Welcome to Lagos

by Chibundu Onuzo

  The safest thing to do was turn the Chief in. And how could they turn him in without the money? And how could they lose the money without losing their schools? They could kill him, Chike thought in fanciful moments. Oma’s knives were sharp enough for the job. But it was not so easy for Chike to kill a man anymore. How had he done it before; coolly and without rancor, shooting strangers his commanding officer believed threatened the Nigerian state? He could imagine killing a man out of rage in Lagos but not in the clinical way he had once done.

  They would have to watch the Chief closely, that was all. Use his expertise but watch him closely. His talk is smooth as butter, yet war is in his heart.

  “Mind your step,” Sandayọ said as they approached a puddle.

  37

  I decided to devote my life and my wealth to the poor when I saw so much in the world was vanity. It was a decision my wife and family were against at the time. They thought I had run mad but I am glad to say they have now joined me in good works.

  —interview with Guru Mahadi, Nigerian Journal

  IT HAD BEGUN WITH Chief Sandayọ wanting to win their trust. For what other reason would he go tramping through Lagos, haggling like an Ikire market woman for discounts small and insignificant? His plan was working. They had grown lax, forgetting sometimes he was their prisoner, joking and exchanging stories with him. Not lax enough to leave him unguarded at night, but still, Oma was no longer required to remove the knives from the kitchen at the end of each day.

  Walking through Lagos in Yẹmi’s clothes, the Chief was truly anonymous. It was not pleasant to be so completely unknown but it was not unpleasant either. In Abuja when he entered a room, people would begin to scurry, a wind of motion swirling around him, aides running, civil servants leaping ahead to smooth his way. His wife would have mocked him if she had witnessed this sycophancy.

  “What’s wrong with your hands?” Funkẹ would have said. “Too weak to carry your own briefcase?”

  Chief Sandayọ finally let Chike convince him to see a refurbished school. He added a face cap and sunglasses to his disguise only as a precaution. He no longer feared he would be recognized. Although they fed him well, he had lost weight and his face had thinned into a younger version of himself.

  He could guess Chike’s motives for taking him to the primary school. A change of heart: it was what do-gooders like Chike and his wife always wanted, proselytizers living for the next conversion high. And yet, knowing this, he was still pleased by the students, lined behind their new desks like rows of crops.

  “We’ve done well,” he said, meaning it for a short moment. In his fourteen months as minister, he had missed his early days in the YPC, the earth and smoke of their village schools, the eagerness of his pupils. He had been a miracle worker back then. Eyes that had once looked upon letters unseeing opened to the wonders of “the cat sat on the mat” while “John put the kettle on the fire.”

  He had spent his thirties driving to the remotest parts of the southwest, living the national pledge, serving with all his strength so a few could learn to read and write. And to what end? This was a country that could not be dragged out of the mud. Mud became Nigeria. Filth was her natural covering. And if people like Chike did not know this, it was out of willful ignorance, a delusion dangerous for these children. What would these new chairs do? Or the computers? Or the textbooks? The statistics did not lie. If these children could read, it was only to learn that their country was not made to work for them.

  He had found a black thread of nihilism in Funkẹ’s new religion, a buoyant despair he understood. Before her conversion, calamities upset his wife. She would cry at the aftermath of an earthquake, pipes wrenched out of the ground, homes collapsed with families inside. She was quiet for weeks after they drove past the body of a child, knocked over and dead by the time they swerved to avoid the corpse.

  Then Funkẹ had had her religious experience and all suffering had been put in an unsettling perspective. The sooner the world unraveled, the sooner the Second Coming of her savior. Earthquakes, famine, war: all signs and precursors to glorious Rapture. It was a rationale to explain a world that never got better. Despite one’s best efforts, despite one’s highest hopes: the world did not change.

  38

  On this historic day, fresh and independent journalism has come to Nigeria. We say down with the brown envelope. Down with news without intelligent analysis. Down with bad-quality ink on even worse-quality paper. No more the drab arts and culture section, the lifeless politics pages, the cliché-ridden sports section. The Nigerian Journal, for the inquisitive mind, has arrived.

  —pilot edition, Nigerian Journal

  AHMED REMAINED IN THE flat with people he had grown friendly with yet knew so little of. On that first night, Sandayọ had seemed almost a captive and Chike his head jailer, but now the Chief was part of the group that went out every morning in a foursome and did not return till evening, speaking in snatches of the day’s work. Computers were ready, plumber not cooperating, painter had done a good job: he could not catch the gist of it.

  Nor could he grasp what linked them all. Fineboy and Isoken had the rivalry of siblings but were both equally aghast at the thought. Chike and Oma clearly had some sort of relationship but they were not married. Yẹmi was the only one he could place. Chike’s loyal retainer, laundryman and shoe polisher.

  Then there were the evening sessions where Chike would read from the Bible and they would all listen, rapt as children, even Sandayọ drawn in, Chike’s voice bringing to life the Sea of Galilee and the demons of Gadarene. And then after a beautiful reading, he would turn and point out holes, the agnostic Bible scholar, and Oma would jump to the defense of the passage, and Fineboy would often join her, and whatever side he took, Isoken would stand on the opposite and the Chief would say something cutting and Yẹmi would remain neutral. It had something of a family, the large family he had always wanted as an only child, often humored, often discontented.

  Perhaps if Ahmed had stayed in England, he would have a wife and a house in a north London suburb, a patch of grass to tend, his slot of life to live. He had sent his mother a few more texts, brief and to the point. “I’m still OK. Tell Dad.” And when she replied “Wer r u?” in the strangely current text language that she was so fond of, he had texted simply, “Safe.”

  They were right. He should not have returned to Nigeria. After five years, what did he have to show? No newspaper. No building. No staff. He had tried to call his former employees and only Kẹmi, a young intern, picked up.

  “Mr. Bakare, is this you?”

  “Yes. Kẹmi, how are you?”

  “You’re alive.”

  “Was anyone hurt in the fire?”

  “Most people had already gone home, because the men came at five fifteen. They shot in the air and told the few of us that were in the building to leave.”

  “What about Chidinma?”

  “I don’t know. I left.”

  “Kẹmi, I’m going to need you to do me a favor. I want you to write a statement. We still have the website. We can continue running underground.”

  “Mr. Bakare, I can’t. My parents have warned me not to even speak to you.”

  “Of course. I apologize. Have you started looking for a new job?”

  “Yes. I’ve dropped my CV at MTN and Stavos Air.”

  “That’s a shame. You’d have made a wonderful journalist.”

  “My parents said it’s too dangerous. I’m sorry. I have to go now.”

  “Of course. Thank you.”

  “Bye, Mr. Bakare. Stay where you are.”

  WHEN HIS FATHER CALLED him, he had let the phone ring, answering just before the call expired.

  “Good afternoon.”

  “I knew you were there. Your mother thought you would have come home by now.”

  “I didn’t want to put you in any danger.”

  “It’s better this way. It’s been a week but you never know who is watching.”

 
“How’s Mum?”

  “She’s enjoying your notoriety. No hour passes without one of her friends coming to see her. In fact, two of them just walked in. These things they tie on their heads get bigger every day.”

  “I should go before someone asks who you’re talking to.”

  “I suppose you knew what you were getting into when you decided to run that article.”

  “I had an idea.”

  “You had an idea. Do you know your receptionist is still missing? You have many foolish thoughts but no idea of responsibility.”

  “I have to go now.”

  “Your mother said I should ask you if you want to leave the country. You could go to England for a while, wait there until things calm down.”

  “You want me to run away.”

  “I want you to act with common sense. You don’t know how serious these people are. You think you can just write anything you like in Nigeria?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  His capitulation robbed his father of his signature rant of rhetorical questions piled swiftly on each other. Are you normal? Are you thinking straight? Am I your mate? What is the meaning of this? Have you lost your senses? In his childhood, by the third question, he would have been reduced to tears.

  “Where are you?”

  “It’s better I don’t say.”

  “OK. I have a call coming in on the landline. Your mother sends her love.”

  To stand in a queue patiently, to draw the blinds at seven, to offer warm beverages to all and sundry, he had lost these domestic British habits. They could be regained, as he had regained this brusque manner when he moved back to Lagos.

  And what of his receptionist? He had tried her phone. He had sent texts. He would have gone to her house if he knew where she lived. His staying in Nigeria would not bring her back. If no news of her surfaced, he would pay for an advert in This Day to be run in a week’s time. He would use a picture from an office party, one where she was posing, clutching the curve of her hip and smiling at the lens. If she was alive, she would never forgive him for using a bad picture, and perhaps even if she was dead. Missing person’s advert: that was the most he could do for Chidinma, then he, too, would disappear.

  III

  Water No Get Enemy

  39

  EVERY DAY BROUGHT SOMETHING new for Chike. One morning he might be arguing with an electrician over ceiling fans that turned sluggishly through the air. The next, he might be stacking a library with books, shelves full for the first time.

  He had begun meditating to deal with the stress of their work. There was no other name for this teasing apart of the words, prodding and kneading and pulling until his mind grew slack with the meanings he had made and remade from one line of text. The prose of St. John suited this sort of mental labor. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. A riddle, a mystery, a nonsense that he continued to turn over for days, weaving in and out of the words until all he saw when he thought of the verse was a picture of glowing Hebrew script running through a black, unformed universe.

  The journalist had left as abruptly as he arrived. Chike had grown used to his slim form stretched out on the sofa, his face covered by the pages of a broadsheet. In his two-week stay, Ahmed had left the flat only to buy newspapers, returning with a wide selection of dailies and news-magazines. In his mind, perhaps, Ahmed still ran the Nigerian Journal and needed to know what the competition was saying.

  “Where will you go?” Chike had asked him the previous night.

  “I’ll travel out. England for a month or so. I think the matter has blown over. They’ve had their revenge, but just to be safe. My receptionist is still missing, you know.”

  Ahmed did not have any of the pretensions of a rich man. He ate whatever Oma served them and seemed content to sleep on the couch, but he belonged to that class of person who flew easily over borders, his passage through the world legal and approved. Chike had always wanted to travel, to pose under McDonald’s arches, twin arcs to the triumph of capitalism, and walk on ocean beds among the coral and tropical fish he had studied in his textbooks and knew only as dry black-and-white sketches.

  To travel overseas took money, of which there was an abundance in the flat. He was the only one who knew where Sandayọ’s loot was hidden, a responsibility that waxed and waned in heaviness. Sometimes his hands trembled as he counted out the cash for the day’s expenditure. Other times he was indifferent, as if the dollars were mere paper stamped with a balding Benjamin Franklin.

  The journalist would be in the air now, rushing through the sky. Chike had flown once as a child, sitting in the window seat by his mother, their destination now lost to his memory. He remembered the clouds spread below them like a new, white earth, large cumuli that looked firm enough to walk on if only his mother would let him out of the plane.

  “You’d fall. You’re too heavy,” his mother said.

  “I’m lighter than you.”

  “Not light enough. I’d need to stretch you and stretch you and stretch you and stretch you till you were as thin as a—”

  “Butterfly.”

  “Thinner.”

  “Mosquito.”

  “Thinner.”

  “Amoeba.”

  “Yes, as thin as an amoeba. And then you wouldn’t have any legs to walk on the clouds. You’d just float on top of them, a long, thin, shapeless amoeba.”

  She had pulled at his cheeks as she said this and he had laughed, squirming against the cool metal buckle of his seat belt. That was what he remembered of flying. The sharp air of the cabin, the mountain range of clouds, and his cheeks, sore from her pulling and his laughter.

  40

  “SIR, THE CAPTAIN HAS asked that seat belts be worn at this time.”

  “Please, can I have a glass of wine?”

  “Alcohol will be served at mealtimes. May I ask that you fasten your seat belt, sir?”

  “What time will the meal be served?”

  “The cart will be on its way shortly, sir.”

  There were cracks beginning to appear in her makeup, which was too thick for this altitude. Ahmed had flown first class with his parents when he was a child. He remembered the air hostesses as slim and tractable. He had stopped flying at his parents’ expense in his second year of university. It was also the year he stopped moving with the Nigerian crowd. They had all dated one another and their parents belonged to the same political circles back home, but it was the spending that finally separated him.

  Mondays to Thursdays were lean days. Ahmed would be almost ascetic, eating simple meals of boiled eggs and noodles because he never knew what Friday would bring. Sometimes they would rent sports cars and drive down to Birmingham or Cardiff, cities with larger clusters of Nigerian students. Once they flew to New York. Half his allowance in one weekend, £2,000. That was when he said: thus far and no farther.

  Naturally, he had drifted towards the other Africans. The words of Garvey and Fanon, set texts in his first year, had long effaced the worth of his boarding-school friendships. Once he stopped moving with the Nigerians, he began to notice the Somalians, Eritreans, Ugandans, Zimbabweans, Sudanese. They were markedly political. Mobutu. Mugabe. Mengistu. Mandela: names that never left their conversations.

  “What’s it like living under a dictator?” Farida, their unelected president, asked once. She was a devout Kenyan Muslim, never seen without a scarf hugging her scalp, always scowling when she saw him drinking beer. Ahmed used to wish he could send her to purdah.

  “It’s only the West that will tell you every military ruler is a dictator. They want to impose democracy on us.” He had stood firm in his father’s words.

  “What about Bubaginda’s human rights record? Who killed the journalist Deli Giwo?”

  “That’s not how you pronounce their names,” he had responded foolishly.

  That summer he put Farida’s questions to his father, and some of his own. Perhaps that was the first time he wanted to
become a journalist, watching his father evade direct question after question until he finally broke down into straightforward anger. When Ahmed got back to England, he moved out of the flat his parents had rented in Loughborough and got a part-time job in a restaurant. Thereafter, he had always lived his life on his own terms and at his own expense.

  Now here he was, returned to his childhood, flying to England courtesy of his father because his mother had felt it was too risky for him to withdraw money from the bank.

  “What would you like, madam? Chicken or beef?” The singsong cadence of this air hostess’s voice was decidedly northern, somewhere between Manchester and Newcastle.

  “What’s the difference?” Ahmed’s neighbor asked.

  “Chicken is like poultry. You might call it fowl in Nigeria.”

  “I know what a chicken is. What is it served with? Like rice, potato.”

  “Sorry. How silly of me. The chicken comes with a mushroom sauce, mashed potatoes, and green peas. The beef comes with rice, tomato stew, and some fried plantain.”

  “Give me the chicken.”

  “And you, sir?”

  “I’ll have the beef, please,” Ahmed said.

  When the air hostess had moved a few seats away, his neighbor leaned in to him and said, “These white people, they think we’re monkeys. Can you imagine that girl telling me what a chicken is?”

  He made a sympathetic noise as he peeled back the foil lid.

  “You should have taken the chicken,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  He looked at his seatmate properly. She was wearing an orange lace shift, maybe in her late forties or early fifties. The gold bracelets on her wrist stirred slightly as she sawed her poultry with the plastic knife. A madam, wife, and mother back home, but forty thousand feet in the air, only another passenger in economy. He ate the bread but left the sticky toffee dessert.