A Million Years with You (18 page)

We had named our son John for my brother, never dreaming that he would one day attend a British school or that the Brits call their penises John Thomas. Not only that, but he was the youngest, smallest boy in his class. The other kids bullied him so mercilessly that on one occasion he came home with a black eye and on another occasion he ran away. His British teacher didn't seem to notice the bullying or his departure, and she phoned us to ask why he wasn't in class. Surprised because we had taken him to school ourselves and had watched him trudge unhappily into the building, we went to look for him. No one from the school seemed to care that he was missing.

Luckily the Yoruba groundskeeper cared, and showed us which direction he'd taken. We found him very sensibly climbing along a steep embankment above the only highway, rather than walking in the traffic. He was almost a mile from the school by then, and obviously had a sense of direction, as he was only six and the route to the school was complicated. Probably that made no difference, though, because in the back seat of our car on his way to school, crouched down with misery, he couldn't have seen where we were going. But he had made no mistakes and was almost home.

Many people—certainly many westerners—can't orient themselves without equipment, so I was exceptionally proud of him. A cougar could not have done better.

We didn't like to see our children suffer, so in time we developed a what-the-heck attitude. They could go to school if they felt like it, but they didn't have to. Some of the neighbors felt as we did, so our kids could play with theirs.

Eventually, as a young adult, our son dropped his first name and used his middle name, Ramsay. This was due to some issues with my brother, not because of the British slang for
penis
, which by then was forgotten. So at first he was John, later he was Ramsay, and hereafter I refer to him as Ramsay.

 

One day the young nanny borrowed our car and drove off to do a little sightseeing. Alas, in one of the villages along the road, she ran over a man and killed him. Sometimes when such a thing happened the villagers would kill the driver of the car, but the nanny was so broken by the experience that they took pity on her. They said it was the man's fault. I don't remember all that happened after that, but the nanny soon went home. So things began rather badly.

But if the Nigerian experience was lukewarm for our children and dreadful for the nanny, it was good for Steve. He made friends with the editor of the
Nigerian Tribune
, Ayo Ojewumi, and also with Olu Olofin, editor of
Irohin Yoruba
, then a highly political Yoruba-language weekly paper in Ibadan. Olu became one of the closest friends Steve ever had, so close that they became known as “the twins,” and thanks to him and Ayo, Steve came to know every person of interest in the progressive political spectrum, from the leaders to the thugs, who, as it happened, were known as “field assistants.” Young women found the dignified title attractive. The wide political spectrum fascinated Steve and awoke his love of politics.

The political situation was complicated and has been written about by various historians with varying amounts of bias. Here I will just paint the broad strokes. The large picture, of course, began with colonization, when the colonizing powers drew lines on the map of Africa and declared the enclosed areas to be nations. The lines creating Nigeria enclosed no fewer than 453 different tribes, each of which had its own culture and language. Little attention was paid to the tribes themselves, so in some cases the national borders cut across their areas, leaving part of a group in the newly formed Nigeria and their relatives in the nations that were to become Cameroon, Benin, Niger, and Chad. Also the northern part of the new Nigeria was savannah, the southern part was rainforest, and the middle part was mixed, so the regions had totally different economies. It was as if some authority in a big city had captured a crowded subway train and tried to force the passengers to behave like a family.

Because of the cultural issues, Nigeria was then subdivided into three main areas—the Northern Region, where the largest ethnic groups were Hausa and Fulani; the Eastern Region, where the largest ethnic group was Ibo; and the Western Region, where the largest ethnic group was Yoruba but was divided into different tribal units which in the not-so-distant past had made war on each other. Some of the enmity lingered.

Then during the colonial period people began to move around, so that each region gained communities of ethnic minorities in addition to the indigenous populations. A large Hausa community went to Yoruba Ibadan, for instance, complete with its traditional culture. In all this there seemed to be no unifying element. Each group looked after its own.

At the time of independence, a struggle arose as to which group would dominate. Representation in parliament was based on population, so the census-takers, being of the same ethnicity as those they were counting, exaggerated the figures so greatly that the census was considered a joke. This was most flagrant in the Northern Region, which was getting the highest numbers, so the party of the Eastern Region joined with the progressive party of the Western Region in an effort to have representation. Even so, the conservative, authoritarian party of the Northern Region came out on top, controlling the federal government as well as the Western Region by means of a conservative but not very popular Yoruba party that was allied with the north.

Widespread rioting resulted. Chief Awolowo, leader of the large, progressive Yoruba party (the Action Group), was imprisoned. Not surprisingly, this caused profound resentment among his party members and clouded the prospects for the next election, which was upcoming when we arrived. I was about to get a lesson in the New Way—the politics of mankind rather than the appeal of nature.

 

Most of the Yoruba people in Ibadan belonged to the Action Group, which gave them considerable unity. This came home to me when we tried to get a telephone. We went to the phone company to apply and learned that the waiting period was six months to a year. Steve mentioned this to his friend Olu, and Olu, a member of the Action Group, took Steve to meet a certain chief, also a member of the Action Group, who had connections to the phone company. Three days later a crew was at our condo installing the phone, and that evening we had phone service.

As for political unity, this was not a rare example. Far from it. Now and then Steve would telephone the leader of the Action Group, Alhaji Dawodu Adegbenro, the man who replaced the imprisoned Chief Awolowo. The alhaji
⁶
lived in Abeokuta, a small but important city about forty miles southeast of Ibadan; thus the phone call was long distance, for which one needed the operator.

On one occasion Steve gave the operator the alhaji's number. She too belonged to the Action Group, or so it appeared when she asked, “Do you want to speak with the alhaji himself?”

Surprised, Steve said he did.

“He's not at home,” said the operator. “He's in Lagos. Will I ring him there?”

Steve said please do, and moments later he and the alhaji were talking.

The alhaji and Steve became friends, and Steve and I would sometimes visit him in Abeokuta. I was wowed by him—not only was he a brilliant, congenial person, but he liked dogs. His three wives, also brilliant and congenial, were equally awesome, each of them strong and self-sufficient like most Yoruba women, each with her own successful business which she ran herself, with no involvement by the alhaji. I'd listen while all of them talked politics.

This, of course, fed Steve's interests, but I learned something that fed mine when the alhaji told us how he had determined Eid al-Fitr, a three-day festival at the end of Ramadan. A feast had been prepared but could not be enjoyed until the right people saw the new crescent moon, the sign that Ramadan had ended. That year, as often happened in the forested parts of Nigeria, the new crescent was hidden by clouds. So the alhaji called an imam in Kano, five hundred miles northeast of Ibadan in northern Nigeria, to ask if he had seen the crescent. Kano is in open country and the sky is usually clear, but that night Kano was also cloudy and the imam had not seen the moon. The alhaji then called an imam in Maiduguri, six hundred miles northeast of Ibadan, still in Nigeria but at the edge of the Sahara. Even Maiduguri was cloudy, so the alhaji called an imam in Khartoum, two thousand miles northeast of Ibadan, in the Sudan. And yes, in Khartoum the imam had seen the crescent. Ramadan had ended, and in Ibadan the feast could begin. The alhaji said that if Khartoum had been cloudy, his next call would have been to Mecca. That's almost three thousand miles away in Saudi Arabia, and the call would have been costly, but by then Mecca would have been the only option, because the moon had to be seen.

 

We didn't have much to do with the expatriate community, which was mostly British, mostly tied up with the university and the arts, and far above the ongoing hassle of politics. But Steve was different. Within a fairly short time, his friendships expanded so widely that he found connections not only in the Western Region but also in the Eastern Region. In the evenings he would join various groups of men at a nightspot called the Rose Catering Club or a bar called Total Gardens, part of the gas station that sold Total gasoline, where they would drink beer and eat tree snails while talking politics. The people at the American consulate in Ibadan became aware of Steve's connections and now and then would phone him if they needed information.

This too was interesting, because almost any English-speaking man could have done what Steve did—any man who was politically inclined and fun to be with—because almost everybody spoke English and nothing about the political scene was confidential. Far from it. Most people spoke of nothing else, and that Steve was an American bothered no one because if people thought about America at all, they were perfectly happy to know that at least one American took an interest.

 

Steve was not only interested, he was fascinated. Originally we had gone to Nigeria with the plan of working together, but very quickly our objectives diverged, and I seldom saw him. The understanding he acquired and the friendships he formed remained a high point in his life, so much so—interestingly—that fifty years later, after I wrote this chapter and showed it to him, he was astonished that our experiences had been so different. “Were we in the same country?” he asked.

We were, of course, but we didn't seem to be because I had no involvement with politics. My task was to get a sense of a traditional African city. Ibadan dated from the nineteenth century, so one of the first things I did, with an interpreter, was to meet the chief priest of its patron goddess. The chief priest was a kindly, elderly man who with other members of his family lived in one of the traditional compounds of Ibadan, and he was generous enough to talk with me. But all he wanted to talk about was the political situation!

I soon became aware that he was probably the most conservative person I'd ever met, even though he seemed to lean toward the liberal Action Group. This would be because he was from Ibadan and didn't like the fact that the party in power in the Western Region was associated with Oyo, a city that at one time had been at war with Ibadan. He chose the Action Group because it was not associated with Oyo. But that didn't make him a liberal.

The political situation was riveting, but I wasn't there for that and I kept trying to turn the conversation. My best success came when I asked the chief priest what was wrong with his leg, which was swollen and which he kept propped on a pillow. A guinea worm was in his leg, he told me, and showed me the hole from which the worm's head would sometimes emerge. Guinea worms are huge, two or three feet long and as thick as cooked spaghetti noodles. The worm made a bulge under his skin, and he experienced burning pain whenever it changed its position.

I was horrified, and as soon as I got home that day I consulted my medical handbook, because I thought that western medicine might help. From my handbook I learned that you get guinea worms from drinking contaminated water. That came as no surprise but wasn't enough information, so I consulted a Nigerian medical doctor, who told me he would treat the chief priest without charge if I took him to the Ibadan hospital.

I rushed back to the chief priest and told him all this, but he just smiled in a patronizing manner. He wouldn't go to that doctor, he said, because he didn't believe in western medicine. I praised the medical doctor, which did nothing to alter the chief priest's opinion. Then I turned to the question of water. He should boil it, I told him. Again he smiled. “Boiling kills the life in the water,” he said. I felt a surge of hope. “That's right,” I cried. “And guinea worms are part of that life.” But again my information was worthless. The kind of life he had in mind was of a spiritual nature.

He was always polite and gracious, but he had a habit of looking at the ceiling and talking with someone else while I tried to talk about guinea worms and water, and I soon saw the hopelessness of someone like me changing the mind of someone like him. Foreign, white, and a woman, I was not the kind of person he'd be likely to believe, so I could understand his position. If the situation had been reversed and he had tried to persuade me not to boil water, I would have been interested and respectful and I would not have looked at the ceiling, but he was a priest, not a scientist, so I wouldn't have believed him either.

In time I gave up. Now and then on later visits I'd beseech him to let me take him to the medical doctor, but I soon saw that this also was beginning to annoy him, so I gave it up too. Even so, every time the guinea worm moved it would hurt him, and he suffered. One day I saw that someone had managed to capture a few millimeters of the guinea worm and wrap it around a matchstick with the idea of slowly rolling it up until all of it was out, but at about that time the political situation overtook us and my visits with the chief priest ended. He was a wise and very interesting person, so this is one of my regrets.