Of traffic snarls and the land of the rubber men

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.

Time to bite back harder

Weeks ago, while seeking creative stimulus on television, I chanced upon an American programme, one of those life-of-a-very-rich-brat formats that are becoming very popular these days.


This one centred on an eighteen year old girl who came home to receive what she termed the worst news of her life - a forced visit to Africa (it was actually Kenya) as a birthday present.

My grouse is not with the programme title (though ‘Exiled’, is a rather harsh name for a holiday to the Kenyan Savannah) but with the way, the producers conveniently skipped most of modern Kenya - minus a beat up Land Rover and a khaki wearing guide. The editor cut off all references to modern Kenya, leaving just a sparsely populated Masai village, whose natives paint their round earthen huts with cow dung - a point the teenager made sure to stress when her rich dad called her via satellite phone.

Another sore point is with the subtitles. The native guide in the programme, a tall, beautiful Masai girl inappropriately named Josephine, who spoke clear, just slightly accented English, had her words subtitled, while the nasal sounding American teenager, whose words seem to drawl forever, made do without subtitles.

Anyway, I took solace in the thought that the use of subtitles probably meant Americans cannot understand clear, well-spoken English. Perhaps I am propagating a stereotype here but what else does the constant use of subtitles when African speakers are concerned denote?

However, as we all know, double standards are hallmarks of the great western experience.

One would have expected Josephine to be invited to partake, even if briefly, in the ‘good life’ when her American guest went back home, but, expectedly, nothing of such occurred. The American girl went back home to tell about the horrors she faced during her five-day stay, further subjecting an already badly informed society to more miss-education .

Time and time again, I have come across condescending stereotypical opinions about Africa and Africans in the western media. I used to excuse these statements, believing, erroneously, that the writers did not know enough about Africa to form an opinion about the topic they chose to spotlight, when in truth, these writers were following a cultural script that sends every negative image about Africa to the top of the list without recourse to factuality.

I was so set in my belief that human nature makes it imperative for people to seek knowledge about the unknown, that a thirst for knowledge inherent in man makes discovery possible.

Well, I believed wrong. For the West, knowledge about Africa, when not linked to profit making, is generally constrained to stories about despotic leaders, child soldiers, wars, epidemics and recently, mass rapes. Even knowledge about economic potential exploited from Africa is usually left to the annual reports of western multinationals involved in the exploitation.

Sometime ago a friend pondered on his Facebook status about the common perception by westerners that Africa is one country. The answer, which I am sure you would have grasped, points to an institutionalised apathy to knowledge outside the western sphere of influence.

Thankfully, I was not one of those that bought into the Obamamania that swept this planet a few years ago.
Africans, even more than the African Americans, saw in that man’s ascension a sign of the acceptance of the African into the scheme of things.

They forgot that Obama, raised within the safety of his white mother’s family, would naturally feel more affinity to that race, hence, the little impact of his government on the perception of Africa on the global stage.

The battle to get Africa more respect in the western media should be an all-inclusive one. Let us shout to the high heavens when we feel aggrieved, let the African American media spare Africa more coverage; let their celebrities visit more, and not just our game reserves, let their writers counter the negative images that the west seem to feed off. Only by doing such can they find relevance in a society that begrudges them their blackness. An African American posting a picture of starving children in Somalia beside that of poor welfare African American kids in a quest to explain why she is proud of her ‘good fortune’ for being born American smacks too much of self loathing and the culture of ignorance we are talking about.

We in Africa should also do more to sell ourselves. We have to start believing again, to look beyond the toga of bad leadership and embrace a more positive outlook to life, if for nothing, then for the fact that the western world needs us more than we need them.

There is really nothing to be ashamed of in being an African, we may be poor by Dollar and Pound standards, but as Eric Donaldson said, ‘‘the progress you make is not about how rich you are’’.

Hollywood and the African: whither our culture

Even if the average African viewer tries to balance the portrayal of Africa in Hollywood sponsored movies against the information that might have been available to the movie makers, it still remains very obvious that the average Hollywood movie, deliberately or not, continuously portrays Africa in a distorted light.

It has become accepted norm for Hollywood to assign a singular, peculiar speech pattern and mannerism to the African character regardless of geographical origin. These movies also go out of their way to avoid modern Africa, choosing instead to lay emphasis on slums or build throw back African villages, images of what was obtainable a hundred years ago – It appears Hollywood allow for time shift in movies about the west but refuse to do same for those set in Africa.

One might try to trivialize this Tarzan and King Kong mentality, and argue that those movies about Africa stem from another era, but how does one explain the bastardization of traditional African society in recent movies like Wonderful World, Phat girls, Sahara, when the sun sets and the blockbuster Wolverine (though one might give Wolverine some kudus, it still toed that sour line).

One recalls with unabashed horror a housemaid, supposedly in urban Lagos, near the end of ‘Phat girls’, who conveniently couldn’t understand basic English, the official language of Nigeria for decades (she naturally should be able speak the common pidgin variant) and how the Lagos disappeared in ‘Sahara’ replaced by a dirty little sparsely inhabited islet – very insulting, methinks, to depict a very modern city with two airports, several harbours and millions of inhabitants, this way.
It gets worse, in ‘wonderful world’ where only a small airstrip with a single engine airplane represents Dakar airport, making one wonder if the crew could not get hold of a clip of the country’s international airport or even one of several local airports? Then, again conveniently, a single-room house represented a village in Senegal, how obtainable is that.

Then a five hour trip from Lagos to eastern Nigeria became ‘a two day trip’ in ‘Wolverine’ and the heroes of ‘Sahara’ managed to navigate by boat from Lagos to Mali through a Niger River that aside from being dammed in Nigeria, is wildly known to be not navigable after Lokoja in central Nigeria, at least by a boat the size they used – Makes one wonder if the director bothered to surf the net to find out stuff about Nigeria at all or if as usual it was just convenient to portray Africa through the West’s eye, no apologies given.

Some of the constant goofs Hollywood make about Africa, aside from being hurtful, appear to be somewhat deliberate, as if Hollywood is saying: ‘we don’t have to be factual when portraying you because you don’t really matter.’ Why else would they spend millions of dollar making sure sundry props are up to date and as factual as possible, but yet depict Africa constantly like post stone age society. I am not talking about racism and other like prejudices here (that will come), but simple truth about African realities and lifestyle.

Somehow Hollywood seems to derive a lot of joy – and money – making the world believe that Haggard, H. Ryder’s ‘King Solomon's Mines’ Africa existed and do still exist. Plain stupid or acute laziness, be the judge of that.

Most people in the west know next to nothing about Africa and seem to enjoy this ignorance. Perhaps it allows them to continue to see us as those half nude savages their history books tells them we are.

As a writer with a little online presence, one has had his fair share of stupid questions. A college graduate from the US once asked me how I managed to cure my guinea worm infection and dodge been drafted as a child soldier. It took all my strength to control my ragging anger and educate him a little. Apparently all he has ever heard about Africa were negative. The fact that I have never seen guinea worm firsthand or and knows nothing about child soldiers baffled him. But you live in Africa? He asked. Yes, I replied. But in Nigeria there are no child soldiers and I live in a modern city where Guinea worm does not exist.

This overgeneralization where Africa is concerned brings me to the issue of unabashed racism that the west seems to have inculcated into Hollywood movie culture. I recently watched the controversial Hollywood sponsored movie ‘District 9’ and came off feeling numb. For a movie set in Africa and directed by an African – presumably – there was very little about Africa on display aside from place names and black faces. As a Nigerian I was peeved at the constant referral to ‘Nigerian gang’, and wondered why the director wanted to make sure that tag stuck to the viewers mind. As a black man, I was also bothered by the fact that that future South Africa appeared to be the dream land the Afrikaners had wanted, the one with black servants, factory workers and white rulers.

Also, this movie very much followed the usual Hollywood cultural script (do little or no research about the Africans characters you portray) as the so-called Nigerian gangs spoke South African languages which Western ears will definitely hear as Nigerian languages. No wonder the movie got the nominations it did (I hear it just got nominated for both the Hugo and nebula.). Seems like Neil Blombank is receiving a lot of kudus for this rape of Africa in a movie where, for me, he killed the chance to really tell and African tale, at least a political correct one.

As for Hollywood, it is time they stop portraying us as ignorant savages that should be poked fun of in movie after movie. The producers and directors should spare a little expense on creating factual African characters that are synonymous to real life figures, just like they do for western characters. It is time Hollywood accepts that we do have home grown heroes here in Africa.

On a lighter note, one thinks Africa has come of age; we don’t need western heroes saving us movie after movie.