Across the street

I look outside my window and see a middle-aged white man in the compound across the street. There is something subtly odd about this view. I can’t quite put a finger on it.  He is walking around, perhaps just out to stretch, in shorts and a plain shirt. Or is it striped? I can’t see well.  I continue to stare, I know I am intruding his privacy a little. The height from which I see him is several feet above his head. He is in his little safe compound and someone is watching.

The 3-storey Egyptian embassy with tall coconut trees and a mature mango tree in its front yard is across the street, Kofo Abayomi street. Half of the mango tree is over the walls of the compound, generously providing shade for a woman sitting under. She has been there since the first day i looked out this window, selling credit cards. There is always a queue of cars on this street!...they remind me I am in the office, somehow.

Perhaps what makes me stare longer than I ordinarily would is because I am staring at a white man. I catch myself staring like one would when one saw something totally new and unusual. I wonder: ‘why is he this casually dressed in such a corporate environment?’. A trace of misdirected anger flows through me, penetrating the thick glass, far above the walls surrounding this gigantic four-storey building , the street, above his little grey gate, descending to him. Why should he dress so casually when everyone around him is working?...Every black person, every Nigerian.

I shift my attention lazily to the moving cars, my face is at right angles to my body, but I’m no more interested in the sluggish motion of the cars than I am in the unattractive young man across the office who has been staring at me. I ascend slowly into some form of limbo, my eyes are fully open, but I see nothing. They seem to have retreated deep into my mind where more active interrogations build up; ‘Why is he dressed so casually?’, ‘This is not his home… this woman outside his walls has nothing to do but spend her days selling, for a miserly income’.

My face starts to betray my thoughts as my brows furrow into a worried crease; “But, I can’t blame him just for being white…This is the Egyptian embassy, not American nau!” “Urgh..Please, white is white” “So what if he is white, don’t we have leaders?” “It is our leaders who have failed us, wicked bunch of leaders we have” “He is just a normal person, like you are, in a foreign country…a poverty-stricken one. Don’t blame him for your poverty, please don’t blame him for your poverty”. 

My head snaps back into place as I straighten my back and square my shoulders, Usman has just returned to his computer, across mine. I give him a dreary look, “Don’t dare judge me for looking out the window!”. My brows are still creased. I stare at my computer blankly. The conclusion which Usman delayed came crawling back as my eyes dim again: “By blaming him for your problems, you give him the power to solve them, to help you. In doing that, you become truly inferior”.