by Cole, Teju
When I start speaking Yoruba, the man I’ve been haggling with over some carved masks laughs nervously. “Ah oga,” he says, “I didn’t know you knew the language, I took you for an oyinbo, or an Ibo man!” I’m irritated. What subtle tells of dress or body language have, again, given me away? This kind of thing didn’t happen when I lived here, when I used to pass through this very market on my way to my exam preparation lessons.
The Tejuosho bus stop, a stone’s throw from where I stand, is a tangle of traffic, mostly danfos and molues, that one might be tempted to describe as one of the densest spots of human activity in the city, were the description not also true of many other neighborhoods: Ojuelegba, Ikeja, Oshodi, Isolo, Ketu, Ojota.
“Well now that you know I’m not a visitor, you will agree to give me a good price, abi?” He shakes his head, searches for excuses. “Oga, times are hard, I am not charging you high.” He still suspects me of carrying more money than I know what to do with. The masks are beautiful, but the price he is asking is exorbitant. I leave his shop and move on. Other vendors call me. “Oga, boss, look my side now, I go give una good price.” Others simply call out: “Oyinbo.” “White man.” Young men sit in the interiors of the small stalls on raffia mats or on low stools, their limbs unfurled. They are passing time, waiting for the next thing, in bodies designed for activity far more vigorous than this. I move through the warren of shops, which, like a souk, is cool and overstuffed, delighting in its own tacky variety, spilling seamlessly into the cavernous indoor shop. Piles of bright plastic buckets line the entrance, and beyond them, the cloth merchants—these ones are women, alhajas—swaddled in laces and looking out with listless gazes. The hall is not well lit. It is as if the outdoor market is reclaiming for itself what had been designed to be a mall. It was my favorite of all the markets, because of this interior coolness. The only movement here is from the stream of customers, and the slow surveillance of the standing fans. The concrete underfoot is curiously soft, tempered with use. Then I emerge to sunlight and the sudden hysteria of car horns and engines. Six roads meet here and there are no traffic lights. Congestion is the rule, to which there is rarely exception. Here, I’m told, is where the boy was killed.
He was eleven years old. He snatched a bag from inside the market, six weeks ago. I know the rest, even before I’m told: I’ve seen it before. At least, I’ve seen it in its constituent parts, if never all at once. I watched in fragments and was unimpressed, as children are by whatever seems to them to be normal. I was still a child when I learned to stitch the various vignettes into a single story. The desperate grab, the cries of thief—an ordinary cry anywhere else, but in a Lagos market, it thins the blood out with fear—the cry taken up by those who never saw the original theft, but who nevertheless believe in its motivating power. It was like this the day I was at the garri stall with my mother. I could have been no more than seven. Cries of thief, thief. Then the chase that arises organically and with frightening swiftness out of the placid texture of the market, a furious wave of men that organizes itself into a single living thing. And then the capture of the felon—there is nowhere to run—his denials and, when those inevitably fail, his pleas. He’s never far into the pleas before he is pushed—all this I’ve seen, more than once—kicked, beaten with what never looks like less than a personal aggravation by other men whom he has never met. The violence is intimate, interspersed with curses. The stolen bag has, by now, made its way back into the hands of the madame, and she has cleared out of the scene. If nothing was stolen, nothing is returned, but the event must always run its course.
Someone pushes me out of the way. I am daydreaming at the market, making myself a target. This is pure idiocy. I check my pockets, make sure I still have my wallet on me, and push my way into the crowd that has gathered in the intersection. Traffic is stalled. I have come for this, to see with my own eyes where this thing happened.
The boy is eleven, but he has eaten poorly all his life and looks much younger. He is crying. He is trying to explain something. Someone told me to do it, he says, that man over there. He points. It’s futile. A wiry man steps forward and slaps him hard. It’s not a bag, it turns out; it’s a baby he’s accused of stealing. Everyone knows that you can use a stolen baby to make money, to literally manufacture cash, in alliance with unseen occult powers. An old car tire—from where?—has been quickly sourced. The boy’s clothes are torn off, he is knocked down repeatedly. Space has been created out of the congestion. A gaggle of schoolgirls, in green-and-white uniforms, has joined the spectators. And a new twist: in the crowd, there stands a man with a digital camcorder. The single eye of his machine collects the event: this fragile body, which, shed of clothes, is now like a dark sapling whipped about in the wind. The tire is flung around the boy. He is losing consciousness but revives with sudden panic when he is doused with petrol. From the distance, two traffic officers, the ones they call Yellow Fever, watch. The splashing liquid is lighter than water, it is fragrant, it drips off him, beads in his woolly hair. He glistens. The begging stops. He stops begging and he is not yet lit. The whites of his eyes are bright as lamps. And then only the last thing, which is soon supplied. The fire catches with a loud gust, and the crowd gasps and inches back. The boy dances furiously but, hemmed down by the tire, quickly goes prone, and still. The most vivid moment in the fire’s life passes, and its color dulls and fizzes out. The crowd, chattering and sighing, momentarily sated, melts away. The man with the digicam lowers his machine. He, too, disappears. Traffic quickly reconstitutes around the charred pile. The air smells of rubber, meat, and exhaust.
In a few days, it will be as though nothing happened. There are those who will copy the tape, it will move around, perhaps provide some grim entertainment for the men in the shops, or in police stations, or homes. It will finally be broadcast on the national news, to outrage, and to an instant forgetting. I cannot find the will to hunt the tape down, but I hear about it here and there. A wick, nameless, snuffed. And what if he was only eleven? A thief is a thief; his master will find another boy, another one without a name. The market has seen everything. It must eat. It does not break its habits.
For my part, I need to find the danfo that goes from here to Yaba. It only takes a moment. The conductor’s song draws me, to the other side of the pedestrian bridge. The vehicle is newer than most. It has a sticker on its back window: “God’s Time Is the Best Time.” And under that another one: “He’s a Fine Guy.” I enter the bus and leave the scene.
THIRTEEN
The air in the strange, familiar environment of this city is dense with story, and it draws me into thinking of life as stories. The narratives fly at me from all directions. Everyone who walks into the house, every stranger I engage in conversation, has a fascinating story to deliver. The details I find so alluring in Gabriel García Márquez are here, awaiting their recording angel. All I have to do is prod gently, and people open up. And that literary texture, of lives full of unpredictable narrative, is what appeals.
There is a romantic aspect to this. I think of Vikram Seth, who abandoned his doctoral studies at Stanford and moved to India to write A Suitable Boy. The monk-like solitude in his room at home, the meals prepared and then announced with a discreet knock on his door. Or the example of García Márquez, when he was writing One Hundred Years of Solitude. Complete devotion to the task, the unwavering support of a partner, and a confidence in his own gifts, a confidence he knows the public will come to share. The ghosts of his early failures are not allowed to interfere with this vision.
One morning, walking outside the estate to where the Isheri Road joins the Lagos–Sagamu Expressway Bridge, I witness a collision between two cars. Immediately, both drivers shut off their engines, jump out of their vehicles, and start beating each other up. They fight fiercely but without malice, as if this is an ancient ritual they both have to undergo, less for the right-of-way than to prove their manliness. When someone from the gathering crowd eventually pulls them apart, I see that on
e of the men is bleeding at the mouth.
Well, this is wonderful, I think. Life hangs out here. The pungent details are all around me. It is a paradise for the lover of gossip. Just one week later, I see another fight, at the very same bend in the road. All the touts in the vicinity join in this one. It is pandemonium, but a completely normal kind, and it fizzles out after about ten minutes. End of brawl. Everyone goes back to his normal business. It is an appalling way to conduct a society, yes, but I suddenly feel a vague pity for all those writers who have to ply their trade from sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolized by the very slow washing of dishes. Had John Updike been African, he would have won the Nobel Prize twenty years ago. I feel sure that his material hobbled him. Shillington, Pennsylvania, simply did not measure up to his extravagant gifts. And sadder yet are those who haven’t even a fraction of Updike’s talent and yet must hoe the same arid patch for stories. No such aridity here, but that doesn’t mean I can just move to Nigeria. There are practical issues to consider. There is the question of money, the question of my professional development and my other work. Serious questions for which there are answers. But there is also the question of my tolerance for the environment. Am I ready for all the rage Nigeria can bring out of me? The various run-ins a “humanist” might have in such a place as this? My first few nights in Lagos, I actually enjoy the power cuts. Muyiwa and I take bets about whether electricity will see us past 10:00 P.M. on a given night. It rarely does. The television flickers into nothingness, the room is instantly swallowed up by shadow, and the ceiling fans whir to a stop. Depending on how late it is, we might switch on the generator or we might leave it off. Rarely do we have the generator going right through the night.
Power comes back at 4:00 A.M. or later. The fan resumes its spinning like a broken conversation continued in mid-sentence. Lightbulbs hiss back to brightness in the hallway and living room. The heat is difficult to deal with at night, and often I don’t get to sleep until the power is restored. Only then, as the fan cools the room down, do I finally fade out of consciousness. But within an hour or two the sun comes up, the muezzin and the cockerels begin their daily contest, and any further hope of sleep is futile. The hardest thing to deal with, after weeks of constant power cuts, is the noise of the generators. The house, which was quite large to begin with, has been carved up into three sizable apartments. Two have been rented out to other families, an arrangement that supplements my relatives’ income. One negative result of this arrangement is that there are now three loud diesel generators in the compound. When they all come on, as they do nightly, I can feel my mind fraying. I don’t experience the real privilege that it is for these three families to have the generators in a city where so many sit in darkness. The noise, the dark gray plumes of the diesel smoke are foremost in my mind: the moment there is a power cut, my evening is finished. The neighbors downstairs watch South African sitcoms at top volume. My bedroom, near the generator house, is filled with the din. It is impossible to hear myself think. I would prefer, on these evenings, to sit in silence with a candle, but that is not a decision I can make for the eighteen other individuals in the compound.
This is but one issue out of many. Combined with traffic congestion, which is a serious problem in Lagos, and considering the thousand natural shocks to which the average Nigerian is subject—the police, the armed robbers, the public officials, the government, the total absence of social services, the poor distribution of amenities—the environment is anything but tranquil. I have newfound respect for anyone who accomplishes any kind of creative work in the country. Like the Nigerian photographers I met at an event at the Goethe-Institut: people who, against all odds, keep an artistic struggle alive. I admire them anew.
There is a disconnect between the wealth of stories available here and the rarity of creative refuge. There is no computer at the house, but I had hoped at least to sit quietly in the bedroom in the evenings and do some writing. It proves difficult to do so. Not in daylight, with all the running around to do and people to see, and not at night, with the smell of diesel lacing the air, and the wail of a trio of power-generating engines mixing with the loud singing from the churches in the middle distance. Writing is difficult, reading impossible. People are so exhausted after all the hassle of a normal Lagos day that, for the vast majority, mindless entertainment is preferable to any other kind. This is the secret price paid for all those cumulative stresses of Lagos life: the ten-minute journeys that take forty-five minutes, the rarity of places of refuge, the constant confrontation with needs more abject than your own. By day’s end, the mind is worn, the body ragged. The best I can manage is to take a few photographs. For the rest of the month, I neither read nor write.
And yet, and yet. The place exerts an elemental pull on me. There is no end of fascinations. People talk all the time, calling on a sense of reality that is not identical to mine. They have wonderful solutions to some nasty problems; in this I see a nobility of spirit that is rare in the world. But also, there is much sorrow, not only of the dramatic kind but also in the way that difficult economic circumstances wear people down, eroding them, preying on their weaknesses, until they do things that they themselves find hateful, until they are shadows of their best selves. The problem used to only be the leadership. But now, when you step out into the city, your oppressor is likely to be your fellow citizen, his ethics eroded by years of suffering and life at the cusp of desperation. There is venality in abundance here, and the general air of surrender, of helplessness, is the most heartbreaking thing about it. I decide that I love my own tranquillity too much to muck about in other people’s troubles. I am not going to move back to Lagos. No way. I don’t care if there are a million untold stories, I don’t care if that, too, is a contribution to the atmosphere of surrender.
I am going to move back to Lagos. I must. I lie in bed, on my back, wearing only boxer shorts, enduring the late afternoon’s damp heat. I have headphones on, and I am listening to “Giant Steps,” that twisting, modal argument of saxophone, drums, bass, and piano that is like a repeated unmaking and remaking of the audible world. It is at high volume, but the generators say, No, you will not enjoy this. I have no right to Coltrane here, not with everything else going on. This is Lagos. I disagree, turn the volume up, listen to both the music and the noise. Neither gives way. No sense emerges of the combat between art and messy reality.
FOURTEEN
The National Museum is in Onikan in the heart of old Lagos. This part of the city has much in common with other faded colonial centers. The legacy of foreign rule is visible in the churches, the Brazilian-style buildings, the porticoed and decrepit institutions that lace the tiny, winding streets. Alongside these are the gleaming modern buildings that announce Lagos Island as the national center of commerce. It is the same thing one might observe in Bombay around Victoria Terminus, a combination of the borrowed old and the uncertain new. The museum sits in a less choked section of Onikan, in the shadow of the Tafawa Balewa Square stadium, across the street from the vibrant headquarters of the Musical Society of Nigeria, next to the brand-new Doric-porticoed City Mall.
The museum has no share in the glamour of these buildings. It consists of three or four low buildings set at the end of a drive fringed with manicured lawns. On the morning of my visit, the grounds are quiet. A sweeper is at his calm work. Behind the blue ironwork grille at the entrance is a pair of giant pots. The reception window, which opens into the vestibule, has a sign announcing an entry fee of fifty naira. The listless woman at the reception sends me to the ticket office, which is five yards away from where she sits. I buy a ticket from another woman and, as neither the receptionist nor the ticket agent looks keen to answer questions, walk into the first of the galleries. There are no brochures available about the collection. There are no books or prints for sale. There is no gift shop.
I have looked forward to this visit for many years because the National Museum has been a memorial touchstone for me. During my years i
n the United States and in Europe, many of my musings about Nigerian cultural patrimony returned me mentally to Onikan, to the insubstantial recollection I had of a place I had last visited as a young schoolboy. All people who are far from home have something they hold on to. For me, it was the museum and the meaning I had invested in its collection.
I am the only guest in each of the interlinked galleries I enter. The rooms are indeed silent, save for the chattering of two museum staff in one room, and the solitary singing by another in the next room. The woman sits in a corner and sings from a hymnal as if, for all the world, she were not at a place of work. She ignores me until, standing at the end of a long row of cases, I take out my camera and capture an image.
—Is not allowed!
—Excuse me?
—Is not allowed. Forbidden. No photo.
She points at the offending contraption, flaps a hand at it, and fixes me with a withering stare. Her tone is acidic. But the voice changes back immediately as she picks up the verse where she left off and resumes sweetly singing the glories of her Lord. Her disconnection from the environment is absolute. A victorious Christian among the idols. Her voice floats through the rooms. The galleries, cramped, are spatially unlike what I remember or had imagined, and the artifacts are caked in dust and under dirty plastic screens. The whole place has a tired, improvised air about it, like a secondary school assignment finished years ago and never touched since. The deepest disappointment, though, is not in presentation. It is in content. I honestly expected to find the glory of Nigerian archaeology and art history on display here. I had hoped to see the best of the Ife bronzes, the fine Benin brass plaques and figures, Nok terra-cottas, the roped vessels of Igbo-Ukwu, the art for which Nigeria is justly admired in academies and museums the world over.