Looking for Transwonderland (5 page)

We walked into the quiet, dimly lit exhibition room. A female employee sat slumped asleep on a chair in the corner. She surfaced briefly to look at me before nodding off again. I felt a strange obligation to tread lightly and not disturb her. There were no other
visitors in the room. Around me were glass cabinets containing artefacts and clothing belonging to various ethnic groups: bronze sculptures from the old Benin empire; chain mail from the Islamic north, and a camel saddle made from leather, wood, brass and iron. The museum provided no other information. Each artefact was simply labelled ‘camel saddle' or ‘Yoruba drum' without any clue about its age, rarity, provenance or cultural significance. The museum guide had no extra information either, but he insisted on giving me a guided tour anyway.

Just as he showed me some divination symbols, the power cut out and threw the entire museum into semi-darkness. ‘I'm coming,' he said to me, as he rushed out to switch on the power generator. I stood in the shadows and waited patiently. Eventually, I decided to view the rest of exhibition by myself. I squinted at some bows and arrows, Yoruba bracelets intricately carved from ivory, and the silhouettes of the splendidly clothed waxwork figures of a northern emir and a Calabar chief, towering scarily in the twilight gloom.

When the lights finally came back on, the museum guide reemerged with a bearded German tourist who had just arrived at the museum. The sight of the European visitor woke the dozing female staffer like a splash of cold water; she immediately stood up to lavish him with attention, both she and her colleague hovering around the man as if money might ooze from his pores at any moment. All interest in me disappeared. I felt irked. Why focus all their attention on this German when they'd be better off getting a juicy tip from him and me both?

Across the courtyard, I stepped inside a room housing exquisite Benin empire elephant tusks carved with low-relief hieroglyphs. The female staffer followed me inside (museum rules) and resumed her snoozing in another corner chair. I left her there and went through to the gallery next door, which was filled with contemporary paintings, including Japanese manga-style drawings. My favourite was an oil on canvas depicting a woman sitting on the back
of a motorcycle taxi. A double victim of fashion and Nigeria's transport system, her low-cut hipster jeans rudely revealed the crack of her backside. In a spirit of playfulness or sternness – I couldn't tell which – the painting was titled
Watch Your Back
. The Nigeria I knew as a child was never this interesting or humanised, never filled with artwork. I was enjoying being a tourist, even if I hadn't been happy with the museum guide for presuming I was one.

I moved on to another annex of the museum, which displayed the car in which President Murtala Mohammed was assassinated in 1976. Mohammed was an army general who took power in a coup in 1975 and presided over a fractious military regime, another episode of the violence that had undermined Nigeria ever since it gained independence. The sight of the car punctured my mood and plunged me back into the mire of Nigerian history and politics.

Until 1960, Nigeria was ruled by the British. They introduced Western education to the south, and also developed it economically, exploiting its ports and oil, but they preserved the north's pre-colonial emirate system. The north was divided into several mini-states, each centred around a paramount ruler or emir. This structure made it easy for the British to exercise colonial rule without having to spend money on employing colonial administrators. They interfered little with the emirate system, its sharia law or its traditional Islamic education. Consequently, the north fell behind the south in terms of modern education and economic development.

Because they outnumbered the rest of the country according to the census, northerners were allocated more seats in the Federal Legislature after Nigeria gained independence in 1960. The three main parliamentary parties reflected the dominant ethnic make-up of the country: Muslim Hausas in the north, the Igbos in the south-east and the Yorubas in the south-west. Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, a quiet northerner, was elected the country's first prime minister.

At the time, my mother was a ten-year-old living in our
Ogoniland village, where traditional life continued despite the discovery of oil in 1957. She fetched water from the stream and wore new uniforms on Empire Day and prayed at the small church. My father, in his late teens, was a student in the city of Ibadan, the first member of his family to attend university.

By the time Nigeria became a republic in 1963, the tensions caused by ethnic and economic inequalities were already surfacing. The less educated northerners feared being dominated in a new, westernised political system. In the central region, the Tiv people held violent protests over minority rights, and factional fighting broke out in the Yoruba West, leading to the imprisonment of the country's main opposition leader on spurious treason charges. By this stage, government corruption had already taken root.

General elections were held in 1965 but were sullied by boycotts and alleged fraud. Riots broke out. The following year, a group of mainly Igbo army officers overthrew the government and assassinated Balewa, the prime minister.

The replacement military government couldn't govern effectively or produce a new constitution that satisfied all Nigerians (we're still dissatisfied to this day). When the military tried to change the country's federal structure, a second coup was staged, led by a Ngas, General Yakubu Gowon. Igbos living in the north were massacred in attacks intended to avenge the killing of Balewa. The killings fuelled a growing desire among the Igbo people to separate from Nigeria and create a nation state of their own, and in 1967, they declared the eastern region an independent state called Biafra, which included the oil-rich Niger Delta – Nigeria's main source of wealth. A brutal civil war ensued.

At the start of the war, my parents were living in Nsukka, an Igbo town. The government had asked Nigerians to return to their broader regional homelands, so my father transferred his PhD from Ibadan University to Nsukka University in the south-east of the country. It was here that he met my mother, who was living with
her sister and brother-in-law in Nsukka town. Without TV and objective newspapers, my mother, then seventeen, had little sense of danger. But the placidity of normal life was gradually eroded by rumours that ‘Northerners' were out to kill everyone. My mother only started to believe the rumours and fear the worst when she heard the morale-boosting Igbo war songs on the radio, and the wail of air raids accompanied by anti-aircraft gunfire. Nsukka's non-Igbo residents began returning to their home towns in convoys of lorries. My parents returned to Ogoniland and stayed with my father's parents.

There, they realised that the war ‘facts' they'd been hearing were merely propaganda. Ogonis speculated heatedly on our place within the struggle. The whole of south-eastern Nigeria – Ogoniland included – had been bundled under the Biafra rubric without any consultation. There was discomfort about that. The Igbo people already dominated us economically and politically in the south-east. If Biafra became a fully fledged country, would our language and culture be eradicated?

My parents decided to flee Biafra and live in the federal part of Nigeria. Early one morning, disguised as simple fishermen, they boarded a canoe. Bombs and gunfire exploded from the war front ahead. The sound of it compelled others to retreat, but my parents were determined to leave and forged ahead counter-intuitively, rowing through the mangrove creeks to Bonny, a federally controlled port. From there, they took a ship to Lagos, where they started a temporary new life. My brother Ken Jr was born in the city the following year, in 1968.

Two years and one million civilian deaths later, Biafra finally surrendered. My father had returned to the war front to serve as an administrator in Bonny, and when the war ended, he took a job as the Commissioner for Works in our home town of Port Harcourt. During the next six years, my second brother Gian was born, followed by Zina and me.

Throughout the 1970s, a reunited Nigeria rebuilt itself with the help of dizzy oil prices. Soon after the war, our president, General Gowon, declared that Nigeria would return to civilian rule in four years. Accused of dragging his feet, he was overthrown in a coup led by General Murtala Mohammed in 1975. Many of this new leader's policies went down well with the public. Mohammed sacked any army and government staff associated with Gowon, and he reverted to the former national census. It had recorded a lower Hausa population, with implications for the make-up of the Federal Assembly. But his Supreme Military Council boosted federal powers at the expense of state-level government, and it took over the media. As Mohammed made his way to the army barracks in Lagos a year later, his limousine was ambushed and he was killed by a round of bullets.

This black limousine now stood in the museum. Every bullet hole and every window crack painted a brutally exact image of his death. Despite the damage, the car looked in finer condition than many of the vehicles plying Lagos's streets today. The public display of Mohammed's violated car contrasted acutely for me with the secrecy that had surrounded my father's murder. He was hanged along with eight of his colleagues at a prison in Port Harcourt. Our families were informed after the executions, which had been carried out furtively and without warning, behind closed doors, the victims' remains kept from us for more than a decade. Not being an eyewitness to it all was a blessing, but it has left me with a displaced curiosity about the details of other murders.

The car was the only museum artefact that roused the imagination or gave any insight into Nigeria's modern history. The museum's current curator showed no such imagination when creating the photography exhibit near Mohammed's car. Black-and-white photos of every post-independence leader hung on the walls, but the museum offered no written information about how these men got into power, or what good (if any) they did for the country. The
guide materialised from behind to inform me that I was looking at photographs of our former leaders.

‘This is Nigeria's first prime minister, Tafawa Balewa, and this is—' He paused suddenly. ‘Are you married?'

‘No,' I replied, stunned by the timing and irrelevance of the question. We exchanged lingering, unsmiling stares before he turned to the photos and resumed his run-through of the faces on the wall.

There was a photo of Olusegun Obasanjo, a lieutenant general who succeeded Murtala Mohammed as president, with his characteristically small eyes and flared nostrils. In 1979 he became the first military man to restore Nigeria to civilian rule through elections that were widely known to have been rigged. Next to Obasanjo's picture was the photo of his successor, Shehu Shagari. His forehead bulged over a round face and gently protuberant eyes. Shagari, a northerner, presided over four years of highly corrupt rule and economic mismanagement. The national debt soared and so did unemployment, while the economy shrank by 8 per cent. Shagari was shunted aside in another military coup, led by Major-General Muhammadu Buhari, a slim, chisel-faced man whose moustache hung beneath prominent cheekbones. He lasted two years before being overthrown by the man in the museum's next photo, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida. His features – gap-toothed, with a square face and cuddly physique – looked deceptively honest. At first, Babangida made all the right noises: he restored press freedom and released political prisoners; but he took corruption to a new and unprecedented level.

A return to civilian rule was promised in 1990, but Babangida pushed it back to 1993. During that time, the military government gave the illusion of democracy by creating two puppet political parties, which it tightly controlled. After holding local-level elections, Babangida eventually allowed a general election in 1993. Although his good friend, a wealthy entrepreneur called Moshood Abiola, was
declared the winner in this relatively fair election, General Babangida annulled the result. Deadly riots ensued, and the general handed over power to an interim government.

Within twelve months, Babangida's deputy, General Sani Abacha, pushed the new authorities aside and assumed power. His face in the photograph emanated ruthlessness: tribal marks stretched vertically between reptilian eyes and a sour pout; a brooding assassin. Abacha governed Nigeria with an iron fist. He disbanded all political parties and government institutions, including the Senate, and replaced them with army men.

In 1994 Abiola, the presumed winner of the 1993 elections, declared himself president before being arrested on treason charges and kept in solitary confinement. A growing opposition lobbied to reinstate the Senate, and workers went on strike to campaign for Abiola's release from prison. Abacha, intolerant of all dissent, jailed union leaders. The former president Obasanjo was imprisoned for plotting to overthrow the government. My father and eight of his colleagues were jailed and falsely charged with inciting the murder of four other Ogoni activists, even though all of them had been prevented from entering Ogoniland on the day of the murders. The tribunal set up to try them was declared rigged by human rights organisations. Witnesses who testified against them later admitted to receiving bribes. The Ogoni Nine's subsequent executions ignited international condemnation, and led to Nigeria's expulsion from the Commonwealth.

In 1998, Abacha died of a sudden heart attack. He was succeeded by General Abdulsalami Abubakar, a bespectacled, cleft-chinned man who allowed general elections to be held in 1999. Former head of state Obasanjo won the presidency and served two terms in office before being succeeded in the 2007 elections by Umaru Yar'Adua, a former chemistry professor whose thin lips and arched nose seem to originate north of the Sahara. It was the first time that Nigeria had had two successive democratic administrations.