Any parent who has never sent a reluctant ward to the boarding school would not realize the depth of guilt felt Jane, a middle-aged, middle-class accountant who felt her son, now 21 was ripe enough to test the waters of independence. Her son, Jaiye is a British citizen, thanks to the son’s father who is also a citizen. Jaiye had scaled through his first degree effortlessly and Jane thought he would gain more if he were to have foreign post-graduate experience.
“We found him a good school abroad paid his fees and I was more than lucky to have a sister living abroad who happily consented to being his guardian whenever he was on holidays from the university”, recalls Jane. “A few days after I came home to Nigeria from settling him in, the phone rang. It was him. Was he alright? Did he like life at his new university? My son sounded as if a warden had grudgingly agreed for him to use the phone.
He moaned about the food, about the students and about feeling terribly lonely. I guess it was one thing going on regular holidays with the parents and quite a different kettle of fish being marooned in a college amongst strange faces. I reminded him that he would soon get used to it. He was after all a man and lots of children younger than he were happily settling into various schools abroad. His complaints grew by the months.
He said he was being bullied by racists and I assured him it was a common trait abroad, that he should just ignore them. When I eventually went to visit him, my son was a shadow of himself. His warmth was gone and he was more clingy. I was getting ready to come back after settling all his needs when he broke down and started sobbing heartbreakingly. I quietly bought his ticket and brought him back. No one has a right to be as unhappy as he was.
“Two of his siblings are now abroad and doing as well as could be under the circumstance. Jaiye too has since bounced back and is now into his masters, in one of the universities here. I guess some children are more adventurous than others”. A while back, there was an ‘immigrant’ story in the foreign paper about a Nigerian cleaner. “A woman whose good nature has been sorely tested of late by a mugging, a burglary, a faithless husband and an ugly business with her senior daughter who lost all her domestic appliances in a flat-sharing dispute,” the report read.
“She came from a large Nigerian family who are also large in the area of the recalcitrant child. Her junior daughter would not be where she is today if they were still in Nigeria. In Nigeria, her mother would have been able to threaten: ‘If you’re not home by 11, I will summon my brothers and the whole tribe and they will beat you up’, and that girl would never have dared put a foot out of line. But the girl came to England when she was 14, noticed at once that physical violence towards children was frowned upon, learned at once that she could leave home when she was 16, and off the rail she trotted.
“She bought herself a large trunk and began to buy saucepans against the day she could take off. But 16 came, then 17, then 18, then 19 and she didn’t move out but stayed and by and large, pleased herself about what she did with her crazy friends. Her mother didn’t adapt to English ways with quite the same speed. She wanted respect from the girl whose manners became increasingly stroppy.
She wanted to have a say in her life but the girl hated what she had to say. Pretty soon, they stopped speaking civilly, then they stopped speaking, then the mother began to take her meals in her bedroom, they then began to open each other’s mail then to hide each other’s mails, then matters became intolerable. And so the poor mother notified the local housing authority that she was going to evict her daughter to teach her a lesson.
“She also notified the local police because she said she didn’t want any bloodshed. She then changed the locks. Though the daughter arrived with a policeman to collect her belongings, and though the policeman told the mother she was out of line, she steeled her heart which was very heavy. The girl, she says must go through a little bit of hell so she can appreciate all that has been done for her…”
In Ariyike ‘s case, it was her 15-year old daughter that was always reporting her to the authorities because she (Ariyike) was physically abusive towards her. Since according to British law, each child is owed a duty of care by his parents, no parent dares starve or be cruel to their child. Ariyike who now believed she was raising a monster asked her friend’s advice.
The friends urged her to return her daughter to Nigeria. “To do this”, recalled Ariyike— I had to tell the children, (three in all) that we were all going back to Nigeria for the final funeral rites of my mother. Tina, my recalcitrant daughter was very fond of her grandmas and after initially taunting that I couldn’t make her go; she finally agreed to come when she realized all of us would be leaving.
“After the funeral, I told the other two children what I had in mind. They never liked the way Tina always behaved. So, when she reluctantly agreed to spend a few days with my younger sister in Ibadan, we hurriedly came back to England, leaving her in my sister’s care. My sister is a no-nonsense disciplinarian and with luck, she would kick her back into shape in the meantime, I have vowed not to get in touch with her until she’s civil and responsible…?
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