In the taxi on our return to the mainland, Maurice regaled me with the stories he had covered during his days as a news reporter. The occasional headless bodies discovered around town; the boy who gouged his girlfriend’s eyes out in order to sell them to marabouts for black magic purposes. Along with most Lagosians, Maurice was disgusted by it all, but almost as confounded by European society, where ‘people don’t believe in anything’.
Maurice’s openness to the supernatural was unexpected, and made me feel more isolated than ever. Four and a half months in Nigeria hadn’t made it any easier for me to digest the widespread enthusiasm for the paranormal. I was still reeling from a newspaper opinion article I’d recently read in which the columnist, complaining about speeding drivers on our roads, called upon ‘those who administer prayers to exorcise the demons that possess these drivers’. Government initiatives hadn’t been factored into his solution to the problem.
When I mentioned this article to Aunty Janice later that evening, it quickly led to another religious quarrel.
‘We can’t rely on prayer to solve this problem,’ I carped. ‘How can demons make people speed on the roads? We have to create practical solutions to our problems!’
‘How?’ Aunty Janice angrily asked. ‘What can the child on the street selling groundnut do to change things? The child’s parents must go around and beg for money to send her to school . . . she graduates but she is not paid well and must stay with her parents because she cannot afford her own home. What is she to do?’
Aunty Janice had misunderstood me. She thought I was criticising individual Nigerians for not escaping poverty, but my worries actually lay with a broader mindset, which saw a link between living standards and the spiritual.
‘I’m not saying it’s easy, but if a large part of the country believes in practical solutions, then eventually a few individuals like my father will emerge, and they’ll try to change things!’
‘People don’t want to fight the government like your father. They have families. They don’t want to die!’
‘Well, Europe became what it is today because people took matters into their own hands. They realised they had control of their own destiny.’
‘Europeans are wealthy because they prayed,’ Aunty responded.
‘But they don’t pray now, and they’re even better off than they were four hundred years ago!’
‘Their ancestors prayed and this has helped their descendants. But now that they’re not praying things will go bad again in the future.’
Things might very well go downhill, but not, I believed, due to a lack of prayer. I was a little annoyed that future events (oil shortages, superbugs, elderly populations) might accidentally validate Aunty Janice’s theory.
‘It’s a pity that Africans who grow up in Europe are becoming godless,’ she lamented reproachfully.
I was too drained to explain that I was suggesting more pragmatism, not godlessness. Aunty Janice saw me as a hedonistic oyibo, submitting mindlessly to Western values without proper consideration. I didn’t want to be seen that way, but fighting her perceptions was pointless.
We ate dinner silently, in the flickering gloom of the candlelight.
For the next two days, I hung around Victoria Island and Ikoyi to enjoy the lovelier side of Lagos. I was hit by the traveller’s paradoxical urge to spend money at the penniless end of the journey, and the desire to purge myself of Nigeria’s shabbiness; a reaction to the strain of the last four months.
And so I drank wine at a Mexican restaurant on Victoria Island, where the ethnic Lebanese owners smoked cigarettes and sat back in their chairs with an enviably proprietary air. I perused the books at the glorious Jazzhole bookstore. At a Thai restaurant, I overheard fellow diners discussing business ideas in uncharacteristically muted voices, and women with long, opulent weaves, tight jeans and high heels chatting with their music industry boyfriends.
While searching a supermarket cake aisle for a present for Mabel, I fell into conversation with a woman called Marie who turned out to be my father’s contemporary at Ibadan University.
‘You’d better control yourself,’ Marie joked as I eyed a Black Forest gateau.
‘What are you getting?’ I asked.
‘Croissants for an old couple. I’m buying five to avoid arguments.’
‘Five? How does buying an uneven number avoid arguments?’
‘If I buy four the husband won’t like it. You know what African men are like . . . the man always has to have more!’
Marie worked for an NGO in Washington, DC. She was the face of Nigeria’s lost opportunities: confident, educated, articulate, a rare specimen who wasn’t cloying or trying to extract money from me. In fact, she cut the conversation short and went on her sprightly way, as fleeting and elusive as Nigerian success.
Later, I knocked back vodka and Coke at a bar with giant windows looking out onto the lagoon. ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ wafted into the air-conditioned room. Through the huge windows I watched three European expats on jet skis overtaking a pair of fishermen as they cast a net from their canoe. The green waters of the lagoon sparkled salubriously, yet bobbing against the restaurant walls were plastic bottles, sucked oranges, and sachets of pure water floating like lilies on the surface.
Throughout town I saw glimpses of how handsome Lagos could have been: a few swaying palms lining the seafront like Miami, or the Third Mainland Bridge, an engineering wonder, snaking across the blue lagoon during sunset. I savoured these scenes and tried to block out the waterside stilt-house shanty towns or the partially collapsed skyscraper on Lagos Island, standing erect like a sarcastic standard bearer of our Excellence.
Now that I was ending my journey, though, I realised that Lagos is in fact one of Nigeria’s greatest success stories. It’s an achievement when 15 million people across 250 ethnic groups can live together relatively harmoniously in an unstructured, dirty metropolis seemingly governed by no one. Lagos is an anthropological case study in how humans interact with one another when confined in tight, ungoverned spaces; proof, as one NGO director once said, that the theory of free competition as a social regulator doesn’t work. When two cars inevitably end up locked in a perpendicular stand-off, each party roars at the other for denying him right of way, as if an outrageous breach of protocol has taken place. Every hour some kind of altercation takes place, and as I watched yet another motorcyclist trying to squeeze between two cars, getting stuck and losing a wing mirror, I marvelled at the fact that such incidents generally ended so placidly (and that so many of London’s ham-fisted traffic wardens originate from this bedlam).
At CMS, I flung myself across the traffic and jumped into a minibus. London in the old days was once as chaotic as this, its residents having to run for their lives when crossing the torrent of cars and horse buggies. The attitudes and behaviour of British drivers eventually changed, though. Nigeria just needs to catch up. But maybe Lagos isn’t a laggard on the bottom rung of urban evolution. Perhaps the city is more futuristic than we care to realise. Isn’t its low-tech overcrowding and pollution what our planet is heading towards, after all? As Albert Einstein said, ‘I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.’ Oil will run out one day. I was saddened by the prospect, but relieved by it, too – Nigeria might be better off, anyway; the country seems innately prepared for a simple, back-to-basics future. It’s as if our government has eschewed a fully industrialised economy in favour of the fundamentals of life that will outlive civilisation: growing crops, maintaining extended family networks, worshipping deities.
There were many glimpses of hope: the mechanised farms, Cross River State’s tourism, and Lagos’s fancy new bus transit system, which I noticed as my minibus cruised along the mainland expressway. The system had been built in the few months since I was last in the city, with its own separate lane. Things were improving. But beneath it all lurked the belief in witchcraft, the oil dependency, the politicians’ c
onstant acceptance of low standards, all of it waiting to negate our achievements in an instant. I wasn’t sure I had the patience.
‘You’ll get used to it,’ people kept telling me. Knowing my temperament, I would only get used to it and stop being angry if I either had nothing to lose or something to gain from the status quo. I was in neither of those positions. For me, getting used to the situation meant capitulating to it, which required an unhealthy shift in mentality. It’s not right to stop being angry about the state of Nigeria, but anger is only useful if one is willing to risk one’s life changing the system. Was I brave enough? My cowardice – the extent of it – was one of several revelations for me on this trip. The strength of society’s religious fervour had flattened me. I was the cowardly lion, no longer willing to roar my disagreement with my cousin Tom and Big Mama. The Nigerian reliance on God to change material circumstances will ultimately hold our country back even more than corruption, I suspect, but even if I had the strength to challenge excessive religiosity, it would be an enormous task, like extinguishing a forest fire with spittle.
But over time, I had come to love many things about Nigeria: our indigenous heritage, the dances, the masks, the music, the baobab trees and the drill monkeys. I, the progressive urbanite, had become a lover of nature and pre-colonial, animist ceremony; the mirage of a Transwonderland-style holiday wasn’t worth chasing. Yet Nigeria, for all its sapphire rivers and weddings and apes, couldn’t seduce me fully when all roads snaked back to corruption, the rottenness my father fought against and the cause he died for. At least my journey had cured my emotional fear of the country. It was a far scarier place for those who have to live here, for whom flight was not an option. They had to fight their way through life in a way that I didn’t have to, and for that I wanted to hug my father’s knees in thanks for raising me abroad and expanding my life choices.
So all was forgiven: the unspeakable train rides, the itchy tropical nights in the village, the enforced essay-writing in hotel rooms. For years they had turned me off Nigeria, but all of it, I now realised, was a necessary induction, a way of ‘breadcrumbing’ the trail between my village and my life as an émigré. My mistake as a child was to assume that my summers there were a rehearsal for an adult life filled with pounded yam breakfasts and sweaty water-fetching. But my parents had never expected me to live in Nigeria permanently. I could maintain a relationship with it from my chosen home, much as my father engaged with Ogoniland from his air-conditioned office in Port Harcourt.
Of course, returning to Nigeria on my own initiative was crucial to the epiphany. Travelling here as an adult helped me to finally wipe away the negative associations and start a new relationship with the country, in which I was prepared to embrace the irritations with tentative arms, and invest some of myself.
Epilogue
For my last three days in Nigeria I stayed with my cousin Loveday and his wife Helen at their modest, second-floor apartment on a quiet street in the Ippu-Ileju neighbourhood, near the airport. Most of my time was spent playing with the eldest of their two daughters, Donu, a precocious three-year-old with an eye for detail: ‘Where is your second phone?’ she asked me after I finished making a call (Nigerians often have more than one cell phone in case of robbery, or in case a power outage prevents them from recharging). The girl pestered me constantly for pens, paper and alphabet lessons. But above all, she wanted to use my colourful raffia fan, the only thing standing between me and death by dehydration.
‘Donu, I need this fan,’ I begged her. ‘I’m sweating.’
‘I am sweating too,’ she pouted, patting her dry brow. I wouldn’t normally fight a child over such a trifling object but in that unbearable heat, my fan was worth more to me than a million barrels of oil.
NEPA’s erratic power supply had forced Helen and Loveday to buy a generator, which they used sparingly to keep down costs. In the evening, when the lights cut out, I followed Helen down the fire escape stairwell to the switch on the generator. She yanked its chord repeatedly to get the engine running, the movement straining her caesarean scars and making her wince. The neighbours all had generators too. The machines, four or five of them, rumbled from all sides of Helen’s apartment. They vibrated through the windows and created a deafening roar that forced us to boost the TV volume; all conversation became a ridiculous bellowing exchange. Perhaps this is why Lagosians talk so loudly.
Late on a Sunday evening, the night before my flight back to London, Loveday and Helen drove me through the dark, empty streets towards The Shrine, the club where the late musician and political activist Fela Kuti used to perform. Fela was the unanointed king of Nigeria, our highest-quality export, a near-deity who invented Afrobeat, a combination of jazz, funk and highlife rhythms that no normal person can resist dancing to. This marijuana-smoking maverick married twenty-seven women in one day, used his music to criticise military regimes, and once delivered his mother’s coffin to the military barracks after the regime killed her during a raid on his commune. In the 1980s, Fela was jailed for nearly two years on currency smuggling charges.
Fela died of an Aids-related illness in 1997. Since then, his son, Femi, has carried on where his father left off, playing to the crowds every Sunday at The Shrine. As we approached, we could hear music saturating the night air even before we’d parked the car. Loveday was exhausted from work but, hypnotised by the Afrobeat rhythm, he bought tickets for himself and Helen too.
‘What are you doing?’ Helen exclaimed, surprised. ‘We’re not staying!’ In his love for live music, Loveday had momentarily forgotten that they had two small children at home. Loveday relented, handing me my ticket before the pair of them said goodbye and returned to the car. I passed through the security and up the stairs to the mezzanine area. Although The Shrine has been subject to several police raids over the years, its posters, signs and graffiti still exuded a curious mix of moral rectitude, political sloganeering and hedonism. A signboard at the entrance listed several proverbs on wisdom and discipline, while another poster called for government corruption to stop. Wall-mounted signs warned against the smoking of marijuana, yet a defiant haze floated up towards the mezzanine from where I surveyed the audience below, sitting at tables and sipping their stout through straws.
Towards midnight, Femi entered the stage with his band and sang ‘One Day Africa Will Be Free’. His dancers, doubling as his backing singers, entered the stage with their backs to the audience. Like Fela’s girls back in the day, these women shook their arses extremely seriously, staring down at their hips in their sequined mini-dresses, their faces betraying little expression, as if mesmerised by their own movement. All action took place below the waist. Having entered the stage with their backs to the audience, the dancers stayed in that position throughout most of the concert, waving their beautiful, sparkling booty at the crowd. Two more dancers were gyrating in cages on either side of the room.
Femi, like his father, often performs glistening and bare-chested, but on this night, he wore a long green shirt and matching trousers. He and his band played renditions of ‘Summertime’, ‘I Want to Be Free’ and the fast-paced ‘One, Two, Three, Four’. Femi high-fived and bumped fists with fans crowding the front of the stage. During his sax solo, a woman in a gypsy dress spun around the tables; a legless man skidded excitedly near the stage on his skateboard, waving his baseball cap in the air; two Europeans boogied passionately, even during lulls in the music when everyone else sat still. I was hoping for a performance of the song ‘Shotan’, during which the fans go wild, hurling plastic chairs around the place, in an oddly punkish, un-Nigerian meltdown. But, disappointingly, Femi didn’t perform the song.
It was 2 a.m. when the band finished. The crowd dissipated. I stayed behind at The Shrine with a few others until morning – Lagos isn’t safe in the early hours, and there was no public transport anyway. While workers cleared the tables and swept the floor, we clustered around the chairs and tables beneath the ceiling fans to avoid getting mosquito bites. F
ela’s classics pumped out of the speakers. Fatigue and marijuana smoke stung my eyes, but I was happy, listening to the music in a sleepy daze. No one says it better than Fela. He’s the embodiment of everything I love about Nigeria: intelligent, funny, passionate, exciting, raw, an ‘Africa man original’, not a ‘gentleman’. He took the best elements of Nigerian music and mixed them with foreign genres to create something so fresh and superior, it gives listeners a swaggering pride in being Nigerian. But Fela was also incorrigible and untamed, railing against government immorality while grabbing his dancers’ buttocks on stage; he had a messy family life and a distaste for upward mobility.
At The Shrine, I slouched opposite a mural depicting him making a clenched-fist power salute, a marijuana joint lodged between his knuckles. Next to me, people slept with their spines arched over the chair backs, their heads slumped on tables, mouths gaping open, bodies curled up. It was a shabby end to a fabulous night and a fabulous journey. But that’s Nigeria for you: it can be stylish, sublime, beautiful, yet no matter how much it amazes or bedazzles you, it’s always that little bit jagga jagga.
Acknowledgements
Firstly, I’d like to thank my agent Lizzie Kremer at David Higham Associates for believing in me. Immeasurable thanks go to Granta commissioning editor Bella Lacey, and my editors Sara Holloway and Amber Dowell for teaching me so much about writing and whipping me over the finishing line; I’m also grateful to Christine Lo, Benjamin Buchan, Jennie Condell and Kelly Pike at Granta. A non-repayable debt of gratitude goes to Rachel Wallman and Zilfa Al-Zaid for buoying up my morale and bearing the brunt of my writer’s blocks. Special nods also for Owens Wiwa, Lizzie Williams, Ilka Schlockermann and Oliver Oguntade for their kind advice. And finally, I am forever indebted to my family, especially my mother Maria, brother Ken Jr, and sisters Zina and Singto.
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