There was another group of Nigerians who had come to England. This group of men came in the late forties, when Nigeria was still a colony. Even under colonisation, they were men in the middle-class strata of Nigerian society. They were well educated, with good secondary schooling or its equivalent, qualified enough to hold down clerical jobs in the Civil Service. These were men who were conversant with the goings-on in world politics, who knew that colonialism, like the slave trade, would soon become too expensive for the colonial masters; that the outcome would be independence - in the same way the slaves were freed, when it became too expensive to keep them. The final nail in the coffin was the independence of India. It would soon be their turn. Nigeria would soon become independent.
These groups of men calculated that with independence would come prosperity, the opportunity for self-rule, poshy vacant jobs, and more money, plenty of it. One had to be eligible for these jobs, though, thought these men. The only place to secure this eligibility, this passport to prosperity, was England. They must come to England, get a quick degree in Law and go back to rule their country. What could be more suitable?
The reaction that followed this sudden realisation spread like wildfire. Responsible men, in high Civil Service posts, threw up their jobs, asked for their gratuities, demanded their pensions, abandoned their children, gave twenty pounds or so to their illiterate wives, and packed their bags for the trip to the United Kingdom in search of education, in search of eligibility. The eligibility that would make them free, free to rule their country, free to go into poshy jobs with long shiny American cars with back wings. The eligibility that would sanction their declaring their old illiterate wives redundant and would not frown on their taking one of the newly emerging graduate females in Nigeria as a wife. Oh, yes, there was a great deal the United Kingdom was going to do for these men.
In search of this dream or reality, or whatever you decide to call it, they sold all, abandoned all they had held dear. They were like those men in the Bible whom Jesus had told to sell all they had and follow him. Those men in the Bible had little to lose. Only their nets. But these Nigerians had plenty - wives, status, jobs and many, many children. The mothers of these children, though dubious about the whole plan, though they might have wondered what was to become of them and their offspring, dared not say anything, otherwise they would have been branded as wicked women who stood in the way of their ambitious husbands. Of course, the husbands promised to be better husbands to their wives, good and rich fathers to their children, men of whom they would all be proud when and if they came back from England. The children, poor things, were usually overjoyed at having a father in the United Kingdom. But whether they saw their father again, or whether he was a better father for his going to England, no one knew.
As is well known in such cases, many people were usually called, but few were chosen. Most of the first generation of Nigerian politicians, who sprung up from everywhere after the independence, just like mushrooms, were from among these men. Some of them actually made it; they came back to Nigeria, equipped with law degrees, and a great talent for oratorical glibness. They had mastered enough political terms to turn the basic proposition of having enough food for everybody into beautiful jargon, which left their listeners lost in the muddle of long, jaw-breaking words. Some of these listeners sometimes wondered whether they were not better off with the white master, who would at least take the trouble to learn the pidgin English which they could understand. Not to worry, though; being independent and learning to be a world statesman demanded certain things. One must be well-versed in rhetoric, whether it made sense or not!
However, most of those men who sought the kingdom of the eligibles did not make it. Like the seeds of that sower in the Bible, they fell on the wayside to be trodden upon by passersby. They came, failed to make a foothold, in England, sought consolation in the pubs, got themselves involved with the type of women who frequented the pubs - because it was just after the war, when many such unattached women were around, and that, of course, meant goodbye to their Law studies and a happy welcome to a house full of half-caste children! Nearly all the failures married white women. Maybe it was the only way of boosting their egos, or was it a way of getting even with their colonial masters? Any woman would do, as long as she was white. The set of African males who started to discriminate between the educated and the uneducated white women came later. But for those men who did not make it, educated or not educated, it did not matter; Irish or English or Greek, it did not matter. She was white. If they remembered or had pangs of guilt about their families at home, they stifled them with the consolation that, after all, they were married to white women. That, at least, would not have been possible at home. If they remembered their original dream, the dream of reading Law and becoming an élite in their newly independent country, they buried it deep in their bitter hearts. It was such a disappointment, too bitter to put into words. When these men fell so disastrously, their dreams were crushed within them. The dream of becoming an aristocracy became a reality of being a black, a nobody, a second-class citizen.
There was one old Nigerian, Mr Noble was his name - at least, Mr Noble was what they called him at the time, but Adah came to know later on that this was not the name his mother and father had given him. He was given that name when he came to England, when he became a second-rate person, when he became second-class. In the early sixties, when Adah came to know this man, there were all sorts of stories going round about him. The stories were so many, so confusing and so contradictory that he became a living legend. The version that was told to Adah was that he was a retired civil servant, that he was the only son of a certain chief in Benin City, that he had six wives and about twenty children and that he left them all, and came to England to read Law. The long and short of it was that he failed to make it.
His failure was due to a gross miscalculation. The pension and gratuity money he brought with him was not even enough to see him through GCE or Matriculation or whatever they called those examinations in those days. He kept failing and failing, and his money vanished, just as if he had gambled with it. But Mr Noble was undaunted. He would work and study. He searched for work in all the offices his disappointed mind could think of, but with no success. He settled, instead, on becoming a lift man at a tube station. His work was to shout “Mind the doors!” all day and to collect tickets and sometimes pennies from fare-dodgers. If he was disappointed with the work and the situation he found himself in, he drowned it in drink, frequenting pubs and night clubs His mates at work were not bad. They liked him, because they turned him into a jester, a clown. They would invariably ask him to perform some African tricks, just for laughs, and Mr Noble would comply. Nobody knew what actually went wrong, but Mr Noble started to behave like a child. Who said that society makes us? Was it Durkheim? Well, if he had said so, or something to that effect, he was right in Mr Noble’s case. He stopped being a man respected in his own right and became a clown for men young enough to be his sons. On one occasion, he was asked to remove his trousers; his mates wanted to see whether Africans had tails or not because that was the story they were told during the war. Adah remembered her father telling some of his friends something like that, but she had been too young to understand. When she heard of Mr Noble’s case, she knew that such stories really were told. In any case, Mr Noble removed his trousers for a pint of beer. It was then that he became so popular, popular and generous enough to be given the name “Noble”. He was such a noble man that he would do anything for his mates, even taking his trousers off!
So Mr Noble liked the name It stuck to him like a leech. He found that by claiming to be Mr Noble, things became a little easier for him. At least he had an English name. But his clownish performances nearly sent him to his Maker one quiet afternoon. Adah did not really know what had happened. The story was too illogical even for fiction. But people believed that was what had happened. Mr Noble had his shoulders to show as a proof, so there must be some truth in it.
The story
was that one afternoon, when it was not very busy in the lift, one of Mr Noble’s mates told him to operate the lift manually, without the electricity provided. Mr Noble had always told them that Africans were very strong. On this afternoon he was told to prove it, for a pint of beer. Mr Noble stooped, like a big fool, to shoulder the lift. Only God knew how his muddled brain told him he could do this but, nevertheless, he attempted it to prove how strong he was, for a pint. Something in the lift groaned, twisted and crashed onto him, trapping his shoulder. His mates got scared. Some made as if to run, but two or three could not deaden their ears to the soul-rending bleating of Mr Noble. The sound was awful. It was like the sound men might make if they were being dismembered alive, just before they lost consciousness. His mates tried to help him. They heaved and puffed at the lift door, but Mr Noble’s shoulder was trapped among the twisted metal. Help came eventually, and he was rushed to hospital. He was not operated on, but that right shoulder was useless for life. It later affected the whole arm, so much so that on seeing him one would at first get the impression that he was a one-armed man. The shoulder was permanently dislocated.
The railway authorities were very generous. They paid him a lump sum in compensation for his injury. It was treated as an accident at work. All his mates came to the court to testify on his behalf. So Pa Noble was pensioned off for the second time.
This time he decided to face reality. Hope of his ever becoming a learned lawyer was fast disappearing, so he invested his money in buying an old terrace house in Willes Road, just by Kentish Town station. He could only afford the cheapest, for he did not wish to be saddled with endless mortgage. He could not anyway get a mortgage, so had to buy cash down. Mortgages and things like that were for the fully employed, the young and, at that time, mainly for the whites.
There was a big trap in buying the house, but at that time he was carried away with a big wave of optimism and he fell into it. The house had three floors, and the two top floors were occupied by two sisters who had been born in the house. When Pa Noble heard of this, he told himself that the two women were bound to move out as soon as they knew that their new landlord was a black man. He was wrong. He did not know what it meant to be a rent-controlled tenant. He thought that owning a house in England was like owning a house in Nigeria, where you had more freedom with your property. He had never heard of a situation in which the landlord was poorer than the tenants. He did not know that the law could be so strong on the side of the tenant. He bought the house, dreaming of all the improvements he was going to make with the big rent he was going to collect when the white sisters moved out.
But the two women not only refused to move, they refused to increase their rent, which was less than a pound a week for the two floors. Mr Noble went several times to the Town Hall at Euston to moan about his fate, but there was nothing the clerks could do. It was the law. You could not evict a controlled tenant, you could not increase their rent, not even when you wanted to use the money for improvements. Mr Noble felt like going crazy.
That was not the end of his trouble. He stopped going to the pubs, but not before he’d got himself one of the women who frequented them. This woman - Sue was her name - started to do her bit, blessing Mr Noble with more and more children. It came to a point where there was no place for these children to sleep. Mr Noble went to the court again, but he lost. The old ladies were controlled tenants. He must not evict them, even though the forty-year-old son of one of the women lived with his mother and was a junior manager in an office. He refused to pay more rent to Mr Noble.
Mr Noble came to the end of his tether. Having lived most of his life in Nigeria in a village where most people knew how to use psychological pressures on one another, Mr Noble decided to use this type of pressure. He told the old ladies that his mother was the greatest witch in the whole of Black Africa. He told them that he had reported them to this great mother of his, and that she was going to kill them. He kept making a song and dance of this information, even when he saw the old ladies in the street. If they were frightened, they pretended they were not. But Mr Noble knew that they were beginning to be afraid of him. He was on safe ground, because these poor old things, who were caught in the same situation as he was, could not prove his psychological cruelty in the court. They pretended to ignore him. Meanwhile, Mr Noble told everybody who would listen that he had reported the old ladies to his dead mother. Many Africans took him seriously, because such things were possible at home. But the Europeans who heard him ruled it out as the ravings of a crazy man. His wife, Sue, was amused by it all.
Then the great winter of 1962-3 came. The weather was so cold that many old people could not even come out to leave their empty bottles for the milkman. The walls of Mr Noble’s house started to feel the strain of the weather. He could not repair it because the old ladies did not pay enough rent. One of the old ladies died. Mr Noble shouted that his dead mother was acting on his behalf at last. The cold weather did not give up. It continued. It snowed without cease for weeks. In one of the cold weeks that followed, the other sister died. The son fled in terror.
Mr Noble boasted, “I told them so. My old mother killed them from her grave.” But what Mr Noble did not tell his friends was that the roof of the house leaked, that the stairs were cold and that they creaked, that the walls were damp and that the windows were cracked. So the story clung. It became the thing to talk about his power in hushed tones. Everybody knew that Mr Noble could kill.
He enjoyed the popularity which this story gave him for a while, but stopped enjoying it when he saw that nobody would live in his house. The house was too old, too shabby for any white family. So he was calculating on his fellow Nigerians snatching up the empty rooms. He was not unaware of the housing shortage. But people were always hesitant about living there. The few who did, did so just as a stop-gap until they found somewhere else. Nobody wanted to stay for long. So Pa Noble’s rooms were almost invariably empty.
Francis and Adah heard that Pa Noble had a vacant room. They knew about the dead sisters; they heard about his great power over others; they also knew that his wife Sue was a filthy woman who invariably stole bits and pieces from their tenants. But what were they going to do? Adah’s baby was due in a few months, winter was fast approaching, and their present landlord would not change his mind. Adah did not at first like to take Janet’s hints and talk to Francis about their going to see the Nobles. She went on hoping it would never come to that.
But it did come to that; when they had only two days of the extended time given to them by the landlord’s solicitor left, she decided to talk to Francis about it. She made sure she chose the right moment. These moments were usually when Francis was pressed with desire for her. She would encourage him to work himself up and then bring up important discussions like where they were going to live. On this particular occasion, Francis was like an enraged bull.
“Why must you talk about it just now at three o’clock in the morning? Why, you wicked witch? Is it too much for a man to want his wife?” he thundered, shaking Adah brutally by the shoulders.
She whimpered in pain, but she was not going to give in. Not until they had discussed the Nobles and decided where her baby was going to be born. It was all right for Mary to have hers in the stable in Bethlehem, but that was ages ago and in the desert, where it was always hot. Not in England where it could be as cold as a mortuary in winter, or so Adah had been told. Francis must be made to talk about it, and this was the only way. Three o’clock in the morning was the only appropriate time. It was a time when it was too late for Francis to run to any of his girl friends for help; it was the time when only Adah could meet all his wants; it was the only time when she and she alone, of all the women in the whole world, could satisfy him. Adah knew how vulnerable Francis could be at that time, so she sat by the edge of the bed, sparsely dressed, covering her head with her hands and looking down at her bulging midriff.
Her voice too was part of the act, low, and hushed, but she pressed her point
. “Are we going to see the Nobles or not?”
“Yes, yes, we will,” answered Francis quickly rushing to her. She dodged, and this annoyed her husband and he demanded: “What the bloody hell do you want? I’ve said that we will go and talk to them, what else do you want?”
Adah was now standing by the sink and felt like laughing at Francis, standing there all flushed. How like animals we all look when we are consumed by our basic desires, thought Adah, standing there by the sink, like a wicked temptress luring her male to destruction. All that Francis needed to be taken for a gorilla was simply to bend his knees.
“Yes, I heard you, but I want us to go there tomorrow, so that we can move by the weekend if possible,” she said, maintaining her ground, her large, tired eyes lowered. If she looked up, the magic would stop working.
Then Francis went on, pleading like a fool, “Oh, yes, we’ll go tomorrow. Is that all you wanted? Have I ever refused anything you said? Are you not like my mother to me in this country? Have I ever refused your command?”
Adah had to laugh here. Her command, indeed! How funny men can be! Her laughter was mocking, but Francis took it for a laugh of acquiescence. She might as well give in to him, now, otherwise it would result in blows. She accepted what came to her after that, for the rest of the night, hoping and praying that her baby would not be born three months prematurely. She heard the church bell chiming seven o’clock, when Francis rolled on his side, like an exhausted drunk. It was all over, but they would see the Nobles.
It was a damp windy day in September. Autumn was on its way already. It blew the cold rain onto their faces but their hearts were panicky and their steps uncertain. Still they went on. They were going to the Nobles’. Francis had not forgotten his promise of the night before.
Willes Road was narrow, curving into Prince of Wales Road. Approaching the street from the Queen’s Crescent side, it had a gloomy and unwelcoming look, but the part that joined Prince of Wales Road widened into a cheerful set of well-kept Edwardian terrace houses with beautifully tended front gardens. Those houses, the clean, beautiful ones, seemed to belong to a different neighbourhood; in fact, a different world.
Second Class Citizen Page 10