Ted Conover

by The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World;the Way We Live Today

  As it happened, I was met at the airport by both Bill and the brother’s driver—Agbonifo, wanting to make certain I was covered, had sent both. The driver took me to my guesthouse in a stately old Mercedes, with Bill following doggedly in his battered red Toyota Starlet sedan to make sure everything was okay. The journey went well until I was delivered to the guesthouse, a small, fortified compound operated by an agricultural NGO for scientists and others who had to spend a day or two in transit through Lagos. There the driver quoted his price for the services just rendered. Bill was outraged at the number—5,000 naira, or US$42—and argued long and heatedly on my behalf. The battle became quite intense, and the angrier Bill got, the more I liked him. Finally, the driver compromised: 3,500 naira ($30). When, a few days later, Bill invited me to move out of the guesthouse and into the apartment he shared with his wife, I happily agreed.

  Bill and Biola’s small two-bedroom setup was located in Isolo, a working-class suburb. The guesthouse, with its eight-foot cyclone fences topped with razor wire, barred windows, and watchmen at the gate, had felt like a fortress, but I was surprised that their apartment did too. It was on a short street of two-story, multi-family stucco and cinder-block houses that had creaky gates at both ends; security guards locked them after dark. The house also had a big front gate that was locked at night (once the Toyota Starlet was inside), gates on the doors that were always locked, and grilles on every window. It lacked the niceties of the guest house such as internet and air conditioning, but, on a barred-in, cagelike terrace, Bill and Biola had their own small gasoline-powered generator so they could watch television and use lights and a fan at night during the outages in electrical service. (The city’s electrical grid is a shambles; NEPA, the National Electric Power Authority, is also said to stand for Never Expect Power Again. During my stay, electricity in Isolo was off about three-quarters of the time.) It was noisy with the generator on—but then again, it was often noisy in Isolo, anyway. The apartment was small and often very hot; but the couple had given me the larger of their two modest bedrooms, and I felt grateful.

  Bill was up and out early in the morning. He is a vigorous man in his fifties, a journalist who covers the cyberworld for a South African-owned business newspaper. Biola, in her forties, made him breakfast and then divided her time between tending to the house, taking a history course at a local college, making plans to start a catering business, and attending church functions. Like many Lagosians, she is an evangelical Christian. She belonged to Faith Tabernacle (which, I would see, is literally the biggest church in the world, capable of holding 50,000 people). She went out to buy fresh food every morning, since the refrigerator was seldom cold, and usually she would cook me an egg with toast for breakfast. And then I would leave for the day, an event that, I eventually realized, filled her with relief, for as dangerous as it was for me to walk alone on the street in a city where robbery was common, it was risky for them to lodge me: having a white-skinned tenant was tantamount to saying “We have a lot of money in here!” (It happened to be true: credit cards, travelers checks, and banking machines are essentially not used in Nigeria, so I had brought with me, and kept in my room, a couple of thousand dollars in cash.)

  But I liked living with people. Even nice hotels are so lonely. Bill and “B,” it seemed, were suspicious of most of their neighbors—they advised me not to speak to others on the street, including the people upstairs, whom they did not socialize with. But they were friends with the neighbors behind. A second two-story house occupied the space in which a backyard would otherwise be, and the ground-floor neighbor was a single mom with an inquisitive daughter about ten years old. Motorola, as she was named, loved to come in and see what I was doing. I was always glad to show her my things, and she enjoyed telling me what was new with her. Often it was her hair: the girls at her school coordinated the pattern of their braids, changing styles weekly; the day we met, the braids were tied with colorful thin wires and coiled into tiny spirals. “Bill,” I asked, “is she named after the electronics company?” No, he said—but nobody else I asked had ever heard of a person with that name.

  When I wasn’t with an ambulance crew or out doing an interview or having a beer with Bill after work, there were a number of interesting Lagosians I could hang out with, mostly contacts I had drummed up before leaving on my trip: a doctor affiliated with the police department (brother of a friend of my own family doctor), a young woman at an advertising agency (sister of a former student of a friend of mine), a young stockbroker (brother of a friend of my wife’s), and a European financier (friend of a friend of my father).

  The truck driver and those in his path were lucky to be alive. The scene of the accident was a highway exit about a mile from our post. The semitrailer rig had apparently taken the turn too fast; it had flipped and now was lying on its side, the tractor’s windshield smashed. The ground across which it had slid had been a vegetable garden but now was flattened. The driver, shirtless and bleeding, sat on a stump, looking dazed. Florence and Rasheedat put on latex gloves, helped him into the ambulance, and cleaned him up. They told him he should come to the hospital for X-rays, but he said he did not want to.

  He claimed his brakes had failed. I passed this information along to Nurudeen, our driver, who gave a rueful little laugh. “It’s possible,” he said. “But now it doesn’t matter. He will lose his job.”

  The nurses gave him a shot for pain, and we drove back to our post, past a road sign in pidgin that read, Drive Soft—Life No Get Duplicate. A mother came by with her daughter, who looked about six and had a fever, maybe malaria. She wore only flip-flops and underpants and looked very unhappy when Florence gave her a shot.

  A truck driver who rolled his semi rig (in the background) while exiting the expressway sits in the ambulance doorway as Florence checks his blood pressure.

  Quite a while passed with neither walk-ups nor calls from headquarters, but time at the post was far from boring. I joined Nurudeen up in the cab, and we watched the area boys working the traffic jam in front of us. The highway had three lanes of traffic in each direction, with a concrete divider between them. Northbound traffic was on the far side of the divider from us, and usually was slower than the southbound, perhaps because of the time of day, perhaps because it was on an uphill incline. Whatever the case, the area boys would perch on the divider or on the shoulder near us and then casually, almost gracefully, they would mount a big truck like lampreys and climb up to the driver’s window. Some of the drivers were clearly startled and combative; more than once we saw the driver make a fist as he tried to rid his rig of this unwanted guest. Others had “cutlasses,” said Nurudeen, by which he meant knives; when the area boys got stabbed in the course of their work, he said, the ambulance was the first to know.

  “So what are they doing? Are they extorting money? Do they threaten the driver?”

  “I don’t think they usually threaten them. They just ask for money.”

  “And why would a driver give them money?”

  “Well, many drivers have come from the country. They don’t live here, and they’ve heard stories about the area boys. Then suddenly there is the boy, upon their truck! I don’t think the boys would attack the drivers. But I think sometimes the drivers believe they will. And so sometimes they pay.”

  I watched the area boys for hours. Hopping aboard trucks wasn’t the only way they worked the traffic. They were constantly on the lookout for anything that fell off a truck onto the roadway, and a surprising number of items did. We’d know something had when several area boys materialized at once, quickly weaving through traffic to converge at the same point. One would come away with the prize: a sack of flour, a carton containing goods, some pieces of wood. He would place it on his shoulders, wade back through the traffic in his flip-flops, and disappear under the bridge. It was money in the bank.

  I’d already had an experience with area boys that left me wary. It was during evening rush hour. I was leaving Lagos Island via one of the t
hree bridges that connect it to the mainland. I was part of a sea of yellow, the particular shade that the thousands of private vehicles that supply Lagos with public transportation are required to be painted. Okadas, or motorbike taxis, which are as common as flies, can be any color at all. But taxi-cabs, the shared minivans called danfos, and the unwieldy, oversized truck-buses called molues all must be painted yellow and have two black lines all the way around them. The danfos and molues, in addition, must have their fixed routes painted on them. In many principal routes on the transportation grid, traffic at rush hour is more than 90 percent yellow, and all the more striking for the dingy, hazy landscape it passes through.

  I was in a danfo. These rolling wrecks are typically stuffed with about a dozen people and have side doors that are either missing or permanently open. The driver’s assistant, or tout, stands in the doorway, shouting the destination and collecting fares. He signals the driver when to stop or go by banging on the roof with his hand. Having already missed three danfos that were full, I’d spotted one that had room for me, just barely, on the edge of a wooden bench that looked out the door. I jammed myself inside.

  The driver was soon in a traffic jam, or go-slow, and our lack of forward progress led him, abruptly and apparently on a hunch, to reverse down the shoulder and then turn and exit on an entrance ramp. It had the promise of enterprise and creative thinking, but two-thirds of the way down the curving ramp he saw something unpromising—more traffic? construction?—and abandoned his plan. He started doing a three-point turn to change direction again; we would go back the way we had come.

  Meanwhile, in the gloom, we could make out a dozen or so area boys playing soccer on the ground inside the cloverleaf. As we halted our reverse, they halted their game. And as our driver stalled out halfway through his about-face, they became very interested in us. The reason was almost certainly me: a white guy perched on the edge of a wide-open doorway was like a fat peach on a low-hanging branch.

  They started jogging toward us. The other passengers began yelling at the driver. The driver’s tout, standing in the doorway, began banging on the roof to convey the urgency of the situation. To myself I thought, I am fucked. Then, with maybe five seconds to interception, the engine came to life in a cloud of acrid smoke and the danfo accelerated back up to the populated highway. The soccer players gave up the chase.

  That had been about a week before. I wasn’t exactly haunted by the memory but, as far as area boys were concerned, I did consider myself a kind of prey.

  It was hot in the cab of the ambulance. I offered to buy cold sodas for the ambulance crew and they accepted. Rasheedat said there were cold ones for sale nearby and that she would go there with me. But as she headed toward shrubs and a path that I knew led under the bridge, I stopped in my tracks. “But that’s where the area boys are!” I exclaimed, surprised that she’d even consider it. Rasheedat laughed.

  “Oh, they’re not so bad,” she said. “Would you like to see? Come on, I’ll show you.” It took some convincing; Lagos had made me feel susceptible to attack even when I wasn’t doing anything risky, and this looked like something risky. But surely a nurse would not lead me to harm …

  I followed her down a dirt footpath. We passed through some bushes and then into the shade of the overpass. About a dozen young men, mostly teenagers, were sitting on the concrete skirt underneath the roadway, watching us. Rasheedat greeted a young woman who lived in a shack down there; its roof was the side door of a danfo. One of the two children at her feet was throwing crumbs to chickens in a makeshift pen. The chickens ate them and then took a drink from an oily puddle. There were no other women around. One of the young men came down from the bridge and asked the nurse a question in pidgin. She looked at me and said my name, “Mr. Ted.” He didn’t look at me but nodded at her and walked away to rejoin the others up under the roadway. With that, about half my fear disappeared.

  “Most of them are okay,” she said to me as we walked toward a nearby stall selling drinks. Next to it was a shack where, another day, we’d buy yamcake, eko (a corn-flour gruel), and akara (fried balls of ground bean mixed with onion) for lunch. “Some of them are bad. But mostly they have no parents and no place to live. I do not think they will hurt you.”

  The drinks stand consisted of pieces of corrugated metal that formed a kind of counter, and some nearby boxes where you could sit and drink. As we sipped, I saw two boys soaping themselves up with water from an open tank next to a car wash. I supposed car wash water was somewhat clean; the day before, at ambulance Point 1 to the north of here, I’d watched other kids sudsing themselves up in water that poured out of an effluent pipe at the edge of a big Pepsi-Cola plant.

  Three of the area boys rose to their feet as we headed back, and my heart skipped a beat. But they weren’t interested in me. They wanted to talk to Rasheedat and they did so, fervently and for several minutes, pointing several times to the roadway overhead. They looked as though they were complaining to her, trying to persuade her of something. It gave me a chance to size them up a bit. Earlier I’d learned how to tell an area boy from a regular kid. “They look like miscreants!” someone had explained, but that required a certain baseline knowledge. Partly, you could tell by where they were and whom they were with. Most looked as though they’d had tough lives. I saw an earring or two, facial tattoos and scars (some of the scars denoted tribal ritual, and therefore a country background), some missing teeth, and a lot of swagger. Two or three from the underpass appeared to be brothers. “If you see guys in clean clothes with even the slightest paunch,” a friend told me, “they’re not area boys.”

  Rasheedat offered them some words of assurance and we left for the ambulance. They were in a dispute with the policemen, she explained. The night before, an oil tanker had caught fire on the highway. The area boys had been instrumental in putting the fire out, and the grateful truck driver had said his boss would send a reward. But when the reward arrived, the boys said, the policemen had kept most of it, though they’d done very little. And that made the young men angry.

  That afternoon, the dispute would spill over onto the highway. But first, to clarify: In Lagos, there are at least five different kinds of policemen concerned with roads and traffic, and each is known by its acronym. Three are federal, including the Mobile Police (MoPol) of the Nigerian Police Force (NPF); the Federal Roads Maintenance Agency (FERMA), and the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC). One, the Lagos State Traffic Management Authority (LASTMA), belongs to Lagos State, which is only slightly larger than the city of Lagos. In 2003, a quasi-governmental group called Kick Against Indisciline joined the mix. Each has its distinctive uniform. The recurring turf battles between the different forces occasionally break out into street fights.

  The contingent of police who hung out near our exit ramp wore maroon trousers and beige shirts: LASTMA men. One or two had motorcycles and one or two had cars, but most were simply on foot. They waved over motorists with whom they wanted a word, which generally was not difficult as most were only creeping along in traffic. My observation, and that of many others, was that most of the police spent the day involved in small acts of extortion. They would point out a minor infraction (changing lanes without signaling, say) or irregularity (cracked glass on the rear-view mirror), announce the driver’s arrest, and settle for a small fine paid directly to them. In other words, like so many others in Lagos, they were hustlers.

  So it did not come as a complete surprise that afternoon to see the group of area boys in hot argument with a group of policemen, on the side of the highway. Each group had two or three spokesmen who launched charges at a member of the other group, while the non-spokesmen massed behind. The area boys appeared to be incensed, but faced with this passion the police merely shouted back, occasionally raising a hand as though about to land a blow but never actually doing so.

  It was an unlikely sight, the “miscreants” challenging the police, one group of hustlers to another. In the middle of it, I noticed that two of
the area boys peeled off; opportunity must have beckoned on the highway. I marveled at the ease with which they crossed the center divider, almost like synchronized swimmers: left legs up, butts over, kick up right legs, glide between cars, all while wearing the thinnest flip-flops. I could see, finally, how the highway was the river of life to the area boys. They sheltered under it and subsisted on it, by begging, thieving, and running after dropped loads. In some places, I knew, they worked with danfo drivers, taking bribes (“dash”) to let them stop in places they weren’t supposed to stop.

  The cops lived off the highway, too, but less enterprisingly. There was something rotten about the way they used their authority to prey on Everyman, or Everydriver. The area boys, lacking official authority (and guns and radios), appeared to leave Everyman alone—at least, during the day. Nurudeen said that at night, all bets were off: they’d attack even him.

  Another call came in, this one from a private clinic: a patient was coughing up blood and needed to be transferred to Ikeja Hospital. On went the lights and siren, and about half an hour later we arrived at the small clinic. The man was old, gravely ill, and very large. Unfortunately, he was on the second story of a building with a narrow, winding staircase and no elevator. The ambulance crew and orderlies strapped him onto a board and then together we, along with the man’s son, tipped and tilted the patient and board down the stairway. He lost so much blood in transit that it filled every container the nurses could find. They had to hose out the back of the ambulance once he was delivered to the emergency room.