The Dada boys had grown into handsome young men. They looked like Debayo in the photograph, dressed in their suits and ties. They were in English boarding schools and during the holidays were either at the polo club or at their beach house on Tarkwa Bay with friends who were similarly placed. The whole lot of them were known as omo olowo—children of the rich. Poor things, they were so indulged by their parents that you couldn’t help but sympathise when they ended up taking drugs or getting drunk and crashing cars because no one had taught them when enough was enough. I knew this only because Ashake often bemoaned her sons’ hectic social life, to other mothers’ annoyance. I couldn’t be resentful of her, no matter what she did or said. I wasn’t embarrassed for her, either; there was no point. She didn’t care what other people thought.
We had a few mutual friends and as we passed through the house I found myself slipping into my usual polyglot party greetings: “Ciao.” “E wo lese?” “Comme ci comme ça.” Expatriates enjoyed a Nigerian greeting; Nigerians loved a European one. They were mostly people from the business community. Tutu, a woman who had several directorships, was there. She had qualified as a chartered accountant at a time when only Nigerian men did, and was always the lone woman in the company of men. She stood with a group of them, in a black shift dress, swirling her brandy as they smoked cigars. She was divorced from her first husband and separated from her second, who had accused her of adultery. Arin, a gold-jewellery millionaire, was there as well, resplendent in traditional regalia. So was her husband, a chief, who had fathered children by several other women he supported. He and Arin lived together, practised juju together, but kept their finances separate.
Were there any normal, happily married couples at the party? Of course there were, together for ten, fifteen, twenty years, with no major problems I’d heard about. But they were indistinguishable from the rest, who looked just as normal without captions to suggest otherwise. The husbands: drinks too much; occasionally manhandles his wife; may have impregnated his wife’s younger sister. The wives: on Valium; not permitted to do a thing without her husband’s consent; beaten on a regular basis.
Ashake and I parted ways and I circulated, encouraged by the James Last Orchestra’s instrumental version of “Soley, Soley”. Tunde was busy slapping Debayo’s back and looking as if he couldn’t contain himself.
It wasn’t a cocktail party; it was a feast. The drinks were followed by a buffet of dressed crab, shrimp salad, avocado salad, fried rice, jollof rice, coconut rice, roast chicken, and some pasta dish I couldn’t identify. That was merely part of the European continental spread. The Nigerian spread included barbecued goat, peppered snails, and egusi with pounded yam. I started with the dressed crab and proceeded to the shrimp salad. By the time I got to the peppered snails I was full, but the food kept coming, and so did the wines and spirits. I had some Châteauneuf-du-Pape, followed by a little Baileys Irish Cream, which I’d been meaning to try since it came out. It reminded me of Bols Advocaat: far too sweet, yet I couldn’t stop drinking it.
The Nigerian guests ate and drank, unaware of the waiters. The expatriates were more polite, yet deliberately brief. We all appeared to be mixing but, on close inspection, there were Nigerians who couldn’t be bothered to talk to expatriates, and expatriates who would rather stick to their own kind. The Lebanese and Indians mingled with everyone. There was a Nigerian couple who only spoke to expatriates to prove—well, I didn’t know what, and an English fellow who was so pleased to be in the presence of Nigerians, he shook hands with every single one of us.
After dinner, we all gathered in the sitting room with champagne flutes to toast the Dadas. Debayo declared Ashake the love of his life and they danced to Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You”. I had to admire them. They were unusually affectionate for a Nigerian couple, and united. Even when they argued, they referred to each other as “honey”, “sugar”, and all manner of sweet food. I’d been with them on such an occasion, the details of which failed me because they were so trivial. It was hard enough trying to keep up with their terms of endearment. She, for instance, saying, “Honey, your head is not correct,” and he replying, “Sugar, I’m warning you for the very last time not to insult me.”
The toast over, they launched their new swimming pool to Cliff Richard’s “Congratulations”. Debayo made everyone stand behind Ashake and count from ten downwards, then she cut a red ribbon tied across the sliding doors, which led to the veranda.
The Dadas lived in an Ikoyi neighbourhood that wasn’t designated for government housing. Consequently, it had smaller plots. But they had built such a huge house in theirs that there was hardly any room for a back garden. We walked into what used to be their sons’ playground, now replaced by the swimming pool, which was so small it could pass for a paddling pool.
Tunde nudged me and whispered, “How can anyone swim laps in that?”
We stood around the edge so we could see the bottom of the pool, where the Dadas’ new family crest was depicted in blue tiles. All I could think of, when I saw the crest, were the invitations that Ashake had ordered from me.
“I don’t know,” I muttered. “But someone had better pay me my money.”
Gabeba Baderoon
A South African poet, she is the author of four poetry collections: The History of Intimacy (2018); A hundred silences (2006), which was a finalist for the University of Johannesburg Prize and the Olive Schreiner Award; The Museum of Ordinary Life (2005); and The Dream in the Next Body (2005). The Silence Before Speaking, a volume of her poetry translated into Swedish, was published in 2008. She received the DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Poetry and has held numerous fellowships internationally. She earned a PhD in English from the University of Cape Town, and is currently an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and African Studies at Pennsylvania State University.
I forget to look
The photograph of my mother at her desk in the fifties
has been in my purse for twenty years,
its paper faded, browning,
the scalloped edge bent then straightened.
The collar of her dress folds discreetly.
The angle of her neck looks as though
someone has called her from far away.
She was the first in her family to take
the bus from Claremont
up the hill to the university.
At one point during the lectures at medical school,
black students had to pack their notes, get up and walk
past the ascending rows of desks out of the theatre.
Behind the closed door, in an autopsy
black students were not meant to see.
the uncovering and cutting of white skin.
Under the knife, the skin,
the mystery of sameness.
In a world that defined how black and white
could look at each other, touch each other,
my mother looks back, her poise unmarred.
Every time I open my purse,
she is there, so familiar I forget
to look at her.
Old photographs
On my desk is a photograph of you
taken by the woman who loved you then.
In some photos her shadow falls
in the foreground. In this one,
her body is not that far from yours.
Did you hold your head that way
because she loved it?
She is not invisible, not
my enemy, nor even the past.
I think I love the things she loved.
Of all your old photographs, I wanted
this one for its becoming. I think
you were starting to turn your head a little,
your eyes looking slightly to the side.
Was this the beginning of leaving?
War Triptych: Silence, Glory, Love
I. Accounting
The mother asked to stay.
&nb
sp; She looked at her silent child.
I was waiting for you.
The quiet of the girl’s face was a different quiet.
Her hands lay untouched by death.
The washer of bodies cut
away her long black dress.
Blue prayer beads fell
to the floor in a slow accounting.
The washer of bodies began to sing a
prayer to mothers and daughters.
The mother said,
who will wait for me.
II. Father Receives News His Son Died in the Intifada
When he heard the news, Mr Karim became silent.
He did not look at the cameras,
nor at the people who brought their grief.
He felt a hand slip from his hand,
a small unclasping,
and for that he refused the solace of glory.
III. Always For The First Time
We tell our stories of war like stories
of love, innocent as eggs.
But we will meet memory again
at the wall around our city,
always for the first time.
Doreen Baingana
A Ugandan, her story collection, Tropical Fish, won an AWP Prize (USA, 2004), and a Commonwealth Prize (2006), and she has twice been a finalist for the Caine Prize for African Writers (2004 and 2005). Her recent honours include a Rockefeller Bellagio Residency (Italy, 2017), and a Miles Morland Scholarship for African Writers (2014). She has also published two children’s books, as well as fiction and essays in numerous international journals. A former Managing Editor at Storymoja Africa, and former Chairperson of FEMRITE, she co-founded and runs the Mawazo Africa Writing Institute, based in Entebbe, Uganda.
Tuk-Tuk Trail to Suya and Stars
You venture into the dark, and it looms over and crowds your every space, thick, even pushes into your earlobes like cotton wool, this hazy yellow darkness choked with harmattan dust. You are boxed in by solid air and you must breathe it in. You enter a tuk-tuk, the most rickety vehicle ever made, as if banged together from the spare parts of small cars, circa 1960 Austins, say, and old saucepans panel-beaten into shape, all loosely held by rusted nails and chains and placed on top of what was once a three-wheeled motorbike, now an ungainly carriage with a snub metal nose. You sit on plastic, which is easy to wipe of dust, but clings like a kid to your sweaty thighs. All the tuk-tuks are painted orange to compete with the river of dirty sand called the road—haze, heat, rush, animal-like hoots and horns. Orange to shock your eyes into seeing.
Still, it provides the miracle every vehicle does: to move, all you have to do is sit, or rather grip desperately, as there are no side walls or doors. The breeze is a blessing; it strokes your cheek and whispers in your ear that you can breathe, it’s okay, but not too deeply. No, your lungs cannot suck air out of dust as fish do out of water. This dust that covers everything in a fine grey layer, gauze-like, sticky.
You realize as you climb into the tuk-tuk that with cars you settle quickly, assured that the solid metal case will protect you from the rush of the busy street, the intense heat and light, the potholes underneath, the direct hit of any accident. For a while, driven from A to B, you have the pleasure of giving up responsibility and you sink gratefully into the cushioned bowl of the back seat. Not in a tuk-tuk. You sit, yes, but unsupported, holding tight to the rusty rail, sweaty fingers slipping as you are shaken from side to side like jelly, shaken inside out. You are in a blender, a coffee grinder, an angry machine that jostles and jangles you. It sets your stomach churning and everything in it is squeezed and kneaded and turns to shit, straining to escape with every hard bump, your ass clenched tight. Oops, you piss in your pants as the tuk-tuk driver swerves to avoid potholes the size and shape of dried ponds. His dark ball of a head bobs in front of you as he does the same desperate bouncing you do: the tuk-tuk dance.
It’s not all dance. It’s real danger, as each swerve to avoid falling into a pothole leads to a motorbike coming straight at you. It’s as if the whole point of being on the road is to almost crash into the next car, okada, bicycle, just missing by a thread’s breadth to show off your skill, saying, We’re here, full-limbed, we ain’t dead yet, okay, here we go again! Respect is only for huge lumbering lorries, ancient blind dinosaurs that will not, cannot swerve out of your way, so you slow down and slide to the side: a momentary bow of acknowledgement.
You hiccup.
Everything else rushes at you, even the dusty, smoking yellow night, a living thing, a sister to the street, which is not a straight line but a maze. Is it really lit by candle light? Yes, and lamps, lanterns; words that sound so Medieval but are very much here and now, gleaming, grinning like a mouth with missing teeth. What gapes through the yellow-black gaps? What flashes past your dust-teared eyes? Endless shacks made from wooden planks and strips of corrugated iron slapped together, as ugly as a rubbish dump, that form a long crooked line that hugs the crooked road. The kiosks are filled with the cheapest that Nigeria and China have to offer: shiny nylon shirts, brightly coloured packets of Sunlight soap, curry powder, St Louis cubed sugar (all the way from France?), brand new bicycle wheels wrapped tightly around with white, black, and blue polythene strips and hung up on a pole in a pattern of open-mouthed Os, TVs and electric fans, dirty jars of chewing-gum, and shelf upon shelf of brightly coloured packages and boxes, with sacks of grain below. To you it’s all jumbled up, but obviously there’s some kind of order because it is repeated at every single kiosk, each guarded in front by a fire and frying-pan where starchy snacks bubble and pop.
Your eyes rove on. Bare bulbs reveal a family of half-naked babies and toddlers crawling and playing among the wares. No sissy eight-o’clock-it’s-bedtime-let’s-take-you-home, no; it’s finally cool enough to be outside. Parents are splayed on plastic chairs nearby, their patterned akara prints showing boldly through the dusk after winning the day’s competition against the sun. Some men are manly enough to wear lace, long shirts and trousers of it, while the women boast headscarves shaped like huge birds’ open wings, and they all, all have cheeks lovingly scrawled by deep tiger claws, three on each side. A grandma sits wide-legged, her long skirt pulled above the knee as she leans over a red basin, peeling or washing, you can’t tell which. Skinny yellow legs, chicken-like. Your shock is as fleeting as your tuk-tuk ride, and on you go, onwards, since you can’t join the family.
There is a point to your night-time tuk-tuk journey: suya.
You stop by an open street stand, called there by a bare bulb swinging and shining like goodness over a huge enamel plate, as wide as a wheel, piled high with meat, as every plate should be. A cow’s healthy thigh becomes a hunk of raw flesh, cut into thin slabs that are caressed and squeezed and pampered with ginger, curry powder, salt, who knows what other spices, and chili pepper, of course—this is Nigeria after all—coated with palm oil and groundnut paste, pierced with a skewer and, crying red tears, thrown over the fire to roast. What you get is thick, meaty, fire-red butterfly wings spotted with yellow chili seeds: suya.
The cook is a tall, heavy, dark man whose sweating forehead—as if more drama were needed—is speckled pink and grey. Either hot oil splashed up and seared off his skin, or he was born that way, and this somehow makes your meat spicier. His long-fingered hands are deft from years of slicing and spicing and roasting; his fingers, faster than your eyes, perform a light dance you watch greedily, because this meat is for you, as are the added ginger powder and chopped raw tomato and onion on the side. Who cares what your mouth will smell like tonight, tomorrow? You also refuse to think of the garnish of germs that have been squirming and feasting, shitting and multiplying all over your meat just before it is once again sizzled hot over the smoking charcoal. Your share is diced up and wrapped in newspaper, and of course it doesn’t matter to you which chief or senator’s face or subsidy scandal will soon be soggy with grease.
Back in the tuk-tuk, your load (their word for baggage, pronounced “l
oot”) held tight in one hand, the other grasping the tuk-tuk railing, you race, jiggle, bounce, shake, rattle your way back, now in search of beer, a Star, the coldest, crispiest, liquid opposite of suya—its perfect partner.
You go somewhere with fuji and juju music and not too much light, The Club, whose design and décor is “abandoned building”, and whose toilet is the rubbish-strewn back yard. An irritated rat scurries away as your piss just misses an empty Sprite bottle, but the grey-brown sand between your feet generously accepts it.
All this is preamble. You sit, eat, and suddenly your mama’s Don’t talk with food in your mouth, you! makes sense. Chew, sip, love, and be silent. Give in, as Pépé kisses your lips and stings your tongue and bites you in the belly; makes you groan with his intensity. Sick love, the kind that’s so bad for you, you can’t give it up. Once you’ve had suya, like sex, you can’t not have it again. When you become dictator, you will decree that all food must burn tongues and curdle stomachs, must shoot a hole through the head like Pépé’s cool green cousin, Wasabi. Food must announce its way down your throat, through your curled tunnel of intestines, circling and gurgling, and finally, kiss again your sweet asshole. So this is what nerve endings are for.
Spicy hot is sweet: a tongue and mind twister, a dark Iseyin street.
Ellen Banda-Aaku
Born in Zambia, she is a writer, radio drama producer and documentary film-maker from Zambia, based between Zambia and the UK. She has published seven books for children and two novels and has produced a radio drama and film documentary. Her first book for children, Wandi’s Little Voice, won the 2004 Macmillan’s Writers Prize for Africa. Her short story “Sozi’s Box” won the 2007 Commonwealth Short Story Competition in 2007. Her work has appeared in anthologies published in Australia, South Africa, the UK and the US. Her first novel, Patchwork, won the Penguin Prize for African Writing and was shortlisted for the 2012 Commonwealth Book Prize. In 2012 she was awarded the Zambia Arts Council Ngoma Chairperson’s Award for her achievements in the field of literature. She is patron of The Pelican Post, a charity dedicated to donating books to schools in Africa.
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