The man sent home
Deported from London, beaten in a cell, broke on a veranda bench. He has a plan, a London accent and a debt to the gate police.
One of them kept calling me 'oyinbo'. I'm as Naija as he is.AJ, to Chuks
AJ was born in Lagos and taken to London as a boy. He grew up in south London, picked up the accent, and never got his papers straight. He drifted into a crowd that made money in ways he did not ask about, and when a party was raided and immigration checked everyone in the room, AJ was the one who could not prove he was allowed to be there. He was detained and put on a plane.
Lagos did not welcome him back. Within days of landing he was swept up by police and held in a cell nobody names, where the mosquitoes worked the night shift and the men inside joined the officers in beating the stranger with the funny accent. "Oyinbo," they called him — foreigner. He walked out with nothing.
Two weeks after London, he is sitting on the veranda bench of Iloro House, a face-me-I-face-you rooming house on June 12 Street, with Room 3, an empty wallet and one old friend: Chuks, who feeds him before asking a single question. His uncle, a pastor in Benin City, wants to pray over him for an hour. The police at the north gate want ₦2,500,000 before they will open it. The man who owns the club down the street wants something too.
AJ is proud, quick and funny when things are going badly, which is most of the time. He keeps his word. In the game, you are AJ.
AJ's story starts on the veranda bench at Iloro House. Talk to Chuks at his coal pot for a walk around the estate, earn money as a ball boy at the bush pitch, and pay the gate police little by little until they open the north gate.
Deported from London with one bag and an accent Lagos will not forgive, AJ washes up on June 12 Street with nothing but an old friend and a cooking pot. Now the gate police want ₦2,500,000, and the man who owns the purple club wants a favor.
Big, kind and always cooking. He knew AJ before London, and he feeds him before he asks a single question.
A fifth-year medical student who leaves for LUTH at dawn and talks to AJ from her window at night, while her father keeps the door shut.
The hairdresser at Palmline, outside the main gate, and AJ's neighbor in Room 7. Everybody talks in her chair. She repeats almost none of it.
The most dangerous man on June 12 Street and the one it loves most: a stare that stops a fight, a laugh you can hear from the gate, and a notebook of verses.
Small, quick and never short of a word. If it is moving this week, Benny has it, and it is written in a notebook with a rubber band around it.
The smallest room, the emptiest pocket and the busiest door on June 12 Street. Nobody can explain it, least of all Benny.
Funny, tired, underpaid, sometimes greedy and sometimes kind. They hold the gates, and they want to be settled.
Thirty-one years at Kirikiri prison, now the owner of Prizm. He plays the big man, brokers deals at his table, and takes ten percent.
AJ Cities