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Obi was away in England for a little under four years. He sometimes found it difficult to believe that it was as short as that. It seemed more like a decade than four years, what with the miseries of winter when his longing to return home took on the sharpness of physical pain. It was in England that Nigeria first became more than just a name to him. That was the first great thing that England did for him.
But the Nigeria he returned to was in many ways different from the picture he had carried in his mind during those four years. There were many things he could no longer recognize, and others—like the slums of Lagos—which he was seeing for the first time.
As a boy in the village of Umuofia he had heard his first stories about Lagos from a soldier home on leave from the war. Those soldiers were heroes who had seen the great world. They spoke of Abyssinia, Egypt, Palestine, Burma and so on. Some of them had been village ne’er-do-wells, but now they were heroes. They had bags and bags of money, and the villagers sat at their feet to listen to their stories. One of them went regularly to a market in the neighboring village and helped himself to whatever he liked. He went in full uniform, breaking the earth with his boots, and no one dared touch him. It was said that if you touched a soldier, Government would deal with you. Besides, soldiers were as strong as lions because of the injections they were given in the army. It was from one of these soldiers that Obi had his first picture of Lagos.
“There is no darkness there,” he told his admiring listeners, “because at night the electric shines like the sun, and people are always walking about, that is, those who want to walk. If you don’t want to walk you only have to wave your hand and a pleasure car stops for you.” His audience made sounds of wonderment. Then by way of digression he said: “If you see a white man, take off your hat for him. The only thing he cannot do is mold a human being.”
For many years afterwards, Lagos was always associated with electric lights and motorcars in Obi’s mind. Even after he had at last visited the city and spent a few days there before flying to the United Kingdom his views did not change very much. Of course, he did not really see much of Lagos then. His mind was, as it were, on higher things. He spent the few days with his “countryman,” Joseph Okeke, a clerk in the Survey Department. Obi and Joseph had been classmates at the Umuofia C.M.S. Central School. But Joseph had not gone on to a secondary school because he was too old and his parents were poor. He had joined the Education Corps of the 82nd Division and, when the war ended, the clerical service of the Nigerian Government.
Joseph was at Lagos Motor Park to meet his lucky friend who was passing through Lagos to the United Kingdom. He took him to his lodgings in Obalende. It was only one room. A curtain of light-blue cloth ran the full breadth of the room separating the Holy of Holies (as he called his double spring bed) from the sitting area. His cooking utensils, boxes, and other personal effects were hidden away under the Holy of Holies. The sitting area was taken up with two armchairs, a settee (otherwise called “me and my girl”), and a round table on which he displayed his photo album. At night, his house-boy moved away the round table and spread his mat on the floor.
Joseph had so much to tell Obi on his first night in Lagos that it was past three when they slept. He told him about the cinema and the dance halls and about political meetings.
“Dancing is very important nowadays. No girl will look at you if you can’t dance. I first met Joy at the dancing school.” “Who is Joy?” asked Obi, who was fascinated by what he was learning of this strange and sinful new world. “She was my girl friend for—let’s see …”—he counted off his fingers—“… March, April, May, June, July—for five months. She made these pillowcases for me.”
Obi raised himself instinctively to look at the pillow he was lying on. He had taken particular notice of it earlier in the day. It had the strange word osculate sewn on it, each letter in a different color.
“She was a nice girl but sometimes very foolish. Sometimes, though, I wish we hadn’t broken up. She was simply mad about me; and she was a virgin when I met her, which is very rare here.”
Joseph talked and talked and finally became less and less coherent. Then without any pause at all his talk was transformed into a deep snore, which continued until the morning.
The very next day Obi found himself taking a compulsory walk down Lewis Street. Joseph had brought a woman home and it was quite clear that Obi’s presence in the room was not desirable; so he went out to have a look round. The girl was one of Joseph’s new finds, as he told him later. She was dark and tall with an enormous pneumatic bosom under a tight-fitting red and yellow dress. Her lips and long fingernails were a brilliant red, and her eyebrows were fine black lines. She looked not unlike those wooden masks made in Ikot Ekpene. Altogether she left a nasty taste in Obi’s mouth, like the multicolored word osculate on the pillowcase.
Some years later as Obi, newly returned from England, stood beside his car at night in one of the less formidable of Lagos slum areas waiting for Clara to take yards of material to her seamstress, his mind went over his earlier impressions of the city. He had not thought places like this stood side by side with the cars, electric lights, and brightly dressed girls.
His car was parked close to a wide-open storm drain from which came a very strong smell of rotting flesh. It was the remains of a dog which had no doubt been run over by a taxi. Obi used to wonder why so many dogs were killed by cars in Lagos, until one day the driver he had engaged to teach him driving went out of his way to run over one. In shocked amazement Obi asked why he had done it. “Na good luck,” said the man. “Dog bring good luck for new car. But duck be different. If you kill duck you go get accident or kill man.”
Beyond the storm drain there was a meat stall. It was quite empty of meat or meat-sellers. But a man was working a little machine on one of the tables. It looked like a sewing machine except that it ground maize. A woman stood by watching the man turn the machine to grind her maize.
On the other side of the road a little boy wrapped in a cloth was selling bean cakes or akara under a lamppost. His bowl of akara was lying in the dust and he seemed half asleep. But he really wasn’t, for as soon as the night-soilman passed swinging his broom and hurricane lamp and trailing clouds of putrefaction the boy quickly sprang to his feet and began calling him names. The man made for him with his broom but the boy was already in flight, his bowl of akara on his head. The man grinding maize burst into laughter, and the woman joined in. The night-soilman smiled and went his way, having said something very rude about the boy’s mother.
Here was Lagos, thought Obi, the real La
gos he hadn’t imagined existed until now. During his first winter in England he had written a callow, nostalgic poem about Nigeria. It wasn’t about Lagos in particular, but Lagos was part of the Nigeria he had in mind.
“How sweet it is to lie beneath a tree
At eventime and share the ecstasy
Of jocund birds and flimsy butterflies;
How sweet to leave our earthbound body in its mud,
And rise towards the music of the spheres,
Descending softly with the wind,
And the tender glow of the fading sun.”
He recalled this poem and then turned and looked at the rotting dog in the storm drain and smiled. “I have tasted putrid flesh in the spoon,” he said through clenched teeth. “Far more apt.” At last Clara emerged from the side street and they drove away.
They drove for a while in silence through narrow overcrowded streets. “I can’t understand why you should choose your dressmaker from the slums.” Clara did not reply. Instead she started humming “Che sarà sarà.”
The streets were now quite noisy and crowded, which was to be expected on a Saturday night at nine o’clock. Every few yards one met bands of dancers often wearing identical dress or “aso ebi.” Gay temporary sheds were erected in front of derelict houses and lit with brilliant fluorescent tubes for the celebration of an engagement or marriage or birth or promotion or success in business or the death of an old relative.
Obi slowed down as he approached three drummers and a large group of young women in damask and velvet swivelling their waists as effortlessly as oiled ball bearings. A taxi driver hooted impatiently and overtook him, leaning out at the same time to shout: “Ori oda, your head no correct!” “Ori oda—bloody fool!” replied Obi. Almost immediately a cyclist crossed the road without looking back or giving any signal. Obi jammed on his brakes and his tires screamed on the tarmac. Clara let out a little scream and gripped his left arm. The cyclist looked back once and rode away, his ambition written for all to see on his black bicycle bag—FUTURE MINISTER.
Going from the Lagos mainland to Ikoyi on a Saturday night was like going from a bazaar to a funeral. And the vast Lagos cemetery which separated the two places helped to deepen this feeling. For all its luxurious bungalows and flats and its extensive greenery, Ikoyi was like a graveyard. It had no corporate life—at any rate for those Africans who lived there. They had not always lived there, of course. It was once a European reserve. But things had changed, and some Africans in “European posts” had been given houses in Ikoyi. Obi Okonkwo, for example lived there, and as he drove from Lagos to his flat he was struck again by these two cities in one. It always reminded him of twin kernels separated by a thin wall in a palm-nut shell. Sometimes one kernel was shiny black and alive, the other powdery white and dead.
