My problems began at the frontier. I had been issued a visa
valid for a month, but in a gesture of solidarity with his fellow officialdom,
the border guard arbitrarily reduced this validity to a week – I could get an
extension in a variety of ways, all of which involved significant contact with
Nigerian bureaucracy. By the end of the day I had decided that under no circumstances
would I spend more than a week there, despite an expected 2-3 day delay while I
obtained a visa for the next country Cameroon.
The driver had come prepared with a pile of small denomination
Naira notes in the glove compartment of the car. Beyond the border stretched a
broad dual carriageway along which heavy lorries and buses thundered, an abrupt
transition from sleepy Benin, but every few kilometres the traffic was slowed to
walking pace by a police checkpoint, marked by a plank hammered full of
upturned nails to choke the traffic down to single file. At each one, the
driver placed a note in the palm of his hand, shook hands carefully with the
armed policeman, and the Naira mysteriously vanished. In this way we made
reasonable speed.
Occasionally it seemed he misjudged the appropriate sum, and
we were summoned out of the car. Generally the driver handled these situations with
diplomatic astuteness (usually by dispensing another small amount of cash), but
on a couple of occasions something went more seriously wrong. On the first, we
were marched into the police station, where my luggage was searched and, on
discovering my camera, I was loudly accused of being a spy. (They also discovered
my lucky owl, a small stuffed toy presented to me by my parents before a
previous journey in South America to keep me safe. John le Carré makes no
mention of lucky owls in any of his novels). This was rather alarming but my
driver muttered in French to be quiet, and then proceeded in the local language
to establish that the “fine” for spying would be twenty dollars, swiftly
negotiated down to ten. As Nigeria also sported one of the dreaded currency
declaration forms, which the police had neglected so far to check and thereby discover
I was still carrying a significant quantity of cash, I quickly agreed pending
any higher demand. The second occasion was more disturbing, as we were marched
at gunpoint into a small room, I was again accused of being a spy, and we were
then left to stew for half an hour, before the policeman returned still
gesticulating dangerously with his gun. I was by now quite frightened, but bizarrely
the (apparently) standard twenty dollar fine was demanded, once again reduced
to ten after discussions which still involved waving the gun around and
periodically pointing it at me. Thankfully after passing around Lagos, which I
had decided to avoid as its evil reputation suggested that as a lone traveller I
would be excessively vulnerable to, at the very least, sudden separation from my
rucksack, the checkpoints settled down again to the routine handshake process.
"Señor Optime": a small owl arrested for spying
Next morning I stood outside my hotel, recovering from a
cold shower (I hate cold showers even in the hottest stickiest climates, but
there was inevitably no hot water) and trying to figure out from a wholly
inadequate map which part of town I was in. A fellow guest introduced himself:
he was a professional footballer playing for a team in Sweden home to visit his
family during the summer break, and could he help? I explained that I was
trying to figure out where buses departed to Calabar, a town in the Niger Delta
area whose main attraction was the alternative Cameroonian consulate not in Lagos.
He very generously offered to drive me to the minibus
station, helped find me a seat, and then passed the time waiting for the bus to
fill up by showing me squad photos. Twenty years on, I can’t remember either
his name or the team, so if you happen to be a Nigerian footballer from Ibadan playing
in Sweden during the 1990-1 season reading this, then thank you for your help!I was allocated a rearward facing seat, my back to the driver. My neighbour, in the centre seat, was a man in his late twenties, clean shaven and dressed in a dark suit and tie. No sooner had the bus started than he extracted a bible which he studied deeply, occasionally underlining passages, making small grunts of agreement as he did so. After a couple of hours, it became apparent that he had not selected his seat at random, and that his bible study was preparation for the religious service he now proceeded to conduct. Some stirring revivalist preaching went down quite well with the rest of the passengers, who chorused “praise the Lord” and “amen” appropriately in a rather subdued manner, but what really got them into the spirit were the hymns. Most were sung in English and everybody joined in enthusiastically, but we were travelling from Yoruba to Igbo areas, and the preacher occasionally successfully suggested a hymn in one or the other of these languages. Once he asked if anyone knew any Hausa hymns (the Hausa are the dominant group in northern Nigeria, and are almost exclusively Moslems), which raised a laugh but no tunes. It was almost cliché Africa, as the hymns were well chosen, and the passengers clearly knew them all well enough to sing parts in harmonies, with a bass voice at the back making an especially beautiful contribution. I am not a religious person, but the whole experience was quite moving, and to these people the message of Christianity clearly had meaning to them in a deep way: if you live in Nigeria, then the next life can only be better than this one.
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