Sunday, December 04, 2005
Groundhog Day in Maiduguri.
Then it is five am. We are at the Major's table. The soldier who referred us to NAF is going to receive a letter of commendation. Air Force officers give each other vigorous hi-fives when they hear that their checkpoint is the only one that did not ask us for a bribe. We are learning about the UN Peace Keeping operation in Congo. We are eating brains. We are eating locusts. We are dancing for the first time since Accra. The Major's chauffeur will be driving us home. The chauffeur is sulkily drinking soft drinks. And we have started Groundhog Day. We need to meet more of the Major's friends, see his photographs, talk about Fela Kuti and are treated to a decoding of selected passages of his pidgin English. We are expected to return tomorrow afternoon.
We return the tomorrow afternoon. A homemade table tennis set is prepared and a checker's set is revealed. Horseplay ensues. The people we are supposed to meet begin to arrive. We meet the television anchorwoman/reporter for Maiduguri's TV station. Her husband has been destroying us at table tennis for several hours. (Apparently it is only the Chinese who give Nigerians any trouble when it comes to table tennis; for whatever bizarre reason it has become their national mini-sport.) We meet a gang of friends from Abuja who have been contracted for roadwork in the area. They have never been here. Everyone is telling us we have to come to Abuja. We have to go to Lagos. They will host us in Jos or Port Harcourt.
The residents are begging us to remain for one or two days. They want to show us their town. They want to introduce us to some people who are working on HIV/AIDS. They want to put us on television. Then they have measured us for clothing. They have filmed us for television and we have to wait for the tape of the program and the gift of the clothing. We realize that we will be in Maiduguri for a solid week.
Then I am singing Fela Kuti songs with a man who is continuously offering me women. All the time we are shaking each other's hands and eating animals. I am looking at amazing photographs from the Democratic Republic of Congo on the Major's laptop. I am looking at young boys gloating over severed heads, young boys crossing a bridge brandishing heads on long sticks. Awful corpses. There is a python stuffed full. There is a python cut open and there is a man inside, looking green, being dead. There are behind the scenes shots of Peace Keepers that would be impossible for a journalist to take. They are the most ethnically diverse group I have ever seen photographed in my life, which has included sufficient time at international schools and in New York. We learn that these soldiers had to give their stuff to thirteen year old boys with guns because they were not allowed to engage in warfare with the rebel groups. We learn how the Peace Keepers were humiliated and used and how they quarreled with one another and enjoyed themselves. We hear atrocious things involving child prostitution and amusing things involving cookouts and horseplay. There was no breathing room between the most disturbing things I have recently seen and some of the most heartwarming evidence for transcending all this bravado about nations.
The company was too good to leave. We got a simcard for our telephone and joined their network. We visited people's homes. Sometimes we tried to avoid NAF in the evening times and always we found ourselves there. Most nights we were the last to leave. It was best to enter our dismal powerless hotel in the last extremes of exhaustion. Sometimes we came home and found ourselves locked out. Then we stumbled through this dumpy warehouse of ruined hotel things; in the cavernous unoccupied first floor we tumbled over wooden things and made noise. One night Sean sprayed me with water and we fought in the dark. I began kicking everywhere, connecting with nothing and getting wet. Eventually, I changed my strategy, heard him laughing and knocked him over something hard. Then we quit.
We went all over Maiduguri's market and found amazing music. We hung out with a man who had collected cassette tapes of traditional music from various tribes dating back to World War II. We sat with him and listened to his stuff, buying meat off the heads of passing vendors and sharing it with him. For seventy cents, we bought the tapes that we liked: the official band of the local king performing in 1942; some Fuulani's that passed through a few decades before; Canoury music; something popular with the Hausas that sounded like Baliwood music; hours of entrancing music.
I found a store that was brimming with original vinyl LPs of Nigerian high life music from the late sixties and the seventies: Fela Kuti; Prince Nico; Ikenga; the Doves. It was candyland. It was hipper than anything in the United States. But they wouldn't sell the records. They were for copying. Cool. That is so Nigerian and cool. They have pride in their stuff and they aren't going to sell it to me because I'm offering cold cash. Instead this was a kind of library; so, I respected the rules and set them to work for perhaps sixteen hours copying these amazing popping, crackling records of songs about African unity and African corruption sung by men in knee high, high heel boots and frilling leather shirts, backed by enormous bands of everything filling my blank tapes.
Then we had to figure out how to thank our hosts and Tuuli found a woman who baked cakes. We had more days at NAF. More table tennis. More real and interesting conversation. More wandering around the market. Mending of clothing. Buying of sandals. And then we had to leave. We were dressed in shimmering new fitted Kaftans (Tuuli in her colorful printed dress) sitting at a large table of our friends and we were eating a truly awful cake. We shared it with everyone at the club: Tuuli and Queen (the Major's friend) minced around with cubes of it on little trays. Low and behold they presented cake to the ultimate authority of the border post we would be passing through on the following day.
Incidentally, Northern Nigeria seems to be a total no-go zone for caucasians, of whom we have seen precisely none in the last two weeks. This is the first such blackout of our trip and it is welcome.
Then it is five am. We are at the Major's table. The soldier who referred us to NAF is going to receive a letter of commendation. Air Force officers give each other vigorous hi-fives when they hear that their checkpoint is the only one that did not ask us for a bribe. We are learning about the UN Peace Keeping operation in Congo. We are eating brains. We are eating locusts. We are dancing for the first time since Accra. The Major's chauffeur will be driving us home. The chauffeur is sulkily drinking soft drinks. And we have started Groundhog Day. We need to meet more of the Major's friends, see his photographs, talk about Fela Kuti and are treated to a decoding of selected passages of his pidgin English. We are expected to return tomorrow afternoon.
We return the tomorrow afternoon. A homemade table tennis set is prepared and a checker's set is revealed. Horseplay ensues. The people we are supposed to meet begin to arrive. We meet the television anchorwoman/reporter for Maiduguri's TV station. Her husband has been destroying us at table tennis for several hours. (Apparently it is only the Chinese who give Nigerians any trouble when it comes to table tennis; for whatever bizarre reason it has become their national mini-sport.) We meet a gang of friends from Abuja who have been contracted for roadwork in the area. They have never been here. Everyone is telling us we have to come to Abuja. We have to go to Lagos. They will host us in Jos or Port Harcourt.
The residents are begging us to remain for one or two days. They want to show us their town. They want to introduce us to some people who are working on HIV/AIDS. They want to put us on television. Then they have measured us for clothing. They have filmed us for television and we have to wait for the tape of the program and the gift of the clothing. We realize that we will be in Maiduguri for a solid week.
Then I am singing Fela Kuti songs with a man who is continuously offering me women. All the time we are shaking each other's hands and eating animals. I am looking at amazing photographs from the Democratic Republic of Congo on the Major's laptop. I am looking at young boys gloating over severed heads, young boys crossing a bridge brandishing heads on long sticks. Awful corpses. There is a python stuffed full. There is a python cut open and there is a man inside, looking green, being dead. There are behind the scenes shots of Peace Keepers that would be impossible for a journalist to take. They are the most ethnically diverse group I have ever seen photographed in my life, which has included sufficient time at international schools and in New York. We learn that these soldiers had to give their stuff to thirteen year old boys with guns because they were not allowed to engage in warfare with the rebel groups. We learn how the Peace Keepers were humiliated and used and how they quarreled with one another and enjoyed themselves. We hear atrocious things involving child prostitution and amusing things involving cookouts and horseplay. There was no breathing room between the most disturbing things I have recently seen and some of the most heartwarming evidence for transcending all this bravado about nations.
The company was too good to leave. We got a simcard for our telephone and joined their network. We visited people's homes. Sometimes we tried to avoid NAF in the evening times and always we found ourselves there. Most nights we were the last to leave. It was best to enter our dismal powerless hotel in the last extremes of exhaustion. Sometimes we came home and found ourselves locked out. Then we stumbled through this dumpy warehouse of ruined hotel things; in the cavernous unoccupied first floor we tumbled over wooden things and made noise. One night Sean sprayed me with water and we fought in the dark. I began kicking everywhere, connecting with nothing and getting wet. Eventually, I changed my strategy, heard him laughing and knocked him over something hard. Then we quit.
We went all over Maiduguri's market and found amazing music. We hung out with a man who had collected cassette tapes of traditional music from various tribes dating back to World War II. We sat with him and listened to his stuff, buying meat off the heads of passing vendors and sharing it with him. For seventy cents, we bought the tapes that we liked: the official band of the local king performing in 1942; some Fuulani's that passed through a few decades before; Canoury music; something popular with the Hausas that sounded like Baliwood music; hours of entrancing music.
I found a store that was brimming with original vinyl LPs of Nigerian high life music from the late sixties and the seventies: Fela Kuti; Prince Nico; Ikenga; the Doves. It was candyland. It was hipper than anything in the United States. But they wouldn't sell the records. They were for copying. Cool. That is so Nigerian and cool. They have pride in their stuff and they aren't going to sell it to me because I'm offering cold cash. Instead this was a kind of library; so, I respected the rules and set them to work for perhaps sixteen hours copying these amazing popping, crackling records of songs about African unity and African corruption sung by men in knee high, high heel boots and frilling leather shirts, backed by enormous bands of everything filling my blank tapes.
Then we had to figure out how to thank our hosts and Tuuli found a woman who baked cakes. We had more days at NAF. More table tennis. More real and interesting conversation. More wandering around the market. Mending of clothing. Buying of sandals. And then we had to leave. We were dressed in shimmering new fitted Kaftans (Tuuli in her colorful printed dress) sitting at a large table of our friends and we were eating a truly awful cake. We shared it with everyone at the club: Tuuli and Queen (the Major's friend) minced around with cubes of it on little trays. Low and behold they presented cake to the ultimate authority of the border post we would be passing through on the following day.
Incidentally, Northern Nigeria seems to be a total no-go zone for caucasians, of whom we have seen precisely none in the last two weeks. This is the first such blackout of our trip and it is welcome.
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