by Bill Barich
Whenever Michael Ofokonsi dropped by, Dom hurried to provide refreshments, some sliced papaya and an orange Fanta, but he hid out when Fred arrived, and I had to shout at him to do his job. With a wounded air he’d comply, lingering long enough to give Fred the evil eye. Again it was a question of etiquette. Dom thought the photographer was rude compared to most other guests, who were stultifyingly polite, but that was mainly because they hadn’t been invited. They just turned up cold, so that they could boast they’d been inside a white man’s house. It had become a thing to do, an accomplishment of sorts. However halfheartedly, I had to admit them, and as they sat speechless on the couch, frozen by their own boldness, I took on the thankless task of trying to make conversation.
The uninvited guests were careful not to disturb the furniture, whereas Fred swept in with the abandon of a favored talk-show guest and sprawled into a chair as if he owned it. Never at a loss for words, he talked a blue streak and had an opinion ready on any topic. Dom objected to his casual disdain for the formalities, and I was a little shocked myself until I accepted his brazen manner for what it was, the very quality he’d translated into his business success. No Igbo forged ahead by answering a want ad. There were no want ads. What mattered was energy, ingenuity, and jive. Everybody had to scratch out a living from lean earth, so your power to imagine was the equivalent of start-up capital. If you created a bankable self, as Fred had done, so much the better. It was no accident Nnewi had produced the first Nigerian millionaire.
Fred’s interest in me began when he noticed me drinking a Star beer at a market shop, an activity he endorsed. He consumed a fair amount of Star himself, he reported once he had decided to adopt me, especially on the nights when St. Bottles Society, his men’s club, convened. The club was every bit as heretical as its name implied, and dedicated to offending the conservative citizens who frequented our Anglican church. Rarely did St. Bottles induct a new member, Fred went on, but they would let the rules slide in my case, and he laid out the requirements. They were very simple. A candidate had to be able to drink beer and sing, and though I wasn’t sure about the singing part, I couldn’t refuse the honor.
Fred collected me before the next St. Bottles session. We walked through the bush to a jolly bar and sat at tables outside under a new moon. My sponsor introduced me to a half-dozen men with his usual swagger and exaggerated the benefits I would bring to the club, such as increased visibility and notoriety that would lead, in turn, to free beer. I wanted to issue an immediate denial, but before I could, the group’s president rose to address me.
This was Andrew Marcellus Okonkwo, whose appearance can only be described as baleful. His father, a teacher of classics, had called him Marcellus after the Roman general, hoping to imbue him with a strong character, and Okonkwo carried himself with such pomp and authority I guessed he must hold a significant position, possibly in the civil service, when in fact he tended to avoid work and survived on the proceeds of various schemes.
His haughty demeanor affected the others profoundly. When he assumed his orator’s stance, a Napoleonic hand thrust between the buttons of his shirt, they all fell silent except for Fred, his loyal accomplice, who yelled, “Speech!” Okonkwo nodded happily, as if to acknowledge the acclaim of the crowd he must have heard cheering in his head. He was tall and fierce-looking and spoke with surprising eloquence, clearly an educated man. His fluid voice was rich and deep and ranged over the octaves in a musical way. He celebrated me as a harbinger of better things, the first but not the last of my kind to join the club, and he promised that someday there would be branches of St. Bottles all across America. I was a pioneer, a bridge between cultures, a gentleman and a scholar.
Okonkwo was awfully good, and when he concluded after fifteen minutes or so, wiping his brow with a handkerchief, his mates applauded. “Toast!” Fred cried, and a small boy brought out a cardboard carton of beer in quart bottles, followed by a tray of plastic tumblers that the men filled and emptied with alarming speed. I couldn’t keep up, but I participated in the many toasts to friends and neighbors; to the revered highlife performer Cardinal Rex Jim Lawson; and to Major General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, an Igbo and the current head of state, a leader of the recent coup.
As instructed, I poured beer on the ground as a libation to departed ancestors, too. “If you go back, we leave you behind!” Okonkwo roared. That was the club’s motto, and we repeated it several times to ensure the forward progress of St. Bottles.
The singing began around midnight. The lyrics were in Igbo, but I had drunk enough to be relatively loose and could catch a glimmer of meaning if I listened attentively. One peppy song was an obvious tribute to the club, perhaps even its anthem, to judge by the men’s fervent rendition, their arms around one another’s shoulders as they swayed, while another provided an ironic gloss on the coup. Its chorus consisted of the names of the political leaders assassinated during the bloodshed—Sardauna of Sokoto, Samuel Akintola, Tafewa Balewa, and Festus Okotie Eboh. Black humor was an essential feature of any St. Bottles’ gathering. The members laughed in the face of disaster until disaster moved closer to home.
I had classes in the morning, so I excused myself after a few songs and held out some money for the beer, but Okonkwo brushed it away. We weren’t expected to settle the bill, because the bar’s owner was thrilled to have our patronage. When the word got around that we had endorsed the place, it would be a huge boost for his business—a blessing of sorts that could just as easily have been withheld, Okonkwo implied with a satisfied grin. As the author of this gambit, he had also been its salesman, and it was his talent for flattery and manipulation that granted him such esteem in his circle. Whenever a new bar opened around Nnewi, he pulled the same caper. He had the clout of a newspaper critic who can kill a restaurant with a single bad review. Brilliant and lawless, he would still be singing at dawn.
* * *
I became a student of houseboys over the next few months. My Peace Corps friends had also hired some help, and I was fascinated by the different styles. Lawrence in Onitsha, who worked for Russ Jones, was flamboyantly gay, for instance, and camped it up in the kitchen with his lover. The Cartwrights in Owerri had a gorgeous housemaid I flirted with unsuccessfully. Lying in their guest bed, I’d conjure up Eucharia’s face and breasts and will her to come to me, but she never did. I lacked the necessary magic. Once I crossed the great bridge over the Niger River to see Bob Royer in Benin City, whose houseboy, Felix, had culinary pretensions that surpassed Dominic’s. As a special treat, he grilled us a piece of meat we couldn’t identify. “Grasscutter,” Felix beamed. We’d just eaten a porcupine.
When it came to being cool, no houseboy matched Francis, who served Mike Higgins in Port Harcourt. We all envied Higgins’s setup. He’d landed at a well-to-do college and had a house with a grand front porch and also a real bathroom, although the toilet wasn’t plumbed. Instead the waste dropped into a bucket, and night soil men collected it after dark to sell to farmers as fertilizer. They were competitive and territorial, and if they caught an intruder stealing a bucket on their turf, a knockdown fight was likely to ensue. A pair of night soil men once did battle in the city streets, flinging insults and shit at each other, and it made the front page of the local paper.
Higgins led a charmed life. He’d grown up in San Bernardino, the first true Californian I’d ever met, and he had an effortless, laid-back grace. I couldn’t imagine him breaking a sweat, even in Nigeria. He still dressed as if for a trip to the beach in a T-shirt, baggy shorts, and low-cut Converse sneakers, and so did Francis. In essence, Mike had transformed his houseboy into an African surfer dude. Francis used the same slang expressions as Higgins and spoke the lingo of the coastal meccas where Mike had once ridden the big waves. I almost fell over when I heard Francis say “gnarly.” He wore a trendy little cap with its brim turned up like a bike racer’s and whistled Beatles’ tunes from Revolver, an album his master played endlessly. When I stayed with Mike, I could be certain he’d wak
e me the next morning with a blast of “Good Day, Sunshine.”
What Higgins had re-created in Port Harcourt, of course, was a scrambled version of Southern California. You’d never find any pounded yam or bitterleaf soup on his table. Instead, Francis had learned to cook the sort of down-home grub you’d eat in a funky café on the Pacific. He did quarter-pounders with fries, steak-and-eggs, hot dogs, and even tacos. That was only possible because PH, as Mike called it, was a boomtown that catered to expats.
At its air-conditioned supermarkets, you could buy Rice Krispies, frozen pizza, Jack Daniels, and cases of Schlitz, along with tortillas and decent ground beef. Its nightclubs were the jazziest and its bar girls the classiest. All this was due to the oil money flowing into the city, scads of it. After years of exploration, huge deposits of petroleum had finally been discovered in the Delta, so reps from Shell-BP, Gulf, Elf, and Phillips had made the scene and were salting Nigerian pockets left and right to gain an upper hand.
Wherever we went in PH, we met expats. We saw them at the Hotel Presidential when we’d go for a swim, taking a shortcut from Higgins’s house through the bush. It was a good, clean, generally snake-free path, but you had to watch out for army ants, a silent menace. If you walked through a colony, they crawled up your legs and began to sting you. In the midst of an attack, I always remembered Humphrey Bogart and the leeches in The African Queen. The ants caused the same type of shuddering revulsion when they invaded our crotches and armpits, seeking out our privates. If they massed on the frontiers of flesh you couldn’t reach yourself, they could be hard to get rid of, and once Higgins had to pluck them off my back in a restroom at the Presidential, leaving me with a myriad of tiny red welts.
The hotel pool was Olympic-size. Chaise lounges were arrayed around its perimeter, and the wives of oil men, diplomats, and spies, both British and American, occupied them. They were a bored-looking lot, although not bored enough to be interested in us. My fantasy of a blazing affair in the jungle died quickly. In fact, the wives could be hostile, suspicious of anyone who’d travel to Nigeria voluntarily. They made it clear that they were in PH under duress, as prisoners of their husbands’ desire for a big payday, and some projected a barely disguised contempt.
You could see it when they summoned a waiter. They were curt and dismissive and avoided any eye contact. The waiters, elegant in crisp white tunics with Presidential stitched in green script over a pocket, bristled with anger and fought to control it. They took their revenge by subterfuge and talked too loudly, their voices rising, yammering, even seething, and also by being slow to deliver drinks.
There was tension almost everywhere expats convened. Nigerians were too noisy, they complained, too animated and brassy, so they erected barriers and called for more gin. Pimms Cup was also popular, along with games of snooker and tennis. What most expats really enjoyed was having servants, the same as we did, although they kept a distance from their staff, while we were naive enough to regard our houseboys as comrades. That didn’t make the expats unkind, just chilly, and their servants felt the chill.
“I couldn’t live this well at home,” a British functionary confided to me once. “Why else would I accept this bloody awful post?” The only expats who seemed excited by the raucous street life and its way of grabbing you by the lapels were the roustabouts who worked in the oil fields and at the country’s lone refinery outside PH.
We bumped into them at such wild nightclubs as the Crystal Palace. From Higgins’s compound, we rode there in a little Morris Minor taxi, black as a bug, careful to haggle over the fare because to do otherwise would be insulting. If you paid the asking price without protest, the driver thought you didn’t take him seriously. It was de rigueur to accuse him of cheating. That restored his dignity and meant he wasn’t invisible.
“My fran,” Mike would say in pidgin, maybe shaking a finger for effect, “why you go do dis type of ting?” The driver, satisfied to be on trial, would deny that he’d been dishonest, although he often was, and an agreeable row would follow. We’d chip away at the fare until we whittled it down to a reasonable sum and then, with an affirmation of our common bond, a handshake or a clap on the shoulder, we girded ourselves to run the gauntlet of touts outside the club.
The touts couldn’t imagine a more potentially lucrative sight than two young white guys in search of adventure. They converged on us in a pincer movement, either begging for coins or jabbering about the black-market goods they could supply, yet there was no danger until late at night when the criminal types lay in wait for drunks and rolled them in the alleys. The touts’ expectations were actually very low. They dreamed of a gigantic score, of course, but they’d settle for a cigarette. If you decided to purchase some marijuana, they considered it a bonus.
The only sin you couldn’t commit was to push them away. If they felt your distress, your dread of any bodily contact, of the occasional lesions on their skin or their ripe odor, they turned ugly and the banter ended. A tout might spit at you or lie about what you’d done to him, riling the crowd. It was a bad mistake to reject them. You were rejecting poverty, and poverty has its own dynamic.
The touts couldn’t get past the bouncers at the Crystal Palace, so they receded like the waters and squatted in the dirt until the next taxi pulled up with its possibility of deliverance. Inside, we bumped into the roustabouts, who ran in bunches. They were loaded with money and overjoyed to spend it on women and booze. They had the reckless attitude of cowboys after a long trail ride, determined to tear up the town and start a little trouble. Whereas the bored wives thought we were demented, the roustabouts took pity on us for being so broke and stupid, and they always picked up our check. One night a fellow from New Zealand, so wasted he couldn’t stand up, hired a taxi to tour all the best clubs and insisted we come along. He paid for everything. Our only duty was to carry him in and out. It was like drinking with the corpse of John Barrymore.
When the band began to play highlife, the dance floor came alive. You could smell a change in the atmosphere, a mingling of sweat, perfume, and desire. Everybody took a turn going around, even the clumsy and the flat-footed. The music seemed to act as a binding agent, holding together the opposed and opposable forces for a brief, transcendent moment. That’s how it felt to me, at least. I was happy at the Crystal Palace because I had blind faith in the future. If anybody had told me the oil and the money would lead to catastrophe, I would have expressed my doubts. I still believed in the essential goodness of human beings, in their ability to do the right thing. I didn’t know how deep, bitter, and irrational hatred can be. All I heard was the melody, not the drumbeat, as I danced.
* * *
After a trip to Port Harcourt, I was always glad to get back to Nnewi. The partying, though exhilarating, left me exhausted, and I missed the sleepy village, my students, and even Dominic. I was grateful for Mike’s hospitality, but I liked the way my own life had become compact and confined to an area of cleared land bordered by the oil palm bush. In truth, I had almost everything I needed in Nnewi, and that surprised me. As an American, I’d been taught to define my needs in material terms. The Igbo offered me constant correction. What Americans labeled primitive might also be called essential. The word enough acquired new meaning, and I felt a reverence for simplicity I’d never experienced before.
My days acquired an easy rhythm. Even the teaching became easier as I adjusted to the climate. The paralytic anxiety I’d endured at first, certain that I’d reveal myself as a phony, undereducated and inexperienced, vanished when I understood how eager the students were for what little I had to give. In literature class, I began to enjoy the discussions, finally able to elucidate the parallels between Igbo society and the required texts.
Pride and Prejudice was a case in point. I had worried that Mrs. Bennet’s struggle to marry off her daughters would seem remote or antiquated, but there were matchmakers active in Igboland, and a debate evolved between the pro-Bennet group, all loyal to traditional values, and the anti-Ben
net modernists, who thought it old-fashioned for a mother to meddle in her children’s affairs. Neither side would surrender, so we resorted to a soccer match to resolve the deadlock, with the pro-Bennet side winning on a free kick.
To be considered modern meant a great deal to most Igbos. It was an aspect of the same bright future I believed in. My students read any magazine they could get their hands on and passed along newspapers until the pages were in shreds. They asked for my old copies of Time, too, but I dared not share my Playboys. I let a student browse through an issue once, and he walked around for days with a glazed look in his eyes, trying to readjust his notion of reality. The men were also devoted fans of television and gathered before the college’s only set to watch Okonu’s Club, a weekly dance program broadcast from Enugu, whose jovial host, Okonu, cautioned the dancers against any “bone-to-bone” friction.
They were equally attentive whenever Major General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi addressed the nation. When he took over in January, the country’s mood was hopeful because corruption was so widespread. Any change, even if accomplished violently, was presumed to be for the better. The prevalent attitude was wait and see. My Nnewi friends still trusted and respected the new government, but it was May now, and the Islamic Hausa and Fulani in the north were disappointed in their new leader. The dead politicians in the St. Bottles song were primarily Muslims, and though Aguiyi-Ironsi had the assassins in custody, they had not been sentenced. Moreover, he talked about Nigeria becoming a loose federation of states rather than a republic. That would put the oil in Igbo territory, so the northerners and others were wary of the plan.
For the moment, though, village life appeared to be normal. Hausa traders still sold moonstones and leather hassocks at our market, and Fulani nomads still drove herds of scrawny cattle to our abbatoir. When I mentioned this to Dom as a positive sign, he merely shrugged. Politics was not a subject he’d discuss. It was too risky and might cause offense. He was odd that way, secretive about his views and his private life. He never felt entirely comfortable in Nnewi, I believe, since his home was elsewhere. He had no family nearby and no close friends. The Igbo could be clannish, so Dom concentrated on his work. He washed my laundry in an aluminum tub, transported cartons of Star to my house on a bicycle, shopped for groceries, and swept and dusted almost daily. At times, he must have been as lonely as I was.
