Never Look an American in the Eye|Okey Ndibe

Shayera Dark

In Never Look an American in the Eye, Nigerian-American author and political commentator Okey Ndibe takes readers on a pleasant trip through slices of his life. Replete with wry and self-deprecating humour, Ndibe’s memoir entertains, offers insightful commentary on culture, and challenges misguided notions. Case in point, when curiosity leads him to history texts written by Africans disputing the Eurocentric education he’d received in secondary school, he wonders mockingly whether Africans living by River Nile had been “afflicted with blindness” that Scottish explorer Mungo Park be credited with its discovery. And when an American woman compliments his accent, a compliment he returns in jest, she bridles at the thought of having an accent because she was born and bred in America.

The memoir's comical title derives from a string of advice an uncle gave Ndibe on the eve of his maiden voyage to America, where he would work as an editor for African Commentary at the behest of Chinua Achebe, the magazine’s co-founder.

“And the first thing to remember is this: Never look an American in the eye… They take it as an insult,” the uncle intones. “If they catch you, a stranger, looking them in the face, they will shoot.”

Ndibe takes the council to heart so much so that when he locks eyes with a policeman at a bus station barely two weeks after his arrival, he’s paralysed with fear. “Immediately, I swept my eyes upward, as if some strange thing floating in the air had caught my attention. It was a wordless way of assuring the officer that, in locking eyes with him, ever briefly, I had not meant any provocation.”

Unknown to him, he caught the officer’s eye for his supposed resemblance to a robbery suspect, which only becomes evident when the uniformed man enquires about his ID.

That encounter, no doubt, leaves a bilious taste in the mouth of the new expatriate but also exposes him to a peculiar trait absent in Nigerian police officers, who never address civilians as “Sir” or use the phrase “Do you mind” unless they are top shots. These cultural peculiarities would manifest in different scenarios with varying consequences as when Ndibe learns in a rather disconcerting fashion that an invitation to lunch in America doesn’t automatically mean the bill is the invitee's responsibility, and that showing up unannounced to a friend’s house is considered rude.

Yet, in matters of the former variety, Ndibe vows to retain his Nigerian tradition of footing the bill for meals he initiates, while respecting other foreign social mores on the basis that his ways are not better, but different.

Aside from Ndibe, the only person the book profiles to a substantial extent is his father, Chidibe—perhaps because he is deceased. In the chapter devoted to him, Ndibe paints a warm picture of a self-assured, stoic but emotionally distant father as was the default parental mode of conduct for men of that generation towards their kids.

“Children did not pry into adult affairs. The incautious, overcurious child was liable to […] get a few ‘corrective’ strokes delivered on the buttocks with a sturdy cane,” the writer notes in another chapter of his decision to suppress questions pertaining to his father’s British penfriend, whose letters he pilfered and read furtively.

It would be years before Ndibe enquires about his father’s participation in WW II and his decades-long friendship with Tucker, the man whose letters generated childhood fantasies about England. Their relationship, forged in Burma at the end of the war, is strikingly unconventional. For one, Tucker. a lieutenant, was responsible for the platoon where Chidibe served as a non-commissioned lance corporal. What’s more, Tucker represented an empire that had annexed Chidibe’s homeland, and by his presence and mien constantly reminded the African soldier of his secondary status as a colonised subject.

“One day, I angrily told Tucker he had his rank because he was British, not because he knew signalling as well as some of the African soldiers,” recalls Chidibe. And yet, despite his insubordination—or perhaps because of it—Tucker befriends him, “recognising that he burned with nationalist ideas”. That small act of humanity inspires Ndibe to reconnect both men, almost fifty years later, via a three-way phone call.

Although Never look an American in the Eye is beautifully woven and never boring, there remain some missing and unresolved elements like the status of Ndibe’s relationship with Chinua Achebe after his bitter resignation from the financially-beleaguered African Commentary and how he supported himself afterwards. Also, there is barely any mention of his experience of the Nigeria-Biafra war—a story he recounted in the literary magazine, Guernica—neither does he delve into the familial ties that have and continue to shape him. Perhaps that omission could be attributed to wanting to keep his private life private. Notwithstanding, the memoir is a fascinating, delightful read.

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