It was 5.30 a.m. by then. I was tired.
“Mum, I was probably three or four.”
“Yes,” she replied. “My skirts were much too long.”
She was laughing in that over the top way that you only know when you have a parent with serious bipolar. The shrillness that caught people’s attention, but they couldn’t quite place. The volume was turned up too high, the eyes had something in it that I could never explain. She pulled the chair close to the table.
Inside I went oh-oh. Two years ago she had climbed the chair, then the kitchen table, reached for the plant pots she had on the sill under the kitchen window, picked up the mint and thrown it against the opposite wall. Then the basil and the thyme, which was the heaviest, and the rosemary. I had been at hers because of another club night close to her flat. Not yet with Temi, not yet alone with her but with a bunch of friends that included her. A vase with dead flowers followed. When I shouted “why” from the kitchen door mum said she was repotting. It was spring.
She had gone on to throw many more things that were above hip level until the neighbours from underneath called the police. It wasn’t that bad, a little loud, but they were always looking for a reason since the day the husband had helped mum out of the bathtub all naked. She had left the flat door open and he had come back from the terrace above, where he had his secret smokes, nothing exciting, just Superkings, and seen the light on at 2 a.m. Mum had fallen asleep in the bathtub. They’d had it in for us since then. Why did she have to be sectioned for throwing a couple of things in her own flat we had both asked. But the officer hadn’t engaged. Of course, she had the shrill laugh then but there was no way he could know exactly what that meant.
Here we were two years later, another spring and a serious anniversary. I was bracing myself. I needed cooling down, something to keep me mellow.
She didn’t climb the table.
I climbed down the river bank.
I should have done it face down. I should have tried to keep my face under water for as long as I could, submerged. But I already knew my face would turn out of the water the first chance it could. It’s what the body does when it can, my body at least.
Mum had taken the skirt down and sat at the table.
“We should talk.”
There wasn’t anything I feared more than Mum’s talks. They could be like the repotting. Anything could land on you, anything was up for being dismantled and thrown my way. Things I wasn’t ready to hear, details I couldn’t stomach. I left.
The long sleeve was pulling downward, so were my sweatpants. I moved my hands, back and forth, the fingers spread a little. The water was too cold to stay in for much longer, my lips had started to shiver. I was worried about the joggers. If I was still here when they got back, what would they do.
Temi had been rushing us, taking short cuts I didn’t know, through back streets that smelled.
“Maybe it was the light.” There was no telling if she was listening. “It could have been the light affecting her, that’s why she moved the lamps. It happens with mania, light sensitivity.”
I stumbled behind her. Her Doc Martens were almost echoing back from the arches we were under. Her long shirt was hanging over her ripped shorts moving around her legs where I wanted my hands to be. She stopped suddenly and pulled me close.
“It’s not that I don’t like you. I like you a lot.”
Inside I was ducking. Were there pots coming my way?
She kissed me and I sucked on her lips until she pulled back.
“It’s just, you don’t talk. You are not really . . . here. You just disappear and hang on. Metaphorically.”
Her eyes fixed on me as she walked backwards, her hands waving me to follow her. I did.
In the club we danced and kissed some more and she whispered something in my ear that I couldn’t hear. When she went to the toilet I ran out of the club, and took the bus to Mum’s. My head leaned against the window. I texted her about some emergency, I would catch her next time. It was the first time I had left first. It was also the first time Temi had talked to me like that. I had complained and complained about her non-committed ways. I had told my friends about her infrequent libido, or whatever it was, of her probably having a string of lovers, of her not knowing how to be close. She was stringing me along, she wasn’t serious, she wasn’t interested and called me only out of boredom. We, my friends and I, had chewed over it again and again.
To Temi I had only ever said, “Sure, I’m free, let’s go out.”
Before the skirt, Mum had asked what was wrong. And said that she hadn’t expected me that night. How were things going with that young woman?
There was water everywhere. The river was full of it.
Twice in one night I had left a woman that I had complicated but deep feelings for.
I climbed back on the bank and sat on the bench with my knees close to my body, arms wrapped around the shins. It was dripping from everywhere, the water melted into the wood. I could see the joggers coming up. They were smiling when they saw me sitting on solid ground.
“I should probably get home, inside.”
“Probably.”
They were no longer running but had come to a full stop. The guy, it was a man and a woman, took my hand and pulled me off the bench. The woman flanked me on the other side. She picked up my phone, my oyster card and the keys I had left on the grass before the slope that led into the water.
“It might even be a warm day today.”
“Yeah, looks like it,” I replied.
We walked and my trainers made a slurping sound.
“How was the water,” she asked. “Cold?”
I nodded. We passed the part where you had to walk up some stairs to the bus stop. I wanted to say something but it felt right, the walking.
Minna Salami
An author, blogger, social critic, international keynote speaker and founder of the multiple award-winning blog, MsAfropolitan, which connects feminism with critical reflections on contemporary culture from an Africa-centred perspective. She was listed by Elle magazine as “one of 12 women changing the world” alongside Angelina Jolie and Michelle Obama. As an international keynote speaker, she has presented to audiences at the European Parliament, the Oxford Union, Yale University, TEDx, The Singularity University at NASA and UNWomen among others. She is a contributor to The Guardian, Al Jazeera and the Royal Society of the Arts, and a columnist for the Guardian Nigeria. She is Nigerian, Finnish and Swedish and lives between London and Lagos. She has a BA in Political Science from the University of Lund, and was awarded a distinction for her MA thesis in Gender Studies from SOAS. Her debut book, Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Interpretation, will be published in 2020.
Searching for my Feminist Roots
This is an essay about a sense of loss leading to the discovery of self.
It starts with a cliché statement, which I am sure that every African woman who identifies as feminist has heard, namely “feminism is not African”.
I am also sure that every African feminist, upon hearing this stereotypical statement, has felt exasperation. After all, if anything should be considered “not African”, it is the oppression that girls and women are subject to. Also, the idea that there are parts of shared human culture that are “not African” is belittling. Africa is not a continent in outer space, it is part of the world. So long as feminism is a global movement, so long is feminism African.
But as I mentioned, this essay is about loss and self-discovery and not about whether or not feminism is African. The only reason I begin with the contention, is because these types of attitudes are what led me to the central figure in this essay, Oya, a woman who has significantly impacted my life.
Before I tell you about Oya, let me briefly explain why the “Feminism is not African” announcement nevertheless led me to her. It is because, apart from exasperation, what is implied in that statement always made me feel a sense of loss.
Why loss? Well put it t
his way, there are many influences that may shape a woman into a feminist; in my case first and foremost my mother, and the many books of feminist struggles around the world that she introduced me to. Furthermore, the experiences of oppression that one lives through as a girl and a woman shaped me into a feminist too. Moreover, I’ve always believed—if somewhat in jest—that I was born a feminist; in my earliest childhood memories, I was already the feminist person that I am now. But a key reason that I am a feminist is that I belong to a lineage of generations of women across the African continent who were feminist. I am sure that many of my colleagues share this last sentiment with me—we are feminists because there were women before us who were feminists. What causes the sense of loss, then, is that due to the invasion of Africa, the majority of historical records of these women are missing. So when someone says that feminism isn’t African, we are reminded that we do not have the historical proof to show how continuous our presence is in the continent.
It is a similar sense of loss, I believe, that led Alice Walker to search for Zora Neale Hurston in her book In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens; and it is a similar sense of loss that led Gloria Jean Watkins to take on her grandmother’s name, bell hooks, as a pen name; I believe it is a similar sense of loss that inspired the publication of the first edition of this book, Daughters of Africa. As Margaret Busby writes in the introduction of the first edition, “Tradition and history are nurturing spirits for women of African descent. For without an understanding of where we have come from, we are less likely to be able to make sense of where we are going.” Without doubt, it was this sense of loss that led me to Oya, who unlike any other figure in precolonial African history has expanded my purview of where I come from and of where I am going.
To readers who are familiar with Oya and who know her as an Orisha, that is, as a goddess belonging to the Yoruba pantheon of deities known as the Orisha where she is the “Goddess of Thunder”, you may be thinking that it is pompous of me to imply that I am headed toward the status of a goddess. I assure you that I have no such aspirations, not least because I do not believe in any gods, or goddesses, for that matter. However, the Oya I have discovered was not a goddess, other than figuratively. She was an actual woman who lived many centuries ago and was a revolutionary feminist.
The eminent Yoruba philosopher, Dr Sophie Bósèdé Olúwolé, is one of a growing number of scholars who argue that “the word Orisha does not mean ‘god’ in the Yoruba language” as it has been sloppily translated, but rather something closer to “hero” or “heroine”. She argues that from a Yoruba Classical Philosophy standpoint, the Orisha are actually human beings who made significant contributions to the transformation of society. She compares the Orisha to the Christian saints and Ancient Greece’s philosophers such as Socrates. I would add that the Orisha are comparable to figures such as Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, Jesus or the Buddha. I even like to think of Nina Simone as an Orisha!
The question is, were individuals such as Gandhi or Jesus spiritual figures or were they revolutionaries? The answer is that the line between the two is blurry. People generally think of spirituality as being predominantly about peacefulness, serenity, positive thinking, and so on. But can you truly be at peace if there is suffering around you and you do nothing about it? Resistance to injustice combined with compassionate action toward the self as well as toward society, is what it truly means to be spiritual. That is why, if you take a good look at any of history’s perceivably most spiritual figures, you realise that what actually gives them an immortal status is that their radical, revolutionary as well as compassionate and wise ways diverted the steadfast progression of ignorance toward enlightenment, if only briefly.
The more I learn about Oya, the more the marriage between spirituality and revolution becomes clear to me. When it comes to Oya, she is on the one hand seen as the goddess of thunder, winds and lightning. She is held as the guardian of the realm between life and death, and as such, of funerals and cemeteries. She is worshipped with the colours red and purple and sacrifices of kola nuts and gin are made to her. These are all clearly spiritual—or you could argue—animist, readings of her.
But Oya is also seen as the patron saint of the marketplace and of women’s affairs. She is noted as the one who fearlessly spoke truth to power no matter the consequences. She is recorded as a force of feminine leadership, and as both a sensual and a maternal figure driven to restore balance in society by all means necessary, even if by causing anomie.
In other words, while Oya is assumed to be a deity, embedded in her deification is the story of a revolutionary. The compendium of Yoruba philosophy, Ifa, includes a collection of verses dedicated to each Orisha including Oya. In one of the verses, Oya is described as “something [that] tore into the house and paralysed everyone with fright.” In another she is, “the leader of freedom for women who unfreely praise the broken earth.” Then there is the verse which begins with, “Vagina is highly intelligent” and goes on to say, “Oya, the complete fighter, massive woman up in the sky: pow, pow [ . . . ] whose uplifting strengthens me.”
These incantations written many centuries ago carry echoes of more contemporary feminists such as Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti or Emmeline Pankhurst who you could say “tore into the house [or society]” and “paralysed everyone with fright”; or women like Leymah Gbowee or Malala Yousafzai who could be described as “leaders of freedom for the unfree”. The altitude of transformation ushered by a “massive woman up in the sky” who lifts as she climbs could equally be plucked from a eulogy for a Harriet Tubman or a Simone de Beauvoir.
In 2015 I published an essay on my blog, MsAfropolitan, titled “Oyalogy—A poetic approach to African feminism”. In the essay, I used Oya’s divine status to build a feminist theory rooted in African mythology. But I needn’t have deified the source of the theory. The extent to which Oya is a god, I now believe was bestowed upon her for her radical but compassionate uprooting of injustice in her society. I concede that this is a view that is open to interpretation: to some Oya will always be a supernatural being, but to me she was human being supernatural—a heroine. Whichever the case may be, what I found in Oya replaced a sense of loss with a sense of self-discovery; I had come upon the African feminist lineage I had sought for so long.
Noo Saro-Wiwa
Born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, she was raised in England and is based in London. Her first book, Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria, was selected for BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week, named Sunday Times Travel Book of the Year in 2012, shortlisted for the Author’s Club Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award in 2013; and nominated by the Financial Times as one of the best travel books of 2012. She has contributed stories to the anthologies An Unreliable Guide to London, A Place of Refuge and La Felicità Degli Uomini Semplici. She has written book reviews, travel and other articles for publications including The Guardian, Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement, City AM, Prospect and La Repubblica. She was awarded a Miles Morland Scholarship for non-fiction writing in 2015. In 2018 she was among the judges for the Jhalak Prize for literature. She was awarded a Bellagio Center residency for 2019.
A Fetching Destination
It’s not every day I find myself eyeing up pornographic imagery with a Chinese man and a veiled-up African Muslim woman. The three of us were gathered around a counter and inspecting some aphrodisiac pills, the packaging of which displayed a photo of a man (with what I pray was a prosthetic penis) in session with a naked woman. Seized by embarrassment, my ears grew hot and I developed a phantom itch on my nose. The Nigerienne customer, however, didn’t give a toss. She was here on a shopping mission and had little time to waste on coyness or prudery.
“Many, many,” the lady told the Chinese seller, using the international lingo for wholesale purchasing. She ordered a thousand packets of Brother Long Legs, secured a delivery date for the merchandise then walked off with her friend, chatting away in French.
I was on the ground flo
or of the Tianxiu building in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, a magnet for African wholesale buyers. Dotted around me were glass counters stacked with all manner of “sexuality enhancing” products, sold by Chinese people who stood by nonchalantly while I checked out their merchandise. I saw vagina-tightening gels, and “extra strong delay sprays for long-lasting excitement” and—most intriguing of all—a “high-grade professional female oestrus induction toner” called Spanish Gold Fly. The packaging of another aphrodisiac had Arabic script printed on it and a photo of a black man being “entertained” below the waist by two white ladies. I scarcely knew where to put my eyes. The vendors slouched behind their counters and fiddled with their phones.
Very few things surprise Chinese manufacturers and wholesalers. They are the eyes and ears of the consumer universe. They know all our secrets and desires, and produce for them accordingly. Motivated by an all-consuming desire to make money (this non-Christian nation runs the world’s biggest Bible printing press, after all), the vendors in the Tianxiu building were unoffended by my camera and time-wasting inquiries. So long as they made sales at some point in the day I was free to snoop, prod and ogle to my heart’s content.
And so I checked out “hip lift” massage creams and hair wigs and Brazilian weaves. Some of the Chinese vendors had adopted the African method of hissing to get my attention—“Hello, my sista,” they said, while showing me buttock-enhancing yansh pads and packets of Ginseng tea, formulated to strengthen one’s kidneys, supposedly.
The second floor was the place to buy underwear. Some of the packaging displayed faces of famous footballers that had been photoshopped onto Y-front-clad torsos: an improbably buff Zinedine Zidane showed off his bulge. Buck-toothed Ronaldinho looked especially pleased to be wearing his 100% combed cotton singlet. David Beckham, meanwhile, sizzled in a white vest and briefs, his hand cupping his crotch. But by far my favourite was the “Black Power Obama Collection”—a pack of men’s underpants decorated with a photo of America’s finest president, fingers on chin, eyes gazing eruditely into the distance. In the free-for-all that is the China-Africa small commodity trade, matters of image copyright do not enter the equation. Just shift the product.
New Daughters of Africa Page 83