Empathy is not a Colour. Chapter 2

At Vauxhall Cross, in a new HQ building, all post-modern with a

thousand windows twitching, Elizabeth Boro and Jon Peters had

been called to a morning meeting with Protheroe, their Controller.

It was the same day that Blunt started his bus training and the

day after the Blair Government had taken the decision to support

an American invasion of Iraq. March 2002. The propaganda, the

lies, the surveillance and the dirty tricks were being put in place.


"You have a target." Was Protheroe's opening remark, "His names

Blunt and you have to learn to drive a London bus."


"What?" The surprised question came in unison.


"You heard. You have to learn to drive a bus. It has been

arranged that you start in April. If you fuck this assisgnment up then

you can get a real job as a bus driver. The target used to work for the

Communist Party and the files in front of you have everything you

need to know. Be back here in 4 hours after you have read it and

we will go through the operation. Don't leave the building with the

file." Protheroe walked to the door as he was finishing, indicating

that this stage of the meeting was over.


Elizabeth Boro and Jon Peters picked up the 2inch thick files and

headed for the canteen.


"Christ. My old man's a bus driver and its sent him fucking mad."

Peters said to Boro.


"Don't blaspheme." Elizabeth Boro had already decided that she

was going to put on a religious front for this job. It would keep a lot

of people away from her. She was beautiful. Not pretty. Beautiful.

Skin - red hued black burnished flawless. An oval mouth, small

with a curve in her upper lip not quite closing with the lower, the

peltrum hinting at infinite pleasures in a kiss. Fathomless jet-black

eyes deep as coal. To learn the secrets in those eyes would take

a life-time or two. And had done. Her walk and the swish of skirt

swung heads to an ass J-Lo would die for. Most men in the canteen

couldn't take their eyes from her and were jealous of Peters close

proximity. The women just looked in awe or with the green eyes of

envy.


He was pleased that at least this job meant he was working with her

again, though he knew he had no chance. The last time they had

operated as a pair she had kicked him in the balls for making an

advance. Her feminism came with steel capped boots.


"Well. What do you think?" Said Protheroe as the meeting

reconvened.


Peters was the first to respond. "He was done in Germany for

dope. Can't he just be picked up and done for suppling then

stuck in prison? It should be easy to fit him up."


"No. You've obviously not seen the obvious." Was Protheroe's

curt response. "Well Elizabeth?"


"I noticed that he seemed to have a nervous breakdown after the

break up of a relationship and took to stalking her. He is accessing

a lot of internet porn so I suppose I could hook him and get sex

crimes involved." She replied sneering at Peters.


"Exactly. But it's better than that. We now know that he has

multiple sclerosis and the event you referred to was a very severe

relapse. He didn't know he had it at the time and the diagnosis still

hasn't been confirmed but our medical experts are 99% sure. The

porn sites he is visiting on the Internet are free ones, so he has not

used his credit card. No kiddy stuff yet but maybe in time. Elizabeth

you hook him when we say, get him watched by sex crimes and

hopefully lifted, then we have discredit his politics as deviant and he

becomes fodder for the tabloids. A 'nonce' if he ever gets jailed.

Looking at his past we think he is a romantic so you probably won't

have to fuck this one."


Elizabeth Boro was relieved when Protheroe had uttered his last

sentence. Not that she had any qualms about fucking someone for

her controller. The job she was doing now was better than the life

of a sex-slave for the Nigerian gangsters who had originally brought

her to London. She was grateful that she had been saved from that

by the Secret Intelligence Services. The information about his

interest in porn made her skin crawl, reminded her of the old life and

what she was forced to do. The series of photographs of Blunt in the

file hadn't helped. They had shown that he was quite handsome when

younger but the latest depicted a tired, shop-soiled rogue and the

sex for her would just be mechanical, not enjoyable. She wanted to

enjoy her work.


"Peters, you will act as a decoy. The details still have to be sorted.

OK, you have a month between now and training which lasts a month,

so get to know the target as per the training manual, then report back

here in two months for the final briefing before joining Blunt's garage.

Goodbye, and pass the test. That's an order." Protheroe was impatient

to end themeeting. He had other operatives to brief and targets to

destroy.




“How have I got to here?” Elizabeth Boro was deep in introspection,

driving, crawling with the traffic and on auto-pilot heading for bus

driver training.



Born an Ujowbi in Warri 37 years ago and named Rosemary Oritse.



For hundreds of years the Ujowbi had lived in the Niger delta around

Warri.



The town was founded in the 15th Century by the Oba of Benin. When

Portugese and Dutch slave traders arrived later that century they used

Warri as their base. The Ujowbi collaborated with them, broke with

the anamistic religion of their ancestors and converted to Catholicism.

The break wasn't absolute, much to the chagrin of the Portuguese

missionaries but they was a realism attached to their obscurantism, and

they rationalised an acceptance to this Africanisation of Christ. It was

the age of discovery and they weren't in Lisbon or Rome but in Warri

at the edge of their known world. Some of the Ujowbi's traditional

beliefs and practises were squeezed between the cracks, the crevices

of doubt that inhabit the acceptance to a new spiritual culture. It is still

quite common for men to bring a log of wood in tribute to the family of

a new born girl and seek her betrothal. As long as they were not

cousins of the same clan and with a common ancestor - a taboo stronger

than European familial incest - the suitor stood a chance.



Collaboration with Europeans had been a useful political strategy in

maintaining some control by the Oba over Ujowbiland and in the

continual struggles against, and shifting alliances with, the Yoruba in

the west and north and the Ibo in the east. Great politicians and

warriors, the Ujowbi.



200 hundred years of growth and increased wealth from collaboration

helped Warri win independence from Benin in the 17th century, and

with it came the elevation of an Oba of Warri.



When the British supplanted the Portugese and Dutch in the

nineteenth century, they found the Ujowbi easy to deal with. Four

centuries of being told that black people were inferior had left its

pyschological mark on them. They came to believe it and lost any

semblance of self-esteem.


The super-profits extracted from the slave trade and its denigration

of a people to the level of the unter-menschen, the sub-human,

had been invested in the reseach and development that produced

the Industrial Revolution in Britain. By the time Britain had abolished

slaving in its colonial territories it was the pre-eminent industrial and

Imperial Power. It could afford to forego slavery's profits, and this

helped with cementing the collaboration of the Ujowbi to British

interests.



Collaboration had been successful for 400 years - a long time in

politics. But then, towards the end of the 19th century and the

heightening of imperial rivalries between France, Germany and

Britain the agreements of the Berlin West Africa Conference in

1884-85 were formally signed in an attempt to avert war. Africa was

divvied up, spheres of influence agreed and lines drawn on maps

that sundered great tribes, extensive nations, the millenial culture

of ancestors. Official colonialism now existed. No African chief from

any African tribe was ever consulted. Not the Oba of Warri.



Collaboration was now redundant, stood in the way of maximising the

short term profits demanded by laissez faire's fraudulent economics.



Victorian Britain acted. To consolidate her hold on the vast tracts of

West Africa ceeded to her by other European white states, the

Imperial Mother's military came out to play her favourite game -

Slaughter & Rape - and turned on the Ujowbi. Stole the Ujowbi's

cultural artifacts to display as booty in the British Museum. Exiled the

Oba after a rigged trial. Banned the centuries old democracy of the

Ujowbi's politics and forbade negotiations or treaties with Yoruba and

Ibo. They were now mere administrators of their land following the

orders of the Royal Niger Company. Collaborating with the Victorian

British ended this way where ever the British went. A once great

civilisation, The Ujowbi were reduced to a small corner of Nigeria

and subject to a foreign Queen. With a very British sense of gallows

humour they named Warri a 'Protectorate'.



“Why?” The Oba had asked.


“Because I can.” Replied the Imperial Mother.



By the time Rosemary Oritse was born, Warri was a big city. A

decade before her birth, oil had been discovered in the delta and

Warri had grown expotentially. It was already a major transshipment

point between the River Niger and the Atlantic. Shipping rubber,

palm products, cocoa, groundnuts, hides and skins. An energetic

industrial sector was developing, assembling bicycles, processing

rubber and repairing ships. Oil came with a rush and at a cost. Great

slums grew on the promise of work and food, the dream of the poor

and hungry. Sanitation couldn't meet demand. The retching stench of

sewage drapped the streets. It flowed with the mud to the creeks and

rivers, mingling with the seeping oil, the 'black tears'. Polluting.

Fishermen lost their fish. Tilapia and catfish were decimated and

fishermens families added their numbers to the city slums. Refuse

could hardly be called collected, more like dumped on the nearest

empty plot. Dogs scavenged and vultures circled casting shadows.

Gastrointestinal disease flourished, some years it scythed down a

years cohort of children.



She was lucky as a child. Warri is in a wet, low-lying marshy region

and home to the Anopheles mosquito. The drone, the stilleto

harbringer of malaria. It kills one child in three. Not one day would

pass without her seeing some poverty striken human writhing at the

side of the road after an attack. Their malnourished body wracked

with the tremors and deliriums of the disease, lying in pools of sweat.

Ice would course through their veins and arteries as their bones

calved icebergs amongst the body's soft tissue. It didn't matter that

the temperature was 40c - they were wrapped in a glacier. As the

tremors leave them they would be weak, lie were they where for

hours or days, pathetic and benumbed, unable to call for help.



Six months before she was born an Ujowbi in Warri there had been a

coup followed by a counter-coup in Nigeria. Six months after she was

born, civil war broke out. A hundred miles to the east of Warri,

Biafra had seceeded from Nigeria. During the previous twelve months

tens of thousands of Ibo had been returning to the ancestral home in

the eastern delta from all over Nigeria, running scared after the

Hausa in the far north had slaughtered 20, 000 of them. Muslim versus

Animist/Christian, again. This was partly the reason for the

secession and war, but oil was its driving force. Just as it was the

main reason behind the military coups. When ever oil seeps to the

surface it brings it's 'black tears' to cultivate corruption. Not wealth

but poverty it's footprint.



Within a month of the outbreak of war, the city had been raided and

overrun by the Biafran/Ibo Army. Two and half months of terror, her

mother, Isabella remembered. Col Benjamin Adekunle's 'Black

Scorpion' Division drove the Biafran army out of Warri. Then

another slaughter of the Ibo began. 5, 000 were murdered by the

'Black Scorpions' and local mobs in Warri, Sapele, Agbor, Benin.....

It didn't matter if an Ibo family had been in Warri for generations,

lived next door to Ujowbi for years and had broken bread together,

or had intermarried. They were still Ibo and Ibo were Biafrans, the

cause of her family's terror. She didn't know of the pogram at the

time being only six months old and carried on her mother's back. She

still doesn't fully know. No Ujowbi ever mentions it, though she has

a memory trace from two years later, a distant echo of being scared

at her mother's furious voice.



“We didn't kill enough of them, ” Isobella screamed as Warri was

bombed by mercenaries flying for Biafra.



The words are not exact (when is childhood memory ever exact?),

but they carried her mother's sentiment. That and the animosity her

brothers and sister had for Ibo, infected her over the years.



With access to the sea denied by the Nigerian Army and Navy over a

million Ibo would be starved to death by the end of the war. In the all

to human words of Col Adekunle, “I want to see no Red Cross, no

Caritas, no World Council of Churches, no Pope, no missionary and

no UN delegation. I want to prevent even one Ibo from having even

one piece to eat before their capitulation. We shoot at everything

that moves and when our troops march into Ibo territory, we shoot

at everything even at things that do not move....”



Into this she was born, lucky to survive her infancy. But not so lucky

with her family. She was betrothed two days after she was born.



Her father, Umukoro Oritse was a business man and tribal politician.

A wheeler-dealer in export-import who made more than he lost when

loose with the law and scruple. Like the British, the military regime

banned Ujowbi politics, but his intellectual grasp of the complex

interaction of clans and families, of who was obligated to whom and

why, which clans were fueding, and how to use had been noted prior

to the coups. He had moved quickly through the heirarchy. Making

alliances and deals. Building business on the way. Enemies came with

his looseness for the law and scruple.



He had read the signs following the coups and knew that his enemies

would attempt to undermine him. His alliances were good and strong

in Ujowbiland but he lacked contact in Lagos and thats where the real

danger now lived. To ensure his business' survived he needed a

powerful ally there, and found one. A cousin of his was obligated to

by Akinyemi Ola. It was a small obligation only capable of an

introduction when passed onto him. But that was all he needed.