By Jenni Gate
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Car in Sandbox
Photo by Tim Lang (CC by 2.0) |
At the age of six, I was magical. I
had the power to create and shape anything I wanted in my sandbox. I spent
hours creating and destroying, shaping mud into magical foods and fantastic
animals. In my sandbox, I was like Aladdin flying on a carpet around the world.
With magic thoughts, I visited my grandparents in America. Magic sang from me in my
sandbox. I traveled down a river on a raft, through a jungle with snakes
hanging from the trees. With a blink of the eyes, I was on a camel in the Sahara.
In 1966, our house in Kaduna,
the capital of the Northern Region of Nigeria, was in the suburbs of the city
in the agricultural heartland. There was a large field surrounding our house.
Nearby, cattle grazed on dry, grassy plains, hot and dusty, with snakes
slithering through long grass.
We loved Nigeria.
We had an active social life, clubs and parties, friends of every nationality,
road trips into the country, lazy days spent by the river or at a hotel
swimming pool. We loved our nanny, Martha, who watched my little sister and me
when my mother was out during the day. Ussman, a highly-respected hajj in our community, managed our
household.
At night, before we crawled under our mosquito netting, we
watched termites swarm around the light posts on our street. As some touched
the heat of the bulbs, the lights sizzled, their bodies popped, and they fell
to the ground. Sometimes the hot, charred scent wafted past our noses in the
night. The Nigerians gathered and ate the fat termite bodies. Ussman said they
were a gift from Allah, to feed the people. It was magic.
When I played in my sandbox, I created swarms of termites to
feed my pretend people. My older sister Susie dug streets and built houses on
her side of the sandbox. She honked the horns of her match box cars, revved
engines and sped the cars through her town. She was not happy when my imaginary
termites tried to feed her imaginary people by dropping in big clumps all
around her cars.
Sometimes when we played, we saw dik-dik, small bush deer, watching us from the field next to our
house. Magic shimmered in the air, as if the deer could talk to us.
Every afternoon, Ussman came out on the porch at dusk and
called us in. "Pickin,"
(children) he called, "time to come in now." He worried about the
cobras, adders and scorpions living under our house and porch and in holes in
the ground. Once we were safely inside, large, black cobras, as high as my
shoulders and as dark as the night swayed before the windows, spying on us from
the pitch black night.
My parents loved to entertain. The Irish Catholic priest,
Father Bell, was a frequent guest. At Christmas, he always blessed our house,
expecting a nog in return. If Dad shared his good whiskey, Father Bell blessed
the house no matter what the season was. He was jolly and loved to drink and
dance. We once had him in a conga line, and a woman dancing in line behind him
flopped his cassock up and down with the beat of the music.
"Father Bell, do your blessings really work?" I
asked.
"Aye, child," he said, "they keep you safe
and happy." He was the most magical person I knew.
Playing in my sandbox one spring day in 1966 while Susie was
at school, I heard explosions. I hurried inside as a crowd of angry people ran
down the street, sticks and machetes in hand. Ussman reassured us that he would
not let anything happen to us.
That night, we heard on BBC radio that the Premier of
Nigeria was assassinated, and his home a few blocks from our house was
destroyed. Military leaders of Ibo ethnicity seized power.
There were frequent riots, and school was often disrupted. I
sat in my room, scooting Susie's matchbox cars along the windowsill, wishing my
sandbox could be inside.
At school, air raid practices became the norm for Susie, who
never believed her desk would really save her. Whenever she dove under her
desk, she invariably found herself with her nose butting up to the smelly boy
in front of her. She began to think she would take her chances if there ever
was an air raid.
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| Masks & Spears |
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One night we were robbed as we slept, and the blankets were
stolen from our beds. In a patch of brush across from our house, Dad and
several neighbors and servants armed with poison-tipped spears and bows and
arrows converged on a hiding place and found curtains, weapons, our silverware
set, even a typewriter. The thieves had a spear and some ground nuts in a
little wooden bowl with primitive animal patterns burnished into the surface.
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| Thieves' Bowl |
It turned out our night watchman had failed to pay his
"dues" or protection money to the corrupt police chief who was
running a protection racket. Dad fired the watchman and hired one Tuareg, a fierce nomadic warrior, to guard our house. Although we
hired only one, at night we saw hundreds of small cooking fires in the bush
surrounding our house. When we put our lights out, they hid and waited for
thieves. I felt safer with the Tuaregs
guarding our house, their fires flickering magically into the distant brush.
But I still made Dad check under my bed every night.
Playing in my sandbox, I used sticks as spears and knives.
My make-believe people locked their doors at night. Sometimes they fought
battles and had to have a priest bless their homes.
In July, 1966, there was a second military coup, putting
Colonel Yakubu Gowon in power. There were several riots. Kaduna, as the capitol of the Northern
Region, became embroiled in turmoil. The Muslim Hausa from the north swept
south, slaughtering Christian Ibos from the east. The Ibos retaliated.
Portrayed as a religious war in the international press, it was probably rooted more in nepotism than religion. Thousands of
refugees fled across Nigeria.
Bodies lay in the streets near our home.
Throughout 1966, we heard sporadic gunfire and fighting. Mom
worried about Dad being stranded from us at his USAID job in the city, and he
often was. Ussman began warning us to stay away from certain areas of the city
because there was going to be a spontaneous riot. His predictions were always
right.
Magic thoughts dimmed as I started school. Our Embassy
advised that if there was an air raid, we should dive into the ditches along
the road, essentially open sewers. Mom said she would rather take her chances
with the planes. Life went on.
We lived with riots and gunfire in the night. Our dreams
were full of army men coming into the house while we slept. Susie sometimes
whispered, "If anything happens to our parents, Ussman can walk us north
to Niger.
We will find people to help us there."
"What's going to happen to them?" I asked.
"I don't know," Susie answered, "but we need
to figure out how to get back to the States."
I no longer fantasized about magic. Streams of refugees
passed through our city. My childish prayers and magic would not help anyone. I
stopped pretending.
In 1967, after months of violence, the evacuation orders
came. We said a quick goodbye to Ussman with no time to say goodbye to the
other people we loved. The plane loomed large before us. Dead and injured
bodies littered the tarmac. My magic was also dead.
In our absence, the Embassy sent packers to pack and ship
all our belongings to us. When our things arrived in America months later, everything of
value had been stolen, but the packers had carefully wrapped all the garbage in
our wastebaskets and shipped it to us. Unpacking the box from my room, I smiled
when I noticed a sandy matchbox car cocooned in the trash.
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