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Racism on the Marina
I was once so angry while living in Nigeria that I felt I was being subjected to racism in my own country. That anger lived in me. It built up. And one day, it went off the wall.
In the early 1990s I joined the Lagos Yacht Club on the Marina. An old sailing club. Mostly white. About 98 percent white at the time. Nigerians prefer motorboats. I sail. I have sailed since I was eight years old in England and elsewhere. I was taught how to sail by professionals. Sailing was not something I picked up yesterday.
When I joined the club, I told my friend Niyi Adebayo. A man I respect because he knows me inside out. I remember exactly what he said.
“I bet you, within the first week you will come back and tell me you are having problems with the members of that club. You are asking for trouble. I know you. I know your temper.”
Two days later I saw him at the Polo Club. He was having a beer. I walked up to him furious.
“That club you warned me about is unreal,” I said. “It is like apartheid South Africa, except it is happening here in Nigeria, under our noses.”
He laughed and ordered a Chapman for me, non-alcoholic, because I was so angry he didn’t want me drinking and going back to hurt someone.
It started with the sailing test. One has to pass a test to qualify to sail. It was supposed to be a series of ten questions about sailing. I was confident I would pass. I had been sailing since my schoolboy days.
Instead, the Englishman running the test, dressed like a colonial British overseer—shorts, long socks, sandals, army shirt, the standard colonial uniform—calling himself the Commodore, started asking me the questions. Except they were no longer the official ten. They were now twenty-five.
He looked shocked when I breezed through every single one. The trap didn’t work. He had no choice but to pass me.
In the bathrooms, where one took showers after sailing, the white members would not talk to me or acknowledge me. They were uncomfortable that a Nigerian was now in their inner enclave, seeing them naked, pot bellies and little dodgers on display. I had gone to boarding school in England. Their behaviour was not a surprise.
In the 1960s and 1970s at Ikoyi Club swimming pool changing rooms, the same thing used to happen. The silence. The stares.
“What is a black boy doing here, in our private domain?”
But I was not a little boy anymore. I was a grown man who had seen life.
They never talked to me socially at the bar. That didn’t bother me. I had a few good white friends already, friends from daily life and work.
The trouble started when I began bringing my Nigerian guests to the club.
At the time there were only two Nigerian members. One was Deji George-Coker, a lawyer who had worked in my father’s law chambers. His mother and my father had grown up together. At the club he acted like he didn’t know me. He never sat down to talk to me. He preferred mixing with the whites. The other Nigerians were mostly Nigerian wives of white men working in Nigeria.
One night I brought a Nigerian guest. A lawyer. Educated in England. We were at the bar drinking when he leaned over and said, “Why are they staring at us?”
I turned around. A group of white men were drinking, staring at us, whispering among themselves. They were drunk.
I told my friend to ignore them. He didn’t. He asked them, “What are you staring at?”
One of them shouted back, “You. You dumb nigger.”
I swear on my father’s grave, those words entered my ears, travelled straight to my brain, and pulled a trigger.
In my country. Nigeria.
My friend wanted to fight them there and then. Five drunk Europeans in a club on the Marina. The others started laughing, mocking us. Other tables joined in. The waiters whispered to me, “Oga Kio, don’t fight them. They are drunk.”
I told my friend, “Let’s go.”
We left. The laughter was loud. The insults continued.
The next morning, as each of them left their homes to go to work, mobile policemen were waiting. Each one was detained, beaten the living daylight out of, driven to the airport, and deported.
The Lagos Yacht Club sits on Nigerian Navy land. At the time, Augustus Aikhomu, a Vice Admiral of the Nigerian Navy, was Vice President of Nigeria under General Ibrahim Babangida. That very night I went to see him and told him what had happened. He nearly had a heart attack. He was furious.
Nigeria is a country of connections. If you are a guest in Nigeria, you must be very careful who you insult, how much you drink in public places, and most of all, who you insult.
If I had made the mistake of fighting them in the club, I would have lost both my legal and moral standing. But you cannot call Kio Amachree a nigger in Nigeria. Not after all the things I had endured, going to your schools, living among you. Not in my own country.
Two of them were saved only because they were married to Nigerian women. Racists married to black women. Not the kind of Nigerian women any of my friends would marry. Women they met in bars. That made the whole thing even crazier.
Word spread like a bonfire.
“Amachree is dangerous.”
“He’s a thug.”
“He had our people beaten up and deported.”
I already had my run-ins with the Indians. Now it was the British. I was getting a reputation.
The Deputy British Ambassador later came up to me at the club and said he would have thought Eton had taught me more restraint. I told him Eton taught me not to take rubbish from peasants.
From that moment on, everything changed.
I was top dog in the club. Everyone wanted to talk to Kio Amachree. I was offered business deals left, right, and centre. They discovered that I was very well connected. Connected enough to have any one of them deported. Why not use his connections to reach leadership?
I wasn’t complaining. I got my cut. They got their papers signed. And we all lived happily ever after.
No more trouble.
No more racism.
No more fights.
The waiters were proud. My fellow Nigerians were proud. If any white member was rude to them, they would say quietly,
“We are protected. We have Oga Kio. Chief Amachree.”
When Otunba Niyi Adebayo heard the full story, he laughed and said,
“I trust you, Kio. I knew you would conquer South Africa for us.”
This time, he ordered schnapps for me.
— Kio Amachree
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