Europeans Still Believe Africans Hang on Trees
The marriage of this boisterous Nigerian lady to a Spanish engineer started with fight at first sight! 25 years and two graduate daughters down the road, Mrs. Nwanne Campo relishes the challenge of blending two cultures as a teenager among other experiences. Gbubemi God’s Covenant Snr reports. A graduate of sociology at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, the drama started after Nwanne’s second semester. There is just one building between her family home (then 22 Savage Crescent) and 16a, in the Government Reservation Area, Enugu. Expatriates on special projects for the state government reside at 16a and leave after their assignments were over, but the domestic staff always remained the same. This love drama started after a Spanish engineer arrived house No. 16a; he had problems with the staff so he promptly fired everybody and found his own staff; but for people in the neighborhood, who didn’t know the true story, this white guy was a racist. ‘I matched up and asked him what he thought he was doing sacking everybody in the house, but he squinted at me a moment and asked, ‘Small girl, what is your business?’ He even spoke very pidgin, and that got me angry: I hollered at him: ‘So it’s true! You fired everyone working here for ages and just look at you, cutting grass by yourself. Look, if you think you can come here and do whatever you like, you’d better go back to your country!’
But an unpleasant surprise greeted her as her mom welcomed her home with the news: ‘Do you know we have a new neighbour now? After you refresh and rest, be a darling and organize a welcome party for him this evening.’ Nwanne quite forgot her mom was always asking her to organize welcome parties for new neighbors before she went to school. ‘I was taken aback; I couldn’t tell her I just clashed with the guy, so I went ahead and organized the party. As I went up to give him the invitation I noticed his security man saw me coming and ran inside the house.
I wondered what he was up to, but as I approached the gate, the white guy came out and we just stood there, glaring at each other, for a moment, then I told him my mom is throwing a party in his honour and here’s his card, but of course he refused the invitation! ‘I found myself pleading with him because my mom must not hear I clashed with him. Finally he gave me a pen and spelt out his name: ‘Engr. Ignacio Campo’. I wrote it before he collected the card and he attended the party later. I found out much later that after our first clash in the afternoon we first met, he had told his driver that he was going to ‘marry that girl’; it was when we were finally married that the driver told me.’ Looking back to those teenage years, Nwanne could not say when precisely she fell in love with the Spaniard. ‘I don’t know exactly when I fell in love because I can’t say I really liked him under the circumstances we met; though he kept coming over to the house and I didn’t like that either. I noticed he spoke French and Spanish and his English was very poor. He understood when you speak but he was only able to communicate with signs and gestures.’
Nwanne recalls the storm that almost broke up her young marriage in 1993 following the June 12 political unrest. ‘Because of the cancellation of that presidential election the Federal Government closed all borders and imposed a flight ban which caused foreign embassies to call back their nationals. My husband had to go and I found myself with a tough decision to make: ‘I had just matriculated for my final year and we hadn’t resumed because of the unrest; also my first baby Julia was only a few months old. My husband decided he will leave with the baby and I, and if I won’t go, he will go with the baby. I had to decide whether to stay back until things calmed down and finish my studies then join him and my baby later, or follow him to Spain.’ It was her decision to make, and for a 19 year old Ibo girl of that time, it was indeed a tough decision.
‘I was quite apprehensive at the time because though they say love is blind, we get to hear about foreigners who married Nigerian girls and later it was found that their husbands were not really who they claimed to be; they were not from the countries they claimed, and when you later try to reach them, you find that many didn’t exist; so that fear was in me because I had never left my country before and I was only 19, but in the end I decided to go with my husband and my baby.’
A NEW LIFE IN SPAIN
‘I felt like I just stepped into a new world; I didn’t speak Spanish then so I was totally lost; not understanding a word of what they were saying made me feel like I was in prison! Though my husband helped when he was around but of course he wasn’t always around. Oh, I felt miserable.’ But with great determination Nwanne learnt the language in six months. ‘I had the best teachers – my parent in-laws, but my main teacher was my father in-law who is late now. He was such a strict teacher that, if he spoke a word I didn’t understand, he would still repeat the same word with signs slowly and clearly as if I was deaf. He didn’t speak English and didn’t even want to learn; and because my husband was working in another state, I had no choice but to be a very attentive pupil, and that did it: in six months I was at home with Spanish language. Also in those six months I learnt to cook their kinds of meals.’
DOMESTIC LIFE IN SPAIN Adapting to Spanish domestic life was both upsetting and instructive for the young Ibo mom.
‘Every day I learnt something new, and the funny part of it was that I never noticed the difference until I would have done something we consider normal in Nigeria only to find I have made a blunder! ‘For example, back home in Nigeria, we hang washed collared shirts with the middle over the line and you clip it; or you simply use a hanger; but Spaniards clip both bottom tips of the shirt to the line so the sleeves and collar are hanging upside down. Everything they washed they hang upside down and I didn’t know that, so after I had washed and hung the clothes, before I turn back they’ll remove everything and hang them upside down! That upset me in the beginning, and it took me some time to adjust to it.’
But she found other culture and habits she delighted in. ‘The way they dress their beds is just as you see in top hotels; then their home decoy is light and simple; they don’t stuff it with lots of things like we do in Nigeria. Also they use a lot of electro-domestic gadgets we didn’t have or use in Anambra of that time. For example, I never had a vacuum cleaner, never used a microwave or a washing machine before leaving in 1993; all those I had to learn; I never used the heater before because in Nigeria we use air conditioners, so everything was completely different: the foods, their bread, oh, it was a completely new world.’
A peep at her boisterous life shows Nwanne swinging on the extreme end of social pendulum. Apart from chairing a group called ‘Nigerians living in Spain’ with over 300 membership for now, Nwanne is a personal shopper, an events planner across Spain, an interpreter in seven languages though her French, Portuguese, Italia and German are only on a basic level while still studying foreign languages at the Escuela Official de Idiomas en Santander. In the midst of these, Nwanne still finds time as a voluntary worker in Cadis where she is a lifeline, assisting African immigrants coming into Spain through the sea from Moroko.
‘Under an NGO called Tartessos, we bail immigrants from the police and help them, especially the ladies with children, and those that are pregnant we keep in apartments, feed and clothe them and help procure their legal documents. I did that for one year and while there I also organized conferences, lots of shows for people to get to know about us and change some of the prejudices they have about us Africans and all that.’ Also, this busy bee works hand in hand with the local authorities of the State of Vialago, in Northern Spain where she participates in intercultural projects where participants from other nations work to get Spaniards closer to their respective cultures. ‘I represent Nigeria while my other colleagues represent their respective countries, like Abdul who represent Pakistan, Abiba from Moroko, Bella from Azadvejile; Mariokenia from Venezuela, and a lot more.’
Of Nigerians living in Spain she said it’s a forum where ‘We feel at home, announce and discuss our businesses, our problems and remind ourselves of the necessity to be ambassadors of our country in Spain by keep ing our lives and businesses within the bounds of the law because in Spain, we have great Nigerian based artistes, entertainers and comedians and they all belong to this forum. Then of course we share jokes and generally have fun.’ But it is not all rosy for non- Spaniards in areas of economy and business. ‘True, cost of living in Spain is very high; as I’m talking to you, unemployment is extremely high up to the five million figure. There are busts of protests from citizens now and then and we don’t even know when things will get better because authorities are not promising anything.’ ‘There’s is this belief in Spain that we Africans are extremely poor; that we can’t feed or clothe ourselves and especially that some of us hang on trees, we ride on lions, and strange stuffs like that. In fact I had this riding on lions from the mouth of my late father in-law that used to ask my husband when he got a job in the former Enugu State.
He would ask him how come he loved living in Africa; that he has been told that there, we have to use sticks to wade off lions to be able to move about, so how can they pay him if the people live on trees, no house and animals everywhere and all that? ‘Also, I was in Cadis in the South of Spain, reading under a tree; then came one elderly woman who had been observing me out of sight and asked to know if that book is a pictorial story book. I demanded to know why, and she said she’s been watching me, looking at a page for a long time, then flipping it over to another page and continue to stare; that they heard we Africans are illiterates and don’t know how to read, so what was I doing with a book? ‘I sat up and let her see the book and she got the surprise of her life because it was a novel written in Spanish language; and that’s one thing I pride myself: I taught myself to read and write Spanish without going to their school; so I told her in Spanish that I read and write their language and she felt ashamed of herself. She apologized and said that was what they were made to believe hence she wanted to confirm this for herself.’
On the lighter side, Nwanne mirrors some 26 years into her marriage that started with fight at first sight and laughed merrily. ‘Oh, first of all I love that guy, my husband that made me to know that country. He’s the best thing that has ever happened to me; and like I say and he always say the same, if there is another world to come, we’ll marry ourselves over and over again.’ The Spanish Nigerian has since returned back to her married country and family in Spain after six breezy weeks in Nigeria.
