It is a hot day.
Another of those days
that traffic stretches as far as the eyes can see causing people in cars to share something other than the unity of crawling traffic and sweltering
heat: short fused temperament.
This is Lagos, the
heat and traffic snarls are constant realities that we have learnt to live with,
no matter how hard that is. Nigerians, we are special breeds, rubber men that
defy the laws of elasticity—we are yet to find that elastic limit and we
continue to adjust to constantly shifting challenges. Nothing seems to shift
more constantly than our traffic laws. Perhaps they don’t really shift, change,
rather the government finds new way to express them. That way they keep us on
our toes, sweating in choking traffic.
We do have constants,
those things that remain the same year in year out. The danfo bus, a modified
Volkswagen van that perhaps ferried goods from one point to another in the
European country that hosted its first incarnation, is one of the things that
remain the same. A testament of our dump mentality, the danfo, like millions of
other automobiles in Nigeria, comes second-hand: Europe’s discard serving
faithfully here, still.
There is little to see
in the scrap-like drabness of the danfo bus I boarded in the hope that their
street and alley meandering ability would perhaps shorten the time I would
otherwise spend in the traffic snarl—a vain hope. The clammy intensity of the
heat that comes from within and without did not gift concentration, so
Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I will
Write About This Place rests in its place in the side pocket of my
well-used bag. Yes, I had discovered that the three hours spent in traffic
heading to work and the three hours spent on the way back is a good time as any
to catch up on reading. Before One Day I
Will Write About This Place, one of those Ikeja-under-bridge-paper-backs—a
novel by John Varley—occupied the space in the bag. Victor Ehikhamenor’s brand
new book Excuse Me!, a testament of
where Nigerian literature is headed, will replace Binya’s in a few days.
