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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.”

ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY, 1981 (Part Seventeen)

ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY, 1981 (Part Seventeen)

ByMoyo Okediji

I was already tipsy when Gina screamed.

But the performance on the stage continued as if nothing was happening. Obaseki got up and went into the ushers’ chamber. I tried really hard to see what was happening at the other end of the arena, to get an idea of what was happening to Gina. I really couldn’t see her. But because Joshua, who was assaulting Gina, was wearing a white suit, he was relatively visible, next to Gina, who, going by what she wore during the day, was in a red gown. But it appeared that Gina was already on the floor, and Joshua was kicking her, as she continued to scream while it seemed he continued to hit her.

ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY, 1981 (Part Ten)

ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY, 1981 (Part Ten)

ByMoyo Okediji

Once Obaseki realized that Iya Ngu was busting him, and called him out that it was from him that the smell of marijuana was coming, for some inexplicable reason, his nervousness reduced. He smiled and said, “Madam, it is true. I just smoked a tiny joint.”

Obaseki’s sunken face took on a different appearance. I observed his face holistically the way Madam Ngu taught me to study the human face. On my first meeting with her, in the drawing class, she took a look at my drawing and she said, “Moyo, what am I going to do with you? You don’t know how to draw. Come, let’s go to my office. You are still young. I can mold you.”

ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY, 1981 (Part Nine)

ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY, 1981 (Part Nine)

ByMoyo Okediji

Madam Ngu finally cornered me in the buka.

If I had any inkling she was coming to that buka that fateful day, I would rather have starved than be found dead there. She had been looking for me for weeks. And I had been evading her. I was trying to break free of her influence and she was trying her very best to ensure that she stamped herself into my art, my being, my style of creating, and my idioms of expression. She had studied at the Royal College in London and was trying to make me a master draughtsman who painted in the European fashion. And I was a radical looking for a way to break out of the western mold of painting.

ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY, 1981 (Part Eight)

ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY, 1981 (Part Eight)

ByMoyo Okediji

His jaw was clenched as Rufus advanced toward Obaseki. I realized that he was shutting off the reasoning valve and pressing on the throttle of turmoil within the engine of his brain. His sense, judgment, calculation and intelligence was at this point on vacation. The agents of automation were now in control of his anatomy. He was more machine than person, and his entire being was on remote control as Rufus began to press forward.