by Paul Carter
I left Sydney very quietly. Ruby and Tony, good friends who kept my head up regardless of how much I pissed and moaned about my lack of a normal life, were there to wave me off. I was so depressed, but when I finally found my way to the seat on the aircraft and started thumbing through the in-flight magazine, my mood lifted for the first time in weeks. No matter what Africa had to offer, I knew it was a better option than skulking around the house over the festive season looking like someone just shat on the turkey.
The flight was your standard economy-class nightmare exercise in confined space anxiety management, with a couple of infants screaming so loud that dogs 35000 feet below us could hear them. I ate the mini-meal with the mini-plastic cutlery, watched the mini-TV trying not to get the headphone cord in my mini-mashed potatoes, while the overweight flatulent pensioner next to me made a concerted effort to have the whole cabin smelling like cabbage before the flight attendants had cleared away the trays. I’m sure everyone else in that section felt the same way. We were locked in, unable to escape because of the tray tables and the mini-food carts that effectively block your path to cleaner air and a mini-toilet where one could have a few mini-moments of relative solitude, or a claustrophobic panic attack, whatever gets you through today’s budget air travel. Just think of the frequent mini-miles, not the deep vein thrombosis that will have you dropping dead on a beach on your first day.
Charles de Gaulle International Airport sucks. I had been through there on a few occasions and it was always a pain. Eventually I found myself standing in a heaving sea of tired passengers with methane intoxication, all jostling for a good spot near the luggage carousel. I could hear the two children from the flight still breaking the sound barrier and making people on the other side of Paris cringe and cover their ears. (It’s not that I dislike children, I love them, and I totally understand it’s the air pressure in their little inner ears causing them pain, and that they are too young to clear their sinus passages and equalise the pressure; it can be very painful, like flying with a bad head cold. I just don’t have any experience with kids. Even with my sister’s three boys, I am told I handled them like rabies-infected carrier monkeys. She made me change a nappy. I have seen men cut limbs off, all kinds of nasty accidents on the drill floor, but a nephew’s shitty nappy made me gag and resemble someone trying to deal with an untidy parcel filled with a mixture of nuclear waste and velcro. But, as I’ve been told before, it’s different when it’s your own kid’s poo, right?)
My taxi pulled up outside our Paris office and I was greeted by a friendly receptionist, who politely showed me into the manager’s office. He was affable and smiled too much, and while he was offering me coffee I saw the ‘poor bastard’ look in his eye. The logistical issues turned out to be remarkably silly, almost comical if they were not so serious.
On arrival in Lagos, after going through customs and immigration, I was to look for my driver; he would be wearing green company coveralls and holding up a sign with my name on it. I would approach and speak this sentence and only this sentence, ‘It’s hot here, just like Australia.’ The driver, upon hearing that, was to answer, ‘Just as hot, but no kangaroos.’ If he didn’t say that, it meant that he had murdered the real driver, stolen the company car and was planning to drive me out of town, put two in the back of my head and make off with my stuff.
I was curious as to who thought up the dialogue, because it was bloody stupid. The French manager, puzzled at my sarcasm, said he constructed the sentences. I only hope one day I can see him arrive at Kingsford Smith, walk up to his driver and say,‘Bonjour, the potato is on the suitcase.’ He didn’t get it, and went on to emphasise that this was a vital protocol as two men had been killed exactly that way only a few months earlier. So with my ridiculous cloak-and-dagger routine committed to memory, I walked off to spend an enjoyable evening with Mum and John.
We had a fabulous dinner and a special wine; we sat and talked until late about the entire goings-on in our lives. I ate too much fois gras and hoped my Nigerian driver wouldn’t shoot me as I padded up the stairs to brush my teeth and sleep off John’s three bottles of Château de Carrier Monkey. Mum cried at the train station the next day, and gave me her standard ‘Don’t forget your safety’ line. But she and John knew the rigs well after thirty years in the business so it was pointless trying to gloss over where I was going.
The flight to Lagos was a carbon copy of the Paris flight, except I was the only white person. Babies screamed, the food was small and tasteless. Instead of a smelly pensioner I sat next to a middle-aged Nigerian woman who enjoyed telling me that Lagos Airport is the most dangerous airport in the world, and I should be very careful indeed. That’s no problem, I thought, I’m just going to walk up to a complete stranger and come out with the dumbest line imaginable, and hope he doesn’t blow my brains out for two hundred dollars in traveller’s cheques, a Mars Bar and some dirty underwear.
I could smell Nigeria before I could see it. Then on our final approach I looked down and saw a mess that resembled a Manila shanty town after a typhoon, with extra shit and heavy on the random people with big guns.
Everyone disembarked, that is to say, everyone just got up and rushed the cabin crew, who flung the door open and let the passengers trample over each other in a bizarre scramble to get out. I thought, perhaps the flatulent pensioner from yesterday was on this flight? But when I rounded the last corner of the terminal I understood why: eight immigration booths and one guy on duty.
He spotted me a mile away at the back of the official queue-jumpers’ queue, his eyes immediately bulging. You could almost hear the ‘KA-CHING’.They told me in Paris to arrive looking poor, no jewellery etc., so I was looking lower than whale shit, and if you saw me at home you would cross the street to avoid me. But I could not disguise white skin; a bribe was definitely in order. I hoped they took traveller’s cheques.
After dealing with him and his two mates in customs I was officially in Africa. Passing through large wooden doors I was suddenly confronted with a mass of black faces, all staring straight at me. Then just behind the front row of the crowd I saw the sign ‘Mr Pauli’. Practising my line under my breath, I walked up to the fit-looking man in green coveralls who bore the sign and said in a loud confident voice,‘It’s hot here, just like Australia.’
He gave me a blank look, then flashed a huge bent-toothed grin and said,‘I am de driva.’
Cocksucker, I thought, what do I do now? Leaning in, with lots of eye contact, I repeated, ‘IT’S HOT HERE, JUST LIKE AUSTRALIA.’
‘Oh yes sa, BUT NO HOT KANGAROOS.’
Close enough.
‘I am Oscar de driva.’
‘How do you do Oscar, now get me fuckin’ out of here.’
‘Very good Mr Pauli follow me, I have caa with air-condishanings.’
Oscar was only twenty-one and had already managed to father four kids. He had been working since he was eleven and looked it. His English was good, I especially liked his accent. He hoped we could talk a lot and perhaps I could help him learn to read and write. He was in the middle of asking questions about what it was like to live in a free Western democracy and sleep with white women when I became distracted by a large sign on the side of the road.
Fifty feet square in size it read, ‘Welcome to Port Harcourt’. Most of the letters had long since fallen off, and the whole thing was riddled with bullet holes and covered in brown stains that suggested some strange explosion had occurred involving lots of hot coffee. Two huge black vultures perched on the top of the sign and a third was on the ground with his head buried inside what turned out to be the chest cavity of some unlucky Nigerian.
My jaw slowly dropped, as I tried to take it in. That summed up Port Harcourt perfectly.
Oscar flashed me another bent grin, palmed a pistol from under the seat and said, ‘First time in Nigeria? No wahalla, you are always protected sa.’
Christ, for a second I thought he was going to point that gun at me, and I would be joining th
e vulture picnic, the second course in an ever-increasing pile of dead idiots. So I played it cool, only making him stop once so I could throw up.
Guns are as common a sight in Nigeria as mobile phones are in Sydney. In this respect the Nigerians put even the Americans to shame—but no wait, guns don’t kill people, people kill people right? Oscar de driva always had his mobile phone and his gun on him. I thought Nokia should develop a camera/gun, or a phone/gun, or even a gun/phone/camera . . . there would be massive sales in West Africa.
Port Harcourt is a remarkably dangerous place. Once considered a jewel in the dark continent, war and corruption has destroyed it. And while 2.3 million barrels a day come from its belly, none of that is put into the most basic of human needs. All the oil service company personnel operate from bases surrounded by high walls with razor wire on top and armed guards on duty twenty-four hours. The sensible people only leave the confines of the base to go to a rig or to the accommodation, that’s within another secure base. If you must go out it’s best done in a large group. All the transportation between these places is done with an armed driver and a guard who usually carries an automatic weapon and 130 rounds—hope that’s enough.
We drove into town, past filthy ramshackle neighbourhoods and the kind of abject poverty that puts every creature comfort you have at home clearly in perspective. I was immediately thankful that I was born on the right continent. After a few miles I asked Oscar what ‘No wahalla’ means. He explained—it’s basically ‘No problem’—and for the next six months it was ‘No wahalla this’,‘No wahalla that’.
When we arrived at the base, Oscar beeped the horn and the two heavy steel doors swung open. The compound was 500 square metres of concrete with three large hangars on one side and three single-storey office buildings on the other. In the centre of the compound an ancient truck was parked and two security guards were pointing their rifles at a local man who was on the ground, cowering, his arms doing a frantic explanatory pantomime, he was talking so fast it came out in one long syllable.
Oscar ignored all this and pulled up in front of the largest of the administration buildings. I jumped out and ran over to the guards. ‘Stop pointing those weapons at that man.’
They turned and smiled. ‘Dis man was stealing diesel boss.’
I looked at the accused man more closely; he was badly beaten, obviously suffering broken ribs, possibly haemorrhaging, going from his difficulty in breathing and the profuse amount of blood running out of his mouth.‘Who told you to do this?’ I asked the guards.
The bigger one stepped forward. He had a cold look; he was enjoying his job and I wondered how many people he had killed. He pointed over my right shoulder but nothing was said. I turned and saw the angry base supervisor marching towards us. He looked straight through me and barked at the guards in a thick German accent,‘I told you to flog him well.’
The local man started crawling away slowly, under the truck.
The heavyset German had a round head and fair complexion, which in the African heat made him look like a Bulldog that just swallowed a bee. He extended a sweaty hand.‘Hello, I’m Carl,’ ‘What the fuck’s going on Carl?’
‘Ya ya come, you don’t know how we do things here yet.’
By the end of my first day in Nigeria I was disgusted to a point that made me feel ill.
After meeting all the expat crew stationed there, it was apparent that this base was a kind of Betty Ford clinic, as most of them were disgruntled middle-aged habitual alcoholics, who regularly entertained each other with a fist-fight. I celebrated Christmas and then the New Year in the company of what’s best described as lobotomised monkeys. They started out well, lots of handshakes and backslapping, but quickly degenerated into the kind of malevolent lunacy I thought was only a myth in today’s oilfield. Right down to throwing full cans of beer skyward and unloading 12-gauge shotguns at them. This was followed by a rousing game of hurl-fireworks-at-each-other, the indoors version of course. I did get on well with a couple of them, but on the whole the crew was burnt out; for them the prospect of working on new projects with new equipment presented all the excitement of a blocked toilet to a plumber.
Luckily I spent more time offshore working on the rig than on the base. During one spell in town, the mechanic announced his new house was finished and he wanted to show me.
‘I have been building it for almost one year,’ he said proudly.
It was just around the corner from the base so I said we would go and have a look at lunch time. When we got there I couldn’t believe what I saw. There in amongst the rusty tin and mud bricks of a foul shanty town stood the mechanic’s new house, constructed entirely of blue plastic milk crates bound together with baling wire. There were hundreds of them, with tin pop-riveted to the outside, forming the house. The whole thing stood about one foot off the ground on another series of milk crates. The floor was made of plywood from the packing crates used to ship our equipment. The toilet was a hole cut in the plywood floor in the back corner.
The mechanic’s wife came out followed by a procession of children. They lined up around the outside and with some help from the neighbours demonstrated how the house could easily be picked up and moved once the crap piled up underneath the toilet. He was already accumulating more milk crates to build an extension, possibly a nice porch or gazebo. Apparently the highest cost involved was the gun his wife was brandishing, because milk crates are highly soughtafter in the Nigerian building trade.
The crew’s accommodation, a simple house which seemed palatial in comparison, came with its own set of problems. Getting home was one. For example, once, I was on my way back from a job, the chopper touched down just as the sun was starting to set, its rotor wash sending up a cloud of dust that smothered the small heliport. The driver and guard were waiting for me. That was a relief because on the last occasion I sat at the heliport for two hours, waiting, too afraid to take a taxi, because shooting me would be more lucrative than driving me to town.
As we drove through Port Harcourt I was told there had been a lot of rioting that week because of the elections. It was all very tribal, the Muslim ‘Felani’ in the north clashing with the ‘Ebu’ Christians in the south. When they get really pissed off with each other they wave limbs from banana trees over their heads, and if you see them throw the limbs then it’s going to the next level. That’s when everyone runs home and comes straight back with a gun, or a petrol bomb, or a machete.
The car was all over the place and it became apparent once he started talking that the driver was shitfaced. He took us on a brief but exciting detour into a lane of oncoming traffic, turning sharply down an alley and into the middle of a pre-riot banana branch waving session. As soon as the crowd pinged my shiny bald white head they rushed the car.
Within minutes the driver was panicking; he stalled and flooded the engine and frantically tried to restart it. The crowd began to produce weapons and beat their fists on the windows. The Pajero rocked under the surge. I remember screaming at the guard to do something. He racked the cocking lever on the side of his AK, cranked down the window, stuck out the barrel, roughly pointing at the sky, and emptied the magazine.
Everyone shat their pants. The weapon kicked in the guard’s hands, as empty brass casings spat across the inside of the car, hit the windscreen and glanced off directly into the crotch of the driver, who was still keying the ignition and pumping the throttle like the drummer of a speed-metal band.
Empty shell casings are extremely hot, and the driver was wearing shorts.
He suddenly shot up, banging his head into the roof, but at the same time he somehow held the ignition on and bunny-hopped the car straight over a man who was trying to clamber onto the hood over the crash bar. We rocked over to the right as the car went over the man; I scrambled over my offshore bag just in time to see him emerge from under the car, one big Desert Dueler tread mark running across his flat body.
The guard had changed magazines and was hanging out of the window n
ow pointing his rifle directly at the crowd, over his trigger freeze problem; he looked like he was enjoying the whole thing. We bolted flat out back to the base, and I made the journey laying flat on my face on the car floor.
Arriving back at the staff house, I relayed my story to the crew who just shrugged their shoulders as they had all been through similar things before; it’s just part of working in Nigeria.
A few days later I found myself returning to the staff house alone, everyone was on jobs, so I sat down to enjoy a quiet night in front of the TV.We had a satellite dish on the roof and could get half a dozen decent channels, the house favourite being the cartoon channel. The boys would sit and watch cartoons through the night. The fact that they did that was disturbing enough, but what I found truly remarkable was that this channel carried commercials. What could you possibly sell to someone who voluntarily watches Deputy Dawg at three in the morning?
On this night I tuned it to HBO Movies: Fight Club was just starting, I hadn’t seen it and was looking forward to it. Then halfway through the movie the wall socket behind me started making more noise than usual. Our electricity was supplied by a massive generator in the backyard that had come from some rig and was far too big for the house. The lights would regularly jump from sixty watts of glow to 100 and back down to ten, and the wall sockets would crackle and spark, giving the impression that someone was being electrocuted in the basement every half hour. But I was so used to it I just ignored it. Only moments later I could smell something other than Africa. Turning, I saw the wall socket, the air-conditioner, and a good deal of wallpaper on fire.
The fire extinguisher in the kitchen was empty; it had been used up during the New Year’s Eve indoor fireworks display. I grabbed the small one from the car and put it out, but was worried the fire could reignite in the roof or wall space so I checked all the rooms and found one of the guys asleep. He was most upset with me; not for waking him, but for putting out the fire.