by Okey Ndibe
One afternoon, having found Nnaji’s office locked, I walked down the stairs and out the engineering building to see if he was in his lab. As I walked in, Chris looked up from poring over an engineering textbook. As was his wont, he shouted my name and smiled widely.
“Professor Nnaji here?” I asked, even though I had a clear view of the lab and could see that Chris was alone.
“He was here earlier. Did you check his office?”
“He wasn’t there.”
“He’s probably in class. Or in a meeting. Did you check with the secretary?”
I explained I didn’t; it wasn’t that important.
“Glad you came,” Chris said. “I’ve got a question for you.”
“Go ahead,” I urged.
“I’ve been wondering about something. I see a lot of Africans around town. How are you guys able to come to America when there are no airports in Africa?”
Chris was fond of rib-cracking jokes, a tendency to roll out a hard, easy laugh. I searched his face. There was not a trace of amusement, no sign of laughter reined in. Yet, I conjectured, he must have spoken in jest. Perhaps I was seeing a new side of him, a rookie funnyman, trying out his material on me. I let out a quick laugh but stopped when he didn’t join me. Briefly, I scrutinized his face again. I reckoned it closed, inscrutable. That he was serious seemed to me an implausible scenario. Despite the absence of clues on his face, I regarded his question as a joke. At any rate, I was going to respond as if his question had been asked in a comedic spirit.
I said, “Why, we ride on the backs of crocodiles across the Atlantic!”
Instantly, an expression of horror seized his face. “Crocodiles? Don’t they eat you?”
This time, his genius for disguise impressed me. I was determined to sustain the lighthearted tone. “Oh no,” I assured. “African languages make crocodiles docile. If you speak an African language, a crocodile would give you a hug. Even kiss you, if you wanted.”
“Wow!” Chris exclaimed. His mouth hung open. This time, his eyes appeared to search mine. “Amazing!”
Later that night, I received a telephone call from Chris. “Okey, I told the crocodile story to my roommates, but they don’t believe it. I’d like you to meet them. They need to hear the story from the horse’s mouth.” He sounded unquestioningly serious. Yet, I was not about to abandon my tone of levity.
“I don’t know the horse that well,” I said. “And the crocodile I know rather better is too busy ferrying other Africans across the Atlantic.”
I was quite shocked to realize that Chris had not been joking all along, as I had thought. It was then that the hilarious potential of the conversation struck me. I couldn’t help imagining a most absurdist scene at New York Harbor, wave after wave of African immigrants arriving after a wearying trip on the backs of crocodiles, their luggage wrapped in water-soaked bundles. I pictured US immigration agents processing these new immigrants who’d braved the perils of tumultuous seas.
When I told a few African friends about my exchanges with Chris, one of them remarked, “It makes sense that crocodiles bring us to America. As far as some Americans are concerned, animals are the first natives of Africa.”
Several years later, my father-in-law, Aliyu Babatunde Fafunwa, told me kindred stories from the 1950s when he was a student at Bethune-Cookman College in Florida. His stories were every bit as fantastical as mine. And he told them with the same self-deprecatory sense of humor that served me and many other Africans.
One day, an American student had asked him, “Is it true that you Africans live in trees?”
“Yes, that’s where we live,” he’d answered, nodding vigorously.
“So how do you get up there?”
“We take the elevator, of course!”
On another occasion, somebody had asked him, “What do you Africans do when an elephant storms into your home in the jungle?”
“You have very little choice when an elephant decides to call. First, you pull out the best chair you have. Then you look up at the mammoth thing. Then, gesturing in the direction of the chair, you say, ‘Mr. Elephant, please make yourself at home.’”
On yet another occasion, shortly after his arrival in Florida, a professor at Bethune-Cookman had invited the small contingent of African students to his house for dinner. Ravenously hungry, my father-in-law and his fellow guests had looked forward to gorging on a sumptuous, home-cooked meal. In the American tradition, dinner was preceded by a long, meandering conversation over cheese and crackers. The preamble served to sharpen their appetites. Finally, dinner was served, and they were summoned to the table.
Right before their eyes was a meal of salad, steak, boiled potatoes, and sautéed vegetables. Much of it looked unpromisingly bland. But that was the least of the problem. The steak on the platter was rare. Blood seemed to surge out of it, coloring meat and plate alike. They had never seen cooked meat awash with blood. They sat staring at the strange sight, too horrified to touch the food. It was an extremely awkward moment, made worse because they had little or no idea how to draw their host’s attention, with delicate politeness, to the fact that he had presented them with meat that wasn’t cooked.
At length, their professor noticed that they were not eating. “Go ahead, boys, eat your dinner,” he prodded.
It was my father-in-law who finally found his voice. Speaking gingerly, haltingly, he said, “Sir, I think the meat has not been cooked. There is, um, a lot of blood in it.”
“What!” the teacher cried. “I expected that you Africans would worry that the meat was cooked at all.”
A week or two after I sold the crocodile yarn to Chris, Kitty Axelson, then the editor of the Valley Advocate, a free newspaper that provided the kind of political and art features and news ignored by America’s mainstream media, asked me to write an opinion piece of my choice for her paper. I focused on some Americans’ bizarre impressions of Africa as the charmed kingdom of animals, the human population sometimes deemed marginal, even an inconvenient intrusion on an idyllic, wild landscape. I recounted my conversation with Chris.
When the piece was published, I gave Chris a copy. I watched, bemused, as he read it. Raising his face from the paper, he gave me an embarrassed smile. Then, as the smile widened, he grabbed me by the collar of my shirt.
“Gosh, so you lied to me! You lied to me!” he screamed, good-naturedly.
What was it about Africa that enabled some Americans to, in effect, regard the continent as some form of pathology, on the one hand simple and stark and digestibly knowable, on the other mysterious, spellbindingly magical, remote? How many times did Americans tell me they had an African friend I must know, their confidence based on the fact that their friend’s father was an important man in Africa, a lawyer, say, or a dentist? And then, as if they believed that Africa was some small village, rather than a continent of fifty-plus countries, they would mention a name that rang a bell only because I had read numerous novels by different African writers and could conjecture that the name given to me was, in all likelihood, from some East African country, say. How many times was I asked how it was sleeping in Africa at night, with all that racket from lions, baboons, and monkeys, to say nothing of the slithering venomous snakes and a myriad nameless gnomes and goblins?
Why was it easy to render Africa as some utterly “other” location, a space devoid of logic and order, indeed a habitat where simplicities, mayhems, chimeras, and other incredible phenomena take root, sprout to life, thrive?
In the twin decades of the 1980s and 1990s, America saw the germination among black Americans of an intense renewal of interest in Africa. It expressed itself, this Afrocentric consciousness, in a certain buoyant identification with Africa, especially its ancient civilizations and kingdoms, pharaonic Egypt chief among them. But that awakening was not without its distortions and disfigurations.
I remember when Bryant
Gumbel, then one of the biggest stars in morning network television, decided to take his show to Africa. There was much coverage of the event in the media. Though no fan of talk-show TV, I was infected by all the excitement—and decided to tune in. On a continent with numerous studios, Gumbel chose to broadcast from an open park, with animals prancing in the background. I hazard that he didn’t mean to, but he reinforced the idea that animals were inescapable in the African landscape. They were, in fact, the dominant presences, a sort of synecdoche for the entire continent.
If Gumbel would choose to project Africa via the lens of animals, imagine the temptation for people who have even less information—and much less of a stake in the matter. One day, I arrived at Union Station, Hartford, to pick up my brother-in-law who was visiting from Nigeria and was supposed to come in on an Amtrak train. On finding out that his train was running thirty minutes late, I ducked into a nearby bar to have a beer while I waited. Soon two women walked in and took the stools nearest to me. They ordered drinks and instantly carried on a conversation in a loud voice, interspersed with carefree laughter that accentuated the impression that they were already inebriated. I feigned interest only in my drink but stole glances at them.
“Hi, honey, how you doing?” one of them addressed me. I had been too late to avert my gaze.
“Fine, and you?”
“We’re having a great time,” she said. Then she informed me that it was her companion’s birthday.
“Oh, happy birthday,” I said.
“Thanks, honey,” the birthday celebrant replied. Then she added, “Where you from, sweetie? You have a cute accent. I just love it.”
“From West Hartford,” I said. “So do you. And I really love your accent.”
“Me?” she asked, momentarily confused. “I don’t have an accent. I was born here.” With her forefinger she pointed down.
“I don’t believe it. Right here?” I asked.
“I kid you not, honey.”
“You were born right in this bar?”
She raised her head, and her laughter pierced the air. “You got a great sense of humor. No, I mean I was born and raised here, in Connecticut. Lived here all my life.”
“That explains your accent,” I insisted.
She laughed again. “You’re too funny, honey. So, tell me for real, where you from?”
“I told you: West Hartford.”
“I mean originally.”
“I originally just came from there,” I insisted, oddly enjoying the exchanges.
“You gotta be from Jamaica,” her friend chimed in.
“Wrong; from Nigeria,” I offered, sensing it was time to run back to the train station.
“Gotta be near Jamaica, though,” suggested the birthday woman.
I stood up from the stool. “It’s in Africa,” I explained. “West Africa.”
At the answer, her friend seemed to perk up. “You’re from Africa, so what are you doing here, honey?” she asked, a touch of rebuke and pity in her tone. “If I was born in Africa, I would never leave. I love nature. Jungles, animals, I love it all.”
“You like jungles and animals?” I asked.
“Believe me, honey.”
“Then I’d suggest you move to Vermont,” I said, hurrying away, the echo of their laughter rushing after me.
In the years since that whole phantasm of Africans riding on the backs of crocodiles, I have had fewer and fewer encounters with Americans ready to digest the most outlandish tales about Africa and Africans. The Internet, with its one-click-away digest of news from anywhere on the globe, has made it harder to meet the likes of Chris or the two women at the Hartford bar. Innocence about Africa—or a species of ignorance around the continent and its diverse cultures—has yielded place, I must hope, to a deeper awareness. More and more American universities have established study-abroad programs in African countries, and large numbers of American students take classes in or on Africa—and often with African scholars.
For sure, there has been enough progress to permit the crocodile a well-deserved retirement from its commuter business. Even so, Africa remains in the imagination of some Americans a vortex of disease, an area of vestigial darkness and residual mystery.
Will Edit For Food
In mid-January 1992, African Commentary, the project that had brought me to America, died a sudden death. I have never had a claim to clairvoyance, but the magazine’s demise was, for me, long foreseen.
From the outset, indeed twenty-four hours after my arrival in the United States, I developed the sneaking sense that the publication was fated for a fiasco. The name of the malaise, to be sure, was lack of cash.
Most of the magazine’s board members were Nigerian academics in the United States. It’d be overstating it to say they were impecunious, but the reality was that most of them had little discretionary income. It meant that their financial investment in the publication ranged from a couple of thousand to thirty thousand dollars. And the cash was invested a little bit at a time, over a period of three years.
For many, the investment represented a significant bunch of change. They tried heroically—in my estimation, at least—to keep the magazine afloat. It just happened that they were using a few thousand dollars to prosecute a dream that demanded millions.
In fact, one or two of the magazine’s board members put in nary a cent, instead lending intellectual capital. Intellectual capital was good. A little bit of cash would have been, I daresay, rather better.
African Commentary hardly had a fighting chance. A typical American magazine of comparable ambition would have a start-off budget in excess of five million dollars. Even so, a good number of those publications were still susceptible to high mortality rates. The magazine I edited never had a smidgen of that. To illustrate: the day after my arrival in the United States, Bart Nnaji, who served as the magazine’s president and CEO, told me that African Commentary had only eleven thousand dollars in the bank. The dire implication was not lost on me: the magazine did not command enough cash even to pay one-third of my annual salary. For most of its checkered existence, even at the best of times, African Commentary could not count on five thousand dollars in its bank account.
The cash crunch translated into unceasing ordeals for me and the other staff. Some days I would arrive at the magazine’s office at 29 Pray Street, Amherst, to dead phones—our service cut because the company had failed to pay its phone bill. Other times, there would be no electric power in the office, for the same reason. We made only fitful payments to our correspondents in different parts of the world. I had the painful, humiliating burden of inventing excuses for our delinquency. I was caught between the demands of brutal honesty about the state of our finances and offering garnished accounts—a tad too rosy, at times. I found a balance between portrayal of our difficulties and striking the right note of optimism to keep the correspondents from abandoning the magazine. Those we commissioned to write features, opinions, and reports were hardly ever paid.
It wore on me. Indeed, the magazine’s financial woes brought the staff and me severe emotional and material suffering. I arrived at work one morning and saw the secretary in tears. She was a young woman in her early twenties, a recent graduate. The job with the magazine was her first employment after graduation.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
She covered her face and continued to sob, her body shaking. All I could do was mutter a string of phrases. I’m sorry. Are you sick? Can I help you with anything? Do you need to go home? To all my questions, she shook her head, but said no word. Then after a few minutes, she drew a deep breath, exhaled, and wiped tears with the back of her hand.
Only then, in a quaky voice, did she explain that she had had a disquieting phone conversation with a man who had written a piece for the magazine but had not received his fees. In fact, it was less a conversation than a verbal smacking. The writer had p
honed and asked for me. When she explained that I wasn’t in yet, the man had gone berserk. Suspecting her of shielding me from his fury, he had unleashed a flurry of curses on her. Then the writer-antagonist, who was based in New York, reminded her that he knew where we were. And he threatened to show up at our office and “kick all the asses I find there!”
“I’m so sorry for my reaction,” the secretary said after telling me why she had been so upset.
“Not at all. I apologize that you had to go through this,” I said.
I could not blame the irate writer. In fact, he and I had had several conversations over his pay. Each time he called, I apologized for the delay in paying him. I then explained our financial hardship. In turn, he told me that a huge chunk of his income came from his freelance journalism. “I can’t pay my bills if I don’t get paid for work,” he’d say. I sympathized with his situation, I would assure him; then I’d promise to ensure he got paid within a week.
Not once did I mean my promise as deception—no. Each promise was made in earnest, driven by hope. I continually, stubbornly, hoped we would find money: enough to pay him, other contributors, our correspondents, and me. Yet, another week would pass, with no funds in sight. He’d call again, and we would go over the same ground, ending with the inevitable promise to pay—in a week.
I quietly acknowledged that my string of unredeemed promises had tried the writer’s patience, brought him to the edge. I couldn’t take umbrage at a man who, week after week, had bought the wishy-washy diet of hope I sold. Only I wished he had saved his fury until he had me on the phone, instead of lashing out at the magazine’s innocent secretary.
