Blackass

@_IGONI

Furo Wariboko persisted in my thoughts after I left him at the mall, and so I did what everyone does these days: I Googled him. The search results pointed me to either Facebook or Twitter, and since I was no longer on Facebook (I deleted my account after I started receiving homophobic messages over my personal essay on wanting to be a girl), I followed the Twitter links. Now is the time to admit this: from the first moment I saw Furo I suspected I’d found a story, but it was when I heard him speak that I finally knew. A white man with a strong Nigerian accent, stranded in Lagos without a place to stay, without any friends to turn to, and with a job as a bookseller for a company so small I hadn’t heard of it? Even if I hadn’t met the hero myself, hadn’t gleaned the details directly from the source, and even if I had plucked the whole fiction out of the air, there was no way in hell the writer in me was going to miss the rat smell of the story. What I didn’t know though was the scale of the story. For that discovery I have Twitter to thank. It was there that I found out about the Furo who had gone missing in Lagos one day before I met my Furo. And it was from the tweeted photos of that lost Furo that I realised my own Furo used to be black.

Furo’s story didn’t emerge abracadabra-quick. It took me some time to weave the fragments I gathered from Twitter into any sort of narrative. (The thing with Twitter is: to get what you want from it, you first have to give it what it wants. As with most social networking platforms, the currency on Twitter is the users who sign up and the content they generate. Every currency holds value for someone somewhere, whether that value is based on gold or the stock market or, in the case of Twitter, popularity; that blanket word, which, for the pinpoint purpose of metaphor, I will now proceed to formularise as P = U x C x T. Extrapolating this to Twitter, popularity equals ‘500 million users’ multiplied by ‘content generated by users’ multiplied by ‘time spent on Twitter by users’. Yes, time — the terminus of all rigmaroles.) And so I, @_igoni, spent bundles of time on Twitter. Hours spent lurking on the timelines of virtual strangers. Hours spent snooping through megabytes of diarrhoeic data. But my investment paid off, I got what I wanted, I found @pweetychic_tk, whom I realised was Furo’s sister as I read this tweet of hers:

Pls help RT. This is my missing bro Furo Wariboko in the pic. He left home Monday morn & no news of him since. pic.twitter.com/0J9xt5WaW

I followed her on Twitter, of course, and going through her timeline hour after hour and day by day, reading her tweets for hidden meanings in her abbreviations and punctuation choices, and searching for mood flaggers like what news stories she retweeted and favorited, and monitoring her movements from the geotagging of her shared photos and videos, I began to get some insight into a part of Furo’s story that cannot be told better than by the family he left behind.

@pweetychic_tk: Wednesday, 20 June

09:08 | Hello Twitter! #myfirstTweet

09:10 | Pls help RT. This is my missing bro Furo Wariboko in the pic. He left home Monday morn & no news of him since. pic.twitter.com/0J9xt5WaW

09:26 | RT ‘@RubyOsa: My cousin @pweetychic_tk has just joined Twitter. #Follow her. Her big bro got lost in Eko 2 days ago!’ Thanks Ruby.

10:14 | @RubyOsa Furo is also on Twitter. His handle is @efyouaruoh

10:31 | Thanks! RT ‘@lazyeyedben: Hello @pweetychic_tk. I dig your pic. I’m now #ffing.’

11:01 | I’m fed up with this ASUU strike. 2 whole months without school!

14:37 | I’m hungry.

14:59 | Without @efyouaruoh the house is lonely. Mum & Dad are looking for him. I’m getting afraid. Maybe something has really happened.

16:35 | I’m starting a hashtag for my missing bro. See the attached picture for details. #Furo needs us! (RT if you have a heart.) twitpic.com/bz7htc

17:52 | RT ‘@RICHnaijakids: Lord in heaven, you’ve been good to me. Finally found the Air Retro 7s Bordeaux http://tmblr.co/ZX-9nta1U9bm’

17:55 | @RICHnaijakids Enjoy your riches oh. But we KNOW your fathers. #corruptleaders

18:58 | Today is K’s birthday. I should call him. I should be the bigger person. But I won’t.

19:41 | Mum & Dad just got back from the police. They’ve still not heard anything about Furo.

19:59 | I ask Mummy a simple YES or NO question & she gives me a 20-minute speech!

20:02 | How can the police at Akowonjo Station tell Dad to pay them to go and find Furo???

20:05 | I’m just tired of everything.

22:47 | Going to bed. Goodnight everyone.

From early on I distrusted the persona of @pweetychic_tk. I didn’t know why at first, as she seemed sincere enough in her tweets about herself, and so I put my scepticism down to my own suspicious nature. (Just to press home that point about my suspicious nature, here’s my first tweet upon opening my account: To make money off selling us to ourselves for free, that’s the business model of social media. Given the tone of this tweet, I’ll understand if netizens find it hard to believe when in future I declare that actually I don’t disapprove of social media. But I don’t and can’t and won’t. For one thing, I’m too much aware that my disapproval wouldn’t matter a Facebook poke to the billions who have adopted Facebook and Twitter as if they were new-age versions of Christianity and Islam. And then again, as @_igoni, how can I, in honesty, oppose the very medium responsible for my existence? My efforts would be better served in renouncing Jehovah from the pulpit of a Kingdom Hall. Jesus wept and the hashtag exists, that’s gospel, so I’ll move on to the real crux: my distrust of digital personas.) I was wrong to think that my scepticism was unfounded, as the more I learnt about Furo’s story, the more certain I became that his sister’s persona had to be either contrived or schizophrenic. For here was a young lady whose full-blood brother had just gone missing, and there she was on Twitter collecting followers and trading jokes? If her digital persona was not misleading, then her real one had to be full of shit.

@pweetychic_tk: Thursday, 21 June

03:36 | I think I’m starting to understand this Twitter thing oh …

09:11 | Morning Twitterfam! See the sunny weather we’re enjoying in Eko!

09:30 | Phone app lets women rate men like restaurants http://hfpv.to/629Nv via @HuffPoVidz

09:31 | If that app had come out b4 it might have saved me from my rubbish ex! (See last tweet.)

09:37 | Did anyone watch yesterday’s episode of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

10:16 | Not a single retweet or mention since morning! #bored

10:20 | The biggest #COCK I’ve ever seen belongs to the aboki who has a kiosk near my hostel!

10:21 | FOOL => RT ‘@RUDEbwoyDeji: This #Unilag okpeke @pweetychic_tk has just fessed up that she likes aboki cock ha ha ha!’

10:23 | @RUDEbwoyDeji Silence is the best answer for a FOOL.

12:36 | WOOHOO! 104 new followers! #COCK tweets rule!

12:47 | Some people are sending me angry DMs oh. #COCK

12:50 | Confession time! #COCK

12:51 | For all you tweeps who RTed my #COCK tweet, I meant CHICKEN! The aboki keeps a big fat chicken as a pet. #gotcha #LWKMD

13:47 | Hmm. Follows have stopped since #COCK became CHICKEN. #justsaying

13:50 | O se!:-) RT ‘@lazyeyedben: #ff @pweetychic_tk, one of the realest chics on Twitter.’

15:27 | LOL RT ‘@drbigox: NEPA promo = Pay your bills regularly and win a generator.’

16:01 | I miss @efyouaruoh. Where are you? Mum & Dad went to the newspapers today. This is not funny any more oh. #Furo

16:06 | I’m sad:‘(@efyouaruoh won’t reply to his mentions & FB messages. Or is he lost 4 real?

21:54 | See me see wahala! This ugly FOOL @RudebwoyDeji is still looking 4 my trouble!

22:19 | Some people on Twitter are stupid sha. They think they can just say anything. But that’s easy to fix. @RudebwoyDeji, you’re BLOCKED.

22:43 | Too much animosity on Twirrer tonight mehn … get a life you haters. #goodbye

While searching for Furo’s story, I, too, underwent a transformation. I was more relieved than surprised by this happenstance. The seeds had always been there, embedded in the parched earth of my subconscious. I had heard their muted rattling in the remembered moments of my sleeping life; I had seen their shadowy branches overhanging the narrow road that wound into my future. As is usual with Damascus journeys, I only understood the portents after my conversion. (One such portent — or, rather, evidence of my subliminal preoccupation — can be recognised in this quote from an interview I granted a magazine a few months earlier: No human being has ever directly seen their own face. It’s impossible within nature — the most you can do is glimpse your nose and, for those with full lips, the curve of your upper lip. And so we only see ourselves through external sources, whether as images in mirrors, pixels on the screen, or words on the page, words of love from a mother, words of hate from an ex-lover.) Long before Furo’s story became my own, I was already trying to say what I see now, that we are all constructed narratives.

@pweetychic_tk: Friday, 22 June

09:45 | This thing is getting real. It’s now 4 whole days since my big bro #Furo got lost. See his missing ad in today’s (cont) http://tl.gd/ktdfkbt

09:53 | I’m still disgusted at how the Christian Taliban twisted my #COCK tweet yesterday. It was just a joke — GET IT? #hypocrites

09:54 | 4 all the #hypocrites who attacked me, I now have 1856 followers! Eat your hearts out!

10:32 | WHAT have I done to this one AGAIN??? => @Nu9jaYoots

10:41 | @Nu9jaYoots Who dash you #YOOT Leader? You can’t even bloody spell! #mschew

10:52 | By their tweets we shall know them, Twitter #YOOT Leaders. With achieve-nothings like YOU no wonder PDP has a 68 y/o grandpa as Youth Leader!

10:55 | Why am I even wasting my time? For my new followers, abeg see my next hashtag.

10:57 | #Furo #Furo #Furo #Furo #Furo #Furo #Furo #Furo #Furo #Furo #Furo #Furo

10:59 | RT ‘@lazyeyedben: @pweetychic_tk Who is Furo?’ YOU don’t know? And to think you were my Twitter crush! You’re dumped! ^*stomps away^*

11:06 |:-) RT ‘@lazyeyedben: @pweetychic_tk ^*singing^* Please don’t go, don’t gooo …’

11:42 | I love Twirrer.

11:42 | Facebook is sooo yesterday.

11:43 | RT ‘@Lurv_Facts: Women are biologically attracted to a-holes because their traits resemble those needed for survival in the wild.’

11:44 | Retweets are NOT endorsements!

11:49 | I just lost 3 followers. WTF. Why can’t I get to 2000???

14:49 | For those who haven’t seen this yet, here’s my big brother’s missing advert in today’s newspaper: twitpic.com/yjs75Np #Furo

17:30 | God I LOVE this picture! twitpic.com/bzR76on via @JimmyChooLtd

17:31 | I’ll gladly endure the pain of wearing a tight pair of shoes … if it looks good LOL.

20:03 | I’m not pregnant. That’s a relief.

20:40 | _|_ (-.-) _|_ to @emem_1987 & @anpasticru

20:42 | Twitter is beginning to piss me off sha!

20:44 | Some RATS don’t know when to choke on their evil thoughts @emem_1987 @anpasticru

20:45 | I came here to look for my missing bro. Every other thing is dirt off my shoulder.

20:49 | This! RT ‘@lazyeyedben: I’m digging your style @pweetychic_tk. Don’t mind the olofofos.’

20:49 | THANKS @lazyeyedben! You’re such a cool dude!

21:04 | Co-sign => RT ‘@Rihanna: The one person you can’t run from is YOU!!!’

21:05 | I ♥ @Rihanna! #justsaying

21:15 | Mum & Dad have returned. Mum is crying again. My life is so not fun right now.

21:41 | OMG!!! Mummy wants to go to the mortuary 2moro to look for Furo!!!

22:17 | 2moro is officially the worst day of my life. #goodnight

My handle is @_igoni and I was born into the Twitter stream in January 2009. Apart from tweeting links to my online publications as well as other articles I’d enjoyed reading, I didn’t have much to do in my short existence. Until, that is, I found @pweetychic_tk and, through her, @efyouaruoh. Furo’s Twitter page displayed as its profile photo an image of sunglasses-wearing Neo from The Matrix, and the profile name was ‘FW’, while the bio read, ‘Lagos-based job hunter,’ and so, if not for his sister’s tweets, @efyouaruoh would have remained a cipher for ever vanished into the dead-end alleys of the Web, just another one of hundreds of millions of unverified Twitter handles with a meagre following and a preference for the pseudonymous; and, to boot, a digital persona whose final breath was drawn at 00:13 on 18 June. ‘Nepa bring light abeg,’ he tweeted, and then nothing ever again. Silence, on Twitter, is as good as death, and if life hadn’t intervened to bring us together on the day after his final tweet, I might never have found myself scrolling through the timelines of the dead, searching for the POVs of the real person in the ghosts of their digital personas.

@pweetychic_tk: Saturday, 23 June

11:15 | This is NOT a good morning. Dad is driving us to the #mortuary in Ikeja. We’re going to search for #Furo there!

12:21 | I just knew the place would be UGLY twitpic.com/bzT67oM #mortuary

12:27 | It STINKS inside!!!! twitpic.com/c4KnnIP #mortuary

12:33 | RT ‘@Nneka_Or: omg can this be Lagos?? RT @pweetychic_tk: It STINKS inside!!!! twitpic.com/c4KnnIP #mortuary’

12:33 | RT ‘@PrinceofmoJo: RT @infoeNGine: Lagos govt shuts down smelly #mortuary http://dlvr.it/2NLieR @pweetychic_tk’

13:03 | THOSE ARE DEAD PEOPLE!!! twitpic.com/bzs24bP #mortuary

13:05 | RT ‘@asiwajuayo: WTF! Naija should suffer a natural disaster! RT @pweetychic_tk: THOSE ARE DEAD PEOPLE!!! twitpic.com/bzs24bP #mortuary’

13:05 | RT ‘enugu2coventry: This is unspeakably shameful. RT @pweetychic_tk: THOSE ARE DEAD PEOPLE!!! twitpic.com/bzs24bP #mortuary’

13:06 | RT ‘@PrinceofmoJo: RT @punchonthenet: Rear Admiral’s missing daughter found in Lagos #mortuary http://dlvr.it/2NLtuM @pweetychic_tk’

13:33 | When I die I want to be cremated! On the same day! twitpic.com/ZvY80pQ #mortuary

13:48 | O_o RT ‘@gambianfaust: @pweetychic_tk My granny died & I wanted 2 keep a part of her with me. So after her cremation, I snorted the ashes.’

13:48 | RT ‘@MarkyMona: @pweetychic_tk Thx 4 raising awareness abt this prob. See the #mortuary they kept my father in! pic.twitter.com/rU1ogDtS’

14:07 | I just threw up a little in my mouth. Even dead people don’t deserve this. #mortuary

14:22 | RT ‘@PrinceofmoJo: RT @HMNews: Nigeria | Floods: #Mortuary Attendants Stack Corpses on Rooftops http://dlvr.it/2NLdG @pweetychic_tk’

14:26 | @PrinceofmoJo Stop tweeting those links at me you PERVERT!!!

14:27 | Apologies 2 my followers 4 the error, but please don’t RT or click on @PrinceofmoJo #mortuary links. They’re porn.

14:44 | RT ‘@asiwajuayo: Yay! @pweetychic_tk is the reason! RT @TrendsLagos: ‘mortuary’ is now trending in #Lagos: http://trendsmap.com/ng/lagos’

15:12 | Thanks ALL!!! My phone battery’s about to die, I have to go now. #mortuary

23:17 | OMG!!!!!! @DONJAZZY retweeted me!!!

When I’d learned enough about Furo’s story to be sure I was committed to following it to the end, I tweeted @pweetychic_tk. In remarkable time she had become a Twitter celeb, gathering seven times as many followers in a week as I had in four years, so I wasn’t certain she would respond to a Twitter lightweight like me. (Question: How did she get so many followers so fast? Answer: Check out the first page of the Google search for ‘get Twitter followers fast’. In other words, she did the work.) With this in mind — ‘this’ being my dread of getting rebuffed in public — I pondered on the approach most likely to succeed, at the same time studying her timeline for any clues that might help with my decision, which I indeed reached upon seeing a serendipitous tweet of hers. From meeting her brother I knew about our shared ethnicity, and so, to indicate to her that we had a connection deeper than Twitter esprit de corps, I greeted her in Kalabari before offering to buy her ice cream. Calculation always trumps sincerity on social media. Yet I must admit that when she not only replied my tweet but also accepted my offer, I was buffaloed.

@pweetychic_tk: Sunday, 24 June

07:33 | Good morning folks! Thanks for all the RTs & mentions yesterday!! #mortuary

07:33 | And happy Sunday to ALL my new followers! Have you seen my hashtag #Furo yet?

07:35 | So @DONJAZZY RTed me yesterday & my phone hasn’t stopped buzzing. #Thank you

08:45 | I’m off to church. Yes oh, I believe in all that bible stuff; o)

09:41 | I’m seriously craving ice cream. It’s all this hellfire talk I’m sure!

09:57 | Pastor finish soon oh so my Daddy can buy me ice cream LOL!

09:59 | TWITTER FIGHT ALERT!!!

09:59 | RT ‘@kweenofsheebah: I’m Ethiopian and I’m SO offended by @afrikais1country’

10:01 | O_o RT ‘@kweenofsheebah: @afrikais1country Ethiopians are a proud people. We’re not like the rest of you African booty scratchers. #HornPride’

10:04 | RT ‘@kweenofsheebah: @VJ_Singhing If @afrikais1country wants to mock that way of thinking it should be called AFRICA-IS-A-CONTINENT.’

10:06 | RT ‘@kweenofsheebah: @VJ_Singhing YOU shouldn’t even be on this topic of Africans! You look like you eat curry in Mumbai.’

10:08 | TWEEPS!!! See #HornPride for the latest. I’ll only retweet the best insults ha ha!

10:10 | #HornPride RT ‘@kweenofsheebah: @naijapalaver Nigeria was colonised just like the rest of Africa. Ethiopia was NOT.’

10:13 | #HornPride RT ‘@_igoni: @kweenofsheebah Seems you need reminding that tiny Eritrea kicked your butt. @pweetychic_tk’

10:15 | #HornPride RT ‘@kweenofsheebah: @_igoni Don’t tell me about butt-kicking when your people were dragged to the US to pick cotton & get whipped!’

10:15 | See my last retweet! @kweenofsheebah is subbing NIGERIANS!!! #HornPride

10:35 | NOooo! RT ‘@kweenofsheebah: @pweetychic_tk Stop hashing my tweets you repulsive Nigerian troll!’ #HornPride

11:01 | Church is finally over!!!

11:05 | Have you seen @kweenofsheebah bio? @afrikais 1country #HornPride

11:06 | @kweenofsheebah YOU live in CANADA & yet you talk shit about AFRICA???

11:31 | #HornPride RT ‘@kweenofsheebah: Shut up all you poor Africans. Go fix your starving 3rd world countries. That should keep y’all busy.’

11:50 | My fingers hurt from all the RTing, but this has got to be the best fight ever! And a BIG hello to all my new followers!!! #HornPride

11:51 |:-) #HornPride RT ‘@kweenofsheebah: All you Nigerian scammers tweeting threats at me, I’ve nothing to say to you.’

12:11 | YAY! RT ‘@lazyeyedben: #HornPride is trending! 2 days in a row @pweetychic_tk has put Lagos on the map! I love that gal!!’

12:43 | No more tweets from @kweenofsheebah in the last 20 minutes. She’s run off to lick her wounds. Good riddance to bad rubbish!

13:00 | Time for ice cream!!!

13:11 | Aargh! Mum is still waiting to see Pastor! I’m stuck here with Dad until she’s done. No ice cream! ^*sheds angry tears^*

13:13 | Ooh yes please! RT ‘@_igoni: Tobra, @pweetychic_tk. I’ll buy you ice cream. Least I can do after you provided my Sunday entertainment.’

13:14 | @_igoni I’m at the Winners Chapel on Akowojo Road in Egbeda.

13:49 | Just got off the phone with my new Twitterpal @_igoni … #crazyexcited

13:57 | @_igoni arrives! twitpic.com/bzBvv3h

15:43 | Eating ice cream with @_igoni at The Palms in Lekki! twitpic.com/bzFu2dl

20:03 | Today’s stupid rain couldn’t spoil all the fun I had with @_igoni! Now heading home in one of those new metro cabs! #enjoyment

20:14 | 4,743 RTs & 86 favs of my first-ever tweet about #Furo (You guys ROCK!!!)

21:37 | Mum needs to chillax! I can’t go out again because Furo got lost???

22:31 | I’m thinking about the long talk @_igoni and I had about #Furo today.

22:35 | @_igoni And imiete for the @ColdStone ice cream!!!

23:22 |:o))) RT ‘@_igoni: @pweetychic_tk The pleasure was mine. See you again soon.’

23:45 | Ooooh just 2 followers short of 7,000!!!

23:46 | ^*staggers across bedroom^{* *}flops on bed^{* *}hugs teddy bear^* #happy #goodnight

Five days after I found her on Twitter, I got a chance to meet @pweetychic_tk. I was conflicted about that move — should the artist probe too deeply into the mundane lives of their characters — but grabbed the chance anyway. We met by arrangement at the gate of her church in Egbeda on an overcast Sunday afternoon after the close of service and, at her suggestion, I took her to The Palms in Lekki for ice cream. Her name was Tekena. (When she asked what she should call me, @_igoni or just plain Igoni, I joked, ‘Call me Morpheus.’)