Tell Magazine

By BEN LAWRENCE

In the late 1950s, it was becoming difficult to differentiate a mad man from a mechanic in Warri. The mad man’s hair was unkempt and greasy. He wore rags smeared with all sorts of things. The mechanic’s hair and clothing were not different from those of the insane. So there was always the puzzle telling one from the other.

Warri, Sapele and Benin were very Europeanised because of their closeness to the sea. By 1472, the Portuguese were already in Benin City, their first port of call on mainland West of Africa. Other Europeans, like the Spaniards and the Dutch, followed and so, about 600 years ago, the area was already awash with Caucasians who brought some of their good and bad habits, some of which the people of the Guinea coast, which included Benin City, Warri, Sapele, Burutu Forcados and others, have imbibed till this day.

The Europeans met those people very clean and orderly as their despatches revealed before Western imperialism started to rewrite history. So to see a man disheveled in a town like Warri must provoke comments about his sanity among those people with very high tastes. For instance, one day, while I was on relief duty in Warri in 1959, our biggest social brother, Orlu Mowoe, in one of our week-end treats, asked whether we were not finding it difficult to tell a mechanic from a mad man in Warri. In no time, it became the talk of the town that one could not be safe because one’s supposed mechanic might just be demented.

Warri mechanics got the message and quickly chose the saner path. They opted for their overall cloak while out of their workshops and cleaned themselves so as not to be mistaken for the city’s mentally unbalanced.

Nigerian designers and models may need to borrow a leaf from what Warri mechanics did more than 50 years ago to redeem their image because it is becoming one mighty puzzle to tell a model from a drug addict when one watches some fashion shows on the TV. This brings to mind my experience 40 years ago on Manhattan, New York. I was visiting there from my Bloomington, Indiana, the home of Indiana University. As I stepped out of my hotel to have a feel of the city that noon, I beckoned on a black shoe shiner to attend to me. As he worked on my shoes, I told him I was from Nigeria. He said he was from Guyana and had served with the Allied troops in part of the Sahel during World War II. He yarned stories of some men who were losing their self-respect pimping.

He told of all those men called “superflies”, ornamented with rings in their ears and striding effeminately for clients. They were male prostitutes. He was proud of being a shoe-shine man, though he fought in the Great War for America.

Then appearing before us on Broadway, where we talked, was one lanky black brother, about six foot-six, wearing the great Afro hair-do and with shoes that were about three inches high. He glided “psychedelically” towards us – the real superfly on patrol! He was slim and athletically built.

I sized up with him, I being about six-foot-three, but wearing a pair of Brooks’s executive shoes, deep-blue, pinstriped suit with polka–dotted black tie to match.

We greeted politely and I asked whether he was a basketballer. He liked basketball, but he was not a player. He was in the fashion world, a model. The next question I asked was whether he considered me well-dressed. My accent had given me out, so he was interested in knowing more about me. I told him about Nigeria and, expectedly, he asked about the war and Biafra. I drew him back to the subject that interested me. Why was he, much taller than a six-footer, wearing the Afro hair-do and the stiletto? He laughed. He said it was fashion! Then I added whether one needed to be abnormal to be fashionable; sporting zany jackets and bell-bottom trousers? He said it depended mostly on designers; they were models and were highly paid for their jobs. I appreciated the candour he displayed because he said as he grew older, he would really want to look executive like me.

It used to be said that a woman would do anything to look beautiful, including damaging her face.  And this reminds me of Magistrate Savage. He took no nonsense with indecent dressing in Benin City in the late 1940s. The Native Authority police raided women who wore gowns that showed their thighs and those who tied their wrappers above the knees. There was always a stampede when the name, Savage, was mentioned. Elders and parents liked the war he waged but the young ladies of that period hated him with a passion. Savage won the war and brought order to the city. If it were these days of unqualified human rights, including those of self-flagellation, he perhaps, would have lost the war. The immediate post-World War II years were trying.

In the early 1960s in Ghana, the government waged a war on black women who wanted to be white by bleaching their skins with a brand called Atra The government warned about the consequences of their action on their skin. True, many of them became ghoulish as they aged. Today, in Nigeria, you find women with multi-coloured skins because of the abuses they inflicted on their bodies and hair while they were younger. Most of them now regret their past.

The issue of differentiating a model from a lunatic is still very rife. In the past, they used to be what was called “Twiggies” –  women in semi-nakedness on display. Today, from what one sees on Nigerian television screens, there are always on parade ladies wearing rags with big earrings like Kikuyu cattle raiders, strutting the red carpet on cat walks. The men are like lunatics, sporting odd outfits and funny hair like those of the denizens on the popular Marina quayside of old, where both servicemen and criminals “cut the joint” (smoke marijuana).

Modeling is an honourable part of fashion because one recollects how the likes of Shade Thomas brought class and respectability to the business, following the legendary Mrs Duncan, at whose feet girls from her native Warri, Benin City, Sapele and Calabar learnt the trade of being seamstresses. The new ones are going over the cliff to derangement. Umhh!