Looking for Transwonderland

by Noo Saro-Wiwa

  Minutes later, as we crested a hill, Zuma Rock rose suddenly and magnificently out of the otherwise featureless, yellowy landscape. Its dark, striated dome stood several hundred metres high and held dominion over the scenery for miles around. After days in Abuja’s flatness, my eyes needed to adjust to this topographical excitement. Back in 1988, the surrounding landscape was a flat and barely populated expanse of trees and sandy soil. Now, traffic in the area around the rock droned more densely, and the previously deserted plateau shone with corrugated rooftops.

  This time, my eyes could decipher the outline of a cone-headed alien with a dark round eye. I wanted to phone Tedum and tell him I could finally see the ‘man’ on the rock. But there was nobody to call: five years after first visiting here, he died suddenly from heart failure, two years before our father was killed. My sister is now the only living link with that day. Revisiting Zuma Rock by myself felt like a physical expression of the family’s loss, and all morning I had been worried that coming here might disrupt whatever amnesia may have protected me from my pain these past dozen years. Fortunately, my melancholy was swept aside by some unusual activity in the area.

  As my okada approached the stone dome, I could see that dozens of parked motorcycles and two, maybe three, hundred people were clustered on the side of the highway. Everyone stared and pointed fixedly at the dome, which loomed 300 metres away. The focus of all this fuss? Two Europeans in sports gear and helmets slowly abseiling down the rock.

  The roadside spectators chattered excitedly on their mobile phones as they urged their friends in the nearby town to come and watch. Most of the crowd were dark-skinned, sharp-featured Muslim men wearing flowing white boubous and kufi hats. I and a handful of peanut-selling girls were the only females there.

  Police patrolled the roadside, directing traffic and shepherding everyone away from the highway. One helmeted officer with massive aviator sunglasses rode the fanciest patrol motorcycle I’d seen in Nigeria, a shiny, high-spec machine fitted with a windshield, siren lights and loud speakers. He knew he looked like a Californian patrolman, and he was loving it.

  ‘Kommot for de side of the road!’ he boomed down the speaker at a driver who had stopped his car to observe the spectacle. ‘Look me well, o.’ But the driver was too busy staring at Zuma Rock to acknowledge the officer’s command.

  Why all this attention for such a simple leisure activity? Were the abseilers famous? A very tall and irritable second policeman with tribal markings radiating from his nose gruffly ordered me to keep away from the road. I hoped he might know something about these foreigners.

  ‘Who are they?’ I asked him.

  ‘They are human beings like you, and they are white,’ he sneered, brushing past me as if I were a lowly she-goat. Rudeness aside, I admired his ability to keep things in perspective. Everyone else ogled the scene as if aliens had just landed.

  One of the abseilers, a girl, was stranded midway down the steep rock face. Her partner was several metres away and slowly struggled to scale across and reach her. No-one had witnessed abseiling before, or even heard of it. But, this being Nigeria, there was an expert at hand to expound on the subject.

  ‘I can climb Zuma Rock,’ a man boasted, his arms folded across his chest. ‘I don’t need all these things.’ He cast a belittling eye on the abseilers’ harnesses and belay devices.

  A superstitious man standing next to me proclaimed he wouldn’t touch Zuma Rock, ‘not even for a million naira’.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘I fear it,’ he said. I later found out that in the old days, young girls were sacrificed near the rock to appease its evil spirits. He mistrusted those abseilers too. ‘They use other things,’ he said. ‘It’s not just rope.’

  I asked him what ‘things’. He didn’t know exactly.

  ‘Do you mean voodoo?’

  He shrugged his shoulders without expanding on the matter. ‘It’s not safe,’ he said, grimacing with fearful disapproval.

  ‘They have equipment to stop them from falling,’ I assured him.

  ‘Are you with them?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you a Nigerian?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you don’t talk like a Nigerian.’

  ‘That’s because I live in London.’ Was my Nigerian accent that bad?

  He smiled suspiciously. ‘I think you are with them.’

  ‘I’m not!’

  ‘Why did you come here to Zuma Rock like this?’

  ‘I just came to see it. I didn’t know all this was happening.’ It was indeed odd that I managed to catch this event. The coincidence was bizarre, but I was glad of it. Nobody had ever abseiled down Zuma Rock before.

  The male abseiler finally reached his friend and rescued her from her predicament. Both of them were descending the rock more rapidly now. As they approached the bottom, the spectators fizzed with excitement. One middle-aged man abruptly launched himself into the scrubby bush and strode authoritatively towards the rock as if he were personally connected to the adventurists. A second guy copied him, and soon a trickle of people began wading through the foliage. The trickle graduated into a steady current, which within a minute exploded into a mad rush. Nearly everybody was now racing towards the base of the rock. Stick-legged boys with ringwormed scalps and ragged clothes giggled and bounced through the scrub; little girls, still carrying trays of groundnuts on their heads, gathered their dresses with their free hands and sprinted in aim of God knows what; the men’s long djellaba garments billowed like sails as they hot-footed it with everyone else.

  A part of me almost joined in the madness, but the thought of running in that heat dissuaded me. I stood with the handful of people still left on the highway.

  ‘Nigeriaah . . .’ one man chortled ruefully.

  ‘You cannot see such a thing outside of Nigeria,’ the rock-fearer said to me.

  Five minutes later the abseiling pair emerged through the trees and walked towards the highway, surrounded by the panting welcome committee. A police vehicle was parked on the highway, ready to collect them. The girl walked several paces in front of her friend. As she approached the 4 x 4, the onlookers parted to make way for her, like the sea fanning out for Moses. This tiny, red-headed slip of a thing looked exhausted as she cut a self-conscious swathe through the crowd. Everyone kept a respectful distance and watched her in silence. You could have heard a groundnut drop, it was so quiet. Her male friend, however, enjoyed a very different reception. This guy was the hero. He’d saved the girl.

  ‘Yaaaaay!’ the men all cheered as he strode through, a strange display of male solidarity that I wasn’t privy to. They tousled his blond, shoulder-length locks, patted his back and shook his shoulders until the police led him into the back of the police 4 x 4 like a rock star. The car zoomed off into the horizon, chauffering him and his friend back to wherever they had come from.

  Their abseiling was not the only new thing happening on Zuma Rock. The government plans to build a $500 million, five-star tourist resort nearby to ‘boost’ the area’s economic development. There will be a cable car and walkway to Zuma’s summit, and an artificial waterfall tumbling luxuriantly from the top. Already I could glimpse what looked like either a golf course or well-tended lawn just north of the base of the rock. I was all in favour of improving tourism, but how would this playground for the rich energise the local economy and educate people enough to stop ‘fearing’ the rock? It all seemed like sweet icing on a rather stale cake, an imitation of Western economies and their big service sectors. I wished that the government would focus on creating manufacturing jobs on a mass scale, too.

  Now that the show was over, the hoards of spectators crossed the highway to mount their motorcycles. I ran from person to person, begging them to give me a lift to the nearby town of Suleja where I could catch a bus back to Abuja. A man eventually agreed in exchange for a few naira. I hopped on and we sped towards the town.

  Back in Abuja that evening, I had t
o get a taxi back to Junior’s house. I rather resented having to resume this form of transport, but it was the only means of getting around the city. Every fare had to be negotiated, and it often involved more wahala than I cared for. After getting into the vehicle, my driver opened the proceedings with a warning that the place was ‘far’ and it would cost me 500. I baulked and suggested 150. Stamping his foot on the brake, he ordered me out of the vehicle in theatrical disgust. Angrily, I concurred, slamming the door shut and glaring into the middle distance, pretending to look for another taxi. This ritual dance of strategic posturing, kissing of teeth and mutual outrage was exhausting. Life in Nigeria was an unending negotiation, with few guarantees.

  ‘250,’ the driver said through the rolled-down window. ‘I am not cheating you.’ Story. I declined with a haughty silence, and watched him drive away very slowly. After 10 metres, he opened the passenger door to offer a reconciliatory 200. I climbed back in and we resumed the journey back to the house.

  ‘Hausa men are the nicest,’ my cousin Ketiwe said, referring to the biggest ethnic group in Northern Nigeria. We were ambling through stalls separated by tidy alleyways in Wuse Market, west of the city. ‘They buy you things, they take care of you when you’re dating. If you run out of water they buy you a whole crate of bottled water.’

  She and I were indulging in some silly ethno-romantic profiling. After witnessing the Hausa men’s silence towards the female tourist at Zuma Rock, I had gender relations on my mind.

  ‘What about Igbos?’ I asked Ketiwe.

  ‘An Igbo man takes care of his wife,’ she smiled. ‘She will dress like a queen while he wears ordinary clothes. If they only have one car he’ll say, “It’s OK, you can take it into town.”’

  Ketiwe was dating a Yoruba man from Kwara State in the west. She joked that our men from Rivers State were to be avoided because they’re sexist philanderers. But marriage anywhere in the country seemed a minefield of infidelity, jealousy, intrigue and money fights; a clash between modern values and traditional ideas, between men (such as my father) calling themselves ‘traditional’ polygamists, and women (such as my mother) labelling them as mere philanderers.

  The Sunday newspapers gave a highly entertaining insight into the Nigerian dating scene. The messages in the ‘Lonelyhearts’, ‘Friendships’ and ‘Relationships’ pages differed sharply from British ones, where pithy humour is welcomed but stating a strong intent for marriage is taken as a sign of madness. Nigerian lonely hearts contributors, by contrast, get straight to the point:Oke, 24, female, needs a guy that is ready for marriage, aged between 30 – 33.

  Others had more exacting requirements:Kay, 28, resident in Port Harcourt, needs a tall, slim, disciplined, God-fearing lady for a relationship that will lead to marriage.

  And: Hakeem, lawyer, needs a young Muslim lady for a serious relationship. She must be dark complexioned, pretty, and of Yoruba origin.

  Then there was this brazen offering:Prince, 45, handsome, married, kind, needs a romantic lady with a fear of God.

  I think Prince forgot to add ‘hypocrite’ to his list of qualities.

  The ‘Friendships’ and ‘Relationships’ sections were surprisingly short, occupying less than one-third of the page. The rest of the spread was devoted to a compelling section called ‘Sugar Cares’, where men looking for sugar mummies made their demands extremely plain:Uche, 27, needs a wealthy lady for marriage.

  22-year-old fun-loving guy, seeks a financially stable older lady aged between 40 – 55.

  Felix, 27, graduate, romantic, needs a rich, sexy sugar mummy, aged between 35 – 55, from any part of the country.

  Tony, 27, undergraduate, needs a caring, independent, neat and comfortable sugar mummy who needs sexual satisfaction (preferably single parent, divorcée or widow).

  Brown, 23, needs a mature, lonely lady, resident in Lagos, Benin or Port Harcourt.

  Victor from Port Harcourt needs a fat sugar mummy with big boobs. He promises to satisfy her needs.

  Julius, 28, needs a rich, sexy single sugar mummy, aged between 30 – 45 for financial support in exchange for the fun of her life.

  I was intrigued. Pretending to be a prospective sugar mummy, I picked up my phone and dialled one of the numbers.

  John, a ‘cute, handsome undergraduate’ picked up the phone. I explained to him that I was new to this sort of thing and wanted to know more before taking the plunge.

  ‘Have you had a sugar mummy before?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘I’ve had just one.’

  ‘How old was she?’

  ‘Hmmm, she was about forty.’

  ‘Why did it end?’

  ‘I promised to make her happy. But she disappointed me. We agreed not to cheat on each other. But she cheated on me . . . I didn’t like that. I obeyed her rules very well but she was a liar.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I wanted to know if she was unfaithful. I thought I’ll ask her in a playful way. She said no. But my friend told me he saw her in a hotel with another man, so I changed my appearance. I put on head scarf and went to the hotel. I saw she had parked her car in a hidden place. So I bribed the waiter with money and he gave me her room number. I was waiting for some hours until she came out. When she saw me she was shocked. I told her I can’t continue with this. I was angry because I sacrificed myself, my faith.’

  I asked John how much money she gave him. He never really counted, he said. He was a student at the time. She bought him clothes and meals. Sometimes she transferred money into his account. When the money ran out, she checked with someone at his university to verify his financial situation, he claimed. On his birthday, she bought him a 60,000 Nokia phone. John said the lowest amount he ever received from her was 30,000 (perhaps he was exaggerating the figure, knowing that I was a prospective sugar mummy).

  ‘That’s why it was painful for me when we ended the relationship,’ John said. ‘I have no money now.’

  ‘What if you don’t find me attractive?’ I asked.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. As long as you look good when we go out. I just want someone to love me, take care of me, have fun. As long as she can take care of me and her heart is clean. Are you hearing me? If she tells me, “This is what I want,” I will do it.’

  The next guy I rang – a twenty-three-year-old, self-described ‘worker’ called Dan – was less romantic. This time, I pretended to be a fifty-three-year-old divorcee looking for my first ever toy boy.

  ‘You’re fifty-three? . . . Wow,’ he stammered nervously. But it took him less than a second to digest the information and shift into an aggressive, transactional frame of mind. ‘You have to satisfy me,’ he demanded. ‘I don’t care if you are fifty-three years old, we have to be together.’

  ‘What are you looking for in a sugar mummy?’

  ‘I need assistance from people like you, you understand? I want to further my studies.’

  ‘Have you had a sugar mummy before?’ I asked.

  ‘You’ll be the first person I’ve been seeing. Women have approached me before but they were not serious, they were beating about the bush . . . I need a dedication of your time.’

  ‘I’ve never done this sort of thing before. How much money would you expect me to give you?’

  ‘I won’t ask you. Give me what you have . . . whatever you think is good for me. I’m not doing this because of pleasure. I want to further my studies . . . I need cash. If you are rich, I will satisfy you.’

  ‘But can you satisfy me if you don’t find me attractive?’

  ‘Blood flows in my veins,’ he said impatiently. ‘I’m not a statue. You’re going to have feeling . . . I promise. You can use oil to make it more crazy. You are pushing your menopause, right? So I would advise you to use oil.’

  I asked Dan for his philosophical perspective on male pride and the power dynamic in sugar relationships.

  ‘I just want your security, your loyalty,’ he insisted. ‘I won’t ask you for money. It’s like
dating a young girl . . . you have to give her what she needs. You just have to apply that situation to this. So when are we going to meet?’

  I put down the phone. His enthusiasm was overwhelming.

  Sugar mummying isn’t rife in Nigeria, but when men start com-modifying their bodies, one senses that the economy must be in a bad way. Money was subverting Nigeria’s social norms in surprising ways. I’d always regarded gigolos as something confined to a film fantasy or photo-less confessions in a British Saturday magazine, but they existed in Nigeria too. Peeping through this hole in our pious veil gave me a glimpse of the future, perhaps; the wobbling first steps towards gender equality, the end of polygamy, or some other kind of social change. It was comforting, because if there was one thing deterring me from living in this part of the world, it was fear of rigid, old-fashioned social structures.

  I spent my last day in Abuja plotting my journey around Northern Nigeria. I knew little about the Islamic, northern half of the country. Ketiwe had helped me buy a long, flowing djellaba gown that I would wear out there. In Wuse Market we had consulted with some stall owners, five old Muslim men, about whether I needed to wear one. They said I didn’t have to wear a djellaba, but if I respected myself and I wanted respect from others, then I should wear one.

  The north was a very different place, foreign enough to make me feel like a true tourist. Without family connections here, I planned on exploring the region as if I were on one of my guidebook-writing trips. As a pure tourist I could replace my increasing emotional baggage with a (metaphorical) knapsack and travel lightly. That was the plan, at least.