The call of the pack

The first thing I saw were the sticks. The mob were clawing over the car in front of us and they were waving big lumps of wood. I could see some of them had nails driven through them. The thugs brandished their clubs at the driver, holding them up, threatening to let them fall, stamping forward, trying to make the driver flinch. They swamped the car. Over 30 of them crowded round like hunting dogs on a kill, banging on the windows and the sides, whooping and yelling, cursing and waving their rope-like arms.
"What should I do?" Could we get out of this? I slammed the car into reverse and looked over my shoulder, but there was another car behind us already –where had he come from? The revving of the motor had their attention. My attempt to flee had pulled them up from the car in front, they fell away from it and began to lope toward us. They were approaching slowly. One boy stood in front of us, he had a fencepost he'd ripped out of the ground with a glob of concrete on the end. He held it aloft over the bonnet of the car. His bottom lip jutted out and twitched, beckoning me to try him. There was another, thin weevilly thug on the other side of the mob, dragging the tip of his cutlass along the ground with the sloppy indifference of a boy who would attack when the rest of the pack attacked, who had no mind of his own, would feel nothing, who would not stop, and who didn't care.
"The boot, open the boot of your car!" they shouted, flinging their hands up. We had two laptops in there, these guys were robbing us.
"Do we do what they say?" I asked, scared and not really knowing what to do.
"Yes," said Tashikalmah, definitely. I resigned myself to losing the computer. I got out. One of the boys came up to us. He was wearing a pair of home made sunglasses. Black transparent plastic glued to a wire frame, trying to mimic something he's seen on Channel O. These glasses made him some kind of leader. He held a cutlass in his hand. He grabbed the door handle and pulled at it, angrily. They were jabbering in Hausa, and Tashikalmah was talking back. I came forward with the key and opened the boot. They were in head first, clawing at the bags. "They're looking for fake ballot papers," said Tashikalmah. I pushed my way forward and opened the bag with my computer. See? No ballots.
The air went out of the mob a little. Some slunk away, the pack was no longer wired together. The younger ones now came forward, getting bold, copying the older ones –hoping the older ones would notice them, not wanting the confrontation to pass without striking a pose, throwing a curse, or rattling a sabre, even though the pack leaders had certified the danger was over.
One of the ANPP party agents told them about a 'suspicious van' that had been discovered. It had been full of fake ballot papers and ballot boxes. But do you know what? They'd escaped and there was no evidence of it ever happening. Ali, a 32 year old baker in the village was leading the vigilante mob. He told us he hadn't seen it himself, but was "protecting the town" from the forces of manipulation. Somehow I knew that if we asked every boy in the village that day, no one could say they actually saw the suspicious outsiders with the rigging tools. Everyone we spoke to in the whole state of Bauchi had heard the same thing, and everyone believed it utterly. And there's a chance it could have been true, but what it achieved was much more powerful than the mysterious riggers could have hoped to achieve for their side. Gangs of boys roamed the streets, on a mission to 'vote, protect, escort'. I would think the chances of any voter who happened to support the PDP coming out on that day were nil. But what with PDP politicians scrabbling to jump ship, what did it matter?
It's not like many would get to vote anyway.
It wasn't the only time we got stopped like this. The night after the election we drove into a mob outside Inec, lounging around in the dark, showing off to each other with their crude clubs. As Tashikalmah opened the boot I looked at one boy standing by the car. He was about 14, lanky and listless. He didn't have a club or a cutlass, or a sneer. He looked scared. It was the kind of fear that breeds in the darkness of ignorance and fatalism. I felt like shouting at him: "Go home! Go to school! Read a book! Grow up!" but I had a feeling he would do none of these.