Looking for Transwonderland

by Noo Saro-Wiwa

  My father tried to address this problem non-violently through his Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), which campaigned to improve the environment and ensure Delta ethnic groups received our fair share of the oil wealth. Since my father’s death in 1995, several militant groups, mainly ethnic Ijaws, have adopted a similar political platform, but achieve their aims by abducting oil workers, sabotaging oil pipelines and forcing oil companies to pay ‘protection’ money. Their actions have reduced crude oil production by a third since 2006. Gangs such as the Niger Delta Vigilantes attack oil installations to extort money or force the oil companies to create local development projects, which has placated a few people.

  These gangs, including the NDPVF, are embedded in a muddy, interchangeable world of criminality and politics. One minute they’re fighting the government for ‘resource control’, the next they’re cooperating with corrupt politicians and policemen to set up arms deals and oil bunkering ventures (oil bunkering involves tapping pipelines and selling the oil on the local and foreign black market).

  On the road to Ndoni, Rivers State felt like a feral place. The violence had leapt from the newspaper pages and was playing out in front of me. Sleeping was the only way for me to escape the anxiety.

  The road branching off the highway to Odili’s home town was freshly tarmacked, and sturdy new bridges carried us across the numerous rivers and creeks of the Niger River Delta. We turned off the highway and into a sleepy village situated by the steep sandy banks of a magnificently blue river. The tidy streets, paved with interlocking stone slabs, contained only a handful of pedestrians, including a woman strolling contentedly beneath a blue parasol. A bus station under construction nearby was fronted by a sign proclaiming it an ULTRA-MODERN MOTOR PARK.

  ‘How many vehicles are coming here?’ Sonny snorted. ‘This was just swamp before.’ He pointed at a clump of trees across the street. Building a motor park seemed an unnecessary expense, considering the size of the village. Like voyeurs, we cruised around, taking inventory of the diverted oil wealth surrounding us.

  ‘Look at it,’ Sonny murmured, ‘look at our money. Odili has turned the village into a town!’ Street lights – only 4.5 metres apart – lined the roads. One or two of them were even switched on despite the midday sun, as if smugly emphasising Ndoni’s constant power supply. Electricity seemed more a status symbol here than a basic requirement for the functioning of daily life.

  Odili’s mansion was unmissable: a big white colonnaded structure with a red tiled roof, a satellite dish and several air con units barnacling its exterior. Almost as a statement of virtue, the house stood next to a Catholic church, a fancy red-and-white building, fenced off by an ornate metal gate. Other alleged beneficiaries of Odili’s governorship had built mansions in the vicinity. They had two-storey, glass-fronted atriums, with the owner’s names – Onyema Hall or Oshinili Villa – emblazoned hubristically across them.

  ‘These houses look empty,’ I commented.

  ‘That’s because they are staying in Port Harcourt – where there’s no light.’ Sonny sneered at the irony. People spent most of their time in the big city. Nearby was a plot of land scattered with palm trees that had been felled to make way for the construction of more houses. Sonny and I rolled slowly along the streets, past a huge house with a thatched rotunda in the garden, which Sonny suspected belonged to Peter Odili’s older brother. Odili liked to spread his wealth. He is renowned for dashing people money – 20 million here, 50 million there.

  ‘You cannot get close to him and come back empty-handed,’ Sonny said. But what good had Odili really done for Ndoni? The town was still a quiet backwater: messy-haired women still sold fruit and groundnuts on the side of the spotless streets; the school building was a shabby confection of peeling yellow paint, and the pupils ran around in tatty uniforms. How typical that the church should be in better shape than the primary school.

  ‘When you are in power you bring development to your village,’ Sonny insisted, to my surprise.

  ‘But they should be bringing development to everyone. Can you imagine British prime ministers developing their home towns in England and no one else’s? They don’t do that.’

  ‘But you cannot be in government for eight years and your village is still bush,’ Sonny countered. He told me that when he and my brother Ken attended the funeral of a politician’s mother at their village, he was taken aback by the scruffiness of the village. ‘If you are in government you must develop your village and your people. Otherwise what will they take for remember you?’

  I had assumed Sonny was against Ndoni’s development. In fact, he was simply annoyed that no Ogoni person had had the chance to occupy high political office and develop our villages similarly. He didn’t support corruption the way Ekpenyong in Calabar did, but he was still in favour of allocating funds along ethnic lines.

  ‘Nobody from the south has become a minister in Abuja,’ Sonny fumed. ‘When I was in Abuja with your father and he saw the way they were building the place, he always be angry. Twenty-four hours a day, he was angry.’

  I remember that rage. My father would grumble at the gleaming skyscrapers, venting livid clouds of tobacco smoke through his nostrils as he complained about oil money developing the north but not the south. However, he didn’t believe in politicians diverting public funds to help their own village at the expense of others. He was too high-minded to delve too much into Nigerian politics, the rottenness of which I now fully appreciated. In the upper echelons of government, it isn’t easy to keep one’s head down and do a good job. Having principles is considered a sign of weakness by many politicians, who will punish those who try to uphold any morals. If a governor or senator doesn’t help his or her friends and kinsmen, not only do they face the wrath of their nearest and dearest, but their political enemies will see feebleness in their honesty and begin sharpening the knives. In a system like this, politicians of a dishonest bent will gladly swim with the corrupt tide rather than get washed up alone on the penniless banks of virtue.

  The next day, at my mother’s suggestion, I visited my aunty at her shop on the other side of Port Harcourt. Known to all as Big Mama (real name Elizabeth), she’s my mother’s eldest sister, a large, frank, gregarious septuagenarian who once celebrated my puberty by playfully poking my breasts and cackling long and hard. Her ribaldry couldn’t be more different from my mother’s prim reserve, yet their faces are almost exactly alike; seeing my mother in Big Mama’s every smile or frown brought on pangs of homesickness after four months on the road.

  I met Big Mama at her small fabric shop across town, next to the law office of her son, Tom. I hadn’t seen Tom since he was a good-looking, spirited university student. Nowadays, his handsome face was plumper and fringed with slightly greying hair. The last fourteen years had taken their toll. His father, an Ogoni activist, was murdered with three other men in 1994. The Abacha regime exploited their deaths and falsely accused my father and eight of his colleagues of inciting the murders, although on that day none of them had been allowed to enter Ogoniland where the murders took place.

  It created a fissure in the family that had taken more than a decade to close. Time had passed and wounds were healing; we didn’t dwell on these issues. In such family matters I still felt like a child somehow, and I naturally excluded myself from these ‘adult’ concerns. Besides, Port Harcourt’s violence seem to occupy Big Mama’s thoughts these days.

  ‘It’s so dangerous now,’ she complained. Almost every week the streets flinched in the crossfire of gang bullets.

  Tom asked me why I was in Nigeria. I told him I was travelling around the country and writing a book about my experiences.

  ‘Why are you writing?’ he said. ‘Junior was the one to do that sort of thing. I thought you and Zina would become doctors or lawyers.’

  Our cultural differences ran deep. ‘I don’t want to be a doctor or lawyer. I’m doing things that I find interesting. I can’t pursue a career just because I’m exp
ected to.’

  ‘You should come back to Nigeria.’

  ‘I can’t just come back here.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know the country well enough . . . That’s partly what my trip is about. I’m getting to know the place.’ My dislike for the country was softening into a wavering ambiguity.

  ‘You’re like one of those 1950s British women who never leave England and don’t want to try new things,’ Tom declared.

  ‘No, I’m not!’ I retorted, irked by his inaccuracy, and a little threatened by the suggestion. ‘You can’t just move to a country you don’t know very well. I need to understand how it works. And I’ve left England plenty of times. I’ve been all over West Africa too.’

  ‘Oh,’ Tom said, ‘I didn’t realise.’

  To bolster my case, I mentioned how expensive it was to travel around Nigeria.

  ‘Junior could buy you a first-class ticket to Abuja if you want him to,’ Tom said. ‘He works in government.’

  ‘No, he couldn’t, he doesn’t have money to spend on me. And even if he did, I wouldn’t expect him to.’

  ‘But you can ask him.’

  ‘Why would I? He’s not my father. He should spend his money on his sons. If I want my own ticket I’ll buy it myself.’

  ‘You think like a British person,’ Tom jibed with a smile. My family like to confront, prod, dissect and disparage with the kindest of intentions – but it rubbed raw against my diasporan sensibilities, which were more used to British-style individualism and all the ginger diplomacy that comes with it.

  Changing the subject, I asked Big Mama whether her Catholic church was becoming more evangelical in the style of its services.

  ‘Oh yes!’ she said, raising her hand in approval. ‘We even have prayer warriors in our church!’ By ‘prayer warriors’ she meant worshippers who commit their lives to praying for others. ‘Do you go to church?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ I stammered, half considering lying.

  Big Mama’s face crumpled into a mortified frown. Tom, who’d become a devout Christian over the years, was equally shocked. After quizzing me about the Bible and exposing every hole in my knowledge, he devoted the rest of our chat to Saving me.

  He was wasting his energy. For years my mother, God bless her, tried unsuccessfully to drag me to church. Born a Catholic, she would take Zina, Tedum and me to mass every Sunday to instil the devoutness that our father – not so religious a man – strove to minimise. But a childhood spent marinating in stolid, European-style worship was enough to permanently kill my enthusiasm for churchgoing.

  Not even the evangelical Pentecostal services that my mother converted to could sway me. When we were around twelve, she took Zina and me to an evening service, our first taste of evangelical worship. We obeyed the pastor’s call to stand up and introduce ourselves to the beaming congregation. Then we watched in bewilderment as the pastor roared down the mike, touching people’s foreheads and blessing them before they collapsed in spent heaps in the arms of fellow worshippers. Zina and I were soon ushered onstage to receive blessings. The pastor placed a gentle palm on our foreheads while belting praises to Jeezos. Naive to the protocol, we resisted the growing pressure of his palm with tautened necks and heavy feet, waiting for a divine force to knock us out. But as the pastor’s palm grew more and more insistent, we realised it was best to give in and launch ourselves backwards. The congregation went wild.

  Amateur dramatics aside, the service was very uplifting. Had I been raised in that church from the start, things might have been different, but by age twelve I was stuck in my lapsed ways and nothing could make me attend church regularly. My mother sadly resigned herself to the situation.

  My father wasn’t troubled by this. He disliked excessive fixation on religion if it distracted people from their work or education. I discovered this on a Sunday afternoon in Port Harcourt when I was about nine years old. A cousin of mine, Patience, had visited our house while my father was at the office. Patience – an extremely devout teenager who didn’t want to go to university – suggested that Zina, Tedum and I cut up several pieces of paper and inscribe them with phrases such as ‘Jesus Loves Me’ and ‘God Lives’. For us youngsters, it was a fun exercise, a chance to whip out our felt-tip pens and express ourselves artistically. We pasted the colourful signs high up on our bedroom wall and admired the results. But when our father returned home, the sight of our handiwork detonated a rage we’d never seen in him before.

  ‘Take this off the wall!’ he boomed. ‘Take it off now!’ He jumped up and ripped off bits of paper himself. We scurried around the room removing the slogans, while he fumed and ranted, ordering us to speed it up. Apoplectic, he turned to a sobbingly defiant Patience and urged her – ordered her – to concentrate on her studies, not on twenty-four-hour prayer. Then he directed his wrath towards me and my siblings. We were not to get hooked on this ‘opiate of the masses’, he warned. I was quaking and confused, too young to understand his anger, which appeared to be mixed with an uncharacteristic panic. My father was a proactive man who believed in action, self-sufficiency, progress. He wanted Ogonis to get educated, to become doctors and lawyers, or geologists with knowledge of the oil industry. Although, according to my brother Junior, our father became more spiritual and devoted to prayer towards the end of his life, at this point he was an agnostic who sought to fix problems, not pray for them to go away. With Nigeria in the grip of a military dictatorship, he feared that people like Patience were slipping into a religious coma.

  More than twenty years on, I sympathised with my father, yet I was on the receiving end of cousin Tom and Big Mama’s reverse outrage at my church absences. Tom, intent on laying all seven shades of Jesus on me, was now referring to our planned weekend get-together as an ‘appointment’. Stiffened with a sudden rectitude, he addressed me in church-pastor tones; all jibes and grins had gone.

  I sat and listened like a petrified nine-year-old, surprised at my own silence. I was unable to defend my non-attendance at church. In the face of this muscular faith, the religious defiance I displayed at Janice’s house at the start of my trip had gradually peeled away after a few months in Nigeria. Tom had exposed an inner cowardice that had lain dormant and unchallenged after a lifetime in England. Up until now, I’d assumed that my father was a thousand times braver than I was. Now I realised he was a million times more so. He had faced up to a ruthless political and commercial system that willingly killed anyone who challenged it. I, meanwhile, was rattled by the harmless reprimands of my Born Again relatives. This certainly wasn’t the voyage of discovery I’d had in mind when starting this trip.

  The episode distanced me slightly from my relatives. In the years since I last saw them they seemed possessed, literally, floating away from me on a path of Righteousness. What happened to the irreverent buoyancy of the old days? Perhaps I overestimated the extent of change – children don’t register adults’ burdens – but there was a perceptible difference in my aunt and cousin’s spirits that alienated me. I had been warming to Nigeria over the last few weeks, but now the chill had crept in again.

  The best part of the next morning was spent procrastinating in bed and staring at the ceiling. I was due to go to Bane, my family’s village, to which every year during our childhood summer holidays my father banished me, Zina and Tedum for a few days. In our mother’s absence, the three of us were at the mercy of our father’s itinerary. My mosquito-bitten experiences instilled a lifelong unease about Bane (or rural life anywhere in the world, for that matter). I always left the village with the euphoric feeling that I’d been given another chance at life.

  For once, I was making this trip voluntarily. I had the power to come and go as I pleased, yet I still felt a reflexive dread, as if I were being marched towards purgatory. The morning’s grey, saturated clouds bulged above us as Sonny and I climbed into the car. On the road to Bane, the abundance of buildings and church signs diminished, eventually giving way to acres of flat, tree-le
ss farmland. In the 1980s, my fetish for perfectly shaped palm trees kept me alert on this road. I kept a constant vigil for the shapeliest specimens, with their thick round fronds and pencil-straight trunks. But now I would have been glad to see any tree, no matter how wretched. Farming had cleared many of them, and the fumes from oil production, coupled with the burning of fields by farmers, were choking the trees and turning some of them brown.

  We passed through the tiny town of Bori, where my father was born, and where he sold palm wine on the streets as a ten-year-old boy. Bori, though growing bigger by the year, still felt like a small hamlet, a slender collection of iron-roofed buildings on either side of the road, jammed with people and okadas, mini food markets and a rainbow of plastic ware. Through the window I heard snippets of conversation in our dialect, Khana, swirling around me at unusually amplified levels, like a strange dream. In my everyday life, Khana was restricted to telephone conversations between my mother and her friends or family; it was a minority language barely heard in Nigeria, let alone England. But here in Bori, it was the dominant language. Having spent four months travelling around as an ethnic foreigner, being in a place where Khana was widely spoken carried a new and deep significance. These were my people – not sharp-nosed Hausas, or Efiks, Biroms or Yorubas – but Ogonis.

  Most special of all, I was in a place where everyone could say my name properly. Having the name Noo (pronounced ‘gnaw’) is a heavy cross to bear. Not only is it the same word for ‘crude oil’ in Khana – the most unpoetic of injustices – but the specific tonality of the name makes it impossible for foreigners and most Nigerians to pronounce correctly. Barely a day goes by when I’m not explaining my name to a new acquaintance, repeating it, spelling it, repeating it again, then resignedly accepting their mispronunciation. Finally, I was in the one place on Earth where everyone gets it right straight away.