Nulli Secundus
Nels Abbey
Whenever I start a new job or venture the first thing I do is look around for who the super-Nigerian in the room, industry or business is. Once identified, I immediately go and make friends with them. Not because I want to, but because I have to. I know the risk associated with competing with Nigerians, and Iād rather we pre-emptively get the truce out of the way and cooperate.
There is no corridor you walk into in the West (and around the world) where a Nigerian has not decided they are going to dominate. From sports to academics to medicine to banking to ā¦ well, letās just say the more informal areas of financial opportunity: dominate we do.
Remember the doctor who removed an unborn baby from a womanās womb, treated the baby for cancer and then placed it back to enable a natural birth? That doctor was Nigerian.
How about the superdiverse school in working-class East London that consistently produces nation-beating A-level results and gets their students into the best universities (in the world)? The principal is a Nigerian.
The 26-year-old appointed as Covid adviser to President Joe Biden? Sheās a Nigerian.
The first woman to head the World Trade Organization? Nigerian.
The founder and owner of the Shade Room? Yep, Nigerian.
The worldās best (or most promising) boxer, basketball player, UFC fighter and rugby player? All Nigerian.
The first Black man and the first Black woman to win the Booker Prize? Theyāre Nigerian.
The two brothers who confessed to helping the actor Jussie Smollett stage a white supremacist attack? Okay, yes, they too were ā¦
Jest aside, Nigerians achieve amazing, globe-beating feats. But there is one issue that Iāve long been bothered by, especially in modern times: why are Nigerians able to walk on water abroad but often struggle to crawl on concrete at home? Why does it seem that these days, most Nigerians have to leave Nigeria to be great?
*
My childhood was a compendium of Nigerian parental experiments and trends. I was born in Britain to Nigerian parents in the early Eighties. Humble brag: I was actually born in the same hospital as generations of members of the royal family, St Maryās Hospital in Paddington (humble technicality, my siblings were, I happened to be born on a hood off-site of St Maryās, a couple of miles away).
In Britain in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties there was a strange and widespread phenomenon in which Nigerian parents handed their children over to white foster parents to raise them, often in strange and racist-as-Mississippi corners of Britain. Why? Classic Nigerian ambition. As new immigrants to Britain these parents believed that white foster parents would better help their children integrate into society. Additionally, fostering out their children would grant the parents the time and space to study, work and pursue business interests in Britain and Nigeria. As a result, countless British-Nigerian children were fostered. I was one of those children.
I was handed over to loving white working-class foster parents (a German-Jewish mother and a Scottish father) as a baby. I was raised in a little-known, all-white village called Benson.
For much of my childhood I didnāt know what a Black person was, let alone a Nigerian. I donāt think I even considered myself British, I was an English boy, nothing else. I didnāt know I was different to the other children until I was approached by some teenagers offering me ten pence to see if my hair would attach to Velcro. Dripping with sincerity, they informed me that they had heard that āthe soft part of Velcro is made of Black peopleās hairā (this was the mid-Eighties, pre-Google). Moments later, for the grand price of ten pennies, the first money I ever earned in my life (and enough to buy me my favourite thing: a Belgian bun), 5- or 6-year-old me unwittingly agreed to enter the centuries-long tradition of Africans used as experiments by racially curious and confused Europeans.
Outcome: negative. Of course, it didnāt stick. They left the encounter ten pence poorer and I left ten pence richer, but they also embedded a million-pound question into my head: what the hell is a Black person?
Prior to that moment, I didnāt know what Velcro was and I didnāt know what Black people were. After that exchange I didnāt care for Velcro but I quickly figured out what a Black person was. And I then knew the exact number of Black people who lived in Benson: two. My elder sister and I.
There were significantly more bulls in Benson than there were Black people.
When I was 9, my biological mother picked us up for our regular summer holidays in big bad London, but this time she unilaterally decided we were never returning to our foster parents. This was an extremely traumatic moment for my foster mother and I ā¦
Aaaand: CUT!
For the average Black British writer (Nigerian or otherwise) ā that would be the story, the TED Talk, the book deal, the film, the white liberal tears and potentially even the Oscar. Not me, I was destined for much crazier stuff.
By the early Nineties, foster care was falling out of fashion and Nigerian parents came up with their next bright idea. Part punishment, part āyou have to know your cultureā: sending their children āback homeā to the old country.
Naija was the new Black. Or was it?
In the early Nineties being Nigerian in London was far from cool. This was the age of Shabba Ranks, Maxi Priest and the remains of Bob Marley. Lord knows Sir Shina Peters tried his very best, but Shinamania was no competition for Mr Loverman and Housecall. Culturally, this was the age of Jamaican supremacy: they were absolutely killing us. So, I did what all cold cowards do: I waved the white flag and picked up the Jamaican one. Yep, I became a Jamaican. My name made it so easy. In our ridiculous attempts to live up to the most vicious of Jamaican stereotypes, my fellow āJamaicanā friends (years later I would learn that many of them too were West Africans pretending to be Jamaican) and I got into a little trouble in school. In order to scare me straight, my mother threatened to send me to Nigeria. My eldest sister, who is thirteen years older than me, upped the āscare-him-straightā ante by informing me that āNigeria is too good for you, you need Kenya!ā
What clinched the deal was my teacher, a white English man who happened to be a swirler dating a Nigerian. To my horror, during a parentsā evening he revealed that he saw right through my Jamaican act. This swirler could smell a Nigerian.
āNels is Nigerian isnāt he Mrs Abbey?ā he asked.
āAh-ah, of course he is, sir,ā responded my mother, demonstrating her colonial deference to white authority figures.
āErm ā¦ no I am not,ā I chipped in, attempting to defend my Yardie credentials.
They both looked at me in bemusement. The rest followed the usual script: āNels is extremely bright, but he will waste his potential if he stays here. I spent the summer in Nigeria and saw the amazing structure and discipline in boarding schools over there ā¦ā
The colonial whispers of a swirler worked their magic again on my motherās African ears: a few weeks later, I was in a three-piece suit on a plane to Lagos, crying my eyes out. Six to seven hours later, we landed in Ibrahim Badamasi Babangidaās Nigeria.
*
My first thought of Lagos: white people had lied to me about Africa all of my life.
It was far from the āmud-huts, flies and absolute darknessā Africa that British television had led me to believe. What I saw was an exciting, dynamic, super-busy urban sprawl, with all the trappings of success. Of course, there was poverty but, selfishly speaking, my own standard of living improved fantastically compared to life in the UK.
I met my father for the first time in my life at the airport. Meeting, hugging and holding your fatherās hand for the first time is a critical part of the life of any boy who grew up as I did. My father was funny, successful, popular with his peers, masculine and fatherly. He was a big man in all senses of the word. I quickly learned to love him.
Our home was in an amazing middle-class area called Bode Thomas in Surulere. Weād shop in a rather posh Westernised local supermarket called UTC. I had an abundance of successful role models ā brilliant, strategic and ambitious people. Pillars of community, dignity, integrity and professionalism. Yes, the society was unorthodox in parts but it was, in retrospect, well-functioning and prosperous in many parts. In London, we were very working-class, but in Nigeria, we were part of a buoyant middle class.
The Ā£10 note I took to Nigeria had me feeling like a millionaire when I found out it was worth 330 Naira. I felt so happy about the 33 Naira to Ā£1 exchange rate, yet my father saw it as a sign of serious economic deterioration. Though I didnāt say it, I considered him a little bit of a hater when I thought he was scoffing at the āupgradedā status of my Ā£10 note.
The joys of youthful economic illiteracy.
Although I thought things were amazing, my father and his friends would often speak of the nation crumbling. āThese guys donāt know how good they have it,ā I would think to myself as I sipped Fanta out of a champagne glass and watched Voltron. My new life in Nigeria was amazing and I loved it ā¦ until it became time to enrol in school. I quickly learned about life on the other side of Nigeria.
All of my proudly-held Great British certificates were placed neatly in a folder so we could show the school administrators proof of my academic and extracurricular achievements. I can still remember the wry smile curl on to the face of the official who was lucky enough to be presented with them, as he pushed the folder carelessly back across the table.
āThis is just paper, weāve seen this before. Oyinbo give their children certificate for anything. Wash their yansh properly? Oyinbo will give them certificate. I beg show me proper paper please sir.ā
āHe wants me to bribe him,ā said my dad as we got up and left.
āI DID NOT ASK FOR BRIBE, OOO! PLEASE DO NOT ACCUSE ME OF SUCH NONSENSE!ā shouted the official as we left his office.
At that point, in Nigeria bribery wasnāt as usual as it would go on to become. Like most Nigerian businessmen, my father too was a sinner but he was strictly against bribing people for academic access or in pursuance of success for his children.
āWhatever you achieve, you must achieve it honourably. Your academics must be a true mirror of your ability. If the school system is corrupted or goes bad, everything this nation tries to do will fail. Everything will be rubbish.ā
That experience of corruption in the education system in Lagos prompted the decision to send me to a boarding school in the place where my dad had gone to school: āthe city of Abeokutaā. Lagos was always just āLagosā. And Lagos was fairly amazing to me so I thought āthe city of Abeokutaā must be pretty magnificent. It was labelled a ācityā after all.
I learnt I had been enrolled at the Baptist Boysā High School (BBHS), but for some reason my father didnāt take me along for a school viewing. Weeks later, we pulled into the ācity of Abeokutaā in my fatherās car.
My first impression of this ācityā: white people were telling the stone-cold truth. This was the Africa they had shown me my entire life. This was do-they-know-itās-Christmas Africa.
When I heard the word ācityā, imagery of New York, Los Angeles and Miami sprang to mind. Skyscrapers, underground train stations, McDonaldās, all the comforting detritus of the urban high life. Abeokuta was and had none of the above. Labelling Abeokuta a ācityā was perhaps the single biggest advertising fraud I have ever been subjected to. Converting my little Ā£10 into Naira, finding the Lagos school official and bribing him myself actually crossed my mind.
Anything to escape.
The three things Abeokuta did have going for it were: education, education and ā¦ education. It was a ācityā of education. And in this regard, it was a magical ācityā, for Abeokuta ā literally meaning āunder a rockā ā was a global fountain of black excellence.
Fair enough it didnāt have a KFC or, for the most part, widely available running water, which meant settling for Iya Kabiru and a well, but when it came to academics, Abeokuta was world-beating. This excellence was principally due to two schools: Abeokuta Grammar School and my alma mater. A whoās who of south-western Nigerian life were educated in Abeokuta: Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Fela Kuti, Wole Soyinka and many others all went to Abeokuta Grammar School. Obafemi Awolowo, President Olusegun Obasanjo and would-be President M. K. O. Abiola all went to my school. In fact, that was the entire marketing brochure for my school: Abiola and Obasanjo went here. āSay no more,ā said many a Nigerian parent.
BBHS, which was (predictably) founded by British missionaries, did not subscribe to the Nigerian adage, āNaija no dey carry last.ā We were forced to aim a little higher. Our slogan was the simple Latin phrase: Nulli Secundus. We were to be āsecond to noneā.
I will not offer the truly gory details of discipline here, but the drive for academic excellence was unlike anything I had ever experienced. The average child in my school was not bright, they were truly brilliant. And if you werenāt, you were weeded out and thrown away. Gifted was normalised, genius was over-represented.
Unlike in the British education system where you moved on to the next class no matter what, in Nigeria, moving to the next year necessitated meeting an academic achievement threshold. If you didnāt meet that threshold, you were either forced to repeat the entire year or āadvisedā to withdraw from the school. The use of the term āadvisedā here was Nigeria at its most British in terms of polite subtlety. It wasnāt advice, it was an iron-clad compulsory instruction.
Another area that was completely different from my experience at school in the UK was that students were in direct and open competition with one another. In my year there were nearly 200 children. At the end of each term we were all ranked against each other based on our grades. Everyone was informed of their position from first to last. Coming first was the epitome of cool, coming last was ā¦ like being a Nigerian in London in the early Nineties. I had never in my life struggled academically. But until that point I had never been in explicit head-to-head combat with over 200 brilliant students. Iād also never lived in Nigeria or in a boarding school. In my first term I came 194th out of 200. Even in these liberal times that is hardly trophy worthy, but I was so proud that I hadnāt come last ā¦ until I was informed that I had technically come last as there were several tied places and each tied place meant a number was eradicated off the end. And there I was: meritocratically designated the ādullestā child in my year. I never wanted to feel that sense of shame again so the following term, I threw everything into my studies. Out of fear of being asked to repeat the year and wanting to be taken seriously by my peers, I worked and worked and worked. And prayed and prayed and prayed.
I came 42nd.
Still far from trophy-worthy, but it was the biggest esteem-boosting achievement of my life. I scored the highest mark in English literature ā hence I am here today! After a quick celebration treat of kuli-kuli and gari, the cycle of competition, commendation and potential shame s...
