A Single Swallow (25 page)

With ‘Amazing Grace' echoing in our ears Josephine and I sat at a row of empty tables, ordered fizzy drinks and stared at the grey-brown water and the green swamps of the river's edge.

‘This is where they took the ancestors away,' Josephine said, quietly.

Small bands of swallows came up the river bank, feeding easily as
they went. I felt sick and hangdog, with a kind of guilty squirming in my stomach. The river banks, the mangroves, the still palms and the birds were all here, exactly like this, when my people were enslaving Josephine's. Guilt, particularly the guilt of the white man in Africa, is a useless, much-mocked emotion: what a bleeding heart, to sit at a café table and lament what cannot be undone. Furthermore, Josephine's actual ancestors had not been slaves, or she would not be here in Nigeria, and mine were not slavers. So what I felt, I realise now, and I can still recall it, as physical a sensation as a shiver, was a confusion of guilt with shame.

‘How is God's mercy manifest? What is the absolute proof of God's power?' the preacher demands.

We are the last Abuja-bound travellers to leave Calabar the next morning, packed into a Toyota minibus which is promisingly well maintained and functional, but we are not going anywhere until the preacher has finished with us.

We listen dutifully as he explains that our very existence, all existence, indeed, is proof of God's mercy, and that our continued survival is absolute proof of His power. We pray that we will have His protection on our travels this morning, this afternoon, tomorrow and ever more. We pray, we say Amen, we are blessed, we say Amen again, we pray again, until everyone has been through a restive and uncomfortable period, and emerged into a numbed – or enlightened – acquiescence, whereupon there are final Amens, the preacher withdraws and the driver takes his seat.

It is a little after nine in the morning. The traffic in Calabar is heavy, as usual, but at least it keeps our pace down. Emerging onto the main road to Aba the peril becomes apparent. Nigeria has excellent roads, the best I have seen since Namibia: the problem is this allows drivers to proceed at the maximum speeds their vehicles can summon – and they do. Our driver is a fat, impassive man with a look of frozen discontent, who drives us like the clappers. After the first five miles I consciously force my stomach to relax, my fingers to loosen and my
chest to breathe normally, and commit my soul to God. At least the end will be quick, judging by the blackened wrecks at the sides of the road.

Cross River State, through which we are passing, seems to be in the middle of a low-level guerrilla war. Occasionally bites of this conflict appear in the western media, particularly incidents involving kidnapped or shot-up western oil workers, which therefore affect the oil market. The morning newspapers are full of all the rest of the battle: police machine-gunned, rebels shot, bombs thrown, houses burned, people displaced, soldiers ambushed, guerrillas killed, arrested, tried, imprisoned. The three most common sights on the road this morning are soldiers, gas stations and churches. It is a close thing, but I estimate that the churches dominate.

The sky is a hot kind of dusty yellow. Fumes belch from the lorries and I marvel at the churches as we hurtle between them like a sort of jet-propelled unholy spirit. The Chapel of Glory, the City of Life, SuperChristian Church International, Last Days Christian Fellowship, the Unified Church of God, Jesus Family Church, the Established Church of Christ . . . Many are no more than a small square building; some seem to be merely a roadside sign.

We stop to fill up with gas. I have been sitting in the second row of seats: directly in front of me is the poor young man who has had the best view of our multiple near-death experiences. He is shaky on his feet.

‘What do you do?'

‘I am a model,' he says. ‘I am going to Abuja for a shoot.'

‘How's it going?'

‘My career is going well,' he says. ‘Do you have a cigarette?'

The problem is finding somewhere to light them. The road is lined with gas stations in both directions. The air is heady with the smell of petrol.

Nigeria is the United States of Africa, I think, amazed by the volume of traffic on the roads, by the swiftness of transactions, by a pace and a beat which seem everywhere stronger, louder and more pressing. The clientele in the café where we stop for lunch are unlike
any similar gathering of travellers in the places I have passed. The men wear smart shirts and good shoes; the women are still in all the colours of Africa but now these are cut and stitched into the styles of Europe. Labels and gold, fake and not, line the long table. Meals are picked at fastidiously; since South Africa I cannot remember seeing food being thrown away.

The day changes colour as we go north. We cross the Benue River, a dark orange tributary of the Niger rolling sluggishly through low mud-banks under smoky copper clouds. The land feels almost unearthly under the sky's strange light. God and Gasoline, I keep thinking: the two most powerful, most dangerous genies in the modern world are here both so present, so ubiquitous, it feels as though a single spark could ignite the very air.

The afternoon newspapers are gripping thrillers. Here are terrible stories of women being circumcised by their in-laws, men being shot for their car keys, former ministers making off with hundreds of millions of naira and freely confessing it, state governors attacking each other and their predecessors, youth groups turning on politicians, rumours about sects within the military planning coups, committees at war with assemblies, and public-spirited reassurances that lovers who have gum disease should not worry about kissing their beloveds because gum disease is not transferable. The newspapers eat up hundreds of high-speed miles as we hurtle towards Abuja, an invented capital city.

Nigeria was a constellation of kingdoms, peoples and religions. In the north was Bornu, on the western side of Lake Chad, and the trading cities of the Hausa. Bornu was Muslim by the eleventh century, as were the Hausa traders by the fourteenth. The Fulani people adopted a stricter Islam than was practised by the Hausa, and prosecuted it through war. By 1809 they ruled what is now northern Nigeria from the desert town of Sokoto. West of the Niger were the lands of the Yoruba, and the states of Ife and Oyo. In the forest south of Oyo was Benin, whose leaders were still using human sacrifice in the nineteenth century.

With the arrival of the British, first as enthusiastic slavers then as
equally enthusiastic anti-slavers (evangelising palm oil instead), came first trading stations, then consuls, then conquerors. Lagos was taken in 1851 and annexed to Britain in 1861. By 1900, having partly burned down Benin City in a reprisal raid, Britain ruled everything from the Niger delta in the south to Bornu and Sokoto on the edge of the northern desert – and the constellation became, in the eyes of Europe at least, one vast territory.

Britain's administration of these regions between 1900 and independence in 1960 develops as a tortuous series of reclassifications, with administrators struggling to impose unified rule on diverse peoples and kingdoms. A federal structure is created which facilitates ‘Indirect Rule', in which powerful chiefs rule small fiefdoms under British supervision. In 1914, two blocks of fiefdoms, hitherto known as the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria and the Niger Coast Protectorate are merged into a single entity: the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria, a simplification which causes more complications. The northern, eastern and western regions each have their own Houses of Assembly by 1951; by 1954 there have been three new constitutions in eight years; by 1959 all three regions have achieved internal self-government and Lagos is a federal territory, like Washington DC, home to a federal government dominated by northerners.

Independence in 1960 creates a nation of 115 million people, divided into 200 tribes, speaking over 500 languages, living in a federation in which the north is predominantly Muslim, the south Christian and the whole riven by internal conflicts. A rebellion in 1966 by the Ibo people of the east leads to Ibos living in the north being massacred. The following year the East declares itself the independent Republic of Biafra. The Biafran War lasts three years and ends with a famine and Biafra's surrender. Since then, dictatorships, coups, swindles, flawed elections, riots and inter-ethnic strife have failed to prevent the country being declared the happiest in the world by the
New Scientist
magazine, which claimed to have surveyed the happiness of sixty-five nations and found that Nigeria came top.

Perhaps the most concrete consequence of the country's short, vexed and often bloody post-colonial history is Abuja, a city created
in the early 1970s as an alternative to Lagos, symbolically situated in the middle of the country, and, perhaps also symbolically, designed by a consortium of three American firms. It was built in the 1980s and became the national capital in 1991. We rocketed into it, as the late afternoon began to turn to evening, at top speed. The edges of the road eddied and swirled with dense crowds of people. Huge shanty towns have grown up outside Abuja in recent years: roadside cooking, crabby buses and jostling crowds made a narrower and narrower passage for the increasing volume of traffic.

There did not seem to be anything to Abuja – away from the packed suburbs the centre was a network of huge, wide, near-empty roads. At the bus station I shook hands with my model friend and jumped into a taxi.

‘Please take me to the biggest hotel you can think of, where they are most likely to have satellite television,' I begged the driver. It was Saturday 15 March and Wales, having beaten England, Scotland, Ireland and Italy, was about to play France in Cardiff for the Grand Slam.

I missed the game but was included in the celebrations by text message. Thanks also to text messages, I made contact with an old friend whom I had not seen since school. Fifteen years ago she was a quiet and thoughtful half-Nigerian, half-German student of International Relations. I did not know what she was doing with her life now, but she seemed to have become rather grand: ‘I will send you my driver,' her message ran. ‘He will be in a Jeep, registration . . .'

The jeep and the driver arrive and whisk me through the dark and deserted boulevards of the city. We pause, turn off the highway and pass through a high steel gate, which closes behind us.

‘What is this place?'

‘This is the French Compound,' the driver replies.

Low bungalows, a school, a swimming pool and a clubhouse are threaded through with trees and lawns. There are soft lights illuminating pathways; from the pool area music plays.

The driver knocks on the kitchen door of one of the bungalows, and there she is. It is like being seized by a whirlwind.

‘Look at you! Not an ounce of fat!' she cries, as we hug. She was always strong, a dancer, and she is even stronger now: a European girl has become an African woman.

‘Have you eaten? Would you like a drink? As you can see I tend to eat and work at the same time . . .' The television is tuned to CNN and faces her place on the sofa, in front of the laptop. ‘I will switch it off now,' she says. ‘Come on!'

At the clubhouse she is the only non-white. People are surprised and delighted to see her.

‘I never come out here,' she says, sidelong, ‘except to swim. Do you want to swim? I really need to . . .'

The moon is high behind gaseous clouds and it is still hot. Before we swim I manage to sit her down for a few moments. She speaks clearly and very quickly, her dark eyes locked on mine, her hands telling half the story.

‘OK so what the Growing Business Foundation does is micro-credit, partly, and loans for small businesses, and we push for improved policy frameworks, because half the problem is policy. At the moment I have this idea about providing computers for community centres for kids after school, and I am trying to help nomads, because you know in the Sahel they are just . . .'

The Sahel is the semi-desert region where the Sahara shades into a more habitable area, where vegetation begins to overcome the sands. It is one of the most vulnerable environments on earth to rainfall, or lack of rainfall. Traditionally only nomadic farmers could make a living there: the ground could not sustain settled agriculture. With increases in population, the fragile ecology of the Sahel has come under fatal pressure: over-grazing of scarce grasslands and tree-felling for firewood, together with more years of failed or insufficient rain, are effectively expanding the desert southwards.

We swim. She hurtles up and down like an athlete, then we are out and back in her house, eating.

‘I fly business class now,' she says. ‘And I move people. If I am
sitting next to someone who can help, then great. If not, I say excuse me, would you mind, and I swap them for someone else.'

‘What are you doing tomorrow?'

‘I am flying down to the delta to talk to the Ogoni, then back to Lagos for a meeting.'

She does not say it so simply, but it appears that her foundation raises money from banks, oil companies and big business and puts it into people's hands at the lowest level. She talks about doing this sort of business in Nigeria: about seeing the price of assistance before it is offered with its price disguised. She talks about watching powerful men torn between aspiration and temptation. My head swims at the merest intimation of the complexities of tribal, political, historical, corporate and social networks which she continually processes, cross-references and engages. She talks about the disillusionment of the disenfranchised and the poor, about the enthusiastic corruption of the rich, and about a new employee of hers who has just been to a village and returned, lit up with inspiration at the possibility of being able to contribute to its people.

‘It's a strange place to live,' she says, looking around the compound the next morning, as if she has not really looked at it before. ‘But my girls like it when they come home from school, they have friends, and they can roam around . . .'