I Used to Say My Mother Was Shirley Bassey (7 page)

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.

T
HE
C
HRISTMAS 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.

Granny Ola had presents for all of us. She had selected a massive bolt of floral-patterned cloth, which in Yoruba is called
aso oke
(top cloth), and had new clothes made for everyone. It is very much in the Yoruba tradition to select a special cloth for family and friends to wear on special occasions. It's also about showing who's family and who's not. She demanded that we all wear the clothes straight away and with six people squeezed onto one sofa all dressed in the same floral pattern it was hard to see where one person ended and the other began. We looked like an amorphous Amos family blob with heads and hands appearing at random.

Stella and I were picked to help Granny in the kitchen and to start with it looked depressingly like it would be another meal made up of various kinds of paste. Stella was busy making the
garri
and I was helping to make
moin moin
, which is another kind of paste made from beans. Just as we were wondering if and when the meat was going to turn up . . . it did. On four legs. The butcher rounded the corner driving in front of him a fat goat with a bell around its neck and Mamma Ola got very excited and ran outside to greet him. She paid him the extra naira to kill the goat for us and a boy with a metal bath on his head grabbed the poor creature, stuck him in the bath and then stuck him for real. Half an hour later a skinned and gutted goat was sitting on the sideboard in the kitchen.

You can't be squeamish when it comes to food in Nigeria and Granny got out half a dozen different kinds of knife and set about chopping the animal into different cuts. There were steaks to barbecue, tough meat to stew, joints to roast, ears and cheeks to fry, trotters to boil into jelly and sweetbreads to be made. The kitchen became a carnival of energy and us kids were shooed away as the women set about preparing every part of the goat.

We enjoyed a banquet that day the likes of which I'd never had before or since. The men set about preparing outdoor tables and chairs and we all sat down. Dad dished out kola nuts to the adults as they waited. I think kola nuts should be called bitter nuts because to my palette they tasted so disgusting, but I found out they have caffeine in them and are good to eat if you are suffering from hunger pangs. As it happened, we didn't have to wait long for the food to start arriving. And once it started it didn't stop! Different dishes were ready at different times, so for hours and hours we all ate. First fried meats, then barbecued, then roasted, then stewed. The meal went on for so long that you could go to bed, sleep it off and then come back hours later to find a fresh plate in front of you.

The meal went on late into the night and by the next morning people were slumped on armchairs, across sofas, in beds and even outside at the dinner table. I thought back to the Christmases we hadn't really enjoyed in London. Christmas back there involved a roast in our jeans and T-shirts followed by watching telly and heading to bed at a sensible hour. By Boxing Day morning normally Mum or Dad would be back working and all memories of Christmas would be fading fast. Here in Abeokuta the mammoth task of cleaning up didn't even begin until Boxing Day evening, simply because it took that long to rouse everyone from their slumbers.

The next few days were marked by more relatives coming and going and, before we knew it, New Year's Eve had arrived. Nigerians know how to party like no others and that evening I was to learn the words
owambe
(party),
effizzy
(swagger) and
shakara
(showing off). Simply dressing for the occasion is an all-day thing for most women, who go out in their absolute finest. We all went out in the early evening wearing the clothes Mamma Ola had had made for us and the whole town was on the streets ambling around. There was to be a free party at the Abeokuta football stadium that night and, even though it was only a few minutes' walk, it took us nearly an hour to get there as we had to stop and talk to everyone that crossed our path.

Abeokuta stadium can hold 30,000 people in the stands, but when they open up the pitch for a public event it can hold twice that. As we stepped into the middle of the stadium we could have been a visiting football team dressed in our matching outfits. Massive petrol generators had been installed around the edges of the pitch and the sound they made was already deafening. Auntie Yomi from Ikeja had come up to Abeokuta from Lagos to set up the sound systems and when we arrived she came and greeted us one by one.

‘Welcome! Welcome! It's loud isn't it? What a lot of work to control all of this! Thank God they chose some of us from Lagos to look after everything. But you wait until the
Gbedu
(sound systems) are installed. It's going to be a real
owambe
tonight!'

We watched all evening as people and equipment arrived. A small market was set up where people could buy food, drink, streamers, bangers and sparklers. When the massive sound systems were hooked up to the generators, they started playing music at a deafening volume and slowly more and more people from across town showed up. By nightfall, giant bonfires were lit all around the stadium and they served as little centres of activity, each with their own sound system playing different sorts of music from Afrobeat to soul and rap music. There was even one area in the stadium where they were playing church music and a gospel choir had turned up. Religion, as I said, is everywhere in Nigeria, but even if one person is very conservative and God-fearing they don't mind rubbing shoulders with people who are on the wilder side of life.