"People Don't Get Depressed in Nigeria"
It is a cold January morning and I am sitting in a cafe on a busy London street. Looking out of the window, I watch people bustle determinedly along the pavement. I remember how my English friends used to complain that I walked too slowly when I first arrived in London. I thought they walked too fast, but now, in the chill of winter, I find myself quickening my own pace and lengthening my strides, eager to get back to warmth. I unfold the newspaper that I’ve found lying on the table and struggle to keep the still-unfamiliar, outsized pages from encroaching upon the space of the people seated at the tables next to me. I open the newspaper and the word ‘Nigeria’ catches my eye. It is funny how my mind always, almost unconsciously, seems to seek that word out whenever I am reading a paper. Sometimes I am fooled and the reference is to Nicaragua, but this time my eyes have found a worthy target. It’s a feature on the young British Nigerian novelist Helen Oyeyemi in which she speaks of her struggle with depression in her teenage years and the difficulty her parents faced with understanding it. ‘Because people don’t get depressed in Nigeria,’ she says. ‘They were like, “Cheer up, get on with it.”’ The black words sliding over the page carry me back in time to another place, where I too, like Helen’s parents, believed that people don’t get depressed in Nigeria.
