William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

In Nigeria we had a cook and a houseboy, Johnson and Israel. Johnson was very old, his hair was greying, and he was very set in his ways. When I read Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson I always think of our old cook. Cary’s Johnson is much younger but the two had much in common. Johnson had been married many times but had no children. This, he claimed, was the fault of the wives he had had and nothing to do with his potency. Just before we left Nigeria he got married again to a very young girl. She used to do our washing for us and when Johnson was away in the afternoons received visits from other men. Eventually she became pregnant and later had a baby girl. There never was a prouder father.

Johnson was very tall and lanky, Israel was extremely small and walked everywhere very fast. He was an Easterner, an Ibo, and during the Biafran War he joined the Biafran Army in order to get something to eat. One day he was given a rifle and five rounds of ammunition and was deployed in the bush to repel an attack by the Federal forces. He was always quite candid about what he did next. He took off his camouflage jacket (the only uniform he possessed) and buried it. Then he threw his rifle away and deserted.

Once, in some waiting-room, or at some station bookstall, I picked up a copy of Scientific American. On the cover was what looked like a picture of a badly made patchwork quilt, all greys, rusts and ochrous browns. I recognized it immediately as an aerial photograph of Ibadan town centre, without need of recourse to the theme of the issue — which was “Town Planning in the Third World,” or something equivalent. Ibadan is lodged as firmly in my mind as any of the other cities I’ve lived in. It is known, sometimes affectionately, as the largest village in Africa. It has a population of well over one million. Most of the buildings within its sprawling purlieus are made of mud and roofed with corrugated iron. The streets crumble away at the edges into large deep ditches and are permanently crammed with cars. From every house and shop, radio music blares. At night the buildings are lit with fluorescent tubes, predominantly green and blue. There is public transport but the most common way of getting about the city is in Volkswagen vans. When you see a VW coming you stick out your hand and it stops. You climb in (the sliding doors are removed) and give sixpence to a small boy who hangs on to the outside. The vans ply certain basic routes. When you want to get off you rap with your knuckles on the roof. The van stops at once.

I used to travel by this means from the university campus into town to the Recreation Club. Here you could play tennis, golf and squash, swim at the pool, eat snacks and drink at the bars. During school holidays it was a focal point for the children of expatriates. We would spend the entire day there. In the evening we would go to the cinema or go to a party. There were lots of parties. Parties in town, parties at the university, parties at the New Reservation, parties in Bodija. Teenage parties: the same boys, the same girls, records and beer, sometimes a punch made from illicit gin brewed on the banks of distant creeks and reputed to make you blind if you drank too much.

Excursions out of town were few and far between. Sometimes we would go fishing. Drive out a couple of hours into the jungle to find a slow brown river and spin for perch. Sometimes we went down to Lagos for a week to stay in rickety beach huts at Tarqua Bay. Fish off the breakwater, go sailing — dodging the merchant ships steaming into Lagos harbour; surf at the surfing beach, and at night sleep on camp beds in the open air, beneath the stars and a mosquito net. The Americans refer to the children of US Army personnel serving abroad as “army brats” or “air force brats.” There were times when we were “colonial brats.” Lazy, self-regarding, pleasure-seeking and utterly incurious about the country we were living in.

That all changed with the Biafran War. I well remember the day of the military coup that precipitated the country into its civil war. I was due to fly back to Britain for the start of the school term. Johnson, our cook, laconically told me that I wouldn’t be going. Why not? I asked. Because, he said, there’s going to be a military coup on Monday. He was right.

When the war was on (1967-70) the tenor of life changed radically, largely because of the overwhelming presence of the Nigerian Army. From the minute you stepped off the plane at Ikeja airport armed soldiery became a constant feature of your day. Off-duty soldiers kept their guns with them: on buses, in bars, taking their kids for a walk.

One evening, driving along a quiet road with my father, we turned a corner and passed an oil drum with a plank leaning against it jutting a couple of feet into the road. It was only when we saw half a dozen soldiers spring from the trees with Kalashnikovs levelled that we realized it was a road block. We stopped abruptly and got out of the car. The guns were lowered and the car was searched. They were looking for currency smugglers, they said. The soldiers were young and edgy. They wore the odd bit of camouflage uniform supplemented by their own clothes, gym shoes, flannel trousers, an Hawaiian shirt. Their guns looked like very old Warsaw Pact surplus — with numbers burned crudely into the stock. You looked at these guys, who had volunteered because of the free beer and cigarettes the Army provided, and wondered what was going on in the rebel heartland.

I haven’t been back to Nigeria or any part of West Africa since 1973. I started writing about it in 1976 when I wrote an (unpublished) novel about the Biafran War. Subsequent efforts of hindsight and occasional nostalgia keep it very fresh in my mind. Particularly heavy rain, a warm and muggy night, the sound of crickets, a cold beer on a hot day, are always weighed up against their African equivalents and always found wanting. But it’s the music of Nat King Cole that proves the most effective Proustian trigger.

It was one of my father’s habits when he first got up in the morning almost immediately to put a record on a shiny walnut hi-fi he had shipped out from Britain. Invariably, the record he chose was by Nat King Cole, the first bars of which were greeted by loud groans from the rest of the family, but he paid no heed. He would stand in the middle of the main room, the sliding glass doors thrown wide open to catch the cool early-morning breeze and look out on the sunlit view as he sang along with Nat Cole. He always struck me in those moments as being a very happy man. Whenever I hear that distinctive dry voice I think of my father and of Africa in the early morning.

1984

York, Hermes, Argonaut, Stratocruiser, Super Constellation, Britannia, Boeing 707, VC10 … The story of my early encounters with England is a small history of aviation. I do not remember the York, a development of the Lancaster bomber, I believe, but in 1952—the year I was born — my flying life began, in a Hermes. I was born in March in the Ridge Hospital in Accra, the capital of the Gold Coast. Four months later I was carried up the steps to the waiting Hermes to begin my first flight from my native land back to the place my parents came from. The Hermes followed the York on the first passenger services from the Gold Coast to London, making a series of short hops across the great protruding bulge of western Africa — Accra, Lagos, Kano, Tripoli — before crossing the Mediterranean to Madrid, Rome or Frankfurt and then on to London. The whole journey took seventeen hours.

I do remember the Argonaut quite well, however, a British version of the DC6, a four-engined prop plane that did not owe anything to World War Two precursors and was the first to make the trans-Sahara overfly routine (if one discounts the truly terrifying turbulence), and was thus able to cut the time of the West Africa to London trip substantially. We would land in Kano in northern Nigeria to refuel before setting off on the long leg over the desert to Tripoli. Kano airport was so fly-infested that the airport buildings were proofed with mosquito wire. Vultures perched on the control tower. We always crossed the Sahara at night (perhaps at the level the planes flew in those days the turbulence made it impassable when the sun was up?) and we would arrive at Tripoli as dawn broke. For this reason Tripoli airport always seemed dramatic and somewhat disturbing to me, as I recall: its hangars were colandered from World War Two shrapnel and in the pale light you could see cannibalized hulks of Italian bombers of the same era rusting mysteriously in the thin blond grass that fringed the runways. Beyond the perimeter fence camels grazed… There was still one more stop to be made in mainland Europe before we cruised over the English Channel to land at London airport — as Heathrow was always quaintly referred to in those days.