Cack-Handed

by Gina Yashere

  In Nigeria, they were subjected to a different level of discipline. The beatings my mum gave us paled next to what they did to unruly kids in Nigeria. Teachers at school were allowed to kick your ass, then you went home and got double whooped. One day they’d be rebellious, unruly children in England, then the next day they’d be gone. We’d see them return a few years later, having had the attitude beaten out of them. They’d have a Nigerian accent, and they’d be quieter and more respectful of their elders. Like they’d been replaced with a Stepford version of themselves. We knew a few kids that had happened to. The Nigerian boot camp worked for most of them. But not all.

  One boy my brothers and I had known as children was Yomi. We’d all gone to school together. He was what you’d call a challenging kid. To us, he was just bad. From an early age he was constantly getting into trouble at school, talking back to teachers, stealing, and just generally uncontrollable. I never liked him. I had my naughty days, but there was always something off and a little not-fun dangerous about him. He never knew when to stop, and even as an eight-year-old, I was wary of being dragged into his orbit. His parents’ constant beatings just didn’t work on him, and as he got older, his digressions became more serious.

  If there’s one thing Nigerian parents are afraid of, it’s their child bringing the police to their home, and therefore shame on their family name. Especially after they had made sacrifices to give their children all these opportunities and had tried to differentiate themselves from the Caribbean community, which they believed was more prone to criminal activity.

  After one too many school suspensions, when Yomi was twelve, his parents told him to pack a case, as they were going “on holiday.” They took him to Nigeria and came back without him. We didn’t see him again till he was sixteen. When he returned he was even more off. Yes, he now had the Nigerian accent, but something seemed to have snapped in his head. I’m not sure whether the abuse he suffered there broke him even further or he’d spent six years biding his time before he came back to England to wreak revenge on his parents, but wreak he did. I never went near him again, but I heard from my brothers that he went completely off the rails. He became involved in all sorts of criminal activity, from robberies to assault. He was stabbed to death in a drug deal gone wrong at twenty-three.

  When I was around fourteen, it seemed that Mum became embarrassed that we couldn’t speak our mother tongue. She began berating us for having no culture and then began trying to teach us, but what would have been absorbed by us as babies wasn’t going in now that we were teenagers.

  “Sit down. I’m going to teach you my language!”

  “Sorry, Mum, it’s too late. I’m learning French now. Bonsoir, Maman!” Being the child of African immigrants had made me no friends at school, so I wanted no part of it.

  Later, around the time I joined the Nation of Islam and began to take pride in my heritage, I decided I did want to learn to speak my mother tongue. I found an evening class that taught Yoruba. Yoruba is not my mother’s language, but the Yoruba tribe is one of the largest in Nigeria, and therefore one of the most commonly spoken languages, and that was the only course in any Nigerian language available at that time. It would do. I turned up for my first class, excited to meet other young Nigerians in the same boat, looking to rediscover their culture. I was the only Black student. The class was full of what you’d call white hipsters, who stared at me as I walked in, no doubt wondering why their teacher had gone to sit at the back of the class. At least the real teacher was an actual Nigerian man. Mr. Adelogun and I bonded, and just by virtue of me having grown up listening to the Nigerian accent and inflections, I was able to pick up the basics quite quickly and became his best student. To be fair, the bar was set quite low. As in underground. That course ran for a year, then started again the following year from scratch. No advancement. I was disappointed.

  My Yoruba skills ended at me being able to say hi to my mum, ask her how she was, and tell her my age—that was about it. But I was determined to take my new three sentences to Nigeria. I wanted to see where I came from. I felt like an outsider most of the time in England. I didn’t fit in with white people, and I didn’t fit in with the majority of Caribbean Black people. I wanted to go and find my people, and see the country of my parents’ birth.

  Considering Mum had spent my whole childhood threatening to send me back, she wasn’t too keen. “Don’t go there. They will kill you!” Presumably because of my outspoken ways, and not my gayness, which she didn’t know about yet. To many Nigerians in Nigeria, I’m one of the “lost generation”—born in England and supposedly far removed from my culture. There’s this idea that the streets of London are paved with gold and opportunity, and that we have it much better than those who stay in Nigeria. So there is a certain amount of resentment and envy aimed at us. I found this out the hard way.

  People’s responses are different depending on where you tell them you’re traveling. When I told people I was going to New York, their excitement was palpable: “Oh, bring me back a Statue of Liberty!” “Send me a postcard!” (This was the early ’90s.) But a few years later, when I told these same people I was going to Nigeria, crickets. I’d heard a lot of stories about lawlessness and corruption in Nigeria, mainly from other Nigerians, but having learned about the true scourge of colonialism from the Nation of Islam, I was suspicious of what I saw as bad propaganda and brainwashing. I wanted to see for myself.

  I planned a trip back with my friend Yetunde. Yetunde was a British-born Nigerian like myself, but she had lived a number of years in Nigeria and so spoke Yoruba fluently. I’d introduced her to my mum, and she had prostrated before my mum in the Nigerian show of respect when you greet your elders. Mum liked her immediately and then felt better about entrusting her with my safety in Nigeria, even though I was twenty-six at the time! We flew Virgin Atlantic to Nigeria and landed safely at the Lagos airport. We went through immigration with no major issues and collected our suitcases, but there was one more hurdle to cross. A line of customs officers waited behind tables on the way to the exit. I’d heard about the corruption at the Lagos airport. Apparently these officers, to supplement their earnings, would stop foreign-looking travelers and make a show of searching their bags, expecting you to slip them twenty dollars or more to bribe your way out. I am Nigerian! I thought. My parents were born here, and I will not be bribing my way out of this airport!

  Yetunde and I were separated. Yetunde went first, greeting the officers in Yoruba, therefore flagging her status as a Nigerian. She passed through without incident. I was up next. “E kaale, sir!” I wished the officer staring at me as I approached a good evening in my best Nigerian accent. He took one look at me and beckoned me to his table for a bag search. Shit.

  “Open your case. Open. Your. Case.”

  I opened my case. He dug through the contents, which contained nothing useful to him. I’d made sure that I’d brought nothing valuable on this trip, just in case. After rummaging around for a couple of minutes, he looked up at me with a sly smile.

  “Do you have anything for me?” I knew exactly what he was expecting, but I played dumb.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Do you have something for me?”

  “What would I have?”

  “Something!” He was becoming exasperated at my stupidity, but I was going to play this till the end. I wasn’t about to be shafted out of money like some foreigner. I was Nigerian!

  “Did you not bring anything for me?”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “I don’t know you.” I stared into his eyes, unblinking. For a long time.

  Eventually he pointed with his lips towards the exit. “Go.” He muttered something under his breath, probably calling me a fool, but I was out and scot-free.

  We got into a taxi and headed to the Sheraton Lagos Hotel. I let Yetunde do all the talking. My year of basic Yoruba training had done nothing to increase my Yoruba status.

  Lagos is a vast metropolitan mix of slums, cr
owded streets, and traffic jams. It is densely populated with people who travel from all over Africa to try to make it in what is arguably the commercial heart of Nigeria. If the word “hustle” were a city, Lagos would be it. From the moment we left the airport to the moment we finally entered our hotel room, we ran a gamut of hawkers selling everything from drinks to fruit to cell phones to clothing to fire extinguishers. After we passed that particular extinguisher salesperson, I began to wonder if I’d made a mistake, not buying one, as our taxi driver drove like he’d stolen his car, and I became worried we would crash. If we were consumed by a ball of flames, my last thought would be of the fire extinguisher I could have purchased two miles back. The sheer population in Lagos meant that freeways were rarely ever free. We sat in traffic jams for the entire drive, and spent the whole time fending off relentless sales pitches from street entrepreneurs.

  Huge, gleaming skyscrapers and apartment buildings stood alongside tin-roofed shacks. I saw many houses with makeshift signs pinned to the walls that said, THIS HOUSE IS NOT FOR SALE. Apparently in Lagos, home of the original Nigerian internet scam, people had been known to sell homes that didn’t belong to them. Criminal, but very enterprising.

  I couldn’t wait to get out to explore. Our first taxi ride from our hotel into the city taught me a lesson in being a tourist in Nigeria. I was excited, wanting to record everything I could on my camcorder for posterity. As we drove, I put my camera out of the window to shoot the scenery.

  “What are you doing? Put that away!” Yetunde hissed.

  I didn’t understand the urgency in her voice. “What are you on about?”

  “The camera, you fool. This isn’t Amsterdam. Put it down!”

  Before I could even get out my rebuttal, I felt a tug. Someone was trying to pull my camera out of my hand, but luckily the camera strap was wound tightly around my wrist. Four young guys had appeared, jogging alongside the taxi as it slowed down in traffic, and they were trying to rob me, inside the moving vehicle.

  “You cannot film here unless you pay,” one of them announced.

  “Piss off!” I struggled to keep ahold of my camera as Yetunde leaned over and tried to wind up the car window, all while the taxi crept along at five miles an hour.

  “You pay or give us the camera!”

  “Not giving you shit! Drive, taxi!”

  “The light is red.” The taxi driver pointed at the stoplight up ahead.

  Yetunde shouted at him in Yoruba, and the driver swerved out of our lane, clipping the car in front, and jumped the red light, leaving the boys behind.

  “I told you to put that damn camera away, you stupid cow!”

  That was my first encounter with what are known in Nigeria as “area boys”—gangs of youngsters who roam the streets of Lagos extorting money from passersby, traders, drivers in traffic jams, drivers parking their cars, charging them a fee to watch their cars, whether they want the service or not. This was our first day in Nigeria. It was turning out to be a pretty exciting holiday. I don’t have a single picture or video from that trip, as that camera never left the hotel room again, until we were heading to the airport for the flight home.

  Yetunde had a bunch of friends in Nigeria, from her school days and her frequent travels back and forth. One night we were invited to dinner by two of her male friends, at the restaurant in the hotel where we were staying. These guys had done well for themselves and had money. They dressed very fashionably and carried themselves with the confidence of men who had the world at their feet. During the course of the dinner, they began espousing their views of women. They opined that their money gave them the power to, in their own words, “fuck and dump, these gold-digging asewos, who smelled their expensive cologne and buzzed around them like flies on shit. My Yoruba was basic, but it took me a millisecond from the context of the conversation to work out that they were referring to all women as whores. Never one to not speak my mind, I asked what we were, then, seeing as they had come to take us to dinner and were presumably paying for the meal. They laughed derisively, one of them even telling me to be quiet and stop interrupting. I told him that I didn’t know who he thought he was talking to, but I would speak whenever I damn well pleased, and then I stared at Yetunde. My friend who was usually outspoken and confident, who didn’t suffer fools gladly and had a fiery temper, sat there passively, saying nothing and pretending to laugh at their jokes. I had had enough. I stood, threw down some money to pay for the food that I’d eaten, excused myself, and went back to the room. Yetunde was furious with me when she returned an hour later. “Why, did you do that?” she yelled. “That was rude and ungrateful! You offended them.”

  “Offended them? You expected me to sit there, smiling, while they discussed women in such a derogatory and disgusting manner? Hell no. I wasn’t that desperate for jollof rice.”

  “You can’t talk to men like that here. This is Nigeria . . .”

  Having spent her formative years here, she had a better understanding of how patriarchal it was, and she was genuinely frightened that my outspokenness would get us into serious trouble. After I hadn’t listened to her in the taxi and nearly got us robbed by area boys, I decided I’d bow to her superior knowledge and try to bite my lip around Nigerian men for the rest of the trip. But I am my mother’s daughter. It was a struggle, and I bruised a few male egos in that two weeks.

  Despite the inherited homophobia in Nigeria (I say “inherited” since it was thrust upon African cultures from the white Christian missionaries hundreds of years previously), there was a thriving underground gay scene in Lagos, found mainly in people’s houses and a few private parties held in hotels and clubs. Before 2014, during a wave of increased religious fundamentalism, Nigeria introduced a slew of draconian laws making the already illegal homosexuality even more illegal, driving the scene even deeper underground, but those laws had been largely ignored, with gays operating within their own subculture, mostly closeted from work colleagues and family. I’d met Yetunde in the gay scene in London, and she had a girlfriend at the time we were traveling in Nigeria together, but she identified as bisexual. She had some lesbian friends in Nigeria, and one of them came by to have lunch with us at the hotel. As we ate and laughed, I wondered what her life could possibly be like as lesbian in a country that would jail her for her sexuality. Considering the risks she was taking, just by being who she was, she was pretty relaxed.

  Tumi, an attractive, voluptuous, big-haired woman, waved her hand dismissively when I asked how she lived. “Ah-ah. You get married, you have some children, and then your family can get off your back, as you have fulfilled your womanly duties!”

  And there I made a startling discovery. Many gays in Nigeria married each other to allay their families’ suspicions, often producing children. They then either moved their true partners into the house or continued their lifestyles outside the family unit. It was pretty genius and worked out great if you were gay and wanted a family, but the lengths Nigerians had to go to, to hide their true selves made me grateful that, even though in England I was still very much hiding my sexuality from all but my closest friends, I had freedoms and could live without fear of arrest, having been born as one of the “lost generation.”

  Decapitation is not the antidote for a headache.

  I loved the markets in Lagos. They reminded me of the ones my mum used to drag me to as a child, but on steroids. They were huge, extremely busy, full of color, vibrancy, and a cacophony of sounds. People sold everything from yams to fabrics to live chickens. I bought a lot of trinkets, but my main priority was to find Nollywood DVDs. “Nollywood” is the term used for the Nigerian film industry—a play on “Hollywood.” A large number of straight-to-DVD movies were made in Nigeria, and my mum was a fan. She hadn’t been back to Nigeria since she’d arrived in England all those years before, but she kept abreast of the changes in her homeland through her friends and family who still traveled back and through her consumption of Nigerian films and television. I wanted to buy a large num
ber of the latest Nollywood movies to bring back to her in London.

  We had been told there was a large DVD stall in one particular market, but we couldn’t find it, so Yetunde approached a nearby female market stall seller and asked her in Yoruba where we could purchase them. The woman stared at her and didn’t answer. Yetunde asked again. The woman again refused to answer. Yetunde began asking the woman angrily why she was refusing to speak to us. At this point, I knew something was up, but I wasn’t sure what, as my elementary Yoruba was not up to the task. The woman suddenly screamed at the top of her voice at us: “Go back to America with your devil tattoos!”

  At the time, I had only one tattoo on my shoulder—this was the early 2000s, and the addiction to ink and the full tattooed sleeves hadn’t become popular yet. Afrobeats hadn’t taken over the world yet either, but the younger generation of Nigerian artists had emerged, like Davido, Wizkid, Tekno, and Burna Boy, who in looks are pretty much indistinguishable from African American rappers. To this woman, we looked like African Americans. And having been fed the imagery of African Americans as criminals, we were not worth her time, or her courtesy, even though Yetunde had spoken to her in fluent Yoruba.

  Over the following days, I noticed that despite the fact that Yetunde spoke her language perfectly, Nigerians detected her British inflections and were quite disdainful towards her. I could almost understand their confusion when they came across me. I had no distinguishing features or mannerisms that singled me out as having any Nigerian roots, but her? This left me disappointed. What was the point of struggling to learn the language if I would be an outsider, laughed at and dismissed?

  I resigned myself to just trying to enjoy my time there and soak up as many good experiences as I could. I had made no attempt to contact my father, who I believe lived in Benin City, around 150 miles east of Lagos. This was partly through loyalty to my mum, who throughout my childhood had drummed it into our heads that he had abandoned us. I was curious about the other half of my genetic makeup but not ready yet to explore it. I needed time to acclimate. But I had originally planned to make this exploratory trip, to dip my toe in, then return later and perhaps connect with family I’d never met, including my mother’s still living siblings, as well as my father. After my experiences on that virgin voyage to Nigeria, I felt it was unlikely that I would return. The rejection from my people stung. I was a citizen of nowhere, accepted by no one.