Evidence

My friends call me Evi. I am Evi Okoye, a final year medical student. Everybody says I have a lovely name, albeit, unusual, for the part of Nigeria I come from. Funnily, hardly any of them bothers to ask what my full name is.

Evi is short for Evidence. Yes, my parents, my father, to be exact, named me Evidence. I am the evidence of all sorts of attributes. Of faithfulness and faithlessness. Of love and hatred. Of passion and cold-bloodedness. A lot more I can name, if I care to.

But I’ll answer your question, my sweetheart, since you ask. Not like many a village woman who got their answer without asking questions; or many a neighbour who generated a story that satisfied the curiosity of those who looked up to them to know about my origin.

You know my brothers and you wonder how I fit in with them. They are dark, really dark. The richness of their mahogany contrasts sharply with my paleness. The darkness of their eyes, a thousand miles from my blue. So you wonder.

I am the last of a family of five. I could pass to the uninitiated eye as white. Yes, my mother was a full-blooded Nigerian. Oh, she was fair and pretty. So fair you’d almost think she was an albino. But she could never make a blue-eyed baby with my father, a man of such intolerably possessive dark genes.

That’s how I came to be called Evidence.
My mother had won an award sponsored by the British Council, to do a diploma in epidermology. She was a nurse at the Teaching Hospital at the time.

The Council had a policy against giving awards to single ladies. Many a lady had either absconded on setting foot on the British soil or got married to anyone who had a right of stay, and never came home to be useful to the government for whom the Council had undertaken the burden of training them.

Married women were preferred, especially if their husbands had engaging means of livelihood or ones so lucrative it would be unprofitable to abandon altogether. The Council could never be sure with the men. With women, they always knew where they were taking chances. The deciding factor in each case was whether the benefiting country realized just how indebted to the British Council they were. If Nigerian government begged for it long enough, the Council would count that as one more feather to its cap and send off another lucky devil.

Now, my mother had four sons. Any married woman who could boast of a son was sure to come back. Her place in her husband’s family was fairly stable. With four sons, the likes of my mother were prize cows. She was sure to come back. All the Council had to worry about was whether or not she was pregnant at the time of departure. The British government was getting damned tired of acquiring citizens by default. They’d even started to snigger about the American government that claimed as citizens, even children born in their air space of some undesirable ‘barbarian’ parents!

There was no doubt in the Council official’s mind after persistent questioning, that my mother was, indeed, sure of her last menstrual date and could not be unknowingly pregnant. Satisfied, they’d given her clearance to collect a visa off the British High Commission. Never mind that she couldn’t pick an airline of her choice. It was clearly B-Cal. She had to be grateful, after all, she would still have chosen it if it came to down to a choice between Nigerian Airways and B-Cal. Patriotism was for the comfortable. For those, also, whose governments had welfare policies. A government that only begged from other governments would be asking for too much if it so much as muted the idea of patriotism.

My mother was billed for a one-year diploma. She went for it. She behaved herself and came back exactly on schedule, twelve months later. She was a dream British Council Fellow. While there, she mixed so well; so eager was she to drink in all of the tenets of the glorified British heritage. She came back, in some ways, more conservative than your average Briton. Even her tutors had not intended for her to take them quite as seriously as she had. But my mother was an exemplary student, so in all things, she practised what she preached and what she was taught to preach.

Her stiff upper lip, for instance, was so unbending that it took little for me to start an unending spate of chain reactions.

So you ask: how did I come about?
My mother’s class was a balance of all self-respecting and contributing member countries of the British Commonwealth. As expected, various shades of both colours and opinions came into play. As these ambassadors had not gone all that way for a purely Commonwealth conference. A handful of the promising generation of Britons was occasionally thrown in to rub minds with the aided countries. Hopefully, they would help to bend the minds of the ‘rustics’ towards the more desirable pear shape.

Excellent students immediately caught on. My mother did. There was Tony Matthews. He, with his girlfriend, Fiona, sought to immerse my mother into the mainstream of British upper class respectability. Mother attended cocktails and dinners in fine restaurants. Or visited families. And paid heavily to visit interesting countryside. Not for my mother all those second-hand clothes and shoes that fascinated her peers who always checked up the current rate of the Naira before they spent a pound. If she couldn’t name the shop in some elitist conversation – the kind she now delighted in – she was not interested. My mother was proper. So proper that she had thrown away any item that would have constituted excess luggage when she was returning. She shunned all those shameless Nigerian women whose hand luggage were so enormous they would render flight impossible for the big bird, but for the foresight of aeronautical engineers. When she got down at the international airport in Nigeria, you could pick out my mother from the furthermost end of the waiting lounge. She stood apart from the rest, her dressing screamed prim and proper!

Her luggage was brief and to the point. Not for my mother, the endless trips to clear goods and bribe a thousand and one officials of the Customs and Excise Department and those of the Immigration. The Police and the Army too. Then the local security at the ports. Etc, etc. She was not a businesswoman. Anyone who used their stipend as they should was not expected to be able to afford enough to buy anything that was worth shipping. My mother was not greedy.

This she pointed out to the endless throngs of people who realized then that they were our friends and took out time to come and welcome her back. Many of them had not deemed it necessary to disturb our family in her absence. And anyway, it was necessary to give honour to whom it was due. For this, at least, I praised my mother. She had dealt them a blow I wish I could have dealt them myself if I was in being.

The endless courtesy calls soon ended. Name-calling began. My father was in the middle of all this. He was undecided whether to pitch camps with my mother or to give in to consanguineous sentiments and stay with his relations. Some of my mother’s too. Grandma, for one, did not understand why her daughter should visit the very home of ‘George’ and let her go to her grave in rags! There were also mutual acquaintances of my parents. Mother remained adamant. In the end, my father had to doff his cap to her. But that itself, was belittling. Mother always got her way in everything.

She had had no doubts when this scholarship thing started. The questionnaires sent by the British Council were filled in by my father. But it was my mother who suggested the words. Well, wasn’t my father free to reject suggestions? But he did not. It was not that Mother was bossy. My father would be the first to one to tell you she wasn’t. She was just lucky father didn’t object too much. She merely filled in gaps. Mother was soon bursting out of her clothes. Obviously pregnant.
‘Ah’, people speculated, ‘one for the road!’
‘A gift from Obodo Oyibo!’
How right.

I came right on schedule! Lovely, bubbly-blue-eyed-bundle!
‘My bundle of joy!’ cried my father, really meaning it.
‘My lovely daughter. The crown of my life! The evidence of my perpetual torture. No one will deny me the pleasure of the last laugh! I shall name you Evidence!’ This was one evidence my mother could not contest. And finally, my father had his way. My mother lived with her conscience. To her grave, she maintained her stiff upper lip!

Originally published in OKIKE – An African Journal of new writing (No. 45, June, 2000) pp. 3-7. This is slightly revised.