didn’t get down to the Nigeria region, but he wasn’t too far away. The difference between his West Africa and what we see today is incalculable. This may be obvious, but its very obviousness makes it easy to forget. Yet it is the necessary background to any assessment of Nigeria. Nigeria is rich now, with its oil. But modern Nigeria is new; it is only about eight or ten generations old; and some of the most gifted Nigerians carry this burden of newness.
I had been given an introduction to Edun. He was a handsome, athletic man of fifty, and an investment banker. I felt it was still a source of wonder to him how he had become what he was. The world was new for him. In this new world he saw everything as possible for him, and his patriotism, of an entirely new sort, took the form of wishing people to understand their new possibilities.
He had been born in Manchester in England. So he was an immigrant, with the immigrant’s drive. It wasn’t something one associated with Africa. It was new. It wouldn’t have happened one hundred years before; the Africa of that period would have been close to the Africa of Mungo Park.
When Edun was three he, with an older brother, had been taken back to Africa by his parents. The brother died, and Edun had been taken back to England; this was how it happened that all his education had been in that country. His parents were passionate about education; it was something they had brought with them from Africa. Edun, as a child, felt that concern. “My mother said that if I had a good education I would not look back.” When Nigerian visitors came to the house they always asked the little boy what class he was in, and what his position was in the class. So Edun, growing up, found himself different from his West Indian friends, who gave up school without thought. Now these friends (descendants of the people Mungo Park saw being walked down to the coast) look at Edun and say, “Well, we dropped out, but you carried on.”
This, about West Indians, was strange to me. In Trinidad we had overcome some of the effects of history. We had a distinguished group of black professionals; their children reflected the confidence of their parents. We were able, without trouble, to distinguish these people from the general black population. Black and ordinary, black and distinguished: we carried the two ideas in our head, and it could even be said that their blackness added to the distinction of the distinguished. Perhaps this group had required time to grow; my feeling is that they began to come up fifty or sixty years after the abolition of slavery. The West Indian children in England (some of them descendants of the people Mungo Park saw being walked to the coast) didn’t have this professional background, this idea of what was possible; they stayed with old ways of thinking and behaving.
Early in his banking career, when he was working in an international bank in Washington, Edun had an illumination. It was very simple. A Nigerian friend said to him during a general conversation, “I want to own my own bank one day.”
Edun at that stage could imagine a cook wanting to own a catering firm, or an artisan wanting his own workshop, or a driver wanting to have a car-hire business. But a bank! In fact, it was already possible for a Nigerian to own a bank; the formalities were not insuperable. Very quickly, as I heard from someone else, there were 126 private banks in Nigeria. Most were simple deposit-takers, but many of them went on to develop proper banking skills; today, after regulation, there are twenty-five Nigerian banks. Edun’s friend now owns a bank. Edun himself started his own bank, with a friend; that bank was later merged with an important South African bank; its branches can be seen in many African countries.
Edun said, “This is the mindset here. I did not have it as I was brought up and educated outside the country, but I soon picked it up. People often say to each other, ‘You can be anything here. You can reach any height.’ And this mindset is our great strength.”
But Edun, growing up in England, was spared the other side of the Nigerian mindset, the side that fell down a deep well into ancient beliefs and magic, the side that resisted rationality.
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THE CONTRACTOR