Looking for Transwonderland Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 - Centre of Excellence

  Chapter 2 - Oil and People on Water

  Chapter 3 - Total Formula for Victory Over the Hardships of Life

  Chapter 4 - Under the Light of Fading Stars

  Chapter 5 - Transwonderland

  Chapter 6 - In the Chop House

  Chapter 7 - Spiderman, Rock Stars and Gigolos

  Chapter 8 - Straddling Modernity’s Kofar

  Chapter 9 - Where Are Those Stupid Animals?

  Chapter 10 - Hidden Legacies

  Chapter 11 - Kingdom of Heaven

  Chapter 12 - Masquerade Mischief

  Chapter 13 - Spoiling Nature’s Spoils

  Chapter 14 - Behind the Mask

  Chapter 15 - Tending the Backyard

  Chapter 16 - Truth and Reconciliation

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Sources

  Copyright Page

  In loving memory of Sara Al-Bader (1976 – 2010),

  my dear friend and inspiration.

  You’ll never be forgotten.

  Prologue

  The deep voices boomed loudly enough to jolt me from my mid-morning snooze. My eyes opened up to a predominantly male crowd of Nigerians clustered near the information desk in the centre of Gatwick Airport’s departure lounge, gesticulating angrily.

  ‘You are treating us like animals!’ one man barked at the blond airport official, who absorbed the verbal barrage with a passive, slightly bemused smirk. ‘Are we not human beings, like you?’ A mechanical fault had delayed our flight to Lagos indefinitely, and some of the Nigerian passengers – always alive to the whiff of conspiracy – smelt something fishy. They gathered in a circle around a fellow passenger who had appointed himself as spokesman for their suspicions. Angling his head towards the mezzanine, this oga sermonised at maximum volume about Gatwick’s strategy to humiliate us, and Virgin’s stinginess in not providing a replacement aircraft.

  Others waved their compensatory food vouchers at the information desk staff, shouting at point-blank range about Gatwick’s deliberate withholding of information. They huffed and pontificated, everyone offering a theory on why the plane was grounded, gradually transforming the tranquillity of the departure lounge into the tumult of an angry football terrace.

  But whoever decided to send in armed police to monitor the situation was taking an unnecessary precaution. I wanted to tell them not to panic: Nigerians like to shout at the tops of our voices, whether we’re telling a joke, praying in church or rocking a baby to sleep. I also wanted to tell them that we’re not crazy – decades of political corruption have made us deeply suspicious of authority – but there was no one to discuss this with, so I had no choice but to sit and watch our national image sink further in the eyes of the world.

  When two Italian men walked past, one of them giggled to his friend, tapped his forehead and said the word ‘mentale’ before swinging round to take one last derisive glance at the spectacle. The English travellers, more understated in their feelings, shrugged their shoulders at one another and smiled with their eyes, while two spiky-haired employees at a nearby electronics shop chatted amongst themselves and gestured their condemnation of the crowd’s behaviour.

  An hour later, the airport information officer switched on the tannoy to inform the Nigerian passengers of a 50 per cent discount on our next return flight.

  ‘We apologise for the delay,’ the woman began, but her words were drowned out by the disgruntled crowd, which was now clamouring for extra food vouchers. She tried again, this time half bellowing down the microphone. ‘Can you please be quiet, I’m trying to help you!’ The entire departure lounge flinched in surprise.

  ‘We lack discipline,’ an older Nigerian lady murmured to me as she shook her head in shame. She and I, along with the silent majority of Lagos-bound passengers, watched from one side, not sure whether to laugh or cry.

  Being Nigerian can be the most embarrassing of burdens. We’re constantly wincing at the sight of some of our compatriots, who have committed themselves to presenting us as a nation of ruffians. Their efforts are richly rewarded at airports, where the very nature of such venues ensures that our rowdy reputation enjoys an extensive, global reach. I’ve always dreaded airports for that reason. They are also places where, as a Nigerian raised in England, I’m forced to watch the European and African mindsets collide in a way that equally splits my loyalty and disdain towards both: I wanted to spank that Italian for misunderstanding our behaviour and revelling in his sense of superiority; I also cringed at the noisy Nigerian passengers for their paranoia, ill discipline and obliviousness to British cultural norms.

  But the embarrassment and sense of cultural dislocation were nothing new. These airport fiascos began for me back in 1983, when a similar scenario saw my family and 300 irate Nigeria Airways passengers bussed like low-grade cattle to a faraway hotel in Brighton until our delayed flight was ready. I was too young to understand the circumstances surrounding the delay, yet I remember the shouting, chaos and feelings of national shame with visceral clarity. From that day onwards, travelling from England to Nigeria became a source of anxiety for me, a journey I repeated only under duress.

  As a teenager, I virtually had to be escorted by the ankles onto a Nigeria Airways flight at the start of the summer holidays, not only because I wanted to avoid all that airport angst, but also because I didn’t want to reach the ultimate destination. Having to spend those two months in my unglamorous, godforsaken motherland with its penchant for noise and disorder felt like a punishment. I wanted a real holiday, riding banana boats in Barbados or eating pizzas by the Spanish Steps, like my school friends. But my parents didn’t have the money or the inclination for that sort of thing.

  ‘We’re going home,’ they insisted with the firmness of people who knew better than to waste exotic travel on the very young. Come July each year, I would pack my bags and prepare to serve my annual sentence in a country where the only ‘development’ I witnessed was the advance of new wall cracks and cobwebs, and where ‘growth’ simply meant larger damp stains on the ceiling. Nothing ever seemed to change for the better politically or economically in 1980s Nigeria.

  I would arrive at an airport that hadn’t been refurbished in twenty years. The humid viscous air, pointlessly stirred by sleepy ceiling fans, would smother me like a pillow and gave a foretaste of the decrepitude and discomfort that lay ahead. Back then, when international flying was considered the height of sophistication, many of the child passengers were dressed as if attending a black-tie event. Parents tarted up their little girls in frilly party dresses; the boys sweated it out in bow ties and dinner jackets; while armed thieves (otherwise known as government soldiers) rummaged through everyone’s luggage at customs. Only in Nigeria could you see machine guns, tuxedos, army fatigues and evening frocks together at an airport. The insane aesthetic summarised my country’s vanities and bathos more clearly than anything else, and it depressed me. I wanted out.

  I wanted to go back to the place I called home: leafy Surrey, a bountiful paradise of Twix bars and TV cartoons and leylandii trees, far removed from the heat and chaos of Nigeria. I was a toddler when the family moved here in 1978. It was during the oil boom, when the Nigerian currency, the naira (), enjoyed near-parity with the British pound, and a middle-class Nigerian life could easily be transferred to England. With plans to give us English schooling, my father settled the family in the UK while he continued to work in Nigeria as a property developer, writer and businessman. For months at a time, our family was headed by our homesick mother. She cooked plantain and grappl
ed with central heating and the other novelties of English life. We watched Sesame Street and scribbled naughtily on the walls when not scanning the fridge for snacks.

  But the luxuries of English life were not what my father had brought his children to England for. We were here to get an education , and he was terrified we’d all gone soft, which is why our summer returns to Nigeria sometimes included a brutal acculturation fortnight in our village. The experience was a ‘character-building’ one in which we were forced to live without electricity, running water and – the most egregious of deprivations – television. It was a tropical gulag. Nameless aunts and uncles would claw lovingly at our faces and mock us for not speaking our native language fluently. ‘O bee kruawa?’ they would deliberately ask us, cackling at our non-response. For dinner they fed us intensely savoury dishes such as ground rice and okra soup, eaten by the light of a kerosene lamp and washed down with body-temperature Coca-Cola. Then at bedtime we provided the meals for an invisible but frighteningly audible army of mosquitoes and sandflies. By dawn, our arms were covered in itchy lumps that looked like strawberries, only bigger, and our fingernails had turned black from the nocturnal scratching of sweaty flesh.

  Having a cooling shower was the only incentive to get up and face the new day, yet even achieving that was a chore in itself. You had to fetch the water first. We didn’t have to trek all the way to the river, but the jerrycans still needed to be dragged from my grandmother’s house 20 metres away from ours, which wasn’t easy when the water weighed more than we did.

  Concerned that all this suffering wasn’t sufficiently authentic, my father later instructed my grandmother to take us everywhere she went. We were to shadow her every move to get a true taste of village life. But she interpreted this diktat more literally than my father intended, and tried waking us for pre-dawn prayers. Faking sleep, my siblings and I cowered against the hot, sticky bed sheets as her lamplit silhouette banged against the window and called out our names: ‘Zina! Noo! Tedum! Aakeh! Wake up!’ I had never suffered such cold sweats in such a hot place.

  By contrast, my parents believed that without their country they were nothing. My mother habitually referred to our Surrey residence as the ‘house’. Nigeria was ‘home’, the place where her parents and siblings lived, where her wilted energies blossomed and her pale skin toasted to its original brown. At ‘home’, she sparkled in Nigerian traditional clothing, rather than battling the British winter air in woollens and thick overcoats. At ‘home’ she was no longer the alienated housewife but the Madam, handing over laundry and shopping lists to the servant while she caught up with old friends.

  My father’s patriotism was even more fervent. He carpeted our hallway in green to match the colour of the national flag, and once interrupted a crucial TV episode of Little House on the Prairie to teach me verses of the national anthem – a pointed stand against our Americanisation. Even our passports remained resolutely Nigerian, a snub to gold-dusted British citizenship.

  One year, when I was twelve, my father tried to instil a love of country in his children by taking us on a road trip to see the beautiful side of Nigeria. From our home town of Port Harcourt in the south we travelled north into the interior. My sister, younger brother and I sat in the back of our Peugeot 504 while our father puffed on his pipe in the front passenger seat and hummed with us to Richard Clayderman, a deeply uncool classical pianist who performed covers of 1970s pop songs. Our driver, Sonny (who hated those tinkling Bee Gees and Barbra Streisand covers), drove in agonised silence through the central highlands.

  Throughout the trip we were repeatedly reminded of how lucky we were to travel in this way. ‘Very few Nigerians have seen as much of the country as you,’ my father would say on the way to the Yankari National Park Game Reserve, to the new capital city Abuja, to Jos and to Kano. But I was too young to grasp this privilege. Fun as the trip was in parts, I still wasn’t sold on the country.

  The following year, on our last holiday in the motherland, my opinion was finally cemented. While my mother stayed behind in England, my siblings and I were unexpectedly introduced to two half-sisters we’d never met nor known about, the product of my father’s polygamous ‘other life’ in Nigeria. He called it tradition. I took it as a betrayal. It clarified the fuzz of parental tension that my childhood antennae had picked up on but never quite understood: the arguments, the clothes my father regularly bought for our ‘cousins’; my mother fuming tearfully about ‘that woman’. Luckily, being children, we had the emotional elasticity to adjust to the situation. By holiday’s end, the two halves of the family had warmed to each other, but Nigerian family life now seemed to me as treacherous and unpredictable as the military dictatorship that destabilised Nigeria during those years. Had someone told me then that the holiday of 1990 was to be our last in Nigeria, I would have performed cartwheels down the street. Little did I know that the reason for our future absence would be so grim.

  Our ethnic group, the Ogoni, have relied on the Delta for fishing and farming for centuries, but ever since oil was discovered in 1956 and extracted primarily by Shell Oil, this fertile agricultural region has suffered oil spills and pollution from gas flares, which are used for eliminating waste gas, a by-product of oil extraction. A succession of corrupt governments squandered profits that should have developed the region economically, leaving the Ogoni and other Delta peoples in a bind: we are unable to develop industrially, yet we struggle to cultivate our polluted land and we’re fishing gradually emptying rivers.

  In the early 1990s, my father, Ken Saro-Wiwa, had started a campaign against government corruption and environmental degradation by Shell. His battle led to his being arrested and imprisoned several times. The optimist in me believed the situation would resolve itself relatively uneventfully, a perception he himself fuelled. Solitary confinement did not stop him occupying himself with the relative minutiae of our everyday lives, demanding by letter that I tell him about my exam results and the universities I had applied to. His focus on such matters made it easy for me to underestimate the implications of his arrest. But a phone call from my mother on the evening of 10 November 1995 destroyed that illusion.

  My father’s murder severed my personal links with Nigeria. Though safe to travel, I was not obliged by my mother to go there any more, nor did I have the desire. Nigeria was an unpiloted juggernaut of pain, and it became the repository for all my fears and disappointments ; a place where nightmares did come true. As a word and as a brand, it connoted negativity. The green of the national flag reminded me not of life and vegetation but of murky quagmires. Nigeria sapped my self-esteem; it was the hostile epicentre of a life in which we languished at the margins in England, playing second fiddle in my father’s life. I wanted nothing to do with the country. In the ten years after my father’s death, I returned only twice for very brief visits, to attend his official funeral in 2000 and his actual burial in 2005.

  In the meantime, I concentrated on other parts of the world, scratching the travel itch that had tormented me in my childhood: Europe, South America, North America, the Middle East, West and Southern Africa – I made up for my misspent youth. But as the world grew smaller and less mysterious, Nigeria began to take on a certain mystique, especially as I was no longer forced to spend time there. Writing travel guidebooks in other West African countries made me question my juvenile notions of West Africa as an unappealing destination. I saw alpine valleys in Guinea, Ghanaian Ashanti sculptures that were fit for the Queen’s living room, and in Côte d’Ivoire I ate braised fish that makes me salivate even now. Didn’t such things exist in Nigeria too? How could a country of 140 million people, stretching from the tropical rainforest of the Atlantic coast to the fringes of the Sahara, not be interesting? There had to be more besides the media reports of kidnappings and the scam e-mails from ‘Sani Abacha’s wife’ wanting to split her millions with me. Suddenly I found myself in the unfamiliar position of wanting to visit Nigeria independently, exploring its breadth, and voyaging to
this final frontier that has perhaps received fewer voluntary visitors than outer space.

  There was another reason why I felt ready to return. Obligations of the First Born had forced my eldest brother, Ken Jr, to go back to Nigeria. Reluctantly, he had taken over the family business and reacquainted himself with Ogoniland, while I hunkered down in England. I pitied him. But he adapted and, over the years, nestled into Nigerian life without losing his sanity. Things weren’t so bad, he assured me. In time, his successful plunge proved to be an inspiration, more powerful than any of our father’s stern reminders that we should go back to the country at some point and use our good education to help people.

  But re-engaging with Nigeria meant disassociating it from the painful memories lurking in my mind’s dark matter. I needed to travel freely around the country, as part-returnee and part-tourist with the innocence of the outsider, untarnished by personal associations. Then, hopefully, I could learn to be less scared of it, perhaps even like it, and consider it a potential ‘home’. My trip would begin in Lagos, the biggest city, in the south-west. I would travel to the arid Muslim north, then down to the central highland plateau and north-east, before moving on to the tropical lowlands in the south and south-east, including my home town of Port Harcourt. Along the way, I would revisit some of the places my father showed me; see them with adult eyes.

  It was almost midnight when the passengers finally boarded the plane at Gatwick in haphazard style. They talked loudly and clogged the aisles, wedging bulky hand luggage in the overhead carriages.

  ‘We will be landing in Lagos at 6.20 a.m. local time,’ the captain announced. Those words triggered old spasms of apprehension. The plane took off and I ascended, moving away from England’s lights and into the black canvas of night, trying not to write my unease all over it.