A. Barrett - Blackass

But now she was smiling as Furo replied with caution: ‘Maybe the salary is small, but it’s all I have.’

‘Until something better comes along,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ agreed Furo.

‘That’s the spirit. Something better will come, very soon, you’ll see.’

When the Honda pulled up at the gate of Haba! Furo said his goodbyes to Syreeta, then clambered down from the car. He felt like a cosseted child on the first-ever day of school, a feeling of abandonment and peril that grew stronger as Syreeta drove off with a cheery wave. It felt too easy to call her back, to climb back into the coolness of the car and be driven home to finish his sleep, and then watch TV, eat her cooking, do anything but worry about work, money, responsibility. It felt too easy to give up what he had wanted for so long — a money-paying, office-going, real-life job. Not easy enough, he told himself, and striding to the closed gate, he nodded at the maiguard who emerged from the gatehouse at his knock, then said in answer to the old man’s polite question, ‘I work here.’

Following their start-up meeting, which lasted about an hour, Ayo Abu Arinze showed Furo around the office, and during the tour he delivered a running commentary on the internal workings of the three-year-old company, its mission and vision, rules and regulations, the anecdotal history. ‘Work starts at eight and ends at five, but the office is locked up around ten, so you can stay until then if you want … what we sell, in a nutshell, is self-education … lunch hour is between noon and one … I was a senior manager in the telecoms industry before I resigned my job to start this company … every word in a Haba! proposal must be spelled correctly, no text message spellings, that is a rule … Nigerians must start reading serious books, whether for work or for pleasure, that’s my vision … the red button on the dispenser is actually cold water and the blue is hot,’ Arinze said as he led Furo into office after office and presented him to the staff as Frank Whyte, the new head of marketing.

Sales, Accounts, Human Resources, Information Technology, and Marketing: the five departments of Haba! The sales department comprised two staff members, one of whom had been employed on the same day as Furo. The senior sales manager and department head was a bejewelled, hijab-wearing, boubou-clad woman called Zainab. She beamed a fatigued smile at Furo, and when, to the clatter of gold bangles, she raised a hand and patted her belly, he saw she was with child. The new salesperson was a plump, stylish woman whose name was Iquo, and after Furo was introduced, she spoke in a confident tone of voice, her words directed at Arinze: ‘I remember Mr Whyte from the interview day. I also want to thank you, sir, for granting me the opportunity to work for this great company. I promise to give my best, sir.’ She sounded easy to boss around. This intuition of Furo’s was strengthened when she stood up from her desk and rushed towards the door as he and Arinze turned to leave, but Arinze waved her back and said, with a cool glance at her eager face, ‘I can get the door myself. One more thing, please don’t call me “sir”.’ The next-door office was the IT department, and it held one person, Tetsola. He was a wide-shouldered and long-limbed man who sat hunched over a white-tiled ledge in the dim cubbyhole that was crammed with dismembered computers and discarded compact discs and tangled rubber cables. His office, which shared a wall with the lavatory, had been converted from a bathroom, and perhaps for this reason, because of the mouldering smell that seeped from the peeling walls, he remained silent when Furo was introduced. He dipped his head at Furo’s hello, and then shuffled his feet in their outsized sneakers as Arinze described his duties and praised his work to Furo, but he refused to say a word. After emerging from the IT office, as they made their way downstairs, Arinze told Furo that he himself handled the company accounts, hence his office doubled as the accounts department, while the HR department was staffed by two people, Obata and Tosin. Obata was the head of department, but it was Tosin who managed the support staff of two drivers and one gatekeeper. She also served as his personal assistant.

‘Meet the amazing Ms Amao,’ Arinze said as they reached the reception desk. ‘Tosin has been with me from the very beginning … she and I opened this office together as the only staff. You could say she’s the face and voice of Haba! Anything you need to know about the business, about how we started, or where to get ink for the printer, or how to requisition books from the store, Tosin’s the person to ask.’ And to Tosin he said, ‘This is—’

‘I know, Furo Wariboko,’ Tosin interjected.

‘Oh yes,’ Arinze said with a low chuckle, and then nibbled his lower lip. Finally he spoke. ‘From now on he will be known only as Frank Whyte.’

During their meeting in Arinze’s office, Arinze had expressed astonishment at Furo’s decision to change his name. In response to his cautious questions, Furo explained that Frank was his Christian name and Whyte was his furo ere , his family name, the English version of his family’s compound name. Many Kalabari families still retained this legacy of the slave-trading days when the chieftains answered one name in the clan and another to the white customer, the European sailors, who had no interest in learning their names and thus, partly in mockery and partly from necessity, addressed them by English nicknames. Hence it became that Fyneface was Karibo, Yellowe was Iyalla, Black-Duke was Oweredaba, Bobmanuel was Ekine, Georgewill was Otagi, Harry was Idoniboye-Obu, and, according to Furo, Whyte was Wariboko.

But Whyte was not Wariboko. Furo wasn’t worried about this fabrication, his first to his boss. He had no fear he would be caught out. Ayo Abu Arinze was Yoruba or more likely Igbo, or even of mixed ethnicity, with some Hausa thrown in somewhere — his three names together were confusing, but his surname was Igbo — and more to the point, he wasn’t Kalabari, so it was unlikely he would know the secret history of Kalabari names. Yet Arinze was Nigerian enough to know that the whitest names in the country came from Furo’s parts, the Niger Delta. Besides, he was pleased at the reason Furo gave for making the change. Because, as Furo said, Whyte would be easier for Haba! customers to pronounce and memorise, and, furthermore, it would remove the distraction of a white man bearing a black name. Such dedication to duty boded well, Arinze said, and he agreed with Furo that no one in the office need be informed of his old name.

From the lobby Furo and Arinze went back upstairs to Obata’s office. Obata was typing on his laptop, and he looked up from the screen as they entered, then pushed back his chair and rose to his feet. He greeted Arinze in a genial tone and nodded at Furo like an old enemy, and then, apart from a sidelong glance at Furo’s face, he showed no emotion as Arinze informed him of the name change. When Arinze finished speaking, he asked:

‘What name should I use in his employment file?’

‘Frank Whyte, of course,’ Arinze answered.

‘And his salary account? Will that be opened under this name?’

‘That’s a good point,’ Arinze said. He turned to Furo. ‘What do you suggest? Your new passport bears your old name. We’ll need new ID to open a bank account.’

Furo pondered on this snag before he said at last, ‘I’ll make the change official. I’ll get a new passport. Is it possible to pay me in cash until I bring the passport?’

‘That we can do,’ Arinze said. ‘Tell you what, Obata. Don’t open a file for him, not yet. For tax purposes let the records show that he’s on a three-month internship in marketing, and put down his salary as marketing expenses. Frank, you’ll have to bring your passport before the end of three months, by the end of September. Then we’ll make your position permanent.’