“Ha, Pat Lake’s house,” she said. “Pat was one of my dear friends, an English girl.”
“Then he said he danced with you.”
“I was working in Bristol in those days. He was training all over the place. It was very rigorous—he and the other officers like your godfather were very serious. There are pictures here of them running and jumping and doing field exercises. You must have found them. For God’s sake, all these African officers were getting their countries back! That was the excitement. But he never seemed tired. When your father showed up to see me, the little boy in the house told his parents that an African soldier was at the door.”
“And so again, how did you meet him?”
“It was like Doctor Zhivago. Lovely film. And the music!” She began singing a song that I eventually discovered was called “Somewhere, My Love,” or “Lara’s Theme.” “What I remember about that film was the love story and the revolution and trains. It was on a train where we first saw each other, you know. I don’t remember if I was going to London from Bristol or from Bristol to London or somewhere else. I was with a friend, probably Pat Lake. We were walking to our seats, and there in front of me were these long legs stretched out across the aisle. I said, Excuse me, please, and the rest of his body appeared, in uniform. He and his friend were talking their language, and they acted like it was their private car. Nobody West Indian would have acted that way. I thought maybe he didn’t speak English. But then he did the most extraordinary thing. He stood up and made his friend stand up too, both bowing.”
Her wonderment was infectious.
“What did he say? What did you say?”
“Well, I still thought he didn’t speak English. He just stared at us as I said thank you and we walked by. We found our seats in the next car.”
“That’s really all? You didn’t look back or he didn’t try to get your attention?”
“Girls like us didn’t look back. And to West Indian people, that was just beyond the pale—Africans. I knew some people moved with them in London, but those were islanders from a lower class, people we would have called bush people back in Jamaica.”
“I know there was some hostility to the marriage from the Jamaican side.”
“From my English friends too, but for a different reason. They thought it wouldn’t be safe to go where people lived in trees and such foolishness. But my English friends relaxed when they saw him in his uniform and heard his English and found out about Sandhurst. There was some glamour there, like some of the Africans who were going to Oxford and Cambridge, or the ones we saw on telly after Ghana was independent. Dark glasses, and speaking English very properly.”
“Ghana’s independence was 1957.”
“We thought of it as the first black one and so in London it was quite a thing.”
She began to sing a calypso. I recognized it as the legendary calypsonian Lord Kitchener’s “Birth of Ghana.”
Smiling, eyes closed, swaying as much as she could, she continued. “I think that might be when we began to really notice the Africans. All the race riots and things were going on in London, and then suddenly it was all about Ghana and then Nigeria, Guinea, Cameroon. The Black Man was on the rise, Africa this and that and other such things. But I tried not to get all caught up in that at first. I was there for a reason.”
“Sounds like quite a time to be in England.”
“Well, I was in Bristol, which was not a quiet place, mind you. But it did seem that black people in England were all abuzz, and there was Cuba too and Kenya, and Egypt. Independence everywhere and all over the place! At first, I didn’t pay much attention because I was working and studying and sending money back home. I made it to staff nurse and was a midwife. Suddenly, white people had black nurses who were delivering white babies and tending to the dying. People were not happy and there is no anger like the anger that comes when people have no choice in the matter. But we were professionals. We were supposed to be cultural ambassadors and I still think we were even though your generation doesn’t believe that. I didn’t know any Africans at all. It was only after I met him that I realized how close I’d been to them the whole time. I mean they had been there all along! Not knowing them couldn’t have been an accident.”
“And he just shows up at your door in Bristol.”
“Pat and I had on our nurses’ uniforms, so that was it, you know, on the train. He asked around. He was famous for his charm. A prince among men, they said—really, they all said that. It’s easy to be charming when you are tall. That’s what Pansy said. Ha, he just knocked on the door in his uniform, standing tall, and the young boy of the house—a real rascal, far too curious for his own good, used to follow me around with the strangest questions, even asked to see my tail when I first arrived because so many English people thought we had tails! He came running back to the parlor where I was and said there was an African soldier at the door. Who would an African soldier be there to see?”
“And then six weeks later you were in Nigeria.”
“But we were legally married in England or else it wouldn’t have been right for me to go, of course, and then we had a grand state ceremony in Lagos.”
“But six weeks!”
Of the photos she kept of my father, only two were of him without his uniform. In one he wore a dashiki and it softened his features and expression. His skin was pale as if washed out by the light from behind the camera. There had never been any talk of European or even Arabic/Fulani blood in our family, and in the other picture of him out of uniform—the only one of him and his family—his father and mother were as dark as all of the others.
“There was also a wedding announcement in his diary from Jamaica.”
“I didn’t save that, did I? My goodness. Well, at least you have more than you need. My parents, I suppose they couldn’t resist, since I was getting married to an African prince. That was probably my fault. It was the only way to make them feel it was okay, to say he was a prince or a king, which wasn’t true but not a lie either. Plus, I’m sure him having light skin made a positive impact on them. The pictures I sent them were of raised swords, uniforms, big cars; they had to have been proud. It was like proper English royalty but African.”
“And that worked, you think?”
“For some, but the letters from home never stopped asking if he had other wives or about wild animals or things like that or if we lived in trees. But when the war started, they were just trying to find us. When we returned to Jamaica, they were just so happy to see me and my baby the son of an African king.” She smiled.
“I don’t remember much princely treatment in Jamaica.”
“But you always exaggerate your suffering and how long it lasted. That’s very American. Those people were good to you.”
“Or maybe you diminish and try to forget the suffering. That’s very English.”
She looked away again, this time so emphatically that when the cat returned it seemed to do so to save us from the awkwardness.
* * *
I’d given up using the tape recorder during our sessions not only because the amount of material was so vast that it would be a challenge to transcribe but also because I realized that my mother could no longer fill the gaps in her story. This could only be done by making my own trip to Nigeria. She said as much, encouraging me to track down my godfather and talk to my uncles instead of trusting all the Biafra books that were still appearing. Until then, there was the gin and tonic and—in the wake of chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant—occasional marijuana tablets.
“What was Lagos like when you arrived?”
“Someone said it was feeling itself be a city for the first time. It was probably Chris the poet who said that. Please make sure you write about Chris Okigbo. He was a dear, dear friend.”
Her eyes went warm, almost tearing up. Because she seemed so hurt by her mention of Okigbo, I didn’t tell her that everyone wrote about him now and that his death had attained far greater meaning than it had even in her time.
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“But it was still colonial, still orderly and clean. There was pride in maintaining what the English left. That’s gone now, I know. Most of my social life was in the officers’ quarters, and we had house boys and house girls. A lot of dust and dirt, though.”
“It looks amazing in the photos.”
“It was! Even when people said that the Northerners were jealous of what we were doing in Lagos and the Muslims thought Igbos were corrupt and loving life too much, none of that mattered. Until they started killing us like diseased cattle, we thought that in Lagos there was room for everybody. But we were only thinking about Lagos.”
“Cities that big can seem infinite.”
“For most of the people, Lagos was replacing villages. There everyone was coming from everywhere. People from the villages were becoming Nigerian for the first time. A lot of our set were international, schooled in America, England, in Europe—not just military, but doctors, barristers, professors, and poets, and people from Ghana and Congo. And there was the civil-service set. Some of them were West Indian from before independence. Lagos wasn’t as big as it is now, but there always seemed room. It was like America that way.”
“So, you were in Lagos when people started moving east to Igboland.”
“To Biafra. No, I was between Enugu, where you were born, and Onitsha. He was stationed there. You were born at the start of the bombing of the East. We traveled to Onitsha, where I was training nurses and midwives. We’d drive to Lagos for parties and visits. And when he went to the Congo with your godfather—”
“And that was for?”
“A United Nations mission after Patrice Lumumba was killed. While he was gone, I stayed in our village.”
“You mention his traveling. He went to India too, right?”
“Yes, for a military training course. It was 1966.”
“There was a coup that year that people say made the civil war happen.”
She became withdrawn, and I wondered if it was the medication, the remembering, or both. The 1966 coup was a particularly bloody one, led by a cadre of soldiers who killed almost two dozen high-ranking political and social figures, including Nigerian Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and the Muslim leader of the North, Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto. This coup, led largely by Igbo leaders, was viciously subdued by the government, but it triggered a countercoup six months later by Muslim officers in northern Nigeria. Although the Igbo soldiers who had led the prior coup argued that its focus was anticorruption, the Muslim officers saw it as based on ethnicity. The countercoup caused a suspension of the Nigerian constitution. A military government was installed with Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon—my father and godfather’s colleague from Sandhurst—at its head. This installation justified in the minds of many Northerners a long-standing suspicion that Igbos were trying to take over the country. The cultural impact of Igbos—they were the first to embrace Christianity, the English language, and Western education—and their having a culture devoted to enterprise is why many described them as the “Jews of Africa.” Their being targeted for genocide would seal that description.
“There is something that seems to obsess historians and doesn’t make much sense to me,” I said. “A lot of people say my father was a part of the 1966 coup, that he was their ‘man in the East.’ Why was he mysteriously sent to India just before it happened?”
“He went on a training course, yes, to India. He brought me that wooden egg I’ve shown you. You really liked playing with it when you were young but I kept it from you. You would have lost it. Do you know where it is?”
“But was he a part of that group that some think actually started the war? It seems to me that if he were going to lead a military strike he’d not suddenly leave right before to go to India.”
“Could you bring me the egg, please? Look for it.”
“And if he was involved, wouldn’t he be arrested when he got back?”
“I will be truly distraught if that egg is not in this house.”
“Okay then, let’s talk about the village. Sometimes you stayed there alone.”
“Boy, you know that you can never be alone in Africa.” She laughed. “We used to say that all the time.”
“But you were there alone after he died.”
“Where else would I go? We came back to the village and stayed there until we left the country weeks before Biafra fell in 1970.”
“I want to talk about that, but first I want to know what the village was like in the early days for you.”
“Well, at first I did miss Lagos. But you know, the point was to become an Igbo wife. Even though your father always told me to be a Jamaica woman, God bless him. He and your godfather wanted the women in the village to be like me. Can you imagine? They imitate me while I was imitating them. Your godfather said I was the modern black woman, which I don’t think meant anything to people in the village. He was very serious about Biafra being a symbol of the struggle of the Black Man, which I didn’t understand at all.”
“Why didn’t you understand it?”
“Well, when we said it in England, we were talking about whites or racism or the color bar and all that. Here the Northerners and the federal government were also the Black Man, so what he said made no sense unless black was his way of saying something else; in which case, he should have found a better word.”
Apparently, she’d accepted the logic of the Black Man only up to a certain point. It was a thing that men said. Such thinking became unacceptable when the federal government’s blockade of Biafra started to produce lethal results. Britain was still her Mother Country despite the racism she’d encountered there, but it was aware of the starvation and violence in Biafra and discouraged other nations from intervening. With the numbers of people dying all around her as Biafra was brought to heel, it was clear that there was no more hope to be placed in the Mother Country or the Black Man.
“Maybe he meant that all Nigerians were struggling against the legacy of the British and colonialism. They were involved in this too.”
“Ha, I think the British wanted the oil. They supported genocide to protect it. The worst thing to happen to Nigeria is they found oil in the East before independence. Our mistake was to think it would be without consequences.”
“And that’s still the main problem, the oil—”
“No, it’s not the oil that’s the main problem.”
“Well, the British wanted it. I’m sure the Americans wanted it too. That’s what I mean.”
“That’s not what you mean. I know what you mean.”
“What do I mean?”
“You want to blame whites. You want to blame America. For everything.”
This time I was the one who looked away. She was sitting up now without the cushions. Her cat was in her arms, and she stroked it with great concentration. As revenge, I imagined her as the type of comic-book villain the Phantom or James Bond used to face who had cats to signify just how sinister they were.
When she talked about Biafra, she usually emphasized the oil and the fact that the British had supported the Nigerian Federal Government against Biafra due to it. This sudden refusal to see the war as colonial and racial was as much a comment on my godfather’s faith in the Black Man as it was a critique of my own racialized politics, which to her must have seemed similar.
It was, understandably, difficult to challenge her on these topics. She had seen men and boys in fragments, bones exposed and limbs held together by stretched skin. House boys and gardeners, teachers and merchants, priests and taxi drivers, friends and enemies dying in ways that suggested depths of hatred that could not be explained by oil or borders or skin or arbitrary names like Nigeria or Biafra.
Then there was kwashiorkor, which haunted her for the rest of her life. She watched the bellies of children swell and their heads balloon, their bones fragile like long bits of coral found on Jamaican beaches. In her view, it was indecent to assign blame for the violence itself. Nobody was “behind” all t
his. There were simply those who did the killing and those who did not, those who did nothing and those who did everything they could.
What surprised me was that her disillusionment with political explanations for genocide occurred after my father’s death, not alongside it. But with so many dying every day and so many depending on her to manage their losses, she thought it selfish to give in to grief. There was no time to parse whatever ideologies may have contributed to the conflict. Then there was her child, me, not just a fatherless infant but now the head of a family, the first son of the first son. As such, I was less hers than her husband’s family’s. She would be shocked to discover her rights to the child were effectively annulled by her husband’s death.
This part of the story, along with how my father actually died, had always been beyond her capacity to tell. There was nothing about it in her papers. It required information and insights that could only come from my own trip to Nigeria.
And what I would learn there was this: my father died near Onitsha, lungs pierced by shrapnel. Because this area never been shelled before, his men assumed that his location had been betrayed. That is why rumors of assassination always emerged when I asked my uncles or ex-soldiers about his death. Because my mother’s new culture dictated that she marry her husband’s brother, a ceremony was prepared within weeks of the funeral, and in the midst of war, rituals began. She, however, decided to run. I don’t know if it was a moment of panic or a detailed plan. I also don’t know how far she traveled before the family realized she was gone. What is known is that she wrapped her child in fabrics and drove as fast as she could across shelled-out roads and targeted fields past where her husband had been wounded to where she knew my godfather to be. Legend has it that upon discovering that the child had been taken—kidnapped, they say—her husband’s mother had a heart attack and died on the spot.
My godfather arranged for her and her baby to board one of the airlifts that had been smuggling food and medical supplies into Biafra. We were bundled on a plane decades past its use and piloted by European mercenaries that was filled with starving children with only my mother to care for them. It may have been the last one that flew out before the secessionist nation collapsed, but that too could be legend.
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