You Must Set Forth at Dawn (55 page)

He took offense at having to slow down at all. Whas the matter with you?
You no get eyes? You no see who I dey carry for inside car?
He took umbrage at any delay in removing a tire rim or log of wood, at having to negotiate broken bottles.
You people, you no think how all this broken bottle fit begin cause tire puncture?
He became personally affronted by any query from the vigilantes.
Thas
the way with our people, is the person trying to help common man that they no respect.
I became tired of rebuking him, simply resigned myself to undoing his braggadocio by popping out my head, getting down, and turning on the lubrication tap, gesturing that he be ignored. Underneath his bluster, however, was simple anxiety—he wanted to be out of the string of roadblocks and back in the calm security of his home.

Of all the taxi drivers, why had I landed this one? Well, the answer to that was straightforward enough, I reminded myself—he had been the only one stupid enough to take on the trip. When admonitions failed to work, I resorted to threats. If he had not so obviously been a pious, abstemious type, full of homilies and prayerful thanks to Jesus, I would have suspected him of sneaking a drink when I was not attentive. He was certainly high on something— was it some slow-fuse marijuana he had been smoking before I came upon him? Finally I grew weary and half threatened:
At the next roadblock I shall tell
the vigilantes to detain you. I'll take over your taxi, and then you can pick it up tomorrow.
The bloodshot eyes in his round face looked as if he believed me. Anyway, it held him in check, but worse was to come—the bravado began to peel off. I watched it physically vaporize as we approached the outskirts of Lagos.

Fifty, maybe sixty kilometers in five hours? It finally got to me, and I became anxious. The tension in the air became palpable as we moved nearer to Lagos. The roadblocks became more frequent; so did the sight of damaged vehicles and, worst of all, corpses. At the sight of the first corpse, my driver simply disintegrated as a human being. We encountered abandoned roadblocks, and one could see that they had been violently dismantled, smashed through by forces that were clearly not of the popular resistance. Lurking around the peripheries of such posts were the temporarily destabilized vigilantes. They had changed tactics and become mobile forces, swooping out from hiding places to enforce the implacable “No movement” order, inflict what damage they could on the erring motorist, and then retreat before the forces of law and order came into sight. The frequency of corpses increased, but with a marked difference; these were not victims of immolation but of neat, clinical bullets. Danger was thick in the air, accompanied by an acrid sting in the nostrils; it penetrated through to and invested the taxi, and I finally understood what I had been watching. All that bravado? The man was undergoing a long-drawn-out attack of hysteria. It was a strange experience, watching a human being disintegrate before my very eyes, and so rapidly.

There is a turnoff, a few miles before the junction known as Mile 12, that offers a direct route to Ota, on the way to Abeokuta. I decided that it might be best for us to use that route. It would take us to yet another possible route into Lagos, a hardly used road and therefore certain to be less patrolled by the vigilantes. The driver was falling to pieces and no longer capable of thought. I offered to take over the driving several times, but the steering wheel had become a crutch. It was an object of familiarity; it offered the last crumbs of friendship and security that were left to him in a situation into which he had been tricked. I could read that accusation forming itself slowly on his face—tricked! Everything else had been taken from him. The steering wheel was his last hold on any personal reality, and he was not about to give it up. Suburbia turned gradually to greenery as we took the diversion through rural land, lined by cassava bushes and okra and vegetable farms.

The roadblocks diminished and, where encountered, were far less aggressive but no less dangerous. On those deserted stretches through mostly farm-land, a car and its passengers could simply disappear forever. The personnel at these nonurban barriers were far less frenzied, less overtly menacing. They watched you approach with lazy, indifferent eyes, watched you approach the barrier with total unconcern, remained inhumanly still as they waited for you to make the first move. I leaned out of the car, spoke to them in Yoruba. These were mostly farmers and villagers. They moved slowly. I could read on their faces their difficulty in accepting that someone like “Prof” would be on such roads at that hour, but then, moments later, I would read again that they had decided that this was the most natural thing in the world. The lethargy would disappear, to be replaced by concern for my safety and an evident boost in their morale. The barrier would be pushed aside, warnings given about other barriers farther on:
Tell them you've just been through Agbara village and that you met
Yekini.

And then the skies opened and a deluge began. I tapped my driver on the shoulder and told him to cheer up. The rains would at least send the vigilantes seeking shelter, so we would have easier passage from then on. He was beyond consoling. We finally came to a decision point—the fork where one road led to Ota, then on to Abeokuta. The other led to Ipaja—and Lagos. At first he badly wanted to go to Ota, where he would rejoin his family the soonest. Ota suited me also, since this was closer to Abeokuta. Suddenly, however, he no longer wanted to go to Ota. The road was much too abandoned. He saw armed robbers everywhere—they would have taken over the deserted roads by now, he swore. They were not interested in any revolution; all they did was take advantage of the uprising and rob people of their vehicles. On that lonely stretch, he whimpered, we did not stand a chance—much better to take our chances where the Lagos people were out in force.
At least people there get sense,
oga. Yes, suddenly his earlier tormentors were the more rational.

And so we turned toward Lagos. Several more roadblocks, and we were on the main dual carriageway that links Lagos through Agege to Abeokuta. He knew some shortcuts, according to him, which meant, of course, that in a short while we were totally lost. This was a part of outer Lagos where I had never been, and this same driver, who had earlier boasted that all of this sector was his regular beat, became thoroughly befuddled. Moreover, the rain now took on an intensity like a third force intervening in the confrontation. Visibility approached zero. We arrived in a fairly well populated suburb and found that we had come upon a recent battleground. The streets were mostly deserted. A few stragglers moved cautiously from time to time, first peeking out from a door or window barely cracked open, then stepping out. We stopped one and asked for directions into Agege. He pointed, then warned, But you mustn't go that way. Soldiers? I asked. No, but it all came to the same thing. These were the Mobile Police, the “Kill-and-Go,” also known as MOPO. They had just shot six people in the area. If you go past that side street, he said, you will see the bodies. They came in, shooting wildly. And they've just chased some of the demonstrators in the direction of Agege, so I advise you not to go there. Was there another route? Oh yes, we could go back the way we had just come, then take the first right at the roundabout....

At the roundabout, we came upon the remains of what had been the best-constructed barrier yet. The hulks of long-discarded vehicles, nothing left of them but skeletal frames and rust, lay across the approaches. Heavy wooden logs had been inserted between the eye sockets—once side windows—as reinforcements. It was possible to find a passage, but only by weaving through, slowly, sometimes with one set of wheels on the broken curb. We succeeded, and without getting down to move any obstacles aside, only to come to yet another barrier, this time more makeshift than before. This was where we heard the first shots, followed almost immediately by the sound of a heavy engine at full speed, and it was clear that the vehicle was heading our way. The driver hesitated, stalled the car right in the middle of the road. I screamed at him, “Hurry up, pull over, pull over!”—only to bite my tongue as I realized that I had only made him more nervous. Miraculously, he succeeded in restarting the engine and pulled onto the grass verge just as a Peugeot station wagon roared around the corner, virtually on two wheels and loaded with at least eight MOPO bristling with arms. In what was obviously a well-practiced maneuver, the two front doors were flung open at the same time with booted legs that held the doors stiff, turning the entire vehicle into a battering ram. The barrels went flying off the road as the motor vehicle crashed through. Two policemen from the rear seats then leaped out, guns at the ready, and raced around the barrier in an obvious attempt to find whoever had been manning it and cut them down. The vehicle roared off, leaving the two policemen behind, presumably to sweep the environment clean of any rebels. I guessed that the patrol car was engaged in dropping more of those killers at various stops at top speed and would return the same way to pick them up.

By now the rains had eased off, though the clouds were regrouping in readiness for a new discharge. We watched the MOPO maneuvers for a while, and then I asked the driver to pull back onto the road. Driver? No. I no longer had a driver. The creature that attempted to restart the taxi and operate the steering wheel was some kind of animated jelly whose lips moved and uttered some half-human gibberish. From time to time I could make out Yoruba words that suggested that he was thinking about his wife and children and the home that he had last seen nearly a week before. Gone was the last shred of that earlier bravado that had sustained him as our passage continued its near-magical course from Idi-iroko. But he had not yet touched the nadir of his collapse.

I directed him toward one of the policemen, who had clearly gotten weary of his sweeping operations and was now resting under a tree, presumably awaiting the return of the van. All I wanted to do was to ask for directions—we needed to get ourselves out of that embattled zone, and the policeman seemed to me the most obvious person to ask. We parked some distance away, so as not to make him jumpy, then I came down and approached him in the most nonthreatening manner I could muster. If I had had a white flag, I probably would have held it aloft, intoning “Peace, brother man, I come in peace.”

His jaw dropped and his eyes opened wide as I approached. “Wait, wait, wait, am I seeing... Wait, is this not the Professor? ...”

His eyes were bloodshot and he stank of alcohol, unquestionably a particularly lethal brand of
ogogoro.
When he stood up unsteadily to salute, he forgot that the gun was resting on his lap. It clattered down, but he ignored it.

I waved my hand around the deserted space. “You appear to have been having some trouble.”

“But, Professor, you are here? In this place? Sir, this place is very dangerous.”

“We drove in from Idi-iroko. As a matter of fact, we took this route to avoid the battle zones around Lagos—at least, so I thought—but they seem to be all over the place.”

“Where you want to go, sir?”

I hesitated. “Well, right now, if I could get to Allen Avenue or as close by as possible.... My house is in that area.”

“The ground is bad,
oga.
Too many killings today. The ground is very bad. What you see here is not the worst. My advice, sir, is, don't try to go into Lagos.”

For a while I stood thoughtfully. The clouds had grown inky dark, and there were rumblings that appeared to warn that the earlier downpour would have been child's play by comparison. Only four in the afternoon, and it felt more like midnight. The more I reviewed the situation, the more distant appeared even my now-adjusted goal of reaching the heart of Lagos. I asked the policeman if there was any kind of hotel, motel, or lodging rooms in that area. He proceeded to describe one, so I waved to the driver to bring his car nearer so he could take the directions himself. I thus committed one of my many errors of that day. The Kill-and-Go did indeed begin by trying to give directions, but his words were slurred and his arms waved so imprecisely that neither my companion nor myself could tell in what direction he pointed—in any case, in backtracking to repeat his last direction, he contradicted everything he had said before. The sooner we extricated ourselves from him, I thought . . . so I thanked him, assuring him that we were now fully enlightened. I asked the driver to move on. The next moment, however, this drunk had opened the front door and was thrusting himself into the empty seat.

“No, no, there's no need to come with us. We can find the hotel perfectly from your instructions. Thank you so much.”

But he was struggling to bring his body, then his gun, into the car. “
Oga,
this place is dangerous, very dangerous.”

“I know. That's why we've decided to stay in a hotel for the night.”

“Yes, and that's why I must accompany you. Sir, I can't let anything happen to you. How will the papers carry it, eh? That something happened to Professor Wole Soyinka in our juri... juri... jurisidintion? God forbid bad ting!”

“Nothing will happen, I promise you. We've managed so far from Seme. I assure you, we're quite capable on our own.”

“Sir, you don't understand. I must make a report when I get back to the station. I have to tell my
oga
that I find Professor Soyinka on the road, trying to get to Lagos. And do you know what he will ask me? Sir, he will say, did you escort him? And when I tell him that I left you on the road, first he will give me a dirty slap! Sir, I swear to you, he will give me a dirty slap, then he will lock me in the guardroom.”

“I'll give you a note if you like.”

But he was no longer listening. His gun, which he had somehow persuaded to enter the car before him, was now wedged between him and the driver, who, by now, had no more willpower, no form of volition visible on his face or discernable in his limbs. And no wonder, since he was now staring, riveted, at the gun, whose slanted muzzle was pointing directly at his head. I leaned forward and pushed it away from him and toward the unwanted passenger, who gratefully assumed temporary control of his weapon.