On An African Abroad

Ọlábísí Àjàlá in June 21, 1957, when he was 27-year-old Nigerian student of Fellows Road. He is pictured here in the early stages of his journey, as way he made his way through England. Alamy Images.

When I mentioned Ọlábísí Àjàlá to my Yoruba teacher she told me he died a bad death. He also liked women too much. I could tell because I was reading his travel memoirs, An African Abroad, and in them he describes almost every woman he meets as beautiful: his KGB-appointed travel guide, Natasha; a French-Arab sex worker in Damascus; the shah of Iran’s wife, Queen Farah; his friend of a former-Nazi-soldier friend, Barbara; Golda Meir. The book’s existence is itself proof of his dependency on women, as it was typed up and edited by his wife, Joane Àjàlá, the third of at least five separate marriages across four continents.

I’ve been doing my Yoruba lessons online for three years and forget most things I learn; in my Notes app I have long lists of words that passed straight through me. So I’d forgotten that we’d learned about Àjàlá already when I found a copy of An African Abroad, written in English and published just three years after Nigerian independence. I rediscovered that Àjàlá’s journeys began in earnest in 1952, when he set off from the University of Chicago to California on a bicycle wearing traditional Nigerian robes. This was also the start of a lifelong infatuation with statesmen, who are thanked as a group in the preface. An issue of Jet magazine from December 1952 records under the headline “Cross-Country African Cyclist Gets Movie Role” that he was given a small part in White Witch Doctor after screen-testing at the recommendation of Ronald Reagan.

After a valiant last stand involving a radio tower and a hunger strike, he was eventually deported from the U.S. for forsaking his UChicago studies and (allegedly) issuing fake checks. He reentered the U.S. and married, got divorced, moved to the UK and married there as well before resuming his travels, this time along the length and breadth of the Eurasian landmass from 1957 to 1963: A roundabout journey from Indonesia to Israel armed with a scooter and nowhere near enough travel documents. This is the period An African Abroad covers. He finds himself constantly in trouble. Borders often make themselves felt, in the simplest sense, as barriers placed between people and their desires. Even more so for citizens of the Global South. Àjàlá did not like these borders. At a farewell party thrown by Radio Jerusalem, in Jerusalem, where he’s been working for a few months, he lays out his plan to cross the militarized no-man’s land between Israel and Lebanon on scooter. His justification conflates the personal and the geopolitical. He says first that as an African he should not be legally bound by the rules of a conflict between Arabs and Israelis, and second that he can’t be bothered to go the long way around.

I was hooked. I sent many friends quotes from the book, and still more pictures. In this particular border-crossing attempt, he was surrounded by a convoy of Jeeps and soldiers only a few miles into Lebanon, and they negotiated for hours. To make clear his commitment to staying in the borderlands if they denied him entry, Àjàlá brewed coffee, put a tent up, and ate (apparently) preprepared sandwiches. With nightfall approaching, the soldiers reluctantly arrested him, but not before they took a photo, which appears in the book.

Àjàlá swings his head round to the camera with his hand in his pocket, eyes narrow, a daring smile on his face. “My Lebanese captors on the Israeli Arab Frontier,” the caption reads. It’s a holiday photo from a madman’s slideshow. The soldier to Àjàlá’s left is austere, but the one to his right can’t suppress his smile. You can see him being won over in real time.

I know the feeling. There are people in my life I’ve resented but then come to love because they reveal to me how much of what I consider to be my unfreedom is in fact my fear. They quit jobs, they get new ones, they FaceTime me from North America, they have their passports confiscated in West Africa. “You’ve got to kill the cop in your thoughts,” they tell me. Àjàlá has no cop and it’s terrifying. It’s why I and his wives and his Lebanese soldiers love him. His cop has been hung, drawn, and quartered.

He made me confront my fear, my reflexive respect for deadlines and terms and conditions. More often than not these things are paper tigers. I lost count of the number of times he argued with people with guns. I also lost count of the number of times—in Germany, in Israel, in Jordan—he was shot at. But only rarely were these incidents directly linked.

When ordered to surrender his documents by the KGB, he tells them, “I am not allowed to part with my passport. I am quite capable of looking after it myself.” He is beaten up by Persian guards “several” times in his attempt to meet the shah but perseveres through more than six weeks of inquiries with the Iranian government. In Old Jerusalem he decides to cross from Palestine into Israel under sniper fire, again just to avoid going the long way around. He speaks to the guards, arguing, “Please be reasonable with me, my good brothers.” They refuse him, clearly. “Looking at your scooter alone makes us sick,” one says. Àjàlá doesn’t listen. He asks for a map as a distraction and guns it over the border while they’re looking the other way.

In Nigeria his name has become synonymous with traveler, but it does have a literal meaning: Àjà—one who fights; lá—to tire out. Àjàlá, his surname by birth, dubs him a fighter who wears his opponents down. Only once in the book does his name turn literal. In Egypt he learns of a country club which refuses to admit Black people and he decides he must go and see it for himself. The entrance guards—Àjàlá notices they are unarmed—are short work for a man with a moped. He’s in. He asks for a drink and is told that they don’t serve anyone who isn’t European. He asks to see the manager and someone smashes a plate over his head from behind. Before he’s beaten unconscious and arrested, he fights his way to the kitchen and arms himself: “I helped myself to a stack of plates and dishes, and tossed them at my attackers. I did not spare any cases of beer, whisky and soft drink I could lay my hands on … I made sure I did a good job of damaging the crockery.”

More so than in the actual substance of his narrative, which his remarkable photos with Nasser and Nehru edge towards plausibility, there’s something unreal, something of the cartoon character or video game avatar in how things just bounce off Àjàlá. Not just the violence, but the racismo as well. In Moscow a little girl touches his skin to see if the color will come off, then bursts into tears. For Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, a moment like this is the source a of a major psychic rupture. By Àjàlá’s account, he forgets it immediately after it happens.

And this made me think. For all the pleasure and wonder he evinces, there is little real spiritual reckoning with the state violence and poverty and apartheid and assassination attempts he sees. He sometimes punctuates the narrative with faux state-department boilerplate—“Jordan is now reported to be producing more fruit and vegetables than any other of the Arab states in the region,” he tells us. “Beirut is a casino for loose women.” These asides crystallized something that was grating on me: his carefully curated performance of invulnerability. Describing the moment he was taken for an assassin and nearly shot breaking through Khrushchev’s police cordon, Àjàlá writes, “The unexpected and tense incident created a temporary disorder.” What kind of person goes through life this way?

As he intended in life, Àjàlá has become something of a hero in death. He’s most famous now for being mentioned on the album Board Members by the juju singer Chief Ebenezer Obey. Most of the Nigerians I spoke to started singing the lyrics as soon as I said his name.

He has traveled all over the world.
Àjàlá traveled all over the world.
Àjàlá traveled,
Àjàlá traveled,
Àjàlá traveled all over the world.

It’s not just the violence without consequences, or the parade of beautiful women, or the world leaders brushing shoulders with him, or even the fact that he has a theme song. Folk heroes need a mythical world, and Àjàlá’s world is mythical because it no longer exists. He wanders a globe bursting with fresh, green countries in the Global South, with ideologies and ideologues striding boldly into the next decade. I recently saw a wonderful play, Drum, set in Àjàlá’s era, about a photographer doing a magazine shoot with a more westernized fellow Ghanaian in London. The two argue over the recently deposed Nkrumah at length but turn best friends when they fall into reminiscing about the day of Ghanaian independence in 1957, the flags waving in the streets, the dances, the ebullient crowds, the cries that Ghana would be “free forever,” and it made me tear up in the audience when I thought what had become of that era of African optimism over the rest of the twentieth century.

It would be hard enough today for any Nigerian to obtain visas for a cross-Eurasian trip. Maybe impossible, for one with a documented history of breaking through military checkpoints, of climbing radio towers to avoid deportation, of starting crockery fights at country clubs, of being arrested on suspicion of trying to assassinate the second most powerful man in the world. But that’s me speaking. Àjàlá would probably say different.

Toye Oladinni is a British Nigerian writer from London. His short stories and essays have appeared in Granta, the London Review of Books, The Dublin Review, and elsewhere.