Chapter 1

I Am More Like the Things I Dislike

Than the Things I Like

Wise people are careful in judging things, because they know that our judgment is what we become. Before I realized this, I, too, was a critical judge. As a child in Nigeria, my favorite subjects in school were history, religion, and geography. I’m not sure why I liked them, other than the fact that the textbooks had pictures of foreign people and places I had never seen or heard of before. The other subjects felt like a waste of time, and I would guess it’s because they did not focus on people. I found them abstract and unrealistic.

Rather than paying attention during my classes, I spent hours staring out the classroom window, absorbed by the traffic flow along Zik’s Avenue in Onitsha, which makes the traffic around Arc de Triomphe in Paris seem like organized chaos. Zik’s Avenue was an endless queue of diesel-powered trucks and buses zigzagging their way along the avenue at a snail’s pace, each one belching clouds of thick black fumes into the atmosphere, a sight that would make most Western environmentalists convulse in disgust. Meandering between the trucks and busses were smaller cars, motorcycles, bicycles, hand-drawn carts, pedestrians, flocks of goats and sheep, wandering pigs, stray dogs, cats, and free-roaming chickens.

Fender-bender accidents were not uncommon because most of the trucks and buses did not have functional brake lights and the vehicles traveling in front were often hidden in the cloud of black exhaust fumes, so the driver behind did not always realize when the vehicle in front had stopped. Cars and big vehicles alike swerved from one side of the road to the other, trying to avoid the countless treacherous potholes that were deep enough to swallow half the diameter of a wheel on a vehicle, trapping the vehicle until it was pushed out of the hole for a fee by an army of unemployed day laborers and muscle-bound hand-cart pushers who waited for these opportunities to make an extra penny.

Looking out the school window I might see two vehicles trying to avoid the same pothole ending up on the same side of the road, with neither willing to give way to the other. Traffic would be backed up for half a mile on both ends of the avenue. The drivers would jump out of their vehicles, shouting, flailing their arms, and often ending in fisticuffs. The pedestrians and other stranded drivers would form a circle around the dueling drivers, some egging them on toward an entertaining fight. Although there were no mobile phones at the time, somehow the police would get word of the commotion and make their way to the scene on foot.

Zik’s Avenue Seen from My Classroom.

When the police arrived, the crowd would melt away, since no one wanted to be summoned to the police station as a witness. The police would break up the fight and force the drivers to move their vehicles from the road so traffic flow could resume. Then they would take the two drivers to a corner, away from the prying eyes of passersby, and shake them down for bribes. The driver that offered the most money would be set free, and the one with little or no money for a bribe would be hauled off by the seat of his pants to the nearest detention center.

I would spend hours absorbing this drama or I would look at the pictures in my history and geography textbooks and wonder what life was like in the strange places depicted on their pages. When we studied the European explorers such as Columbus, Magellan, Vasco da Gama, Francis Drake, I would look at the pictures of these strangely dressed men aboard ships on the high seas and wonder why there were no women, children, or old people with them. I wanted to ask the teacher, but I dared not because I was not sure if it was a good question or a stupid one that would earn me punishment, such as a bop to the head with a cane, or a pinch and twist of the earlobe, followed by the comment, “Dumba$$!”

I couldn’t understand how these men could leave their families behind and wander off to a strange land. What were they looking for? As a child I thought a man’s family was the most important thing to him. I could not bear the thought of my dad leaving us behind to venture off and discover a new land. What would he do there? Who would take care of us in his absence? Who would be there to protect and comfort my mum? Grandma would be heartbroken that her only son would not be there to see her through her last days. I was fascinated by the explorers, but at the same time I was appalled by their lifestyle. I swore I would never be anything like them. Years later I read other literature and historical accounts of life on the high seas and began to understand why it was not a place for women, children, or the elderly. 

At that time I did not know the difference between a pirate, a privateer, an explorer, or a conquistador. To tell the truth, I’m not sure I know the difference now; it all depends on who you ask. I remember browsing through a history book at the Onitsha Municipal Library about pirates. I was drawn to a page with the picture of a flamboyant character named Henry Morgan. He wore a brightly colored long coat which at the time looked like a dress to me, and I wondered, “How can a man look so proud wearing a dress?” The men behind him were quite a spectacle. They had pistols and knives tucked into their waistbands, they wore earrings and long hair that was kept in place with a bandana. The entire crew looked tough and self-assured, but they did not look happy, and I could not understand why these tough men dressed like women. They wore dresses, earrings, long hair and headscarves like my mum. I assured myself that I would never live the life of these men, nor dress like them.

About thirty years later I was living in Naples, Florida. I was a tennis director at a beach club. One evening, after a long day on the tennis courts, I was ready to ride home on my bicycle, but I decided to sit for a moment and rest my aching knees that were inflamed from tendonitis and arthritis before setting out for home. I slumped into a wicker chair in the pro shop to relax. Earlier that day one of my members had given me a picture she took of me with her adorable children. I pulled the picture out of the envelope and looked at it.

At first, the picture gave me a sense of pride because I had bonded with these children. It was fulfilling to watch them year after year progress in their tennis skills and physical growth as well. But all of a sudden I became cynical. I thought, “Okay, another addition to the collection of many pictures of my students and me that I stash away in a shoe box somewhere in my closet. In five to six years these kids would grow beyond recognition, life would go on, and I would wait to pose again for another picture with a new set of students that are not born yet.” Something about that thought made me reflect about life, particularly my own life. “I was once a kid like them, and I moved on with life, but what have I moved on to?” I stared at the picture again, not looking for anything in particular. Then an image caught my attention. It was the logo patch on the right chest of my tennis shirt, an image of a pirate.

Students and Teacher:

I remembered my fascination and disdain for these characters as a child, and now I found myself working at a place that had a pirate as its symbol, in a club named after a famous den of pirates in Jamaica, Port Royal, where the infamous Henry Morgan lived and died.

What else?

I recalled how I felt about the lifestyle of pirates as a child, and how I swore never to live like them. To my dismay, I realized my life had turned out more like theirs than I could have ever imagined. I was almost forty years old, and I lived in a foreign land thousands of miles away from my family. As a child I believed that having a family of your own was a very important task every man should accomplish, but here I was, with no wife, no children. In some ways I even looked like a pirate because I had long hair that I kept in place with a bandana. I had unkempt fingernails and a scruffy beard because I did not shave the day the picture was taken. What hit me the hardest was when I reflected on the fact that I had left my family and wandered off to a foreign land, just like I had hoped and prayed my dad would never do. I was not there for my dad when he took his last breath. I had become everything I swore I would never be.

Before this moment I had questioned and searched for the meaning of life, but this incident provided me with an essential insight. I was humbled when I realized I had become many things that I never thought I would become. As a child I dreaded going to school or church because I was terrified of many teachers and church wardens. They did not show much empathy. After I completed the graduate program at Virginia Tech, I swore I will have nothing to do with school for the rest of my life. Well, today I work at a school in Sweden as a philosophy teacher and vision director. I have since learned that my life was no different from the life of the people that I had judged; the teachers, preachers, pirates, priests, politicians, prostitutes. My humility made me a bit wiser as it...