Black White: Memoirs of a Nigerian Studying for a Master’s Degree in the United Kingdom.

By Mark Anaki

Black White describes a young man’s pursuit of higher education overseas. A journey that leads him from his homestead in Western Nigeria to the United Kingdom. It chronicles culture conflicts, internal dialogues and personal discoveries. As the title may suggest, Black White is not so much about racial tension but about the contrasts a young man observes as he transitions from one world to another. It is about how his identity is formed, altered and reformed by the socio-cultural currents around him. It is about how his concept of learning and education changes as he leaves one society for the other and how his blackness (an earlier unknown concept) often turned up the most unexpected twists. Black White is a personal story of aspiration, conflict and gradual enlightenment. It is a catalogue of the many dimensions of being a privileged man in a black and white world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Dec 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781481776165

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© 2021 Mark Anaki. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  12/18/2020

ISBN: 978-1-4817-7615-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-7616-5 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are

models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the Holy Bible,

King James Version (Authorized Version). First published

in 1611. Quoted from the KJV Classic Reference Bible,

Copyright © 1983 by The Zondervan Corporation.

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addresses or links contained in this book may have changed

since publication and may no longer be valid. The views

expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do

not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the

publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

ONDO

Prologue

PART 1

LAGOS

The Journey

LONDON

Terra firma

MANNITAWIW

First Impressions

Induction

Meet George

Saturday

Finding Gold

First Week

Owambe

PART 2

DURBAR

Heavily Laden

Pelican Clutch in Mannitawiw

Gatecrashers

Loneliness

In Search of God

Flu

Halloween

Soorenstaad

First Tests

LONDON

Lions and Spending Cuts

Caught!

Audrey

Oohs and Ahs!

Dwindling Resources

Christmas without the Mass

Christmas

LEEDS

Old Friends

PART 3

MANNITAWIW

New Year

Since 1832

Moody Cow

Work

Newcastle upon Tyne

Tests

PART 4

FRANCE

Late Again!

Following ‘Sortie’ – the Way Out

See Paris

Tu Parles Francais?

Food for the Soul

Of Black Skins and White Masks

MANNITAWIW

Penniless!

The Evening and the Morning

Dying minutes

Shedding Weight

LAGOS

Epilogue

ONDO

Prologue

There is a tree in Ondo Town from which the corpses of dogs hang in various stages of decay. This tree grows on a mound enclosed by a wall covered with ritual objects and the decades-old congealed blood of sacrificial beasts. Their hind legs are held in place by ropes and their eyeless skulls peer soullessly to the ground just inches above the blood-blackened earth. It is a reminder of the annual festival in honour of Ogun—the god of Iron.

I grew up in this place and attended these festivals with my childhood friends. I walked great distances from our flat on Oke-ayo Street to the very ends of this ancient town. To the old Anglican church where I spent a great deal of time learning religion, finding my gifts and making friends. To old secondary schools where I attended extramural classes with Ghanaian teachers. And the many aimless wanderings I engaged in across backyards, through markets, in-between streets, down earth roads and often through the corridors of face-me-I-face-you houses that doubled as public thoroughfare.

I grew up with two younger brothers and my mother—who had separated from my father when I was about 6 years of age. We lived in a modest apartment on the first floor of an old building that had aged with us and we had lots of love and books to replace the many other things we never had. It is in this town, in a cybercafe of a newly built hotel (at the time) that this story begins.

It was 2006; I was fresh out of architecture school and I was eagerly looking forward to the next phase of life, which was participation in the compulsory National service and the much-dreaded phase of employment and starting life as an adult. Most of my colleagues were returning to continue their education by studying for a Master’s degree in Architecture from the same institution. I had decided to not proceed with the postgraduate degree largely because I still wasn’t convinced it was the next logical step to take. I liked architecture, but it still wasn’t clear to me what I was supposed to achieve with it–there was yet too much uncertainty than spending another two years of my life throwing dice. There was also the gradual realization of the reality of the Nigerian employment market. As fresh graduates, we had heard that the oil companies and consulting firms paid the most—salaries that were significantly higher than other industries in the country. So a lot of graduates, regardless of their degrees, refracted their career paths by taking professional examinations to increase their potential of being absorbed into these companies. Most others winged it, took what they found or became entrepreneurs—a clichéd term that defined everyone from the idle job seeker constantly dreaming up fantastic schemes that would make billions of dollars; to those who had long ditched their degrees because of a lack of demand for it in an insanely narrow job market that appeared to only cater to doctors, lawyers and accountants.

So, everyone tried to squeeze into the 1% of very well-paid employees by studying the market and equipping themselves with what it took to fall into that demographic. One of those avenues was to get an overseas degree. It was common knowledge that the employment market had a bias for foreign-trained graduates and the remuneration for job skills also reflected this bias. From school, we had heard many stories of how expatriates earned significantly higher salaries than that of their Nigerian contemporaries despite having similar portfolios. So most graduates, who had the means, sought the logical next step of increasing their earning potential by bagging a post-graduate degree overseas. Those who didn’t have the wherewithal to fund these overseas degrees became creative in seeking admissions from the most obscure universities from the most obscure places in the world. As long as the school had a coat of arms with two griffins standing on either side of a shield with a ribbon below them that bore a Latin phrase, then all would be well. Others who didn’t have the luxury of the first two categories of Nigerian graduates but who felt bright enough, applied to the Nigeria Petroleum Development Fund or trolled the websites of Chevening, USAID, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and just about any other organisation that extended aid in the form of scholarships to the best and brightest of Nigerian students and applied to as many of them as they could. It was a game of darts and the more darts they threw at this destiny board, the more their likelihood of hitting a bull’s eye.

I belonged to this very last group of people. My parents, who were mid-level civil servants, didn’t have the financial muscle to pay $20,000 in tuition fees. However, I had been the award-winning type from my early school days so I reasoned that what I lacked in parental financial support, I could make up in brains. By going head to head with the best and brightest, I could get a scholarship, study overseas and increase my worth in the fast shrinking Nigerian job market.

Every week, I would book some time at the cybercafe, sit down with groups of other boys who frequented the place, some of whom I had now come to identify. I would type Scholarship opportunities for Nigerian Students into an online search engine and follow the links. The cybercafe which was also a hub for yahoo boys was an attraction to the Police and the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency officials. So apart from the flash drive I carried with me at all times, which contained scans of my credentials, I also carried a copy of my expired university ID card and tried not to stay late into the night before returning home.

Over a period of 3 months, while I waited for my call up letter for the mandatory National Service, I sent out over 30 applications to universities and organisations that offered scholarships. For a while, I enjoyed getting the fancy, full colour print prospectuses of international universities in the mail. It was a physical evidence of the progress I was making. I also got several admission offers–some from universities as far as Japan and Australia. However, getting the admissions was the easy part because my grades were good and I had good references. The difficult part was how to pay the fees on the invoice that usually came with the offer since I had not been particularly successful with my scholarship applications. I think this exercise, for the first time, made me appreciate how dirt cheap education in Nigeria was. It had cost my parents an average of about $200 per session in tuition fees for a graduate programme in a Federal University.

After several rejections, I got my National Service posting letter to Lagos–the commercial capital of Nigeria, city of glitz and glamour and the most preferable location for most Nigerian graduates. In a country where most States had next to zero income outside government allocations to the civil service, going to Lagos meant being closer to the opportunities out there. As part of the overall strategy of gaining an advantage in a highly polarized job market, graduates, most times conniving with their parents, bribed authorities to get posted to Lagos. For me, I had to do nothing for it. It just came in the post. Just like that. So, with Lagos as my next destination, I put the admission letters and fancy prospectuses in a pile on our sagging bookshelf at home, packed my things and said my goodbyes. I would later travel to Lagos on a rickety space wagon, squeezed in with 4 other people on the back seat. This journey, which started at the Ore motor park in Ondo would take me far away from home but bring me much closer to my dream of one day becoming.

PART 1

LAGOS

The Journey

As I waited in line at the baggage check-in section of the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, prior to my flight out of Naija to start school in England, I reflected upon the fact that it was going to be my second time in a plane and my third trip outside the country of my birth. The first had been to Cotonou for a West Africa tour organized by a travel agency while I was studying for a diploma at the Shibad College of Technology, Lagos. The second had been to Niger Republic on an expedition. Over 40 of us who were winners of a keenly contested reality show had attempted to travel by road from Lagos to London on an expedition across the Sahara desert with the famed explorer Dr. Newton Jibunoh but had had our trip prematurely truncated because of a civil war in Niger Republic. Moving had always been a part of my life, but getting here had been a slow crawl.

My first flight had been two years earlier. I had made the shortlist of a Japanese University and had been invited to write their entry examinations in Abuja. At the time, I was working for a real estate development company in Lagos so I had to apply for leave to go on the trip. Up till that time, I had never been in a plane before. On a whim, I took a 1 hour flight instead of the 6 hour trip by bus I ordinarily would have opted for. It had been an uneventful trip despite being a first time experience. I strapped myself in, watched Lagos disappear till all there was to see were the wooly clouds and in another hour, watched Abuja appear through the fog-slowly ascending till the plane touched down.

When I finally arrived at the venue of the entry examination–a large stadium complex in the centre of Abuja, the good feeling of having made the shortlist all but faded. There were about a million of us that had been ‘shortlisted.’ Worse still we were all expected to have a basic understanding of the Japanese language because the examination questions, which were in written form, were in Japanese type. The latter came as a rude shock for most of us as the organizers stopped speaking English after a while and continued to issue verbal instructions in Japanese. I recall returning to Lagos angry at the resources I had wasted on the wild goose chase.

Four years earlier, I had arrived Lagos with only two carry-on bags, one in which I packed my clothes and personal items, the other in which I packed my credentials and some books. After alighting from the rickety space wagon that brought me from Ondo Town, I had gone straight to the makeshift paramilitary camp at Iyana Ipaja in Lagos to start the National Service year-a mandatory programme for all Nigerian graduates. At the camp, I spent three weeks having fun, getting to know many other people from other parts of Nigeria and taking part in as many camp activities as I reasonably could. On the final day of camp, I had followed a colleague from architecture school to his uncle’s house somewhere in Lagos and the morning after, sought a close cousin of mine to spend the weekend with while I sorted out my paperwork for our work posting. The National Service Office had posted me to a new generation bank, which was walking distance from my cousin’s house. I would stay on for another 4 years at that house.

After my National Service year elapsed, I became a permanent staff of the bank. In that same period, I made the final shortlist of the consulting firm KPMG—a tax, audit and financial advisory firm and met a real estate icon, whom I had the good graces of meeting straight out of school and had asked that I come work with him. I eventually took the job at the real estate firm and moved out of my cousin’s house into the staff accommodation provided for me while I worked there. In all this period, I had all but abandoned the idea of going to school again. Work was progressing, I was a development officer on a massive residential project for the firm and I was making money and had more liberty in the execution of my work than I had bargained for. Life was good. But I had been watching my mentor closely too. He wasn’t 50 yet, but he had risen up the ranks in the army, bagged a Ph.D. from a London University and had more achievements under his belt than he had epaulets on his shoulders. Watching him and strongly desiring to be like him made me revisit my old dreams of going further. So I applied yet again—this time to the same university he had attended in London in his time.

Two years later, I got a provisional admission at my mentor’s alma mater. The admissions office had graciously offered me a small rebate on my tuition fees. However, I still needed about £10,000 to make up the balance. To put £10,000 in context, it translated to about N2,500,000. My parents combined annual salary was N2,760,000 and though I had started working and earning my upkeep, I hadn’t worked long enough to have any serious savings from my N128,000 per month salary. Despite these challenges, I looked for other avenues to finance this new opportunity that had opened up to me. I approached my firm for financial support but they didn’t have any policies for sponsoring employees. I later applied for an education loan from one of the local Nigerian banks. The terms required me to pay back the loan with a 22% interest rate within the one year I would spend studying overseas. It also required that I provide a guarantor who would pledge land or property in designated choice locations in Nigeria as collateral. By the time the bank officer was through with explaining the terms and conditions, it was clear that the loan would never become reality. If I could meet those terms, I wouldn’t be in their bank asking for a loan. The admission letter became a feature in the one room staff apartment I occupied. I put it up as a motivation to keep me going, optimistic that somehow I’d find a way.

I never did.

After exhausting my options, I started emailing the university’s admissions office every other week to grant me a full scholarship. This time, it wasn’t from an old computer in a stuffy room full of rowdy boys; it was from my work computer in my firm’s comfortable office in Lekki, Lagos. Yet, I was no nearer to achieving my dream than I had been two years back. After weeks of what might have appeared to the admission office as a nuisance, they stopped replying and my emails stopped getting delivered.

They had blocked me.

One day, while working at my desk, a colleague who had recently joined the firm came to show me an advertisement in the newspaper by the British Liege Office in Nigeria for a call for ideas competition she thought might interest me.

You speak a lot of grammar during meetings, this looks like your sort of thing. She had told me as she dropped the publication on my desk and walked off to her corner of the open floor office we shared.

The competition was an ideation challenge for change in the Nigeria’s education system and nothing excited me more than the thought of contributing to something that had the potential to bring change to my home country. Growing up in Ondo town, having read all the books we had in our little flat by the time I was fourteen, I had formed a strong sense of identity of the world and my place in it. I had voraciously devoured books that ranged widely in theme from local history published in Yoruba language to western history. Including the over 3-decades worth of Jehovah’s Witness Awake publications my mother had inherited after my maternal grandfather passed on.

Spending my formative years in a little town, away from the tinsel and glitz of the more metropolitan cities like Lagos also played a part in my acculturation. It had given me the opportunity to see the different worlds at the opposite ends of the social spectrum that defined my identity. The boy who had sang Yoruba hymns in Anglican choirs in my old family church had now become the young man that drove a brand new company car and sat at meetings with property developers from Israel who owned football clubs. I spoke decent English at meetings where everyone wore freshly laundered suits and pocket squares. I spoke Yoruba to friends and family and code switched to Pidgin English at my neighbourhood store or the builders markets where part of my job designation required negotiating huge discounts. I wasn’t just one person—I had become many people relating across cultures I had come to own—switching from one persona to the other as easily as a chameleon would change the colour of its coat. And I could relate to the many problems of this flawed society I called mine. So an ideation challenge that called to fore some of the challenges I had observed and experienced was a welcome opportunity to plumb my intellect and add my voice to the clamour for change. The only difference was that this time it wasn’t just beer parlour banter. I now had a global platform and a listening audience.

The challenge I entered for was finding a solution to the problem of child illiteracy in Nigeria and recommending a strategy to educate the highest number of children possible in the shortest time span. My idea was to take school to children by creating ready-to-go curriculums that instructors could teach to any gathering of children anywhere in the country—not necessarily within the confined walls of a formal school. I proposed that we should adapt places of worship, community meeting points, individual homes and other social watering holes for implementing this strategy; and community and charity effort should drive the initiative rather than government agencies or political organisations. It took all my word wizardry to squeeze in the deluge of ideas in my head into 750 words.

That idea would later get shortlisted. The faces of the authors of the winning entries, mine inclusive, would later get widely publicized in all the prominent newspapers in the country. My parents would later bask in the glory of their son making the dailies for good reason. I would then go head-to-head with some of the brightest and best young men and women I have met to date and emerge as one of the winners, winning the grand prize of a full scholarship to study in any of 5 universities in the United Kingdom that had sponsored the awards through the British Liege office in Nigeria. I would later choose the Mannitawiw City University—the only one of the sponsoring universities that offered a course in Real Estate - and the university would cover the cost of my tuition, accommodation and upkeep. Virgin Atlantic, also one of the sponsors, would fly me to and from the UK at no personal cost.

As the hum of humanity, punctuated by boarding calls and announcements continued at the airport I watched my mother and Folahanmi, my girlfriend of 8 years pass time in their own way as they talked excitedly. I was in a happy place but I also felt an overwhelming sense of apprehension, the type that preceded many great expectations. After winning the competition, I had quit my job to travel on a two-week televised expedition into the Sahara to bring to the world’s notice the evils of deforestations and how it crept more and more inland over the decades. On my return, I had moved back into my cousin’s apartment and spent the next six months publishing my first book titled, On a Lot of Things and watching tons of films. Now, here I was, holding a Virgin