Looking for Transwonderland

by Noo Saro-Wiwa

  Sonny returned from a market stall and drove on towards Bane. Above the flat stretches of green acres, the sky’s ashen murk became dotted with bright orange oil flares. We were nearing Bane village. My father used to point out the flares in disgust, bemoaning their environmental impact, while I would nod blankly, too young to understand the implications. The oil companies burn off excess gas, which is a by-product of oil extraction. With the correct (though very expensive) infrastructure, the gas could be captured and exported at huge profit, but instead it’s burned away to pollute the skies; our wealth going up in flames.

  The road leading to the village was smooth and tarmacked, an improvement on the old days when heavy rain and giant potholes – Mother Nature’s speed bumps – made the last 5 kilometres of the journey take twice as long as the preceding 110 kilometres. On entering Bane, we rolled past adobe thatched-roof houses nestled between palm trees, waddling goats and small, balloon-bellied children who stared drop-jawed as our car rolled past. Bane still lacks running water or a permanent supply of electricity, but modern houses are springing up all the time. We passed one house that had a gold lion carving on the front door and the words LION OF JUDAH etched above it. Sonny, too, owns a cute red-brick and mustard bungalow. As more people build houses, the village is gradually looking less rustic.

  Deeper into the village, the tarmac stopped and the road became sandy. The heat bludgeoned me as I climbed out of the car outside my father’s white bungalow. It stood close to the unpainted, windowless church on the edge of his parents’ compound. My grandfather’s two-storey house towered above the surrounding bungalows belonging to some of his six wives, including my grandmother. All of them are dead now. Their graves filled up the compound, converting it into a graveyard of sorts. That’s the tradition: we bury our dead next to their homes.

  My father, however, is buried in a public field in the village as a tribute to his struggle. His body had been dumped unceremoniously in a grave after he and his eight colleagues were murdered by Sani Abacha’s regime. It had taken some years to retrieve the remains: we had to wait for democratic elections, then ask the government to locate the grave, and finally the bones had to be identified through forensic tests.

  In 2005, my brother Junior, sister Zina, half-sister Singto, Uncle Owens and I prepared the remains for burial. As Junior brought out the large bag containing our father’s dissembled skeleton, Zina cried out loud on the far edge of the room. Singto watched silently through her tears. I decided that the situation was only as macabre as my mind would allow, so I forced myself to lift out a long bone wrapped in newspaper. Uncle Owens, a medical doctor, helped us to identify and arrange each femur, fibula, metacarpal and rib, settling our minds into a more industrious mood as we assembled the skeleton.

  Before long, everyone was helping out. It was hard to conceive that these coarse brown objects we held in our hands were our father, a once energetic man with dark, stocky flesh. In vain, I searched for his face in the skull now resting at one end of the coffin. The two front teeth were missing. How and why, I didn’t know. But when Junior placed a pipe between the upper and lower jaws, his teeth metamorphosed into that familiar smile.

  My father was always the one who made the decisions in the family, but now we were taking charge of him, deciding the fate of his remains. When I think of the day he showed me the architectural drawings of the bungalow twenty-odd years ago (‘. . . this is the lounge, that’s the living room, that’ll be your bedroom . . . we’ll spend summer holidays in this house . . .’), I doubt he ever imagined we would be using one of the rooms as a temporary morgue. It had now made the house uninhabitable in my view, and I certainly wasn’t going to spend the night there by myself.

  ‘You fear your father’s spirit will worry you?’ Sonny asked.

  ‘Sort of... not really. I just don’t like all these graves being right outside everyone’s houses. We should have a cemetery.’

  ‘You cannot have a cemetery . . . the place will grow into bush,’ Sonny explained. Cemeteries were a wholly unsuitable idea, he believed. ‘My brother is buried next to my mother outside her house.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I don’t like it. Having a grave next to the house is like putting a bed inside the bathroom. There’s an appropriate place for everything.’

  Sonny laughed.

  My grandparents’ compound was silent and empty except for the odd goat and sporadic children’s game. I was used to visiting Bane with one or both of my parents, in the days when the machinery of hospitality seemed to grind into action of its own accord. But now that I was on my own, and my grandparents were all dead, there was no one to greet me or feed me. As I pottered about, examining the graves, I recalled my cousin Ketiwe once telling me that she felt little reason to visit Bane now that our grandparents were gone.

  In their absence, our grandparents aroused a curiosity in me about who they were as people, the nooks and crannies of their personalities. I wondered what characteristics, aside perhaps from my sporting ability, they had passed on to me, and which parts of my character had been nurtured in England. Was my fastidiousness genetic, or the product of eight years in a dirty boarding school? Was my short temper sown in my DNA, or fashioned in the rush-hour carriages of London underground trains? Which of my ancestors was musical? I had never considered the finer details of their personalities. And this empty village wouldn’t provide the answers. I chastised myself for not asking these questions when they were alive.

  Sonny and I drove to the house of my maternal grandmother Daada, half a kilometre away down a sandy path. My mother and her sisters had helped to build Daada’s house when they were young. It was a simple adobe structure, fitted with glass windows, wooden padlocked doors and wiring set up in endless anticipation of electricity. Daada’s grave lies near the house, along with the graves of her husband and her youngest daughter, my Aunty Rose. My cousin Barisi still lived in the compound with her mother Aunty Naayira, a darker, more sinewy version of my mother. She had just finished a day of planting cassava at the farm and squealed with delight when she saw me.

  They cooked me gari and soup. Its aroma triggered memories of the dilemma we faced when both my grandmothers cooked lunch for us kids. Because we always stayed in our paternal compound, we generally ate there first, meaning we were never hungry enough to accept Daada’s meals at her house. The social mores underpinning the offering of food were lost on us. Turning down Daada’s lunch was simply our logical response to having a full stomach, but she took it as an incomprehensible snub, which we had to rectify by stuffing ourselves in a gut-busting encore.

  This time, I ate with leisurely ease. My cousin Barisi sat with me. In our younger days, she, Zina and I would tease each other and banter freely. Now she was all grown up with a husband and four beautiful kids, her natural buoyancy weighed down by money worries and other unspoken woes. Because of her new job at the local government office, she’d had to move back to Bane with her children while her husband stayed in a nearby town.

  Conversation with Barisi and Aunty Naayira revolved around updates on family members (‘What of Zina? What of Gian? What of Junior? What of Nene? How are your nephews?’). Then Barisi and her mother were joined by Dorcas, a neighbour. The three of them began chatting in Khana while I ate my gari and tried not to let another bead of sweat plop from my forehead into my soup. Silently I watched them. They were physically elegant women, yet hardy and blessed with practical skills like cooking, house-building and farming. My proficiencies were confined to my fingertips: tapping keyboards and flicking switches; cerebral know-how that contributed nothing to the workings of everyday village life.

  Barisi and Aunty Naayira mentioned mine and Zina’s names between giggles.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Barisi absent-mindedly replied, keen to continue the conversation with the others. Sensing that they were reminiscing about us, I wanted in on the chat but I was being firewalled by language. My Khana isn’t fluen
t. The everyday basic vocabulary is buried deep in my mental hard drive, but without practice I can’t hold my own in conversation. My childhood indifference towards this non-fluency gradually strengthened into embarrassment, then intense resentment. My parents spoke to Zina and me primarily in English, expecting that we would learn Khana when we were older, in the same way that they had acquired English as a second language. They mistakenly assumed that Khana could wade against the cultural tsunami of the Anglophone world. But Khana was too small a language to compete with English, which holds all the vocal tools for modern life: no Ogoni person can have a worldly conversation without importing chunks of English. So the latter became my mother tongue.

  And now it made me feel small here in my relatives’ house, and I was reluctant to utter even the few words I knew. I think I inherited this linguistic awkwardness from my paternal grandmother, ‘Mama’, who I always assumed couldn’t speak English until my father told me she actually knew a little bit but was ‘too embarrassed’ to practise it on us. Hindsight makes it all clearer: Zina, Tedum and I probably came across as self-centred, toy-focused brats, subconsciously exuding a very Western disregard for their elders, which Mama possibly found alienating. Daada didn’t speak English either. Our relationship with both grandmothers was a warm but generally conversation-less affair, and now, just like Mama, I preferred to stay mute than speak Khana like an inarticulate toddler. I sat back and enjoyed snippets of their nattering. Anyhow, there was little about my life that I could tell them: property ladders, career choices, publishers – they were meaningless details in this context. Births, deaths, marriages were the only news worth sharing.

  As Barisi, Dorcas and Aunty Naayira chatted away, I took a walk to the river nearby, smiling wordlessly at the half-naked, hernia-bellied children whose dark, lean faces stared at mine as I ambled past. If we share fairly recent ancestors, then the lineage has most definitely forked; their poverty and my relative wealth separated not just our lives but our morphologies too, it seemed.

  The river was beautiful, flowing at a lower altitude to the village, and fringed with green vegetation and mangrove swamps. We knew only vaguely of its presence when we were children, since most of our days in Bane were spent perspiring in our grandparents’ houses. When Zina and I came across it again in 2005, we were in awe of its beauty, like tourists. No one else quite understood our excitement. The village boys drew little aesthetic pleasure from this place where they routinely bathed and caught fish, bari. Zina had asked some boys to unlock one of the fishing canoes and let us ride in it. They obeyed, bemused as to why we wanted to drift aimlessly along the water.

  I returned to Daada’s house and perused Barisi’s photo album, feeling increasingly weakened by the sweltering air, and waiting subconsciously for permission to leave. Then I gleefully remembered that I was on my own schedule.

  I decided to get going.

  Returning to Bane as an adult hadn’t changed my feelings about the place. There was no cathartic awakening or joyful homecoming. No matter how much my dislike of the village had diminished and my respect for my relatives had grown, any new, romanticised perspectives quickly evaporated in the steaming humidity. Besides, living in the countryside seemed pointless if one wasn’t getting one’s knees dirty on the farm. Urban-style idleness isn’t much fun without urban amusements. But perhaps one day in the future, a new world order, global oil shortages or British pension poverty might force me to live in Bane. I wouldn’t be bored into complete stupefaction – the village has a large enough population to support what I like to call the ‘gossip threshold’: enough people to sustain juicy gossip on a regular basis. I knew from past experience that talking about other people is the only entertainment when there aren’t any new books to read, films to watch or web pages to surf. Life here would be tolerable in that respect. But I would have to learn Khana. And the heat – my God, it was too much.

  Now I understood why my father never once spent the night here during our childhood stays. He luxuriated in the air-conditioned solitude of his Port Harcourt study while dispatching us to the village. As much as he loved Bane, his attachment to the place was an emotional one that didn’t require his physical presence.

  As Sonny drove me back to Port Harcourt, I wondered how Bane would evolve in the future. Only the old and the very young stayed here these days; migration to the cities has been draining it, and every other Nigerian village, for years. I wondered whether it would remain a quiet village, sprouting new graves and modern, fleetingly inhabited brick houses. Or would it evolve to become a town, like many villages in England? I couldn’t imagine it. Urbanisation requires industrialisation and an influx of people and capital from around the country, but outsiders rarely settle in Nigerian rural areas. The land usually remains the preserve of its indigenous ethnic group. Whatever happens, Bane is the one place on earth that feels like mine, whether I want to stay here or not. I need no title deeds to this place; and found comfort in the thought that my genes alone grant me an undisputed claim to the land.

  16

  Truth and Reconciliation

  Lagos

  ‘This will kill all your worms,’ the salesman bellowed to us on the danfo. ‘You feel hungry after you have eaten . . . it go “fut, fut, fut” when you go to toilet . . . there was a man and woman, when they were kissing, and the worm—’

  I blocked my ears and sang to myself, to the amusement of the passengers next to me. It still wasn’t enough to drown out the merchant’s anecdote, which he delivered – in all its unspeakable detail – loudly enough to penetrate my ‘la-la-la’s.

  I was back in the ‘Centre of Excellence’, back to the hard sell and noise, although I had now become inured to Lagos’s incomprehensibilities and chaos. The doctor’s sign advertising MONEY WONDERFUL FOWL SOUP no longer aroused my curiosity.

  ‘God will punish you!’ a male passenger shouted out to the driver as the danfo pulled into a gas station. ‘You should refuel before you collect passengers.’ As the bus queued up for fuel, the humidity resumed its damp grip, prompting everyone to fan themselves with religious pamphlets amid a chorus of teeth kissing.

  I was on my way to the National Museum to have lunch with Maurice Archibong, the travel journalist I had met in Benin. Maurice was a smart, skinny, mild-mannered man in his forties with delicate dietary requirements thanks to a stomach ulcer. He asked for no pepper in his stew, but the waitress insisted it would be too bland.

  ‘You see what I mean when I tell you that Nigerians are unnecessarily inhospitable?’ Maurice said, tasting his stew. ‘I told her no pepper.’

  Maurice was a one-man chronicler of Nigeria’s cultural heritage. He travelled all around the country writing about cultural and historical sites. Studies on Nigeria were sparse, he told me. The Historical Association of Nigeria (‘It should be called the Association of Nigerian Historians’) has thousands of professors as members but little work gets done.

  ‘I don’t know if it’s for want of funding. Nobody is interested because there isn’t money to chase, so I just go by myself and document everything. Nigeria is a vast place. Very vast place.’

  ‘I had no idea how rich it is,’ I told him. ‘We have ten times what Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire have in culture and artefacts.’

  ‘If not more so.’

  Both of us had visited the Ashanti palace in Kumasi, Ghana, and were impressed by its museum. Ghanaians took real care of their exhibits.

  ‘That’s because they don’t have oil,’ Maurice said, ‘so they must use their heads. Here we have been pampered by nature. Every time I go to the museum, I try to see how we’re losing out. Because we’re not able to put things in their proper places. And lots of looting goes on in our museums. Even the top officials are partaking in theft.’

  The 800-year-old soapstone figurines at Esie sprang to mind.

  ‘I’m so impressed by them,’ I gushed. ‘Do you think the figurines come from the twelfth century or later?’

  ‘I think there wa
s carbon dating. But bear in mind that the dating was not done in Nigeria. It was taken to Europe. And sometimes the specimens are taken there and never come back. I’m sure they don’t involve Nigerian scientists in the dating process. So we are at the mercy of what the Europeans tell us.’

  ‘But twelfth-century is pretty flattering,’ I said, not quite sharing Maurice’s distrust of Western scientists.

  ‘Flattering enough, but they could be older. You must be accurate. How do you know? The researchers didn’t take it elsewhere for confirmation, you understand. If it were a bipolar world and you dated something in the West, you would take it to the East for “control” dating.’

  ‘I love those figurines so much, I wanted to steal one.’

  Maurice tipped his head back and laughed loudly. ‘Where would you keep it?’

  ‘In my bedroom. I’d just want to look at it when I wake up.’

  ‘Ah, but you need to make sure the things do not have powers. Some persons have stolen those things and had to return them. There’s a story . . . I can’t prove it empirically, but somebody went to a shrine in his village and stole some objects, which he sold to some German guy. The German took it home, but every evening there would be some cries in the room where the artefact was kept. He didn’t know where the sound was coming from but he suspected it was from that object. When the sounds kept coming from that part of the room he knew it must be the artefact. So he went to the trouble of flying all the way back to Nigeria to return it!’