Adventures into Koko (2)

SO, I left Koko, jealous of her painful memories, of unkept government promises of ultramodern hospital and other goodies.

I came back to Milan; totally dazed from a trip I considered an authentic flop and depression set in. But I didn’t have the luxury to sit around and lick my wounds; I had a film to make. So, I set out on a new mission; Koko’s migrated memory to Italy. Here I discovered that Italy swarms with that memory and unlike Koko, Italy was and is still eager to remember and maybe exorcise herself of an event many still refer to as “Le Navi dei Veleni,”  — Ships of Poison.

This brings us to another question: to whom does memory belong to?

Is collective memory as legitimate as the individual(s) directly connected to a specific event? Are we a mass of lonely stars, or a broken whole separated at birth, awaken to our original connection by some events, tragic or not? In short, does Amina in Katsina, Ese in Edo, Oluwatosin in Oyo, Billy in Wisconsin, Marco in Milan have legitimate rights to feel as theirs events that happened to Ada in a remote town in Imo State?

Okay, enough of two kobo… pardon, kobo died many years ago in a dance of IMF-sponsored devaluation. So, enough of this cheap two Naira philosophy!

Back to the film!

ITALY does not only remember but is eager to talk about Koko.

I picked up the phone and, like in a story of Salman Rushdie, I began once again looking for someone who knew someone, that has contacts with yet another someone. And, like in those lands where simply knowing someone could land you in jail or the presidential palace, my contacts led me to two Nigerians, a giant, quick-speaking and ever-smiling industrial chemist,  Dr. Niyi Johnson Laniyonu and a soft-spoken, articulate agronomist, Dr. Udo C. Enwereuzor, senior adviser on migration, minorities and citizenship of COSPE, a non-governmental organisation.

Both men, now successful professionals in their fields, were very eager to recount the events that lead to the discovery of the toxic barrels in Koko. Niyi was then a student of industrial chemistry at the University of Pisa at that time.

“I remember the Italian television station RAI2 carried the news on their Sunday lunch hour edition. I grew white hairs after reading the contents of the drums, because as an industrial chemist, I knew that one could be contaminated even living kilometers away from those materials,” Dr. Laniyonu recollects.

“We held a meeting of the Nigerian students’ association and decided to contact Rachele Gonnelli, the journalist that carried out the investigation. We translated the documents and taxed our meager resources to send packages to various Nigerian newspapers, the Nigerian The Guardian in particular, the Nigerian embassy in Rome, the ministry of external affairs other Nigerian ministries and newspapers in England,” says Dr. Enwereuzor.

This single action of the students was equal to uncovering the proverbial hornet’s nest. As dictatorial military governments live in perennial climate of suspicion and fear of someone paying them back in the same coin of putsch, the military government of General Ibahim Babangida was no exception to this climate of conspiracy theorems. Thinking that a group of foreign conspirators were behind the waste dumping and news outbreak, the government sent the deputy ambassador to search out the students behind the toxic leak. A leak that rubbed Nigeria’s face in the mud, because it came after the Nigerian government’s bitter protest over an accord signed between the Benin Republic and America to receive the latter’s industrial wastes.

Niyi continues, “We were worried to meet such a high government official because it was unheard for such high-ranking embassy official to leave Rome and meet common students in Pisa. I think the vice-ambassador herself was surprised to see a ragtag group of students as the brains behind such event that created a diplomatic row between Nigeria and Italy. “The vice-ambassador asked us what we wanted from the government as a compensation for our heroic action and we asked her to give us some time to hold a meeting. Some of the students were on government scholarship at that time; many didn’t have enough money to complete their studies. So, the government asking us to state our needs was sort of manna from heaven for some of us,” says Niyi.

“Some suggested we ask for cash money, while others asked for or extension of scholarship for those that needed it. But the general mood was to refuse anything from the government, not as a political protest against the military government, but as way of saying we did what we did because it was the right thing and not for personal gains,” recalls Udo.

“The students union was a real expression of Naija’s youthful energy and federal character, if you may. We came from different cultures, but nobody cared about such thing as tribes, the only thing was that our heads deh hot too much. So, we decided to put the government’s offer to vote and, even if help would have been very much welcome, the majority voted “NO”! We took the decision to the vice-ambassador and you could see incredulity allover her face,” says Niyi.

“There’s something very worrisome going on about Nigerian girls; can you help the embassy to find out how they arrive here and end up on the streets as prostitutes?” the deputy ambassador asked us before we left her in the hotel. We immediately, naively set out to work and divided ourselves into groups, ignorant of the danger we were heading into once again,” Niyi concludes.

What the then students discovered on human trafficking will surprise you, because, there seems to be an incredible and invisible common thread that linked the discoveries of the then students to the work I came later to do in Italy.

After the film on toxic wastes to Koko, my next theatre plays, workshops and movie, Granma, deals precisely with human trafficking and migration.

The Nigerian-Italian connection holds interesting twists…

*Nze, actor, director, filmmaker, writes from Milan, Italy