I Used to Say My Mother Was Shirley Bassey

by Stephen K Amos

  So we’d gone from Londoners to Lagosians overnight. We didn’t have any time to get adjusted to anything because a week after Dad enrolled us in school we had to start. The Nigerian school year runs from January to December, so we were going straight into the second term. Stella and I would be in the same secondary entry-level class and Albert was going into the more senior class three years ahead of us. So to add insult to injury, we were going to miss out on our summer holidays altogether. We were given bolts of cloth in the school colours and we had to pay someone to make our uniforms. It was like a condemned man being made to pay for his own bullet. That first day was a horrible experience, and the heat on the mile-long walk to school produced more sweat than I’d ever known.

  A kid going into the school class halfway through the year is already social suicide. But we weren’t just new; we were foreign to the other kids and to the teachers too. My Nigerian roots are important to me, but simply having black skin does not qualify you for fitting perfectly in to a foreign culture with its fair share of bullies. They taught in English but they mainly spoke Pidgin English and Yoruba in break and at lunch and we could barely understand them. With our English accents we did not fit in any better here than we had back home in South London.

  By the time we had been in Orile Iganmu for a month our home was quite comfortable. We had electricity when NEPA hadn’t taken the light, and we had clean water from the well, a TV and radio, a cooker and beds. But the school was a complete eye-opener, with no windows and just a door-sized hole where a door should have been as an entrance. There was no power and so no air conditioning or fans and because the tropical heat of the day ran from six thirty in the morning until two in the afternoon. We had to leave every day at first light, which is the only option as there is barely any street lighting in Lagos but there are a lot of very deep potholes. And the food from the school kitchen was so bad that we had to go out and buy suya from the local suya spot for lunch every day.

  We thought that with our English education we would at least be at the top of the class, but we were wrong. They were not only at a higher level than us in science and maths but they also had classes in subjects that we had never encountered before – like agriculture. By which I mean we had to actually plough the land and plant seeds. With the teachers barking at us for getting it wrong and sweating in our uncomfortable uniforms, Stella and I felt like we were on a chain gang. And the religious education was not like I’d experienced it in the UK. It wasn’t a philosophical debate class or even a history of the Bible. It was just a prayer group led by a local preacher. First, we had to read the Bible for half an hour, then we had to pray to the Lord while shaking our heads from side to side like possessed people. This is supposed to shake out the bad thoughts! To me this seemed odd. At school I didn’t cry for three days because I thought I was having a nightmare.

  Back home in London, the other kids and the teachers had been the major problem for me, but here it was the schoolmasters. Nigeria has rejected so much of British culture but has kept some strange archaic bits and pieces almost at random. The schoolmaster is one of these. They aren’t teachers, more like school housemasters and administrators, and they look after the boarding houses. A lot of Nigerian schools have boarding houses attached to them because so many families live in rural areas and need to send their children to cities and towns for education.

  In most ways, boarding-school pupils in Nigeria are not like the English equivalent at all. The kids are not aristocratic, rich and pampered. It is completely the opposite. The kids in the boarding houses are the poorer kids and they make fun of the day students as being a bunch of soft, indulged ajebo or ajebutta (butter eaters). However, in other ways, the boarding house regime is a lot like that found in English boarding schools. As in the experience is a living hell for the kids who live there.

  Everyone is terrified of the housemasters because they are liberal users of corporal punishment and they use sticks, cowhide and kobokos (whips) to flog the students. Even the other teachers were completely terrified of them. So much so that I guessed that some of the junior teachers were being regularly flogged by these grotesque creatures. Going to school in Nigeria is really like something out of a Roald Dahl book.

  Soon after we moved to Orile Iganmu, my dad’s mother, Mama Bunmi, came to stay with us. Her family were from all over West Africa, which meant that she could speak a dozen languages and was such easy company that everyone in the area seemed to know her. I remember the day she arrived very well because Dad stood outside waiting for her for over an hour and cried when she arrived. She came on foot, which was strange because we basically lived off a highway, but she must have come via a market because her bag was brimming with fruit for all of us kids. Mum’s family are all tall and rangy and there are a lot of them (all of the relatives who’d come to meet us at the airport were from her side), but Dad’s side are shorter, broader and quick to smile. When we started to prostrate before her, she grabbed us up before we hit the ground and hugged us all at once.

  She had come to our home to help look after the youngest kids, but she would often come and pick us up from school and accompany us home. When Mama Bunmi saw the kind of food that the school kitchen served she was appalled and made friends with the local suya seller, who agreed to give us food and water whenever we were hungry. Granny agreed to settle the bill at the end of each month because she was a much better haggler than we were. Everything in Nigeria is about haggling and she told us the secret. ‘In this city you can pay in money or in talk-time. I am an old woman and have a lot of time on my hands. The longer you talk the lower the price!’

  Things were not going that well at home. Mum and Dad were not rich by Nigerian standards at all. We didn’t have a private road like Auntie Yomi, or houseboys and security guards. Mum and Dad still had to work hard. Dad was working in construction and Mum was doing secretarial work for him. We wondered what had happened to our home in South London and whether Dad had sold it. It just didn’t make any sense to us why we’d gone from struggling in London to struggling in Lagos. However, in my family you didn’t ask questions about money without being told to mind your own business. Which was weird because in this case it certainly seemed like it was our business.

  Back at school, hardly any kids spoke to us for the first few weeks. Then one day another boy called us over. ‘Hello dear!’ he said to us. ‘How you dey? Come on! Come on! Do you know ten-ten?’ We didn’t know what he was talking about. ‘Ah! What do they teach you in England if you don’t know ten-ten? Here. I will teach you.’

  Ten-ten is a simple hand-clapping game that everyone in Nigeria can play. It’s basically a kind of superfast version of Pat-a-Cake. We’d noticed that all the students, both male and female, right the way up to the final year, played it all the time in classrooms and in the scrub outside that served as a playground. Stella and I had laughed to ourselves to see all these big bad Yoruba teenagers playing a game that, in my opinion, was reserved for little girls. This kid was called Sunday and when he offered to show us how to play the game we jumped at it.

  He took us under his wing and it has to be said that Stella and I became the best at ten-ten in the whole year in no time at all. ‘Ay! Ten-ten balogun! (Ten-ten warrior!)’ shouted Sunday when we were going strong. Maybe it was because we were twins and in tune with each other but we could move our hands so fast that they were a blur to see. Ten-ten is a lot more complicated than Pat-a-Cake and you can play with two, three or more people and there are special hand signals that you can use to mean that you have to change players, touch the ground or freeze for a second. The trick is to make all the moves totally fluidly and you only lose if you miss a clap. Then you’re out. The older kids even used to bet on this game.

  Sunday was one of the unfortunate kids who had to stay in the boarding house all year long and he said, ‘Stephen. It is a Godforsaken place. We have to get up at five o’clock to do chores. Sometimes they wake you with bells and sometimes they wake you with
belts.’ And of all the things that Nigerians could have kept up from the British, like healthcare or roads without potholes, they chose to keep prefects! Sunday would say, ‘I miss my mummy and daddy. When they left me here I ran after them with tears in my eyes. “Please take me with you!” I shouted. Then last term, God bless them! They came to school and they showed off. Ah too much! They brought me pocket money but they put it in public eye. The prefects! They take my money.’

  I’d never experienced the so-called Developing World and it was a shock to me that in some parts of Lagos there was no running water. However, when we told Sunday that we had a well in the back yard he was actually impressed! He asked us if he could come to our house to get water in the morning, as the public fountain was more than three miles away. When he came around, I brought him a bucket of water and he laughed at me because I carried it in front of me. ‘Stephen! You need to learn bucket skills. You carry water like oyimbo (Westerner) and all the water is slopping out. Here, put it on your head like this.’ And he grabbed the bucket and balanced it on his head, moving skilfully from side to side to show me how it is done.

  Next he showed me how to use a bowl to wash. ‘First you put water, then you rub soap, then you rinse. In the boarding house, if you leave the water and go back to sleep, when you wake up, the water is gone. Then all you can do is rub and shine with Vaseline. You put on knees, elbows and lips to stop chaff.’ As a kid from South London I’d only ever had to carry a bucket to mop the floor and Vaseline did not serve as a substitute for a hot shower in the mornings.

  After a few months, we were beginning to feel like even if Nigeria wasn’t the best place for us to be it was just a part of life to be dealt with. Sunday helped to defend us when the other kids made fun of us. He said, ‘What you have to do is give them a knock on the head. Like this.’ And he made a fist and hit me right on the skull. ‘Yes! Now you can feel where your brain is in your skull. You can hit me back.’ And he leaned forward and with a smile offered me his head to bash.

  Nigerian students, even though they have to put up with all of this archaic discipline, or maybe because of it, are very well educated, especially in the sciences. Sunday was one of the smartest and he would even correct the teachers when they made mistakes. He thought it was very funny to expose their ignorance by using words they didn’t understand. I remember one day when a teacher said to him, ‘Sunday, you are more stupid than stupid.’ He replied, ‘Yes. But your medulla oblongata is very loose!’ He really savoured the words – ME-DU-LLA OB-LON-GA-TA, which is a posh term for brains. If you hear it with a Nigerian accent then you can get the picture. Nigerian people will always surprise you. In the early days I needed to keep a dictionary handy at all times.

  You really can never predict what a Nigerian will say, whether educated or not. Halfway through the term, the old auntie who ran the school kitchen said something that had Stella, Sunday and me in stitches. She had to quit her job to go and take care of her family in Benue State, which is in the middle of the country. Although the food she served was terrible, she was nice to the kids and we were sorry that she wasn’t staying. We all asked her why she had to go. Without pausing and while still dishing out stew, she said, ‘I must go back to Benue State immediately, my PLACEN-TA is buried there!’ She made no attempt to explain what she was talking about, but we could work out that she meant her family were living there. Medulla oblongata! Placenta! Yoruba is a tonal language so it has a singsong quality. If you listen to how the Yoruba people speak, it really is a rich language to hear.

  I reckon that Nigerians like sciences so much because they like the sounds of the long words more than anything else. Albert was always excellent at science and so he was getting along very well at school and was top of the class. To start with, he wasn’t much happier than us because he was still horny as hell and wasn’t getting any further with the girls in Nigeria than he had been getting with the girls back in the UK. But unlike in the UK, being at the top of the class actually makes you popular with the ladies in Lagos. Many Yoruba girls are a lot more religious and conservative than their English counterparts and so Albert, a sharp cookie, started to attend the local church group and soon he was getting dates left, right and centre.

  So school was school, but at home Mum had just had carpets laid so we had to get used to the idea that we were really here for the long haul. I missed simple things from back home like watching SuperTed and Danger Mouse on telly on Saturday morning. The idea that I might never eat a Wham! bar again filled me with dread. Any last hopes that we harboured that this Nigerian holiday would be temporary went out the window. We had been deceived. Towards December, after we had been there about six months, I noticed that we had started to pick up Nigerian accents and I even started to pick up religion. Sort of. I started saying prayers every day in a little shrine that I built in my room with candles and a Bible. I prayed that we would be allowed to go back to London. I also decided that since God was so important here in Nigeria I’d pray to him to get good grades in the exams as opposed to taking the trouble to study hard. However, by the end of the school year in December, it appeared my prayers had not been answered. We were still in Nigeria, I failed all my exams and my shrine had mysteriously burned down.

  5

  THE CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS WERE very welcome by the time they came in mid-December. We had a whole month off and the only thing I’d miss about school was Sunday. When I got my exam results, he was very concerned because I’d done so badly.

  ‘Oh my God, Stephen! What will your parents say? You will be beaten! If you wake up it will be thanks only to God!’

  He was very worried, because in Nigeria if you failed your exams you had to repeat the year, not just the exams. I swear there were people in the year above me who were thirty-five. Mum came into school and pleaded with the teachers. She said that it was unfair to penalize me as I had missed the first half of the year and they agreed to let me enter the second year. I’d thought that Mum and Dad would actually kill me, but once it was settled that I’d be able to move up to the next year they forgot all about it. They were very preoccupied with work at the time and were at least as eager for the holidays as we were.

  Christmas and New Year are the biggest holidays in Nigeria and everyone goes back to their home towns and villages to spend time with extended family. So we all packed our bags, got in the van and headed for Abeokuta. We were going to stay with Mum’s family because they had a huge house on the hill that could fit us all in. Mama Bunmi would go and stay with her daughter in a more modest apartment on the other side of town, but she made me promise that I’d come and see her in the New Year.

  I asked her, ‘Will you be coming to see us on Christmas?’

  ‘Oh no, Stephen.’ She smiled, kissed us all and walked quietly away.

  ‘Dad? Why isn’t Mama Bunmi coming with us?’

  ‘It is because your mother’s family go to church too much at Christmas time for her. She is more traditional.’ Mama Bunmi had the tribal markings on her cheeks. She was an animist.

  Abeokuta was only an hour and half north but it was very different from the hubbub of Lagos. Although it is the capital of Ogun State, it was still very rural and once we got there Dad had another hour of negotiating potholed dirt tracks to get to the house. The van itself was a novelty and loads of the local people followed us at walking pace as we wound our way through town. If any one of them had broken into a light jog they would have quickly overtaken us. In the end, it was good that we had attracted a crowd because once we got to the foot of the hill they helped us lug all of our bags to the house for a couple of naira each.

  Dad warned us that although Mum’s family were quite well off and had a big house none of them spoke any English at all. Not even Pidgin English. When we got to the gates Mum’s mum, Mama Ola, ran to meet us. Her full name is Olatundun and it means in Yoruba ‘tomorrow’s wealth is sweet’ and Granny Ola is one of the most hilariously bubbly and positive people who you will ever meet. She took
an instant shine to us kids and, in full knowledge that we didn’t understand much Yoruba, launched into endless enthusiastic conversations with us. When we looked at her with confusion on our faces, she just laughed, gave us little bits of sweet cake to eat with her fingers and pinched our cheeks.

  The house we were to stay in was very odd to look at. It was the biggest in the area and sat on the side of a hill on two storeys, but it seemed a little bit like someone with a toilet fetish had built it. There were eight big bedrooms and all of them had en-suite bathrooms. There were two grand-looking living rooms with chandeliers, one on each floor, and they also came with toilets and showers attached. But the architect had neglected to realize that there is a limited water supply in that area of Abeokuta, so a huge tank had been installed and lorries would deliver fresh, clean water when it was needed. So to wash you still had to fill a plastic tub with water in the kitchen, carry it to the bathroom (whichever was closest), put it in the bath and sit in it using a smaller bowl to pour water onto yourself. Moreover, due to the unpredictable electricity supply, Mama Ola had to have a generator on the side of the house. However, it was normal to have it turned off when absolutely necessary. To us it just seemed hilarious that in this grand house full of chandeliers, everyone had to spend the whole time in the kitchen lit by battery-powered torches and lamps.

  Over the course of a week a dozen or more relations turned up and the kitchen was definitely the centre of this travelling circus with Mamma Ola the ringmaster and cook. Christmas is a huge deal in Nigeria and you have to go to church not once but twice in the morning. The first time is to have a service and the second time is to sing carols and meet the neighbourhood. By the afternoon, two dozen people had settled into the house for the day and the adults were drinking Gulder beer with the kids getting high on sugary drinks.