Africa39

by Wole Soyinka

  Over cigarettes, the matter of Chief Koko finally came up. We were informed that your meeting with Koko went on for quite a while, one of the merchants said.

  You are the representative of Her Majesty, said another merchant. It came as a surprise that you found worthwhile matters to discuss with such a knave.

  Henry Hamilton squirmed.

  Are you sure the Foreign Office would be delighted with your conduct? asked a third merchant. Jaw-jawing with that native scoundrel, as if he were your equal, doesn’t strike us as seemly.

  I thought this was meant to be a reception, Henry Hamilton protested, not an inquisition.

  On the contrary, sir, began John Holt, but Henry Hamilton interrupted him. The missionaries are happy about the meeting, the consul said. They want me to convince the Chief to allow them to widen the scope of their operations in his domain.

  Mary Kingsley laughed. Traders, not clergy, are the soul of the imperial enterprise, she said. I would be shocked if the distinguished consul didn’t know that already.

  Henry Hamilton regarded Mary Kingsley. Her eyes were laughing at him. The consul went red in the face.

  Remember, sir, she added, without commerce, there would be no Empire.

  Berlin has long given us leave to have direct access to the hinterland, Mr Holt said. But Chief Koko is a greedy middleman. Removing him won’t be achieved by holding picnics on the beach with him.

  John Holt’s fellow merchants nodded. Henry Hamilton sighed.

  Mr Holt dragged another puff from his pipe. Koko has to go, he said. That is our collective resolution.

  Henry Hamilton scowled at the gathering. The merchants glared back. Mary Kingsley’s eyes were still mocking Henry Hamilton. The consul felt even more like a fool.

  Are you in agreement with us on that? John Holt asked.

  Henry Hamilton nodded.

  The palaver was cut. Neither heaven nor earth can do anything now to change Chief Koko’s fate, John Holt would later tell his warehouse manager. The merchants smoked on in silence and contentment. Mary Kingsley began talking about her ascent up Mount Cameroon and the iciness of the winds that whip around its highest reaches.

  Two Fragments of Love

  Eileen Almeida Barbosa

  I. Graffiti

  We met on a school bench. Saladine and Salazar. I was the serious and studious one, you were the artist. You were always drawing – book covers, tabletops, toilet walls: all these were your canvases.

  I don’t know what came first: becoming your muse, your biggest fan or falling in love with you. Or did it all happen at the same time?

  You used to like drawing me from the front, even though I looked better in profile. You never cared much about your drawings once they were finished. They were beautiful. I kept all your sketches of me. And the others; any I could get my hands on.

  I always wanted to be with you, though I never really knew why you stayed with me. I was never artistic. But no one loved you more! The years we had were wonderful. Intimate. Colourful. Supporting you was never a burden; it was a contribution to art. I saw myself as your patron, as well as your muse. And what a radiant muse I was.

  Although you didn’t talk much, I always understood you perfectly, but not from your gestures or the expressions on your ever-reserved face. Simply from your drawings. In that sense, I always thought how transparent you were.

  I know, I know, I know. There are no lies or inventions in what you draw. You never expressed a dark thought in your comic graffiti, or a bleak thought when you used bright colours. For a long time I’ve read you better than anyone. Better than your false friends or your true ones, your fellow artists, your critics, your parents.

  That was how, when you drew bolder strokes, I discovered how happy you were, when your strokes seemed to tremble I felt you hesitate, when you used contrasting colours I knew you were comparing us and when your strokes wavered I sensed that you wanted to leave.

  I wandered around the city, deciphering the drawings you spray-painted on public buildings, telegraph poles, crumbling walls, or wherever the police let you and the gangs don’t bother you.

  I followed the trail of renegade, illegal artists, of non-transportable art all around Coimbra. Art for the street, your favourite place. I saw myself everywhere, but in the faded paint of someone drawn only in the past.

  Now you draw new faces, eyes different to mine.

  I could buy some tubs of paint and cover over all your old drawings, out of spite and fear and anger at being abandoned.

  I could empty your cans of paint down the toilet, stop your allowance.

  I could weep. Prove my parents right and leave you.

  I could sit quietly and hope that it’s only a fleeting passion. That in the end you’ll choose me.

  II. I am Not a Witch

  What do you want me to write? What news, when I haven’t seen you for all these years?

  I will describe for you people you have never seen, streets you will never walk. This is my life now. I leave work, and as I walk I greet familiar faces, acquaintances whose worries trouble me more than yours because I know their relevance, and they spit at my feet.

  Their spit settles the dust that would otherwise dirty my white shoes. They bring their children for me to vaccinate. I’ve learned to love this and I barely remember what it’s like to live in a country with running water; television is a myth to me. But I’ll tell you how malaria develops, how the scabs on wounds have a special smell that attracts more flies than shit. I want to tell you that I’ve got tougher. I see young women who’ve been raped. Women who poison their husbands then regret it come to me asking for antidotes. I’ll tell you just what I say to them: I am not a witch.

  You want me to write a diary for you, not about my day-to-day life but about the ideas that come into my head. I’ll tell you one thing: I learned to sew. I make mosquito nets. I buy metres and metres of gauze; I sew it into big tubes, with a frame for hanging the nets above sleeping mats. When I’m struggling with those metres of white gauze, my mind wanders. My thoughts are random. And with so many metres of white gauze I end up thinking, as well, about brides all dressed in white, about purity and innocence. Above all innocence. Well, I think about the past, too.

  Last night, when I was putting the finishing touches to a mosquito net, I was remembering my journey to Spain. I don’t know why I decided to disembark there, when I was actually heading back to Portugal. I’d just lost you. The days were like Everests that I had to climb, becoming more and more breathless towards evening, which was when I had to be on my feet, at the restaurant, serving drinks. I never confessed to my supervisor that I felt ill; that I always felt seasick. And what with the pain of having lost you . . . I went ashore at Barcelona and didn’t go back on board, not at 6 p.m., nor when the ship’s horn sounded.

  I spent the days crying. I saw streets I’d never seen before. I imagined us walking in the shade of peach trees. I used paper napkins that I took from the bars where I went to use the toilet. By now, I regretted having spent my savings on you. I had barely any money left. I stole food, too. And the rest of the time, I wandered. The little money I had was for buying batteries so I could keep listening to ‘Where is My Love’ over and over and over again on my Walkman. And I cried. I wanted to die, but I couldn’t summon up the courage to throw myself under one of the cars that passed me by, indifferent. On a park bench, where I’d collapsed, unable to look at the peach trees, a man sat down beside me, took my face in his hands. I saw him through the mist that had fallen over my eyes and thought he had a face like Jesus. He said to me in a thick Catalan accent that he’d seen me wandering around his block for days. What was wrong? I cried even more, I never could stand people pitying me. He hugged me and it didn’t even occur to me to think it strange. I slumped into his arms; I cried so much that after a while I was just numb, quite still, doggedly snatching breaths. He said to me: ‘Do you want to come to my place for a cup of tea?’

  I don’t know if I walked o
r if he carried me, I don’t know if I climbed the stairs or hovered over them, until we reached a single person’s flat, with books, blank walls, mismatched furniture. A huge fish tank, with the biggest shoal of orange fish I’d ever seen. A sofa welcomed my body and my eyes fixed on the fish tank, finding a certain peace. And I spent six years there. My life has always been like that, I get shipwrecked, then the tide carries me to a beach and to safety. I spend a few days, or years there, then I get shipwrecked again. When my Catalan swapped me for another woman – who was a lot less pretty but a lot more cheerful, the little bitch – I was shipwrecked again, and I fled again.

  I thought I’d found you on a Greek island, but it wasn’t you. And then I came here and saw people in a much worse state than me, I found some perspective. And I lost my expectations. Just like that.

  Folks here don’t bother much with expectations either. The average lifespan is so short that they have children as teenagers and are old by the time they’re thirty. They don’t use coffins and each grave serves for two or three, stacked up. They are buried in their clothes.

  I often think, too, about how short my time on this planet will be. But do you know what? There’s a force, some kind of force that pushes me along, pulls me out of bed in the morning, dresses me and compels me to try and save these poor wretches.

  I went to the capital once. I didn’t like it. It seemed like the whole city was covered in a cloak of sleep. In parks, in cinema aisles, behind the barred windows, the homeless and the middle classes, little old men and young girls, teachers and businessmen: they were all half-asleep. In air-conditioned offices, not even a fly buzzed. The city had been besieged for longer than anyone could remember, and outside, those still surrounding it blinked in confusion. They didn’t feel angry any more, they no longer craved blood. The languid air seemed to be fading the green of the trees, and very slowly withering the general’s moustache to the point that he no longer seemed terrifying.

  There was a certain spirit, drab, washed-out, neither black nor white nor any colour at all. It felt like a landscape-poem, an elegant melancholy sometimes, a lump in the throat, a knot in the stomach, a burning sensation in the eyes.

  But no one was alert enough to notice. I came straight back and never returned. It seems like the siege ended a long time ago but nothing changed. Me? I don’t cry, I don’t gesticulate, I don’t sing, I live, but not much. And the kindly breeze lifts the hair from my forehead and dries my sweat. I drag myself through the day and, with luck, I get to midday, with faith I get to midnight and the worst will have passed and the next day will dawn blank and white. But there are no colours, so the white will barely stand out against the hues that cover me from skin to pupil, inseparable, like nail and cuticle.

  Right, that’s enough for my first letter, I think. This is the life I’m leading, here in this place where I flung myself or where I washed up. Tell me about you too.

  Lots of love,

  From your Saladine

  Translated by Lucy Greaves

  from the forthcoming novel Blackass

  A. Igoni Barrett

  Why Radio DJs Are Superstars in Lagos

  At Ikoyi passport office, Syreeta waited in the Honda as Furo went in. When he returned minutes later with his new passport grasped in his hand, she reached out for it, and after reading the identification page, she handed it back and asked how come his surname was Nigerian. Furo’s answer:

  ‘I’ve already told you I’m Nigerian.’

  ‘But you’re white!’ exclaimed Syreeta.

  ‘So you mean I can’t be white and Nigerian?’

  ‘That’s not what I’m saying. I’m asking how it happened.’

  This question had been expected by Furo for some time, and over the long weekend he had thought through his answer. He’d considered saying he was mixed race with a Nigerian father and a white American mother, but while that explained his name and his black buttocks, it raised other questions, the most irksome being a white extended family and his lack of ties to the US embassy in Nigeria. The second story he’d considered was that his white family had settled a long time ago in Nigeria and along the line had changed their name, but on further thought that idea seemed absurd and so he discarded it. Nigerians readily adopted European and Arab and Hebrew names. It never happened the other way around.

  The story he settled on appeared to him the most plausible, the least open to rebuttal – it answered every question except that of his buttocks. But then, he told himself, nothing in life is perfect. To Syreeta he said:

  ‘I don’t like talking about it so I’ll just say this quickly. My parents are Nigerians. They lived in America for many years, my father was born there, and while they were over there they adopted me. My mother couldn’t have children. They returned to Lagos while I was still a baby, and they quarrelled when my father married a second wife. My mother took me away, we moved to Port Harcourt, and I haven’t heard from my father in nearly twenty years. My mother passed away last year. I came to Lagos and got stranded. Then I met you. That’s why I have this name. That’s why I have nobody. Now I’m hungry. Can we stop somewhere to eat?’

  ‘Of course,’ Syreeta said, and after she faced forwards and guided the Honda on to the road, she added in a voice hoarsened with awe:

  ‘I didn’t know it was possible for black people to adopt white people.’

  And so it happened that Syreeta stopped over at the Palms to buy lunch at the café where she and Furo had met six days ago, and by three o’clock they were back on the Lekki–Ajah highway, in after-work traffic, headed towards her friend’s house in Victoria Garden City.

  Seated beside Syreeta as she steered the Honda through traffic, Furo realised why radio DJs were superstars in Lagos. The car radio was tuned to Cool FM, and many times on the drive from Lekki to Ikoyi to pick up Furo’s passport and back to Lekki for lunch and on to Ajah to visit her friend, Syreeta had danced in her seat and squealed with laughter at the music selections and the lisping banter of a host of DJs who seemed never to run out of something to say. With the Honda now stuck in a monster traffic jam on the outskirts of Ajah, Furo began to think that for the millions of commuters who spent hour after hour and day after day in Lagos traffic with only their car radios for company, these feigned accents and invented personalities became as dear as confidantes. The more he thought about it, the more he was struck by blinding flashes of the obvious, a whole rash of ideas marching into his head to the beats from the car radio. Persistent power cuts in Lagos, in the whole of Nigeria, meant that battery-operated radios were the entertainment appliance of necessity for both rich and poor, young and old, the city-based and the village-trapped, everyone. Radios were cheap to buy and free to use, no data bundles or subscription packages or credit plans, and they were also long-lasting, easy to carry around, available in private cars and commercial buses, and most important, they were independent of the undependable power grid. Mobile phones even came with radios, as did MP3 players; and computers had applications that live-streamed radio; and thinking of it, the rechargeable battery lamps that everyone owned also had radios built into them. Then again there were those new Chinese toys for the tech-starved: radio sunglasses, radio caps, radio wristwatches. It was endless. Radio was deathless. Radio DJs were superstars.

  Furo lost interest in this line of thinking when the DJ cut the music to announce that it was time to pay the bills so don’t touch that dial. After several minutes of jolly-sounding jingles, most of which seemed aimed at schoolchildren and petty traders, a new Tuface single was introduced by the DJ, and as the song sprang from the speakers Syreeta flung up her arms and hooted with joy, and then glanced over at Furo with a wide grin.

  Syreeta showed a clear fondness for local music. Pidgin hip-hop, Afrobeat electronica, Ajegunle reggae, highlife-flavoured R&B, even oldies’ disco crooned to a lover named Ifeoma. Nigerian music dominated the Lagos airwaves, and Syreeta seemed to know the lyrics to every song. Rihanna’s anthems might be enjoyed, and Drake�
�s rap acknowledged with sporadic nods of approval, but when P-Square warbled, Syreeta hollered back. Furo also listened to Nigerian pop – he even had two P-Square songs in his old phone – though he couldn’t say he had a particular taste for it. But now, hearing Syreeta sing along to lyrics that preached money and marriage and little else, he found himself hating P-Square a little.

  The song ended, the DJ resumed his adenoidal chatter and Syreeta said, pointing with a finger straight ahead, ‘See where those buses are turning – and that LASTMA man is just sitting there looking! OK now, I’m going to follow them.’

  Furo stared through the windscreen at the congested road: in the confusion that met his eyes he couldn’t find what Syreeta was pointing at. The road should have resembled a Mumbai train station at rush hour – lines and lines of stilled cars stretching into the distance, armies of hawkers darting about in rag uniforms, the air sluggish with exhaust fumes and exhausted breaths – but it didn’t, it had a chaos all of its own. It looked exactly like after-work traffic in Lagos was supposed to look. A sprawling coastal city that had no ferry system, no commuter trains, no underground tunnels or overhead tramlines, where hordes of people leaving work poured on to the roads at the same time as the freight trucks carting petroleum products and food produce and all manner of manufacture from all corners of Nigeria. The roads were overburdened and under-policed, and even in select areas where road expansion projects were under way, the contracted engineers worked at a pace that betrayed their lack of confidence in the usefulness of their labour. They knew as well as the politicians that Lagos was exploding at a rate its road network could never keep up with.

  The cars ahead revved and spat out smoke, the Honda rolled forward inches, and finally Furo saw the reason this section of the road was gridlocked. Metres ahead, in the middle of the highway, an excavator was breaking blacktop and scooping earth, and at the spot where it heaved and clanged, a new roundabout had been partitioned out with concrete barriers that narrowed the road into a bottleneck. A small band of touts, led by a cap-wearing man, whose white goatee caught the sunlight, had pushed aside one of the barriers, opened a path to the other side of the road – which was free of traffic – and they collected money from any car that squeezed through the breach. It was mostly minibuses that turned off to disgorge passengers and rush back into town, but a few private cars also took the opening. A state traffic warden sat on the tailgate of a Peugeot wagon adjacent to the breach and calmly watched proceedings. His crisp uniform shirt, the yellow of spoiled milk, was tucked into his beef-red trousers, and his black boots gleamed as he swung his feet back and forth.