CHAPTER TWO
Of my provenance, “details are scanty,” a phrase often used by “impartial” corporate state broadcasters to avoid causing their paymasters offence. One day in the 1950s mum waddled out of Zaria Railway Station after a trading trip and I dropped out of her, landing on my head. Mum blames my similarity in lineament to that of “Bert” the muppet character from Sesame Street, on the unsolicited attempts of two men passing by to stop my head bleeding me to death by clamping it between two thick planks, a spirit level and a carpenter’s square.
We lived in Zaria, a sleepy walled city in Northern Nigeria about 60 miles away from the regional capital, Kaduna. When I started to walk dad insisted on sending me to sit in a playpen at the Koranic school run by the formidable and highly respected Malaam Haruna, he, the trainer of many eminent scholars. The diminutive cleric had staring eyes that seemed to have been hewn from ice. He never laughed nor appeared in public without his white cap perched high up on his head to show off his glowing zebiba. Rumour had it that he dyed it black at a secret barber’s. Malaam Haruna edited an Hausa language newspaper in Gyara and lived north of the city with two wives and several life-sized portraits of the Sardauna of Sokoto, the leader of the Northern Peoples’ Congress.
I must have taken it all in from my playpen because by the time I was three, despite a lazy left eye and syncopal sneezing hayfever coughing attacks, I could read the Koran upside down, which calls to the page the story of the “Black” US architect who learned to read plans upside down because he was not allowed to stand beside his “White” peers. But I digress.
Aged six I gave a famous lecture in Islamic cosmology to a packed hall of undergraduates at Ahmadu Bello University. After that, invitations poured in from all over the world faster than tributes to fallen heads of state. Tens of thousands flocked to the great mosques at Djenne to see and listen to me. Then it was Gaza, Tangiers, Cairo and Djakarta. Sunni and Shia scholars put aside age-old differences to teach me Islamic hermeneutics. They concluded that the well stocked mind of Ali the Peerless, needed honing, lest it end up merely as an unwieldy bludgeon, open to manipulation by infidels. Plans were made to send me for further study in Iraq, Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Not necessarily in that order, lest anyone who happens to come across this takes offence and calls Aunty terrorist.
Dad, Momodu, worked as a gardener and general dogsbody for the man we called oga, the urbane Dr. Nwokoye, a Chief Medical Officer with the Nigeria Railway Corporation. Oga lived with madam, and two children, Jonathan, my friend and Agnes his sister in a large white house with long mullioned windows, a Spanish veranda and French doors that opened onto a half acre of land. Kidney shaped lawns at the front of the house surrounded a gravelled drive that opened onto Sokoto Road. Opposite the house curved the white picket perimeter fence of the race course where horsey expatriates cavorted, day and night.
We lived in a poky windowless room in a whitewashed outhouse known as the “boys quarters.” It had three rooms, the two larger ones reserved for madam’s pets. Mum and dad slept indoors three nights a week and I had the other four nights on my own, unless mum was away on a trading trip, when I had to put up with deep snoring dad.
My dad was, as they now say on football shows, “a physical presence,” a towering man of well over 6 feet, with huge tightly packed teeth, a smooth round face that never needed a shave and big somewhat sad and needy eyes overlooked by huge hairy brows. His wide and muscular torso rested on an incongruous combination of spindly legs and size 14 feet. Mum scraped scale off her saucepans on his thick coarse heels. Often after evening meal and prayers, which, as a child prodigy, I led, dad rested his back against the white wall of the block, gnawing on a chicken bone or broiled cow’s hoof, oblivious to the mosquitoes circling above his head. When stung he shrugged and brushed the bite with a languid thumb. Unlike mum or everyone else I knew, dad didn’t slap the mosquito to death. Were they not also Allah’s creations? He had plenty of blood to spare, not so? Malaria? No way? He was born immune, a claim which I learned many years later had some clinical backing because we shared a protective haematological mutation. In the evenings, when he thought mum was not looking, or she pretended not to notice, he’d fish a spiff out of a pocket of his khaki shorts, creep off to puff the pungent thick purple over the back fence into Mr Ofo the accountant’s garden. After supper dad would kiss the ice cubes he pinched from oga’s house in a weird plea for their forgiveness for kidnapping them, then promptly drown the cubes in a tumbler of water for his nightcap. After, he’d emit a loud satisfied sigh, burp and ask Mariama to come feel his six-pack. His body was Allah’s temple. That is why she married him, certainly not for his mind. ‘No be so?’ he’d say in his pidgin English. An earthy frisson would pass between them and, ‘Momodu, everything in moderation,’ mum would say as her bright eyes narrowed in a loving smile. Then dad would ask me to pray for a good woman because a good life partner was worth all the groundnuts and cocoa beans in Nigeria – the main agricultural exports until the 1960s when crude oil rudely took over.
Dad’s day started at about 530 when he got up to wash oga’s car or cut the grass or empty the bins, lay traps for vermin and so on. It ended when madam said so, often well into the evening. Mid way between tending a poinsettia or hibiscus he’d often stand still and stare at the sky as if to watch the clouds grow. Then madam would poke her angry face through the door and, banging the back wall with a dustbin lid scream at dad to get back to work. “These people…too lazy…,” she said or words to that effect. Dad would snap back up straight, with hoe or rake in hand, mutter some weedy excuse and creep out of madam’s line of sight. I wept silently for dad and was angry with madam for her condescending insolence and with dad for his docile response. When I asked mum why Allah allowed madam to speak to dad in that way she shrugged and told me to concentrate on my Koranic studies for which Allah blessed me with such great aptitude. To my follow-up questions she shut me up by counselling me to submit to “moderation.”
Mum’s bearing – shoulders back, chin up, made her look taller than her 5ft 6 inches. She had a stern matt dark heart shaped face, watchful eyes sides tilted ever so slightly upwards, a beaky nose and well spaced even white teeth. Slim, she wore her hair in thick plaits under a scarf. Mum did everything in a hurry. Life is short, but can be stretched out for good. Pigeon toed, arms pumping, elbows jutting, bangles jangling, she swept from task to task, project to project. She was saving to build us a house. Like a commercial bank you can curse life all you want but it will not allow you to withdraw without making a deposit, meaning effort. And if like us we had noone to make the deposit for us we had to make the effort ourselves. “Deposit before you withdraw hin better pass withdraw before you deposit,” she said with a straight face. But we should always remember to “cut our lifestyle to our condition not our ambition.” If mum was not on a trading trip for textiles or jewellery she was at Sabongari market selling the tomatoes and lettuce, and sweet potatoes she grew on a small patch behind our block known as the “boys quarters,” using horse manure she scraped off the race track. The budget for her building project decided whether we had meat to eat or had to imagine it. Asked why she was so slim she’d say she had many mouths to feed, referring to the rooms in this dream house she was saving for.
Whilst dad smoked mum often tuned to the news on the brown pocket radio she found on a rubbish tip and repaired. If we ever saw her without this radio she must be dead. Dad asked why she bothered to listen to the news. It was all lies anyway.
“Ah Baba Ali…” It was because the lies were entertaining that she listened and lying implied that they still cared what you thought about them. When they stop lying to you and boldly steal and murder and insult you to your face that’s when you should begin to worry. Anyway, she had other sources of reliable information and you should always be able to describe before you condemn or commend. Mum was not wedded to tribal loyalties. We are all born simple humans until they slap their labels on us to make us predictable and easy to manipulate. Yet you have to watch those who say we are all the same too for they will get you where they want you then join those who say we are not the same to rob you blind.
I must have been aged 9 or 10 or 11 when the elders decided that before I went on this momentous sabbatical, they must find me a suitable bride. Not a day passed without an offer of marriage from some part of the Islamic world, and beyond. Drum and Time magazine named me one of the most eligible bachelors in the world. Haruna decided on the daughter of the Emir of Zaria. According to his reading of the runes we were destined to have twenty boys, who would spread the Ali dynasty all over the Islamic world. Of course we would not live as man and wife until a time to be decided by the elders. “Insha Allah.” Imagine it son, once betrothed your baba and mama would never again have to break sweat to make meat meet its end between your teeth. Put that way what did love have to do with it? The thought of seeing dad tell madam where to shove her silly job intoxicated me dangerously, meaning thinking about it I nearly got me run over by a bus, a rickety one at that. But I wished Haruna would hurry up because I was dying of boredom teaching Koranic studies to rich kids for nothing other than florid platitudes.
