ENGAGEMENTS BY Chidi Amuta
Tomorrow, I shall be 70. I call it the 70th checkpoint. A friend calls it climbing to the 7th floor even though I do not know how many floors there are. It would be at exactly 9 am. It was at that hour on that rainy July day at Aba General Hospital that the dam broke. The dam of water and blood burst open and this mayhem of a life made land fall.
My grandmother, eternal narrator of memory, did not recall that there were any comets seen in the sky on that day to announce this birth. There was neither an earthquake nor a hurricane to make this birth anything special. It was just an ordinary rainy day in its season. Ever since then, it has been raining a combination of laughter, tears and surprises nearly every day in the last seven decades.
People expected my father to blow a trumpet to announce a child he and his wife almost did not have. But he refused to borrow anyone’s trumpet to herald their joy, insisting that children whose births are heralded by trumpet flourishes end up badly. As I reflect on my birthday tomorrow, I am sure there are friends and well- wishers who would want me to blow a trumpet about the bumpy trajectory that my life has been. My response is simple: You do not blow a non- existent trumpet!
All things considered, turning seventy in this place is a miracle that could baffle the greatest miracle merchant. Seventy years of surviving deadly childhood diseases, overcrowded ghettoes or the evil eyes of village witches as a village boy… Seventy years of dodging the bullets of war, the ambushes of armed robbers… Seventy years of studying sometimes on empty stomach, under leaky roofs and with candle light… Seventy years of hunger and skipping meals. It has been seventy years of traversing this dangerous land on rickety wagons on dangerous pot holed roads. Or flying in creaky contraptions in the air.
Seventy years, each day literally begun with a surfeit of bad news… an epidemic of preventable afflictions…A preventable flood here, terrorists bombings there, a few kidnappings here and there… You live life with tragedy as an entitlement and ill fortune as an endowment of providence….When good fortune comes, it is cause for festivity.
A lot of the people I have encountered on this journey mostly think I grew up with a silver spoon! But they’ll be shocked by the truth. There was no spoon let alone a wooden, clay or wrought iron one. You ate your Eba with bare hands! Later in life, when the eba became a bowl of rice, you went in search of a spoon, not caring what it is made off. So, do not set out looking for a silver or golden spoon only to get back and find there is no food to eat! If there is no food, it will not matter what the spoon in your hand is made of. Only people who take the next meal for granted can afford the luxury of debating what the spoon is made of.
Growing up in a rural setting with occasional holiday peeps into the urban neon light at Aba meant setting high goals. The supreme goal was to escape from the vicious ogre of want and poverty. The principal goal of my life has been to run very fast away from the ogre of a humble background. It is a race you run without looking back. What is chasing after you is deadly and unrelenting. There is no time to look back, You fear that if you look back, the ogre will catch you and trap you back into hell or use the razor blade of poverty to shred you! You have to run like mad. At 70, I am still running that race.
My late father told me some truths that have guided my journey so far: According to him, the son of a poor man with poor school examination results will end up in the dungeon of life because ‘’poor plus poor is equal to “poorest’’ QED! He taught me other inconvenient truths as well. Breaking the barrier of a humble background literally means breaking concrete walls with your head. A humble background means that you do not just reach your destination, you must ‘arrive’ with a splash to be noticed. Make some noise so that people notice your presence! When you get to a city or a country, befriend Caesar. When you get to an office or business premises, do not exchange words with the security guard or the janitor. That is beating a dead horse! The bunch of keys the janitor is carrying around lead to someone else’s treasure rooms. Ask instead to see the owner of the business. Ask to see the Managing Director, the Minister, etc. Be a Nigerian: bold, audacious and daring. At the church premises, ask to see the General Overseer. If they won’t let you in, go back and establish your own church. Give yourself the title of General Overseer! When next they call a meeting of religious leaders, you will be sitting in the front row to the amazement of the small people who never gave you access!
For me, every new day is a blessing but also a looming battle in a war whose end is not in sight. I wake up at 5.30 am every day. Meditations and stretches follow. Then a mental map through the oncoming day. It is a mini battle plan. Never leave home without a compass or battle plan. Otherwise you will get lost in the jungle. Do the mandatory wake up cup of black coffee preferably with a few nuts- almonds, cashews, peanuts. Do not clog up the system with heavy food so early when you have earned nothing today.
I do an early morning ride with my 14 year old son to school at 6.30 am. It is just to wish him ‘a nice day’ at drop-off at the school. It is a ritual that is both a prayer, a wish and a rejection of my own ordeals with school. As he disappears into the school entrance, I recall the bush paths that I took every day to the village school. I never liked school but studied hard to earn my freedom from the confinement of dormitories, classrooms and campuses! .
Thereafter, from about 8 am, it is exercise time. I do an average of one hour of physical exercise in my private gym at home five days in a week. It is usually a mixed regime: 20-30 minutes mid to fast walk on the treadmill, another 20 minutes on the bike. I get to do pull downs on a lathe, a bit of weights with 5-7.5 kg dumb bells. Some days, I do 50 push -ups or struggle with the abdominal machine.
While I am in the gym, no phone calls or chats. The phone is for workout music delivered through my ear pods. No distractions or interventions. Absolute privacy. I end every exercise session with a dance. I dance to the music of Davido, Burna Boy, Rema, Flavour, good old Stephen Osadebe, Rex Lawson, Oriental Brothers. My taste in music traverses generation, geography, clime and period. Whatever the music, just dance and be possessed with the spirit of the creativity of song and rhythm. Out of the rhythm of the universe, reality was born. Those who dance are in tune with the first law of the universe. Ever wondered why, without being taught, babies begin to swing their heads to the tunes of great music?
As a habitual newsman, news is my endless daily diet. Even when I am working out in the gym, I am glued to the news. I catch up and stay with the news across the globe on all major platforms and significant networks. News is the life blood of my industry. Life is incomplete without the punctuation of tragedy. An earthquake here, a street protest there, the compulsory school shooting somewhere in America everyday, the mad man in North Korea with the nasty habit of firing silly missiles into empty seas and spaces to blackmail America into listening to his bluster. America’s threats keep him in power as the heroic defender of his hermit kingdom.
From Nigeria, bandits sack a school and terrorists cart all the innocent school girls into slavery. The soldiers and policemen arrive a few hours too late with bags of excuses on why they cannot find rag tag terrorists on slow moving lorries or on donkeys with a hundred innocent girls as captives. Still from Nigeria, some big man is reported to have pocketed a billion dollars from the commonwealth! It is all in the day’s news.
The morning bath after workout is a daily baptism of mild fire in a steam cubicle. Thereafter, breakfast ensues. It is a mixed grill of yet more coffee, wheat bread toast and fruits, enough to keep the engine running for the rest of the day.
Morning rituals over, I go to the office to earn a keep. All manner of people stop by to say hello. Most of them come with a proposal in their pocket. They know a business that can make you richer if you collaborate with them. But the business can only work if it is driven by your own money, not theirs! They never leave without narrating their ordeal with the landlord, the hospital or the greedy school proprietor who wants to deny ‘junior’ an education because of a paltry school fees in arrears since last year. There is always a dying grandmother in hospital in the village in urgent need of money to pay the hospital, or another burial to fund!
Thanks to the Covid-19 emergency, I now work mostly from home. The home office is my study. It is my best place in the house. There, I have the company of innumerable books. Books everywhere. The best books are those by great authors who have died. A multitude and cocktail of my favorite authors both dead and alive: Kofi Awoonor, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Kazuo Ishiguro, Dennis Brutus, Ayi Kwei Armah, William Shakespeare, Sophocles, John O’Donohue, Chimamanda Adichie, Mahmoud Darwish, Mourid Barghouti etc , etc
Books upon books on every shelf are among the things in life that keep me happy. My favourite subjects are: political theory and philosophy, poetry, biography, intelligence and espionage, serious fiction… I buy books online literally everyday either in hard copy for physical delivery from Amazon or local book sellers or I buy books to read electronically on Kindle. I read an average of two books a week.
I have just read a brilliant new novel by an unusual young Nigerian writer, Stephen Buoro. It is called The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa (“Life in Africa is a long prayer…”). I was reading that side by side with a non -fictional work – The Tragic Mind-by the great war journalist, Robert D. Kaplan (“Without order, civilization is impossible…”).
Television is a constant after work. Even if you do not want to watch it, it is there watching you in its overwhelming presence in your living room and in every room and sitting space the house. It is a constant surveillance. The television is an ever present spy from George Orwell’s 1984. “Big Brother is watching you” seems to be the constant unspoken refrain of the ubiquity of the television age.
Digital television is another matter. You subscribe to 100 plus cable channels and watch mostly only 3. We are all subsidizing the global racket of multi channel digital television business! They sell and bill you for 300-400 channels even though they know we all have only two eyes and only an average of one television viewing hour per day. In a world that is now a market place, everybody is selling everybody else some dodgy package, ripping off everybody else. The capitalist dogs of war are on the loose everywhere. Eat thy neighbor seems to be the universal dictum! Just sign here or click there and your money is gone to the wind of the global information blizzard.
For me, the must -watch channels for relaxation are few. Cartoon Network and Animal Planet or National Geographic Wild are favourites. I like Animal Planet because the animals do not pretend like us humans. If they are hungry and find a prey, they jump at it, devour it and move on! If they want to have sex, they go after a vulnerable female and get it over with!
I like the cartoon channels because the characters are carriers of possibility. On Cartoon Network, give me : “The Amazing World of Gunball” where everybody has an enlarged colourful head full of tricks. Rigby in “Regular Show” tells us that the distance between dreams and possibility is just one quick dash away. Kids dwell in the world of the imagination; that is why they are hooked to cartoons. Their parents are too busy chasing after the same things that kept me on my toes for the better part of seventy years. We used to call it the ‘rat race’ but the rat is now a digital mouse attached to your computer keyboard. Just click and your money comes or goes. Rat poisons and cats have exterminated most rats. So, there are hardly any rats left to chase after these days. So people chase after nothing in particular.
At other times, television is Comedy Central, celebrating the perpetual laughableness of life. With comedy, you are constantly and permanent walking on banana peels. You are constantly laughing at our foibles as humans. It pays to take a step back and distance yourself from life. Laugh at the things others consider serious and important. Most of all, look in the mirror and laugh at yourself as part of the comic pageant of life. Laugh at the bank manager and his obsession with the figures of other people’s money. Laugh at the lies of politicians. Laugh at the cleric and his gown as he pretends he can show you salvation.
Laugh at the new transgender generation as adult males cellotape their manhood to their bodies in a hard effort to feign womanhood. ‘Oga, your son is now a girl!, screams your curious neighbour! ‘Madam, your daughter is about to take a wife!’, another neighbor laughs aloud. In the end, everything is comedy. Everything is nothing and nothing is nothing! A crisis of language is looming. Soon, father and mother, man and woman, husband and wife will be erased from human memory in a neuter world.
In my lonely moments everyday, it is time to reflect on the past and project into the future. The past is the home of memory, of things forgotten and forever remembered. It is time to connect the past to the present and tremble at the future. Time to think of those who were here and are now gone. My parents, the eternal presences even in their absence.
The dinner table is the gathering point of the day’s harvest. It is more of bonding time for the family than about food. Dinner is the daily sacrament of love and family unity. Each day’s dinner is more of a communion of saints bound by blood who narrowly missed canonization. It is the hour to commune and break bread in your bond with those sent to you from above to make life livable. At the dinner table, the burdens of the day are off –loaded in conversation. A trouble shared is a burden made lighter.
As the day recedes and nature prepares to obey the heavy necessity of night, enveloping us all in the blanket of darkness, I spare a thought for my country. This place is more of paradise in bondage. It will break loose some day and unleash its goodness. As I prepare for the greetings of friends and family on my birthday tomorrow, I am comforted by the assurance that at the 70th checkpoint, I am 7 years older than my country, this beautiful land that today’s youth fondly call Naija!
