Reverie on Milliken Hill

Mispronounced, surely; I suspected that the languid Enugu

tongue had played fast and loose, as usual, with the syllables,

and so, for many years, I had taken it to be “Milking Hill”—

dedicated simply to the fetching of milk from cows.

But no pastoral ruminants here except the potbellied goats

who look twice before capering across the village roads.

Milliken’s Hill, a white man’s memorial. Christened seventy years

or so ago after the colonial holdover who dynamite-blasted the rock

to carve out the lean road that unwinds in a tight spiral round

the coalhearted hills. So the hilltop prince told me. Seventy years

later, warranty expired, as these things do, the old road don give out,

the damp sand underneath crumbling and taking the coal tar with it.

I dare to look off  the unrailed cliff, to the depths of  it, to see for myself

past the very tops of  untapped raffia palms and eucalypti and the cell

towers and zinc-roofed houses shelved on neighboring hills. This valley

is layered over by soft mist, undertoned by the bluegreen of the leaf-

crowded mountain, the eye-watering ochre of  the highlife evening.

Mma bu nkwukwu. Looking now off  Milliken Hill, I see, in my wandering

mind’s eye, only the cackling monkeys deep within, who will go to mock

later the humble people keeping vigil at altars on a holier rock,

as if  they know better—now, nevertheless, they swing about and decry

the burnt-out frames of commercial passenger buses, fallen off  the brink

with so many nameless bones. Fewer, though, than you would think;

my conveyor, old-reliable Coal City Cab, is righted just in time, having

digressed abruptly to avoid headlong death; screeching out of nowhere

at two hundred and twenty kilometers an hour, tumbling along

like these lines, the would-be manslaughterer with failing brakes.