Twice in the last year, I have flirted with the idea of commuting by bus in Lagos or Ibadan. The objective is to see how much has changed and to eavesdrop on the conversations that still make public transport one of the country’s greatest theatres.
I have not been able to do it.
Why? PTSD from countless episodes, perhaps. More likely because I still remember the experience of a former colleague who once found himself seated beside a spectacularly drunk man.
The story still creeps back whenever I think about boarding a bus. As the vehicle rumbled along, my colleague suddenly heard a loud “Grrrrraaaah!” The drunk had vomited. On him, that is.
My colleague was horrified and demanded to know what had just happened, as though the answer was not dripping down his shirt.
The drunk man was incapable of an apology. Instead, with admirable commitment to keeping every passenger fully informed, he announced, “Mo si ma yagbe.”
Vomiting, he said, was only the opening act. Defecation was still to come.
My colleague shouted at the driver to stop and fled the bus like it was a burning building. Several passengers followed him. I have always believed that was a once-in-an-age event.
My own memories were less traumatic and they involved conductors. The Ibadan conductors of my youth, known locally as kondor, were considerably less feral than their Lagos counterparts. That is not to suggest they were warm, fuzzy or cuddly. They rarely grabbed your shirt or buba because you were short of fare, but they possessed sabre-sharp tongues. It takes something close to complete detribalisation for an Ibadan-born or bred person to be unable to flay another human being with words. I should know. I grew up there and possess the same attribute, albeit in a modest quantity.
But every time I come close to acting on the impulse, my PTSD taps me gently on the shoulder and reminds me that nostalgia is best enjoyed from a safe distance.
One of my most memorable rides took place around 1988 on a bus from Gate to Iwo Road. At Testing Ground Bus Stop, a woman approached with a baby strapped to her back and four other children in tow, all apparently hers. The kondor sensed danger, suspecting that she intended to pay for one seat while somehow compressing the four other children into whatever space was available.
The kondor objected. The woman hit back, saying:
“Jon’peyin e bimo le’ede yin.”
Roughly translated, she wanted to know whether nobody in his family had ever produced children, which explained why he was behaving as though witnessing a biological impossibility seeing her kids being loaded into the bus like crates of Coca-Cola.
The kondor blinked.
“E sa ko won wole,” he muttered.
“Just bring them in.”
That should have ended the matter. It did not. As we approached her destination, the woman shouted, “Abe biriji nbe o,” letting him know she wanted to get down under the bridge. The kondor snapped.
“Eleyun e se bus stop. Ee b’oole l’Abayomi ni o.”
Under the bridge was not a designated bus stop. She would have to alight at Abayomi instead.
The woman erupted. The distance between the two points was only about 650 metres. Under ordinary circumstances, that would have been trivial. But with four children to herd, another strapped to her back and traffic swirling around her, the distance was a source of grief. When we eventually reached Abayomi, she climbed down and instructed the kondor to hand the children to her one after another.
He looked at her in affronted disbelief, saying: “Jon’pa jo biwon ni?”
“Did you have them for me?”
A fellow passenger eventually stepped in to help unload the children. Watching them descend one after another, the kondor delivered his closing verbal blow.
“E si a n’ja won bi apo agbado.”
“See how they are offloading them like sacks of maize.”
The woman responded with enough curses to sustain a Pentecostal deliverance service.
“O s’ofo danu. Ofo lo’ose. Ko ni ye o, kondor osi. Panda, aloku seini (chain or necklace).”
She declared that it would never be well with him, dismissing him as the human equivalent of worthless jewellery. Unlike everyone else, I managed to suppress my laughter until she was well out of earshot and the bus had pulled away.
In Lagos, where conductors belong firmly to the take-no-prisoners demographic, that woman might never have boarded the bus in the first place. If she had, there is an 80 per cent chance she would have paid whatever fare the conductor demanded.
Lagos conductors never had any qualms about grabbing your shirt, cleverly stepping on your shoe until it slipped off your foot, snatching it up and springing back onto a bus that never completely stopped.
If I were offering advice, it would be that you should never put yourself in a position where a conductor has reason to come close to you. That proximity could be deeply unpleasant. Back then, conductors almost never sat. Once the bus filled up, they hung from the door, their head jutting out. Whenever they saw policemen, they ducked low, clinging to a seat with one hand while the other arm stretched across the face of whichever unfortunate passenger happened to be nearest.
It was the dictionary definition of horror.
Many of them were rough sleepers, to whom bathing was a hostile ideology. Sleeveless T-shirts seemed compulsory. Look up at the wrong moment and you might find yourself gazing into an unshaven armpit marinated in a broth-coloured secretion and smelling like a poorly managed morgue. When they spoke, a four-day-old morning breath announced, beyond reasonable doubt, that you had entered a biohazard zone.
Being told, “Gbowo e lo” (collect fares from the other passengers before asking for mine) was usually a euphemism for, “I don’t have money,” and an invitation to trouble. Pleas for understanding, with “Alaye, ajuwaya e” counted for nothing. Slaps, kicks, headbutts, torn clothes and the confiscation of one shoe, leaving you looking like a half Cele man, all lay within the range of possible outcomes once you heard, “Respect yourself,” or “Ogbeni, pon ra e le.”
And whatever you do, never board the wrong bus.
I learnt that lesson the hard way in 1997 when I lived in Maryland. I was returning from Somolu with just enough money to get home. At Palm Grove, I encountered a dense thicket of passengers scrambling for buses. I squeezed into one whose conductor was growling, “Hey land! Hey land! Wole pelu change e.”
Lagos conductors pronounce destinations with such creative licence that I became convinced he meant Maryland.
The bus pulled away. Then it turned back into Shipeolu Street, the very road I had just come from. For a few minutes, I assumed there was another route to Maryland.
Then my brain reported back for duty. I asked the conductor whether that was really the way to Maryland.
He growled like a bear.
“O n’siere. Se mo pe Maryland fun e?”
“Are you mad? Did you hear me shout Maryland?”
The woman beside me calmly announced that the bus was actually going to Ladi Lak.
Ladi Lak bawo? E be like say I lack sense. I immediately asked to get off. Instead, I found myself double-teamed by the conductor and the driver.
“Mo ro p’ori yin ti daru,” the driver said with considerably more courtesy than his colleague. “I think something is wrong with your head.”
The conductor was a fountain of pugilistic rage.
“Ab’olosi l’egbon yi ni? O je m’owo mi jade. Mo pe Maryland fun e, abi? Wa gba.”
“Are you poverty-stricken? Bring out my fare. Did you hear me call Maryland?”
I was furious. But the possibility that he might actually collect the little money I had left terrified me even more. Had he succeeded, I would have trekked all the way back to Maryland. I kept asking, rather meekly, I confess, to be allowed off the bus.
Thankfully, the other passengers sided with me and persuaded the driver to stop.
I escaped, but not before receiving one final volley of abuse, the most memorable being the accusation that I was broke and coyly attempting to hitchhike on a commercial bus. Every fibre of my being wanted to answer with my fists.
But that would have been carrying my saara beyond the mosque.
I still want to ride on those buses again. I know they no longer pay in wazo, faiba and kala, the descriptions of some naira denominations. I want to ride on them because it is not because nowhere else captures Nigeria quite like a commercial bus. Politics, football, inflation, prophecy, heartbreak, tribalism, religion and unsolicited economic policy, all compressed into 14 or 18 seats.
But every time I come close to acting on the impulse, my PTSD taps me gently on the shoulder and reminds me that nostalgia is best enjoyed from a safe distance.
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