Date Published: 12/30/09

We All Are Berliners ByOghene Omonisa

        Now going to three years in Lagos, the city state in South-Western Nigeria, the fact of it being Nigeria’s number one destination for commerce, manufacturing, finance, importation and the media is clearly evident in the pace and pulse of its activities. Living in Lagos  is exciting and opportunities and possibilities for the ambitious are almost unlimited – most times elusively unlimited.
        But home is still home. Home for me is the city of Warri, Delta State, in the oil-rich Niger Delta Region, deeper south. Warri holds so much fond memories for its emigrants. Certainly, we have our own share of a large population, like we have our own commerce, manufacturing, finance, port, the media and even our own modern airport, which was recently constructed to replace the old one. But certainly Warri is not on the scale of Lagos. Warri is only to Delta State what Lagos State is to Nigeria. What distinguishes a Waffarian – as we call ourselves – from every other Nigerian is the childhood that never fades away – the childhood we hold so dear because of the wonderful experiences we arrogantly but wrongly presume others never had or will never have.
        One of such experiences is the learning we had in the mid 1980s to early 1990s. When a comprehensive history of Warri will be written, that era will be better known as the Age of Learning. And if Waffarians before us had had similar experiences, then perhaps ours will be known as the Second or Third Age of Learning. Teenage Waffarians of my time wanted to know everything – or almost everything. And we almost did! We knew the names and faces of public figures, especially political leaders and sportsmen and women, up to the national and international levels. We followed every major event on television, on radio and in the newspaper. We knew every state and its capital and could tell most African countries and their capitals. Of course, we knew major countries of the world and their capitals, especially the US and Western Europe. Some of us even knew the fifty states of the US and their capitals.
        Most teenage Waffarians of my time knew every route to the city library and to the post office almost as much as to the small old compact stadium, which ironically we called Big Field, perhaps out of our innate high sense of humour, which is well acknowledged, going by the large percentage of celebrated raw talents that the city spins out rapidly to dominate the Nigerian stand-up comedy industry. (The stadium has recently been upgraded and expanded.) Our adoration of books and the quests for them came almost after football. There were many and updated books to be borrowed from and to be read in the library. And there were quests for more books to be pursued by postage.
        Nearly all of us wrote letters. Those who did not, knew somebody who did. We wrote to embassies and foreign missions, mostly Western missions, seeking for information about their home countries, simply to enrich our knowledge of their countries. And they would send us loads and loads of books, mostly on their history and tourist destinations. And we would read them all and tell ourselves stories about what we had read. We listened to international radio stations like BBC and VOA and wrote to them to send us books about world events and news-makers, and they did, but mostly they sent their programme schedules, their magazines and their stickers. Some of us wrote to foreign universities, mostly British and American, wishing to further our studies over there, and they would send us colourful and exciting brochures about their schools. Others wrote to Christian organisations and pastors, wishing to have Christian literature to enrich our Christian faith and they sent us books and magazines. How can I forget the ubiquitous World Bible School (WBS) and its correspondent courses and certificates? And how can one forget American televangelists like Pastor Billy Graham, who sent us his messages in books and audio cassettes, and Pastor Frederick K.C. Price of the Crenshaw Christian Centre (CCC), California, USA, whose extended family photographs which he sent me year in, year out I still have in my old collection. There were also secular organisations which sent magazines which had pen-pal clubs in them and we made pen pals all over the world.
        I can recall two memorable books sent to me by the American Embassy: An Outline of American History and An Outline of American Geography. I also can recall a collection of information tracts sent to me by the German Embassy titled Germany at a Glance, which provided in simple words and exciting pictures the history of Germany through its nationhood, the two World Wars, the break-up of Germany and the economic miracle. The tracts were very enriching. This was in 1988.
        Many of us much later went into reading Western popular novelists like Nick Carter and James Hadley Chase. This was after we had read Pacesetters, a series of popular African writers with very familiar themes and storyline. Going around with a novel in your hand or in your pocket was status symbol. It showed you belonged!
        VCR was luxury then. And if a home had one, it was known around a neighbourhood. And such a home was sure to attract a crowd by the mere sound of a movie. But watching Western movies late in the night on the local television station attracted larger following. Though not every teenager understood their accent, the fact that the actors were white was sure enough reason to get eyes completely glued to the television screen. But those of us who also listened to foreign radio stations and who were familiar with the accent enjoyed the movies better. To those who did not understand the accent, when a movie had no action, then it was a talku-talku film (made up of only dialogues) and therefore boring. But it was a tough film when it was action-packed, especially when it had the climatic action where the protagonist triumphs over his antagonist, which we called last fight. Nevertheless, everybody went for the sitcoms which have the sounds of the audience in the background, laughing to comic actions or dialogues, which we called lafu-lafu film, because they sure made everybody laugh: those viewing it live and those watching the recorded version at home!
        From the few times we watched them on VCR, we understood most Chinese and James Bond films are very tough because they are action-packed and are full of many fights before the last fight. But for reasons we still have not learnt, the local station never showed such films, except James Bond movies which were once in a while featured in the quarterly programme schedule. Apart from VCR, few Waffarians of that era also had opportunity of watching such movies in cinemas, and I can recall four cinemas then: Laila, Cine Rex, Central and Sonia, whose name was later changed to AP. But parents of that era did not take kids to the cinema as cinemas were resting places for non-students. Kids who went to cinemas then, were kids who earned money, mostly hawkers and casual labourers, perhaps with the exception of Laila, which was owned by foreigners and which enjoyed patronage from Lebanese who went with their wives and kids. But even by the late 1980s, cinema going was a fading culture due to low patronage and one or two of them converted to VCR to remain afloat.
        So, it was only in few instances teenagers of my era went to the cinema. Naturally, nearly all our knowledge of Western people and culture were learnt from reading novels, books, newspapers and magazines, and listening to radio and watching television. And there were Western sitcoms like Diff’rent Strokes and children educational programmes like Sesame Street which are unforgettable. Ho, one cannot forget the adventures of Tom Grantham, an English teenager in a serial movie whose name I cannot recall but which was set in England in the Second World War. Indeed, the mid and late 1980s were the Age of Learning for Warri teenagers. We read a lot, we listened a lot, we watched a lot and we learnt a lot!
        Before the fall of the Berlin Wall two months to the end of that decade – 9th November 1989 – we already knew about the Wall as much as we knew of the Cold War between the West, led by the US, and the East Bloc, led by the former Soviet Union – a rivalry that we had noticed even in the books sent to us by their foreign missions. We had also read about the Iron Curtain as well as Checkpoint Charlie, the famous crossing point between West Berlin and East Berlin, a checkpoint which I had read first in Believed Violent by James Hadley Chase.
        So, when the Wall came tumbling down, there were high interests among us as we followed its reports in the paper and on radio and television. Some of us went to the library to consult more, mostly in encyclopedia – Britannica and Americana. That was when I first read of President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 famous speech at Rudulph Wilde Platz, near the Berlin Wall, during his first and only state visit to Germany, where he had proclaimed in German: ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ (‘I am a Berliner’).
        During news reports of the crumbing of the wall, one had recalled two years before when President Ronald Reagan, in a speech during a visit to West Berlin, had called on former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to ‘tear down this wall’. And after the Wall had been torn down, we developed more interests in world affairs and followed world events more. And we read some more – novels, newspapers, magazines and books.
        By the early and mid 1990s, when some of us had bade goodbye to our teenage years, we had become part of the world, going by our knowledge of the world we lived in and our international contacts. We had developed interests in more popular writers like Sidney Sheldon, Mario Puzo, Frederick Forsyth, Harold Robbins, Jeffrey Archer, Robert Ludlum, John le Carre and others, even the then new rave of the moment, John Grisham. And mostly through the library, we had access to Time, Newsweek and The Economist magazines.

        We followed it when Germany finally became unified as one country again and when Soviet broke up. We were abreast with events when former Communist Eastern Bloc countries let loose from Soviet control and influence and Europe knew West or East Bloc no more. And Africans, mostly from Anglophone countries, saw new opportunities in the former Communist countries and the independent states of the former Soviet countries which before then were not common destinations for migrant Africans. And the proverbial greener pastures was no longer to be found only in the West, especially the UK and the US.
        It became commonplace to enquire of an old friend and learn he was in Bulgaria, or Estonia, or Latvia, or Ukraine, or Lithuania, or Russia. In his second attempt at seeking for his own greener pastures in Europe, my elder brother ended up in Czech Republic, one of the two countries that emerged from the break-up of former Communist country of Czechoslovakia. The day he called to say he was pitching his tent in Prague, the capital city, I had joked that he had gone behind the Iron Curtain and reminded him of the adventurous rescue mission of Mark Girland to Prague.  (Girland is a popular character in the old James Hadley Chase espionage series, and he had gone to Prague on a rescue mission in Have This One on Me.) My brother had understood and he had laughed. When eventually my brother married a Czech woman and they both later migrated to the UK, I had also joked that together with his wife, he had just ‘escaped’ to the West, using a term
very common in the Cold War era.
        The crumbling down of the Berlin Wall was the precursor to the unification of Germany, the break-up of the former Soviet Union, the loss of Soviet influence on former Eastern Bloc countries and the emergence of a united Europe. The breaking down of the Wall was the end of an era, an era that began with the erection of the Wall in 1961, a wall that separated a city and its residents in two, a city that is one of oldest inhabited cities in the world; a wall that took thirty-eight lives in their attempts to cross over. It is still unbelievable that a wall separated one of the leading cities in Europe for twenty-eight years of the second half of the last century, a continent which for three centuries before, controlled the Americas, most of Africa, Oceania and portions of Asia; Europe, a continent which is the birth place of Western civilization and culture, a continent which set the pace and others would follow. Most of the peoples of the new world trace their ancestry to Europe. And when the Wall came crumbling down twenty years ago, the rest of the world joined Europe in celebrating. Where would humanity have been with a wall separating Berlin, separating Germany, separating Europe and separating the world?
        As the whole world focused attention on Germany as it prepared to mark twenty years of the demolition of the Wall, memories started pouring back. And as I followed media coverage of the first of the events, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s hosting of former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, former US President George H. W. Bush Sr. and former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev on Saturday, 31st October in Berlin, it was like 1989 all over again!
        But the lead actors from that era are now old men. Bush is now 85 and has presently added the proverbial third leg, the walking stick; Gorbachev is now 78 and all his hair gone totally grey, and it was difficult locating the trademark dark patch just above his forehead; and Kohl is 79 with completely grey hair like Gorbachev, but confined to a wheelchair and with a voice now low and slow. They all reminisced about events that led to 9th November 1989 and about that day itself twenty years before. But three other major actors from that era who were conspicuously missing at the historic gathering were Reagan, former President Francois Mitterrand of France, both of whom have since bade our world goodbye; and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady from Grantham!
        Man of the moment President Barack Obama could not make the grand event on the 9th of November, a ceremony to mark the symbolism of an era that represents a prominent part of the last century. President Obama was ably represented by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The world followed it on television, on radio and on the Internet, a unique symbol of a united world where news knows no bound or limit.
        And in the heart of every being that followed that event was certainly a feeling of the breaking down of walls, walls that limit integration and freedom of movement; the crumbling down of walls, walls that restrain ideology and freedom of choice; and the crushing down of walls, walls that restrict individualism and freedom of dreams.
        Humanity is truly touched and deeply moved as the fall of the Berlin Wall is remembered twenty years after. And for those who were privileged to have watched, to have listened, or to have read President Kennedy’s Ich bin ein Berliner speech forty-six years ago, the last paragraph would have readily come to mind:
 
       ‘All free men, wherever they live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words “Ich bin ein Berliner” ("I am a Berliner").’
       
        Kennedy was not speaking to Berliners and about Berlin alone. Kennedy was talking to the human race and about humanity. In every country on earth, of every city we know, for everyone who knew of the Berlin Wall and its eventual collapse, whether in the same era as ours in the city of Warri, whether before or after ours, as the world mark the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, may we keep afresh Kennedy’s words in our hearts.
        Everybody could not have gone to Berlin for the Anniversary. We could not all have been opportune to give beautiful speeches or listen and cheer speakers. But today and always, may we in our hearts and acts repeat the words spoken in the afternoon of Wednesday, 26th June 1963: ‘I am a Berliner’; and live by it.
        Amen!