New Lagos

On my way to go and get my passport in NY, I passed so many towns, I went by New Haven, New London, New Rochelle and even New Lagos!!!!!!

Believe me, in Connecticut, Exit 39, there it was, New Lagos!!!

This was one exit that I had to get off. New Lagos? In America?

The sign just off the exit said, Welcome to New Lagos, Rest Stop 2 miles, Gas, Lodging and Food, 5 Miles!!! I told Yemi we had to check this place out. So we got off the freeway at Exit 39.

I was expecting to see McDonalds with a Mobil gas station but instead, I saw "Obalende Suya" with a Total gas station in the corner.

They even had their orange gas cylinders arranged for people who wanted to buy cooking gas. I thought this was America? We approached the Obalende suya building and as we entered, a lady came out to greet us. She smiled and I couldn't help but smile back. She had hips that swayed with every bounce.

"What would you guys like to eat?" Gosh, she her Pepsodent smile came with close-up appeal, her teeth were shining and that little gap-tooth was sexy.

I love women with gap tooth, they are always created beautiful. The truth is I have never seen a woman with a gap tooth who is ugly. Period.

Yemi: Do you have eba?

Woman: We have everything, Eba, okro, fufu, pounded yam, jollof rice, Mbanaga soup, okporoko, gizzard and isi ewu for desert, in short, anything you want, we give you.

Yemi: I will have eba please.

Me: I want pounded yam with Okro soup, my sister, where are you from, cos your beauty seems to be heavenly ordained.

I was getting carried away by this woman and her smile was certainly captivating.

This was not one of those juju where I could have sworn that she hit my bum and I started following her everywhere but it certainly seemed like it. Neither did she blow any powder in my face that has started to mesmerize me.

Remember in Nigeria when people use to sweet-talk folks, maybe blow powder in their face and ask them to go and bring their mother's jewelry and their father's hard currency? Those days were hard sha.

Worse was the tale of the disappearing "thingi"!!! Guys were walking with their hands in their pockets, refusing to shake anyone's hand while the women would walk sometimes with their hands across their chest, refusing to hug anyone. Those were really suspicious times but anyway, this lady sure had me going hmmmm.

Girl: My name is Omari, I am from the Buguma area where the Niger meets the rivers of all rivers..

Me: Yemi, you sure say she no be mami water as she fine so?

Omari: I love your GM

Me: I am sorry, I don't drive General Motors vehicle, I drive a Toyota.

Omari: No foolish, that's not what I mean.

Me: Your fineness, pray , what do you mean?

Omari: I meant, I love your Glutus Maximus

Me: (Whispering to Yemi) Chei, Yemi, I never siddon, she don dey checkout my yansh

Me: Even me, I like as you rock your defenders as you move, you face just dey shine like oyinbo own. What perfume is that you are wearing?

Omari: Contradiction.

Me: I don't blame you, you are a contradiction to all the Nigerian women I have seen, special in your own way, well, make I no talk anymore, I don't want to...don't want.....

As I tried to continue, I started to choke on the appetizer, the bone from the fried fish was hooking me.

ME: Damn, I asked for tilapia fish, why is this fish somersaulting in my throat?

Yemi started banging my back as if he was trying to make the fish do a break dance in my throat. See the kind of friends I have?

Mamiwater, sorry, Omari came over and scolded him, started rubbing my back in an upward motion and I am not sure what happened in those two minutes, but the bone was suddenly gone.

She was feeding me the pounded yam and okro. Swallowing gari or gari substitutes was a remedy for fish bone giving you the choke hold.

Me: A beg, I know its winter but can you please put on the AC, as you are standing so close to me, I am feeling very hot.

Omari: Its too cold to put on the AC, I am sure you are one of those people who like to drive on the highway with the window all the way down.

ME: How do you know that? And don't tell me you saw me on TV...(as if..)

Anyway, look, I hear you cook a mean jollof rice with sweet potato and ribs, any chance I might get to sink my teeth into that after I am done with this poundo and okro?

Omari: How did you know that?

Me: Apart from the fact that you are famous? I hear all Buguma women cook like that. The only people that come close are the Sapele women. Its all in the water. Look at the whole country, everywhere that is near water has a soup that can make you bite your finger..Mbanga soup, edikaikong, even okro in the Calabar format can make you hmmm.

Do you know that Ofe Nsala started near Onitsha at the banks of River Niger. Compare that to Gbegiri soup that came from Kwara..See when the North produces excessive groundnut, they ship it to Kwara and those people grind it to make Gbegiri.

Yemi: How do you know all this?

Me: Ah, stay there, where were you when they were teaching nutritional geography in FGC? Let me break it down for you.

Me: Do you know why they call Ibo people, Nyamiri? They are always begging for water, why do you think they are all over Lagos? There is no running water in Lagos and they can sure live without it if they have to.

Look at all your Ibo friends when they eat, They can eat a sack of akpu with egusi soup and not a drop of water will go down with it. The rumour is that they even rubbed off on Bendel People as I have witnessed in some of my friends.

That's why Ibos are generally called "Aje okuta ma m'omi" which means we eat stones and still don't drink water. I don't think we rubbed off well on some Bendel people sha because my ex-roommate used to pass out on the couch after trying such patented experiments.

On the other leg, we have my Yoruba friends who will drown the little rice left in the pot in oil. Like we used to say in secondary school, if you dey cook Yoruba food and you never put oil, you never start be that.

I went to my friend's house on numerous occasions to eat (I only go when they are cooking anyway) and when dinner was served, I saw the chicken swimming in oil, trying to stay afloat, at least I knew it wasn't "anu 404" (dog meat) since dogs can swim in any liquid medium.

One time, I was eating pounded yam, and after rolling the poundo, it fell into the soup. For the next 10 minutes, I wasn't getting any sonar response, the black box on the plate couldn't reveal an inconsistent liquid level and after the NTSB (my host) invited divers (a fork), the debris was located and deposited in my stomach for further enzyme analysis.

Nowadays, I take an oil drill when I go to his house, at about $22 a barrel, I could still come out ahead of Bill Gates.

But have you noticed that you can tell where a person is from by how they fry plantain?

After conducting analysis at the Omoibo Institute of Technology, we discovered that Yoruba people will soak the plantain in oil and deep fry??? While Ibo people will use the tiniest bit of oil so they can have enough left over to run the generator!!!

Now to the land of dry air, chapped lips and bland food. This was where the art of making suya started.

Get a dog, bang it on the head and by 6pm, you are selling out on the corner of Angwar Sariki and General Market in Kaduna. Its hard to stay away from suya even if you know that Bingo disappeared a day before.

The only thing different we got in Kaduna was plenty of rice and Camel meat which at the time I thought tasted like chicken even though it was really really HARD!!!!

So you see, "I know my stuff."

Me: Anyway, beautiful one, we have to start running, we have a long day ahead of us at the Embassy.

Since it will be a long day, could you pack one plate of Mbanga Soup and pounded yam, some of that suya, extra spicy jollof rice with fried meat, gizzard as we've never seen it.

Yemi, do you want to add anything?

Yemi: Me I just want Eba.

Me: You never ask for much do you..Omari, thanks for hosting us, we enjoyed your smile, oh just for next time, there is a difference between dancing to sweet mother the African way and dancing to it as if it is Russian ballet and you are dancing to the Nut Cracker.

Keep the smile going, I will keep in touch after all, your rice leaves a lot to be remembered as well as your hands that managed to remove the bone from my neck.

We will try to pass by on our way back.

Please, on our way back, can you call all your friends that look like you and ask them to come for dinner, we wont mind meeting them.

Oya, yemi, make we dey go!!!!!!

There's A Reason Why!!

Once a while in our lifetime, we go through ups and downs. When things are going well for us, if we remember, we thank our God and we never fail to blame the devil (real or imagined) for the bad times we go through. Events happen in our daily lives that make an impact on us in ways we might not know or understand. We meet people daily, make new friends, go to school, get a degree, get a job, drive to work, have lunch with friends, party till we drop, go to work late, get fired from work and start all over again. These events dont just happen. The person we meet today might hire us for a job tomorrow or we might even marry them. What you learn in a lecture today could stimulate a business idea that will make you tons of money in the future. On the flipside, the test you failed yesterday could spur you to study hard for tomorrow's examination. The car accident you saw on TV will make you a careful driver when next you are on the road, when you get kicked out of a grocery store for no reason, you begin to have a new perspective on racism. There is a lot to learn when life is speaking to us. When the results of my final examinations in Nigeria were released, they were quite appalling and I thought that was the begining of the end of an education for me. I thought entrance into a university was out of the question, at least for now. I cried a lot during that time and my mother kept trying to calm me down because she felt, there was a reason this was happening.

My secondary school education was at Federal Government College, Kaduna in Northern Nigeria. The system was such that we had to take about fourteen classses ranging from Introduction to technology, art, home economics to Social Studies and the three Nigerian Languages. After completing what we called the Junior Secondary School in three years, we had to sit for a nationwide examination to qualify to go ion to the Senior Secondary School that lasts for three years as well. Students who passed the JSS examination moved on while those who did not make it had to repeat a year and attempt the exam again the following year. In all, it still amazes me how we managed the 14 subjects we were constantly being tested on. At the Senior Secondary School level (SSS1-SSS3), the subjects were scaled back to nine. How the educational authorities came up with this magic number is unknown to me but I assumed we had to do the core subects - maths, english and at least two sciences and to give us a well rounded education a bunch of other subject. In any case, I ended up with Mathematics, English Language, English Literature, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Agricultural Science and Igbo, a Nigerian language. I had wanted to be an engineer since I was good at repairing and wrecking things around the house especially electrical equipments. I had also at a different time wanted to be an architect, I love houses, structures and I still have my idea of a dream house. After three years of SSS, we were required to take two major examinations in order to get into one of the Nigerian Universities. One of the exams was the Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board (JAMB) which is somewhat like the CPA examination for accountants in the sense that it consists of four individual exams which includes the use of English and three others depending on your intended major. The second examination was the SSCE which is much like the finals in colleges but harder since it tests what you have learnt in a particular subject for the past three years. Both were very important to every students future. If you made the requuired grade in both, you went on to one of the universities and if you failed one of the two, you technically shut the door on a university education for that year. Unlike the SAT or the GRE, these exams were only offered once a year. In any case, university admission was only once a year. In a simple sentence, I clonked the SSCE. At that point, I began to notice that everything about life was an abbreviation.

My mother always believed there was a reason for everything. She is a very special person so you have to believe it when she tells you that. After my results arrived at my house, there was a lot of tension at home. To say my dad was astounded is an understatement. My dad is someone many would call an academic. He expected a lot from his children and being the first, he probably hated the idea of this trend being emulated by my siblings. This is beside the fact that it seemed as if good money was being thrown away with nothing to show for it. Looking back now, good money was being wasted and since I now pay my own bills, it is easy to put myself in the mindset of a parent. My failure meant that more money was to be spent on and extra year of education on which money had previously being invested. It also meant that instead of being at the University where I could partially fend for myself, I was still at home where I was going to be fed full time and who knows probably eat into other people's ration. Everything meant more money and this investment was yielding no returns. My poor result meant that I could not get into a university for the 1991/1992 session. My results were mailed to me in Nairobi, Kenya where my father works for one of the international agencies and my mother made every effort to enrol me into a school so I could take my exams over again. Numerous visits to schools around the area yielded nothing. Many of them wanted to set me back by two-three years and I was not about to start high school all over again. I finally paid a visit to Nairobi Academy with my parents. It was one of the private schools in Nairobi and one of the good ones too. After a series of test and interviews, they agreed to accept me. A new chapter in my life had just begun.

I still had fears of what lay in my future. I was trying to erase the image of me as a baggage handler/tout at the bus station since these were the occupations my father said we might end up in if we did not study hard. I was back in school for the 1991/92 session and I had no social life whatsoever. All I could think about was University. To keep myself focused, I joined the track, soccer and volleyball team, the three areas I enjoy passionately. My books and my sports activities were all that kept body and soul together. The initial plan (or should I say my father's plan since I was not yet beyond my childhood fantasy plans) was to start my undergraduate career in one of the Nigerian Universities. By this time, the Career and Counseling Committee made up of my father, my dad and my male parent had decided that whatever happens, I was going to be an economics major. I had no choice, I could not be an engineer since I already flunked Physics and Chemistry in my SSCE; I was not sure what course a baker or a carpenter could study at the University level. If I had the choice, I could have gone pro but the question then is pro-what? In any case, who was I to argue, after all, the buck starts and stops in the same place, my father's pocket. The school year went along fine, I was concentrating with no distractions. I started excelling in the classroom and on the sports field. I won various awards for both my academic work and for track. I was almost made captain of my house had I not decided to leave the school later. The question of what University I might be headed to came up again as we were midway through the school year. The CCC still believed that a Nigerian University was the best place to get an undergraduate degree and only then should one seek an advanced degree outside the shores of the country. Well, a lot of events conspired in my favor. The most important but unfortunate event was the shut down of almost all the Nigerian universities because the academic staff was on strike protesting the non payment of their wages. That meant that the chances of going to a Nigerian university was becoming bleak. The other alternative was to go to a university in Kenya and I did not cherish the thought of that because by this time, I longed to be with my peers and frankly, I wanted to leave home and try new things.

I started my application process about February of 1992 for the fall of the same year. I applied to Michigan State University, University of Michigan and a host of Canadian universities that had closed their application process for that year. Somehow, the colorful brochure of Northeastern Univeristy in Boston caught my eye at one of the offices I visited in Nairobi and I got hooked. Was I guillible or what? How often do you go to a school because of the fine architecture without for a second thinking about all the other factors? Schools now play on the fact that students fall for colorful booklets. They take pictures of fine buildings and sometimes ugly ones from a good angle, print them, invite you to campus just as soon as they finish construction on a new classroom building. They make sure your whole visit to the school centers around that building and afterwards, they take you to the best cafeteria on campus to sample the food that has been specially prepared to entice you to the school. It was all about showboating and a lot of people always fell for that including me. Northeastern began to respond to my mail and at a point I had decided that that was where I was headed, provided of course that I was accepted and my father approved. After a couple of missing mails and request for more information, I finally got my admission letter on July 30, 1992. My mother came to me and said "I told you to be patient, there is a reason you could not get into school in Nigeria, a better opportunity has now arisen, make use of it" Actually, I already knew that, I am sure my dad was also happy but he hardly ever jumped for joy unless he got a visit from Jesus Christ. Inwardly, he was smiling but externally, his expression was telling you that he was no Chase Manhattan Bank.