Ogbomosho

I knew two words of Yoruba when I began my Yoruba lessons last Fall: Obasanjo and Ogbomosho. The former is rather obvious, and the latter had been a recurring theme in my academic research: a great deal of Yorubas in the Diaspora originate from the town of Ogbomosho. The Ogbomoshos travel. They stick together. And they don't forget where they come from. That felt strangely familiar to me. When it came time to take on a Yoruba persona in my class, I thus became Titilayo from Ogbomosho. And when my Yoruba respondents in Accra asked me defiantly if I had "ever been to Nigeria," I responded without a flinch that I was headed to Ogbomosho in May. So when I found the opportunity to accompany my friend Jide back home to Ogbomosho, I had to seize it.

Ogbomosho is a rather small city (of approximately 1.5 million people) by Nigerian standards. It has one reputable university, one impressive meat market (where they kill, cut, sell and burn cattle right there in the open air), one stadium, one football team, one Baptist seminary and over 400 Baptist churches. There are five or six hours of electricity at night and on Sunday mornings if we're lucky. The roads are packed with taxis, okadas (moto-taxis) and oil trucks; the latter have the right of way.

In Ogbomosho I am the rare Oyinbo (pronounced O-EE-BO, a.k.a. Obruni) to step out of the gates of the Baptist seminary and to come on academic and not evangelizing mission; and because Yoruba is a tonal language, the Oyinbo interpellation sounds like a question: Oyinbo? Oyinbo? is all I hear when I zoom by on okadas. Ogbomosho is the second largest town in Oyo State, Nigeria's "Pace Setter" State. (Lagos, by the way, is Nigeria's "Center of Excellence" while Abuja is its "Center of Unity" - whoever came up with these mottos?) This time of year, electric rain storms paralyze the town every other day and keep the landscape green and the air refreshingly light.

The people of Ogbomosho welcomed me to Nigeria with such kindness and generosity that I almost forgot which country I was in. Those I interviewed showered me with food and drinks the way only my Hungarian grandmother used to. They were delighted with my forays into their colorful culture, and the Yoruba greeting and bowing sent them cheering with laughter. They thought I looked "beautiful" when I went native with my braids and Yoruba cloth (I thought it made me look like a market mama. It's all relative.) They loved to call me Titi. And they all tried to get me to accept Christ. Don't worry mom, they failed.

Lizzie Williams, who wrote a brilliant Bradt travel guide for Nigeria, claims that "[Q]uite frankly there is no other way to write about Nigeria than personally. It's a destination that's not about Eiffel Towers or Serengeti Plains, but about a conversation or a unique moment." She is right.

One Chief I interviewed offered me the opportunity to meet the King of Ogbomosho and before I knew it, Chief Evergreen escorted Jide and me to the Kabiyesi Palace. I didn't know what to expect but was instructed to call him Kabiyesi (King) and to kneel in greeting. We entered the Kabiyesi quarters in Chief Evergreen's red Mercedes. We approached the Palace's visiting room and as we entered, I let Jide and Evergreen take the lead because in a room full of old men in Yoruba attire, I had no idea which was King. Jide and Evergreen walked forward and suddenly prostrated themselves right there, face flat, on the carpet. I kneeled, as instructed, and looked up to find a short elderly man in a purple gown, rocking his legs from side to side on his chair and smiling at me. He motioned for me to come sit next to him and he asked me about my research. We chatted for a while about Ogbomosho, the Yorubas, my work, Nigeria. Every now and then his attention turned to the television set in the corner: Desperate Housewives was on, followed by the Martha Stewart show. What dissonance, I thought, to be chatting with the 81-year-old King of Ogbomosho while Martha baked a cake in the background.

The King told me of his travels to Britain, Germany, France, and the Middle East. The U.S.? I asked. He had never been to America. He told me he had an opportunity to go to Texas in 1957 while working for a French oil company. "But I found out that it wasn't good to be black in America then," he said as he pointed to the skin on his arm. He shook his head resoundingly. "So I decided I didn't want to go to the U.S." The gap between his dated impression of the U.S. and the kind of place I knew it to be today really struck me, and I pondered how much space there was between the kinds of things I heard about Nigeria back home and the taste I got of Nigeria today.

And maybe both can be true. Nigeria is a notorious image of violence and fraud that almost kept me away entirely, and a depth and wealth of personality I am grateful to have experienced - if only briefly. I don' think Nigeria was meant to be summed up in a blog for it is a country of contradictions and constant dissonance. Like when a King watches Desperate Housewives as he receives visitors; or when the women of the house cook dinner lighting charcoal with one hand and holding their cell phones as flashlights with the other; or when the same people who drive on the shoulders of roads and have no regard for a line at the bank, the chop shop, or the gas station, queue up willingly for their daily church offering; or when newspaper editorials scrutinize and criticize a flawed election process and conclude that Yar'Adua's victory was God's will; or when children all over town jump up and down in joy when electricity comes back on for a few hours at night in a country that holds 10% of the world's oil reserves and the tenth largest gas reserves in the world.

Nowhere else did I find such big hearts and loud mouths, so many open arms and so many grabbing hands. Hard as I try, I can't paint a picture of Nigeria. But maybe these snapshots can give you a taste... if not a good laugh.

The Seme-Badagry Road

My plans to travel to Nigeria met many raised eyebrows and two cents over the past six months. This is not surprising given the kind of press this country attracts. There's those rebels in the Southeast who regularly kidnap and release foreign oil workers. There's that monster of a city in the Southwest in which over thirteen million people try to live and make a living, and whose appeal was best captured by my advisor's claim that he would "rather be in Baghdad than in Lagos." And then, of course, there was that joke of an election, which confirmed the ruling party's firm grasp on power, awakened pockets of electoral violence throughout the country, and pissed off Madeleine Albright. When we think of Nigeria, we think oil, we think email scams, we think corruption, we think muggings, we think religious riots... sometimes we also think bad B-movies. Embassy men aside, there are many, many deterrents to visiting Nigeria.

But am I really going to write a dissertation about the Yorubas without setting foot in their homeland?

I thought I was avoiding one of the most dangerous airports in the world by entering Nigeria by road; instead, I was thrown into the grabbing hands of border officials at Seme. We left Accra early Wednesday morning to avoid arriving in Lagos at night. One old red volvo hatchback, a few too many luggages, and five travelers. My friend Jide. Our driver Solomon. One Ghanaian-born Yoruba, Suzie. JAB. Me. We left our overpriced hotel around 5.45 a.m. Three hours later, we were at the Ghana-Togo border. I had not realized how many checkpoints there were on the road to the Aflao border with Togo, but riding in a car with a Nigerian license plate, we had no choice but to stop and listen to the Ghanaian police's verbal harassment. All in all, however, the border crossings into Togo and Benin were rather eventless. The two obrunis went through the slow and official way (you know, where they stamp your passport and all); the rest simply "met us on the other side."

We arrived in Cotonou and dropped off JAB by mid-afternoon; the car grew eerily quiet during the stretch of road that linked Cotonou to the Seme border with Nigeria. At some point, the traffic in front of us slowed down, and I noticed a queue of cars and trucks parked on the left shoulder while men lined up on the right, peering into our vehicle as we rolled slowly by.

Finally, Solomon pulled over on the left shoulder and parked behind an oil truck. A few men gathered around the car, but I wasn't too worried yet as Solomon seemed to know most of them. I trusted Solomon. Not only was he Jide's friend, but he didn't hesitate to stand up to the Ghanaian cops when they told him to go back to his country (he was born in Ghana, mind you) - definitely my kind of guy. I don't know how long we stayed parked on the shoulder, but Solomon was involved in some serious negotiations - all in Yoruba - that largely escaped me. Part of me was desperately wishing my language skills were better so that I could feel a little more in the loop and a little less like the stupid white tourist. Part of me gladly surrendered to being the stupid white tourist.

Finally, Jide clued me in. He informed me that I was to cross the border alone with Solomon in the car while he and Suzie took the unofficial route across... on moto-taxis. I guess that's what you do when you don't have a passport. If asked, I was to tell officials that I and three other obruni sistahs had hired Solomon to take us to Benin, and that once in Cotonou I simply decided I was going to go alone all the way to Nigeria instead. Hence the empty car with one lone passenger. Before I could retort with a joke about how silly that story made me look, Jide hopped on the back of a moto-taxi and drove off.

It was just Solomon and me. We pulled up slowly to a rope blocking the road and parked. Solomon pointed to a long, white building on the right and advised that "whatever they say, don't give them any money." I left all my belongings in the car and walked up to the first counter with my passport in my hand, my bank card and a few Naira bills in my super-secret-REI-pants-pocket. As much as I hated leaving my bags in the car, they were safer there than on my back. It did feel strange, though, walking into this no-man's land of a border carrying only my passport. The border-crossing building was rather non-descript and I found myself wandering around directionlessly until the first official stopped me, stamped my passport, and marked my exit from Benin. Painless! and I walked confidently to the next official. This man startled me by being the first in the past five months to ask me for my yellow fever card. I handed him my passport, in which I had stapled my yellow card, and waited as he slowly flipped through it. He took his time, and finally announced "Ca c'est pas bon [This is no good]." I asked him what was no good and he claimed I was missing a stamp. I then showed him the stamp that marked my yellow fever vaccination, and he shook his head saying "the other stamp." I flipped through the pages of my passport and showed him the exit stamp the previous official had just placed, and he shook his head saying "not that one." I grew nervous. "What stamp are you talking about?" He seemed to take pleasure in the fact that he knew something I didn't. After a few condescending "You don't understand what I'm asking for?" Solomon and his temper intervened. I had not realized this, but Solomon had been hanging out behind me this entire time. He began to yell at the official, claiming that the stamp he was asking for didn't exist and that he was full of nonsense (I think he used a different word). I stood there while Solomon and the official engaged in a screaming match in Franglais (half French, half English). This quickly turned into a fight about tone and respect, as many screaming matches I have witnessed in this region do. I was alarmed that Solomon had taken the interaction to a whole new level of hostility, but quickly realized that this would actually save me. The official was visibly upset that Solomon refused to speak to him in French. So I calmly stepped into the conversation, in French and with a great deal of deference, playing good cop/bad cop with Solomon. I explained to this official that I had not had any problems with my yellow card before and that he was the first to ask me about this stamp; he claimed that the airport officials in Accra were supposed to have stamped my yellow fever card when I entered the country. I calmly disagreed, in French, and stood there quietly; Solomon was still yelling in the background. This went on for another few minutes. Finally, the official looked at me and said "Alright, just give me 200 and go." That was, of course, what this was all about. I opened up my bare arms, displaying my pants and shirt as my only belongings(gotta love the super-secret-REI-pant-pocket). We stood at loggerheads for a few minutes while Solomon continued his diatribe on the side. Finally defeated, the official handed me my passport and motioned for me to pass. I still don't know what stamp he was talking about.

I was in Nigeria now. And in a country that consistently ranks first or second in Transparency International's index of corruption, the officials are a tad more straightforward when it comes to bribing. This one flipped through the pages of my passport a few times, gave my visa a quick glance, closed the passport and slammed it on the table announcing his price: 200. I, in turn, opened up my passport, displayed my Nigerian visa so he could take a better look at it, and told him defiantly that I had already payed a good $56 to get this visa. The official smirked, looked me up and down, and shrugged me away.

It wasn't as difficult as I expected. Nothing stopped these officials from insisting that I pay them. My guess is that people don't typically protest, and that expectations of having to pay a bribe (or "offer a dash", as Nigerians euphemistically put it) are self-fulfilling prophecies. I wouldn't have protested either, had Solomon not advised otherwise. I could have and would have spared the two or three dollars these guys demanded. But I have to admit I was glad I had not played by their rules, and I walked back triumphantly toward the car.

I had made it! I was in Nigeria. So were my bags, my passport, and my money. Yet I was a fool to believe it was all behind me, because the road leading to Badagry and Lagos - I was soon to discover - was an entire horizon of bribes and dashes. Suzie mentioned she had once counted 47 roadblocks on this stretch. I was too baffled to count for myself, but she couldn't have been too far from the truth.

At first it was immigration officials, loosely defined. Solomon warned me not to hand my passport to anyone before confirming with him first. I obeyed, though I have no idea how Solomon distinguished the real thing from the fraud because they all looked the same to me: young men with sticks and guns. They all wanted to know what the hell I was doing here. I, too, was beginning to wonder. There were hoards of them, each asking for my passport and hoping for his own dash: immigration, customs, drug control, even the veterinary quarantine squad... The Badagry-Seme Road was, obviously, where they cashed in. I gave nothing but my passport, and only when Solomon acquiesced. I noticed Solomon "dashing" a few officials here and there; I'm sure those expenses were included in the transportation fee I had payed him.

Immigration officials eventually gave way to police officers. For each police station we passed, three roadblocks awaited us. At that point, Solomon's strategy changed and I realized that the liability in the car - me - suddenly became an asset. We slowed down, and as the cop approached the car, Solomon declared almost alarmingly "Tourist in the car! Tourist in the car!" The official peered inside, caught sight of me, and motioned for us to move on. I quickly got the hang of this, and took out my Katie Holmes sunglasses and my travel guide: I had truly become the stupid white tourist in Nigeria, and it worked. Solomon didn't even have to say anything anymore. I rolled down my window. Cops approached the car, noticed me, and walked on.

The road eventually cleared up until we hit Lagos evening traffic, which is itself a claustrophobia-inducing mayhem. The car grew quiet as Lagos offered a cacophony of car horns and vendors outside. I was exhausted. I did not know whether to feel anger or sadness at the bribing parade that had welcomed me to Nigeria. My friend Jide laughs when I bring it up again. He tells me people say you haven't really been to Africa until you've been to Nigeria. I beg to differ, on so many levels. And I think I'll leave my first impression of Nigeria where it belongs: at the border.