Looking for Transwonderland (20 page)

Five minutes later the abseiling pair emerged through the trees and walked towards the highway, surrounded by the panting welcome committee. A police vehicle was parked on the highway, ready to collect them. The girl walked several paces in front of her friend. As she approached the 4 x 4, the onlookers parted to make way for her, like the sea fanning out for Moses. This tiny, red-headed slip of a thing looked exhausted as she cut a self-conscious swathe through the crowd. Everyone kept a respectful distance and watched her in silence. You could have heard a groundnut drop, it was so quiet. Her male friend, however, enjoyed a very different reception. This guy was the hero. He'd saved the girl.

‘Yaaaaay!' the men all cheered as he strode through, a strange display of male solidarity that I wasn't privy to. They tousled his blond, shoulder-length locks, patted his back and shook his shoulders until the police led him into the back of the police 4 x 4 like a rock star. The car zoomed off into the horizon, chauffering him and his friend back to wherever they had come from.

Their abseiling was not the only new thing happening on Zuma Rock. The government plans to build a $500 million, five-star tourist resort nearby to ‘boost' the area's economic development. There will be a cable car and walkway to Zuma's summit, and an artificial waterfall tumbling luxuriantly from the top. Already I could glimpse what looked like either a golf course or well-tended lawn just north of the base of the rock. I was all in favour of improving tourism, but how would this playground for the rich energise the local economy and educate people enough to stop ‘fearing' the rock? It all seemed like sweet icing on a rather stale
cake, an imitation of Western economies and their big service sectors. I wished that the government would focus on creating manufacturing jobs on a mass scale, too.

Now that the show was over, the hoards of spectators crossed the highway to mount their motorcycles. I ran from person to person, begging them to give me a lift to the nearby town of Suleja where I could catch a bus back to Abuja. A man eventually agreed in exchange for a few naira. I hopped on and we sped towards the town.

Back in Abuja that evening, I had to get a taxi back to Junior's house. I rather resented having to resume this form of transport, but it was the only means of getting around the city. Every fare had to be negotiated, and it often involved more wahala than I cared for. After getting into the vehicle, my driver opened the proceedings with a warning that the place was ‘far' and it would cost me
500. I baulked and suggested
150. Stamping his foot on the brake, he ordered me out of the vehicle in theatrical disgust. Angrily, I concurred, slamming the door shut and glaring into the middle distance, pretending to look for another taxi. This ritual dance of strategic posturing, kissing of teeth and mutual outrage was exhausting. Life in Nigeria was an unending negotiation, with few guarantees.

‘
250,' the driver said through the rolled-down window. ‘I am not cheating you.'
Story
. I declined with a haughty silence, and watched him drive away very slowly. After 10 metres, he opened the passenger door to offer a reconciliatory
200. I climbed back in and we resumed the journey back to the house.

 

‘Hausa men are the nicest,' my cousin Ketiwe said, referring to the biggest ethnic group in Northern Nigeria. We were ambling through stalls separated by tidy alleyways in Wuse Market, west of the city. ‘They buy you things, they take care of you when you're dating. If you run out of water they buy you a whole crate of bottled water.'

She and I were indulging in some silly ethno-romantic profiling. After witnessing the Hausa men's silence towards the female tourist at Zuma Rock, I had gender relations on my mind.

‘What about Igbos?' I asked Ketiwe.

‘An Igbo man takes care of his wife,' she smiled. ‘She will dress like a queen while he wears ordinary clothes. If they only have one car he'll say, “It's OK, you can take it into town.”'

Ketiwe was dating a Yoruba man from Kwara State in the west. She joked that our men from Rivers State were to be avoided because they're sexist philanderers. But marriage anywhere in the country seemed a minefield of infidelity, jealousy, intrigue and money fights; a clash between modern values and traditional ideas, between men (such as my father) calling themselves ‘traditional' polygamists, and women (such as my mother) labelling them as mere philanderers.

The Sunday newspapers gave a highly entertaining insight into the Nigerian dating scene. The messages in the ‘Lonelyhearts', ‘Friendships' and ‘Relationships' pages differed sharply from British ones, where pithy humour is welcomed but stating a strong intent for marriage is taken as a sign of madness. Nigerian lonely hearts contributors, by contrast, get straight to the point:

Others had more exacting requirements:

And:

Then there was this brazen offering:

I think Prince forgot to add ‘hypocrite' to his list of qualities.

The ‘Friendships' and ‘Relationships' sections were surprisingly short, occupying less than one-third of the page. The rest of the spread was devoted to a compelling section called ‘Sugar Cares', where men looking for sugar mummies made their demands extremely plain:

I was intrigued. Pretending to be a prospective sugar mummy, I picked up my phone and dialled one of the numbers.

John, a ‘cute, handsome undergraduate' picked up the phone. I explained to him that I was new to this sort of thing and wanted to know more before taking the plunge.

‘Have you had a sugar mummy before?' I asked.

‘Yes,' he replied, ‘I've had just one.'

‘How old was she?'

‘Hmmm, she was about forty.'

‘Why did it end?'

‘I promised to make her happy. But she disappointed me. We agreed not to cheat on each other. But she cheated on me . . . I didn't like that. I obeyed her rules very well but she was a liar.'

‘What happened?'

‘I wanted to know if she was unfaithful. I thought I'll ask her in a playful way. She said no. But my friend told me he saw her in a hotel with another man, so I changed my appearance. I put on head scarf and went to the hotel. I saw she had parked her car in a hidden place. So I bribed the waiter with money and he gave me her room number. I was waiting for some hours until she came out. When she saw me she was shocked. I told her I can't continue with this. I was angry because I sacrificed myself, my faith.'

I asked John how much money she gave him. He never really counted, he said. He was a student at the time. She bought him clothes and meals. Sometimes she transferred money into his account. When the money ran out, she checked with someone at his university to verify his financial situation, he claimed. On his birthday, she bought him a
60,000 Nokia phone. John said the lowest amount he ever received from her was
30,000 (perhaps he
was exaggerating the figure, knowing that I was a prospective sugar mummy).