Other people's memories

Baboon, Wikimedia

The person whose parents were in Kaduna, Nigeria at the same time as us, around 1979 - 81 was about 13 years old to my 7. As I said earlier, I didn't know her there as she was at boarding school in England while I went to a local international primary school, the Sacred Heart. At first she said about all she could remember was staring at the stars singing David Bowie.  The stars were exceptionally bright there.  I can remember standing with dad in the garden outside the patio next to the banana trees one night while he showed me the stars. 

I asked if she could remember the wife (of an officer) who got shot.  But in her version the wife was carjacked, dumped out of the car, shot in the leg so she couldn't get help while the thieves made off with the car.  In my version, a wife was shot during a burglary of the duplex (two level) houses and shot several times at that. I think both might be true. That's why we had m'guardis

She had a story about her brother accidentally hitting a local boy with a golf ball.  I don't even remember a golf course.  The brother apparently said: it's OK, you can have my sister.  And sure enough, the boy's father came around to request the white girl of the family. Barter was common there and disputes presumably were solved this way.

She said she remembered going to Jos and Kano a lot on trips with friends and the baboons would steal the mothers' handbags.  I don't remember Jos at all, though I know the name.  They were far away: four hours I see now, to Jos while Kano is three and a half.  Travel wasn't that safe.  Pretty much anything could happen despite the official presence of people British military people called "yellow peril men". The men directed traffic by standing on wide, raised circular wooden structures, like the kind of thing huge cables might be wound around. Their uniform was trousers, I think a hat, in the British military formal style, and a distinctive orange shirt. This is a shockingly racist term, a metaphor for the imagined threat of "Oriental hordes" from the East overtaking the "civilized" West. I didn't know what it meant at the time, but it was always used "humorously" by the adults.  I don't know how many adults understood the reference: I hope few but suspect more.  

During car travel, which was the only kind for us, apart from the school bus, I know my parents saw dead bodies left beside roads. The police stopped people and bribed them, though not the military because who were there teaching the Nigerian army and therefore, as far as I heard, were immune.  They perhaps did too good a job because there were three military coups in the 1980s and 90s starting a few years after we left.