I Used to Say My Mother Was Shirley Bassey (8 page)

There were hundreds of
suya
spots, but instead of getting barbecue for us, Dad ordered the whole family a big bowl of pepper soup each. This is an incredibly spicy mixture that should have meat in it. Unfortunately, on this night they had substituted the beef for a piece of unappetizing cow skin, which floated around in the radioactively hot soup. Cow skin doesn't normally feature on the average Western menu. None of us could stomach it that night and we pushed it away. Aunti Yomi was surprised that we didn't take to it. ‘Your English teeth cannot handle this delicacy,' she roared. ‘Waste not, want not.' And she gathered all of our bowls together and ate every one, carefully chewing each piece of meat until the bowls were empty.

Mum and Dad had long since stopped listening to our complaints about the food in Nigeria. I had moaned to Mama Bunmi back in Lagos that I missed things like McDonald's and that unless you count puddings made from condensed milk there are almost no sweets available. When I explained to her about Wham! bars back in London she was disgusted and said, ‘Ah, Stephen, if you have sweets all the time then you will die of piles!' She didn't mince her words.

I was hanging out by the sound system that was belting out Afrobeat music and a group of men in their twenties were standing nearby commenting on the women as they passed by. ‘Look at her. Oh my God!
Shakara!
Plenty! Stop it, sista! I'm falling in love with you.' They noticed me watching them and they invited me to join them as they danced to the music. As we were dancing together, they offered me a sip of a milky-looking liquid in a clear plastic bottle. My taste buds were challenged once again: it had a weird tang. I didn't know it at the time but I was drinking palm wine, which is a wicked concoction made of fermented tree sap. It is a bit stronger than wine and after a couple of gulps I was feeling very weird, but it seemed to give me energy to dance more.

Soon I was sweating and had to stop. Needing a rest and with a woozy feeling in my head, I wanted to find the others. It was then that I saw the familiar brocade floral pattern and blindly stumbled over to a lady as she went to a different part of the stadium. When we got to another bonfire, I was starting to feel faint and I tugged on her sleeve. When she turned around I was horrified to see that this young woman was a total stranger. The cloth Granny had bought was obviously not that unique after all! I panicked. This was serious. I was in a stadium with tens of thousands of people around me, with barely adequate lighting, and I was lost.

The young woman must have seen fear rising in my face and tried to calm me down. With the music playing so loud she could barely hear me as I tried to tell her my name, but I think it was pretty clear that I was a lost kid: it's not like I was going to ask her to dance. She didn't worry at all and actually took a moment to find a handful of sparklers. She gave me one and took one for herself and once they were lit we waved them around in front of us to clear a path back to where the Afrobeat music was playing. It was actually kind of fun as we strode through the crowds waving the sparklers ahead of us.

‘Not so fast, young man. Remember to walk with plenty of
effizzy
. You want people to stop and stare as you go past them. So remember to swagger.' I've never since managed a walk with such swagger and such fear hand in hand. I had no idea where my family was but somehow I knew that the feeling of being lost was nothing compared to the feeling of looking lost in a crowd full of people riding their
shakara
to the max.

After about forty minutes we were in a different part of the stadium and I heard a voice. ‘Stephen! Stephen! Where are you?' Through my drunken haze, I was very pleased to see that it was Auntie Yomi. She was watching a group of teenagers who were having a break-dancing competition. I ran up to her and told her I'd gotten lost.

‘Stephen! What is that smell on your breath?'

‘Nothing.'

‘You've been drinking toddy. What were you thinking?'

‘I followed that woman!' Yomi looked up and saw the woman who was dressed in the same pattern as I was and she laughed.

‘You had a lucky escape. But you won't be so lucky if your mummy and daddy find out you have been drinking! Look at you now. A big man! Well, you better steer clear of the others. Here come with me.' She led me to a
suya
stall, bought me something to eat and told me to wait there and not move an inch. She came back ten minutes later. ‘There. I told them you are going to stay here with me and so they won't bother about you when they want to go home. We will have fun tonight. And don't go running off chasing women.' So I spent the rest of the night with Auntie Yomi and her DJ friends having a blast. She was so cool and full of life that to be honest I may have even had a few more mouthfuls of palm wine before the evening was out.

M
UM
'
S FAMILY DIDN
'
T HAVE
any electricity due to a corruption scandal, which meant that only half of the town got wired up. They were in the wrong half, but Mama Bunmi's daughter was in the right half. So even though they only had a small apartment they at least got to enjoy fans, lights and television. A few days into January, after everyone had got over the excesses of Christmas and New Year, I went to visit Mama Bunmi and she took me to see the sights of Abeokuta.

We visited the famous rock after which Abeokuta is named. Olumo Rock is a huge system of interlocking rocks and caves and it looks prehistoric, a bit like something out of
The Flintstones
. Abeokuta grew as a town because the surrounding villages were being pillaged for slaves by other tribes. People chose to live ‘under the rock' because the rock and cave systems were easier to defend than the wide open plains surrounding it. We climbed the rock and, from that vantage point, we could see the first cathedral built in Nigeria, St Peter's Cathedral, and the other great building of Abeokuta – the Alake Palace, the home of the
Oba
(king).

Mama Bunmi may not have been as wealthy as Mum's family but she was worldly and friendly and well connected. When we got to the Alake Palace this humble old woman went straight up to the guard on the door, curtsied, and asked right there to have an audience with the King. The guard laughed at her because she'd been there many times before and knew the King well. Nothing happens fast in Abeokuta and we were told that the King would see us in an hour but that until he was ready we were free to look around the palace.

Nigeria has a lot of kings and a lot of princes. Loads of Nigerian last names start with Ade-, which means ‘king' or ‘crown'. So if you know an ‘Ade-something' then you know that they are descended from a king. That's not too difficult because in the olden days Nigerian
Oba
could have plenty of wives and plenty of children. If, when I say king, you start thinking of some kind of National Geographic-looking guy wearing leopard skin then forget it. This guy didn't have any real political power in Nigeria, but he was the most respected figure in the community, who wore tailored suits and had sent his son to be educated at Harrow.

The
Oba's
palace is built in a very grand fashion. You go through a big archway into a courtyard with an east wing and a west wing. Mama Bunmi took me around the palace, which she obviously knew pretty well. The rooms were huge and, with their high ceilings, they kept cool in the tropical heat. It didn't look as if anyone lived there, but although the rooms were completely unfurnished, on every wall hung pieces of traditional West African art. Some were normal painted pictures, others were random bits of acacia and mahogany with burned-on etching. The King had plenty of wooden and iron sculptures and there were a lot of wood-carved masks with coloured material and feathers adorning them. There was one figure that seemed to be represented a lot. It looked like a huge spider. Sometimes the spider had a man's head or sometimes there would be a man riding on the back of the spider.

When the
Oba
came down to see us, he greeted Mama Bunmi warmly. He was wearing a linen shirt and trousers to combat the heat of the tropical midday and black leather shoes, but he wore a traditional round Nigerian
fila
cap on his head. He was very old but seemed to have lots of energy and he was so tall that he had to stoop to embrace Mama Bunmi properly. When I saw him, I prostrated fully on the ground as usual. He laughed at this and said, ‘Ah! An
ajebo
who will prostrate to me!'

I winced at that. I still didn't like being called a butter eater at school.

When the
Oba
saw my reaction he said, ‘Now, Stephen, seriously. Although you were born in the West, do you feel like a Nigerian?'

‘Not really, sir.'

‘Let me tell you something. You are Nigerian if you live in Nigeria. Even
oyimbo
can be a Nigerian, if he lives here.'

‘Who is that man riding the spider in all of the pictures? Is it you?'

‘Oh my God! No! That is a picture of Anansi the spider! Have you never heard of Anansi the spider?'

‘I heard about him in school back in London – he's from Jamaica?'

The King kissed his teeth at that. ‘From the Caribbean? Don't forget that here he born! Anansi is the number one trickster and joker in West Africa too. He can tell a tall tale to fool even a wise man. In fact he is the god of stories too. Don't you know any
anansesem?
'

The King took us from room to room and pointed out the spider in all of the different pictures. ‘Each of these pictures tells an
anansesem
. An Anansi story. Look. That one tells how he became a spider in the first place.

‘You see in the time
bifor bifor
the gods and men lived together on earth and no one did much and nothing much was going on. Anansi is a prankster and to relieve his boredom he played a joke on another god who didn't take it very well. You can see here Anansi is beaten and shattered into eight pieces but because he is a god he couldn't die, so he came back as a spider.

‘Do you know how he got possession of the
anansesem
from his father, the king of the Gods?'

Mama Bunmi took over. ‘The first myth of Anansi is how he got all of the stories from the king of the gods, who until then would always guard them jealously. Anansi boldly went up to his father and asked him straight, “Why do you keep all the stories to yourself? Give them to me.”

‘Anansi's father underestimated his son. He didn't realize that Anansi is a clever god who almost always gets what he wants. So he set Anansi an impossible task. The chief god said that he would give away all of the stories if Anansi could bring back to him four difficult-to-capture creatures alive: a lion, a whole nest of hornets, a python and Mmoatia, a demon.

‘Anansi sat on the ground and thought to himself for a long time about how to go about getting these creatures to the chief god. The lion was a faster runner than Anansi even if he crawled on eight legs and he was bigger too, plus he had claws. Anansi could sneak up and try to bite him but then the lion might be killed. So he set about a trick. He knew where the lion's hut was and that he would go out hunting early in the morning and not come back until late in the evening, when he would be tired from all of his chasing and eating. So Anansi went to the lion's house in the morning and, once he saw lion run off, he used all of his legs to dig a deep hole in the ground. Once it was dug deep enough, he laid some palm leaves and twigs over the hole and sat back to wait.

‘When the sun was going down that evening the lion came running back home and, just as Anansi hoped, he fell right down into the hole. Anansi crawled to the hole and said, “Ho! Lion! Are you stuck or something?”

‘“Yes, Anansi, I fell in the hole. Can you help me?” Anansi went into the forest and found two sticks. He made a big show of reaching down to the lion with the sticks but lion's claws just slid right off of them.

‘“How about if I dangle my web over the side and you can grab on to them and pull yourself up.”

‘“Yes. Yes. Send me down as many strands as you can.”

‘So Anansi let down as much web as he could and sure enough the lion eventually dragged himself back to the surface. When lion finally reached the lip of the hole he bolted for his front door, but he was so entwined in Anansi's web that he couldn't move an inch! He begged Anansi to let him go, but the wily spider knew that he had well and truly caught the lion and brought him straight to the chief god to get his reward.

‘When it came to a whole nest of hornets it was a more difficult question. Hornets can't all be trapped in one place. What if just one escaped? Then the chief god would use it as an excuse to say Anansi had failed. He reasoned to himself that he would have to make them come to him willingly if he was to catch them at all. After thinking long and hard, Anansi decided to pick a gourd fruit from the forest. He ate the flesh to hollow it out and then filled the empty gourd with water. Next, Anansi scurried over to the hornets' nest and put a banana leaf on his head before emptying the gourd over himself and the hornets' nest at once. When the angry hornets came out to see what was going on, Anansi convinced them that it was raining and that they should shelter from the rain like he was doing with the banana leaf.

‘“But how can we cut down a banana leaf? Let us use yours.”

‘“No. I need to use this leaf to shelter myself but here, I have this empty gourd, you can shelter in there if you want.” The hornets thanked him and they flew one by one into the gourd and, once they were all in, what do you think Anansi did? Of course he sealed it up with the banana leaf and took the buzzing calabash filled with the gullible hornets back to his father.

‘Next Anansi had to find a Mmoatia demon, which is a hard job in itself because they live in the hot lands of the north and don't like talking to strangers. Plus they can turn invisible and can even kill you if they just touch you. They are very dangerous creatures and not even gods like Anansi can get to speak to them. How could he catch a Mmoatia without being able to trick him with words? As Anansi travelled north he thought about it. Mmoatia are famous for two things. One is that they are very superstitious and they fear god. Number two is that they are greedy and can't get enough yams to eat. They like yams even more than the Igbo people down in the River States.