Known and Strange Things

by Teju Cole

  That day in Gusau, the banker Olatunji accused the journalist Ibrahim of penis theft. All of a sudden, Ibrahim found himself in mortal danger from a crowd. They closed in on him with murderous intent, and only the presence of quick-thinking policemen saved him from a grisly death. But what made this case truly unusual, and makes it a textbook case of Nigeria’s neuroses and its perplexed modernity, was that Ibrahim later sued Olatunji in a court of law for defamation and false accusation. His response to this intolerable threat to his life was the formalized idea of the law guaranteed by the state. He answered jungle justice with civil justice. And it was at this point that the story dropped out of the public view.

  —

  Crowds are attractive because of their egalitarian promise. The mob is a form of utopia. Justice arrives now, to right what has for too long been wrong with the world. As Elias Canetti wrote in his masterful psychological study, Crowds and Power, “All who belong to the crowd get rid of their differences and feel equal.” In this sudden equality is part of the appeal of a lynching. But it is a spurious appeal. As Canetti says of the equality that mobs feel, “It is based on an illusion; the people who suddenly feel equal have not really become equal; nor will they feel equal forever.”

  When I asked my Nigerian friends to tell me about their own close calls with mob violence, I was surprised, and a little dismayed, by how many of them actually had stories to tell. Eghosa Imasuen, a sharp-minded and witty novelist, told me about his experience at Alaba, the main electronics market in Lagos. This was in 2003, and the salesboy, who had opened the cardboard box of a television, wishing to force a sale, began to loudly allege theft. It was a hustle. He had done it before. As Imasuen put it, “An expletive-filled denial saved me. It was scary. I had received a few slaps before the crowd noticed that my friend and I were too angry to be thieves.” The crowd turned on the accuser instead, and gave him a severe beating before taking him to the chairman of the market, who in turn handed him to police.

  In the case of Akin Ajayi, who writes on arts and culture for Nigerian and international publications, it happened one day when he was fifteen, playing truant from the elite boys’ boarding school King’s College. He had snuck off campus, in Obalende, on Lagos Island, to buy some suya, the spicy grilled meat popular all over the country. A misunderstanding over change, or perhaps, again, a deliberate hustle, from the suya seller, led to Ajayi being suddenly surrounded by violent merchants. He felt the danger, and broke into a run. For a hundred yards, he was pursued by them. It frightens him still, to think of that day.

  Elnathan John, who is also a journalist and satirist for Nigerian newspapers, had been taking photos of a government raid on an illegal market in Abuja. The government officers, though armed, were beaten back; the situation became dangerous all of a sudden, even for onlookers. One man, a black-marketer of petroleum products, objected to John’s camera, and tried to chase him down and hand him over to the angry crowd of traders. John was just barely able to run around a corner, jump into his car, and speed off. The memories are fresh in his mind: it happened just this year.

  —

  Those of us who have lived a long time in Nigeria have heard, in the marketplaces, the cries of “Thief, thief!” We have seen chases that won’t end well for the person being chased. We have all seen, at the very least, in some market square or busy intersection, the charred remains of what used to be a human being, what used to be some mother’s son, some child’s hapless father. Many of us remember hearing of how a boy of eleven, accused of kidnapping a baby, was burned alive near the National Stadium in Lagos in 2005. In that case, as in the case of the Aluu 4, a video recording was made of the incident and circulated; part of it was broadcast on television. There can be little doubt that before the current year is through, several more people will be lynched in Nigeria, for petty crimes or on the basis of false accusations.

  When I’m in Nigeria, I find myself looking at the passive, placid faces of the people standing at the bus stops. They are tired after a day’s work, and thinking perhaps of the long commute back home, or of what to make for dinner. I wonder to myself how these people, who surely love life, who surely love their own families, their own children, could be ready in an instant to exact a fatal violence on strangers. And even though I know that lynchings would largely disappear in a Nigeria with rule of law and strong institutions—just as they have largely disappeared in other places where they were once common—I still wonder what extreme traumas have brought us to this peculiar pass. I suppose it must be a blood knot, one that involves all the restless ghosts of our history-maddened country: the gap between rich and poor, the current corruption of the ruling class, the recent military dictatorships, the butchery of the civil war in the late sixties, the humiliations of British colonialism, the internecine battles of the nineteenth century, and the horrors of the slaving past. We have, by means of a long steeping, been dyed all the way through with callousness.

  —

  I was frightened out of my skin one Sunday morning in Surulere, near the National Stadium in Lagos—in other words, close to where the eleven-year-old boy was lynched in 2005. I saw a van accidentally hit a motorcycle. Neither the motorcyclist nor his passenger appeared to be seriously injured, but the driver of the van, possessed by a sudden panic, didn’t stop. He drove off in an attempt to escape. A cadre of motorcycles gave immediate chase, and there was no doubt that they would bring him to a rough form of justice. “They’ll catch him,” a man said loudly. “They’ll certainly catch him.” Already, I could see that the driver would soon run into traffic and have to face his tormentors. I was appalled, but not especially surprised. I understood well that this was part of what passed for normal in the troubled street life of present-day Nigeria.

  The inspector general of police made a statement vowing to capture the culprits in the murder of the University of Port Harcourt students. A heavy police presence descended on Aluu, and a large number of people have now been arrested, including the traditional ruler of Aluu and a police sergeant who apparently helped the crowd. A manhunt is under way for Lucky, the debtor who is believed to have incited the violence and is now being called, in a bit of wishful thinking, the “mastermind” of the murders.

  It’s hard to escape the conclusion that, in addition to the shock of actually seeing the murders on video, the concern being expressed here by the government—in response to a public outcry that began online—has other, unspoken, elements. These young men are “us” in a way that is not comfortable to confront, in ways that might seem trivial. The contrast between the photos released by their friends—polo shirts, sunshades, jeans, clear skin, jaunty caps worn just so—and the awful sight of their bloodied and naked bodies in the mud is sickening. They are, or were, close to the world of many other cool young Nigerians. Their presence on social media brings them even closer: Ugonna was active on Twitter, and was nicknamed Tipsy. With Lloyd, a.k.a. Big L, he was a hip-hop enthusiast. They had recorded a track together, and this song was widely shared on Nigerian networks. In this sense, they were in the same class as many of the young Nigerian people on Twitter, somewhere along the imprecise continuum that constitutes the Nigerian middle class. They had some access to material resources; they had educated and somewhat well-to-do parents; one or more of them had been overseas; they were technologically savvy; and they had a sense of the world beyond Nigeria. The Aluu 4 are in all these ways just like the young Nigerians who lamented them on Twitter and other social networks, the ones who helped push the police response to the killings, and began a petition to have a bill passed criminalizing mob violence. The Aluu 4 were also, in this material and cultural sense, more like us than they were like the poor villagers who killed them; the violence was probably not disconnected from the terrible income gaps that are a fact of Nigerian life, and the explosive resentments those gaps can create.

  It is startling to consider that another atrocity had occurred in northeastern Nigeria four days earlier, at the Federal Polytech
nic Mubi, when gunmen had lined up and shot no fewer than twenty-six college students. Some reports put the number of dead as high as forty. The response to the Mubi killings was stunned, but much quieter. That incident has essentially dropped out of the public discussion now. We do not know the names of the dead students, nor do we know if they recorded hip-hop music in their spare time, or had Twitter accounts, or traveled overseas. They seem to have been from more modest backgrounds than the Port Harcourt students. The Mubi killings also seem to have some element of the incessant religious conflict that is ripping the north of the country apart. Boko Haram might have been involved. The conflict in the north frightens many privileged southern Nigerians, but rarely touches them directly. Places like Borno, Bauchi, and Adamawa are far away from the world inhabited by most educated, cosmopolitan Nigerians. The Boko Haram conflict and the various incidents of religious violence in the north are exceedingly complex, and have come with a shockingly high death toll. Nevertheless, many who heard the news of the Mubi massacre would simply have surmised that, although the dead were our fellow citizens, they were not really “us,” not in the discomfiting way the Aluu 4 were.

  But even if it is true that there is an element of class loyalty and regional identity in the attention being paid to the murders in Aluu, Nigerians now have a chance to think about a subject too long considered just a part of life. The outrage could lead to legislation. The very slow process of making Nigerians understand that ochlocracy is murder might gain some traction.

  Tade Ipadeola, the lawyer who described mob action as a “diabolical compression of time,” had added: “And to think that we all complain that normal court proceedings are inordinately long in Nigeria.” In a country where the rich commit crimes with impunity, and where the majority of the people in prison are awaiting trial, it is sad, but no great wonder, that citizens so often opt for the false utopia of the mob. But no Nigerian can now shake the feeling that it could be any of us falling afoul of the hive mind. No one really believes that there’s just one mastermind in the case of a mob killing. It was always our problem, but, in a destabilizing new way, it really is our problem now.

  I took a look at eighteen-year-old Ugonna Obuzor’s Twitter account (@tipsy_tipsy), which he last updated on October 3, two days before he was lynched alongside his three friends. His time line isn’t wordy, but it’s fairly opaque, written mostly in the terse, quasi-American argot familiar to anyone who reads young Nigerians. There are a few messages in which he seems distressed about some unexplained event. Perhaps he was going through a romantic breakup (some of his retweets support this reading) or some other personal disappointment, but in light of his sudden death, the messages have taken on a decidedly different cast. On September 14, he wrote, “Its a shame buh it is wat it is…its real as this,” and, six days later, on the twentieth of September, “It breaks my heart evrytym I tink abt it…still can’t beliv it.” I scrolled farther down. On August 21, Ugonna had written, simply: “Perplexed.” And on the day following, on August 22, 2012, the same single, haunting word again: “Perplexed.”

  A Piece of the Wall

  I HEAR THE SOUND of faint bells in the distance. It is like a sound in a dream, or the jingling at the beginning of a Christmas song. Jingle, jingle, jingle. The sound comes closer. Jingle, jingle, jingle. And then they come in, seventy of them, all men, chained together, bound wrist and waist and foot. They shuffle bright-sounding into the courtroom, a large bright room that is, for them, a chasm of hopelessness.

  What you think is true of the country in which you have arrived is often true only of where in it you are. I immigrated to small towns in Michigan. Later on, I went to New York City. These places became my America, and their landscapes and ways of life became natural to me. Other Americas—Salt Lake City, Anchorage, Honolulu—I knew by name only, and considered part of my America only through the imagination. If I traveled to one of these distant Americas, I had to reimagine them. I only slowly understood how I was connected to life there. This was my experience of Tucson, and of the Sonoran desert in Arizona, which goes all the way up to and beyond the border with Mexico. This dry and severely beautiful region, alive with traces of the old Spanish missions, is the home of the Tohono O’odham. Their land preceded Mexico or the United States and stretches across the current border. And the border is incessantly crossed, by various people for various reasons, a matter of commerce, culture, law, and unhappiness.

  The program, called Operation Streamline, is about to jail and then deport these men. Most of them are indigenous people from Mexico or farther south, here in search of work, arrested in the desert or in town. Seventy small dark men. For most of them, Spanish is a second language.

  The brightness of the courtroom is like an assault. They have been coached to say yes, to say no. They are charged with illegal entry, reentry, or false claim to citizenship. Soon—each gets less than a minute in front of the judge—they’ll be taken back to detention. They will be imprisoned for weeks or months, then put on a bus or plane to Mexico City, hundreds of miles away from home. For now, as I watch them in the courtroom, they are like animals in a pen, fastened to one another, a shimmer of sound each time one moves. The security officers are imposing, white, and impassive. The judge is named Bernie. After, I speak with him.

  “Are you, yourself, from a Mexican family?”

  “My father didn’t fight for this country in World War Two so that people could call me Mexican.”

  “But the chains: these men are not dangerous. Why the chains?”

  “It’s more convenient.”

  —

  I’m writing in the restaurant of the lodge. The server asks me about my computer. She’s thinking of buying a similar one, but not right away. She has just bought a mobile phone. She paid quite a lot for it, six hundred dollars. Well, it’s because she didn’t want to be tied to a contract, her boyfriend paid, she isn’t ready to buy a computer yet. The drift of talk.

  Her name is Aurora. She is Peruvian, and in her thirties. She has been in Tucson for nine years.

  “What are you doing here, vacation?”

  “No, I’m a writer. Here to find out more about the border and immigration.”

  It has been a season of trouble, and it has gotten worse since 9/11. This is why I’ve come. This grief, this unsteadiness, is everywhere.

  “Do you know anyone who got into trouble?”

  “Many. I was working in a hotel about six years ago. The owners were Indian. In one morning, twelve Mexican girls, maids, were taken away. They never returned.”

  “You were a maid?”

  “Me? No, I’ve always worked in banquets.”

  She glances at the counter. It’s mid-morning. The restaurant is quiet.

  “But I’ve had trouble. I get stopped all the time while driving. Two years ago, a policeman stopped me, and I didn’t have my resident card. I’m not afraid, but the policeman is so angry. He starts to shout. I look at him directly”—she raises her hand to her face and makes a V with her fingers, pointing at each eye—“I look at him and say, ‘I’m not afraid of you. I’m legal. I have all my papers at home.’ I know if he arrests me, he will be in trouble, because I have done nothing wrong.” She speaks low but with holy intensity. “But now I carry my card with me all the time.”

  —

  Drive an hour directly south of Tucson, and you come to the small town of Nogales, Arizona, at which there is a wall eighteen feet high. On the other side of the wall is the town of Nogales, Sonora. The wall goes on, with gaps, for more than six hundred miles, in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Most of it is in Arizona. Like a river, it takes different forms along its course. More closely guarded here, lower there, deadlier elsewhere. In Nogales, it is great vertiginous rust-colored iron bars spaced just close enough to prevent even a child’s head from getting through.

  Looking through the fence, I see two kids in white and green school uniforms waiting for the bus. They are standing in front of a freshly painted
house. Nogales, Sonora, looks, if not prosperous, not desperately poor. The bus arrives. They get on. It leaves. At my feet is a small bar of rusted iron, a heavy rectangular ingot about a half inch square and seven inches long: a piece of the wall. I pick it up and put it in my bag. The wall is not extensive in Texas, and it stops short of the most inhospitable parts of the desert in Arizona. Those who wish to cross on foot are compelled to walk around the wall. Many do. It’s a quick two- or three-day trek in ideal circumstances. It is much longer for those who get lost. Hundreds of people each year die attempting to cross, killed by heatstroke, cold, dehydration, Border Patrol agents, or wild animals. Some of the lost, the “lucky” ones, are found alive. If they are not arrested, they are simply dropped off, with neither money nor help, on the Mexican side of the border.

  In Nogales, Sonora, in a simple shedlike building close to the checkpoint, Father Martin talks about his organization, the Samaritans. The Samaritans provide shoes and some emergency care for those who have been brought in from the desert. Father Martin speaks of the sorrow of the rescued, and of their wounds (terrible pictures of blistered and burned feet have been put up). Some of the rescued migrants, particularly those who have been separated from their families, will attempt to cross again.

  One of the volunteers at Samaritans is Peggy, a blond American woman in her late fifties or early sixties. She drives down from her ranch in Arizona weekly to work here. She is a retiree and had worked as a nurse in Oregon. She more closely fits the profile of those who fear undocumented immigrants: white people, old people, retired people. What she says when I ask her to describe Arizona’s situation surprises me.