Every Day Is for the Thief

“I have taken into myself some of the assumptions of life in a Western democracy—certain ideas about legality, for instance, certain expectations of due process—and in that sense I have returned a stranger.”

One of the tensions in the narrator’s journey is his growing understanding that he no longer belongs in Nigeria, and this passage is the first example of that. His expectations for behavior have been influenced by the unspoken mores of the US, but Nigeria’s economic and democratic development has different mores, which shock him upon his return there.

“Precisely because everyone takes a shortcut, nothing works and, for this reason, the only way to get anything done is to take another shortcut.”

Nigeria’s corruption has a top-down effect on the people who live there. Because their government, international businesses, and local authorities take advantage of them, they must work outside the system to get by. This extends into the lives of every citizen, and the effect is that society is full of chaotic interactions between people trying to circumvent the official order.

“Yahoo yahoo are on the front lines of their own shadow war, mangling what little good name their country still has. Their successes depend on the gullibility of foreigners, who apparently are still in plentiful supply. There is a sense, I think, in which the swindler and the swindled deserve each other. It is a kind of mutual humiliation society.”

One of Nigeria’s most notorious exports is the 419 scam, which was rampant during the early days of the internet and which largely originated in developing African nations. For the narrator, the problem emblemizes the culture as a whole: Without any sanctioned means of getting ahead economically, the “yahoo yahoo” damage Nigeria’s reputation by associating it with fraud. In this way, they humiliate themselves without realizing it.

“I know I will miss her too, and I see with a pang that every good thing I wish for this country, I secretly wish on her behalf. Any prayer I have that the future be a good one, that the place keep from breaking, is for her sake.”

The narrator’s return trip brings him into contact with many disheartening things about Nigeria, but his young relatives give him cause to hope. The author’s own ambition in the novel—to unpack what it means to call Nigeria your homeland—is to find the good in a chaotic, troubled nation.

“Touting is not a job. It is a way of being in the world, a distillate of pure attitude: the chest puffed out, the body limber, the jaw set to brook no opposition. There is in every tout the same no-nonsense attitude, the quick temper, the willingness to get into a fight over any and all conflicts. […] The regular non-tout Lagosian, too, has to share this attitude. The body language as one moves through the street has to be one of undiluted self-assurance.”

The touts embody one of the ideas that the novel returns to over and again in its portrayal of Nigeria: The facade is more important than the real because letting it slip leads to victimization. Cole later connects this to the history of tribalism and slavery. The touts represent the posturing that one must do to survive in a society where bribery and thievery is an everyday occurrence.

“And I consider myself, my own loss, too. Father’s memory has already become so insubstantial, fixed to a few events only, a birthday party, a day at the beach, a discussion one evening in the kitchen while I cleaned a fish and he sat at the dining table looking over some notes from work. […] I still have photographs, but I no longer know what my father looked like.”

The narrator’s father is part of the understory that rarely gets mentioned, and the narrator can’t bring himself to visit his father’s grave while in Nigeria. Nevertheless, it inflects every moment where he desires to connect with his homeland, and he sees his relationship with the place as symbolizing his relationship with his deceased father. In much the way that he can’t conjure up his father’s face, the narrator no longer understands what Lagos is like.

“A humanist is someone who doesn’t believe in God. That’s what we were told at school.”

One of the things that troubles the narrator most about modern Nigeria is that religious zealotry has infiltrated every part of society, including the school his nephew attends—which was founded by a known and respected humanist. In the intervening years, the difference between humanism and atheism has been lost, and in its place is Christian dogma that doesn’t allow room for such nuances.

“One goes to the market to participate in the world. As with all things that concern the world, being in the market requires caution. The market—as the essence of the city—is always alive with possibility and danger. Strangers encounter each other in the world’s infinite variety; vigilance is needed. Everyone is there not merely to buy or sell, but because it is a duty. If you sit in your house, if you refuse to go to market, how would you know of the existence of others? How would you know of your own existence?”

The narrator feels most connected to Nigeria in the market, which he describes as a colorful, chaotic place. His descriptions capture the romantic ideal, but he’s also keenly aware of his own place as an outsider, frequently mistaken for a white foreigner, as well as the violence that regularly occurs in the market.

“A wick, nameless, snuffed. And what if he was only eleven? A thief is a thief.”

This description of the boy who was burned for theft shows the bitter consequence of the Nigerian attitude that makes room for mob justice and zealotry against those deemed evil or irredeemable. No rationale supports forgiveness for those accused of theft, not even that the suspect is merely a child.

“They have wonderful solutions to some nasty problems; in this I see a nobility of spirit that is rare in the world. But also, there is much sorrow, not only of the dramatic kind but also in the way that difficult economic circumstances wear people down, eroding them, preying on their weaknesses, until they do things that they themselves find hateful, until they are shadows of their best selves. The problem used to only be the leadership. But now, when you step out into the city, your oppressor is likely to be your fellow citizen, his ethics eroded by years of suffering and life at the cusp of desperation.”

The narrator lays out his central thesis about what’s happened to Nigeria: The chaos of living in a corrupt system of bad leadership and little economic opportunity has led the people to turn on each other in big and small ways. He insists that the blame for this rests outside the individual, and he suggest here and elsewhere that the root cause is Nigeria’s centuries of slavery, colonial oppression, and corrupt rulers.

“[T]hat is the depth of it. The Atlantic slave trade, with hundreds of thousands of our compatriots sold, tortured, murdered, was an ‘obnoxious practice.’ This underwhelming text was doubtless written by a colonial officer, probably a few decades ago, but someone else keeps it hanging there, year after year, as an official Nigerian response to slavery.”

Here, the narrator more explicitly ties the current state of Nigeria to the slave trade that drove its economy for over a century, and the attendant Nigerian denialism of their history is of a piece with the way the National Museum whitewashes the worst offences of its leadership. The current leaders ignore a generational trauma for the sake of saving face, even though its consequences in many facets of Lagosian society are apparent to the narrator.

“It is important for a people to have something that is theirs, something to be proud of, and for such institutions to have a host of supporters. And it is vital, at the same time, to have a meaningful forum for interacting with the world. So that Molière’s work can appear onstage in Lagos, as Soyinka’s appears in London. So that what people in one part of the world think of as uniquely theirs takes its rightful place as a part of universal culture.”

The MUSON Centre, which this passage describes, has a special purpose to the narrator: It’s an opportunity for Nigerian art to start building a national cultural identity that rivals the most respected cultural centers on the globe. In doing so, they can demonstrate that they’re ready for the world stage and enter into the conversation in a way that moves beyond the national identity.

“It is difficult for the average Nigerian to live a middle-class lifestyle. And even those whose profession or education gives them an income well above the average still struggle. And for those in the fifteen-thousand-, twenty-thousand-naira range, life is simply hell. A hundred and forty dollars a month is poverty, anywhere in the world.”

As the narrator meets with old friends and catches up with what has happened with them over the last decade and a half, he comes to see the reality of the economic situation in Lagos: A few career paths offer an opportunity for upward mobility, and the rest are stagnating. Even careers that should be prosperous are making little more than subsistence wages. At every level, Nigeria’s economy is broken and favors those willing to exploit others to earn their living.

“This is life too close to the edge of the danger for me. It is too severe a tax on the right to private property.”

The narrator has been debating whether moving back to Nigeria will be best for him; he sees the value in living in a much more vibrant place, especially in his desire to create great art, but the chaos of the place and the exposure to danger are too much for him, and he feels the way that living here could make him into an unkind person who must contemplate doing violence to others or being in fear.

“The history is missing from Lagos. There is no monument to the great wound. There is no day of remembrance, no commemorative museum. There are one or two houses in Badagry that display chains and leg-irons but, beyond that, nothing. Faulkner said: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ But in Lagos we sleep dreamlessly, the sleep of innocents.”

Here, the narrator connects the way in which Nigeria has swept its history of slavery under the rug like the American South’s similar actions. Much of Faulkner’s work deals with the gothic tragedy of the South post-Reconstruction, and he asserts that there’s no escaping from the burden of guilt and violence. The narrator sees the lack of acknowledgment of Nigeria’s past as a moral failing.

“What I am looking for, what Tranströmer described as a moving spot of sun, is somewhere in the city. But it is not easy to find, not here where one has to forget about yesterday.”

The cultural dearth that the narrator experiences in Lagos troubles him: For every MUSON Center that promises glimmers of hope, he sees places where culture is stifled, exploited, or erased. He connects this to the whitewashing of the reality of Nigeria’s history and corruption and the people’s need to ignore the everyday grief born out of it.

“A legitimate business, with a public sign, on one of the busier commercial streets in town, catering to a sophisticated clientele, and all the while living on piracy. Do they have any idea that this is a problem? Or is it enough to settle for sophistication without troubling oneself about the laws that defend creativity?”

Piracy is rampant in much of the developing world, and this example is particularly galling to the narrator, as it represents a disrespect for the most important and valuable contributions to musical culture. He sees a hypocrisy in the people who claim to be fans of jazz, a genre of music that doesn’t promise fame or financial reward yet exploits the creators of that art by making copies without compensating them. They’re destroying what they claim to love.

“And there is really only one word for what I feel about these new contributions to the Lagosian scene: gratitude. They are emerging, these creatives, in spite of everything, and they are essential because they are the signs of hope in a place that, like all other places on the limited earth, needs hope.”

The bookstore that the narrator encounters serves as a counterpoint to the piracy he saw earlier in his visit. There, artists support each other and try to create a space for culture to emerge. He sees this as a promising sign that not all is lost in Nigeria.

“A phrase I hear often in Nigeria is idea l’a need. It means ‘all we need is the general idea or concept.’ People say this in different situations. It is a way of saying: that’s good enough, there’s no need to get bogged down in details.”

The narrator outlines this concept in the context of Nigerian air travel: A poor system of maintenance exists, and the planes are outdated and worn down. However, the industry and Nigerian government don’t bother with these details because doing so would expose all the system’s inherent problems. Instead, they ignore it and call it good enough.

“Nigerians do not always have the philosophical equipment to deal with the material goods they are so eager to consume. We fly planes but we do not manufacture aircraft, much less engage in aeronautical research. We use cellphones but do not make them. But, more important, we do not foster the ways of thinking that lead to the development of telephones or jet engines.”

For the narrator, the central problem with Nigerian development is that it still relies on the work of other nations: Not only are most goods imported, but so are the ideas, the technologies, and the expertise. The government unwilling to invest in programs that will lead to education and innovation within its borders, so in the narrator’s view, Nigerians aren’t responsible enough to wield the developments they have.

“But the past continues to gather around like floodwater. A too easy formulation, but what past do I have in mind? The nation’s, I think. But perhaps I am also thinking of mine, perhaps the two are connected, the way a small segment of a coastline is formed with the same logic that makes the shape of the continental shelf.”

The narrator feels a connection to his homeland, and a symbolic link exists between his disillusionment with his family (and particularly his mother) and his disillusionment with Nigeria. He has difficulty reconciling the Nigeria that’s open to immigrants and claims to be an international hub for business but falls into the same patterns of exploitation and economic diminishment that happened under colonial rule. Likewise, an underlying discomfort permeates his place in the family even as they welcome him into their home.

“He reminds me of Leonard Bast in Howards End. The acute awareness of a social gap and the hope, yet, that the gap can be bridged by enthusiasm and application. He reminds me, painfully, or myself, of times when I was the one in socially asymmetrical situations, in my early years in the United States, the times when I had been someone else’s Leonard Bast.”

The narrator frequently compares Nigeria, its culture, and its people to figures from the Western literary canon. He sees the writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Tranströmer as a key to understanding Lagos or, as here, compares a man to a character from a British romance. This cross-cultural view reflects the narrator’s identity as a cross-cultural figure himself.

“I search his face, in vain, for signs of comprehension. He only shakes his head, as if he feels sorry for me, stuck as I am in a scientific view of the world. ‘Relax! God is in control.’ And in his attitude, I find a key to much of what I have observed in the preceding weeks. The idea that saying makes it so, that the laws of the imagination matter more than all others.”

In this quote, the narrator realizes that his friend really believes that science is false and that to admit you have malaria is the primary cause of having it. This is an interpersonal version of the belief system that runs rampant in Nigeria: It’s idea l’a need taken to its logical extreme, in which what a person says is true is true.