Chibok was turning point, and Africa is still stuck there

Once upon a time, news from the Middle East shocked the world with two words: suicide bomb. The phenomenon took hold, but it was something Nigerians didn’t want to think about. Nigerians were sturdy, were not emotionally broken, could never consider a thing as becoming a suicide bomber. Then came the “underwear bomber”-and it shook […]

Once upon a time, news from the Middle East shocked the world with two words: suicide bomb. The phenomenon took hold, but it was something Nigerians didn’t want to think about.

Nigerians were sturdy, were not emotionally broken, could never consider a thing as becoming a suicide bomber. Then came the “underwear bomber”-and it shook the national psyche.

It was unthinkable. The 23-year-old Umar Abdulmutallab must have been brainwashed during his time getting education in the West. Strapping a bomb to your chest, your pants, anything was un-Nigerian, un-African.

Since then, it has taken nearly a decade of insurgency-turned-terrorism, to shake that table. Suicide bombing is a core Boko Haram strategy-and there have been hundreds.

To explain it better, many haven’t been suicide bombers. Many have been used as human bombs – unwilling boys and girls strapped with bombs and thrust into crowds while a handler palms the detonation device.

While this fledgling debate zips around Nigeria, it has hardly taken a step outside the country. In fact, no one even knows about it. And it comes down to how media-at national and international level-handles what the world reads, watches and listens to.

It turns out the world is watching, but Africa isn’t. South Africa proved it. I didn’t set out to prove specifically that theory. It came by chance.

After two flights, I was in Johannesburg, picking my way through the city’s airport and scanning the display screens for my next flight. It was morning, and I had only 45 minutes to locate my gate. Whites, blacks and coloured rushed with an air of early-morning business toward the gates-and just stood, ignoring perfectly empty seats, waiting for gates that were yet to open.

That doesn’t happen in Nigeria, unless you were queuing up for voter cards or in a banking hall, but never with seats empty and the gates still locked.

Every other person clutched a cup of coffee on the go. Tiny corner shops lining the corridor steamed up with cups after cups of coffee orders.  There was a distinction between the clientele and the coffee servers, the servers and the owners, a difference that’s often a point of contention in the country.

I let go of that thought and was rewarded – after a 12-minute nap on a two-hour flight – by the wonders of nature; hills rolling happily along and morphing into tiny dots of concrete architecture, all struggling to tumble into the green expanse of the Algoa Bay. This is Port Elizabeth, a major seaport for South Africa, and stretches another 16km along the Algoa Bay.

Its description as a seaport brings to mind Apapa in Lagos. That’s all, no more. At least that’s what Fernando tells me. I didn’t know his name but he knew mine. He had a hand card waiting to receive me at the airport-and then drive nearly another two hours to Grahamstown.

Before I knew his name, I thought he looked Indian. Then I heard him speaking to someone on the phone. It wasn’t in English, and it wasn’t in Hindi. It was typically a South African language, but I was not sure which.

So I asked him outright. He told me his name. “Fernando.”

Still convinced some Indian blood was slushing around somewhere on some branch of his family tree, I asked if that was linked to the Portuguese influence in India. I was thinking of Goa, that Portuguese colony that’s left India with 17th century churches and names like Fernandez.

He said no. “My grandmother just really loved that Abba song.”

He broke into that Abba song and belted out a few rusty tunes that even a tone-deaf me could tell was going to end with “Fernando”.

“She named me Fernando because she really loved the song.”

He negotiated a bend that had us right on the highway. I told him how I had overcome my irrational fear of highways that are the opposite of Nigeria’s. South Africa’s right-hand drive cars and drive-on-the-left road nearly knocked me over the first time I encountered them, I told him. I had to grab my seat and close my ears every time someone was coming in the opposite direction. It always felt a collision was imminent and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

That’s only the tip of the iceberg of difference between us. The usual pleasantries came and went, to pass time, and we began to bore deep into the souls of the two most visible nations on the African continent.

As I arrived in late November, school was closing and Port Elizabeth was emptying out. So was Grahamstown, the home of Rhodes University.

So Fernando was doing a brisk turnover shuttling students from the university town to Port Elizabeth to catch flights out of the city. When I was at university, students didn’t do that, I said. He told me these were rich students, and not even South Africans, but the rich of Zambia, Ghana, Egypt, all around continent getting an education in South Africa.

Rhodes University nearly occupies all of Grahamstown. A sign upon entry declares “Settlers 1806”. I wonder if it means 1806 settlers started the town. Fernando tells me the town started in 1806. It is nicknamed “Oxford in the Bush”, modelled as it is after the city of Oxford. The high street is actually named High Street. Hotels, banks, courts line the street. Only a sidewalk separates them from the tarred road. It feels so old England, typically Dickensian-era England. It was so Dickensian, I expected to see Oliver skipping down the street.

And it was in the weather too. When I entered Grahamstown, it was dry and windy; minutes later, after I was done registering for  a solutions-journalism class at Rhodes University, it was drizzling; by lunch time, it got sunny; minutes later, the sun hid its face and was replaced by wind, cold, and that autumn feel as jacaranda trees shed their flowers onto sidewalks – unpredictable as typical English weather. Locals describe it as “four seasons in a day”.

I knew so much, I brimmed with facts about the town, which was why Siyabonga shocked the bejesus out of me with his total and typical ignorance of things Nigerian.

“What’s the biggest thing happening in Nigeria?” he asked sweetly. Siyabonga worked in a hotel, with cable TV constantly on the CNNs and BBCs. Didn’t he watch the news?

Two other Nigerians stood with me on the high street. “Boko Haram,” said one. Siyabonga didn’t get it, and they took pains to explain away his ignorance. The bombings, the attacks, the shootings, the raids, the reprisals were fodder for daily news headlines. No news day was complete without a dose lately.

Siyabonga didn’t, couldn’t get it. “The media here doesn’t show such things. Nobody knows about them. We don’t see them,” he stressed. “The last time I heard about Boko Haram was when the Chibok girls were taken.”

That was in 2014 – a good five years ago. I’m still scraping my jaw off High Street.