Looking for Transwonderland (33 page)

Later in the afternoon, as Ivor and I waited to board the boat back to Calabar, we watched two little boys catching fish, using small balls of gari as bait. The aggressive masquerade was now chasing another girl around the jetty. She giggled fearfully and hid behind old man Ekpo who was eyeing the masquerade with calm disapproval. The masked man stared at her as if weighing up the consequences of smacking her. He chose to walk away, perhaps chastened by the chiding he had received from Ekpenyong and the masquerade committee. I resisted an urge to taunt him.

After the final passenger dropped into the boat, it motored away from the jetty back towards Calabar. Ekpenyong waved goodbye from the waterside. The brutish masquerade stood next to him, with his big mask and raffia mane, all hostilities forgotten. The pair of
them made a comical sight as they chatted and gesticulated, shrinking gradually into the distance.

 

Until the early twentieth century, each district of Calabar (including Creek Town) had its own obong (king). Then the districts were merged into one, ruled by a single supreme obong, who was selected by the Traditional Council. This arrangement has created an accession bottleneck in which the
etubom
(prince) from each district is equally eligible to succeed the obong when he dies.

Ivor had invited me to meet his friend, His Royal Highness Etubom Bassey Ekpo Bassey IV, a high-ranking member of the Efik royal family. A former journalist and vocal opponent of past military regimes, Bassey once ran in the Cross River gubernatorial elections. It turned out that he was also acquainted with my father. Ivor led me to his offices on the second floor of a fading 1960s building close to the river.

Bassey, a light-skinned man in his fifties, was watching an English football match at full volume on the TV. He pumped my hand and murmured a distracted hello, unable to break his fixation with the game in which Arsenal, his favourite team, were playing. Nigerians are
obsessed
with football, and support a handful of European teams. I had yet to meet anyone who did not support either Arsenal, Chelsea, Real Madrid or Barcelona.

‘I knew your father,' Bassey told me, one eye still on the game. ‘He was right about his campaign, but his mistake was that he fought everybody. He should have kept some people on his side, but he criticised everybody . . . the Yorubas, the Igbos, the Hausas. He made too many enemies.' My father was definitely an idealist, not a politician. I used to accompany him to the offices and homes of people similar to Bassey, where they would loudly bemoan Nigeria's ills while my siblings and I sipped Fanta under the crossfire of angry analysis.

‘Why don't Nigerians go on strikes and agitate as much as we used to?' I asked Bassey.

‘There is a lack of leadership,' Bassey replied. ‘The leaders don't want to commit class suicide. They want their comforts. They saw the example of your father and they know that if they fight they could die.

‘Hunger is what weighed the universities down. Babangida's reforms made living very, very expensive. That destroyed the leftist movements on campuses and made it difficult for people to find time for intellectual pursuits. The intellectual activity on campus simply disappeared. I think the last generation who know the difference between right and wrong are on their way out.'

Bassey's focus had also switched away from that sort of politics. He was an ardent enthusiast of pre-Christian traditions, and his ambitions to become the next obong were being obstructed by rival pro-Christian princes. The previous obong, himself a Soldier of Christ, had dedicated his throne to God and banned all libations at his meetings, allowing Christian prayers only. But Bassey was fighting for a return to indigenous, animist rituals and ceremonies. On this particular evening, however, Arsenal versus Blackburn Rovers was the only duel that interested him; my attempts at serious conversation were futile. But I didn't mind. I had arrived unannounced and, frankly, the football was hijacking my attention, too.

‘Is the Calabar royal family under threat?' I asked.

Taking his eyes off the television for a just a second, Bassey handed me a sheet of paper. ‘This is a speech I made the other day,' he said. I took the sheet of paper, grateful for some – any – information, then said my goodbyes and left the building.

Sitting on my hotel bed, I read the piece of paper. Bassey's speech, addressed to the heads of Efik royal houses on New Year's Eve, reprehended people who wanted to ‘demonise' traditional rulers. Bassey criticised rulers who had become Muslims or Christians and ‘abolished the performance of traditional rites', converting their prayer houses to mosques and churches.

The etubom wasn't against modern religions but he wanted to continue traditional libations which, he said, were done

I found myself endorsing Prince Bassey's cause (at least notionally – who knows what machinations underscore these political conflicts). It was pleasing to see someone challenging evangelism's eclipsing of old customs, which were the only unique things about Nigeria's culture and aesthetics. I hadn't cared about these things before – my family's Christianity and my foreign urban upbringing had bred an indifference to animism. But now I was starting to acquire a taste for the indigenous. Where would Nigeria be without those exciting weddings and (non-aggressive) masquerades and libations? They had been the
best part of my journey so far, the things that made this country worth visiting. Relinquishing our traditional heritage might be worthwhile if we could replace it with a modern, developed society, but at the moment we're stumbling into a crack between the two worlds.

 

That night in my hotel room, I became engrossed in a Nollywood film about a woman who takes a job as a government minister. Intoxicated by her newfound power, she begins treating her daughters atrociously. She beats them, criticises their dress sense and dishes out domestic tasks as if they were her slaves. The actress portraying the mother inhabited her role very naturally. Every order she hissed, every smug pout or bug-eyed glare made me despise her even more. Transfixed with hate, I followed each scene, waiting for the woman to receive retribution (which, being Nollywood, would be reliably brutal and severe). I could barely tear myself away to answer the knock on my door from room service.

But two hours later, I woke up to see the credits rolling. I had nodded off during the film, and I had no idea whether that nasty woman kept her job or not. This happened almost every time I watched these interminable Nollywood films. Yet I sought out these movies most evenings, and as time went on, I found myself caring more and more about the outcomes of the plots. I even surprised myself by recognising the names of the more famous actors, my eyes lighting up at Clem Ohameze's name in the opening credits. What was happening to me?

 

Being rich in a country that produces nothing but oil isn't easy: upgrading the accoutrements of wealth or obtaining spare parts for one's jet skis or Aston Martin involves much to-ing and fro-ing across the oceans. British Airways runs a lucrative line in ferrying Nigeria's wealthy to Europe to conduct their shopping trips. Sensing an opportunity, Calabar's government decided to build a massive,
duty-free shopping complex aimed at keeping some of this spending activity within Nigeria's borders.

The Tinapa retail development, built just outside Calabar, is the jewel in the city's development crown, a business/leisure complex and retail emporium where Lagos and Abuja millionaires can buy their jewels and Tommy Hilfiger casual wear without schlepping to Dubai or London. I'd seen the CNN commercials: aerial views of a modern concrete complex bursting with clothing stores, restaurants and cinemas – the latest manifestation of Calabar's vision of itself as Nigeria's premier city. I was looking forward to visiting.

‘There's nothing at Tinapa,' Ivor the American had told me. At the time, I assumed he was speaking figuratively.
He's American
, I thought dismissively; his definition of a shopping mall was probably stricter than the Nigerian one. Here, even the shabbiest, most thinly stocked outlet proudly described itself as a ‘shopping complex'. Surely no retail centre in Nigeria would measure up to Ivor's American notions?

Assuming I could grab a pizza in Tinapa, I skipped lunch and took an okada towards the outskirts of town. We turned off the highway and down an empty, freshly tarmacked road, flanked by very high concrete walls and brand new streetlights. But as the entrance gate neared, my driver turned away from the road, and trundled through a cluster of trees and decrepit houses.

‘Where are we going?' I asked him.

‘We are going to Tinapa, now,' he answered. ‘Okadas cannot enter the gate, so we must go through here.'

Clothes hung from washing lines and chickens lurched and scratched in the littered soil. Outside a mud-brick house, a barefoot toddler played, wearing nothing except her underpants and a curly wig. The place resembled a rural village. My driver parked at a wall where a policeman stood guard.

‘Enter through here,' my driver said, pointing to a gap in the wall.

I walked through it and scrambled down a very steep grassy bank, ending up in a vast and mostly empty car park. Assuming the action must be somewhere further away, I walked towards the main building, a modern design surrounded by water features and stone benches. Vacant shop fronts bordered the walkways, save for a few companies that had staked their claim and erected signs and logos. Behind the closed doors of one clothing store, two women were filling the window display with fabrics.

‘Where's the restaurant?' I asked a security guard, who kept vigil over the deserted space.

‘It's there.' The man pointed to some steps rising to an elevated set of buildings. I clambered up and scoured the emptiness around me.

‘I can't see any restaurant,' I hollered down to him.

‘It has not opened.'

Why didn't he tell me that
before
? He smiled up at me politely, probably thinking he was talking to a mad woman. The reality of the situation finally dawned on me. Flashbacks of those CNN commercials came to mind as I assembled the pieces of the jigsaw. The TV voiceover had spoken about Tinapa in the present tense, not the future. As far as I can remember, it gave no indication that the development – 7,000 square metres of it – was tenantless. And no one in Calabar had told me I was wasting my time when I'd asked them how to get here. They'd simply given me directions and sent me on my deluded way, presumably assuming that I was knowingly visiting a work in progress.

My stomach was angrier than I was. It grumbled and squealed as I approached the top of another flight of steps, which culminated at the crest of a hill. From the top of the stairs, the river shimmered in the distance. Looming in the foreground was a building with a huge golden dome and a King Kong gorilla perched on top of it, holding a NOLLYWOOD sign. This was Tinapa's entertainment complex. Muddled cultural referencing aside, it looked exciting. A sign
outside the building listed its intended uses: post-production, editing and sound studios, screening theatre, office, café, movie sets workshop, pre-production suites. The intention was grand, but I couldn't envisage Lagos-based Nollywood directors dropping their laptops and flying to Calabar to edit their shaky-cam productions in Tinapa's state-of-the art editing suites.

The movie theme park was situated behind the post-production suites.
Jurassic Park
dinosaurs manned its entrance. I walked through the gate, past a soldier lying almost supine in his chair. Springing upright, he demanded to know where I was going, and reprimanded me for ‘marching in' without his permission. I had to apologise before he let me through.

In the theme park, an outdoor amphitheatre was dotted with waxwork statues, a wonderland of cowboys and Indians, a knight in shining armour, the detective Dick Tracy, Disney-like gnomes and giant plastic flowers, which bloomed amid the din of construction work. A European foreman barked impatiently at his Nigerian workers. Jabbing an angry forefinger at the blueprints, he instructed his employees as though they were recalcitrant children. Before my indignation spilled over, I reminded myself that Nigerian foremen treat their staff the same way.

The men were working for a German construction group. Work was due to have finished in 2006, and it had cost the government and investors nearly $350 million so far. Three million visitors were supposed to be traipsing through here each year eventually, parking their SUVs, staying at the hotel, and generating $2.5 billion in revenue. It was hard to imagine it all. Harder still was envisaging those notoriously corrupt customs officers tolerating the idea of duty-free trading.

A young man, one of the few other visitors at Tinapa, was standing nearby. I asked him what he thought of Tinapa. With a sceptical shake of the head, he branded the project a scam. ‘You cannot carry money from government like that,' he said. ‘You must put it
through something first.' The ex-governor Donald Duke, for all his virtues, was as corrupt as the others, the man claimed. Tinapa was his Big White Elephant, an excuse to build a project and collect kickbacks.