That evening, Nwamaka’s boxes were arranged by the door. She was a university student now, and like her twin, a few years from finishing if the strikes would allow.
‘He’s promised to pay for all my fees and everything else going forward so you don’t have to worry about any of that,’ she said to my mother. ‘He’ll also sign the divorce papers as soon as the courts open since your mind is already made up.’
Nkechinyere grabbed at a box and began to pull it towards their room. ‘You can’t do this. I thought we talked about it?’
Nwamaka wrestled the handle from her twin. ‘We might be twins but we’re not joined at the hip. I’ll live my life how I want it.’
My mother wept when she was gone, sobs so strangled, I called Akin to calm her.
‘I failed, I failed as a mother,’ she said over and over.
The acceptance tasted like sawdust in our mouths. My mother was yet to recover from Nwamaka’s departure, and I could not muster any excitement at the prospect of leaving her behind.
‘Congratulations Nwakaego,’ it said.
‘I’m not going,’ I told her.
‘I will not allow you to waste such an opportunity,’ she said.
And so, I submitted the acceptance letter to the government office in charge of the scholarship applications to be included in my file, convinced I wouldn’t even be invited for an interview.
The lead interviewer stared at my name and profile long and hard, then she asked questions I thought too simple for such a prestigious scholarship, and I wondered if she’d recognised my surname, if she knew my father somehow and would use it as leverage one day to seek a favour from him. But the other interviewer seemed just as impressed. ‘It was good to meet you Nwakaego, expect to hear from us soon,’ he said.
We read the marriage announcement in the newspapers as we waited for the results, routinely scanning the pages of the dailies for a publication of the list.
Wedding bells are ringing in the households of Chief Dr Chigozie Azubuike and Chief Olanipekun Badmus as their children Nwamaka Azubuike and Olufela Badmus prepare to tie the knot. The much-anticipated event is expected to take place later this year and will be graced by the crème de la crème of society.
A thick envelope was delivered to our doorstep later that week – I’d gotten the scholarship. Akin drove me to the passport office to get my picture and biometrics taken. I applied for a visa, fearful that I’d be rejected, but the sandy-haired interviewer informed me I could come pick up my passport in three weeks.
Aunty Sally organised a send-off party; Aunty Ada and Sister Bolatito insisted on handling the cooking.
My mother’s brothers presented me with a well-padded envelope. ‘You’re only the second person from our family to go to obodo oyinbo to study, we’re very proud of you. Represent us well, you hear?’ Uncle Kelechi said on their behalf, pushing it between my fingers.
At the airport, my mother cried, until Nkechi told her, ‘You’ll see her again; she’s not dying.’
Before I walked towards the check-in point, my mother shoved an envelope in my handbag.
‘I have an allowance,’ I protested, realising it was more than she could afford.
She shook her head and zipped the bag closed. ‘I’m your mother. It’s what I’m supposed to do.’
At Oxford, we cycled: to class, to the store, to the city centre, to the weekly open marketplace.
‘The city’s mascot should be a cycling monkey,’ Njoki said even though she refused to buy a bicycle. ‘A car will blow its horn and I will panic and fall down. God forbid.’
We were the only black Africans in our class. On the very first day of the programme, the Dean had boasted about how Africans made up five percent of the set, an increase from two percent the previous year, but a majority of the Africans had turned out to be white South Africans who rarely, if ever, associated with the darker of our collective. Most times, we could barely tell them apart from the other foreigners, until they opened their mouths to speak.
‘We’re nothing but mere statistics, but at least we can benefit from it,’ Njoki joked at the African Society cookout, and everyone laughed.
At Oxford, tradition was upheld in its most historic form – the sub fusc at exams, the physical submission of printed assignments at the exams school, weekly debates at the Union, college dinners in vaulted halls with pictures of dead benefactors hanging. The ancient city was the school and the school was the city, or so we were told.
In my first days there, I did not have friends, and I blamed this on the fact that I hated drinking, the acrid aftertaste and burning sensation as the alcohol passed from mouth to gut. If there was anything graduate students loved to do, it was drink; restaurant hopping, weekend pub crawls, house parties, there seemed to be a constant flow of alcohol. In the beginning, I tagged along, desperate to make the most of my experience, then as the day waned into darkness and spirits heightened in bloodstreams, I discovered that I was the only one without the added sheen of humour alcohol provided, and as others guffawed at the stale jokes, I gaped at them, lonely in my mirthlessness.
There was also the problem of funds. For many students, Oxford was simply another stamp in the book, not a fragile lifeline to survival. Having parents that descended from old money, had links to Asian royalty and sat on the boards of multinationals meant there was always an exciting city to visit, a new restaurant that had just opened down the street, some competition with another school that required a trip. Their lives were free of the creases of scholarships, the limitations of allowances. I envied them their superior passports that did not require visas to move between borders, the ease with which they could travel through life.
An Indian classmate called Aarav asked why my English was so good. I stared at him for a long minute, feeling my accumulating frustration mount even higher. An American had already asked how I’d flown to England and if we had access to the internet back home; a professor had looked around the class for someone to answer his question, he’d stopped at my raised hand and my name tag, stared at the letters for mere seconds – what was so hard about pronouncing Ego? – and called on a girl named Jessica instead.
‘You’re Indian, right?’ I asked.
‘Yes?’ He seemed confused by the line of my questioning.
‘Then you should know we were colonised by the same country, and so of course I speak English. Don’t they teach that in secondary schools in your country? At the very least, I know India gained its independence in 1947.’
People avoided me after that. I imagined Aarav going round whispering, ‘You wouldn’t believe what she said,’ and so kept to myself, hiding in my college room.
Njoki sought me out after a lecture. ‘So you’re the one that put that Aarav in his place. It’s great to officially meet you,’ she said.
I looked around, unsure of who she was speaking to.
Njoki continued, ‘I can understand the whites, even the snooty white South Africans with their Afrikaans accent, but how can Asians join them to look down on us? Are we not suffering racism together?’
She laughed, and I thought her laughter brash; it reminded me of Zina. Later she would tell me, ‘I’ve been gauging you from afar. For a while, I thought you were one of those fake Africans that like to lounge in the sun during summer like they’re looking for a tan and talk about how warm it is.’
Through Njoki, I discovered the African Society and the constant battle between the Nigerians and black South Africans for supremacy, the Congolese students and their winding flexible waists, the monthly cookouts where the Ghanaians insisted on cooking jollof rice with basmati rice. Once, a Namibian tried to invite a white South African student in the African Studies department to the cookout.
‘Please bring out your phone,’ Chukwuka, the society president said to him when he informed us. ‘It’s not too late, uninvite her before she gets here. Blacks only!’
In our gatherings, we had unrestricted freedom to discuss the culture shock we’d experienced without the veneer of politeness.
