ktravula – a travelogue!

Spotting Nigerians

Watching a cover of Rihanna’s “Man Down” yesterday, I noticed something curious: one of the girls in the video pronounced the word “man” with a familiar consistency. I became intrigued and went to see other videos by the young ladies. Eventually I found one in which they answered questions from their fans, and I got what I was looking for. They were born to Nigerian parents, raised partly in Nigeria and in the United States. It’s unmistakable. That pronunciation of “man” in the video is of someone who has lived in Nigeria at one point or the other in their life. Watch the song cover here.

The last time something like this happened to me was four weeks ago on the streets of Chicago. “Are you from Nigeria?” I asked the taxi driver who had spoken just a few words to me through the window as I complained that his fares were too exorbitant. “Yes, in fact,” he responded, to the astonishment of my company. “There was something in his pronunciation,” I told her later. It turned out that the man had grown up in Nigeria but had lived in Chicago since 1979. Like her, he was also astonished to hear that I had guessed his nationality from just a few words in a big city.

There are some very distinct peculiarities in Nigerian English pronunciations observable usually only to compatriots, residents or regular visitors. This must be why all comedic imitations of African speech by American actors seem to be funnier (or sillier, depending on how you look at it) for being too inaccurately generic. (Chris Tucker does another one of those impressions at the end of this video, and Steve Havey in this one.)

PS: Here is a related video in which we played around with the perceptible difference in “man” on a Nigerian or an American tongue.

America I Am

Pictures from an exhibition of African contribution to American history, at the Missouri History Museum last week. They included Epa masks from Nigeria, real doors, manacles and other relics from the slave castles in Ghana, clothes and artifacts from American slavery, and plenty 20th century notable artifacts including Alex Haley’s typewriter, Mohamed Ali’s famous track jacket, the KKK’s hood, Michael Jordan’s vest, Michael Jackson’s whistle, Prince’s purple vest, Serena William’s top, Louis Armstrong’s bugle, a black astronaut’s suit, among so many others. Hanging from the ceiling of the history museum is “The Spirit of St. Louis“, the famous airplane that made the first transatlantic flight from New York to Paris in 1927.

More about the exhibition here.

Watercolor Memories

The most pleasurable pleasures of my childhood were those I had moving around with father who was a broadcaster, record producer, culture researcher, and writer. There were many more which included haunts of the neighbourhood in Akobo where we lived in Ibadan (at one time West Africa’s largest city). There was a railway line that ran through the area about two miles from where our house was located. The blare of its horns was always piercing through the morning air. I remember the sense of awe and delight the first time I walked onto the tracks for the first time. We had just got back from school, and we walked, and ran, aimlessly around the area through bushes, paths, houses and dusty roads until the rail tracks showed up, then stretched in two directions away from view. I have encountered a few other moments in life where the simple pleasures of new discoveries made everything else seem insignificant, and with memory being the only consolation for their brief, fleeting existence.

I was eight, and father was driving to Akure in an old Isuzu. Hands on the wheel, and hungry, he asked me the excited son to feed him bread from the passenger’s seat since I had two hands free. There was another one with mother at the wheel driving somewhere, and insisting that drivers should never turn their heads back from the road. It was my duty to look out to find the right water bottle we had wanted to buy from many of those hanging out of the many shops we were driving around. Where are those days? Faces come in and out of that seemingly crowded childhood: Seye, the distant cousin who rode a bicycle, and later joined the military; Baba M who drove the brown Toyota van; Lanko Lanko who made bread a few houses away and who – from now distant memory – looked like the biggest woman I had ever seen. Iya Tobi was the one who pilfered grandmother’s kola nuts. Grandfather liked ludo. Grandmother liked singing, and storytelling, and gardening.

The best rationale I can muster for keeping a public journal of thoughts is so as to re-live the delights of a charming childhood and now an equally stimulating adult experience. It is not remarkable that I’m writing this now from a cozy comfort of a Chicago hotel, but there is also something pleasing in the deja vu smell of a new experience reminding of a forgotten past. One of the first water colour drawings I ever made were lost in a hotel drawer.

In Redneck Country*

The invitation from my friend for me to come along to Highlands – a town about twenty-five minutes away from Edwardsville – included a caveat that I would be entering a “redneck” zone. I immediately conjured up images of a rural and underdeveloped small town with no non-white person in sight, and everyone driving trucks with “NObama 2012” bumper stickers. The immediate second thought of course was that it was going to be a fun experience witnessing a county fair or a demolition derby for the very first time. I absolutely have to go see this, I said, and started looking for my camouflage fisherman hat.

I have now returned, and I am alive which must mean something (especially to those whose imagination of a “redneck” town includes a horde of black-hating, gun totting, motorbike riding people with tatoos all over their bodies who eat hamburgers, listen to Rush Limbaugh and watch Fox News). In actual fact, what constitute a small town is not really its ethnic homogeneity (even though that is certainly noticeable). What makes a small town a small town is the ordinariness of the way they look at the world, their down-to-earth-ness (as literally as you can interpret that), and the otherwise silly, playful ways in which they spend their leisure (and the seriousness with which they take it).

The county fair is an annual event, I’m told, and it includes a public auction of farm animals. The ceremony is graced by the distinguished presence of the year’s beauty queen of the town who stands gracefully with a tiara on her head beside the stall of the waiting animals. There are also live barns in the fair where if one chooses one could purchase of any of the animals. The cattle are extremely huge and in pretty colours. I saw a sheep wearing a military camouflage jacket. We also saw a hall full of rabbits all for sale for about $2 each. “Do you eat rabbits?” I asked Karla who immediately began to giggle. “No, I don’t.” She said “They’re pets. They’re cute.” Yea right! A few seconds later, the barn owner who had overheard us had a few more words to add. “Of course we eat rabbits. And more, we use parts of them for very many other things too. You know those pee sticks you use for pregnancy tests at home? They’re made from rabbit brains! Their eyes are used for glaucoma testing and the animals are also used to test beauty products before they are released to the market… Of course we eat them. We have about 1,200 of them in our farm at home.” Well, there you go.

There were roosters of various colours and kinds which reminded me of Chicken George in Alex Haley’s Roots. I have never seen so many different kinds of cocks in one place. (I have a different post coming up on this come later. There was something distinctly familiar about the smell of so many free-range roosters put together in one place, cackles, colours, and all. It comes from distant memories of my own childhood).

The demolition derby itself – the fair’s biggest attraction – took place in the arena surrounded by an anticipating crowd. Imagine the arena in Rome with gladiators in the ring. The gladiators in this case are trucks constructed specially for the occasion. The aim is to ram them into other competitors’ trucks as much as possible until there is only one functioning truck left in the arena. Think again of the WWF’s Royal Rumble of those days. By the time we arrived, one truck was already out of commission. The remaining five slugged it out in the mud for a while, and by the time we left, there were three of them left chasing each other around the muddy stage. I’m told that the grand event will take place today with even smaller vehicles still driven by real people, playing the same game. I guess the idea of building something that will eventually be crashed for the purpose of entertainment makes a whole lot of sense. From sitting in the stand and watching along with the intense excitement of fellow spectators, I can at least say that it has its thrilling moments.

All that remained was walking around the fair grounds, observing small town park entertainment, having a first taste of some new snacks (a corndog is a hotdog covered in corn bread and fried. A funnel cake is not a cake. It’s a fried sweet dough covered in icing sugar). In the end, I also discovered that I was not the only black person in a fair of many thousands of people. There was this other guy I saw at the auction close to the horse, but he was probably American.

_______

* I use the term advisedly. Wikipedia tells me that unless you are one yourself, it’s not a word you should use to refer to someone else.

Political Theatre Sucks

By the end of this year, one new phrase would have been added to the English dictionary – or at least the urban dictionary. That is “the debt ceiling”. To the layman, it means nothing other than the ball that both Democrats and Republicans in the US legislative houses have been kicking around for the past few months. If anything in the news is to be believed, in a week’s time, the credit rating of the country will be permanently damaged from the country’s default on its financial obligations except this “ceiling” is raised.

Horrible as that prospect seems, it has become nothing but a means of political posturing and hostage-taking by elected representatives. On the one hand a party that wants nothing cut out of its special interest programs, on the other another party (and its activist arm) which is hell-bent on opposing any compromise that involves as much as a tiny concession on revenue increase. From afar, all this just seems mad. This is not what you’d expect from “adults in the room”. I listened to the president’s speech yesterday where he did his best to again articulate his ideas of the best solutions to the problem. I also saw the almost immediate rebuttal and posturing by the Speaker of the House. And in that little space of time, the country was back again to a countdown to (as The Daily Show calls it, Armadebtdon: the end of the world as we owe it.)

Unfortunately, there is nothing else exciting on television these days so we will watch with bated breath. What works for me especially while watching an important football match is to imagine the worst, and just enjoy the roller-coaster ride of crazy emotions. I’ll do that now, since politicians have chosen this option over good old common sense. In any case, we still will always have Netflix. Thank goodness for that.

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