24 Mar 2025

From Nigeria to Bermondsey

by Yemisi Aribisala

Illustration by the author

Ola Soyinka was a better pro-democracy activist than he was a businessman. I went to work for him at the British Journal of Cardiology at 3 Tyers Gate, London, in 1995; he hired me because I was his brother’s girlfriend, that was my full and final CV. I had an irrelevant first degree in law and could barely use a computer beyond picking out keys for word processing. Despite my best efforts I arrived late for work almost every day via a bus that crawled the Peckham High Street and a tube that flew to London Bridge, rarely getting in before 9:30 a.m. At the end of the first week Ola told me that I was obtuse, like the edge of a table standing uselessly in the way. Never before or since have I been so nonchalantly and efficiently dressed down at point-blank range. Admittedly, hiring someone who had never worked in an office environment was a questionable decision in the first place but Ola was not the best of businessmen, as I have already observed.

I cleaned the office’s adjoining kitchenette till you could eat off the short counter. I left a sign on the cabinet doors for anyone who dared to tarnish the stainless steel teaspoons I had painstakingly polished, even if it meant they had to scrupulously lick the last bits of coffee off the teaspoons thank you.

“Apocalypse Now!” read my hand-drawn memo.

But I spoke with an accent that wobbled, often unravelling without warning into proud Nigerian intonation that made the clients laugh. I called someone Mr. Parsnip over the phone (that’s what I honestly heard him say) and could not pronounce “Reuters.” I had to learn to touch-type in a matter of days and master the prima donna fax machine in order to ginger up my usefulness to the enterprise. I was promoted to “tea-lady who happens to respond to letters when not making tea,” responses that took me scandalous hours to write. And I was the one you sent round to the coffee shop next door for freshly toasted white bread slathered with butter and strawberry jam, rushed back to the office in brown paper bags so the toast arrived still hot and visibly sousing butter. One day I arrived late as usual for work and found a good-natured redheaded lady named Charlotte sitting in my chair. I threw an almighty strop that almost lost me my job. Ola asked me to meet him at the park nearby, where he subjected me to a long tight-lipped talking to, to remind me that my full and final CV was that I was his brother’s girlfriend.