‘Was that me?’ Kemi interrupted.
‘No,’ Tayo laughed. ‘You weren’t born yet.’
‘Was it Mummy then?’
‘Listen,’ Tayo smiled. ‘Omotayo wished with all his heart that the maiden were his friend. That way they could sail the seas together and see all the countries, the pirates, other ships and the sharks — everything. He would protect her, and they would find the golden fleece for their families. He felt very sad that he wasn’t going on the ship, and he slumped on his father’s shoulders. ‘Baa mi. Igba wo lemi n’lo? When can I go Baba?’ he pleaded, and rubbed his eyes to stop the tears from falling.’
‘And the little girl was Mummy!’ Kemi jumped in to finish the story. ‘And when you were grown up you went on the boat to England, then you came back and you married Mummy, and we all lived happily ever after.’
‘Yes, darling.’ Tayo hugged her tightly. ‘Yes.’
Chapter 23
In July of 1984, the Ajayis flew to Lagos as they always did for the summer holidays. They would spend three weeks with Uncle Kayode and his wife, using their home as a base from which to visit Mama and Remi, as well as other relatives in Lagos and Ibadan. In years past, visits to kinfolk were endless, but Uncle Bola and Uncle Joseph had now died and many other relatives had moved away. Bisi was living in Ghana with her three children. She worked as an accountant in Accra. Aunty Bayo had also left Nigeria shortly after her divorce, which had been messy because of Uncle Kayode’s affair with Hélène. Apparently, the affair had begun in 1963, not long after Uncle Kayode’s marriage to Bayo. Tayo wondered sometimes how the relationship had started and what had made his uncle so sure about Hélène. And what had made Hélène so certain that Uncle Kayode wouldn’t later find another woman to replace her? But these were not things one asked, not even to a heterodox like Uncle Kayode.
Uncle Kayode had left the Nigerian army shortly after the Biafran war and gone to France, just as he’d said he would, to complete his engineering training. Tayo presumed that it was during this time that his uncle lived with Hélène in France, and then returned with her to Nigeria after his studies. They were married in 1974 and moved from the old house in Yaba to Victoria Island. Uncle Kayode held a senior position with the oil conglomerate Elf, while Hélène worked from home as an artist. For a few years, Miriam had refused to stay with Uncle Kayode out of a sense of loyalty to Aunty Bayo who had been her mentor at nursing school but, with time, Miriam, like the rest of the extended family, came to love Hélène. Hélène was one of those rare expatriate women who embraced Nigeria and adopted its cultures to the point where it was easy to forget she was French. She even spoke English with a Yoruba accent rather than a French one. Often, when Tayo was with Hélène, he thought of Vanessa and allowed himself to fantasise about what things might have been like had he and Vanessa been living happily together.
The house was a five-minute walk from the ocean and it was such a striking building that it had once featured in a design magazine under the headline: ‘Beauty in the Heart of Darkness.’ Uncle Kayode disapproved of the caption, but it obviously hadn’t annoyed him enough to stop displaying several copies of the article throughout the house. Like most properties in the most expensive part of Lagos, none of the beauty was visible from the outside. A 10-foot high concrete wall, laced with loops of barbed wire, encircled the house, hiding it from public view. Even when the guards let people through the imposing steel gates, little of the actual house could be seen from the front; leafy palm trees and thick bougainvillea obscured the building. Always, when they arrived at the Ogundeles, Kemi would announce that this was the sort of house she wanted when she grew up. And because the Ogundeles had no children of their own, they spoilt her.
‘When I have a house it will be just like Auntie Hélène’s,’ Kemi would say. ‘Maybe not so big, but it will have lots of art.’
And there was certainly an abundance of art in the Ogundeles’ home, which sometimes reminded Tayo of the Barkers’ home in Oxford. Hélène, like Edward, had collected paintings from around the world as well as sculptures and bronzes from across West Africa. On this visit, as a special treat for Kemi, Hélène had invited two local artists to the house to talk about their craft. One was a carver and the other a bronze sculptor. Kemi had been thrilled and Tayo had watched with amusement as his daughter badgered the artists with questions.
The carver, a man by the name of Akin, had brought a small collection of his works, including some statuettes of former colonial officers. The inspiration for these, he explained, came from a great uncle who enjoyed telling stories, particularly about his former boss, named Lugard. When Tayo heard this, he could hardly contain his excitement. Might this be Lord Lugard? Many books had been written on the legendary British High Commissioner to Nigeria, but never from the perspective of Nigerians who knew and worked with him, so if this old man could still remember stories, that was very exciting.
When Akin offered to take Tayo to see the uncle, Tayo jumped at the opportunity. Miriam was less keen, complaining that Tayo was not spending enough time with them, but Tayo argued that this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience that he wasn’t going to miss. Besides, since the uncle was an old man, he might not have long to live.
‘And isn’t your mother also old?’ Miriam retorted, reminding him that his trip would delay their planned visit to Ibadan.
‘But what difference does a day or two make?’
Tayo would not be dissuaded.
The next day, Tayo set off with Akin, on the four-hour drive to the old man’s village of Atan. They left early in the morning, avoiding the worst of the traffic and the accompanying street vendors who stuck to cars like magnets, thrusting everything — from boxes of rat poison to French perfumes — through open windows in hopes of a sale. As they drove out of Lagos beyond the lagoon, the landscape changed to one of dense rainforest, which gradually thinned as they progressed northward. It was the rainy season and mounds of rich, red earth lay by the side of the roads. For miles around, the landscape showed no sign of habitation. Only a few people walked along the side of the road, some of them children who waved excitedly at the passing cars. What a beautiful country, Tayo thought, admiring the vast open space.
They drove by roadside bukkas that sold bush meat and fire-wood, and once they stopped to buy some peanuts and dodo Ikire, which they ate in the car as they continued their journey. The drive was peaceful, except for the occasional crazy driver who would overtake on bends. Mostly these were lorry drivers transporting farm produce, some of which would drop off the sides of the trucks as they sped by. The vehicles sported popular phrases painted on the back and sides in bright, florid letters, large enough for even the short-sighted to read — Allah Saves, Jesus Saves, The Almighty Saves — as if this would guarantee them safe passage. Akin was playing some Juju music on the crackly car radio and after a while they began to speak of Akin’s plans to move to Europe. He intended to spend just a day in the village before driving on to Ilorin for an exhibition of his work, with the hope of meeting a rich European or American sponsor.
They arrived at the village in the middle of the day when the sun was fierce and people sought shade from their work in the fields. The old man had gone out, so Akin went to find him, leaving Tayo to wait. He sat on the grass beneath a tree drinking warm Coca-Cola and eating shelled groundnuts given to him by the woman of the house. After a while some young boys returned from school and started playing football close to where Tayo sat. They used Sprite bottles as goalposts, just as Tayo remembered doing as child. He remembered having to wake up early when the cock crowed to do his chores around the house, then bathe and eat. In those days everybody walked to school, so they needed a hearty breakfast that their mothers cooked. Sometimes it was porridge, or beans with yam, or sometimes akara and ogi. If it rained, Father would drive them to school in his Morris Minor; otherwise they went by foot along city paths and across the Ogunpa River.
During the rainy season, Tayo remembered that th
e river would sometimes rise so high they’d have to remove their shoes and school uniform, place them in a canvas bag on their heads, and then wade through water that was occasionally chest-high. School ended early in the afternoon, as it apparently still did, since these boys were out playing. Perhaps they also stopped at roadside bukkas on their walk home to buy refreshments — groundnuts, oranges and coconut milk, before coming home to play football.
As Tayo continued to watch he thought of his future son and felt remorse for being impatient with Miriam. Pregnant women were entitled to be irritable, and he shouldn’t have dismissed her concern for his mother. How many husbands could boast, as he did, of a wife that loved and cared for a mother-in-law just as much as she loved her own mother? He would apologise when he got back and now, as he waited, he picked up a twig and drew a grid in the sand with three headings: F (for family), W (for work), and O (for other).
Beneath F he wrote the word, time. Despite all his denials to Miriam, he knew that he’d been spending too many hours working and not enough at home. There were also other things to change. He had fallen into a bad habit of cutting Miriam out of discussions by referring to topics or people with whom she was not familiar. He did it as a way of asserting his intellectual interests because Miriam rarely asked about them. But he knew that to talk above her, to simply make her more aware of what she didn’t know, was not the way to solicit interest, and certainly wasn’t strengthening their relationship. No doubt there were also things she would like to share with him. Perhaps, for her sake, he ought to make an effort to attend church again. This way there would be more that they shared in common. Perhaps it might make him less nervous about growing old with her and, even if it didn’t, it would surely be good for the children. Children were, after all, the one thing he and Miriam did share in common, and always would.
On the work front, things were going well. Being Chair of the Department of History was a considerable achievement for someone his age. He was proud of his staff and of the projects he’d started, but he still needed to find ways of limiting his administrative duties in order to devote more hours to research.
Other? What should he write here? He should, perhaps, increase his physical activities now that he’d officially entered middle-age. And then there was the perennial question of what he’d achieved at this supposed halfway point of his life. In one sense he knew he had every reason to be proud of his achievements, but he was Chair of a department that was chronically understaffed. As a result, neither he nor his colleagues had been able to make their mark as scholars in the wider world of academia. The government had promised a review of higher education but these were empty promises. His old college friend, Ike, worked in the Ministry of Education, but even he hadn’t been able to accomplish much. When Tayo had last seen Ike, he had challenged his old friend on why there had been such little progress. Ike had refused to discuss his party’s policies and had accused Tayo of having unreasonable expectations. But it was Ike, as far as Tayo was concerned, who’d lost his way. Tayo was still thinking of Ike when Akin returned with the uncle.
The uncle was indeed elderly and looked frail, but he had a youthful twinkle in his eye as one might expect of a storyteller. Greetings were exchanged, and soon others from the village arrived to sit with them. They talked about the village and the season’s crops, while the women pounded yams and washed pots nearby in preparation for the evening meal. A bowl of water was brought for the men to rinse their hands, and then two large steaming plates of pounded yam and egusi soup were placed in front of them. The men took turns, rolling balls of yam between their fingers and dipping them in the stew which had large pieces of chicken resting at the bottom of the clay pot. More meat than usual, Tayo guessed, in his honour as their guest. They ate by the light of two kerosene lamps that attracted flying ants, which folded their wings and began crawling around the base of each light. Once the meal was finished, Tayo hoped to ask the uncle some questions, but the old man had started a game of ayo with his friends and it was soon time to sleep. Tayo resigned himself to waiting until the next day and went to sleep recalling all that he could from a recent publication of Lugard’s diaries.
The next morning Tayo was keen to resume where they’d left off but, by then, word had spread to a neighbouring village that a professor had come, and visitors besieged the house. Men and women came with their children, or photographs of children, wanting to see what the professor could do to guarantee them places in universities. There was little Tayo could do except show interest and concern and by the end of the day he was exhausted. He wished that Ike and all the other government officials could see the desperation in these people’s faces. Their only hope lay in the future of a son or daughter, and that was tenuous. Tayo tried not to be downhearted, but it was hard not to despair when it was his generation, the generation of Nigeria’s Independence, that was failing the country.
Tayo still had not spoken with the old man, nor had he contacted his family to tell them he would be returning later than planned but he was not concerned about the latter. Delays were always to be expected. ‘No news is good news,’ Mama used to say.
Eventually, on the third day, Tayo found a way of walking alone with Akin’s uncle. Occasionally, the old man spoke in Yoruba, but his preference was English in a way that reminded Tayo of his own father. He spoke in a formal and somewhat stylised English with a penchant for the phrase, ‘you follow?’
‘So, what shall I tell you about my old boss, Lord Lugard?’ the old man smiled. ‘I can inform you that I commenced employment with my boss in the year of 1912. You know that was the time when Oga returned to Nigeria after being governor in Hong Kong? You follow?’
‘Yes sir,’ Tayo nodded.
‘But even before the time whereby I started employment with Lord Lugard and Lady Lugard, my father was in Lord Lugard’s service before me. Baba was the one who accompanied Lord Lugard to Borgu to claim it away from the French. You follow?’
‘Yes sir,’ Tayo nodded, bemused by the man’s obvious admiration for his old boss.
Tayo wondered, as the man continued recounting his stories, how much of his English had been learnt from Lugard.
‘Sometimes, he would ask my advice on government matters, especially if there were no other white people around. That was when he would ask us questions.’
Tayo nodded, finding this particularly interesting, as it was a side of Lugard not reflected in the diaries.
‘And I’ll tell you something else.’ The old man smiled. ‘My boss liked our women.’
‘Eh-enh?’ Tayo smiled. ‘Is that so?’
‘Oh yes.’ The old man grinned. ‘He used to ask my father to find him some good woman and to this day there are some half-caste people in Nigeria who come from him.’
Tayo laughed, his head now filled with additional questions about Lugard. As the man spoke, Tayo also found himself thinking of his mother. The more he listened to old people, the more he realised how little he knew of Mama’s life. He thought of Vanessa, too, and how good she must now be at these sorts of interviews. The walk had taken them around the old man’s fields and they were now retracing their steps.
‘I have one more thing to show you,’ the old man said, as they approached the house. He disappeared into a back room and emerged minutes later with purple material draped over his arms. Tayo thought he was bringing church robes, but then as he drew closer he peered in amazement at what lay in front of him. It was Lugard’s official robe, the one Lugard was known to have detested wearing for meetings with local dignitaries but had been required to wear by His Majesty.
‘Keep the robe safely,’ Tayo urged, ‘and don’t let any British museum take it from you. Whatever someone offers to pay, you can be sure it won’t be enough.’
By the time Tayo left the village, three nights had passed and he looked forward to returning to the Ogundeles’ home to rest. Sleeping rough on dirt floors and bathing in cold water had taken its toll and he dozed in the back seat. He dreamt
of a proper bed, twenty-four hour air-conditioning and the sauna that awaited him in the luxury of Uncle Kayode’s home. The beautiful heart of darkness, Tayo smiled to himself. He would shower and then sit outside in the gardens, next to the pool. Or perhaps he would retire to their guest cottage and lie with Miriam. Perhaps she would be in the mood to make love, but that was rare these days. Even when she hadn’t been pregnant, their lovemaking had grown infrequent with the exception of those days of hoped-for fertility — and how he hated the precision with which she made love then. For the rest of the time, her excuse was tiredness. Even on holiday she seemed to have little desire for him. Perhaps it was biological. He knew he was not the only husband to suffer from a wife’s abstinence, yet he didn’t go further afield to feed his physical desires as others did. He’d considered it, but never wanted to risk it — more for Kemi’s sake than for anything else. He’d already made these mistakes in his youth. He dozed off again and dreamt of Hélène’s cooking and then Hélène turned into Vanessa, and the house was no longer in Lagos but in Dakar. He was lying with Vanessa in the guest cottage and kissing her when the dream stopped. The car had broken down.
Several more hours were spent stuck by the side of the road in the stifling heat, waiting for the vehicle to be repaired. Eventually, when they set off again, Tayo stayed awake for the rest of the journey knowing that in the dark he would have to direct the driver to the house. At least they’d managed to avoid the worst of Lagos traffic, but as they got closer Tayo was surprised to see the gates wide open and cars parked everywhere — inside and outside. Was Uncle Kayode holding some sort of meeting or party at his home? Was someone ill? Had someone died? One of the guards ran to the car.
In Dependence Page 15