NOTES ON AN INTERESTING AFRICAN SHYSTER CALLED JAMES

Ozodi Osuji Ph.d

People come into our lives to teach us something. James read some of my writings on Nigerian Internet forums and wrote to me wanting to be my friend. He also asked me how to become a member of the forums so that he can write for them. I gave him that information, and he wrote a few articles, and folks made fun of him and called him unprintable names (as they call each other; you must have tough skin to take the verbal abuse folks dish out to each other on those forums).
He did not know that when you make a grand entrance to Nigerian Internet forums, especially if you call yourself Doctor, as he always calls himself, some of the members of the forum will check you out.
Within a week, one of the members of the forum, called Jerome, posted that James’s African American wife recently died of cancer and that his three sons are all drug and alcohol addicts. He provided so much detailed information on James that I wondered how on earth he ferreted that information out. Jerome ended by calling James an old fool and told folks to see him as mentally retarded and not pay attention to what he called his claptrap writing!
Before the end of the month, James had dropped out of the forums. He could not bear the heat.
Subsequently, he would email me privately, and I sometimes replied to his emails. Thereafter, he began requesting to come visit me in Alaska.
He said that he had always wanted to visit Alaska and wanted to visit Alaska. I hardly know the guy, and he wanted to visit me. He said that he is retired, is doing nothing, and is bored, and thought visiting Alaska would excite him. Obviously, I do not exist to make life exciting for him. In my mind, the question is: why is he bored? Self-centered folks who are not involved with society tend to become bored.
I told him that I live in an apartment and cannot accommodate another person. He kept bothering me about visiting me. As late as this week, this weird guy was still asking to come visit me, and I do not know why.
He then began telling me everything about his life from when he was born in 1940 to when he was in elementary school. He said that he began secondary school in 1953. The man is obviously way too much older than me and came from a different generation, so we have little in common (generally, people read my writing and think that I am older than I am; when in fact they see me and realize that they are older than I am, they ask how I got the experience to write about what I write about…some of us are old souls and understand more than our age would lead people to believe).
Every once in a while, he would write something that gave me insights into his character. Many of his people, Igbos, were taking drugs to Asian countries and South Africa, and when caught, were tried and some shot to death (particularly in Asia). He was angry, saying that the seller of drugs does not force anyone to buy the drugs, in effect, that they should be allowed to sell their drugs. I could not believe what came out of his filthy mouth. Most parents want to strangle the dope pushers who addict their children to heroin, crack cocaine, and other drugs, and here is an old fool defending the selling of drugs under the banner of the free enterprise economy.
I began suspecting that the man is amoral and a sociopath. I wanted nothing to do with him. But I kind of liked some of his stories; they were entertaining.
Once, he told me that he visited one of his former students (he was a teacher), and the man bought fresh fish, smoked them, and sold them. He now wants to go into the business of smoke-drying fish and selling them, as he said, to make money. He even bought some of the equipment for smoking the fish, but soon the desire fizzled out.
Later, he said that there was money to be made in the hotel business. He bought land in Ogwashi Ukwu in Delta state, Nigeria, and began building what he called a hotel. He said that he wanted to make it a place where rich men come to have a fun time, rent rooms, and bring their girlfriends. He would supply them with food and liquor. I asked him how he felt about running a brothel, for that is essentially what he wanted to do. He said that as long as he made money, he did not care what people did sexually. That feedback solidified my perception of him as an amoral man.
Many of his people, Anambra folks, apparently are like him; they seem amoral and want to make money by all means necessary.
Later, he told me about some of his scamming behaviors. And he would just up and tell me about these without me asking him to tell me; he talked about how he would borrow money from American institutions and not pay it back because, as he says, they cart his people’s oil, gold, and diamonds to Europe and America, so why shouldn’t he take from them, why should he feel guilty for stealing from them. He actually said it out loud that he is a proud thief when it comes to stealing from the white man. He tried to persuade me to do what he does and was shocked at my telling him that what he is doing is wrong. He considered me a fool for not taking from the white man whatever I could get from him. Indeed, he called me the white man’s boy.
He told me how he married his wife for a green card. He came to the USA on a four-year student visa, and after his bachelor’s degree in Washington, DC, at the school for the deaf, he was supposed to go home, but he went to graduate school in Tennessee and was always hiding from immigration because his four-year visa had expired. He talked about meeting a light-skinned black American woman in the college library and became friendly with her, and within a few months, proposed marriage to her. His goal was to marry and use her to get a green card. I asked him how he felt about using a woman to get a green card and not love her.
He told me that in his Igbo world, there is no such thing as love; he said that people marry for all sorts of pragmatic reasons.
The man is amoral through and through and does not feel bad about using people. See, he does not know who I am, but he wanted to use me to visit Alaska, not because he cared for me but for his own goals.
I believe that he came into my life for me to learn about his amorality and his people’s amorality; these people are thieves motivated by only money, not love for people.
I really do not need him anymore, for my education on human amorality, which he helped with, is over. Therefore, I tried to end our relationship and would no longer pick up his incessant phone calls. But every once in a while, I picked up the phone, and he would regale me with further interesting stories.
He likes talking about his three sons. He said that all three of them are drug addicts and that they produce children all over the place without marrying the women, and that two of them have spent time in jail.
His oldest son is living with him, with the understanding that he pays his mortgage (about $850) and utility bills.
He said that he is so afraid of his sons that he has a sharp knife in his bedroom in case a drug-crazed son came into his room to shake him down for money, and that he would not hesitate to stab him to death (he talked about how Marvin Gay’s father killed him and was not sent to prison, so he would not be sent to prison if he killed his son).
Clearly, he places his life above his sons’ lives. He stiffs them for money; he said that it is not his fault that his sons turn out to be drug addicts.
He calls me a fool for being the one who spends money on my kids instead of having them give me money. His advice is for me to demand money from them, and I would ignore him because in my family, parents take care of their sons, not the other way around.
He has his sons pay for his upkeep in Atlanta, Georgia. He then sends his social security check to Nigeria and uses it to build houses and his other grandiose projects.
The man is deaf and always talks about how people are jealous of his accomplishments relative to their no accomplishment. He would like to feel that people are jealous of him; it is kind of like a monkey thinking that a human being envies it, and that makes him feel important and powerful. In my world, he does not even register as a human being. He is nothing.
I used to be a psychotherapist and kind of liked listening to people pour out stuff from their minds. I see myself as an unpaid sounding board for him to project his twisted life on, and I learn whatever I can from it.
I say extraordinarily little about myself (in psychoanalysis, the analyst is there to listen to the analysand, not to talk), and he feels frustrated and asks me to tell him about myself.
Whatever little he had learned about me, he used to try to blackmail me. For example, I used to be married to a white woman and like going to Europe every two years or so because I feel at home there. He translated that bit of information on me to mean that I hate black folks and desire to be like white folks.
Unasked, he is always reminding me that I am not a white person, and regardless of whatever I do (my lifestyle is a classic upper-class white folks’ lifestyle, such as listening to classical music, going to symphonies all over the world, etc., and I have lived so even during my childhood in Lagos).
I do not know why he needs to tell me that I am his fellow African, not a white person. He is a busybody and talks about other people’s business as if it were his business.
One time, he asked me for my brothers’ names and where they live. I was hesitant to tell him. One of them lived in Delta state in Nigeria, and it was the time he was building his hotel there, and he said that he wanted my brother to go see for him how the building is progressing. I reluctantly gave him my brother’s phone number. He asked him to go see the building for him, and my brother did and reported back to him.
Later, the owners of the land said that he bought the land from an unauthorized member of their family, and simply went and bulldozed the building down, and asked him not to ever show his face in their town, and that if he did, he would be arrested.
Currently, he has acquired another piece of land near Badagry, Lagos, and said that he is building a school. I asked what kind of school, and he said kindergarten, elementary, and secondary school all rolled together. He sent me some pictures of his pupils, and they looked under five. In effect, he is running a daycare center for children.
So, this is the great accomplishment that he brags about? A man of nearly ninety brags of running a day care center for children, and that is his great accomplishment, which he said that folks are jealous of.
He is a pathetic old man who has wasted his life and, at the door of death, is searching for relevance and legacy.
He has been complaining that he has only two people he talks to: me and someone he calls Dr Okafor. He said that the Okafor man no longer picks up his calls, that he has four daughters and that they are all nurses and make good money, and he thinks that because he has a good income, he no longer wants to associate with him. It never occurs to him that folks simply get tired of listening to his perpetual put-downs of other people.
He has desecrated his children beyond what a healthy human being would do. He probably destroyed their self-esteem to the extent that low self-esteem contributed to their drug-taking behavior.
He said that because my brother was going to his building site to check it out for him and refused to take money from him, he gave his wife three hundred dollars without telling my brother.
When my brother found out, he asked him why he had bypassed him and gave his wife the money. Thereafter, he demanded that his money be returned to him, not from the person he gave it to, but by me!
Why did he even give another man’s wife money? Is it because of his obvious sexual perversion? (He is always telling me that he did not have sex with his sons, and I would ask him why such a thought even entered his mind. I suspect that he is homosexual and repressed it, and that accounts for his paranoia, as Sigmund Freud said about Judge Shreber’s homosexuality.)
This man dared to write to my brother that I was an obstacle to him giving him more money for his services. I had asked my brother to have no financial dealings with him because I suspected that he was a criminal and did not see any good coming out of his various idiotic projects in Nigeria.
Actually, what he was trying to do was cause trouble between my brother and me. Since he is devilish enough to want to accomplish that nefarious goal, I am tempted to report him to the police for investigation into his various financial schemes, borrowing money from American institutions and not paying them back, and not being bothered by bankruptcies. This man told me such a long tale of his criminal activities that the police probably would like to interview him about how he got all that money. But I will make no effort to get him into trouble with the law because I have no firsthand information on anything beyond what he told me; for all I know, he could be bragging to make himself seem powerful.
He is emotionally a child. Diagnostically, there is no doubt that he has an anxiety disorder and depression (he has been on all known anti-anxiety and anti-depression medications) with psychotic features.
He is clearly paranoid and deluded. I had assumed that his suspiciousness and tendency not to trust people (every once in a while, he would tell me not to tell the police about his shenanigans) were due to the fun he said that people made of him when he was a deaf kid; folks called him all kinds of negative names.
Whatever the cause, the objective fact is that he has depression, paranoia, and delusional disorder. According to his own testimony, he is on medication for them.
One time, this dude went to Nigeria and found a woman for one of his sons to marry and connected them. The son visited Nigeria, and he and the woman rented an apartment. Later, the woman demanded marriage, and apparently, the son did not want marriage but a playmate. She insisted on marriage, and the son did not want to go there. James started blaming the son for what was going on. I asked him why he introduced the woman to his son.
He came up with his familiar response to whatever goes wrong in his life, that it is not his fault. Well, they had to come up with a considerable amount of money to pay the woman to get her to move out of their apartment in Lagos, and indeed, stop living in his village house.
What struck me in all these is his insistence that it is not his fault, nothing is ever his fault, and he is too quick to blame other people for whatever goes wrong in his life.
He overutilizes the primitive ego defense mechanisms of denial and projection; he projects what he sees in himself that he does not like onto other people, and that way fancies that he is perfect.
Why did you introduce the woman to your son? His son is about 55. Why is he in the marriage-making business? He said that he wants his son to marry a Nigerian woman. This man is weird.
I try to shake him off, and when I think that I have succeeded, months later, he would call, and out of pity, I would pick up the phone. He would verbally abuse me. I would ask him: Did you call to verbally abuse me, and he would say yes.
I ask, does that sound right in your mind? He would say that he feels that it is his obligation to tell me that I am a Westernized African fool and that he is out to save me (a man with three sons who are drug addicts is not exactly in a position to save anyone).
In truth, I do not see him as remotely intelligent. I believe that he is mildly mentally retarded; alternatively, his advanced age probably engendered some senility in him. He is what a human being ought not to be, really.

CONCLUSION

I wrote these notes for myself, for the purpose of learning from a twisted character who is emotionally underdeveloped; he is emotionally arrested at the age of five. He is a child in an adult’s body; his behavior astonishes me.
He told me that he is on several medications, including some for psychoses; I hope that those are not contributing to his apparent cognitive decline. I once told him to read in the PDR all the medications he is on, and better still, take them to a neutral doctor and ask him if they are interacting to cause him problems. (Only a few days ago, he told me that he is on over ten medications, some for his eyes, ears, kidneys, liver, heart, legs, and other ailments. He read their names for me, and some of them are neuroleptics and some anti-depressants. He is a dead man walking.)
He came into my life for me to learn about him and his people and about myself (for example, why do I listen to him, when in truth he repulses me, do I have some masochistic desire for a sadist like him to put me down?).
He and his people are mercenaries who don’t love. That lesson is now complete, and I want nothing else to do with him.
In sum, James lacks an inner solid core of beliefs and does not know who he is; whatever he sees people doing, he wants to do and gives it a try for a little while, and his mind moves on. This way, he goes from one thing to another, not settled on any profession.
He sees me writing and wants to be a writer and found out that writing means having something to write about, and he has nothing to write about beyond Iko Okwu, putting people down, and Ima-Njakari, his Igbo people’s tendency to gather and badmouth each other.
In the years I have known this weird guy, from afar, he has tried many vocations, writing, fish smoking, hotelier -ing, educator, children’s daycare center provider (each done to make money not because he is committed to it or likes it…in his younger years he did the same thing, teaching at an elementary school, secondary, some college and selling ice-cream, carpentering; he is always bouncing from one job to another but not committed to any of them).
Now he wants to turn his house in his village into a church so that people may pray for his soul and he goes to heaven when he dies. Well, all the stealing he did in this world cannot be eradicated by devoting a house he built with money he stole from Americans, to worshipping God.
The little coward is terrified of going to hell; his fear of the unknown shows in the coward’s voice. He says that every morning he shouts his prayer to his God to forgive him his sins and welcome him to heaven.
He asks God to allow him to live for a few more years to accomplish whatever white elephant project on which he is embarked. He is afraid of dying and thinks that pleasing God would allow him to live a little longer.
He lives a life lacking long-term commitment to any idea he finds useful for mankind; he is devoted to making money (which he does not have the energy and concentration to make beyond imitating what other people are doing and never doing it well).
He persisted in coming close to me even though I pushed him away because he is repulsive to me. Now I know why. He wanted to learn, and I have given him the lessons to learn, and hopefully, in a different lifetime, he will learn some of the lessons I have taught him. It is probably too late for him to learn them in this lifetime and change his set criminal ways.
His free education is over, done. I now permanently move away from the freak.

Ozodi Osuji
July 16, 2026