Cack-Handed Read online

  Dedication

  To my mum. Who else. This book is about me, but really about her.

  Epigraph

  The moment anyone tries to demean or degrade you in any way, you have to know how great you are. Nobody would bother to beat you down if you were not a threat.

  —CICELY TYSON

  Author’s Note

  When I was a kid, my mum would speak in proverbs. She had one for every occasion without fail. EVERY. SINGLE. OCCASION. A proverb was used to make a point, prove a point, illustrate a point, and sometimes didn’t seem to have a point, but Mum always had one ready to whip out like a Nigerian gunslinger. I could have sworn she made some of them up! Having grown up and discussed at length with other children of Africans, it seems that my siblings and I were not alone, and African parents all over the globe were bombarding their kids with these sayings. Looking back and deciphering these proverbs, there are some wise ones, some hilarious ones, and straight-up crazy ones. As an ode to all those African parents, each chapter of the book is headed by some of mine and my mum’s favorites.

  The definition of cack-handed is left-handed, which I am, and also clumsy and awkward, which I am. It also represents the unconventional track my life and career have taken.

  This is a book about following your dreams.

  It’s not one of those self-help ladi-dadi, anything is possible if you just believe, and eat nothing but almonds and kale–type books.

  This is a book about wanting something and going for it, despite how ridiculous, impossible, and stupid it sounds to other people.

  This book is about trying. Whether you succeed or not.

  You can judge at the end of the book whether or not you think I’ve succeeded, but you better believe I’ve given it a go. (Or given it a shot, for Americans who prefer everything to have a gun reference.)

  Enjoy.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  1.Man Is like Pepper—You Only Know Him When You’ve Ground Him

  2.Languages Differ, but Coughs Are the Same

  3.A Snake Can Only Give Birth to Long Things

  4.When the Laborer Is Praised, His Cutlass Begins to Cut More Keenly

  5.Going to Church Doesn’t Make You a Holy Person Any More Than Going to a Garage Makes You a Mechanic

  6.If You Are Eating with the Devil, You Must Use a Long Spoon

  7.It Is Not What You Are Called, but What You Answer To

  8.If You Sleep with an Itching Anus, You Will Definitely Wake Up with Your Hand Smelling

  9.Where You Fall, You Should Know that It Is God Who Pushed You

  10.Procrastination Is the Thief of Time

  11.The Same Sun That Melts Wax Also Hardens Clay

  12.Success Is 10 Percent Ability and 90 Percent Sweat

  13.However Hard a Lizard Does a Push-up, It Will Never Have an Alligator’s Chest

  14.Smooth Seas Do Not Make Skillful Sailors

  15.It Is When There Is a Stampede that a Person with Big Buttocks Knows that He Carries a Load

  16.Warm Water Never Forgets that It Was Once Cold

  17.A Bird That Flies off the Earth and Lands on an Anthill Is Still on the Ground

  18.Be a Mountain or Lean on One

  19.A Flea Can Trouble a Lion More Than a Lion Can Trouble a Flea

  20.If You Are Building a House and a Nail Breaks, Do You Stop Building or Do You Change the Nail?

  21.Just Because a Man Is Short, It Does Not Make Him a Child

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Man Is like Pepper—You Only Know Him When You’ve Ground Him

  My grandmother Patience Ebuwa Obaseki died under suspicious circumstances. My mother believes that her father’s other wives finally succeeded in getting rid of her, by poisoning her food. When she died, she had a large mysterious mark on her throat, from either the poison or the injuries sustained during the poisoning.

  I don’t know much about her, and I never saw her, not even in a picture, but my mother tells me that she was a lively and humorous character, and when my mother was a little girl in Nigeria, she would entertain my mother with vividly funny stories and made-up songs. My grandmother was the mother of six children and the first of several wives of a wealthy chief and businessman, Samson Okankan Obaseki, in Benin City, in southern Nigeria. My grandfather was a member of a family that had links to the ruling echelons of the Benin Empire.

  Polygamy was widely practiced in Nigeria before British Christian missionaries came along and told them that the shit was barbaric and sinful. It didn’t dawn on or even seem to matter to the missionaries that polygamy was about survival—more wives meant more on your team! The wealthier a man was, the bigger the compound he could own and the more wives he could take care of. Many wives meant many children, and in Nigeria, having many children is highly respected and greatly envied. Kind of like in the US, where the bigger the garage, the more cars you put in it. My grandfather was the Nigerian Jay Leno. And for many of his wives, depending on how many sons they produced, this also meant more power.

  My mother had thirteen brothers and sisters from the other wives of her father, but her mother was the first wife and had produced the most children, which made her the most powerful within the compound among the other wives. It also made her a target.

  My grandmother actually gave birth to ten children, but mysteriously, all five boys she birthed died before they were three from mysterious illnesses, and one, even, to a dog attack. This prompted my grandmother to believe that the other, less-favored wives of her husband were practicing juju on her to undermine her standing, by casting spells and killing all her male children, which in Nigerian society, as well as the rest of patriarchy, is the more desired gender. As a result of this, my mother, Grace Nekpen-Nekpen Obaseki—the first of the surviving girls—had five younger sisters born from her mother but no living brothers.

  Despite my grandmother’s lack of living male children, my grandfather still adored his first wife and their girl children, and my mother was his favorite. My mother showed a keen intelligence from early childhood, and in an era when daughters were often not educated and only groomed for wifedom and motherhood, she was sent to the best private and convent boarding schools, and she traveled with her dad on many of his business trips abroad. My mum thrived in school and her further studies, qualifying as an English teacher by the time she was twenty and becoming an assistant school principal by age twenty-four. Her mother became afraid that she, as the favorite and most accomplished child of her father, would also be a target of the other wives, as had been her sons, so she begged my grandfather to send my mum out of Nigeria, to further her studies in England and get her away from the jealous other wives. Eventually, after my grandmother’s death, my distraught grandfather sent Mum to London and told her never to return.

  You may not have heard of the Kingdom of Benin—not to be confused with the country Benin. However, if you’ve ever been to a museum anywhere in the world and seen any cool as hell Edo bronze sculptures and masks, then you have. To cut a long story short, Benin was a powerful forest kingdom within what is now Nigeria. The Edo people of the kingdom were ruled by an oba, whose ultimate power was basically his ability to determine life and death for those within the confines of his multiethnic empire. The area was rich in natural resources, and from the 1400s to the mid-1500s, the Edo traded with the Portuguese, who were the first Europeans to arrive there, and then the Dutch, swapping their rubber, palm oil, pepper, and ivory for copper and brass, which Edo artists cast into various elabo
rate works of art. Basically, the Kingdom of Benin was the real Wakanda. (If you don’t get this reference, then you have been truly living under a Jupiter-size rock.) The kingdom was an extremely advanced society, and Europeans described Benin City as one of the most beautiful and well-planned cities in the world.

  Don’t believe me? This is from The Guardian:

  In 1691, the Portuguese ship captain Lourenco Pinto observed: “Great Benin, where the king resides, is larger than Lisbon; all the streets run straight and as far as the eye can see. The houses are large, especially that of the king, which is richly decorated and has fine columns. The city is wealthy and industrious. It is so well governed that theft is unknown and the people live in such security that they have no doors to their houses.

  In contrast, London at the same time is described by Bruce Holsinger, professor of English at the University of Virginia, as being a city where “thievery, prostitution, murder, bribery and a thriving black market made the medieval city ripe for exploitation by those with a skill for the quick blade or picking a pocket.”1

  Most Westerners assume that it was Europeans who brought civilization to Africa and that Africans should be grateful, but in London, they were still throwing their piss out their windows and having sex in shit-filled alleys while the area now known as Nigeria had a thriving, advanced social network. This is true of many other civilizations throughout Africa and the world before European contact.

  The Edo, also called the Bini, are originally from what is now known as southern Nigeria. Benin City was the center of the Kingdom of Benin, which had its heyday from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Their territory is west of the Niger River and extends from the northern hills down to the swamps of the Niger Delta. The Edo people were very advanced and controlled most of the trade happening in this area. The Brits wanted a piece of this action, but the oba put certain restrictions on what the Edo were or were not allowed to trade. The Brits wanted to just take all the Edo people’s shit, using Benin’s wealth and resources to expand and enrich the British Empire. They tried to do a sneaky invasion of Benin in 1896, but they had their asses handed to them by the Edo warriors. The Brits got their revenge a year later, returning to Benin with a huge army to undertake one of their infamous “punitive” expeditions—capturing the oba, exiling him, and then burning Benin City to the ground. The Brits looted all of the bronze, ivory, and other artifacts, and loaded it up on their warships to take back to London, selling it to British and European museums. The money raised through the sale of these precious goods helped pay for the looting army. Ahhh, the circle of life . . . A recent Guardian article declared the “British museum is the world’s largest receiver of stolen goods.”2

  If only the Edo people had had vibranium (another Black Panther reference for the ignorant amongst you) . . . The Brits continued their stranglehold on Nigeria through slavery and colonialism, as did other European countries throughout Africa, eventually slicing up the continent and sharing it amongst themselves like a huge pie. My parents are descendants of those proud Edo people.

  Love, like rain, does not choose the grass on which it falls.

  It was in England that my mum met my dad, who was also from Benin City. She went all the way to London to meet the boy next door. From the 1950s through the 1970s, England was not the most welcoming place for Black people, in that it wasn’t welcoming at all. As well as the Nigerian influx, due to the Brits’ aforementioned meddling in Nigerian geographical boundaries, there was an influx of East Indians, for pretty much the same reasons. This was coupled with the fact that the British government had invited a ton of people from the Caribbean, which was part of the Commonwealth—or should I say, from their former plantations—to help rebuild the country after World War II, to do a lot of the jobs that white English people didn’t want to do, like nursing, driving buses, and sorting and delivering the mail. The problem was that the British hadn’t really prepared the English natives for this influx of color, the actual results of British colonialism.

  It was like a father left his family, started another elsewhere, then suddenly brought all his new kids home to live with his original family, to help with the housework and share the resources. Instead of him starting a family elsewhere, a closer analogy would be more like he went to another country, tied up a bunch of women in a basement, and then brought over the resulting offspring. The image of England of the ’50s and ’60s was all bowler hats, canes, tea and crumpets, the genteel cry of “Tally-ho!” It was also a time when people had no problem with posting signs on their doors that said, NO BLACKS, NO DOGS, NO IRISH, so, unsurprisingly, adequate accommodations were hard to come by, even when you had more than sufficient means, as my mum did.

  This is why a lot of the neighborhoods Black people found themselves living in—raising their families, working, creating additional markets (as my mum did by selling African goods)—didn’t have the best living conditions. Notting Hill and Brixton were such neighborhoods, and that explains why Black people hated the movie Notting Hill. Who would have known, watching that film, that it was once a Black area and the location of one of England’s worst race riots? Or that from the ’50s to the ’70s its houses were managed by slumlords? It was one of the few places in London where Black people were able to rent rooms, due to the xenophobia and suspicion Brits had for us. Black people stayed regardless, made the area cool, and started a yearly Notting Hill street carnival (similar to New York’s Labor Day Parade) that put London on the map, but then they were driven out by gentrification, so by the time the movie came out, Hugh Grant was the face of the area, and the only Black person with a speaking part was a security guard. That would have been like shooting a remake of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing but with Radio Raheem played by Justin Timberlake.

  There was a small, thriving Nigerian social scene in London in the ’60s, and that is where my mum and dad met. There were many Nigerians studying in the UK, as a result of the British interference in Nigeria, and the fact Nigerians had been taught that the British education system was superior to their own.

  To cut a long story short, after slavery was outlawed in England, the Brits colonized Nigeria in order to keep control of both its resources and its people. They decided to teach Nigerian children to read (in English), write, and do arithmetic. Sounds very generous of them. They convinced Nigerians that this was a superior style of learning to their current system of orally passing down to the younger generation skills that benefited the community as a whole, such as farming, fishing, traditional medicine, and blacksmithing. Kids were taken from their families and put in boarding schools to be fully immersed in the Western values system. Nothing wrong with a bit of literacy and maths, I hear you thinking. But in so doing, the Brits convinced Nigerian families to place more importance on individual enrichment via examinations, rankings, and performance statistics than on traditional cultural upbringing. Basically, they swapped out community spirit for good old individualistic capitalism.

  When Nigeria finally gained independence from the Brits in 1960, the country was left in some disarray due to tribal conflicts, for the most part caused by the arbitrary borders the Brits had drawn up, and because the Brits had installed puppet leaders to continue managing their colonial interests, even though they were supposed to have withdrawn. This led to various coups and infighting. After an initial economic boom due to how much oil and natural resources Nigeria had, a mixture of mismanagement, corruption, and greed among some top members of government led to a recession, a devaluation of Nigeria’s currency, and massive unemployment. The government’s inability to afford the high wages of its civil servants and teachers led to strikes and a general collapse of Nigerian infrastructure, including the education system. Nigerians who could afford to focused on getting their children educated outside the country, in order to give them a better chance of gainful employment later.

  Cue Mum and Dad ending up in Europe to study.

  My dad, Yusuf Kumbi Iyasere, came from Niger
ia to study for his master’s degree in Prague, capital of what was then Czechoslovakia, in central Europe. (Side note: you might have noticed my dad’s last name has no h. The s is pronounced “ssh,” but apparently Europeans couldn’t get their heads round that, so my dad added an h to appease them. Either that or my parents told me that story to cover the evidence of a mistake on my birth certificate. I would later drop the I when embarking on my comedy career because it’s essentially silent and people kept mispronouncing my name as “Ayesha.” I’m the only person in the family to spell my name Y-a-s-h-e-r-e.) Like my mother, Dad came from a well-connected Benin City family. His brother lived in South London with a friend, who was my mum’s distant cousin. One day when my dad visited his brother, my mum’s cousin suggested they all go over to visit my mum in North London. Mum was quite eligible at the time, with her background and accomplishments; there were many men interested in her, including my father’s brother.

  When the men arrived in North London, my mother invited them in for tea. They sat and chatted—probably about the goings-on in Nigeria, the challenges of immigrant living, probably with Elvis or Jim Reeves playing in the background, because for some reason Africans loved those white crooners. After it got late, the men left for the long Tube ride back to South London, after which my father told the other two men that he was going to pop out for a cigarette. But that’s not what he did. He hopped right back on the Tube and took that hour-long journey all the way back to North London. He found a phone box near my mum’s house and dialed her number, which he had memorized while visiting earlier by making sure he sat next to the phone labeled with its number (as they were in the olden days).

  My mum answered, “Hello?”

  “Do you know who this is? I was sitting in your house not long ago.”

  “Why are you calling me?”