Petrol Hymn

About

Lagos, 1976. Oil money everywhere and four hundred ships anchored off Apapa full of cement that will not fit through the port. Ifeoma Nwachukwu fronts eleven musicians at the Ilupeju Hotel six nights a week and pays them out of a biscuit tin, and what she wants is a pressing with her own name on the label and the long song on it — the fourteen-minute one about the ships, which is about the ships the way rain is about weather. Major Bala Danjuma is signals, northern, married in Kaduna, and in her flat on Wednesdays. In February he was three telephone calls from the men who shot the head of state. Rukky Ejiro is A&R at a label funded through a general's wife, has wanted to sign Ify for two years and has wanted rather more than that for two months, and can put the song on wax, on the radio, and simultaneously into a file. Every route to the record runs through one of them. A music-industry story about patronage, protest and the cost of a chorus, written in the specific textures of boom-time Lagos: naira in a tin, generator fuel, studio time by the hour, the exact wording of a Broadcasting Corporation memo. The reversal is not that a lover is a conspirator — it is worse and more careful than that. Desire is adult and frank and cuts away at the door; the violence is state violence and arrives on letterhead before it arrives in person. Five endings, and the record exists in three of them.

Cast

• Ifeoma Nwachukwu protagonist; bandleader and singer
• Maj. Bala Danjuma army signals officer; Wednesdays
• Rukky Ejiro A&R; can put the song on wax and in a file
• Sam Okposo tenor sax; the band's conscience and its worst timekeeper
• Mrs Adeyemi the label's money; a general's wife
• Superintendent Ojo special branch; polite, patient, everywhere