Looking for Transwonderland

by Noo Saro-Wiwa

  Beneath some beautiful bronze plaques layered with bas-relief carvings, the museum caretaker sat and breastfed her youngest child while chatting to a man who exhibited an in-depth knowledge of the heritage sector.

  ‘The state of Nigerian museums is terrible . . . terrible,’ the man said. ‘In the sixties and seventies Ghanaians used to come to Nigerian museums for training. Now they have overtaken us.’ His name was Maurice Archibong, and he turned out to be a travel writer for one of the national newspapers. We exchanged numbers and agreed to continue the conversation in Lagos in a month’s time.

  Across town, I searched for Chief Ogiamien’s house, the only imperial building not razed to the ground by the British. The geriatric building stood next to a noisy motorbike repair garage, the latter overshadowing the former with its modern vigour. Ogiamien’s house was made of red earth with the characteristic horizontal grooves running along its exterior walls, and bas-relief carvings decorating one of the doors. There was nothing, no plaque or sign, to celebrate this sole remnant of empire. Metal chairs and low tables cluttered its courtyard.

  At the back of the house, among the complex of rooms, a smiley elderly woman sat in an alleyway. I hoped she could tell me more about the house, but she didn’t understand English. As I took photos, she gestured to me, speaking in Bini. Unintelligible as her words were, the international language of begging was easy to decipher. I dashed her 40 and left.

  The oba lineage still continues in Benin, although these days the oba’s palace is fighting for supremacy in a world where money and political power wield far more influence than traditional titles. In 2007, the oba of Benin banished the esama – a non-hereditary title-holder – from the royal palace after the esama was accused of acting as if he were the oba himself. He certainly enjoyed a lot of power. The esama is the father of the wealthy ex-governor of Edo state, a man who was under investigation for corruption. In an audacious move, the esama ignored the oba’s traditional New Year ceremony at the palace, and instead invited several high chiefs to a ceremony of his own.

  Catching wind of this, the enraged oba suspended the esama from the palace for flouting palace protocol (an ‘abominable act’), and barred him and the naughty chiefs from wearing palace paraphernalia or partaking in palace activities.

  This wasn’t the first time the oba and the esama had clashed. The esama – ranked sixth in the palace but number one in wealth – was accused of acting above his station when he decorated a visiting Jamaican ex-prime minister with royal beads, a ritual traditionally performed by the oba. The ‘upstart’ esama also received Ghanaian and Yoruba royalty at the airport in a sumptuous parade before inviting his guests to his palace, not the oba’s. The esama’s son defended his father’s behaviour, saying that the esama ought to use his wealth and influence to ‘protect’ the royal traditions. But the oba considered it an erosion of his status.

  Age and seniority used to matter a lot more in Nigerian society. As a child, my older relatives would conclude arguments with me by deploying that most infuriating of non-sequiturs, ‘I am your senior!’; any chocolate disputes with Zina, my twin, were routinely settled in her favour because she entered the world ten minutes before me. Age was a prime criterion for competency, respect and authority, and it still imbues certain old men with the belief that they are omniscient demigods beyond reproach. When, for example, President Obasanjo’s son accused the then vice-president of corruption, the VP’s spokesman issued this response in a national newspaper: ‘The VP does not belong to a culture in which children trade words with elders . . . Young men who attack men old enough to be their father are dismissed as rude and uncultured. This boy will not be glorified with a response.’ The ‘boy’ in question was a grown man with a PhD.

  I’m convinced that gerontocracy stifles individual creativity and innovation. But returning to Nigeria made me realise how much the country’s poverty is undermining this old system, anyway: my relative wealth gave me a lot of leverage for a person of my age – gerontocracy is gradually being replaced by corrupt plutocracy.

  ‘We do not talk of his name,’ a staff worker at the oba’s palace said, wagging her finger sternly. In asking for her opinion on the esama, I had committed a major faux pas.

  ‘But—’

  ‘I said we do not talk of him here.’ She raised her palm in the air. ‘You are a foreigner here, so you didn’t know . . . but we do not talk of him.’ She blinked and shifted huffily in her seat.

  I was visiting the palace, or eguae, set in a sprawling, modernised compound in the middle of Benin City. The palace hummed with activity. Flags flew everywhere, police strolled about, and royal title-holders donned traditional robes and beads, hurrying from one place to the next. The oba spends most of his time inside the palace, emerging only for festivals and other royal functions. The place retained a certain mystique and was the subject of constant rumours, including whispers that the oba’s many wives walk in permanent silence, prohibited from uttering a word.

  Could I get a tour of the palace? I asked the oba’s staff. They said no. Instead, they offered me a booklet about the history and rules of the palace. One page read:SOME OF THE QUALIFICATIONS WHICH ENABLE A CITIZEN TO QUALIFY FOR INITIATION INTO EGUAE OBA N’EDO (PALACE): 1. He must be sane.

  2. He should be free of infectious diseases, contagious diseases, any deadly diseases.

  3. He should not be a descendant of any of the families forbidden to enter the palace or move freely with the free citizens.

  4. He must not be an enemy of the oba.

  5. A naturalised Bini.

  As I read the book, a portly palace staff member called Veronica sat me down at her desk by the palace courtyard. She was a brisk, stocky, short-haired woman whose eyes were windows to a very tenacious soul.

  ‘Where are you from?’ she asked.

  ‘Port Harcourt.’

  ‘But you tok like Ingleesh pessin.’ I immediately sensed she wasn’t asking out of innocent curiosity.

  ‘That’s because I went to university in London.’

  ‘Where did you attend secondary school?’

  ‘In Nigeria,’ I lied, trying to blink casually at her.

  ‘Which secondary school?’ Veronica demanded. She was shaking me down for information, taking detailed inventory of my answers and my life. I searched the sky for a response but gave up when my hesitation lasted too long.

  ‘I went to school in England,’ I conceded. The confession would cost me, I knew. Veronica turned to her colleague and said something in their Bini dialect. She mentioned ‘London’ a couple of times, in tones of restrained glee, as if she’d just won a mini lottery. In her eyes, I had attended secondary school in England, therefore I was rich. I was ready to leave the palace, especially now that they wouldn’t give me a tour of the place. But Veronica kept me in my seat. She wanted me to buy a book about Benin and a DVD of the oba’s coronation.

  ‘3,000,’ she said in a freshly adopted salesman’s pitch. ‘It’s a good price . . . good price.’ Zealously, she tapped her fingers on the table and eyeballed me. I bargained downwards but didn’t have the skill or patience to lower the price to a reasonable level. Eventually I paid an excessive 1,200 for the merchandise.

  ‘Won’t you dash me something small?’ Veronica grinned as she pocketed the cash.

  ‘I don’t have money.’

  ‘Yes you do, you are from London,’ she replied sharply. Her steely smile and fidgety fingers bullied me into submission. I watched my foolish hands reach into my bag and rummage for small change. As Veronica’s eyes bored into my wallet, I wanted to tell her she was wrong to think that I was rich, and that life in England is a never-ending payment of mortgages and bills; liquidity and disposable cash were an illusion. But she would never accept this truth. I sourly gave her 100 and said goodbye.

  By now, Benin’s dereliction of its heritage had become a compelling attraction in itself. I went around town, examining the pitiful remnants of the defensive moat that once ringed the
ancient kingdom. They were scattered at various points around the city centre, the water now replaced by tall grasses. Signs had been erected reading: YOU ARE CROSSING THE BENIN MOAT, THE GREAT PERIMETER OF ANCIENT BENIN KINGDOM, ONE OF NIGERIA’S GREATEST LANDMARKS. Further on, I saw a smaller sticker that said: ‘Benin City walls and moats. Our cultural heritage, our national monuments. Protect them. Do not destroy, do not excavate, do not dump refuse.’ The sign was surrounded by a mutinous mountain of banana skins, plastic bottles and wrappers floating in bubbly green sewage slime.

  ‘Aren’t people proud of Benin history?’ I asked Michael, my okada man. He’d brought me to the widest section of the moat.

  ‘We are,’ he replied.

  ‘So why is there so much rubbish here?’

  ‘People are not supposed to build their houses very close. But there is no people to enforce the law, so they can just do whatever they like. You see the rubbish inside the moat? The government is supposed to provide rubbish bin.’

  We rode to a large section of moat that was about 9 metres wide and still 6 metres deep, even though vegetation and rubbish clogged its base.

  ‘It’s not the people’s fault,’ Michael said. ‘It’s the government. You can see how they have tied the rubbish,’ he pointed at the tied-up plastic bags. ‘They bring it here because there is nowhere else to put it.’

  ‘The moat is much bigger than I thought,’ I remarked.

  ‘They dug with shovels, no machinery, just wood that they carve into shovels. They were thick men.’ Michael flexed his biceps.

  If only the moat’s litter were as biodegradable as our history. Perhaps it was wrong of me to expect anyone to take serious interest in the moat’s remains. It was historically significant, but its function as a defence against invaders was now obsolete, so why should the people of twenty-first-century Benin care? They had other things to worry about.

  Besides, I’d been in the country long enough to take less proprietary pride in the Benin empire than I did when in London. I felt more Ogoni than ever, and Benin’s history didn’t seem part of my own any more. My ethnic minority status in Nigeria had grown almost as strong as my identity as a racial minority in England. My people, the Ogonis, had been bit-players in the drama of Nigerian history in which the Binis, Yorubas, Hausas and Igbos played a leading role. Mocked as simpletons and cannibals, Ogonis were barely known outside the Delta region until my father made our presence felt.

  ‘Even your Aunty Janice was surprised when I told her we have over 110 villages in Ogoni!’ my mother told me. Janice was an Edo from Benin state.

  Neighbouring ethnic groups mockingly twisted Ogoni words: pia pia (meaning ‘people’) became pior pior, which means ‘bad’. According to my mother, Ogonis are characteristically passive and accommodating, to the extent that we became tenants in our own towns. The economic and numerical dominance of the Igbo people engulfed us, their commercially savvy tentacles spreading as far as Bori, the tiny Ogoni town where my father was born. By the start of the Biafran civil war, Igbos owned about 80 per cent of Bori’s businesses, my mother told me. Only when the Biafran Republic was declared did most of them vacate the town to join their new republic.

  These ethnic disparities were significant at national level. But in a global context, what were the differences between us now? From a foreigner’s point of view, the Bini, Yoruba, Ogoni, Igbo and Hausa are all the same; we’re all Nigerians, demoted by modern-day corruption – that great equaliser – to bit-players wading in a sea of rubbish and dereliction.

  On a sunny morning, I boarded a car destined for Ilorin, a town three hours north of Ibadan. The car waited for passengers in the eye of the honking, rumbling swirl of street life. A vendor thrust a book in my face, written by a Nigerian doctor, called How to Gain Weight. A song by the singer Asa boomed from a nearby stereo: ‘There is fire on the mountain, and nobody seems to be on the run, oh there is fire on the mountain top and no one is running.’

  I paid for two seats at the back of the car to give my thighs breathing space. The gangly man sitting next to me used the extra space to spread his legs as widely as possible, leaving me squeezed once again against the window. I was livid. Months of travelling cheek-by-jowl in cars had instilled in me a new-found loathing of men’s legs, which, like air, seem constantly to expand to fill the space available. I’m amazed they’re not all buried in Y-shaped coffins.

  After so many weeks of travelling in disagreeable conditions, staying positive about Nigeria was difficult when economic success constantly taunted us from the horizon. With oil now costing $140 (21,000) a barrel, politicians’ complacency over the economy had only deepened, and people were still suffering in the Niger Delta. I tried to envision Ogoniland as an oil-free economy in which we modernised the farming that’s sustained us so well for centuries. Fleetingly, I fantasised about a California-style food industry, free from oil spills, with me as a modern farmer exporting fruit and palm oil to foreign markets. My paternal grandfather would be proud.

  ‘When I came to England I saw people tending to their little farms,’ he once observed while giving me a lecture about the virtues of toil. ‘They were working hard.’ Bemused, I wondered how he could mistake a front garden for a farm. But in Nigeria, the two can resemble one another. Our farming is largely a small-scale affair with no machinery or fertilizer, just women bent over and sowing, planting and reaping. Whenever my grandmother or aunt said that they were ‘going to the farm’, I would visualise these diminutive women in their wrappas and headscarves, whistling behind the wheel of a tractor. It was very confusing. I didn’t realise that they and the women bending over by the roadside were growing crops – they always looked like they were doing a spot of gardening.

  Small-scale farmers like my aunty don’t grow enough crops to feed Nigeria’s population, which means the country has to import nearly $750 million worth of food. To alleviate the situation, the western state of Kwara plans on mechanising its farms. When Zimbabwe’s government declared that it would appropriate farms belonging to white Zimbabweans in 2004, the Kwara State government saw an opportunity and invited thirteen landless Zimbabweans to set up a mechanised agriculture business in Kwara on a twenty-five-year lease. The farmers settled near the town of Ilorin on the Tsonga farms, an area cultivated by the Muslim Nupe people. Some of the Nupe were paid to move off their farms so that the Zimbabweans could start producing soya beans, rice, cassava and dairy products.

  For the first six months, while their houses were being built, the Zimbabweans lived like pioneers in makeshift tents. Now, their newly constructed homes were surrounded by verdant lawns, swimming pools and the obligatory dogs maintaining hostilities at the gate. I loved the way these farmers could transfer their know-how to other parts of the world and create oases of high living. Knowledge is such a beautiful, powerful thing.

  Initially, some of the Nupe people weren’t happy about handing over their land to the Zimbabweans. They believed their farms were being unfairly seized. The Emir of Tsonga was accused of knowingly persuading village leaders (some of whom were illiterate) to sign away their land. In protest, several villagers invaded the emir’s palace on his daughter’s wedding day to deliver their complaints in person. This new system was too confusing and daunting, they grumbled: complex legalities, new agricultural practices, alien crops. Over time, however, the Nupe broadly accepted the situation, after being mollified by the government’s offer of re-allocated land, seeds, equipment, chemicals and cash.

  My driver dropped me off outside a milk factory. Shouting above the din of construction work, I asked if I could speak to the farmer in charge. A Nupe man led me to a black Zimbabwean called Onias, who was sitting in an office with his white boss. Dan Swaart was an ex-tobacco farmer, a big man with bright blue eyes, leathery brown arms buried beneath a forest of blond hairs, and a cheery disposition that belied the trauma of being jailed by Mugabe and losing his home. Counting stacks of 500 notes piled up on the table near some machinery, Dan paused to g
ive me a friendly handshake.

  ‘Is farming very different in Nigeria?’ I asked.

  ‘You have to adapt to the climate and the soil,’ he said. ‘They’ve been using this soil for years without fertiliser, so we had to get the right nutrients into it.’

  ‘How does working with Nigerians compare with working with Zimbabweans?’

  ‘They haven’t been trained,’ Dan said. ‘Zimbabweans are disciplined, but here there’s no discipline, so you have to bring discipline and teach them to work. They’re used to lying under a mango tree for eight hours a day and working for two hours of the day,’ Dan laughed. ‘So that’s a mindset you have to change. But they’re good people.’

  ‘How do you communicate with them?’

  ‘We’ve got supervisors and they speak English. But you know, you speak English to them and they can’t understand your English. They talk this pidgin English. They really don’t understand,’ he beamed. ‘When you first get here – especially on the telephone – they’re difficult to understand. But once you get the gist, then you’re in.’

  Dan’s aim was to ‘pass the knowledge’ on to the Nigerians, set up the machinery, get it working and train the people. The Zimbabweans are teaching the Nupe all the other aspects of mechanised farming, including how to clear their lands properly and plant with planters.