To My One Love

Lagos in June is steamy. But that Thursday afternoon at the Champion newspaper office, I did not notice how the air was like a hot, moist blanket. I swaggered and smiled, too full of accomplishment. I had just had a collection of watery poetry published by a vanity press in London. I was doing my first newspaper interview. I was 19 years old.

Kate, the woman who interviewed me, was squat, friendly, and full of praise for the poems (although she had not read them). After the questions, she told me I was a role model for young Nigerians. I glowed. She took me downstairs to have my picture taken in a wide room that smelled of chemicals. Matte photographs were plastered on the wall. Most of them were of prominent people, but there were also beggars under bridges and children playing football and soldiers by the roadsides.

“They put up the best on the wall,” Kate said.

Later, as we left, I turned to glance again at the wall of photographs, and that was when I saw it, the photo of Nnamdi. I might have let out a sound, I might have only shivered, but Kate noticed and asked if something was wrong.

I pointed. “I knew him,” I said.

Kate shook her head. “Oh, sorry, sorry. It was an operation at the bank just across the road,” she said.

I remember the splashes of blood on Nnamdi’s face, his head slumped against the seat of the car; the blood was a deep gray in the black-and-white photo.

At my university secondary school in Nsukka, there were two groups of students. The staff group, which I belonged to, was made up of students whose parents were university lecturers, who lived on campus and had little money and spoke good English. The other group was the Omata. They came mostly from Onitsha and the name Omata somehow conjured the chaos of that large commercial town. Their parents were rich, illiterate traders; they lived in dormitories and often missed the first week of term. We mimicked their mixed-up English tenses, laughed at their poor grades, and mocked their bluster. And, secretly, we coveted what they had: the gold watches that we saw only on the wrists of adults, the gullibility of uneducated parents, the imported sandals that cost more than our families made in a month.

Nnamdi owned such sandals; his were a sparkly brown, almost orange, and had wedge heels. He was an archetype of the unrefined Omata student, down to his swaying-to-the-side strut. Nnamdi was in Form 4, a popular senior student, while I was in Form 2. Of course I found him terribly attractive.

It was his friends who called me at first to say, “Ima, Nnamdi really likes you.” I was noncommittal, tough because I was expected to be. Finally, he came himself. I wish I remembered the first day I talked to him, or what we said. I remember that he walked me home after school, though, and that he said very little. I knew him because he was the kind of student everybody knew, and I had always thought him to be larger than life, taller than life. But there he was, shy beside me, looking down as we walked.