October 28th, 2021. Femi Ibrahim

I don’t know how popular a practice this still is but when I was young my parents would set up their phones so they would have different ringtones for different groups of people. That way, they’d know who was calling before picking up the phone. Anytime I hear the song Olomi gbo temi I still check around for my dad’s phone to see if my mum is calling. I didn’t realize it then but it was pretty cute that he did that.

Fortunately, or unfortunately,–I still haven’t decided–I don’t need a special ringtone to know when it’s my dad texting me. My phone vibrates so much that I stopped putting it at the edges of tables after it fell the first few times. If you’re not attentive you’ll think it’s one long continuous vibration but it’s at least twenty short vibrations that come almost immediately back-to-back.

It doesn’t take long for my friends to notice, too. Whenever my pocket starts vibrating they would usually laugh and call me daddy’s boy. I don’t know why, but a small part of me thought leaving Nigeria for my master’s in the UK would help.

My roommate, Victor, doesn’t tease me too much. He’s from Ghana so he understands how African parents can be. We sat down this evening in our living room for movie night as we’d started doing on Saturdays when my pocket started vibrating. Victor laughed, “Your dad again?” I brought the phone out of my pocket, skimmed through my notifications, and then sighed before putting the phone down.

“What is it now?” he asked.

“It’s Tunde, again. My dad loves updating me whenever there’s a new development in that story.”

“Really? What’d he do this time?”

“I don’t wanna know”

I felt my face fall and Victor saw it. “Are you good?”

“Yeah. I just… I don’t support what he’s doing, but I read part of his story, the part we know, and I understand a bit.”

“Who? Tunde?”

“Yeah. I am grateful though, the story has gained traction but they didn’t hold it against every Nigerian and revoke my visa.” There was a pause, and then I continued, “Do your parents know about it?”

“Who doesn’t?”

“What do they think?”

“About Tunde?”

“No. About you leaving Ghana to come here.”

“Are you kidding me? They practically begged me to leave. It’s hard to find a Ghanaian parent who’s not looking for how to send their children abroad.”

I chuckled.

“Your parents didn’t want you coming here?”

“It was a bit different for me. My parents were conflicted at first. My dad reads the news way too much so he was afraid that I’d ‘fall into the hands of foreigners or become a foreigner myself and forget about where I came from and lose my way’.”

“Wow. Are you for real?”

“Why do you think they insist on only speaking Yoruba when they call?”

Victor laughed and I continued, “If you asked my dad about Tunde he’ll say he fell into the hands of foreigners because he was trying to become one.”

“So how’d you convince them to allow you leave?”

“I didn’t have to, they saw it. The number of opportunities at home was dropping by the day and increasing abroad. Even my dad couldn’t deny that.”

“Hmm.”

I looked back at the TV for a while and turned to him. “What do you think?”

“About Tunde?”

“Yeah”

He sighed, “Same as you, I guess. I don’t agree, but I understand.”

The oven dinged. The pizza was ready. We paused the movie and shared the pizza before coming back to continue. Halfway through, I turned to him again and asked, “After your master’s, what’s your plan? Are you going back home?” He smiled, and then he started laughing. I laughed too.

Cover Photo by Silas Baisch on Unsplash