Elizabeth Nene Papadopoulous. This is the name of the first and only
daughter of Jagua Nana, a fashionable free woman who in the late 20th
century Nigeria would have been daubed a Lagos Socialite or something
like that. She was conceived and born in secrecy while Jagua was still a
teenage schoolgirl: Jagua’s parents knew nothing of her and neither did
her father, a Greek citizen working in the mines of Jos, know when he
conceived her. Nick Papadopoulous had a mistress Kate, actually a
Cameroonian making a living in Jos in the business of the high class sex
workers. Nick wanted a child from her and since she could not give him
one, she lured the innocent Jagua into a web that resulted in Nick
getting personal with Jagua during one night of partying, that
eventually got her pregnant. It was Kate that made sure the birth was a
secret and then she and her live-in friend Sister Heide took to caring
for the baby, until an ethnic crisis in Jos forced Jagua and her parents
to flee, still living the baby with Kate. Kate then cemented her plan
by telling Jagua the baby was killed during the riot months later, while
on the other hand, she presented the baby to Nick as hers. So Nick
finally married her.
That
was the history. Now it is twenty-something years later and Liza Nene
Papadopoulous who had lived and schooled in London was back in Nigeria
in search of her real mother, after discovering that Kate that had
pretended to be her mother was in fact not. It is a quite interesting
story that throws up a number of issues of contemporary Nigerian city
and rural life in the East: Rich Nigerian men with several wives
including one referred to as “London wife;” the quest for the male child
by these men; the ever-busy businessman traveling from one city to
another; wives fighting it out with their husband’s girlfriend seen as
rival, men fighting it out with their girlfriend’s men seen as rivals;
judges that bend the law to suit governments in power; the poor
conditions in police stations and the unprofessional conduct of the cops
themselves; how justice was often denied the poor; smuggling,
trafficking of young ladies as sex slaves though in this case it was
from Cameroon to Nigeria; the rapid transformation of Nigerian cities
like Jos; travelers from one part of the country to another and their
need for a resting place in the middle of nowhere; border conflicts and
how difficult it was to distinguish citizens living in border areas.
The search by Nene for her mother on the one hand, and of Jagua for her
daughter on the other, did not last too long. On one hand there was a
chance sighting of Auntie Kate by Nene at a lecture organized by the
Cameroonian Embassy in Lagos. And on the other Kate’s live-in friend
Sister Heide who had not liked the manner Kate “stole” Nene from the
mother finally revealed the secret to Jagua that her daughter did not
die, prompting Jagua to begin the search on her part. They did meet and
it was a happy ending for both of them.
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