I don’t speak Yoruba. I’m not going to attempt to ride a middle ground here and say I understand it but speak only a little. Or try to make excuses by explaining my upbringing.
I’ll just keep it simple, I don’t speak Yoruba.

What I’ve found in my role as a non-Yoruba speaking Yoruba person, is that the absolute worst people to you are Yoruba people who speak the language. It is as if you have wronged them by being different.
I have never, not once, met a Yoruba person who was kind, or understanding, or even indifferent about it.
The reactions I’ve gotten when my terrible secret is revealed has ranged from anger, to disgust, to outrage. Like I should have known better when I raised myself and taken to the streets to learn that Yoruba by force.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, after all their mocking and snide comments, will these same Yoruba people, the gatekeepers of their cherished culture, teach me? No.
Will they reach a hand out to help me better myself by extending a few helpful morsels? They can’t be bothered. They just shake their heads, laugh some more, and tell me I can’t be saved.

And that’s fine, they can keep their language.
Over time, I’ve gotten used to it, but based on all this, I will be glad when the Yoruba language dies. I will not raise a finger to save it.
*shrugs* asko

Someone should translate this to Yoruba so they can read it and know I mean business.

I am over protective of artists I like.
When I find a song that touches me, I look for the singer and really dig my nails into them. I immerse myself in their work, exploring every song they’ve ever made, starting at the inception, tracking their growth, and try to find the limits of my love for them,

All this comes with a dark side.
When I completely love a band, liking every album they have ever made with no exceptions, I am also secretly hoping that they break up, retire, or die.
I know I should feel guilty about this, but I don’t. I want them to make a lot of money and I’m not specifying that they have to die, I will settle for breaking up or retiring.

The way I see it, if a group has made the best music ever, and you’re sitting on your bed in the dark holding an autographed copy of their last album, crying as you listen to the hidden track at the end like it is a personal message to you, the worst thing that artist can do is come out with a new album.

The chances that the new album will be better than the previous one is small enough, that I don’t think it is worth releasing. They should just say, “we love our fans so much, we’ll leave on that high note.”

Two of the Beatles are still actively singing and touring, but imagine if the entire group was still around, and they had made new music all through the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Even at the low rate of three albums a decade, that’s an additional 200 songs we don’t need.

Ask any Michael Jackson fan for their favourite song, no one would name something from his last album. They won’t say, “I thought he was just warming up in Thriller, but he really hit his peak in that duet with Bieber.”
I’ve never even heard anyone say one of his later songs like ‘Blood on the Dance Floor’ is their favourite MJ song.

This is not to suggest that creative people should quit their callings and die or settle into a life of mediocrity. I know every new piece tells a different story, I just want to know I have everything before I commit to an artist.

Adele’s next album might win six Grammys, but she probably won’t.
So if you’re not sold on Adele now, her next album isn’t going to be the one that gets you. The only way she could make you happy would be if she releases something drastically different that alienates her current fans.

To get new followers, she must stab the existing ones in the back, and as a psychotic fan who likes her now, that should terrify you.

There is no winning, the only way from here is down.

At the school I was teaching, a student’s phone was stolen. The students are not allowed to bring phones to school, so when she told me her phone had been stolen and that she thought a boy in her class took it, I wasn’t sure what to do.

I reported it to the proprietor who shrugged and said, this is why we don’t allow phones in school. End of story.

At the end of the day, the girl accused the boy of taking her phone in front of everyone. He stormed out of the school ignoring her and she followed him calling him names.

WARRANT ISSUED

The following morning, two policemen came to the school looking for the boy. The girl called me outside to meet them. One of the policemen, who turned out to be her uncle, said the girl had filed a complaint against the boy, and they had come to pick him up for questioning. The two policemen came on one motorcycle, so I use the term ‘pick him up’ very loosely. They dragged the boy out of his 8am class with much struggling. The boy held onto the gate as he was carried out by both men, shouting that he wouldn’t let go unless a member of staff went with him. He was looking right at me as he said this, spittle sputtering out of his mouth as he screamed. So I got my stuff and went along with them.

PRISONER PROCESSING
We got to the local police headquarters, and the boy was taken through the normal check-in process. By normal check-in process, I mean, they took 100 naira from him for processing fees, slapped him a few times for being difficult. Then they stripped him of his belt and shoes, and shoved in a wet cell that smelled strongly of Izal disinfectant. They didn’t even take his name down.
As they pushed the boy into the cell, the front desk policeman stuffed the processing fee into his pocket and scoffed as if disgusted he had to deal with such criminal scum.

INVESTIGATION
We were taken up to the AOC’s office (or was that AO, DO? Everyone there had an abbreviated title, I lost track). The office had two sofas on opposite walls facing each other and a desk and chair on the third wall.
In the office, the girl repeated her story to the police chief, his assistant, and the two arresting officers. She said she suspected the boy because he had once hidden her phone as a joke. Then after she followed him home accusing him, he had turned around and beaten her up on the street.
The policemen nodded in all the right places.
When she was done, the four policemen talked about the collapse of society and moral decay in the youth. Then lapsed into silence with no decision made or plan on how to proceed.
I sat in the office with the girl for hours doing nothing. Other people came in and out of the office, policemen engaging in small talk, laughing, counting huge piles of money and divvying them up.

AN ACQUAINTANCE
At some point during the day, the police chief suddenly remembered a man they had arrested and locked up the previous day. “Is he still in the prison? Kai, bring him out, bring him out!”
They brought in an old man into the office and made him sit on the floor. The old man told his tale.
He had borrowed 15,000 from a married couple that he was friends with. He had paid 10,000 naira back to the married man, who had failed to mention that the couple was (still married but) now separated. The woman didn’t want to deal with getting her share of the money from her husband, so she had called the police and they had arrested the borrower (for paying money to the wrong person without first finding out the situation).

CASE CLOSED
As he told the story, the old man kept saying, “Ask the woman, we are friends. Three of us, we are all friends.”
They called the woman from home and told her to come to the police station.
She got there in 15 minutes, and we all crowded around the old man sitting on the floor like an informal court. The police chief asked the married woman how she wanted the situation resolved. She said 10,000 naira of the borrowed money belonged to her and only 5,000 belonged to her husband. She also wanted an additional 2,000 for coming to the police station twice.
I was surprised that the entire time, no one mentioned getting the money from the husband. Or calling him, or tracking him down, or arresting him. Nothing. This is the robbery division, they don’t handle family issues.

The police chief asked the old man if he was okay with paying 12,000 by the end of the week, or if he wanted to think about it for one more night in the cell downstairs.
The old man picked freedom. He tried begging the woman for more time to repay the loan. When she refused, he said, ok, ok, he would give her money by Friday. They led him downstairs to sign a confession.

I saw the old man one more time two weeks later. He was standing on the side of the road wearing the same dirty jacket he’d slept in that night in prison. He flagged down the bus I was in, and when the bus stopped to pick him up, he looked inside, staring right at me and ran off into the bushes. His oversized slippers making a schlopping sound as he jumped over some brambles into a puddle. The rest of the people in the bus thought he was mad.
The entire time in that office, he thought I was a policeman.

POLICE ATTITUDES
Another man came in to report that he was robbed. The taxi he was in had been stopped between towns by armed robbers. The armed robbers made the passengers kneel at the roadside, as they stopped other cars passing and robbed them as well. As the passengers lined up increased, the robbers told them that if they found out anyone of them was a policeman, they would kill the person.
The man retelling the story said it finally ended when soldiers arrived shooting up the place and everybody, robber and victim alike, ran away.
The police chief and his men listened to this story, their expressions like a group of scared village women, wringing their hands into their wrappers, their faces crestfallen, clicking their tongues in defeat as they shared stories of an evil they can neither comprehend nor defeat.

I walked down the hall to an empty room that the station uses as their trophy room. Lining the walls of the room were photographs of the different victories that station had had. A man in handcuffs holding a chicken, two men chained to a goat they presumably stole. No armed robbers next to cars though, those are real crimes.

INTERROGATION
I left the police station at about 2 pm to get lunch. I came back to find that another school official had stopped by and paid the policemen 2,000 naira to allow the boy out of the cell to write a statement.

The boy wrote his statement with a timeline of events, denying taking the phone. The policemen brought him into the office and asked him to sit on the floor of the office while they read his statement out to everyone.
The police officers appeared surprised that the boy wrote that he didn’t take the phone so they started the interrogation process.

“Did you take the girl’s phone?”
“No, sir”
“Hmmm, the girl said that you took her phone. So did you take the phone?”
“No, sir, I did not take the phone.”

There was an intermission of slaps and kicks administered by the arresting officers. Then the police chief continued:

“You see, we all believe that you took the phone. I will ask you one more time, did you take the girl’s phone?”

“No, sir. I didn’t”

Investigation over, the police chief sent the boy back to the cell while they discussed what they would do next.

RELEASE
They concluded that the only way they would release the boy was if he agreed to pay for the missing phone. The arresting officers (the girl’s uncle and his friend) believed the boy stole it. They said he had acted stubborn, had been rude to the police when they tried to pick him up from the school, so they had all the evidence they needed about his character and he must have stolen the phone.

The phone cost about 7,000 naira so if you factored in the 2,000 paid to get him out of his cell plus however more he would pay while they wasted time, I thought it made sense to agree to pay for the phone and leave.

They brought the boy out again. By this time, the boy was crying and blubbering like a baby. Pacing back and forth barefooted, holding his baggy shorts up with one hand and wiping his face with his other hand as tears streamed down his cheeks into his big boy beard.

I explained what they said, that if he agreed to pay the girl for the missing phone he could go.
He nodded and said he would have the money by the following Monday.
The girl interrupted and said she wanted an additional 3,000 for injuries. The policemen looked at the boy and asked if he would be willing to pay that as well.
He said he would.

They made him write a new statement saying that he had agreed on his own without being forced by the police to pay for the girl’s phone and the injuries she sustained during their argument.

I was asked to co-sign this, in case the boy did not pay by Monday.
I co-signed it. It was now 5 pm.

CONCLUSION
The boy was taken downstairs to the front desk to get his shoes and belt, and I was called into a side room by the girl’s uncle.

After spending hours talking about the importance of character and how they concluded the boy stole the phone based on his behaviour, the arresting policeman had called me aside to ask for a bribe.

The way the man asked for it was pitiful. It was bumbling, it was sad. He couldn’t even make eye contact.
Have you ever seen a poetry recital by a kindergarten student at a school’s variety day? The child is looking up at the ceiling, looking down at his shoes, he is playing with his feet drawing circles with his toes on the stage.
It was exactly like that. A shoddy all-around performance.
“I should know that…. erm…. they think that …. umm… I should pay … *cough, cough*… 10,000 naira for letting the boy go. Especially as they ..err.. wasted their …. whole day.”

I was quiet for a long time. I just stared at him. This whole thing was going to turn out to costing everybody about three times the price of the phone.

Then I started laughing, I told him to keep the boy, and I walked out.

Time passes.
Drifting away from us like sand through an open hand.
Nothing can be held, nothing kept.

My response is always the same. Always a safe answer that cannot be used against me later.
I say, I don’t have a type, because it is safe and because it is mostly true.

Then they ask a follow-up question like, “Does she have to speak English?”

But they are not asking “does she have to speak good English?” which is a question about how particular you are about grammar.

Instead they are legitimately asking what if the two of you cannot understand each other because you have different languages.

What type of life do they think I have where I’ll be sitting at a bar and a woman who doesn’t speak English will slide into the stool next to me and say, “Je t’adore.”

These people have been watching too many romantic films.

Or maybe they are thinking of it in a village sense, where I’ll be walking on a dusty path between mud huts and I will see her through the palm fronds that line the community well.

I will watch as she pulls the bucket up from the well, hand over hand, the length of rope piling up at her feet.

She will fill her basin, bend over and pick up it up, lifting it and balancing on her head.
Some of the water will spill, splashing on her shoulders, trickling down the front of her wrapper.

She will walk on the path towards me, glancing at me through smoky eyelashes.
I will lick my lips and untangle my tongue enough to mumble “yaya aiki” as she passes.

So I reply
Okay. She doesn’t have to speak English. Happy?

The questioners will now ramp it up with something like,
“Does she have to have hands?”

Hands?

Are you serious? Hands?

I’ll ask for clarification
She won’t have hands at all? Or can she have like …. lobster pincers?

And they will say, very seriously, “No hands at all.”

Well, if she doesn’t have hands or speak English, how will she do the sign language for ‘I wuv you’ in the final romantic scene of the shitty movie playing in your head?

Alright, no hands.
Hands are optional for me.

Just give me a person with a torso that makes guttural noises and I’ll be fine.
Ridiculous.

FWD:
“please try and be extremely vigilant when driving or doing anything. Kidnappers are on the prowl around lagos and abuja and they are targeting average, normal middle class people. Try as much as possible to desist from parking your car in isolated areas in day or nite time and if u must, look for a busy place. “

Do you see the thinly veiled insult there? That someone who knows me actually thought, “He is an average normal person who will benefit from this.”

God forbid.

If I ever get kidnapped, I will ask the bandits if they are the ones people have been talking about who take normal people. If they say yes, I will tell them surely there has been a mistake because I am rich.

When they hear this, they will be remorseful, drop me off at my mansion, and apologise for killing my driver.

I know this goes against every instinct because you cannot get a Nigerian to admit they are rich. Tell someone pointedly that they are upper class, and they’ll respond with a “No o, middle class. Maybe even lower class sef. We are struggling.”

Tell them they are doing well, and they’ll pause live TV on their flat screen, put down the bottle of Cristal, move closer to you and say, “Shh…. let me tell you something, my wife doesn’t know this but we are poor.”

“We’re still dragging it o. Everyday hustle, hustle.”

Even a retired man sitting on a fat pension with a house in the middle of Lagos close to his business, another house on the outskirts of town for when he needs to get away from the bustle, and a third house in his village for when he goes there to bless his people.
This man will be arguing that he is middle class, at most.

Someone should audit him, maybe some kidnappers.

He only made it to 24.

He never caught up.

He took his camcorder there, shot the performances, and was showing us the footage after he got back.

In the video, he captures a few of the musical performances, then he sweeps across the crowd heads to the parking lot, still filming, and settles on a Lamborghini. My friend keeps the camera on the car and zooms in on the tyres and says (to us watching), “Check out, the car is so low it cannot drive over a can of coke.”

I am always a little proud when I see exotic cars in Nigeria. It warms my heart because it stands in contrast to the footage we always see coming out of Africa. It gives me hope that there is more where that came from and it shows that you can get anything in Nigeria.

At the same time, I am confounded by the utter uselessness of having a Lamborghini here.

Maybe I just don’t know the secret places in Nigeria where you can lay on the throttle and let your car ease up to 300 km/hr. But there has to be only about three long smooth stretches of road in Lagos. And if you factor in traffic lights and crowds, you’ll probably be down to just one road where you could drive the car.

If you had a car like that, where could you drive it to, besides to the Star Mega Jam and only if you lived next to the concert.

Even if you wanted to go somewhere else with better roads, you would have to put the car in a container to transport it to, Abuja for example, just so you could drive it there in stop-and-go traffic (by yourself).

You could have gotten a cheaper car, paid a driver for his entire lifetime, and hired a woman with small delicate hands to give you foot massages while you were stuck in the neverending traffic, but rather than be chauffeured around in luxury, you opted for a Lamborghini that you can only drive on one road in the state.

Instead, you decided to burden yourself with a car that insists you pore over a map, plotting a course to avoid all roads with potholes in Lagos before you go anywhere.

Punk move, man.

I sat in the taxi making mental notes – wake up early tomorrow, pack, go back to work, finish the proposal, send for review, make corrections, get signatures and approval, rush out of work to airport and fly home.

There was a toll booth between office and the hotel. Normally, the taxi driver would either ask the passenger to pay the toll when they reached the booth, or add it into the fare at the end. This driver didn’t say anything at the toll plaza so I assumed he would add the toll into the fare at the end.

When we got to the hotel, the taxi driver gave me the bill, and it was a lot more than I expected. I asked how he came to that amount, he showed me that he had factored in a higher amount to bring me there, and he had added in the toll gate fees twice.
He said, since he was bringing me somewhere that he wouldn’t be able to pick up another fare, he had to charge me for the total cost to get back home. I could live with the higher amount, but did he have to charge me for the toll too? Like I had woken him out of his house and inconvenienced him with my petty taxi requests.

The price wasn’t a big deal, transportation was being paid for by the office, but  the whole thing upset me.

I started to argue with him.
“Won’t you just pick someone else up?”
“What if I show you a place where you will find people pick up?”
“If you’re going back, how do I know you will take the toll road? I know it is nice and convenient, but if you were driving back at night with no traffic and paying your own money, you would probably take the free road.”

He shot down all my suggestions.
He was a big guy with a rough beard. Not tall, but fat and settled in comfortably like he would have trouble getting out of the cab.
He dismissed all my points with a backward wave of his hand, I was wasting his time.
Finally, I gave up, gave him the money and went up to my room.

Three hours later, I was still awake, sitting in bed and thinking, “Why would the taxi driver assume he could take advantage of me? Is there something written on my face that lets people know that I won’t fight back?”
I should have said something. I should have thrown the amount I thought he deserved at him and stormed out of the taxi. He could have struggled out of the cab, chased me down and then what?
I couldn’t sleep at all that night.

I was up two hours later, got dressed and headed downstairs. The hotel attendant called a cab to take me to the office. As I got into the taxi, I asked the driver, “When you drop me, will you also charge me the amount it costs you to come back here?”
He scoffed, laughed a dry laugh, and said, “Why would anyone do that? That’s ridiculous.”

I knew it.
It was ridiculous. I had been swindled by the fat bearded taxi driver.

I fumed all the way to work.
I got to the office too early to eat breakfast and I skipped lunch to finish the proposal. My meetings went terribly  and I blamed the bearded driver for the lack of sleep. By evening when I submitted the proposal, I think of him sitting in his driver’s seat throne doing that dismissive back wave of his hand at all my effort.

I run of work to catch a taxi to the airport and as I run downstairs, I think about what an interesting coincidence it would be if I get Fat Beard’s taxi again. Will I turn him down and give him the finger? Will I get into his cab and  underpay him when we to the airport?

But I don’t get Fat Beard. A different taxi driver pulls up, I get in and we make it to the airport just in time for my flight. It is a short flight, an hour long hop. I am exhausted and I barely close my eyes before we are landing.
I get home and I pass out in my work clothes.

I wake up the next morning, my phone has five missed calls. I was supposed to meet a contractor and I overslept. I head out to meet the contractor and when we are done, I realise how weak I feel and how badly my stomach hurts.

I remember that I haven’t eaten in about two days.
I pull into the first place I see that serves food. It is a franchise fast food restaurant. I am waiting in line with everyone else to place my order. I am looking up at the pictures of food and trying to make up my mind on what I want, besides one of everything.

There are four stages of hunger. There is slight hunger, which you feel at regular meal times. You know what you like, you can afford to be picky about what you’re going to eat. If they only have rice, and you don’t like rice, you turn it down and wait and eat something else later.

After slight hunger is major hunger. At major hunger, you are no longer picky about what you get to eat. That rice you turned down is now looking fine. Once you squirt some stew or ketchup on it to mask the taste, you won’t remember why you didn’t like it in the first place, all you’ll taste is win as the food is metabolised into energy in your body.

Past major hunger is starvation. Starvation is a strange place because you’ve come full circle back to being picky about food. At starvation, you’ll get nauseous at the mere smell of the wrong thing. You can’t just eat anything at starvation, instead, you have to wean yourself off starvation by eating small portions of the right food. You have to slowly step yourself back down to major hunger, and then you can proceed to eating normally.

Beyond starvation is madness.

I was past the hungers and bordering on psychosis. I was aware only of two things, the fact that I had to eat soon to continue to function and my anger at Fat Beard. Fat Beard had become some type of phantom arch-nemesis in my mind,  the suppressor of the downtrodden, the reason why I didn’t sleep or eat. If you don’t stand up for yourself, Fat Beard will be right there to snatch away what belongs to you.

The line moves, I shuffle forward, closer to ordering my food.

By the time it is my turn, I have decided that I want a flatbread chicken sandwich, which is just two pieces of flat toasted bread with a slice of chicken and some cheese in between. Nothing else will sate my hunger at this point except that particular sandwich.

But I don’t want the cheese.
All I want is toasted bread and chicken to step myself down to some major hunger.

My eyes are bloodshot, hands trembling, I ask the cashier for a flatbread chicken sandwich without cheese. He looks at me, stares down at the screen for a long while, squints his eyes, punches some buttons, looks back up at me and says, “Sorry, we can’t do that.”

Huh?

Yes you can. It is my money, my sandwich. Remove the cheese and give it to me.

He explains that the sandwich is pre-packaged, and all he does when I place my order is take the pre-made sandwich and put it in the industrial toaster. The toaster will warm the sandwich, brown the bread, and melt the cheese all over chicken. He says, once it does that, it will become impossible to extract the cheese from the sandwich.

He is explaining all of this to me, I am standing there with my mouth open, my lips cracked, and I’m sure flies are starting to buzz around me. Stage four of hunger comes with flies.

I tell him to give me the sandwich without warming it. I will remove the cheese myself while it is still cold and solid so that it doesn’t melt onto the chicken. And after that, I can take it home to warm it myself or, if he wants, I can give it back to him to toast it for me.

He smiles, shakes his head that he can’t do that, waving me away as he says no.

I notice the back wave.

My face twitches.

I’ve seen that hand gesture before, Fat Beard. That gesture that means my opinion doesn’t matter.

I start to yell at him. I demand to see the manager.

The manager comes out of the back room and I give him a piece of my fragmented mind.
When I am done shouting at him, he still doesn’t bend. It is company policy, he says, they can’t give uncooked food to the customers. Either they warm it before giving it to me or I leave empty-handed.

The little vestige of sanity I have is telling me to back down. But we all know I am way past the point where I can just settle for any other sandwich and sit quietly at a booth to eat it. All the customers are staring.

This is not going well.

Ten minutes later, I am pacing in a corner of the restaurant. I am on the phone, in the middle of an angry call to the franchise’s head office. The manager is standing next to me, waiting, he is still holding the company booklet that contains the list of numbers to call in an emergency while a policeman watches us from the door.

What is wrong with me?

*************************************

Loosely connected events and a final straw triggering a disproportionate response in a hungry people? Seen.