by Judy Jones
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO READ THE NEWSPAPERS: Although blaming the other side is practically a national pastime here, take all accusations with a grain of salt. Neither Sandinistas nor contras, recompas (ex-Sandinistas who refused to stop fighting after the war was officially over) nor recontras (ex-contras, ditto) are entirely to blame for the sorry state Nicaragua’s in today. None is blameless either, of course. Like all good Marxists, the minute they took office the Sandinistas began holding compulsory pep rallies, punishing incorrect thinking, and pressuring reluctant peasants to leave their homes and move to prefab farming cooperatives. Like any young adults who’ve spent their formative years holed up in the mountains with their AK-47s, they weren’t above looting confiscated estates or spending the money earmarked for farm machinery on the girls up at the hotel, either. (Let’s not forget, however, their education crusade, which virtually eliminated adult illiteracy in a year.) The contras, on the other hand, were, as every good liberal knew at the time, mere pawns of the CIA. Disgruntled peasants and Indians manipulated by sadistic former National Guardsmen, they spent a decade terrorizing women and children and sabotaging every Sandinista reform effort. While we’re pointing fingers, how about that U.S. government, which showed itself to be the world’s sorest loser after the Sandinistas’ victory and which was quite prepared, throughout the 1980s, to disgrace itself (remember the Iran-contra Affair? remember Oliver North?) while scuttling the entire country plus most of the rest of Central America, in order to assuage its Cold War paranoia? How about Arnoldo Alemán, Nicaragua’s president from 1997 to 2002, currently under house arrest for stealing something like $100 million from the national kitty? And how about Daniel Ortega, who’s been willing to play all sides against each other—and to use his considerable influence with poor Nicaraguans to disrupt the reform efforts of his successors—in order to hang on to political power? Well, nobody’s perfect. At least everybody seems to agree on one thing: The country is jojido—all screwed up.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO DATE A NICARAGUAN: You’ll be spending a lot of time together, since your date is almost certainly unemployed or underemployed, like about 60 percent of the workforce. That doesn’t mean he or she will do nothing, though. If your date lives in Managua, you might spend your days together selling candy or oranges at traffic lights, washing the windshields of the new SUVs owned by members of the government, or scrubbing laundry for friends of the administration. You’ll also enjoy taking in the sights. Former mayor Arnoldo Alemán, accused of looting the treasury when he became president, spent a lot of tax money beautifying the capital, which was once considered to be among Latin America’s ugliest. You’ll be able to stroll the broad boulevards, admiring the splashing fountains, the luxury hotels, and the new malls you can’t afford to shop in. If your date lives out in the countryside, bring your gardening gloves! If you’re lucky, you might make half a dollar a day picking coffee beans, bananas, sugarcane, or cotton. Many of the big estates that were confiscated during the revolution are now being reclaimed by their former owners, while land that was redistributed to peasant farmers during the 1980s, or promised to the contras in return for demobilizing after 1990, lies fallow, its ownership still in legal limbo.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO MEET YOUR DATE’S PARENTS: That they’re probably mestizos, like nearly 70 percent of the population, and that they’ve spent their whole lives picking cotton, bananas, or coffee beans and being treated like dumb animals by the folks up at the hacienda. They may have had high hopes for the revolution at some point (or they may not have known it was going on), but by now they’re beginning to feel nostalgic for the old Somoza days, when they could still afford tortillas to wrap their beans in. And you may be sharing meager dinners with your date’s uncles and their families rather frequently. Many families were split during Nicaragua’s civil war, with one sibling fighting for the Sandinistas while the other fought with the contras, and estrangements lasted long after the contras demobilized (partly because the Sandinistas never did). Now, however, many Sandinistas and contras have been reconciled by the realization that not much has changed for the better, no matter which side has been in power. In fact, the only person your date’s family is likely to have a good word for is the local priest. Nicaragua’s Catholic Church, one of the most radical in Latin America, played a key role in mobilizing the campesinos in the early days of the Sandinistas’ rebellion, though it later became as politically divided as everyone else in the country. In the end, the bishops opted for moderation, and the Church helped pave the way for the elections of 1990. At the 2003 celebration of the revolution, the Church gave its blessing to the Sandinistas for the first time since 1980, which many people on both sides see as a sign that the Sandinistas know exactly what it’s going to take to get back in power by the next presidential election. NIGERIA
THE LAYOUT: It’s the biggest, fanciest house on the block, but the block’s in a shantytown—nine ramshackle converted colonies crowded together in a row, looking as though their stilts are about to give way. Not surprising, since they were all carved out of the mangrove swamp a century ago by imperialists who were thinking more about administrative convenience for their respective motherlands than about sensible zoning, with the result that nearly all of them are having to struggle to remain upright. Nigeria’s the one at the far end, before you leave West Africa and turn the corner into Equatorial Africa. A former British colony surrounded by former French ones, it’s much bigger than its neighbors and has, topographically, a lot more going on: swamps and tropical forests in the south, grasslands and savannas in the middle, semidesert in the far north. With around 130 million inhabitants, it’s also the most populous country on the continent and growing fast. According to the United Nations, Lagos, the former capital, could be one of the world’s five largest cities by the year 2010. Even the new capital, Abuja, an oasis of plate glass and polished marble set in the dead center of the country to avoid any taint of regional favoritism, is beginning to experience traffic jams. Designed to reflect Nigeria’s high-roller image of the Seventies and early Eighties, when the country dreamed of becoming Africa’s first global superpower, Abuja was also meant to serve local and international VIPs as an escape from the continuously escalating crime, congestion, and chaos of Lagos, which, aside from active combat zones, is one of the world’s least relaxing travel destinations.
THE SYSTEM: A U.S.-style presidential democracy has been struggling to take root since 1979; unfortunately, the gardeners keep stealing the seedlings, and guys in army boots periodically trample the flowerbed. Currently, there’s a president, now in his second four-year term, and a two-house assembly. The question is, how can they get 250 mostly impoverished and frequently hostile ethnic groups to function democratically in a sacked and gutted country? Well, you could start by rigging elections, as President Olusegun Obasanji, a former army general, is accused of having done. And you could carry on Nigeria’s time-honored tradition of dispensing favors—e.g., contracts, jobs, and cash—to your supporters while disenfranchising the opposition. Still, it’s risky business to run a potentially rich country with a dirt-poor but feisty population and a military perennially itching for a coup. Soon after gaining independence in 1960, Nigeria became a federal republic comprising four more or less self-governing territories—North, West, and East Nigeria (a.k.a. Biafra) and the federal Territory of Lagos—loosely bound together under a weak central government. When north-south hostilities broke out in 1966, the Supreme Military Council took over and held things together—through a couple of attempted coups and an assassination—until 1979, when the American model of government was adopted and the country was reorganized into nineteen states in an effort to defuse regional antagonisms. (That number has since grown to thirty-six plus the capital territory, though nobody seems to get along any better for it.) After four years of corruption and mismanagement, the military put the civilian government out of its misery. General followed general, all of them interchangeably larcenous, as far as your aver
age Nigerian could tell, until 1994, when General Sani Abacha took over. Abacha promptly dismantled whatever democratic structures his predecessors had established, took greed and larceny to a new level, and in a refreshing change of pace did not immediately set a date for handing power back to civilians. Civilian rule was finally reinstated soon after Abacha graciously died of a heart attack in 1998. A new constitution was introduced in 1999, but it’s been a tough sell to the many Nigerians who are still agitating for a return to weak central government and a loose federation of states.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO READ THE NEWSPAPERS: That Nigeria is the world’s sixth-leading exporter of oil—a particularly pure, particularly desirable variety of oil—and was, in the 1970s, a Cinderella state for which sudden wealth created more problems than it solved (e.g., an unstable, overspecialized economy; a boomtown atmosphere of high inflation, widespread corruption, and unrealistic expectations; and a government that, when faced with a depressed oil market, was left holding a bag of unfulfilled promises it could no longer afford to keep). Also, that Nigeria has long ranked high on lists of the world’s most corrupt countries (where it usually ties for first place with Haiti and Bangladesh).
Along with oil, Nigeria’s got unification headaches: 250 ethnic groups that can’t understand each other’s lingo, including three big ones that actively dislike each other, and a north-south split that led to civil war back in the Sixties, when the Igbos (pronounced “EE-boze”) of the southeast tried to secede and form the Republic of Biafra, only to be blockaded inside their own barren (but oil-rich) land, where more than a million of them starved to death. The country is still recovering from five years of devil-may-care brutality and treasury-looting by General Abacha, who managed to drive an already shaky economy into the dirt and frighten one of Africa’s boldest, most confident peoples into something resembling submission. Nigeria was suspended from the British Commonwealth in 1995 after Abacha, ignoring international outrage, executed the prominent playwright and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who had campaigned against oil-company exploitation.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW IF YOU’RE DATING A NIGERIAN: Still sitting by the phone, waiting for your date to call? Don’t take it personally. There are plenty of telephones in Nigeria, but they hardly ever work. (A cell phone would make a great gift. Everyone—that is, everyone who can afford to eat—is getting them.) When you do finally get together, at least you won’t spend many boring nights in front of the TV, since the few TVs around are usually missing parts nobody can afford to import anymore. Besides, you’ll only have electricity if you’re in one of the bigger cities, like Lagos, and even there the two of you will spend most evenings cuddled in the dark because of power outages. If you are in Lagos, going to the movies—or anywhere else—will be a hassle. Your date may have a car, but even if you’re lucky enough to pay scalpers’ prices for a few liters of gas, you’ll spend hours sitting in traffic jams, or “go-slows,” during which you’ll want to stay on your guard against carjackers. Should you decide to walk, beware of kidnappers, robbers, muggers, rioters, and car drivers—the talk about drivers who don’t bother to stop when they’ve run over a pedestrian is not mere urban legend. Out in the country, things are not that much safer, just less crowded. Since most people are subsistence farmers who, despite the billions of dollars in oil revenues that have been stolen or squandered by corrupt politicians over the last fifty years, have less to eat today than they did back at independence, you may notice signs of irritability, not to say psychosis, in your date. And if you’re down around the Niger Delta, where violent conflict between major oil companies, gangs of thugs, and local militias kill about a thousand people a year, be advised that the bandolier your date is wearing is not a mere fashion statement.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO MEET YOUR DATE’S PARENTS: If they live in one of Nigeria’s many cities, they’ll probably speak English, but out in the bush, anything goes. It’s just as well: Communicating through sign language will minimize your chances of putting your foot in your mouth. The air is thick with ethnic antagonisms left over from colonial days, when the country was divided administratively into north and south and the southerners, who were mostly Christians, benefited from the best educations and fastest economic development. Remember that while it’s standard practice to think of the country as three ethnically separate regions dominated by Nigeria’s three largest ethnic groups, in reality no region is anything like homogeneous anymore. Still, some general guidelines might come in handy when meeting your date’s parents. If they live in the north (and are wearing turbans) they’re probably Hausas—conservative, traditional, and solidly Muslim. The Hausas once ruled empires (you might still see a sultan or two in full regalia), are now the largest ethnic group in Nigeria (which has one of the biggest Muslim communities in the world, although Muslims and Christians come out about even in countrywide head counts), and wield a lot of political influence, to the dismay of non-Hausas. If your date’s parents live in the west (and are wearing flowing robes, matching headpieces, and three or four tribal scars on each cheek), congratulations! They’re probably sophisticated Yorubas, known for their lavish hospitality. Well-educated, thoroughly Westernized (except for the robes, headpieces, and scars) and about half Christians, the Yorubas are the Nigerians most likely to be doctors, lawyers, writers, or presidents of the country. They might be feeling a little tense, though. When sharia (Islamic law) was introduced in northern Nigeria in 2000, Christians living in the north interpreted it as part of a Muslim takeover and a couple thousand people were killed in the ensuing protests. You might try calming your date’s parents by pointing out that their fears were exaggerated, stoked by political factions hoping to destabilize the civilian government. (Or you might just keep your mouth shut and enjoy your dinner.) Finally, if your date’s parents call one of the southeast territories home, you can assume they’re activist Christian Igbos, who feel chronically put-upon because, despite the fact that most of Nigeria’s oil is dug out of their land, they’ve never, they insist, been given more than a tiny sliver of the profits. Don’t mention Biafra, whomever you’re talking to; the very name still provokes anxiety attacks in a country so ethnically inflammable that even a minor intertribal snub is likely to be seen as a threat to national security. And while you’re tiptoeing through the conversational minefields, remember that ethnic resentments here are not some principle-of-the-thing abstraction. They’re a reaction to the fact that tribal loyalties still so thoroughly outweigh any concept of national interest that a politician who didn’t funnel all the plum jobs, government contracts, and kickbacks-worth-mentioning to his own tribe would be shunned as a turncoat. PAKISTAN
THE LAYOUT: Say hello to the subcontinent (make sure there are no Pakistanis in the room before you go calling it the Indian subcontinent), where anything can happen and something unimaginably gruesome usually does. Pakistan, the slab to the west, angling down from the Hindu Kush and the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea, marks the spot at which the Muslim and Hindu worlds collide. West of Pakistan are the rich relations: Iran and the Middle Eastern gang, all reassuringly Muslim, if a bit unbalanced. Eastward yawns the gaping maw of India, Pakistan’s Mommie Dearest. Travel northwest or due north and you’ve got your pick of death traps: Afghanistan, happy campground for warlords, militants, and opium smugglers, especially along its notoriously porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, and the chronically inflamed territory of Kashmir, partitioned, to no one’s satisfaction, between India and Pakistan. Just beyond Kashmir, China, which has a history of bad blood with both India and the former Soviet Union, blows kisses and sends weapons to Pakistan across some of the world’s most impassable mountains. All in all, Pakistan comprises four provinces (Northwest Frontier, Punjab, Sindh, and Baluchistan) and a territory (Federally Administered Tribal Areas), each with a mind—and weapons—of its own, and a clutch of colorful cities and towns, including rich, conservative Islamabad, the capital; raunchy, dangerous Karachi, the major seaport; Rawalpindi, home of the military; and P
eshawar, the wild frontier town that’s become the unofficial convention center for Islamic holy warriors from around the world.
