I said I would come back and tell you about Jagua Nana (1961). I picked it up. I read it. I cannot stop thinking about it.
I first heard of Jagua Nana in my senior three after a kindly caretaker called Martin at a school I went to, tipped me that there was a heap of books at the back of the administration book due for destruction.
The anthill sized pile of books, donated in the 1970s and 1980s by various long defunct organisations and rich families, were moulding. No one was reading them, in the school store where they were kept. The space was needed. So it had been decided to burn them. Did I want anything before they were set alight?
I would have taken all of them but I only a small, blue backpack for my exercise books, lunch plate, Tumpeco cup and school sweater. I could only pick a few. Among the few I picked was a purple-coloured Modern African Writers book by Ernest Emenyonu about a writer called Cyprian Ekwensi.
The book had been donated in March 1978 and it looked like it had never left the book shelf until it was brought to the back of this building on this Friday evening to be burnt.
I happened to open to page 79 and my eyes fell on an extract, “The action is superb, the description graphic. This is characteristic of the whole book. While one may forget the woolly characters in People of the City, Jagua Nana is a character whose dynamism is recorded with such fidelity that one tends to say to oneself: ‘I think I have met her before.’
I wanted to know who Mabel Aig-Imoukhuede was talking about. I wanted to know why Emenyonu had decided to dedicate a whole book talking about one author, Cyprian Ekwensi, this Nigerian I had never heard of but who he assured me, was once mentioned in the same breath with the great Chinua Achebe.
I opened a small, black pocket notebook my mother had given me and wrote down the title of the novel and the author. I would find this book one day. I did. Almost fifteen years later. Jagua Nana was worth the hunt!
Right from the beginning, Ekwensi centers Jagua Nana as the hero of the story. Like Mabel said, he sets her before us in a way that we cannot stop looking, listening, and waiting for her.
“Jagua had just had a cold bath, and, in the manner of African women, she sat on a low stool with a mirror propped between her bare knees, gazing at her wet hair. Only one cloth – a flowered cotton print – concealed her nakedness, and she had wound it over her breasts and under her armpits. Her arms and shoulders were bare, and she sat with the cloth bunched between her thighs so that the mirror bit into the skin between her knees.
She raised her arm and ran the comb through the wiry kinks, and her breasts swelled into a sensuous arc and her eyes tensed with the pain as the kinks straightened. From the skin on her long arms and beautiful shoulders the drops of speckled water slid down chasing one another.
She saw Freddie pass by her door just then, saw him hesitate when he caught a glimpse of the dark naked hair under her armpits. Then he hurried past into his own room on the floor below, calling as he went:
‘Jagwa! … Jagwa Nana! …’
She knew he was teasing. They called her Jagua because of her good looks and stunning fashions. They said she was Ja-gwa, after the famous British prestige car.
‘I’m comin’ – jus’ now! … Call me when you ready!”
Jagua is a woman in the city trying to more than survive. She wants, like her newly independent country men and women, to live fully. She wants to enjoy all the music and dancing, fancy cars, good food, comfortable beds that were long denied to her by poverty and Nigeria’s previous masters.
She is a believer in the new and wants to be a part of it. Even if it means she will not love the conventional life a “proper” Ibo woman is supposed to.
As her Brother Fonso points out, “Was Jagua doing anything in Lagos, and when Jagua said she was trading in cloth, Fonso laughed. ‘Let us hear somethin’ else, Jagua. You deceivin’ no one. My dear sister, is time you stop your loose life. Is a shameful thin’ to me, your brother. I got a beautiful sister like you. God made you with dignity; an’ when I think of your kind of life …’ He was not looking at her face, and he walked so quickly that she found difficulty in keeping up with him. ‘So what I say to you is this. My sister, come home and stay in the family. You don’ wan’ to marry. Awright. Nobody forcin’ you. Den keep yourself with respect.”
But Jagua is decided in the course of her life. She will love the man she wants. Even if he is ten years younger than she is, like Fred Namme is. This is part of her rule breaking. “The sigh was a prayer to God to stay back the years and a challenge to herself to employ all the coquettish arts to help Him. She did not often remember that if her son had lived he would today be roughly as old as her lover.
Freddie was hardly more than a boy, with his whole ambitious life before him. He was a teacher at the Nigerian National College who badly wanted to travel overseas to complete his law studies. He had applied for a Government Scholarship, but did not pin his faith on being selected. She knew Freddie deserved a good girl to marry him, raise his children and ‘shadow’ him in all his ambitions. But Jagua was too much in love with him to make a reasonable exit.”
She appreciates that rule breakers are the ones who will get ahead in this new Nigeria even as she is appalled by the extent of the avarice that drives some of the people she runs into. Like the man and politician Uncle Taiwo who will soon become her benefactor.
Uncle Taiwo schools Jagua, “He leaned back and slapped his knee. ‘Tell dem to vote for O.P. 2. What? You tellin’ me you don’ know what you will say?’ He began to laugh and to slap his knees, the stool, shaking till the beer glasses bounced off the stool. ‘You don’t know what you will tell dem? Oh, you jus’ too funny. Tell dem to vote for O.P. 2! Tell dem our party is de bes’ one. We will give dem free market stall, plenty trade, and commission so dem kin educate de children. Tell dem all de lie. When Uncle Taiwo win, dem will never remember anythin’ about all dis promise.”
This is a lesson she tries to pass on to Freddie. Freddie is part of the hopeful, scornful youth who believe that just because they have studied abroad this automatically grants them leadership right in this cutthroat Nigeria. Someone less educated must get up from their seat and make way for them.
“That is not how it works,” Jagua Nana tries to tell Fred Namme repeatedly. But she cannot emphasise it too much. She is not certain she is right either. Anything can happen here.
Life in Lagos is like crossing a fast flowing river over a rickety, one plank bridge. You pray when it is your turn, you will safely cross too. Ekwensi’s plot careens with that unpredictability.
As I came to the end of Ekwensi’s masterpiece, I was struck by a realisation. Intentionally or not, Ekwensi, in Jagua, had created the symbol of a new African. Jagua is not afraid to stand out. She is not afraid to try out new ways of making money.
She does not let “classes” or snobbery blind her or turn her off the person before her. She wants to understand their angle. Find out how it could work for her. Jagua Nana today would probably be an influencer.
Jagua Nana was published 63 years ago but it might as well have been published today. A book worth your time and a quick read at that. Only be warned. You will not forget Jagua so fast. I still think about her.
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