Second Class Citizen Read online

  So that was how Adah started school. Pa would not hear of her going to the Methodist Primary; she was to go to the posh one, Ladi-Lak. Success in life would surely have come earlier to her if Pa had lived. But he died soon after, and Adah and her brother Boy were transferred to an inferior school. Despite all this, Adah’s dream never left her.

  It was understandable that Ma refused to take her to see the new lawyer, because Adah had started school only a few weeks before the preparations for the great man’s arrival. Ma really got furious with Adah for asking such a thing.

  “You made me drink gari only last month until I nearly burst my stomach, all because you said you wanted school. Now we gave you school, you want the wharf. No, you won’t go. You chose school. To school you must go from now until you go grey.”

  How right Ma was! Adah would never stop learning. She had been a student ever since.

  Adah’s face had fallen at this. If only she had known before, she would have staged her school drama after the arrival of Lawyer Nweze. But as it turned out, she missed little. The women practised their songs several times and showed off their uniform to which they had given the name Ezidiji ji de ogoli, ome oba, meaning: “When a good man holds a woman, she becomes like the queen.” They wove the name of the uniform into the song, and it was a joy to hear and see these women, happy in their innocence, just like children. Their wants were simple and easily met. Not like those of their children who later got caught up in the entangled web of industrialisation. Adah’s Ma had no experience of having to keep up mortgage payments: she never knew what it was to have a family car, or worry about its innards; she had no worries about pollution, the population explosion or race. Was it surprising, therefore, that she was happy, being unaware of the so-called joys of civilisation and all its pitfalls?

  They went to the wharf that day, these happy women, to welcome someone who had been to have a taste of that civilisation; the civilisation which was soon afterwards to hook them all, like opium. That day, they were happy to welcome their man.

  They went in their new uniform. Adah still remembered its colour. It had a dark velvety background with pale blue drawings of feathers on it. The headscarf was red, and it was tied in such a way that it displayed their straightened hair. The shoes they wore were of black patent leather called “nine-nine”. No one really knew why, maybe it was the rhythm of the repetition. In any case they wore these “nine-nine” shoes with their “Ezidiji ji de ogoli ome oba” and bought new gourds which they covered with colourful beads. When these gourds were rattled, they produced sounds like the Spanish samba, with a wild sort of animal overtone.

  They had had a good time, Adah was told later. They danced happily at the wharf, shaking their colourful gourds in the air. The European arrivals gaped at them. They had never seen anything like it before. The climax of it all was when an Englishman took their photographs. He even singled out women with babies behind their backs and took several shots of them. Ma and her friends were really happy to have their pictures taken by Europeans! These were the days before Nigerian independence when nearly every boat from England brought hundreds of English graduates and doctors to work in the schools and hospitals of Lagos.

  The few gaps in the magical story of Nweze’s arrival were filled in by Pa. All the Ibuza men went to welcome him the following Sunday. They could not leave their places of work during the week. Pa said that the lawyer could not swallow pounded yam any more; he could not even eat a piece of bone. The meat they cooked for him had to be stewed for days until it was almost a pulp. “I felt like being sick,” Pa said as he spat on the floor. “It reminded me of the sickly, watery food we ate in the army. There is one thing, though,” Pa went on, “he did not bring a white woman with him.” All Pa’s friends agreed with him that that was a good thing. If Nweze had brought a white woman to Ibuza, Oboshi would have sent leprosy on her!

  Remembering all these taboos and superstitions of the Western Ibos of Nigeria, Adah could not help laughing to herself. She had been brought up with them, they were part of her, yet now, in the seventies, the thought of them amused her. The funniest thing about all these superstitions and beliefs was that they still had such a doleful grip on the minds of her people. No one dared ignore any of them. Leprosy was a disease with which the goddess of the biggest river in Ibuza cursed anyone who dared to flout one of the town’s traditions.

  Well, Pa and his friends toasted the goddess of the river Oboshi for not allowing Lawyer Nweze to go astray. That Oboshi was strong enough to guide the thoughts of Nweze, demonstrated her power. They toasted her again.

  Later, Adah did not know what came over that river Oboshi, though. Oil was discovered very near her, and she allowed the oilmen to dig into her, without cursing them with leprosy. The oilmen were mainly white, which was a surprise. Or perhaps she had long been declared redundant by the greater gods. That would not have surprised Adah, for everybody could be declared redundant these days, even goddesses. If not redundant, then she must have been in a Rip Van Winkle sleep, for she also allowed the Hausa soldiers to come and massacre her sons, and some Ibuza men had married white women without getting leprosy. Only last year an Ibuza girl graduate had married a white American! So Oboshi was faster than most of her sons and daughters at catching up with the times.

  Anyway, the talk about Nweze’s arrival went on for months and months. Adah talked about him to all her friends at school, telling them that he was her cousin. Well, everybody else talked big, so she might as well. But she made a secret vow to herself that she would go to this United Kingdom one day. Her arrival there would be the pinnacle of her ambition. She dared not tell anyone; they might decide to have her head examined or something. A small girl of her kind, with a father who was only a railwayman and a mother who knew nothing but the Ibo Bible and the Ibo Anglican hymn book, from the Introduction to the Index, and who still thought that Jerusalem was at the right hand of God.

  That she would go to the United Kingdom one day was a dream she kept to herself, but dreams soon assumed substance. It lived with her, just like a Presence.

  2

  Escape into Elitism

  Most dreams, as all dreamers know quite well, do have setbacks. Adah’s dream was no exception, for hers had many.

  The first hitch happened all of a sudden. Just a few months after she started school, Pa went to the hospital for something, she could not remember what. Then someone - she was not quite sure who it was - told her that Pa was staying there for a few days. A week or two later Pa was brought home; a corpse. After that things moved so fast that she sometimes got them confused. Adah, like most girl-orphans, was to live with her mother’s elder brother as a servant. Ma was inherited by Pa’s brother, and Boy was to live with one of Pa’s cousins. It was decided that the money in the family, a hundred pounds or two, would be spent on Boy’s education. So Boy was cut out for a bright future, with a grammar school education and all that. Adah’s schooling would have been stopped, but somebody pointed out that the longer she stayed at school, the bigger the dowry her future husband would pay for her. After all, she was too young for marriage at the age of nine or so, and moreover the extra money she would fetch would tide Boy over. So, for the time being, Adah stayed at school.

  Adah missed her old school, the cleanliness, the orderliness and the brightness, but she could not continue there. The fee was almost six times the cost of the others and she had to get herself used to an older and noisier school, otherwise she would not be allowed to go to school at all. But she had gained something from her short stay at Ladi-Lak, a very good and sound beginning, which put her ahead of her new class. Her efforts amused her cousins greatly - they regarded her as a funny little girl. She was glad, though, that they mercifully left her to dream away after she had done her day’s work.

  The day’s work! Jesus! Her day started at four-thirty in the morning. On the veranda of her new home in Pike Street, there was a mighty drum used as a water container and Adah had to fill this with wa
ter before going to school. This usually meant making ten to twelve trips to the public “pump”, as those public monstrosities were called in those days.

  In Adah’s new family there was Ma’s brother who worked in the dockyard at the marina; his old wife, a quiet, retiring woman who was a shadow to her autocratic husband; and their four mighty sons, all grown up. One was married with a young daughter, one was working as a clerk in the Treasury, one was an artist, who would stay at home and sing all day long, the youngest was at a finishing school. So Pa’s death was a blessing to them, for it meant they could have Adah as an unpaid servant to help in this bulging household. All these people occupied only one room and a veranda, yet the house had ten rooms! One could imagine the number of households that depended on the pump at Pike Street, for it served eight other streets as well. It was always a case of first come, first served. By seven or eight in the mornings there were usually fights, metal buckets were thrown in the air, fists drawn, and clothes torn. To avoid this rush hour, Adah was usually woken up at four-thirty. Her being up so early was also a great help to her new Pa and master. He went to work by six-thirty in the mornings and Adah had to be there to get him his odds and ends.

  One might think on this evidence that Africans treated their children badly. But to Adah’s people and to Adah herself, this was not so at all; it was the custom. Children, especially girls, were taught to be very useful very early in life, and this had its advantages. For instance, Adah learned very early to be responsible for herself. Nobody was interested in her for her own sake, only in the money she would fetch, and the housework she could do and Adah, happy at being given this opportunity of survival, did not waste time thinking about its rights or wrongs. She had to survive.

  Time went by quickly, and when she reached the age of eleven, people started asking her when she was going to leave school. This was an urgent question because the fund for Boy’s education was running low; Ma was not happy with her new husband and it was considered time that Adah started making a financial contribution to her family. This terrified Adah. For a time it seemed as if she must give in to save Ma from the humiliating position she found herself in. She hated Ma for marrying again, thinking it was a betrayal of Pa. Sometimes she dreamt of marrying early; a rich man who would allow Ma and Boy to come and stay with her. That would have solved a lot of problems, but the kind of men that she was being pushed to by her clever cousins and Ma’s tactful hints were bald and huge, almost as big as her dead Pa. Ma had told her that older men took better care of their wives than the young and overeducated ones, but Adah didn’t like them. She would never, never in her life get married to any man, rich or poor, to whom she would have to serve his food on bended knee: she would not consent to live with a husband whom she would have to treat as a master and refer to as “Sir” even behind his back. She knew that all Ibo women did this, but she wasn’t going to!

  Unfortunately, her obstinacy gained her a very bad reputation; what nobody told her then was that the older men were encouraged to come and “talk” to her because only they could afford the high “bride-price” Ma was asking. Since, however, she didn’t know this, as soon as she saw one of those “baldies” in his white starched trousers, she would burst into native songs about bad old baldies. If that failed to repel them, she would go to the back yard and burst the bicycle tyres of the suitors. She discovered later this was very bad indeed, because she had since learnt that the Nigerian Government usually gave the junior clerks an advance for these bicycles. All the suitors were doing then was to ask for the advance for their new Raleigh bikes with flashy lights in order to impress Adah. But the stupid girl refused to be impressed.

  The number of suitors did start to dwindle, though. Maybe word went round that she was a peculiar girl, for she did look funny in those days; all head, with odd-coloured hair and a tummy that would have graced any Oxfam poster. She was subsequently told that they stopped coming because she was cranky and ugly. She did not dispute that; she was ugly then, all skin and bone.

  The thought of her having to leave school at the end of the year worried her so much that she lost weight. She acquired a pathetically anxious look; the type some insane people have, with eyes as blank as contact lenses.

  At about this time, something happened that showed her that her dream was just suffering a tiny dent, just a small one, nothing deep enough to destroy the basic structure. The dream had by now assumed an image in her mind, it seemed to take life, to breathe and to smile kindly at her. The smile of the Presence became wide as the headmaster of Adah’s school announced the lists of available secondary schools which the children could apply for. “You are going, you must go and to one of the very best of schools; not only are you going, you’re going to do well there,” Adah heard the Presence telling her. She heard it so much that she started to smile. The headmaster’s voice jolted her back to reality.

  “And what is it about me that you find so funny, Adah Ofili?”

  “Me, sir? Oh, no, sir, I was not laughing, I mean not smiling, sir.”

  “You were not what? You mean I am lying? Well, back her up!”

  Immediately a group of three or four tough-looking boys came out from the back row and the biggest of them all swept Adah onto his back and two others held her feet while the headmaster administered the cane on her posterior. The searing of the cane was so intense that Adah was beyond screaming. To ease the pain, she sank her sharp teeth deep into the back of the poor boy who was backing her. He started to scream loudly, but Adah would not let go, not even when the caning stopped. The boy wriggled in agony and so did Adah. All the teachers came to the rescue. Adah’s teeth had dug so deep into him that fragments of his flesh were stuck between her teeth. She quickly spat them out and wiped her mouth, looking at them all wide-eyed.

  “You’ll go to jail for this,” the headmaster thundered and he took the boy into his office for first aid. From that day on, no boy ever volunteered to back Adah up any more, but that incident gave her a nickname which she never lived down: the Ibo tigress. Some of her Yoruba classmates used to ask her what human flesh tasted like, because “You Ibos used to eat people, didn’t you?” Well, Adah didn’t know about the cannibalistic tendencies of her tribe; all she knew was that the headmaster’s cane burnt her so much that she felt irrepressible urges to pass the pain to something else. Latifu, the boy who was doing the backing, happened to be the closest victim, so he had to take it. Adah also felt that she was being unjustly punished. She had been smiling at the Presence, not the headmaster, and she suspected that the headmaster knew she was telling the truth; he had simply wanted to cane her, that was all.

  Adah waited for days for the Law which the headmaster said was coming to take her to jail. No policeman came for her, so she decided that she had either been forgotten or that her bite of Latifu was not deep enough to merit imprisonment. The thought nagged her, though. It nagged her so much that she was tempted to commit another atrocity, this time a really horrible one that nearly sent her, not to jail, but to her Maker.

  Adah was given two shillings to buy a pound of steak from a market called Sand Ground. She looked at the two-shilling piece for a very, very long time. All she needed to take the entrance examination to the school of her dreams was two shillings. Didn’t Jesus say that one should not steal? But she was sure there was a place in the Bible where it said that one could be as clever as the serpent but as harmless as the dove. Would she be harming anybody if she paid for her entrance examination fee with this two shillings? Would Jesus condemn her for doing it: for stealing? After all, her cousin could afford the money, though he would not give it to her if she asked for it in the proper way. What was she to do? That was the trouble with Jesus, He never answered you; He never really gave you a sign of what to do in such a tempting situation. Anybody could twist what He said to suit his own interpretation. Then she saw the Image again. It was going to be all right, the Image was smiling, so Adah buried the money and went back home in tears, without the meat
.

  She was really no good at lying. The wildness in her eyes had a way of betraying her. If only she could have kept her large eyes lowered it would have been all right: people would have believed her story. But she kept staring into their eyes, and her face showed her up like a mirror.

  “You’re lying, Adah,” her cousin’s wife said, pointedly.

  Adah opened her mouth, but had to close it quickly, because no sound came. She knew what was going to happen to her, the cane. She did not mind this caning because she knew that anybody who sinned must be punished. What she did not bargain for was the extent of the punishment. Her cousin sent her out with a three-penny piece to buy the type of cane called the koboko. It was the one the Hausas used for their horses. There was nothing Adah could do but buy it. Her cousin warned her that he would not stop administering the cane until she’d told him the truth. That was bad, thought Adah. She had to go to the Methodist Girls’ High School or die. She concentrated her mind on something else. After the burning of the first few strokes, her skin became hardened, and so did her heart. She started to count. When Cousin Vincent had counted to fifty, he appealed to Adah to cry a little. If only she would cry and beg for mercy, he would let her go. But Adah would not take the bait. She began to see herself as another martyr; she was being punished for what she believed in. Meanwhile Cousin Vincent’s anger increased; he caned her wildly, all over her body. After a hundred and three strokes, he told Adah that he would never talk to her again: not in this world nor in the world to come. Adah did not mind that. She was, in fact, very happy. She had earned the two shillings.