You Are Not Black in Nigeria

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You Are Not Black in Nigeria Zainab A. Omaki (bio) You've been thinking about race and, in thinking about it, you consider that perhaps you're lucky because you're not really black in Nigeria. Your skin is black; you exist in shades from light caramel to dark chocolate but, in your mind and society where blackness actually exists, you aren't. You can't be black in a country where everyone is the same colour. You can't be black in a country where there isn't any or much whiteness. You're not really black in Nigeria until you encounter foreignness. By this I mean, you're not black until you come into contact with the Chinese bakery owners who pay you a fraction of what they pay their fellow countrymen, who lock you in at lunch times to force you to keep working. You aren't black until you meet white expats who are surprised at your ability to speak "good" English, or who are at first reluctant to associate with you until they find that you have a foreign degree, or you have lived in a country in the West, or you went to the same sorts of schools they did—perhaps better. You aren't really black in Nigeria until waiters in restaurants, your countrymen, choose to serve the tables of white people around you, even if you came first, when you can hear these waiters twisting their tongues to sound more "Americanah" like people they have watched in movies. And when their movements are just a tad too eager; they giggle at every word that comes out of the mouths of the people they are serving like the stereotype of a woman in mid-flirtation. Colonialism? You silently ask the people at the table with you. Colonialism, they respond with a silent nod. Because you all instinctively understand that it's largely a trickle down of that. First, the continent was divvied up. Then, they made you think by virtue of social, political, religious, and economic structures that they were better than you, and there was something to look up to them for. [End Page 76] Now a century later, your people are excited, nervous, unsure, eager to please, almost tail-wagging in their presence. You are only black in Nigeria if you work for a foreign company, heavy with its cover of liberalism, but all the managerial positions are occupied by people of white skin, and you instinctively know that if an issue was ever to crop up between a person of black skin, the local, and a person of white skin, the foreigner, and one had to be let go, it would be the person of black skin. You're only black in Nigeria if you understand that hiring a foreigner, but more specifically someone white, to act as the face of your company (while the true work is done by the locals, A.K.A. the black people) will lead to more success, more customers, better profit margins—the business must be both legitimate and doing quite well to be able to employ a white person. On a day-to-day basis, you are not black—you are light skinned and dark skinned—something you know on an intellectual level is an off shoot of again, the colonialism. Again, the coming of white people onto your shores to tell you that your ways were a) not the right ones, and b) barbaric. You are light skinned and darker skinned, and darker skin is seen to be worse than light skin, so a common greeting will be, "You're getting darker, is everything okay? Are you sick?" Bleaching creams run rampant in stores and in targeted ads. Your sister was teased about having darker skin and always asks whenever she takes a picture if she looks too dark in it. And you worry that one of your nieces has light skin and the other dark skin, and maybe the darker one will grow up feeling like the lighter one has it better. Dark is a shade but also a concept, like blackness. In fact, it derives from the concept of...