Whyteface

Once upon a time, but not so long ago, there was a woman who disobeyed her father by loving another man. The hot slap of her rebellion was heightened by the gulf in the social positions of the two men from whom her bloodline sprang. She was the daughter of a war-canoe chief in the Kalabari islands of the Niger Delta, and knowing her father’s hallowed position as the head of a founding family of their village, she should have known better—as the folk song about her dalliance would later go—than to open her heart and spread her legs for a roaming dancer with no canoe to call his home. Her kinsmen whetted their blades and chattered their teeth at their proud chief’s misfortune, but their co-wives and half sisters and stepmothers, all the farseeing womenfolk of that community on the Sombreiro River, banded together to soothe the white-bearded sire’s ego and lance the bloodlust from warriors’ hearts by reminding everyone that the supreme goddess Akaso, mother of all deities in the Kalabari pantheon, disapproved of needless bloodletting. In the tragic love song that is still chanted by Iriawo dancers in the concrete town that mushroomed out of that island, the pacific voices of those heroic women have outlived their goddess, whose supremacy even then was already being supplanted by Jehovah and his legions of crusading white men.

Article continues after advertisement

The father was Chief Wariboko, a cocked-hat marauder who was dreaded in bygone times by the mainland villages he raided for slaves—the trade on which he’d built his wealth at home and earned his reputation abroad. The darling daughter who wounded his pride in his octogenarian years was called Tekena, first of her name. The name of her fugitive lover, who fled into the creeks after impregnating the warlord’s youngest daughter, survived through the next century in her song, but he never once saw their baby, never returned to that mangrove island where the boy grew up under his grandfather’s bleary eye and at last inherited all the customary rights and privileges of his mother, including her respectable family name, upon her early death from a stingray spike through the heart while she was fishing for mudskippers. When the British governor-general formalized the name Nigeria, coined several years earlier by an imperialist journalist who became his wife (some say she was alluding to Niger area, others hint at a missing g) for the heterogeneous nations they had shoehorned into one colony, the eight-year-old son of the late Tekena, first of her name, was still playing clapping games in that remote fishing village under the guardianship of his schoolteacher uncle, who was the new head of the Wariboko war-canoe house.

The child’s name was Jamabo Wariboko, the stranger who took refuge. He had his father’s dancing legs, his mother’s plucky spirit, and the fighting strength of a boy who had been hardened by playground bullies in a village whose lineage structure was based on the war-canoe house of a strongman and his household, extended family, trading assistants, paid servants, and captured slaves. Thus it was Jamabo’s fate to disprove any gossip of hereditary sissiness, and to establish a war-canoe chiefdom by his moneymaking exploits in honor of progenitors who had been mighty pirates, but the amalgamation of swampland, rainforest, savannah, and desert into the colony of Nigeria had altered everyone’s fate, including that of the colonial-educated Uncle Chadwick, current chief of a slavery-glorifying family in flux over its purpose within a Christianized world order. When Chadwick was dispatched to the young city of Port Harcourt to administer a missionary school, he left behind his ancestral duein stool and feathered bicorn hat, the emblems of his nobility, but took along his church-wed spouse and their five children, as well as his teenage nephew, who had never traveled beyond the asylum he was born into, the crude oil-rich waters of his mother’s graveyard.

Guided by his disciplinarian uncle, Jamabo sailed through the rest of his schooling and won a James Aggrey scholarship to Columbia University in New York, where he lived for six years before taking a job in Trinidad. After two decades on the move—traveling the world for work and sightseeing, and also visiting his birthplace to choose a wife and build a mansion over his mother’s grave—he relocated to his sunny homeland at independence as a member of the middle-class vanguard, the foreign-educated citizens who were trooping back to swap places with Queen Elizabeth’s civil servants. Invigorated by the bloodless ousting of the over-lords who had cobbled together and christened their nation (whose name, Nigeria, had no meaning in any indigenous language, and yet they were content to retain it along with the English tongue of their education), the new overseers happily took to strutting about on two legs like their colonial predecessors. They toasted to new beginnings with blood-red French wine swirling in their upraised goblets of German crystal, and then feasted from bone-white china with silver spoons that were stamped “Made in Sheffield,” and yet never imagined that the crumbs they scattered to their gatemen and housegirls would not feed but rather inflame a ragtag populace that was still wondering about their place in the new hierarchy. Not everyone could be as fortunate as Jamabo, the orphaned son of a highborn mother whose slave-trading father had valued his bloodline enough to grant his unwanted grandchild the Nigerian future he’d stolen from countless others.

And what a future it became for the merrymaking citizenry of that newborn country. The anachronistic politics of their myriad cultures, whose centuries-old skirmishes had been interrupted by European warship cannons, resumed as was predicted by armchair pessimists, its fierceness compounded by the contained space of enforced nationhood. Igbo, Yoruba, and Hausa, the big three of the three hundred–plus ethnicities that made up the national character, exerted their outsized influence in the shattering wave of military coups that preceded and followed the brutal civil war. Growing hunger, widespread greed, the fleeing of refugees to the same snowy countries they had fought against for independence . . . on and on it goes like another sad pop song for global aid. We all know the rote discourse of how Europe underdeveloped Africa, so why recount the Nigerian traumas of the wretched of the earth?

Nigeria, like Jamabo, was the accidental offspring of a royal fuckery between insiders and outsiders. Jamabo had learned this truism too late to flee, and tried to make the best of it for the rest of his life, like so many other bourgeois whose numbers were never enough to overcome the adversarial forces that were fixed in that Trojan horse they called their nation. His dedication to the civil service had suffocated him over time, draining his hope and also impoverishing his lifestyle by a thousand cuts. He came to understand that his job wouldn’t feed him if he didn’t cook the books. His islander morals—his stand-alone sense of fairness that was forged under the blows of daddy-protected bullies, the well-adjusted children who had tormented his orphaned youth—clashed with a justice system that rated influence over innocence, bigwig godfathers over wrong or right. Such fraudulence bore only poisoned fruit, swelling overseas bank accounts for the Manchurian candidates who were seeding duplicity into the loam of their nation’s imagination. For Jamabo—offspring of a fearless woman; descendant of Kalabari heroes who sold blackness to whiteness and got paid back in baubles; fatherless son who had done everything to prove he was different from the runaway dancer in his mother’s song—it was a horror to realize his homeland was destined never to flourish. By the time he died at sixty-nine, his broken heart had shrunk his world down to his wife Dakoru and their three children, his immediate family, the same insular boundaries of his colonial childhood.

What you don’t know becomes the only thing you know, an overjoyed widow would proclaim one day to her long lost grandchildren, the boy and girl their mother had brought from Lagos to visit her on her deathbed.

The scattering of the Wariboko war-canoe clan started with Princewill, the youngest son of Chadwick. Like his four siblings and his cousin Jamabo, Princewill was overeducated by their schoolteacher father, the whispers alleged. He, too, had returned from foreign lands after the colonials handed over, but his arrival soon caused a shock wave of chatter from the villagers who caught him partying in the nearby city of Port Harcourt. His halo was conked and pompadoured like James Brown’s; he wore two gold hoop earrings, buccaneer style; and he always reeked of schnapps. Only his father’s respectability, and perhaps his odd Motown accent, spared him from getting cussed out by bridesmaids at society weddings as a wastrel and drunkard, a shameless woman-wrapper. He was the jobless fashionista of the Wariboko family after his return from college in Detroit, until one day his parents’ prayers appeared to be answered and he shaved off his perm, threw out his flared trousers and disco shoes, gave up the bottle, and took up the Bible with a pugnacious fanaticism that made his beer-parlor buddies hide their faces whenever he came around evangelizing at his former haunts.

No one knew what had happened to make him change his ways, but everyone heard the story of his surprise visit to his hometown with a ferryload of crusading black men. They marched down from the wharf like an army needing no guns, their chorister voices booming: “O Looord, trouble them that trouble me—” This procession of fiery Christians was headed to the burial ground of Tekena, first of her name; the family compound of her pirate papa, a revered founding father; and the abandoned seat of power of the paramount chief, the retired educator who was living out his last years in Port Harcourt, the Sodom across the Sombreiro River. Their destination was the ancestral hearth, spiritual fountainhead, and reliquary of antiquities, the country home of the Wariboko war-canoe family.

Your grandpa liked to use pidgin to distill the moral of a story, the ailing old lady told her eldest grandchild as she chronicled the family history that the boy’s father, her absentee son, never talked about. Nah so our own people come scatter everything throway.

Almost a century after the overthrow of the goddess Akaso and her kinfolk of local deities by the arrival of white missionaries, their disciples were stepping up to root out what was left. Their mission was obliteration, their tactic shock and awe. Princewill led the charge on that fateful day, a son of the soil who knew where to look for the feathered hat and duein stool of his ancestors, totemic symbols of his own nobility. He guided his born-again family through the maze of his ancestral home, kicking down doors and praying along, and joined them in smashing up every artifice of the devil. As a final blow to his patrimony, he tossed the throne-stool and plumy crown onto the bonfire himself, singing to foreign gods as his history burned.

The curse he loosed that day consumed every son that was in line to inherit the lost symbols of the Wariboko war-canoe house. The deposed goddess Akaso, the women say, was against avoidable bloodshed even when men pushed her to show her wrath, and so she spared the Wariboko womenfolk—as much as any divinity could—from the affliction of their men. Sons would die and mothers, wives, daughters would mourn, the way of the world since old men’s egos started wars that young men fought. But the fire this time was started by a son, which led to raging misfortunes that consumed his three brothers one by one, leaving only ashen memories for his surviving sister and aged parents to sift through. By 1975, the year Jamabo died, he had already lived through the burials of his four cousins, his childhood playmates, all the male heirs of the full-blooded brother of Tekena, first of her name.

For the three children of the stranger who had returned to seek refuge, fifteen years had passed between the collective joy of independence and the personal tragedy of burying their father in a graveyard already full of their uncles’ memories. Jamabo’s first child and only son, Monima, had been born in his parents’ village in 1948, and a few months later, he and his mother, Dakoru, traveled to join her much older husband in his new workplace in wintry Chicago. The same city where their first daughter, Tekena, second of her name, was born two years later. By the autumn of 1955 the Kalabari family of three British-protected persons and one American citizen had sailed across the Atlantic to sooty Manchester, where their last daughter, Tonte, was born. Jamabo’s decision to get his girls their foreign passports before uprooting his family for the last time had been a purely logistical step, but it proved a canny move that allowed Tonte and Tekena, second of her name, after their father’s funeral, to restart their lives outside the land they’d grown to hate for crushing their father’s dreams. As for Monima, the last male descendant of Tekena, first of her name, he moved across the country to Lagos at his sisters’ urging, to escape the curse that was wiping out Wariboko heirs. Some years later, at the age of twenty-nine, he met and married a feisty Edo woman called Esosa, who waved aside her husband’s worries and twice traveled to Port Harcourt to deliver her children, a firstborn named Furo and a lastborn called Tekena, third of her name, in their grandma’s house while their father stayed behind in that far-away godless city that he always believed had shielded him and his son from the reach of their family curse.

Nah so our own people come scatter everything throway: That’s how insiders finish what outsiders began. The wisdom that Dakoru’s deathbed tales had tried to pass down, as her grandson would come to see in adulthood, was that you can conquer a people’s armies, depose their sovereigns, infiltrate their aristocratic and priestly classes, and massacre their innocents in unthinkable numbers, and yet these cultures still persevere in the memory of survivors, the beating heart of living history. But if we—domineering outsiders same as indoctrinated insiders—embark on a persistent campaign to pillage their shrines and raze their monuments, in time these nations wither away, and their lost traditions, their stolen history float up as a cloud of ash that turns all our futures into a wasteland. The mythmaking rebellion of Tekena, first of her name, for the sake of a coward’s love was as recognizable to her descendants as their need to cross borders, both ethnic and geographic, in search of a happiness that wasn’t promised. Jamabo traveled for school and work, and then returned to seek refuge as a stranger in his own home, his poisoned country. His son Monima wed an Edo outsider and then stayed away from his mother’s side, even as he missed her keenly. The sisters, Tonte and Tekena, second of her name, both migrated to their birthplaces, one Chicagoan and the other Mancunian, where their documented rights were no real defense against the blinkered nature of local cultures that judged a person for what they were not. White . . . same difference to a colonial-era slave trader and the modern-day bigot, who immolates their humanity on the altar of lost causes.

Princewill was the first to die from a curse he didn’t believe in. A few weeks after his destruction of the Wariboko heirlooms, his left leg began to bloat from ankle to groin. Some villagers swore his leg was wrinkled like hippo leather, though others said it was as smooth as the sacred giant python that swallowed offending children in bygone times. But all agreed he was paying Akaso’s price for his desecration, which even his white man’s gods, it seemed, could not avert. He hobbled from temple to tabernacle in search of a cure for his tumid limb, his faith burning fiercer as the symptoms of disease spread to other parts of his body, eating him up. At the end, when he’d gotten too delirious to defy anyone’s wishes, he was rescued by his brothers and Jamabo—acting under instructions from their aged parents, who had, in that evil hour, forgiven their prodigal of his sins—from the grubby floor of a white-garment church in Port Harcourt, and whisked off by ambulance to a private clinic, where he died shortly after from what the doctors claimed was chronic liver cirrhosis.

You see, my son, life is ruled over by fate, which never loses a case, said Dakoru to her grandson as she finished her narration of family and survival all those years later on her deathbed in Port Harcourt. But the lastborn male heir of Tekena, first of her name, wouldn’t recall his grandma’s words when he awoke one morning to find his blackness burned away, his skin as white as ash. What you don’t know becomes the only thing you know.

__________________________________

From Whyteface by A. Igoni Barrett. Copyright © 2026 by A. Igoni Barrett. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.