Read Africa39 Online

Authors: Wole Soyinka

Africa39 (9 page)

Furo lost interest in this line of thinking when the DJ cut the music to announce that it was time to pay the bills so don’t touch that dial. After several minutes of jolly-sounding jingles, most of which seemed aimed at schoolchildren and petty traders, a new Tuface single was introduced by the DJ, and as the song sprang from the speakers Syreeta flung up her arms and hooted with joy, and then glanced over at Furo with a wide grin.

Syreeta showed a clear fondness for local music. Pidgin hip-hop, Afrobeat electronica, Ajegunle reggae, highlife-flavoured R&B, even oldies’ disco crooned to a lover named Ifeoma. Nigerian music dominated the Lagos airwaves, and Syreeta seemed to know the lyrics to every song. Rihanna’s anthems might be enjoyed, and Drake’s rap acknowledged with sporadic nods of approval, but when P-Square warbled, Syreeta hollered back. Furo also listened to Nigerian pop – he even had two P-Square songs in his old phone – though he couldn’t say he had a particular taste for it. But now, hearing Syreeta sing along to lyrics that preached money and marriage and little else, he found himself hating P-Square a little.

The song ended, the DJ resumed his adenoidal chatter and Syreeta said, pointing with a finger straight ahead, ‘See where those buses are turning – and that LASTMA man is just sitting there looking! OK now, I’m going to follow them.’

Furo stared through the windscreen at the congested road: in the confusion that met his eyes he couldn’t find what Syreeta was pointing at. The road should have resembled a Mumbai train station at rush hour – lines and lines of stilled cars stretching into the distance, armies of hawkers darting about in rag uniforms, the air sluggish with exhaust fumes and exhausted breaths – but it didn’t, it had a chaos all of its own. It looked exactly like after-work traffic in Lagos was supposed to look. A sprawling coastal city that had no ferry system, no commuter trains, no underground tunnels or overhead tramlines, where hordes of people leaving work poured on to the roads at the same time as the freight trucks carting petroleum products and food produce and all manner of manufacture from all corners of Nigeria. The roads were overburdened and under-policed, and even in select areas where road expansion projects were under way, the contracted engineers worked at a pace that betrayed their lack of confidence in the usefulness of their labour. They knew as well as the politicians that Lagos was exploding at a rate its road network could never keep up with.

The cars ahead revved and spat out smoke, the Honda rolled forward inches, and finally Furo saw the reason this section of the road was gridlocked. Metres ahead, in the middle of the highway, an excavator was breaking blacktop and scooping earth, and at the spot where it heaved and clanged, a new roundabout had been partitioned out with concrete barriers that narrowed the road into a bottleneck. A small band of touts, led by a cap-wearing man, whose white goatee caught the sunlight, had pushed aside one of the barriers, opened a path to the other side of the road – which was free of traffic – and they collected money from any car that squeezed through the breach. It was mostly minibuses that turned off to disgorge passengers and rush back into town, but a few private cars also took the opening. A state traffic warden sat on the tailgate of a Peugeot wagon adjacent to the breach and calmly watched proceedings. His crisp uniform shirt, the yellow of spoiled milk, was tucked into his beef-red trousers, and his black boots gleamed as he swung his feet back and forth.

Furo turned to Syreeta. ‘I’ve seen the opening. Do you want to turn around? Aren’t we going to see your friend any more?’

‘We are,’ Syreeta replied. ‘See where the petrol station is? VGC gate is right beside it. I’ll cross over and drive by the side of the road till we reach the gate. If I stay here I’ll have to go far ahead, I’ll have to follow this traffic till after Ajah junction, then turn around and start coming back. With this go-slow, that will take us at least another thirty minutes.’

Furo was tired of sitting, his buttocks ached, and yet he wasn’t eager for Syreeta to take the shortcut. He felt too conspicuous to break laws openly.

He spoke. ‘I don’t trust that LASTMA guy.’

‘He won’t try anything,’ Syreeta responded, and turning to smile at Furo, she added in a teasing tone: ‘You white people fear too much.’

Furo didn’t return her smile. ‘I still think it’s safer to stay on the road.’

Of course Syreeta ignored his warning, and after she forked over two hundred naira for the illegal toll – special fee for special people, white goatee said with a brooding glance at Furo – and drove through the breach, of course the traffic warden jumped down from his perch and bolted forward to accost the car. Syreeta tried to drive around him, but the man was nimble for his size and he also seemed to have no regard for his life. When finally he leaped on to the bonnet and bumped his forehead against the windscreen, smearing the glass with sweat, Syreeta braked the car to a stop, wound down her side window, switched off the ignition and removed the key, then stuck out her head. ‘Are you crazy?’ she yelled. ‘Do you want to break my windshield? What sort of nonsense is this?’

The traffic warden slid off the bonnet, dashed to Syreeta’s side and grabbed the steering wheel through the open window. ‘Your key,’ he puffed, and glowered at Syreeta with his sun-darkened face only inches from hers. His chest rose and sank with each breath.

‘Are you joking?’ Syreeta snapped. ‘I’m not giving you my key!’

‘Give me your key, Madam,’ the traffic warden said again in a voice whose threatening tone had jumped several notches, and his knuckles bunched on the steering wheel.

‘No,’ Syreeta said, and shook her head in emphasis, leaned back in her seat, calmly returned his stare.

‘You this woman, I’m warning you o, give me the key!’

‘Why?’ Syreeta shouted back. ‘Oya, tell me first, what did I do?’

‘You don’t know what you did, ehn? OK, I will tell you after you give me the key. Just do as I order. Obey before complaint.’

‘No fucking way,’ Syreeta said.

‘You’re looking for trouble.’ This said quietly, his tensed forearm trembling through the window. Vapours of cold air wafted out of the car into his shiny face.

‘You’re the one looking for trouble,’ Syreeta said. ‘Didn’t you see other cars passing? How come it’s me you want to stop? You think you’ve seen awoof? You better get out of my way if know what’s good for you!’

‘If you move I will show you!’ the traffic warden growled in warning, at the same time shoving his second hand through the window to grasp the steering wheel. His flexing muscles seemed prepared to wrest out the steering wheel, and his expression showed he would try, but Syreeta, to Furo’s growing wonder, didn’t appear in the slightest bothered by the suppressed violence of those arms in front of her chest. With a mocking laugh she averted her face, stared straight through the windscreen, ignoring the traffic warden. It was a deadlock.

Furo knew there was nothing he could say to defuse the situation, and nothing he could do in his broke state, but still he felt compelled to act. He leaned across Syreeta, met the traffic warden’s hostile eyes, and said in a beseeching tone, ‘Excuse me, oga,’ but Syreeta whirled around and shushed him with a curt ‘No.’ He settled back in his seat. Syreeta was handling this all wrong. She should be ingratiating herself to the traffic warden, not provoking the man to arrest her. With her car impounded she would pay a fine many times larger than the bribe that had prompted the traffic warden to pick on her, while he, for all his exertions, would get nothing except paperwork to fill.

The traffic warden broke the silence. ‘Answer me, Madam,’ he said, and Syreeta did, she turned her face to the window and told the man in haughty tones that she would have his job for the embarrassment he was causing her. Furo rolled his eyes in exasperation at her words. But surely she must know what to do, he thought. Nobody who had lived in Lagos more than a week could remain ignorant of the survival codes, and yet Syreeta flouted rule after rule. The traffic warden had begun shouting the threat Furo was waiting for – he demanded to board the car and lead Syreeta to the nearest LASTMA office. Bureaucratic hellholes, LASTMA offices, and if the traffic warden made good his threat then Syreeta would be lucky to retrieve her car before the month’s end. And only after paying a heavy fine and settling the bill for mandatory driving lessons and a psychiatric evaluation, this last a precondition for allowing her back into the madness of Lagos roads. Furo felt he had to warn her, and he opened his mouth to do so, but Syreeta spoke first.

‘Furo, I’m sorry, please get down from the car.’

He tried to catch her eyes. ‘This is not the best way—’

‘I know what I’m doing,’ she cut him off, her right hand cleaving the air in time to her words. ‘I’ll deal with this idiot my own way. Just get down.’

Sighing in resignation, Furo reached for the door handle, and the traffic warden released his grip on the steering wheel and sprinted around the car’s front. As the man grabbed the door and yanked it open, Furo looked at Syreeta. ‘Should I sit in the back?’ he asked. ‘I don’t mind following you to the LASTMA office.’

‘No need,’ Syreeta said. Then she noticed the anxiety on Furo’s face, and her expression softened, she curved her lips in a smile intended to reassure. ‘It’s OK, I have this under control.’ She cast a look around. ‘But there’s no place for you to wait around here,’ she muttered, as if chiding herself. ‘Oh, I know. Why don’t you walk to VGC? Go inside and wait for me near the gate. I won’t be long.’

Behind Furo the traffic warden snorted with derision, and Syreeta threw him a vicious look. Furo spoke quickly to forestall the attack gathering in her face. ‘If that’s what you want,’ he said, and climbed down from the car, then stood watching as the traffic warden clambered in and slammed the door. He heard the harmonised clicks of the car’s central lock, followed by the whirr of Syreeta’s side window closing. When Syreeta and the traffic warden turned on each other with furious faces, Furo spun around and strode away from their muffled yapping.

Avoiding the curious stares of the pedestrians he passed, Furo walked quickly to the filling station, then cut across its concrete expanse and approached the double gates of Victoria Garden City. Two lines of cars flowed through the estate gates, entering and leaving. In front of the entry gate, right beside the sleeping policeman, stood a uniformed guard. Hands clasped behind his back and feet spread apart, he eyeballed each car that clambered over the bump. He raised his head as Furo approached, and his shoulders stiffened, his features gathered into a scowl. Furo realised there was someone walking behind him. A man wearing black jeans and a white T-shirt, his hair cornrowed, a rhinestone stud glinting in one ear. Furo turned back around, and slowed his steps to a shuffle, unsure if he should walk past the guard or state his business. Deciding on the action least likely to cause offence, he halted by the guard and said, ‘Hello.’

‘Good afternoon, sir,’ the guard replied with a smile. ‘Are you here to visit?’

‘Yes,’ Furo said.

‘I see, I see,’ said the guard, and ran his hands over the front of his epauletted shirt, smoothing it out. He ignored the cars entering the estate; he stared hard at Furo’s nose. ‘Who is the person you want to see?’

‘I don’t know her name . . . she’s the friend of my friend,’ Furo said. ‘Well, actually—’

‘I see, not a problem,’ the guard interrupted, and threw a suspicious look at the cornrowed man waiting behind Furo. ‘What is her house number?’

‘I don’t know,’ Furo said. ‘The thing is, I’m supposed to—’

‘Not a problem,’ the guard said and wrinkled his brow in contemplation of the problem before him. At that moment the cornrowed man made an impatient noise in his throat, and then he moved forwards, muttered ‘sorry’ to Furo, and said to the guard, ‘I’m going to Mr Oyegun’s house.’

The guard aimed a hard stare at him. ‘Can’t you see I’m attending to somebody?’

‘I’m in a hurry,’ the cornrowed man said, his voice urgent. ‘Mr Oyegun is expecting me. I know his house, I’ve come here before.’

‘Respect yourself, Mister Man!’ the guard barked at him. ‘Or you think anyone can just walk in here anyhow? Who are you anyway? Move back, move back – can’t you hear me, I said move back!’ He flapped his hands in the chest of the cornrowed man, drove him back behind Furo. ‘That’s how we Nigerians behave, no respect at all,’ the guard said to Furo with a grimace of apology. Lowering his voice, he asked: ‘Do you have your, erm, friend’s phone number?’

‘I was trying to explain,’ Furo said. ‘I’m supposed to wait for someone to pick me up here. If you don’t mind I’ll just stand in that corner.’ He pointed to a spot just inside the gate.

‘Oh, I see,’ the guard said, nodding his head. He waved Furo in. ‘Not a problem at all, you can go inside. Should I bring a chair for you?’

‘I’m OK,’ Furo replied. He passed through the gate, strode a few paces to the road’s grass shoulder, and turned around to face the road. The cornrowed man had moved forwards, he was speaking with the guard, who shook his head with vehemence and remained standing in the way. The cornrowed man flung up his hands and uttered something in complaint, then with a stony face he pulled out his mobile phone, dialled a number. After repeated attempts at reaching someone on the phone, all seemingly unsuccessful, the cornrowed man again spoke to the guard. The guard ignored him, he stood with his fists clenched and his boots planted apart, he glowered at passing cars. The cornrowed man gave up talking with a gesture of dismissal. Pocketing his phone, he whirled around and stalked off, and the guard glanced over at Furo. ‘Are you sure you’re OK, sir?’ he shouted across. ‘You’re sure you don’t want a chair?’

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