6th July, 2015
By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
I cannot in good conscience say how I got the title: Obi of Ikate. My iconoclastic scoffing at chieftaincies of all coloration makes me the most unlikely bloke to be blessed with chiefdom. But here I was being hailed by the young and old as the king of boys in the Ikate suburbia of Surulere, Lagos. But who am I to complain? I belong to the Oscar Wilde School, apropos: ‘There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.’
I lived in a cramped two-bedroom upstairs back-flat on Olushola-Keku Street, towards the right end of the popular Nnobi Street. Ankle-length floods stayed for hours on end whenever it rained such that occupants of the ground-floor rooms had to flee their homes. One of the major tenants down there happened to be a traditional doctor-cum-herbalist from whose stuffy room always emitted the harsh tang of medicinal herbs. The scraggy, middle-aged man, said to be
highly medicated in local juju powers, ended up being conned out of his life savings by some Lagos sharp guys who induced him to a two-day-long sleep!
It was in the middle of 1986 that I left my less-than-five-hundred naira per month reporter job at African Guardian magazine, a subsidiary of The Guardian, to team up with the founding staff of the newly set-up ThisWeek magazine owned by the swashbuckling publisher Nduka Obaigbena. I got a salary advance to rent the apartment that was a walking distance from the office at 113 Ogunlana Drive. It was my virgin accommodation in Lagos and I gave it a very virginal launch through one-day abstinence. This was indeed a hallowed entrée to the accommodation of many ladies thereafter.
The nearby Nnobi Street was a happening hub with all the hip eateries and pop beer parlours, sharp guys and sharper babes. People came from far-flung places like Lagos Island, Ikeja and the then developing Lekki Peninsula to eat at the famous Nwanyi Nnewi Restaurant, which I somewhat turned into the daily and nightly kitchen for me and my people. Next to the restaurant was the beer place of the woman we called Madam Ikorodu, mother of a now popular actress. Anybody who needed to have an appointment with the Obi of Ikate almost always appeared there instead of coming to the house, sorry, palace.
The poets of Lagos made great company. Sanya Osha and Obi Nwakanma once needed to be rescued from police ambush-arrest amid a bout of divine drunkenness. Uche Nduka had the fine fettle to always convince his then intended to allow him spend the night in my palace to hone his poetry, though without divulging the details of his other nocturnal attentions. Nduka Otiono readily gauged the diverse drinks for taste, and in one encounter his companion, Eddie Ayo Ojo, waxed lyrical that he had a one-night-stand with the fiancée of another buddy of mine in the very presence of the twosome. For Chiedu Ezeanah, the joy was in the search for harmony in the middle of the bottle. To round up matters, there was always the need to reiterate the poetic vista of my teacher at Ife, the inimitable Okot p’Bitek, to wit: “I want to suck the stiff breasts of my wife’s younger sister.”
The lady of the house was Ngozi, more popularly known as Engee, whose father hated the Obi of Ikate with a passion hotter than protest poetry. Engee dared the don’ts of her dad, and coped with an assurance beyond her age in managing the diverse types of friends of mine on offer whenever she was around. My respect for her earned deeper roots when she led me to the international school where she had done her school certificate exams and I discovered that she made straight A1s in her subjects, including English, Maths and Further Maths. The dull head of the Obi of Ikate revelled in being surrounded by self-effacing geniuses.
The cane couch in the parlour was the lair of Dulue Mbachu, a rendering friend and brother from way back in secondary school. He played the guitar with my younger brother, Isidore Emeka, who was his classmate and playmate in secondary school. Jossey Ogbuanoh, my buddy at Ife and colleague at ThisWeek, sponsored night-time outings and carousing at Suya Spot with Ayilara Joint add-ons. There was Ernest Chika who adeptly combined church matters and socialite sorties. The palace on Lake Keku was indeed a home for all-comers and goers alike – such as the darker-than-midnight journalist called Darkness and his sparring partner, Victor. Nobody could really count the number of folks who lived here. Amid all the gated streets of Surulere and Lagos
of that era, this was the one place with no gate whatsoever blocking one’s way any time, night or day.
Visiting writers, scholars and journalists such as South African poet Dennis Brutus and the critic Jane Bryce spiced up the Ikate atmosphere. Brutus never stopped wondering why Nigeria still had open gutters. Adewale Maja-Pearce came from England to have the fight of his life in reclaiming his late father’s house in Surulere as told in his book, The House My Father Built. Adewale’s many colleagues from abroad always visited to enjoy the local culinary delights of isi-ewu, nkwobi and the like, with one particular lady reporting that Adewale had gone native by enjoying local life near the gutter! The polymath
journalist Niyi Alabi, with his ever-handy briefcase containing only a copy of The Guardian, popped in and out with vitalizing gusto.
Beyond the intellectual types, there were the bus drivers and conductors at the Nnobi bus-stop axis who adopted me as their patron to help settle their multiform cases and save them from the menacing clutches of the police. A major denizen of Nnobi Street then was a large fellow named Parker Liquor, with a well-earned reputation for consuming two crates of Small Stout, that is, some 48 bottles, in a good drinking session. The resourceful Emeka Ogoh came to Lagos to do his mandatory one-year National Service and ended up living with me before striking it rich by setting-up the ultra-modern, multi-million
Dolphin Studios on Itire Road. Emeka died tragically young… On the work front, I resigned from ThisWeek magazine in solidarity with the editor, Sonala Olumhense, to help him found the for-Lagos-only tabloid, City Tempo, which died a sudden death due to paucity of funds.
Almost starving to death, I found work as the editor of the highbrow SOCIETY magazine complete with car and driver, published from the 13th floor of a skyscraper behind Tafawa Balewa Square, Lagos Island. Before I could settle down to real work, the publisher, Chief Ralph Obioha, talked to me haughtily like a high chief and I promptly told him that I had the option to resign my appointment and that, in fact, I had resigned! My deputy, Iheanyi Iwuofor, aka Pita Okute, told me to wait by the door as he, too, had resigned! We descended the lift together and used the last money we had to drink beer at the fine lady Mubo’s bar there in Onikan, Lagos before departing into the night, jobless and kobo-less!
It was after that blast that my old buddy, Nduka Obaigbena, came back into the picture by giving me the seed money to do the dummy for the founding of THISDAY newspaper. I demanded beer money from Nduka with the argument that business money cannot mix with beer money. I got back to Surulere to booze up my friends. The drinking bouts had an uncanny fallout, like Wally J returning home only to fall asleep after plugging a boiling ring to make eba. He woke up with a start, all covered with soot, and had to thank his ancestors that the entire house did not catch fire with his beer belly trapped within!
The moment it occurred to me that I had to leave Surulere for good was when I took my wife-to-be, Chidimma, to Elebeukwu Restaurant, which was owned by the woman with the largest hips on planet Earth. Her many daughters refused to serve us for well over thirty minutes. When they eventually – reluctantly – did so they refused payment. Their mother in the end came to take the money and pointedly told me in Igbo, ‘Lukwaa ya alu’, ‘Make sure you marry her.’ Sorry, Madam, I was serenading within my soul, I never knew you wanted me to marry your daughters instead…
I fled!