I shared the elevator up to work this morning with three German men and a colleague from the office, another Nigerian. On the 5th floor, the Germans appeared lost and I helpfully gave them directions, surprised that my colleague stood stoic and separated from the happenings in the elevator. I figured he was erstwhile preoccupied and continued along. When we alighted on our floor, he said to me, do you know what those men were discussing as we were going up? They were complaining in German about black people moving into their neighbourhood and saying how upsetting it is for them.

“HAAAA in my own motherland? In Nigeria ke?!?!” Was my internal reaction.

Outwardly, I quietly said in response to my colleague: “ I forgot you spoke German. If I had heard them like you had, I would have given the directions in German. “

In the immortal words of queen Kanye, “…racism alive, they just be concealing it.”

Race is a strange issue. I mean in Nigeria, tribalism is really more the issue than racism. But racism does rear its head randomly in a way that I think is sometimes more comical than anything.

Take for instance, once when I was at the airport in Abuja. We’d all been queuing for a bit to get into the departure hall of the international airport. The queue was moving slowly because the guards were taking ages to check passports and identity cards. Now, in true Nigerian style, a senator’s wife and her two handsome sons arrived armed with an orderly and police escort. They bamboozled and bullied their way to the front; came in, saw everyone queuing and majestically stalked to the front with people parting like the Red Sea to allow these very important personalities through.

Of course following their passing, the hisses, insults and complaints about Nigeria’s corrupt ruling class was loud enough to have God lean down and say “Yo! Shut it!” if He wanted to. And, in the midst of all that pointless noise-after-the-fact, a funny thing happened.

A young white woman  had also just come in, she was probably walking behind the senator’s crew from the parking lot and saw them jump the queue. I’ll give her the benefit of doubt and assume that she believed that all of us standing around were waiting for something else…surely not to enter into the departure lodge (“For why else would they let the lady who just walked in go through with nary a sound?” She wondered). She walked straight through in the exact same fashion as the senators’ crew….let me tell you, I have never seen a crowd clam up so fast! LOL! 1, 2, babygirl was in the middle of a screaming mob!

“How dare she?!”

“WHO BE DIS ONE ?!”

“Unfortunate oyibo!”

“Get to the back of the line, bloody fool!”

“You think you can come to Nigeria and do anything you want just because you’re white?!”

“Colonialist!”

Guys, I was torn between real thug tears and laughter. I honestly felt so bad for her because she was doing a “…when in Rome”. And then I wanted to laugh because the entire situation was too ridiculous! Misplaced Anger Syndrome (MAS) is what most Nigerians are suffering from. You know  who you ought to be angry at, for instance here it’s clearly the senator’s crew that deserved the anger for violating the most basic of courtesies and treating the citizenry that sponsor their lifestyle so worthlessly. Yet the almost-innocent foreigner who does not have an orderly and a police escort to protect her, is your scape goat?! No wahala, I’m sure that makes sense on Uranus. On earth and I hear in Mars as well, it is an idiotic manner of reasoning.

But that’s race in Nigeria. Caucasians sometimes, a lot of times, have it good here  There are a lot of third-class ‘expatriates’ with failed careers and poor degrees abroad making it in Nigeria solely by virtue of their race. This is because we pander to the foreign; everything that is not Nigerian is good and if it is Nigerian-made, it is automatically bad or substandard. How strange it is to forget that every white person is not the dearly loved “expat”…many, many of these clowns are merely immigrants.

When we go abroad, we are always immigrants. When they come here, they are always expatriates.

But that’s a story for another day. I should point out that many black people are just as racist as any other racial group anyway.

As I’m speaking on race, I think I’ll share my solo or at least most vivid and obvious racist experience. I studied in London for several years and lived in America for a little time as well, in all that time I can’t really say I suffered any real racist experience except the one I’m about to narrate. I mean there were a few subliminal disses here and there that I often chose to just interprete as an obvious ignorance and mannerlessness (Nigerians love this word! Lol) on the part of the racist.

For instance, in the law library at my university in America, there was one pretty white librarian who ALWAYS spoke to me in broken English as though she didn’t believe I could understand normal English. She always saved her ‘hood’ accent for me. Just because I’m black, it doesn’t mean I am African-American, which is clearly what she assumed. And even if I were African-American, it’s ridiculous to assume that every African-American has a problem with syntax, conjugation and subject-verb harmonisation! So this girl would be serving white people on the queue in her bright Californian accent; words pumped with sunshined-adrenaline, pitch high and sentences ending with that silent question mark that Californians add to everything they say….then I’d get to the front of the queue and it would suddenly be all “Hey girlfriend! Where you be at Friday? I’mma be out in Oakland with my boo and his homies all night, is you gon come? That’s what I’m talm’bout” (I can’t even write this type of English properly!)

Me: *Blinks* Hi, I’d like to know if there’s an additional copy of the Merges book on Intellectual Property Law and Antitrust Regulation, please.

Anyways, so yeah, subliminal and more stupid than anything.

But the one racist experience that shook me happened in England, on my way back to London from visiting my uncle and aunt in Essex.

A little way out of their pretty house, is a little bus stop on the main road. I stood there waiting for a bus at about 6pm on a Sunday when a group of young white boys ranging from 7 to about 14 arrived at the bus stop and stood next to me. There must have been 10 to 12 of them, I hadn’t become addicted to Criminal Minds or the Crime and Investigation channel at the time otherwise, trust and believe that I would have called the police JUST to say that if they found my body, I was killed by chavs. Yes, elitist I know but those boys hurt me…you’ll see how in a minute.

So, the bus finally comes and these young men push past me to get on. One of the lot; a short boy with a really mean glint (no lie) in his eye, looking like he hadn’t even celebrated his 12th birthday yet (I mean little man’s voice hadn’t even broken!), told them all to move away, “Step off and let the lady get on!”

Quelle surprise! How nice of him! I smile, thank him and walk unto the bus. And then I hear him say something that makes all the other midgets burst into laughter, so I stop and turn around faster than a super hero, “What did you just say?!” Idiot grin and a “Nothing” follows. I ignore them and find a seat at the back of the bus. The rowdy boys proceed up the stairs.

We’re almost at the train station and it’s the young men’s stop. They noisily file down and wait for the doors to open. The doors open and they start trooping out. Little leader man stops and calls back loudly for the entire bus and the little leader’s group on the street to hear, he calls out, “Nice arse, shame it’s coloured!”

Now, let me tell you something. Nobody, not in all my years, had warned me that the day you openly face racism you will not feel anger, fear or general upset first.….no one warned me that the one thing that would register above all else, was the feeling that I had been violated.

Violated.

That was the only thing I could think at that moment. I felt vulnerable and attacked, I was shocked, like someone had bathed me with frozen ice. I felt open and bruised and for some reason I, strangely, wanted to hide my face, I felt ashamed. I don’t understand why but I felt like I ought to apologise to everyone on the bus as they sat silently pretending that they had heard nothing, that nothing untoward had happened, perhaps that I had imagined it all in my mind or mistaken the meaning of the young man’s words. My sole consolation was that one or two of the young men in the leader man’s pack looked slightly embarrassed. For me? Or for their own?

My friend Margarita once asked a very interesting question. She said, racism in South Africa went on for ages and then one day in 1994, apartheid was suddenly stopped. Where did all the racists go?
As I sat on my train back to London from Essex that Sunday evening and reflected on the events of the day, I realised that what frightened me the most about the attack was the fact that those kids were really young…who taught them to hate so early?