To Be a Man Is Not a One-Day Job by Daniel Jordan Smith

Author:Daniel Jordan Smith [Smith, Daniel Jordan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Africa, West, Social Science, General, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9780226491653
Google: bFM3DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-11-24T05:50:49+00:00

8 The author with Osofia, fifteen years after their first tennis match.

The week after my victory the club organized a big ceremony to present my trophy, which was presided over by the traditional ruler of Owerri, Eze Onu Egunwoke, who was an honorary trustee of the club. The club champion automatically becomes a “celebrity” in the club, so that every time someone addressed the club or beer was distributed I was mentioned and served because of my new status. But I found out it was much more than that. Each time I entered the club, for the entire year I was champion, every member greeted me with an enthusiastic “Up Champ!” or “My Champ!” And the ring of recognition went further. When I would run into club members around town they greeted me in the same way, with great enthusiasm. I was surprised by how good it felt and the feeling was amplified because my work colleagues and other friends in Owerri seemed so impressed that all these men in the town knew me and treated me in such a special way.

In addition to my status as club champion—which lasted only a year because in 1990 I faced Francis in the semifinals and lost—I acquired another nickname because of my tennis. As a club, we periodically played other clubs in friendly but competitive tournaments. There were four other tennis clubs to play in Owerri, but, more interestingly, we would sometimes host and often travel to clubs around Nigeria in places like Onitsha, Aba, Enugu, Nnewi, Port Harcourt, and Enugu in the Southeast, and occasionally to farther-away places like Warri, Abuja, Lagos, and Kaduna. In the first match I played for Owerri Sports Club against another team, after I made a winning backhand shot, one of my club mates shouted “Beke wu agbara,” which translates “the white man is a wizard.” It stuck and in addition to being addressed as “Champ,” when I played tennis my teammates regularly shouted it. While I received some special attention as the lone foreigner in the club, what I eventually realized was that many—in fact most—men in the club enjoyed similar recognition in one form or another. The men enthusiastically acknowledged each other at the club and around town, supporting each other’s claims to social status and belonging. Every man was a celebrity his own right.

When I left Owerri in 1992 after three years working for the NGO, the club organized a big send-off party in my honor. The comradery and the special sense of belonging in this completely male-dominated social space was one of the things I missed most when I left Nigeria to go back to school in the United States for a PhD in anthropology. Indeed, when I returned to do long-term fieldwork in 1995 in the semirural community of Ubakala, one of the first things I did was find the club with the best tennis in nearby Umuahia. I joined Umuahia Sports Club and for the past twenty years the men there have become some of my very best friends.

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