My earliest memory is of a neighbour’s naming ceremony in the village of Arodan. I go with my father and hold his hand all the way through.
You don’t just slap a name on a Yoruba child the moment they are born. Names have significance in terms of the destiny of the individual and the alignment with the will of the ancestors. My full name is Oyindamola, although I only go by Oyin Da. It means “sweetness/honey mixed with wealth or well-being”; a good name, one that the Ifa priest said my ancestors favoured. I am not nor have I ever been sweet, but that never bothered my parents.
The ceremony takes place in the courtyard of the baby’s parents. There is a dais on which a decorated high table dominates. The parents and the baby sit, while the chairperson, a stout, intense woman called Doyin, holds forth on a microphone. My father points out a stranger just to the left of the dais with a briefcase chained to his left hand. This is a man from the government, the registrar, who has to attend all births and naming ceremonies. In the past people took children to birth registration, but things are different now.
I watch Doyin start things off with an opening prayer. Back in time, this would be an exhortation to ancestors, but with the advent of missionaries, colonialism and American-style fundamentalism, Christian prayers came to dominate in the twentieth and early twenty-first century. The Yoruba recently reverted to the ancestral theme, when the role of fundamentalists in the near-destruction of the world became clear. When stoking apocalyptic events did not lead to Armageddon or the Rapture, Immanentising the Eschaton fell out of fashion, and Christianity became either nominal or fringe.
Doyin pours out spirits to the ancestors, and the naming begins. The child has four names, agreed by everyone to be fortuitous and strong. It is given a taste of the seven flavours of life: water, salt, honey, palm oil, kola nut, bitter nut and pepper. These are just rubbed against the lips of the child, and each comes with a prayer for a long and prosperous life, using puns on the names of the flavours.
After the pepper, the registrar steps forward and opens his briefcase. He takes out a smaller case, like the kind of box you’d have an engagement ring in, and breaks a seal in full view. He hands the box to Doyin who examines it and turns to the crowd.
“I attest that this is not an Ariyo chip.” She is referring to the brand of chips so infamous in Nigeria for their dangerous malfunctions that this proclamation has become an accepted part of the ceremony.
She hands it back to the registrar, who has a jet injector ready. He picks out a chip from the box, charges the injector and places it on the neck of the baby. He fires, with that truncated hissing sound, and the crowd bursts into song and laughter. The registrar does not stick around. The baby cries and the mother whips out an engorged breast to feed him.
“Did I have one of those, Daddy?” I ask.
“Yes.”
The earliest effort of the Nigerian government to tag all citizens with ID implants was a disaster because the pilot group got toxic chips that poisoned them, first driving them mad with heavy metal, then killing them. Not all, of course, but about seventy per cent, a PR disaster since not everyone was convinced that they wanted to be chipped in the first place. It became a rallying cry for privacy advocates and delayed the ID programme by decades. Now it is a slick machine, with chipping at birth, then repositioning at ten and nineteen.
While my father drops an envelope for the new couple, I examine the baby’s neck and spot the red dot where the chip was applied.
“Come on,” says my father. “Let’s go to the forest.”
My father is not typical of Yoruba or Nigerian men. He will die young, but while he is alive, each day is a surprise. For one thing, he has no trade, and that separates him out from the other village men, but when I say he has no trade, I don’t mean he is without occupation, I mean he has not settled on any one thing. He has a multitude of skills and from each day to the next he does whatever he wants. He can hunt, butcher, do carpentry, lay bricks, and his natural curiosity leads him to tinker with machines.
After checking the integrity of the traps, we head for the cashew tree and pick up the fallen nuts, piling them into a two-litre tin can. Father digs a hole and sets a fire in it, then we suspend the tin over it, allowing the flames to make contact with the can. In a few moments we both hear the hiss-pop! of the cashews roasting. The fleshy bits we gather in a bucket–it can be caustic in these amounts. Outer casing crisp and black, we crack the nuts free and I do not burn myself once. My father’s face is calm, like a pond surface. When I do something with particular verve, he breaks into a smile, but remains quiet.
Later, when we check the traps again, we have two grass-cutters and a bush rat. Father lifts me up, and places me on the bamboo bench. I giggle as he washes my feet. He cuts down fresh bamboo stems, then opens them lengthwise. He skins the animals, then chops them into bite-sized pieces, which he lays into the concavity of a portion of the bamboo stems. He squeezes out the cashew juice into the meat, then adds the nuts and whole wild chillies we picked on the way. He seals the concavity with green bamboo leaves, and repeats the whole process a second time on a different stem. He restarts the fire from before, then places the two bespoke bamboo pots inside.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” he asks.
“Always right,” I say.
He cracks a smile, and may have chuckled briefly. “I don’t think your mother could stand being sandwiched between two know-it-alls.”
We eat the stewed meat in the bamboo grove out of bamboo bowls, sitting in the bamboo shelter he built. Shadows are longer now, and I sit in the shade of my father’s. I smell his sweat and hear his mastication and brief burps. I’m dozing when he lifts me up, and the gentle rocking of his gait on the way home sends me off to sleep.
I wake and turn, realising that we are not at home, but in the workshop, where my father tinkers on a monstrosity. I sleep off before he notices that I am awake.
My mother writes a single sentence of four hundred words in Yoruba and explains to me why it is meaningless. She teaches me that this is the essence of politics: to say much, but mean nothing. My mother is warm-hearted and soft of feature, all curves and roundness, sharp contrast to her incisive brain. She does not have an ID chip. A census-taker tried to berate her for it once and she beat him to death with verbal hypotaxis. Metaphorically, of course.
I don’t learn English until I am ten years old. By this time, my father is gone.
I have never seen my parents kiss, although for some reason, for many years I think I have. Later, when I revisit, I realise I have not. Is it just me? Is this the fiction that children who lose their parents create? Or is the past changing in subtle ways?
Arodan, our village, has a single claim to fame: proximity to twelve wind tunnels built to support the abortive Nigerian space programme. When the resources dried up, the workers simply downed tools and walked away. One day the place was a thriving anthill of activity; the next, abandoned. I have been to see the tunnels, screeched inside them, fearful of my own echo. I have been dwarfed by the giant fans, each blade five times my height. I imagine them moving, first slow, then faster than the eye can follow. The tunnels fill with imaginary air and blow my mental self away as though I am a leaf. The spaces look like the belly of a concrete leviathan, dilated from putrefying gases. I am an undigested morsel, standing alone among waste.
“Daddy, tell me about aliens,” I say.
“They are green-skinned, and they come from Mars.”
“Daddy…”
“They have spaceships made of corn husks and superglue. They have to eat a lot of beans.”
“Daddy…”
“Because theirs is a spaceflight powered by—”
“I’m going to tell Mother that you won’t tell me.”
“Aliens… aliens are only a problem in London, my little heart.”
“Have you been to London?”
“I’ve been to Birmingham, but I know what London is like.”
“What is it like?”
“London is like Lagos. It is built on the blood of others and is home to bandits and freebooters.”
“And aliens!”
“And aliens.”
My father is very strict with discipline in that I don’t get away with anything, but immediately after my punishment he is very warm and affectionate.
I deliberately transgress because of this sometimes.
Arodan as a village clutches a gentle hill, then spills down the west side to the plains, stopping at the banks of a river, a nameless tributary of the larger Yemaja. That description makes it seem large, but there is a lot of space between dwellings. This place has been resettled twice, once after a British punitive expedition razed it to the ground for some infraction lost to time, and the other time in 1956 or so, when all the inhabitants were found dead, mauled by carnivorous animals.
There has always been internal pressure to maintain a rural feel. We know each other’s families at least. Yes, we all have ID chips, but there is only a dirt road that links the motorways with Arodan, and though there are a multitude of footpaths, only one road down the hill through the middle of the village. We have some electricity, potable water from boreholes, sewerage, a post office, but that’s it. The cinema is a ninety-minute drive away, and nobody ever visits.
Which is why a stranger in town is always news.
Which is why the woman staring at me, a visitor, is both memorable and strange. My first impression of her is of a person completely at peace with herself. You get that sense even before you take in her physical presence, her lean frame, her fair skin, her light-brown eyes, her blue tie-and-dye wrap, which stops just above her breasts, her bare arms and feet. I can’t say how old she is. To me, at my level of maturity, there are only four ages: baby, child, adult and old person. She is an adult.
“Oh. You’re revising,” she says. I may have misheard. It doesn’t matter, because she disappears after that. Without drama, no sparkles, no dissolution, just there, then not-there.
I argue the memory with myself sometimes, and even consider that I may have imagined her. Nobody else saw her on that day, and even though I had never seen her before, I could not shake a feeling of familiarity.
This is one of the few things I never told my father.
Priests in red fussing around the smoking ruins of a home destroyed overnight during the thunderstorm; my father and I in the crowd that gathers to watch. It is the quietest crowd you’ve ever seen; not a soul speaks. I do. I ask who the people in red are.
“Sango priests,” says my father. “Lightning struck the house last night. Sango is the god of thunder, and any dwelling that has been brought down like this must be purified before repair.”
“They don’t seem to be purifying. They seem to be looking for something.”
My father nods. “The thunderstone, the thunderbolt calculus. The process can’t begin until they find the lithic manifestation of the lightning.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They’re going to find a pretty stone they’ll call the thunderstone, then they’re going to begin purification rites.”
And so they did.
Later that evening, while working on the engine, he tells me they aren’t really going to find the thunderstone. They will find an interesting pebble and decide it is the thunderstone. I ask why they still go through the motions. He says there is community cohesion in the old ways. Think of the poor character who has just lost their home and in addition suffers some injury or has a deceased family member. A visit from the god makes them feel special. It makes whoever has to live in the property feel safer. I say, it’s fake safety.
“Never underestimate the effect of neurotransmitters,” says my father.
A month later he winks as he hands me a thunderstone necklace.
We should talk about the engine.