News from Home

by Sefi Atta

  He pushed the mouse around, prodded buttons and got into his Yahoo account, and then into his inbox. He had twenty-seven messages. He clicked on the first one, which was blank but for two words in capital letters: SOD OFF.

  “This is what is called retrieving email,” he said. He typed YOU TOO. “This is what is called sending email...”

  I was sure I would never learn. The process was too complex. He repeated it and then guided me through my first try. I could barely press the keys for fear of causing an explosion. As for the mouse, I mastered that pretty quickly. I was nervous about the clicking part, though. Did I have to click with my forefinger or little finger? Augustine meanwhile talked in that voice, as if I were a mumu: “This. Is. What. Is. Called. Logging off.”

  The internet was anachronistic. That was exactly the word for it. Outside, there were stagnant gutters, because the drainage system was permanently blocked. Indoors, I was tapping into the future, as people did in science documentaries when voice-overs with echoes announced: “Tap into an undiscovered territory and discover the unknown” and nonsense like that.

  The business was like gambling, he said. Every reply we received would increase our chances of winning until we hit a jackpot. He showed me a sample letter in circulation that he had plagiarized. All I had to do was learn how to extract email addresses and send it out.

  From the desk of Alhaji Ahmed

  Public Relations Office

  Foreign Remittance Dept.

  Bank of Nigeria

  Dear friend,

  I am the manager of Bills and Exchange at the Foreign Remittance Department of Bank of Nigeria.

  In my department, we discovered an abandoned sum of $25.5 million in an account that belongs to one of our foreign customers who died along with his entire family in a plane crash.

  Since we got information about his death, we have been expecting his next of kin to claim his money, because we cannot release it unless somebody applies for it according to our banking guidelines and laws. Unfortunately, we learned that all his supposed next of kin have died, leaving nobody.

  It is therefore this discovery that has led I and other officials in my department to decide to make this business proposal to you and release the money to you as the next of kin and subsequently disburse the money to you. We don’t want this money to go into the bank treasury as an unclaimed bill.

  The banking law and guidelines here stipulate that if such money remains unclaimed after six years, it will be considered unclaimed. Our request for a foreigner as next of kin in this business is occasioned by the fact that the customer was a foreigner and a Nigerian cannot stand as next of kin to a foreigner.

  We agree that 30% of the money will be for you as a foreign partner, in respect to the provision of a foreign account, 10% will be set aside for expenses incurred during the business, and 60% will be for my colleagues and I.

  Therefore, we will visit your country for disbursement according to the percentage indicated, to enable the immediate transfer of this fund to you. You must apply first to the bank as next of kin of the deceased, indicating your bank name, bank account number, your private telephone and fax number for easy and effective communication.

  Upon receipt of your reply, I will send you by fax or email the text of the application. Kindly contact me as soon as you receive this letter.

  Yours faithfully,

  Alhaji A. A. Ahmel

  Bills and Exchange Manager

  We were online for an hour. When we finished, I was sweating and my heart was racing. I might as well have been at PE. Augustine resumed his normal speaking voice as we stepped outside.

  “You want to know why I approached you?”

  “Yes,” I said, shaking out my arms and legs.

  “I didn’t want anyone to see us together at school. The timing was right. You must not act as if we know each other. Understand? It’s important. If someone asks you, ‘Do you know Augustine?’ deny me. Deny me on the spot. Straightaway. From now on, we meet here. If this works out well, I will get you a phone. We will communicate like that...”

  I hopped over a gutter full of green slime and he followed and stumbled as he landed, because his hands were in his pockets.

  “The internet is your link to mugus overseas,” he said, recovering his balance. Mugus, magas, mumus, they were all the same. Dullards.

  “All you need to learn is how to handle a computer and tell a story, and mugus will send you money. Do you know how to tell a story?”

  “Yes.”

  We looked left and right before we crossed the street. On the other side was a yellow sign saying Loan Without Collateral. A man ran towards me and I almost collided with him.

  “Are you s-stupid?” he asked.

  I didn’t answer. We got to the other side. I was hot and had to confess.

  “My popsi is a policeman.”

  Augustine frowned. “What?”

  “My popsi is a policeman.”

  He spat on the ground. “Ehen, so? It doesn’t mean.”

  Of course it meant. Of course it did. I was angry with Popsi. No one believed he was law-abiding. What was the use?

  “He’s not corrupt,” I said.

  Augustine hissed. “Nigerian police. They are all corrupt and poverty-stricken.”

  “What about your popsi?” I asked.

  I smirked, so he would know I’d heard about his connection to the Hilton.

  “My father?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Your father. What does he do?”

  “My father is a chef.”

  A houseboy. A lackey, as Popsi would say. A rich person could call his name or ring a bell and he would come running: “Yes madam, no madam. Yes sir, no sir. Yes oga, no oga.”

  “He is retired now,” Augustine said. “We used to live on Lekki Peninsula, you know. He worked for an American family, the Savages. Mr. Savage was with Summit Oil. Their headquarters is on Lekki Peninsula...”

  Lekki Peninsula indeed. He was back to his American accent.

  As he launched into a long explanation about how he had grown up eating the Savages’ food, like spaghetti and meatballs and burgers and fries, and played table tennis with their kids, Chip and Peanut (their father’s name was Dick), I deliberately yawned. They called table tennis ping-pong. Their nanny, a Calabar woman, borrowed their books about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and taught him how to read and write. When the Savages returned to America, they left his father their VHS player and a library of videos.

  “You should see Pacino in The Godfather,” he said. “Nicholson in The Postman Always Rings Twice”

  “Me, I’m into Jet Li.”

  The latest DVDs were available in the police barracks, bootleg copies from overseas.

  Augustine was just jiving and his family had since relocated to Ajegunle. “I’m telling you,” he said, “they don’t call that area Jungle City for nothing.”

  He wanted to travel to America. He had a cousin who lived there and had got married to get a green card. He planned to apply for a visa by pretending to be dying. He would get a fake doctor’s report saying he had a hole in his heart and needed an operation. His sponsors were an NGO dedicated to saving Nigerian children with chronic medical ailments. That was the only reason he came to school. If the United States Consulate so much as suspected he was a Yahoo Yahoo, his application wouldn’t stand a chance.

  The United States Consulate’s website had a section warning visa applicants about Yahoo Yahoos, apparently. On their visa requirements page, they asked for general forms, special forms for men aged sixteen to forty-five, and proof of sufficient funds. Applicants had to make appointments for their visa interviews and pay a non-refundable fee.

  “They’re the original YahooYahoos,” he said. “They collect the fees and turn down everybody, even rich Nigerians, let alone a poor man’s son like me.”

  I had grown up believing Momsi was a cash madam. With the money she earned from her business, she’d bought our Panasonic televis
ion and Sanyo fan. Her sewing machine was a Singer. Society women would come from Ikoyi with copies of Hello! magazine and ask her to copy Princess Diana’s outfits. They drove through our gates in their old Peugeots and wore ordinary ankara up-and-downs like hers, so she couldn’t guess how rich they were (and end up jacking up her prices), but she could tell from their watches and gold rings, and their need for clothes: always fast, fast and now, now.

  “You,” one said, pointing at me, when she met me playing in the compound. “Go and call your mother. Do quick, I beg.” She spoke pidgin in that pretend down-to-earth manner and she couldn’t even be bothered to walk up our stairs. Customers who did wrinkled their noses when they entered our flat. One of them told Momsi outright, “I hope you’re not going to return my clothes smelling of beans. I have no money to waste on dry-cleaning.”

  They had massive yanshes most of them, huge hips, big bobbies that no brassiere could contain, and no gratitude for Momsi, who would adjust Princess Diana’s outfits to suit their bodies.

  As for me, I’d begun to peruse their photographs of Princess Diana. She wasn’t a bad chick: that smile, those eyes. I mistook my crush on her for wishing she was my mother and took that out on her sons, William and Harry.

  “Look at them,” I would say to Momsi. “Spoiled. She’s always hugging them and taking them out.”

  Momsi would say that was how oyinbo women raised their children. They didn’t teach them any discipline.

  I was her personal assistant at home, helping to measure cloth, fetching buttons and zips. I knew too much about fashion and foreign celebrities I would never have heard about but for Hello! magazine. Brother and Sister teased me about behaving like a middle-aged woman. Brother in particular was concerned that I was too effeminate, but things were much more complex than that with me.

  One day, for instance, I lost patience with that William for burying his face in his mother’s belly because a paparazzo wanted a snapshot of him. “It’s not his fault,” I said. “He has no home training. He thinks he can do anything he wants.”

  “He can,” Momsi said. “His father has money. He is not a poor man’s pikin, like you.”

  I had never considered Popsi poor. Nothing had prepared me for that. Not our block of flats with laundry hanging on balconies and wooden boards nailed across windows. Not our compound with chickens running around and sewage leaking from the septic tank. Our walls were filthier than they were in my dream, and from my bedroom I could hear our neighbors shouting and babies crying. It was a miracle to have electricity and running water for a whole month. On the other side of the lagoon were mansions on Victoria Island, with electricity generators and swimming pools. I still had never thought we were poor until she said we were. I disliked William and Harry even more.

  Momsi made money when Princess Di was alive, though, and I remember the day she died. Momsi cried out, “Heh, what am I going to do?” I too walked around the flat saying, “Heh, what am I going to do?” until Popsi kicked me in the yansh and asked, “Was she a relation of yours?”

  Momsi explained she was worried about her customers, and they did stop coming as frequently. Her outbursts became more unpredictable—or rather, more sporadic. One day she might say, “Hm, if only Popsi was less upstanding.” The next, she might say that anyone who could stitch two pieces of cloth together was now known as a dress designer. Foreign fashions went out for society women—or perhaps they were just too fat to wear what was fashionable overseas. The latest trend was the up-and-down. They copied styles from photos in local magazines like Lifestyles and Heritage. Every seamstress in Lagos could replicate those photos. The competition became too much. We were eating beans and garri every day, and beans made me spoil the air. Popsi was not only a drinker, but a smoker, and he gave up his Gitanes cigarettes to save a little on the side.

  “I can’t miss school,” I said to Augustine, “unless I am sick. Malaria, chest colds...”

  “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “I will take care of your attendance record.”

  “How?”

  He waved. “I have people on my payroll.”

  We passed a woman under a Coca-Cola umbrella. Was he fabulizing again?

  “Like who?”

  He laughed. “I say I have people on my payroll. Look, I fake my school reports at the end of the year. I even buy WAEC papers. Forty dollars is all you need. What? What?”

  I was shaking my head. West African Examination Council papers. That wasn’t a surprise. They were available on the black market. The only reason students in our school didn’t buy them was because they had no money.

  “WAEC,” I said. “They will catch you.”

  They recalled papers every year and students had to re-sit exams.

  He nodded. “You have to be a real mugu to be that obvious. A big one. But it is not by force. If you don’t want to do it, then don’t. All I’m saying is that you can talk about WAEC from morning till night, but who is selling the papers? I’m not the one selling the papers. I just buy them. And let me tell you another thing: even if you pass your WAEC exams and end up going to university, you will never get a job that pays as much as I make on a daily basis, so what are you wasting your time in school for?”

  The sun was beating my head. Above us was a banner saying Royal Finishing School. How to be a lady, gentleman. Dining etiquette.

  “It’s not every day you have to come,” he said. “We can alternate. Me, three days a week. You, two, once I teach you what to do.”

  I was thinking about Popsi again. He had only ever shared one fraud case with me, a case involving two grandmothers. They were first cousins. One needed money for her seventieth-birthday celebration and the other for her youngest daughter’s engagement ceremony. A man had arranged to meet them at a hotel. The man claimed he had a link to diamonds smuggled from Sierra Leone. He asked for an initial investment to grant access to them.

  These women delivered their entire savings to the man. In the middle of the transaction, the hotel door burst open and policemen charged in. They ordered the women to disappear or else. The women ran to reception shouting that they had been waylaid. They refused to say by whom. Come to find out that their link to the diamonds had disappeared. Come to find out that the police had never raided the hotel.

  It was a classic Section 419 crime, Popsi said, and the men were neither found nor apprehended, but 419 was local. Yahoo Yahoos operated in cyberspace.

  Popsi also said that not everyone who lived on Victoria Island was rich, but the word “poor,” to him, was for people of Maroko. I was not yet born when the place was leveled and the land sold off as part of Lekki Peninsula. He was one of the policemen who were dispatched to drive the people out. The police were merely following orders, he said, but, as usual, the majority of them got carried away. The word “poor,” to me, referred to people like those who lived in fishing villages like Sokoro under Third Mainland Bridge. Their communities were propped up on sticks. They swam past their own shit to reach their wooden huts. Perhaps they didn’t even consider themselves poor.

  “I’m not sure,” I said to Augustine.

  He raised his hands. “You’re not sure? You’re not sure? What else is there to be sure about? Look, it’s because you have not been near the other side, to see how they live. In this place, we may all be in the same, em, em, vicinity, but there are invisible barriers between us. It is a class system. A class system, you hear me?You know what a class system means? I don’t think you do.”

  Now, I was walking behind him, listening to his sweet talk, as if he were one of those child-molesting street prophets Momsi had warned me about. We were heading away from school. Had school been less dry, I would not have bothered. I would have said, “It done do,” and returned there. But I’d never met anyone who behaved like Augustine before. He was a performer. I could tell he was putting on a show for his own enjoyment as much as mine, as if all he needed was an audience of one, and that was enough for him.

  He had to talk
. He needed to and that made me pity him a little. I might have been the only one in the world who had time to listen. My legs were cramping. I kept up with him, though, as we passed rusty gates, piles of sticks, rotten banana plants, phone-card hawkers sitting under umbrellas and a wall with a sign saying No urinary.

  He found a sandy patch by the gate of a block of Public Works Department flats. Pedestrians and hawkers were walking past. We were obstructing their path. He didn’t seem to notice or care. He picked up a stick near a street gutter and drew a lopsided circle in the sand. Then he drew a line across to divide it in two and poked dots all over the place.

  “These are the haves,” he said. “These are the have-nots. This is you and me. Consider yourself part of the masses. Now, of the haves, there are two types: the nouveau riche...”

  The word “nouveau” put me off. It was like a French lesson.

  “They are taking over Lagos. They are the ones who have made stupid money recently. First-generation money. That is the difference between them and the elite. The only difference. Now, the elite are a dying breed. They have money going generations back, only three at most, but they can’t stand to see the nouveau riche around them. They think they own Lagos and they are no better than the nouveau riche. They both made their money the same way. Mostly by wuruwuru: stealing from the government, from a bank, from somewhere. A generation later, they are looking down on others. You see? Don’t let anyone fool you. They are no better than you. In every rich family, the first person to make money was a poor man’s pikin like you. Come.”

  His mouth was too sweet. I was mesmerized. Or had he jujued me? What was the use of my beads? We continued up Awolowo Road in the wrong direction. The road had changed from residential to commercial in the olden days—the early eighties, to be precise. At one end was the Command Officers’ Mess, at the other was the French Consulate where people queued up to apply for visas, and somewhere in the middle was the shopping center.

  Oil, he said. That was the ultimate source of wealth, but there were others: the new-generation banks and the wireless-phone companies. The elite were just jealous of other people who were discovering these outlets. They were the cause of the class barriers that existed. Their trick was to intimidate the rest of us by mimicking oyinbos, whom they claimed they didn’t look up to. They would swear they were superior to oyinbos, even, but the evidence of their colonial mentality was there.