Looking for Transwonderland

by Noo Saro-Wiwa

  Across the water from Victoria Island was Tarkwa Bay, a sheltered beach along Lagos Harbour. It wasn’t the prettiest of places, but it was a diversion from the city, singled out by my guidebook for its mere existence rather than its attractiveness. In Lagos a trip to the seaside – with all its debris and harsh views of Lagos’s industrial harbour – represented a break from the hustling multitudes and non-stop irritation of city life.

  After the play, my okada man took me to the western edge of Victoria Island, past the foreign embassy buildings and the armed soldiers idling on chairs beneath a grove of trees by the water’s edge. At the jetty, I saw a shaven-headed man with a goatee wrapped around extremely shapely lips. He was sitting at an outdoor desk. As I watched him stand up and walk towards me, I could tell he was a hustler right from the start. Obscuring his shifty eyes behind dark sunglasses, he homed in on me with a swiftness that made his motives clear. He worked in the office near the boats, he told me, helping people apply for visas to the US. Though this bore no connection with the boats, he acted as an intermediary between me and the man in charge of the water transport.

  ‘My name is Sam,’ he intoned smoothly, extending his hand to shake mine. ‘I can show you around Tarkwa Bay.’ His intentions aside, I couldn’t help being impressed by his cool, laconic demeanour. He led me to the boat and tried to charm a free ride from the boat man, but the old guy was having none of it.

  ‘You’re a thief,’ he jibed at Sam, a stern glint piercing his smiley eyes. Sam begrudgingly paid for a full-price ticket.

  The motor boat took us and a quartet of Italians through Five Cowrie Creek and out to the Atlantic. We cruised beneath the flyover bridge separating Victoria Island from Ikoyi, and headed into the choppy blue waters. Lagos’s industrial sprawl extended into the lagoon, filling its blue surface with oil tankers and oil pipelines that stretched above our heads. A group of hardened white expats, embracing the industrial aesthetic, sailed among the tankers on their yachts and jet skis.

  Once at Tarkwa Bay, everyone waded onto the beach, except me. I stayed on the boat, adamant about keeping my shoes and legs dry. Sam gallantly lifted me up in his arms and carried me onto the beach. I felt his knees buckle briefly.

  ‘Ai, I didn’t think you were so heavy,’ he said as he tipped me onto my feet.

  ‘I weigh nine and a quarter stone. How heavy should I be?’

  ‘You’ve been eating too much yam,’ he informed me, examining my frame at arm’s length.

  The beach was relatively empty at that time of the day. A bald friend of Sam’s bounded up to him, slung an arm around his shoulders and whispered conspiratorially into his ear, eyes darting towards me between giggles. I caught the words ‘. . . at least ten thousand naira,’ and prepared myself for the scheming that was to come.

  Sam and I sat down on some chairs near a handful of people beneath a shady tree, opposite a makeshift wooden bar run by a female friend of his. For once, I heard birdsong and the rustle of trees in the breeze. Even the gentle whoosh of the sea waves – normally drowned out by Lagos’s noise pollution – was a novelty. I closed my eyes and imagined that we were in the Caribbean, less than 10 kilometres away from Lagos. But my illusions were swiftly demolished when I opened my eyes and turned to face the sea. Tarkwa Bay sat right in the middle of oil tanker traffic. The huge vessels sailed so close to the beach I thought I was hallucinating. Almost noiseless, they moved along at an unexpectedly fast pace. One minute they were blobs on the horizon, the next minute they were partially obliterating the sunlight as they cruised past like mobile edifices 20 metres from the shore.

  Sam and I chatted for an hour or so under the tree. Like me, he was thirty-one years old, an ethnic Birom from central Nigeria, the son of a retired air force pilot. Most of his brothers and sisters were living and working in the US.

  ‘Do you ever want to go to the States?’ I asked him. He shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Maybe one day,’ he drawled quietly. ‘If God wants it to happen it will happen.’ Sam had that preoccupied expression adopted by people who spend time with you solely in the pursuit of money. He wasn’t in the mood for conversation. He sat back and stifled a yawn.

  ‘What were you doing last night?’ I asked.

  ‘I was in a bar on Lekki with some friends. We watched football, danced . . .’ Sam’s words petered into silence. I bet he’d seduced a woman or two as well. He had the looks and essence of a successful womaniser.

  ‘Are you married?’ he asked me. I sighed impatiently. People’s curiosity about me could be frustratingly one-dimensional.

  ‘No. Are you?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I hope God will find me a wife soon. I am tired of sinning.’

  ‘What do you mean, “sinning”?’

  ‘I’m tired of committing fornication,’ he said, hanging his head in fake shame. I tried to keep a straight face. He took sips of ogogoro, a hot alcoholic drink, and stared dramatically into the sand.

  We took a walk along the beach, past a lone, sumptuous-looking house overlooking the water. Sam said it belonged to a European expat.

  ‘My best friend died here,’ Sam said out of the blue. He said the oil pipeline at Tarkwa Bay caught fire and exploded, killing hundreds of people. Sam’s best friend was one of them. The locals regularly smash holes in the pipes to steal fuel that’s otherwise beyond their purchasing power. Nigeria loses millions of barrels of petroleum every year this way from pipelines around the country. The pipes bleed oil until the professionals can repair them. Carelessly lit cigarettes or paraffin lamps can start such fires.

  ‘Ade didn’t tell anyone he was stealing oil,’ Sam said. ‘His wife had a baby girl. The naming ceremony was due . . . he needed money to pay for it.’

  The fireball engulfed everyone in 900°C flames. Some died within seconds; others, including Ade, staggered towards the beach, ghoulishly charred and disfigured, fighting imminent death.

  ‘The white man who owns that big house took him to hospital, but he died before they reached there. You know, these oil burns are not like normal. They burn inside your body.’ Sam held back genuine tears. He said Ade’s burnt features were still recognisable enough for his corpse to be identified, and he was given a quick Islamic burial in Tarkwa Bay that same day.

  It was good to finally put some names, if not faces, to the victims of these tragedies. Foreign media reports on these incidents rarely give descriptions of those who died, and sometimes the accidents’ exact locations aren’t stated: ‘near Lagos’ is the vague description provided. It was a stinging reflection of our worth in the eyes of government and, by extension, the world.

  Sam and I sat on the smooth, damp sand of a deserted beach. The turquoise surf threw up a mist that blurred the brilliant sunshine and cast an ethereal haze around us. The beach and its palm trees stretched into the distance where the matchstick figure of a man rolled about on the shoreline, waves cresting over his body. He was performing a traditional Yoruba prayer, Sam said. Four hundred kilometres beyond us to the west, I knew that foreign tourists were sunning themselves and taking drum lessons on the beaches of Kokrobite in Ghana, staying in well-run hotels. Why can’t Nigeria offer something similar? Our thousands of miles of glorious coastline lay empty and shamefully under-capitalised. Oil saboteurs like Ade should be earning their money from beach tourism and using their disposable income to enjoy the beach more. The only people who seemed to be enjoying this particular stretch of beach that day were a handful of expats – the fat Israeli talking loudly to his friend in Hebrew; the haughty, muscular surfer walking past with his surfboard.

  Out on the dazzling horizon, I counted more than fifty tankers. Sam told me that the vessels spend up to six weeks on the water waiting to load and offload their goods at the port, their crews sustained by hawkers and prostitutes who sail out to them in small boats.

  By now, Sam’s eyes were caressing my face, and his voice had lowered to a pre-coital purr. My ego toyed with the possibility that he was genuinely int
erested in me, but after factoring in my messy hair, baggy trousers and legs greyed by the dry winds, I knew my wallet was the only thing fanning his gigolo interest. His eyes now bored into mine while I stared into the horizon and made idle chit chat, strategically adjusting my position in order to maintain some daylight between us. When the daylight shrank further, I quickly rose to my feet.

  We walked back to the main beach, where the endless stretches of sand were strewn with an ungodly amount of litter. I had recently stopped noticing garbage – after a few days in Lagos, one’s eyes surrender to its ubiquity – but suddenly its quantity offended me to the core.

  ‘Why don’t they clean up all this rubbish?’

  ‘Who will do it?’ Sam was surprised that I expected anyone to take responsibility. Not only was there litter everywhere, but there were also a few wooden crosses, which looked like they’d been plonked there unceremoniously. Sam shrugged his shoulders; that’s where people chose to bury their dead, he said. Land is used randomly in parts of Lagos.

  We returned to Tarkwa Bay’s main beach, which was now filling up with expats. Groups of Lebanese men played football and volleyball by the waves. Sam pointed out the very hairy, barrel-chested Arab whose father owns the Eko Hotel, one of Lagos’s fanciest places to stay. He was one of the thousands of ethnic Lebanese merchants who came to Nigeria in the early twentieth century, a middle-class stratum that rarely dips its toes in the indigenous gene pool, preferring to marry within itself or fetch partners from the mother country. Their relative wealth and influence, nothing special in absolute terms, shines an embarrassing light on Nigeria’s anaemic economy. As the Lebanese men played football on the beach, a Nigerian hawker stood nearby and watched them, a tray of fruit balanced on top of his head. I couldn’t tell if he was waiting to sell them something, or whether he was simply fixated by the game; either way, he cut a frustratingly marginalised, shabby figure against their flabby affluence.

  When I told Sam I wanted to return to Victoria Island, he stared sadly into my eyes, disappointed that our day out hadn’t been more enriching for him. He stood in the water beside me as I sat myself in the boat that would take me back to town.

  ‘I need to see you again,’ he murmured, saucing his disappointment with false romantic distress. ‘Please . . . I am not an Area Boy.’1

  ‘I know,’ I told him, before hugging him goodbye. Even though Sam wasn’t a gangster, he didn’t deserve any money from me.

  On the way back to Victoria Island, Europeans bounced around the boat on jet skis, and from a thatch-roofed balcony overlooking the water, members of an expat boat club sipped drinks and gazed at their surroundings, easily gratified by sunshine and sea despite the presence of pipelines and tankers.

  It was time to return to the city.

  The air had begun to take on a distinctly crepuscular hue. By the time I reached the CMS bus stop on Lagos Island, the city was twinkling beneath the dark night sky. Janice had warned me time and time again never to stay out after sunset, and my guidebook was equally stern (‘Never, and I repeat never, stay on Lagos Island after dark’). At this time of day, thieves and armed robbers were on the lookout for hapless commuters. I waited restlessly for the bus to fill.

  Finally, the bus began to inch slowly through the dense traffic. The journey was uneventful until we approached Mile Two, where the traffic dispersed and the roads quickly became less clogged. Our teenage driver reacted to this unexpected freedom in the same way that air inside a balloon reacts to a puncture. He stamped on the accelerator and sent us all crashing back into our seats.

  ‘Go small small, o!’ a young woman said, begging him to slow down. The rest of us clung silently to the seats in front of us. ‘People are not feeling well,’ she implored. ‘Please . . . think about them.’ Her pleas only spurred the driver to go faster. He raced down the expressway, swerving past all other traffic before braking suddenly and slamming all of us into the backs of the chairs in front. Before we had time to recover, the driver resumed top speed with a painful lurch.

  ‘Conductor, please tell him to go small!’ another passenger appealed, but the conductor, hanging from the side of the vehicle like a nonchalant bandit, was deaf to their desperation. The mood inside the bus turned from anxiety to heart-stopping rage, and before long everyone was taking turns to insult the boy behind the wheel.

  ‘Idiot!’ the young woman shouted.

  ‘How old are you?’ a man barked rhetorically.

  ‘Are you mad?’ fumed another.

  ‘You’re going to kill us all, and yourself!’ an older lady screamed.

  Through the rear-view mirror the boy driver cackled as if he were the devil himself. Perhaps he was on drugs. As soon as the bus slowed into another traffic jam, nearly every passenger evacuated the vehicle as though it had just burst into flames. Had I known my way around I would have joined them. But I stayed on, along with a young woman and her boyfriend, to witness the final – and scariest – segment of the journey.

  At the spaghetti junction of Mile Two, the driver wanted to switch from one strand of a fork in the road to the other. Getting there involved crossing the V-shaped patch of rocky ground between the two roads. When the danfo tried accelerating over the rocks, it came suddenly to a halt and brought the three of us – and all the bus seats – sliding forwards. The seats were makeshift benches that had been loosely screwed into the floor. Without the weight of any passengers to hold them down they slid in tandem with the danfo, which now accelerated and reversed alternately as the driver tried to overcome the sloping terrain beneath us.

  ‘Hold on to the window!’ the guy advised his whimpering girlfriend. Her dark knuckles had turned caramel from gripping the seat so hard. We were batted around the metallic shell of the bus with every forward jerk, like expendable characters in a horror movie. My skin was scratched repeatedly as it bashed against the twisted metal of the bench in front of me. I couldn’t quite believe what was happening. A part of me wanted to giggle hysterically, yet I knew I was in the hands of a mad man and could end up badly gashed.

  The bus finally heaved itself across to the other section of road and came to a standstill on the busy roadside. I clambered out, shaken and speechless. In the darkness, the expressway was an Inferno of red tail lights that glowed hellishly through the pollution haze, throwing an eerie light on the human shapes still selling food, dodging the traffic and running for buses.

  I jumped into the final danfo that would take me to Aunty Janice’s house. As we sped along the expressway towards Satellite Town, the sliding door of the bus broke loose from all but one of its hinges. The door dragged along the tarmac road, spewing a screeching shower of sparks. The conductor ordered the driver to stop so that he could re-attach the door.

  ‘I beg, leave the thing now and let’s go!’ someone shouted at the conductor. Neither he nor the other passengers had time for such trivial hitches. They were anxious to get home and enjoy the scraps of family time not already devoured by their daily five-hour commute. They were also rushing to escape the thieves who lurk in the tall grass flanking that section of the expressway, waiting to pounce on stationary vehicles. Travelling without a car door was preferable to arriving home without one’s wallet.

  It was 9 p.m. when I returned to Aunty Janice’s house.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she yelled at me. I’d never seen her this angry.

  ‘I went to Tarkwa Bay,’ I explained, defensive and irritated. ‘Sorry, I didn’t realise it was so far away.’

  ‘I told you to never stay out in the night. Never! I was so worried . . . I called your mother in England!’

  ‘But I sent you a text telling you I was running late.’

  ‘I didn’t receive it! If I knew you were returning so late I would never, never have allowed you to go!’

  Was I to blame for Nigeria’s useless telecoms system?

  Aunty Janice set my dinner, a truce, on the table. I ate it in worn-out silence, thinking about Victoria Island and what a dist
ant memory it now seemed. In the space of ten hours I felt I had been snatched from its celestial grace, sucked through a wormhole and spat out into the relative purgatory of the mainland evening commute. Lagos had taken me through many emotions that day. I was feeling particularly chastened and disorientated, but at least boredom hadn’t come into it: for all its defects the city never failed to deliver buttock-clenching excitement, and I was grateful for that.

  I just needed to shed my complacency and learn not to get too cosy on the roads. As much as Aunty Janice loved Lagos, she knew it was no one’s friend. She furiously recounted her experiences of night-time robberies when the traffic would slow to an ominous halt, and passengers – accustomed to the drill – scrambled to remove the SIM cards from their phones. The robbers would hop on board and demand phones and cash, slapping the passengers until they relinquished the treasures hidden in their hair, their cleavage and their underwear (thieves knew all the tricks). The night throbbed with danger, Aunty Janice chided, and she considered me a fool for staying out after dark, using buses and okadas and dangling myself within tantalising reach of trouble.

  For once, at least privately, I agreed with her. Lesson learned, I lay down to sleep and vowed to make early starts from then on.

  Later that week, I went on another trip, this time with Mabel. Around Lagos, I kept seeing people who resembled African Americans from TV and film: that same kissing of teeth, the intriguingly similar speech cadences that emphasised certain syllables, the way when they laughed they clapped their hands and collapsed forwards. Yet the idea that some Americans originated from Nigeria via the slave trade barely crossed my childhood mind, especially when most Americans and West Indians were flocking to Ghana in search of their African roots. The author Maya Angelou was one of many African Americans to spend time in Ghana. During the early 1960s, she worked at the University of Ghana’s music department, wrote newspaper articles and plays, and learnt the Fante language. English-speaking and politically stable, Ghana has long been more palatable for foreign visitors, and holds firm at the centre of the slave heritage tourism map. As a travel guidebook author, I too had visited its imposing, white coastal slave fort at Elmina where slaves were imprisoned before their journey across the ocean. I had also seen forts in Senegal, which for years has successfully portrayed a hut on its Gorée Island as the fulcrum of the transatlantic trade, and stood on the beaches in Benin where slaves left Africa for the last time. But Nigeria, for all its size and history, seemed a rather quiet player in this context, even though our colonial place name made our slavery links clear: Ghana was the Gold Coast, further west was the Ivory Coast, while Nigeria was unequivocally titled the Slave Coast.