‘I must say I admire how they’ve managed to maintain so many old structures; some of these buildings are almost a thousand years old,’ Sylvester, the Namibian, said.
‘Yes, they preserved theirs while going everywhere to destroy others’,’ Njoki retorted.
Time passed quickly as the chilly autumn turned into sunless dreary winter that hurriedly transitioned into murky spring and sweltering summer.
Njoki complained about how ill equipped the buildings were for the change in weather. ‘Heaters everywhere, and not a single air conditioner in the rooms. I have to open my window and invite insects in because I’m sweating.’
Soon we were conducting research for our final thesis and spending hours in supervisors’ offices, and even more time in the career counsellor’s office seeking help with our job searches. I admired the utility of the careers office, the actual support it provided, unlike the one during my undergraduate years where the officer had reviewed curriculum vitaes with an ennui that said she’d only taken the role to avoid unemployment herself.
On the day we wore sub fusc for the last time, Njoki pulled at her neck ties and said wistfully, ‘You know, I’ll miss this thing.’
At the ceremony, my mother clapped the loudest when my name was called, Akin’s ring blinking on her finger. Afterwards, people commented on what a handsome couple my ‘parents’ were.
18
Breathless
The year 2015 opened with a flourish: new client jobs, networking dinners and talks of possible promotion. But the trip to America had snuffed the wind out of life and a new inextinguishable longing settled in its place, driving my pace at work.
It was ineffable, even to me, exactly what I longed for. I’d done well for myself – for an immigrant at least – with a job in the Square Mile (and in the Magic Circle of law firms), an annual six-figure salary and an apartment situated in Canary Wharf. It was more than many could hope for. And yet my days were shadowed by gnawing discontent.
Sensing the disequilibrium in my soul, Eriife sent articles florid with stories of young professionals and artists who’d moved back home and found purpose and success. ‘This could be you,’ each message said, and yet I didn’t want it to be me, at least not yet, I told her. But afterwards, I searched their names on social media and snuffed around their Instagram pages, imagining myself in their place, picturing life in a city where the sun did not just shine, it burned.
Zina thought otherwise. ‘Don’t mind Eriife and her politician tongue. This country is hard; have you forgotten so soon? No amount of money can protect you from the nonsense, one day you’ll be sick and you’ll wish you were in a country with decent healthcare.’
I shopped often, spending money I’d once hoarded and scrimped to send home to my mother before she’d informed me she was moving to America with Akin.
‘Nkechi has a job now and has moved to her own flat. Who will spend all this money you’re sending? Please keep some for yourself,’ she’d said then. And still I’d felt an annoyance that rankled at her decision, a possessiveness over her person. She was my mother before she was Akin’s wife; their wedding was a simple affair at the marriage registry at Ikoyi. Now we’d formed a new bond exchanging stories of racist aggressions we faced.
‘You should have heard the way she called out the bill! Is it because of my accent? Does being African automatically make us poor?’ she said. And I wanted to remind her that not too long ago, we were that: poor.
I no longer glanced at the shop attendants that tailed my movement with wry amusement. It had first happened at Oxford, in my very first week, on the day I’d stopped by a shop for a thicker sweater. I’d spent a few minutes browsing, working the currency conversions in my head, when I’d noticed a blonde shadow. I’d read about it on online forums and immigrant chat rooms – ‘prepare to be followed around any shop you visit,’ they said – and I’d scoffed. To experience it so ineluctably was jarring. I’d marched up to the attendant and pulled out one of the shiny 50 pound notes my mother had tucked in my bag at the airport and said, ‘Where is your counter? I’d like to pay for this sweater,’ and taken satisfaction in watching her face turn beet red. With time, I’d begun to view them with tolerant amusement.
Now they no longer amused me. I thought of Njoki who used to say, ‘Those working-class teenagers steal more than any of us, but how would they notice when they’re too busy following us around like policemen and looking at our notes under lights like they work at the Bank of England? Who would come to their country if ours were working properly? Such cold people, you greet them and they answer with their nose.’ I thought of calling her – it had been a while since we’d spoken – to hear her speak of colonial theory and laugh at her jokes. But I worried she would no longer be interested in such conversations, too far removed from the problems of blackness in a foreign land.
Braids were the reason Njoki had returned to her country. ‘Listen, you’re already at a disadvantage with your accent and immigration status. You have to try to get in first, then once you’re comfortable, you can do whatever hairstyle you like,’ I advised her, but she refused to take out her braids in favour of a weave-on for job interviews. ‘Why should I pretend to be someone else? You think I’ve not noticed how you’ve started twisting your tongue for these people?’ she protested.
‘It’s not being someone else; it’s being smart. I’m still me. I’ll always be Nigerian inside,’ I said.
‘Well, I want to be Kenyan outside,’ Njoki said.
The interviews had all returned the same result: polite rejection. ‘Even their rejections are very British,’ she joked. Still, I sensed a plaintive sadness at their refusal to hire her, an Oxford graduate.
She bought a plane ticket to Nairobi the day my job offer came; a small role to build experience so I could apply for a trainee solicitor position.
‘Why not come stay with me? We can get a small apartment and you’ll look for a job while I work, and when you get a job, you can pay me your half of the rent,’ I proposed.
‘Nah, I think the ancestors are calling me back to the fatherland. I’ll be better off there anyways,’ she said. ‘This place was already driving me mad.’
We kept in touch via Facebook and intermittent phone calls but our friendship had begun to feel like a distant waning thing. In her last uploaded picture, she was laughing with a dark-skinned man, a man she hadn’t told me about.
The outfits were ill-suited for the coming weather I knew, the tops sleeveless and loose fitting, the dresses cropped and lightweight cotton. Still, I shopped, saying to myself that I was taking advantage of the discounts, and not the yearning that knocked insistently. The worst of winter was imminent and yet I shopped for the sun.
Like the Hydra with its multiple heads, other forms of loneliness emerged with a central character at their fore: Emeka. He came to me in dreams, dreams so poignant and lucid that when I eventually opened my eyes, they left me feeling adrift, unsure of reality.
In the middle of the erratic winter that opened the new year, a radio station played Shayne Ward’s ‘Breathless’ and the Uber driver turned the volume up. ‘Now that’s it for Throwback Thursday, shout out to Shayne Ward. Hope you lovers out there enjoyed it,’ the radio host sounded out as the final strings of the song died and I realised I’d stopped typing as the song played.
In my apartment that night, I allowed myself to think of him, the most I’d obliged myself in a long time. Opening Facebook, I searched for his profile, scrolling past multiple Daniels and Chukwuemeka Igwes – he’d been right, his name was indeed common – until I stumbled on a thumbnail that resembled the person I knew. One mutual friend, the subtext underneath said. I clicked on it and Zina’s name popped up.
I scouted the picture folder for signs of a wife or girlfriend and found only pictures of him smiling in the sun on holiday, at tech conferences and with t-shirted colleagues all wearing the logo of his startup. He’d grown a beard and it added a ruggedness to his looks I liked. I wondered if he’d ever visited the UK and thought of calling Zina to ask for her password so I could view pictures only available to friends, then I imagined her reaction and thought better of it.
I’d never told Zina but I’d dated in my first year in London. A proper working-class English boy named George that Njoki – who I’d never told about Emeka – had described as ‘so pale!’ when I sent her his pictures.
‘He likes West Indian cuisine, and reggae music and afro pop,’ I’d said in his defence.
We’d met at a work conference, and for weeks, flirted off and on, until I agreed to go on a date. He kissed me that evening in the car, his tongue darting about my mouth with purpose, and I enjoyed it, inviting him upstairs to my apartment. There, we continued, our hands rushing up our clothing until he reached for the edge of my underwear and my body turned solid.
We never spoke after that, and every now and then, I thought of calling him to offer an explanation. But how did you say, ‘I was raped’?
Change was coming; Eriife was sure of it.
‘Ego, the people are tired. They’re ready for real change, and we will bring it,’ she said.
In English politics, the left was the ‘progressive’ side, the side that wanted a more socialistic approach to governance, feeding programmes and general healthcare, and the right favoured the capitalistic approach, staunch proponents of trickle-down economics and retention of systems and ‘values’ as they were. Each side considered themselves right, and every social issue and figure was politicised along these lines. In the digital sphere, it was an interminable battle to see who could one-up the other, who could be in creation of the most raucous cacophony; there was no nuance, no complexity. There was only right and wrong, and the other side was always definitely wrong.
Back home, our problems were more elemental – there was the kleptomaniacal ruling class, and there were the people. And it reflected in our daily language, in considerations of duty to self and country. It wasn’t about capitalism or socialism; it was about those who greedily pocketed the nation’s coffers, who implemented policies to ensure monopolistic advantage for their cronies and utilised institutions to pursue political grievances, who exhibited a blatant disregard for the rule of law.
And so, when people tried to initiate conversations along the translated Western political lines, I found it absurd. There was no ‘service’; resignations were an anomaly. There was us, and there was them. And there were those willing to sacrifice their mothers to join them. Over time, especially as the parliamentary election results were announced in favour of the conservative party, I’d come to wonder if it was the same in England as it was in Nigeria, albeit in a less obvious form.
