Alien by Design

By Adéwálé Májà-Pearce

In former colonies across sub-Saharan Africa, the wealthy elite self-isolate from their neighbors. Adéwálé Májà-Pearce explains how this alienation shaped his upbringing in Nigeria.

THERE IS IN AFRICA a select minority of people I call “native expatriates.” They are not the prodigal African for whom their homeland is a distant abstraction. Nor are they the rooted subject of shifting imperial powers who crave some kind of permanence in a world that has largely rendered them invisible. Outwardly at least, they are denizens of the continent for as many generations as you care to count, but they also inhabit a metaphysical space that makes them alien by design. They have almost invariably studied abroad, usually in the European country that colonized their homes—Britain, France, Portugal, Spain—where they own a summer house and quite possibly employ servants of the same ethnicity. The Francophones are the worst, dating from colonial policies that favored a deleterious definition of “French” that actively campaigned to keep the civil service estranged from any notion of African identity, but all are anxious not to be confused with the great, unwashed majority and never hesitate to signal their elevated status. As I write, the news reports that a housewife in an eastern town beat her ten-year-old servant to death because she caught her watching TV with her children.

Native expatriates can be found in most professions but are ubiquitous in politics, where they are free to loot a nation they perforce never believed in anyway. Take the case of Femi Gbajabiamila, the former leader of Nigeria’s House of Representatives, now personal assistant to President Bọ́lá Tinúbú. When his mother celebrated her ninetieth birthday, he paid for three hundred relatives and friends to fly to Dubai rather than condescend to meet a single celebrant on their home turf. Even more disheartening, not one of the invited guests saw the self-loathing for what it was: the ingrained need on the part of natives to prove to foreigners (who couldn’t care less) that they are superior to their impoverished compatriots in the Dark Continent they have been fortunate enough to escape. It is a tragic state. I should know, I was born into it.

I drew my first breath in London in 1953. Before my first birthday, my father relocated us to his native Nigeria, where he found work as an ophthalmologist after graduating from his studies at Moorfields Eye Hospital. My British mother was a reluctant trainee nurse twenty years his junior. At the time, Nigeria was a British colony, and it would be another seven years before it won the right to its own flag, anthem, and perfunctory UN seat. As a surgeon and ophthalmologist, my father was a “big boy,” as we say in Lagos, part of the minority of educated natives primed to take over from the white man when the time came—not that there was much in the way of industry to take over. The only real enterprise was oil, and that has always been in the hands of the multinationals, with Shell leading the way. He was allocated a house in the exclusive suburb of Ikoyi, developed for the expatriate civil servants who were our neighbors on either side. We were waited on hand and foot by a team of servants—steward, nanny, driver, night watchman—labor being dirt cheap, then as now. In other words, I grew up in a bubble, as far from the despised, struggling masses as possible. This was compounded by my father’s refusal to expose me to Yorùbá, his native language, which I only heard him speak when he was on the phone with a friend; he also actively discouraged his “backward” relatives—that is, most of them—from visiting us. My mother, with her lower-middle-class background (class in England being as poisonous as ethnicity in Nigeria), wasn’t the least bit interested in the culture she had married into and was keen that I learn how to speak the “proper” English of Received Pronunciation (RP). My accent was reinforced by my enrollment at the nearby St. Saviour’s primary school attended by white children of colonial civil servants and staffed by white teachers. This is to say nothing of the distinctly Anglophone books we were introduced to, the most memorable for me being C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; although there was little English-language Nigerian literature at the time.

“I grew up in a bubble, as far from the despised, struggling masses as possible.”

As a child, l took my privilege for granted, although certain things began to bother me as I grew older. For one thing, our white neighbors, whose front garden I could peer into from the window of my upstairs bedroom, never invited my parents to their midafternoon gatherings, where the only black faces belonged to the white-gloved servants dispensing cocktails and sandwiches. My father, on the other hand, invariably invited them to his annual end-of-year party; though they never came, it would have been impossible for them to ignore the live band playing the makeshift stand at midnight. My father was a Yorùbá man, a member of the group the British considered the “fun-loving tribe of West Africa.” With the straight hair I had inherited from my mother, I was regarded as white by Nigerians who didn’t know my background. On the few occasions we ventured into downtown Lagos, the local children gathered to stare at the oyibo (white) woman and her white child, occasionally breaking into the well-worn chant still in vogue today—“oyibo pepper, if you eat pepper, you go yellow more more”—which I loathed. To the ordinary Nigerian, if you weren’t black, you were white, the “legend of color,” to quote James Baldwin, that is mistaken for race and which justified colonialism in the first place, just as it had the slavery that preceded it.

When Nigeria became independent, my father took over as head of the General Hospital from the less qualified oyibo doctor he had been obliged to work under, and he went about letting everybody know that he was now a man and could do what he liked. This mostly meant coming home in the wee hours, the worse for wear, and the inevitable shouting match—until one day when I was nine my mother called me aside and told me that I would be going with her and my infant sister to London.

Continue reading “Alien by Design,” an essay by Adéwálé Májà-Pearce, on our site.

Subscribe

You received this email because you signed up for The Baffler’s newsletter mailing list, have a Baffler subscription, donated to our foundation, or contributed to the magazine. Want to change how you receive these emails? Update your preferences, or unsubscribe from this list. For questions about your subscription, contact Customer Care.

To ensure our email updates reach your inbox, please add newsletter@thebaffler.com to your email Address Book.