A Single Swallow (24 page)

Mark speaks like this: ‘Heeeey, maaan! Have you ever had African pussy, maaaaan?'

‘Well . . .'

‘Where do you live, maaan?'

‘In London, some of the time –'

‘I live in Seoul in Korea. I teach English to Korean kids – you should see them! They're good!'

‘Oh yeah?'

‘And I own a hairdressing salon. I make about 3,000 US dollars a month, maaan – do you want to see a picture of my wife?'

‘Sure.'

‘Look, here's a picture of my car. God, I love my car, maaan – look, there it is, and my wife, in the snow. It's such a great car – it's so cheap to run. You know what I've been shipping CD players and things to Cameroon and because they actually work I'm making real money, maaan! There's another picture of my car . . .'

‘Very nice.'

‘It's so easy to make money out there – and I love the attitude – not like Cameroon!'

‘I guess things are harder here.'

‘Huh! No good blaming the government, maaan! That's all people do here, sit around and complain! They're lazy! They don't have to do anything! The food grows on trees! They want to make the country better they gotta get up, stop complaining, and make it better!'

‘But it's a dictatorship and the army will shoot anyone who tries to change it, won't they?'

‘True. But, well, I'm gonna make money in Korea then come back and help my country, because I love my country, maaan!'

For complicated reasons which I struggle to follow, Mark is going to Nigeria to renew a visa, or fulfil the conditions of a visa which will allow him to continue to commute between Korea and Cameroon.

The boat is being loaded with sacks of a leaf which looks like cocoa, and bags of an unidentifiable vegetable. These are rolled off trucks and bundled into the stern. The loaders are working quickly but not fast enough for the boat crew: an order is given and the front ropes are cast off. Every flat surface of the deck and superstructure is covered in men and women. Many are eating now; the journey is out of their hands for a while, and they are relaxing. There is shouting at the back, two more sacks are tumbled onto the deck, and the stern is untied. We move off, into dark channels. The helmsman switches on a powerful searchlight which probes ahead of us, roaming across dark masses of mangrove. It is eleven at night and still the sweat runs off us. The boat twists and turns, following the arm of the searchlight through the mangroves. Now large speakers on the rear passenger deck begin pumping out an Africanised hip-hop beat: it feels more as though we are cruising around the block trying to turn girls' heads than setting sail for the Bight of Biafra and the Gulf of Guinea. Then a preacher starts up, bellowing over the music, haranguing the travellers who are packed together on benches under an awning – how is it, he wants to know, that God's miracle has been proved for all to see? He has two accomplices. After a good harangue they bless us and we all join in with the Amens. The preacher prays fervently for our safety on our travels and we all join in with the Amens, even more fervently.

‘I went on a boat from Korea to China and it was nothing like this!' Mark says. He looks rather shocked.

Now a breeze picks up; a warm fluting of air around our sticky faces. We turn into the open sea. The boat puts on a gentle roll, which becomes a less gentle corkscrew. Looking through the window of the bridge Mark and I are relieved to see there is a radar, which is working. Suddenly everyone feels tired. Mark goes off to find some deck to sleep on; I lie down where I am, on the wing of the bridge, on the seaward side. Lightning flashes behind the clouds to landward. We are passing between Bioko island, part of Equatorial Guinea, and Mount Cameroon, but both are invisible. There are no lights, the moon has vanished and the stars are blotted out by thick cloud.

 

WE WAKE TO
rain falling quite hard with a hissing noise. Bodies are stirring around me, cursing quietly as those of us without shelter struggle and slither, crab-like, towards sheltered parts of the deck which are already over-full. I fall asleep in a sort of crouch. When the rain stops I move back to my former spot. It is wet but the air is still hot.

At three in the morning the rain comes again, heavier this time. I struggle to my feet, drunk with fatigue. The land is invisible in the dark but to seaward half the horizon is on fire. Oil flares, rigs, supply ships and tankers form a motorway of light. In the depths of the night it is business as usual in the Gulf of Guinea, one of the hottest oil spots on earth. I stand there, swaying, staring at the illuminated sea, trying to distinguish between different ships and rigs, breaking the strings of light and fire into separate vessels, too tired to care about the rain and wishing I had some emergency whisky with which to fend it off. The door to the bridge opens and a figure beckons me in. It seems an extraordinary kindness: I can barely believe it. Thank you so much,
merci, merci
, I whisper, and curl up, making myself as small as possible in a corner. I black out and sleep deep and dreamless.

Daylight comes with lots of ankles and legs, engine noise, conversation and the luxury of the hard, dry floor of the bridge.

‘
Bonjour!
'

Heads turn, faces look down from above: ‘
Bonjour!
' they grin. I
stand, feeling excellent, as though all my muscles have been wrung out.

‘There you are!' says Mark. We return to our spot, yawning. He found a good place to sleep too, he says. A man comes around with milky coffee and a sweet pastry, which, strangely, has some sort of fish paste in the middle.

We are cruising up a wide channel of mangroves and palms. It looks like an ancient, eternal Africa of picture books, of
Just So Stories
and legends. The palms with their heads nodding slightly to one side and the mangroves, clutching the sea between their roots, seem to promise fever, snakes and slavers. Here and there, through breaks in the green walls, are villages made of reeds, half-floating. In the channel canoes are working: they are heavy wooden things, flat like big punts; some are being paddled, some sailed and one or two have motors. There are three men in each, throwing out and hauling in nets. The channel is thick with flotsam: lumps of wood and clumps of mangrove bob out to sea as large terns dive into the water, fishing, and supply ships steam past us, heading out for the rigs in the gulf.

‘What is the absolute proof of God's mercy?'

As it gets hotter the preacher starts up again. His assistants come round handing out leaflets, then the Bible, instructing us to read a bit and then pass it on. Around half past ten the channel turns right into a large river, and there is Calabar.

There are houses along a ridge, warehouses and sheds by the water, naval vessels and wrecked boats half-sunk, and other wrecked boats so battered and rusty that they really ought to be sunk but which are in fact being loaded, and a wharf crammed with a crowd of hundreds of people. Over it all, against a hot silver sky, a huge green and white flag of Nigeria, the biggest flag I have seen, flaps slightly.

The door of the captain's cabin opens and the captain emerges. It is the first we have seen of him; we must have been in the hands of the mate. The captain looks fat and self-important in gold-rimmed shades. As children burst into tears and loud women fuss over them the captain takes over and noses us towards our berth. We edge between two rusty freighters, and all seems well until the captain
forgets about our stern and it swings viciously. There are cries of alarm on the other boat, men run, and ropes stretched between one of the freighters and the shore first take then fail to hold the tremendous pressure of our weight. They drag the freighter towards us and there is a mighty crash.

Disembarking means charging down a narrow plank off the nose of the boat into a heaving, howling, shouting, waving, surging throng of people. I am the only white, as at least a hundred people have noticed and a good dozen point out. Dozens more want to shake hands, say hello and find out where you have come from. I keep smiling and keep bullocking in. I am rapidly adopted by a young man who leads me in a kind of race around the immigration people, who stamp my passport, and the money-changers, who have stacks of naira which they manipulate at dizzying speed (a crowd of nodding faces assure you the exchange rate is fair), to the medical people.

‘You have a yellow fever certificate?'

‘Yes, it's in the bottom of my bag.'

‘Your bag?'

‘Yes, here.'

‘OK, don't worry about it.'

The next thing I know I am on the back of a motorbike and ripping up the hill, out of the port and into the razzle-dazzle of Calabar's permanent rush hour. In Nigeria, I surmise, they do not hang about.

‘Who are you – Simon Peter or one of the other disciples?' demands Josephine, the receptionist at the hotel. She offers to show me around town when her shift ends in the afternoon, on the condition that I shave thoroughly and change. We set off in her little red Volkswagen.

‘My father gave me this car as a graduation present,' she giggles. ‘I am still not very good.'

‘You are just fine,' I gasp, soothingly, as we career around a roundabout. We go first to a salad bar, which is deserted but for a waiter watching a soap. Someone weeps by a hospital bed as Josephine picks over a huge salad of tinned vegetables.

‘I live with my brothers, but I am so fed up with them, they do not do any cooking! So I get up, cook their lunch, go to work, go home and cook their supper. My new boyfriend has a good job at a bank. Perhaps I will marry him and leave my brothers – ha ha!'

Josephine says her job is a bore. She has graduated in Tourism and Hotel Management and now wants to move to a city, but as yet she does not have the money. It is a shock, after Congo, Cameroon and Zambia, where jobs like hers are in the hands of older people, mostly men, to find a young woman evincing exactly the same kind of dissatisfaction you would expect to find in a European graduate in a similar role: it is as though in crossing from Cameroon an older century, almost another continent, has slipped away. Josephine wears a crucifix and although she does not go to church she does believe in God, and in the tenets of the Church.

‘Do you have a wife?'

‘No.'

‘Are you homosexual?'

‘No. Why are you whispering?'

‘Because here if you say you are homosexual they will stone you!'

‘Don't be ridiculous! Why would they do a thing like that?'

‘Because it's a sin!'

‘Of course it's not! Stoning people definitely is, though.'

‘Yes it is – homosexuality is against God.'

‘No it isn't, if you believe God makes us who we are then you have to believe He makes some of us gay.'

‘But it's a sin!'

‘No it isn't. I know vicars who do God's work who are gay.'

She almost falls off her chair.

‘Do you want to see the museum? I have not seen it myself yet.'

‘Yes please.'

We swerve and stall our way to the river, a little way downstream from the port. There is a deserted visitors' centre, a line of empty cafés and a museum. Bad music plays from speakers attached to lamp-posts and vultures circle the car park. It is nearly closing time but the duty guide says there is just time for a tour. We take the fastest tour of
Calabar's museum of slavery that there has ever been. We hustle along a dark spiral corridor, pausing in front of exhibits which light up automatically. They are composed of animated life-size figures in tableau, with recorded voice-overs.

A woman begs for mercy as slavers seize her from her village. Men moan in agony as they are shipped across the sea. Americans laugh heartlessly and bid for slaves at an auction. A slave howls as plantation-owners beat him.

Astonishingly, the museum's narrative makes the Americans the ultimate baddies of slavery. The British, who thanks to the heroic Royal Navy put a stop to it all, come out, lauded with a chorus of ‘Amazing Grace', symbolised by portraits of Wilberforce and John Henry Adams, as the best of eggs. Whoever had set out the museum took great pains over context. Slavery, it is pointed out, existed all over Africa for centuries before the Europeans became involved. Africans enslaved Africans, Arabs enslaved Africans, then Europeans came and everything culminated in the plantations of Virginia and the Caribbean, where villainous masters made fortunes out of misery.

But the central point of Calabar's history is that between 1720 and 1830 over a million people were here loaded into little boats, crammed head to foot in decks less than 12 inches high, and taken out to sea where the deep-draught slave ships were waiting. Between 1700 and 1830 Calabar was effectively twinned with Bristol in the most horrifying manner imaginable – Bristol-based merchants held a near-monopoly on the trade through Calabar. During the period of British involvement on this coast, ‘the Slave Coast', otherwise known, in a linguistic twist far beyond irony as ‘the White Man's Grave', over two million people were transported from West Africa to the New World. A third of a million died en route.