Welcome to Lagos. Chibundu Onuzo
know him,” he said, opening the bus door.
“Na why you dey answer this boy?”
“Don’t let anyone take my seat,” Chike said to Yẹmi.
Chike climbed down and faced him.
“Yes. What do you want?”
“Please can we move away?”
There was the carcass of a trailer truck stripped to its frame, resting on its side and waiting for the resurrection to rise again. A rubbish heap grew like a shrub beside it, emptying the area of passersby. Fineboy led him there.
“I need to get out of Yenagoa tonight.”
“Your affairs do not concern me.”
“Please. I take God beg you. Soldier is looking for me. I could not go home. I saw my friend Amos on the way. He said there are people watching my house. I don’t have the money to leave.”
“What about your family?”
“They have my picture. They will kill me. They have already killed one of the boys who came home on my street.”
“I should put you and the girl you tried to rape in the same bus?”
“I wasn’t even there. It was a story they told me when they came back to camp. Nobody raped her. That’s what she said. I got the story wrong. Let thunder strike me if I am lying. Let thunder kill my whole family.”
He touched his index finger to his lip and raised it to the sky.
“You can come with us to Lagos. Stand up. What’s that your name again?”
“Fineboy.”
“Fineboy, stand up. It’s a loan you’ll pay back when you find your feet. Make sure you don’t sit next to her.”
He paid Fineboy’s fare and the boy climbed into the back. The last space in the bus was next to Chike. Whoever sat there would feel the driver’s hand each time he reached down to change gears, his knuckles brushing against legs and knees. Women in particular hated this seat.
“This driver is too greedy,” a passenger said.
“So because of one seat, we will leave Bayelsa so late.”
“Driver, make we dey go o.”
“Look, I can’t take this anymore. Do you know who I am? I’m coming down from this bus.”
“Lagos?” a woman asked, running and out of breath.
“Yes.” She paid and he got down for her to enter. She smelled expensive, like the clear alcohol perfumes his mother sprayed for special events, crushed flowers and party stew, the scent of an occasion. The driver started the bus.
“Wait!” the man carrying the large Bible said.
“Mr. Man, I have an appointment tomorrow morning. Let’s be going.”
“What if you die before then? Can a dead body attend a meeting?”
“God forbid.”
“Then let us pray. Father, in the name of Jesus, we commit this bus journey into your hands. We command that no accident shall befall us.”
“Amen,” the other passengers said.
“We declare that we have not set out on a night when the road is hungry.”
“Amen.”
“I cover each and every one of us with the blood of Jesus.”
“Blood of Jesus,” the passengers intoned.
“I wash the wheels of the bus with the blood of Jesus.”
“Blood of Jesus.”
“I soak the driver’s eyes with the blood of Jesus.”
“Blood of Jesus.”
“He will see clearly and by your grace, tomorrow morning we will arrive safely in Lagos. We thank you, Father.”
“Thank you, Lord.”
“We give you all the glory for in Jesus’ name we have prayed.”
“Amen.”
“And all God’s people said?”
“Amen!”
Lagos
“REPORTS ARE COMING IN that the army has destroyed a whole village in Bayelsa State. We need someone to go down there and find out what happened,” Ahmed Bakare said to the senior editorial staff of the Nigerian Journal, the paper he had founded and run for the past five years.
They sat in the boardroom, the windows and doors flung open, the output of the generator too low for air-conditioning. Ties had come undone, buttons were following suit, a moist triangle of chest flesh visible on most of his employees. Ahmed had taken off his jacket but the knot of his tie still pressed against his throat.
“You must see why it’s so important that we send somebody down there?” he said.
It was not the first time Ahmed had tried to get one of his journalists to go to the Niger Delta. They felt the shame of reporting what they had not seen, news of oil spills and militants, fleshed out from the dry summaries on Reuters. Yet shame was not enough to risk their lives.
“The men from BBC, CNN, any sign of trouble, they’ll send a helicopter to fly them out,” his political editor said to him. “Can you guarantee that? Can you even afford it?”
“I’ll send you a speedboat.”
“With Rambo inside?”
The meeting ended in laughter as the group filed out of the boardroom. They were competent staff, diligent with deadlines and precise in their prose, but they were more interested in the business of newspapers, in ink and paper quality, distribution channels and advert space, than in the ideas that could be read between the lines of the text, the very principles that had propelled him to found this newspaper.
Nigerian news, by Nigerian people, for Nigerian people. Telling our own stories, creating our narratives, emphasizing our truths. They were tired mantras but they would have been sparks to people with imagination. Meeting with his staff was like holding a flame to a wet rag. Port Harcourt was only an hour’s flight away. He could go and see for himself: charter a boat, take a recorder, a notepad, a toothbrush, and some gin. Surely the militants would welcome him. They must grow tired of these white journalists who mistook their bravado for real menace, missing the irony of the stylized war paint, branding the movement something atavistic. Or they might use him as target practice.
He was an only child: a caution that had sounded in his ears since his sister’s death. For his eighteenth birthday, he had wanted to jump out of a plane over the English countryside, a billowing nylon cloud the only barrier between himself and death. His mother had spent two NITEL calling cards crying down a bad phone line. He was indispensable to her. And what of his reporters? To whom were they indispensable? Their wives, their husbands, daughters, elderly parents, younger siblings still in school.
He returned to his office to sift through tomorrow’s leaders. He had committed to publishing at least one anticorruption piece in each issue of the paper, and in the five years the Nigerian Journal had been open, he had not failed.
The intercom rang.
“Good morning, Mr. Bakare. There are some men here to see you from Chief Momoh’s office.”
“Show them in,” Ahmed said to his receptionist.
Chief Momoh was a former minister of petroleum and a billionaire, two facts that Momoh insisted were unrelated. A few days ago the Journal had run a piece