A panegyric on a unique culture and modern reality.
God is not forgotten in a place like Nigeria. Where the thunderclaps of June and July split your ear as you cook on a gas stove. Where power outages are treated as minor inconveniences and generators are a familiar household name, a just-in-case gone everyday necessity.
God is not forgotten in Lagos, the city that smells of petrol and hustle, where there are four men to every job and seven women to every good man. God is sold in the megachurches and the proud, tall mosques of the country, bartered to men and women in exchange for loyalty and heavy pockets. Leaders fluent in the art of spinning tales of easily attained salvation and promises of prosperity guaranteed to be found only at the bottom of the collection boxes. Their portion is coming, their God is always good.
Belief is always, belief is constant and forever. Unshaking, unwavering. Mixed and washed religion threads through the families. Christianity and Islam intertwined and diffused, paganism converged at the essence of Yoruba existence. Proud flags of religion — a headscarf or a beard or a cross find their ways into bars and clubs, alongside skinny jeans and miniskirts. A flowing white gowns in a beer parlour.
To stare at a shrine, a priestess and her followers and to know that many still follow the ancient way of the gods with offerings and pleadings is a feeling that washes over one as they stand by the holy river polluted with plastic bottles.
The home, the fatherland. We don’t go back to square one, but to square Nigeria, where the hierarchy of city life rains down the extravagant cost of living on the earning and the innocent. To cover the cost of the non-existent repairs to the tiles that are cracking, the door frames that are crumbling, the broken mosquito nets. School fees, medical bills, odun. To fund survival and possibly comfort.
A holy grail. Where white ladies and gentlemen come to taste a fertile ground full of potential. For converts, for luxury, to see how the people live. Who gingerly set foot in Murtala Muhammad, the new and unknowing among them unaware of the force field cast around them by their pale skin and thinner noses.
Missionaries eager and optimistic in spreading the word of God, fulfilling their duty to those unlucky enough to have lost the lottery of birth and be born in Africa. A young woman who walked into a world of fortune after a Big Man found a white girl he liked online, and who showed up ready and willing to offer her services in return for a life that satiates every need imaginable, oblivious to the mosquitos bites she invites with her outfits that bare all.
The glory-hunters, people willing to give African tourism a chance, to grace the people of poverty with an attempt to understand their country. He will build a well and go back home and give a talk about the lessons he learned from a lady who hawked peanuts on the streets and the epiphany a potholed road brought to his life. This contentment and accomplishment will follow him, his heart who understands, his eyes that don’t see colour. Like a badge he wears with pride and shine — him, the awoken in a world of ignorance.
The ones who married into the country, the ones arriving to run a multinational, the modern incarnation of the coloniser.
The oyinbo-lised children show up too. Every summer like birds migrating, they flock behind their parents, who hadn’t been smitten with Western queue efficiency and planned housing enough to deny their children a taste of their roots. Some of the chosen offspring take to their place of origin like a fish to water. The ones who tickle the language with their foreign accents and eat heartily and don’t complain when the electricity cuts. The others who are tentative and repulsed, questioning why and not understanding how, counting down the days till their return home. Yet undeniably, between the good, bad and the Naija-questionable, they feel, whether or not they admit it, a strange comfort in the organised chaos of a country full of fellow brown-skinned folk. And the green-white-green loves them back, loudly. Not just when they ‘appreciate their people’, but genuinely, because the children return to the family, to where they belong, even if just for the summer.
Wealth and education and a good wife stretch the bellies of men, the rounder, the better off. The grease is love. The oil is prosperity. The meat is a good life. Meals and snacks that exercise the jaws pay homage to the relentless tenacity of the Yoruba mind. The eternal spirit of struggle coursing in mans’ body from the tales of the orisha till now. Alafiya is utopia for the Yoruba mind, the mind that never rests. The soul grown from red soils, the fertile green land their final resting place.
The shacks of wood and tin that sell unadulterated tradition. That sell culture in beads and calling cards and herbal medicine. The music in the streets and the children that skilfully dodge between legs and cars with nimble innocence and childhood grace, already beginning to be tainted by street smarts beyond their years.
Something never dies in the people who leave their father’s homes in the motherland.
The outside world that received these people with sceptical eyes and arms not fully open subjected them to the test of love and time. They rationed and measured out the racism, dishing it out in doses to communities and individuals on their own. They tested the resilience of the Nigerian spirit and, finding that it was too robust for tampering, let it be.
Then came the test of love. Years scorn at traditional dress, years of mockery and repulsion at accents, at mispronounced words, misused nouns, wild applications of plural and singular and the unholy travesty to the Queen’s English that is Pidgin; years of anger at hearing the ever-too-loud music from the continent, confusion at the intense, suggestive dance, years of burning tongues peppered with insults for the country and peppered with the too-spicy, too-salty food of men and women closer to the equator. Years of misunderstanding.
And finally the test of love takes a sharp turn to her final destination. Of admiration, appropriation, association. First, second, third generation all of a sudden cool and fashionable, the slang the freshest, the music the newest and most futuristic and most globally appreciated, morphed into to the cousin of the Latin beat, the nova bossa nova, the neighbour of the Arab rhythm, the Desi percussion and the American trap, hip hop, blues, jazz. Clubs and bars now heave with new accents and open minds. Cities are now dotted with places selling the flavoursome, the spicy kicks, the wholesome and filling, tradition pours outwards and the dances are viral, bouncing in time with the original bodies jiving under the sun from screen to stage to stadium. When people watch Nollywood, they start to laugh intentionally. Fashion explodes with the colour and energy of traditional print, loud patterns, bright colours, the exhibitional beauty of elaborate headdresses and unique cuts on catwalks, the dynamic afro hair the most coveted and admired, curls imitated, braids in every curl pattern. The whole world is suddenly a stage for Nigerians, for betta country pipo.
Yet something never changes about those with the blood in them. No matter where they go, what they see, who they meet and where they make it, the compass spins and spins and always finds its north. North is home and home is Nigeria. And it is said pejoratively and it is said with spite that you may take the special person out of the special place, but you can never take the special place out of the special person, and this is a beautiful truth from an ugly slant. Because no matter what, the compass always finds north, and north will never stop being the weather the skin longs for, the temperature the bones pine for, the atmosphere the mind hopes for and the place the heart yearns for. Though the compass may spin and spin and spin.
In a nation so expressive, so theatrical and alive and vibrant in everyday existence, subtlety is dull and understating, a type of communication unnecessary for the world that shines under the sun of a green-white-green. Words are to be delivered with passion and meaning, emotion should be clear with every muscle in your face, every twist of your lips, every stretch of your arm and hand. Much like the nature isn’t subtle — the sun is not ever gentle, the rain is never delicate, the nights never half-dark, and the days never half-bright — why would the people ever be any version less than the fullest of themselves?
Love is not small. Frustration is not small. And joy certainly no be small. The African Giant does no things in halves, and the life of the country that still has so far to go can never be anything less than dazzling.
Imagine, being an Irish-Nigerian fool for literature who visits Nigeria in the summer of 2019 and jots some words some nights when the power is gone before bed. And then forgetting about them. And then later dedicating her Instagram partially as a visual love letter to the country and her African identity. All the while, reading, listening, tuning in to the heartbeat of the country through what’s been written about her. And then in 2020, stumbling across these words again and feeling the spirits of Achebe and Adichie and editing and putting out a scrambled contemporary-style piece professing a year-old expression of love. Nigeria makes you that way. And there’s still so much more to say.
Dedicated to my parents.
