Free Africa39 by Wole Soyinka

biggest shoal of orange fish I’d ever seen. A sofa welcomed my body and my eyes fixed on the fish tank, finding a certain peace. And I spent six years there. My life has always been like that, I get shipwrecked, then the tide carries me to a beach and to safety. I spend a few days, or years there, then I get shipwrecked again. When my Catalan swapped me for another woman – who was a lot less pretty but a lot more cheerful, the little bitch – I was shipwrecked again, and I fled again.
    I thought I’d found you on a Greek island, but it wasn’t you. And then I came here and saw people in a much worse state than me, I found some perspective. And I lost my expectations. Just like that.
    Folks here don’t bother much with expectations either. The average lifespan is so short that they have children as teenagers and are old by the time they’re thirty. They don’t use coffins and each grave serves for two or three, stacked up. They are buried in their clothes.
    I often think, too, about how short my time on this planet will be. But do you know what? There’s a force, some kind of force that pushes me along, pulls me out of bed in the morning, dresses me and compels me to try and save these poor wretches.
    I went to the capital once. I didn’t like it. It seemed like the whole city was covered in a cloak of sleep. In parks, in cinema aisles, behind the barred windows, the homeless and the middle classes, little old men and young girls, teachers and businessmen: they were all half-asleep. In air-conditioned offices, not even a fly buzzed. The city had been besieged for longer than anyone could remember, and outside, those still surrounding it blinked in confusion. They didn’t feel angry any more, they no longer craved blood. The languid air seemed to be fading the green of the trees, and very slowly withering the general’s moustache to the point that he no longer seemed terrifying.
    There was a certain spirit, drab, washed-out, neither black nor white nor any colour at all. It felt like a landscape-poem, an elegant melancholy sometimes, a lump in the throat, a knot in the stomach, a burning sensation in the eyes.
    But no one was alert enough to notice. I came straight back and never returned. It seems like the siege ended a long time ago but nothing changed. Me? I don’t cry, I don’t gesticulate, I don’t sing, I live, but not much. And the kindly breeze lifts the hair from my forehead and dries my sweat. I drag myself through the day and, with luck, I get to midday, with faith I get to midnight and the worst will have passed and the next day will dawn blank and white. But there are no colours, so the white will barely stand out against the hues that cover me from skin to pupil, inseparable, like nail and cuticle.
    Right, that’s enough for my first letter, I think. This is the life I’m leading, here in this place where I flung myself or where I washed up. Tell me about you too.
    Lots of love,
    From your Saladine
     
    Translated by Lucy Greaves

from the forthcoming novel Blackass
    A. Igoni Barrett
    Why Radio DJs Are Superstars in Lagos
    At Ikoyi passport office, Syreeta waited in the Honda as Furo went in. When he returned minutes later with his new passport grasped in his hand, she reached out for it, and after reading the identification page, she handed it back and asked how come his surname was Nigerian. Furo’s answer:
    ‘I’ve already told you I’m Nigerian.’
    ‘But you’re white!’ exclaimed Syreeta.
    ‘So you mean I can’t be white and Nigerian?’
    ‘That’s not what I’m saying. I’m asking how it happened.’
    This question had been expected by Furo for some time, and over the long weekend he had thought through his answer. He’d considered saying he was mixed race with a Nigerian father and a white American mother, but while that explained his name and his black buttocks, it raised other questions, the most irksome being a white extended family and his lack of ties to the US embassy