A traveler's advisory
By
There is a young man who plies his trade at the toll plaza along the Lagos to Badagry expressway. On most days, between 7a.m. and noon, rain or shine, he can be seen running after motor cars, with a bundle of newspapers tucked under his arm. I have known him for roughly four years now, but I still don’t know his name. When I want to attract his attention I shout "Vendor!", for that is what he is.
He probably doesn’t know it yet, but one of these days he could become a millionaire several times over.
We first met one Sunday morning when another vendor who does the newspaper rounds in the neighbourhood where I live failed to turn up. He had a monopoly of the newspaper vendor business in the area, and like all monopolists be tended to put his own interests ahead of those of his customers. My solution, whenever he failed to come, was to drive about eight kilometres to the toll gate, where I was sure to get whatever newspaper I wanted.
On this particular Sunday I had parked by the roadside and was transacting my business with the second vendor when I heard the sound of gunfire coming from the direction of the toll booths.
Bedlam.
With an instinct for self-preservation that I did not know a possessed, I jumped out and crouched behind my car, using its entire length as shield, hoping that the engine block was capable of stopping any bullet travelling in my direction.
The shouting lasted only two minute, although the panic it caused lingered on for a while longer. (The shots were fired by some Customs officers who were in hot pursuit of a gang of smugglers a regular occurrence in that area.) When I got up from behind the car the vendor, who had not taken cover, said to me: "I didn’t know that oga can be so afraid."
I told him the difference between being afraid and having a healthy fear. I also told him about stray bullets and what they could do when they hit flesh and bone. He merely laughed and said that, when he realised that no one in Lagos was safe from the bullets of armed robbers he had, during a visit to his hometown somewhere in Oyo State, taken the precaution of consulting a medicine man who gave him a charm to wear round his waist. Would I like to see it?
I shook my head. "I’ll take your word for it," I said. "Just tell me what the charm does."
"If I am shot at," he said, "the bullet will simply turn into harmless pap."
That sounded even better than a bullet proof vest, which I am told isn’t the most comfortable garment to wear. But...
"How do you know it would work?" I asked. "Have you ever been shot at?"
He gave me an enigmatic smile and said: "I am still alive, am I not?"
When I got home and sat down to read the newspaper, the headlines were all about people being shot dead by armed robbers, and also about "shoot outs" between the police and armed robbery gangs. It set me thinking and the next time I went to buy papers at the toll gate, I picked up my conversation with the vendor from where we left off on the last occasion.
"Apart from the one that turns bullets into pap," I asked, what other charms does this medicine man of yours prepare?"
He thought for a moment, and then said: "There is one for anyone who finds himself in a tight spot. What he does is lean against a wall, and he will vanish from the scene.
Just vanish?
"Well, he will be teleported somewhere else," he said.
That should be useful, I thought. Instead of paying through the nose to fly those airlines that find the Lagos/London route so "lucrative", one could just find a convenient wall, lean on it, say the magic words, and be teleported to, say, Oxford Street in London for the summer shopping.
"Not so," the vendor told me. "It only works when you are in real danger."
I thought of the dangers of travelling these days, especially after the horror of September 11. These were real enough to qualify.
"How much would one such charm cost?" I asked.
He mentioned a sum that I thought was on the high side. Then he added: "it will be cheaper if you buy it through me but you will have to pay me some commission."
That is where the matter rests at the moment. But with the demand I foresee for this extraordinary charm, if the vendor stops vendoring and turns all his attention to hawking charms, perhaps our sluggish economy would again perk up.
When the world was first waking up to the horror of hijackers insinuating themselves into the cockpit in mid-flight and pointing a gun at the pilot and saying: "Take me to Cuba, one could say that things were conducted along more civilised lines in those days. There were well established ground rules for hijacking. The pilot, after getting over his initial surprise, would quietly bank the aircraft and change course for Havana, knowing that the hijacker would be routinely detained for a token, few days, and that the aircraft re-fueled and sent on its way. In those days all that the hijacker wanted was a free ride to somewhere, even if it meant a detour to Havana.
Then the professional terrorists took over, and things turned really nasty, with planes being blown up in the desert and innocent passengers shot just to make the terror even more real. To forestall hijackings, security at airports became tight (or so we thought), giving rise to not so funny stories of misadventures involving passengers’ luggage.
One such story concerned a young Nigerian who checked in his luggage at an airport in continental Europe, and then went into the gents for a few minutes. Her returned to find his suitcase attracting considerable attention from the airport security people, and for a good reason. From within it could be heard the ticking of a clock on which the young man had spent good money, and for which a place had already been reserved on a wall cabinet back home in Nigeria. The clock had to be torn to pieces before the security men were satisfied that it was not a triggering device for a bomb. The young man does not complain about the destruction of his clock. The alternative would have been for the entire suitcase to be taken to an isolated corner of the airfield and "detonated" by bomb experts.
Less fortunate was the traveler who checked in at the airport in Nairobi where, as long ago as the early 1980s, security checks were so tight that, after stringent inspection at the check in counter, passengers’ luggage was carted to the aircraft but was not loaded into the cargo hold until each bag and baggage had been identified by its owner, the idea being to make sure that no malevolent individual packed a bomb in an unaccompanied suitcase which would explode at 32,000 feet while the sender sat safely in his house waiting to hear about it on CNN. (I understand that this practice is now also in force in Nigeria, but regard it as hearsay, as I have not been to any airport inside or outside Nigeria since 1989).
Well, back to Nairobi airport where the passenger under reference got into the plane without first identifying his suitcase. The plane was taxing to the end of the runway for take off when the passenger, changing to look out of the window, sighted his suitcase, which was of a distinctive shape and colour. It had been placed on the ground at the far end of the airfield, and two marksmen were shouting at it to detonate the bomb they were sure was inside it.
And last the reader should go away thinking that only bombs and guns can be a danger to air travellers, it should be mentioned that, some years ago, a kerosene stove was suspected to be cause of a fire that consumed a plane that was conveying over two hundred men and women from Kano airport to Jeddah for the annual pilgrimage. One of the passengers had lit the stove to warm the soup she had taken on board. Security men who would have pounced on her if she had been carrying a nail file, completely overlooked the stove. They couldn’t imagine anything so wild as a passenger heating up her soup over a stove lit in the cabin.
One of the most uncanny things about what happened in New York and Washington on September 11 was that it had happened before, five years ago, in a novel written by Tom Clancy and titled: EXECUTIVE ORDERS.
In the 1358 page work of fiction first published in August 1996, an international network of terrorists crashed an aircraft into the Capitol in Washington, at a time when the top people in the three arms of government the president included were under that one roof. The administration was decimated.
The new president cobbled together a coalition of sorts, and sent troops to fight against those known to be responsible for planning and executing the plane crash. While all this was going on, the terrorists launched a biological warfare which had the potential for decimating the population of the United States. The plague was only contained when a ban was placed on all travel into, out of, and within the United States.
Exactly five years after the book was published, planes were crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre, and the Pentagon.
When life decides to imitate Art, it does it with a vengeance.
October 2001