Searching for Angels: Adventures of a Nomad

By Amatesiro Gianni Nozze Dore

Chapter Two: Life in Pontassieve after Minna [Part II]

“The Ministry of Destiny Helpers,” Joshua Selman. My biggest regret, in Minna, was that I wasn’t happy enough. I was too conscious of my physical condition when I should have been thinking celestial. As usual, I sought a friend: a local, an opportunity to learn the culture, history, and the nuances of the languages that governed that territory. It was a skill I perfected at Ago Palace Way: how to partner with the land to ensure it produced desired results.

One of my challenges in Lekki Phase One was the lack of true locals in that bougie peninsular. I always understood wealth and power. It was my natural habitat. As a child in Warri, I watched how Ogiame Atuwatse II, the then Olu of Warri, appeared superior to the Lord God Almighty we all worshipped at the Four Square Gospel Church at the palace in Ekweditsekiri. Yes, all powers belongs to God but I was also taught that all authority in heaven and on earth were vested on the throne behind and above the altar where my maternal grandfather interpreted the English sermons of every preacher into Itsekiri.

Poverty was something I never really understood because I only had to ask, and it was always provided. My maternal grandparents raised me as one of their kids in a household full of distant relatives spoiling me with attention, my mother’s sisters acted as though they gave birth to me, and my biological father eventually came into comfortable personal wealth and resources before I lost any milk teeth.

Poverty was that thing that nagged my mother and made her impatient with the love of her life, my stepfather, and his immense literary talent in a country designed to destroy and impoverish creative minds.

After decades of peaceful but stressful marital life with an industrious & starving artist, my mother fought the heavens to prevent me from experiencing a life of unrewarding literary pursuits after ensuring I obtained the most expensive legal education in Nigeria fully funded by my biological father who shopped across the world for my books, shoes, wristwatches, and clothes.

Everything was going according to plan until Onyeka Nwelue asked me to help return “Midnight Children by Salman Rushdie” to Jude Dibia who lived about 35 minutes drive, at Osapa London, from my dad’s 6-bedroom duplex where I lived alone with a cook and a driver; an alternative home on the Island where my biological father hosted his international guests and business partners.

Jude Dibia authored “Walking with Shadows” which should have won the 100,000 USD NLNG Nigeria Prize for Literature if not for the rampant homophobia of the Nigerian literary community which is currently masked as a condition for international grants, awards, scholarships, and residencies. My professional literary career commenced based on that meeting with Jude Dibia, whom I had previously encountered at several literary events such as the ANA Creative Writing Workshop of 2008/9 facilitated by the incredible Professor Karen Aribisala-King.

I guess I had written “Seven Yellow Brassieres for Fried Egg” for the Kwani? Africa I Live in Competition; and may have already won a Naija Stories competition organised by Nkem Akinsoto [aka Myne Whitman]; when Jude Dibia sent me an online link or asked me to check the call for submission in a daily newspaper about the 2009 Farafina Trust Creative Writing Workshop facilitated by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and a host of other international writers like Aslak Myhre, Jackie Kay, and the indomitable Binyavanga Wainaina. If I was destined to become a Senior Advocate of Nigeria like my legal hero and father of my university classmate, Gani Fawehinmi, the Farafina Trust Creative Writing Workshop and the viral influence of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and her literary gang of global change agents showed me the powers of literature especially when I was already disillusioned by the inherent corruption and aristocratic nature of the legal profession. Jurisprudence is historically designed to protect the rich and powerful while disadvantaged people like my mother, stepfather, and maternal siblings are naturally exposed to the evils and manipulations of the world, without any societal safeguards, for daring to lead honest lives, without compromising, until the disgrace and dearth of opportunities my sexuality brought to that innocent family.

I moved into the matrimonial home of my mother and her struggling family at Ago Palace Way, in 2012, to write and create art because I romantised poverty and sought to understand the language of the working class. Five years of exorbitant and flamboyant tertiary education at the Igbinedion University Okada, from October 2003 to the summer of 2008, provided lifetime experiences about the perils of excessive wealth, unbridled lust, unchallenged power, abuse of spiritual authority, and the manipulative influences of uncriticised mentors.

As a 17 year old law undergraduate, I addressed the Vice Chancellor of our great university, in a gathering of very angry students from some of the wealthiest and most powerful families in the country who didn’t want their heirs to experience the “corrupting” influence of a western education abroad during their formative years; to protest against the mismanagement of our great university. I looked at the distinguished modafucker and said: “this school is nonsense!” Everywhere scatter!

By the time, they were calling me “Dagbana” at Ago Palace Way as a result of my boldness, clarity of mind despite multiple bottles of drink & sticks of high-end smokes in my system, coupled with immense creative productivity: I had slayed dragons across the country and extinguished multiple international demons with my words, writings, the strength of my fucking uncompromising character, and quest for justice across the world.

In Minna, after I returned to Christ at House on the Rock, the first gift Pastor PeteRock Sadiq gave to me was a new name: Silas!

I became Jaiyeoba for the writing residency programme at the country home of Professor Wole Soyinka in Abeokuta.

Whenever the Lord wants to change my story: he gives me a new name! I left Nigeria with a mental consciousness that my name was Silas Jaiyeoba because Amatesiro Roland Dore was not powerful enough to escape that hellhole.

Before the Lord gave me Italy as an inheritance for meekness [after many years of blissful barrenness in Pontassieve, beautiful terrorism at Firenzuola, and the manipulative hospitality of Firenze], the first thing God did was to give me a new name in the hellish paradise of San Casciano Val di Pesa:

Gianni Nozze

Granduca di Toscana, diahane!

Watch out for Chapter Two: Life at Pontassieve after Minna [Part III] from my memoir, forthcoming in 2024, “Searching for Angels: Adventures of a Nomad” by Amatesiro Gianni Nozze Dore.

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Tot ziens, bedankt! Ci si becca, grazie! Danke, merci, modokpe gidigbo!