I was assigned to a boarding school outside the town of Ikorita. “Crossroads,” the town’s name meant, though only a single road passed through it; dusty and prosaic and slow, it was like a hundred other towns in the region, shambling toward modernity, not so much the clash of old and new as some uncertain hybrid between them, the TV antennas that sprouted above its tin roofs seeming as natural to it as the ju-ju stalls in the market, with their monkey skulls and dried rats and small bundled pouches of unknown charms. The market followed a non-weekly rotation I could never keep straight, forever shifting to accommodate holy days and feasts; though it seemed now merely a sort of lingering habit, offering little more than what could be had at the shops that ringed the lorry park, onions and shrivelled tomatoes, cassava root, dirty rice, canned tomato paste from Portugal, canned mackerel, Geisha-brand, from Japan.
Outside the town the jungle rose up, the tiny fields hacked from the wall of it here and there seeming merely moments’ irritations in its continuous slow burgeoning. Our school, Mayflower Secondary, lay in the midst of it like a secret clearing, an arched gateway at the main road bearing its name and its motto, “Knowledge Is Light,” and then a steep gully-scarred lane leading up to its little village of buildings and outbuildings, vaguely ramshackle and crude but still giving an air, amidst the flame trees and irokos and palms, of a tropical elegance. I had a bungalow secluded behind a wall of hibiscus bush at the edge of the school compound, its windows barred with metal grilles because of the danger of thieves there, the far side looking out toward guava and citrus and bush and the back opening onto a small plot of rock-hard earth that I worked a few months then abandoned, unable to hold it against the ravages of insects and weeds and heat; during the rains the house was a mess of leaks from the stones students threw to knock down guava but otherwise it was comfortable enough, with its warps and odd angles, its smoothed concrete floors, it generic furnishings, slightly shoddy and sparse but enough to give an illusion of home. Shortly after my arrival an important chief died in a nearby town, for days afterwards the drums sounding long into the night to mourn him; and from my place there at the edge of the bush, with the crickets chirring outside in the brilliant dark and the vines creeping up through my windows, they seemed an ironic welcome, like the distant drums in some movie about darkest Africa.
There were four of us there at the school, four white people, “Europeans,” beyond myself an Englishwoman, Kate Townsend, who’d been there for years, and two Americans on a one-year exchange their university had set up; the rest of the staff were mainly Nigerian and then a mix of Ghanaian and Indian and Pakistani. In my first weeks some of the native teachers came by my house to greet me, wandering inquisitive from room to room, leafing through my books and magazines, establishing their presence as if laying a claim on me; but amidst the ceaseless blur of school work it seemed after a few months that little had come of this contact aside from the brief exaggerated friendliness of greeting when paths crossed between classes, that it had remained no more than a haze of indistinct possibility at the edges of my aloneness. There appeared an assumption in most of my dealings with people there that beneath the surface gestures of fellowship there was a chasm that couldn’t be bridged, so taken for granted that every exchange seemed a kind of evasion, a circling around some truer version of things that was never named; and there was perhaps less the lingering of a colonial distrust in this than simply the belief that whites couldn’t be expected to understand how things truly were, our notions no doubt fine for the efficient mythical world we came from but merely quaint, inessential, misguided, in the grittier, more complex reality we now found ourselves in. Inevitably I fell in more and more with the Americans – we were united, at least, in our whiteness, our newness, had less work to do to understand one another; though even then there remained always the shadow of difference between us, if only in the quicker, more expectant intimacy others assumed with them because they were Americans, known quantities, emissaries from the centre of the world.
Our school had been founded in the fifties by a Nigerian reformer in protest against the forced teaching of religion in government schools. Hence the school’s name, though it seemed to me a strangely innocent choice, conjuring an image of American slave ships plying the African coast; and hence also its continuing distinction, its founder become a legend of sorts, he and his students having carved the school from nothing out of the bush and built it up as a kind of monument to self-sufficiency. But by my time the school had passed into government hands and a creeping decay had set in. There was evidence still of a former glory, in the tiny world it still formed with its bakery and piggery and farms, the lingering ethic of a well-rounded self-reliance; but always there was the gap between the rhetoric of how things should be and the reality of how they were. Perhaps the school had never been as illustrious, as efficient, as the collective memory of it portrayed it; but my whole time there I was dogged by the sense that we were a waning, that the country outside us, with all its disorder and contradictions, had slowly begun to contaminate the tiny enclave we formed.
I taught fourth-form English and literature, preparing the students for the O-levels they’d write the following year. As a teacher I was adequate perhaps in the simplest things, dogged, methodical, but finally never comfortable in a classroom, never sensing with the sureness of instinct the thing that was needed, the moment that worked. Mr. Tsikata, the portly Ghanaian who headed the English department, seemed to extend to me at once an infinite forgiveness.
“There is a syllabus, I have it,” he said, smiling, amused, embarrassed, “but you could say it’s a kind of Platonic construct. It bears little relation to our own sublunar reality here.”
But still I began every day with the same small despair, did my teaching as best I could, took on extra duties, arranged extra lessons, yet never shook the feeling that every effort was provisional, incomplete. Short of starting from the beginning, what a noun was, what a verb, of re-creating from scratch the whole edifice of a language, it seemed possible only to keep up a panicked salvage of whatever the students had, all that I knew appearing sometimes to recede into the protean haze that language had been when I myself had first learned English years before. Ultimately my teaching became simply a matter of getting through: I longed every day for the final bell, the silence the classrooms took on then, the crooked rows of empty desks, only in that calm the fear lifting from me of some impending chaos that my own insufficient grasp of things would be responsible for. The school was more the students’ world than mine, with their regimen of meals and prep and physical labour, their prefects and officers, their societies, their understanding of the hundred shifting rules and the thousand shifting exceptions that governed the rhythm of their lives there; and early on I simply conceded to them this greater authority, accepting the role of innocent that my whiteness allowed me, the token reverence that came with it and its reverse, a kind of invisibility.
That invisibility seemed in the end what most defined my stay in the country. If I’d fought against it, refused to obscure myself behind my difference, I might have broken through to some truer level of exchange with people, become real, an individual; but there seemed always a risk in the transition, a challenge to the accepted order, always the line to be walked between this innocuous thing I was seen as and the darker history I might cross back into. In my first months in the country I made an attempt, though English was common enough there, to learn the rudiments of the native language; but when I moved from simple greetings to phrases, to catching now and then some word of conversation, there appeared a subtle shift in people’s reactions to me, no longer the first exaggerated praise but a twinge of unease and a kind of boredom, as if I’d undermined somehow the game established between us.
What I seemed offered finally in my encounters with the country, or what I was able to see, were always its most obvious elements, what was folkloric, colourful, quaint, the face prepared for the foreigner, for the white, what instinctively served to mask from outsiders the truer life that went on beneath. But that truer life, the complexities that informed it, seemed accessible only by a kind of indirection. The country cried out for caricature, all garish surfaces and excess, the noise and the heat, the oppression, the endless soldiers manning the endless checkpoints, the poverty and the wealth. Every journey out revealed some new contradiction, the elaborate rites for the dead and then the bodies left rotting at the roadside because people feared being implicated in their deaths, one that I’d seen on the Benin road flattened into the pavement like a decal, the contours still visible of hands and legs, a face; every month revealed some new fad, the tennis rackets strapped to the front grilles of Peugeot 504s, the sudden appearance of Coca-Cola in cans at the toll-booths off the Lagos expressway. The newspapers gave out a wealth of bizarre incident, riots in Lagos spawned by the stealing of genitals, human heads found in shoeboxes to be used to redeem the souls of wealthy chieftains; and everywhere there were the signs of a rampant mongrel spirituality, the babalawos and the brothers, the churches and the shrines, the thousand different sects, from the Hare Krishna to the Adventists to the ghostly luminousness of the Cherubim and Seraphim, who could be seen on Sundays dancing single file along roadsides in their gossamer robes. But these surfaces seemed to play against one another like mirrors, revealing only in what they obscured, some more secretive life going on beneath them, more magical, more mundane – the life of the school perhaps, with its prefects and prep, its adolescent hopes, its essential normalcy, or the quietness Ikorita took on after nightfall, the stilled market stalls then and the smoky courtyards, the calm domestic ordinariness of meals and sleep.
Yet even as I stood outside it the country seeped into me, grew familiar as if I’d remembered it from my own past. There was a way people were there that brought up in me the sense that they were my secret, truer allies who I’d defected from to the whites: with students sometimes a gesture or tone of voice, the contour of a face, would bring back suddenly some classmate from Valle del Sole, the ramshackle classroom there, its uneven walls and stone floor; in the lorry parks the market women, mocking and independent and fierce, seemed to hold in them a familiar fire. And I was happy there finally, unreasonably so, felt a contentment at the core of me that seemed to have little to do with the daily texture of my life, its frustrations and tensions, its occasional satisfactions, was more the sense of the smallness of these things, tiny blips in an energy too large to take the measure of. Being there made the world seem suddenly without horizon, without centre, like the surprise of discovering life on another planet: here was a place going on so far from anything I had known, with its own history and rules, its own sense of importance, the thought filling me sometimes with a wonder that made of the simplest things tiny perfect revelations, the smile of a girl in the market, the signs over shops, the odd names of my students, Bunmi Benson, Lola Leigh. Or perhaps the wonder was simply in feeling fall away from me all the foreign world I had never quite entered into at home, to be in this place without expectation that I should ever have to find the way to fit in.
In the full moon there, bright enough to read by, the world was lit like an enchanted place, all silvered and phosphorescent as from some cool inner glow. I wandered into the bush sometimes to revel in it, down the paths cut there like secrets by the local farmers to reach their tiny patches of hidden field. Even in daylight those paths were like some inner dreamscape, with their gigantic vegetation, their huge unknown flowers, their scattered evidences, the potsherds and blackened gourds, the ashy remnants of a fire, of whispered midnight rituals; but in that haunted moon I had the sense that I might step at any instant into the miraculous. It seemed a kind of redemption to be reawakened like that to the world, attuned to every possibility, to feel at every breath the blood’s quickening, the heart’s hollow thrum.