ka yi sauki yanzu ne?
on Fantastic Voyage (Nigeria), 27/Aug/2010 14:04, 34 days ago
Now, I don’t tend to get scared that easily. All the things that really should be alarming here I’ve so far been generally pretty excited by, and that’s been very pleasant thank you very much. A couple of things, though, do alarm me: just thinking about them now makes my finger tips a little sweaty and gives me a peculiar feeling in the base of my belly, as if something needs to turn over or burst out in a slippery mess. One is pointlessness. I hate having no purpose and no direction, and generally being of no consequence. That makes my elbows a bit trembly, too. The other is social awkwardness: any situation where I can’t be understood or in which I’m not going to meet someone else’s script. That’s why I hate phone conversations: you don’t know either the agenda or the context if you can’t see someone and hold onto them if something goes wrong. (I’m also a bit scared of rollercoasters, heights, tapeworms, and rabies.)Yesterday, the second of these nearly cost me rather more than would be strictly sensible or appropriate. My computer– bless its cheap, but almost brand new, little plastic socks – has died. It’s kaput. I took it into work just in case, but no redemption was available, so I had to take it to a computer shop. (There’s a whole new level of social awkwardness in that kind of environment in the UK, where the kind of currently hegemonic masculinity to which I can’t even aspire assumes that everyone knows what a motherboard is and why it isn’t a bit rude and funny. Not here – there’s a nice fat post somewhere down the line about Nigerian masculinity.) So I had to take an okkada.It so happened that the chap who stopped for me had a bright pink bobble hat on with sparkly pink threads among the wool. That fits into the masculinity discussion again, but here it’s important because I spent about 20 minutes staring at this charming headwear thinking how ridiculous, and somehow darkly humiliating, it would be if it was the last thing I ever saw. Because the driver was either in serious need of mental health care, or had enjoyed a big bowl of drugs for breakfast. Probably the latter. I should have guessed – and more or less did – by his inability to recognise any of the place names I asked for, coupled with his ready acceptance of a price given that he had no idea where he was going. His head twitches as I got on, and the difficulty with whichhis feet found their way to starting us off, should have confirmed my suspicions. But I wasn’t absolutely sure until – steaming along a main road – he took both hands off the handlebars (is that what they’re called on a motorbike?) to wave them in front of his eyes, presumably warding offwhatever demons a hefty quantity of West African dope give you.Was I prepared to stop the bike, get off, slap the poor chap round his bleary face and travel onwards with a safer, less addled, driver? I most certainly was not. In between trying to stop my knees from shaking, staring solidly at the warp and woof of his knitwear, and gesturing frantically when we needed to turn every corner along the way, I was trying to imagine how the conversation would go.“I want to stop.”“We stop here?”“Yes. Now. Please.”“This is where you go?”“No, but I want to get off. You’re mental, and need either a lot of drugs and support, or a lot of no-drugs and support.”“?”“Never mind. Just let me off.”“You live here?”“No. But I want to get off.”“I don’t understand.”*Sigh* And silent tears.And so on.Of course, it wouldn’t have been like that. In the cold light of day, in front of a computer and probably hours away from a social situation in which I might have to spontaneously make up conversation in response to whatever it is the other person says I can find this situation both highly unlikely and not remotelyalarming anyway. But on the back of his bike, as my arm hair was trimmed by two other bikes which we – for no reason anyone in their right mind could ever fathom – essentially decided to ram raid while going over a roundabout, I couldn’t face discussing it.Jenny, whose fear of death or seriously disabling injury is greater than her fear of awkwardness (tuh! women!) doesn’t like the things at the best of times, and has several times ended journeys early when they’re being genuinely unsafe. I would never dare do this. Not when I might have to hold a conversation, which I might get wrong. This is something I need to get over: for one thing, if I do it again, and survive again, my wife will kill me herself.(I got there safely, of course. And my computer is now both missing and presumed dead, sent as it has been to Dell in Nigeria. I’ll never get it back.)