‘Akin sent me something for my birthday, you know he earns in dollars,’ she said.
‘You’re lying, your birthday isn’t until next month,’ I retorted.
‘He sent it early.’
‘Nwakaego, I don’t need money!’
‘That one is your business. I’ve sent it already, go and pick it up from Western Union.’ She knew. She’d pretended not to know, but she did. I wondered if that was why I hadn’t gotten any roles, if my acting was so poor that even my friend knew I was struggling.
The man at the Western Union counter stared at my ID card for a while, whether he was looking at my name or the caricature portrait, I wasn’t sure. But eventually, he counted the naira equivalent to £500, shoved it in an envelope and handed it over.
21
Boundaries
We shot the final scenes of the movie in South Africa: a retelling of an old Nollywood movie about a group of con artists who stumble on illicit loot; a story of poverty and its desperations. Zino was eager to make it a memorable one, and having come on as an executive producer, he put forward the funds necessary to do so.
‘I’ve been in the business long enough to spot a good project,’ he said to me. ‘We need to push the boundaries, tell more stories. Our people are incredibly talented, they just need the backing of entrepreneurs and the government out of their way.’
Zino’s irrefutable passion for all things Nigerian irked and confounded me. The blue American passport kept secure in a safe box in his room and the bottomless funds in accounts across multiple banks meant he could leave, turn his back and never have to deal with the inanity, and yet not only did he stay, but he remained committed to creating an element of transformation one way or another. He was as unconvinced as I was convinced that the country was irredeemable. At the airport, they checked his passport quickly, respectfully, while I was subjected to inquisitorial questioning.
‘If all of us left, who would stay to fix things for the millions who can’t afford to go?’ he often said. I concluded he had a penchant for fixing things, the same way he’d pulled me back from the edge at the start of our friendship.
In Onitsha, I’d slept in boarding houses with peeling walls, rats that scurried at night, scavenging for their next meal, munching on the skin of human feet when they couldn’t find it. The bathrooms had no running water and so we depended on the filmy water that rose in the well at the back of the compound; we killed the earthworms that slithered up the drain with salt and shouted for whoever was behind the broken door to finish quickly so others could bathe.
‘Do you know anybody here? Who sent you?’ one of the casting directors asked at the first location I tried. His eyes moved up and down my frame, settling meaningfully on my hips.
‘She’s a fine girl sha,’ his counterpart commented. To me, he asked, ‘What’s your name again?’, shuffling through the papers in front of him. ‘You’re okay, still new, but let’s see.’
For my first role, I was paid twenty thousand naira, barely enough to cover rent for a decent room. I spent the money on food and new shoes; the soles of every pair I owned had been eaten in by the tar of the streets I’d trudged. The next role paid just ten thousand naira more, and the next. A director recommended me to another director, and I played a role that lasted more than ten minutes on screen; I was paid eighty thousand naira.
It was how I lived for a year, role to role, side job to side job, avoiding the ingratiating leers and surreptitious taps, the spoken and unspoken requests and suggestions, unwilling to return to my parents, defeated and at their mercy. Until one day, at the edge of the River Niger, I met Zino, and it was only then that my life truly changed.
In the Witteberg mountains of the Western Cape, we taped the adrenaline-packed car chase scenes, and exchanged fire between warring gangs.
‘This is what I’m talking about!’ the director said from behind the screen. Zino sat beside the director, cross-legged and expressionless, half of his face covered by oversized dark glasses. He was always hands-on with his projects.
We took a trip to Mossel Bay for the skydiving scenes.
‘Ready?’ the instructor asked as the door opened, filling the plane with a rush of cold wind.
I smiled. ‘It’s what I do.’
His brows creased in confusion.
‘Live on the edge,’ I clarified.
On our final night in South Africa, a team dinner was held in the hotel restaurant to celebrate the success of the shoot. I stayed in my room to video call Ego. She’d booked her flight, some of the boxes she’d shipped ahead had already arrived at my house. I’d given up on convincing her not to come back, and now our conversations focused on concrete plans for her return.
Her tweets gave no indication of the life-changing decision she’d made:
I wondered if someone had said or done something racist to her. Through her, I’d come to understand what it was like to discover what it meant to be black. In Nigeria, our prejudices were tribal, amplified by decades of colonial-forced cohabitation.
There was a knock at my door: Zino, wearing a fashionable belted two-piece and holding a bottle of champagne in one hand, two flutes in the other.
‘I was told you didn’t join the party,’ he said as I let him in. ‘So I came to make sure you weren’t moping about.’
Locking the door behind him, I said, ‘I had a call with Ego.’
‘Oh, I see. That’s lovely. When does she arrive?’ He settled in an armchair.
‘In two weeks,’ I replied, plopping on the bed and staring up at the ceiling.
He chuckled. ‘You act like she’s signed a death warrant. We both live there, you know.’
I huffed. ‘Well, I can’t speak for you, because like I’ve told you several times, you’re strange.’ He guffawed. ‘But I only live there because of my acting career. I can’t imagine going to London – where the glass ceiling is almost titanium by the way – or Los Angeles to hustle for roles with my accent, passport and African-sounding surname. Even Nigerian Americans are still trying to get roles without being accused of taking roles from African Americans. You think if I’d been born elsewhere or had a different career, I’d be in that country with you? Please.’
‘Well, shouldn’t you be celebrating this illustrious career that has kept you tied to your beloved country?’ He waved the flutes and bottle of Dom Pérignon.
I laughed. ‘I wouldn’t call it illustrious.’
It wasn’t illustrious – as yet – but it was surreal, even after so many years. To be cast as a lead in a movie that made it to the screen of a cinema, to travel to locations for shoots, to have my face printed on billboards.
‘The goal is to be too good to be rejected, to be more than a pretty face,’ Zino had told me back then as he’d drilled me through hours of practice and training. I did not object because I was hungry and desperate – the perfect recipe for docile compliance – and I still thought he wasn’t human. It had been too fortuitous, the sort of intervention my mother would label as divine.
We were the same, you see, he’d explained to me. His father had rejected him for refusing to participate in the family business, for not outwardly representing the sort of men their family groomed. He’d survived on a sizeable inheritance left to him by his grandparents, an inheritance he’d managed to multiply. But even the mention of an inheritance seemed too alien to assure me we were anything alike – my grandfather had perished in the rampage of the civil war, and my grandmother had followed him years later in a small, thatched hut in our village.
