On one occasion, we were watching a movie at Mendaus’s house, and there was this scene where an old woman with gray frizzy hair was making incantations in a dark room with little dolls. It was the first time I had ever seen anything remotely close to what my mother did at home in her studio. I was just about to bring up the Ifá issue when Pastor’s son started preaching about the horrors of the devil’s black magic. Zeenat looked relieved that the film had distressed someone else and quickly changed the tape even as Mendaus teased them for acting like little children.
A few weeks after the black-magic incident, I followed my mother to the market. Our return journey was silent; whenever we made such trips, she hated to see silent moments go unspoken. Normally, she would start pointing at places we passed, showing me buildings and roads I already knew, or begin telling me how different things were when she was my age, but that day her words were a little less casual.
“Why don’t you play football with your friends anymore?” she asked without looking at me or making any gesture.
“We never win anymore”—I was still unaware of her intentions—“and losing every day is boring.”
“Oh! Well, is playing with girls more interesting?”
“I don’t know.” My dark cheeks managed a blush.
“You don’t know? Alhaja thinks you would know.” Alhaja was one of the street vendors. “In fact, Alhaja says you’ve started chasing girls up and down the streets of Omole.”
“It’s a lie!” I exclaimed. It was a weak defense, but it was all I could muster in my moment of shame.
“So who is the liar, me or Alhaja?” She allowed the silence to dwell for a while. “I don’t know where you got this one from—your father never used to chase girls, and even though I don’t have any brothers, I know your grandfather never used to chase girls, either. Maybe Esu would help us find out from Ọrunmila why these small girls are trying to put your destiny inside their brassieres.” I usually would swoon at any thoughts of Zeenat’s brassiere, but instead my body cringed at the thought of my mother making divinations over her. “A woman is like fire, Ihechi; if you must take some, take a little.”
“Yes, Ma.” I cherished every silent second for the rest of the journey home.
I did not have to worry too long about further discussions of Zeenat with my mother, or about my mother’s Ifá teachings with Zeenat and the rest, because that was the summer I finished primary school and began secondary school at a boardinghouse in Ofada, a few hundred kilometers and a state border away from my parents, Mendaus, Pastor’s son, and Zeenat.
1992
There can never really be a sovereign definition of the secondary school experience. The only stable concept is a group of teenage students being taught basic science, commerce, and art in large and largely ineffective bundles, and every experience outside this pretty well depends on the particular school. To illustrate: My school was a boarding school that accepted both boys and girls; Mendaus’s boarding school, on the other hand, registered only boys. We had constant contact with the girls, developed likes and crushes, some people fell in love, and we shared this overall Romeo-et-Juliet-esque relationship. In Mendaus’s school, they saw girls only on weekends, when they scaled the school fence and sneaked into their sister school down the road. Each expedition was treated as a hunt in every form of the word—a survey, interested predators took shots at the prey, and then the conquest ended successfully with the pleasure of a new kill and bragging rights, or unsuccessfully with amassed ridicule. Pastor’s son’s school was a Christian mission school that had no boarding facilities and endeavored to pray and anoint the lust of the flesh out of all its wards.
The one thing that brought us all together was trends: From the rounded Afro to the Afro-punk, and from highlife to reggae, all transitions of popular culture were en masse. During and after our six years of secondary school, it was these trends that kept our friendship alive. At this point we had outgrown Omole and drew our thrill from the city of Lagos in its entirety. The population of Lagos was growing exponentially. Millions of people had been blessed by birthright to constitute the life that was the city, and thousands more immigrated each year through every available aperture, hoping to fit in to the dynamism of the metropolitan organism, for indeed, this was a city that had life. The adrenaline-infused thumping of the city’s heartbeat amid the blistering heat and quick tempo of the daytime emphasized the spirited life of the city and its inhabitants’ pursuits of happiness. Yet after the exasperations of each day, the night emerged proudly as a testament to the divinity of the human spirit which contained the capacity to face daunting challenges head-on and, regardless of the eventual success or failure, still laugh, love, and live. Fibs forsaken, so vibrant was the city at night that it was once spoken to me, by someone who was told by another, that whoever controlled the nightlife of the city wielded the most influence in the corridors of power during the day. And even as the sun set each day to the dreams and fantasies of the satisfied, it rose each morning to the hopes and aspirations of the desperate. Ultimately, nothing captured the essence of this city of life like the break of dawn, each new day blind to its own destiny, yet coming alive nonetheless like the accentuating cry of a baby.
We knew too well that it was always better to get going with the city as it came alive at the beginning of the day, or else risk a psychological disconnection from the flow of events as the day continued, so when we set out in the city on weekends, we set out early. Our muster point was the street vendors’ kiosk, and from there, we would make our way to the bus stop. The cold air of the morning would burn my nostrils as I drew every breath. But I was ever unfeeling toward it, much too overwhelmed by the climax of grandiose that remained after I exhaled the smoke from the smoldering roll of lint and grass (smoking marijuana was another trend that had spread around our schools).
I was alive, not in the ordinary sense of merely living but in complete exhilaration. I kissed the edge of the roll and sucked in more smoke, holding my breath to make sure my head was airtight, and letting it out only when I began smiling helplessly like a victim of ancestral witchcraft. My eyes would remain focused on the particles of smoke as they diffused under the headlights that throttled down the road toward us. Mendaus and Zeenat would share drags of smoke in no particular order, poking fun at Pastor’s son, who never smoked with us.
The bus would begin from the stop at Berger, hurtling on to the main expressway at Ojota, where almost all of the state capital’s rubbish was dumped and its cattle egrets nested. And it was always somewhere between these two points that the circus would begin. Lagosians, above all other things, were exclaimers. Their spoken sentences began with exclamations as their written sentences began with capital letters. An exclamation would be sounded if the bus was moving too slowly, because there was always someone who had to be at a destination quite urgently. Another would sound if the bus moved too fast, because there would always be someone else who figured that arriving at a destination with stable blood pressure was more important than arriving at all. There were those who exclaimed because they felt they knew shorter routes than the driver’s choice, and there were those who exclaimed simply because they did not want to feel left out of the circus.
When people on the bus were not exclaiming, they were preaching gospels that Pastor’s son derided as homemade versions of Christianity: praying down holy fire from heaven to consume enemies, wearing the ring of King David for good fortune, and other rubbishes of that sort. Pastor’s son never spoke out to contradict any of these bus bishops; he just grumbled and mumbled and whispered his complaints every now and then, to my amusement.
If we could count on anybody speaking out, it would be Mendaus, and he never failed us on the bus. Occasionally, when the bus had quieted, he would rise to begin his own sermon of what Pastor’s son tagged “The Gospel of Mendaus.” His gospel was mostly excerpts from all of the “Save Nigeria, Save Africa, Save the World” books he had been reading, and though most of his audie
nce jeered and cursed, he was relentless. There was always the odd commuter or two who would see reason with him and exclaim in delight; this always startled Mendaus. He would have to peek into the bible of his gospel, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, to remember the rest of his lines. And then he would conclude always with the same words: “These rich people divide us up. They think they’re different. They call themselves the upper class, and us the lower class. Now, this upper class paints the lower class as a society lacking in all forms of values and ethics. They starve us slowly and then blame us for stealing, they leave us in the worst living conditions—no light, barely any water—and then they blame us for acting like mad people. And still we grasp at these rich people whenever we cross their paths; we seek handouts, a helping hand, and a way out of the asylum they created for us. But the upper class’s view of the lower class is always too genuine to be masked, because disregard can’t be hidden, just as love can’t be hidden. And we the lower class have noticed. We have to realize we’re never going to be offered a helping hand or a way out, so we have to sharpen the methods of our madness, which are the only tools life ever gave us, and then go on to take our freedom by force. We’re all going to have to take sides; be merry now and be damned later with the upper class, or be damned now and be merry later with the lower class.”
“You need to calm down with all this world-liberation talk, man,” Pastor’s son said.
“So we should just relax and allow the truth to shine its shoes while the lies are sprinting all over the place?” Mendaus retorted.
“Oh, please,” Pastor’s son replied. “What they don’t know can’t kill them. It’s safe for you to talk like this in a bus, but what happens when any of these people echo your words in the wrong place or in front of a soldier? They’re in the Garden of Eden, and you’re giving them the apple of knowledge that could destroy them.”
“Destroy them? These people are dead already. I’m trying to get their hearts pumping again.”
“All he’s trying to say is that not every truth needs to be spoken,” Zeenat butted in with a calmer approach. “That kind of talk could get you killed in a Mafia film. And let me give you a tip—the real world outside the safety of this bus is a Mafia film.”
I was not entirely certain the Mafia films Zeenat had watched bore any relation to real life, but I understood her point. As children in Omole—which was safely concealed on the outskirts of Lagos—we had never been cognizant of the strict and often brutal manner with which the military regime regarded public opinion. The kind of statements Mendaus made could be considered in the best interest of the public until they traversed the domain of a military man.
There was barely any traffic early on weekends, and so after about thirty minutes, we would be across the Third Mainland Bridge and onto the island, where most commuters got off, bringing the circus to a close. A stark contrast existed between the parts of Lagos at either end of the bridge, and as always, the colors told the stories. The mainland was teeming with urban savages, their haphazard streets and houses donned in the brightest paints and decorations, which betrayed their ineptitude in the finer things of life. The more refined people on the island, experts in luxury and vanities, avoided such things in preference for a strict, hypocritical code of self-effacing colors: Roads were black, sidewalks and walls gray, and most houses white. The mainland was probably so because savages never lived by rules. Rules are instruments of maintenance: maintenance of order, wealth, or whatever. But savages have nothing to maintain, so they risk nothing for everything with every moment of their lives.
We would sometimes travail in the market just opposite the marina. Other times, when more money was available than usual, we would scavenge Victoria Island, where the air tasted sweeter and the buildings resembled those in Zeenat’s videos. Our first day on Victoria Island, Pastor’s son asked, “So when God destroys the world at the end of time, would he really destroy something as beautiful as Victoria Island?” Most times we would go to Bar Beach. It was not as clean and proper as Lekki Beach, but it was much more populated, so it was easier for us to run into people we knew from school or wherever else. Everybody ranged from dwarves masquerading around little children as òrisà in raffia-made costumes to the devout members of the Celestial Church of God ringing bells, dancing barefoot, and chanting the incomprehensible in their white angelic robes. If we were lucky enough, we would stumble upon a rave party or reggae concert; we had seen Majek Fashek perform “Send Down the Rain” in his dreadlock-twirling rage, and Mike Okri croon “Time Na Money” as the palm trees by the waters mimicked the sway of the enchanted girls.
It was Bar Beach where we saw Boniface for the first time in six years. Pastor’s son sighted him, Pastor’s son alerted the rest of us, Pastor’s son reached out to him from within the crowd, and Pastor’s son doubted it was Boniface long after we had left. The doubts were initially raised by the earring in his left ear and the gold front tooth in his smile; all chances of acquittal were relinquished to the abyss when Mendaus called him by the name we were all used to—Maradona.
“Ol’ boy, no shit for church. Bee Money isn’t called Maradona anymore,” Maradona said.
“Who is Bee Money?” Pastor’s son asked through a stutter, as if Maradona’s reappearance had suddenly reinvigorated the condemnation to confusion that he had suffered all through our childhood.
“Bee Money is the G who used to be known as Maradona back in the day,” Maradona continued. “Bee Money doesn’t play with football anymore, Bee Money plays with money.” He spoke with a half-baked American accent that was obviously mixed and rolled in the shoddy kitchens of Lagos backstreets, the type that made him say, “Bee Money never experred to see you here” and “Bee Money will be flying ourra the country in a marra of weeks.” After about an hour of listening to “Bee Money” relate the stories of his life and business in third person, we were all convinced that none of us had missed seeing him around as much as we claimed to, and that he was a profiteer of advanced fee fraud—an affair the poor described as “business” but the rich stigmatized as “larceny.” In the most private part of my mind, just before I went to sleep that night, I wondered if he would have turned out another person if events had played out differently on that football field many years ago.
Mendaus, a predator of all things feminine by virtue of his secondary school training, always met new girls at the beach. There was the one he met on the bus to the beach, who we agreed had a pungent odor. There was another who flirted with him despite coming with a male friend she denounced being involved with at every possible juncture. And then there was the one he had sorted out through a crowd of bodies splattering in the advancing and receding tide, the one who stuck around. Her name was one of those long but common names shared with supernumeraries of males and females of her two-million-strong Ijaw tribe, and when he inquired of it, she told him. Ayeebaatonyeseigha meant “what God has planned to do” in English; she told him this after they began exchanging opinions on trivialities at the suya spot. They had been waiting for the butcher, who had run off to a nearby mosque to say his midday prayers.
Atonye had that innocent but clearly evident physical appeal, but I think what attracted Mendaus to her the most was that she believed in his gospel. She agreed that Léopold Sédar Senghor was a coward who had more faith in the French than he had in his own people, and not the righteous hero of African liberation, as was taught to us all in secondary school. She believed that tribalism was the new imperialism, though none of us except Mendaus knew what imperialism stood for. And she was unshakably convinced that Nigeria was a child kidnapped by military dictatorship that needed rescuing.
Atonye had no responsibility to anyone and took instructions from her curious will alone, like a palm-wine drunkard leading the adventures of her life in the bush of ghosts. I think Zeenat’s issue with her was more a result of Zeenat being used to having neither female friends nor gawking at bare-chested white men and the other ultra-feminine thi
ngs Atonye was inclined to do from time to time. Pastor’s son’s concern was definitely her brazen disregard for the things he held dear. It was bad enough that she smoked and drank as much as we did. It was worse that she furnished the same sentence with swear words and the name of Jesus.
The final straw was her suggesting our visit to Afrika Shrine, the home and performing theater of Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Mendaus and Zeenat had visited it a couple of times but had never been able to overcome the skepticism shown by Pastor’s son and me. Atonye gave their argument the numerical advantage. When we eventually did go, Pastor’s son refused to follow us. There was no live performance, as we had desperately anticipated—Fela had fallen ill, reminding us that he was human after all—and so Mendaus, Zeenat, Atonye, and I just had drinks as we bobbed our head to tapes blasting from the speakers. With time, subsequent visits became a Saturday habit after the beach. The first time Pastor’s son did come with us was the first time Atonye did not. That was the night we met Fela, the legend, the same night our consciousness got knocked out by alcohol, which led us to picking a fight with patrolling policemen well after midnight, the same night we spent our first night in prison.
By the time I had left secondary school, my family portrait was a debased representation of its expected order, depicting fluctuating hardships instead of increasing prosperity, and strife in place of accord. My father had not held a proper job since leaving the bank six years ago, just in time to avoid being held for corruption charges, as most of his colleagues were. Not a lot of them had gone to jail, but all of those who had were still behind bars. Since then, he had peddled secondhand vehicles and transported shipped containers across the Seme Border. And so, all through my secondary school, when I was asked about my father’s profession, my reply was a nondescript “businessman.”
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