Musa

by Nnamdi Ibeanusi

Apr 23, 2024

Notes on Living is a column of reflections on how we are co-creating this life. What keeps us? What feeds us? How do challenges move (through) us, individually and collectively? What has life shown us about itself? How are we finding belonging and making meaning/healing in all this?

Here, Nnamdi Ibeanusi, a software engineer, storyteller and aspiring professional filmmaker in Ontario, writes about a childhood friendship that still haunts him.

I did not grow up by the ocean, but I could always feel it near. It revealed itself in the faintly salty breeze that fanned us at night, in thick woolly clouds that blotted out the sun and caused the shrubs that lined our fence to stand out in a lucid lime green. Port Harcourt in 2006 was trips to the local DSTV to renew our subscription with the smart card tucked in father’s pocket like a holy relic and nights with my siblings crowded around a candle, telling each other scary stories about the witch who lived in the plantain trees in our backyard. Port Harcourt in 2006 was football practice on Saturdays with the Shell Under-10s team, hot afternoons with my siblings sprawled on the floor, wracked by the most intense longing as we scoured the toy sections in the thick Argos catalogues. Port Harcourt in 2006 was masked men with AK47s and bullets strung across their backs, taking their hostages deep into the creeks in the name of emancipation.

In 2006, Big Treat was the place in Port Harcourt. It was a shopping complex situated along Aba Road, the main vehicular artery that sliced through the city and from which numerous roads branched off. We spent evenings of our long vacation delighting in riding the elevator to the 2nd floor which hosted the well-stocked toy & book shop. There was a restaurant downstairs and a video game store with rows of video games stacked in neat columns in padlocked glass displays. My siblings and I looked forward to every visit because it was guaranteed to end with some snack or sweet treat. It was on one of these summer evenings that I met him.

My limited anthropological knowledge at the time summarised his appearance simply as ‘not Nigerian’. His hair was full and curly, somehow retaining a sheen despite the light bronzing of dust that perpetually coated it, nothing like mine which was always in a disciplined crewcut. He had a chipped tooth. He would have been my age when we met, maybe 1 or 2 years older, but it shames me now that I never asked his age. I do not remember the exact nature of our first interaction—what words were spoken, and who approached whom. He spoke only rudimentary English, his lexicon limited to “Please”, “Sah please” and “My friend”. Today, I would guess he came from Niger or Chad, crossing into Northern Nigeria and then making his way south for greener pastures. Every time I saw him, a wide smile split his face.

We fell into an easy friendship, or what I think was an easy friendship. I knew nothing about him. I saw his mother on occasion, and he had a younger sister with long plaited hair that reached down her back. She may have been my earliest crush. Whenever my parents took my siblings and me to Big Treat, there he would be, walking quickly after a patron or sitting on a cement block as his sister milled around him. On sighting my father’s dark blue Mercedes he’d rush over to wait by my door to greet me with “My friend!” Our friendship was limited to the 15 seconds it took to emerge from the car and walk into the building, and the 15 seconds it took to exit the building and walk to the car. The second time I saw him, I asked my parents to buy an extra snack for my new friend and they agreed. Getting an extra snack for him soon became routine, and it was my responsibility (and delight) to hand over the snack and whatever change my father could spare. I never told him my name. For the period I knew him, he referred to me exclusively as “My friend” even before we became friends. He told me his name the first time I gave him a snack. Musa.

I became aware of the schism that separated Musa and me one evening after I gave him a crumpled 20 naira note and meat pie. Musa held my hand and gave me a quick hug. On reaching home, my clothes were stripped and sent for immediate laundry and I was commanded to bathe. I never once noticed he had dirty clothes. Our parking lot friendship was rooted firmly in the locus of what I deemed our essential aspects: his bright smile as he welcomed me with “My friend!”, my handing over the snack we purchased for him and the money, my shy glances at his sister if she was in the vicinity. I had no notion that I would ever need to consider anything outside this tight sphere.

Musa’s clothes were dirty and, against my will, I began to notice. In time, the ease I described earlier curdled into lumpy shame. I was ashamed of the car we arrived in, and of the sandals that protected my feet from the dust that caked his. Likewise, the act of giving him the pastry assumed a terrible significance. It became a solemn exchange, and the feeling of mutual joy transformed into a dutiful extension of charity. I chafed when, after giving him his snack and chatting briefly about things I don’t remember, I turned to walk back to the car where my parents were waiting, suddenly aware that the path I naively thought we trod together had indeed diverged a long time ago. I was going back to a house where there was water running in the taps, and domestic staff to wash our clothes and drive us to school. While I received lessons on the conjugations of être with my classmates, Musa and his sister chased after respectable patrons and begged for alms to ensure the survival of their family. Every goodbye felt like a betrayal of self.

Because Musa could have been me. The callous accident of birth was not enough to draw a border between my personhood and his. And this sobering thought can be extended to other situations and areas of my life. I could have been Musa in the same way that I could have been the exuberant taxi driver who picked me up from the airport when I first arrived in Ireland and spoke about his wife for the entire journey to my campus, or the SARS officer with a large birthmark on his neck who asked me to alight from the bus and enter their van because I had a laptop in my bag. Only as I’ve gotten older have I been able to articulate what this recognition of shared humanity is, and how differently I know we can handle it. My parents could offer no satisfactory explanation to me on why Musa had to live as a destitute while I could afford a relative luxury. I remember crying for days at their refusal to take Musa and his siblings in (“But we have an empty room in the house!” I howled ) and despairing at my perceived betrayal of someone I loved. Despair was the best I could do as an 8-year-old, but despair is no longer an option.

Some days it feels like life has robbed me of agency and the ability to order my steps. A leaf at the mercy of swift river currents. But other days reinforce that many things do lie firmly within my sphere of influence. I could leave my house thinking “I hope someone hugs me today,” a proposition that is left entirely up to chance. I could equally choose to leave my house thinking “I will hug someone today,” and at once the probabilistic element vanishes, for me—though that’s not the point—and for whomever the receiver may be. It is true that, in many cases, speed and direction will have already been plotted before I even conceive of a compass. But maybe the things we cannot control, although they do have an outsized impact on our lives, are not more essential than the people we choose to be. I choose to be someone who recognizes this truth and elevates our shared humanity above all else in this same way, Musa, in the sliver of time I knew him, chose to call me ‘friend’.

Towards the end of the summer holidays that year, I had the revelation to defy my parents. I resolved to bundle Musa and his sister into the trunk of our car and smuggle them into our home. Surely, I thought, when confronted with the physical reality of Musa at our front door my parents would yield. I looked forward to going to Big Treat all week. Saturday came and my father announced he would go to get some bread. I volunteered to follow. But I didn’t see Musa that day despite a thorough search of the parking lot, scanning this way and that for the curly hair, for the triumphant “My friend!”. Nor was Musa there the next weekend, and the weekend after that. It has now been 17 years since I last saw him. Whenever I visit Port Harcourt, a small part of me still looks out for him whenever I am in a car speeding past Big Treat. The building has aged, its grey paint peeling, weeds forcing themselves through the concrete on the car park and moss gathering on the awning that overlooked the entrance; a solemn decrepitude drapes over its structure like a shawl. We have aged, too. Even if I did see him, it is unlikely I would recognize him, nor would he me. I think about him often, and in other periods of my life, I don’t think about him at all. It has been 17 years and I can only hope that, wherever the river currents have carried him, he is safe.

- Nnamdi*, April 2024.