by Okey Ndibe
I would—I could—find out if I ever had the chance of landing in Concrete London. So I yearned for London.
Then, one fateful day, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics blasted into my childhood dreams and seized center stage.
As a child, I was something of an expert eavesdropper. If I spied any group of adults who seemed engaged in heated or juicy conversation, I’d stake out a position near them. There was an art to it. I could not afford to let on that I was there to fish snippets from adults’ conversation. If I got caught at it, I knew I would be sharply rebuked or even smacked. The trick was to be at once near and unobtrusive, to steer within hearing range but give the impression of being occupied with something else.
One day, I saw some men in a bar, drinking and eating and talking animatedly. I drew near enough to overhear them but also pretended to focus on kicking around a makeshift soccer ball spun from rags.
“So, tell me more about this thing you call comanizim,” one of the men said, addressing a man whose face bore a thick, bushy beard.
“Communism,” the bearded man corrected.
“Eheh, tell me more about this comanizim,” the first man demanded.
“Communism means that people own everything in common. Everything! There’s nothing like This is my own or That belongs to me. And you can’t hear it said that this man is rich, that one poor. Everybody is equal in communism.”
“But they must have rulers,” interjected the first speaker.
“Yes, but the rulers are in truth the servants of the people.”
“Surely, the rulers have big houses reserved only for their use. And big cars they alone ride in.”
“Not under communism!” the bearded one assured. “It doesn’t matter who you are, once you feel the call of sleep, you can walk into any big house, look for the biggest room, lie down in the biggest bed—and sleep. Yes! The first to claim a big bed gets to sleep in it for the night. There’s no argument about it. If a ruler happens to walk in late, he may end up with the smallest bed. And he won’t make a fuss or demand that the person in the big bed get up for him. No!”
“But what if one person takes a key and locks a big house so he alone can enter it?”
“Impossible!” shouted the bearded fellow. “In fact, it’s against the law to lock any house. It’s also against the law to lock a car. The key is always left in every car’s ignition. If you want to drive to some place, you open the door of any car, start it, and drive away. It doesn’t matter if the car is a Rolls-Royce. Each car, even the most expensive one, is as much yours as anybody else’s. All cars are owned in common.”
“This comanizim is very good,” one of the other drinkers said.
“Communism,” the bearded man corrected again. “That’s why we workers are fighting to make this country a Communist one.”
My heart beat riotously. I, too, was willing to fight to bring communism into our lives. Born poor, I badly wanted my circumstances leveled up. I felt a strong stirring inside to know what, from a distance, seemed to me the luxurious life of my acquaintances whose parents had cars. I fantasized about riding with my parents in a different car each day, sleeping in a different big house—a mansion—each night. I’d make sure, I resolved in the silence of my heart, always to stake out the most rare cars and to beat everybody, night after night, to the softest, biggest bed in the swankiest homes.
A chance encounter with the words of that bearded man was all it took to transform me into a Communist! The man’s cause became mine. For a moment, I felt tempted to walk up to the men and announce my enlistment in the fight for Communism. I refrained only from fear that such an impetuous gesture might jinx things.
At the time, my parents had never owned a car, any car. Years later, having qualified for a loan from the state government, my mother bought a Peugeot 404 that became my parents’ one and only car. I hadn’t had the fortune of sleeping in a bed. Each night, my siblings and I brought out rolled up raffia mats, unfurled and lay them on the hard floor, and went to sleep. A few folded shirts served for pillows. My childhood dreams never wandered to the remote territory of cars or even soft mattresses; they hovered around food.
“If you succeed in bringing this comanizim—” one man began to ask.
“It’s not if, it’s when,” the bearded one interjected. “The struggle of the workers always succeeds.”
“I can own a car, then—when you succeed?”
“And I, a big house?” another man asked.
“No,” the bearded man answered exasperatedly. “Didn’t you hear me say that nobody owns this or that?”
“But you said poor people in comanizim own big cars and mansions,” one of the men challenged.
“No, they don’t own. The community owns everything in common. That’s what I said, unless you’re drunk already. Everybody can use what is owned in common.”
His audience fell silent, seemed to weigh his words. Then one of them asked, “Who thought up this idea?”
“A man called Karl Marx,” answered the bearded man, dragging out the name. “My beard is nothing compared to his. There was no knowledge in this world that he didn’t have in his head.”
“Kalu Mazi,” one of the men said, pronouncing it as an Igbo name.
“No, Karl Marx.”
Karl Marx or Kalu Mazi, I loved this man who had invented this thing called communism. I pictured a human head filled to the brim with knowledge. It made sense to me. Here, after all, was a man who’d devised a system that offered everybody access to plentiful food, access to cars, big beds, and mansions. Communism meant, for me, the very extinction of poverty.
I knew what communism meant, knew who invented it, but there remained a mystery: Where was it to be found? For unless it existed somewhere, it was all a fairy tale, airy.
The conversation progressed. Then, as if he read my agitation, one of the men let out a sharp excited whistle, filliped his fingers, and asked whether there was anywhere in the world where communism had been planted.
“Several places,” said the bearded man. He named Cuba, which didn’t sound to my ears like a country. He named China, which somehow didn’t impress me. Then he said, “There’s the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, USSR.”
Perhaps it had to do with the sheer flourish of the name, capped with that acronym, USSR, but somehow the name clicked! That day, the USSR matched—perhaps even supplanted—Britain as the place in the world I most wanted to visit.
Just when I thought the matter settled, America sneaked up on me, announced itself into my dreams, and made a claim for my attention I was powerless to resist. America didn’t come with anything that rivaled Britain’s ornate charms; it lacked that primal prestige that belonged alone to that veritable Obodo Oyibo. Nor could it boast that sunny Communist paradise that elevated the USSR. It was its mixture of swashbuckling drama and flair for evocative names that compelled my attention.
It all began during a school vacation I spent at the home of relatives who lived in Enugu, the then capital of East Central State. My hosts’ mammoth black-and-white TV set ran a steady parade of American programs. Bewitched, I sat for hours in front of that TV. There were episodes of Gunsmoke and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Yet, it was American professional wrestling that seized me by the scruff.
They had names like Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka, Ricky “the Dragon” Steamboat, Ernie Ladd, Mil Máscaras, Wahoo McDaniel, Mighty Igor, André the Giant, Pedro Morales, “Nature Boy” Buddy Rogers, Terry Funk, Bruno Sammartino, Chief Jay Strongbow, Superstar Billy Graham, Harley Race, and Big John Studd. I was blind then to the secret that wrestling matches were often choreographed, the outcomes fixed. I marveled at the drop kicks, pile drives, body slams, head butts, figure-four leg locks, and a variety of submission holds. The wrestlers had to be a different breed of men, specimens grown on some human farm, their bodies steel-like. I pictured each of them de
vouring two whole chickens at a sitting, wolfing a whole pot of rice. How else could they fly from the top rope and slam their bodies on an opponent lying supine in the ring? How else could the slammed wrestler survive the crush of that massive weight coming at such velocity?
The wrestlers’ rhetoric was an art in itself. It grabbed my attention. With tubular arms, they stabbed the air. They threatened to break their opponents limb by limb, or vowed to put them in the hospital, to drive them into forced retirement. It was spectacular theater, except that I didn’t have that name for it at the time.
I couldn’t get over the wrestlers’ sheer bigness, how some of them looked like two or three men glued together. It stirred something within me, a desire to see America, the country that produced these elephantine beings.
Back in my hometown, I told all my friends about these amazing men I had seen on TV. I demonstrated some of the wrestlers’ moves and invited them to practice on me. In one session, a friend twisted my arm so hard that a wristbone popped out of place. I kept the injury and the pain secret, scared to tell my parents. Through pain, through mimicry of American wrestlers, the United States surreptitiously burrowed its way into my dreams.
As I paid attention to America, I became fascinated by the names of its actors, its cities and states. In my secondary-school days, a kind of chewing gum was in vogue. Each pack of gum came with a small card that bore the name of an American actor. You unwrapped the gum and saw a card with the name and photo of, say, Lorne Greene or Dan Blocker. One day, I unveiled a card with the photo and name of Tony Curtis. I believe he had two guns.
My parents had named me Anthony, after Saint Anthony of Padua. The moment I saw the card, I renamed myself Tony Curtis. It became my reigning name throughout my secondary-school years and gave me a newfound swagger that went with a wild, awakening interest in girls. A part of me adored the country that had sent me this new, heady, gun-flaunting name. There was a strange music to it, the same way other “American” names had captivated me and many other youngsters of my generation. Many of my secondary-school mates adopted North American names, won over by their unusual sound. One friend took Alabama, another Manitoba, yet another Lorne Greene. There was an Adam Faith and an Arizona. I was thrilled by the sound of Tennessee and Mississippi; I couldn’t wait to visit them.
My relationship with America evolved, entered a mature phase, a year after I gained admission into Yaba College of Technology in Lagos to study business administration. I was still a devotee of American professional wrestlers, but by happenstance—browsing an outdoor bookstore at Yaba Market—I discovered books by or on Martin Luther King Jr. and Booker T. Washington, and novels by several American writers, white and black—Richard Wright, John Steinbeck, Ralph Ellison, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin. These books extended my earlier interest in North America sparked by reading Time and Newsweek magazines that my father often bought. I began to explore the world through these American texts, delving ever deeper into matters Americana. Some of the readings exposed me to the horrors faced by Africans taken captive and enslaved in the so-called New World. I took pride in accounts of these captives’ mighty struggle for liberation. The more I read, the more baffled I became—but the more drawn I felt to America.
The books and journalism I consumed fueled my desire to write. I needed writing badly, needed it to save me from a career in the corporate world that my studies would sentence me to. Bohemian at heart and by habit, I dreaded the prospect of a regular eight-to-five job. Even more frightening was the idea of perennially sporting a tie—an altogether bizarre invention of male fashion that I have never understood or cared for. I began to send out opinion pieces to several Nigerian newspapers. My confidence grew with each piece that got published. At graduation I had made a modest name for myself—enough to earn me job offers from several newspaper groups. Journalism suited my restlessness and knack for adventure. After a two-year stint at the Concord Group of newspapers, I accepted an offer as an assistant editor at African Guardian, a Lagos-based weekly newsmagazine.
One day, in September of 1988, the editor’s secretary hailed me as I arrived at work.
“Oga Okey,” he said, “Professor Chinua Achebe called you from America.”
The palpable glee in the secretary’s demeanor was understandable. Achebe was one of Nigeria’s biggest cultural icons, a fact known even to those Nigerians who hardly read books. He had become a world-class novelist, his Things Fall Apart belonging to a select body of books that had a significant global readership. At the time, he held a distinguished visiting professorship at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He would often call me when he planned to arrive in Nigeria. With his eldest son, Ike, I would go to the international airport to welcome him.
My relationship with him had had an interesting evolution.
The first time I ever saw Achebe was in 1976, the year before I completed secondary school. My set had had the luck of coming along just as a major curricular shift was taking shape. After decades of being disdained, Africa was finally incorporated into secondary-school curriculums. African history replaced British and European, and African literature unseated the former focus on (very) English literature. Where those who preceded my set had studied such writers as Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, and Charlotte Brontë, my classmates and I were assigned books by Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (who then went by James Ngũgĩ), Kwesi Brew, Cyprian Ekwensi, Robert Wellesley Cole, and Kofi Awoonor (then known as George Awoonor-Williams). Most of the titles we studied were published in Heinemann’s African Writers Series, the photo of the author on the back cover of the orange-colored books.
During the long vacation, some of my friends and I would occasionally gather at a spot in the town of Enugwu Ukwu beside a busy road that connected Enugu, the state capital, with Onitsha, the famed commercial town on the banks of the River Niger. It was one of several locations where cliques of youngsters would congregate. We’d talk jazz—which meant any subject that caught our teenage fancy. We’d steal puffs on cigarettes. We’d take furtive swills of kai-kai, the fiery, locally brewed gin that set the mouth’s roof on fire. We’d wince as the liquid scalded its way down our brave, shuddering esophagi. Most of all, we’d just stand around, dawdle, idle away time. What we wanted, rather desperately, was adventure. We’d scavenge for any excitement to spice up our lives, anything that would deliver us from the curse of too much time, too little to do. We were bored, for sure, to hell and back, even though we didn’t know it at the time. Nobody had given the word “boredom” to the agitation we felt, the restlessness within. And if anybody had attempted to sell us the theory, we would not have bought it at any price—we simply didn’t have boredom in our social dictionaries.
On a Saturday, as we stood around, one of us sighted a blue unusual-shaped car that shook off a slight bend in the road and unfurled itself, headed in our direction. It may have been some silent transmission of urgency in the first observer’s gaze, or perhaps he rallied us with words; I no longer recall. But the curious, strange automobile—curious as to color, strange as to shape and type—became the cynosure of all our eyes. In a moment, as the speeding long-bodied car whirred past, we fixed on the driver. We’d never seen that make of car ever before. But its driver was immediately recognizable. Instantly, from the driver’s resemblance to the author photo on the back of Things Fall Apart, we recognized Chinua Achebe!
A few of us jumped onto the paved thoroughfare, indifferent to the danger from other traffic, and waved frantically. We saw him see us from his rearview mirror and saw him raise a hand to return our greeting. Our eyes had beheld a legend. We had a stock of excitement to last us a week.
Subsequently, we staked out the same spot every Saturday, expectant. Time and again, our vigil was rewarded. Once we spied the car from a distance, we’d start waving way before Achebe drove past. He’d make eye contact with us, smile in that accustomed wry way that I would come to reco
gnize, a few years later, as his signature, and wave to us. Each time he drove past and waved at us, we felt our lives touched by magic, our week made.
One day, during a solitary walk, I chanced upon Achebe. He’d stopped at a gas station to fuel up his blue Mercury Monarch. My heart skipped a few beats at the sight of the legend. I walked toward him in the slow, timid steps of one approaching a god of unpredictable temper. Should I speak to him? Say what, exactly? Tell him I had been enchanted by his work? Or should I exhibit (puny) erudition? Ask him a question or two about, say, the impulsive, domineering Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart, whose killing of the boy Ikemefuna shook me to my very depths, gave me one of my earliest, purest portraits of evil? Or should I ask about Obi Okonkwo, the self-willed, failed idealist protagonist of No Longer at Ease? But what if Achebe upturned the scale, asked me a question or two about his novels? What then? Could I find words to give a coherent answer? Or would dread be a boa constrictor around my throat, stifle every word welling up for air, nervousness choke each word to death? What if Achebe knew he was a deity in my eyes, and that eminent personages like him didn’t have to speak to mere mortals—least of all, an upstart, uppity, secondary-school mortal? What if he ignored me, if he stared or glared at me in silence?
Once within earshot, I blurted out—the only words, ultimately, my breath could form—“Good afternoon, sir.”
“Good afternoon,” Achebe said in response. The surprise softness of his voice put me at ease. Then, as if to garnish the gift of returning my greeting, he humored me with a smile.
I lingered until he finished fueling, entered his car, and drove away. Then I ran, panting, to a friend’s home. I knew that a few other friends of mine would be there, too. In an urgent, even agitated, tone, I related what had just happened, my close-up encounter with the writer whose quick wave had become for us the crowning thrill of many a weekend. My friends moped at me, their expressions a mixture of awe and envy. They knew what I felt: that my life had been brushed by stardom.
