Nigeria

An altogether forgettable weekend - and at my age they all are - is bookended by a pit stop at Union Square for lunch with a friend of a friend. A random conversation a couple of weeks ago about (yet another) mutual friend and my lack of proactivity had ended up in a challenge of sorts being issued in my direction. Three phone calls later - with a few text messages thrown in - I end up making my way up the stairs towards the safe bet that is Nandos for a quick bite and chat. I arrive early - knowing Union Square, getting a table can be a hassle on sunny Sunday afternoons - the added advantage being that I get to see her first, and the satisfaction that she fits the image I have of her in my head. We order simple food - lime and herb flavoured chicken with a mixed leaf salad for me and a ratatouille for her and bottomless drinks and make small talk over the course of an hour and a half. All told it is a pleasant afternoon, and but for the fact that I have dodgy genes, and family history I would already be inventing scenarios involving white picket fences and 2.1 kids in my head. :) Given the choice, I would most certainly like an encore by all accounts. ...

I struggled to not slip into an overly pessimistic, dystopian view of Nigeria with all its troubles. In the few intervening years I have been away, the Nigerian tragedy has hit close home. As with most other people, it turned out that the Dana air crash had claimed a fairly recent acquaintance of my father’s as it did a couple of friends of friends of Sister #1. It also transpired that she - whether by some quirk of fate, divine orchestration, or plain old chance - had resigned from her poorly paid job as a doctor in the police officers hospital the Friday before the Monday Boko Haram’s bloodbath hit the IG’s offices. One day late and that could have gotten really personal. ...

You know that the bride’s wedding gown will be ultra conservative as will be those for the bridal train. There will be no low cut, cleavage accentuating, eye candy-ish, strapless nonsense, and the hems will be at least an inch below the knee. You know that there will be at least ten different preachers – each with the belief that he is a colossus in his own right - and where both bride and groom are PKs, they might be nearer fifty than not. You know that the program will be tweaked to provide an opportunity for every one of them to do something – give a word of admonition, pray, or lead the reading of the vows, or take a thanksgiving offering. You know that every speech and every prayer will be interminably long, as though there were an unofficial contest with a prize for the longest, most colourful speech. You know that it will be baking hot, and dry, because the powers that be have ‘decreed’ that there will be no rain. ...

Deserted... The House on the corner of 3rd and 12th. The sun had began to lose some of its unblinking menace by the time my overloaded bus laboured up the final incline and began its descent into Ekpoma. Although we had made steady progress on the Lagos to Benin leg, navigating the maze of the Uselu - Lagos road and finding my way to the Big Joe motor park across town had taken a while and it was well past four pm before I found my not particularly comfortable seat on a bus to Ekpoma. ...

Hawker, Lagos Plan A was to catch a flight from Lagos into Benin and then a bus for the final leg of the trip to the small university town of Ekpoma, where the wedding was to hold, but the events of the last few weeks ensured that the one thing my mother insisted on was that the journey out of Lagos would be by road. I thus had to brace myself to navigate the tortuous 3oo km+ trip from Lagos into Benin with minimum fuss. ...

As I stand, satchel slung across my shoulder waiting for the call to board the KLM flight from Schipol to Lagos, I think back wistfully to a similar scene just over three years ago, when I stood within the Departures Lounge at the Murtala Mohammed Airport making the transit in the opposite direction. Then, as with now, it was a wedding - that of Sister #1 - that had lured me across the miles, outside the safety of what had been a year of near total insulation, back to Nigeria. In truth, the time and the distance have been mere blips on the timeline of life, but so total has the lostness been that it almost feels like I need to be reacquainted with everything all over again. ...

A moment of rashness by a certain Sani Kaita will go down as the defining moment of Nigeria’s World Cup - when the tenuous grip of one hundred and fifty million people was savagely hacked off. At that time Nigeria was 1-0 up - thanks to a somewhat fortuitous goal – and had largely being untroubled by the Greeks who had been pedestrian all through. The rest, as they say, is history and Greece went on to win to put Nigeria’s world cup dreams effectively on hold for four more years. ...

I suspect I am not the only one whose instinctive reation to the overly ebullient demeanour of sales people customer service assistants is to curl my fingers into a tight fist. I often want to punch them, so that the smile plastered on their face vanishes. They give me the impression of the legendary house rat - which I am told eats the skin off the feet, but aims a puff of air at the right time and place to dull the pain until it has had its fill of its victim’s feet! Thankfully, I am too lilly-livered to follow through my macabre thoughts with action - else I might be rotting in some jail on the grounds of causing grevious bodily harm. ...

If I did crushes, Bassey Ikpi would be it. I stumbled on some YouTube videos back in the day, but I never got to dig into them until a bout of extreme boredom got the better of me. The poem Homecoming is a precise distillation of all the various emotions being caught between two worlds generates in us. I totally loved it! Oh and she’s cute too…. :) [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTcOWR3uc0E]

Edit: This is me venting… Nothing personal.. Just vexed by the way certain things have panned out.. I fear that soon all I will have as memories of my Africa will be the melancholic bits interspersed with a few shards here and there of a nostalgic past - growing up, friends, family, schools, holidays and times spent in wanton play - occasional successes mired in a morass of resounding failure. I wrote in my journal when I turned 21, that I felt my future was inextricably linked to Africa and that whatever I did, I would always have her at the back of my mind. Nine years on, I fear I may have made a volte face; one not altogether of my own volition. ...