BEVERLY HILLS, May 16, (THEWILL) – The House My Father Built by Adewale Maja-Pearce, Farafina Kamsi, Lagos, 2014, 175pp
Some of the most gripping tales in fiction or non-fiction are those the writers experienced themselves, either personally or their immediate environment. Without a lengthy prison sentence, it is doubtful if Nelson Mandela’s A Long Walk to Freedom would ever have been published. In writing his most recognised masterpiece, Gustave Flaubert had to cut short a continental jaunt and go back to his own native port city of Rouen from where he began and finished Madame Bovary.
In other words, writers sometimes mine their lived experiences – however distressing or enjoyable – and distill them into publications that have become stunning successes. The Man Died by Wole Soyinka is a classic example of this, a point made abundantly clear by his jailor and former head of state, Yakubu Gowon in Abeokuta in 2004.
On the occasion of the Nobel laureate’s 70th birthday, with dozens of state governors, top politicians and high profile guests in attendance, Gowon admitted his government had to put the idealistic writer behind bars. And while thus incarcerated, the genial general went on, Soyinka wrote his prison memoirs which became an instant bestseller.
The House My Father Built by Adewale Maja-Pearce is one such publication though the author didn’t have to go to the slammer. Still, he went through all the physical and psychological torture that can befall anyone in his position as a newly minted landlord inheriting his father’s house in Lagos.
The house itself is a solid structure of four flats in a livable space somewhere in Surulere, willed to the author and his sibs by their late father. Being the eldest child, he had to “take possession,” as Pentecostal evangelists around here are wont to say.
It was in the process of taking possession of his rightful property that all kinds of obstacles began to crop up – mostly human, mostly from his tenants, close pals he used to hang out with, the police, NEPA, court clerks, a judge with bribe-infested fingers and even hired assassins who, apparently, failed or did not attempt to take him out.
The tenant who brought two roughnecks one afternoon to give him a one-over was the closest to Maja-Pearce. At the time, Prince, now late, not only lived in the author’s house rent-free but also depended on him for almost everything that could keep a guy going – food, drinks and much else – yet he was the most stubborn to evict.
Nearly all the other tenants, from Ngozi to Pepsi, Alhaji and Prince behaved likewise with the exception of two who complied with the landlord’s order. It was a protracted battle fought at different venues – some at home, at police stations, in the courts and just about anywhere convenient for the combatants. (It would be unfair, though, to classify Maja-Pearce as one since he was magnanimous enough to them through his one year rent-free tenancy and, for obvious reasons, they nearly always instigated such shout-downs.)
On one infamous occasion, the wife of the Alhaji challenged him to a duel but were separated by the prompt intervention of those around. The same woman would later beg the author to “buy me small stout” when it seemed they had made up. In his characteristic generosity with malice towards none and charity for all, Maja-Pearce obliged her.
But before this time, it was pure hell for the author. Once his order was conveyed to them, the tenants quickly formed alliances with one another to resist his eviction, leaving Maja-Pearce to also look for dependable allies to help prosecute his case. “I had no idea at the time,” Maja-Pearce tells us early in the book, “how fierce and long-drawn out it would turn out to be, how rancorous and tiring, how absurd and humiliating.”
From the moment the author intimated his tenants – starting with the Yoruba Alhaji (“a squat, thick-set man in his early fifties with red lips, bandy legs and white skull cap”) – of his plans to evict them after offering them one year rent-free tenancy, what was previously a cordial relation became acrimonious.
The Alhaji in question was the oldest and first tenant in the house, so presumably had a sense of entitlement to the place. As Maja-Pearce writes, “he thought me amusing when I politely knocked on his door and told him that he had to go in a year’s time, but that it wasn’t personal…It took me six years to be rid of him.”
Confrontations between landlords and tenants are as common as danfo drivers roughing it out with LASTMA officials just about anywhere in Lagos, from the slummy Ajegunle to posh places like Ikoyi or Victoria Island, middle class neighbourhoods in Egbeda, Festac Town or Surulere.
Unlike scuffles between road rage perpetrators and those who try to check their excesses, we don’t often get to see how landlords and tenants square up over unpaid electricity bills, accumulated rents or even expiration of tenancy. Most often, such confrontations end up in dusty police files or even dustier cabinets under the care of lugubrious court clerks.
But with The House My Father Built, Maja-Pearce has availed readers with what happens routinely in many parts of Lagos. It is the first of its kind in the history of Nigerian literature. It is not fiction yet it reads like one. Nor is it a potted auto bio of the author yet there are aspects of that in the 175-page book.
Maja-Pearce has been Africa editor of Index on Censorship, contributed pieces and articles to The New York Times and reviews for the London Review of Books. The author’s remembrance of things past is simply astonishing because when many of the incidents happened, he probably never thought of writing them in a book form. By the time he did, every single detail came flowing back in such sequential order that you wonder whether he, indeed, jotted some of them down in a secret diary.
Tall and rangy like a Scot, Maja-Pearce has a Nigerian father and a Scottish mother with Caucasian features – from his hair to pigment and visage. Of course, that would have emboldened the headstrong tenants in prolonging their stay, making it seem someone from the outside had come to disrupt their already settled lives.
Besides, none of the tenants, one can safely assume, would have been equal to him in height, making some of them look up to him while he looked down on them. It is an unfair advantage the embattled tenants would have felt grumpy about. Sometimes, too, by his own account, he used to stay up in his balcony and talk with them like a true Lagos landlord. Well, it is not his fault that his father bequeathed a house to him and his sibs. Neither is it his fault that the tenants took for granted his eviction notice.
Of the whole saga itself, Maja-Pearce has this to say: “The more drawn-out the case the more money I would have to part with, which suited not only whichever lawyer I happened to be using at the time (and I went through a number of them) but also the court clerk, the fellow who helped with photocopying (always so many papers) and even the old man under the spreading almond tree.”
It is a miracle he survived the unnecessary ordeal, how tenants he had freeloaded one year rent on refused to move or even pay tenancy rates or electricity bills, how one of them almost made away with the gate; another stole his meter and then complained he was denied access to electricity and was cheeky enough to report to the police.
Even so, any sympathetic reader would have hoped that Maja-Pearce never had to endure the indignities and shout-downs with his tenants, the same way one would have hoped that Soyinka didn’t go to prison for The Man Died to have been written. But, as they say, what will be will be and sometimes for good.
It is a good thing Maja-Pearce has left us this charming publication. It is even better that, somehow, he linked the incidents/ events in his father’s house to the larger society, Nigeria itself that was going through its own years of upheaval just about the same time when the military refused to quit the political stage in 1993. Six years later when the author had sent the recalcitrant tenants packing, the military had voluntarily handed over power to civilians.
About the Author
Michael Jimoh is a Nigerian journalist with many years experience in print media. He is currently a Special Correspondent with THEWILL.
