglers would not accept the native currency of our country.
The boat, like the car we had travelled in, looked large, dirty and worn out. There was a strong odour – the greasy smell of scared and sweaty human beings, packed tightly into a space. More and more people were crammed into the boat. I felt anxious. There was no chance that the secret police would think that this was an innocent fishing expedition. It would be obvious to anyone who saw us that we were trying to escape to safety across the sea. Have you ever caught a bus when you were in a big hurry? You know the feeling, after you get on the bus, when you want it to start moving and it seems to take forever? Getting on the boat was like that. When we finally walked across a rust-streaked metal walkway, onto the fishing boat, I desperately wanted the boat to get moving. Instead, the engine coughed and died. A couple of the crew started fiddling with the engine. I saw streaks of rust on the metal surfaces of the boat. Was this boat going to leave port, let alone reach the other shore? I watched the shore anxiously, expecting the secret police to arrive at any moment. When my wife’s hand slipped into my hand, I felt a moment of peace.
Our sea journey was long under the relentless summer sun. My wife and I sipped our water and held on tightly to our bags and each other. The boat’s engine seemed to be wheezing and coughing. If the engine failed, would we be left drifting in the middle of the sea? Would anyone look for us? Would anyone care if we were lost?
I tried to distract myself by thinking about my book about the history of the democratic underground movement. In the book, I tried to work out what had gone wrong with our country. Like every country, our country’s destiny could not avoid being shaped by the choices made by the leaders of other nations. The decision that doomed us, I argued, was the choice by Stalin and Hitler to keep to the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Historians had found evidence of plans for Hitler’s armies to invade Soviet Russia. If the Nazis had done that, they would have been at war with Soviet Russia as well as Britain and the United States. It had been a historian who had urged the Nazi leaders to learn from the mistakes of Napoleon and Germany’s leaders in the First World War: even a powerful European empire could not win a war on two fronts. If only that historian’s message had not been heard, how different our history could have been! Perhaps the democratic nations might have won the Second World War. If only they had!
After the defeat of the democracies of Europe, the resistance fighters in France, Spain and Britain became the democratic underground movement. The underground had high hopes, at first. There were democratic resistance movements in Germany and Italy, too, of course. You probably know about their attempt to assassinate Hitler and his top leaders in 1944, the July bomb plot. The movement hoped for help from America, but the United States was fighting its own two-front war, to prevent invasions from the sea by Japan and Germany. If America had fallen, I think our movement would have lost all hope. Even with America still free, the hopes of the democratic underground in Europe were harder to sustain, as the years went on. From time to time, there were uprisings – in the 1960s, after the American civil rights movement inspired Europeans to rise up, in 1989 when people tried to overthrow the governments of Soviet-dominated countries in Eastern Europe and in 2011, when the last dictatorships in Africa were overthrown in the Arab Spring. Each uprising caused a wave of hope, which crashed down when the dictators of Europe responded with relentless brutality.
After decades of struggle, and the disappearance, torture and death of many, too many of us, people were desperate to get away from the brutal regimes governing European nations. We hoped to find sanctuary in the thriving democracies of Africa. After the defeat of the European democracies, the African nations had banded together with countries in the Americas and Asia to form the United Nations Treaty Organisation. The doctrine of the UNTO was that an attack on any nation was an attack in them all. Even the ruthless leaders of the fascist and communist regimes in Europe did not dare to attack the UNTO. Occasionally Europeans could get a glimpse of life in UNTO countries through their TV broadcasts. We cheered when we saw images of joint military exercises by troops from the Americas, Africa and Asia, as they demonstrated their determination to repel any attack from Europe. We envied their liberty and their prosperity, after the huge success of the Marshall Plan in the late 1940s, when the United States gave $13 billion to help the emerging democracies in Africa and Asia. $13 billion in the 1940s would be worth a lot more now, of course. Meanwhile, the economies of European nations withered under fascist and communist rule, as corruption spread and hope for a better future faded away.
Even as we escaped, we had no illusions about the reception we were likely to receive. Many of the political leaders in African democracies were anxious about the costs of accepting waves of migrants. Some African leaders called for their warships to be sent to rescue us. But other politicians said that we should be left to drown, because helping us would only encourage more of us to swarm Africa. That’s the word they used - ‘swarm’ – as if we were a cloud of locusts! Some of them even said that they should use their warships to forcibly return us to the shores of Europe, so that they would not be burdened by us. As the engine on the rusty, overcrowded fishing boat coughed and stuttered, I held my wife’s hand and silently said a prayer. I thought about the risk which I had run by writing my book, which had made me into a target for the secret police. Sometimes telling the truth can get you killed.
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Re: Assignment 1 - The Mysterious Call (Brian Klems)
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. I don't follow American football at all
Originally Posted by mr_president
up a minute, will ya?” 
