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Tola Rotimi Abraham is a writer from Lagos, Nigeria. She lives in Iowa City and is currently pursuing a graduate degree in journalism. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has taught writing at the University of Iowa. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Catapult, the Des Moines Register, the Nigerian Literary Magazine and other places. @thatTola
First published in Great Britain in 2020
by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
First published in the United States by Catapult
This digital edition first published in 2020 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Tola Rotimi Abraham, 2020
The right of Tola Rotimi Abraham to be identified as the
author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 83885 158 3
eISBN 978 1 83885 159 0
Book design by Wah-Ming Chang
For Afolarori, Oluwatomi, Akinloluwa, and Oluwaseye
Iya ni wura, Baba ni dingi.
YORUBA PROVERB
Mother is gold, Father is a mirror.
CONTENTS
How to be a Stupid Girl in Lagos
Something Happened on the Way to Love
The Beautiful People and the Beloved Country
HOW TO BE A STUPID GIRL IN LAGOS
BIBIKE
1996
THERE WERE MANY easy ways to be a stupid girl in Lagos. We were not stupid girls. We were bright with borrowed wisdom. We never paid full fare to drivers of yellow city cabs before we arrived at the final stop. We did not wear any kind of visible jewelry walking around busy streets like Balogun. When we went to Tejuosho market and a stranger shouted, “Hey. Fine girl. Stop, see your money for ground,” we never stopped to look.
When many of the ECOMOG soldiers were returning from peacekeeping in Liberia, flush with UN dollars, we were still protected prepubescent girls, yet we knew to avoid the one we called Uncle Timo, the one who gave all the little girls Mills & Boon paperbacks wrapped in old newspapers.
MY TWIN SISTER and I were almost stupid girls once, and this is how it begins, with Ariyike and me lost on our way home from school. I am holding on to her out of habit; she is pulling away, walking up to and talking to every stranger we meet, asking over and over, “Uncle, please, where can we get a bus to Fadeyi?”
We are walking home from secondary school. Today is the first time we have been allowed to come home by ourselves. Our younger brothers, Andrew and Peter, attend Holy Child Academy, the primary school that shares a fence with the military cemetery where all the agbalumo trees grow. They don’t need to be picked up. The church bus drops them off every day at half past four.
I am thinking of school and today’s government studies class and gerrymandering, how I like the way that word sounds, well calculated and important, like meandering, only with purpose. Everything is better with purpose.
I am also thinking of Father, who likes to say our government studies teacher is verbose:
“Mr. Agbo fancies himself a university lecturer, he is always going off tangent, completely missing the point.”
And
