Nigeria: The big surprise of the expedition

There are texts from my family on a daily basis wanting to know if we are out of Nigeria yet. Are we safe? Are we OK? I cannot blame them – everything we know of Nigeria spells danger, crime, violence, chaotic, unruly, unpredictable.

As South Africans we are only too familiar with the many Nigerians who have all but taken over our big cities where they run the clubs, the drugs, the prostitution and the hijacking syndicates. We spent over a month in Bamako, Mali, doing everything in our power to obtain visas for Nigeria – and when we finally got them, we had more or less decided we were not going to like this place. When we got the border post – very remote and off the beaten track, we had to wait a couple of hours for the border officials to make their appearance.

Then, the moment we were on the Nigerian road – skirting Lagos and heading for Abuja, we were stopped at checkpoints every few kilometres – sometimes as often as five times in fifty metres! In the span of one afternoon and the next morning we were stopped 26 - yes! 26 times! The 'officials' who stop us with their old tyres scattered over the road or long planks with rusty nails sticking out pushed across the road to force vehicles to stop, can be dressed in anything from full camouflage military uniform, black police uniforms or blue jeans and dirty t-shirts – but they all carry impressive AK-47's, all strut like roosters in the farm yard and all walk up to the truck with the sole aim of finding something with which they can charge us. At every stop the full manifesto of the truck has to be shown, all the vehicle papers, our passports and our yellow fever certificates. At one stop the main man discovered that there were quite a few in the group who had not had their cholera vaccinations and insisted that we all get off the truck and gather around him where he was lounging on his bed under the thatch lean-to so that he could give the group a lecture on health. His lecture covered the causes of cholera ("random littering and defecating...") a political speech on how white people think that black people are not intelligent but how Nigerians are in fact highly intelligent and well educated and should never be underestimated and then a serious reprimand of the group for taking health so lightly and not acknowledging the fact that cholera exists in Africa and that it is not up to us to decide what we need and what not – we should have done research about the places we were visiting and come prepared. He spent quite some time going through the manifesto and questioning individuals who have 'student' written down as their occupation (the bulk of the group!) and asking about what they are reading and then specific questions about the course and the university where they are stuying. A tense moment. It was quite obvious to me that we could trip up seriously should one of us refer to an university where this 'well educated and learned' man happened to have studied himself, but fortunately it did not get that far. Despite some slightly questionable replies we remained looking very sceptical but stopped his grilling and afterwards it was decided that perhaps everyone should spend a little time getting their stories straight – and credible! Graham – a journalist by profession, is listed as 'manager'. “What business?” asked the man. “Ummm, paper,” said Graham digging his hand into his thick beard, tugging and stroking as if to get his inspiration there. “Paper?” asked the man. “Yes – umm pulp and err--- toilet paper!” came the reply. (I must get Graham to tell me more about the newspaper he works for...)

Each of these stops has the barrier across the road – so at times it looks like the entire road through Nigeria is one road block after the next – as far as your eyes can see. Some are on the right hand side of the road, others on the left. They are little thatched lean-to's with sometimes a table, mostly just a wooden platform with a mattress where the 'official/s' can sleep in between vehicles that come past. Almost everyone asks for a 'gift' or a 'fee' for processing the papers, but Mark is quite an expert in responding that he knows he does not need to pay anything and he does not give 'gifts'.

Nigeria is a country of many cultures and languages, born and raised in conflict and confusion. Chimamanda Adichi, the brilliant young author whose debut book Purple Hibiscus captures the social fabric of Nigeria so beautifully, writes in her latest book, Half of a yellow sun: “... the only authentic identity for the Africa is the tribe. I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came.”

The main three ethnic groups of Nigeria are the mainly muslim Hausa in the north, the strong and highly educated Igbo in the south east and the strong leaders in the south west, the Yaruba. It was quite amazing as we travelled through the country how noticably different the different areas are. Not only do the mosques and the churches denote the distinct borders between the north and the south, but the architecture, the clothing of the people, the sounds of the language they speak, the tribal markings on their faces, even their very features. One could easily mistake the differnet tribal areas for different countries and wonder why we had not crossed a border post and had had to show our passports.

We did not go as far south as Biafra, but I was embarrassed to discover that I had never realised that Biafra was in fact the south-east of Nigeria. Somehow I had always pictured it to be somewhere more north west in Africa. However; I have now read Aichi's Half of a yellow sun (a book about the Biafran war and one that I cannot recommend highly enough) and am so pleased to have been put on the right track. -- Apart from having to admit - shamefacedly - how ignorant I have been on this issue, I now have a far greater understanding of Nigeria and the Nigerians - and - am once again completely convinced that when we study history of a country, we should always start with the history written by a native of that country before reading the 'erudite' books written by people who passed through for a short space of time and then consider themselves experts on the country and its history. As a South African -- probably one of the most written-about countries in the world over the last 30-40 years, and knowing only too well how warped, biased and prejudiced most of those studies are, I have always known that history written by anyone other than a person who is rooted in a country cannot possibly result in a reasoned and objective observation. As is, it is difficult - if not impossible enough getting anything 'objective' in written history, but at least, if the author is a native of the country, the accounts of events will be from the perspective of the people to whom those events are relevant on a first-hand basis and who will have a better grasp of the causes of -- and the effect of the events on the people of that country. Just as I came into Nigeria 'knowing already what to expect as I know from reading the papers and the history books what Nigeria is about', so the history writers come here. But until I travelled through Nigeria and read Nigerian authors, I had in fact no clue what Nigeria was about -- all I had were the accounts and analyses of other outsiders.

If there is one thing I have learned on this trip, it is that we know so little about this continent and its people that it is frightening. It is time we stop talking and start listening.

When we left Nigeria and crossed into Cameroon – at the most relaxed border post we have yet come across – we drove for a few kilometres to -Rhumsiki where we stopped for what must have been the highlight of our expeditoon so far (*definitely more about this Reddest Button Moment later!), parked the vehicle and then set off on a walk through the village and back into Nigeria for the afternoon! The local people laughed and said: “We did not made the border. White people came to make the border. But we are all the same people!”

Remembering how long and with how much difficulty we obtained those Nigerian visas, and considering how stark the contrasting differences were between the different regions within Nigeria, this was quite an ironic situation; as far as these people were concerned they were neither Camerounian nor Nigerian, they just were.