The University guest house is called White House, its walls glare white, whiter than the walls of the houses in town, and the boy’s name is Innocent. He is a cook and serves us the same meal over and over, hard beef with yam in a thick, spicy sauce.
“Yam and yam, again, yam and yam, and again, yam. Yam replaced potatoes. I hate potatoes. I hate yam even more,” mourns Professor Bialy. Bialy means white in Polish.
Professor Alyan laughs at Bialy. “Professor, don’t you like kartoshki?” which means potatoes in Russian.
“I hate them, kartoshki, kartofeln, potatoes. I hate them in any form, in any language.”
Bialy’s face is red. NEPA is out, which means no electricity to power air conditioners. NEPA stands for National Electric Power Authority and becomes the keyword, an emblem of suffering when NEPA is out. So, NEPA is out now. NEPA is out at least half of the time. Moreover, Bialy hates yams. He is pretty upset altogether.
But where did Alyan learn Russian? I would like to clear this mystery.
I am excited about living with three professors from various countries under one roof in White House in Yola. What a genuine thrill, what an honour. After a humiliating expulsion from academia in Poland a year ago, I am back. I feel ennobled and elevated to a deserved level. The third Prof, William Pruitt, is the African American from the South, and he told me the other day that he was searching for his African roots. By roots, he meant places where his ancestors lived and thrived at least five generations ago. Was Pruitt’s great-great-grandfather in the mould of Kunta Kinte, the fictional hero of Roots: The Saga of an American Family? Or was he a Fulani tribe’s chief? I guess so, as he is tall. We were standing on the porch of White House, and he held a golf club, silent with raised head, his facial muscles tout, his eyes focused on the horizon.
“A faint trace I found in Ghana or further north,” he said.
“Upper Volta or Mali?” I said, willing to help in his endeavour. Would a tribe’s chief of whatever African name have a better life than Pruitt in Alabama or as an American in Yola? I don’t know, and he does not declare. And we stare at the mountains on the border with Cameroon. Africa is a vast, multilayered bundle of many tribes carved by colonial boundaries. Is America better, steady and boundless? I don’t know, either.
When NEPA is out, Professor Alyan talks to me, which might go on for hours, whenever NEPA is out. This afternoon he lectures me on history, although he is a professor of biology, I suppose. “We traded the black slaves before the Europeans did. We used them for us or sold them further. Caravans crossed the desert carrying salt and cloth for centuries and returned with gold and black slaves.” He is proud of this long-lasting commercial procedure and hints at his national superiority. “But first, the blacks were castrated, you see,” he adds and waits for my reaction. The meaning of the pronoun WE is vague. We-Egyptians or we-Arabs?
African geography has no darks for me, but the continent’s history is a white page. So I stalk for response in other compartments of my head. “You have conquered Ethiopia, and your king has taken prison the celestial princess, a marvel of flowers in her hair, her name Aida, music is Verdi’s ….”
Alyan is not an opera aficionado, it seems. “In Arabic, Sudan means black,” he explains. “So, Sudan means land of the black people. Sudan stretched wide and far in sub-Sahara, and we traded and raided there. We brought servants and labourers for mines and construction.”
I wonder where he comes from with the history, but soon I learn where he is heading.
“I am a professor of biology at Cairo University and came to Nigeria because they offered me good money. But the American professor has not come for money. He has enough dollars in America. I think he looks for something else in Nigeria,” Alyan comments, this time on Pruitt. “Oh, yes. Vice-Chancellor Chukwu brought him from America and made him his deputy. So Pruitt acts like a deputy vice-chancellor. He will be the first to move from a single room in the guest house to a big new house on campus. He is the first in line. And this is our situation – you see, Doctor.”
How does Alyan know all this? I can see he is older than Pruitt by at least a decade. Likely, he is senior in academic achievement and rank.
“I see Professor,” I echo. If FUTY paid by spoken words, Alyan could earn ten times more than Pruitt. Thank heavens he will not teach social sciences.
“Perhaps, Pruitt will bring a large family from America,” I say, “a wife, half a dozen boys, girls and babies.” From a previous conversation, I know that Alyan has a smaller family, and they will never come to Yola. “Please excuse me, Professor,” I say, “I feel exhausted from the heat of the day.” It is not true at all, and I do not care if Alyan believes it or not. I walk to my bedroom, stand barefoot, and the cold from the tiles forges up my body. Nice feeling.
I stretch down wide on the bed and think how uncanny the faculty members are, even in Yola. Or more so in Yola, because they arrived from disparate universities, cultures and families. They are like dendrites extended from neurons in the brain that sense and stimulate in far ends of limbs or elsewhere. I know that I barely comprehend them, and it is okay. What matters is that the profs will not harm me, push me out, or be obnoxious. No, the profs are just funny, and this is the beauty of being in Yola.
I think of Bialy, who perspires in his room without air conditioning. Did he plan well for survival in Africa? Or did he miss freakish NEPA and its power over his Northerner’s body?