Never Look an American in the Eye

by Okey Ndibe

  After a short while, my grandfather and his fellow adventurers despaired of working long, arduous hours for British employers who paid them little but abused them, physically and verbally, with glee. They chose to return to Amawbia and take up the interrupted rhythm of their pastoral life.

  In those days, modern highways were nonexistent, and travelers trekked long distances. The day of their scheduled departure, my grandfather had taken ill. Unable to brave the punishing journey, he asked the others to announce to his parents that he would be home shortly—as soon as he recovered.

  Months passed, but my grandfather did not return. His parents and relatives presumed him dead. In Igbo culture, the dead must be “buried,” even in the absence of their bodies. A deceased person, unburied, was presumed exposed to great suffering, at the mercy of the harshness of the elements—whether buffeting rainstorms or sweltering heat. It was the gravest form of abandonment, one that incurred the wrath of the disregarded, vagrant spirit.

  My grandfather’s relatives did their sacred duty by him. They dug a grave, cut a stump from a tree, and threw it in the grave, imploring the earth to accept the log as a stand-in for the dead.

  Days after the funeral rites were completed, my grandfather sauntered into the village. His reappearance created quite a stir—and a spiritual terror appropriate to the aberrancy. On some level, his relatives and other members of the community were ecstatic. But they also knew the dire implications of a dead man, a spirit, emerging in flesh and blood. They were caught in a jam.

  Everybody who saw my returning grandfather immediately halted and turned their back to him. Done half in dread, half in reverence, the turning of the back was a prescribed response when one encountered a spirit—which my grandfather had become the moment that log of wood was interred.

  When the journey-weary pilgrim reached his father’s homestead, the old man—who had been forewarned of his “buried” son’s return—stood at the threshold of his traditional wooden gate and used a hand sign to instruct his son to stand outside. While the young adventurer stood in the glare and heat of the sun, his father sent for a dibia. Part of the dibia’s office was to preside over rites of expiation. Such a ceremony was called for, a ritual reversal of my grandfather’s funeral. Unless that rite was performed, my grandfather would remain, in his community’s reckoning and memory, a dead, interred man. His subsequent appearance in physical form would be seen as anomalous, an abomination. If the funeral were not formally reversed, nobody in Amawbia would touch my returnee grandfather. In the eyes of his people, he would stay a dead man, a spirit. And nobody would dare welcome a ghost into the community of the living.

  The dibia brought with him a chick and a scoop of the tiny seeds of an alligator pepper. With the chick he began to beat my grandfather all over the body. He threw the pelletlike seeds at the returnee, part of a spiritual cleansing regimen. All the while, he implored the gods to let the chick assume the evil, corruption, and aberrancy in my grandfather’s body.

  The rite completed, the dibia ordered that a fresh grave be dug. The sacrificial chick, now burdened with my grandfather’s errant spirit, was thrown into the grave. A wooden stump was also fetched and thrown in, to stand in for a new body.

  “Earth,” the traditional priest prayed, “we implore you to take this new body as replacement for Ndibe’s body.”

  The Igbo believe that the earth never disgorges what it has “eaten.” So the rite of exhumation was a complex transaction. Since a stump had been buried in lieu of my grandfather’s absent body, the earth was owed another stump—a symbolic body—before the returnee-adventurer could be exhumed and reclaimed as a legitimate member of the human world.

  Once the rite was completed, my grandfather passed from the threshold of spirits back into the time and space of the living. He had—for the community, literally—come back from the dead. His fellows could now talk to him, touch him, commune with him as one of their number.

  I once heard an account of the whole ceremony from an elder in Amawbia. He had witnessed the event as a child. It had imprinted his impressionable mind with awe and amazement. In particular, he recalled the great feast that followed, with much eating, drinking, and dancing.

  With his “deadly” curiosity about white people behind him, Grandfather settled down to hunting, farming, and palm wine tapping. But his flirtation with the white world, however brief, branded him for the rest of his life, made him something of a legend. Fellow villagers celebrated him for possessing a smattering of English words, most of them insults that the British hurled at African laborers. Many an evening, after sumptuous dinners that compensated for arduous hours of farmwork, some villagers would visit my grandfather. These visitors craved linguistic entertainment.

  “Ndibe,” they would urge, “speak to us in the tongue of the white man.”

  Their entreaties made my grandfather eager.

  “Bladder foolu!” he would say, his thick accent mangling the malign words and phrases he’d memorized.

  His audience would clap and hoot and roar in laughter.

  “You sukaliwagi!” he would follow up, the keyword marinated in extra syllables.

  Another roar of appreciation.

  “I willi deali withi you!”

  More applause.

  “Sucoundrelu!”

  Applause.

  “Don’tu letu me givi you a dirtee sulap!”

  Rising applause.

  The legend took root that my grandfather was the man who first brought English to Amawbia. Years later, after I became a well-known journalist in Nigeria, an elder in Amawbia invited me to his house. He invoked blessings on me with a kola nut. Then, as I sipped from a shot of schnapps, the elderly man reminisced about the provenance of English in Amawbia.

  “This thing called blood is not to be trifled with,” he said. “Your grandfather, Ndibe Ekweozo, was the first person from Amawbia to speak the English language. His first son, your father, then inherited the language. Even though your father only went through elementary school, he writes better English than those who graduated from university. That’s why he has served for a long time as the secretary of the Amawbia Town Union. Now the language has been passed to you.”

  My father married my mother in 1958, when she was thirty-three and he was thirty-six. At the time, any woman past twenty years of age was considered close to being an unviable spouse. At twenty-five, a woman was deemed dangerously akin to a museum piece. At thirty, forget it; few sane men would court a woman so old.

  In fact, most of my father’s relatives felt there were two grave counts against the woman he wished to marry. At a time when the “ideal” wife had her primary office firmly planted in the home, a bearer and rearer of children as well as the sovereign controller of the kitchen, Mother had trained as a teacher. In those days, many people were deeply suspicious of women who had consented to undergo training as teachers or nurses in schools set up by Catholic or Anglican missions.

  The second—and much graver—count against Father’s intended spouse was, of course, her age. Father’s relatives asserted that age must have weakened my mother’s womb, rendering her incapable of bearing children. Father had countered their plaint with the simple point that this was the woman he loved. This response scandalized his relatives. Theirs was a world in which the romantic notion of love was hardly countenanced. Love was alchemized into duty. A man who ensured that his wife (or wives) and children were fed, clothed, and had shelter had discharged the burden of love. At any rate, affection was far from a ranking consideration in taking a wife. The likelihood of the woman begetting children was the decisive factor.

  Father was stubborn. And he cleverly devised a way to blackmail his family into letting him have his way. And this was what he did: he threatened to go to my mother’s family, on his own, to declare his suit. It was, in cultural terms, a truly scary prospect.

  In Igbo society,
marriage is conceived and acted out more as a social compact involving two extended families than an individual arrangement between a man and a woman. If a man showed up at a prospective bride’s home, unaccompanied by his relatives, he would have advertised himself as mentally abject. And the stain of shame would extend past him and terribly tar his larger family. Father’s relatives had to forestall that shame. They decided, even if unhappily, that if he was foolish enough to insist on wedding a woman with a bankrupt womb, they would go along.

  Like two truly smitten lovers, Father and Mother became scandals of sorts wherever they lived. How so? By doing the kinds of things that spouses in the crazed societies of Europe took for granted. They ate together. They held hands as they walked. They took baths together. They addressed each other, endearingly, by the first letter of their baptismal names: “C” (for Christopher) and “E” (for Elizabeth). But they did more; they used the same chewing stick—an oral-care device made from a twig—to clean their teeth. It was the equivalent of using the same toothbrush.

  Poor for most of his life, my father nevertheless carried himself with an air of assured nobility. He labored at his postmaster’s job with the cheery spirit of one determined that dignity would never be foreign to him. He hardly ever raised his voice against his fellows. I never saw him surly. He loathed self-pity in all its guises. He was never one to bear his circumstance, however hard and trying, on his face.

  The news of Father’s ailment stabbed me with sharp anxiety attacks. A large part of my distress owed to the fact that I resided in the United States, separated from him by more than five thousand miles. I was also aware that his illness amounted to a death sentence, slowly, painfully executed. Nigerian hospitals, like much else in that oil-producing country that had been misruled by a succession of military dictators and visionless politicians, are little more than ghastly caricatures of medical care. Dialysis machines are unavailable in most hospitals. The few that have the equipment are flooded by rows upon rows of patients lying in shattering anguish, hoping that their turn to be dialyzed might come faster than death.

  The greater source of my anxiety lay in realizing how much I didn’t know about my father. I knew little about his life before he became my father, before he and my mother married and had five children, four sons and one daughter, myself as the second child. Of course, my parents had told us, their children, many stories: about their own childhoods, about their parents, and about that distant time of their own youth, full of excitement and peril. I had simply not paid much attention.

  The reason was simple: the stories were often told in the context of rebuking shameful conduct. I was the rebellious child in the family. I was drawn early to smoking. I hankered after all-night parties. I was a truant student. Worst of all—in the opinion of my parents, who were Catholics—I was driven to sex.

  Callow and self-absorbed, I felt affronted, diminished by my parents’ stories. I quickly mastered a way to distract myself during those storytelling sessions. I would focus on some cheeky fantasy, often daydreaming about some girl with whom I was infatuated. Or I would think about the day when I would be grown and wealthy, able to live my dream life of prurient liberty. The particular fantasy changed, but never the objective—to block out the lessons contained in the personal histories my parents shared.

  I did an effective job of it. As I tried to grapple with the news of my father’s illness, I was struck by the paltriness of the memories I had of him. It suddenly dawned on me how sorely I missed the treasure of stories I had once spurned.

  Visiting Nigeria in 1994—a more or less annual ritual for me—I made sure I spent long hours with my father, asking him questions. There was so much ground we could never hope to cover, but that hardly blunted my joy that, in the race against time, I had reduced my margin of loss, however fractionally.

  The first blurry persona I asked about was the Reverend John Tucker, an Englishman who had been my father’s regular correspondent for as long as I could remember. For many years, Tucker had been an alluringly misty figure. All I knew was that he wrote to my father once or twice each year, but unfailingly at Christmas. As a child, when my parents were away, I would pilfer one of the Englishman’s letters and run off to a quiet spot to read it. Many of Tucker’s letters were mundane affairs: a quick statement about his pastoral work, a report of the progress in school of his three children, something about his wife’s job, an expression of delight at the news from my father that his own wife and children were also doing quite nicely. There was nothing in the letters that could lift the cloak of mystery that surrounded the Englishman in my mind. Nothing explained who he was and why he and my father had become friends. There was little in the letters to reward the punishment I surely would have received had my parents found out I was peeking in their mail.

  In a way, the absence of clues served me in my youthful, dreaming days. I invented a place for Tucker in my impoverished life. He became a symbol that bolstered my standing among my secondary school friends. It did not matter that some of these schoolmates spent summer vacations with their parents in England. John Tucker became my peculiar fashion of visiting England in the days when his country was synonymous with idyllic beauty.

  In time I outgrew this quaint fantasy, but not my curiosity about where or how my father’s story with Reverend Tucker had begun. They had met in Burma weeks after the end of World War II, my father told me. Tucker, a lieutenant in the British Army, had been detailed as the officer in charge of the Signals Platoon where my father had served for a good part of the war. My father was a noncommissioned officer with the rank of lance corporal.

  My father was not one to rhapsodize about war, yet he took unmistakable pride in the four medals he had earned. Among the few items of memorabilia that survived Nigeria’s political crisis—a crisis that culminated in the Biafran War of 1967 to 1970—is one of those medals, as well as his discharge certificate from the Royal West African Frontier Force, dated December 31, 1946. The certificate noted “one small scar on the belly” as my father’s only wartime injury. Its final testimonial captured the essence of the man who, years after the war ended, would become my father. Honest, sober, and trustworthy. Used to handling men. Works efficiently without supervision. Gives great support to his superiors, wrote his British superior officers in the discharge document.

  Educated only up to elementary-school level, my father was able to acquire from the war the necessary skills for his postwar employment with Nigeria’s Posts and Telegraphs Department.

  One day, visited by two Nigerian veterans of the war, my father brought out his lone surviving medal from the box where it was kept, like a rare totem. I was too young to make much sense of the three men’s conversation, but I was impressed by the passion with which they shared their experiences. My father and his guests recounted their gallantry in such and such a battle. And they recalled the number of enemy forces they had, in their own words, “wiped out.”

  I was always proud that my father took part in World War II, the most meaningful conflict of the modern era. I found myself awed by the war’s moral dimensions, the strange configurations of alliances it engendered, its geopolitical consequences, the sheer scale of its prosecution, and its gargantuan cost in lives. It was not until I became a serious student of African history—especially the history of Africans’ struggle to reclaim their autonomy from several centuries of European derogation and control—that I began to see the war in an entirely broader light. I was shocked—almost incredulous—to learn that some one hundred thousand Nigerians had fought in the war. Other African countries, most of them under the colonial tutelage of Britain or France, also sent several hundreds of thousands of combatants.

  Why was this fact glossed over in the major books on the war that I read? Why were Africans consigned to the margins, their role often altogether erased, when the drama of the war was narrated?

  As I discussed the war with my father, I came close to grasp
ing a sense of the great psychic toll World War II had taken on the African combatants. There they were, compelled to fight in a war that was, in the end, the logical culmination of a species of racism Europeans had planted. The same Europeans had used this creed of racial superiority to yoke Africans. In Burma, my father became a budding nationalist. “I was constantly disgusted at the way European officers treated African soldiers,” he said.

  Tucker was not as haughty as some, but he could not help carrying himself, much to my father’s detestation, with that very British of airs, a mixture of detachment and purse-lipped confidence. It was the carriage of a man secure in his place in the world, affecting an easy swagger.

  Silently, my father seethed. He considered himself far more adept than his superior officer at using signaling equipment. By their sheer presence and attitude, Tucker and the other British officers reminded my father of his wretched place, as an African, in the world. While my father fought side by side with Europeans (and for the same cause), he was a conquered man, subject to the whims of his British conquerors. For sure, his life was less prized. He was a man whose world had been turned upside down by the English.

  Deep down, however, my father saw himself differently. He saw himself as better than some of his British subjugators. The thinker of such thoughts is a dangerous man. My father was constantly on the verge of explosion. “One day, I angrily told Tucker that he had his rank because he was British, not because he knew signaling as well as some of the African soldiers,” my father told me.

  Father’s brusque manner alarmed his African compatriots. “Many of them dropped their jaws in shock,” he recalled. “They were sure I would be court-martialed for insubordination. Some of them even feared I would be shot.” Somehow my father remained indifferent to whatever fate awaited him. As it turned out, Tucker chose not to pursue the incident. Instead, recognizing that his less-than-respectful subordinate burned with nationalist ideas, Tucker went out of his way to befriend my father. The two began to hold long discussions, often touching on the likely postwar developments in British colonial possessions.