A Squatter's Tale, page 1
About Apollo Africa
The original Heinemann African Writers Series was launched in 1962 with the publication of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Cyprian Ekwensi’s Burning Grass and Kenneth Kaunda’s Zambia Shall Be Free, with Achebe himself acting as an editorial advisor. Over the next 40 years, the series continued to publish the best writ¬ing from across the African continent.
One of the founding aims of the Heinemann series was to make books by African writers available to as wide a readership as possible. Apollo Africa – a collaboration between Black Star Books and Head of Zeus – is proud to continue this work, ensuring novels, essays, poetry and plays from the original series are once again made available to readers all over the world.
A SQUATTER’S TALE
Ike Oguine
Please be aware that this book contains themes readers may find upsetting, including sexual violence, rape, murder, and harmful and offensive descriptions of people and cultures.
Black Star Books and Head of Zeus would like to thank the following organisations: The Miles Morland Foundation, The Ford Foundation, and Africa No Filter. This publication was made possible through their support.
First published in the Heinemann African Writers Series in 2000 by Heinemann Educational Books
This edition published in 2023 by Black Star Books and Head of Zeus, part of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Copyright © Ike Oguine, 1997
The moral right of Ike Oguine to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This reprint is published by arrangement with Pearson Education Limited.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (PB): 9781035900633
ISBN (E): 9781803288420
Head of Zeus Ltd
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For O.D.M. and BLACK SOUL
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
My Uncle Happiness
Christ, Gandhi and a Girl with Brown Hair
The Warehouses of Despair
Gorilla Millionaire
Glass, Not Diamond
The Surgeon and the Republican Party
The Monster with Fifty Heads
Drunken-Driver Love
Nebraska Man
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
My Uncle Happiness
The most memorable event of the tenth year of my life was the arrival of my Uncle Happiness at our house in Yaba, Lagos, Nigeria on a visit from America. It was his first and, to date, only visit to his home country since he had left in January 1970, claiming to the Americans to be on the run from the Nigerian government which he said had placed him on a Wanted List because of his exploits in the Biafran Army during the just-ended Nigerian civil war. He had, in fact, largely spent the war concealed in the toilet of my parents’ house in our hometown, his heart pounding in tune to the real and imagined bootfalls of the Biafran Army’s conscripting squads. Uncle Happiness was a huge, perfectly black, perfectly smooth balloon, topped with a black balloon-shaped, clean-shaven head divided in the middle by the widest smile on earth. He was supported by two boomerang legs that did not walk but gently rolled forward, like wheels. That rain-sodden evening in 1976, the balloon was packed into a dark brown cowboy outfit, straight from Hollywood, which included a ten-gallon hat and spurs. The only thing missing was a holstered pistol.
Still clutching four mighty travelling bags, two in each hand, and bellowing directions to a small man behind him on how to ease a mighty trunk past the door of our house, he swept me into his arms as soon as I opened the door. He yelled: ‘Obi the Giant! Obi the Giant! Only a tiny ant yesterday! Only a tiny ant!’ He also quickly seized my elder sister who had come up behind me: ‘Princess, Beautiful Princess, Adaku, Daughter of Wealth! Only an ant yesterday!’ My mother, coming from the kitchen to investigate the cause of the commotion, leapt at her only brother, crushing Adaku and me into the squashy stomach of the balloon, adding her own cries: ‘My eyes are lying to me! It is not true!’ to her brother’s: ‘Beautiful Woman! Younger every day! Others are going forward, getting older, you are going backwards, getting younger!’ My father was not swept up in an embrace when he came downstairs drawn by the noise of rejoicing, probably because in his old shirt and wrapper and reading glasses, a rolled-up newspaper in his hand, his spare, serious frame did not look huggable; but Uncle Happiness did the next best thing: he poured on my father all the praise names imaginable, alluding to his learning, his kindness, his gentleness, his handsomeness, drawing from my father’s face a rare coy smile. My younger sister, Nwaka, the youngest of my parents’ three children, was only two years old at the time and was safe from my uncle in her bed upstairs. We had not known he was coming because the letter he had written to inform us only reached our mailbox weeks after he had returned to America.
Uncle Happiness, surrounded by his trunk and travelling bags, was so much larger than life that our long living room seemed to shrink around him. He whistled and yelled and bellowed. He cast his eyes towards the ceiling and shouted thanks to the Almighty for bringing him home safely. Then inspired by a highlife tune that was playing on the radio, he went into a wild dance of celebration. His hands rotating above his head like windmills, he swung his waist this way and that, pendulum-fashion, then, his left leg raised, he hopped around the living room like an excited baboon. His soft stomach leapt about wildly, struggling to free itself from his cowboy shirt, from his body, pushing oohs, aahs, hohos and hahas out of Uncle Happiness’s throat. He stopped suddenly, executed two incredible pirouettes and after that began to shake his buttocks madly. Sweat dropped off his face like tennis balls, a greedy stream soaked his armpits, his back and his waist. The seat of his tight cowboy trousers stretched so taut it seemed about to explode. My mother shook her shoulders to the music, modestly accompanying her brother without abandoning the propriety of an adult; my father looked deeply confused. I, too, was confused: adults, I’d been brought up to believe, always behaved properly, didn’t suddenly break into wild dancing, didn’t jerk their hips all over the place in a lewd, abandoned manner. When Happiness’s celebration finally came to an end, we, the onlookers, were as exhausted as him.
Uncle Happiness’s bags and trunk brought for us the sort of fabulous riches you hear about in folk-tales. For me alone there were sets of shirts and pants and shorts and caps and shoes of dazzling colours and styles, different sets of pens, three different school bags, one of his wonderful, shiny travelling bags and, the gift that dwarfed all gifts, that made Adaku look miserably at the brightly flowered clothes and bags he bought for her and eye me dangerously, was a cowboy outfit exactly like the one he wore. In fact, I thought that my own waistcoat (or monkey-jacket as we called it at the time) was even more beautiful than his. My mother got a pile of fabrics which Uncle Happiness said he had ordered specially from Holland, shoes, bags, new pots and pans and a portrait of herself made from an old photograph in which she looked fifteen years younger. For years after, when my mother wanted to taunt my father, she’d tell him that the only new clothes she had were the ones her brother had brought for her from Holland and America donkey years before. My father, who chose his fights very carefully, would smile an embarrassed smile and keep quiet. My father got a small radio that was also a cassette player and a calculator, an electric shaver, half a dozen ties and more than ten bottles of spirits, which he kept locked in a drawer in his bedroom and drank alone with a scowl on his face to keep anyone from asking for a drop. There were loads of baby’s things for Nwaka, and for the whole family Uncle Happiness brought monstrous tins of powdered milk and Quaker Oats, cartons of corn flakes and sugar, and roast turkey and chicken in barbecue sauce wrapped in aluminium foil and still warm—at least that is how I remember it—after flying thousands of miles across oceans and deserts. It remains the best chicken and turkey I’ve had in my life, and I remember, whenever a family friend or relative came to the house that week and my mother yanked off another large chunk of chicken or turkey for them, feeling as wounded as if she were cutting and offering up parts of my body.
I was the second man of the house, next only to my father, and Uncle Happiness gave me special attention. Every morning he took me on jaunts to Broad Street and the Marina, Bar Beach, the museum, Federal Palace Hotel, or to visit relatives or to buy the things he would take back to America. I ate meat pies, chocolates, buns, cakes, ice cream and all the other wonderful things my mother had decreed were never to be touched or only eaten in pitiful quantities at Christmas or at birthday parties. In our cowboy outfits, which I insisted we wear every day until my mother put her foot down and said they had to be washed, we attracted more attention than the shops on the Marina and the highlife band at Federal Palace. Children, and some adults too, gathered to stare at us and to exclaim ‘Americana’ or ‘High Chaparral’ or ‘John Wayne’; the daring stepped forward and brushed their fingers across my monkey-jacket as I struggled to keep pace with my rolling uncle. I was the happiest ten-year-old in Lagos.
In the evenings, the family gathered around Uncle Happiness to hear him talk about America.
‘The shops, heyiee, one is like from Yaba to Lagos Island, with everything in this world, you will buy bread and a car from the same shop. I hear some shops even sell airplanes, I’ve not seen any like that, but I’ve been in many shops where you’ll be buying matches and behind you are cars on sale. The shops are like towns. No, they are not just like towns, they are towns. Twenty thousand people will be shopping together at the same time. More than one hundred cashiers. Their hands fly over the cash machines kpraa kpraa kpraa and they tell you how much you are to pay in a second. Some cashiers serve more than ten thousand people in a day.
‘The roads, heyiee, those roads, those roads, heyiee, twenty lanes, thirty lanes like football fields made from tar. It will take you twenty minutes or even thirty minutes to walk across some roads. All the cars are new and very fast, no old cars are allowed on the roads.’
Uncle Happiness’s eyes would widen in wonder as though each telling renewed, indeed increased, America’s dazzle, as though America was so amazing that no matter how long you lived there it continued to astonish, to overwhelm, you.
‘The buildings, heyiee, the buildings so tall, so tall. We think we have tall buildings in Lagos, but I tell you no building in Lagos Island is half as tall as the tall buildings in the smallest village in America, the smallest village. There’s a building in New York, that building, heyiee, so tall, the Empire House, that’s the name, the Empire House. I hear that from that building you can see what is going on in the moon, I hear that when people fly to the moon you can watch them from the top of Empire House, you can even see other countries from there if you have good eyes, not like Nigeria, that is too far away, but neighbouring countries like Canada and Mexico.
‘Food, heyiee, the food in that country. They throw food away, food loaded in many lorries. The man whose job it is to throw away the food is one of the richest men in America because he has so much food to throw away and he is very well paid because he does a difficult job. Can you imagine it? A man whose job is throwing food away. If you are walking along the streets, people will be handing food to you from vans just like that.
‘America is a land blessed by God,’ he would conclude every time, exhaling loudly, left breathless by the great nation beyond the seas.
On the evening Uncle Happiness suggested that you could see the moon and Canada and Mexico from atop the Empire State Building, my father mumbled goodnight to us, picked up his newspaper and went upstairs to his room, after having given my uncle a look of distaste. He never attended any of Uncle Happiness’s evening story- tellings after that, preferring to spend the time in his room upstairs reading the papers.
My mother was no gullible fool. She’d attended what in those days was called an advanced teachers’ college and had taught in secondary schools for many years before giving up the chalk to run a provisions shop, in spite of my father’s objections, believing with remarkable foresight that they could not both put all their eggs in the basket of government monthly wages. But, like Adaku and I and our fourteen-year-old cousin who lived with us at the time, she lapped up every tale Uncle Happiness told and even prodded him with her own grunts of amazement and little shouts at the fantastic things that happened routinely in the land blessed by God. Perhaps she allowed that his enrichment of the bare facts of the things he told about was necessary to convey effectively the magnitude of America’s enormous wealth and its miraculous scientific achievements. Or maybe she was just too pleased to see her brother after such a long time, too grateful for the fabrics from Holland to bother about minor things like whether or not it was possible to take a peek at the moon or at Canada from atop the Empire State Building.
Now, when I think back, I realise that even my father’s quiet withdrawal from the story-telling was not really in character. He was a compulsive and acerbic arguer even about things he knew next to nothing about and if it hadn’t been for the radio that was also a cassette player and also a calculator and Uncle Happiness’s other presents, my father would probably have called him a liar to his face.
Adeyemo, our neighbour and landlord, strolled in one evening while Uncle Happiness was serving more fantastic slices of America to us. He had a large, noisy family, a wife and six children, aged between fifteen and twenty-three, and an army of near and distant relations, whom he said bothered him all day. So whenever he could he slipped across the low wall fence dividing our houses, bolting and locking the small gate behind him, to the sanctuary of our living room, where he argued the latest offerings of the newspapers with my father or just sat on one of our easy chairs, covered his face with an old newspaper, and dozed off. Since Uncle Happiness had not brought him any presents, he had no qualms about suggesting that my uncle was not presenting the whole picture.
‘Some people sleep in the streets,’ Adeyemo said, ‘many die in winter. There are many poor people suffering.’
‘There are some poor people,’ Uncle Happiness conceded, ‘but they are very few, usually people who don’t want to work hard, and a poor man in America is a rich man in Nigeria. Everyone has a car except for a few people, very few. And nobody sleeps outside except maybe some mad people who escape from where they are kept. You know there are houses even for mad people. There are houses where you can just walk in and sleep, and in the morning you go and face your work.’
‘There is unemployment, thousands of unemployed people. I saw the figures in the paper this afternoon.’
‘Don’t believe what those newspapers say; they are controlled by Jews and Russians who want to cause trouble in America. Unemployment in America? When they are begging you to come and work. Every shop you pass, everywhere they are looking for workers. You are very funny, sir. There is nothing like unemployment in America. Don’t mind what those papers say; they are just making trouble.’
My mother kept out of the argument; she served Adeyemo a turkey drumstick and went to the dining table to look at her shop’s accounts, while Uncle Happiness duelled with our neighbour, pitting the evidence of his naked eyes and the evidence of the naked eyes of close and trusted friends against what Adeyemo had read in trouble-making newspapers published by Jews and Russians.
For me there was no doubt at the time that Uncle Happiness was telling the truth and Adeyemo was just a loud-mouthed, interfering ignoramus who was jealous of our uncle who lived in America and had come to spoil our evening out of spite. I felt like kicking his dried-up bony legs with scales the shape of a spider’s web, which poked out of his frayed khaki shorts like broomsticks and which kept shivering as he argued, in a voice that sounded like a knife being filed against rock.
‘That man is a wicked man, you have to watch him carefully,’ Uncle Happiness said to my mother, sounding rather subdued, after Adeyemo left.
I retold Uncle Happiness’s stories when school resumed, and since I was already a habitual liar in my own right, I added spices of my own here and there. And one day when my mother wasn’t looking, I stuffed my cowboy outfit into my school bag and showed it off to my classmates. I was riding on a wave of sudden popularity when Millard, a part Nigerian, part Gambian, part Irish, part God-knows-what-else classmate, who had returned late from the holidays, heard my stories and said I was lying. There is nothing more painful to a ten-year-old habitual liar than being called a liar, especially when he has told lies, and I launched at Millard immediately we stepped out for break. It was not much of a fight, mainly pushing and shoving and threatening, but a teacher saw us and we spent the rest of the day standing under the sun in the football field.
I wrote to Uncle Happiness religiously, and once in a long while he replied and sent a present through someone who was visiting from America. We began to expect him every Christmas and then the Easter after. My mother, not wanting to be taken by surprise again, would have the curtains washed and buy new bedsheets for our guest room. On some rainy evenings our expectancy became so great that when someone knocked on the door we would exchange glances, and then I would walk nervously to open it, and before the door was open I’d hear my mother’s voice behind me asking who it was, and it would be Adeyemo or one of my father’s friends from the office not Uncle Happiness.
