Of Travels and Travails, Part 1
Posted January 13, 2008 · Charles O
The Reentry
The British Airways aircraft entered the Nigerian space around 7 p.m. on that August evening, over eight years since I left that space. As we descended low enough to begin to make out the terrain, I was taken by the aridity of the savanna plains of the North. Our south-westerly traversal brought us shortly to the vast, amorphous greenery that is the West. That nebulous green contradicted the patterns of alternating shades observed from similar heights of the farms and fields of America. This was an unaffected mass, tempered with sporadic pockets of marsh and settlement.
As we neared the outskirts of metropolitan Lagos, the aerial view metamorphosed from the green of leaves and forests to the brown of human occupation. A different kind of chaos manifested itself in the incoherent reticulations of rusty roads and ancient corrugated roofs.
As our plane touched down at the Murtala Mohammed International Airport and taxied to our arrival gate, I observed two airplane carcasses bearing the “Nigeria Airways” insignia. The pair, laid to eternal rest in a clay dugout, had become the substrate of an entire ecosystem, accumulating a visible mass of green algae and, surely, other life-forms. The sheer banality of the sight assaulted the vestiges of my patriotism at once intensely and violently.
When In Rome...
Alighting the plane exposed me to another experience uniquely Nigerian. The unwritten rule for de-boarding aircrafts, as I heretofore understood it, was to wait for passengers in rows ahead of one to make their exit before one did. That rule applied even if those passengers took an inordinate amount of time to recover their luggage from the overhead compartments, under the seats, or wherever else they fancied to stow their stuff. In this homecoming, I was to observe passengers shoving one another to make their way through the aisle!
At that moment, it struck me that every passenger would eventually have to wait at the luggage carousel for a length of time determined almost entirely by the chance of the order in which their luggage was stuffed into the airplane’s bowels at the port of departure. Also, I reckoned that since this was a terminal flight, it was rather unlikely that the rush-mongers were in a hurry to catch a soon-to-be-departing connecting flight. But, no matter.
I was thrown aback when one of the rush-mongers turned out to be an oyinbo. That bull charged his way through the aisle past me, almost knocking me into my seat. I made a mental note of the two realistic conclusions that one might draw from this anomalous behavior: either the hypothesis of the Nigerian’s particular propensity towards unjustified rush is exaggerated, or our oyinbo’s brain cells simply transmuted to that of a Nigerian as soon as he entered the Nigerian space.
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Soyinquesqe as ever! Nce one, im feeling ur writing bro...my skills are getting rusty, havent had time to think.
Ur trip was quite eventful, make sure to write on the delta political warlord..wat was his name again?
Added by Idiare on Jan 14 at 07:27 AM