Amisu did not go to school, even though the primary school the rest of us attended was just a street away. Even though it was a government school and he didn’t need to pay school fees. He, instead, worked with his father at his stall at Kano’s Sabon Gari Market.
Our paths hardly crossed, except on Sundays, when he watched us play football or a game of swell. We pretended he was not even there. And after play, we clustered together, close to him, and talked about how we were all going to be doctors and lawyers and engineers and scientists and pilots. We were tomorrow’s people. He was tomorrow’s cripple.
Or so we thought.
The dreams, like ripe mangoes, hung from the trees, and they were low enough for us, the school people, to reach upward, grab and sink our teeth into their sweetness. The Amisus, they would never amount to anything. They would always sit at the foot of the mango trees, yearning to have a bite of the fruit. They would spend the rest of their lives, throat parched from longing and eyes wet with pleading, as dreamy-eyed school kids plucked from that tree.
One day, our pot handle broke and mum took it to Amisu’s father for repair. That evening, when I got to their home to get back the pot, Amisu waited for me. I felt guilt then. I felt sorry for all the mocking and sneering. He brought out the pot. It was looking better than it was before it broke, with a new handle that looked firmer, better than the old one. I never imagined that Amisu’s father could make something so brilliant. I took the pot from Amisu. He did not flinch when my fingers grazed his. He did not respond when I said “thank you.”
We grew older. Amisu took over his father’s craftshop after he died. Mum continued to patronise Amisu. She returned home with things she had bought from him, things she said were better than the imported ones. Kettles. Cooking stoves. Lanterns. Sieves. Large spoons. Tripods. Amisu made them all, like the father before him, from scrap metals he melted and beat into shape. I tried not to be impressed. I could do much better. I waited until I got to the university. I would build machines and create things out of nothing. Like God.
I joined the science students. We walked around with a chip on our shoulders, as though we could reach forward and grab our tomorrow today. We were the next geniuses who would set the pace for posterity. We were the science students, the serious minded people, the world shakers and movers.
But we weren’t prepared for what the higher institutions in Nigeria had cooked for us. Like the mean father waiting with a horsewhip for when you walked into that room, the lecturers whipped us silly with their arrogance and bloated egos. They would rather fall dead that let us challenge them. And the daring sort who challenged the lecturers had missing scripts and tough years. Those were the scapegoats.
We became the lecturers’ errand boys and girls. We carried their bags from their cars to their offices. We cleaned their seats and desks. We jerked into action when they yelled our names. We sank to our knees in pleas when we mistakenly stepped on their toes. And we paid bitterly with our parent’s money. We bought textbooks that were directly Xeroxed from the old textbooks. They printed and stapled works from Wikipedia as their own books and sold to us as exorbitant prices. We bought those books, or our grades suffered. And for education, we got crammed full of theories we never got to practice. We, the computer science students, didn’t even get to see a computer until the end of our second year.
Years later, at the hall where I had my first interview, I met young people like me. Graduates from prestigious schools in Nigeria. Engineers. Biologists. Educationists. Artists. Chemists. Physicists. The whole wide yard of “ists”. Seeking bank jobs; or for a local/state/federal government job. Sitting in crammed halls. Staring at each other. Hearts thudding in fear. Nerves edgy. Eyes asking why they hadn’t gone on to practice the courses they had studied, why they hadn’t gone on to become innovators and creators and inventors.
What had happened to the dreams?
We realised we only learned how to speak the English Language, and then most of us return to sit behind a desk to wait for the monthly pay. Doing jobs secondary school students could properly do. We realised then that the creators and innovators and inventors were the cobblers, the blacksmiths, the farmers, the craftspeople.
And they didn’t miss us, because they are recreating those products made by same white people we had dreamed of becoming. They are lifting formulas and ideas and styles, and recreating them in new ways.
While speaking to my mother last year, she jumped conversation and asked, of all questions, “Ukamaka, do you remember Amisu?”
I blanched, and then muttered something incoherent.
“He has a new small factory now where he produces all those utensils in large quantities. He is doing real well.”
I laughed and coughed and winced. I said something positive, even as my face burned. Then I cut the call.
Amisu.
How do you begin to make up for those years? How do you begin to retrace your footsteps after you had truly begun to see?
Written by - Olisakwe Ukamaka
I would post and write about some few Amisu's I know and the ones I don't on this blog soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment