I Used to Say My Mother Was Shirley Bassey

by Stephen K Amos

  Lagos is in the same time zone as London and so although Mum must have been knackered by dinner time, we weren’t at all. In tropical countries you avoid the heat of the middle of the day and people stay up all night. So the streets were just coming to life as we arrived at Auntie Yomi’s detached bungalow. She lived on a private road with a gate and a security guard and once we were inside we noticed that the kitchen and living room were on a covered veranda and only the bedrooms were inside. (We also noticed there were only two bedrooms.) The first thing we did was unpack the cars and get settled – Mum, with Auntie Yomi; Albert, Stella and me all in the other room.

  It was pretty obvious that we were too hungry and excited to go to bed and negotiate the delicate sleeping arrangements. Yomi asked us what we all wanted to do for dinner. She offered to start the cooker and make something at home or she said that we could all go out for the night, pick up some food at a local bar and take a look around. Albert and I jumped at the chance to go out and we followed behind Mum and Yomi, with Stella walking between us. We said that we’d keep close to Stella who was still nervous of the assault against the senses, but actually in this alien environment we were all happy to stick together. It was, after all, a very strange place for three kids who had been discouraged from going out after dark even in London.

  We got to the local bar and nobody seemed to care that three underage kids had just walked in. When the barwoman saw Auntie Yomi she shouted, ‘Ay, sista! Wetin dey happen?’

  In Nigeria there are lots of different languages but Yoruba is the main language in the south-west where Lagos is. But to make things a bit easier everyone across the whole of Nigeria speaks this Pidgin English. ‘Wetin dey happen?’ was a common greeting in Pidgin English that we’d have to get used to.

  ‘How now, sista? Nottin dey happen.’

  We edged into the packed bar and a couple of rowdy customers even grabbed Albert, who was fourteen, and offered him a Gulder beer. Auntie Yomi was having none of it and swooped in to grab Albert away and berate the man in Yoruba: ‘Ay Ay! Kilo ndamu e? Odomode okunrin mi niyi!’ ‘What’s wrong with you? This is my boy!’ Mum translated.

  ‘Ay, sista! Ema binu.’ He apologized and looked at me. ‘Broda. I am sorry. Abeg no put me for trouble.’

  I looked up at Mum who stared back at me looking angry. I thought I’d probably done something wrong and was about to prostrate myself, but before I could Mum pulled me up by the scruff of my shirt and ushered us all to a table near the bar. It was a strange thing to see because Mum had always told us never to be rude to older people and to treat them with a lot of respect. It looked like maybe things had changed in Nigeria since Mum and Dad had left.

  ‘Ay Yomi, sista, what has happened to Ikeja? All this hustle and bustle. These bars and music everywhere.’

  ‘Oh yes!’ cried Yomi. ‘The people here. They are always drinking, drinking. Ori e o pe! Their head is not correct! But don’t worry we will eat our fill here. The cook is one of the best in Ikeja. It may be a little bit spicy but I hope your children are not all too soft for it.’ She poked Albert in the stomach. ‘Or are you a butter eater, boy?’ and laughed.

  Nigerian food takes some getting used to. It normally means a spicy stew of meat and vegetables and you eat with it something that, at first glance, looks a bit like paste. Paste is a word that you should encounter after ‘tooth’ or ‘wallpaper’, not before dessert. I asked my Auntie Yomi, ‘What is this paste?’ and she looked dumbfounded. ‘This is not paste, it is eba, like egusi, amala or garri.’ It seemed to me like that was a lot of words for the same thing. Garri is a bit like semolina, and it is an acquired taste, to say the least. And you don’t use a spoon, a knife, or a fork to eat it with. You use your hands. You have to pick up some of the paste between your thumb and forefingers, make a well in the middle of it and scoop the stew up into it, and then into your mouth in one smooth movement.

  Eating with garri is a food fight waiting to happen. And in mine and Albert’s case it very soon degenerated into just that. Stella looked on in horror as we slowly caked our hands in garri up to the wrist with more garri around our mouths, chins and shirts. Mum and Yomi sipped Gulder beers and we drank cola from glass bottles to quench the fire of the spicy stew in our bellies. Poor Stella couldn’t handle the spices and perked up only when they bought out skewers of barbecued suya, which she gratefully tucked into with abandon.

  With our bellies full, we all left the bar and started to wander back towards Yomi’s house just as the streets were getting even more busy with customers looking for food, drink and a party. The Afrobeat music we’d heard as we’d arrived was now everywhere and some sound systems had been set up in different quarters of the neighbourhood with amplifiers rigged up to the exposed overhead wiring to get power. Big fires and strings of bright multicoloured lights popped up near the sound systems and crowds were gathering to dance to the music.

  It was still about 30°C degrees out as we stepped onto the veranda at Auntie Yomi’s place. She put on a pot of water and made us all hot tea before going to bed.

  Mum took her tea from Yomi and gestured towards the street and the thumping sound systems. ‘Sista, how long will this racket be playing for?’

  ‘There are big parties around here and they will go on all night. You can hear them every night. Even Sunday.’

  ‘Even on Sunday? Don’t people know when enough is enough?’

  ‘Ah! You can go to church and head straight back out to dance and drink some more,’ said Yomi with a smile.

  ‘They should pray to God for forgiveness. Drinking all night? The death that will kill a man begins as an appetite. It’s too much. And what about the children? Will they be safe?’

  ‘Of course. We have security twenty-four-seven on this road.’ Yomi turned to us. ‘Just don’t head outside and go wandering around until the sun is out unless you are with me or your mummy.’

  ‘Ah! If I so much as see you off this veranda without me I will beat you!’ It was a bit strange seeing Mum acting like this. I don’t mean it was strange for her to say that she’d beat us; she did that all the time in London. But I’d never heard her talking about Sunday as being anything special and back home we almost never went to church.

  The tea settled our stomachs after all the spicy food and we slowly began to yawn and look to the bedroom. Mum tucked us into bed. It wasn’t like being tucked up at home under sheets and blankets. In Ikeja you get tucked away under mosquito nets and it’s best to sleep on top of the sheets. We lay there with the smell of Nigeria in our noses and the beat of Afrobeat music echoing away in the distance lulling us to sleep.

  3

  YOMI TURNED OUT TO be the archetypal funky aunt. She kept us entertained at her place in Ikeja for two weeks, during which time we were always out visiting people or having people around. She loved music and was really well connected to the Afrobeat scene. My mum’s family is related to Fela Kuti and Yomi had known him very well when he lived in Nigeria before he became an international superstar. Fela came from the same small town about an hour and a half north of Lagos that my family originated from. The town is called Abeokuta, which means ‘under the rock’. It’s not as bad as it sounds; everyone’s not running about under a rock like a bunch of woodlice or ants. The name comes from a massive mountain that sits above the town and lots of famous Nigerians come from Abeokuta including Fela, Wole Soyinka, the first African Nobel-prize winner for literature, and Olusegun Obasanjo, the famous Nigeria president. (And me.)

  Although it’s not rich, Nigeria consistently rates as one of the happiest nations on Earth. We have the biggest economy in Africa and we have the first African Nobel laureate. The average Nigerian can speak three languages whereas most of my friends back home in London could barely master one – ‘Yeah, man I want a burger and put sauce init. No not init. Just put sauce init. Not in the burger just on the side init. No not init, init?’ There are in fact many valuable things that the rest of the world could take from Nigeria. And I
don’t just mean the vast oil reserves in the south.

  Lagos isn’t what you’d call a tourist town in the traditional sense, but there is a lot to see if you keep your eyes open. And you’d better keep your eyes open or you’ll get hit by a truck. It’s a busy place, and just looking at the life going on around you can be interesting and a little bit scary. For example, until I’d visited the local market I’d never seen a goat walking down the street or a chicken killed and gutted before my very eyes to be cooked that night. In spite of sitting on top of tons of oil, Nigeria doesn’t have a steady power supply and a blackout can last anywhere from two hours to two days, so refrigerate anything fresh at your peril. To make sure the meat doesn’t go bad before you eat it people just keep the animal alive until the last possible moment.

  When we were in Nigeria the power company was called NEPA and it was dreadfully unreliable. It was a regular thing to hear people complain that ‘NEPA has taken the light’. Even today it’s not much better. The new power company is called the Power Holding Company of Nigeria or PHCN, but everyone translates it as Please Hold Candle in Nigeria. To make up for this, like a lot of people, Yomi had a big petrol generator at her house and so we could have lights and even watch TV whenever we wanted.

  Nigerian television is dominated by Nollywood, which is now the world’s second biggest film industry. Nigeria has a strong storytelling tradition and so it’s natural that we should have a big film industry. However we also have a big culture of ‘tatafo’, which means gossip. The problem is when these two worlds collide. ‘Ah! You are going to see ET? Come here I want to tell you something … He goes home! …’ ‘You want to see Gone With the Wind? Pssst … He doesn’t give a damn!’… ‘Star Wars? … Darth Vader? He’s Luke’s father!’

  Another thing you notice in a city of industry and action is everyone going to and from their working enterprises, and that means a lot people travelling around on foot and on the roads. Now, you have to be a bit of a thrill seeker to drive in Lagos. You can just buy a driving licence from the right people, traffic lights are few and far between, and I don’t think I ever saw a zebra crossing. However, in a weird quaint little throwback from the colonial days there are traffic policemen in white cotton gloves who try to direct the madness without getting sideswiped.

  Because the traffic is so bad, the main way that people get around is on motorbikes called okadas. Everyone who drives them weaves them in and out of traffic and they are just as crazy as the car drivers – although they’re a lot faster. In England you may see two people riding on a motorbike seat; in Nigeria you will regularly see Daddy, Mummy, two kids and a goat on a single wobbly motorbike. And just as people load vans with goods in the UK, people balance boxes of food, TVs or whatever else on the okadas. The best sight I ever saw was someone travelling on one of these motorbikes with a full-sized coffin strapped to it. I don’t know if he was an undertaker by trade or if it was just the Nigerian version of motor insurance.

  In Ikeja we were all getting into the swing of things. When people said they’d come around for dinner at seven o’clock, they really meant they’d arrive at eleven. When people said that a chicken cost 150 naira, they meant that it really cost 50 naira. We learned that if you’re driving along and a policeman stops you and says, ‘Hello, dear, I hope you have a nice day.’ What he really means is ‘Hello, dear, I hope you have a nice day and give me 50 naira, or you won’t.’

  With so many people coming into the house day and night, we learned a lot of Pidgin English and a lot of Yoruba cuss words. The most frequent of which was the Ori e o pe phrase, which means ‘his head is not correct’. Yoruba is full of weird and wonderful phrases like that and I asked Yomi why she used that particular saying so much. She acted shocked and looked at me like I was a true fool.

  ‘You butter-eater English-educated boy. You mean that you don’t even know the story of where you came from? Don’t you know that when the god Olodumare decides to do his job of making the Yoruba people, their headless bodies are made first and then each person chooses his own head. So when you pick a good head at birth then your destiny will be to have luck, fame and good fortune. But if you don’t even have the sense to pick the right kind of head then you are a real were-fool. We say that the stupidest man is Oloriburuku, a person with a bad head. For everyone else you can just say Ori e o pe, his head is not correct.’

  After two weeks in Ikeja we were getting used being a bit of a novelty in the area and the arrival of Dad with Chris and Cordelia was a bit of a shock. He brought with him the stark reminder of home, not just because he was the newest arrival but because he’d brought a massive amount of luggage with him. Of course, as I have already said, he is a serial hoarder, but he pulled up to Yomi’s bungalow in a van filled to the brim with bags, boxes and cases. When he finally came into the bungalow, he greeted his sister-in-law and immediately began complaining about the cost of coming over from England.

  ‘Sista Yomi, how you dey?’ he said in Pidgin to her.

  ‘Since the children arrived in my home we have visitors every day. Everybody don dey hala.’ Everybody’s been coming around and having a party, she replied with a smile. ‘You lookin vex, Mr Man. Somtin dey worry you?’

  ‘Ah! To get all these bags through customs I had to pay and pay and pay. Every big eye man chop my money.’

  ‘Yes. Where will you unpack so much? There’s not enough room here for all of that.’

  ‘No, sista. We’re going to go stay another place. Come on, everybody. Get packed up quick and get ready. Come on. Come on! Put leg for road!’ This was an unexpected annoyance. We’d been having a nice time with Yomi and her friends. Stella was even getting used to the food here and suddenly Dad arrives from home with screaming kids, too much stuff as usual, and now we had to pack up and go stay with him somewhere else? This was too much. We were pretty sad to lug our bags outside and squish up together in the back of the overheated, non-air-conditioned rusty old van and say goodbye to Yomi.

  ‘It go better now your daddy’s here! I’ll see you.’ Yomi waved as we drove off into the Lagos streets.

  Dad was full of curses as he tried to manage driving around the city for the first time in twenty years. He seemed to know where he was going, which was good, but he kept complaining that the roads were so much busier than they used to be.

  ‘These ugly were drivers! Are they trying to kill us? With so many cars on the road there is nobody even (HONK!) paying attention to where they are going.’

  We wound around the city on the big multi-lane highways freely changing from one lane to another. Dad watched in horror as other drivers simply drove on the wrong side of the road to avoid a traffic queue or a pothole. We had just gotten used to it over the last fortnight and so laughed at Dad who seemed to be so maddened by the whole thing. He didn’t laugh at all and glared at us so we shut up pretty quickly.

  He finally stopped the car about halfway down a dusty side road that branched off a huge highway. This was no private gate and there was no smartly dressed security guard to greet us as we got out of the rusty old van, which he had parked in front of a two-storey stone house that looked like it had seen better days. This was an odd move on Dad’s part and it wasn’t lost on Albert, Stella and me. On the way here, we’d wondered if he was driving us to a hotel or to another relative or to a storage place. Instead he’d brought us to an unfurnished house with a well in the back and no TV.

  It was in a suburb called Orile Iganmu and it felt very far from Ikeja. It looked like there weren’t going to be a lot of sound system parties in this drab part of town. It did not seem like a good place to take a holiday at all, but we didn’t have time to dwell on it too much as box after box was thrust into our hands and we set about unpacking. It took all day to get all the boxes unpacked with Mum rushing around, sweeping the floors, opening the windows and trying to air out the house. By the end of the day, the place was beginning to look a bit more like home. Not home in the ‘There’s no place like home’ Dorot
hy kind of way. I mean it began to look like our home in London as in cluttered and chaotic. Mum fetched water from the well and fed us all bowls of garri and spiced stew for dinner and we ate it quickly and quietly before bedding down for the night.

  The next day, Albert, Stella and I had to get out of bed early and dress up in nice clothes. It was a Monday morning and so we knew we weren’t going to visit friends or head to church. The penny really dropped when Dad took us out in the now empty but still rusty van and stopped outside a school. As Dad ushered the three of us out of the van and into the school reception, a crowd of uniformed school kids appeared and curiously stared at us. Stella was the first to figure out what was going on and burst into tears. Dad started to sign a lot of papers and we realized that we were not going to be heading back to England any time soon. All the hard work that she’d put into getting good grades in her 11-plus, and even in getting me to pass the exam, seemed to have been totally in vain. Even the secondary comprehensive was preferable to this. However, it looked like she would at least get her wish of having us go to the same school when term started.

  4

  MANY THOUGHTS WERE GOING around inside my head. Nigeria. Naija. Niajaland. Yoruba. Hausa. Igbo. Jai! Shut up you dirty stinking mout’ that you’ve never washed since the day you were born in the gutter! Don’t tell me that I have to live here!

  Stella, Albert and I sat together that night and we couldn’t believe that Mum and Dad had taken us to live here without even telling us. Why did we get no warning? If I had known I may have tried to run away again. I had already tried it once in London. Well, I walked. The phrase ‘run away’ implies that there was someone running behind me shouting, ‘Come back, come back! I love you!’ which there wasn’t. I went back home after it got dark and nobody had even noticed that I had left. You don’t know what its like growing up with seven people sitting around the dinner table and your mum asks your brother while pointing to you, ‘Hey, who’s your friend?’ In a big family your parents can neglect you all and call it economy of scale.