My first vision of Africa, as I surfaced from afternoon sleep to gaze from the window of our plane, wasn’t the endless bush I’d expected but a city of sun-baked mud on the desert’s edge, moulded out of the rusted earth like some child’s creation. Then the wall of heat as we stepped from the plane, the ramshackle airport, a cinder-block shed merely, alone in that blasted landscape like a final outpost; and finally the bus ride into Kano, the road alive with a human traffic like a refugee trail, on foot, on bikes, on tiny scooters and motorcycles that chirred away from the path of our ancient bus like swatted insects, everything suspended in the blaze of desert heat as in a dream.
Our in-country orientation was held in a government teaching college just outside the city, the group of us sequestered there in our whiteness as in some holiday camp. All the rhetoric we’d heard in Ottawa about development work seemed to fall away now: there was no global perspective here, only the nuts and bolts of getting by, basic language training, how to work a kerosene fridge, how to select and slaughter a chicken. There’d been talk in Ottawa about a boycott against Nestlé but here their products were used unthinkingly, the powdered milk and the biscuits, even the coffee, Nescafé instant, imported from Belgium though Africa abounded in coffee.
Some of the older volunteers led groups of us into the city. The heat there, the mud barrenness, gave the sense of a perpetual aimlessness or repose, of a world still awaiting the decree that would set it in motion. Taxis – battered blue Datsuns and Beetles, white Peugeot 504s – barrelled through the narrow streets like rockets, from another planet, the calm splitting open to let them pass and then closing again. We came on a bar, a warehouse of a place in yellow stucco, where a dusty juke box was playing the latest Rolling Stones; but outside you had only to walk a few minutes, into the maze of crooked lanes the city was, to feel that time hadn’t moved for a thousand years.
In the old market the gloomy alleyways hummed with quick activity, narrow mud stalls leading back into mysteries of secreted goods. The traders, tall and sharp-featured and dignified, haughty, called out to us in Hausa, bature, white man, then gave the air of not caring to sell to us if we approached them. At prayer time, prayer mats were unfurled, activity ceased: we seemed made invisible then by their indifference, irrelevances they toyed with, then blotted out.
Some fifteen of us out of the eighty or so volunteers who had come had been posted in the southwest. On the fifth day we set out before sunrise in an old plywood-floored bus whose back seats had been removed to make way for a large metal drum, of oil or kerosene or petrol, I was never clear which. The drum was part of some private transaction of the driver’s – the field officer who’d come up from Ibadan to accompany us, Richard Harmond, blond and pink-skinned, seeming to exude still the dying glow of a suburban complacence, had made a show of arguing with the driver before our departure; but the drum had remained. The road was pocked with great potholes, craters really, two, three, four feet across; the driver, never letting up speed, careened and swerved to avoid them, though sometimes a wheel caught the edge of one and the drum at the back gave out a liquid groan as it shifted with the jolt.
As we moved south the landscape grew greener, resolving itself finally into a tree-studded savannah; small mud villages and Fulani encampments glimpsed distantly from the highway gave way to towns of more modern appearance, the buildings of sun-faded stucco, the roofs a sea of corrugated tin. At Kaduna we stopped to eat at a lorry park, a great dusty square ringed round with chop houses and traders’ stalls and crowded with taxis and minibuses and mammy wagons. The older buses seemed cobbled together from scraps of old metal and wood, each one distinct, painted in yellows and blues and inscribed in florid lettering with strange slogans, “No condition is permanent,” “God is God,” “Water be for sea.”
Beyond Kaduna the land grew gradually more hilly, the vegetation more dense; here and there abandoned lorries lay toppled at curves in the road like felled monsters. The towns we passed seemed like settlements in the Old West, dusty and becalmed, provisional, the buildings sitting at odd angles to the road as if someone had wrenched the country out of square.
The checkpoints grew more frequent. In the north we’d encountered them only at the outskirts of towns: the soldiers would step up into the bus, officious, then their eyes would glaze at the sight of us and they’d wave us through. But now the checkpoints appeared without warning in the middle of the bush, makeshift, simply planks laid over metal drums to block the road and little shanties of corrugated tin at the roadside where two or three soldiers milled, rifles slung languidly over their shoulders. Sometimes they didn’t bother to rise up from the little benches they sat on, merely gazed unimpressed at our faces in the windows and called the driver out to them, joking or condescending, going through his papers indifferently or with a painstaking thoroughness, unpredictable; then sometimes they boarded the bus.
“Oyinbó.” The Yoruba word for white man; we were passing into the south.
At one of these stops a soldier came on and strutted idly to the back of the bus, prodding some of the baggage there with the butt of his rifle and then tapping a finger against the top of the metal drum.
“Driv-uh!” The driver came to the back; the soldier made a cursory inspection of his papers, then put them ostentatiously into the pocket of his shirt. He tapped the drum again.
“Na be safety hazard, not so?”
There was a brief exchange in Yoruba and then the soldier left the bus; the driver followed. Outside, a long discussion ensued in mixed Yoruba and English, the soldier’s voice growing increasingly more peremptory, more adamant, the driver’s more pleading; the words “safety hazard” repeated themselves amidst long stretches of Yoruba like a catch-phrase. Finally the soldier crossed back to his shanty and the driver boarded the bus – but only, it turned out, to pull it off to the side of the road. The soldier hadn’t returned his papers; they could be seen bulging still in his pocket.
“Welcome to Nigeria,” Richard said.
The driver resumed his pleading. But the soldier seemed to have lost interest in him now, busying himself with other vehicles passing through or simply sitting at his bench talking idly with the other soldiers, closing the driver out. A few of us got out of the bus to smoke; ten minutes passed, then twenty. Richard kept apart, explaining nothing – he seemed to be awaiting some inevitable conclusion, though time passed and the driver appeared no closer to winning the soldier over. His pleading seemed a ritual merely, the two of them like characters in a masque, the driver perpetually playing the penitent, lean and diminutive in his ragged pyjama clothes, the soldier perpetually feigning indifference.
“Leave me now!” the soldier said finally.
The driver came over to Richard.
“Oga, I beg you, make you give ’am dash.”
“No way,” Richard said, but with a kind of smugness, of put-on authority. “It’s your drum, it’s your problem.”
“No be so, oga, they dey see so many white man, they think na big big money. Why you wan’ make palaver for these people, na be all night we go sit here.”
One of the older volunteers, David, had gone up to them.
“Look, why don’t you just give them the dash. You were the one who wanted to do the trip in a day.”
Richard shrugged.
“We’re not that far behind schedule.” But he seemed put out at the opposition, tried to make light of it. “Anyway you wouldn’t want me to set a bad example for our new recruits.”
“It’s the way things work,” David said. “They might as well get used to it.”
Richard pulled a bill from his wallet and handed it to the driver.
“Then just don’t accuse me of corrupting you guys.”
And in a minute we’d set off again.
A few miles past the next town one of the front tires gave out. The bus veered wildly for an instant but then the driver righted it and brought it expertly to a stop. I expected some complication, some tremendous delay; but the driver pulled a spare, balding but sound, from somewhere under the bus and in a short while we were back on the road. At the next town he stopped at the lorry park to repair the flat. The mechanic was not in his stall; someone was sent to fetch him. We bought some suya from one of the Hausa stalls, some greasy pastries, a few bottles of Fanta and Coke from a barefooted boy who hawked them out of a water-filled bucket. The boy lingered warily at the edges of our group while we drank, anxious that we not leave without returning his empties. Other children gathered, stood staring at us from a distance; one, a small girl, came toward me, put out a tentative hand to touch the whiteness of my skin.
“Oyinbó.”
The mechanic arrived; again I expected some delay.
“Is not possible,” he said, looking over the damage; but then he and the driver argued, discussed, and finally he set about things, efficient and quick, bringing his tools out from his stall into the open and squatting strangely as he worked, exquisitely balanced. But when he went to inflate the tire his compressor failed to start.
“No NEPA,” he said.
“NEPA,” David explained. “No Electrical Power Anytime.”
“Just leave it,” Richard said. “We’ll stop in the next town.”
The NEPA was out in the next town as well. We found a mechanic with a hand pump; it took several minutes of effort, the driver and the mechanic alternating, to fill the tire. Twilight came while we waited, the town seeming to take on a strange frenetic energy, taxis calling out for final passengers, the stalls around the lorry park closing up; and then almost at once it was night, the darkness falling like a blanket, complete, punctured only by the flickerings of scattered hurricane lamps, tiny winks that moved disembodied through the dark like fireflies. Overhead a million moonless stars glittered distantly – I had never seen such a thing, such a night sky, at once so black and so light-filled.
In darkness we crossed the Niger, a stretch of inky black hemmed in by shores of shrouded bush like wading phantoms. It seemed shabby somehow, unimpressive, not the vista I’d expected but merely a trickle lost in the heart of a continent; and yet I had a sense of having crossed over, of having arrived. Just beyond the river lay another town, larger, but like the one before it already beginning to close down for the night; the few taxis still plying the streets there beat their horns in endless staccatos like drums and flashed their high beams as they passed as if in welcome.
Past Ilorin we hit another checkpoint, more official-looking, more entrenched. A soldier came onto the bus and ordered us out.
“Make you come now,” he said, good-humoured. “Oyinbó go sleep here this night.”
A dozen or so other vehicles had been pulled over, their passengers milling along the roadside and soldiers picking through their scattered baggage under the narrow beams of flashlights. But at the sight of us gathering there among the others a tall, muscular figure in crisp khaki, the commander perhaps, came toward us from the station-house.
“Where to?” he asked Richard.
“Ibadan.”
“It’s not possible.” Yet there was something comforting in his voice, an unexpected humility. “Go back, go back to Ilorin, the roads are not safe at this time of night.”
“We need to get to Ibadan,” Richard said. “These people have postings to get to.”
There seemed a petulance in his insistence – I had a sense of him trying to blot the country out, intent only on having things unfold neat and on schedule, on getting back to whatever comforts awaited him in Ibadan. Yet the commander seemed to consider what he’d said, turning finally toward the station-house.
“Olushegun!”
We were assigned a soldier to accompany us into Ibadan. He sat at the front, his rifle propped casually against the floor; at each jolt of the bus I expected it to go off but the soldier seemed oblivious, gazing silent into the funnel of light the headlights formed on the road. At some point he and the driver began to talk, in mixed pidgin and Yoruba, warily at first but then with increasing animation, gesticulating, telling tales. Their voices had a lilting buoyancy, every syllable stressed, important. The air of belligerent authority the soldier’s uniform gave him fell away – he was no more than a boy, really, perhaps eighteen or so, seeming to revert now that he was away from his post to some truer, more human self.
Somewhere beyond Ogbomosho the bus broke down: the engine choked, regained itself, then choked again and died. The driver pulled a flashlight from a toolbox, descended, lifted the hood.
“Na be engine trouble,” he called out.
“No shit, Sherlock,” someone muttered.
The driver worked under the hood while the soldier held the flashlight for him. Snatches of conversation passed between them peppered with bits of English like sudden luminescences, “fuel line,” “carburetor,” “distributor cap.” The rest of us milled listless at the roadside, worn down now by the trip, the constant delays, the bus’s rattling uncomfortableness.
“Maybe we’ll have to sleep in the bush after all,” Richard said.
The darkness rose up around us like a wall, tangible, broken only by the small glow of light from under the hood; and yet we seemed protected somehow, not so much by the soldier as by our own inconsequence here, by our whiteness. There was no sense of crisis: the driver and the soldier tinkered away at the engine, absorbed in their work; even Richard, who had retreated back into the bus, had the air again of having withdrawn himself to await some inevitable solution. In every instance during the day when we’d encountered some obstacle I’d sensed this strange passivity just beneath the surface of his stubbornness; I had thought of it as weakness but now it began to seem simply a benign resignation, a capitulation to an order of things too large to struggle against. All day long a certain rhythm had been working itself out; we were merely caught up in it oblivious, riding it like bodies riding a stream over rapids.
Time passed. A taxi went by, then a minibus, but no one bothered to hail them. Finally the driver tried the engine: it caught. We let up a cheer, spontaneous, all relief and goodwill; for the first time that day the driver seemed part of us.
“Fuel filter na clog,” he said, basking. “I dey say so na first thing, na be fuel filter, not so?”
It was not yet eleven when we came into Ibadan: we had made good time after all. We dropped the soldier at a checkpoint off the ring road and then made our way into the city. In the dark it seemed a vast village, endlessly repeating itself, the dusty buildings and streets, the nighttime hush, the dim haloes of light from windows and streetside stalls and shacks. In the flash of the bus’s headlights I caught a glimpse of a man, his hair a clump of matted dreadlocks, sitting stark-naked atop a smouldering heap of garbage, calm and dignified there like some silent guardian of the city.
Our hostel was in the Government Reservation Area. The streets there were more kempt, almost suburban, the houses tidy bungalows set back in the dim inviting glow of porch lights and vegetation. At the hostel a groundskeeper or watchman of some sort came out from his shed at the edge of the compound to open the gate; and within a few minutes we’d unloaded our bags, briskly efficient, re-energized now that we’d arrived. The hostel had the air of a summerhouse, set on a hill amidst palms and hibiscus and banana trees; from its island of normalcy, of calm, the day seemed a kind of fiction suddenly, purposely, predictably exaggerated like some amusement put together to keep us at a remove from the real life of the country.
Richard left with the driver to return to his own home after we’d settled in. A group of us sat up a while on the back patio, the city distantly glowing in the background, a hundred thousand scattered pins of light. The older volunteers told horror stories, of travelling, of the bureaucracy, of the conditions at their schools.
“It’s a country everyone loves to hate,” one of them said. “My friends thought I was suicidal or something at first because my letters sounded so negative. But I was having a great time.”
At some point the lights went out; all around us the city went black, seeming to retreat in an instant into the night. We lit a hurricane lamp, the group of us huddled there within its intimate haze as around a campfire, made small suddenly by the darkness. For the first time I had the sense of a country stretching unknown around me, the wonder of it. Out in the dark small lights like ours had begun to appear like tiny greetings; for a moment the earth seemed to mirror the sky, with its profusion of stars, to join it, a single canvas, the same blackness and light, the same slow coming forward out of nothing as at the beginning of things.