by Sefi Atta
“Yeah, an old folktale.”
“Not a folktale. Shango is part of the Yoruba religion, like Adam and Eve in the Bible. You see? That is the problem with we Africans. We disrespect ourselves...”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, here we go again. Who cares? The story is so parochial and not relevant today. Then you wonder why no one will sponsor you and you have to end up performing in an empty swimming pool.”
“We had the Goethe.”
“They must have pitied you.”
“The British Council is considering.”
“You won’t be lucky twice.”
“The Americans—”
“Who?” She laughed as if I’d cracked a joke.
“Listen,” I said. “Don’t come here and insult us. It’s bad enough everyone thinks our years of studying drama were a waste of time. Anyone who produces relevant plays in Nigeria today will be locked up. You of all people should understand.”
She hissed. “You’re not acting. You’re messing around over here, and you might impress a few expats, who are always suckers for an authentic cultural display so steeped in native metaphor that the average Nigerian can’t digest it, or thrill a few locals who can’t tell the difference between a drama performance and a wrestling match, but don’t expect me to be singing your praises after I leave this place.”
“At least we have formal training,” I said. “At least we didn’t get our training in a dubious local soap.”
“Theater arts grads?” she said. “You’re right there at the bottom of the manure heap, next to the agriculture students. Tell me something, with no bio to speak of, who will employ you when you finally graduate?”
That led to us faking coughs and covering our crotches.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I have to talk to my friends.”
“No,” Professor said. “I don’t want her here. You heard how she insulted us. She’ll come here and ruin everything.”
Everything. We were in what my mother would have called the parlor. I was on my father’s faded reclining chair, the rest were sitting on sofas with pockmarks. The white paint on the wall was peeling, the carpet had missing patches, and the windows had wooden bars. I’d nailed the bars in myself after I’d smashed the panes. So many mornings, after overnight rains, we’d wake up to find puddles on the floor.
“She didn’t go for my line,” Fineboy murmured. “Nefertiti, Queen Amina of Zaria. Why didn’t she go for my line?”
“Crazehead?” I asked, ignoring him.
Crazehead was scratching his head. Did he have ringworm?
“Shango,” I said, hoping he might have something useful to add.
“You’re the owner of the house,” he said, shrugging. “It’s your decision. Although, I don’t know why she needs a place to stay. The way she speaks and behaves, she’s an elite, definitely a pepperless chick. She even sounds like an away Nigerian. She probably went to school in England, probably has an old man somewhere with a house twice as big as this...”
I’d almost forgotten his inability to stick to issues, any issue at hand. There was agreement all around;Toyosi was definitely an away Nigerian, a pepperless Nigerian, an assorted chick, an aje butter.
“So why is she an actress?” Professor asked. “Shouldn’t she be working in a bank or in Daddy’s law firm or medical practice?”
“Perhaps she’s been thrown out of home,” I said. “She has the baby girl and no ring on her finger. You know the elite: their children must carry on their shenanigans within wedlock, or else—”
“Or else it’s instant disownment,” Fineboy said, as though I’d reminded him of an incident in his past.
I had to ask Toyosi, since she had so many answers. “I don’t understand. A woman like you—why do you want to cook for a group of guys?”
She frowned. “I beg your pardon?”
“Aren’t you for the liberation of women?”
Her daughter was sleeping face up on the mattress that was my sister’s. I couldn’t confirm the mattress was free of bugs. My sister’s photograph was in a square-shaped frame on her dresser. Sweet troublemaker, she had been fourteen at the time, and was always harassing me for fifty naira to buy fruit-flavored lip gloss.
Toyosi shrugged. “Why should I be for women’s liberation? The person who chased my father and broke up my family is a woman. My mother herself, who threw me out of home, is a woman. Plus, what other skills do I have to offer a group of hungry guys?”
Her lips were so thin I could gobble them up with one parting of my mouth, or at least nibble on her lower one, I thought.
I sat on the mattress. “Em, what about this play you’re writing?”
“What about it?”
“Title?”
“The Lawless.”
“Premise?”
“The breakdown of society.”
That was huge. “How many players?”
“I haven’t written it yet. Don’t keep hounding me.”
“Who’s hounding you?”
She wagged her forefinger. “Yes, you were. Yes, you were, just now. Stop it, you hear?”
Why did I still want her to like me? I kept trying: “I suppose you must be fed up with the kind of material for women, em, actors...”
I’d read that in a magazine passed around the Theater Arts department for so long that it had more palm-oil stains than print. It came from a Hollywood actress with skin as delicate as crêpe. She was half starved, yet she wanted to be taken seriously. We looked to America for slang and elements of craft, and to our budding local Nollywood video and stage productions—not to the British; they were inaccessible, like their Queen’s English.
“Poor parts for women,” Toyosi said, stroking her daughter’s legs. “That’s a good reason to quit acting, not to pick up a pen.”
“I can never give up acting, sha.”
“You probably can’t do anything else.”
“Not since I caught the bug.”
“It’s more like a terminal disease to me. Me, I’m through with it.”
“How come you’re so cold?” I asked.
She tucked her chin in. “How come you’re trying to sleep with me?”
If she didn’t work miracles with beans and palm oil, I would have asked her to leave. Immediately. I would have told her, “Look here, you’re harsh, snobbish and not that attractive.”
I never once saw her write, but she could cook, and she had our scenes moving again. That, and the other good reason for having her around was that every girlfriend I’d ever had had looked endearing, even the campus sluts and sugar-daddy types I ended up with. Whatever their conduct in private, they were the sort of women my mother would have approved of, because they had the same wash-and-set hairdo that was popular in Lagos, and they slept with pink foam rollers to maintain that look.
“How can we ever have decent sex with rollers?” I’d asked my last girlfriend. “I mean, can’t I ruffle up your hair once in a while?” She said, as an African woman, she didn’t appreciate her hair being ruffled up. I complained and complained until she agreed, “OK, I’ll take them out, but after sex, I’m rolling my hair up again.”
For that alone I broke up with her, so Toyosi was right, and I was surprised she knew me that well from the start. Whenever I saw a woman who was different from the norm, all I wanted—all I’d ever wanted—was to sleep with her.
Toyosi occupied my sister’s room. Sometimes, I’d see her snoring with her mouth open and her daughter’s head in her armpit, and I suppose that was when I loved her, or perhaps it was later. Who knows? I let her share my parents’ bathroom, scrubbed the tub daily so she could wash her daughter in the evenings. She never once said thank you.
I noticed how she spent more time with Professor than with any of us. She smiled at him and let him bounce her daughter on his knee. One morning, I heard him singing a special anthem he’d made for her: “Pretty girl, pretty girl, who is your daddy? I’m your daddy.” I could have kicked the door down.
/> “He’s trying to chase you,” I whispered in Toyosi’s ear. “He’s even using your daughter. How come you treat him better than me?”
“Prof?” she said. “He likes women?”
Prof. “Of course he does.”
“Na wa. I could have sworn he wasn’t that way inclined. He told me he lost his father in the Civil War.”
“He’s a poet and a liar.”
Professor and his sisters were raised by their mother. Their father was so devastated when Biafra lost the war, he stayed in France.
As soon as I had the opportunity, I made sure I tripped him up. He was coming out of her room with a soiled nappy. The nappy went flying, followed by his glasses.
“Ah-ah, see what you made me do?” he whined, picking himself off the floor.
“Ehen?” I said. “So what are you going to do about it?”
The water shortage in Shapati Town changed our friendship in that house. Every tap in the town center dried up after the rainy season, right through the beginning of the harmattan season, so we had the usual dusty winds in the mornings and evenings. During the hot afternoons, the townspeople disappeared into their cement brick bungalows, under the shelter of their corrugated-iron roofs, just waiting.
Our local council couldn’t tell us when they would “recutify de problem.”A water tanker came round every other day. We had to be on the lookout for the driver, because two honks and that man was off. When he arrived, we ran outside with our aluminum buckets, shouting, “We’re here, oh. We’re here, oh.”Then he’d grab his big hose between his legs and drench us until he’d filled our buckets, then we’d hobble back into the house.
We boiled some of the water to drink and brush our teeth. The rest was for bathing, flushing and Toyosi’s cooking. After about three weeks of this, we were exhausted in the evenings, and not prepared for our performances. People in our audience, who couldn’t afford tanker water, were fetching polluted water from Lagos Lagoon and Five Cowrie Creek. When they showed up, they crossed their arms and expected us to bring not just entertainment, but some frigging joy into their lives. Shango did his usual fire-breathing trick, spitting kerosene from his mouth onto the flame of a hidden lighter. They hissed and called us useless; our story about Yoruba gods was no longer relevant.
We stopped putting on our free show. I went to the British Council to see how far our script had gone there. They said they were still considering us. Shango went to the Americans. Some asshole there told him they only sponsored talented people. Back at the house, my friends were beginning to smell as guys do when they stay together too long: of rivalry and unsatisfied desires, and sheer bad manners.
One evening, Crazehead let out one of his belches. Normally, I would hold my nose until the mist subsided, but I was too tired. I was lying on a sofa. We were in the parlor again. We’d had a power cut and there were shadows dancing on the ceiling from the light of our kerosene lanterns. Shango was studying a journey of ants to and from a bit of bread. “Can’t you even say excuse me?” he said. “Hexcuse,” Crazehead said. Professor hissed. “You this boy, you have no manners.” Toyosi was in the kitchen, boiling water to make her daughter a bottle of milk. She was trying to wean her—not that this was the right time to introduce any child to Lagos water, but the girl was almost one year old and biting hard.
“No consid’ration,” Fineboy said.
“Ah-ah?” Crazehead said, smiling as if he were made popular by our criticisms. “Why is everyone picking on me tonight?” He shuffled across the room and dived by my feet, and then he let out another belch. I smelled it first: bushmeat and orange peel.
“What the hell did you eat, man?” I asked.
The parlor already stank of mosquito repellent.
“Shit,” Fineboy said, burying his face in a cushion.
“One more coming up,” Crazehead said.
Fineboy sprang from his chair. “I swear to God if you...” He reached for Crazehead’s feet.
Crazehead sat up: “It’s not my fault! It’s not my fault!”
“Out of this place,” Fineboy ordered. “Are you an animal or what?”
Fineboy—and I suppose this tallied with his good looks— was particular about personal hygiene. He insisted on shaving despite the water shortage. I’d caught him, numerous times, glaring at Crazehead, who walked around with patches of beard on his chin and dried-up sleep in his eyes.
I heard Toyosi’s daughter crying. Toyosi was checking her boiling water. I turned around again and Fineboy and Crazehead were on the floor, wrestling. Crazehead was on top.
“What are you fighting for?” I asked.
Toyosi hurried into the parlor with her daughter on her hip. Shango dragged Crazehead and Fineboy apart. They were breathing through their mouths. Shango grabbed Crazehead’s shoulders and lifted him. I thought he was about to throw Crazehead across the room. Crazehead kicked his shins. He looked like a puppet with entangled strings.
“Shangooo!”
Toyosi’s shriek so reminded me of my mother’s that I sat up straight. Shango lowered Crazehead to the floor and went back to studying ants, as if he’d never moved from there. Crazehead was grinning. “What’s wrong with ‘im?”
I walked over to Shango as he crouched by the wall. “Hope nothing,” I said.
He was watching the ants crawl up and down. “Everyone thinks I’m soft. I’m not that soft.”
“Why did you do that to Crazehead? You know his head is not correct.”
“Are we really useless and untalented?”
“We’re extremely talented, in fact.”
“Then why will no one sponsor us?”
“Because theater is dead, art is—”
I had to stop myself; I was sounding like the student unionists, specialists in screaming about how they were voiceless victims. But who were we to feel sorry for ourselves because a few foreign embassies wouldn’t give us attention? And why did we have to depend on their charity anyway? Not one stinking rich Nigerian was willing to support us?
I slapped Shango’s back. “What do you expect, jo?” After all, if I allowed myself to address the issue at hand—the real issue: what was the state of art under a dictatorship? Where was the state of art under a dictatorship?
My house was one state. Here, we were so free we deserved to fly our own flag. For this, we had to be grateful, at least.
Shango let an ant crawl onto the tip of his forefinger. “You know the people I feel sorry for most in the whole wide world?”
“Who?” I asked.
“Ants,” he said. “Because all they ever do is live for their work and see how we trample on them.”
I placed my hand on his shoulder. Shango wasn’t soft; he was as thick as a tree trunk.
“Why are your friends such morons?” Toyosi asked, as she bathed her daughter that evening. Her hair was tied up in a turban and she carried the girl in the crook of her arm.
“They’re not so bad,” I said, meaning it.
“Why can’t they just go home to their parents?”
“They don’t have homes they can ‘go’ to.”
On campus, I’d dreaded being on my own in the house. The thought had had me sitting up at nights with a dry throat. Now, I wondered if I should brave it. Toyosi wiped her daughter’s cheeks with a washcloth.
“Are they orphans or what?” she asked.
“Their families can’t afford them.”
“Can you?”
I was broke from paying for water, food and baby milk. What little funds I had left would cover my electricity bills. I remembered the smartest statement Shango ever made. “You’ll spend your inheritance,” he said, “until pain is all you have to live on.”
“What happened to your parents?”Toyosi asked.
“Killed.”
“Eh? How?”
“Armed robbers.”
“Kai. Where?”
“Here. Gateman took a bribe and let them in.”
She looked around the bathroom as if she c
ould feel their ghosts watching us. The windowpane over the bathtub was smashed; I could hear crickets outside.
“My sister, too,” I said.
“When?”
“Remember when there were so many raids?”
There were riots after the Abacha regime announced their constitutional conference. The mobile police squad promptly quashed them. Armed robbers took over Lagos streets at night. They attacked homes with machetes and guns. People swore some of them were university students—they spoke so well. The raids were a social revolution, I’d bragged at the time, not knowing I would be personally affected. Meanwhile, the Abacha regime was passing decrees to muzzle dissidents. Lagos State set up a special squad to combat armed robberies, and the rumor was that the squad was selling arms to the robbers.
Toyosi pulled her wrapper up her thigh and trickled water over her daughter’s belly. “What’s Shango’s own story?”
“His parents had twelve kids. They gave him away. My parents were his guardians. He got me involved in drama, saved me from insanity.”
“Crazehead?”
“Ogogoro and hemp. His father is a trumpeter, drinks ogogoro like water. Crazehead himself started smoking hemp at the age of ten.”
“Professor?”
“Premature ejaculation.”
“Fineboy?”
“He made a pass at you. How come you don’t shun him?”
She shook her head. “I don’t understand. You’re not from the same background as any of your friends.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re... you know.”
“‘You know,’ what?”
“Posh,” she said, but I was the son of an architect who’d inherited an estate, and the middle class were as nonexistent as theater was dead.
Her daughter took ill with malaria, or bad water; we were not sure. At first she was refusing to take her bottle, then her temperature spiked in the evenings, and her little eyeballs sank. At night we could hear her gibbering in baby language. Toyosi got up every hour to sponge her. I gave up asking if I could help. She wouldn’t even let Professor near the child, only during the day, when her temperature subsided. Then we would take turns to place her on our chests and feel her tiny heart pumping and her fingers grasping at our sleeves. She scratched us with her fingernails, wet us with the sweat from her head, and left us smelling of milk and medicine. Professor, Fineboy, Shango, Crazehead, we were all involved in administering her chloroquine and antibiotic drops that Toyosi bought from Hausa street hawkers, knowing they could well be fake.
