HABIBA’S HABITAT: Expert Expats
It is great being an expatriate. You are away from the societal
pressures of your home country, and the ‘ties that bind’. You are free to
reinvent yourself as you wish. All the people who knew you growing up and who
had pegged and pigeonholed you as a certain type of person are no longer there
to force you to conform to the way you previously defined yourself. You are
liberated from those shackles.
At the Moorhouse Hotel on Sunday, I witnessed two French
expatriates here working technical jobs, pursuing their true vocations as ‘cool’
musicians playing the guitar, the saxophone and the flute. They were part of a
trio of jazz musicians who treated the brunch crowd to Bossa Nova standards,
Desafinado, and French Jazz classic, la vie en rose. The third person was
Nigerian, a gifted guitarist. It was a wonderful and energising time out.
It is great to be an expatriate regardless of your gender. For
the men, be you 28 or 68, you are forever young. Starting new jobs, engaging in
new responsibilities, taking on new pursuits, and entering new relationships
with mature and adventurous fellow world travellers or with young, beautiful,
ambitious and exotic local girls. Ah, la vie est belle! Just this weekend, I
heard from one of the arm-candy girls that the expatriate men are experts at
managing the balancing act of those relationships with young girls.
Venezuelan men are hard to tempt. Their girls back home are as
feline and assertive as ours, and have beautiful faces and bodies too. Germans,
Americans, and Englishmen are true connoisseurs of the West African beauty.
Women are women are women – they are looking for the same qualities that they
seek in a woman back home, plus that ‘je ne sais quoi’ exotic quality that
stands them out in a crowd, and makes them feel the way ‘true men’ are supposed
to feel. It has to be love, though.
Frenchmen, on the other hand, are reputedly tricky!!!! The word
on the street amongst the girls is that the men initiate those relationships
purely to have fun! ‘Quelle horreur!!’ There are exceptions, of course. I hate
stereotypes as a rule, but I have to be true to the reports I have received.
The French dangle a journey to Paris on one hand and the possibility of
marriage on the other, stringing the lady along for years sometimes, before
neither materialise. The francophone girls are NOT amused!!! They believe that
a Frenchman is more likely to marry an elegant and exposed black girl bred in
France than one from our shores.
Gentlemen, is this true?
As for the expatriate ladies, it is both a wonderful and
terrifying experience, but it is never dull!!! How many of us working women or
even housewives would love to leave it all behind and take off to a country
where your husband’s skills (usually), sometimes your own, are needed. You are
an expert, you are valued, you are treasured and looked after and pampered.
Your health and your recreation are the focus of meetings by managing directors
and HR directors of multinational companies.
Nothing less than a three-bedroom apartment in a complex with a
playground and swimming pool is good enough for you. You are assigned a driver
to take you shopping and convey you anywhere you wish to go. You are assigned a
cook/steward to ensure that you do not strain yourself seeking to feed yourself
and your family, and so that you can immediately become an expert hostess for
the inescapable social round of parties, teas, cocktails and dinners to further
your partner’s career. If you have children, you MUST have a nanny so that you
can focus on your health and beauty and QUALITY time with the children. You can
let someone else do the routine stuff. What a hardship! What is lovely is that
you get the time you need to further your interests, whether in philanthropy,
fashion, education, art or sport. Many expatriates who spent time in Nigeria learnt
to sail in Lagos Lagoon, according to John and Jill Godwin, the notable
architect couple who can proudly call themselves Nigerian-British after
residing here for over 50 years. Many have also picked up golf and discovered
unimagined and rewarding new skills and talents here.
This is where the terrifying part of being an expatriate partner
comes in. You really do need to stay healthy, beautiful and active.
You had better play golf and tennis and keep your bikini body
looking good, or work towards those two-pack abdominal muscles (six-pack may be
asking for too much) because you and your partner are ordinary to each other,
in an unusual environment. Yet you are each viewed as unusual and desirable in
the eyes of others. Which regard would YOU prefer? To retain your partner’s
affection, you have to compete with all the colleagues, subordinates, service
providers, and young men and women seeking the favour and the liquid currency
of your partner.
We all assume that expatriates have more money than regular
mortals. After all, they get all kinds of extra allowances and incentives for
working away from home. They generally have most of their local bills taken
care of or are living in a place where the cost of living is much lower than
their country.
If they are renting out their own home rather than maintaining
two, as some choose to do, their income can far exceed their expenditure.
Besides which they live in good homes, drive new cars, and love doing fun and
adventurous things. There are a whole raft of people on standby and eager to
help you spend your ready cash, or keen to divert it from its rightful
recipients to themselves. So, watch out! And fellow expatriates, the
experienced ones, are experts in giving you a helpful push into that sinkhole
of expat exploitation, degradation and ruin. Hey, they need your company there
to feel good about the antics that they are up to themselves. I won’t go into
the widespread salacious and sometimes tragic stories of what happens in
expatriate compounds all over the world. The US TV series, Desperate
Housewives, and the new UK series, Mistresses, have nothing on it.
To be fair, expatriates still have a lot to learn about
convoluted love triangles, thwarted passion, agonising betrayals and extreme
measures to capture and keep a desirable partner. Our domestic movie industry,
Nollywood, can educate them in that regard and show them endings in tears,
recriminations, and broken homes.
We hear you, we empathise with you, we feel you as you face your
unique travails during your residency here. There is something called expat
culture that explains the inevitability of many of the situations you find
yourselves in. They are a function of being brought into a different
environment as an expert expat or as the companion of one. We, the locals,
don’t co-operate as we ought to either. Don’t take it personally. It is not
about you; it is about your status as a transient guest, here to sample a
facsimile of our lives and then move on, abruptly cutting the fragile ties and
dependencies that have formed.
There are more advantages than disadvantages to being an expatriate, and
Nigerian expats enjoy them and suffer them too when they are posted or hired on
contract abroad. The trick is, not all foreigners here are expatriates. If you
are one of us, enjoy the benefits but avoid the traps of the expatriate
lifestyle; and if you are an expatriate, especially you French guys….be
nice!!!!
