sose iska sanyi
on Fantastic Voyage (Nigeria), 21/Jan/2011 08:53, 34 days ago
My new role description out here means, excitingly, lots of travelling to schools and local governments to discuss the school support and quality assurance systems that are (or, more accurately, are not) in place.  Or it would, if they weren’t all closed for the moment thanks to the potential prevalence of machete wielding maniacs.This means that I’ll be spending a lot of time on roads, usually as the white man in the passenger seat with a Nigerian driver.  It’s a delightful image, and a bigogarole that I play a little uneasily.  We’re not allowed to travel during darkness (which is a very very good thing) so there’s not a massive risk of being robbed.  But the occupational hazard, which is consistently unnerving and frustrating– if usually mildly entertaining – is of road blocks.  In general life, we move around Nigeria by public transport: saloon cars or battered minibuses which cram passengers in and rattle off with the highest possible volume of Michael Jackson and lowest possible volume of safety equipment.  These are almost never subject to the quasi-official bunches of men who select their victims with apparent randomness.In fact, looking as white and wealthy as possible is also often an invisible forcefield against such delays.  I can never quite comprehend how positively white people are perceived in this country.  Wealth generally (genuine or assumed), in fact, guarantees that most people will admire you.  (Which is perhaps one reason for the nightmarish economic situation here.  Unlike Modern Europe, there seems to be very little likelihood of everyone rising up and slaughtering the wealthy morons who actually hold them spluttering under water because they’re too busy being made angry with other religious or ethnic groups to notice.)  So my most frequent encounter with road blocks is of my driver being addressed in some angry Hausa, then me being politely greeted‘Good morning, sa.  How is your day?’ or what have you.  This arouses strange emotions when the questioner is holding a gun, or a plank studded with nails, or a piece of farming equipment, or a smirk which suggests impending trouble.  But answering politely– ideally in Hausa – and engaging in some idle chit chat almost always ends the situation with grins and cheery waves of firearms all round.  In the country of the poor and black, the white man in a car is king and must be charmed and impressed.  It must be a thousand times worse for regular folk just trying to take their friends or family anywhere.Every so often, though, even representing the largest (and I’d guess probably more or less the most murderous) empire the world has ever known doesn’t curry favour.  This week, I travelled down to the College of Education for a meeting with the team there with whom I work fairly closely.  A road block called us (Gujja– the most laconic of our drivers – and me) to one side.  It was a relatively ill equipped one: no uniforms or IDs at all to speak of, and just large rocks and planks studded with nails (for car tyres, not heads) as deterrents.  The proper game with all road blocks is supposed to be to offer to buy the men a drink and hand over some cash to avoid tedious discussions.  If you don’t do that – and, like many foreign funded NGOs, our drivers aren’t allowed to do so unless in actual bodily danger – they’ll find some complex reason to charge you money.  I have no idea what the actual legal situation is, but the game is basically that there’s always some piece of paperwork or a sticker or something missing, which they’ll kindly sell you for a fee.  This time, we had the photocopy of the document, and only the original was valid.  So we could buy another one for 10,000 N– or a sticker for something different (they weren’t that bothered which we went for) for another 10,000 N.  The main point is that it would cost 10,000 N to get away from them, a point lodged firmly home by rocks being wedged beneath our tyres and men surrounding the vehicle, laying down naily sticks in the process.Now, I don’t actually generally carry that much money on me, and Gujja probably doesn’t generally see that much money.  So there wasn’t much chance of us paying it even were it in accordance with our collective corporate moral code (just for your future reference, mine pretty much evaporates when I’m late for a meeting and confronted with a stick).  We swiftly– if somewhat shoutily – reached an impasse which was to be sustained for several minutes by posturing and snatching of paperwork and brandishing of Pointy Things.  Such contretemps usually resolve themselves into a peaceful dew eventually.  But Gujja didn’t really possess the patience to shout it out, and I haven’t got the balls to fling about someoga-ness in the way I’ve seen colleagues dismiss petty officialdom.  So– thrillingly – he took matters into his own hands and switched the engine back on.  This was the cue for much laughing and checking of sticks and stones– but the driver’s faith in the Hilux was well placed, and with a mighty surge of engine, we romped over the rocks, ploughed straight across the nails, and roamed free with apparently very little damage to the tyres.That was a nice feeling (though Gujja was quite alarmingly angry and drove rather too fast for me to remember much of what happened next).  Until we turned a roundabout into another road block, about 500 metres from our actual destination, with their leader on the phone, all very clearly expecting us.  That was alarming, and these conversations took much longer, involved many more men, many more sticks, and ended in exactly the same way: Gujja getting angry, revving the engine, and heaving the Hilux over nails and rocks, swerving violently past the two men standing in front of us in the road, accelerating like a third Schumacher brother until our turning, and slamming us onto the university campus a mere hour late for my meeting (which was earlier than most of the people who work at the place had managed to get in for) and with me more than a little shaken.Despite my pleas, we didn’t take a different route home.  We just drove really, really fast.  Again.  Looking forward to next Monday’s identical journey with a trickle of trepidation: but at least I know now that sticks and stones and nails and men can upset me, but not break a car.------------------------------------This is nothing to do with my blog– but our neighbours’ children wanted to show me the names of them and their family while I was writing this.  It seemed easier to allow them.  I tried to explain what I was doing, and they generally intimated that they’d like their writing to be shared, too.  So here it is, with my annotations: it’s like the end of the Handmaid’s Tale, where the illusion is drawn aside and dissected.ifeanyi victor ify  (this is the little boy)ebele   johan     abey (this is the little girl)simon charles frederick thomson  (this is me– I wrote that)jennifer ellen fawson  (this is Jenny)uju (this is their mum.  I wonder when I first learnt my parents’ middle names: they weren’t even sure if she had a surname.)emmanueal     ike (this is their dad)(and all of these are aunts and cousins and things)divineebube      goodnessrejoicedubamuemmanueal