I think what all of these have in common, whether they are funny or not, is the closed circle of the story. Each small fate is complete in itself. It needs neither elaboration nor sequel. The small fates, I feel, bring news of a Nigerian modernity, full of conflict, tragedies, and narrow escapes. Similar to the French papers’ fait divers, they work in part because whatever that strange thing was, it didn’t happen to us. They are the destiny that befell some other poor soul, which we experience from a grateful distance…
…In a 1993 interview in the Paris Review, Toni Morrison talks about the beginnings of jazz, and how unhappy the material of that music is. Someone’s always leaving, someone’s always losing something. But, she says, there’s a grandeur and satisfaction in that, because these are people who, until recently, were in a constricting and limiting situation. Then freedom came. “The whole tragedy of choosing somebody, risking love, risking emotion, risking sensuality, and losing it all, didn’t matter, since it was their choice. Exercising choice in who you love was a major, major thing.”
Fifty years after British colonialism, ten years after military rule, Nigerians are free. Not economically free, not yet, and we see the effect of that lack of economic freedom in the kinds of crimes that are committed. But they are free in important ways. You can live where you want, associate with whom you want. You can sue people in court, gather to practice your religion, under the leadership of whichever holy man or charlatan you prefer, and you can marry and divorce as you please. This is a major thing. This is modernity, and to tell these stories, to give the protagonists of these losses even that little bit of attention, is to honor the fact that they are there, that their life goes on. It’s not depressing at all, just as reading the Brooklyn Eagle and New York Herald from a hundred years ago is not depressing, though just about the only mention of blacks was as protagonists in crime reports. The fact is: they were there. And fate arranged a small form of immortality for them in that crime report.
These pieces are generally not events of the kind that alter a nation’s course. They are not about movie stars or, with exceptions, famous politicians. They are about the small fates of ordinary people. The idea is not to show that Lagos, or Abuja, or Owerri, are worse than New York, or worse than Paris. Rather, it’s a modest goal: to show that what happens in the rest of the world happens in Nigeria too, with a little craziness all our own mixed in. In this odd sort of way, bad news is good news because these instances of bad news reveal a whole world of ongoing human experience that is often ignored or oversimplified.
