Prologue

"The marginal man, is one whom fate has condemned to live in two societies and in two, not merely different but antagonistic cultures, his mind is the crucible in which two different and refractory cultures may be said to melt and, either wholly or in part, fuse." [Robert E. Park, 1937]"


The South East coast of England was fast disappearing in the distance as the St Nicholas Sealink Ferry made its way slowly across the North Sea for the second time that day. The ferry was moving towards the Hook of Holland from Harwich. On one of the levels, young people could be seen dancing to the loud sound of the Summer music that was playing loudly in the background. In the dimly lit hall grey clouds of cigarette fumes, seemed to billow from the tables occupied by different sized groups of people, lending the air a rather dry and almost suffocating pong. This would have been the non-smokers worst nightmare, I thought lighting up a stick of Benson and Hedges as I watched some young people dancing to a UB40 track that was playing loudly in the background, while those that did not seem up to dancing sat in their small groups either quaffing cans of beer or just engaged in animated conversations. Now and then someone would break out in what would appear to be an uproarious laughter, but for the loud music that made the laughters barely audible, leaving only funny contortions of their faces…

A few tables to my right were three young men sitting with several unopened cans of beer on their table. Two of them were puffing away on their cigarettes as the third one, who from the look of the big Afro he wore could have been of a mixed African-Caucasian background, was talking with a lot of gesticulations to the other two. From the look on the faces of his listeners you could guess that he was not doing a good job of convincing them of the probably exaggerated stories of the escapades, which he would have had during this summer that was just about ending…. Occasionally, as the ferry would ride on waves of the Atlantic ocean, you could feel a slight swaying of the floor beneath your fleet; so slight that you would be forgiven if for a moment you felt that you were sitting in a nightclub in London’s West end and were having an ordinary weekend night out.

Most of the young people there that evening could have been students, like myself, who were going back to their various universities all over Continental Europe now that the summer holidays was over. There could have also been some young business executives about to start on their holidays; or maybe some backpackers on another leg of their almost irrepressible wanderlust-ing across the globe.

I was seated at my table with a friend of mine, Akin, whom I had met barely 6 weeks earlier. We had met near a students hostel in West Ham; I had been crouched inside a telephone booth, in a park near the hostel, where I had slept the previous night. I was shivering when he had opened the phone booth to make a call and the site of me had startled him as he automatically closed back the door and exclaimed something in Yoruba, a Nigerian language. I had called him back as he closed the door and managed to explain my plight to him. I explained to him that I was also Nigerian, but a Medical student who had arrived London the previous evening and ended up sleeping in that phone booth as I didn’t have any other place to go. Initially I had decided to sleep on one of the park benches until morning. And had planned that in the morning I would be able to look for somebody, with whom I could squat until I could sort out myself in London. But as I lay there on the bench, it had started to rain suddenly and by the time I could find refuge in the warmth of the phone booth I had gotten drenched in the rain…

After Akin saw the state that I was in that early morning he had told me to meet up with him later that day and had offered to squat me temporarily in the room he shared with several other students;“ We don dey 5 already for the room” he was saying in pidgin English, informing me that there was already 5 of them in that room, “ but wetin man go do? ; as man must survive… At least there’s still space on the floor for one more person!“. he said and then made his phone call to one of his colleagues to inform the person that he would be slightly late for his early morning job near the Liverpool street station as an office cleaner.

But that was 6 weeks ago. Akin was now seated opposite me and talking about how he couldn’t wait to get back to his “many babes” in the Ukrainian city of Donetsk where he, like me, was also on a scholarship to study Medicine.“Ol’ boy we don survive the summer be that!” he was saying. He had to raise his voice occasionally so that I could hear him above the sound track that was playing. His eyes were already glazing over from the alcohol that we had been consuming since we left Liverpool street station several hours earlier. He started to open up another can of beer as he grinned lazily…“But life fit sweet, when money dey sha!” he declared in Pidgin English, meaning that with money life can be good. He started to gulp down some beer and then light up a stick of Benson and Hedges. And I couldn’t but agree with him more! I thought as I opened up a can for myself and gulped down a mouthful of cold refreshing beer…Yes, life was good!

We had both survived the summer in London. And we were now going back to our different cities with loads of things, which we had bought from the various cheap Saturday markets that sell all over East London and which we were now going to sell for mind blowing profits once we got back to school…Yes, with money life can be good. Even for us who were going back to our lives as black students in a Soviet Union that was under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev and gripped in the teething pains of his Perestroika. You see, this was the summer of 1988, but I think this story should start a little earlier; I think that we should start at the very beginning of this adventure that took place once upon a time in Soviet Russia…