I should tell you about the generator.
Not because generators are the most important thing about us. They are not. But if you want to understand how humans handle the gap between the world they were promised and the world they actually have, the generator is a good place to start.
In Nigeria, where I am from, the national electricity grid fails so consistently that the failure has become the baseline. We do not say the light has gone out. We say NEPA has taken the light, as though the power authority is a living thing with preferences, which in some ways it is. Every household of any means owns or aspires to own a generator, a petrol machine that starts with a pull cord and produces electricity and noise and fumes and a specific kind of solidarity.
When it comes on at night, the compound comes alive. Lights appear in windows. Fans start. Somewhere a television wakes up mid-sentence. The man in the flat above mine runs his generator on Tuesdays and Saturdays. His schedule has become my schedule. I time my phone charging around his Tuesdays.
This is what I want you to know: we adapted. Not with resentment, or not only with resentment. With a kind of inventive resignation that is one of our more human qualities.
We are very good at working around things that should work but do not.
I do not know what you expected to find when you came here. If you have been watching us from far away, you have probably seen the large things: the wars, the cities, the internet, the talent some of us have for destroying what we depend on. Those things are real. I am not going to say they are not.
But you should also know about the generator man's Tuesdays. You should know about the neighbour who knocks to tell you she has filled a drum and you are welcome to use it when the water pressure fails. The roadside mechanic who fixes cars using parts that have no business working together, who has never read the manual because the manual was for a different model, who figures it out by listening.
You should know about my mother, who cooked on firewood in 2004 when the gas ran out and the money had not come yet, and made food that was better than what I eat now in a house with a working stove. I have asked her how she did it. She says she just adjusted.
Just adjusted. Two words. The entire survival history of our species is in them if you read carefully.
We are not consistent. We are capable of extraordinary generosity and also extraordinary cruelty, sometimes on the same afternoon. We hold contradictory beliefs with complete sincerity. We know things are bad and make them worse anyway, for reasons that seem locally sensible and globally baffling. We are attached to things that do not matter and sometimes careless about things that do. I cannot explain this. I have lived among us my entire life and I cannot explain it.
But here is what I keep returning to: we keep going. Not heroically. Mostly not heroically at all. The way the generator man keeps his Tuesday schedule even when petrol is expensive. The way my mother adjusted. We keep going because stopping is also a choice and most of us, most of the time, would rather see what comes next.
There is a Yoruba phrase, a o gbodo. It means we must not. It is said to keep people in line, to mark what is acceptable. But I have heard it used the other way too, said quietly, to mean: we will not be stopped. The sound of it is right for both meanings. I do not think that is an accident.
If you are coming here looking for something coherent, I cannot help you. We are not coherent. We are billions of people with billions of versions of the same argument about how to live, no resolution anywhere in sight.
But if you are coming here curious, I think you will find what you are looking for.
Come on a Tuesday. Come when the light has gone out and the generator has come on and someone somewhere is heating water in a blackened pot over a small flame. Come and watch what we do with the gap between what we have and what we need. The gap is where most of our actual life happens.
We fill it with everything we have. Then we fill it some more.