by Cole, Teju
Near Akoka, on a road I know well, a police officer flags me down. Lean, in a black uniform, with a hungry look, he walks toward the car. His gait is that of a much larger man, a capacious and considered saunter. His colleague, equally lean, doesn’t get up from their makeshift shelter, which is set back from the road: a bench, four wooden poles, a tin roof. It’s a sniper’s hideout.
—Good afternoon, Officer.
—You know why I stopped you?
His certainty alarms me. No, I say evenly, I don’t know.
—What does that sign say?
He points to a sign behind us. Its upright element is bent, and the sign itself is partially obscured by a tree.
—Oh God. I didn’t see it. This road never used to be a one-way. It must be a new sign.
It’s a scam, of course. The sign has been deliberately concealed.
—It’s one way from here to the end, until the entrance to the university.
—I didn’t know. Sorry. I didn’t know.
He chuckles. The moment has been well rehearsed.
—This is not a matter of sorry.
—I didn’t see the sign. I didn’t know.
—The sign is not for those who know, oga. The sign is for those who don’t know. Your situation is unfortunate. But the reason the sign is there is for you. You have to come to the station with us.
Minutes are wasted. I don’t want to let go of my entire afternoon only to later pay a “fine” that will end up in someone’s pocket. Finally, he comes around to his demand, or rather, he compels me to make it explicit.
—So, what are we to do now, Officer? Maybe one thousand five hundred, so you can get yourself something to eat?
His opening bid is five thousand naira. I manage to hide my disgust, and bargain him down to two thousand five. I hand the money over, start the car. You people should know the law, he says. It doesn’t matter who you are, the law is not a respecter of persons.
I keep my eyes on the road. My face floods with fury.
Amina has come out onto the street to meet me. She looks like herself: girlish still, slender, with chubby cheeks. She wears her hair in an afro usually, but today she’s plaited it simply. I catch sight of her wounded hand (a kitchen accident), which she makes no effort to conceal. Three fingers, two stumps. I back into the driveway of the two-story duplex. It’s a middle-class home, a ground-floor apartment of, I guess, two or three bedrooms, with exterior paint that has gone gray in parts. Air conditioners protrude from several windows and, from somewhere, comes the hum of a generator or two. In the doorway is a man whom I suppose is her husband. He carries a sleeping toddler.
—My husband, Henry. My daughter, Rekia. Please come in, come in.
We are playing grown-ups.
Amina’s living room has solid red floor-to-ceiling drapes and a hushed air. She looks less girlish now. The interior has brought a seriousness to her mood and her body. I notice the bags under her eyes, little dots of heat rash on her cheeks, and the nubs where her right middle and ring finger used to be. Daylight shoots through in a white column where the drapes fail to meet in the middle. Conversation is polite. Henry is a kind, narrow-shouldered man with the beginnings of a paunch. The flat-screen TV, which is on but muted, is playing a Nollywood drama.
He is a banker; he has Friday mornings off. Amina recently left banking and is looking for the next thing. She says she enjoys the opportunity to be with her daughter, but there’s something dutiful in the answer. I ask them about their commutes to work, and about whether they plan to have more children. They don’t ask me much about myself. They do ask if I’d like lunch, and I say no. She has, I presume, told him about me: the first heart she broke (or perhaps it was the other way around). It would be different if I was alone here with her, without the stranger who knows nothing of our conversations, our letters (belabored cursive on perfumed paper; where are they all now?), our long-ago truancy, our first frightened moments in bed, the shame and delight after. And then doing it again and again, any opportunity we had, swept up in a hunger like none since.
The pauses last too long. The tension is that of a waiting room, and I wonder why I have come, why I have chosen, yet again, to recover the impossible. I tell them about my encounter with the policeman, careful not to sound too angry about it.
—You see what we have to face in this country? she says, laughing. But you paid too much. One thousand naira would have done it.
I listen closely to her laughter. I can’t quite reconcile it with what I remember. I can’t tell if it has darkened or if it is some other difference. Is there some trace in her every reaction of that day her hand was caught in the food processor? There had been a power surge, a mutual friend had told me. Something had slipped, somehow, or she had reached into the machine. The blades had whirred, and she’d lost a lot of blood.
I’m distracted by this thought when Henry asks me something.
—Sorry?
—I said, Did you think you could move back here?
—Oh, who knows? The money would have to be right. Things would have to fall into place. It’s easier for bankers than for doctors. We have good banks and bad hospitals.
Another pause. Traffic outside. Generators. There are many lives and many years, and relatively few moments when those individual histories touch each other with real recognition.
At no time is Amina awkward in handling objects. It is she who gives me the glass of water, in the clawlike grip of her right hand. When she writes (but this I know only from hearsay) she writes with her left. She had to learn again, with a hand different from the one that used to write to me. On the television, the camera zooms in on a man with wide eyes, then cuts away and zooms in on another man, with whom he’s locked in staring combat. The little girl finally wakes up. Hello, Rekia, I say. She shies away.
Amina says:
—So moving back has crossed your mind?
—It has crossed my mind.
This is the answer I have heard others give. It will be many weeks before it rains again. When I leave their house, I wipe water from the side-view mirror to get a better glimpse of the three of them waving me bye. They are close together and small, as in a medallion of the Holy Family.
TWENTY-ONE
I escape family and go out into the city on my own to observe its many moods: the lethargy of the early mornings, the raucous early evenings, the silent, lightless nights cut through with the sounds of generators. It is in this aimless wandering that I find myself truly in the city. The days go by. I do not delve, as I had thought I would, into my childhood, do not visit my former schools or look up other old friends.
One afternoon, a few days before Christmas Day, as I walk on Allen Avenue with no particular destination in mind, I happen on a sign for a jazz shop. I follow the arrows and enter a small room at the back of a building. Here at last is something that caters to the tastes of the minority. All that is available at the many street-side record shacks is Nigerian music and records by popular black American and Caribbean artists: hip-hop, dancehall, reggaeton. The interior, covered in glass cases and mirrors, is like a miniature version of the set for the final fight scene in Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon. The glass cases have a decent selection of music. There are the “smooth jazz” artists with their cloying offerings, but there are also many discs by the giants: Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, and many others. The modern jazz adventurers such as Vijay Iyer and Brad Mehldau are also well represented. The ceiling of the shop is, like all the walls, a mirror. The reflective surfaces, in combination with the bright fluorescent lighting, have the peculiar effect of making the room feel not bigger but, rather, smaller and weirder, as if one were stuffed into one of those camera obscura boxes so favored by the early Dutch lens grinders.
A woman and a man are talking at the cashier’s table when I come in. The woman is also working on an accounts book. I look around the shop, and when I have taken note of what is available, I ask about prices.
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��Oh, sorry, none of it is for sale.
—Excuse me?
—The compact discs are not for sale. Unless you want to pay three thousand five for each one.
I am confused. A jazz shop, but the discs are not for sale. Unless I pay twenty-five dollars for each, an absurd figure. Most of these discs wouldn’t cost me any more than fifteen dollars in the States, and some of the reissues would be considerably less. What could be her meaning?
—But, sir, if you see something that you like, what we can do is make a copy for you. That applies to any disc in the shop. And that costs one thousand naira. But the originals are not for sale.
A legitimate business, with a public sign, on one of the busier commercial streets in town, catering to a sophisticated clientele, and all the while living on piracy. Do they have any idea that this is a problem? Or is it enough to settle for sophistication without troubling oneself about the laws that defend creativity? The following week, I visit a shop called Jazzhole on Awolowo Road in Ikoyi. And there I finally find myself in an inspired and congenial setting. The place is a combination music and book shop. The owner is one of a small but tenacious breed of Nigerian cultural innovators. The presentation is outstanding, as well done as many a Western bookshop: there is a broad selection of jazz, Pan-African, and other international music near the capacious entrance, and rows and rows of books for the general reader toward the back. The shop has a cool and quiet interior. Here, I think to myself, is finally that moving spot of sun I have sought.
I see music by Ali Farka Touré, by Salif Keïta. There are books by Philip Roth, Penelope Fitzgerald, and, as I had hoped, Michael Ondaatje. The prices are high; not higher than they would be in an American or British shop, but certainly beyond the reach of most Nigerians. And yet, knowing that there is such a place, in the absence of good libraries or other vendors, makes all the difference to those who must have such sustenance. And better at these high prices than not at all. But the illegitimate business model of the other jazz shop is a threat to this essential work. The people behind the bookshop have also created a record label—they have released three albums by the wonderfully named highlife artist Fatai Rolling Dollar—as well as a publishing house. One of their newest projects, the book Lagos: A City at Work, is a huge textual and photographic compendium of the life of labor here. It features the work of Nigerian thinkers, writers, and photographers, all grappling with the “nonlinear nature” of the city. It is a brilliant confrontation with our great behemoth of a settlement. And there is really only one word for what I feel about these new contributions to the Lagosian scene: gratitude. They are emerging, these creatives, in spite of everything; and they are essential because they are the signs of hope in a place that, like all other places on the limited earth, needs hope.
TWENTY-TWO
I am in the van with Aunty Folake and Uncle Bello. They have many errands to run and I’ve come along for the ride. Every moment I can spend with them is a pleasure. My aunt is a devout Christian who gets up at five every morning to spend an hour with the Bible and devotional texts before the sun rises. Her brother is a committed Muslim. The group he belongs to is called NASFAT, the Nasrul-Lahi-il-Fathi Society of Nigeria, the major Islamic renewal organization in Lagos. With his placid temperament, he is the very antithesis of a jihadi, which makes it funnier that his sister and brother-in-law sometimes tease him with the name Mr. Osama. But, as far as I can tell, they never actually discuss religion, much less attempt to convert each other.
We have several stops to make this morning: we have to buy some live chickens, we need to refill some large jerry cans with palm oil, and there are repaired suitcases to pick up from the leather worker. So we drive all around the neighborhood and I get to see how thickly populated even these outlying areas of the city have become in my absence. Out here, at the spreading edge of the gigantic metropolis, there is a feel of busy village life. It is an urban density, but in the rhythms of certain interactions, away from the highways and major bus stops, life is languid, and the general feeling less frenetic.
The woman selling the oil expertly measures out the exact amount required. The fluent substance is beautiful to watch. It falls in an orange-colored cord from one vessel to the other, gleaming in lines like twisted silk. Across the street from where we buy palm oil, there is a long line of children and women fetching water at a tap. They carry brightly colored plastic bowls. They are orderly. The solitary faucet comes out of a pipe attached to the fence of a large private house. But how does this work? My aunt says:
—The government doesn’t provide any running water in this area. So you’ve got a local big man with his own water supply. Borehole, electric pump, underwater tank, overhead reservoir. That whole system. He puts a tap outside his house, hires someone to watch over it, and charges per bucket. Fifteen naira per bucket, payable before you even fill up your vessel.
I see a child of no more than eight place, with great care, a brimming basin on her head. It sits there in quivering balance. She picks her way across the street, one sure foot after the other, and goes into one of the small houses. A life on the margins. For these people who must buy water every day, if there is no money on a given day, it means there is no water that day. And when there is water, every drop is cherished like a quintessence. We drive on. One thought leads to another, as thoughts do, and Ben comes to mind. Ben is a young man attached to my aunt’s school by the National Youth Service Corps. I say:
—You know, I quite like Ben.
—Oh yes. He’s a good man. Very hardworking, and conscientious. He’s Ogoni, you know.
—That, I didn’t know. Those people have suffered. All that oil wealth, and they don’t see a penny of it. Nigeria has been rough on them. Ken Saro-Wiwa hanged, all the military repression, the ongoing environmental damage.
I am warming to my theme. Then my uncle says:
—Awon ko l’o m’an je’yan ni? Aren’t they the ones who eat people?
I laugh. Oh, come on, Uncle, come on, I say, why are you Nigerians so fond of rumors? We—and what I mean is you—are so tribalistic sometimes. And anyway, don’t our Yoruba people also have some kingship-related and grimly nonvegetarian ritual?
That makes them both laugh. The chickens in the backseat start making a fuss, but they soon quiet down. Uncle Bello says:
—But what rumor? Rumor nothing! Okay, I’ll tell you a story about my friend Constance. Constance works at the same company in Agidingbi as I do. This lady is from Ondo State, and she got posted to the Ogoni area for her stint on the National Youth Service Corps. And you should know that she’s an afin, an albino. Well, during the orientation week, and this was in a fairly remote region, near the tribals and such, there was a racket at the gates every night. This went on for three nights, people singing and howling and rattling the gates late into the night. Until the Youth Service people said, you know, just what is going on out there? So they asked around, and it turns out that there’s a belief in this village pe afin o b’osi rara, won fe fa sita, won fe pa je. Ah! They wanted the albino brought out to them so they could cook and eat her.
My eyes widen. My aunt chuckles. The particular Yoruba choice of words makes the story even funnier.
—Poor Constance. You better believe she cleared out of there by the next day! She finished service in Lagos, and not long after, she got posted to my company.
And then he adds:
—So be careful around that Ben. You just never know when the guy might be hungry.
Such a terrible story, and we are all in stitches the rest of the way home.
TWENTY-THREE
At times, the absurdity makes one laugh. Other times, the only possible response is a stunned silence. Shortly before I left New York for Lagos there was a plane crash in Nigeria. A Bellview aircraft plying the Lagos–Abuja route went down three minutes after takeoff, into forests near the village of Lisa in Ogun State. None of the 117 passengers on board survived. A government inquiry was promised, and there was much public h
and-wringing and talk about a time of national prayer. While I am in Nigeria two months later, a plane belonging to Sosoliso Airlines goes down on the Abuja–Port Harcourt route. One hundred and eight people are killed, and there are two survivors. The victims include seventy-five schoolchildren returning home for the holidays. Almost all of them are pupils of the Ignatius Loyola Jesuit boarding school. Many of the parents witness the accident, because it happens on arrival, when the plane overshoots the runway. The fire department has no water, and can only watch as the plane incinerates its passengers. There are harrowing scenes of parents contending over the bodies of children burnt beyond recognition. A few days later mothers of the dead children stage a peaceful protest in Lagos. At the march, these mothers, some of whom lost as many as three of their children, are teargassed by police, and that is the end of the matter. There is no further protest, and there is no redress.
A phrase I hear often in Nigeria is idea l’a need. It means “all we need is the general idea or concept.” People say this in different situations. It is a way of saying: that’s good enough, there’s no need to get bogged down in details. I hear it time and again. After the electrician installs an antenna and all we get is unclear reception of one station, CNN, instead of the thirty pristine stations we had been promised, the reaction isn’t that he has done an incomplete job. It is, rather: we’ll make do, after all idea l’a need. Why bother with sharp reception when you can have snowy reception? And once, driving in town with one of the school drivers, I discover that the latch for the seat belt is broken. Oh, pull it across your chest and sit on the buckle, he says, idea l’a need. Safety is not the point. The semblance of safety is what we were after.