To the Woman in Oshodi Isale
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
— James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village”
O ò dé Èkó lo ò mọ Ẹ̀yọ̀; o ò dé ṣálángá lo ò bá ìgbẹ́.
— Popular Yoruba expression
1
In 2011, months before the removal of fuel subsidies shut down Nigeria and the resulting protests turned the streets of Lagos into carnivals of fleeting resistance, a version of myself from which I am now estranged was standing at Oshodi Isale. I waited alongside a mass of tired Lagosians for a bus that was supposed to take us to Isolo, via Aswani Market. Babatunde Fashola, then governor of Lagos State, had followed his predecessor Bola Tinubu in his caper of transforming Oshodi Isale from a jumbled mass of yellow buses and pedestrians jostling for space into something with clear demarcations for man and metal beasts of burden, but that transport hub is fated to be something of a mess, so its condition would often worsen when traffic clogged other parts of the city, returning it to its anarchic past. A star could be performing on the island or the president could be leaving the city, and Oshodi paid the price.
That night in 2011 was one of those moments, when other parts of Lagos caught cold and Oshodi got congested. There were no buses going to Isolo because none had been able to come from Owonroshoki on one side or from Apapa on the other. After hours of waiting, I noticed the service lane was free from traffic, which meant a car could drive from Isolo to rescue me. It was nearly 10 p.m. and I was too tired to hike the five kilometers home. I called, got someone to agree to white knight me out of the situation, and began to walk to a filling station that would be accessible to my rescuer.
Before leaving the throng, I stopped to tap your shoulder. I knew you from months of sharing buses. We were both part of that unfortunate class of people compelled by Lagos to leave their homes before sunrise and return after sunset. You often dressed in a tank top and short skirt, cycling through a rotation like a work uniform, and held a small purse on your lap. You would look outside of the bus into the waking city, to that filthy wonder of human ingenuity. The first words I ever said to you were to inform you that someone was coming to pick me up, and you were welcome to join. You looked me over, considered the offer for only a moment before accepting and thanking me, and walked two paces behind me as we snuck past the other waiting passengers and headed toward the extraction point.
I had been in Lagos long enough to know the rhythms that, although masked daily by the overtone of chaos, kept my part of the city thrumming with metronomic consistency, and also to know my part within it: alongside the okada men who worked late hours and called to me as I approached the final stop on the way home, the agbero whose shifts began with my morning commute, the policemen who peered into buses with torchlights as they collected their night tolls, and the only suya seller I could trust to be at their post past midnight. This car ride was a break in that rhythm and an attempt to be kind to you, someone whose face was part of how I heard the city.
2
When you entered the car that night and traveled with two strange men from Oshodi to Isolo, what did you see as you looked outside the window? Were you thinking of the potential for this supposed benevolence to be another one-chance story? Did you think of the women whose mutilated bodies people found dumped on the roads in the mornings, holding their noses up as they walked by and speculating which of the seven deadly sins got them killed? Or did you know enough about me, a stranger, to feel secure in the ride, allowing you to pay attention to the lights of the industrial yards illuminating the road as we zoomed past, to the silence that was beginning to snuff out the bustle of the street, to the women and children schlepping their wares home, chatting about their aspirations for the next day? Did you think of the collective dreams of Lagosians like you who are in constant negotiation with the state government officials who extract from them and restrict their freedoms while pocketing chunks of public space to enrich the coffers of their political fathers? Did you consider resisting these people who push you into hard places, saying to yourself, wèrè sún, wèrè sún, ọjọ́ kan wèrè máa sún kan ògiri? Were you there in 2020 when protesting bodies were pierced with bullets so the state could use massacre to make space for impunity?
“When you entered the car that night and traveled with two strange men from Oshodi to Isolo, what did you see as you looked outside the window? Were you thinking of the potential for this supposed benevolence to be another one-chance story?”
When you never again saw the young man who helped you that night, did you wonder what happened to him, or did you know, like everyone in this city, that nothing lasts forever, people die, or they move on, and no one cares because they, too, may disappear into a manhole during a flood or be lost to a hit and run, their body dumped in a mortuary or the lagoon—and the people who run Lagos will not care?
Did you know that in New York, the Museum of Modern Art’s 2023 edition of their New Photography series, curated by Oluremi Onabanjo, focused on your city, Èkó? That exhibition was a document of your city’s ephemerality and a celebration of its perpetual motions, yet missing from it is the faces of its leaders who continue to raze memorials in order to construct monuments to their greed, dedicated arsonists who believe they are omnipotent and inscrutable, eager to continue to (de)form Èkó in their own depraved image. If you could see that exhibition, perhaps you would recognize someone in the pictures of the EndSars Protests by Yagazie Emezi, remember their face as it was that day, before armored tanks and bullets and bloodied flags, when fighting for the soul of the city seemed a possibility.
3
The last time the stranger who gave you that ride was in Oshodi Isale, it was being transformed into an “ultra-modern” bus terminal. Concrete and metal structures reached for the sky, cyberpunk intrusions from an absurdist universe in the minds of the people who run things, yet the prevailing infrastructure remained dead and the streets still stank. As I entered the gigantic structure, wove through it along with others, and pictured the wreck it would become, I was already looking at the city like an outsider, encountering it in a detached futurity. When we met in 2011, I was an engineering intern fairly confident in my skill as a designer of buildings. My dreams were grand and my concerns petty. I looked at the physical world and saw numbers, engineering ingenuity, or structural failures. I continued to move through the city as a passive participant, people-watching and eavesdropping, imagining the lives of people like you, wondering where they worked, who they went home to, if they had questions about life and living similar to the ones I had and how they answered them—but I made no effort to connect, to replace my imagining with knowing. All I have left of you now is a catalog of physical features—a face crossed in tension, well-worn block heel sandals—an impoverished sample that reveals nothing about the meaningful density of your life in Lagos. Maybe I should have paid more attention and asked questions when I continued to see you at the bus stop after that car ride. Perhaps I could have asked about the rain or the sun or the dry December winds that cracked lips open like seed pods, or what made you enter that car that night—what brutal calculations you made when fielding kindness from strangers in a city that tortures the naive.
“I continued to move through the city as a passive participant, people-watching and eavesdropping, imagining the lives of people like you.”
Now, I watch walking videos of Lagos on YouTube, wishing I had trained my senses on every detail of the city when it was available to me and using the cadence of pidgin on online radio stations to retune my inner monologue. Maybe nothing I did in that past would have precluded the wistful estrangement—from the city and the version of myself that offered you that ride—that will visit me in the future. Maybe this is all about the inherent unknowability of people, of Lagos—or maybe I should have just said hello rather than speculatively prattle on about what could have been. People often tell me they want to see Lagos. They have read about it in novels and essays and watched it in movies. For now, I speak of Islands and Mainlands and nightlife and culture, because sometimes who no know no suppose sabi. This is what I am not yet willing to tell them: No story of Lagos can offer a good view of the city; all who speak for it are unreliable narrators. If they want to know Lagos, they have to meet their own strangers, ask how they construct Èkó through spoken aggressions and silent solidarities, and prepare to be chaiked and chanced.
About the Author
IfeOluwa Nihinlola is a writer from Ogbomoso, Nigeria. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently studies in the Art History department at Emory University.
Read Ife’s “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Header photo by Babatunde Olajide.
Edited by Carey Baraka.
