Oyinbo

“Gosh, this can’t be me!” I gasped, standing before my bedside mirror examining my face. I quickly pulled my shirt off and regarded my chest, my scan running down to my stomach and around my navel; all black, as black as the fur of grandma’s goat! A heavy bulge pounded at the walls of my heart the twinge of sadness I felt gradually blooming into fury as I considered the complexions of my family. Nedu, my younger brother was light-skinned, so was my father. Mama herself was fairer. Grandfather had been slightly dark before he gave in to pneumonia but I was sure some parts of his body like his upper arms had been lighter. Every part of me was dark like the impenetrable blackness of night. I left the mirror and sat on the bed pondering how different I had become to everyone else.

It was Monday morning and I had overslept. “Here you are sleeping when your mates are all dressed for school,” Papa had yelled before walking out of my room. “I think your dark complexion is deceiving you that you don’t even know when its broad daylight!” His words had rung out and enveloped me with an air of insecurity.

On the ride to school, I scrutinized my skin to see if it had responded to the hard scrubbing in the bathroom, but there was no change. My skin was still as dark as it had been earlier, its shoddiness loomed around me still. I turned to the window and watched the passers-by walking hurriedly along the walkways. Most had chocolate complexions, a few had a yellow complexion, while the dark complexions I saw were not as dark as the colour of my skin. If the dark complexion had hierarchies, I was surely at the highest level, alone there. I slowly withdrew from Nedu in the backseat of Papa’s Toyota car. Shrunken, I stared at my white sneakers.

“Is he sleeping?” I heard Papa ask. Nedu was tapping me.

“I am not sleeping Papa,” I replied miserably.

“Then answer my question!” Papa roared, “What topic did you study last night?”

Papa’s rule was that we study one subject every night during weekdays, and four subjects on Saturdays; two in the afternoon after we had discharged our scanty house chores, and two in the night after listening to the network news.

“What topic did you read Nonso?” Papa repeated, disrupting my ruminations.

“Melanin,” I said. I was so used to the topic because I read it often and each time I read it, I would always wonder why God put so much of it in my skin and less in Nedu’s or my parents’ skins.

“You have studied that before,” Papa recollected, disappointed.

“That was in Home Economics Papa,” I answered quickly.

“OK. What is Melanin?” he pressed.

“Melanin is the dark pigment found beneath the skin, hair, and eyes. It gives colour to the skin. Dark skinned people have more melanin beneath their skin while light and fair-skinned people have lesser amounts of melanin. It protects the body from ultraviolet rays which could lead to skin cancer,” I said hastily.

“Excellent!” Papa lauded, nodding his bald head that harboured lots of fatty folds at the back.

“Papa,” Nedu put in, “does it mean that Nonso has more melanin in his skin?”

“Yes,” Papa answered, “which is why he is too dark.”

The words fell out of his mouth in such a deprecating manner. I cowered, struggling to shake off the shame that washed over me. This was not the first time I was being told I was too dark. Sometimes when Mama’s colleagues saw me or when Papa’s friends crossed over to shake hands with him at church, they would look at me and say, “Nke a di iche!” Yesterday, a corpulent woman selling perishables at the World Bank market had remarked that I was too dark. Bold lines of astonishment had flashed across her face when she realized the fair-skinned woman who stood before her was my mother, “He is too dark, unlike you!” she had said with enormous contempt. I wondered if she had never seen a light-skinned woman with a dark-skinned son. Her words had struck, galling. The feeling stayed with me through the drive back home until I slept late at night.

***

“Nonso!” Bunie, my crony chanted my name in his usual exuberant manner, crossing over to my table. I noticed the smudge of butter on his left cheek and smiled narrowly. “Nonso!” he repeated when he did not get my usual response of ‘Bunie Himself!’ used whenever I wanted to herald him or the prideful response ‘Say my name!’ He narrowed his eyelids and sat opposite me, staring keenly at my face.

“Nonso, what is the problem?” he asked. “You look so…”

“Dark right,” I interrupted.

“Dark?” Bunie looked baffled. “I wasn’t going to say that. Moreover, you’ve always been dark.”

I looked away from Bunie, chagrined.

“Nonso, you don’t look good at all!” Bunie pestered, “What is the problem?”

I blinked at Bunie before concentrating on the line of silver-coloured ants marching down the table. I felt heavy in me. I didn’t know whether to feel angry at God for creating me in such a manner, or at myself for allowing this to come upon me. I was only sixteen years old. I looked back at Bunie, searching for some assurance, for the confidence to tell him how bad I felt about my complexion.

“Bunie, I am too dark,” I said, finally. I waited, speechless and mortified. He was trying hard to hold the laughter back. He laughed until his eyes were wet with tears running down his face. He laughed so hard I felt quite stupid. Finally, when he was able to control the surge, he spoke up.

“Nonso, you are funny. You are having problems with your complexion ikwa?”

I nodded, still feeling the idiotic air hovering.

“You are African!” He roared in between guffaws.

“Some Africans are fair,” I hurled back at him in exasperation. “I want to be fair,” I whispered abjectly.

Bunie was taken aback. “So are you saying that you do not like your complexion any longer?” he asked, voice lowered.

“Yes, I want to be as fair as you, like every other fair person out there even Miss Bukky.”

Miss Bukky was our form teacher. She was slim with legs that reminded me of the smooth cucumbers Mama stuck in our refrigerator. She spoke as though there was liquid inside her mouth, which sat on an oval face. This morning she had flogged the back of my palm so unfeelingly with her transparent ruler convinced I had no idea about the question she had asked. I had cried out in pain, prompting Raji to shout, “Black on is crying!” The entire class had erupted into uncontrollable laughter. Miss Bukky had warned him to be quiet but failed to maintain order in the class nor her giggling.

“Use bleaching creams then,” Bunie was saying and catching my attention, “I use them too.”

I peered into his face, searching for traces of another complexion. I tried to imagine him lathering the cream over his face. Bleaching creams, perfect! I thought.

“How do you get them?” I asked.

“My mother uses them too,” he answered, “so I simply sneak into her room and get them.” He shrugged.

I looked around the dining room, most of the pupils had left. The Dining Hall Prefect still sat at his table, staring into space. He seemed strange, almost as strange as the fact that Bunie was also in my boat ─Africans changing their colour.

“I don’t know if my mother uses them,” I said.

“Check her room. Most women keep bleaching creams,” Bunie asserted.

“What makes you think so?” I could not tell why my friend was so certain about this.

Bunie simply laughed and said, “Haven’t you noticed how suddenly every lady out there is fair?”

I remembered asking Nedu the same question. I scarcely entered her room. Each day she came back from work, she would spend appreciable time in her room, bathing, changing from her thick office suits into a lighter dress and touching up her make-up before proceeding to the kitchen to prepare dinner. Still, Mama was never steady in the kitchen. She divided her time between the kitchen and her room. Could one of those numerous containers of cream in her room be the ‘complexion changer?’ Papa had once complained about women spending hours in front of the mirror trying to change their look. This was when Mama had made him late for a wedding ceremony on one Saturday.

A loud bang startled me. I looked up at almost the same time as Bunie. Raji hovered, his bright eyes shifting between Bunie and me.

“What is it Raji?” I asked angrily. He was an annoying, diminutive boy who was fond of wheedling things out of people. He was also a clown who said many meaningless things that made others laugh.

“Black Monkeeeeeeey!” he screamed. Egged on by his companions’ riotous laughter, he continued, “Black Nigerian!”

I sprang to my feet. Raji’s impish smile said he was coaxing his brains for more taunts. Bunie tapped me in an attempt to calm me down. I shook his hand off and stared at him threateningly. Incensed by Raji’s incessant sneers, the jeers from his friends, and the way they pointed at me or my complexion my fists tightened. When he looked away, I seized the fork on my plate and plunged it into the side of his belly. He fell to the floor screaming. I could see the bloodstain on his uniform spreading out further. His friends went wild, screaming, banging the tables and flinging chairs about. I did not have a chance to look at Bunie as I was dragged away to the principal’s office by the other prefects who had dashed in to find the cause of the shouts.

***

I had jumped on my bed screaming happily. My reflection in the mirror earlier that morning had been a pleasant surprise. My face and some parts of my body were becoming lighter. Nobody would tell me that I was too dark. I was no longer a black monkey. Despite the sting of being expelled from school for injuring Raji, and of Papa’s fury at this ─ a ceramic vase from the sitting room was smashed into my head being home had meant the opportunity to test out Bunie’s ideas. Two days after my expulsion, I had stood at my door waiting for Papa to drive out with Nedu. Shortly after, Mama’s car had followed and I sneaked into her room hopefully bolting the door. I studied the well-polished table lined with several make-up kits, eye pencils, lipsticks, lip-glosses, mascara and then there were the creams. I picked them up one after the other and studied the names written on them. I spotted a plastic bottle and studied it closely. It read ‘Skin lightening lotion’. This must be it! I thought. I opened the lid and squeezed the bottle until the white cream spurted into my palm. Quickly, I rubbed it all over my face. It felt thick and refreshing at the same time. I quickly pulled off my red polo and slathered my skin thoroughly with the cream. I waited for the magical transformation of my complexion. It remained dark. That did not dissuade me; I kept rubbing until the pores on my skin were permeated with the cream. Now go and take away my melanin, I had instructed it joyfully. Finally, I was going to be fair. I snuck into her room every day thereafter to apply the cream on my face and skin, being careful to replace the bottle as Mama had kept it. I was not the least bothered that she would notice the reduction in the quantity of the cream. All I wanted was my new complexion, a complexion that would make me belong to the world.

One evening, while I was having dinner with Mama and Nedu ─Papa was away on a business trip, Mama had studied my face suspiciously. “Nonso what are you rubbing on your face?” She’d asked. She had stopped cutting into the chicken on her plate and was peering into my face. I made an innocent face.

“Maybe it’s because he has been indoors,” Nedu said quickly, drawing Mama’s gaze away from me. “The scorching sun has not been dealing with him,” he went on.

“Maybe,” Mama said and returned to her chicken.

Days later, I was an Oyinbo, a light-skinned African, no longer in the league of cheap Africans. Miss Bukky had once told us that light-skinned African slaves were more expensive, and treated with more respect than their dark-skinned counterparts. Raji had thrown jibes at me that day, saying that dark people like me were cheap. I finally felt the superiority and pleasantness that comes with being an Oyinbo. But just when I thought my light skin was going to last, it started to fade. During Mama’s two weeks of leave from work, I was forced to apply just Vaseline to my face unable to sneak into her room. I was so uncomfortable. My face felt dry after my baths and then, there was the appearance of white scaly marks. Gradually, the lightning began to disappear, and rather than reveal my former dark complexion, it gave way to a terrible mix of black and brown spots all over my face. At that moment, I began to prefer the former shame to the latter. Nauseated by my face I took to keeping my face down in church while the priest preached a vibratory sermon. The shame I had tried to run away from had caught up with me again.

I thought Mama had not noticed it until she called me into the kitchen this evening and asked me to sit.

“Your father returns today,” she said. I simply nodded. “How will you greet him with this horrible face that you are carrying?” she asked, her back to me. I couldn’t verbalize anything. Just as I had been thinking about how to change my complexion in the past, all I thought about as I sat in the kitchen with Mama was how to restore my former complexion.

“You have been using my bleaching cream,” she said nonchalantly as if it was something normal. I nodded.

“It’s not good for you. Don’t rub that cream again,” she ordered, waving me off.

Later that evening —dinner dispensed with Papa walked into my room and sat on my bed. “Your mother says you have been using her bleaching creams,” he said to me in a manner that suggested displeasure. I nodded.

He stood up from the bed and paced around the room, hands in his pocket. “Why would you do such a shameful thing?” he asked. “Why would you want to change the colour you have?” I could tell he was disappointed with my actions. Turning to face me fully he said, “Listen Nonso, you are African and being black is one of our basic identities. You should have been proud of that colour!”

“I was feeling odd, Papa!” I said. He immediately stopped pacing. He turned to face me “You shouldn’t feel odd that you are dark, Nonso. Now tell me, which feels odder, being dark or having this mess all over your face?” He turned to leave. “Tomorrow, I will take you to a dermatologist who will fix you,” he said bolting out of the room. I lay on my bed and stared at the high ceiling. It was funny how things turned out in my quest to become Oyinbo. I missed my dark complexion.