ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY, 1981 (Part Twenty-five)

ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY, 1981 (Part Twenty-five)

ByMoyo Okediji

Oyinbo drove us home from the burial ceremony.

Rufus and Felicia sat in the middle row of the bus. I sat all by myself at the back row. Nobody said a word as Steve drove slowly and solemnly through the city, negotiating the traffic with the dexterity of a spider moving through its tightly woven web.

When he was new, Steve found it difficult to drive through the city, because in Britain, they drive on the left side of the road, but in Nigeria people drive on the right side. Also, Steve found the drivers on the roads of Benin City extremely rough for his temperament.

a picture showing moyo okediji poised for the camera

ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY, 1981 (Part Twenty-four)

ByMoyo Okediji

The burial ceremony was brief.

There were many more people than I expected. It was the first burial ceremony I ever attended in my entire life. Scores of nurses from the school of nursing were in attendance. All of them wore dark glasses and white uniforms. They looked like angels. I didn’t know many men were in the nursing profession. They stood together in the blazing son, men and women, some wiping their faces with handkerchief, others lifting up their glasses and dabbing up tears.

a picture showing moyo okediji poised for the camera

ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY, 1981 (PART Twenty-four)

ByMoyo Okediji

Rufus could tell something was wrong when he opened the door and saw me. All he needed to do was to take one look into my eyes and he could read me like a book. First, I had been gone all day. All I went do was to drop off Josephine and Gina. He expected that I would be back within an hour, maybe two maximum. The hospital was not that far, maybe fifteen minutes. I left before 8 am, and it was 6 pm when I came back.

ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY, 1981 (Part Twenty-Three)

ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY, 1981 (Part Twenty-Three)

ByMoyo Okediji

Josephine was embarrassed when I informed her that her white uniform was soaked with blood at the back.

She immediately opened the door and jumped into the bus. As she entered the bus, she realized that the seat from which she got up was already soaked in blood also. She became confused. She didn’t know whether to sit on the bloody seat, but as she hesitated, I gently led her down to the seat. Just as her uniform, the seat was already stained. No further damage could be done. What was most important at that point was her health.

Rufus Orisayomi with my friend, in 1981,

ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY (Part Twenty-two)

ByMoyo Okediji

I almost lost control of the steering wheel when Gina told me that the woman sitting patiently by the door of the buka was her mom. Her back was turned to us, and it was not until the bus jerked forward noisily that she turned towards our direction.

“She is gorgeous,” Josephine said.

Gina, with a scared look on her face, did not want to step down. She was sitting next to me in front of the bus, and her mother looked directly at us with some suspicion.

a picture showing moyo okediji poised for the camera

ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY, 1981 (Part Twenty-two)

ByMoyo Okediji

“You’re kidding me, right?” I asked Steve when he said that Gina was probably in my room. He extended his bottle of beer to Rufus who yanked off the top with his teeth and handed it back.

“Why sounding so alarmed?” Steve asked. “If you asked me, I’d say let’s swap places.”

“What!” I said, alarmed at his suggestion.

“You can stay in my cold room tonight,” Steve, “and I can use your warm room.”

“Is that British custom?” I asked sarcastically.

Did he wink? I couldn’t quite tell in the dark. He said, “The British have no custom. Only Africans have customs.”

ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY, 1981 (Part Twenty-One)

ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY, 1981 (Part Twenty-One)

ByMoyo Okediji

When Steve offered us a cigarette, I took one out of the pack he extended.

It was from one of the packs he brought from Britain a couple of months earlier.

I was not good with cigarettes. But I was also not good at saying no to cigarette offers. All my friends smoked. And I loved to hold a stick of cigarette stylishly and watch the smoke rise from the tip of the ashes.

We sat there in the dark, watching the moon, smoking, silent. Suddenly, a bolt of lightning crashed across the sky, followed by a ripping sound of thunder. Instantly, the moon and the stars disappeared, and the sky was an endless black canvas coughing out intermittent flashes of jagged lights filled with throbs of thunder.

ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY, 1981 (Part Twenty)

ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY, 1981 (Part Twenty)

ByMoyo Okediji

Josephine came out of Rufus’s room and sat next to him.

“I didn’t know you were around,” I told her.

“I came out when I heard your voice,” she said.

“You must have been pretty scared when the guys who took Papa Ru’s things came,” I said to her.

“No,” Josephine responded. “I came in about thirty minutes ago. I missed everything. My friend at the school of nursing didn’t come to class today, so I went to find out what happened to her. Turns out she is sick.”

a picture showing qhat Donald attaches as one of the oldest photos of prof moyo okediji The photo was taken in 1985.

ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY, 1981 (Part Nineteen A)

ByMoyo Okediji

Today I got this email that took me back to 1985. Listen:

“Dear Moyo,

I am sure you may not remember me but I remember you most days. My name is Donald [deleted] and, at the beginning of 1985, when I came to University of Ife as a young recent graduate from Camberwell School of Art you realised I was well out of my depth and kindly took me into your home.

a picture showing moyo okediji standing next to his artwork

ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY,1981 (Part Nineteen)

ByMoyo Okediji

I had never seen Papa Ru in such a subdued mood. Nothing could have slugged him harder than the thought of Kongi maltreating him. He used to boast that it was because of Kongi that he returned to Nigeria from Britain.

Kongi had attended an event that Rufus produced for the BBC in London in 1979. And after the event, Rufus said, “Kongi met me backstage and asked, ‘Young man, what are you doing here, with all this talent that you have? You need to return to Nigeria immediately and contribute to the development of your country.’”

a picture of moyo okediji working on one of his art pieces in his art gallery

ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY 1981, (Part Eighteen)

ByMoyo Okediji

Gina was looking at me directly in the eye as she began to turn the button that reclined the car seat. The moon came out of a clump of clouds and highlighted half of her face, as she pressed her back against the front seat, flattening it almost completely on the back seat. Her teeth, as she smiled at me, looked perfectly even, and they sparkled like diamonds in the dark.

“You are a handsome man, Uncle Mo,” Gina said. “Your mom must be very beautiful.”

“Thanks, Gina,” I responded. “My mom is beautiful indeed, but everybody thinks his mother is beautiful.”