Into Africa

January 23: Christmas in Nigeria

A little bit of family history before I delve into my holiday recounting: My maternal grandmother’s brother, Uncle Jerry, was a missionary doctor in Cameroon. My Great Uncle Jerry is now retired and living in the U.S., but his children all grew up in Africa. His daughter, Karen, is my mom’s cousin, making us second cousins. She married a Nigerian named Equi and they have lived in Nigeria for nineteen years now. They have two children: Ifolo is sixteen and came to spend two weeks with me in Cotonou in November. Chika is fourteen and a half. It is with these cousins, the Nwulu family, that I spent Christmas and New Year’s at their home in Ibadan, Nigeria.

On Sunday, December 23, my Sunday school kids led the morning worship service.The class of the Petits Français, ages four to seven, had worked hard to decorate the church, adorning it with colored Nativity coloring book pages and pink and green paper chains. The high school students read the liturgy and scriptures, the Petits Français sang "Le Divin Enfant" and "Silent Night," and the intermediate children performed the Christmas Nativity drama. There were some funny parts to the drama – mainly Mary, who took literally minutes to deliver her baby because she had great difficulty making the plastic doll we bought to be Jesus cry as it was supposed to. That’s what happens with Western-imitation toys sold on the street. Jesus was also white and wearing a blue and yellow over-all outfit whilst his earthly parents were black and wearing traditional Beninois outfits. Wrapped in swaddling pagnes, though, no one could really tell. Another small detail: King Herod was presented as an African King, equipped with a guard who made the wise men obey his every command at the shake of a maraca.

After the service the kids were treated to a package of cookies and a bag of pineapple juice. Yes, a bag of pineapple juice. Here, water, juice, and yogurt are sold in knotted-tight clear plastic baggies. To drink the refreshing liquid, you simply pierce a hole in one of the corners with your teeth and suck the liquid out. At first it was a big of a struggle to figure out how to hold it shut between gulps, but the trick is to grasp the area of the hole with your thumb and forefinger. The trash is next to nothing and the cost of the packaging is minimal (like with everything here in Africa).

I left straight after the service with my cousins to head to Nigeria. The border crossing was not as bad as some rant about. At the Nigeria/Benin border, you and lines of bush taxis and overloaded trucks arrive at several roadblocks made from three cinder blocks and a wooden pole. You must go through a series of at least four of these road blocks, passing through them only when the higher-in-command shouts to a young patroller to raise up the pole. Equi parked the car and took our passports to go talk with, bow-down to, joke with, flatter, shake hands with, and respectfully honor the customs officials, immigration officers, and other people scattered along the building in no particular order. While he was taking care of business, we made the horrible mistake of eating our sandwich lunch in the car. With our windows rolled all the way down due to the heat, we attracted plenty of people begging for food. One man in particular decided to keep us company during the whole twenty minutes of our wait by telling us stories and jokes – none of which were true nor funny. We laughed and ate and shared our tangerines and bread....

If you go to the U.S. State Department’s Webpage about Nigeria, you will see why my parents were extra nervous for me to go to visit my family there. In plain terms, it states that Americans should not go there because of civil unrest and the extremely high corruption in all sectors. This is the main reason why I prefer Benin to Nigeria. Even the police take money from passing cars for no reason other than they have a gun and want to take advantage of it. Nigerian businessmen are notorious for swindling naïve Americans and other Westerners into doing business with them and then wiping out their bank accounts. Armed robberies occur and assassinations as well, but then again in the U.S. guns are legal, robbery is common, and murders are a part of life.

The difference is, you cannot rely on or trust anyone to protect you or bring justice to the country except God. Truly, Karen repeated over and over that she can only trust in God to keep her and her family safe. I saw for myself, with the assassination of the equivalent of their attorney general the day before Christmas, and the theft from the car of a laptop computer, that one must trust in God or. . . I don’t know what the other option is....

We left after Christmas to visit Equi’s family village. We stayed at Uncle Willie’s house. It is a very nice European-style house. We are grateful for the shelter.... We had picked up Uncle Willie’s steward in Lagos earlier that day, so he opened the house for us and served as our cook.... He stood behind the table, filling our water glasses when they were not even halfway empty.

While in the village, our primary job was to visit lots of people. The Nwulus had not been to the village for five years, since Equi’s mother had passed away. We saw Equi’s brother, who was staying at his mother’s house. Karen told me stories of how she lived the "village life" for one year when they took care of Equi’s mother: from carrying firewood on her head to taking cupped-hand bucket showers outside in the dark. We saw their uncle and various relatives and family friends. At each visit we were greeted with smiles and hugs and "Wow, your children have grown!"

And now to see the Obi, the village king. We were greeted by him and his sister, sitting in wooden chairs on the grass in front of the palace. There were no purple gowns, no crowns, no fancy gates. This a simple guy who knows all the village inhabitants and who knows all the family lineage. . . and keeps tabs on all living members. He is responsible for making sure that the village is prosperous throughout the generations; he strives to preserve tradition. We were greeted with a lecture on us not being there for five years, not going to the village meeting in Ibadan, not giving money to build up the village, not speaking Ibo to Ifolo and Chika. After the initial reprimand, he softened up and talked about village affairs and asked how things in Ibadan were going.