by Pius Adesanmi
Tayo and I set forth on a trip to our source. We set forth on roads unworthy of the animal dignity of pigs. Successive generations of Nigeria’s federal leadership have decided that these roads, beneath the dignity of swine, are all their people deserve. You see their convoys of glistening Toyota Prados on these roads. Moribund, contemptible leaders: heavier and newer Prados is the only solution their porridge brains have to offer.
I tell Tayo that Nigeria’s leaders will not deny me the bucolic joys of this trip to the interior. There is nature. Verdant and luxuriant nature. It works on the senses as the wounded macadam finally gives up and becomes a reddish sprawl of clay bush path. These paths bear the poetry and promise of so much psychic jouissance for this wayfarer to his homeland. It renews me. That is one gift that horrible leadership cannot take away from me.
Then there is the gift of the little occupations with which the little people cling to a semblance of human dignity even as their oppressors speed by in sirened Prados.
The smile on the face of the woman who sold us mouth organ is a gift.
The smile on the face of the woman who sold us asala is a gift.
The smile on the face of the hunter who sold us antelope, grass cutter, and guinea fowl is a gift.
The smile on the face of grandma who sold us baskets for the live turkeys we had with us is a gift.
There is a calm, serene dignity to these little people who run the economics of the roadside all over Nigeria. It will take us hours to reach Isanlu because we are stopping so often to be part of this economics of the roadside.
But there is immense joy in interacting and bonding with these roadside sellers in order to listen to their heroic tales of surviving the wickedness and incompetence of the black Prado dwellers who speed past them, invisible behind tainted screens.
Night falls. We are on the road. But I know that nightfall turns the forest to a playground for the son of the snake.
I don’t know about the son of the rat.
Op–ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija
Pius Adesanmi, a professor of English, is Director of the Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Canada
