Pirates

by Ross Kemp

  Our destination was a white enclave with a number of weekend residences of the type used by Billy and his mates. There were a bunch of black kids looking after the boats by the side of the lagoon where we moored, and a few of the locals earned a scant living fetching and carrying for the white men, but apart from these, black faces were very scarce. Billy’s beachside hangout was a pretty basic place – there were no proper bedrooms and only the most basic facilities. But for a couple of days of beach, beer and barbecues – which is what the expat workers come here for – it was fine.

  Billy Graham was a traumatized man. When we turned up I got the distinct feeling that he had furnished himself with a little Dutch courage, but perhaps, in the circumstances, that was to be expected. I was going to ask him to recount an event that he would no doubt rather forget. If he had hit the bottle before our arrival, I couldn’t entirely blame him. Eighteen months ago Billy had been kidnapped. His abductors had stuck him on a boat, taken him to a hiding place and held him for 26 days. He went without food for ten days, and during this time they forced him to dig his own grave and made him lie down in it. The pirates who took him were young – ‘fresh out of secondary school,’ he told me in his southern drawl – and he claimed to have known every one of them before the kidnapping.

  Billy might have been traumatized by what had happened to him, but what struck me was that he was unwilling to blame his captors fully for what they had done. ‘I was a victim of it,’ he told me, ‘and they were a victim of it. Nigeria is a place with great potential. Look around you.’

  I did so. I saw sandy beaches and palm trees. The sun sparkled on the lapping water. Half close your eyes and you might be looking at a holiday brochure. ‘It’s fantastic,’ I told him.

  ‘Well,’ Billy continued, ‘we get to live this way. The rest of the country does not.’

  What Billy was telling me was the time-honoured tale of the haves and the have-nots. He believed that the terrifying experience he had undergone was a direct result of the differences between the rich foreigners in Nigeria and the indigenous poor. My next trip would take me to a place that threw these differences into even sharper relief. A place that I know I will not forget for as long as I live.

  The residents of Ajegunle call it the Jungle. It’s a bit of a misnomer. Jungles are green and fertile. Stuff grows there. You’d be hard pressed to find anything that grows in this desperate place.

  Ajegunle is Lagos’s biggest waterside slum. It’s difficult to say how many people live there – like the rest of Lagos, the population is fluid and expanding. Estimates vary. Whatever the true figure, one thing’s for sure – it’s too many.

  To get to Ajegunle from our hotel we had to drive through the perpetual Lagos traffic. Once we had freed ourselves from that snarling logjam, we drove through some suburbs that weren’t, by Nigerian standards, too bad. I remember passing a school not far from our destination that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a less impoverished part of the world, with big bright paintings of animals on the walls. But with a population so large, I knew it was only a privileged few that received the advantage of any kind of education. We stopped our car at the end of a long thin alleyway – perhaps half the length of a football pitch – and as we unloaded our vehicle we started attracting the usual attention. Locals approached us, intrigued by the camera gear and offering to carry it. In Africa, it’s easy to assume that when this happens they mean to rob you, but that would be a lazy assumption. These people were poor, and like so many others they wanted chop-chop – a small tip for services rendered.

  We walked down the alleyway. There was litter on the ground, but nothing out of the ordinary for Lagos. The further I walked, though, the more I could tell that there was something round the corner. Something unpleasant. A sudden stench filled the air – the sort of stench that makes you screw up your face, and which grew stronger and stronger the further we walked down that alleyway.

  And then we saw it.

  Ajegunle is hell on earth, its principal waterway like the River Styx. I half imagined the Devil cruising by in his speedboat, nodding proudly at a job well done. A couple of years previously, when I had travelled to Kenya to try and meet members of the Mongiki clan, I had visited Dandora, the biggest, most toxic rubbish tip in Africa. Ajegunle was like Dandora by the sea. The slum is so polluted that you can’t see the riverbank for the rubbish that is piled up by the side of the water. To get to the main drag of the slum, we had to cross the river in one of the crowded punts that ferried the inhabitants back and forth. The water that carried us was thick with debris – plastic bottles, food wrappers, all manner of day-to-day waste that you or I would put in the bin, ready for the tip. But there are no bins in Ajegunle. It is the tip and this rubbish covers every spare space.

  A large proportion of the population of the slum originates from the interior. In the Nigerian countryside most of what the people consume comes from the ground. It doesn’t matter if they throw it away because it biodegrades. But in Ajegunle it’s different. Like in most cities, food comes in plastic wrappers, in cartons and tins – stuff that won’t biodegrade in a thousand years, that will stay precisely where you chuck it. While I was in the slums, I heard it said that the pollution was in large part down to the Western soft-drinks factory just a couple of miles up the road. Maybe that’s true, but this wasn’t just packaging. This was everything – the accumulated detritus of an overpopulated hellhole.

  There were other kinds of waste here too. There is no proper drainage in Ajegunle, or sewers. The people who live in the Jungle defecate in the street. They don’t clear it up because there’s nowhere to put it, and because to clean up one turd out of millions would be a drop in the malodorous ocean. When it rains, what drains there are overflow and yet more raw sewage is coughed up onto the streets. As I wandered around Ajegunle that day I saw a sign advertising a ‘Top Class Toilet’, open to anyone willing to pay the few kobo it cost. These exclusive facilities, though, consisted simply of a toilet seat opening out onto the water below. You might get somewhere to park your behind, but you still have to shit into the river.

  There are, strangely, a few semi-decent houses in this slum, raised above the water on stilts. They still look out on to the pollution, however, and in any case they are far outnumbered by run-down shanties cobbled together from sheets of corrugated iron, where families live, 12 to a room, in subhuman conditions. The electricity supply is erratic and unpredictable; open a window from one of these squalid dwellings and more than likely you look out into a gutter crammed with human waste and clouds of mosquitoes. And yet the people who live in Ajegunle are fiercely proud of their city. Some of Nigeria’s biggest music stars come from here, and though it appeared hellish to me, the slum grows by the day. They’re coming to Ajegunle in droves, and it’s hard, from our comfortable Western perspective, to understand why.

  It wasn’t the first time my camera team and I had been the only white men in a slum, and you never quite get used to it. You do, however, learn certain techniques, and for me the only way of dealing with the inevitable attention is to plough on through the streets no matter what. As I set foot in Ajegunle, that’s exactly what I did. It didn’t stop me being a magnet for the inhabitants pushing their wares: it might have been early in the morning, but I hadn’t gone more than 20 metres before I was offered palm wine by two men and sex by three girls. Could have been a very eventful morning, and it was an immediate reminder that street crime and prostitution were rife here.

  We immediately attracted attention from other sources too. I’d barely set foot in Ajegunle before seven or eight big burly young men started following us and shouting, ‘What you doing here? What you doing, oyibo? Oyibo, go! You have no right to be here! You go!’ They were screaming, excitable and aggressive, crowding round us as we stepped through the rubbish-strewn slum. I barged through, away from our unwanted companions, but they managed to stop Will the cameraman and they weren’t going to let him go any further, so we had to tell th
em what we were doing.

  Our Nigerian fixer had arranged for us to meet a man who had been described to us as the chief of Ajegunle. He had lived in the slum for many years, and we had been told he had agreed to give us a tour of the area and explain to us some of the effects piracy had had on his community.

  ‘We’re going to see the chief,’ I told them, naively thinking that this might buy our passage.

  ‘What chief?’ they shouted. ‘Who chief?’

  Will and I looked at each other with a bit of a sinking feeling. They seemed slightly less impressed than we thought they would be. What we didn’t know was that, in true Nigerian style, there were about 15 different chiefs in Ajegunle, all self-appointed and all, as far as I could tell, vying with each other for whatever tenuous authority they had. Too many chiefs, you might say, and not enough Indians…

  We told them the name of our man and they sucked their teeth, unimpressed. They stepped back, but it was obvious this was just a temporary reprieve for us. There was nothing else for the team and me to do other than press on into the slum – I had the distinct feeling that we wouldn’t be allowed to turn back in any case – so we did exactly that. We couldn’t shake our trail and before long we had a massive crowd following us, like a meteor with its long tail.

  It was only 8.30 in the morning but already the sweat was pouring off me. We hadn’t brought any water with us and I could feel myself dehydrating, but stopping for a leisurely drink was off the menu. It was clear as we went that nobody particularly wanted to be filmed. I had the impression that they were proud of where they lived and didn’t want a white man to come there and look down on them. That wasn’t what we were there to do of course, but I guess they weren’t to know that. As our tail got bigger, however, it became increasingly clear what our new companions wanted. Chop-chop. They sniffed money.

  We walked and we walked, the stench filling our noses, our shoes covered in shit. Eventually we came to the place where our fixer had told us we could meet our chief. It was hardly grand – a room on a platform on stilts overlooking the filthy water, the squalor and the degradation. There was a second room alongside it, also on stilts, and it was possible, if you were of a mind to risk falling into the filthy water, to jump between the two. By now we must have attracted a tail of between 150 and 200 people, all of them looking at us like we were a meal ticket. By that time all I wanted to do was get the hell out of Ajegunle. The mood was getting ugly. You could forget about interviews and pirates and TV shows – we had images of being mugged, or thrown into the shitty water, or worse. All we wanted to do was get away, but it was clear by now that the locals weren’t going to let that happen. Not easily.

  We crowded around the edge of one of the platforms. Inside the room all the local chiefs had congregated, along with their advisers and their heavies. We were not invited inside as they argued among themselves, clearly working out exactly how much money they could rip us off for, and who should get what slice. On the other platform our followers thronged. You could see the stilts starting to sway and bend, and if too many people moved to one side, the whole platform would tilt precariously. Kids jumped from one platform to the other. I could envisage either one collapsing into the water at any moment, and I really didn’t feel like a swim.

  The chiefs carried on bickering. One of them was particularly lairy, and he looked like a cross between Oliver Hardy and Robert Mugabe. He was more despot than funny man, though, and he kept approaching us, telling us that he was the real boss and shouting that we didn’t have permission to film here. He threatened to confiscate our equipment, and only backed down thanks to our fixer’s attempts to smooth things over. Inside, the ‘negotiations’ continued, each of the chiefs saying their piece as we waited nervously outside, wishing that we were almost anywhere but there.

  It was a riot of aggression and confusion, and to be honest none of us really knew what was going on. Eventually, though, they arrived at some sort of consensus and we were allowed access to our chief, an elderly man in traditional African garb, more quietly spoken than the others. It was clear, though, that the other chiefs were not fully satisfied with the outcome. I could tell that there was a good deal more aggro to come from them…

  In the past, the people of Ajegunle had earned their living from fishing. The chief himself had fished the river for oysters and crayfish just 15 years ago. He took us out on a boat that chugged slowly through the polluted waters. Nothing could live here now, not in this soupy miasma of pollution. The chief echoed my very thoughts. ‘There is no life in this water any more,’ he said passionately. In order to find water clean enough for fish, you had to travel 20 miles out of Ajegunle. A big deal in a place whose main industry once relied on the health of the water.

  As I had already learned, however, taking a boat out to sea off the Nigerian coast carried with it certain risks. The chief explained to me that many people were too scared to leave the filthy waterways of Ajegunle because of the piracy threat. ‘They carry weapons,’ the chief told me of the pirates. ‘Sophisticated ones. They carry weapons that even our soldiers, our navy are not having in their possession.’

  I wanted to know if the chief could shed any light on where these pirates were coming from. ‘They migrate from anywhere,’ he told me. ‘Not from this community. They use masks to cover their faces. You cannot identify them.’ He explained to me that if the pirates came across a fisherman, they would steal what little money he had on him. If there was no money, they would steal the fisherman’s engine and net, then leave him to drift. ‘Many are dying,’ he told me. ‘Many are wounded.’

  Our chief spoke with real passion, and I didn’t doubt that what he was saying was the truth. I wasn’t entirely sure I believed his assertion, though, that none of the pirates came from Ajegunle. To rob a poor fisherman smacks of desperation, and I sensed that desperation was in plentiful supply in this slum.

  I couldn’t tell for sure if the pirates originated from places like Ajegunle or not, but I suspected that they did. What was clear, however, was that they were having a devastating effect on an already devastated community. The people of Ajegunle were impoverished; their principal means of making a living had been taken from them on account of the astonishing levels of pollution; and now, if they tried to travel further afield to fish, they came up against the violent criminality of the pirates. It looked to me like a vicious circle, and there didn’t seem to be any way out.

  I couldn’t wait to leave Ajegunle, but that wasn’t possible. Not yet. We were still the focus of everyone’s attention, and before we could get away from that godforsaken place we were told that we had to go and ‘pay our respects’ to the Oliver Hardy lookalike who claimed to be such an important man. Of course, we all understood what the phrase ‘pay our respects’ really meant. Ollie wanted chop-chop; otherwise we weren’t getting out of there. It was about half past five when we arrived at his house, followed, of course, by the ever-present crowd of people. For such an important chief, it was a humble abode, although there was a whole row of people lined up outside – but Ollie was nowhere to be seen. It turned out that he was inside, having a kip – he’d hit the palm wine earlier that afternoon, got absolutely sozzled and was now sleeping it off.

  When he finally made his appearance he certainly looked the worse for wear. He slurred his words, which didn’t make it at all easy for us to understand him as his English was heavily accented anyway. As he demanded once more who we were and why we were here, he was a pretty comical figure. Under other circumstances we might have just laughed at him, or simply walked away, but that wasn’t possible here. He might have been ridiculous, but we were surrounded by people who seemed to take him seriously. We weren’t getting out of there until Ollie gave us the thumbs up, and for that to happen we needed to do some fast talking.

  I stepped forward. The chief and his stooges fell quiet. And then, in a voice that made me sound like something between Captain Cook and General Custer, I spoke. ‘We have come from far away,’ I
said.

  Behind me, I could sense the guys suppressing their giggles.

  ‘We have travelled many miles across Africa to search for pirates,’ I improvised. ‘To the Sudan.’ (No, I don’t know where that came from either – as the crew took great pleasure in pointing out to me later, Sudan is landlocked.) ‘And now here.’ I waffled on for a couple of minutes with my grandiose, over-the-top speech. And when I had finished there was a heavy silence.

  I looked at the chief.

  The chief looked at me.

  And then he spoke.

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘I am not understanding you.’

  I blinked. And then, because he hadn’t appeared to understand a word I’d said, I repeated the whole thing again.

  My piece finished, the chief demanded to see the identity cards that we had been issued by the Nigerian government. He made a great show of scrutinizing these documents, looking us up and down as if we were obviously presenting him with forgeries, before revealing that he used to work as a passport control officer at the airport. So much for being the big chief of Ajegunle. Once he had satisfied himself that we were who we said we were, he started on a speech of his own. A long speech, telling us what an important man he was and how well he looked after his people. We listened politely, and were relieved when he finally finished. But then, to our dismay, one of his stooges took the floor. Another speech. More polite listening. Then a third. Then a fourth…

  By this time we couldn’t take any more. I stood up, announced that we’d really got the message, then nodded to our fixer. The time had come to cut to the chase. It was obvious that the only thing that was going to bring about our passage out of Ajegunle was hard cash, and so the fixer handed over a fistful of notes. It wasn’t much in our terms – maybe about 50 quid – but I suppose to them it was a reasonable amount of chop-chop.