In a Glass House (37 page)

“
Oyinbó
.”

The mechanic arrived; again I expected some delay.

“Is not possible,” he said, looking over the damage; but then he and the driver argued, discussed, and finally he set about things, efficient and quick, bringing his tools out from his stall into the open and squatting strangely as he worked, exquisitely balanced. But when he went to inflate the tire his compressor failed to start.

“No
NEPA
,” he said.

“
NEPA
,” David explained. “No Electrical Power Anytime.”

“Just leave it,” Richard said. “We’ll stop in the next town.”

The
NEPA
was out in the next town as well. We found a mechanic with a hand pump; it took several minutes of effort, the driver and the mechanic alternating, to fill the tire. Twilight came while we waited, the town seeming to take on a strange
frenetic energy, taxis calling out for final passengers, the stalls around the lorry park closing up; and then almost at once it was night, the darkness falling like a blanket, complete, punctured only by the flickerings of scattered hurricane lamps, tiny winks that moved disembodied through the dark like fireflies. Overhead a million moonless stars glittered distantly – I had never seen such a thing, such a night sky, at once so black and so light-filled.

In darkness we crossed the Niger, a stretch of inky black hemmed in by shores of shrouded bush like wading phantoms. It seemed shabby somehow, unimpressive, not the vista I’d expected but merely a trickle lost in the heart of a continent; and yet I had a sense of having crossed over, of having arrived. Just beyond the river lay another town, larger, but like the one before it already beginning to close down for the night; the few taxis still plying the streets there beat their horns in endless staccatos like drums and flashed their high beams as they passed as if in welcome.

Past Ilorin we hit another checkpoint, more official-looking, more entrenched. A soldier came onto the bus and ordered us out.

“Make you come now,” he said, good-humoured. “
Oyinbó
go sleep here this night.”

A dozen or so other vehicles had been pulled over, their passengers milling along the roadside and soldiers picking through their scattered baggage under the narrow beams of flashlights. But at the sight of us gathering there among the others a tall, muscular figure in crisp khaki, the commander perhaps, came toward us from the station-house.

“Where to?” he asked Richard.

“Ibadan.”

“It’s not possible.” Yet there was something comforting in his voice, an unexpected humility. “Go back, go back to Ilorin, the roads are not safe at this time of night.”

“We need to get to Ibadan,” Richard said. “These people have postings to get to.”

There seemed a petulance in his insistence – I had a sense of him trying to blot the country out, intent only on having things unfold neat and on schedule, on getting back to whatever comforts awaited him in Ibadan. Yet the commander seemed to consider what he’d said, turning finally toward the station-house.

“Olushegun!”

We were assigned a soldier to accompany us into Ibadan. He sat at the front, his rifle propped casually against the floor; at each jolt of the bus I expected it to go off but the soldier seemed oblivious, gazing silent into the funnel of light the headlights formed on the road. At some point he and the driver began to talk, in mixed pidgin and Yoruba, warily at first but then with increasing animation, gesticulating, telling tales. Their voices had a lilting buoyancy, every syllable stressed, important. The air of belligerent authority the soldier’s uniform gave him fell away – he was no more than a boy, really, perhaps eighteen or so, seeming to revert now that he was away from his post to some truer, more human self.

Somewhere beyond Ogbomosho the bus broke down: the engine choked, regained itself, then choked again and died. The driver pulled a flashlight from a toolbox, descended, lifted the hood.

“Na be engine trouble,” he called out.

“No shit, Sherlock,” someone muttered.

The driver worked under the hood while the soldier held the flashlight for him. Snatches of conversation passed between
them peppered with bits of English like sudden luminescences, “fuel line,” “carburetor,” “distributor cap.” The rest of us milled listless at the roadside, worn down now by the trip, the constant delays, the bus’s rattling uncomfortableness.

“Maybe we’ll have to sleep in the bush after all,” Richard said.

The darkness rose up around us like a wall, tangible, broken only by the small glow of light from under the hood; and yet we seemed protected somehow, not so much by the soldier as by our own inconsequence here, by our whiteness. There was no sense of crisis: the driver and the soldier tinkered away at the engine, absorbed in their work; even Richard, who had retreated back into the bus, had the air again of having withdrawn himself to await some inevitable solution. In every instance during the day when we’d encountered some obstacle I’d sensed this strange passivity just beneath the surface of his stubbornness; I had thought of it as weakness but now it began to seem simply a benign resignation, a capitulation to an order of things too large to struggle against. All day long a certain rhythm had been working itself out; we were merely caught up in it oblivious, riding it like bodies riding a stream over rapids.

Time passed. A taxi went by, then a minibus, but no one bothered to hail them. Finally the driver tried the engine: it caught. We let up a cheer, spontaneous, all relief and goodwill; for the first time that day the driver seemed part of us.

“Fuel filter na clog,” he said, basking. “I dey say so na first thing, na be fuel filter, not so?”

It was not yet eleven when we came into Ibadan: we had made good time after all. We dropped the soldier at a checkpoint off the ring road and then made our way into the city. In the dark it seemed a vast village, endlessly repeating itself, the
dusty buildings and streets, the nighttime hush, the dim haloes of light from windows and streetside stalls and shacks. In the flash of the bus’s headlights I caught a glimpse of a man, his hair a clump of matted dreadlocks, sitting stark-naked atop a smouldering heap of garbage, calm and dignified there like some silent guardian of the city.

Our hostel was in the Government Reservation Area. The streets there were more kempt, almost suburban, the houses tidy bungalows set back in the dim inviting glow of porch lights and vegetation. At the hostel a groundskeeper or watchman of some sort came out from his shed at the edge of the compound to open the gate; and within a few minutes we’d unloaded our bags, briskly efficient, re-energized now that we’d arrived. The hostel had the air of a summerhouse, set on a hill amidst palms and hibiscus and banana trees; from its island of normalcy, of calm, the day seemed a kind of fiction suddenly, purposely, predictably exaggerated like some amusement put together to keep us at a remove from the real life of the country.

Richard left with the driver to return to his own home after we’d settled in. A group of us sat up a while on the back patio, the city distantly glowing in the background, a hundred thousand scattered pins of light. The older volunteers told horror stories, of travelling, of the bureaucracy, of the conditions at their schools.

“It’s a country everyone loves to hate,” one of them said. “My friends thought I was suicidal or something at first because my letters sounded so negative. But I was having a great time.”

At some point the lights went out; all around us the city went black, seeming to retreat in an instant into the night. We lit a hurricane lamp, the group of us huddled there within its intimate haze as around a campfire, made small suddenly by the
darkness. For the first time I had the sense of a country stretching unknown around me, the wonder of it. Out in the dark small lights like ours had begun to appear like tiny greetings; for a moment the earth seemed to mirror the sky, with its profusion of stars, to join it, a single canvas, the same blackness and light, the same slow coming forward out of nothing as at the beginning of things.

I was assigned to a boarding school outside the town of Ikorita. “Crossroads,” the town’s name meant, though only a single road passed through it; dusty and prosaic and slow, it was like a hundred other towns in the region, shambling toward modernity, not so much the clash of old and new as some uncertain hybrid between them, the TV antennas that sprouted above its tin roofs seeming as natural to it as the ju-ju stalls in the market, with their monkey skulls and dried rats and small bundled pouches of unknown charms. The market followed a non-weekly rotation I could never keep straight, forever shifting to accommodate holy days and feasts; though it seemed now merely a sort of lingering habit, offering little more than what could be had at the shops that ringed the lorry park, onions and shrivelled tomatoes, cassava root, dirty rice, canned tomato paste from Portugal, canned mackerel, Geisha-brand, from Japan.

Outside the town the jungle rose up, the tiny fields hacked from the wall of it here and there seeming merely moments’ irritations in its continuous slow burgeoning. Our school,
Mayflower Secondary, lay in the midst of it like a secret clearing, an arched gateway at the main road bearing its name and its motto, “Knowledge Is Light,” and then a steep gully-scarred lane leading up to its little village of buildings and outbuildings, vaguely ramshackle and crude but still giving an air, amidst the flame trees and irokos and palms, of a tropical elegance. I had a bungalow secluded behind a wall of hibiscus bush at the edge of the school compound, its windows barred with metal grilles because of the danger of thieves there, the far side looking out toward guava and citrus and bush and the back opening onto a small plot of rock-hard earth that I worked a few months then abandoned, unable to hold it against the ravages of insects and weeds and heat; during the rains the house was a mess of leaks from the stones students threw to knock down guava but otherwise it was comfortable enough, with its warps and odd angles, its smoothed concrete floors, it generic furnishings, slightly shoddy and sparse but enough to give an illusion of home. Shortly after my arrival an important chief died in a nearby town, for days afterwards the drums sounding long into the night to mourn him; and from my place there at the edge of the bush, with the crickets chirring outside in the brilliant dark and the vines creeping up through my windows, they seemed an ironic welcome, like the distant drums in some movie about darkest Africa.

There were four of us there at the school, four white people, “Europeans,” beyond myself an Englishwoman, Kate Townsend, who’d been there for years, and two Americans on a one-year exchange their university had set up; the rest of the staff were mainly Nigerian and then a mix of Ghanaian and Indian and Pakistani. In my first weeks some of the native teachers came by my house to greet me, wandering inquisitive from room to
room, leafing through my books and magazines, establishing their presence as if laying a claim on me; but amidst the ceaseless blur of school work it seemed after a few months that little had come of this contact aside from the brief exaggerated friendliness of greeting when paths crossed between classes, that it had remained no more than a haze of indistinct possibility at the edges of my aloneness. There appeared an assumption in most of my dealings with people there that beneath the surface gestures of fellowship there was a chasm that couldn’t be bridged, so taken for granted that every exchange seemed a kind of evasion, a circling around some truer version of things that was never named; and there was perhaps less the lingering of a colonial distrust in this than simply the belief that whites couldn’t be expected to understand how things truly were, our notions no doubt fine for the efficient mythical world we came from but merely quaint, inessential, misguided, in the grittier, more complex reality we now found ourselves in. Inevitably I fell in more and more with the Americans – we were united, at least, in our whiteness, our newness, had less work to do to understand one another; though even then there remained always the shadow of difference between us, if only in the quicker, more expectant intimacy others assumed with them because they were Americans, known quantities, emissaries from the centre of the world.

Our school had been founded in the fifties by a Nigerian reformer in protest against the forced teaching of religion in government schools. Hence the school’s name, though it seemed to me a strangely innocent choice, conjuring an image of American slave ships plying the African coast; and hence also its continuing distinction, its founder become a legend of sorts, he and his students having carved the school from nothing out of
the bush and built it up as a kind of monument to self-sufficiency. But by my time the school had passed into government hands and a creeping decay had set in. There was evidence still of a former glory, in the tiny world it still formed with its bakery and piggery and farms, the lingering ethic of a well-rounded self-reliance; but always there was the gap between the rhetoric of how things should be and the reality of how they were. Perhaps the school had never been as illustrious, as efficient, as the collective memory of it portrayed it; but my whole time there I was dogged by the sense that we were a waning, that the country outside us, with all its disorder and contradictions, had slowly begun to contaminate the tiny enclave we formed.

I taught fourth-form English and literature, preparing the students for the O-levels they’d write the following year. As a teacher I was adequate perhaps in the simplest things, dogged, methodical, but finally never comfortable in a classroom, never sensing with the sureness of instinct the thing that was needed, the moment that worked. Mr. Tsikata, the portly Ghanaian who headed the English department, seemed to extend to me at once an infinite forgiveness.

“There is a syllabus, I have it,” he said, smiling, amused, embarrassed, “but you could say it’s a kind of Platonic construct. It bears little relation to our own sublunar reality here.”

But still I began every day with the same small despair, did my teaching as best I could, took on extra duties, arranged extra lessons, yet never shook the feeling that every effort was provisional, incomplete. Short of starting from the beginning, what a noun was, what a verb, of re-creating from scratch the whole edifice of a language, it seemed possible only to keep up a panicked salvage of whatever the students had, all that I knew appearing sometimes to recede into the protean haze that language had
been when I myself had first learned English years before. Ultimately my teaching became simply a matter of getting through: I longed every day for the final bell, the silence the classrooms took on then, the crooked rows of empty desks, only in that calm the fear lifting from me of some impending chaos that my own insufficient grasp of things would be responsible for. The school was more the students’ world than mine, with their regimen of meals and prep and physical labour, their prefects and officers, their societies, their understanding of the hundred shifting rules and the thousand shifting exceptions that governed the rhythm of their lives there; and early on I simply conceded to them this greater authority, accepting the role of innocent that my whiteness allowed me, the token reverence that came with it and its reverse, a kind of invisibility.