I Used to Say My Mother Was Shirley Bassey

by Stephen K Amos

  Granny Ola had presents for all of us. She had selected a massive bolt of floral-patterned cloth, which in Yoruba is called aso oke (top cloth), and had new clothes made for everyone. It is very much in the Yoruba tradition to select a special cloth for family and friends to wear on special occasions. It’s also about showing who’s family and who’s not. She demanded that we all wear the clothes straight away and with six people squeezed onto one sofa all dressed in the same floral pattern it was hard to see where one person ended and the other began. We looked like an amorphous Amos family blob with heads and hands appearing at random.

  Stella and I were picked to help Granny in the kitchen and to start with it looked depressingly like it would be another meal made up of various kinds of paste. Stella was busy making the garri and I was helping to make moin moin, which is another kind of paste made from beans. Just as we were wondering if and when the meat was going to turn up … it did. On four legs. The butcher rounded the corner driving in front of him a fat goat with a bell around its neck and Mamma Ola got very excited and ran outside to greet him. She paid him the extra naira to kill the goat for us and a boy with a metal bath on his head grabbed the poor creature, stuck him in the bath and then stuck him for real. Half an hour later a skinned and gutted goat was sitting on the sideboard in the kitchen.

  You can’t be squeamish when it comes to food in Nigeria and Granny got out half a dozen different kinds of knife and set about chopping the animal into different cuts. There were steaks to barbecue, tough meat to stew, joints to roast, ears and cheeks to fry, trotters to boil into jelly and sweetbreads to be made. The kitchen became a carnival of energy and us kids were shooed away as the women set about preparing every part of the goat.

  We enjoyed a banquet that day the likes of which I’d never had before or since. The men set about preparing outdoor tables and chairs and we all sat down. Dad dished out kola nuts to the adults as they waited. I think kola nuts should be called bitter nuts because to my palette they tasted so disgusting, but I found out they have caffeine in them and are good to eat if you are suffering from hunger pangs. As it happened, we didn’t have to wait long for the food to start arriving. And once it started it didn’t stop! Different dishes were ready at different times, so for hours and hours we all ate. First fried meats, then barbecued, then roasted, then stewed. The meal went on for so long that you could go to bed, sleep it off and then come back hours later to find a fresh plate in front of you.

  The meal went on late into the night and by the next morning people were slumped on armchairs, across sofas, in beds and even outside at the dinner table. I thought back to the Christmases we hadn’t really enjoyed in London. Christmas back there involved a roast in our jeans and T-shirts followed by watching telly and heading to bed at a sensible hour. By Boxing Day morning normally Mum or Dad would be back working and all memories of Christmas would be fading fast. Here in Abeokuta the mammoth task of cleaning up didn’t even begin until Boxing Day evening, simply because it took that long to rouse everyone from their slumbers.

  The next few days were marked by more relatives coming and going and, before we knew it, New Year’s Eve had arrived. Nigerians know how to party like no others and that evening I was to learn the words owambe (party), effizzy (swagger) and shakara (showing off). Simply dressing for the occasion is an all-day thing for most women, who go out in their absolute finest. We all went out in the early evening wearing the clothes Mamma Ola had had made for us and the whole town was on the streets ambling around. There was to be a free party at the Abeokuta football stadium that night and, even though it was only a few minutes’ walk, it took us nearly an hour to get there as we had to stop and talk to everyone that crossed our path.

  Abeokuta stadium can hold 30,000 people in the stands, but when they open up the pitch for a public event it can hold twice that. As we stepped into the middle of the stadium we could have been a visiting football team dressed in our matching outfits. Massive petrol generators had been installed around the edges of the pitch and the sound they made was already deafening. Auntie Yomi from Ikeja had come up to Abeokuta from Lagos to set up the sound systems and when we arrived she came and greeted us one by one.

  ‘Welcome! Welcome! It’s loud isn’t it? What a lot of work to control all of this! Thank God they chose some of us from Lagos to look after everything. But you wait until the Gbedu (sound systems) are installed. It’s going to be a real owambe tonight!’

  We watched all evening as people and equipment arrived. A small market was set up where people could buy food, drink, streamers, bangers and sparklers. When the massive sound systems were hooked up to the generators, they started playing music at a deafening volume and slowly more and more people from across town showed up. By nightfall, giant bonfires were lit all around the stadium and they served as little centres of activity, each with their own sound system playing different sorts of music from Afrobeat to soul and rap music. There was even one area in the stadium where they were playing church music and a gospel choir had turned up. Religion, as I said, is everywhere in Nigeria, but even if one person is very conservative and God-fearing they don’t mind rubbing shoulders with people who are on the wilder side of life.

  There were hundreds of suya spots, but instead of getting barbecue for us, Dad ordered the whole family a big bowl of pepper soup each. This is an incredibly spicy mixture that should have meat in it. Unfortunately, on this night they had substituted the beef for a piece of unappetizing cow skin, which floated around in the radioactively hot soup. Cow skin doesn’t normally feature on the average Western menu. None of us could stomach it that night and we pushed it away. Aunti Yomi was surprised that we didn’t take to it. ‘Your English teeth cannot handle this delicacy,’ she roared. ‘Waste not, want not.’ And she gathered all of our bowls together and ate every one, carefully chewing each piece of meat until the bowls were empty.

  Mum and Dad had long since stopped listening to our complaints about the food in Nigeria. I had moaned to Mama Bunmi back in Lagos that I missed things like McDonald’s and that unless you count puddings made from condensed milk there are almost no sweets available. When I explained to her about Wham! bars back in London she was disgusted and said, ‘Ah, Stephen, if you have sweets all the time then you will die of piles!’ She didn’t mince her words.

  I was hanging out by the sound system that was belting out Afrobeat music and a group of men in their twenties were standing nearby commenting on the women as they passed by. ‘Look at her. Oh my God! Shakara! Plenty! Stop it, sista! I’m falling in love with you.’ They noticed me watching them and they invited me to join them as they danced to the music. As we were dancing together, they offered me a sip of a milky-looking liquid in a clear plastic bottle. My taste buds were challenged once again: it had a weird tang. I didn’t know it at the time but I was drinking palm wine, which is a wicked concoction made of fermented tree sap. It is a bit stronger than wine and after a couple of gulps I was feeling very weird, but it seemed to give me energy to dance more.

  Soon I was sweating and had to stop. Needing a rest and with a woozy feeling in my head, I wanted to find the others. It was then that I saw the familiar brocade floral pattern and blindly stumbled over to a lady as she went to a different part of the stadium. When we got to another bonfire, I was starting to feel faint and I tugged on her sleeve. When she turned around I was horrified to see that this young woman was a total stranger. The cloth Granny had bought was obviously not that unique after all! I panicked. This was serious. I was in a stadium with tens of thousands of people around me, with barely adequate lighting, and I was lost.

  The young woman must have seen fear rising in my face and tried to calm me down. With the music playing so loud she could barely hear me as I tried to tell her my name, but I think it was pretty clear that I was a lost kid: it’s not like I was going to ask her to dance. She didn’t worry at all and actually took a moment to find a handful of sparklers. She gave me one and took one for herself and once
they were lit we waved them around in front of us to clear a path back to where the Afrobeat music was playing. It was actually kind of fun as we strode through the crowds waving the sparklers ahead of us.

  ‘Not so fast, young man. Remember to walk with plenty of effizzy. You want people to stop and stare as you go past them. So remember to swagger.’ I’ve never since managed a walk with such swagger and such fear hand in hand. I had no idea where my family was but somehow I knew that the feeling of being lost was nothing compared to the feeling of looking lost in a crowd full of people riding their shakara to the max.

  After about forty minutes we were in a different part of the stadium and I heard a voice. ‘Stephen! Stephen! Where are you?’ Through my drunken haze, I was very pleased to see that it was Auntie Yomi. She was watching a group of teenagers who were having a break-dancing competition. I ran up to her and told her I’d gotten lost.

  ‘Stephen! What is that smell on your breath?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You’ve been drinking toddy. What were you thinking?’

  ‘I followed that woman!’ Yomi looked up and saw the woman who was dressed in the same pattern as I was and she laughed.

  ‘You had a lucky escape. But you won’t be so lucky if your mummy and daddy find out you have been drinking! Look at you now. A big man! Well, you better steer clear of the others. Here come with me.’ She led me to a suya stall, bought me something to eat and told me to wait there and not move an inch. She came back ten minutes later. ‘There. I told them you are going to stay here with me and so they won’t bother about you when they want to go home. We will have fun tonight. And don’t go running off chasing women.’ So I spent the rest of the night with Auntie Yomi and her DJ friends having a blast. She was so cool and full of life that to be honest I may have even had a few more mouthfuls of palm wine before the evening was out.

  6

  MUM’S FAMILY DIDN’T HAVE any electricity due to a corruption scandal, which meant that only half of the town got wired up. They were in the wrong half, but Mama Bunmi’s daughter was in the right half. So even though they only had a small apartment they at least got to enjoy fans, lights and television. A few days into January, after everyone had got over the excesses of Christmas and New Year, I went to visit Mama Bunmi and she took me to see the sights of Abeokuta.

  We visited the famous rock after which Abeokuta is named. Olumo Rock is a huge system of interlocking rocks and caves and it looks prehistoric, a bit like something out of The Flintstones. Abeokuta grew as a town because the surrounding villages were being pillaged for slaves by other tribes. People chose to live ‘under the rock’ because the rock and cave systems were easier to defend than the wide open plains surrounding it. We climbed the rock and, from that vantage point, we could see the first cathedral built in Nigeria, St Peter’s Cathedral, and the other great building of Abeokuta – the Alake Palace, the home of the Oba (king).

  Mama Bunmi may not have been as wealthy as Mum’s family but she was worldly and friendly and well connected. When we got to the Alake Palace this humble old woman went straight up to the guard on the door, curtsied, and asked right there to have an audience with the King. The guard laughed at her because she’d been there many times before and knew the King well. Nothing happens fast in Abeokuta and we were told that the King would see us in an hour but that until he was ready we were free to look around the palace.

  Nigeria has a lot of kings and a lot of princes. Loads of Nigerian last names start with Ade-, which means ‘king’ or ‘crown’. So if you know an ‘Ade-something’ then you know that they are descended from a king. That’s not too difficult because in the olden days Nigerian Oba could have plenty of wives and plenty of children. If, when I say king, you start thinking of some kind of National Geographic-looking guy wearing leopard skin then forget it. This guy didn’t have any real political power in Nigeria, but he was the most respected figure in the community, who wore tailored suits and had sent his son to be educated at Harrow.

  The Oba’s palace is built in a very grand fashion. You go through a big archway into a courtyard with an east wing and a west wing. Mama Bunmi took me around the palace, which she obviously knew pretty well. The rooms were huge and, with their high ceilings, they kept cool in the tropical heat. It didn’t look as if anyone lived there, but although the rooms were completely unfurnished, on every wall hung pieces of traditional West African art. Some were normal painted pictures, others were random bits of acacia and mahogany with burned-on etching. The King had plenty of wooden and iron sculptures and there were a lot of wood-carved masks with coloured material and feathers adorning them. There was one figure that seemed to be represented a lot. It looked like a huge spider. Sometimes the spider had a man’s head or sometimes there would be a man riding on the back of the spider.

  When the Oba came down to see us, he greeted Mama Bunmi warmly. He was wearing a linen shirt and trousers to combat the heat of the tropical midday and black leather shoes, but he wore a traditional round Nigerian fila cap on his head. He was very old but seemed to have lots of energy and he was so tall that he had to stoop to embrace Mama Bunmi properly. When I saw him, I prostrated fully on the ground as usual. He laughed at this and said, ‘Ah! An ajebo who will prostrate to me!’

  I winced at that. I still didn’t like being called a butter eater at school.

  When the Oba saw my reaction he said, ‘Now, Stephen, seriously. Although you were born in the West, do you feel like a Nigerian?’

  ‘Not really, sir.’

  ‘Let me tell you something. You are Nigerian if you live in Nigeria. Even oyimbo can be a Nigerian, if he lives here.’

  ‘Who is that man riding the spider in all of the pictures? Is it you?’

  ‘Oh my God! No! That is a picture of Anansi the spider! Have you never heard of Anansi the spider?’

  ‘I heard about him in school back in London – he’s from Jamaica?’

  The King kissed his teeth at that. ‘From the Caribbean? Don’t forget that here he born! Anansi is the number one trickster and joker in West Africa too. He can tell a tall tale to fool even a wise man. In fact he is the god of stories too. Don’t you know any anansesem?’

  The King took us from room to room and pointed out the spider in all of the different pictures. ‘Each of these pictures tells an anansesem. An Anansi story. Look. That one tells how he became a spider in the first place.

  ‘You see in the time bifor bifor the gods and men lived together on earth and no one did much and nothing much was going on. Anansi is a prankster and to relieve his boredom he played a joke on another god who didn’t take it very well. You can see here Anansi is beaten and shattered into eight pieces but because he is a god he couldn’t die, so he came back as a spider.

  ‘Do you know how he got possession of the anansesem from his father, the king of the Gods?’

  Mama Bunmi took over. ‘The first myth of Anansi is how he got all of the stories from the king of the gods, who until then would always guard them jealously. Anansi boldly went up to his father and asked him straight, “Why do you keep all the stories to yourself? Give them to me.”

  ‘Anansi’s father underestimated his son. He didn’t realize that Anansi is a clever god who almost always gets what he wants. So he set Anansi an impossible task. The chief god said that he would give away all of the stories if Anansi could bring back to him four difficult-to-capture creatures alive: a lion, a whole nest of hornets, a python and Mmoatia, a demon.

  ‘Anansi sat on the ground and thought to himself for a long time about how to go about getting these creatures to the chief god. The lion was a faster runner than Anansi even if he crawled on eight legs and he was bigger too, plus he had claws. Anansi could sneak up and try to bite him but then the lion might be killed. So he set about a trick. He knew where the lion’s hut was and that he would go out hunting early in the morning and not come back until late in the evening, when he would be tired from all of his chasing and eating. So Anansi went to
the lion’s house in the morning and, once he saw lion run off, he used all of his legs to dig a deep hole in the ground. Once it was dug deep enough, he laid some palm leaves and twigs over the hole and sat back to wait.

  ‘When the sun was going down that evening the lion came running back home and, just as Anansi hoped, he fell right down into the hole. Anansi crawled to the hole and said, “Ho! Lion! Are you stuck or something?”

  ‘“Yes, Anansi, I fell in the hole. Can you help me?” Anansi went into the forest and found two sticks. He made a big show of reaching down to the lion with the sticks but lion’s claws just slid right off of them.

  ‘“How about if I dangle my web over the side and you can grab on to them and pull yourself up.”

  ‘“Yes. Yes. Send me down as many strands as you can.”

  ‘So Anansi let down as much web as he could and sure enough the lion eventually dragged himself back to the surface. When lion finally reached the lip of the hole he bolted for his front door, but he was so entwined in Anansi’s web that he couldn’t move an inch! He begged Anansi to let him go, but the wily spider knew that he had well and truly caught the lion and brought him straight to the chief god to get his reward.

  ‘When it came to a whole nest of hornets it was a more difficult question. Hornets can’t all be trapped in one place. What if just one escaped? Then the chief god would use it as an excuse to say Anansi had failed. He reasoned to himself that he would have to make them come to him willingly if he was to catch them at all. After thinking long and hard, Anansi decided to pick a gourd fruit from the forest. He ate the flesh to hollow it out and then filled the empty gourd with water. Next, Anansi scurried over to the hornets’ nest and put a banana leaf on his head before emptying the gourd over himself and the hornets’ nest at once. When the angry hornets came out to see what was going on, Anansi convinced them that it was raining and that they should shelter from the rain like he was doing with the banana leaf.