A Squatter's Tale, page 12
My father’s foolishness cost him dear. Three days after the report was submitted, the minister sent for him. From behind his wide, cluttered desk and gold-rimmed glasses, the little minister silently watched my father for what seemed like one hour. Sweat broke out on my father’s body; the narcotic haze began to clear from his mind. He avoided the minister’s chilly, dagger-point stare and examined the several rows of photographs of past ministers on the wall.
‘Why did you allow tribal sentiments to stop you from doing your job properly?’ the minister asked finally, pointing a disgusted finger at the panel’s report which lay at the edge of the ministerial desk and had suddenly begun to look like damning evidence in a murder trial. The managing director of the government company praised in the report was, like my father, Igbo.
Before my father could respond the minister snapped: ‘I have to attend a very important meeting right now so don’t disturb me. Take your bundle of rubbish and get out,’ and he shoved the report off the table and it landed with a muffled, ominous thud on the opulent rug.
Even after thirty years in the civil service, my father had not learnt true subservience. Instead of going flat on his belly to beg for mercy, which might have worked wonders, he picked up the report and left the office. He drove home, locked himself in his study and wrote a treatise of thirty pages, in the same elevated prose that had put him in trouble in the first place, essentially reaffirming that the panel had done its job properly. A stubborn man my father is in his own way, but in his treatise he left open a window of compromise by suggesting that perhaps additional facts might now be in the honourable minister’s possession which would colour the matter differently. He did not forget to mention his thirty years and more of meritorious service, his wife and three children, his undying loyalty to the minister. The next morning my mother woke me and my sister, Nwaka, for special morning prayers in my father’s study. He read from the Book of Psalms and tremulously called upon the Lord to show His Face, to ensure that Truth was not defeated by Falsehood. My mother, as always, led us in singing a song of praise:
I know my Lord is able
Come rain, come shine
Come joy, come sorrow
I know my Lord is able
Fortified with prayer, psalm and song of praise, my father took his novella to the minister’s office. The minister replied later that afternoon with a letter of ten lines compulsorily retiring my father from the civil service.
My father ran to the squash-playing brigadier, and the brigadier, terribly outraged, asked him to write yet another treatise, addressed this time to the head of state, the secretary to the federal government and other great personages, and said that he would personally carry these treatises to the persons concerned and also put in a firm word. This time my father covered fifty pages and had to insert a table of contents, and we prayed for two hours, read five psalms, sang three songs of praise. As I write these lines, twenty-three months later, my father has yet to receive any kind of reply.
Our house in Yaba was rented by the government, and the minister, determined to grind his former underling to a pulp, sent a letter to our landlord, Adeyemo, notifying him that as of the date of that letter, the government was no longer interested in leasing the property. He further advised Adeyemo to eject immediately anyone currently occupying the house. Adeyemo had spent many evenings sympathising with my father, recounting how he was similarly hounded out of UAC, failing to mention that in his own case he had been unable to account for a lot of money and had been fortunate to get away with only summary dismissal. Anyway, because he was our family friend, we had no doubt that he would let my father lease the house privately at a moderate rent. But house rents were rising amazingly all over Lagos and the laws of economics proved more persuasive than a friendship of twenty years. An insurance company, Adeyemo said, had offered him two hundred thousand a year for the house and was going to pay him for five years in advance. If my father could match their offer and give him a cheque for one million in a week as the insurance company had promised to do, he would let us remain. One million! my father roared like a jet plane, one million! We had been thinking of a rent of fifty thousand a year and my father had said he would plead with Adeyemo to let him pay it in two instalments. There was no need to even try to appeal to him: to travel from fifty thousand to one million would have been for us more difficult than trying to get from Lagos to Los Angeles by bicycle.
We had taken that solid, airy two-storey house, our home for twenty years, for granted: four bedrooms and a study, a large living room with six tall windows, five toilets and four baths. And a small garden which received bursts of attention when, once in a while, either of my parents would lament at how the beautiful garden had gone to seed, get everyone to weed it, buy new plants and manure, excavate the watering hose, and spend the next three weeks, maximum a month, padding about every evening, exclaiming at how well the plants were doing, after which the garden would be forgotten again for six or seven months. Being a much doted-upon only son, I had been given the room on the ground floor in my first year at university and my parents had pretended not to notice when Robo, and occasional strays, spent the night. I learnt how to drive a car on the lawn outside, on the same lawn where our parents had given one birthday party a year for their three young children even though our birthdays were months apart.
A few days into 1994 we moved from the Yaba house to a three-bedroom flat in a block of six belonging to a distant relation of my father’s in the outer reaches of Isolo. We had become part of an involuntary exodus that had been going on for years, of once middle-class families being carried by market forces from the central parts of Lagos and dumped on its edges like refuse. In those wastelands rushed into being by the city’s insatiable hunger for new homes, sanitation and drainage are unknown, roads are dust-quarrying gullies in the dry season and treacherous swamps or angry floods when the rains come. The infernal noise from factory engines and the lung-corroding substances pumped out of their pistons together assault the misshapen blocks of flats, which look like the mass-produced designs of the same overworked unimaginative draftsman. Though Lagos as a whole is ridden with armed robbers, Isolo has distinguished itself in this field, and within Isolo the new areas, into one of which we moved, are indisputably in first place. The clumps of bush that appear suddenly on the roadside, usually on parcels of land so far safe from frenetic construction because of ownership disputes, are excellent for ambush and the deep gullies on the roads assist robbers in bringing vehicles to a complete, helpless stop. Gunshots, angry voices, piercing wails tear your sleep to pieces nearly every night, fill you with terror.
From our new home my mother had to do a hellish drive to her shop in Yaba every morning (leaving behind two disabled men—my father and me—brooding in the living room all day in front of the shiny black Sony Trinitron 21-inch TV I bought when I was treasury manager at BTF) and another hellish drive back every evening through the most chaotic traffic in the whole of Lagos. Rushing home one day to catch one of the miserably acted and poorly translated soap operas from Mexico, immensely popular with a television audience that doesn’t have too much to choose from, she drove into a deep gully in the middle of an Isolo street and broke the axle of her van which had given excellent service for ten years. She walked all the way home, about two miles, and was so completely covered in reddish-brown dust when she entered the house that my father and I didn’t recognise her for a moment. She stood in the living room, trembling with swallowed agony until my father led her to their room. That was when I noticed for the first time how much weight she had lost, how the struggle of the previous months had flattened her stomach and lopped off half of her nicely rounded backside.
My father seemed to have suffered a stroke. A big bone of impotence wedged itself in his throat and allowed him only fractured imitations of speech, and he stared into space, rheumy-eyed, for hours on end. During the family prayers which became even more frequent in our lives, my mother began to sound as if she was warning the Lord that her patience with Him was running out, ‘We have waited for You to show us the way, we have waited oh Lord, we have waited …’, in a bitter tone. But when my father prayed he sounded serene, as though he was past caring, was content to let the will of the Lord be done, however unfair it seemed. In that cramped, sorrowful flat, with window louvres that broke into pieces if you didn’t shut them with great care, and toilet seats that came apart under you and turned into jagged weapons anxious to pierce your tenderest parts, depression began to choke me like smoke-plumes from a car’s exhaust.
*
When I was still a successful financial executive at BTF, I remember marvelling at the astonishing desperation of people trying to leave the country. I and many in the comfortable professional classes wondered, in our pseudo-Oxbridge, pseudo-Texan, pseudo-everywhere accents, why anyone would go to such lengths just to do menial jobs in Europe and America. When it was my turn to try to get away I discovered that the brain (and brawn) drain industry was far more extensive and inventive than we had ever imagined, and that the desperation seemed to be growing and spreading across all classes of our society by the minute.
Outside all the western embassies, long queues of visa applicants—managing directors of failed companies, frustrated senior civil servants, drug dealers masquerading as vicars, prostitutes claiming to be nuns, clutching enough genuine and bogus documents to fill several trailers—endured slashing rain and bitter sunshine. The rate of rejection was on the average ninety-five per cent, probably higher now. The rejected went home, bought new passports, changed from being vicars and nuns to being researchers attending academic conferences and officials of NGOs, and went back and rejoined the eternal queue. A resourceful Nigerian businessman opened an office in rural Transkei where Nigerians acquired South African nationality in thirty minutes and applied for visas as South Africans, cashing in on the continuing goodwill of Mandela’s land.
Some went through Belize, some through Burkina Faso, others through Trinidad and Tobago; some crept across the Mexican border. Ships sailing from Lagos regularly discovered stowaways and it was rumoured that sadistic seamen had thrown many of them overboard. Sports teams melted away as soon as they cleared immigration, academics invited to conferences didn’t even bother to deliver their papers before taking off to search for jobs as security guards or factory hands. Some shredded their Nigerian passports and flushed the pieces down airplane toilets, and arrived at Gatwick or Frankfurt or Amsterdam without nationality, stateless debris. One twenty-year-old boy entered Belgium illegally, married a fifty-year-old woman in order to become a Belgian (and European Union) citizen, and slit her throat when, in a moment of vanity, she showed him her small box of jewellery. He found out later that all the trinkets were made of glass, not diamonds, and then he slit his own throat.
For five months I developed and discarded intricate plans to get an American visa. Then I learnt through a friend who promoted musicians that a reggae band had been invited to perform at a musical festival outside New York. For fifty thousand naira they would add my name—as a keyboard player—to their visa applications, but I would have to attend an interview at the American embassy with the band.
Eleke Crescent, at five-thirty on the morning I went to the American embassy for my visa interview, was a place of ominous shadows. Well-dressed visa applicants, laden with papers, who had spent the night in the shacks by the lagoon near to the embassy in order to gain a good place in the endless visa queue, emerged in small groups from the semi-darkness like gangs of thieves. As the numbers grew rapidly and the queue twisted round and round the thick chains meant to maintain order of a kind, the improbability of getting a visa became more and more apparent. All the talk in the queue was about how heavily the odds were stacked against every applicant: many of the people near me had applied more than five times using different names, claiming widely different reasons for wanting to travel each time. They had been refused on every occasion. In a couple of hours I became certain that mine was a hopeless quest.
To make matters worse, the members of the band I was supposed to be a part of kept glaring at me as we stood in the queue and rebuffed every attempt I made to be friendly: ‘Hey, what sort of festival is it you guys are going for?’ Silence. I tried again: ‘I missed your concert at Laparius Gardens but a friend who went said it was wild.’ Silence. Even if somehow the band was granted visas I was sure that the others would disown me when the time came. And I looked clearly out of place, the only one who didn’t have greasy dreadlocks and marijuana-reddened eyes.
But the interview was surprisingly painless. The middle-aged Latina lady who interviewed us glanced at our passports and papers, asked a few simple questions, and then asked us to pick up our visas in a couple of days. It was over in ten minutes—so unbelievable that when I got my passport back, I kept opening it to check that the American visa was really there.
My parents could not bear the thought of their only son suffering in a strange land and they dug into their last reserves to give me one thousand US dollars in addition to buying my tickets. I had to go into America through New York’s JFK airport with the band so that we would clear immigration as a group, and then on to Oakland alone. In spite of the huge expense, handling preparations for my trip re-infused my father with life. Whatever difficulties there were in America (and horror stories abounded, of Nigerian PhDs washing the corpses of the AIDS dead for a living, of random, mindless killings and so on), however tough things might be, he believed, like the thousands fleeing the country, that almost any place in the world had to be better than our rudderless nation.
The Surgeon and the Republican Party
I bought a car for fifteen hundred dollars at the end of January 1995, my sixth month in America. A 1982 Toyota Corolla, not too weathered, quite fast. One advantage of being on the graveyard shift, not having any social life and living exclusively on junk food was that you saved a good part of your wages. My first priority had been to get my own place, but the rains which began in late December and the bitterly cold nights had made waiting for buses very uncomfortable.
I bought a shelf-full of maps with my car, of Oakland and Berkeley, of Alameda County, of San Francisco, of the East Bay, of Northern California, and even a map of America showing all the fifty states and bits of Canada and Mexico. That was the extent of my sudden excitement, of the possibilities that danced about in my mind. But California’s freeways and city streets, straightforward on the maps, had surprises in store for me. Junctions didn’t appear where the maps seemed to say they would be; freeway numbers got jumbled up in my nervous brain, 980 became 880, 580 turned to 680. Impatient drivers chased me from the inside lanes to the outer lanes and back into the inside lanes. And every time I missed a car darting heedlessly into the freeway from a side street, or realised too late that I had just jumped a stop sign, or that I was going the wrong way down one of downtown Oakland’s numerous one-way streets, I thought of my illegal status and what someone has described as the permanent state of war between American policemen and young black men. (I wasn’t sure if the fact that I didn’t have an African-American accent would make matters worse or better.) Now I can look back and smile about those initiation rites, but in those days almost every drive within or outside Oakland demanded extraordinary mental labour.
I phoned Ego on the spur of the moment. I’d borne a grudge against her after the way she had treated me when I called her from the airport on my arrival in Oakland, but I had no friends to visit in my new car and even Ego was better than nothing. Besides, I said to myself, she might be able to introduce me to a woman. Ego, sounding guarded and suspicious at first, became very pleasant as soon as she confirmed that I wasn’t planning to move into her house. ‘Oh, you have to come over immediately,’ she said, ‘I’ve been thinking about you for months. I asked my mother last time I phoned Nigeria to find out from your parents where you were staying, but she hasn’t called in a while, you know how rotten those Nigerian phones are. I’ve told my husband so much about you and we’d love to have you over for lunch,’ and so on and so forth. I didn’t want to appear desperate so I told her I was meeting friends for lunch that day but that I would call her again during the week so we could fix a date.
They lived in a gated community in affluent Blackhawk, more than twenty miles from Oakland. Though I had phoned Ego before I set off, and she’d said she would call the gate to let me in, the fat, shifty-eyed man at the security post still had to whisper something into the phone before allowing me past the immense gate. I felt like I was entering into a top secret military facility.
Identical sloping-roofed, stuccoed houses, surrounded by trees and gardens, all very neat and precise, lined both sides of the road. Ego’s house was several rungs above those ones: on a hillside, a mighty stuccoed mansion set in the middle of splendid flower gardens, with a bean-shaped artificial lake beside the driveway and charming antique lampholders. Its roof of dark brown tiles sloped almost all the way to the ground. Ego rushed out of the house as soon as I got out of my car and hugged me tightly.
‘You’ve lost weight,’ she said in a mother’s rebuking tone, though she hadn’t seen me for three years. ‘It’s so good to see you. How could you be in this place for so long without calling us? Don’t you know you’re the closest person to me in the whole of this country?’
I remembered her cold voice on the phone the day I had called her from Oakland airport the previous August, sharply telling me I wasn’t welcome in her house, but I said nothing, just kept admiring the house. Ego looked very nice in a loose-fitting shirt and a pair of large khaki shorts and fetching strapless sandals; I noticed for the first time that she had straight, beautiful legs. Her skin was much lighter than I remembered it. I wondered if that was the product of toning creams or merely the sheen of wealth.
