Free Africa39 by Wole Soyinka Page B

grin.
    Syreeta showed a clear fondness for local music. Pidgin hip-hop, Afrobeat electronica, Ajegunle reggae, highlife-flavoured R&B, even oldies’ disco crooned to a lover named Ifeoma. Nigerian music dominated the Lagos airwaves, and Syreeta seemed to know the lyrics to every song. Rihanna’s anthems might be enjoyed, and Drake’s rap acknowledged with sporadic nods of approval, but when P-Square warbled, Syreeta hollered back. Furo also listened to Nigerian pop – he even had two P-Square songs in his old phone – though he couldn’t say he had a particular taste for it. But now, hearing Syreeta sing along to lyrics that preached money and marriage and little else, he found himself hating P-Square a little.
    The song ended, the DJ resumed his adenoidal chatter and Syreeta said, pointing with a finger straight ahead, ‘See where those buses are turning – and that LASTMA man is just sitting there looking! OK now, I’m going to follow them.’
    Furo stared through the windscreen at the congested road: in the confusion that met his eyes he couldn’t find what Syreeta was pointing at. The road should have resembled a Mumbai train station at rush hour – lines and lines of stilled cars stretching into the distance, armies of hawkers darting about in rag uniforms, the air sluggish with exhaust fumes and exhausted breaths – but it didn’t, it had a chaos all of its own. It looked exactly like after-work traffic in Lagos was supposed to look. A sprawling coastal city that had no ferry system, no commuter trains, no underground tunnels or overhead tramlines, where hordes of people leaving work poured on to the roads at the same time as the freight trucks carting petroleum products and food produce and all manner of manufacture from all corners of Nigeria. The roads were overburdened and under-policed, and even in select areas where road expansion projects were under way, the contracted engineers worked at a pace that betrayed their lack of confidence in the usefulness of their labour. They knew as well as the politicians that Lagos was exploding at a rate its road network could never keep up with.
    The cars ahead revved and spat out smoke, the Honda rolled forward inches, and finally Furo saw the reason this section of the road was gridlocked. Metres ahead, in the middle of the highway, an excavator was breaking blacktop and scooping earth, and at the spot where it heaved and clanged, a new roundabout had been partitioned out with concrete barriers that narrowed the road into a bottleneck. A small band of touts, led by a cap-wearing man, whose white goatee caught the sunlight, had pushed aside one of the barriers, opened a path to the other side of the road – which was free of traffic – and they collected money from any car that squeezed through the breach. It was mostly minibuses that turned off to disgorge passengers and rush back into town, but a few private cars also took the opening. A state traffic warden sat on the tailgate of a Peugeot wagon adjacent to the breach and calmly watched proceedings. His crisp uniform shirt, the yellow of spoiled milk, was tucked into his beef-red trousers, and his black boots gleamed as he swung his feet back and forth.
    Furo turned to Syreeta. ‘I’ve seen the opening. Do you want to turn around? Aren’t we going to see your friend any more?’
    ‘We are,’ Syreeta replied. ‘See where the petrol station is? VGC gate is right beside it. I’ll cross over and drive by the side of the road till we reach the gate. If I stay here I’ll have to go far ahead, I’ll have to follow this traffic till after Ajah junction, then turn around and start coming back. With this go-slow, that will take us at least another thirty minutes.’
    Furo was tired of sitting, his buttocks ached, and yet he wasn’t eager for Syreeta to take the shortcut. He felt too conspicuous to break laws openly.
    He spoke. ‘I don’t trust that LASTMA guy.’
    ‘He won’t try anything,’ Syreeta