by Okey Ndibe
Tucker assured my father that Nigeria, like other British colonies in Africa, would regain political autonomy soon after the war. It was a view other officers mocked, convinced as they were that Africans were little more than bumbling children who would profit by submitting to many more years of stern guidance by their European masters. Tucker’s generosity began to make a good impression on my father. He began to reassess the Englishman. As he did, his mistrust of all things and people British soon thawed where Tucker was concerned.
The two men, defying the gulf of history that separated them, began to build a new relationship. Even in the uncertain time and turf of war-worn Burma, that relationship could bear the name: friendship. The British officer and the African soldier, in deciding to meet on an even ground, were saying, in effect, that the arrangements of history were subordinate to the call of friendship.
Their friendship was at once beautiful and, yes, subversive.
As my father spoke, I could see that his fiery outburst against Tucker had drawn on an uncommon depth of courage from within him, to say nothing of his disregard for the imperative of personal safety. The world of 1946 was one in which Father’s kind was meant to be seen, not heard. Not heard, at any rate, speaking in irreverent terms to any British citizen, much less an officer. For in 1946, Britain owned Nigeria. And Tucker was—military ranks aside—literally my father’s master. Improbable as my father’s conduct was—in a sense, because of it—the two men would go ahead to become lifelong friends.
Back from Nigeria in the spring of 1994, I kept thinking about the meaning of my father’s relationship with the Englishman. The excitement of listening as my father re-created his Burmese encounter with Tucker stayed with me. I decided to arrange a telephone conversation between the two men. I chose not to alert either man about my plan, electing the mode of surprise.
One day, I called my father in Nigeria and linked him up, in a conference call, with Tucker in England. It was the first time they were hearing each other’s voice in nearly fifty years. I had pictured them exploding in uproarious excitement, perhaps too choked with joy to find words. How wrong I was.
“Hello, Christopher,” Mr. Tucker said, with a calmness that would have been altogether fitting had he and my father been exchanging weekly conversations for decades.
“Hello, John,” my father responded, matching his friend’s reserve.
“This is really you,” said the Englishman, a half question masked inside a declaration.
“Yes, it’s me,” my father confirmed. His solemn tone had the ring of a courtroom testimony.
Silent, I eavesdropped, as tense and apprehensive as those long-ago days when I used to steal away to a corner to read the Englishman’s letters to Father. What was this slow buildup, this absence of emotion? And did Tucker think, for a moment, that I would profit from foisting a scam on them, that I would orchestrate a bogus telephone conversation between him and an impostor posing as my father?
“How have you been keeping?” Tucker asked.
“Very well. And how about you?”
“I try to keep busy the best way I can. Lesley has trouble with arthritis, which slows her down quite a bit. But she has a lot of interests that occupy her. How is Elizabeth faring?”
“She’s fine. We are both long retired.”
“Yes, you wrote so.”
“But we do some farming here in my hometown.”
“That’s lovely.”
They exchanged tidbits about their children, Tucker’s two sons and a daughter, my father’s four sons and a daughter.
“How are things in Nigeria?” Tucker asked, for the first time shifting the conversation to a different plane.
“Nigeria is difficult, but we continue to manage,” my father said. He spoke about the popular yearning for the military to cede power to elected officials.
“Yes, sometimes we read disheartening news about Nigeria in our papers,” Tucker chimed in.” Then he said, “Do send Elizabeth our love.”
“Tell Lesley that Elizabeth and I also sent her our love.”
“I shall be writing you soon.”
“I look forward to it.”
“Okay, then,” I said, hastening out of silence, breaking in between them, for I sensed them about to hang up. “Have a good day.”
They muttered their thanks and reclaimed their quiet lives.
My first reaction was pained disbelief. Father and Tucker had conversed with an unbelievable emotional restraint, their voices controlled, their exchanges hardly breaching the genteel confines of domesticity. In my mind, I had done a mighty service to two friends who hadn’t heard each other’s voice for decades. At first glance, then, their calmness on the phone struck me as odd. There was no question: they had somehow betrayed my sense of how they should sound in a telephone conversation, the emotional pitch they were supposed to affect, given their friendship.
Yet, once I thought about it later, their reserve emerged as illustration of the character of both men, perhaps even a definition of the spirit of their times. There was a lot to admire in these men who, despite the seduction of the telephone, simply preferred to stay in touch through the rigorous habit of writing letters. I felt mildly rebuked by their equanimity, as though I had rudely disrupted the familiar rhythm of their routine. A few days after the telephone linkup, Tucker wrote my father a letter that made it clear that my trouble was not wasted.
May I say, he wrote, how delighted I was to receive the telephone call from Anthony [my English name] some weeks ago and was amazed to be able to speak to you, as well. I would never have imagined it was possible. Will you please thank Anthony for his forethought and kindness. For days after the phone call, I was filled with pleasure to be able to speak to you after an interval of forty-eight years. He underlined “delighted,” as if, now safe within the letter, he could finally express excitement.
On May 28, 1995, I inexplicably took the handset phone into the bathroom. It rang as warm darts of water pelted my lathered body. The voice on the other side was my elder brother’s, John, far away in Nigeria. He asked after my family, and I explained that they had gone to visit friends. We then chatted about a few inconsequential things.
Suddenly John’s tone changed. “Okey,” he said, “you have to be strong.” He paused and I held my breath. Then he quietly unburdened himself: “Our father died this afternoon.”
Strange, I didn’t feel any of the emotions and sensations I had anticipated or feared. There was no tightness around my chest, no urge to wail or curse, no sense that the world was unhinged, spinning maddeningly, no shattering sense of grief. I felt only this: a serenity that left me startlingly confused. I wanted to cry. If I could, I would have demanded tears flood my eyes. I wanted to feel some pain, the sharp pulse of pain promised by loss. If pain would not come, I wanted to scream, to lash out at fate, at time, at life—even to turn to God and, raising my voice, demand, Why? Yet, I couldn’t work up anything save for this deep, inexhaustible serenity.
Confused, I thought as much about the suddenness and awfulness of the news as about my idiosyncratic experiences in bathrooms. Why did I find bathrooms conducive to contemplation? Why was it that, in them, my thoughts sometimes seemed to become clearer, my imagination more vivid? Why, I wondered, did the meaning of things come to me in the bathroom, my body bared, vulnerable?
It was only after my brother hung up that I felt a taut heaviness settle in my heart. I desperately clung to images of my father alive. I recaptured him emoting during an international soccer game. Father was an avid lover of the game. Listening to a game was one of the few occasions he would raise his voice, in exultation or exasperation, depending on how his team was faring. I pictured him washing his own clothes; a man of almost-compulsive cleanliness, he never believed that his children could get his clothes clean enough. I remembered him working on his farm under the sweltering sun, remembered the sweat
that ran down his arched back as he scooped up soil with his hoe. I recalled him kneeling, every blessed day, first thing in the morning and last thing at night, to lead his family in prayer. I remembered how he and my mother would always wake up at 5 a.m. to take a cold bath together, however chilly the temperature. They would then wake us up to say morning prayers. Thereafter, holding hands, they both went off to attend morning Mass. I remembered how Father would cuddle his old, cranky transistor radio in the morning. He would hold up the radio and turn it this way and that, straining to hear the world news broadcast of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Despite his efforts, many of the broadcaster’s words were strangled by static.
I summoned up these familiar moments because I was loath to picture my father still, inert, dead.
It fell to me to call Tucker in England with news of my father’s passing. He wasn’t home, so I left the message with his wife. I was relieved that I didn’t have to hear his reaction. In the days that followed, I spent much time thinking about my father’s friendship with his former English officer. I obsessed over what their friendship meant to them, and what it could mean for me. On a purely practical level, how had they managed to keep up regular correspondence for close to fifty years? Even though I have friends scattered all over the world, I write to them, at best, in fits and starts.
Often, when I consider writing to friends, I end up reaching for the phone instead. Or I would send a text or a cryptic email. Was mine, then, a lazier age? A too-busy age? Or was it simply that technology has rendered obsolete the necessity for letter writing?
The hunger to probe my father’s past was linked to my desire to deepen self-knowledge, to understand the clay from which I was molded. I felt certain that there were things his friendship with Tucker could tell me about my father and his age, and about myself and mine. At the very least, it would illuminate for me a world whose terrors and triumphs I knew only dimly, through accounts in history books. It would instruct me on a world in which the most horrendous war in human history was fought by brave men but also by the vile. The near half-century of their correspondence encompassed some of the most dramatic events between Africa and Europe.
What kinds of statements did my father make as those events unfolded? Were his letters silent on sensitive political issues, say, on Nigeria’s postwar struggle for independence from Britain? For such silence would be telling, even if my father regarded it as a fair price to pay in order not to fray the bond of friendship.
My own direct experience of war began in 1967, when I was barely seven, and my country was embroiled in a fratricidal war that lasted until 1970. The war’s images of famine, destitution, and death remain sharp in my adult mind. I vividly remember the throngs of emaciated refugees waiting in long, unmoving lines for relief food donated by Caritas or some other humanitarian group. I remember how many people would slump from exhaustion before they were able to fetch food. I remember women suckling their babies on flat, sapped breasts. I remember children whose bodies seemed sheared to the bone, their heads big and bare, and eyes sunken. It is a picture that, years later, became all too familiar, brought into living rooms in all the colorful accents of television from Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Congo: images of humans at their most hopeless and grotesque, as if death, in making slow haste, was withholding from them the joys of a grave.
The history of Nigeria, a country with the largest population of black people in the world, is a testimony to the disastrous aftermath of Europe’s bold, but wrong minded, attempt to create modern nation-states in Africa. Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal, and Spain, in carving up Africa among themselves in the second part of the nineteenth century, paid little attention to the infusion of national consciousness in the freshly created colonial outposts. There was no effort to redraw the map of Africa along lines that could sustain a sense of community among the subjects of these new nations, much less serve to strengthen national identity. For Europe, the overriding objective was to secure exclusive territories on the African continent for the promotion of the economic interests of individual European nations.
Nigeria exemplifies the tragic result of this cavalier, arbitrary, and profit-driven policy. The British threw together more than four hundred different ethnic groups and gave the behemoth a new name: Nigeria. The chaos inherent in this cartographic arrangement is best understood by imagining the forced amalgamation of all of Europe into one nation. From the very moment of its conception as a nation, Nigeria contained the seeds of fission. A volatile ethnic tension was exacerbated by religious and other cultural differences. These divisive tendencies attained a dramatic force in 1967 when the country’s southeastern region, predominantly Igbo and Christian, renamed itself Biafra and declared its intent to secede from the Nigerian nation. Had the secession succeeded, Biafra would have become the first modern nation in Africa created by Africans themselves. Instead, other Nigerians, defending the integrity of a territorial entity wrought by imperial Britain, waged a costly thirty-month war that squelched the Biafran dream. Britain, much to my father’s disgust, lent its considerable diplomatic and material muscle to Nigeria, thus guaranteeing the abortion of the Biafran aspiration. My father found another reason to hold John Tucker’s country in contempt.
Although a staunch supporter of Biafra, my father was committed to a vision of social justice, humane ideals he saw as superior to the consensus of national identity, even in a war. He became active among a group of Biafran workers and citizens who condemned the excesses of the secessionist territory’s leadership. They had written and circulated a petition rebuking the Biafran hierarchy for diverting relief donations. He paid a steep price for his idealism. One of my most poignant memories of the Nigerian war was my father’s unexplained absence from home for several weeks.
One day, some somber-looking plainclothes men had come and searched around our home. Then, leaving, they took my father away with them. I still remember the day he returned, sporting an unaccustomed beard that both fascinated and frightened me. For many years, I had doubted the authenticity of this memory, persuading myself that it was a nightmarish dream. It was my mother who finally assured me that it was not a figment of my imagination. My father had indeed been detained, accused of mobilizing workers against the secessionist territory’s leadership.
With some luck, I hoped, there might be a letter or two my father wrote to his English friend during the war. Through the letters I would be able to feel the pulse of my father’s reaction as the war progressed and more people perished.
I arrived in England on June 10, 1997, two years after my father’s death. It was my very first visit to that old country, the object of agonized longing in my childhood years. Tucker and his wife, Lesley, had kindly offered to host me in their home for a day or two. During my stay, Tucker would explore my questions, reminisce, and pore over letters.
At Heathrow Airport, while I went through customs and immigration, I noticed I had broken out in sweat. I was trembling with anxiety and exhilaration. My uneasiness worsened as I waited at the cavernous Paddington Station for the train that would take me to Taunton, where Reverend Tucker would meet me. Then, as the train snaked out of the city, I was charmed by the English countryside. I took in the wide carpets of manicured green that rolled away on either side of the train as far as the eye could see. The train’s motion somehow gave the illusion of movement to the lush expanses of grass, transforming them into quietly flowing green rivers. Hillocks dotted the landscape here and there. After a while, the greenery would give way to clusters of brownstone houses, television antennas spiking from their roofs.
Two hours later (but to my mind all too soon), the train drew into Taunton station, in Somerset County, in the southwest of England. I alighted from the train, certain that Tucker would immediately recognize me, being the only black passenger descending at the station. I was pretty confident that I would recognize him, too; for, though retired in 1989 from his
pastoral post, he had told me he would be wearing his prelate’s collar. He walked toward me, beaming. His movement was sprightly, his athletic physique worthy of an old soldier. We shook hands, and then he turned and led the way. He talked as he walked, nimbly. Even then, moments after we met, there was much in his demeanor that reminded me of my father’s briskness.
In the car, the thing he asked was: How old was my father when he died? He explained that the question of age was never asked of Nigerian soldiers in Burma because some of them did not know the year of their birth. Seventy-three, I told him. “Oh,” he said, noting that that was his own present age.
Tucker’s wife, Lesley, was a biologist and retired teacher, a lanky woman with sunny eyes and a ready smile. I was charmed by her passion for birds and other wildlife. I soon found out that I was not the only African visitor to their home: a pair of flycatchers, migratory birds from southern Africa, had arrived ahead of me in May. “They come six thousand miles,” said Mrs. Tucker of the birds nesting in the front eaves of their home. “They come all that way,” she stressed, smiling, “so I think they deserve to be treated with respect.”
The first day I asked few questions, content to listen to Tucker’s free-floating reminiscences. He recalled how, in 1946, he had passed up the opportunity to return to England in time for Christmas, choosing instead to travel through northern Nigeria as the officer accompanying demobilized soldiers to their home areas. He talked with great feeling about a Hausa leather bag my father had sent them as a wedding present in 1965. His wife went and fetched the bag so I could see it. He recalled my father’s proficiency as a Morse radio signaler in Burma, his mastery of sophisticated American-made equipment that other signalers found challenging. “Whenever the American soldiers were not around, Christopher was usually asked to be the relief operator,” he said. “I must have sent one or two of the signals myself, but I was nowhere near as good as your father.”
