I CLIMB OUT OF THE BUS AND THE WHOLE WORLD TURNS yellow and mad.
Cars and buses are covering the motor park and lining the road in rows. I never dreamed of seeing so many people and motorcars crowded together in my life. It’s as if an important man has died and his funeral is in progress. The percussion of revving engines and speakers reminds me of Ikorodo dance back home, the hooting of lorries like the dance’s deep flourish of horns. My mind wanders to the half-dressed young girls dancing to the soft drumming and vibrant woodwind rhythm. The girls stand on their toes, bend their knees, and wriggle their slim waists. They always leave me scowling, itching to reach out a hand and pinch their breasts that dare to point at me in their skimpy costumes.
“Dimkpa,” Beatrice says, startling me, her voice shaking me out of my mind trip home. “What are you staring at again? Oya, let’s go.”
Once again I fall in step with Beatrice as she meanders through the maze of crowds and yellow buses with liquid ease. I did not realize that I had stopped walking, that I was daydreaming, and now I am struggling to keep pace again, pushing against people weaving back and forth like armies of marching soldier ants. The last time I stepped into one of these dark columns, the ants hissed with anger and stung me mercilessly, their harsh smell fouling the air.
The streets are milling with people and cars, the sun burning the back of my neck. One look, one quick glance into the clouds and I bump into a woman in aso oke, her gele standing high on her head like a plume. She swears at me in harsh-sounding Yoruba. I don’t know if it is my imagination, but the woman leaves a trail of the familiar odour of the soldier ants. I spit and wrinkle my nose at the smell, the sun burning harder, speakers screaming with music and reedy voices in ads, conductors and touts shouting for passengers in strident voices, hawkers clanging their bells and blowing their shrill whistles, molues and grim-faced bolekajas roaring and shitting exhaust fumes that sting my eyes and force sneezes out of me, the world going round and round, faster and faster.
A body is lying close to the road. I look at it with wide-open eyes, shaken by the sight of this dead man, riven and charred like roast yam. His face is pressed into the concrete of the sidewalk. Flies rear and swirl over him. Vultures are sidling, surveying the landscape. People who are passing either ignore the body or spit and go their way.
A hand grabs and pulls me away. “You better stop staring like a goat!” Beatrice screams at the top of her voice above the din. “This is Lagos.”
“But I just saw—”
“Forget what you saw!” She tucks my hand into hers and tows me along like a dog on a leash as she rides the wave of the surging crowds. “You will see many more dead bodies, some pickpockets, some robbers, all burnt to death with petrol and tyres.”
A shiver runs over me. Back home people treat the dead with respect. Women scream and tear their hair while men cross their arms in tearless grief when a person dies.
We walk through a market where the smell of ripe fruit mingles with dried fish and the sweaty odour of market women, the crowd thickening, and the smell so strong I retch. I have never seen so many people in my life moving all about me in a frenzy. It is as if the whole world has gathered here. Beatrice is elbowing people, and people are elbowing her, and I am struggling to follow. She is cutting corners and emerging again in places that look like where we have passed before. Clutching my polythene bag of clothes tighter, I allow myself to drift with the stream of cold, insensitive crowds.
“You are staring again, village boy,” she snaps, nearly yanking my hand off, as I pause and stare at a woman fighting with a man.
A fleeing brown goat gets crushed by a speeding car as it tries to cross the road. We climb a pedestrian bridge. When I look at the thick crowds below, the human heads are like grains of sand in the distance. As we climb down on the other side of the road, around a bus stop where many people are waiting for molues and bolekajas, I see two young men trading punches nearby. They are stripped to the waist, sweat glistening on their bodies. They are throwing blows, real hot blows, and kicking and heaving with muscles that bunch on their arms and backs. As the fight goes on, molues and bolekajas are arriving, conductors shouting their destinations in a confusing blur of words, and bus-waiters are diving in. Some join the knot of spectators watching the fight. They cheer as the blows rise and fall, slower and slower. Others, like Beatrice, look away without interest as we wait for more molues and bolekajas to come.
“Will somebody not separate them?” I say.
“They will stop fighting when they are tired.” She waves her left hand, throwing them an indifferent look. “Nobody has the time to separate fighting touts in Eko.”
No one tries to stop the fighters, whose faces are already swollen and bloodied. The crowd is enjoying the fight and cheering as the men wrestle each other to the ground and roll in the grey gutter water overflowing onto the sidewalk. They struggle again to their feet, their bodies covered with grime, their punches and kicks becoming slower each time, weakened by tiredness. They are almost finished, only leaning on each other, and throwing the blows sluggishly at intervals with the last sap of energy left in them. The yeahs and the oohs of the fight-watchers are also dying down. I watch with revulsion and a sense of savagery. More than being caged in by the mob of fight-watchers, the fighters are captives of their own ego, and neither of them wants to give up even at the risk of being killed, perhaps, to avoid being thought a weakling. So this is what Lagos turns people into, I think: cannibals and savages.
A bolekaja going to Palmgrove finally arrives with a toot that tears through my thoughts.
“Oya, let’s go.” Beatrice dives in, dragging me with her.
In the scramble to get on board, I step on the toes of a woman. She throws curses and pounds my torso, setting off an exchange of hot words in fleet-footed Yoruba with Beatrice. The woman has touched her venom, and now Beatrice is ready to sting. She is shouting and screaming like a madwoman.
“Don’t let us tear each other to pieces in this bolekaja,” she rails, thrusting her full breasts into the face of the intimidated woman, who decides to back out of a possible fistfight.
I find myself lost in the crowded wooden passenger compartment with one single entrance and exit point—a door at the back. The bolekaja is overloaded. Those who have no seats are standing along the aisle, holding on to the railing for support. At bus stops the bolekaja slows down to discharge and pick up more passengers, and then speeds up again. I find myself needing space and breeze, getting choked on a smell like that which wafts from a cow pen.
The woman I had stepped on causes a mild drama as the bolekaja draws close to the next bus stop. “Oloyun-po omo! Oloyun-po omo!” she yells several times in a loud voice, forcing the driver to fully stop for her to disembark.
“Oloshi!” the conductor shouts at the woman as she clambers down.
She rails back abuse in Yoruba.
The passengers laugh, but Beatrice does not, and I think it wise not to laugh, too. I don’t know how she might see it. Besides, I didn’t grasp a word of what transpired between the conductor and the woman, as I do not understand Yoruba.
“She lied that she had a baby tied to her back and was pregnant with another,” Beatrice explains. “It is a simple trick that fat women who can’t jump out use to force the drivers to stop.”
I laugh, not because it is funny, but because I feel that Beatrice expects me to laugh. But then she frowns and looks away.
At each bus stop the conductor squeezes a note into the palms of touts to be allowed to pick up passengers; the touts with their menacing faces and bloodshot eyes, scowling and bellowing in their rough base voices as though they are the gatekeepers of Lagos. Sometimes the conductor tries to shortchange them. They end up exchanging hot words or even a few blows. Policemen standing at close intervals get their own share of the squeezed notes. Drivers drive against the traffic and scream swearwords at each other.
Lagos is madness raging like Harmattan fire.