Ted Conover

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

The patient looked to be at death’s door, but three days later, when I stopped by the intensive care unit, he had stabilized—an ambulance success story. I doubt the same could be said, however, for a woman we encountered the next morning. This time the call came not over the radio but from a pedestrian. We were headed from the base to our post at Anthony when a man tapped on the pilot’s window and directed us to a business about three blocks away. Lights on, the ambulance sped to the scene, and paused.

  On a patch of ground in front of a small clothing shop, in full sun, lay an unconscious woman. Flies swarmed about her. There was a gash on her leg. The ambulance rolled forward a few more feet and her face came into view. I thought she was dead. Florence put on her latex gloves, climbed out, and bent over her without touching. Then she came back in, closed the door, said a couple of words quietly to Nurudeen, the pilot, and we drove off.

  “So she was dead?” I asked.

  “No, she was alive.”

  “Then why are we leaving?”

  “She is a derelict.”

  “Yes, but…”

  “She does not require medical services, she requires rehabilitation.”

  “Okay, but right now—”

  “No. You see, he is calling social services,” she said, pointing at Nurudeen through the little window that separated the cab from the back of the ambulance. “They will come get her and take care of her, put her into a special home.”

  “She needs more than a special home! She’s almost dead! She needs—”

  “Mr. Ted, she is a derelict. We have very few ambulances in Lagos, and if we picked up derelicts it would be even less. Also, we do not pick up corpses, though everybody thinks we do.”

  I kept my peace, but guiltily. In my world, you did not walk away from somebody that sick. But I knew Lagos was different. And I knew the ambulance service was different from a Western one. For one thing, it had only been launched in 2001 and so was still in its infancy. Sikuade Jagun, M.D., director of the service, had explained that having a small number of ambulances relative to the population was just one of his challenges. (Lagos State’s twenty-one ambulances worked out to one for every 666,666 people. In a Western city, the ratio is typically one for every 18,000-20,000 people.)

  A bigger challenge, ironically, was that the ambulances were underused. This was because, in the public imagination, ambulances were indeed for transporting corpses. This had been the principal function of various private ambulances for years, taking cadavers from hospital to mortuary, and from home to morgue. Still, many people I spoke with in Lagos remembered how commonly one would see corpses by the roadside during the 1970s and 1980s. But recently the government had started a service to pick up corpses exclusively, and without the use of red lights and sirens—a step meant to help the traffic situation, because every official and his sister apparently had the right to attach lights and siren to their vehicle. “We have seen even the hospitals using sirens, just to transport supplies. Everybody wants to get around the traffic.” But of course, overuse of that equipment devalued its currency. That was the reason real ambulances like ours were so commonly ignored. To deal with the problem, Dr. Jagun had proposed fining ambulances using lights or sirens for non-emergencies.

  Anyway, to change their image, the Lagos State Ambulance Service (LASAMBUS) now strictly forbade ambulances to carry a corpse. And they forbade them to treat “derelicts.”

  No matter what the restrictions, Lord knows there could probably never be enough ambulances for Lagos. Later in the day of the derelict episode, five minutes from base, we stumbled onto another accident, wholly by chance. An okada, one of the omnipresent motorbike taxis, had collided with a car. The way we noticed was that maybe sixty other okada drivers had stopped and surrounded the driver of the car. They were tossing him around by his shirt and looked as though they might lynch him. For his part, the okada driver was limping and appeared dazed, and the gas tank of his motorbike had a big dent in it. Florence waved him over to the ambulance and gave him a quick once-over and a shot of painkiller. He didn’t want to go to the hospital. I suggested that we wave the Mercedes driver over, as well, to save him from mayhem. Florence looked as me as though I were daft: “They’d attack the ambulance if we did that!” There was nothing we could do for him short of sending a squadron of police.

  Nurudeen piloted the ambulance away, but again I felt bad: the Mercedes driver might have been completely innocent. Okada drivers were notorious for illegal and dangerous maneuvers, for driving drunk, for hitting pedestrians, and even for injuring their own passengers. The weekend before, stuck in traffic as I returned home from church with Biola and some of her friends, we had watched an okada driver zip down a pothole-strewn dirt median in the rain, his passenger clinging on behind him as though to a bucking bronco. As he skidded into one deep hole and then bumped out of it, the motion launched his passenger into the air. The man landed on the ground with a splash. Furious and dripping with mud, he energetically berated the driver. So commonly were okada drivers involved in crime that a law now forbade them to stop in front of a bank. At the same time, they were notorious for standing up for their fellow okada drivers, no questions asked.

  I was looking for something uplifting, something beautiful, something in Lagos that was a pleasure. Eating “pick & kill” catfish at a neighborhood bar was the best thing I’d found so far—the fish were live when you ordered, then baked with hot sauce, and delicious. But I was thinking larger scale. Bill suggested I visit the National Museum near Tafawa Balewa Square. A “borrowing” from its collection of Benin bronze sculptures—by a former president, who gave the bust to Queen Elizabeth!—had recently been in the news. Bill was going to take me but got called to the office.

  Instead, my local stockbroker friend gave me an after-hours tour of the Nigerian stock exchange. It was a stately looking room full of computer monitors and desks. But what was frankly more interesting was the disrepair of the 1970s high-rise in which it was located. Out of a bank of four elevators, only one worked. And the car did not stop even with the floors it serviced; at one floor, it stopped nearly a foot too low, so those who exited first turned and lent a hand to other riders who were less spry.

  That building’s troubles were nothing like those of the twenty-story NIDB House, just a couple of blocks away on Broad Street. In March 2006, following a fire, a portion of the top eight floors of the skyscraper had collapsed onto the ones below them, killing two people; twenty more were injured when the large water tank atop the building landed on the street. From a distance, it looked as though a small plane had struck the top of the building. More amazing, though, was that months later, the situation had not been rectified; the building was still unusable, the streets around it still closed off to pedestrians and other traffic. But this was simply more disaster, not what I was after.

  A driver I hired, Hassan, took me by the National Arts Theatre, a large venue for plays, dances, and art shows that looked impressive (lawns surrounded it! open space!), if beset by mildew. But my hopes of going in were dashed when an apparently counterfeit policeman approached Hassan’s old Mercedes in traffic nearby, slapped the windshield hard, and angrily ordered him over to the side of the road. Hassan pretended to comply but then, as traffic loosened, saw an opening and got the hell out of there.

  Maybe public facilities were the wrong idea. Fair-skinned expats in Lagos, or oyibos, tend to stay close to their walled compounds in Ikoyi or on Victoria Island. Shell Oil’s, among the largest and most prominent, is like a small, self-contained suburb. So were the true pleasures of Lagos mostly private? Dr. Jagun, the head of the ambulance service, took me in his BMW for drinks at the boat club in Apapa, an upscale quarter of the city. It had a large, secure yard with storage for fifty craft, most of them speedboats. It had a ramp for launching them, and it had a small clubhouse with windows overlooking the water. It was like an annex to an expat compound—the crowd at cocktail hour was European workers and us. The view across the narrow channel of wat
er was all industry: rusty tanks and warehouses. The water itself looked murky and unwholesome. The landscape reminded me of the Bronx River, which I’d canoed with a conservation group out to revive the long-polluted inner-city passage. We’d passed through the formerly industrial South Bronx, with its abandoned factories and junkyards. But the water was no longer dirty, abandoned cars and tires had been removed, and, miracle of miracles, a beaver had recently been sighted, the first in a hundred years. The area was on its way back.

  Not Lagos, however, at least not yet. A German at the bar told me that members regularly toured the lagoons around the city’s islands, and up and down the coast beyond, but always in groups of several craft, the biggest danger being “things in the water,” which he explained as meaning logs, trash, wires, and carcasses including human remains. “And sometimes they make your motor stop working.”

  My search for a legitimate tourist attraction in Lagos continued. I made dates to visit The Shrine nightclub, the temple to Afropop music run by legendary musician Fela Kuti and then by his son, Femi, but each fell through. I wanted to take a stroll on the beach off Victoria Island, but people nearby warned me away: I’d surely be robbed, they said.

  But then Dr. Jagun assigned me to Point 2, the ambulance post located halfway across the Third Mainland Bridge, occupying a few square yards of a turnout. And there, beyond the shadow of a doubt, I realized that what I’d been looking for had been in front of me all along. It was the bridge itself.

  At 7.3 miles, the Third Mainland Bridge, Africa’s longest, connects the sprawling slums and settlements of the mainland to Lagos Island, home to the city’s high-rises (and most of its remaining historical buildings, including a handful of colonial houses with deep verandas and “Brazilian houses” with Baroque styling brought home by returning slaves in the nineteenth century). The Carter and the Eko bridges connect Lagos Island to the mainland, as well, but they are modest, even stolid, while the Third Mainland Bridge is grand. Completed in 1990, it is easily the most impressive public work in Lagos.

  The Third Mainland Bridge and high-rises of Lagos Island, as seen from the midbridge ambulance post

  For one thing, it is beautiful to look at from a distance: long, low, silver, gracefully spanning Lagos Lagoon at about a hundred feet above the water’s surface. For another, in a city that is utterly flat, it affords amazing views: of the lagoon, dotted with fishing boats and net traps; of the tall buildings of Lagos Island; of the ocean horizon (the South Atlantic); and, perhaps most memorably, of the horrific lumber mill zone. Ebute Metta, just a few hundred yards from the bridge, looked like the set for an ambitious dystopian movie. Smoke rose from smoldering mountains of sawdust and drifted across the bridge, obscuring views of wooden mills and shacks with rusting corrugated roofs, casting it all in the browning yellow of a sepia photograph, a tropical shantytown version of Manchester, England, in the early nineteenth century. Flames shot up as well, though it was hard to determine the source—you just saw flashes among the blackened timbers of docks and the sooty facades of market buildings and warehouses. The smoking sawdust piles gave a sense that the land itself was combustible, a level of hell risen to Earth’s surface. Narrow channels of water seeped into (or out of) the district from the lagoon, and maybe that was behind the drama: here were earth, water, and fire juxtaposed. Rafts of logs from Nigeria’s dwindling forests floated under the bridge and queued up wharfside to meet their fate, as convincing a depiction of the “end of nature” as anyone could devise.

  I’d been on the bridge many times in taxis before the ambulance assignment. But back then I’d just enjoyed the chance to go fast. For most of its span the bridge is a long straightaway uninterrupted by cross streets, so traffic on it sometimes flows freely outside rush hours; the temptation to really step on it is irresistible.

  But going really fast in Lagos seems in many ways more perilous than going really fast in other places. One problem is that a few other vehicles, such as donkey-or human-pulled carts, might be going really slowly. Another problem is that most of the vehicles in Lagos are in poor repair, with bad tires and worn suspensions, and dangerous when driven fast. So, despite the bridge being a place where one might imagine there are few accidents, in fact there are many. And thus the ambulance post.

  I waited in the ambulance during the morning with Josephine and Lara, the nurses, and Ganiu, the pilot. All the doors were open, and there was a nice ocean breeze. Occasionally a work crew would pull into the turnout where we were stationed, or a police motorcycle. In the late morning an okada dropped off a freelance mechanic. He walked to a large storage bin and produced a bag of tools from a hiding spot underneath. Like us, he was waiting for trouble to happen.

  Through the open back doors of the ambulance, I could look down on the water. The occasional rafts of logs with small boats attached, heading to the sawmill district, reminded me of the river in Peru: sometimes wood didn’t need a road to get where it was going. But the more common craft were dugout-style traditional fishing boats, with single, ancient-looking trapezoidal sails. You would look at them, then look at this impressive, expensive bridge, and think: The parts of this picture don’t fit together. It was like the beggar with no legs who rode on another man’s back, and begged beside backed-up cars on the Lagos Island end of the bridge, or the girl with no hands who would tap on your window within sight of the high-rise district, ancient need juxtaposed with the veneer of civilization that oil money and international markets had provided. The existence of the new and gleaming was rendered less authentic, less convincing, by the persistent needs of the least fit, still unmet.

  The bridge transferred its vibrations to us. It felt like a living thing. When a heavy truck rumbled by, we’d sense it; if a gust of wind came up, you could feel the sway. (Months later, engineers would cite excess movement as a symptom of poor maintenance, and closed parts of the bridge for repair.) After two hours an urgent call came in: a danfo van full of passengers had blown a front tire and “somersaulted” on the southbound side of the bridge. We were on the northbound, and would have to go all the way to the end and make a U-turn. Doors slammed shut, seat belts were fastened, and off we roared.

  Fifteen minutes later, we arrived at the scene of the accident. But the victims had already been transported away. “Did another ambulance already come?” I asked, confused. “No, no,” answered Cecilia, one of today’s nurses. “They were probably taken to the hospital by Samaritans,” by which she meant nice people. Since it was almost lunchtime, we continued on to Lagos Island.

  I’d spent a fair amount of time there already—most of it on foot, since getting around the thronged commercial areas in a vehicle was practically impossible. Authorities had lost control of the streets, and everywhere you went, it seemed, there was a bazaar, the stalls and vendors having taken over the sidewalk, impinging on the street from both sides. Seldom was there room for more than a single vehicle, so the streets were oneway. And, even if you were in that vehicle, you crept along at a snail’s pace while scores of people flowed around you.

  It was area boys, I’d been told, who controlled the streets, if anyone did. Gangs allocated commercial stall space on the basis of fees, and certain kinds of drivers—I was never clear exactly which ones—had to pay, as well. I’d seen small groups of young men terrorizing taxi drivers, for example, trying to take their keys just like policemen did. And I’d seen someone making a delivery getting punched through the window of his small station wagon: if you didn’t pay their “tax,” that’s what would happen.

  I was still surprised, though, by what happened to us after Ganiu, the pilot, grabbed some bread at a shop and eased back into traffic. We were midway between the highway and the really congested zone, on a narrow street where two small cars might pass each other going opposite directions, but not two large ones. Our ambulance was sizable, and when we came upon a passenger car heading in the opposite direction, I fully expected the other driver to pull over—if he’d put two wheels over the curb
, which other cars did all the time, we could handily pass.

  But he refused. The standoff escalated, first with honking, then with gesticulating, then with the driver of the car and his two passengers getting out and approaching the ambulance.

  “Who wouldn’t get out of the way of an ambulance?” I asked Josephine, the other nurse, who was watching with me.

  “They are area boys,” she explained.

  That explained their brazenness. The area boys didn’t care. These were not street soldiers: they had jewelry and nice shoes and fancy cell phones, and one was calling somebody. Ganiu didn’t immediately back down, but I saw him gulp. And then, as area boys leaned on different parts of the ambulance, I saw him blink. Still swearing and gesticulating, he shifted into reverse, waited for cars behind him to give us a little space, and then eased the ambulance back over the curb. The gangsters glowered as they finally drove by.

  For some time after, Ganiu didn’t talk. Finally, he sighed and said simply, “Oh. This city.” It was three more days until he went to his village, he explained. He lived in the countryside two hours outside Lagos, working seven days in the city before returning home on the eighth for two days’ rest. No, he said—he did not wish to move his family to Lagos. “I make 9,000 naira” a month (US$76), he explained. “I could not keep them here.”

  I had been to the countryside with people at the other end of the income scale. My internist in New York had a Nigerian-born colleague whose brother, Dr. Okaa, in Lagos, had close connections to the police. On the evening I arrived I gave him a call. He asked if I wanted to come along to a “burial” in the country the next day. I imagined he was something like a coroner, and thought, Hmm, this could be interesting. He told me to be at his house by eight a.m.

  It was a gated two-story brick house, sprawling though sparsely furnished, in Ikoyi. Dr. Okaa’s Mercedes sedan was soon joined in the circular driveway by those of his friends Terry and Josiah. Terry had trained as a pharmacist on Long Island but had returned home to more lucrative opportunities; inexplicably, he now ran a firm that designed offshore oil drilling platforms. Josiah was in real estate. All were dressed in Yoruba tribal finery. Dr. Okaa wore a lime-green agbada, or ceremonial tunic, with a cherry-red fila cap. The code words here were “rich” and “connected.”