Seated beside Syreeta as she steered the Honda through traffic, Furo realised why radio DJs were superstars in Lagos. The car radio was tuned to Cool FM, and many times on the drive from Lekki to Ikoyi to pick up Furo’s passport and back to Lekki for lunch and on to Ajah to visit her friend, Syreeta had danced in her seat and squealed with laughter at the music selections and the banter of a host of DJs who seemed never to run out of something to say. With the Honda now stuck in a monster traffic jam on the outskirts of Ajah, Furo began to think that for the millions of commuters who spent hour after hour and day after day in Lagos traffic with only their car radios for company, these feigned accents and invented personalities became as dear as confidantes. The more he thought about it, the more he was struck by blinding flashes of the obvious, a whole rash of ideas marching into his head to the beats from the car radio. Persistent power cuts in Lagos, in the whole of Nigeria, meant that battery-operated radios were the entertainment appliance of necessity for both rich and poor, young and old, the city-based and the village-trapped, everyone. Radios were cheap to buy and free to use, no data bundles or subscription packages or credit plans, and they were also long-lasting, easy to carry around, available in private cars and commercial buses, and most important, they were independent of the undependable power grid. Mobile phones even came with radios, as did MP3 players; and computers had applications that live-streamed radio; and thinking of it, the rechargeable lamps that everyone owned also had radios built into them. Then again there were those new Chinese toys for the tech-starved: radio headphones, radio sunglasses, radio caps, radio wristwatches. It was endless. Radio was deathless. Radio DJs were superstars.
Furo lost interest in this line of thinking when the DJ cut the music to announce that it was time to pay the bills so don’t touch that dial. After several minutes of jolly-sounding jingles, most of which seemed aimed at schoolchildren and petty traders, a spanking-new Tuface single was introduced by the DJ, and as the song sprang from the speakers Syreeta threw up her arms and hooted with joy, and then glanced over at Furo with a lopsided grin.
Syreeta showed a clear fondness for local music. Pidgin hip-hop, Afrobeat electronica, Ajegunle reggae, highlife-flavoured R & B, even oldies disco crooned to a lover named Ifeoma. Nigerian music dominated the Lagos airwaves, and Syreeta seemed to know the lyrics to every song. Rihanna’s anthems might be enjoyed, and Drake’s rap acknowledged with sporadic nods of approval, but when P-Square warbled, Syreeta hollered back. Furo also listened to Nigerian pop — he had two P-Square albums on his old phone — though he couldn’t say he had a particular taste for it. But now, hearing Syreeta sing along to lyrics that preached money and marriage and little else, he found himself hating P-Square a little.
The song ended, the DJ resumed his adenoidal chatter, and Syreeta said, pointing with a finger straight ahead, ‘See where those buses are turning — and that LASTMA man is just sitting there looking! OK now, I’m going to follow them.’
Furo stared through the windscreen at the congested road: in the confusion that met his eyes he couldn’t find what Syreeta was pointing at. The road should have resembled a Mumbai train station at rush hour — lines and lines of stilled cars stretching into the distance, armies of hawkers darting about in rag uniforms, the air sluggish with exhaust fumes and exhausted breaths — but it didn’t, it had a chaos all of its own. It looked exactly like after-work traffic in Lagos was supposed to look. A sprawling coastal city that had no ferry system, no commuter trains, no underground tunnels or overhead tramlines, where hordes of people leaving work poured on to the roads at the same time as the freight trucks carting petroleum products and food produce and all manner of manufacture from all corners of Nigeria. The roads were overburdened and under-policed, and even in select areas where road-expansion projects were under way, the contracted engineers worked at a pace that betrayed their lack of confidence in the usefulness of their labour. They knew as well as the politicians that Lagos was exploding at a rate its road network could never keep up with.
The cars ahead revved and spat out smoke, the Honda rolled forwards a few inches, and finally Furo saw the reason this section of the road was gridlocked. Metres ahead, in the middle of the highway, an excavator was breaking blacktop and scooping earth, and at the spot where it heaved and clanged, a new roundabout had been partitioned out with concrete barriers that narrowed the road into a bottleneck. A small band of touts, led by a cap-wearing man, whose white goatee caught the sunlight, had pushed aside one of the barriers, opened a path to the other side of the road — which was free of traffic — and they collected money from any car that squeezed through the breach. It was mostly minibuses that turned off to disgorge passengers and rush back into town, but a few private cars also took the opening. A state traffic warden sat on the tailgate of a patrol wagon adjacent to the breach and calmly watched proceedings. His crisp uniform shirt, the yellow of spoiled milk, was tucked into his beef-red trousers, and his black boots gleamed as he swung his feet back and forth. Heavy-shouldered and round-bellied, he appeared too comfortable in his position, too dapper for roadside work.
Furo turned to Syreeta. ‘I’ve seen the opening. Do you want to turn around? Aren’t we going to see your friend any more?’
‘We are,’ Syreeta replied. ‘See where the petrol station is? VGC gate is right beside it. I’ll cross over and drive by the side of the road till we reach the gate. If I stay here I’ll have to go too far ahead, I’ll have to follow this traffic till after Ajah Junction, then turn around and start coming back. With this go-slow, that will take us at least another thirty minutes.’
Furo was tired of sitting, his buttocks ached, and yet he wasn’t eager for Syreeta to take the shortcut. He felt too conspicuous to break laws openly.
He spoke. ‘I don’t trust that LASTMA guy.’
‘He won’t try anything,’ Syreeta responded, and turning to smile at Furo, she added in a teasing tone: ‘You white people fear too much.’
Furo didn’t return her smile. ‘I think it’s safer to stay on the road.’
Of course Syreeta ignored his warning, and after she forked out two hundred naira for the illegal toll — special fee for special people, white goatee said with a brooding glance at Furo — and drove through the breach, of course the traffic warden jumped down from his perch and bolted forwards to accost the car. Syreeta tried to drive around him, but the man was nimble despite his paunch and he also seemed to have no regard for his life. When he leapt on to the bonnet and bumped his forehead against the windscreen, smearing the glass with sweat, Syreeta braked the car to a stop, pressed the control button for her side window, and yelled out through the opening, ‘Are you crazy? Do you want to break my windshield?’
The traffic warden made no response as he slid off the bonnet on his belly, this action soiling his shirtfront and dishevelling his tucked-in hemline. Then he dashed to Syreeta’s side and tugged at the door handle, but finding it locked, he squeezed his arm through the window crack and grasped the top rim of the steering wheel with some difficulty. ‘Your key,’ he puffed, and his eyes darted towards the ignition. He blinked as he realised it was out of his reach. Unless Syreeta lowered the glass for him to lean in and grab the key, she was out of his power. The only option open to him was to coerce her into ceding control. These machinations were exposed by the whole range of expressions that played across the man’s features in the instant before he raised his gaze, and as he glowered at Syreeta with his sun-darkened face only inches from hers, his chest rose and sank with each baleful breath that clouded the glass barrier between them. His knuckles bunched on the steering wheel; the edge of the glass dug into the flesh of his upper arm. In a voice whose threatening tone had jumped several notches, he repeated his demand: