A SMALL TOWN IN THREE ACTS

by MISSANG OYONGHA (Nigeria)

Making a local connection Nigeria

A Small Town in Three Acts “We’re not looking for an English teacher right now”, Mr Olotu said to me, neatly folding the letter I had just presented. “Every year the government sends someone from the youth corps just like you, but ours is a small school, and we can’t always afford to pay”. We were sitting in the cool living room of his house in Ikare, a town in Southwest Nigeria. I had come up the winding outer staircase of this once-elegant house, with its wrought-iron balustrade, its wide, stony front yard, its mud-spattered walls. On a sunny day in rainy April, there were boys playing outside. I felt in my pockets for my thinning wad of naira notes, gauging how many days before it thinned out. It had taken me forty-eight hours, travelling seven hundred kilometres, to get here. I was lugging around a burden of a suitcase, stuffed with enough clothes and books to last me a year away from home. At twenty, I welcomed the distance from the familiar, the chance to be a stranger. I hoped to learn Yoruba, drink palm wine, and write. Mr Olotu was seventy-six, with the assured tone of a past master of shrewd monologues and deflater of salary expectations. The cheerful and petite Mrs Olotu served lunch, warm amala and gbegiri soup. For two days I had ignored meaty aromas and stuck to a diet of bread and biscuits, careful not to incite my bowels with spicy food on a road journey. In the expansive mood after lunch, it emerged that Mr Olotu had been to Fourah Bay College, in Freetown, and then on to university in America. Mrs Olotu, I learnt had been the very first teacher of French in the state. The boys whose play animated the compound had been rescued from the carnage that overtook Sierra Leone in the 1990s – to life in a town thousands ofkilometres from home, where Yoruba, once again, was the mother tongue. Afterwards, as I heaved my suitcase into the boot of Mr Olotu’s Peugeot for the short drive to my lodgings, it occurred to me that this one-storey house held a multitude of stories. Small towns like Ikare reveal themselves best when seen on foot, when visually absorbed in doses. There were two parts of town. In old Ikare the architectural dialect was rich in simple nouns: mud and cement walls, wooden shutters, rusty metal roofs. I lived in new Ikare, which was loud with mini buses, trade, and polyglot voices. The town had two kings too, oddly. One king, the Owa Ale, lived in old Ikare, in a palace hidden behind stately, high clay walls. “The Kabiyesi is not around”, a palace official told us curtly at the gates when my youth corps cohorts and I went to pay homage. The other king, the Olukare, lived tellingly in a spacious bungalow in the middle of the town market, amid the women selling roasted fish, garri, vegetables, and palm oil. “The Kabiyesi will be with you shortly”, a palace functionary assured us. Thirty minutes later, the monarch appeared, voluble and urbane. It was a fascinating tale: a boyhood friendship curdled in adulthood by rivalry; a royal lineage going back centuries to the Yoruba ancestor, Oduduwa; a ruling hierarchy complicated by British colonial rule; the claim to royal office of a settler family made good. Another letter came, urgent and personal, and I had to leave Ikare.I didn’t learn as much Yoruba as I had hoped to. I learnt just enough to offer terse greetings, without the minor rituals of obeisance that mark the stranger from the native. I never climbed the hill which loomed over our house, because it was the allotted or chosen preserve of a sect of worshippers called the ‘aladura’[ in Yoruba, “ praying people”]. Their white-robed figures could be seen clambering up and down the slopes all day. At night their prayers wafted down to us in the stillness. They were obsessive. Once I lay awake and remembered the Nigerian pidgin expression, “ God no dey sleep”, a statement of faith in an all-seeing God, eternally vigilant and chronically insomniac. I turned over and tried to sleep.