‘Oh dear, oh dear, what have you done?’ she exclaimed.
‘I fell in a hole.’
‘So sorry,’ she said. ‘You must come to our clinic.’
We were whisked up to the sixth floor only to find the clinic closed. But the kind lady found some bandage and more magic balm, sat me down and tightly bandaged my foot, which hurt like hell. Grimacing, I hopped back to the lifts. Then the strangest thing happened. Also standing waiting was a woman so pregnant that she looked as if she was about to give birth. In her hand she was holding up a photocopied sheet as if she meant us to see it.
Tom and I both caught sight of it at the same time and looked at each other in astonishment. The paper was a map of a place on which was clearly written Isashi Road, just one letter different from the Mail’s Isahi.
‘Excuse me,’ I asked, ‘are you from that place?’
‘Yes,’ she replied, looking surprised.
‘Is it called Isashi?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does it have a school called Luciana school?’
‘Yes, it’s just round the corner from my house.’
We couldn’t believe it. Discovering that she was about to catch a series of three buses to get back there, we offered her a lift. If she had refused we would have kidnapped her. She insisted on bringing her friend, a banker in a suit, so all four of us squashed into the back of our yellow taxi and set off.
It was about 5.30 p.m. and rush hour but the pregnant lady assured us it was only an hour or so to Isashi. That was African time. The traffic out of the city was barely at walking pace, so packed was the highway. Alongside us were buses so crammed that passengers were crouched on the roof and squeezed out of the windows.
In and out of the traffic weaved hundreds of small boys younger even than Damilola, coming to the car windows offering everything from clothes pegs to shower curtains, garden shears to toilet rolls. You could literally sit in your car and do your shopping, though not buy the one thing I wanted – a wedding card for my friends, Mark and Caroline. My request sent them all scurrying about in search of one.
The sun was setting as we turned off the Benin road and I began looking at my watch. By 7.30 p.m. we were at a complete standstill. Cars had apparently changed their minds about where they were going midway and turned around, blocking traffic in both directions. I’d never seen anything like it. No one seemed to have a clue how to get out. Then we heard gunfire. ‘Highway robbers,’ said our driver. It was completely dark and, trapped inside our car, Tom and I began to feel rather vulnerable as the only white people in sight.
I couldn’t believe that the pregnant lady and the banker did this journey to work and back every day, and by three buses, so it was presumably even slower.
It was almost 9 p.m. when we finally arrived in Isashi. I was nearly in tears, wondering how I was ever going to catch the 11.50 p.m. flight to London to be back in time for the wedding. The area had no electricity so we could not see much. But luck was on our side. Our pregnant passenger guided us up a side street and outside the white walls of Luciana school. A guard appeared and told us the headmistress lived next door.
My foot felt like a ton weight but I hopped out of the car and into the school where the headmistress and her husband agreed to talk. It was a short interview as I had one eye on the clock and was standing on one leg. They were very helpful, however, and told us that the best friend of Damilola’s father lived round the corner. We piled into their jeep, still with the pregnant lady and the banker in tow. The friend of the family had the key to the Taylors’ house so took us inside. It was a pleasant house, no comparison to the squalid Peckham council flat. I was exhausted so collapsed on the sofa and rather imperiously demanded they bring things over, such as a large framed photo of Damilola and one of his school friends.
I rudely rushed the interviews, neglecting all the usual niceties, and we were out of Isashi by about 10.20 p.m., waving farewell to our baffled friends from the bank. I’d got the story; all I needed was to catch the flight. Once again we quickly got trapped in one of the world’s worst traffic jams. The minutes were ticking by and I was losing hope. Eventually, I got the driver to ask one of the many people milling around if they knew a short cut to the airport. A young man jumped in and led us through a warren of dark alleys, the middle of a market and across some farmland. It did occur to me that he could be leading us to some remote spot in order to rob us, but instead he led us on to the airport road. The wad of naira I gave him was well worth it.
We got to the airport at 11.30 p.m., just twenty minutes before the flight. The counters were already closed. I imagined the shocked silence in church the next morning as no one appeared to do the reading. I was lucky to be with Tom, who was one of the nicest correspondents you could hope to meet on the road. Although he was from a rival paper and also needed to file, he had become as determined as I was that I would make the wedding. From somewhere he rustled up Victor, the BA manager. Fortunately the Sunday Telegraph had been in touch to warn I’d had an accident. But there was an unforeseen problem. They needed a doctor’s certificate to allow me to fly. I couldn’t believe it. ‘It’s only my foot,’ I wailed. ‘I’m not ill.’ Finally, Victor said that if I could get to the gate before the doors closed then I could fly. A wheelchair was summoned. I jumped in.
We’d gone about twenty metres when the lady pushing it stopped. ‘Madam, there’s a problem,’ she said.
‘What now?’
‘The tyres are flat.’
I got out and started hopping manically, then another wheelchair appeared. This was little better. The lady pushing it was wearing stilettos she could hardly walk in and tottered in tiny steps like a Japanese geisha. Victor appeared and exhorted her to hurry. We got to the door of the aircraft just as it was closing. The stiletto woman made a final push and I was in.
Damilola thought he was coming to a better life in England – how wrong he was
Sunday Telegraph, 3 December 2000
IN THE SMALL community of Isashi village on the dusty western edge of Lagos, life in England is seen as a far-off dream – a green and pleasant land where there is always running water and electricity (Isashi has had none for the past three months), where people are always polite, doff their hats and stop for tea at four in the afternoon, and where there are nice clean trains, and buses driving along tree-lined roads with no traffic jams.
So in August, when 10-year-old Damilola Taylor told his friends and teachers that he was going to London to live, they were envious. ‘Sometimes, when we have a generator, we watch TV programmes like Sesame Street and see the lives and toys that children have in England and America,’ said his friend David Akbapot. ‘It is like another world.’
Lucy Ikioda, the headmistress of Luciana school, where Damilola studied, was delighted. ‘England is a fantasy land to the children. I thought Dami would have access to so many things that he did not have here, that he could be a doctor or something respected. I told him that one of these days when I get to England you can help me out, look after your old teacher who once looked after you.’
That within four months Damilola would be found bleeding to death in a dingy stairwell of a half-derelict estate which would not be out of place in central Lagos, having been stabbed probably by schoolmates, has horrified the people of Isashi and shattered their rosy vision of England.
‘We just don’t understand,’ said Mrs Ikioda, who wept when her husband told her the news. ‘Nigeria is one of the most dangerous countries in the world and England the safest. But such a thing could not happen here. I read that Dami dragged himself a hundred yards bleeding, but no one came to help. Where were his neighbours? Why were his teachers letting him walk dangerous ways home? What are the schools doing there that children do not learn discipline and respect for each other?’
Such questions might seem odd coming from a resident of a city where nothing works, the heat and humidity are relentless, corruption is so endemic that I once had to bribe a bellboy fo
r a bulb to have light in the room of my five-star hotel, and violent death is common.
Friday’s newspapers reflected a typical day in the Nigerian capital. Fifty people killed in an oil pipeline explosion that occurred when they were collecting oil for fuel from a leak. Two people killed and scores injured when a minibus ploughed into a crowd and a gang called the Area Boys started shooting. Such incidents – along with diseases such as cholera, malaria and typhoid – mean that life expectancy is less than 50.
However, Nigeria – even Lagos, with its population of 14 million – has a sense of community long lost in England. In Isashi, everyone helps each other when times are hard, dropping over some rice and goat meat for supper, and looking after each other’s children. Almost everybody seems to go to church – a growth industry in Nigeria, with numerous Pentecostal churches springing up in every neighbourhood, boasting names such as Feed My Sheep and Operation Naked the Devil.
While foreigners are warned to stay off the roads at night – on the way to Isashi I saw people held up at gunpoint while stuck in their cars in a traffic jam – children play safely in the dark streets. Not with Sony PlayStations or Pokémon cards, but with cars and lorries that they have cleverly crafted from wire and bottle tops.
Benson Owoturu, a builder who constructed the Taylors’ bungalow in Isashi and has been the best friend of Damilola’s father, Richard, for twenty-five years, recalled: ‘It’s almost exactly a year since Damilola’s tenth birthday party on 7 December. There were hundreds of people, a live band and whole goats on the barbecue. Look, everyone got gifts.’ He shows me a pink plastic mug printed: ‘Hurray! Damilola Taylor Is 10. Wishing You More Prosperous Years Ahead.’
Mr Owoturu took me next door into the house that the Taylors planned to come back to after receiving medical treatment for the epilepsy of Beme, their eldest daughter, so that she could be married off. This was the reason why Mrs Taylor took her three children to London.
It is a comfortable place, with neatly trimmed conifers in the garden, large rooms with black-and-white tiled floors and ceiling fans to slowly stir the heavy air. On the terracotta painted walls are a selection of framed photographs of the wedding of Richard and Gloria Taylor and of their children, including several of their youngest, Damilola – the boy whom his headmistress remembers as ‘lovable’ and whose favourite book was Cinderella. Even as a baby, he had that shy, beseeching smile that was all over British newspapers last week as the image of what has gone wrong with our society.
From the house, Damilola had only to walk two streets away to enter the green gates of Luciana school, passing its small playground with a Donald Duck slide under a palm tree, to be in morning assembly at 7.45 a.m.
Painted white and Mediterranean blue, the walls are dotted with slogans such as ‘Create Time Now to Train Your Children and You Will Have Peace For Ever’. Any child ten minutes late is caned – Mrs Ikioda is a stern disciplinarian. ‘All my children are well behaved,’ she explains. ‘That’s the job of a school – to make sure that they are properly trained.’
It is easy to see why the people of Isashi might think that England offers a better life. Luciana school might look nice but, with fees of only 1,500 naira (£10) a term for its 200 pupils, it cannot afford computers, telephones or teaching aids any more sophisticated than a blackboard and a poster of the digestive system.
The local shops consist of one shack selling yams, rice, unrefrigerated meat and condensed milk for treats. The village has no roads, only sandy tracks. The local buses look as if they started life on a scrapheap. Their bodywork is rusted, all the seats torn out, windows broken; radiator grilles hang off, engines clank and they have been painted with slogans such as ‘Put Your Faith in God’.
The last train in Lagos ran some fifteen years ago. Despite being the world’s sixth-biggest oil producer, Nigeria has constant fuel shortages and there are mile-long queues to buy canfuls on the black market.
The journey to Lagos from Isashi, a trip that Damilola’s mother Gloria made every day to reach her job as a manager at the Union Bank, means taking three buses. The day that I made the trip by car, it took four hours because of the ‘go-slow’, as traffic jams are known locally: cars were attempting to do U-turns, blocking the whole road. For such a commute, people must leave home at 6 a. m., often not returning before 10 p.m.
And, while children are prized in Nigerian society, theirs can be an extremely tough life. The highways are thronged with children as young as 6 selling to captive customers in gridlocked cars everything from Venetian blinds and apples on strings to Michael Bolton CDs.
Even so, when they dream of England, they do not dream of ending up in another hellhole 3,000 miles away.
On the way to Isashi, sitting in what seemed like the Perfect Traffic Jam in which nobody could move, inhaling carbon monoxide and hearing gunshots, the only white woman amid thousands of cars, I felt the same unease that I had experienced two nights earlier.
Yet then I was in south-east London, only a few miles from where I had grown up. North Peckham by night is a menacing place. Few streetlamps work, teenagers in hooded sweatshirts hang about on corners sizing up passers-by, BMWs with blacked-out windows park in dark spots for drug deals, receivers hang uselessly from broken telephone boxes, and everybody avoids eye contact.
It is everyone out for themselves. Even in the brighter lights of Peckham High Street, with its award-winning library, no one is safe. A month ago, there was a shootout at Chicago’s nightclub with youths firing Uzi sub-machine-guns across the room.
St Briavels Court, where Damilola’s family moved in August, sounds like the sort of place that should have small almshouses with rose-covered trellises. Instead, it is a grim block daubed with graffiti, all the ground-floor windows boarded up. Inside, past the lift that has been out of order for longer than anyone can remember, the corners reeking of urine, the ceilings black with mould, and the slimy walls, four flights of stairs lead to number 32 where the Taylors live.
Each flight ends in a dark walkway, lit by flickering forty-watt bulbs, in which shadowy figures lurk – the squatters who have moved into the abandoned apartments. When one of them, with long, matted hair, suddenly appeared from a door revealing a room with no electricity – only a candle – a figure huddled in a corner and two syringes on the floor, I grasped my bag as tightly as I would in an African city. Down one corridor, firefighters were trying to put out flames caused by a dropped cigarette.
As a foreign correspondent who has spent the past fourteen years reporting mainly on Third World countries and eleven years living in them, I found it hard to believe that such a dismal place existed on my own doorstep. I have been to numerous places such as Damilola’s village of Isashi and far worse in Africa almost unblinkingly, yet in England my own middle-class existence had fooled me into thinking that people in my country all lived better.
Was the spacious bungalow in the sandy village of palm trees and daily sunshine, where children and chicke ns run free, really a worse place to live than this dingy flat with peeling paint and not a green leaf in sight, where Damilola had to sleep on the sofa?
Politicians will say that north Peckham is changing. Built in the 1960s and described by the Bishop of Southwark as one of the worst housing estates in Europe, the five blocks are gradually being demolished in a £260 million project, to be replaced with so-called ‘family-friendly’ units with a nursery, parks and a youth centre.
But, for Damilola, it is too late. Michelle, the tenants’ representative, whose mother lives below the Taylors, showed me the black burn mark round the letter box where someone had thrown in a lighted rag. ‘Every evening we collect my mum from here because it is too dangerous to be here at night,’ she said. ‘You in the media and the politicians will all forget us soon.’
I hope not. It’s hard to forget that appealing little face in the photographs. I might complain about commuting and the English rain, but, with the arrogance of most western foreign correspondents, I had alway
s assumed that life in my country was superior to most places that I had reported on. Damilola’s death forced me to confront realities about my own country that I never dreamt existed.
I did get to the church just before the bride, the above article written on the plane at speed. There was no time to explain to my friends as I hopped up to the lectern to read the lesson. It was a wonderful wedding with lots of champagne to dull the pain. When I finally got to casualty that evening, at University College Hospital, they told me there was an eight-hour wait. I couldn’t help wondering whether it would have been that long in Lagos.
A Short Arrest in the Ivory Coast
It was Easter Monday and I was enjoying a rare day at home with my husband and baby before flying out the next evening to Pakistan when the news came in that a ship was sailing round West Africa bearing a cargo of ‘child slaves’. A spokesperson for Unicef was saying that there were at least 100 children and perhaps as many as 250 on board and they had been sold by their parents for as little as £10. The ship had left Benin three weeks before but not been allowed to dock by officials in Gabon and Cameroon. The crew were thought to be running so short of food and water that some children may have been thrown overboard.
It was a horrific image. Worse, the children were thought to have been bought to work on cocoa plantations harvesting the cocoa beans that had gone into many of our Easter eggs.
‘Forget Pakistan. Find chocolate slaves forthwith’ came the message from Con Coughlin, the Sunday Telegraph managing editor.
This was easier said than done. Rounds of phone calls to aid agency press officers established that Ivory Coast would be the best place to look as it was the largest exporter of cocoa beans and had the most children working on cocoa plantations. I phoned the travel office to cancel Islamabad and book Abidjan. As usual they reacted as if I were randomly switching continents just to spite them. There was a flight first thing on Wednesday, which gave me a day to get visas.
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