Inspired by Music 1: Cavatina 1979 by Elizabeth Obadina

My neighbours in the summer of 1979

Cavatina - A short melody without repetition.

It was 1979. A year of great change for me and for much of it the haunting guitar notes of John William’s Cavatina was its soundtrack. I always thought John Williams had written it and only recently realised that it was a 1970 Stanley Myers’ piano composition but for me and I suspect millions of others, it was and will always be the theme tune to ‘The Deer Hunter’ – one of the first Vietnam War film epics to be made after that generation-defining war ended in 1975. It was the big movie release of the winter, first in the United States at the end of 1978 and then in London in February 1979. I didn’t see it right away. I had promised to wait for Tunde who had travelled to Nigeria on New Year’s Eve to return and then we would see it together.

Tunde had returned to Lagos, his birthplace, after growing up in England from the age of seven. Neither of us knew how 1979 would unfold as winter ended and spring bloomed but in April he returned to London having found a job as a political columnist with ‘The Punch’, a popular Nigerian national newspaper. He was on leave and time was short. We decided to marry, booked the first registry office slot available and then informed our families giving them a fortnight’s notice. We wanted to move on with our lives. He had to be back in Lagos – it was another election year and the nation was holding its breath to see if the military would hand over power to the civilians peaceably. I was teaching at that time. I handed in my notice and set about preparing to join my soon-to-be husband when the summer term ended in mid-July.

It was whilst we were waiting for our wedding day that we took ourselves off to Wood Green Odeon to see the film that everyone was talking about, but we had yet to see. It wasn’t exactly the film to set the mood for a wedding. The tragic disintegration of characters and raw emotion portrayed by that film left us walking home in silence. Then, in the absence of any traditional wedding music, it was that melancholy refrain that lodged itself in my head and defined the subsequent months of waiting to fly out to and then settle down in Lagos.  Cavatina replaced the two other hit songs of early 1979 which had been my soundtrack to life up until then; at work, it had been ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’ by Ian Dury which was the go-to East End white boys’ goad for a fight with their black classmates which ‘disrupted learning’ to put it in twenty-first-century terminology; at home, it had been ‘I Will Survive’ by Gloria Gaynor as I dealt by myself with builders, the winter cold and a hole in a crumbling front wall where the roof had leaked. Cavatina erased those tunes from my mind. It was being played all around me that summer term, it was in the charts and on the radio; it reflected my mood when Margaret Thatcher swept to power in May and then foolishly I bought myself the tape cassette version and took it out to Lagos with me although it did not reflect the optimism I felt about leaving England and being part of what I hoped was a nation on the rise.

           Those early days in Lagos were strange. I thought I knew Nigeria because I had worked in the north of the country in 1974. That is how I met Tunde. Returning to London a mutual friend introduced us because I had just come from Nigeria and Tunde was about to make his first ‘trip home’ after seventeen years in England. However the Nigeria I had encountered and the Nigeria he came from were two very, very different places. For a start the climate was different. I had worked in hot, desert and savannah environments. In Lagos, a wall of tropical humidity hit me the second I left the air-conditioned halls of the newly opened Murtala Mohammed International Airport, a Schiphol look-alike terminal building miraculously transported from Amsterdam to Lagos! The airport’s air conditioning would not function for much longer after my arrival but that’s another story about electricity.

           Well, perhaps, electricity should be the next thing to mention! Compared to my cool ex-patriot compound in Kano, northern Nigeria’s largest city, where generators switched on when the public power supply switched off my experience in Lagos was very different. Tunde’s mother had found us a newly built flat in a developing northern suburb of the city optimistically called Maryland. It was on the top floor of the building and the wind blew through it which was mercy during the frequent days and nights of power cuts. We could not afford a generator, let alone an air-conditioner, and without a generator, there was no fan and no light. I would sit for hours and hours on the balcony overlooking the neighbourhood and forest swamps beyond with only battery-powered lanterns and flickering candlelight to see by and my cassette recorder playing mainly Cavatina. Around me, the incense of mosquito coils would add to the potpourri of aromas arising from evening suppers and sometimes soap as neighbours washed their dusty children outside before bedtime.

I was usually waiting. Waiting for Tunde to come home from work and as anyone who has worked in print journalism knows it can be very late before a newspaper is ‘put to bed’. I rarely wandered out for an evening walk as although utterly safe, the unrelenting chanting of local children following me around chanting “Oyinbo!” “Oyinbo!” and something that sounded to me like ‘ikky, ikky Mama, something, something pepper’ became utterly irritating. Tunde assured me it wasn’t racist like it had been for him in Sicily when one holiday had been blighted by grannies in black mustering their families to come and stare at us walking down the streets to the refrain, “Nero! Nero!” No, I was told, this was different, not racist, just the Yoruba for ‘foreigner’ – and foreigners usually happen to be white. His point was made when to his intense irritation he too was called ‘Oyinbo’ when speaking very Anglicised Yoruba. I might have understood, but I didn’t like my Pied Piper effect on the neighbourhood’s children so I spent most of my time in the flat reading – just as, in Sicily, Tunde had spent most of our visit in the hotel. Too much public attention is tiresome. I ploughed through book after book when I could see to read and listened to music – but the only tune I can remember from that time is Cavatina.

Adjusting to my ‘new normal’ was difficult. It was the first time since I was seventeen that I had been without a car and an independent means of transport. I was always having to wait for someone to pick me up. I could, and perhaps should, have ventured out and battled onto one of the battered, yellow danfo mini-buses or bigger molue yellow buses or taken a dilapidated yellow taxi. But I wasn’t that brave and, in any case, I had no idea where to head off to! Here was a city without maps; there was no helpful ‘Tube Map’ as in other world cities – there was no Tube, no local railways, no river/creek taxis just a heaving, jam-packed, pot-holed road network. Inevitably I found myself wondering if I had made a mistake in moving to Lagos as I had no independence and I could not speak Yoruba, which would have helped. Somehow John Williams’ Cavatina was the balm that soothed the hot, noisy, loneliness. It was a mental escape.

As the weeks passed I got to know the children in the compound. One little girl made me her holiday project. She was so looking forward to moving up from primary to secondary school and learning a language, ‘French’. She already spoke four of Nigeria’s hundreds of languages plus English but they ‘didn’t count’. She found it funny that I found getting my tongue around Yoruba’s tonal pronunciations difficult. Like most native English speakers, I find any accent and any other language impossible. We struck up a deal. I shared some of my very limited French with her in exchange for her teaching me some Yoruba. So I learned some basics like greetings, go, come here and the only sentence I remember to this day, ‘Mo fe alubosa’. I want onions! But my little friend had other things to be getting on with during her summer vacation apart from checking in on the strange oyinbo woman who had moved into the flat next door. 

In August there was an election. Nigeria’s military ruler, General Olusegun Obasanjo, had pledged to return the country to an American style civilian democracy following the assassination of his predecessor General Murtala Mohammed, who was memorialised by the new airport. Nothing ever ran smoothly in Nigeria and the winner of the election had to win 25% of the vote in two-thirds of the 19 states. Two-thirds of 19 is 12.66. The winner, Shehu Shagari, a Northerner won 33% of the overall vote but only 25% of the vote in 12 states. There was electoral stalemate as arguments raged about whether Shagari’s party who had taken almost 20% of the vote in Kano State had won. Did that Kano win total up to 12.6 states or had he lost by not winning 25% in 13 states outright as his opponents contended? The matter went to court and for political journalists like my husband, it was high drama and political cliff-hangers as crisis followed crisis that summer. Tunde’s work was intense, time-consuming and took him away from home.

Meanwhile, I had John Williams, and in those days I’m just remembering, somewhat shamefacedly, that I smoked. Benson and Hedges – original cigarettes – smuggled over the border from neighbouring Benin were ridiculously cheap. Just listening to Cavatina again which I hadn’t done for years, evokes that long ago time of uncertainty; hot, lonely candlelit evenings; a mingling of new sights, sounds and smells and lots of cigarettes as plumes of smoke wafted my worries away on a haunting guitar melody. Away they floated; over rusty red corrugated rooftops; over the plantain, mahogany and raffia palm treetops of the swamps beyond; over the flashing rear, red lights of cars and buses carrying weary workers home from the city centre along the distant highway, and up towards the stars in skies, for whatever the time of year, Lagos skies darkened around seven at night. From 1979 my life underwent a complete change of tune, and for a while, Cavatina captured my mood; wonderous, apprehensive and waiting for the next chapter to unfold.

Elizabeth Obadina on Medium.com