The boys from Naija/4

I joined the queue behind a tall pimple faced young man who was standing with an elderly man in Agbada and a middle aged woman who must have been his mother because of the similarities in their facial appearance. The woman was saying something to the young man but her voice was at that moment swallowed up by another voice announcing something on the public address system;
“Can Olugbenga Thompson please come to the information desk…” the heavily accented femaile voice announced.
I wonder if Olugbenga was the same person that the woman had been frantically looking for when she had been yelling out the name “Olu“ earlier on? I checked to see if she was still standing where I had last seen her, but she wasn’t there anymore.

There were several other young people standing in the queue in front of us who were accompanied to the airport by their families members. And looking at them I couldn’t help being overwhelmed by a feeling of sadness; it felt sad that I didn’t have any of my own family to see me off at the airport. And at that moment I found myself struggling to keep back the tears…

Tears always well up in my eyes whenever I think of my own family. You see, my family and the circumstances of my birth is a bit peculiar. My parents are from different the two Nigerian tribes that seem to hate each other the most; my mother a Yoruba woman from a place called Akure died in child birth while she was giving birth to me in a village near Umuahia where my family had been displaced to during the Biafra war. My dad, a proud Igbo man who still considers himself a Biafran…even though the war ended 16years ago…had relocated his family from the city of Kano immediately after the uprisings against the South Easterners in the Northern part of Nigeria.

This was just before the outbreak of the civil war in which two of his brothers, who had been traders in the same town, were killed but he had managed to escape with his pregnant wife, my mother. On arriving Aba, our hometown, my mother had begged him to allow her to go back to stay with her parents in Akure, because she believed that she would be a lot safer outside of Biafra, but my dad had refused. For him the idea of being separated from her was inconceivable. She gave birth to me in the bushes where they had been hiding from the bombs, but died a few days later because of complications of child birth; she died leaving my dad with a lot of guilt, a lot of hate and one wailing sickly child who had taken away the woman he loved so much…

My father eventually remarried 3 years after the war to a woman who gave him 6 children in a period of 10 years all in a bid to produce another son. Her first 5 children had been girls. Then the last child, Obinna, was born 4 years ago. Obinna means “the fathers desire” and it was as if with his birth I was completely forgotten. Not that I was really ever there. My step-mother had made sure of that. She had ensured that the relationship between my father and I remained strained to the point were I gave up trying to get his recognition. He didn’t seem to care that I had always been tops in my class nor did he say anything when I won medals in athletics during our school’s inter-house sports contests; sports that I became interested in simply because I had found out that he too had been an athlete during his secondary school days. It was as if my dad had stopped caring from the time when my mother, the Yoruba woman whom he had loved so much, died as a result of his foolish pride. And also because I had to be born…

I was at the airport now and there was none of my family members here with me. According to my stepmother, It was a lot cheaper for me to travel alone seeing that the family needed the money to send the younger ones to school. So I had boarded an early morning Luxurious bus at their Owerri terminus 2 days ago and stayed with my Uncle until this morning when he brought me to the airport…
“Ugo, you have to write us a letter immediately you arrive Russia, OK?” the middle aged woman in front of me was saying to the tall pimple faced youth.
“Mummy you’ve told me that so many times already…” he protested.
“I know, but I just want to remind you; I don’t want you to go there and forget your family…”

The young man looked embarrassingly at me when he realised that I could hear what his mother was saying from where I was standing.
“Nna. Are you travelling to Russia as well?” the woman asked directing the question to me.“Yes”
“And you came to the airport alone?”
“No, my uncle dropped me off and had to rush back to work. My parents couldn’t make the journey from Owerri”
“Owerri? Are you from Owerri?”
“No I am from Aba, but we live in Owerri”
“Where in Owerri?
“Ikenegebu layout”
“Eziokwu…?“ meaning, is that true, “…We live in Aladinma Estate. But you don’t look like an Igbo person!”I kept quiet. I didn’t know how to respond to that because I had become tired of having to explain my tribe to Nigerians as if that was all that mattered in this country. Everything had to do with tribe here. The quota system ensured it. Whatever that meant.

I had a first hand experience of this quota system after I got my admission to the University of Jos last year with a score, which was well above the average mark. With that score I should have been able to get into any of the Nigerian universities without any problems but the first thing that I had been asked after presenting my result slip to the admission clerk was about my state of Origin.
“Why is that important” I had asked the clerk a bit irritated.
“Because of the quota system. Candidates from some states need to score higher in order to get into the University of Jos” he explained.
The quota system was just one of so many other such political interventions to “ensure equity” but which only ended up re-enforcing divisions along tribal lines…
“So, Nna what is your name?” she asked me in Igbo.
“Kasi. That’s short for Nkasiobi”
“Nkasiobi onye?” she asking wanting to know my surname.
“ Kasi Obieze”
“Is that from Professor Obieze’s family?”
“No, we don’t have any Professors in my family”
“Nne…” The man in Agbada, whom I assumed was Ugo’s dad was calling his wife and started to say something to her. We had approached the Aeroflot counter and Ugo had to put his luggage on the scale…