Looking for Transwonderland

by Noo Saro-Wiwa

  Balewa’s tomb lay inside a windowless, artistically asymmetrical building, built in the 1970s, with a wraparound patterned roof. Its form was designed to tell the story of Nigeria’s journey to independence. I followed the guide and his student tour group through the entrance, along a tall, cavernous corridor that was almost pitch black, save for a few tiny rays of light streaming through a lattice of holes in the wall. These shafts of light symbolised the distant dream of independence during the dark days of colonialism. As we walked further down the corridor, bigger holes allowed more light to pour in, indicating the achievement of independence.

  The corridor approaching the courtyard contained two sets of staircases: a deliberately narrow one with short steps (signifying the ease of life after independence), and a second, wider, staircase with high steps that represented the difficulty of achieving one’s goals in a colonised Nigeria. The guide instructed everyone to huddle together and walk pointedly down the narrower independence staircase. One of the students and I couldn’t resist taking the bigger, less congested steps instead. We smiled at one another in tacit understanding; it was a matter of convenience, not a political statement.

  The steps led us to a sun-filled open-air courtyard where Tafawa Balewa’s grave lay. The courtyard’s high walls were covered in multicoloured tiles representing Nigeria’s myriad ethnic groups. On the grave itself, a mound of pebbles was piled on a rectangular slab of light stone, Balewa’s name engraved on its edge. There was no grandeur, no fanfare, just a simple engraving of his name. The space was breezy, elegant and fresh; the grave’s simplicity represented everything I imagined about Nigeria of the 1950s and 1960s: a cleaner, less populated, possibly less damaged place.

  In the building next door, we were shown a cabinet filled with Balewa’s personal effects, including a mini Sony TV gifted to him by Queen Elizabeth II. Beside it was a glass vial containing the very first drops of crude oil pumped by Shell in 1957. The black oil sat in the bottle, looking like a dollop of poison. There weren’t many other personal effects, our guide informed us, because Balewa was a simple man, uninterested in consumption. I cynically speculated whether his short tenure in office had prevented him from succumbing to corruption. Still, he was the antithesis of Sani Abacha. After the dictator died suddenly in 1998, the authorities recovered more than $2 billion from his bank accounts, newspapers said. Some of the cash had reportedly been delivered from the central bank to his mansion, where he stored it in mountainous stacks.

  Our guide ushered us into a room with a TV monitor. He pushed an ancient-looking videocassette tape into a VCR and played black-and-white footage of Tafawa Balewa making his first speech to the nation as prime minister of a newly independent Nigeria. His voice and face crackled and flickered, as though the footage had been broadcast from a galaxy millions of miles away. His ambitions for Nigeria seemed equally unreachable, leaving me pining nostalgically for a young, forward-looking Nigeria that I never knew.

  Back in town, I walked aimlessly along the streets, ignoring the stares my un-Islamic attire attracted. Balewa’s tomb had energised me to the extent that when I came across a white arch emblazoned with the words Babangida Square, I didn’t feel the usual irritation. Structures like this, paeans to previous dictators, were everywhere in Nigeria, befouling our towns and cities and street signs like an unwashed bloodstain: Sani Abacha Road, Babangida Drive . . . I couldn’t understand why they were still there.

  I entered Babangida Square, sidestepping the sleeping guardsman at the entrance. The place had become a prairie of grass, so tall and overgrown that I was startled by the sneeze of a goat grazing nearby. A shabby terrace of seats occupied one end of the square, opposite a statue of a nameless soldier. It was a sad, neglected place, and a contrast to Tafawa Balewa’s tomb. Our despots don’t even look after places named in their honour.

  A man passing through the square informed me that the space was used for boy scout parades and similar gatherings.

  ‘Why are there so many street names and parks named after people like Babangida?’ I asked the man.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘They put it there when the people are alive, and they leave them like that.’

  ‘It’s not because they like these people?’

  ‘No,’ he smiled, shaking his head.

  So civic neglect keeps the dictators’ names up there, rather than pride or solidarity. Which was mildly comforting, I suppose. Inertia is preferable to evil.

  10

  Hidden Legacies

  Jos

  With a tense bladder, I sat in the back of a long, ten-seater car. In the seat in front, two female passengers hummed Christian songs to themselves. Ahead of them, a burly, broad-shouldered man in the front passenger seat turned around to grin at the baby sitting with its mother in the row behind him. The infant’s giant forehead bulged irresistibly over round glassy eyes and dumpling cheeks. When the man reached out for the baby, the mother handed him to this complete stranger, who stood the tot on his lap and murmured silly nothings to him.

  Two hours later, we were in Jos. This former tin-mining town sits on a high plateau in rocky, Wild West scenery filled with dusty grey-brown boulders and beautiful ‘hanging rock’ formations, which were arranged as though an invisible, playful giant had placed the boulders one on top of the other. Jos was my favourite city as a child. I loved its mosquito-free, high-altitude freshness and the scenery, so fantastically lunar and un-Nigerian.

  In my hotel room, I sat on the bed and read the sign pasted on the wall by the hotel management: CELEBRATIONS FOR WHAT?

  What were your personally set goals for this year, and how much did you achieved?

  If you have not achieve at least 50 – 60% of your goals, you have no reason to celebrate.

  But if you did, then on behalf of the Management and staff, we wish you a Happy Xmas and more achievement in the coming year.

  This is the time to set the targets.

  I’d long ago adopted the British aversion to being patronised, but I was surprisingly comforted by the paternalistic message. It was nice to be in a place where actively promoting such values was acceptable. I needed that kick up the backside sometimes.

  I stepped out onto the streets, where rocky hills protruded in the near distance. Jos was filled with people and okadas, despite my memories of its sparseness. Nigerian cities keep growing and growing, it appears. My surroundings conjured up vague fragments of memory, of Jos’s cool grey skies, a quiet restaurant serving delicious plantain in a museum, which my father said was the best in the country. Remembering little else about that visit, I headed straight to the museum to jog my memory.

  The Jos Museum comprised several parts, including the main exhibition building and the Museum of Traditional Architecture. The latter was certainly the most original. It contained replicas of regional traditional architectural styles around Nigeria. The buildings were constructed in an open-air compound and, according to a sign at the entrance, were situated in geographical order: Igbo buildings in the south-east, Yoruba buildings in the south-west, Tive and Nupe in middle belt, and a replica of the Friday Mosque in Zaria in the north.

  The Friday Mosque’s interior was beautiful, with arched adobe beams that met at the top to form a dome. Such elegant architecture made from simple materials was an arresting sight, even if the structure looked ripe for demolition. Sunlight streamed through a gaping hole in the mosque’s wooden roof, and birds sprang from their nests to swoop past my face. A man sat on an old wooden chair in the centre of the mosque reading a newspaper before tossing it on the floor and sauntering away.

  Was this replica the exact size of the original mosque? And when was the original mosque built? I had so many questions, but there were no answers. The museum didn’t provide any information. Still, many of the structures were impressive. There were adobe houses with thatched roofs, elegant grooves and cornicing on their walls and floor. The buildings’ ethnic origins could only be identified by geography but, with my poor
sense of direction, I easily lost track of my compass bearings.

  Entering another mystery structure, I encountered a man – the only other visitor at the museum – investigating it too.

  ‘Excuse me, do you know what this building is?’ I asked. The short stocky man responded by sarcastically impersonating a know-nothing museum guide.

  ‘As you can see, this is a very, very old building,’ he deadpanned. ‘And this is the entrance,’ – he pointed at the door – ‘and this is a window.’

  Back outside, towards the entrance, a group of men sat under a tree, chatting. I was savvy enough by now to know they were probably museum staff. The silver-haired one stood up and introduced himself as the caretaker.

  ‘Why are the buildings so run-down?’ I asked him.

  ‘We renovate the place on a seasonal basis, between September and April because that is the dry season. But we couldn’t do it this year because the funds were not forthcoming.’

  ‘Has this happened before?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said matter-of-factly.

  Grass is always green, rain is always wet, and Nigerian ministry funding is always diverted and misused. The caretaker’s de facto job was to sit under a tree and watch the decaying roofs and crumbling buildings. Was there at least some information on these structures that I could look at?

  ‘Some of them have information, but not all,’ he said.

  I gave up on the architectural exhibits and turned my thoughts to lunch. The museum restaurant was the only firm memory I’d retained from my childhood trip here. Housed in a traditional adobe building, it had served the best fried plantain I had ever eaten, intensifying my lifelong love affair with the food. I adore fried plantain’s juicy, firm, succulent slices. So far on my journey I’d successfully ordered it at least once every day, only going without if the restaurant had none in stock. My zealousness was worse when I was younger. One summer, staying at our Uncle Letam’s house, Zina, Tedum and I ate plantain three times a day every day for two weeks, dismissing our uncle’s pleas that we diversify our diet. Just keep it coming, we told him, and so he did. We never got bored of the stuff.

  That legendary meal at the Jos Museum restaurant took my love of plantain to a new level. They cooked it just right: not too dry and not too soft; moist without losing its firmness. Twenty years on, I was eager for more of the same. But on reaching the restaurant, I was devastated to find that it was temporarily closed. A man directed me, hungry and despondent, to another restaurant inside one of the traditional huts in the middle of ‘Chief Ogbwa’s compound’. But instead of being a Nigerian eatery in keeping with the museum theme, I was surprised to find a Chinese restaurant with oriental decor and soulful 1980s saxophone music playing on the radio. I sat down at a red-and-white chequered table near two student types who were scrutinising the menu.

  ‘They’re not serious,’ the boy muttered, aghast at the prices. The pair left without ordering. I found myself alone in the restaurant, eating sweet-and-sour chicken in a breeze that shook the Chinese lanterns hanging from the ceiling beams, and made the paper fans flutter against the walls.

  The main building of Jos Museum contains samples of the famous terracotta figurines of the ancient Nok civilisation, a sophisticated society that existed on the Jos Plateau in northern and central Nigeria between 1000 BC and AD 500, and produced some of West Africa’s finest and oldest sculptures.

  My father had raved about them and stressed their importance, but all efforts to inspire us disappeared down the black hole of our pre-teen incuriosity. At that age we found it impossible to appreciate Nigerian history – our young minds hadn’t developed the self-regard and cultural one-upmanship that I think partly nourishes such interests. I value my father’s intentions in retrospect, though: I was paying attention now.

  For years I had pored over images of the Nok sculptures in books. The large, hollow terracottas are beautiful, haunting, luscious-lipped masterpieces. They depict animals, people or male and female human heads (almost life-size) with highly stylized features, pierced eyes, and elaborate hairstyles and jewellery. Some were moustached dignitaries, some depicted people deformed by disease, others represented people in a variety of poses, including horse riders. Hand-sculpted from clay, then smoothed and polished and fired for several hours, nobody knows what purpose these sculptures – up to a metre high – served. There are theories that they commemorated ancestors or marked graves, or were used as charms to ward off disease, infertility and crop failure.

  The Nok terracottas (and the civilisation that made them) were first discovered during tin mining operations in 1928. A mine worker chanced upon a terracotta monkey head buried in the ground near the village of Nok on the Jos Plateau. The artefacts were handed over to a museum in Jos by the English colonel leading the mining operation.

  Over the next few decades, thousands more terracotta pieces were plucked from the ground, although most had crumbled in the waterlogged soil. The few figurines to be found intact fetched high prices on the international art market.

  In 1943 , again near the village of Nok, a tin mining worker found a clay head and took it home to use as a scarecrow. When the director of the mine heard about the finding, he showed it to Bernard Fagg, an archeologist who initiated an official excavation. By the late 1970s, more than 150 figurines had been found on the Jos Plateau. Since then, more figurines have turned up in the Middle Niger valley and the Lower Benue valley, an area of 80,000 square kilometres.

  The Nok civilisation flourished at a time when other cultures, such as the early Mayans, were developing too. Stone Age Nigerians had settled and created a complex society that produced this fine artwork. It is thought that perhaps the figurines were produced by a wide range of iron-smelting communities across this part of Nigeria, who may possibly have been precursors to the Yoruba and Benin empires. Whoever the Nok people were, their civilisation disappeared mysteriously around AD 500. Knowledge of them is frustratingly patchy. The region’s muddy, acidic soil dissolved every skeleton, temple and home, leaving only an historical enigma that international researchers are still trying to resolve.

  When news of the antiquities came to light, it triggered large-scale thievery. Nok sculptures ended up in the homes of rich Western collectors, or locked away in the vaults of European and American museums, never to see the light of day. The Ethnological Museum in Berlin and the British Museum have several hundred pieces each, while the Louvre in Paris contains some impressive examples. Meanwhile, Jos Museum was bequeathed the sorrier-looking leftovers. The terracottas I saw on display were small and forlorn specimens, the once-haughty refinement of their features now chastened by erosion in the soil. For years Nigerian governments have campaigned for the return of the finest terracottas by Europe and America. But in 2002, Nigeria and France signed an agreement allowing the Nok statues to stay in the Louvre on a twenty-five-year renewable basis – on condition that France acknowledged Nigeria’s ownership of the items.

  The debate about whether antiquities should remain in their countries of origin simmers on. Some people believe that no country can enjoy automatic claim on ancient artefacts found within their borders because there is no evidence that the people who created the antiquities are direct ancestors of the present-day citizens of the region. Yale professor Kwame Appiah has written: ‘We don’t know whether Nok sculptures were commissioned by kings or commoners; we don’t know whether the people who made them and the people who paid for them thought of them as belonging to the kingdom, to a man, to a lineage, to the gods. One thing we know for sure, however, is that they didn’t make them for Nigeria.’

  But Appiah went on to say that if an artefact is ‘found in a country, and no one can establish an existing claim on it, the government gets to decide what to do with it’. He added that if artefacts such as the Nok terracottas are of high cultural value, ‘It would be better to think of them [the government] as trustees for humanity.’

  I felt cheated that I should travel all this way to Jos �
� the source – and find some of the least fine examples of Nok terracottas. But after experiencing the crumbling replica buildings of the Archaeological Museum, a treasonous corner of my mind made peace with the foreign custody of some of our antiquities. At least they’re guaranteed better security and maintenance in museums abroad, and will be viewed by a wider audience. Without these artefacts in the West, I think the world might know a little less about Nigerian history.

  Walking along the streets of Jos afterwards, I came across the National Film Institute. Curious about its activities, I decided to investigate the premises. After passing through the unmanned entrance, I entered a brightly lit warehouse, its shelves stacked with celluloid negatives of Nigerian life dating back to 1932. The institute had bought many of its films from British archives in London, and its staff in Jos cleaned, restored and preserved the celluloid tapes. I wanted to know if they had any footage of my father that perhaps I hadn’t seen before.

  The lady in charge asked me what I was looking for.

  ‘I’d like to watch some of these reels.’

  ‘You need to have written permission,’ she replied.

  ‘How long will it take?’

  ‘Two or three days. There is a lot of bureaucracy. Once they sign and give permission then we can let you watch the film.’