ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the Opinion category.

Jakande Unclothed

Driving by the Jákàńdè area of Lekki (5th roundabout) on Sunday, I noticed a few people with placards at the roundabout standing around with signs like “this is a peaceful protest, leave us alone here” or something to that effect. Behind them was a stretch of destruction that looked like a heavy storm had just passed through. (I’ve been to aftermaths of real life tornadoes, so I know). Behind them lay piles of debris as far as the eyes could see from the roundabout, made of brown roofing sheets and wood.

Before now, that area always looked a little too crowded, too dense, too unplanned to have been housing anything legitimately sanctioned by the state. But as we usually do to things that seemed out of place but seemed to satisfy those immediately concerned, we look away and assume that someone somewhere knows what they are doing. It seems, now, that the government has finally come to pay attention to the area. Now, after removing the shanty that had grown out of the space into a community of sex workers, touts, homeless vagrants, and other Lagosians of little means, what emerges is an open land seemingly ripe for some decent development.

This is probably the story of much of Lekki, anyway: a stretch of fresh land occupied by small communities of people now suddenly discovered by bigger powers with big equipment and big money ready to expand and develop the area for commercial purposes. The spot where the Jákàndè Circle Mall now stands used to be a shanty as well. Same with Márọ̀kọ́ at Sandfill which has now become a modern plaza with a big hotel. In all cases, after the owners of the land are compensated, a bigger human cost arises in the displacement of hundreds to whom these areas are all is left of home.

I wondered while driving through the beach road yesterday what the real cost would end up being. So far, we already have regular cases of carjacking and traffic robbery in early mornings and late evenings. There have also been kidnappings. According to the state government, these shanties are the real causes of such violence as they hide criminals who use them as springboards and hiding places. Demolishing their home and kicking them out would reduce violence and allow free passage of people. There is some allure in that thinking. Past upgrade of hitherto crime-ridden places in the state and the corresponding success in their removal of crime has shown the success of such an endeavour. Plenty spaces under abandoned bridges have been turned into public parks with lighting and security, making them easy to walk under at night without incident. But still, rendering homeless hundreds of residents at just 72 hours’ notice will no doubt have its own consequences. As I tried to read the despondence on the faces of all those I saw sitting around the open spaces, I wondered what those consequences would be in the long run.

But in this case, unlike that of the demolition of the national monument at Lagos Island or other cases still under the outrage of surprised owners angry at the state’s seeming high-handed behaviour in destroying them, there seems to be an overwhelming public interest. But unless something of relevance is erected in this spot, all these gains will be lost soon enough. A sustained involvement in the redevelopment of the now levelled area would be a welcome event indeed.

“Never Look An American In the Eye”

In my last book review, I lamented the dearth of travel writing books by African authors. I have since been scolded for failing to reference a number of other old and new works that tackle the subject matter, so I’m currently looking for Isaac Delano’s The Soul of Nigeria, Babatunde Shadeko’s The Magic Land of Nigeria, Noo Saro Wiwa’s Transwonderland, and Eavesdropping, a collection of essays and travelogues in America by Deji Haastrup.

But one of the example works I pointed to as examples of contemporary works detailing honest and intimate travel experiences of travel was Okey Ndibe’s Never Look An American In the Eye (Soho Press. October, 2016). I have now finished reading a review copy of the work and I can say that it was a thoroughly delightful experience. Having lived in America for a while myself, I am always interested in reading accounts of others who have lived in the country, experienced in ways similar to or different from mine. But with this book, except that both of us had entered the United States for the first time at twenty-eight years old, the experiences could not be any dissimilar, which added a lot of excitement to its reading.

Out October 11, 2016

The title comes from a piece of advice given to the author by his uncle in the village. He, the uncle, not having experienced America in any other way except from the plot of Westerns shown on Nigerian screens where eye contact was the ostensible cause of major conflicts that resulted in lots of gunfire, decided that his nephew on the way to America needed such a good prep. As we know now, from our experience with Americans, the opposite turns out to be true. This leads to a number of awkward, interesting, and hilarious scenarios, one including contact with law-enforcement.

The book is a collection of connected stories about the author’s life in Nigeria and his migration to America. Okey Ndibe is currently a columnist for a number of Nigerian publications. He is also the author of two well-received novels Arrows of Rain (2000) and Foreign Gods Inc (2014). He had arrived in the United States first as a maiden editor of a new international magazine, in the late eighties, before he achieved these later successes, but during which time he was already an accomplished reporter for a major Nigerian publication. In the US, after his stint as an editor, he became a student, and later, a reluctant but ultimately appreciative citizen. The book covers all these periods in his life with tales that paint the picture of an individual with an expansive curiosity and a healthy sense of humour towards misfortunes and uncertainties. The stories follow each other in an unsual order which was slightly disorientating, but ultimately successful in pushing the story forward towards a fitting end. Read to find out why.

As a memoir, it’s an engaging work filled with optimism, written in a style that is neither pretentiously grand nor mindlessly plain. As literature, it is clever in its deceiving simplicity. As travel writing, it is a welcome addition to a trove of like-minded works by Africans traveling around the world. It is a work accessible without being insipid, serious without being morose, and honest without being overexposing or patronising. The handling of his contact and relationships with legends of African literature Wọlé Ṣóyínká and Chinua Achebe deserves credit for its normalcy and honesty. We see them both as humans, chasing human pursuits, and vulnerable to human frailties and human disappointments.

It balances an important narrative about migration, culture, disappointments, love, and restlessness with an outlook that is both sunny and measured. I don’t want to say “circumspect” because that presupposes an unwillingness to take risks. What the work is is the opening of doors into a time in the life of its author which also coincides with a significant time in the life of a country he was leaving behind and the one he eventually adopts. There was no risk to be taken or avoided as far as the writing goes. The story needed to be told well, and it was.

___

The hardcover is 224 pages long, but doesn’t feel like it. The book will be released on October 11, 2016 and can be pre-ordered here. I will be speaking with the author in a public Book Chat in the next Aké Festival in Abẹ́òkuta this November. If you’re in the area, do drop by to hear him answer a number of questions I’m deliberately keeping away from this review :). Go buy/pre-order the book.

Travel as Life: A Review of Route 234

I haven’t read many books about travelling around Nigeria written by Nigerians. No doubt they exist (and readers should please recommend some for me in the comment section). I have however read many about traveling in other parts of the world. Tẹ́jú Cole’s (2016) essay collection comes to mind as well as Wọlé Ṣóyínká’s memoir You Must Set Forth At Dawn (2006). There is also America Their America (1964), an “autotravography” by J.P. Clark which caused controversy for what critics thought was a narrow and judgmental view of American values. Recently, there is Okey Ndibe’s Never Look An American In the Eye (2016), an autobiography, and many more.

There are however many more narratives written about the country, and about the continent, by visiting (foreign) journalists, writers, novelists over the years. Karen Blixen‘s Out of Africa (1937), JMG Le Clezio’s Onitsha (1991) and VS Naipaul’s The Masque of Africa (2010) come to mind easily. But so does this one. The overall impression of such books has always been the worry that they rarely depict reality as is, but only as perceived by the visiting foreigner, which – to be fair – is the whole purpose of the subjective narrative. I expect that the impression of America I’ll get from reading travel notes from an African visiting the US in the 1960s will give me an idea of America through that writer’s perspective of events as they unfold to him/her.

At the Des Moines Capitol, Iowa (2015)

Even in the online space, one might easily find blogs written by foreigners about travel around the continent than one might of blogs by Africans of travel experiences in their own continent. (This is changing, of course. You’re reading this on a travel blog managed by an African, after all). But why is this the case? Human civilization itself is an experiment in travel, documentation and adventure conditioned by necessity, curiosity and sometimes nationalism. We have always left our comfort zones for new experiences. And, as archaeology and anthropology tell us, we have always documented those movements, even unconsciously, in hieroglyphics, and oral poetry, tribal marks, and lately in writing. In the 21st century Africa, the prevailing narrative is that travel for leisure and travel writing is a Western chore, done by the privileged few, and those conditioned to it by their profession in journalism.

Reality, unfortunately, seems to bear it out for the most part except in some rare cases. Olábísí Àjàlá was a Nigerian student who found himself in the United States at age 18 in the late 1940s. Having failed to succeed as a medical student at DePaul University, Chicago, he decided to travel through the country to Los Angeles, on a bicycle and document his experiences along the way. Through deportations, skirmishes with authorities, short Hollywood career (including meeting then actor Ronald Reagan), many short-lived marriages, children, and global fame, through the fifties, sixties, and seventies, he became the patron saint of all adventurers, and an icon in popular culture for African travel. Being called Ajàlá Travels in Nigeria today is a homage to his larger-than-life reputation. He also wrote a book An African Abroad.*

So why is it that unless in rare cases Africans are not known globally to document our adventures in writing, or is it that we are just generally averse to travelling for its own sake? My friend and scholar Rebecca Jones has been asking this question for a while. In a conference she facilitated in Birmingham earlier in the year, the Call observed:

“For a long time study of African travel writing in the West has focused on Western-authored travel writing about Africa. But this has ignored both the long heritage of the genre amongst African and diaspora authors. African travel writers have traversed both the African continent and the rest of the world, writing about encounters and differences they meet in their own societies and others. They have engaged with colonialism and the post-colonial world, have produced ethnographic description, reportage, poetry, humour and more. They have traversed genres and forms, from the Swahili habari written at the turn of the twentieth century to Yoruba newspaper travel narratives of the 1920s, from accounts of students and soldiers abroad, to newspapers and today’s online travel writing.”

Aside from this blog, there are quite a few other ones online with focus on travel as an African hobby, done especially without the express purpose of becoming a travel “journalist” working for a media house, but for its own sake. Why are there not more. Africans, after all, travel as much as everyone else. Is it that we don’t care about documenting our experiences the way that others do? I have just finished reading Route 234 (2016), an anthology of global travel writing by Nigerian arts and culture journalists, compiled and edited by Pẹ̀lú Awófẹ̀sọ, an award-winning culture journalist. It is a delightful read of many fun, scary, heartwarming, and diverse experience of Nigerians in many different local and international situations. The contributors are however many of the continent’s known arts and culture journalists. This fact will not help our subject matter, but it shouldn’t remove from the value of the book as a necessary work and a delightful read.

Route 234(2016), edited by Pẹ̀lú Awófẹ̀sọ̀

According to the editor, the idea for the book came from a private listserve conversation among these culture/travel writers earlier in the decade about documenting some of their travel experiences. It took many years before the idea finally became concrete. The 211-paged book lists Kọ́lé Adé-Odùtọ́la, Olúmìdé Ìyàndá, Ọláyínká Oyègbilé, Èyítáyọ̀ Alọ́h, Mọlará Wood, Steve Ayọ̀rìndé, Pẹ̀lú Awófẹ̀sọ̀, Jahman Aníkúlápó, Túndé Àrẹ̀mú, Nseobong Okon-Ekong, Akíntáyọ̀ Abọ́dúnrìn, Ayẹni Adékúnlé, Fúnkẹ́ Osae-Brown, Sọlá Balógun and Ozolua Uhakheme as contributors. The scope of the travel experiences documented therein covers Los Angeles, Atlanta, Bahia, Juffureh, Accra, Plateau, Nairobi, Durban, Pilanesberg, India, London, France, Frankfurt, Nice, and Holland.

One of my favourite narrative in the work is Mọlará Wood’s “Farewell Juffureh” (page 35), covering a visit to Alex Haley’s ancestral hometown in the heart of Gambia as well as Nseobong Okon-Ekon’s “Trekking the Mambilla Plateau” (page 93). In both, the reader is vividly guided through experiences that must have been much more intense and affecting than words could capture. Some of the others detail culture shocks at visiting a new place for the first time and re-setting their opinions and expectations preconceived from a distance (“Accra Mystic” by Jahman Anikulapo, page 79) while some focus on their immediate task; covering a film festival, for instance (“Film, FESPACO, Ezra” by Steve Ayọ̀rìndé, page 61). A heartwarming one by Ṣọlá Balógun (“The Good Samaritans of Nice”, page 181) describe an experience common to many frequent travellers: being stranded in a strange city after a missed flight.

What the book represents overall is an intervention in a space where much more effort of this nature is needed. But travel isn’t, and shouldn’t be, the preserve of just culture writers and journalists. Writing about it shouldn’t be either. Tourism isn’t a big deal in Nigeria today because of lack of government (and private sector) care, yes, but also because of a seeming lack of interest in the populace itself. As I argued in this recent piece on a visit to historical locations in Ìbàdàn, commercial attention will come when governmental and private sector intervention takes the first step:

“I think back to a recent experience, in Italy, where tourism has built a thriving industry of restaurants, malls, and gift shops around notable structures that tell the country’s history, real and fictional, and how much value that attention (and tourist dollars) has brought to the country. Old churches and abbeys, ancient arenas in Verona and the Colosseum in Rome, among others, are all just ruins of a certain past. But they have been preserved and well branded in order to attract foreigners and their resources. Even a fictional character, Juliet, from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, has a touristy structure built in her honour, called Casa di Giulietta.”

Travel is fun. And even when it is not, it is always an enlightening exercise. As Mark Twain said in The Innocents Abroad (1869), “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” That same perhaps can be said about travel writing, if not as a way to reflect on one’s adventures, as a way to keep said experiences in the memory of the world.

The book is a delightful read, but much more is needed.

_________

* There are many other stories like this, no doubt. Ravi on twitter has pointed me out to “Sol Plaatje’s sea travel piece” (by which I assume he means this book, Mhudi, an epic of South African native life a hundred years ago), and Rebecca, in the comment section, to a few more published narratives, also of a few years back. Their input also reminded me of Olaudah Equiano’s equally notable memoir. There are many more like these, I agree. My point is that there are not many more, and certainly not as many notable ones as there should be).

For more reading

Africa Travels, Africa Writes. Notes on African Intellectual Mobilities

Encounter With a Brexiter

by Dèjì Tóyè

A Cambridge Union Speech. Photo by Dèjì Tóyè.

The first Brexit ideologue I met in flesh and blood was not as dramatic as the foul-mouthed Nigel Farage or mop-headed Boris Johnson. The novelist Fredrick Forsyth was at the Cambridge Union Society to talk about ‘the 7 Pillars of Freedom’ a pretty dainty title for a talk about the future of the UK in Europe. It was in the late autumn of 2013 and Forsyth, himself now in the autumn of his life, was a character from a different era. The Union hall which filled up to the brim and spilled into the lawns when crowd pullers like Jesse Jackson or, as I understand, Julian Assange visited, was sparse on that occasion. I even got a front-row seat in the motley crowd that occupied half an aisle of the hall. As I made my way to that event, Forsyth was for me still an image—that young reporter whose career took off with his coverage of the Nigerian Civil War in the 1960s, whose reportage of that event challenged official British policy much earlier than most analysts’ and whose two books on the war would become as important as any other in the much controversial historiography of that war. In short, I was going to hear this internationalist with an expansive view of the world. But oh, what autumn does!

‘The 7 Pillars of Freedom’ was really a nativist treatise on how only the Anglo-Saxon world now holds the hope for true democracy, and freedom, in the world. And, oh, how Europe is gradually dragging Britain down the path that leads away from all that. Although, in my view, many countries across the world would check the boxes of the so-called 7-pillars, Forsyth did not believe what passes for democracy in the rest of Europe and much of the world (he has interesting things to say about Africa, by the way) meets the mark. The speaker also papers over the fact that Britain does not balance two of the pillars well—that is, the Pillar of ‘Elective supreme power’ (elective executive government) and ‘Election by constituencies’, at least not as well as in her ‘Anglo-Saxon’ peer, the US, where both popular and electoral votes are better balanced in the direct choice of the executive authority. This should have been warning signal that democracies are not all the same. After all, Aristotle may not even recognise as representative of democracy a gathering where all eligible men of the town are not congregated in the agora, caviling all day.

Forsyth’s performance in Cambridge has something to say about the way the Brexit campaign had been carefully curated over the years. Farage may fume and curse in the European parliament, and Boris Johnson may scare the hoi polloi with the immigrant bogeyman, our speaker knew well enough to strike a more dignifying pose before this debating society, appealing rather to the finer, if somewhat exaggerated, elements of the British heritage. Subliminal in Forsyth’s speech – made to the more politically aware of the students in this university that, together with Oxford, has produced all of UK Prime Ministers with university degrees, bar four – was a reminder of ‘the good old days’ when all of Europe was fascism or socialism and Britain ‘alone’ spread the light of freedom and democracy from the Atlantic to the Pacific (never mind that that itself rode on the tailcoat of imperialism).

Fredrick Forsyth. Photo from thetimes.co.uk

That last point is important because Forsyth’s ostensibly more elevated argument also papers over the possible economic consequences of an ‘exit’ decision. It has been suggested that Britain got a better deal in the world when it was not constrained by the collective bargaining of the common market. What is forgotten is that the status quo ante has changed. The old empire has since disappeared and even that feel-good replacement for it – the Commonwealth – has now weakened. India, Britain’s most important colonial legacy is itself now a world power in both economic and technological terms (it launched 20 satellites into space in the last few days). China, that other Asian power, has since repossessed Hong Kong, the British Pacific holdout. Against the colonial dependency paradigm, the biggest European trading partner to Nigeria, Britain’s most important colonial haul in Africa, is, wait for it, The Netherlands.

But the UK has made its decision anyway. And as an avowed political determinist, I support it, just as I supported the Scottish referendum and even mildly wished the separation campaign won, if only to reinforce my belief that, as I stated then, a nation is an argument and not an axiom. It is a lesson for Nigeria and other struggling political inventions of, well, say Britain.

__________

Dèjì is a lawyer and creative writer, based in Lagos.

Meeting Zuckerberg

Not personally (though that would have been nice).

The CEO of Facebook dropped by Lagos, Nigeria yesterday – his first visit to the continent – to visit with the tech community and see for himself what they’re (we’re) doing. He also stopped by places where his foundation has invested millions of dollars, e.g. Andela. Read more here on QZ.

What I’m most pleased by, though (along with the usual delight at his interest in the growing tech space in Nigeria where a number of amazing things are happening every day by young people working very hard with very little) is the fact that he met Temie Giwa whom I’ve talked about on this site countless times – she’s someone whose company LifeBank is doing a lot of good things in the technology space, using a mobile app to connect hospitals and patients to sources of clean and affordable blood supply at record time, thus saving hundreds of lives around Lagos.

What she’s doing hasn’t happened in Nigeria before. Hospitals usually had to physically go around looking for matching blood, usually during emergencies. This has led to many problems, failed matches, and dying patients. The intervention of LifeBank comes to provide not only matching blood types with patients who need it, but also delivering said blood (which has been tested by the lab and by the state government) in record time, and in good condition, to the hospital 24/7. This is poised to change the way healthcare delivery happens in Africa’s most populous country.

Temie talks about the meeting here.

Getting investment from a person of Zuckerberg’s stature in such a startup will be revolutionary for the speed and expansion of LifeBank’s work – and I hope that he considers doing that. Getting it from anyone actually will. The possibility of such eventuality has now hopefully risen with such a public validation, and that’s delightful news. Also delightful is the reality of a dawning future in which technology is being adapted to different field in order to deliver outstanding results. This is the future. Nigeria, now officially in a recession, is certainly in need of such not-so-divine intervention.

This is what Mark has to say about LifeBank (around the 8.30 minute mark in this video):

“If everyone had the opportunity to build something like this, then the world would be a better place… I’ve been to a lot of different cities… people around the world are trying to build stuff like that. If she actually pulls it off, then she’d show a model that will impact not just Lagos, not just Nigeria, but countries all around the world.”

During his live town hall meeting referenced above with developers and entrepreneurs, Mr. Zuckerberg referenced a quote which he said guides much of his work: “The best way to predict the future is to build it.” From the amount of great changes now taking place around the country and around the world fueled by the power of imagination and the tools of technology, it’s hard not to wholeheartedly agree.

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