Maybe you don’t like that I sold drugs. You may wonder why I came all the way from Nigeria to another man’s country to do illegal things. If someone had told me that I will be selling drugs when I came to India, believe me, I myself wouldn’t believe that person. And if the person had told me that selling drugs would be the only option for survival for me in India, I would never have come to India. You see, many of us you see are very good people back home in Nigeria. We come from respectable families.
So many of us have invested time and resources in education.
We got undergraduate and postgraduate degrees from prestigious universities in Nigeria and other parts of Africa. We grew up investing so much in ourselves in the belief that it will pay off. There is a standard we demand of life back home. Realizing we can’t attain this standard of life which we have legitimate claims to, we go elsewhere to see what we can make out of our lives—
the investments we had made of it. The same with me,you see, with everyone I know and with everyone you may know; if you would be calm enough to see them as humans with legitimate dreams and aspirations.
I couldn’t tell people back home that I sold drugs. It would never have sat well with them that a university graduate from a respectable home was a common criminal in India. You would wonder if I felt bad about myself. Well, not exactly. Nigeria had humbled me well enough in reducing me to selling fabrics for a living even though I was a graduate and couldn’t find employment years after graduating from university.
So, coming down to India and stepping further down the social ladder didn’t matter much to me; after all, I had no legitimate claim to social status in India. If India provided me with so much as food, accommodation and a semblance of dignity to enjoy these things, then they would have treated me very well. I am an African in India, after all.
So, yes, I sold drugs, marijuana, at first, with Nasir. I sold his stock for him. It sold off quickly, and he was making money like never before. I have said this earlier, but it is good that I am repeating it even though you don’t like it. But like bad music that gets repeated on the radio on and on, at some point, you find yourself humming to it. That is why I want you to come to terms with this part of me and what I did to survive starvation. Maybe when you hear about drug dealers, you think of rats scurrying about, away from the public eye as they forage and do what they have to do in the world that they have made of shadows and gutters and crevices, all of which constitute the underbelly of cities and towns.
For sure, we are humans, not rats, and though we exist away from the public eye, in the shadows, we exist to supply the drug appetite of people who are part of normal society. I am just telling you this because I know it now, and things have happened to make me sit down and think everything through. When I started out, I did not think like this. I only wanted to make money and eat, and when I began to make money, I began to think of growth—expansion—of moving on with life to bigger things.
About the Book
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Praise for the book
“Onyeka Nwelue is Africa’s literary boy-wonder.”- Nury Vittachi, Author of Goodbye Hong Kong, Hello Xianggang
“An unusual noir thriller and worth a look for those interested in seeking crime tales based in other countries.” -Run Along The Shelves
“The Nigerian Mafia: Mumbai, was an interesting portrait of an expat group of Nigerians abroad!” - Annabel
About the Author
Onyeka Nwelue, born in 1988, is a Nigerian scholar who has had esteemed positions in academia in African studies at two of the world’s most prestigious universities, the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge.