Ogbuife Arrives Lagos
The bus pulled up at the park entrance and Ogbuife made his way to the overhead compartment locker and tugged his hefty Ghana must go sack out of the crammed space.
Lagos didn’t have the authentic smell of earth like Mbaise. The breeze reeked of burning tar and unwashed armpits, but not the kind soaked with the sweat of farm work; it was the hustle of trying to eke out a living by every unjust means.
Ogbuife saw young and middle-aged men garbed in stained white shirts and gable green trousers racing against danfo* trucks and molues* with beams in their hands yelling “Owo my da?”*
Motorcyclists made rash maneuvers as they tore through tiny openings between ten foot trailers and high-rising footpaths.
“Crazy huh?”
Ogbuife turned and saw a white man behind him.
“What did you say?”
The white man pointed at the highway frenzy. “It’s quite a place.”
Ogbuife nodded, still taken aback.
“For what it’s worth, This city is a really noisy place. It’s not very easy to identify mentally ill patients, because here, madness is a survival skill.”
Ogbuife didn’t respond. He placed his sack on his shoulder and walked towards a bus station. It was mid-July and many of the roads had already sunk into a depression due to the rain; however, the cold didn’t stand a chance against the fiery heat of typical Lagos jostle.
A bus drove to a halt at the station and Ogbuife was about to climb aboard when two...three...six...eight...eleven—a mob. A mob knocked him out of the steel floorboard and he almost knocked his teeth against the door handle. His sack became a launching pad for a number of wild zippy younglings who leaped in through the bus windows.
At first, he tried yanking it out of the brewing melee but on second thought he refrained and let them have their way; for one, he couldn’t even do anything about it. More so, he was protecting his teeth from another unromantic kiss.
The driver revved the engine and the tumult turned to a united “Driver wait!”. The short-lived respite was enough for Ogbuife to grab his sack and be on his way. He walked past two more bus stations and the realization rocked him that he had no idea where he was going.
He simply received a mail to come to Lagos, and without inquiry, he picked his luggage and was about his way. Ogbuife paused at a bar and sat quietly. He gave little thought to his situation and let out peals of laughter. He wasn’t far from what the white man had described as being endemic to city life—to the streets of Lagos.
GLOSSARY
*danfo — a minibus for passengers.
*molue — a privately-owned commercial bus for passengers.
*Owo mi da? — Where is my money? (in Yoruba)
Chukwuebuka Joseph Uzochukwu is a fiction story writer and poet. He has an earnest desire to give voices to issues and people whose voices are, otherwise, drowned in the noise of traditional norms. He is currently an undergraduate student of Mass Communication at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.