A day out on the water

Roger Blench

Journeys with Kay in Nigeria were never less than eccentric and sometimes her insouciance in the face of the uncertainties of life in the Nigerian Delta left me breathless. But in retrospect you can be entertained by the unpredictable situations that go with the territory...

At the end of December 2002, I went down to Port Harcourt to stay with Kay. I decided to fly, as the Christmas roads are often full of policemen hoping to supplement their salaries. The University houses are in a state of splendid decrepitude, rather like something out of Graham Greene novel, with creepers poking their way through crumbling window panes and some occasional water and electricity. Beyond the rather ambiguous boundaries of the campus, the Niger Delta begins. The Delta is quite unlike other regions of Nigeria, hot, ultra-humid, a great area of swamps, river and creeks, with dark trees lining the banks. Any vision of the Amazon is rapidly dispelled though; loggers have cut down all the old trees and most of the creeks are now lined with scrappy palms and other scrub. As a consequence, much of the bird and animal life has disappeared and this fairly recently. Most of the old people you talk to remember a river alive with crocodiles, hippos, manatees. Many people who lived there didn’t farm at all, just fished and sold their smoky products to the yam-growers. The fish and the crustaceans move around all the time and so there are nomadic fishing-camps on sand-spits, following the great swarms of ghost-shrimps that appear at certain times of year. But the canker is the oil; the Delta is where most of it is found and all the multinationals are here, building derricks and pipelines. Great gouts of gas come up with the oil and most of it is burnt off, covering the land in soot. It is disconcerting to turn into a quiet tree-lined creek and see a great oily flame rising from the bush. Yellow pipelines snake off across the landscape and the steel boxes of modern times have replaced the crocodiles on the sandbanks. Oil attracts wheeler-dealers and outsiders seeking to hoover up the surplus cash of the oil business have spotted the potential of the trees and attacked with their chainsaws.

One of Kay’s long-term and picturesque collaborators was Richard Freeman, who had worked with her since the days of the Nigerian Civil War. Richard was a speaker of the Olodiama language, and a great source of knowledge about the Delta. He produced a vast, rambling manuscript on the fisheries of the Delta which we spent many years trying to publish. But he also a poet and short story writer and someone for whom dreams were very real. He would disappear for weeks at a time and once returned with a tale of kidnap by cannibals. Kay was assisting him to build a house in his village, though it later turned out that this structure was largely science fiction and the hopeful photographs with which he reassured her were actually someone else’s house in another place. Richard also had the most complex domestic affairs and, through the agency of his multiple wives and others, contracted AIDS and died in 2001. Richard’s village, Ikebiri, was inaccessible, and Kay had always nurtured an ambition to see his grave.

So we were delighted to receive the following invitation from Samuel Gabon to visit Ikebiri, to attend the following rather unusual proceedings and talk to Richard’s family.

We made out way by car to Yenagoa, in Bayelsa State, and then down to the waterside to hire a fast boat to take us up the creeks. After some negotiations, a sharp-nosed boat was found with a monstrous outboard, and we set off. Any residual image of the peaceful waters of the Delta was shattered by the roar of our engine and others snaking up and down the main channel. Whatever wildlife remained had good warning of our approach and headed off. Fishermen in canoes had no time to paddle away and we chopped up fishing lines, damaged traps and nearly overturned them with our wash, generally disturbed the peace. All this was taken in surprisingly good part by the residents of the creeks, although personally, I felt like Han Solo escaping Darth Vader. As it turned out, this is not a bad analogy, since the side-creeks sometimes harbour ‘sea-pirates’, robbers in fast boats who prey on traffic in the river and boat-owners have learnt to take rapid evasive action.

After a couple of hours, we turned off into a side-channel and reached calmer waters, where not all the trees had been taken out and the occasional bird ventured to the waterside. There were no other power-boats and the whole region was more like the Delta I remembered from earlier trips, a tranquil if humid place. We eventually reached Ikebiri, our whole bodies buzzing with the vibration of the outboard, and tied up at the main jetty which was sloping into the water in an alarming way. The village is a long thin strip of wooden and cement houses along the edge of the water, which is lined with canoes and fish-traps. These settlements are very cut off, no water, electricity or telephones and unless you have a fast boat, very remote from services such as clinics. There are few tiny shops selling washing-powder, tomato paste and Robb vapour rub, those commodities without which Nigerian life could not go forward.

As it turned out, there was some dispute about the festival and part of the village told us they disapproved and would not be attending. As the start was delayed, we made a visit to Richard’s grave (a cement slab next to his family house) and saw the actual building that Kay had lent money to build, so different from the one in the photographs.

The festival itself was a curiosity. Its author had set up a large framework covered in cloth, and hung on it a hugely miscellaneous variety of objects including plastic machine guns, cloths and other items. In front of it was desk, sporting a disconnected telephone which the Master of Ceremonies consulted at regular intervals. The old woman did not appear to tell her story and Late Major Isaac Boro did not greet us. The performers were in fact schoolboys motivated by the chance to dress up and march around, playing ‘bush football’ and dancing in lines, marshalled by Samuel Gabon like an old style scoutmaster. It was hard to link the items on the programme with what we saw, and in the event we were thankful that ‘shooting round the town’ did not take place. In the event, a crowd drifted up drawn by the strange spectacle of two white people taking seriously what appeared to them as the slightly mad activities of someone marginal to the community.

Watching the sky darken and thinking of the ride back, I urged Kay to leave but her sense of politeness meant that we stayed until the dancing was announced. Suddenly, everyone thought that it was now time to greet us seriously and as we went back to the boat, we were stopped and engaged with the usual pleasantries. Further delays meant that when we finally set off the night met us about an hour from Yenagoa. These boats have no lights, and yet they continue to ply the main channel. This meant that you had to judge the direction and path of other boats by ear until they were really close; the whole experience reminded me of being on a pier-end driving machine with no second chances if you run off the road. Kay, of course, was completely unfazed, sitting in the centre of the boat, having higher thoughts about Ijọ sentence structure. We made it safely back with a due sense of fitness as having finally made the visit to the grave; but with my feeling that I would rather go hang-gliding off Everest than experience this again.

This was a visit to a place she had never been, but Kay’s ‘own’ village was Kaiama, about an hour’s drive east of Port Harcourt, and she had built a house there with a plan to retire and pursue a Confucian life of disinterested scholarship. I always thought this was unlikely to happen, because she was too attached to the buzz of life on the campus. But Kaiama was always entertaining to visit, no more so than when we attended the coronation of the King of the Kolokuma people, Kala-Okun III, a post which has gradually been growing in splendour.

Tony Blair and his imperceptive cohorts are always trying to ‘modernise’ the monarchy, complaining of the tedious rituals and the strange clothes worn by Black Rod or Her Majesty. But Nigerians are astute watchers of these ceremonies and find much to imitate and indeed expand upon. Apart from the obligatory cultural dancing and lengthy speeches, the key events were the attendance of the many sub-chiefs and reverends or self-appointed bishops of unusual churches. The bowler hat is the most-favoured headgear in this region, although trilbies and toppers are also popular. But the dull colours Europeans use hardly appeal, so the hats are often spiced up with glitter or picked out in green and red. Bishops in particular have a licence to design their own robes and crosiers and their creations would put Giovanni Versace to shame, rippling in gold and silver. The women wear enormous head-ties, gold and red, whirling up on their heads like cones of Italian ice-cream. As Kay was a long-term resident of the village we were placed on the stage, behind the throne, which was a three-times normal size chair. It was as if we were trapped in those old films where the humans shrink and wander amazed among gigantic furniture. We sipped fruit champagne and gazed as old women came with sacks of banknotes and threw them at the future king, uttering shrill cries of praise.

I was only an occasional visitor to the Delta, but Kay lived in multi-coloured world all the time. I am sorry I’ll no longer have the window on this very different world that she inhabited.