An Inventory of Belonging

By Ken Wiwa (page 1 of 5)

I remember the first time I came to Canada. It was in April 1995 and I was wandering around a cavernous building at Toronto Airport clutching my Nigerian passport. Preying on my mind were the endless hours I'd always had to wait in long lines of foreigners whenever I entered Britain. But here in the muffled and shiny greyness of the customs and immigration hall at Lester Pearson were six or seven lines of people waiting to have their passports inspected. I scanned the room, looking for a sign to point me in the direction where non-Canadians were meant to line up for interrogation by some humourless official but all I could see were indeterminate groups of people, a United Nations of accents, colours and fashions. Where are foreigners supposed to go I asked? The question was invariably met with raised eyebrows, bemused shrugs and vague pointing. I gave up, joining the longest line out of habit.

Fast forwarding through my memories I come to a beach in the South of France. It is October 6th 1998 and I am about to make a decision that will change my life. I am strolling along a sandy beach on a lukewarm evening. The waves are rolling in off the Cote D'Azure and I am gazing out over the sea and thinking that somewhere out there, somewhere on the horizon is Africa. Even though my country is out there I am not in a nostalgic mood. My thoughts are focused instead on the future. As I walk along the deserted beach the impulsive instincts that periodically intervene in my life kick in and almost before I know it I have decided that I am going to live in Canada.

I was 10 years old when my father decided to send me to school in England. When I took my seat in the aircraft at Lagos airport in Nigeria, I had no idea that I was swapping the security of an idyllic African childhood for the uncertainties of adolescence in Europe. I had no idea that I would spend the next twenty years trying, unconsciously, to get away from Nigeria. Or that when I would eventually make an accommodation with my father, my fatherland and my country, I would be living in Canada.

Which is where I am now. In a house in Toronto, delving through my memories, trying to find some rhyme and reason, a line of logic through the erratic sequence of events that brought me here.

Most immigrants have a straightforward enough reason for leaving home - religious or political persecution or the lure of a better life or opportunity abroad. Push and pull factors as I learned at school. But my story refuses to fit into such neat categories. Although there are elements of the push and pull factors in my experience, I didn't exactly come here in search of better opportunities nor was I fleeing from political persecution. Whenever I am asked "why Canada?", I usually sigh and reply enigmatically that all roads led to Canada.

Between leaving Nigeria in 1978 and the decision on a beach in France 20 years later is a circuitous and internal journey of self-discovery.

Lets rewind the video of my life back to April 1999. I am in London. It is six months after I made the decision on the beach in Cannes. I am moving to Canada in four weeks time. In my mind's eye I can see myself watching my son sleeping. Somewhere in the corridors of my memory, I hear a television documentary on the lions of the Serengeti.

When the cubs are old enough to fend for themselves, the familiar tone of the disembodied narrator is explaining, its parents will chase them away and into the wild where the young lions will roam until they are ready to settle down and establish a pride of their own. When they are ready to die, a lion will trek for miles across the parched Serengeti to the exact spot where it was born.

Hearing those words in my mind's ear triggers an old, recurring anxiety; my father sent me abroad so that I would return home one day to apply my expensively trained mind to the problems facing our people. But here I am in Canada, as far away from Africa as he could possibly have hoped. And this after all the financial and emotional expense of my education, after my father has been murdered for trying to protect the idea and sanctity of our home and community. A familiar pang of guilt stabs at my conscience. As the feelings of betrayal well up, I find myself reflecting on those lions on the Serengeti. Whenever I feel the past gnawing at my conscience, I try to pacify my guilt with the thought that we are all lions on the Serengeti. Because all of us, at some point in our lives, have to leave home to establish our pride, to find a place of our own. Which when you think it through it means that a lion never dies in the same place as its progeny.