Signifyin’ Bantus and a ‘Flawless’ Assault that had no Accent

Paul Tiyambe Zeleza was in town the other day for a meeting in Montréal. Prior to his arrival, he had done things the African way by sending an email to notify me that he was coming to my neck of the wood in Canada. Could he tempt me to embark on the two-hour drive from my base in Ottawa for a long overdue reunion in Quebec’s leading city? He needn’t have asked! Ever since we both left Penn State in 2005 - where the seeds of a mutually enriching brotherhood in Africanist intellection were sown - I have always looked forward to every opportunity of relinking with the mentor I fondly call “Mwalimu!”, the idea being to “catch up” on matters of mutual intellectual interest while getting our beering right! Given the fact that our last meeting was at Ann Arbor, at an African studies symposium back in April 2007, I wasn’t going to miss the latest opportunity. I cleared my schedule and headed out to Montréal on a wet Saturday evening. The idea had been for me to arrive in time to also catch up with Ato Quayson, another mentor who was attending the same event from Toronto. A combination of bad weather and horrible traffic ensured that I missed Ato. I arrived at the impressive Fairmont La Reine Elizabeth – wondering what a monumental super-luxury hotel named after the head of a moribund, Anglo-colonialist monarchy was doing in that intensely Franco-nationalistic context of Quebec where everybody and everything that feels anglo, looks anglo, and sounds  anglo is a mortal enemy!

It was too late to have more than five-minutes of riotous African reunion – complete with the joyful, expansive body movements, raucous laughter, handshaking, and hugging, all vital elements in the atmospherics of ‘African warmth’- with Paul. We agreed to meet the following morning for breakfast. Breakfast was everything one would expect in a well-appointed world-class five-star hotel. Paul and I decided to celebrate our reunion with helpings from the sumptuous buffet breakfast in dignified quantities worthy of a trip to the bellies of two African men: sausages, omelettes, hash browns, buttered baguette, assorted fruits, plain yogurt, coffee and the like. Our plates looked attractive! The atmosphere was convivial, the sort that encouraged friendliness to people seated at other tables.

He irrupted from nowhere, almost like an apparition. Tall. Heavily-built. Ebullient. Scraggy beard on a scraggy sixty-ish face. Brotherhood was in the air and it was obvious he wanted very much to be brotherly. “Morning guys”, he wafted effusively, his huge frame casting an early-morning aura on our table. Paul and I looked up, startled, and returned his greeting politely. “So where are you guys from?” Paul and I tensed up a little bit. From experience. For the black subject in Euro-American diaspora, that question is usually the beginning of a journey through an assembly line the final product of which is primivitized, Conradian Otherness. Often, too often, such questions usually come from well-meaning liberals who mean well; who just want to be friendly and polite; who will tell you about their African American neighbor in the second sentence of the conversation; who will tell you about their African co-worker in the third sentence of the conversation; who will tell you about the safari they are planning to the Serengeti in the fourth sentence of the conversation, all in the bid to establish an “I’m-with-you” resume. In the ten seconds it took us to answer his question, I looked around furtively and discovered that Paul and I were the only black people eating in that restaurant. It hadn’t occurred to me…

“From here”, Paul and I answered in perfect symphony, as if planned. I took a quick mental note of our remarkable convergence of minds. If we were going to be othered, why make things easy for our newly minted brother? If the Westerner, pushed by a certain primordial anthropologizing instinct to unearth the “native”or “tribal” roots of every Black person s/he encounters in the Occident, has learnt to shoot without missing, we have equally learnt to fly without perching! We might as well indulge our new friend by taking him through the formula we were both so familiar with and were sure would guide the rest of the unfolding interaction. He half-smiled, half-frowned as expected and continued: “Yes. I mean where are you originally from?” We would have been surprised if that formulaic question hadn’t followed. “Oh, I’m from Ontario”, replied Paul who, after all, carries a Canadian passport. I opted to let Paul handle things here. Bringing my own Nigerian passport/origins into the picture would ruin the game. He appeared a tad uncomfortable but his mask of generous smiles did a pretty good job of shielding the traces of ketchup that were beginning to appear on his face. He wasn’t done yet. The liberal, well-meaning Occidental never gives up that easily. “Really? You’re from Ontario? Nice. I’m from Scotland. So what do you guys do here?”

“What do you do in Scotland”, I butted in at this point with my most expansive smile of the morning. “I’m a farmer”, he offered, “my daughter lives here in Canada and I try to visit once a year.” We didn’t get to react to this family snippet before he took things to the next level. He looked at our plates and finally seemed to be aware for the first time that we were actually having breakfast. All it took was a fraction, just a fraction of a second – he was a master of the quick comeback – for us to notice those ominous movements of facial muscles that are very often the loquacious abode of the unsaid and the unsayable in such circumstances: the imperceptible tweak around the corners of the mouth; the rapid flicker of the eyelids; the slight quiver of the eyebrows; then the smile and the statement that gives everything away: “hey they serve nice breakfast here, don’t they? Are you guys enjoying this? Different from African food, eh?” As he spoke, he pointed obliviously in the direction of Paul’s plate, the offending finger almost touching Paul’s sausages and hashbrowns. He was that carried away.

We had not told him we were Africans!

Our friend’s problem was finally outed. It was clear he had not set out for breakfast that morning expecting to find two folks like us making ourselves so comfortable in what, in his mind, was clearly not our “natural environment”. Remember, it was the Fairmont La Reine Elizabeth in Montréal, not the jungle! Worse, we were treating ourselves to a full compliment of continental breakfast buffet that was apparently too civilized for our native palates!

Different from African food, eh?

And that rude finger in Paul’s food! We both knew it was time to end the intrusion if we were not to lose our appetites. Allow a leper a handshake and he will take things to the next level by insisting on a bear hug. There was no way of telling if our ever smiling friend would not politely ask if he could join our table and proceed to insist on a free anthropological lecture on African food. Words became unnecessary. The grave look on our faces told him to begin a dialogue with his legs. After all, the Yoruba have always claimed that the face is the abode of discourse. He mumbled something inaudible about the weather and left.

Paul and I joked about the situation. I remarked that our friend was a very good pedagogical material for some of those graduate seminars we teach in the production of otherness. Our mirth, however, did not in any way becloud the grave implications of what we had just experienced. I summed up the situation. Here was Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, one of the greatest and the finest intellectual minds the African continent has to offer, having breakfast with a younger colleague. A half-illiterate peasant from remote Scotland casts one look at them and sees black, sees two signifyin Bantus who had dared to venture out of the space he had assigned their ilk in his mind!

I drove back to Ottawa, my mind busy. The Scotsman had produced irresistible material for a new paper, possibly a lecture… I had to do something. Back in Ottawa, I drove straight to campus… and to news of a tragedy. A rapist had struck on campus and had raped and brutalized a Caucasian student. The whole campus was in crisis mode. Campus Security and Ottawa Police had come up with a news alert posted everywhere on campus. Local radio and TV stations were also reading the alert intermittently. I got to my nineteenth-floor office and went straight into my email.

The Communications Department of my University had sent out the police alert as a campus-wide email communiqué. The email contained the usual fare of information one is accustomed to in North American campuses in such circumstances. I read it, empathized with the victim, and wondered how that could have happened in our otherwise serene and beautiful campus. My instinctive feeling of solidarity with the authors of the communiqué suffered an abrupt setback when I got to that part of the notice where they solicit my help – and the help of the entire University community – for information concerning the suspect. Hear them:

Description of Suspect:

White male

height between 5’8” and 5’10” with broad shoulders and a chubby build in his mid-twenties 

bald head wearing a blue sweatshirt

carrying a white Macy’s bag

spoke English with no accent (my emphasis)

Spoke English with no accent? I suddenly began to miss our Scottish friend in Montréal. At least he had not taken Occidental arrogance to the point of assuming, like Canadians and their American brothers south of the border, that there is a single human being on this wide planet of ours who speaks English with no accent!