Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria

305 Pages·2012·1.51 MB·English

by  Noo Saro-Wiwa

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