WHO IS GEORGE SEF???!!!
George Chimezirim Egbuchulam
is a graduate of English, Matric No 132135, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He
graduated with a second class upper division. He hails from Emekuku, Owerri in Imo State
Nigeria. He is born to Mr George and Chinyere Egbuchulam, the first out of six
children: three boys and three girls. During his sojourn in the University of
Ibadan, He won several awards and made some notable achievements. George as a
pressman in his early years won the Union of Campus Journalist award for best
fiction. George was also the winner of the annual quiz competition organized by
an alumnus of the Theatre Arts Department for the ATAS week. George was also
part of the twenty students that made qualified for the Zain20 in the first
edition of Zain Africa Challenge though he wasn’t among the final four selected
to represent the University of Ibadan at the National and African levels.
George was the president of the UI Chess Club in his final year. He is a good prose,
poetry and screen writer. Some of his works can be accessed on NaijaStories. He
has even picked up his form to pursue a masters degree at the Institute of
African Studies, University of Ibadan.
Some of you know him as
Oddman, Chess master, Pawpaw, and lots more. Well, he cannot do some of the
things you know him for, in his present state of health. He needs your help
now. 2.5 million naira is needed for a kidney transplant. And the above figure
only caters for the surgery that will be performed on him and his donor. After
the surgery, both patients will need very expensive post-surgery drugs to
sustain themselves and other laboratory charges. He is currently undergoing
dialysis.
Below is a literary
non-fiction: Cleaning House, written
by George Chimezirim Egbuchulam. A true life account of his sojourn in Lagos
with his family. This was written ages ago. Thanks for reading.
Cleaning House by George Chimezirim Egbuchulam
Did you know that there’s a ubiquitous stink to public toilets? (At least,
I think so.) I wonder why that is. The fact occurred to me today while I was
using the toilet in our new face-me-I-slap-you house. I remembered the days
when, as a child, I spent a lot of my holidays at my Aunty Jane’s (she was my
dad’s elder sister―and was kind and generous, by the way), in a slum
in Orile. She too lived with her husband and children in a face-me-I-slap-you,
and their public toilet smelt just the same.
In
all the houses my family and I have lived in, none of them ever smelt close to
being near-perfect. Let me give a rundown of our domiciliary exodus: sole
occupants of an entire bungalow →fellow occupants in a block of
flats → fellow occupants in another block of
flats → fellow tenants in a face-me-I-slap-you. Now,
our first house, which was in a ghetto in Ilasamaja, Mushin, Lagos, was where I
grew up. The first twenty years of my life were spent there. I have already
mentioned that we were the only occupants of a bungalow. It rested on, I
believe, a plot of land. Let me add that it was a very fertile plot
of land. We lived there for so long that people actually thought the house was
ours. It should have been, but that’s a story I’m not writing now to disclose.
So
what was wrong with our first house? Plenty. For one, I remember no single day―not one―that rain fell and did not leak into the house―in all the rooms. The kind of trauma it imprinted on us is
not one I’m prepared to wish on a foe. Two, there was no privacy: anyone who
cared to could look to see what we were doing in the compound: spreading any or
both of our two fat bedbug-infested mattresses (one, and the best, of which was
my parents’, which any of my three youngest siblings had bedwetted―which was often; there was a third mattress, a rather skinny affair, which
I brought home after my stint in secondary school) on the multi-purpose wooden
rack my mom had had built; putting foodstuff like dried fish, crayfish, smoked
fish, dried pepper, vegetables, etc. out in the sun to dry and watching out for
goats and birds; lounging in one of our six plastic chairs―which hurt our arses like hell, not to mention hardening them too; playing
soccer or ludo or chess, and so on. Any idiot could graze their cattle and
goats and rams and pigs there, if they chose. And they did choose, plenty of
times. The pigs were the worst and the hardest to chase away: they dug ugly
holes in our compound in their endless search for the tortoise’s millstone.
Also, there was this particular beans-seller and her daughters who, until we
moved out of there, spread their laundry either on our clotheslines or on the
grass in our compound. Hell, a lot of people spread their laundry in our
compound. Three, our septic tank deteriorated so bad that its top (laid by a
mediocre bricklayer, one tribal-marked Mr Rasaqi) completely caved in,
revealing shit for the whole street to see and smell. It was so terrible that
health officials, time and again, threatened to lash the law on my dad―being the head of the house and all. I think he ‘settled’ them each time they
came and that ended it. Matters were made even worse by the fact that our
neighbours in the street behind us, though we were separated by a moss-coated
fence, hurled their refuse into our backyard―but mostly they aimed for the soak away. Our neighbours who lived in a
face-me-I-slap-you beside us also threw their garbage into our sump. Their
combined efforts, undeterred by our enraged outbursts and cursing, over the
years filled the septic tank to the brim. But even after that they continued to
throw refuse into our compound. Can you imagine the sheer humiliation of it
all? Four, the house was an architectural bomb waiting to implode. There were
marked signs, both interior and exterior, of this: deep crevices in the walls;
the wood in all the windows were crumbling by the day; the wooden beams in the
roof were rotting away. Five, the landlord put a lot of pressure on us to
leave, mostly because my dad helped him secure a mouth-watering contract with
Globacom to plant their mast in the compound, and he most likely had
nightmares, inspired by his full-grown male children, about my dad suddenly
becoming covetous and claiming ownership of the house and its concomitant
royalties… We eventually moved…
…
to house number two. This was in Okerube, a town way after Ikotun. The first
time I stepped into that house I thought it was the Nicon Hilton. What I mean
is, the relief of no more leaking roof, no more exposed sewage pit, no more
insults from insouciant neighbours… And what’s more, it had sliding doors and
windows, and was fenced and gated! The best things about the house were the
small farm (cultivated by the former occupant, and which my mom, raised in the
village as she was, maintained) and a mango tree. There was a bathtub with a
working shower―the handheld one that resembles a telephone― when there was water and a toilet that flushed! There was a GP tank
filled by a pumping machine with water from a well that was sealed shut. But
this is real life, and in it nothing lasts forever, if at all. It didn’t take
long before we found faults with the house: it could be incredibly hot inside.
You could cook beans in the heat. Furthermore, the bathtub leaked, and we were
chagrined that we had to resort to scooping out the water again. (That was
something we did in our former house that we hated but could not evade. We
scooped water that pooled on the floor of the toilet, and water that pooled in
the far corner of the corridor linking the toilet and bathroom.) The toilet
also leaked, if memory serves. And when there was no electricity, which is a
constant in this exasperating country, we had to go out and fetch water from
the compounds of grumpy neighbours. Once again, pressure was mounted on us to
move out of the house; this time, it was by the caretaker. Like in our former
house, we owed rent. I was at school when my family moved to house number 2,
and at school when they moved to house number 3.
This
was several streets away from house number 2, in a place called Abaranje. The
first day I entered it my heart plummeted. I hated it on sight―and sound. For one, it was too remote, like the second house. As if that
wasn’t enough, the landlord blockaded it from the front with a churchand a
block of apartments. The bathroom/toilet and kitchen were at the wrong angles,
the whole place irritated me and made me very restive. There was no cross
ventilation: it was as hot inside as our second house, and was permanently sunk
in gloom. Sunlight had to beg the preceding buildings in order to reach into
the house. Reading in that house was hellish for me; writing in it was
impossible. We were always fanning ourselves anytime we were inside. Again, the
landlord put pressure on us to leave. I couldn’t understand what was so special
about the house that he hurried us out for. Do you know how close his church
was to us? I could place one foot on the wall of our house and plant the other
on the wall of his church in a half split. That’s how close it
was. It didn’t cross his enlightened mind that he and what passed for his congregation
were an auditory nuisance to us, with their militant preaching, preemptory
praying, and unskilled drumming. Do you know how foolish and insensitive he
was? If he caught us staring or passing what he felt were unfavourable comments
while they were gathered in whose name, he would complain later to my mom
that wedisturbed them! What have we not been through in
this life? I ask.
And
now we are in house number 4, preparing to pass our first night here. We moved
in this morning, around eight. Located in Ikotun, it is much better placed than
our last two residences. (Speaking of which: moving out of Ilasa to Ikotun was
inspired by strictly financial concerns―or is it constraints? Rent in
Ikotun is much cheaper; hence, the overpopulation. But leaving our house in
Ilasa then to, say, Ojuelegba to purchase a novel or two was easy, affordable
and trekable, compared to coming out of Ikotun to, say, Cele Bus Stop to
breathe. Traffic in Ikotun is a prototype for its probable equivalent in Hell.)
From our new house it’s only about six minutes to walk to Ikotun main market. I
already went out to sightsee: Ikotun bubbles and is lively just the way I like
it, even though it will never compare to Yaba or Ojuelegba. The thing I loathed
the most about our last two residences was their remoteness from Ikotun: if you
needed to go out, you had to pay N40 to get to Ikotun first; added to that was
the time lost in waiting for a bus to fill up with passengers, except you were
willing to pay an okada rider or a Keke-Marwa/-NAPEP,
which naturally charged more than commuter buses. (Of course, during Christmas
the fares were jacked outrageously high. Life in Okerube and then Abaranje made
me very reluctant to return home when semesters ended.) Because of the location
of our present accommodation, however, I can ignore the inconvenience of the
public toilet, the public bathroom, the public kitchen and the constricted
space of two rooms. For instance, if the mood hits me, I can walk to the
bookseller’s and exchange novels for fifty bucks―whenever he has books, that is, since, by the looks of his supply, few
people in Ikotun read or care to buy novels; I can walk to a shoe seller’s at
the roadside and pick up a pair of good shoes for a thousand bucks! Provided,
of course, that the police don’t pick him up. I heard a woman informer warn the
shoe seller that ‘Alausa’ were coming in a ‘Black Maria’. He quickly threw a
large black nylon over his wares and vanished. I too, a firm believer in the
quip, ‘prevention is better than cure’, quickly stepped on home. Aside from the
fact that we have no one to pay bail if I was picked up by the police, I heard
later from my mom that people, especially kids (sent out to hawk), left too
long in the hands of the po-po could be sold to ritualists for a quick profit.
This country is indeed sick, when traders can’t sell in peace because the
police stalks and pounces on them.
Dec
30, 2010
P.S.:
This morning, a few hours past
midnight, I suddenly realized why the toilet in this our yard smells like all
the public toilets that I have come across: cockroaches! There is a unique
smell to these vermin. There was a whole revolting gang of them on the walls of
the toilet when I went in to pee. I had to detour to the bathroom. Sad, but
that’s the way it is. I call cockroaches synonyms of public-toilet odour. Shit!
