Welcome home, apparently

The immigration officer at Lagos looked at my British passport, then at my face, then at my passport again, and said, "Welcome home," in a tone that suggested he'd be the judge of that. I'd left when I was nine. My parents had left, technically; I'd been brought. Twenty-six years in south London. I'd kept the food, mostly, and a version of the accent that came out when I was angry or on the phone to my mother, and I'd kept the assumption, never examined, that Lagos was somewhere I was from. My cousin Tunde picked me up. He's my age, thirty-five, and he looked at me the way you look at a photo of yourself from a decade ago. Fond and slightly embarrassed. "You're going to sweat," he said. "I know." "No. You don't know." The heat was a wall. The traffic was a language. Tunde drove the way everyone drove, which was with total commitment and a running commentary, and I sat in the passenger seat gripping the door and trying to look like a man who wasn't gripping the door. The house I'd grown up in was still there. That was the first shock. I'd assumed it would be gone, or changed beyond recognition, and instead it was just smaller, and the mango tree in the compound that I remembered as enormous was a perfectly ordinary tree. A family I didn't know lived there. The woman at the gate let me stand in the road and look and didn't ask why, which I appreciated. The second shock was the market. I'd wanted to go alone. Tunde had said fine, in the voice he used when he was going to let me learn something. I went in with my kitchen Yoruba and my London walk and within four minutes a woman selling peppers had looked me up and down, said something I only half caught, and laughed, and the women either side of her laughed, and I understood, with total clarity, that I had just been identified as a tourist. "What did she say?" I asked Tunde, after.

"She said you were holding your money like it was going to fly away." "Was I?" "You were holding it like an oyinbo." He grinned. "A white man. But polite. She said polite." I'd been prepared for Lagos to feel foreign. I had not been prepared for Lagos to find me foreign. There's a difference, and it's the difference between visiting and being visited upon. It got better. It also got more complicated. My aunt fed me until I couldn't stand and then told me I'd got thin. An uncle asked me why I hadn't sent more money, in front of everyone, as a joke that wasn't. A man at a bar, hearing my accent, asked if I was Jamaican, and when I said Nigerian he said "which kind," and I didn't have an answer he accepted. And then, on the fifth day, something small. I was at a roadside stall with Tunde eating suya off newspaper, standing, the way you do, and a man next to me said something about the football, and I answered without thinking, and the words came out in Yoruba, not the kitchen kind, the proper kind, from somewhere I didn't know was still there. He answered. We had a whole conversation. About a match. It was nothing. Tunde didn't say anything. He just handed me another piece of meat. I fly back next week. My mother will ask how it was and I'll say hot, and she'll ask if I saw the house, and I'll say yes, and she'll ask if it was the same, and I'll say the tree's smaller. She'll know what I mean. At the airport, leaving, the officer will look at my passport and my face and say something. I don't know what yet. I've been practising holding my money.