A Single Swallow

by Horatio Clare

  ‘Do you have a wife?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you homosexual?’

  ‘No. Why are you whispering?’

  ‘Because here if you say you are homosexual they will stone you!’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous! Why would they do a thing like that?’

  ‘Because it’s a sin!’

  ‘Of course it’s not! Stoning people definitely is, though.’

  ‘Yes it is – homosexuality is against God.’

  ‘No it isn’t, if you believe God makes us who we are then you have to believe He makes some of us gay.’

  ‘But it’s a sin!’

  ‘No it isn’t. I know vicars who do God’s work who are gay.’

  She almost falls off her chair.

  ‘Do you want to see the museum? I have not seen it myself yet.’

  ‘Yes please.’

  We swerve and stall our way to the river, a little way downstream from the port. There is a deserted visitors’ centre, a line of empty cafés and a museum. Bad music plays from speakers attached to lamp-posts and vultures circle the car park. It is nearly closing time but the duty guide says there is just time for a tour. We take the fastest tour of Calabar’s museum of slavery that there has ever been. We hustle along a dark spiral corridor, pausing in front of exhibits which light up automatically. They are composed of animated life-size figures in tableau, with recorded voice-overs.

  A woman begs for mercy as slavers seize her from her village. Men moan in agony as they are shipped across the sea. Americans laugh heartlessly and bid for slaves at an auction. A slave howls as plantation-owners beat him.

  Astonishingly, the museum’s narrative makes the Americans the ultimate baddies of slavery. The British, who thanks to the heroic Royal Navy put a stop to it all, come out, lauded with a chorus of ‘Amazing Grace’, symbolised by portraits of Wilberforce and John Henry Adams, as the best of eggs. Whoever had set out the museum took great pains over context. Slavery, it is pointed out, existed all over Africa for centuries before the Europeans became involved. Africans enslaved Africans, Arabs enslaved Africans, then Europeans came and everything culminated in the plantations of Virginia and the Caribbean, where villainous masters made fortunes out of misery.

  But the central point of Calabar’s history is that between 1720 and 1830 over a million people were here loaded into little boats, crammed head to foot in decks less than 12 inches high, and taken out to sea where the deep-draught slave ships were waiting. Between 1700 and 1830 Calabar was effectively twinned with Bristol in the most horrifying manner imaginable – Bristol-based merchants held a near-monopoly on the trade through Calabar. During the period of British involvement on this coast, ‘the Slave Coast’, otherwise known, in a linguistic twist far beyond irony as ‘the White Man’s Grave’, over two million people were transported from West Africa to the New World. A third of a million died en route.

  With ‘Amazing Grace’ echoing in our ears Josephine and I sat at a row of empty tables, ordered fizzy drinks and stared at the grey-brown water and the green swamps of the river’s edge.

  ‘This is where they took the ancestors away,’ Josephine said, quietly.

  Small bands of swallows came up the river bank, feeding easily as they went. I felt sick and hangdog, with a kind of guilty squirming in my stomach. The river banks, the mangroves, the still palms and the birds were all here, exactly like this, when my people were enslaving Josephine’s. Guilt, particularly the guilt of the white man in Africa, is a useless, much-mocked emotion: what a bleeding heart, to sit at a café table and lament what cannot be undone. Furthermore, Josephine’s actual ancestors had not been slaves, or she would not be here in Nigeria, and mine were not slavers. So what I felt, I realise now, and I can still recall it, as physical a sensation as a shiver, was a confusion of guilt with shame.

  ‘How is God’s mercy manifest? What is the absolute proof of God’s power?’ the preacher demands.

  We are the last Abuja-bound travellers to leave Calabar the next morning, packed into a Toyota minibus which is promisingly well maintained and functional, but we are not going anywhere until the preacher has finished with us.

  We listen dutifully as he explains that our very existence, all existence, indeed, is proof of God’s mercy, and that our continued survival is absolute proof of His power. We pray that we will have His protection on our travels this morning, this afternoon, tomorrow and ever more. We pray, we say Amen, we are blessed, we say Amen again, we pray again, until everyone has been through a restive and uncomfortable period, and emerged into a numbed – or enlightened – acquiescence, whereupon there are final Amens, the preacher withdraws and the driver takes his seat.

  It is a little after nine in the morning. The traffic in Calabar is heavy, as usual, but at least it keeps our pace down. Emerging onto the main road to Aba the peril becomes apparent. Nigeria has excellent roads, the best I have seen since Namibia: the problem is this allows drivers to proceed at the maximum speeds their vehicles can summon – and they do. Our driver is a fat, impassive man with a look of frozen discontent, who drives us like the clappers. After the first five miles I consciously force my stomach to relax, my fingers to loosen and my chest to breathe normally, and commit my soul to God. At least the end will be quick, judging by the blackened wrecks at the sides of the road.

  Cross River State, through which we are passing, seems to be in the middle of a low-level guerrilla war. Occasionally bites of this conflict appear in the western media, particularly incidents involving kidnapped or shot-up western oil workers, which therefore affect the oil market. The morning newspapers are full of all the rest of the battle: police machine-gunned, rebels shot, bombs thrown, houses burned, people displaced, soldiers ambushed, guerrillas killed, arrested, tried, imprisoned. The three most common sights on the road this morning are soldiers, gas stations and churches. It is a close thing, but I estimate that the churches dominate.

  The sky is a hot kind of dusty yellow. Fumes belch from the lorries and I marvel at the churches as we hurtle between them like a sort of jet-propelled unholy spirit. The Chapel of Glory, the City of Life, SuperChristian Church International, Last Days Christian Fellowship, the Unified Church of God, Jesus Family Church, the Established Church of Christ . . . Many are no more than a small square building; some seem to be merely a roadside sign.

  We stop to fill up with gas. I have been sitting in the second row of seats: directly in front of me is the poor young man who has had the best view of our multiple near-death experiences. He is shaky on his feet.

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I am a model,’ he says. ‘I am going to Abuja for a shoot.’

  ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘My career is going well,’ he says. ‘Do you have a cigarette?’

  The problem is finding somewhere to light them. The road is lined with gas stations in both directions. The air is heady with the smell of petrol.

  Nigeria is the United States of Africa, I think, amazed by the volume of traffic on the roads, by the swiftness of transactions, by a pace and a beat which seem everywhere stronger, louder and more pressing. The clientele in the café where we stop for lunch are unlike any similar gathering of travellers in the places I have passed. The men wear smart shirts and good shoes; the women are still in all the colours of Africa but now these are cut and stitched into the styles of Europe. Labels and gold, fake and not, line the long table. Meals are picked at fastidiously; since South Africa I cannot remember seeing food being thrown away.

  The day changes colour as we go north. We cross the Benue River, a dark orange tributary of the Niger rolling sluggishly through low mud-banks under smoky copper clouds. The land feels almost unearthly under the sky’s strange light. God and Gasoline, I keep thinking: the two most powerful, most dangerous genies in the modern world are here both so present, so ubiquitous, it feels as though a single spark could ignite the very air.

  The afternoon newspapers are gripping thrillers. Here a
re terrible stories of women being circumcised by their in-laws, men being shot for their car keys, former ministers making off with hundreds of millions of naira and freely confessing it, state governors attacking each other and their predecessors, youth groups turning on politicians, rumours about sects within the military planning coups, committees at war with assemblies, and public-spirited reassurances that lovers who have gum disease should not worry about kissing their beloveds because gum disease is not transferable. The newspapers eat up hundreds of high-speed miles as we hurtle towards Abuja, an invented capital city.

  Nigeria was a constellation of kingdoms, peoples and religions. In the north was Bornu, on the western side of Lake Chad, and the trading cities of the Hausa. Bornu was Muslim by the eleventh century, as were the Hausa traders by the fourteenth. The Fulani people adopted a stricter Islam than was practised by the Hausa, and prosecuted it through war. By 1809 they ruled what is now northern Nigeria from the desert town of Sokoto. West of the Niger were the lands of the Yoruba, and the states of Ife and Oyo. In the forest south of Oyo was Benin, whose leaders were still using human sacrifice in the nineteenth century.

  With the arrival of the British, first as enthusiastic slavers then as equally enthusiastic anti-slavers (evangelising palm oil instead), came first trading stations, then consuls, then conquerors. Lagos was taken in 1851 and annexed to Britain in 1861. By 1900, having partly burned down Benin City in a reprisal raid, Britain ruled everything from the Niger delta in the south to Bornu and Sokoto on the edge of the northern desert – and the constellation became, in the eyes of Europe at least, one vast territory.

  Britain’s administration of these regions between 1900 and independence in 1960 develops as a tortuous series of reclassifications, with administrators struggling to impose unified rule on diverse peoples and kingdoms. A federal structure is created which facilitates ‘Indirect Rule’, in which powerful chiefs rule small fiefdoms under British supervision. In 1914, two blocks of fiefdoms, hitherto known as the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria and the Niger Coast Protectorate are merged into a single entity: the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria, a simplification which causes more complications. The northern, eastern and western regions each have their own Houses of Assembly by 1951; by 1954 there have been three new constitutions in eight years; by 1959 all three regions have achieved internal self-government and Lagos is a federal territory, like Washington DC, home to a federal government dominated by northerners.

  Independence in 1960 creates a nation of 115 million people, divided into 200 tribes, speaking over 500 languages, living in a federation in which the north is predominantly Muslim, the south Christian and the whole riven by internal conflicts. A rebellion in 1966 by the Ibo people of the east leads to Ibos living in the north being massacred. The following year the East declares itself the independent Republic of Biafra. The Biafran War lasts three years and ends with a famine and Biafra’s surrender. Since then, dictatorships, coups, swindles, flawed elections, riots and inter-ethnic strife have failed to prevent the country being declared the happiest in the world by the New Scientist magazine, which claimed to have surveyed the happiness of sixty-five nations and found that Nigeria came top.

  Perhaps the most concrete consequence of the country’s short, vexed and often bloody post-colonial history is Abuja, a city created in the early 1970s as an alternative to Lagos, symbolically situated in the middle of the country, and, perhaps also symbolically, designed by a consortium of three American firms. It was built in the 1980s and became the national capital in 1991. We rocketed into it, as the late afternoon began to turn to evening, at top speed. The edges of the road eddied and swirled with dense crowds of people. Huge shanty towns have grown up outside Abuja in recent years: roadside cooking, crabby buses and jostling crowds made a narrower and narrower passage for the increasing volume of traffic.

  There did not seem to be anything to Abuja – away from the packed suburbs the centre was a network of huge, wide, near-empty roads. At the bus station I shook hands with my model friend and jumped into a taxi.

  ‘Please take me to the biggest hotel you can think of, where they are most likely to have satellite television,’ I begged the driver. It was Saturday 15 March and Wales, having beaten England, Scotland, Ireland and Italy, was about to play France in Cardiff for the Grand Slam.

  I missed the game but was included in the celebrations by text message. Thanks also to text messages, I made contact with an old friend whom I had not seen since school. Fifteen years ago she was a quiet and thoughtful half-Nigerian, half-German student of International Relations. I did not know what she was doing with her life now, but she seemed to have become rather grand: ‘I will send you my driver,’ her message ran. ‘He will be in a Jeep, registration . . .’

  The jeep and the driver arrive and whisk me through the dark and deserted boulevards of the city. We pause, turn off the highway and pass through a high steel gate, which closes behind us.

  ‘What is this place?’

  ‘This is the French Compound,’ the driver replies.

  Low bungalows, a school, a swimming pool and a clubhouse are threaded through with trees and lawns. There are soft lights illuminating pathways; from the pool area music plays.

  The driver knocks on the kitchen door of one of the bungalows, and there she is. It is like being seized by a whirlwind.

  ‘Look at you! Not an ounce of fat!’ she cries, as we hug. She was always strong, a dancer, and she is even stronger now: a European girl has become an African woman.

  ‘Have you eaten? Would you like a drink? As you can see I tend to eat and work at the same time . . .’ The television is tuned to CNN and faces her place on the sofa, in front of the laptop. ‘I will switch it off now,’ she says. ‘Come on!’

  At the clubhouse she is the only non-white. People are surprised and delighted to see her.

  ‘I never come out here,’ she says, sidelong, ‘except to swim. Do you want to swim? I really need to . . .’

  The moon is high behind gaseous clouds and it is still hot. Before we swim I manage to sit her down for a few moments. She speaks clearly and very quickly, her dark eyes locked on mine, her hands telling half the story.

  ‘OK so what the Growing Business Foundation does is micro-credit, partly, and loans for small businesses, and we push for improved policy frameworks, because half the problem is policy. At the moment I have this idea about providing computers for community centres for kids after school, and I am trying to help nomads, because you know in the Sahel they are just . . .’

  The Sahel is the semi-desert region where the Sahara shades into a more habitable area, where vegetation begins to overcome the sands. It is one of the most vulnerable environments on earth to rainfall, or lack of rainfall. Traditionally only nomadic farmers could make a living there: the ground could not sustain settled agriculture. With increases in population, the fragile ecology of the Sahel has come under fatal pressure: over-grazing of scarce grasslands and tree-felling for firewood, together with more years of failed or insufficient rain, are effectively expanding the desert southwards.

  We swim. She hurtles up and down like an athlete, then we are out and back in her house, eating.

  ‘I fly business class now,’ she says. ‘And I move people. If I am sitting next to someone who can help, then great. If not, I say excuse me, would you mind, and I swap them for someone else.’

  ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’

  ‘I am flying down to the delta to talk to the Ogoni, then back to Lagos for a meeting.’

  She does not say it so simply, but it appears that her foundation raises money from banks, oil companies and big business and puts it into people’s hands at the lowest level. She talks about doing this sort of business in Nigeria: about seeing the price of assistance before it is offered with its price disguised. She talks about watching powerful men torn between aspiration and temptation. My head swims at the merest intimation of the complexities of tribal, political, historical, corp
orate and social networks which she continually processes, cross-references and engages. She talks about the disillusionment of the disenfranchised and the poor, about the enthusiastic corruption of the rich, and about a new employee of hers who has just been to a village and returned, lit up with inspiration at the possibility of being able to contribute to its people.

  ‘It’s a strange place to live,’ she says, looking around the compound the next morning, as if she has not really looked at it before. ‘But my girls like it when they come home from school, they have friends, and they can roam around . . .’

  She hugs me again and her driver takes me away. I think of her, working, with the laptop under one hand and the plate of food under another, the lights on, the television on, the telephones on, doing three things at once and in the back of her mind always counting, counting the days until her girls come back from England for the school holidays. She fills every week, every night and every weekend with work. The Nigerian media have already identified her as an inspirational figure: perhaps some day the world will know her name.

  Abuja has two significant seasons, but this is the third, between the wet and the dry: this is the season of the harmattan, the wind from the north-east, which fills the air with a yellow haze of sand. Nothing much moves; one or two kestrels, and straggled flights of swallows – the first time I have seen them in a city. They are not pausing, but going north. I am hurried too: according to my Algerian visa I should be entering that country in four days, and I still have to cross Niger.

  Today I will cross the fault-line that runs across Nigeria, dividing the Muslim north from the Christian south. Beyond that line Niger, Algeria, Mali, Mauritania and Morocco are all Muslim. Below it, behind me, is Christian and Animist Africa. A frontier in many ways far more mighty and significant than all the borders I have crossed will pass, unmarked and invisible. God is about to change His name, the demands he places on His followers and the list of His prohibitions. As symbols, the swallows are about to change too. Associated with the resurrection in Christian Europe (because they arrive at Easter), with household gods in pre-Christian Rome and with good fortune in ancient Greece, in the Islamic world they are also seen as a holy bird. The Koran tells of Allah’s sending swallows to defend the faithful, when an army of Abyssinian Christians is besieging Mecca: