Nnedi Okorafor - Lagoon

For years, I’d been digging on Anthony Dey Craze, the lyrical genius rapper from Ghana. A Ghanaian friend of mine turned me on to his work and then months later I saw Anthony live. His performance… how can I describe it? It changed me. Listening to him in my car or on my phone was one thing. Live was something else entirely. It was in the bass of his voice, the flow of his words. There was a rhythm to his performance that swayed the entire audience! You could practically see waves of it rolling over everyone. I’d never experienced anything like it. That shit came straight from the soil of the continent, I just knew it. I wanted to learn how to do that . So when I opened for him at a show in Atlanta and he asked me to go on tour with him in Ghana and Nigeria, all expenses paid, of course I said, “Hell yeah!”

The show that night in Lagos was amazing. I was the opening act and I don’t think the audience was expecting me. I don’t think they were ready for a six-foot tall African American woman in a glamorous evening gown with a shaved head who could both rap and sing. I took the stage like a dragon. I wrapped things up with a freestyle session. I was so deep in the zone that I don’t even remember what I was spitting. It was just coming and coming and coming. I should have known there was something in the air. Backstage, Anthony came up to me, gave me a big hug and said that I was officially his protégé. I was speechless! Everything in my life was coming together.

I grew up in Athens, Georgia. Up until three years ago, the farthest I’d ever gone from home was Jackson, Mississippi to attend Jackson State University and study psychology. I was the first in my family to go to college. And by my junior year, to my mother’s horror, I also became the first to record a hip-hop album. Never in a million years could I have imagined I’d wind up on the streets of Lagos during some sort of riot.

I’d gone out looking for Anthony after the concert. His producer told me he’d slipped out and that I’d find him down the road at someplace called Bar Beach. That’s why I was out there. I really didn’t plan to go anywhere alone. I just wanted to see if maybe he hadn’t left yet.

There were some guys milling about near the entrance of the nightclub. I leaned against the door and watched the road. The club was on the corner of a busy intersection, and I watched the traffic and enjoyed the night air.

This was how I actually saw it. I saw the sonic boom. I swear to God, the very air shivered. I saw it coming up the street. At first, I thought I was just tired and overwhelmed from such a wonderful night. I wondered if I needed to go and eat something. I can never eat before a performance, and now I was starving.

But the air really did shiver. And as I stood there, it came right at me. There was no physical breeze; it came like a ghost. Then it washed over me like a great wave of water. When it passed, I felt drenched, heavy.

There was a brief silence, like the moment after an intake of breath.

Then BOOM! Deafening noise that made my head vibrate!

People dropped to the ground, a man fell off his okada , windows shattered, car alarms sounded, two cars went over curbs. For a full minute, the constant traffic of honking, beeping cars, trucks, okadas , red buses, beat up orange danfo mini vans, motorized tricycles in front of the nightclub completely stopped . I should have gone inside. Instead, I stepped into the sea of people, holding my ears. In that first few minutes many others did, too. And soon the sides of the roads were full of people like me, curious, afraid, excited people who were scared of being indoors.

We were all wondering the same things: What blew up? Was something else going to explode? My head throbbed and I struggled to ignore it. I stood on shaky legs at an intersection, pressing close to a streetlight to avoid getting knocked around too much. The traffic started moving again but people were clearly scared. You could see it on their faces.

“Did you see that?” Someone tapped roughly on my shoulder.

Rubbing my temples, I turned. An old bent man in a long tan caftan and a wide-brimmed hat leaned on a dark wooden cane. He stank of many cigarettes and had a bushy grey beard and tufts of wiry hair on the sides of his head.

“I… I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do,” he said. “You saw it. Na wao , the first thing you say to me is a lie, kai !”

“I…”

“Maybe you know what it was, then?”

“The noise?” she asked.

“No, the shivering air. Was it a bird?”

“I don’t think so?”

“A plane?”

I frowned.

The man grinned. He didn’t have many teeth. Then he laughed wheezily and said something in another language. Could have been Yoruba, Hausa, or complete gibberish. I don’t think it was gibberish. The man had a glint in his eye and it put me on edge.

“What do you think it was?” I asked.

“You assume that I think.”

“I need to get back to the club,” I said, turning to leave. This was too much weirdness for me. Plus the car alarms and exhaust were increasing my headache. I turned back to him.

“Where are you from? Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America, right?” he said.

“How did you know that?”

“I can tell, o. I got an American cousin,” he said with a smile. “I got cousins all over the world.”

“Um… wow,” I replied. An okada passed dangerously close to him as he stood with his back to the road. He didn’t seem to mind or even notice.

“Yes, you saw what you saw and I saw it, too,” he said. “It’s going to get really interesting here soon, you’ll see. It’s a great time to be in Africa! And at least you can say that you saw it all begin.” He pointed a gnarled finger at me. “You can say you were there. That is not something most young American girls can say. If you ever make it back to your country, make sure you tell them about your country here. Just because you are American does not make you American. This is your home.”

I smiled, despite the fluttery feeling in my chest. I needed to get back to the nightclub. “OK,” I said. “Well, have a good night, sir!”

“Scratch,” he said. “Call me Scratch.”

“OK, Scratch. Be safe.”

“No worry about me, o,” he said. He winked. “This my kine of night.”

I turned to run back up the street to the nightclub. I looked over my shoulder but the man was gone, already swallowed up by the late-night bustle. I took one last look at the busy street. What was that noise? I wondered. It was almost midnight and the street was busier and more frantic than ever.

I’d see Scratch again, twenty-four hours later when I was running for my life after we’d had to abandon our car on the way to the airport. I was with several band members and Anthony’s manager and we were all terrified, having witnessed riots downtown (we couldn’t find Anthony). Scratch was dancing with a crowd of market women in the middle of a dirt road as the women sang songs to the Lord Jesus Christ. When I saw the old man reveling with the women, I lost my fear. They reminded me of my mother and her church group on Sundays.

Boy, did I have a story to tell my mother. Legba, the god of the crossroads was alive and well in the country of his origin. Wow. I just might write a song about this, too, if I survive. I’ll call it “African Chaos”. And if there is one city that rhymes with “chaos”, it is Lagos.

Agu drove, Adaora sat in the passenger seat and Anthony and Ayodele were in the back seat. They were all quiet. Adaora was nibbling at toothpaste. The travel-sized tube was all she had in her purse that could fight off her nausea. Whenever she went scuba diving, she always liked to brush her teeth right after her return, so carrying it was a habit.