mutapi tare
on Fantastic Voyage (Nigeria), 09/Aug/2010 22:20, 34 days ago
Keats once told his chum Benjamin Bailey (whose name is as satisfying as‘royal rumpus’) that ‘the setting sun shall always set me to rights.  Or if a sparrow comes before my window and pecks about the gravel I take part in its existence’.  Or something like that.  I’m not quite as painfully soulful and sensitive to nature as the lil’ Cockney sparrow, so it turns out that (after a good week of feeling like Mr Grumpy Gills) a journey on a Nigerian bus shall always set me to rights.  And that’s when feeling like my stomach is staging some kind of elaborate protest against my very existence.In many ways, these journeys are frustrating, cramping and terrifying by turns.  You wait over an hour for the bus to fill up, then– when it finally does – there’s a big argument and half the bus empties, leaving you sat there for another two hours waiting for it to refill.  You’ve paid some kind of premium rate so only the number of people for whom there are seats get into the bus, then – just before the doors close – three other people get on and you squeeze forward, butt on the edge of the chair and head perilously close to the seat in front; or arms and body squozed into a tight hot hole sweating furiously in a manner that suggests most of you will be left behind when you get up.  And the windscreen is cracked, the doors are liable to fall off if you push them too hard (my second most embarrassing moment thus far, that), and you pass all manner of horrifying / nightmarish / downright mystifying accidents on the way.  How hard– and where - for instance, does a small car have to hit a minibus to leave the bodies of both on one side of the road but the bus’ engine on the opposite verge?  What could have happened to leave scorch marks in that attractive but all encompassing pattern?  Who will win the battle of the half naked large men, the men with big sticks, and the police with guns over the fuel from the oil tanker that’s just crashed?  Or will the oil spilling onto the road write the final, hilarious, chapter by engulfing everyone in a fireball?There’s a lot not to like.  But, it turns out, I love it all.  I wonder if it’s the novelty and variety of everything: the formula isn’t as neat as the one which starts Anna Karenina, but once you’ve worked in one dysfunctional organisation, you’ve worked in them all .  The problems are the same (though usually in different proportions); the solutions are equally obvious and unachievable; the feeling of dim nausea and overwhelming tedium is becoming a familiar friend to me.  But once you’ve seen a thousand joyous, crazy, imaginative, playful, scheming, beautiful, ugly piece of throbbing vitality in a Nigerian motor-park you haven’t blinked yet.  They’re just brilliant places.  Part of it is the sense that you’re all playing the same exciting game: get what you want and pay the least for it.    Part of it, certainly, is to do with being white, and the object of fascination for the children who really ought to be selling peanuts but would rather spend a couple of hours shyly standing outside the windows and staring.  Partly– perhaps mostly – it’s the endless variety of everything.  If you happen to be there for three hours, you’ll end up buying something: some weird little black fruits with stones almost as big as they are; some bright plastic beads; a Hausa hat to complete the tourist look.  And you’ll be offered many more things: I’m becoming particularly excited about the range of football club related merchandise, and will never cease to be impressed by the sheer array of bling jewellery one man can carry on his head.  And you’ll see every manner of vehicle going to every manner of place, squeezing whatever’s needed into it (like three men and about seven sheep, for instance).  There’s also the sense that, despite an incessant tussle in the numbers department, you’re all on the same side: when all the big women laugh at the white man in the Hausa hat, it’s in full expectation that he’ll find himself equally funny and laugh too.  And so, feeling like a thing of impulse and a child of song, he does.