Forty-eight years ago, I became a member of a group in Lagos that was named "The Contemporary Society". It functioned as a sort of standing symposium, drawing its topics, as you may have guessed, from matters related to contemporary affairs.

When the Society, as a change from its usual fare of debates and discussions, decided to go to Badagry for a field study, I volunteered to make a reconnaissance trip to the town. My job was to assess the conditions there, and recommend places of interest that were worth visiting. I was also to check out the route and report on travelling conditions. Badagry, in those days, seemed to be aeons away from Lagos, and getting there was not a piece of cake (and still isn't, for people who have to get past those places called Iyana-Iba, Volkswagen, and Okokomaiko, along the Lagos-Badagry expressway).

The expressway did not exist then, of course, and a relatively isolated Badagry was of interest only to its inhabitants, historians and a clutch of tourists. Badagry had for years been lulled into slumber by its reputation as a former slave port as well as its fame as the place where the seeds of Christianity were first sown in Nigeria.

As it turned out, the real value of my reconnaissance visit lay in what I had to say about the difficulty of getting there. In those pre-expressway days, the only way to get to Badagry from Lagos was by a road that passed through Agege, Ota and Ado, and terminated at Badagry. The distance was about 96 kilometres, and it took about three hours by car.

I set out from Lagos on a Sunday morning. The first part of the journey was pleasant, made even more so by Radio Brazzaville which, at that time, was probably the most listened to African broadcasting station within transmitting distance of Nigeria. You would be right to think that all that Radio Brazzaville existed for was to broadcast the vibrant music of a group known as "O.K. Jazz". The group could not have been better named, for the sound it sent over the airwaves was definitely okay.

When I was about half way to Badagry on that Sunday, what was supposed to be an all season Trunk B road deteriorated to stretches of fine dust that caught the wheels of my car and denied them traction.

In theory, what you do when the wheels of your car get stuck in sand is to "rock" the car, putting it alternately in forward and reverse gear and making small rocking motions until, presumably, the sand under the wheels gets sufficiently compacted to give the treads of the tyres some purchase. That is the theory; it sometimes doesn't work that way.

That Sunday afternoon I learnt about the folly of "rocking" a car to the music of O.K. Jazz. All that happened was that the wheels sank even deeper into the sand with every pressure I applied to the throttle and, soon, I was in it up to my hubcap.

Lesson Two: If your car is stuck in sand, and rocking it proves to be futile, get out and go and get some help in pushing or digging the car out. This only works, of course, if help is nearby. Fortunately, I had just driven past a cluster of houses before I got caught in the sand, so I now made my way back there, hoping to be lucky.

The village was in cassava country, and like the other villages in the area it was inhabited by cassava farmers. A Trunk B road ran through the village, on the strength of which I expected it to have that ultimate symbol of rural change and progress, a one-pump petrol station. It didn't have one, possibly because the cassava business was then not thriving.

The first man to whom I spoke was a palm wine tapper, something I deduced entirely from the fact that he was dressed like one, and was standing at the door of a shed where palm wine was being sold from a huge earthen pot that was half-buried in the ground to keep its content cool. After I told him about my problem, he was good enough to call together six brawny lads who pushed my car on to firmer ground, enabling me to continue my journey.

When I finally got back to Lagos and presented my report at the next meeting of the Contemporary Society, among the things I listed as the tourist attractions on offer were a few unremarkable old chains that were said to date back to the days of the slave trade. I also mentioned another land mark, the very first two-storey house to be built anywhere in Nigeria. I don't know what the house now looks like, but when I saw it in 1958 it was, to put it mildly, certainly looking its age. I also went out of my way in my report to mention a creaky, wind-powered water pump that, though not officially regarded as a tourist attraction, deserved to be listed as one. It was still in use, and for more than five minutes I stood there, watching and listening as it creaked and groaned and sighed while spewing water into waiting buckets. Every community should have one.

Two weeks after my reconnaissance visit, the other members of the Contemporary Society made the trip to Badagry for the field study, but I didn't go with them; I had had enough of that "all season" Trunk B road to last me for a while.

But "a while" doesn't last forever. Years later, when I began to raise a family, one of the ways I hit upon for entertaining my children was to fill a picnic hamper with food and pack all of us into the car for a day trip to Badagry. On one occasion I made a brief stop at the village outside which, years before, my car's wheels had been caught in the sand. The cassava business must have been thriving since my earlier visit. More houses had been built, there was now a small open-air market, and a church was under construction.

The cassava business seemed to have moved downstream to gari making, and two or three women were sitting under a tree, peeling cassava, while another was grating the cassava. To show my gratitude for the help I had received from the villagers on my previous visit I was tempted to buy a bottle of palm wine, but a cholera epidemic was raging in Lagos around that time, and not wishing to take any risks I bought a bunch of bananas instead, and we moved on.

You may ask what all this has to do with missing out on progress and development. Well, more than four decades after that reconnaissance visit, I passed that way again. The only sign that I could see of any change was a row of sturdy wooden poles standing knee-deep in tall grass, holding up sagging power lines that proclaimed the emergence of the village from the Dark Age, so to speak. NEPA had arrived, and the villagers, like others in all the villagers in that area, were unquestioningly optimistic that things could only get better. As proof, several rusted gabled roofs had television aerials attached to them, each one a crude device made from discarded fluorescent light tubes fixed in place like a cross, giving the houses an appearance of sanctity. I wondered if there was much point in owning a television set, even if it is only black and white, when your area is invariably the first to be plunged into darkness whenever NEPA was "load shedding".

The main industries remained palm wine tapping and gari making, with the gari exported for sale at the rotating weekly markets in the district.

Standing outside one of the houses (I never found out whose it was) was the rusting carcass of a car that had long been stripped of everything that was of any value. About a dozen lizards, steeped in lethargy and looking like miniature dragons, clung to the unplastered walls of the house outside which the remnant of the car stood. Not far from a communal well a goat dozed in the sun, and I had to look a second time to convince myself that what I saw basking atop the goat's head was a lizard. The lizard and the goat appeared to be good friends.

It is not difficult to guess what had happened. When the expressway was built, making the journey from Lagos to Badagry easier and shorter, the village lost its relevance. The jungle reclaimed much of the old "all season" trunk road, and what remained of its tarred surface became useful only for drying cassava.

A fifteen kilometre "bush" road now connects the village with the expressway. This bush road winds its way through tall grass, and frequently dissolves into swamp. The village, it says all too clearly, is going nowhere. It has become stranded because the expressway bypassed it, missing it by just eight

read more...

read more...

read more...