Essay from the print issue of 120 Granta: Medicine.
Culled from http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/People-Dont-Get-Depressed-in-Nigeria
It is a cold January morning and I am sitting in a cafe on a
busy London street. Looking out of the window, I watch people bustle
determinedly along the pavement. I remember how my English friends used to
complain that I walked too slowly when I first arrived in London. I thought
they walked too fast, but now, in the chill of winter, I find myself quickening
my own pace and lengthening my strides, eager to get back to warmth. I unfold
the newspaper that I’ve found lying on the table and struggle to keep the
still-unfamiliar, outsized pages from encroaching upon the space of the people
seated at the tables next to me. I open the newspaper and the word ‘Nigeria’
catches my eye. It is funny how my mind always, almost unconsciously, seems to
seek that word out whenever I am reading a paper. Sometimes I am fooled and the
reference is to Nicaragua, but this time my eyes have found a worthy target.
It’s a feature on the young British Nigerian novelist Helen Oyeyemi in which
she speaks of her struggle with depression in her teenage years and the
difficulty her parents faced with understanding it. ‘Because people don’t get
depressed in Nigeria,’ she says. ‘They were like, “Cheer up, get on with it.”’
The black words sliding over the page carry me back in time
to another place, where I too, like Helen’s parents, believed that people don’t
get depressed in Nigeria.
It has been a hot night; much of it spent rolling away from
the concrete against which my bed is pushed. The walls, retaining the fiery,
dry heat from the sun of the previous day, burn with an intensity that seems to
scorch my skin when, in my fitful sleep, I roll to the edge of the bed closest
to them. I have woken up with a start several times, finally dozing off in the
early hours of the morning.
I wake up to a clucking sound outside my bedroom window. It
is guttural, low-pitched, and there is a rustling in the fields of guinea corn
that stand sentry immediately outside our low-eaved modern I am likita – Hausa
for doctor – and I am twenty-seven years old, freshly qualified from medical
school in southern Nigeria bungalow. I walk to the window and peer through the
grimy glass louvres, past the hole-ridden metal mosquito netting, and see a
herd of cattle making its gentle, almost silent way through the fields. In a
distant corner, I can see the Fulani herdsman, a boy really – he is the source
of the clucking noise. Whenever a particularly adventurous cow threatens to
stray too far, he clucks, softly, almost under his breath, yet loudly enough
for the sound to carry into my bedroom, and the cow wanders back to the fold. I
remember the stories I have heard about Fulani being able to ‘talk’ to their
cattle, and from what I can see, it seems that the tales told by an old driver
of my father’s who had once lived in the North are true.
