Nigeria 1: Oyinbo on Okada

On March 6, I traveled from Manila to Lagos via Doha (I'm sure glad I was flying through Doha before Qatar became the target of a Saudi blockade). Thanks to the very generous help of the sister and brother-in-law of a Nigerian friend I met at the Baptist Campus Ministry at Western Kentucky University, I got from Lagos to the city of Ibadan, about an hour's drive north of Lagos. This Nigerian friend of mine currently lives in Australia, and he's married to a Trinidadian woman: if that's not globalization, I don't know what is!

Ibadan is an old city, long pre-dating British rule in Nigeria, which came relatively late in the scheme of things. In fact, Nigeria as a unit only dates back to 1914, when Lord Lugard amalgamated the British colony of Lagos, the Protectorate of Southern Nigeria, and the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria. Ibadan was and is the center of southwestern Nigeria, a region dominated by the Yoruba people. Much smaller than Lagos but still a sizable city, Ibadan also hosts Nigeria's premier university, where I conducted most of my research.

The gate to the University of Ibadan

The University of Ibadan, housed on a former British military base, dates back to 1948 when the British established it as University College, Ibadan, which awarded degrees from University College, London. In 1960, with Nigeria's independence, UI became an independent degree-granting institution. UI's alumnae include renowned Nigerian authors Chinua Achebe and (Nobel laureate) Wole Soyinka.

Lovely statue at the center of UI's campus

National Archives of Nigeria, Ibadan branch

UI also hosts the main branch of the National Archives of Nigeria. I split my time between the National Archives and the special collections of UI's Kenneth Dike Library, which hold the private papers of several important figures in Nigerian political history.

Kenneth Dike Library

Most days, I would go from the house where I was staying (more on that in another post) to UI's campus by riding on an okada, a motorcycle taxi. ('Okada' was a Nigerian airline which went out of business in 1997, but its memory lives on in the speed of the motor taxis!) This clip isn't of my commute to UI, but it gives an idea of what it's like to ride around on an okada, and to see some of Ibadan. Please pardon the very amateur videography, especially when the opening shot is of my pants: https://youtu.be/6aoaq3mrtjs

In Nigeria, I learned quickly that I was 'oyibo' (pronounced, and sometimes spelled, 'oyinbo'), which means 'white man' in the English pidgin dialect used commonly by Nigeria's many languages. Just walking down the street, and especially riding on the okada, I would hear 'Oyibo!' at frequent but random intervals. I quickly learned to think of myself as an oyinbo.

I will admit this took some getting used to. It was a small piece of the difference non-white people in Europe and the United States experience every single day, with much more of a burden. (I should add, 'oyinbo' was never said to me as an offensive statement, just stating a fact. I am very white.) Once a baby, maybe one year old, started crying when I saw him, and his father explained I was the first oyinbo he had ever seen in person. I was reminded of the much more extreme version of this which Frantz Fanon recounts in Black Skin, White Masks, about a French child crying out in fear at seeing him in his small village. My mind also went frequently to WEB Du Bois's description of 'double consciousness,' the constant experience of black people in the United States experiencing themselves and their lives not simply as people, as Americans, but as always Africans, too, seen as different by those around them.

I share this not to equate my experience with those, but simply to point out that being an oyinbo forced me to think about these phenomena differently than I've ever had to in the United States. On a purely human basis, divorced from sociology and histories of constructing race, it is a very odd thing indeed to be identified by one's skin. I often thought when hearing 'oyinbo!,' "I'm not oyinbo, I'm Mark." Which is a very oyinbo thing to think.

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My other video today offers (a) joy from my dark soul, and (b) at 9:34 and 9:56, what it sometimes feels like when doing archival research: