Rushing Right Past It

by Yemisi Aribisala

I was in the back of a car going way over the speed limit on the Lagos Benin Expressway, headed in the direction of my secondary school, Federal Government Girls College in Benin City. I attended that school for three years before my parents decided to move me to a school closer to home in Lagos. During that time I would usually fly in a neat one hour on my own on some local airline, but this time I was traveling with a school friend whose parents had provided the sleek fast car and driver. A parent in the car would have forced the driver to go slower but it was just two 11- or 12-year-olds (I cannot remember) who had no say over the actions of the man at the wheel. Though he was obviously a trusted employee, otherwise we would not have been left on our own with him.

Even at that time, over four decades ago, a journey of 321 kilometres could take five or more hours, if one were to run into some obstacle at notorious points such as Ọrẹ̀, a town that served as an informal border between south-western and south-eastern Nigeria. There, one might find a car crash or large potholes in the highway that cars had to slow down to navigate; a toppled trailer with its contents strewn all over the expressway; flooding from rain; a mangled motorcycle that one had to avert one’s eyes from. Something was always amiss at that town aptly nicknamed theatre of war from the time of the Nigerian civil war…or else it was traffic slowed for the sheer exasperation of it. 

Once past the town you could nod off, with the hope of sleep ferrying you efficiently to the gates of the school. It was an unexceptional journey with nothing to see along the expressway except trees, thick green bush, and homes that saddened you for no other reason than their solemn aloofness and impenetrable windows.  

At some indistinct point in this particular journey, I woke up groggy and dehydrated out of a neck-contorting nap just in time to catch a line of genuflecting bodies flying past on the left-hand side of the car. No, I hadn’t imagined it. I was capable of imagining it but a snap of my head and neck backwards showed the bodies being swallowed up in the thirsty shimmering tarmac behind us, disappearing as swiftly as they had appeared. Sometimes watching the road closely with rays of sun flashing through trees and highway mirages slithering across the melting tarmac could give you a splitting headache. Just a few kilometres ahead, more people appeared with hands held out. Knees bending urgently, lowered heads, as if begging for something. Surely not a ride. Not in the way the bodies were positioned. Not in the tattered clothes caught in the wind draft behind us. 

What made these people more dreamlike was their rootedness in defiance to the cars hurtling past at such terrific speed. Trees leaned in obedience, dense green bush shivered, but these people seemed surer in their poses than trees, rising rocks, or undulating highway shoulders. As solid as mirages that had swum from under the car wheels to form statues at the side of the expressway. Someone in a car ahead had thrown something out of a wound-down window in their direction. I thought it was a cigarette stub or trash. It turned out to be crumpled Naira notes, scrunched up for momentum. This I learnt from the driver.

“Are they asking for a lift to somewhere?” I said to him, straightening up to raise my voice above the car radio and the whistling of wind and tyres. The driver was surely going too fast. Part of the reason I had willed myself to sleep was that I hated the repetition of the car radio jingles blaring out at high volume. Chewing kola and loud radio was this driver’s modus operandi for keeping awake.