Looking for Transwonderland (13 page)

Then again, audiences throughout the world seem to find ways of ignoring bad production quality, sieving it out and distilling a film to its basic essence: the human story. Knowing this, the producers of trashy Western soap operas such as
Eastenders
and
Sunset Beach
use it to win the shameless loyalty of some of my most intelligent British friends. Nigerians will watch Nollywood films, no matter how bad, because everyone likes to see their own culture played back to them. Watching ourselves on screen makes for a pleasant change after being bombarded with foreign stories and images.

Some of the superior Nollywood films have begun to appear at small international festivals. Teco showed one of his at an Israeli film festival. A framed newspaper article about the event hung on his wall.

‘Did they like the film?' I asked.

‘Oh yes, they liked it. They were very encouraging. People came up to me afterwards and congratulated me. They were pleased to see Nigerians making films.'

Things were improving, Teco said. The more sophisticated directors are looking at more esoteric aspects of Nigerian life. The well-known film-maker Aquila Njamah made
After the Vow
, which
followed a young couple discovering new aspects of one another's personalities after their wedding. Another of his films,
Widows
, explored the mistreatment of widows in rural areas. Njamah placed quality above quantity, producing movies at a relatively work-shy rate of two per year. His latest,
The Rivals
, had recently won Best International Drama at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival.

But constant bootlegging may stall Nollywood's artistic evolution. I wondered how our film production could keep improving when profits often vanish into the streets.

‘We're trying to stop it,' Teco said. ‘I've been speaking to distributors and making agreements with them.' He didn't specify how he hoped to control those bootleggers who offered me DVDs at a tenth of the original price. Their copying machines, shamelessly positioned in the market stalls, churn out numerous DVDs, the sleeves littered with incriminating spelling mistakes and smudgy photos. For a small ‘dash', the police look away and conduct raids once or twice a year for show.

The actors and actresses' incomes still don't match their huge fame, and certain celebrity faces must endure the ignominy of riding around town by modest means. ‘Hold on, didn't I see her in that film?' Mabel once asked, as a famous actress trundled past on an okada. But money is not the objective. Even a few famous Nigerians, football stars included, have appeared in Nollywood movies.

‘You could act in one of my films,' Teco suggested.

‘Really?'

‘Introducing Noo Saro-Wiwa,' he said, drawing imaginary opening credits with his hands.

Once upon a time I might have laughed at the offer. Now, I swelled with hubris. A fantasy reel spooled through my mind, my metre-long face emoting on a cinema screen. Hollywood meant nothing. Why be a plankton in the ocean when I could be a big fish
in an emerging pond? Nollywood now seemed a more dignified enterprise, something I could take seriously. Directors like Teco Benson breathed life into the possibility that it might transcend its amateurism and produce international-standard films one day.

I returned to the streets of Surulere, imagining myself with a copper-coloured hair weave, preparing my Oscar acceptance speech.

 

A few days later, Mabel and I dragged my heavy bag through Mile Two's sandy streets to a ‘motor park', a terminal for minibus taxis destined for all parts of the country. A driver wedged my luggage forcefully between two other suitcases, then flattened it beneath a colossal old TV set before closing the door on all of it with the full thrust of his body weight. Sandwiched between the window and a plump lady, I waved Mabel goodbye as the vehicle pulled out onto the road to Ibadan. I wasn't completely done with Lagos, but, after three weeks in the city, I was worn out. I thought I'd take a deep breath and see the rest of the country before returning here at the end of my journey.

 

 

Ibadan. I had always liked the name. It sounded unusual – not Nigerian, not English; almost Arabic. Ibadan was the city where my father attended university. Its name brought back memories of him conversing with his friends; of loud, intellectual gripes that hung in the tobacco clouds above the clink of brandy glasses. Academic books were read as fervently as the Bible back then, a distant era of enlightenment, before the colonial baton of educational progress had been fumbled and dropped.

The Yorubas, Ibadan's dominant ethnic group, were among the first people to mix with European missionaries, and consequently became the most educated Nigerians. Among them was Samuel Ajayi Crowther, born in 1809, the first African bishop and one of the first Nigerians to receive higher education. Yorubas embraced literacy and education, and by the late 1950s, a million of their children were enrolled in primary schools in the south-west. Grammar schools and universities were built, transforming Ibadan into the intellectual heart of Nigeria. The University of Ibadan, where my father studied in the early 1960s, became one of the finest academic establishments in the developing world, a refinery for our newly tapped intellect. We didn't visit Ibadan during our 1988 trip. Too far west, my father said. So I was
particularly keen to visit the city now and see where he studied all those years ago.

Ibadan lay three hours north of Lagos on the highway, just beyond shouting distance of Lagos and its residents. It was a smaller, less labyrinthine city, set in gentle hills that elevate it above Lagos's sea-level humidity. The large golden dome of a mosque rose above streets crowded with vendors and markets and more nondescript modernist architecture, much like Lagos. But there was no question I was still in mouthy Yorubaland, where bedfellows bark at each other as if separated by a busy river.

I checked into an ageing hotel perched aloofly on a hill. The receptionist commented on my non-Nigerian ‘intonation' and asked me where I was from. When he saw the name Saro-Wiwa on my check-in form, he gushed. I looked nothing like my father, apparently.

‘You look like footballer,' he said, glancing down at my trainers.

A porter carried my bags to my room. This was the first time I had stayed in a Nigerian hotel at my own expense. At my price range, I wasn't sure exactly what to expect, although what I found didn't surprise me: an old carpet, a cold shower and a 1980s TV set emitting crackly images of a Nollywood movie. After flopping onto the jelly-springed crater of a bed, I decided to visit the university rather than risk injury to my spine.

I jumped on an okada. During a traffic go-slow near the market, my driver took issue with the driver in front of us for having the temerity to wait three seconds before moving forward with the traffic. To my driver, this had caused an unforgivable delay to our journey. He pulled up alongside the idiot time-waster to give him a piece of his mind with all the diplomacy of a drill sergeant. The pair of them argued, roared and wagged fingers at one another for half a mile, ignoring my screams for them to watch the road. Eventually they went their separate ways, and I was deposited in my usual fluster outside the gates of the University of Ibadan.

Entering its grounds was like stepping into a new dimension: no smog, no noise, no crowds. From the main gate I walked towards the campus buildings down a long quiet road, flanked by smooth lawns and with colourful flowers running along its centre. The university, known as UI, was established by the British in 1948 as an external college of the University of London. Some of Nigeria's most influential people sharpened their minds here: the author Chinua Achebe; the writer and Nobel Prize-winner Wole Soyinka; Jacob Ade Ajayi (one of Africa's best historians), and a stream of lawyers, engineers and doctors. My father gained his English degree here in the early 1960s, just before the college became independent from the University of London.

Education mattered to my father. He
worshipped
the concept. Giving his children a good education, he believed, was the pinnacle of his achievements as a parent, even if he wasn't so good at the everyday displays of affection: on my birthdays he would summon me to his desk to wish me a perfunctory happy birthday, signing my card while I stood and watched. He would stick the card inside an envelope without bothering to seal it, and then hand it over to me, puffing his pipe between unsmiling lips. But when it came to cultivating our minds, we couldn't ask for a more nurturing parent.

Education enabled him to transcend his rural roots. As a ten-year-old boy selling palm wine on the streets of the tiny town of Bori, he won a scholarship to the best local government secondary school, and later enrolled at UI as an undergraduate, then a postgraduate. As one of only two Ogoni students on campus, he encountered what he described as the ‘cankerworm' of tribalism. By his reckoning, voters overlooked him in the Student Union elections because he was an ethnic minority. Regardless, he was part of the ‘High Table', a mixed group of postgrads who met regularly at the refectory to discuss Nigeria's feared demise. It was the 1960s, and student minds had to focus on dissertations amid the distractions of military coups, a civil war, dawn-to-dusk curfews
and tense radio news updates. Yet in spite of the political turbulence, the university maintained academic excellence – an almost enviable inverse of today when standards are sinking in front of a placid backdrop of democracy.

Were my father still alive I'm not sure he would recognise life on campus today. The buildings still looked the same, but the placard erected near the bookshop was undoubtedly a sign of modern times: ‘University of Ibadan says: Cultism puts you in bondage. Renounce and denounce it so that you can enjoy your God-given freedom. Cultism is evil and destructive. DO NOT be part of it.'

University cults are a big problem in Nigerian universities. They began as fraternities or ‘confraternities', harmless social clubs for male students. At UI in the 1950s, Wole Soyinka was a member of the Pyrates Confraternity, which comprised idealists who wanted to rid UI of its elitism. But by the 1980s, the nature of confraternities had morphed into something more sinister. After the coup of Ibrahim Babangida in 1985, military leaders began supplying the confraternities with weapons to subdue pro-democracy protests by students and university staff.

Around the same time, some of the confraternities were evolving into aggressive cults. They engaged in traditional religious rites and voodoo-type practices, giving themselves names such as the Campus Mafia and Brotherhood of the Blood. Their initiation ceremonies consisted of harsh beatings, the drinking of liquid mixed with blood, or even the raping of female students. But it wasn't only the men who joined them. The Black Brazier, Daughters of Jezebel and other all-women cults germinated in the late 1990s, joining forces with their male counterparts and running prostitution syndicates. The cult members also became academic ‘high-fliers': by vandalising lecturers' property or abducting their relatives, they ensured that they received enhanced grades.

When their activities diversified to kidnapping, armed robbery and the murder of rival cult members, universities throughout
Nigeria started a campaign denouncing cultism. They expelled the cults and granted amnesties to students who renounced their membership. But this simply shifted the cults' activities away from campus and onto the streets. The universities also failed to police themselves properly, which eventually led to the return of cultism to the campuses, except that these cults now had off-campus links to the criminal world.

Newspaper reports have alleged that politicians used cults to intimidate their political opponents. And the cults are involved in the kidnapping of foreign oil workers in the oil-rich Niger Delta region. They've fought alongside militant groups such as the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), and even joined these organisations. The cults' influence has extended into government, with some State Assembly members belonging to them. Their power is becoming so extensive – and the networking opportunities so agreeable – that cult membership can further a student's job prospects more than any degree qualification.

My father would be mortified. I carried on walking, past the student halls of residence where lines of laundry hung out to dry on the balconies of grimy, whitewashed buildings leached grey by rain. It had been a while since I was in a place where almost the entire population was educated. I discerned a difference in the way the students carried themselves compared to the vendors who sold them fruits and peanuts from wooden stalls outside the faculty buildings. Their movements were sprightlier, sharper. Perhaps the students were less passive to the mysteries of the world around them now that they understood them better.

In the humanities wing I passed students chatting in a central courtyard and climbed the stairs to the English department where my father once studied. These days, a degree from most Nigerian universities is worth less than a high-school qualification in other parts of the world. Budgets have fallen, standards have fallen, many of the best academics have moved abroad to South Africa, the US
and the UK. But is Ibadan still the academic gold standard in West African education?

‘Of
course
,' replied one lecturer in the English department head's office. I didn't know if he was being defensive. It would have been rude to probe: they'd kindly given me some of their time; my father was a great man, they told me, and they were honoured to meet me.

Faith Odele, the president of the Student Association, was disgusted by the current state of affairs. ‘What is the basis of calling ourselves the best?' she asked. ‘Are we living on past glories or are we comparing ourselves with the best today?' She was a quiet, slim girl whose graceful neck held up a pretty face etched with permanent anxiety.