Looking for Transwonderland

by Noo Saro-Wiwa

  During the annual week-long Osun Festival in August, Yoruba society throws off its Muslim and Christian top layers and congregates at the shrine to worship the goddess and ask for her blessings. Men, women and children converge here in their thousands, bathing in the river and praying for fertility, respite from malaria, or money to pay next month’s rent. A virgin carries a symbolic presence of the river goddess inside a calabash. To affirm the connection between the people and Osun, the girl carries the calabash to Osun’s shrine, a Gaudi-esque thatched-roof building supported by wood-carved columns. Inside it is a sacred stone stool, on which Larooye is said to have first sat. Food is tossed into the river as an offering to the goddess. The crowds follow the virgin girl en masse, their faces contorted in prayer.

  But nothing is too sacred to entrepreneurs. Soft drinks companies circle the festival crowds like mosquitoes, telling people that the gods will bless those who use their beverages for libation rituals. And the Sacred Grove itself is being buffeted by both the indifference of capitalism and bad government: in recent decades the authorities illegally sold off portions of it to property developers, who chopped down trees and dislodged some of the sculptures during construction. Trees were also sacrificed when a paved road was laid down through the forest, inching the Grove closer to extinction.

  Wenger herself was disgusted by the state of affairs. By the time she died in 2009, she was furious at the condition of the Sacred Grove and its sculptures, which were decaying as relentlessly as Ibadan’s Transwonderland Amusement Park. Maintaining a site like this under today’s circumstances requires a certain assiduousness, of which Wenger had plenty in her younger decades. So intense was her passion for Yoruba culture, she even prevented her children (whom she adopted locally) from receiving a Western-style education for fear of contmabelting their spiritual purity. ‘Neo-Tarzanism’ is how Wole Soyinka once described this foreign reverence for our past traditions. Some of those children, now grown adults, remain illiterate to this day. As literacy and modern education tend to erode traditional religious practices, Wenger believed that keeping her children ‘native’ was the only true way of sustaining the Yoruba religion. In her mind, modernity and tradition were two immiscible concepts, the former compromising the latter.

  I understood Wenger’s concerns. My foreign upbringing and education had diluted my cultural identity. Yet it had also given me certain advantages that Wenger herself enjoyed too – her education and worldliness had given her the wherewithal to travel to Nigeria in the first place and revive the Yoruba cult. Was westernisation the Sacred Grove’s nemesis or saviour? I couldn’t decide. Anyway, the peace and tranquillity the grove exuded was nourishing enough for me. I just hoped that the water would keep flowing, the trees would keep rustling, and the animals would continue living among it all.

  6

  In the Chop House

  Abuja

  I first visited Abuja in 1988. My father, in the city on business, deposited us in a hotel, and ordered us to write essays about Abuja while he was at work. Idle hands were the devil’s hands, he said. But how could I describe emptiness? I managed 300 words of half-hearted gibberish about the numerous construction cranes and the mosque’s shiny golden dome, which sparkled in the vista from our hotel window. But that was it. I couldn’t articulate the sense of inauthenticity and fabrication, the 1970s architecture, the blandness of the street names plucked by town planners from an encyclopaedia and inspired by every African leader, capital city or river in the world: Amazon Street, Mandela Street. Danube had been given the Africanised pronunciation ‘Da-noo-bey’.

  Abuja was the type of city I dreamed about during my school holidays in Port Harcourt. Back then, after the electricity blackout interrupted the movie we were watching, Zina, Tedum and I would take to our beds with a flop and a moan, and fantasise about how Nigeria ought to be. As children, we believed that fixing a country’s aesthetic was all that was required for it to become orderly and successful. We mentally drew up clean streets and fancy shopping malls, populated by smartly dressed people who had been taught how to wear good make-up (Zina’s main objective), frequented fancy sweet shops (my personal goal) and drove plush cars (Tedum’s ultimate vision).

  That fantasy of Abuja as an upmarket urban paradise had been partially realised. I flew to the city, emerging from the plane into the fresh whiteness of its domestic airport. It was like a dream. Large windows revealed the shafts of modern architectural beams outside. The interior’s relative newness and cleanliness was uncompromised by hawkers or 1970s-fonted wall signs or disoriented wildlife; the smell of neglect was absent. I struggled to stay awake as the taxi cruised along the pristine highway, its immaculate centre lined with trees that continued for several miles with stupefying monotony, like the background landscape of a Formula 1 computer game. But as the streets rolled by, I found its featurelessness a relaxing antidote to my usual anxiety when arriving in a new place. I felt even more at ease knowing that I would be staying with my brother.

  Abuja was a relatively new metropolis and the cleanest, most orderly one in Nigeria. In the late 1970s, the government anointed it as the new capital city, stripping this status from the incorrigible, Yoruba-dominated Lagos, and moving it to a central region not overrun by any of our three biggest ethnic groups. And so today the local cars’ number plates carry the motto ‘Centre of Unity’, which describes Abuja perfectly, since the city seems to have united Nigerians in the view that it’s the dullest place on earth.

  ‘God forbid I spend Christmas in Abuja,’ Mabel had declared when considering whether to visit her brother during the previous year’s holidays. In her eyes, the city had no soul, no organic flavour. I could see what she meant. Abuja’s fundamental character hadn’t changed in the eighteen years since I was last here, when it was nothing but a network of empty highways and big hotels pleading for humanity to breathe life into them.

  As I toured the city by car that day, on my way to my brother’s house, it still seemed like a work in progress, although it has begun to grow into its big-city pretensions. The traffic-free highways coursed past shopping malls and cuboid buildings made of reflective glass that gleamed with passé futurism. There were no indecently exposed sewage drains and, following a government ban, not an okada in sight. Nigerians and expats jogged or walked their dogs along real sidewalks in the cool, smog-free mornings; a flat TV screen broadcast commercials from a street corner. Islamic, calm, rich, tidy: Abuja was the opposite of my home town of Port Harcourt. I felt an outsider. In an unexpected show of civic pride, my taxi driver even ordered me to both fasten my seatbelt and desist from throwing my orange peel out of the window.

  Reminders of the real Nigeria were everywhere: certain motorists still converted the pavements into extra lanes, or sounded their horns impatiently if the cars in front hadn’t moved within two seconds of the lights going green; nomadic Fulani farmers still herded their cattle along the sides of the roads. For the most part, however, Abuja exuded cleanliness and dreary order, populated by transitory government ministers and civil servants, who often prefer to keep their hearts and families in the bedlam of Lagos, where the real partying is done.

  It’s ironic that this city – a place that confounds Nigeria’s reputation as a hotbed of chaos and dysfunction – is partly funded by the very corruption that created that reputation. After siphoning Nigeria’s assets, politicians and other thieves bring the loot to Abuja, where they’ve created a panorama of semi-laundered splendour – a world-class stadium, the manicured Millennium Park, the elegant golden dome of the National Mosque, the huge church, the world-class IBB Golf Course and millionaire mansions with giant model aeroplanes playfully attached to their rooftops.

  But a strong conservative undercurrent yanks constantly at Abuja’s ambitions for world-class status. The city is the gateway to the Islamic north of the country, where men dominate public life and women operate less noisily behind life’s curtains. The Miss World beauty contest, hosted here in 1999, was abandon
ed after Islamic youths protested violently against the perceived debauchery of the pageant. A few years later, the city was accused of lagging behind the times, losing its bid to host the 2014 Commonwealth Games because of the government’s intolerance towards homosexuality. Try as it might, Abuja hasn’t quite reached that ever-shifting benchmark of ‘modernity’.

  Next morning, I luxuriated on my brother’s sofa, savouring the novelty of cable TV and a well-stocked fridge – such simple pleasures were rarely available during those ascetic holidays with my father. I was staying with my eldest brother Ken, or ‘Junior’ as we call him. He worked as an assistant adviser to the president on environmental affairs, and was currently compiling a report on the double threat faced by Nigeria’s environment: rising sea levels threaten to submerge our coastal cities, while the swelling Sahara is gradually snuffing out the vegetation and lakes in the north as sandstorms dump sand across people’s farms. The felling of trees for firewood is speeding up desertification even more, allowing sand dunes to push people further south, chasing them towards the eye of a land-shortage storm.

  Junior had lived in Abuja for a couple of years, shuttling back and forth between there and his family in London. Working for the government was for him the culmination of years spent reintegrating into Nigerian life after the death of our father. He’d grown up in England since he was nine years old, and had been heading towards a career as a sports journalist before circumstances elbowed him off his chosen life path. Aged twenty-seven, he took control of the small family businesses in Port Harcourt before being offered a government job in 2007 as part of the new democratic government’s reconciliation process.

  I saw him regularly in England, but this was the first time I had observed him in his Nigerian habitat. The transformation was intriguing. Once upon a time in London, he was known as Mr Public Transport due to his encyclopaedic knowledge of the city’s bus system. Now he travelled around Abuja in the back seat of a car, and I nearly laughed when I heard his maid address him as ‘sir’ after he’d ordered her (in a slightly Nigerianised accent) to wash his shirts. Siblings often retain old conceptions of one another, unaware of each other’s full maturation: my brother was now an oga, complete with minions and authority and responsibilities; a more laid-back incarnation of our father.

  Junior had built a wide network of friends in Nigeria, including Nini, a girl I went to school with in England. She now worked in government too, and dropped by for a visit later that day. We hadn’t seen each other in two decades, when I was eleven years old and she was a seemingly adult fifteen. Back then, Nini was unusually popular with both younger students and older ones, blessed with a charm that was impossible to deconstruct or emulate. More than anything, I remembered her as an extremely fast runner, an Olympic champion in the making who at fifteen was already sprinting 100 metres in 12.3 seconds. Nike saw her potential and gave her free running shoes for training sessions with a top athletics coach. It was all going so well.

  Then her father suddenly withdrew her from school and sent her back to Nigeria. Her fate was many a diaspora child’s worst nightmare, a punishment my father routinely threatened whenever I was naughty.

  ‘I didn’t want to be in Nigeria,’ Nini said. ‘I was so upset. I fell ill . . . they put me on a drip.’ She finished her education in Nigeria, attending the University of Benin where she continued to run competitively. By her early twenties she was clocking 11.4 seconds in the 100m, often beating her training mate who went on to compete at the Olympics.

  ‘But my parents didn’t want me to be an athlete,’ Nini said.

  ‘Were they scared you wouldn’t earn enough money?’ I asked.

  ‘No, they’re just conservative. Many Nigerian parents are. They don’t want you to go into music or sports or anything like that. My brother wanted to go into the music industry but they weren’t happy about it.’

  Now in her mid-thirties, Nini hadn’t lost any of the magnetism that so bedazzled everyone at school. Giving birth to her four children hadn’t diminished her speed either: she had recently raced a male friend for a bet, and won. But instead of being a world-class champion athlete, her pockets bulging with endorsement dollars, Nini was working in the foreign service at the Nigerian vice-president’s office, known locally as ‘Villa’. Her husband, having finished his master’s degree in law at a Scottish university, was searching for work in a city where personal connections count more than professional qualifications. Nini was the family’s temporary breadwinner, stretching her salary to cover their children’s school fees.

  ‘In my village they think I’m evil because I’m working in Villa and not giving them millions,’ she smiled ruefully. Although Nini’s experience of leaving England for a life in Nigeria was one of my biggest adolescent fears, she said it had worked out for the best. Despite the uncertainties, she had carved out a life of typically Nigerian fabulousness, a carousel of constant fashion shows, weddings, birthday parties and barbeques. ‘I’m glad I came back,’ she said. ‘I’m not groping like you diasporans!’

  Junior chuckled; it had taken him years of ‘groping’ to reacquaint himself with Nigeria and understand the workings of life here. Nini suggested I come back too. But I wasn’t sure. I didn’t think I could ever grasp the complex mechanics of the economy, the networking rules, the corruption that makes the UK system seem comparatively meritocratic and straightforward. I told Nini about a conversation I once had with an acquaintance concerning how government contracts are obtained. If I ran a hypothetical construction company in Nigeria and wanted to bid for a contract, how would I go about securing it?

  The acquaintance had described the widely known process. Securing a meeting to bid for a government contract requires giving the minister a hefty payment, perhaps as much as $250,000. When you tell the minister of your plans to build something like a gas plant, you must include details of his kickback. It’s standard procedure. If you don’t, he will pretend to listen to you, end the meeting on a positive note, and quietly dismiss your proposal without your knowledge.

  ‘You see?’ I moaned to Nini. ‘You have to know things like that before you can live here. If I’d gone for that contract, I would’ve come out of that meeting thinking everything was OK!’

  Junior and Nini burst out laughing. They weren’t in a position to confirm or deny the story.

  I knew so little about the rules of Nigerian life, and how to make money here. Nini was trying to figure out how to make money too. She reclined in a chair and stared at the ceiling, considering her finances. I suggested buying shares but she was nervous about the risk.

  She wasn’t nearly as optimistic as my cousins, Ledum and Ketiwe, who also dropped by for a visit that afternoon. Of all my cousins, they were closest to me in age, and I knew them best. Ledum was at law school, and Ketiwe was a qualified doctor, looking for a job in Abuja after recently moving there to live with her mother. Again, in both those professions, finding work was all about whom one knew. But neither of them seemed daunted by the challenge.

  ‘My classmates say they should make friends with the people whose fathers are governors,’ Ledum joked. Ketiwe was looking for a job specialising in haematology but, like Ledum, she planned to do business on the side to earn cash.

  ‘You need to do three, four or five businesses. You’ve got to diversify,’ Ledum smiled, splaying her fingers with optimistic zeal. Their drive was striking and alien, a new development since we’d last spent time together in our teens. They didn’t seem too worried about the financial precariousness of Nigerian life.

  ‘You should come and live in Nigeria,’ Ketiwe proposed. ‘It’s good here.’

  She and Ledum raided the fridge while painting a picture of my potential life. ‘You can marry one of those Big Men,’ they cooed. ‘And you could be Minister for Culture and Tourism! They will like this your accent.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’d change it. It doesn’t sound right in Nigeria.’ I didn’t like having a foreign accent here. It marked me out an
d robbed my words of their venom and authority, especially when arguing with okada men or fellow bus passengers.

  ‘No!’ Ledum insisted. ‘They like real English accents, not like those fake ones.’ Radio and television broadcasters in Nigeria sometimes strive for English pronunciation but often end up simulating a hybrid of Dutch and drunk Nigerian. A broadcaster trying to say, ‘I will give you the information on Saturday,’ in an English accent usually ends up sounding something like this: ‘Ay weel gif you thee informaiyshon on Saahtordayy.’

  The right accent was all very well, but did I have the qualifications to become a government minister? Ledum and Keti said that having a foreign degree of any sort would get me any government job, regardless of my experience. Their enthusiasm opened a door to a macrocosm of exciting possibilities, and for a moment I seriously considered living in Nigeria. But I didn’t have the appetite for struggling financially. Ketiwe was still looking for work and had no place of her own. Doctors in Abuja are paid 50,000 per month, around £200. Ketiwe and her fellow young doctors blamed their low pay on the older generation of medics. In order to cut hospital costs, the chairman of the Medical Association had recently called for interns to stop being paid. Boosting hospital budgets at the expense of junior staff was a more viable option than asking the government or patients for extra money. I wasn’t sure if I was prepared to live in a country where qualified doctors can’t find employment easily. The system seemed too difficult and unpredictable; I might flounder without meritocracy’s comforting crutch.

  But the system’s fluidity can be liberating if one is able to ride it rather than being steamrollered by it. Sitting in my brother’s sun-saturated living room, eating lunch prepared by the cook, I could see the positive side of living in Nigeria: more living space, lots of family support, not being a racial minority, enjoying a certain freedom that comes from being restricted in one’s choices and expectations. I wouldn’t have to explain myself if I declined alcohol on a night out, and I could grow old and fat without losing my social standing.