“No, thank you,” I declined, hand raised. “Our daughter doesn’t eat candy.”
“Just something to suck,” she whispered conspiratorially, pressing unwanted sweets against my upraised palm. I found myself thinking of other things one might want to suck, then chided myself for being a filthy old lecher, my child sitting beside me no less.
The flight attendant turned back and winked, as though she could read my dirty mind. “The cabin pressure can be hard on children’s ears.”
While my wife slept, my daughter wept. Alma snored against my right shoulder on the aisle seat, Boahema sniffled against my left shoulder at the window. I didn’t realize she’d been crying until I felt a warm, damp spot seeping down my sleeve.
“What is it, baby?” I hugged her to me, accidentally dislodging Alma’s head from the other side. “Tell Papa all about it.”
My daughter seemed ashamed to be caught crying. She batted her eyes furiously, clutching to her chest the bedraggled rag doll that had become her security blanket.
“Nothing, Papa.” Boahema burrowed her face into my arm. “Something is irritating my eye.”
I took her gently by the chin and tilted up her heart-shaped face. Blew softly into one eye then the other. I kissed my fingertip and smoothed it against each eyelid, dabbing the tears away.
“No more irritation,” I whispered. “Everything’s going to be alright.”
Though really, there was no guarantee. I unwrapped a mint and popped it into her mouth.
Boahema had been happy about our move to New York, more excited than either Alma or myself. She’d been three years old on our last trip to the States, too young to remember much of the visit. Now her six-year-old imagination conjured up an endless revelry of ice cream and television, video games and the expensive designer sneakers the been-to’s sent back home to their African relatives. The very things we’d been trying to escape in the first place.
I didn’t know if it was the unsteady rocking of the plane or the onset of homesickness that made Boahema bite her lip and breathe a ragged sigh.
“Papa, I’m sleepy.”
“Rest yourself, child.” I offered her my shoulder. “Warmest pillow on the plane.”
“But it’s wet,” she protested, as if she hadn’t caused the damage. I took a folded handkerchief from my pocket and spread it on the damp spot.
Boahema snuggled against me once more, eyes blinking with sleepiness. I could feel her jaw working as she sucked hard on her bit of candy.
“A bedtime story,” she murmured.
Alma the poet should have been a more likely bedtime griot. I was the journalist, the practical one. Yet somehow, I fell into the habit of reading Boahema to sleep at night. She soon began requesting anansesem, folktales about the trickster spider, Ananse. I exhausted my store of tales and would have to go scrambling for more, collecting them from friends and colleagues. It had become a bedtime ritual.
“Mmofra, mmofra,” I chanted. “Attention, attention. What is your pleasure, Miss Omobowale?”
She tilted her head, considering. “I want to know about a family that takes a long, long trip.”
“I don’t know any Ananse stories like that.”
“You make it up,” Boahema demanded.
I don’t know what brought slavery to mind. Certainly not the most appropriate subject to entertain a homesick six-year-old, yet I found it prickling the tip of my tongue and tumbling from between my lips.
Boahema never knew any difference between herself and the African children she had grown up with. Words like slavery, racism and minority had not been in her vocabulary. It seemed as good a time as any to broach the subject.
“Not everyone who left Africa flew on planes. Some people left through the Door of No Return.”
“A magic door? Like when Kwaku Ananse went to visit the Sky God?”
“No, baby. Ananse tales are fables. This story is real.”
“The No Return Door is real? Where?”
“All up and down the West Africa coast. Elmina, Cape Coast Castle, a little island called Gorée.”
“What is the meaning of this word, Gorée?”
“I really don’t know, baby.”
“You do,” Boahema insisted. “It means you must ‘go away.’ Go ’way you, bloody fools!” She was mimicking one of our elderly neighbors. The little English Mrs Acheampong knew were insults hurled at her boisterous grandchildren.
“Now, Boahema,” I scolded. “Is that a nice thing to say?”
“Go ’way you,” she repeated, giggling. When Boahema was tired she became giddy. “Papa, have you been to Go’way Island?”
I glanced guiltily at Alma’s sleeping form. “Only once, long before I met your mother. An old friend once had a gig there, a singing engagement. Not many people lived on Gorée before the Europeans came. Africans found it rather inhospitable.”
“In a hospital bowl?” came a sleepy grunt. Boahema was fighting to stay awake.
“Inhospitable. It means it wasn’t a good place to live. No fresh water. Not much in the way of creature comforts.”
“It doesn’t sound anything like New York.”
New York had become Boahema’s paradigm of paradise.
“It was like New York in one way. They’re both places where people are good at selling things.”
“Like Central Market in Kumasi?”
“Except on Gorée Island and other places like it—and this will be hard for you to understand—what they sold were people.”
I waited, expecting innocence to evaporate before my eyes.
“People? Sold in a market?”
Then Boahema laughed, bless her heart. A laughter so shrill and sudden the people in the row ahead turned back, startled. Her mouth was wide open, the disintegrating mint still on her tongue. She soon began to cough and I made her spit the mint into my hand.
“Papa,” she chortled. “You said this was a real story.”
“Lord, do remember me,” I murmured, relief like cool air on my face.
“What happened to the people then?”
“The ones who passed through The Door of No Return? Well, they weren’t happy to leave, but something was taking them away from their home.”
“Go ’way you. Were they chasing a story too?”
“Say what?”
Her response was a gaping yawn, a baby bird begging for food. Boahema’s eyelids fluttered like butterfly wings as she drifted off to dreamland. I wouldn’t get to chant the ritual closing lines:
This is my story I have told
If it be sweet, or if it not be sweet
Take some for yourself
And let some come back to me.
Boahema would not be awake to hear it, even if I knew how the story ended.
Donu Kogbara
Born in Nigeria, she is a print/broadcast journalist and communications consultant. She has worked for the BBC, Sky TV, the Sunday Times, The Guardian, Economist Intelligence Unit, Shell and various Nigerian government organisations, including the Ministry of Transport and the Presidential Oil/Gas Sector Reform Implementation Committee. She writes a weekly column in Vanguard, a leading Nigerian newspaper, and is currently working on an environmental remediation project via the British Department for International Development. She has one child. Her hobbies are reading, eating good food, watching quality TV, talking, listening to 1970s music and travelling.
Losing My Fragile Roots
Kidnapping is the most intelligent and justifiable crime . . . if you come from the wrong side of the tracks in a developing country that has a predatory ruling class and extremely weak policing system.
Domestic-level armed robbery—once the main occupation of the most forceful hoodlums in Nigeria—makes much less sense. You break into someone’s home, waving lethal weapons. You tell everyone to lie on the floor face-down while you ransack the joint; and you leave with a bit of cash and sundry used goods—cars, TVs, jewellery, phones and so on—that you can usually only sell for
a pittance.
It is much more lucrative to steal a person “of substance” as well as—or instead of—the above items of limited value, knowing that, nine times out of ten, his/her family will gladly pay you a sizeable ransom and that there is a very good chance that you will never be caught.
At the crack of dawn on 30 August 2015, I was shaken awake in my bedroom in Port Harcourt—a city in the troubled oil-producing Niger Delta region on Nigeria’s southern coast—by gun-toting youths. I was then frogmarched to a waiting jeep and driven to a quiet cove, from which I was transported in a speedboat to a fisherman’s hut that was precariously balanced on stilts in a swampy mangrove islet.
The hut was in a totally deserted section of the Atlantic creeks. I was held prisoner for thirteen days. There were nine of them, the kidnappers, and one of me.
Three years have elapsed since my sister paid a ransom to get me out of that dangerous mess. And I have so much to say about the actual (terrifying yet fascinating) experience of being incarcerated . . . in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of loquacious kidnappers—some sane and essentially decent, some drug-addled and psychopathic—who were happy to share their personal histories, their political views, their anger, their sadness, their anxieties, their dreams, their failures and their rationales for turning to crime.
It was all so weird, contradictory, complex and ambiguous. There were interesting and amusing conversations. There was warm emotional bonding. There were numerous rape and murder threats.
There were times when I was respectfully addressed as “Madame”, affectionately addressed as “Maleh” (“Mum” in their native Ijaw lingo) or “Auntie” (they were indeed all young enough to be my sons or nephews).
There were times when I was treated like the hated representative of a grasping, ridiculously pampered and heartless elite that has abused the powers it inherited from British colonialists in 1960 and has ignored, oppressed, cheated, impoverished and killed the masses for decades.
There was a day when some of them competed, in a sweetly childlike manner, to impress me with their culinary efforts and asked me to give the surprisingly tasty dishes they had cooked marks out of ten.
There was a day when the worst of them—two alcohol and narcotics addicts who sometimes descended into sadism and lewdness when they were high or inebriated—sniggeringly brushed aside objections from their colleagues, hogtied me like a slaughtered animal being ferried to market in a traditional African rural setting, hung me from the hut ceiling by my wrists and ankles and beat me so savagely that my eardrum was ruptured and I was sure that I would die.
The actual experience of being an abductee was a very, very big deal. I was damned lucky to emerge alive and un-raped; and no day passes when I don’t clearly recall certain details. It’s like having the same movie constantly replaying itself in your head. And, to me at least, it isn’t at all strange that it is not a horror movie throughout.
Alongside painful flashbacks, there are memories of camaraderie, great jokes and uproarious laughter . . . memories of touching acts of kindness . . . memories of feeling sorry for brutalized boys who said they became outlaws because they were sick of being powerless victims . . . and memories of enthralling discussions that taught me a lot about alien existences scarred by injustice, neglect and hunger.
They called themselves “soldiers” who were waging a war on the upper echelons of society; and I admired them for fighting back.
My friends have concluded that I am completely screwed up because, as one of them exasperatedly puts it, “you sound as if you miss those evil gangsters and as if you were often happy in their bloody hut”. And it is possible that I am indeed mad as a hatter and warped and suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, a psychological phenomenon that makes captives illogically identify with their tormentors, sometimes to the point of vigorously defending them.
I cried when I was told that my kidnappers had been caught and summarily executed at the end of 2015. I suppose that tears were an inappropriate response, given that they had hurt me and confessed to murdering, sexually assaulting and torturing several abductees and law-enforcement officials.
“You should be furious with those thugs and very relieved that they have been eliminated,” said the pal who told me they were dead.
Nevertheless, the anguish they inflicted on me was only part of an immensely complicated story; and I prefer to think I am not deluded but simply capable of being forgiving and objective under pressure. I also reckon that the whole thing about illogically identifying was a two-way street, in the sense that my jailors succumbed to whatever the hitherto un-named flipside of Stockholm Syndrome is. They gradually and grudgingly concluded that I was, despite my privileged background and irritating inability to speak proper pidgin English, an OK Person and Good Sport who didn’t deserve misery.
So instead of cynically saying something like “Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you, you posh fake bitch?” when I told them I was ashamed of my class and understood why the likes of them kidnapped the likes of me, they gave me the benefit of the doubt.
And they wound up feeling guilty. Even the sadistic psycho addicts got to a point where they could no longer look me in the eye, and left me alone and even gruffly paid me a couple of compliments.
Meanwhile, most of them apologised to me and said they wished they could continue to hang out with me when I was released.
One offered to work as my driver and bodyguard, if I was willing to forgive and promise to not report him to the authorities. Another planted a shy kiss on my cheek when he said goodbye on the dark Friday night when I was finally returned to the real world.
But you know what, Dear Reader? What happened inside that hut was far less devastating than what has happened subsequently.
For a start, my ear never fully recovered from the bashing it received; and I don’t hear as clearly as I used to.
Furthermore, my once vibrant, sharp-witted and indomitable mother literally lost her mind shortly after I regained my freedom and now sits listlessly slumped on sofas, silently enduring an ailment that a psychiatrist has described as “trauma-induced pseudo-dementia”. That said, many octagenarians have dementia and my poor old mother is not the only member of my extended family who has it and might have got it anyway, even had I not been kidnapped. So I don’t, to be honest and selfish, count her mental deterioration as the most devastating thing that has happened in recent years.
What has upset and destabilised me most is the fact that I felt compelled, after the kidnap drama, to exile myself from my roots and family home in Port Harcourt, a marvellous structure built by my stylish late father and lovingly renovated by me.
My parents bitterly regretted sending me and my three siblings to English schools because we became unrepentantly Westernised Londoners, acquired very foreign partners and flatly refused to move to Nigeria. Then, aged thirty-nine and inspired by various factors, including a desire to please my parents—who were feeling very sorry for themselves and whining interminably about being abandoned in their dotages—I suddenly decided to give the whole Land-Of-My-Ancestors thing a go, which was how I wound up living in the parental residence in Port Harcourt.
I am a member of the Ogoni tribe. Ogonis are domiciled in Rivers State. Port Harcourt is the capital of Rivers State, which is multi-ethnic, populated by minorities and part of the Niger Delta. Rivers State is one of thirty-six states and produces a lot of the petroleum that has made the Federal Republic of Nigeria wealthier than most African countries. Nigeria prides itself on being the “Giant of Africa.”
I did my best to juggle and embrace the often conflicting narrow ethnic, wider state and even wider regional, national and continental loyalties that all Nigerians are expected to juggle and embrace. And, despite being profoundly and unashamedly Eurocentric by nature, I was making serious progress and had mastered the challenge of figuring out why ethnic/tribal loyalty tends to be prioritised over wider loyalties, even by sophisticates who have genuine chums everywhe
re and were educated abroad and are citizens of the world and rarely or never visit their ancestral villages.
When I was dragged out of my bedroom in the late summer of 2015, aged fifty-five, I had already done a decade and a half of struggling to meaningfully (and simultaneously) connect to my Ogoni, Port Harcourt, Rivers, Niger Delta, Nigerian and African identities.
The kidnapping abruptly truncated this process of me trying my darndest to find my feet in a tough and tricky terrain that has battled with serious security problems and toxic gang activity for years.
Now, I am too spooked to spend significant amounts of time in Ogoniland, Port Harcourt, Rivers State or any Niger Deltan location. Which is a tragedy, from my point of view . . . partly because I have been a Niger Deltan activist and advocate for nearly two decades. I have robustly complained about the fact that the Niger Delta produces most of Nigeria’s wealth but gains almost nothing in return. Unemployment is rife because jobs and business opportunities go to grasping bigwigs from elsewhere. Youngsters like my captors can’t earn a living via legal activities. Pollution generated by oil exploration and production has destroyed our farms and fishing fields.
I have lost my self-confidence and no longer feel able to stick around to vociferously join those who make a habit of protesting on behalf of the dispossessed—and the protestors really need help because there are not many Nigerians who can be bothered to push for reforms.
Also, before Port Harcourt became a place that scares the hell out of me, I had created a wonderful support system comprising talented health professionals, beauty therapists, seamstresses, food suppliers, and so on. Now I don’t get to see these angels who put smiles on my face, made me great outfits, straightened me out when I had backache . . .
I no longer get to keep my poor widowed mum company. I can only nervously visit her for an hour or two at a time.
The bottom line is that I am just so sad and so tired of life and missing the cosy existence I carved out for myself in Port Harcourt . . . and the house I beautified in my own image and regarded as a sanctuary.
New Daughters of Africa Page 26