crowd, the body of a lynched man dangling from a tree. The figure was slender, dressed from head to toe in black, reflecting no light. It soon resolved itself, however, into a less ominous thing: dark canvas sheeting on a construction scaffold, twirling in the wind.
SIX
M y attending NMS, the Nigerian Military School in Zaria, was my father’s idea. It was a distinguished institution, its admissions policy was not preferential toward the children of soldiers, and it was famed for producing disciplined teenagers. Discipline: the word had the force of a mantra among Nigerian parents, and my father, who had no military background himself, who indeed had a strong distaste for formalized violence, was taken in by it. The idea was that, in six years, a wayward ten-year-old would be made into a man, a man with all the coolness and strength the word
soldier
implied.
I had no objection to going. King’s College was more prestigious academically, but it would have been too close to home, and that would have suited neither me nor my parents and, in any case, going as far north as Zaria promised its own freedoms. It must have been in July 1986 that my parents drove me up for the one-week interview. I had never been in Northern Nigeria before, and its broad, desertifiedterritory, with small trees and parched shrubs, might as well have been another continent, so different was it from the chaos of Lagos. But it was also part of one single country, across which the same red dust blew, all the way from Yorubaland up into the Hausa Caliphate.
Our cohort for interview week consisted of 150 boys. They came from all over the country, and almost none had been away from home before. Walking in the dry grass of the school’s compound one day with two other boys, I saw a black mamba. The snake looked at us for a moment, then swiftly vanished into the undergrowth. One of my companions was so immediately deranged by fear that he’d begun to weep. He swore he would never return and ended up going to a day school in Ibadan, where his family lived. It was for the best; he would never have survived Zaria, where poisonous snakes were the least of our worries.
I was admitted, and I sent in my registration details. In September, my parents drove me up again. On this second drive, sitting in the backseat, I recall wrestling with myself about my unexamined loyalty to my father, and my growing antipathy toward my mother. They had made a kind of peace with each other over some rift that had been hidden from me, but I nursed the hurt on my father’s behalf. My mother, during their conflict, had become cold, frighteningly so, not just to my father but to almost everyone in her environment. Then she got over it, and moved on. She became, once again, interested in the Nigeria around her, the country she loved but to which she could never belong. When my father passed away, a couple of years later, the vague sense of pique I’d developed during their fight became something harder, though I never, as far as I can now remember, actually blamed my mother for his death.
NMS was a turning point: the new schedule, the deprivations, the making and breaking of school yard friendships and, above all, the endless lessons in where one stood in the hierarchy. We were all boys, but some boys were men; they had natural authority, were athletic,or intelligent, or from rich families. No one thing was enough, but it became clear that we were not all equal. It was a strange new life.
I N F EBRUARY OF MY THIRD YEAR, MY FATHER WAS DIAGNOSED with tuberculosis, and by April he was dead. Our relatives, my father’s relatives in particular, were hysterical, too present, too eager to help and demonstrate their grief, but my mother and I countered them with stoicism. This must have baffled people. But they did not know that our stoicism was disunited, my mother and I saying little to each other, our glances full of dark rooms. Only once did I interrupt that silence. I told my
SIX
M y attending NMS, the Nigerian Military School in Zaria, was my father’s idea. It was a distinguished institution, its admissions policy was not preferential toward the children of soldiers, and it was famed for producing disciplined teenagers. Discipline: the word had the force of a mantra among Nigerian parents, and my father, who had no military background himself, who indeed had a strong distaste for formalized violence, was taken in by it. The idea was that, in six years, a wayward ten-year-old would be made into a man, a man with all the coolness and strength the word
soldier
implied.
I had no objection to going. King’s College was more prestigious academically, but it would have been too close to home, and that would have suited neither me nor my parents and, in any case, going as far north as Zaria promised its own freedoms. It must have been in July 1986 that my parents drove me up for the one-week interview. I had never been in Northern Nigeria before, and its broad, desertifiedterritory, with small trees and parched shrubs, might as well have been another continent, so different was it from the chaos of Lagos. But it was also part of one single country, across which the same red dust blew, all the way from Yorubaland up into the Hausa Caliphate.
Our cohort for interview week consisted of 150 boys. They came from all over the country, and almost none had been away from home before. Walking in the dry grass of the school’s compound one day with two other boys, I saw a black mamba. The snake looked at us for a moment, then swiftly vanished into the undergrowth. One of my companions was so immediately deranged by fear that he’d begun to weep. He swore he would never return and ended up going to a day school in Ibadan, where his family lived. It was for the best; he would never have survived Zaria, where poisonous snakes were the least of our worries.
I was admitted, and I sent in my registration details. In September, my parents drove me up again. On this second drive, sitting in the backseat, I recall wrestling with myself about my unexamined loyalty to my father, and my growing antipathy toward my mother. They had made a kind of peace with each other over some rift that had been hidden from me, but I nursed the hurt on my father’s behalf. My mother, during their conflict, had become cold, frighteningly so, not just to my father but to almost everyone in her environment. Then she got over it, and moved on. She became, once again, interested in the Nigeria around her, the country she loved but to which she could never belong. When my father passed away, a couple of years later, the vague sense of pique I’d developed during their fight became something harder, though I never, as far as I can now remember, actually blamed my mother for his death.
NMS was a turning point: the new schedule, the deprivations, the making and breaking of school yard friendships and, above all, the endless lessons in where one stood in the hierarchy. We were all boys, but some boys were men; they had natural authority, were athletic,or intelligent, or from rich families. No one thing was enough, but it became clear that we were not all equal. It was a strange new life.
I N F EBRUARY OF MY THIRD YEAR, MY FATHER WAS DIAGNOSED with tuberculosis, and by April he was dead. Our relatives, my father’s relatives in particular, were hysterical, too present, too eager to help and demonstrate their grief, but my mother and I countered them with stoicism. This must have baffled people. But they did not know that our stoicism was disunited, my mother and I saying little to each other, our glances full of dark rooms. Only once did I interrupt that silence. I told my
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