Bad Nigga

❦

I met Bunde by accident, almost fifteen years later, under a mango tree where I was having a bottle of Guinness, in Makurdi. He was what now?—I imagined; I did a quick math, 34? He looked younger than myself even if I was three years younger. How we liked to compare our ages back in secondary school.

Where I sat facing the George Akume expressway, vehicles zoomed past. It was a close end to August and the earth still smelt of fresh soil around me with an abundance of air from the tree’s leaves quickening the nostrils. Bunde passed before me in a nice tee shirt, a three-quarter jeans shorts, and an aerosol slippers which he wore with stockings. Had he remained a guy-man? I wore my two-year-old maroon-coloured checkered shorts with an ordinary bend-down-select roundneck polo. He did not see me, and I thought I should probably let him go. It had been too many years, and from both our conditions, I surmised, we had nothing significant to catch up to. What was he doing now, I thought. But as he was about to cross the culvert to my left, to the road leading to the express, I called his name and he stopped and turned.

He registered a look of confusion. Was it me you called?—his expression seemed to say, as he wanted to be sure. So I called his name again; wherefore he approached me gently, humbly, perhaps in deference to my bottle of beer. Yes, it is me, I said, as recognition began to warm his face. Is it really you? he almost yelled. No way!—his excitement infecting me too. So we hugged, and he sat with me, and we couldn’t believe each other’s eyes; and we sat there at the roadside bar, both of us thinking in our minds about the uncanny surprise of our reunion, two old boys from a backwater secondary school from a faraway, insignificant corner of the country, Zaki-Biam—which we always wanted to escape from—meeting after fifteen, long years, not in any magic land, excellent centres or hearts of the nation, but some kilometres away, not too far from our old Zaki-Biam, in a different local government in the same state, little men.

Yes, I just graduated from the state’s university; that’s what I was doing in Makurdi, I answered, as he asked of me. And him? He’d done a lot of things in Zaki-Biam, gotten two girls pregnant, got tired of taking care of the never-ending bills of them and their babies, and one day left the place for good. In Makurdi, he rode an okada for a while but couldn’t endure the road or sun anymore, so he quitted. He spoke with a little mist of spent years in his eyes.

I am doing better, why not, he said.

Me? No. Why would he say that, I asked.

At least you’re in school; you’ve graduated even.

And so?

I had a future ahead of me, he may have wanted to say. I wanted to remind him of the time we both left secondary school, and how far, miserably, we had come, but I interred my words. No one really told us where we’d be or become, as Sarah posed to her mother in that song. But we were happy nonetheless to see each other. Heck, we were all something else back in the day. That my star would shine was certain—the bright boy, the whiz kid, fine English. But Bunde? Hmmm. Oh . . . he had a nickname: Bad Nigga. Ebony complexion and a cool walking swagger. The world was his, of which I shall like to trace a little history of.

When Bunde became a big boy and took his nickname more seriously, he began to be absent in school. We, his friends—maybe not really his friends, some of us weren’t that close but just classmates—learnt that he had become a painter-boy at the yam market. This was a big deal to all of us, for to become a painter-boy was every adolescent boy’s dream, which meant money to show off and girls to win easily. So even when on some days, Bunde rode into school on a borrowed or rented Honda Super Cub bike during games hour in the evening, we were more thrilled by his fortune than worried about his absence in school. Certainly, Nguher, the girl everyone thought only moved with intelligent boys, was seen around him as he bought her and other girls chilled yoghurt. My mother couldn’t have imagined me becoming a painter-boy at the yam market; it was over her dead body, and would mean that I became spoilt, moneyed, wanting to wean myself from her.

Bunde used to push the wheelbarrow before his luck. It was something most of the boys in JSS 3 did on market days, on Fridays and Saturdays, to have some change, but none of them was proud about it. However, it gave them some class as they could afford to buy the bling of the day. So before that time, Bunde was already a blinger in our class, among other boys with unverifiable sources of money, who had nicknames like Xzibit, Drama, and Seedorf. What I am trying to say is Bunde had always been on the path of being a big boy—and becoming a painter-boy at the yam market was a leap for him.

We were useless back then, and we did silly things. There was a story I often heard Drama retell to wilful ears. They had all come up, all right; adolescents spending evenings into the night and past curfew. The thrill was about the police chasing after them. There was a route they normally ran, in the middle of which was an unfinished, uncovered soakaway. But since they knew this, they’d skip over the soakaway and, as it was dark at night, prayed that the police chasing after them fell into the pit.

So this time in JSS 3 as we were all getting wild, a new girl was transferred to our school. A true belle, she caught all the boys’ attention. Two boys nearly fought over her. One whose father was rich, who had a stall at the yam market, which ensured the boy had pocket money to spend on the girl; the other boy, a mere peasant. Let’s not talk about his father. The first boy insulted the second over this girl, that his legs were joined at the knees like that of a traditional drummer—the boy, well, did used to be a drummer for the dance troupe at his church. This drummer boy had told the belle that he was good at solving maths, to woo her. She followed money, and many other boys who came for her, one term to another until in SS 2 when she finally settled with our agric science teacher. Poor me, I never left my letter in her locker for her to see it, which I wrote “I bring out my pen from the basket of love” and all that childish nonsense in. A wonderful time.

We began discovering our demons, all of us. We pillaged the school orange orchard. Uprooted the groundnuts of teachers we hated. One time—heck!—we took turns in making groundnut pepper to bring to school; this way, we sat on the ridges in the teachers’ farms, plugged their garden eggs and had a field day, a good number of days. Flaunted school rules. Fly our shirts. And so on. But what marvelled, as we began to hear like a joke, was the talk of some of our classmates going to Ajoho. It was a market close to the school. Not many had the courage to leave the schoolyard, in their uniform, to go to Ajoho, and then drink burukutu. That was going too delinquently far. But we had Mson, Elijah and Bunde, often returning to class, tipsy, girls shooing them off. We all inherited drinking from our fathers or the community, the lot of us. It was heritage. But it all went quiet after a while, after the boys were saturated from the trips, the indulgence, and the infamy, and as the term also ended and a new one started and the Junior Secondary School promotional exam neared and some people left our school, which was Catholic and wouldn’t allow malpractice, to other places where they could be helped to pass.

The end of the second term or the beginning of a new term meant new prefects were assigned to SS 2 students, so that the SS 3 dudes could face their final year exams. And we in JSS 3, students of a promotional exam, proudly saw ourselves above regulation to accept the seniority of the new SS 2 prefects. This always led to feuds. In my SS 2 days, there was almost a face-off with us and the JSS 3 students. I thought it was a joke when the day neared, when the JSS 3 finished their exams, and a fight brewed in the air, and students started running about. I saw my classmate bring out the sharp-pointed knife he’d borrowed from me the day before, to stab somebody, anybody. I was alarmed. But let me return to my story, back to Bunde, whose nickname, if you have forgotten, was Bad Nigga. We rebelled, all right, when we were in JSS 3, against seniors whose pride were bruised and who didn’t allow many of us go free without lashes. But some of my mates who were the sons of the soil or born-soils—we called them“mar nyar”—did not take the lashing very well. It was like an insult to them who were born-soils. They had the right to the land which the school was built on, they were the homeowners who shouldn’t be disrespected with such a thing as flogging anyone on the buttocks, which when you thought about it, some of them were older teenage boys with fully hairy legs who saw themselves as men. You could flog them in school because you’re a senior, but they’d be waiting for you with their gang of brothers or kin when school closed, for your reckoning.

This is the perfect and last memory I had of Bad Nigga: It was after school, and all of us, throng of students in blue and white uniforms splashed on the brown road, walking under the sun. We had just passed the house of a senior with a long surname, when some students began stopping ahead some of us, lingering for the expectation of something. Someone close to me said a senior was about to be beaten by the born-soils. Truly, a boy who sat on a bike under a mango tree began to approach a set of students—that was when I saw Bad Nigga too, in a black jacket too expensive for any of us, his mates, to afford then, trailing the guy we later heard was an elder relative of his. Now, Bad Nigga was no longer a student in our school; he’d dropped out a term earlier, rumoured to have enrolled in some other school. But we kept seeing him, dressed fly, riding into our school during games hour in a Honda Super Cub.

Bad Nigga. He held a screwdriver firmly in his hand like a knife, as they approached a senior. Kpa. Kpa. The slaps landed on the senior by the first guy. Students scattered. Bad Nigga lurched at another senior with his screwdriver, stabbing twice on the shoulder and abdomen. Anytime I recalled that afternoon back then, I always thought of having the chance to ask Bad Nigga: why a screwdriver? Though I’d later have my answer from another student: a screwdriver won’t cause great harm, say bleeding to death, if used to stab, as a knife would, but it’d cause an internal injury to the victim. I wanted to ask Bad Nigga now, the long last chance to do so; but I swallowed the question with a gulp of beer.

A second round of drinks came. He drank, I drank, we drank. Like our fathers before us. He was a tax collector boy now, he said. Boy? We were in our thirties. But in his dressing—tee shirt, three-quarter jeans shorts, an aerosol slippers worn with stockings—hell, he was a boy. I was a boy, too, just graduating from university looking forward to a life of joblessness. I couldn’t count my fortune too different from his. He was all right, as was I. Maybe I’ll get a teaching job with a bad salary. But Bunde had chosen his path long ago. He’d left Zaki-Biam but Zaki-Biam hadn’t left him. Hadn’t left us. Here we were, an odd reunion: A bad nigga; me, a once-upon-a-time bright secondary school boy; and bottles of beer. The mist that was earlier in his eyes gave way to a warm glint; was it the chilled beer or the recollection of old times? Way he spoke, he counted his English against mine, then switching to Tiv, some Pidgin, on and on; me too, reciprocating, as I watched cars pass on the expressway in front of us.❦

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