A Bit of Difference

by Sefi Atta

  “For what?”

  “He was arrested for lewd and lascivious acts.”

  “Hah?”

  “They are deciding whether to charge him or not as we speak.”

  “What’s wrong with the bobo?”

  “You’re asking me?”

  “Is he in jail?”

  “He’s out on bail. He says she was the one who violated him. You know how people dance nowadays. He met her at a nightclub and she either rubbed up against him or it was the other way around. The next thing you know, she was calling the police.”

  “Swear?”

  “Swear.”

  “He is finished. They will bury him for this.”

  “They’ve already started. They’re putting pressure on his main sponsor to drop him.”

  “It was a matter of time. I’m telling you. I didn’t even know how to respond when I heard what he had to say about polygamy. I made excuses for him. My colleague called him ‘green,’ which was nice of her.”

  “They saw fit to choose him to represent them.”

  Deola yawns. She has already made up her mind. LINK’s policy on Africa bothers her more than their public relations strategy, though she has no doubt the latest news about Dára will cause a stir in the office.

  “That’s their business,” she says. “All I know is that I am going to work tomorrow to talk to them, and if they can’t be open to an idea that involves a community of Africans being independent, then maybe I’m working for the wrong organization.”

  “You will quit?”

  “I might.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  “Why?”

  “Aren’t you the one who’s against charity?”

  She gets some satisfaction out of shocking Subu, but the thought of quitting her job scares her.

  “Don’t do that,” Subu says, “You will meet the same attitude wherever you go. It’s the Tarzan Complex. You have to make them feel useful to get ahead. If you ask for respect, they don’t want to know. Forget about getting through to these people.”

  z

  After she hangs up, Deola checks her e-mail. Jaiye still hasn’t replied. In her inbox, she has adverts for Viagra, male-enhancement drugs, Christian singles and a scam letter from a Mr. Ahmed, who claims to be a managing director of a bank in Ouagadougou. She deletes them, resisting the temptation to look up more information about the morning-after pill. That would be like praying after the fact. Instead, she Googles Dára. There are several articles about his charges and a few that are critical of his comment on polygamy. She finds a blog where someone called “TJ” refers to him as a “punk ass African” and another called “Nubian Queen” replies that he is a fine brother. Most of the postings are hostile to the woman who accused him.

  She Googles Stone Riley afterward and finds an article where he says he has adopted Africa as his cause. Deola is not surprised. In the photograph, he looks as if he hasn’t taken a bath in days, his hair is greasy and his belly bulges. Yet he has a smirk on his face, as if he thinks he is sexy.

  How accurate is Subu? Deola asks herself after she logs off. Of course, her instinctive answer is “very,” but she wants to be rational. It is true she has to be careful about how her colleagues perceive her. Sometimes she acts a little reticent, as she did at Trust Bank, but for different reasons. She wasn’t vulnerable in the same way she is here, working in London. Here she is anxious about being exposed. Everyone has an office persona. Everyone is subject to work norms and anyone who wishes to get ahead ought to learn how to keep their opinions to themselves. She can’t for much longer.

  This might just be the third job she’ll resign from. Only once has she ever lost a job. That was when she was made redundant from the accountancy firm she trained in. She has since called the firm “Stuckupsdale and Hoitytoityheim.” A Nigerian classmate from LSE who worked for Price Waterhouse referred to it as a Jewish firm. “They probably don’t open on Fridays,” he said, and she thought, What does he mean?

  The only Jewish manager she was aware of at Stuckupsdale was never made a partner while she was there. He was married to a Filipina and Deola’s fellow trainees said she had to be a mail-order bride, which Deola also found bizarre. How did they come to that conclusion?

  Back then, bigotry was often cryptic, like a missed punch line in a joke. It always took her a moment to catch on. She was put off most by the gossipy culture in the audit department, the toadying and the fagging especially. Senior auditors ordering junior auditors, “Get me these files.” “Staple these papers together.” “Empty this bin.” All trainees went through the same apprenticeship, so perhaps she was too proud, but she found her first year intolerable, walking around in skirt suits because female employees were not allowed to wear trousers. In the winter, her tights couldn’t keep the cold out, and they laddered. She knew it couldn’t possibly be her wool coats that gave her a constant feeling of being weighed down. Apart from the “braids were unprofessional” business, she had a somewhat unpleasant encounter at a pension fund when a manager looked at her palms and said, “You’re two-toned,” another at a bank, when she arrived at the reception with audit files and said, “I’m here for the audit,” and the receptionist replied, “Deliveries are through the side entrance.” But those were not enough to say she was discriminated against. How would she explain Subu’s rise in the management consultancy department otherwise?

  In the audit department, she worked for a manager who was prematurely gray and all chin. He flirted with the department secretary, Trish. He went to pubs with senior managers and played golf with partners, so he was bound to make progress. He specialized in financial services and once invited her to a game of skirmish with clients, on a Sunday, and she didn’t show up, so she lost favor with him. In retrospect, all she learned from him was how to make her audit files look tidy. She doubted her work had any impact. She was not surprised to hear about the Johnson Matthey Bankers, Barings Bank and other such scandals. She knew how easily they could happen and had to come to terms with the fact that the fat cats who ran financial corporations were doing the same work as her father.

  The audit department had other trainees like her, except they were British born and their parents were immigrants. How did they fare during the redundancy? There was the Indian guy who complained that his jobs were outside London. He had a reputation for being difficult to work with. Management got rid of him. There was the Sri Lankan guy, who always pointed out that he wasn’t Indian, but he seemed keen to explain the origin of his Portuguese surname. Management kept him. There was a girl from Grenada who would not make eye contact with other blacks. They kept her. There was another girl from Hong Kong. Management said she was “good,” which she really wasn’t. They kept her, too. There was a Japanese guy, who was good, but he pissed management off with his Emporio Armani suits. They got rid of him and he didn’t seem to care. Finally, there was a Polish guy who sat around in his socks in the summer months when the office was empty and listened to reggae music on his Walkman. Occasionally, he raised his hand and sang out loud: “Africa unite!” He was rumored to be selling marijuana in the men’s toilets. Management kept him.

  At Stuckupsdale, she was not alone on the lower rungs of the hierarchy. She couldn’t care less about the preferences of the corporate clones on top, but she noticed whom they exempted from discrimination. Apart from Subu, there was a German-Ghanaian in the private investors department. She was exempted because of her complexion. There was a black American who came for six-month exchange in the tax department. She was exempted because of her accent. Even the Nigerian security guard who sat in a cubicle by the door got a boost because people felt sorry for him. He was known as Jimmy. “Hi, Jimmy,” they would say to him. “All right, Jimmy?” He might have been Jimoh or Olujimi. His surname was Ojo. She called him Mr. Ojo and greeted him with a “Good morning,” and he would answer, “Good morning to you. How are you today?” His skin was darker than his navy uniform.
She suspected he was working illegally in England. Without him, there were days she could have wept walking through that door. Whenever he saw her carrying audit files, he would offer to help her. She would protest and he would insist. He must have been in his sixties and he smelled of menthol. There was some talk among the managers that the smell was offensive enough to put clients off. She overheard Trish explaining to her manager, “I think it’s the ointment he uses for his arthritis.”

  Trish was powerful within the department, omnipotent, as the department secretary. Trainees she didn’t like ended up on the worst jobs outside London or they weren’t booked on jobs, and they needed a minimum number of audit hours to qualify. Trish was asked to speak to Jimmy about the menthol smell, which she did in her mini skirt and patent stilettos, then she came back to say, “Aw, he’s ever so sweet, Jimmy, just like a big teddy bear. You just want to wrap your arms around him.”

  Do that, Deola thought. When Jimmy grabs you, then you’ll know who Jimmy is.

  z

  Everything she puts in her mouth in the morning tastes metallic, her toothpaste, the water she rinses her mouth with, even the orange juice she drinks with her breakfast. Her tongue tingles and she would describe her malaise as the onset of a cold, but she has had symptoms like this before, whenever she drinks too much or doesn’t get enough sleep. This must be the case, she decides, the wine she had the previous night and her poor sleeping habits of late.

  She gets ready for work. She is driven more by her obstinacy than a sense of duty. If she doesn’t speak her mind to Kate, she will only become more and more dissatisfied, which might mean she will end up leaving. Kate is open to suggestions. Kate is flexible. She has just been distracted of late.

  Kate comes to work with a list of illnesses and conditions afflicting her family: her husband and daughter still have stomachaches; her daughter can’t keep her food down and is lactose intolerant; her husband had chills the night before and he almost blacked out. This morning, his pinched nerve is acting up and her nose is bunged up. She says she is not one hundred percent well, but she came in because she has the whole weekend to recover.

  Deola sits in Kate’s office and pretends to have sympathy. She feels as if her flesh is on the verge of simmering. What a privilege to be sick without fear, to talk openly about being sick and wallow in sickness.

  Kate blows her nose noisily and sits back in her chair. “Can’t breathe.”

  Deola doesn’t doubt that Kate is sick. Her eyes are puffy and her nose is red. She has brought in herbal tea in a flask. Her office smells pleasant and familiar. Is it lemon verbena?

  “I hear Dára has been causing a stir,” Deola says.

  Kate flops over her table, dangerously close to her mug. “Dára! How could he? How did you hear?”

  “I looked him up on the Internet yesterday.”

  Kate raises her head. “Anne sent me an e-mail. It’s a disaster. He can’t be our spokesperson now, not after this.”

  “Whose idea was it to make him one?”

  “Graham’s,” Kate says, clearing her hair from her face.

  “Has Graham heard?”

  “I e-mailed him. He’ll take care of it when he gets back from Mombasa. The tabloids have already got hold of the story.”

  “They have? I didn’t notice any.”

  “It’s not front-page news or anything, but once they get involved.” Kate shakes her head. “We have to distance ourselves now. We can ignore his views on polygamy, but not this one.”

  Deola thinks of the little she learned about Stone Riley online: the affairs he had during his marriage and his girlfriend, who is younger than his daughter. His son died of a drug overdose, which sent him into what he described as “a downward spiral into hell,” during which he was misusing alcohol and prescription pills. He has been clean since 1998. His story is so formulaic that Deola suspects it is made up, like Dára’s.

  “Stone Riley, too, has been making dubious statements,” she says.

  Kate sips her tea. “God. What’s he on about now?”

  Employees at LINK are in awe of celebrities or envious of them and Kate falls into the latter category. Whenever women in the office say Dára is gorgeous, she says, “Yes, but he doesn’t have much to say for himself, does he?”

  “He says he has adopted Africa as his cause.”

  “Hm, well worth ignoring.”

  Deola agrees. Why worry about what celebrities have to say about Africa, so long as they can make themselves useful? It amuses her whenever she sees a photo op in an African village, where a celebrity meets with people who have obviously been prepped about how to welcome the important visitor from overseas. People who are probably grateful for the help they receive, but who are nevertheless thinking, Who the heck is this?

  She brings up the issue of the microfinance scheme for WIN, explaining that she has to in order to finish her report.

  “I realize that Rita Nwachukwu may not be interested in moving in that direction.”

  “She’s the CEO, though,” Kate says, holding her mug with both hands.

  “But Elizabeth Okeke is from the community. Elizabeth was the one who talked about their needs, so I think I should at least suggest that to the board. I just want to be sure you are aware.”

  “Did we talk about this when Graham was around?”

  “Yes, after he left for Kenya.”

  “We did? It must have skipped my mind. But I get e-mails from Rita and she has never brought this up.”

  “Rita might have her own agenda.”

  She resists telling Kate that she is an oyinbo to Rita, someone Rita can easily deceive. She will not repeat Elizabeth’s allegations, but this ought to be the test. If indeed Rita is misdirecting funds, she will not favor a microfinance scheme that bypasses her as a middleman.

  “It’s getting too messy for me,” Kate says. “I thought once we had Dára on board, we ought to contact a few NGOs in Nigeria. Now, I keep getting these e-mails.”

  She shivers as if she has entered a sinister realm that involves Internet crime.

  “I wouldn’t worry about that,” Deola says, “and it’s just office politics at WIN. I was there. Rita is tenacious and Elizabeth wants control over what goes on in her community.”

  “Look, Deola, ” Kate says. “You can make any recommendation you want. The board might take it into consideration, but it comes down to Graham’s decision in the end and I doubt he will go for it, especially after this fiasco with Dára. You know what Graham is like. It was difficult to persuade him to get involved with Nigerian NGOs in the first place.”

  Deola sits up. “Why send me there, then? Why send me there when he knows he is not going to take my recommendations seriously? What was the point of my going?”

  She shifts the blame to Graham, knowing that Kate has more clout than she admits to. What about Dr. Sokoya, the malaria man? she thinks. Is this the end for him, too?

  “I’m sure we can still work with Dr. Sokoya,” she insists. “I was very impressed with what I saw.”

  Kate pouts. “But you haven’t done any fieldwork. That was just a financial review.”

  “I know,” Deola says, “and I know I have a lot to learn, but…”

  The Tarzan Complex, she thinks.

  “But?” Kate asks.

  “Don’t mind me,” Deola says, repelled by her own indolence.

  Kate shuts her eyes. “God, I can’t wait for Graham to come back. I don’t feel very well. I knew I shouldn’t have come in today.”

  “I’d better get started,” Deola says.

  She can’t suppress the idea that Kate may have pushed Graham to hire her because she is Nigerian—a Nigerian to match Dára. It is clear to her that Kate doesn’t care what either of them thinks.

  z

  By lunchtime, she decides that her symptoms in the morning were due to one of two circumstances: either she caught the stomach virus from Kate or she is pregnant. She plays the gambling game again when a piece of paper slides
off her table. She bends down to catch it before it touches the floor and bumps her head on the edge of the table. For a while she sits and rubs her sore spot. She has been afraid for too long. She is fed up of being afraid and soon a sense of calm overcomes her. She submits to it as she types her report on the malaria NGO and focuses on standard recommendations: one, clearly defined roles; two, separation of duties; three, dual signatories, while knowing her report won’t make a bit of difference. She adds a paragraph about her disapproval of the way the Nigerian programs were jettisoned.

  She still feels guilty for letting down the women of WIN, but not enough to make a heroic effort on their part. A microfinance scheme might be useful to them, but there is no guarantee the scheme would work or even benefit them if indeed there is corruption at WIN.

  She can’t overlook Africa’s self-sabotage. LINK has numerous beneficiaries in African countries that are in or recovering from dictatorships, civil wars and genocides. They account for the majority of LINK’s developmental and rehabilitation programs in Somalia, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Congo, Angola and Rwanda. Whose fault is that? she thinks, shrugging off the amputated sleeves of her summer jacket while imagining it as a one-armed child.

  She has spent her career studying systems. People are surprisingly easy to categorize when they work within systems. There are Africans working for humanitarian and charity organizations, Africans in commerce and industry, Africans in education and in the arts. Africans everywhere, some causing mischief, and once in a while, they will be confronted with the notion that Africans are disposable and of as much consequence to humanity as waste material. This may not be personal; this does not even have to be part of a greater insidious design. This is exactly how systems serve people who are not party to conceiving and creating them. Their daily trauma is trying to survive systems that did not start off with their continuity in mind.

  She checks the brochure for WIN to confirm that the average age of the widows is thirty-nine. How little the statistic tells her of them and it is just as well. She is in the wrong business anyway. She has never wanted to save anyone but the people she loves. Isn’t this enough? Don’t organizations like LINK do the same when they decide who to give what and for how long?