safe.
I don’t remember ever feeling safe. Before I was born, my father got transferred from Lagos, the commercial hub of the country, to Aba, a city toned Sepia. And on a Monday afternoon some months later, I came out from my mother screaming with my mouth wide open. My mother says I was an ugly child, but my father says I was beautiful, and I know he means it because I see it in his eyes when he says it. Though it doesn’t make my mother wrong.
At the age of six I became conscious of how unsafe I was. In Aba, Bakassi warriors would storm into beer parlours in the middle of the day, setting the whole place ablaze. And the news would carry the report in the evening, casually, before going on a break sponsored by Cowbell, our milk. One time, the Local government chairman sent out a directive banning girls from wearing trousers in the city, and I saw my beautiful neighbour Arith walking down from the gate, sobbing, because they had cut her jeans around the waist, and the hem, and the crotch area. Stupid fools.
But even with this, I doubt I would have been so conscious of how unsafe I was if not for the constant reminders from one of the five Pentecostal churches located on our street: The Lord’s Chosen, that held vigils three times a week where they called down fire and brimstone on their enemies. These vigils could last from eight pm till daybreak, and sometimes I could hear their speakers booming in my dreams. “Die by Fire, Die by Fire, Die by Fire, Die by Fire.” They’d repeat, again and again and again, the medley of their dissonant voices forming a semi-pleasant lullaby.
Aba was the type of place where if you sat down in a bus going to Okigwe, someone could sneeze on you and give you a handkerchief filled with juju that would make you lose consciousness, so that when you woke up, you’d find yourself in a bush in the middle of nowhere, primed for human sacrifice; the entrails of a pregnant woman pulsing with leftover breath a few feet before you. In this scenario, the only person that could save you was God. And sometimes he did, because he wanted to hear you give heartfelt testimonies in church the following sunday, followed by generous droppings in the offering basket. But this did not happen all the time. And on other occasions, nobody heard from you again, and you disappeared like a blip in the canvas of time.
Asides from its dirty roads, Aba was also known for dirty money. It was everywhere. In the streets that were mud red, and became a river in the months of june to august, tugging at the tyres of expensive cars and the big houses they led up to. “Do you know that white building on our street?” I recall my mother telling her elder brother once. “It is where all those big boys from our village come to drink beer and throw money around.” She did not have to tell him that it was a cult. At the back of my mind I could remember the leftover crumbs of a conversation she had had with another adult, (one I had no business listening into) about mysterious deaths of closed loved ones with promising futures, and sightings of doppelgangers in unfamiliar streets.
I don’t know why all these memories are coming back. I promised myself I wasn’t going to share this much, but at the age of nine my mother took my siblings and I on a road trip to Lagos. On the way, we were stopped by a troop of soldiers who were doing a routine check of vehicles (which we knew was just a way to collect bribes from passengers and incite terror). A man on the bus opened the window to spit out phlegm and he mistakenly spat at a soldier. Panic ensued. The soldier came into the bus, threatening to cut his ear off. My siblings and I cried, and I stared in shock as my mother pleaded with him not to unleash violence because there were children in the bus. Her bravery terrified me, for a country where telling children who misbehaved that you would call the police to pick them up was enough to make them cry. I hated the hollow feeling I felt in my guts after the soldier man left the bus, and his colleague banged on the side door and said, “oya be going.” The gala in my mouth felt like sand, and every meal after, until we got to my uncle’s house in Ketu.
But Venezuela was not any different.
2008, and everything was good for the first three years. I fell in love with pan sobao, and malta, and boys that listened to Linkin park and bought me coconut popsicles on Wednesday afternoons. Then Chavez died, and our first car was taken from my father at gun point, some months short of a year after we had gotten it. That car was my pride and joy. It had felt good to be one of the children at school whose fathers owned cars, and not just any car, a car that big. My father could not leave the house with peace of mind for months. And it took him months before he could tell us this. All the anxiety and fear he had felt; anxiety and fear he had made us feel, from his constant haranguing on our safety and refusal to allow us do things and meet people. But it hadn’t mattered, because God had saved him from it all, and divine intervention always had a way of miraculously erasing trauma. Even though I could see his hands tremble as he spoke.
The scene reinvented itself some months after when my mother witnessed a robbery between two men. When she told the story, it sounded funny to my ears. The thief cocked a gun at the side of his victim and asked for his cellphone. Then, examining the phone, he hit the victim’s head with it, and told him to buy a better phone (comprate un celular mas fino!) before running off. The dark humour quality of the story made an excellent lunch break tale, but in retrospect, it was a terrible thing to experience.
In Caracas, it was commonplace to hear of Nigerians being killed, and their properties stolen from them. I remember uncle Cheetah, who would carry us in his cab for free, and refused to accept payments from my mother because he respected her. How they shot him dead and stole his car, just like that. The aftermath of that event was fraught with the human tendency to rationalize bad occurrences. “After all they are involved in drugs, and are following Venezuelan women up and down” I heard people say. A vulgar stripping of humanity which we all participated in, whether we were conscious of it or not, in a bid to make the story make sense. If you died, it would not have happened if you lived a clean life. If you lived, God had saved you, and had given you one more chance to make things right. One night we were going for a church vigil in La Candelaria and as we walked past the Bulevar from the metro station, we saw a man in the middle of the road, blood gushing out from his side, and my head rang like a metal bell as my father repeated “don’t look, don’t look, don’t look” till we crossed to the other side. A few nights after, I stepped into the street absent mindedly, and a bullet whizzed past my head as a police man fired a shot at a criminal on the run.
I think about these incidents from time to to time. The close brushes. The number of times I prayed the blood on the sidewalk was just red paint for the flags. And the number of times I was wrong. Vaguely, I remember the time the police came over to our apartment to ask questions about the boys that stayed downstairs. They were criminals, but they were usually so nice. My father said they had arranged to steal the car, and it made sense. I told the police that I didn’t know any of them, because I had watched CSI: Miami and I knew better than to get myself involved. Another day I came back from a sleepover at my friend’s house by 8am and my father screamed at me, “If you ever go to her house again, don’t even bother coming back!” and I chuckled in my mind because I knew that he was not angry, he was afraid. We all were.
Several years have passed and I’m back here in Lagos, the city my parents left before my birth. But this lack of safety has coloured my surroundings so much, it’s found itself within my lines. I am living in Abule Oja, making indomie one night when I hear my friend tell her roommate to be careful, that they’re shooting outside. I marvel at the levelness of her voice, the charming disaffection as she says “guy they’re shooting around our side.” As if she were saying “guy, buy me shawarma as you’re coming back,” or “guy, let’s go and buy palazzos in Yaba.” I stutter, and burn my hand on the side of the pot. It unnerves me. How I don’t feel safe in my environment, my relationships, or my self. I am always looking for the blind spot, something to remind me that everything that promises to be too comfortable will somehow turnout wrong. It never disappoints. The people I know smile like everything is okay. Nigerians know how to wear pretence like aso oke, with pride. But I was born in Aba, and I grew up in Venezuela, so I don’t do a very good job at it. I’m always waiting for the egg to fall. Which is ironic, because whenever I touch my belly I can feel the shells floating around, a testament to what has already been broken.
