I Used to Say My Mother Was Shirley Bassey

by Stephen K Amos

  ‘“But how can we cut down a banana leaf? Let us use yours.”

  ‘“No. I need to use this leaf to shelter myself but here, I have this empty gourd, you can shelter in there if you want.” The hornets thanked him and they flew one by one into the gourd and, once they were all in, what do you think Anansi did? Of course he sealed it up with the banana leaf and took the buzzing calabash filled with the gullible hornets back to his father.

  ‘Next Anansi had to find a Mmoatia demon, which is a hard job in itself because they live in the hot lands of the north and don’t like talking to strangers. Plus they can turn invisible and can even kill you if they just touch you. They are very dangerous creatures and not even gods like Anansi can get to speak to them. How could he catch a Mmoatia without being able to trick him with words? As Anansi travelled north he thought about it. Mmoatia are famous for two things. One is that they are very superstitious and they fear god. Number two is that they are greedy and can’t get enough yams to eat. They like yams even more than the Igbo people down in the River States.

  ‘When Anansi finally arrived at the Mmoatia lands he had come up with a clever plan. He went to the yam fields and he picked up three succulent yams, being very careful not to break the delicate tubers. Then he carved one yam very skilfully into an image of the chief god. He was a good craftsman with his eight legs and when he was finished he was happy with his work. He then coated the idol in a very thick and sticky gum that he got from a tree and placed it in a prominent position near to where the Mmoatia played. In front of the figure of the chief god he placed a wooden bowl and into it he laid the other two yams.

  ‘Anansi watched from a distance as the first Mmoatia came by. He saw the yams and immediately set to devouring them. When he had eaten them and finished licking his lips, he prostrated in front of the idol to give thanks. But when he touched the yam carved to look like a god his hands stuck to it and stuck fast. With the Mmoatia’s hands stuck to the yam husk, Anansi didn’t have to worry about its death-bringing touch and had no trouble at all in carrying him to the chief god, who was getting worried by this time that he was going to lose his precious stories after all.

  ‘The python is a wily and dangerous creature but Anansi knew his weakness. Python is proud and vain. All snakes are vain. That is why they change their skin every season to keep up with the latest fashion. Anansi went to see python and wondered aloud how long the longest snake is. Python slithered around Anansi and said, “Look at my beautiful body. I am the longest snake of all of them.”

  ‘“Yes. You are long but you are always coiled up and wound about yourself. How can I see how long you really are until you lie straight.” So python tried to unravel himself, but he was so used to wrapping himself around things that he couldn’t keep himself flat and straight on the ground.

  ‘Anansi went to get a long branch from a tree. “Here, we can measure you against this.” But when python tried to lie against it he couldn’t stop himself from curling around the branch. You see every animal is a slave to his animal urges. “I know how to solve this problem,” said Anansi. “I will tie your tail to one end of the branch and your head to the other and then we will know once and for all just how long your body is.” The vain python was eager to prove that he was the longest snake and so he agreed immediately. Once the proud snake was safely tied to the branch all Anansi had to do was pick it up and take it to the chief god.

  ‘When the king of the gods saw that Anansi had completed each of the four tasks successfully then he was forced to admit defeat. He relinquished all of the stories to Anansi who read them out loud for everyone to hear. That’s why Anansi appears in so much art because the stories they tell are being told by him. Those are the stories we call anansesem.’

  I looked wide-eyed at Mama Bunmi. I’d never heard a story like that at all. ‘Stephen, close your mouth!’

  ‘You are a Nigerian and so you should know some of our stories,’ said the Oba. ‘Just what are you learning in school?’

  ‘Erm … agriculture and religious education.’

  ‘Ah. Back-breaking labour. My own son is in England now and is exceedingly happy to forgo the plough. I’m sorry that you couldn’t meet him. He is already preparing for the freezing spring term to start.’

  ‘Stephen hasn’t done well in school in Lagos. Now his sister is another matter.’ I hated the way Mama Bunmi had said this. Adults seem to think nothing of making comments and shaming you in public. The whole notion of discretion is alien to them. Or at least it was to my grandmother.

  ‘I understand, Stephen. It is hard for you to live in a foreign country away from your friends and family. You have the same problems in Lagos that my son has in England. You said that you don’t feel Nigerian, but you have to embrace our culture. What are your parents teaching you?’

  ‘They have concerns of their own at the moment. I tell you in Lagos ground no level.’ Mama Bunmi meant that in Lagos times were tough.

  ‘Stephen, what is your full name?’ the Oba asked.

  ‘Stephen Kehinde Amos.’

  ‘So Kehinde means that you are the second born of twins. Amos and Stephen are good Bible names but you need a new Yoruba name now that you live here in Nigeria. Let me give you a present and you can say that you got it from the Oba of Ogun State.’ He stood and looked at me for a moment and said, ‘Since I am giving it to you in the hallway of my own palace I will give you the name “Afolabi” which means “born into high status” and the next time you see me you will call me uncle.’

  Mama Bunmi looked very proud of me and, as we left, she curtsied low and I prostrated. So I had heard a story and been given a new name. Stephen Kehinde Afolabi Amos. It’s just a name and it’s not on my passport or anything, but it was a good present for an ajebo to get from a king.

  7

  WHEN WE WENT BACK to Lagos in January I felt a lot more at home and settled in Nigeria. The Christmas and New Year festivities had helped me slowly to adjust. I went back to school in the new year and when I saw Sunday I told him all about meeting the Oba and getting my new name.

  ‘Ah yes. I’ve heard of him. You have been blessed! He is an educated somebody. And, Stephen, let me tell you I have heard some news. Everyone is talking about it. We are getting a new pupil this year. And this one is a real butter eater. He is an oyimbo.’

  I had been in Nigeria for over six months and I suddenly realized that I hadn’t seen even one white person in all of that time. I thought that if things had been tough for me then they were going to be really tough for him.

  The kid was called Sebastien and his mum and dad were French and had come to Lagos to work in one of the oil ministries. He was older than us and was going into Albert’s class. We all went up to him in break because we thought he would be desperate to make friends with another person who had lived in the West. He was just polite to us but nothing more and I was impressed that he seemed totally unfazed by the new school environment.

  He was one of those odd kids that had lived all over the world. He was born in Kenya, had already gone to school in Hong Kong and New Zealand and didn’t think much of being uprooted and set down in Nigeria. I had been moved around from school to school and home to home in the UK, but each and every time I had hated the change. However Sebastien took it all in his stride and he actually fitted in better than we had.

  This oyimbo didn’t mind it when the other kids walked past him in the corridors and brushed their hands through his long straight hair without even saying, ‘Excuse me.’ The kids were fascinated by this guy’s hair because all of ours was cut very short. They said to him ‘Ah. Oyimbo! He’s not used to the barber.’ They came up to him when he was eating and touched the freckles on his face and said, ‘Ah. Oyimbo! He’s not used to the bath.’ One time the other kids said something that made Stella and I laugh. They came up to Sebastien and touched his nose. ‘Ah. Oyimbo. He has a nose like an animal.’

  ‘What animal?’ said Sebastien.

  ‘A nose like an
elephant!’ And everyone including Sebastien howled.

  At the time a lot of Westerners were being brought into Nigeria to help regulate the oil supply because it was being badly mismanaged. In spite of the oil flowing freely from the Niger Delta, nobody seemed to be making any money from it. This was Nigeria in the mid-eighties during the rule of Ibrahim Babangida. This Babangida was a military ruler who had won power in a coup in 1985 from yet another military ruler called Buhari. Babangida was basically the most corrupt leader ever to rule in Nigeria. And that is saying a lot in a country where chop I chop (bribery and graft) was a national pastime.

  When the British were in charge of Nigeria they took a lot of wealth from the country but they didn’t sniff out the oil in the Niger Delta. After it was discovered in the seventies and eighties a lot of people like Babangida got very rich very quickly. They lost all control of themselves. There’s a Pidgin phrase that people were using a lot at the time to refer to their leader and it goes like this: Dat man na money miss road. It means that someone who gets rich quickly doesn’t know how to use it. In the case of Nigeria, the money missed the roads, missed the rail network, missed the hospitals, missed the schools, the courts and pretty much everything except the pockets of the generals.

  Some strange things happened during this time. It is where the urban legend of the 53 suitcases comes from. In the eighties, the government noticed that millions and billions of naira cash was missing. So the President let everyone know that within a month he was going to revalue and change the currency so that all of the stolen naira would be made useless. Suddenly all the thieves who had salted the cash overseas got worried and tried to bring the money back into the country to exchange it. In a single day, two army officials were stopped at the airport coming into Nigeria carrying 53 suitcases full to the brim with notes. Nobody knows what happened to all the money that was stolen but it’s clear to your average Nigerian that the money’s not been spent on the country.

  I don’t mean to say that the Western companies managed to sort everything out or that they helped to put the oil revenue back in the hands of Nigerian people. Far from it. A bunch of multinational operators took control of the oil wells and they just stole all of the revenue for themselves. In 1980, Fela Kuti was so outraged by this that he wrote a piece of music about the shameful situation called ‘International Thief Thief’.

  ‘Many foreign companies dey Africa carry all our money and go/ Them go write big English for newspaper, dabaru (spoil) we Africans.’

  That was back in the eighties and you’d hope that things would have improved better today. But have they? In 2008, a brilliant Nigerian singer called Nneka released a tune called Niger Delta which says:

  ‘Dem come fish our water empty/ Dem come chop our oil plenty/ Come take resources away/ Come take all of our riches.’

  So in thirty years Nigerians have faced nothing but organized theft of their resources and what can the ordinary people do about it? They can fucking sing for it, that’s what. In the words of Fela himself:

  ‘Motherfuckers, bastard motherfuckers.’

  So things weren’t going too well for Nigerians as a whole and Dad was clearly having trouble making his construction business work. He would pay for materials and then they wouldn’t arrive. He’d build a house only to be told once it was finished that the land belonged to someone else who was very happy to keep the house and not pay for it. There was one occasion when he tried to take the unscrupulous fraudster to court, but it didn’t seem like a real court. It was more like a bribery bidding war and Dad didn’t have the money to secure the right verdict.

  Property fraud was so rife at this time in Lagos that signs started to appear on houses saying ‘Not For Sale’. I asked Dad why anybody would put up a sign like that. He told me that it was because there was a new and innovative chop going around the city. In Lagos scam artists were selling people houses while the real owners were out at work. The scammers would pocket the cash and then when the new owners tried to move in they’d find that the house had never been on the market to begin with. This practice was becoming so prominent that people had taken to putting up signs to let everyone know that their homes were ‘not for sale’.

  When I told him that a white boy had come to school Dad reacted strangely. He started talking about how it had been growing up in Nigeria under British rule.

  ‘Those white men. They came and cut up the land and they took gold home with them, but back then if you turned on the light it stayed on and if you bought a house it stayed yours. What is wrong with these greedy officials that just do what they like?’

  With Dad’s work drying up he didn’t need a secretary any more and Mum began to stay home most of the time. It seemed like Mum and Dad were falling out of love with Nigeria and one day a huge argument erupted in the kitchen between Dad and Mama Bunmi. All we could hear was a lot of angry Yoruba language and the word ‘Abeokuta’ being said a lot. After a long time Mum went in and said, ‘Abeg. Now make I hear word,’ and she took Mama Bunmi out with her and they didn’t come back for hours.

  The next morning Mama Bunmi went with us to school. She bought us breakfast, gave us all a big hug and told us that she was going home to Abeokuta. As usual nobody had bothered to ask us what we thought about her leaving. Once more the rug had been pulled out from under us kids. We were very sad to see her go and made such a big scene in front of the school that even Sunday came out to see what was up. When we told him that Mama Bunmi was going he cried too.

  After Mama Bunmi had gone the house felt empty and to cheer us up Dad took the whole family to the National Theatre on Friday night for a street party. The theatre itself was rarely used, but there was always an owambe in the park in front of it at the weekend. We were all trying to forget about our worries by munching on suya and listening to the music when we saw Sebastien’s family sitting at a table nearby. It wasn’t hard to spot a white family in that situation. I called over to him and his mum and dad invited us to join their table; soon the grown-ups were all chatting together about the woes of Nigeria.

  This party was not like the New Year’s party in Abeokuta. In spite of the thousands of people and the sound systems breaking the decibel barrier, that owambe had been a friendly, family affair. This party was full of people drinking, hawking stuff and there was definitely a strange smell in the air. It was a bit threatening and I can tell you that I wouldn’t have wanted to get lost there. I asked Sebastien what he thought about the diversity of people. ‘Don’t you find it very alien to you?’

  ‘This is not diverse at all. In Hong Kong we saw Africans, Chinese people, Indians and white people. Everyone here is black. It’s the least diverse place I’ve ever been to. Actually, it’s boring.’

  As he was saying the word ‘boring’ a dishevelled-looking woman came rushing past our table trying to hawk a bottle of some concoction. She shouted out, ‘This tincture will cure your baldness, bring you good luck, it will help you keep your wife satisfied all night and keep you free of all diseases.’

  We ignored her at first, but as she was moving away and fading into the crowd Dad called out after her, ‘Ay, sista, whetin dey happen?’

  The dishevelled-looking woman was Auntie Yomi! We hadn’t seen her since Abeokuta when she’d been running sound systems at the party. At New Year’s Eve she’d seemed larger than life and dressed to impress, but here she shrunk away from us when she saw her sister. She started to smooth her wrinkled linen shirt and pocketed the bottle. I remembered how she’d saved me from getting into serious trouble that night and I ran up to embrace her. She looked very embarrassed, but as far as I was concerned she was still the cool auntie and she gave me a big smile.

  ‘Yomi, kilode?’ What’s wrong? asked Mum at first and then, ‘What is in that bottle? What are you selling?’

  Yomi came up to the table and waved a greeting to Sebastien’s family. ‘This?! This is just rubbish but I have to try and sell them.’

  ‘Come on, come on. I will buy one,�
� said Dad and passed over some naira without taking the bottle.

  ‘Ah! Broda, I tell you ground no level. Juss dey patch am.’ Things are tough. I’m just trying to survive. ‘How you dey?’

  ‘Monkey dey work, baboon dey chop.’ One person toils, another enjoys the fruits of it.

  She looked at the white family we were sitting with. ‘Na go bye dat?’ Are you leaving?

  ‘Bodi no be firewood.’ A man can’t work forever.

  Mum looked guilty. ‘Sista. I’m so sorry. I have not been in touch, but things have been so raw for us.’

  ‘Jesus! For you and me too. Remember the Abeokuta owambe? They never paid me and I had all the expense of moving so many gbedu up there. I can’t pay them, so now, the sound systems? They won’t work with me. I can’t get money. I can’t get credit. They take garri from my mouth.’

  In Nigeria there isn’t any kind of welfare state and as Yomi had lost her income she’d had to sell her bungalow. She was now living in a tiny bedsit in one of the blocks in Ikeja.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you are in trouble? You will come and stay with us.’

  ‘No! I’m telling you! My bungalow is gone but I have a place to live. I won’t be a burden to you. If one finger brought oil it soiled the others.’

  ‘Please. At least come and sit with us for a moment. Join us and have a drink,’ said Sebastien’s dad.

  Yomi refused. ‘Thank you, but I’m not finished. I’m not an old woman yet. The house sweeper’s behind is never at one direction. I must work, work, work to get out of this and drinking Gulder beer will give me a headache. But ask me again another time and I will buy the drinks.’

  Dad gave her some more money, but I knew that we were hurting for cash as well. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that the woman who had welcomed us into the country with open arms was hurting so badly and that we were so powerless to help her. But, at the same time, I was impressed that she hadn’t given in and let her situation get her down. She was still my cool auntie.