Caption: The glow of sand/dust from the Sahara surrounds this Mosque in Abuja, Nigeria. Credit: Flickr
By: Brianna Goldberg
You have to pick your taxi battles in the morning so it’s best to decide which one before you hit the street. You must weigh out whether, today, it’s more important to avoid the soul-suck of haggling, be in a vehicle that feels physically coherent, or one that’s clean (ie; not too much eau-de-petrol from the spilled jerry cans in the back and/or other mysterious liquids coating the seats where, yes, the poor taxi driver often sleeps overnight because rent around here is so crazy).
You mull this as you step out the front door, through the squeak/screamy metal gates manned by two twenty-something Nigerian dudes, who are unarmed, but, because of their general kindness and care, you believe would be able to protect you if there was some sort of threat. Except if the threat were a car bomb, which is really the most likely threat anyway, and in that case, unfortunately, they wouldn’t be able to help much because they would definitely be first in the line of the blast. They wave and wish you good morning and you smile back, with feeling.
But as for the taxi drama, today you just want to get to work. You don’t feel the lightness of being required to negotiate a price, to wait for the unicorn of a safe, clean vehicle to come by. So when the first broke-down ‘90s-era Peugeot hatchback rattles down the street, the driver sticking his head out the side (can’t see through the smashed windshield) shouting “OYIBO!,” local slang for “foreigner,” you grin politely, nod discretely and just get in. You just get. in.
The windows are open, of course, and so in wafts a cloud of the black smoke beautifully shooting upwards and dispersing out from the garbage pile being burned on the curb. Its ash mixes with sand and dust and crap in the air to make a cloggy musk, bad for you but strangely pleasant, like the heavy smoke of a cigar.
But soon as you turn the corner from the residential boulevard, where relatively wealthy Nigerians and expats make their home, the stink fog rushes away because now you’re in a smooth, freewheeling coast beneath the open sky. This is rush hour.
Here in Abuja, the roads are wide three-lane freeways. The city was purpose-built as the capital in the geographical centre of the country upon Nigeria’s independence and was intended to accommodate a gush of population spill-off from the teeming former capital of Lagos (twice the population of New York).
But there isn’t much opportunity in Abuja for those who aren’t bureaucrats or aid workers, because Nigeria’s flourishing class of entrepreneurs stayed in already-thriving Lagos and, well, nobody else really came. So the three-lanes are virtually open highways, and the taxi driver shuts off the engine as your vehicle soars downhill, past a few straggly trees in the median, past oasis-like ditch gullies of palm trees and wildness and water, past street hawkers selling small bananas, fluffy puppies, handfuls of phone credit.
Everything fenced with razor wire. Everything caked in a layer of dust because of “the Harmattan:” the Sahara-sand-filled winds coat the city and your sandpaper-feeling tongue. The air so thick with it, you can look straight at the sun.
And then your coasting halts. The police. Or the military. Or something. There are so many people in uniforms here, brandishing automatic weapons, it’s dizzying to keep track of who’s who, and it’s irrelevant, really, because any way you slice it the drill is the same: stop, check the trunk for car bombs, absorb and respond to the request-cum-demand of “What do you have for me?”
The uniformed Kalashnikov-toters probably won’t stop you though, not in the morning, on your way to work. You are Oyibo. Whether you’re Malaysian or German or Pakistani or “white,” or Westerners of African descent, you are Oyibo. You have an air that says “diplomat” even if you’re sitting in a broke-down taxi and even if you’re not a diplomat. So you’ll get hassled by them on the weekend, but not this morning on your way to “diplomat work,” though you will have to wait in the traffic bottleneck.
Your mobile phone network is down so you gaze. Along the side of the road, behind the hawkers and sporadic prayer mats are a line of more broke-down cars with people sprawled in them taking mid-morning naps, some abandoning their rides to take a leak against the trees, some being pressed by renegade police officers unwilling to budge on an issue (likely the one about “What do you have for me?”).
Behind this line of casual purgatory is the city-scape: One low-rise commercial building, densely populated; One half-built residential property, crumbling; One empty lot sprinkled with benches and umbrellas of the informal economy– the “mama”s serving up tupperwares of stew cooked on bonfires right there, the guys who will cut and file your nails, the well-dressed and makeup’d ladies selling mobile phone credit cards out of their fine embroidered pouches. This pattern repeats in differing order, with occasional interjections of rocky land mass pimples, from here to the city limits.
Beyond them, it’s another story. Beyond them, a story so big and frenetic it’s laughable to think it can be contained in the word, “Nigeria.” 160 million people. More than 250 distinct cultural groups operating under one imposed banner. Roughly 50/50 Muslim and Christian. Life expectancy, 47. Legacy of civil war, military dictatorship, and oil, oil, oil, which is money, which is said to be the root of many of Nigeria’s problems, though explaining exactly what they are, and how they’re to be fixed, is not your role or forte.
All you know is that since the discovery of oil in the lush and watery south, it’s been destruction of land, oil company-funded murder of local leaders, retaliation in the form of bombed pipelines and kidnappings of expat oil execs. There, the sky is black. There, the violence is motivated on both sides but also senseless, like the “accidental” military missile fire destroying a building in the region’s urban centre. Many aid organizations are afraid to work there. Your friend, from this area, is a poet. He feels the stress. It presses upwards to the capital.
The more acute stress, though, comes from the arid north, the predominantly Muslim part of the country, where education and infrastructure are all but nonexistent. A radical homegrown Islamic sect is active and growing in power. Their explosions and gun battles have killed more than 1,000 people since the group’s leader was allegedly assassinated by Nigerian forces in 2009, strengthening their directive. Nearly every day now someone dies in related violence. On holidays they hit churches, police stations, government buildings. Their expertise is newly streamlined, coordinated. One weekend in January, five near-simultaneous explosions resulted in more than 250 deaths. The stress is building. It presses downwards to the capital.
And there is the chaos to the east, in Jos, the religiously fraught town from which you order your weekly shipment of vegetables (nothing grows in Abuja). The farm that supplies your expensive but delicious cucumbers sends out weekly letters about what is available and why. No strawberries this week, because the farmer heard of machete attacks between his farm and the delivery depot and was too scared to leave the house. No grapes because the vines were burned in a riot. The stress, it presses west to the capital.
And then Lagos, bubbling just west of you, and all its infamous street crime and thuggery… and opportunity and insane wealth. It presses east.
And there you are in the middle, with your empty streets, and your broke-down taxi, and your purgatory of solitude, eerie quiet, eerie bleakness and shrouded sun. Bracing in the anxiety of no-man’s land.
Oh, get over yourself, already. It’s just another day.
Almost at work now and the taxi’s exhaust pipe is dragging on the road. You need a drink of water, to wipe the dust from your brow, and there it is–the glint off the gold. The giant, looming, thrillingly majestic national mosque, with its golden dome and slender minarets and its beauty of symmetry and calm. The flock of what you think are ravens circles, spinning, in its glow.
Your taxi drops you in the ditch of a dirt road and trundles off over the crest of the hill. Your blackberry flashes–an email from the Canadian High Commission warning of an imminent bomb threat in Abuja. You save the Commision’s phone number, just in case, and climb the stairs to begin your day.
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Brianna Goldberg is a writer and radio producer from Toronto, who’s currently doing the globe-trotting thing. Follow her work on her website and Twitter @b_goldberg.
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