He'll likely go there again.
He has eaten leftovers from refugee camps in his native Nigeria.
But today he is riding his mountain bike down the leafy street that leads to the Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, where he works in disease research.
In his traditional Nigerian outfit, Henry Onwubiko is hard to miss and impossible to dismiss.
Sometime in the next week or so, the 48-year-old Onwubiko will return to his homeland. He's spent the past year at RML, studying Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human side of mad cow disease. But he's also been immersed in scientific method, learning everything he can so he can be a better teacher when he goes home.
“Our schools are in very bad shape, just as the country is in very bad shape,” Onwubiko said Thursday. “We need so many things, so anything I can do is helpful.”
During that same year, Onwubiko has written and published a novel, “Survive the Fittest,” a thorough look at the complex life of Nigerian families.
So when he leaves to go home with his wife and five children, Hamilton and RML will lose an active, vibrant resident and researcher.
But Nigeria will regain one of its most qualified university professors and one of the country's fiercest social critics.
The ruling government and the multinational oil companies that support it will likely not be happy to see him.
“Those oil companies have ruined our country, they are ruining our culture, and they are doing it by paying off their ‘boys,' the government officials who do what needs to be done for those companies,” Onwubiko said. “The government is corrupt and without the will to do anything other than the bidding of multinational companies.”
Onwubiko isn't the only one saying these things - human rights activists, environmentalists and Nigerians themselves have been turning up the heat on both government officials and oil companies over development in the Niger delta.
“It's going to be a very long and hard fight,” he said. “Our people, they have been beaten down by this, and it's very hard for them to rise up against it. It's hard, too, for them to know what's effective.”
It has, for example, become all too easy to grab a few guns, block off a road and take someone hostage.
“That's a way that people can get money, but it's really just another aspect of the problem,” Onwubiko said. “It's a way to express your anger, but not a way to get anything changed over the long term. It will actually just cause the government to respond with more violence. That's not the solution.”
He has known that violence is not the answer since his earliest days.
In the late 1960s, Nigeria erupted in civil war, as its southern provinces tried to secede and call the new country the Republic of Biafra.
An estimated 1 million people died in that war, including relatives of Henry Onwubiko.
“We moved all the time,” he said. “Our village would be destroyed and we'd move. You would plant a tomato and you would be gone before it was ready to eat.”
He was a boy of less than 10 during those years, but because he could speak some French and English, he was hired by Red Cross volunteers as a translator.
“Because I was so young, I didn't get paid, but after the war I asked them if they would pay me by getting me an education,” he said.
And thus little Henry Onwubiko found himself in the United States, living with American families and going to school.
He went to school in California, Pennsylvania and, finally, to Earlham College in Richmond, Ill.
With an undergraduate degree in hand, he headed off to Colorado State University for a master's degree, then began studying for his doctorate.
And then his father died.
“In my country, you bury your dead,” he said.
So he went home, after more than a decade in the United States.
He eventually finished his doctoral work in Nigeria - “I'm sure they wouldn't let me have a degree now” - and went on to teach at the university.
He also became a prolific writer, penning short stories and essays about the country's neocolonial history and the treatment of its poor.
He has now been to prison - he calls it “detainment” - eight times. His longest incarceration lasted three months, but the periods are always uncertain.
“If someone doesn't call on your behalf, someone important like you, there is no telling how long you would be locked up,” he said. “You might just never be seen again.”
While in detainment, Onwubiko was housed in a cell the size of a closet. In America, such a cell might hold two men; in Nigeria, it held 25.
“It's unimaginable,” he said.
As bad as detainment is, it is the wives who suffer more once their husbands are taken away, he said.
“The women, they are subjected to every sort of abuse, sexual abuse, beatings, it's very inhumane,” he said. “And they have no idea if they will ever see their husbands again.”
You might think that a man like Henry Onwubiko, an accomplished scientist and writer, might choose to stay in the United States, work a federal job and enjoy the fruits of his education.
You would be wrong.
For one thing, there are the oranges.
“If I eat 500 oranges from the Safeway, I feel like I still haven't eaten an orange,” he said. “In my country, the fruit is sweet.”
And home is home. As beautiful as the Bitterroot Valley might be, it's not the hills and mountains of Nigeria.
“I need to be with my people, in my own place,” he said.
The truth is, there is work to be done, and Onwubiko will be part of that work, even if it means going to prison repeatedly.
The country is pillaged by oil companies, and yet it's nearly impossible for a Nigerian to buy gasoline.
“They take it away and then sell it back to us,” he said.
The oil-rich nation provides a land of plenty for the well-to-do, but the remaining 99 percent go without.
“No clean water, no hospitals and in most places, no lights,” he said. “How can a country with all this oil, a country with all these rich multinational companies, not be able to turn on the lights for its people?”
School-age children, instead of going to school, sell bananas to help their families scratch by.
Disease wracks the peasantry - malaria, HIV, snail fever, elephantiasis - and immunizations are nearly impossible to come by.
“One of the things I hope to do is instill scientific ideology in people,” Onwubiko said. “I want them to be able to understand that unsanitary conditions and dirty water lead to disease.”
Even when children can go to school, the chance for a college education is abysmal and the education itself might not be much better.
“The country hasn't been interested in scholarship,” he said.
And then there is the government, in bed with the oil companies, he said.
Why, Onwubiko asks, don't Americans care how huge oil companies treat the rest of the world?
“It is you that they are serving,” he said. “Why
don't people care how these companies treat human beings?”
It's a hard question, with few good answers.
And it's the very reason that Henry Onwubiko is riding a bicycle. It's the reason he wears his traditional clothing.
He doesn't want to be an American. He doesn't want to eat genetically engineered tomatoes that never rot and oranges that taste like nothing. He doesn't want an SUV.
“I think it is good that my children have seen the good part of America and also the part that is all about consumption,” he said. “That is a good lesson for them.”
And yet part of the hope that Onwubiko has for his country rests with America.
America, he said, creates demand. America is oil.
“I can't help but feel that if Americans knew what my country was going through because of oil, people here might act differently,” he said. “I hope that is true.”
Once his exit visas are in hand, Henry Onwubiko is headed for Nigeria and that means he's headed for a fight.
“When a man fights for his life, he fights hard,” he said. “My country, it's worth fighting for.”
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