Looking for Transwonderland (45 page)

‘Donu, I need this fan,' I begged her. ‘I'm sweating.'

‘I am sweating too,' she pouted, patting her dry brow. I wouldn't normally fight a child over such a trifling object but in that unbearable heat, my fan was worth more to me than a million barrels of oil.

NEPA's erratic power supply had forced Helen and Loveday to buy a generator, which they used sparingly to keep down costs. In the evening, when the lights cut out, I followed Helen down the fire escape stairwell to the switch on the generator. She yanked its chord repeatedly to get the engine running, the movement straining her caesarean scars and making her wince. The neighbours all had generators too. The machines, four or five of them, rumbled from all sides of Helen's apartment. They vibrated through the windows and created a deafening roar that forced us to boost the TV volume; all conversation became a ridiculous bellowing exchange. Perhaps this is why Lagosians talk so loudly.

Late on a Sunday evening, the night before my flight back to
London, Loveday and Helen drove me through the dark, empty streets towards The Shrine, the club where the late musician and political activist Fela Kuti used to perform. Fela was the unanointed king of Nigeria, our highest-quality export, a near
-
deity who invented Afrobeat, a combination of jazz, funk and highlife rhythms that no normal person can resist dancing to. This marijuana-smoking maverick married twenty-seven women in one day, used his music to criticise military regimes, and once delivered his mother's coffin to the military barracks after the regime killed her during a raid on his commune. In the 1980s, Fela was jailed for nearly two years on currency smuggling charges.

Fela died of an Aids-related illness in 1997. Since then, his son, Femi, has carried on where his father left off, playing to the crowds every Sunday at The Shrine. As we approached, we could hear music saturating the night air even before we'd parked the car. Loveday was exhausted from work but, hypnotised by the Afrobeat rhythm, he bought tickets for himself and Helen too.

‘What are you
doing
?' Helen exclaimed, surprised. ‘We're not staying!' In his love for live music, Loveday had momentarily forgotten that they had two small children at home. Loveday relented, handing me my ticket before the pair of them said goodbye and returned to the car. I passed through the security and up the stairs to the mezzanine area. Although The Shrine has been subject to several police raids over the years, its posters, signs and graffiti still exuded a curious mix of moral rectitude, political sloganeering and hedonism. A signboard at the entrance listed several proverbs on wisdom and discipline, while another poster called for government corruption to stop. Wall-mounted signs warned against the smoking of marijuana, yet a defiant haze floated up towards the mezzanine from where I surveyed the audience below, sitting at tables and sipping their stout through straws.

Towards midnight, Femi entered the stage with his band and
sang ‘One Day Africa Will Be Free'. His dancers, doubling as his backing singers, entered the stage with their backs to the audience. Like Fela's girls back in the day, these women shook their arses extremely seriously, staring down at their hips in their sequined mini-dresses, their faces betraying little expression, as if mesmerised by their own movement. All action took place below the waist. Having entered the stage with their backs to the audience, the dancers stayed in that position throughout most of the concert, waving their beautiful, sparkling booty at the crowd. Two more dancers were gyrating in cages on either side of the room.

Femi, like his father, often performs glistening and bare-chested, but on this night, he wore a long green shirt and matching trousers. He and his band played renditions of ‘Summertime', ‘I Want to Be Free' and the fast-paced ‘One, Two, Three, Four'. Femi high-fived and bumped fists with fans crowding the front of the stage. During his sax solo, a woman in a gypsy dress spun around the tables; a legless man skidded excitedly near the stage on his skateboard, waving his baseball cap in the air; two Europeans boogied passionately, even during lulls in the music when everyone else sat still. I was hoping for a performance of the song ‘Shotan', during which the fans go wild, hurling plastic chairs around the place, in an oddly punkish, un-Nigerian meltdown. But, disappointingly, Femi didn't perform the song.

It was 2 a.m. when the band finished. The crowd dissipated. I stayed behind at The Shrine with a few others until morning – Lagos isn't safe in the early hours, and there was no public transport anyway. While workers cleared the tables and swept the floor, we clustered around the chairs and tables beneath the ceiling fans to avoid getting mosquito bites. Fela's classics pumped out of the speakers. Fatigue and marijuana smoke stung my eyes, but I was happy, listening to the music in a sleepy daze. No one says it better than Fela. He's the embodiment of everything I love about Nigeria: intelligent, funny, passionate, exciting, raw, an ‘Africa man original',
not a ‘gentleman'. He took the best elements of Nigerian music and mixed them with foreign genres to create something so fresh and superior, it gives listeners a swaggering pride in being Nigerian. But Fela was also incorrigible and untamed, railing against government immorality while grabbing his dancers' buttocks on stage; he had a messy family life and a distaste for upward mobility.

At The Shrine, I slouched opposite a mural depicting him making a clenched-fist power salute, a marijuana joint lodged between his knuckles. Next to me, people slept with their spines arched over the chair backs, their heads slumped on tables, mouths gaping open, bodies curled up. It was a shabby end to a fabulous night and a fabulous journey. But that's Nigeria for you: it can be stylish, sublime, beautiful, yet no matter how much it amazes or bedazzles you, it's always that little bit jagga jagga.

Firstly, I'd like to thank my agent Lizzie Kremer at David Higham Associates for believing in me. Immeasurable thanks go to Granta commissioning editor Bella Lacey, and my editors Sara Holloway and Amber Dowell for teaching me so much about writing and whipping me over the finishing line; I'm also grateful to Christine Lo, Benjamin Buchan, Jennie Condell and Kelly Pike at Granta. A non-repayable debt of gratitude goes to Rachel Wallman and Zilfa Al-Zaid for buoying up my morale and bearing the brunt of my writer's blocks. Special nods also for Owens Wiwa, Lizzie Williams, Ilka Schlockermann and Oliver Oguntade for their kind advice. And finally, I am forever indebted to my family, especially my mother Maria, brother Ken Jr, and sisters Zina and Singto.

Walter Ihejirika, ‘Media and Fundamentalism in Nigeria', World Association for Christian Communication (WACC), 2005,
http://archive.waccglobal.org/wacc/publications/media_development/2005_2/media_and_fundamentalism_in_nigeria

 

Chukwuma Okoye, ‘Looking at Ourselves in our Mirror: Agency, Counter-Discourse, and the Nigerian Video Film',
Film International
, volume 5, issue 4, 2007

Copyright © Noo Saro-Wiwa 2012

 

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

 

eISBN : 978-1-593-76491-3

 

 

Soft Skull Press
www.softskull.com
An imprint of COUNTERPOINT
1919 Fifth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710