Dossier: 

Open brief over Nigeria aan Ben Okri

Ben Okri schrijft nog snel een zin op de omslag van de bundel schrijfpapier. Don’t read till you arrive. ‘Je vroeg mij om reistips voor Nigeria. Hierin staan een paar instructies die je moet volgen’. De wereldberoemde Brits-Nigeriaanse schrijver geeft mij vier volgepende blaadjes die ik pas mag lezen na aankomst in Lagos.

De Brits-Nigeriaanse auteur Ben Okri groeide op in Lagos, tijdens de Biafra-oorlog (naar schatting 500.000 tot 2 miljoen doden), zag moord en verdriet en doorstond de ontberingen van een straatloper en de pesterijen van de middelbare school.

In 1991 won hij de prestigieuze Booker Prize voor De hongerende weg, die inzoomt op de zelfkant van Nigeria.

© Stefaan Anrys

Ben Okri aan het dollen met Peter Krüger bij de voorstelling van hun film ‘The Madness of Reason’

Filmfestival in Gent

In 2009 interviewde ik Ben Okri voor het eerst. Net voor mijn afreis naar Nigeria, in oktober jl., loop ik hem opnieuw tegen het lijf, voor een interview tijdens het Filmfestival van Gent. Na afloop vraag ik of hij me een opdracht wil geven. ‘Ik wil iets doen over jongeren, hoe zij overeind blijven in Nigeria vandaag, maar een echt plan heb ik niet. Heb jij ideeën?’

Ik geef Ben Okri papier en potlood. Uit erkentelijkheid beloof ik hem een dure fles Bordeaux. Be careful. Don’t let Nigeria confuse you, zegt hij me ‘s anderendaags en geeft me vier velletjes papier. Niet lezen voor je aankomt, kribbelt hij nog gauw op de omslag.

Ik weet niet wat ik in zijn bruine ogen moet lezen.

 

© Stefaan Anrys

Ben Okri pent vier vellen vol met reistips voor Nigeria

Open brief aan Ben Okri

Ik ben intussen terug uit Nigeria. Mijn reportage is verschenen in de gedrukte MO* en er staat ook een Nigeria-dossier online.

Iets blijft knagen. 

Ik beslis Ben Okri een brief terug te schrijven. Een open brief en u mag hem lezen. Omdat het zin heeft de onmogelijke ambities te delen van een ‘Afrika-journalist’. Misschien vind ik het ook een uiting van erkentelijkheid en een excuus aan de Nigerianen van wie ik iets ‘gestolen’ heb.

Hopelijk staan er geen taalfouten in en maalt Ben Okri er niet om dat ik hem share. Tegen de tijd dat ik zijn emailadres te pakken heb, heeft hij hem misschien al gelezen. Dat zijn dan weer de voordelen van het wereldwijde web.

 

Dear Ben,

I wonder if I have lived up to your advice while travelling to Nigeria.

You have set the bar really high, by giving me a letter that long. Don’t travel with darkness in your heart or you will find but darkness. You wrote something like that.

I have published my report on Nigeria some weeks ago. There is much darkness in it. It talks about corruption, violence, greed, inequality. Still I have met such great people, welcoming people. It seems as if, sitting behind my laptop, trying to make sense of an intense trip, my mind is geared to what I know, or rather think to know about Nigeria.

Leave your masks behind or you will see nothing.

For a journalist it is safe to talk about the ills of an African country. No one back home will dispute the gravitas of my writing when I focus on the dark side.

All this is true, writes Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, but it is the single story of Africa. ‘When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise’.

Still, in my defence, I must say I have been in touch with paradise while in Nigeria. Have I been able to show my readers a glimpse of it? I hope I did. I have tried to follow young people dealing with the ills of your mother country and building it anew.

Your letter was my travel companion. You urged me to meet the world empty and naked like a saint at prayer or a pilgrim. I also could say ‘like a child’. The adult sees everything from the height of his years. The outlook born of experience flattens everything, piles it together, renders it dull. It all comes down to the same. He knows his house is situated in a country, and that several roads lead to it.

These wise words are not mine. I have stolen them from Frédéric Gros’ A philosophy of walking, a book given to me by a dear friend.

You know, we journalists are thieves, porters of words. The words of another.

A student of mine – I am teaching too – asked me whether I’ve needed ‘fixers’ to get my stories in Nigeria. Hardly, I responded. I always felt safe. Nigerians do like journalists, writers, foreigners interested in their country.

But I must be humble. In ten days I cannot but pick the brains of Nigerians, assemble their thoughts, my own impressions and merge them into a story. Without so many good spirits on my trail, I would be nothing.

There is a trail of initiates. Find it if you can. True initiates are the most dependable people – chances are you won’t find them. Now and again they would help you and you would not know it.

At times I think I have walked the trail of initiates you wrote me about. First I mistook them for the members of secret covenants, the student gangs with their violent initiation rituals; or the false spiritualists who sold me a passage to the Osun shrine of Osogbo. These almost got me killed in a car accident, driving like fools on your dangerous roads.

Sssh. I should not come up with travellers tales. Another wise advice you gave me.

I am just trying to tell you that in fleeing the noisy and loud and self-serving and seeking out the quiet and the true, I have learnt a lot.

It is only when listening to the silence of those who cannot be quoted in articles, one starts to get a better picture. Journalists, always in a hurry, have difficulties with that, you know.

I asked you: ‘Write or rather draw me your Nigeria’. As if you were the Little Prince. You started by writing down which places I should go to.

So I did go to the countryside where the real shrines are. I did go see Lagos and not just the Lagos of the rich. I ate in bukkas, hang out with writers and area boys, even with politicians at work. In the Delta I did not see the oil spills – for fear to be kidnapped – but I saw the villages and met that poor girl picking snails in polluted creeks to sell them for almost nothing.

I did not make it to Minna, where you were born. But Ibadan I did see. Abuja in the North too, but further up north I didn’t dare. Didn’t you advice me to go North, safely and wisely? I was afraid of Boko Haram. Who wouldn’t be? But I ran into them, by talking to a writer who wrote a novel about them, meeting up with a journalist who interviewed some of the Chibok girls and by visiting a slumdweller who nearly got killed in a bomb blast and wrote a song to digest the horrible experience. 

You once said to me that Nigerians were bruisers. I was so fortunate talking to Jeremy Weate who unveiled me the pain and the shame behind that noisy and brash mask.

The world is not only what is visible. It is a calling forth. What you see will be what you have secretly summoned.

Your words. 

It’s kind of an anthropologists’ trap. Or the red car thing, you know. When you own one, you tend to see red cars everywhere.

I’m making a bit fun of it, I admit. You know, some of your fellow writers think you are too metaphysical, not enough grounded in daily life. I don’t know whether it’s true and I don’t mind. I like your writing. I believe in spirit. In a bond that transcends skin and kin. I woul be a bad journalist if I wouldn’t be able to surf on a wave of trust and true connection.

I began with a list of things and places and end writing a call to spirit. Where do you think you are going? You are going to yourself. Where do you think you are coming from? From that which must die that you may at last be born. Will you be different from you when born? Only as different from yourself as a dream.

I had no clue, Ben. As I told you. Nigeria did confuse me, as you warned me before my departure from Belgium. Maybe that is why I had to rewrite my report four times before publishing it. And it still felt unfair, unable to translate the good, inspiring and transformative experiences I’ve lived.

I guess I have to try harder next time. And maybe do tell the story of that coffee lady who fought incest all on her own, by talking to kids and parents in churches and on the street. Or tell people about the rastafari wearing a ‘count your blessings’-necklace and uttering wise words. All people around suddenly felt unreal, their voices seemed like dimmed, while the hairy main kept talking to me, his eyes wide open.

Do you think I have found the flower, gift of the true road?

Yours sincerely,

Stef Anrys

 

 

© Stefaan Anrys

‘Laat je maskers achter. Ander zal je niets zien. En kom je enkel terug met reisverhalen.’ (Ben Okri)

 

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